Chapter Ten: The Final Predator

Splash.

Aaaahhhhhh…

My face was stiff.  Dirty.  Putting water on it was the closest thing I’d had to a shower in… whatever unit of time could best measure the missing gap in my head.

Although… shit.

I kicked open the bathroom door.   No.  I tried to, but it felt more like I shattered my ankle bones and fell to the cold, tiled floor, soaking the ass of my pants in bathroom fluids.  When I finally got out of the room, I found Leif in the bar, trying to pull a kitchen knife out of the wall.  It wasn’t budging from its spot in the head of a crude human outline somebody had etched.

he saw me standing there, dripping from the ass and shook his head, disgusted.

“I thought we were over this,” he said, now so accustomed to me shitting my pants that he found it annoying rather than gross.

“Oh, I haven’t pooped myself,” I replied.  My voice sounded gruffer, like over time, the circumstances had gradually begun to evolve into some sort of hard-ass.  In between our words, the only sound was the drops of wetness falling off my pants.  It worked as an effective counter balance to any assumptions of bad-assery on my part.

“I don’t remember walking into the bathroom,” I continued.  ”Which means I must have gone under, and by the looks of that blade in that guy’s head, you spent the time doing exactly what I didn’t want you to do.”

“Damn straight,” Leif stated uncaringly.  ”And you’re a hell of a lot better at knifeplay now than you were at co-piloting a helicopter.”

“I’m not going to kill anyone.”

“You killed this guy about three dozen times in a row,” he informed me, pointing to the marker-drawn man on the wall. “It was pretty cool.”

“I don’t care,” I said immediately. “How cool?” I asked immediately after that.

“We just want you to be able to defend yourself from what’s coming.”

“W… what is coming?”

Leif sighed and finally got the knife out of the wall, tossing it on the bar.  ”Somebody’s always coming.  Could be Clyde. Could be those guys who’s truck you fell out of.  Could be some entirely new thing.”

“Leif.”

He looked at me.  His face was so often adrift in what could only be a nightmarish series of mental episodes, it was jarring to see him look me in the eye.  It may have been the first time he’d even done so.

“I’m not a killer.”

He nodded.  ”Me neither.”  His nod intensified.  ”Devil’s Blood makes us a lot of things we don’t want to be.”

Leif slammed his shut and cringed.  I feared he may be about to explode for no reason at all when the rains outside became wildly audible.  He must have heard them coming from a mile away.  The onset of precipitation was causing him actual, physical pain.

“What is it with you and the rain?” I finally demanded.

He wandered toward the back and didn’t tell me to follow him, but I did anyway.  If I blacked out I wanted someone to be there to clean me up.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

Until Leif unlocked the door and ushered me into the sprawling, enormous warehouse behind it, I had assumed when i saw this structure from the outside, that it belonged to another building.  However, the space was apparently their’s, and they had used it to house a slick looking helicopter that became more and more familiar as I looked at the co-pilot’s chair.  The lights weren’t blinking frantically and Leif wasn’t screaming, so it took a second, but I eventually put together just how well the craft and I knew each other.

“Hey, beautiful…” Leif breathed softly at the aircraft, patting its missile turret.  ”Sorry about that last time.  It’s over; get some rest.”

I coughed, hoping he’d remember I was there before his pants came off.

Isabel walked around the cockpit, holding a small black box in one hand and a crowbar in the other.  She didn’t look happy.  She rarely did.

“This was probably inevitable, but they’re definitely coming now,” she said.  ”I’d be insulted by the cheapness of the tracking device, but they clearly knew what they were doing, if it took us this long to find it.”

“Which is probably why it took Clyde so little time to find us,” Leif replied, looking up at the ceiling.  The rain was clattering even louder in here on the tin roof.

“Max,” Isabel said.  ”This is very close to being the ugliest thing you’ve ever been a part of.”

