Blue Flu

20Nov09

Officers Daniel Danno and Brad Crik were among the few that didn’t know what was happening or why they were there. A big meeting, all of the top brass and the plain clothes were gathered at the front. The uniforms were clustered at the back, most them commenting on the coffee. Good coffee, for a change, the stuff the big guys got, not the shit in the break rooms for the lowly uniforms. But there was something going on, the meeting itself was slapped together, sprung like an ambush.

But nobody seemed to care or notice. Except for Danno and Crik, recent partners and only a year on the force between them. It didn’t smell right, and they knew they were in over their heads the moment the Commandant took the podium and demanded silence.

“As you may know, The City has been hammered by the worst snow storm that we have ever seen.” General murmurs and some exaggerated shivering noises. He continued, “In a time of crisis like these we are often called on for overtime and extra duties. We all have to buckle down and cooperate with the fire department and the hospitals to maintain order and help those caught and injured out there in that frozen wasteland.” More murmurs and some nods.

Danno and Crik untensed a little, this was impromptu and heavy because of the nature of the event, the fear of conspiracy and weirdness fled quickly.

It came back with a heavy right to the gut.

“Which is why we are all going to be ill for the next week. Full pay and a little something extra for your cooperation. The City can’t hope to pay us for what we are going to do so we’re just going to take what we can and distribute it. It is in times of crisis like this that we show our true value to the mayor and his cronies, lets all have ourselves a nice warm vacation in doors and pick up the pieces when its over. Let’s show them who the law is in this town.”

General applause and a few hollers of support as the group mixed and mingled before ultimately trickling out the doors. Danno and Crik tried to stifle their fear, keep it in line. Say nothing, smile and nod.

The two officers exited the building through the front and the horror struck them at the base of their spines and wound up to a compression in the lungs and a grip around the heart. The City was blanketed in a wall of white so intense they couldn’t see across the street. The cold lashed at their skin and created an ache in the joints within moments. There were sounds piercing through the curtain of snow eerie and disembodied, sounds of desperation and alarm. Sounds that were crying out for assistance.

An assistance that was going home to hide and extort the very people that needed them now. The two partners nodded and made their way to a car. Safely inside they confirmed what they knew they felt. “It’s just us against this thing, nobody is out there and nobody is coming. We can’t let this stand,” said Danno.

“It’s going to be a long week,” said Crik.


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Moods

19Nov09

It started with a knock on the window. The rapping of tiny rocks on glass. The Rascal trying to get my attention from the apartment across the alley. I opened the window and leaned out over the yawning chasm of the alley with its stagnant water and assortment of dumpsters and three men trying to sleep with one in spite of the other.

“What is it?” I say.

The Rascal is beaming a smile so intense I have to shield my eyes, the thing is so wide it threatens to split his face in two and then wrap around the other side and keep going until he’s laying on the ground like a well removed orange peel. “I. I. I. I have it Jenny.”

He’s gibbering with an excitement so bright it threatens to pull him out of the window and slam him into the alley. With the men. Who look surprisingly soft from up here, he just might survive.

By ‘it’ he means a catchers mitt. Not a baseball glove, which are yay big and flat but an actual catchers mitt, which is round and broad and used specifically by catchers. He’s holding the thing out the window and waving it frantically. I nod that I can see it and grimace that it might end up a bums pillow in another few seconds. And then what would the Rascal do? Sit in his house and be sad? No. He’d pitch himself from the window after it and she’d be left to testify that she saw the whole thing.

“Yes, yes. Now get inside before you fall. Don’t make me tell your mother what you were doing.” I say.

He pauses in his enthusiasm. It is almost palpable the drop in temperature and the bulwark of tears just waiting to fall. I try to counter before its too late. “Just calm down and tell me how you got the thing.” It is cold in the early morning light, not yet summer, no longer winter, but spring has some nerve standing us all up this way. It is a non-season and my nipples are so hard and pert through the blue/green night that if the bums were only to look up I would have to blind them all with coat hangers on principle. The Rascal doesn’t notice, the Rascal doesn’t notice much.