They both seemed serious; as if everything up to this point had been a disgusting set-up for a sick punchline waiting just around the corner.  Leif fell against the chopper.

“My dad used to tell me about the Serengeti while he was hacking up something,” he said, starting a story from nowhere.  “Fondly… like he used to summer there.  He’d say… the weirdest shit about dead meat lying in the sun.  How a kill brought everything together.  Lions would get the good stuff.  Jackals and vultures would line up to pick at the leftovers.  Swarms of insects got the rest.  And then there’s just… bones.”

“Still, silent bones.”

Leif folded his arms and stared into space.  I could tell he was taking a trip back in time, hanging out with his dad, watching him at work, sitting on a pile of dead animals.

“I mean, what eats a bone?” he asked, on the verge of chuckling.

I nodded in agreement, unsure if this was a rhetorical question.  I knew as soon I thought that it wasn’t, it would be.

“Maybe a—“

“Time,” Leif cut me off.

I knew it.

“It takes forever, but it is the only thing that is perfectly unstoppable.  Time ticks the clocks long after the battery dies.  Time turns all bones to dust.  Time… is the final predator.”

Isabel put a hand on his shoulder.

“Time’s about to catch up with Isabel and I,” he said.

The lights went out, and all three of us knew that it wasn’t because of the weather, though clearly, the eternally cryptic duo in front of me knew a lot more about what was going on than I did.

I sighed.

“You know, I just moved to the city to prove to everyone that I could live on my own.”

Dead silence slipped through the whispered through the darkness like a light breeze.

“Well,” Isabel muttered in my direction, “then I guess you’d better stay alive.”

8/31: Situation Report of Colonel Seth Woogus

Situation Report

Colonel Seth Woogus

Date: August 31

Weather: Fair

As per intelligence, squad approached warehouse said to be housing suspect “Clyde.”  Entrance breached with small explosive and sweeping maneuvers initiated by all squad members.

Upon entrance, the building was clear; neither the suspect nor anyone else was in the area.  All we found was a riding lawn mower, circa 1973.  Somebody had thrown a knife through it.  Not sure why.

No signs of a struggle, except for the explosion and the lawn mower with a knife in it.  A quick sweep of the surrounding area revealed nothing.  The squad headed back to our transport for debriefing.  Private Downey announced that the vehicle had been sabotaged and would not start.  We would have to wait about an hour for pickup, as the mission was so under the radar, we had not planned any backup.

Private Downey then reported seeing movement at the north end of the complex.  What he claimed to be a “lost child” turned out to be a wolf, inspecting a nearby ditch.  NOTE:  Private Downey was only recently promoted to this squad against my advice.  At this point I had not ruled out that he was responsible for the vehicle’s malfunction and had concocted some story about a “sabotage” to prevent me from beating him to death with his own skull.

Squad members took up strategic positions and it was determined that the subject in question was not a child, or a human at all.  It was merely a pack of wolves attracted to what we assumed was roadkill in the ditch.  The “hold fire” signal was given, and Private Downey mistook it for “weapons free,” which is the exact opposite.  He put a round through one of the wolves’ heads and it was instantly killed.

The rest of the pack scattered and the squad approached the area on alert, while I held back to demand an explanation from Private Downey.  He claimed he had meant to fire a “warning shot.”  I then explained to the private why I was taking apart his weapon and throwing each part individually into the woods.

A severely wounded person was discovered in the ditch, who had actually been the source of the wolves’ attention. He was tied to a chair and, given the diameter and placement of the hole in the side of the warehouse, seemed to have been blown out by the force of our entry blast.

He was disoriented and bloodied, and I hauled him out of the ditch myself, at which point he warned me that he may “suddenly pass out” and get “bitey,” which I assumed were merely the ramblings of a brain damaged degenerate.

The subject was placed on board our backup transport, which had finally arrived, and the squad headed back to base. I informed HQ of our progress and began questioning the witness who, entirely unprovoked, mentioned a familiarity with suspect “Clyde.”  When questioned further regarding “Clyde,” the subject stuttered incoherently.

He then identified himself as “Russell Gunston, professional snowboarder.”

Shortly after this, the subject went totally limp and collapsed in a heap.  I assumed this was an attempt to avoid interrogation and poked him with the butt of my rifle with increasing severity.  Several squadmembers hoisted him up in the air and attempts were made to resuscitate him, but he had all the aspects of an actual corpse, except for the wildly increased pulse rate.

Within a few minutes, he began voluntary movement again, but his pupils were severely dialated and he did not seem to be aware of his own actions.

Foaming at the mouth, the subject scrambled around on the floor of the transport before springing to his feet and striking one of the squad members in the jaw.  Caught off guard, he fell to the ground and did not get back up.

The subject then vomited and fell down.  Before anyone could react, his voice, somewhat jarbled, managed to say something about being “gifted sexually” and then instantly collapsed again, striking his head on the metal surface, hard.  I instructed Private Downey and several others to subdue the subject, when I heard another squadmember let out a piercing shriek.  The subject had buried his teeth into the man’s ankle and wasn’t letting go.

Private Downey began kicking the subject in the ribs, only to have him grab Downey by the boot and flip him onto his back, delivering an extremely intense kick to the testicles, and snarling like a wild animal.

At this point, our transport had entered city limits and any disturbance would have drawn the attention of local police.  I instructed the driver to stop the vehicle immediately so that the subject could be subdued without anymore casualties.  The sudden stop sent the subject stumbling backwards and hitting the transport doors so hard that he went right through them, rolling into the street.

Somehow, he avoided being struck by other traffic and rolled onto the side of the road.  Any attempts to re-capture the subject would have been most conspicuous, so I ordered the driver to immediately vacate the scene.

We arrived back at base with three wounded and neither suspect “Clyde” nor the subject we had found.

The whereabouts of both suspects are completely unknown.  The trail on “Clyde” has once again gone dry, and “Russell Gunston” (definitely not real name), we are informed, has been re-captured by two former members of “Operation: Danger, Will Robinson.”

Thankfully, the wolf killed during the operation was discovered to be of an endangered species and Private Downey has been arrested, currently awaiting a court martial.

Chapter Eight: Further Breaking of the Broken

BzzzzzZZZZzzzZZZZzzzZZZZ

“Yup.  He’s coming up for air.”

I feel like I should really explain what catching up with your brain feels like.  Everything so far has happened so fast, it’s not even fair to assume you’re able to keep up.  Every few hours, I’m waking up in a new place, and before an explanation presents itself, I shit my pants and fall asleep.  It’s like Senior Week ’05, but I don’t even have time to sob gently in the corner.

It is not like waking up from an extended nap.  My eyes don’t open, though sometimes my vision is blurred, or like when I came to from smashing my head on the rock, eerily skewed.

It’s more like in a cartoon, when somebody has to get away in a hurry, and they take off in a cloud of dust, but their eyes stay behind for a few extra seconds before catching up with them.  You know what I mean?  Except instead of my eyes, its my brain.  And, unlike a cartoon, you suffer. I felt everything. It sucked. The Devil’s Blood had turned my brain into a cartoon character.

Only this time, partnering up with the rape of my natural born cognitive reflexes was the image of Leif, coming at me with a power drill revved to full blast.

He let go of the trigger and dropped it to his side.  We stared at each other for a moment, and he seemed to recognize my assumption that he was planning to stick that thing in my head.

“Hey, Max,” I heard the light British tune of Isabel’s voice say with a dose of exhausted sympathy.  I almost felt bad for her, even though I was the one tied to a chair with a couple of unfashionable belts.

“Why am I tied to this chair?” I asked suddenly, as my mind managed to fathom that this was not something friend to do each other, especially when one of them has a power drill.