The Rascal gets back in the house, now just leaning out the window, not out on it like a pigeon. “Mommy’s new boyfriend got it for me. He’s really great. He’s tall and says things in a funny way. He’s always giving mommy things but this is mine.”

Mrs. Rascal was not the brightest piece of silver in the chest, and she was also a prostitute, she had serviced everyone with a nickel in the neighborhood, and on more than one occasion the three men in the alley below –all at once– for their booze money. The Rascal was a sweet thing but his mother was a broken tramp and whoever the boyfriend was he gave mommy gifts because he was a client or her pimp or her driver, no love, only business.

A shock of memories that no longer held true shook through her. The days of usury, the days of being a broken and desperate thing. The days when Seth was invincible and immortal and she was a zombie trapped in a body. Days long past that would not return.

It was then that she saw Mrs. Rascal and her new beau walking up to the front of the building. She was looking haggard and barely alive, that combination of drugs and sex that left her pale and frail and out of it, no idea how anyone could want to be with that, how any one would give her money out of anything but pity. The man looked up and saw her there, and she new him and he new her and the world lost another ten degrees and all the color and blood faded out of her and the world.

Johnnie Marino.

The scumbag flesh trader that was the final end of Seth. The man who killed the immortal bag of meat that was her only friend, her lover, her joy, her narcotic. And here he was, four million people in The City and she his face to face with him again in just two years.

Johnnie Marino.

The man that was her savior and her destroyer. A dark messiah that she could not forgive, did not deserve, would not suffer.


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Trail of Blood

17Nov09

The pickup truck was coated in a white, chalky dust from the alkaline plains of Utah and New Mexico. It was rust grey and tattered by close encounters with rocks and wildlife. It was bleached nearly white by a lifetime in the sun and the one patch of unmolested brown paint, located just behind the driver’s side door on the bed was a beauty mark of sorts. A mole on the otherwise unblemished face of a machine that spoke volumes of the hardships endured by it and its operator living and working on the frontier of life. It was called Tin Man.

The dirt crunched beneath the boots of the driver, a lanky man in a simple white checkered shirt, blue jeans, square toed boots, a leather strap for a belt wearing a six gun in an obvious way, slung low around the hip, favoring the left side and indicating the dominant hand of its wielder. He had been shaving with a straight razor in the trucks mirror. No water to be spared for the task and the scritching sound as he worked the immaculately sharp object over the terse horse hairs of his face was only matched by the resilience of his burlap skin to such treatment.

The driver, Tennessee Tom, completed his grooming. Admired his handy work in the mirror for a brief moment then collapsed the razor and shoved it into his back pocket. He climbed back into the cab and fired up the truck in a slow deliberate whine of the alternator and the starter. A war of clicks and screeching of belts. The truck was a beast half living in the grave and each time the engine was turned over it was summoned back to our world for some harrowing task. Finally alive, fully returned from the limbo that all vehicles rest in, it built up speed and left the broken down camp site and headed north east into the face of  the morning sun, towards The City.

As the truck rattled down the nearly not a roads of Wyoming and into Montana the man who had otherwise managed to stay asleep through the beginning of the trip three days ago in Arizona stirred in the back of the bed. His skin was a brilliant mahagony and his hair was black as sin. He pulled a cigarillo out of a pocket somewhere in the depths of his leather coat. Brown doe skin, complete with fringe, a myriad of tiny pockets sewn inside that housed objects sacred and mundane. The man,  Marc Shadoweye, lit the cigarillo off the speeding tire of the truck and puffed three great drags of blue smoke on the thing before he even finished opening his eyes.

The driver noticed that his companion had stirred and slowed the vehicle and geared down. The sage smoker pounded on the cab top two deep booming thumps and they sped back up. It would grow dark eventually and their arrival in The City was late as was.

The sun rose high and the shadows shrunk into pinpoints of dark, cringing under the harsh interrogation. They knew nothing of the task or purpose of the two men and the truck. They were silent bystanders, unreasoning and unconscious.

As dusk approached they pulled into a roadside diner. The lights of The City were visible in the fading light, magnified and diffused by the pollution, an emerald halo around the fabled land of Oz. They just needed a Dorothy and a Toto to complete their set. But Dorothy was not one but a string of farm girls left on ranches and in brothels passed on the road getting here, and Toto had to be put down for worms almost a year ago.

The two men exited the truck with a creak of shocks unfurling, a dull thud from within as the engine left this plane, a straining of metal as the door was forced into a position no longer flush. The tall man greeted his rotund companion with a slap on the back. “Thought we lost you there crossing through Green River, I haven’t seen you sleep that long on any of your vision hunts.”

“The path we tread is not easy, the spirits have much guidance. And they get lonely when they can’t speak to anyone.” This was not a joke, no smugness or raised eyebrows, the simple facts of the matter as only he saw them.

The two men walked into the diner and took a seat at the bar. “Coffee, black,” said Tom. “Tea and Tabasco,” said Marc Shadoweye. The waitress nodded. Neither man ordered food. The reserve of salted meats and empty starches in Tin Man would hold them until they arrived. No need to shell out their few bucks for something they already had. The coffee was thick and had a distinct flavor of unwashed since it was purchased carafe to it. The tea was weak as hell and the Tabasco that Marc Shadoweye splashed into it mostly rode at the top as a film.

“No good for divination, ” he intoned and they left without paying.

Tin Man howled its resurrection dirge once more and they sped on to their destination, The City lay sleeping on the horizon awaiting them. The City and John Birch, the man they had traveled across six states and two thousand miles to drag to hell. The man Marc Shadoweye had seen in a vision, the life debt that Tom owed being paid. The truck happy to be a chariot on one last scream into the grave.


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Loose Change

16Nov09

That it was unfair was both clear and certain. Wholly unheeded and generally unimportant, but clear and certain. That it would take all night to try and fix was not so much of a problem but an impossibility. Lacey Tressler was going to sleep tonight if it killed her, and given that there were two men fiddling with a leaking gas pipe it may well do that. They didn’t know how to find and shut off the line, but they assured her they knew it enough about welding to fix the problem without any other concerns.

In the days that followed it was quite clear that welding is not a word that one wants to hear conjoined with gas pipe. But Lacey Tressler didn’t do much in the hearing department since that day. The two men and their welding implements were found almost a block away, in rather small pieces, by a troop of local stray dogs. Lacey Tressler was sent home after six months of care. Her hearing was destroyed and her hair was no longer real, but the scarring was limited to her arms and hands, the rest of her being protected by an electric blanket that had managed to melt rather than burn and had not been able to quite destroy her cotton pajamas before the second stage of the blast threw her out of the house and into a neighbors pool.

The second blast is also what would cost her the use of both ears.

This, however, would be the end of the good fortune of Lacey Tressler. With no more money left after her hospital stay and her career as a cellist gone the way of much stubbier fingers and no sense of hearing she became a beggar. her house was destroyed, her possession gone, her life a shattered shamble. A parody of life, a cruel joke delivered by a comedian specializing in irony.

Life as a beggar lost its appeal within a week. The freedom of the street and the sleeping under the stars parts held little glamor or gilding when they were unending and unavoidable. Truly the issue was not one of freedom but of consequences.

Her days became increasingly fluid, one into another with no ripples or rivulets to break up the monotony. Her breath became haggard and strainged. She was toying with a cessation of life more then she was contemplating life. Testing herself and her body’s limits for living. Death was an easy thing to toy with, a simple thing to prod and jostle. But living, asking yourself ‘What can you survive?’ that is where the true nature of a person comes out.

For Lacey Tressler living was a thing of passion. To make it from one day to the next despite what adversaries and hurdles could be conjured and placed in front of you, that was passion. That was the essence of life. It was a recursive loop, to live is to grant power to life and granting power to life will help you  live.

So she sat on the street and smiled her broad and luscious smile beneath her synthetic hair and laughed in a broken fashion each time a piece of change smacked into her cup. She couldn’t hear the jangle of the money or the rustle of the bills but she could feel her life continuing with each piece of money dropped upon her by those passing by. Pity her not, for she was free and she was alive.


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