I looked to my right and realized we were back in the bar.  Not that I had great memories of the place, but it was nice to come to somewhere I actually recognized for once.

Isabel was leaning on the bar itself, her head resting gingerly on her folded arms.  She looked tired.  Tired of death.  The bandage on her neck wasn’t as bloody anymore.  I came to close to mentioning this, then decided that it’d be too much like pissing in the corner and then complimenting her on the smell.

“What is the Devil’s Blood?” I asked, wanting that answer faster than I wanted to know about the chair and drill thing.

“Well,” Leif started,

“Leif, just… just go hack your meat.  Go.”

Isabel pointed at the back room.  She didn’t have to tell him twice.  Not because she was asserting authority over him, but because I think he just honestly enjoyed it.  We could hear him slashing away at whatever was dead back there as if it was a neverending gruesome murder.

Isabel walked around the bar and grabbed a chair from one of the tables, dragging it toward me and sitting down.

“Okay,” she stated.  ”Let’s get you some answers.”

“The Devil’s Blood is the codename for the serum that’s chewing its way through your bodily functions.  It was meant to be the government’s first foray into mind control, but it… had it’s problems.  It’s bowel-emptying, foam-gathering problems.  We have it because they wanted to try it on us first.”

“And Clyde–”

“Clyde wants it back, and he wants us back, and he’s a total stars and stripes, U.S. government asshole.”

“He also has a robot voice now.”

“Yeah, sure.  Listen.  This is all so far beyond reality we don’t expect you to not come out of this wanting both of us dead, and the only solace I can give you is that we honestly don’t have any other choice.  Pumping you full of Devil’s Blood turns you into a human Swiss Army knife, and instead of both of us having to suffer through the side effects, we can stay focused on the task at hand, which is to avoid capture.  At all costs.  Only problem is, we’re not chemists, so this stuff’s also completely unpredictable.”

She pointed at her neck bandage.

“I wanted to say that the blood is much less noticeable,” I finally said.

“Thanks, I got it cleaned out.”

“You’re welcome.”

Is this flirting? I thought.  It seems too weird to be flirting.

So that was it.  I was just a tool in their tool box, being hurled at the enemy so they could escape without harm.  ”What happens to me?”

“We have no idea.  But just know that no matter what it is, you did your part to bring down a dark government secret that has no business existing.”

I was unwittingly part of a faction of rebels.  This would be cool if I had a say in it whatsoever and could maintain any confidence in my ability to control myself physically.

“So… I’m a hero,” I said.

“You’re… our hero,” Isabel replied.  ”At least, you could be.”

She cleaned off a few smudges of blood on my forehead gently with her thumb.  ”It’s just about how much more your broken body can break.”

Boy, I didn’t like the sound of that at all.

Leif appeared from the back room, power drill in hand.  He revved it a few times.

“No, no,” Isabel said, waving him off.  ”Emergency surgery’s off.  We’ll just wait for him to go under again.”

She turned to me.  ”That’s why you’re tied up, love.  We’re just trying to keep everybody’s necks tooth-free.”

I nodded.  ”That makes sense, but what the hell do we do next?”

“We kind of need you to be able to kill some people,” Leif explained.

“I don’t want to kill people,” I replied, suddenly realizing just how securely I was tied to this chair.

Leif and Isabel exchanged a look like the parents of a 30-year-old man who just asked where babies come from.  Leif turned back to me, taking point on this inquiry, just like a good father should.

“We kind of don’t need you to want to.”

Chapter Seven: Captain Hammershark and the Son-of-a-Bitch Squad

Dirt.

When I woke up, part of my head was open and dried blood was making it hard to open one of my eyes.

Weeee, I thought.  My brain ushered me back into the nonstop party my life had become and we clasped hands, gleefully skipping into the next set of excruciating bullshit.

A rock jutting out of the dirt wall was decorated joyfully with my blood, so, needless to say, I must have spent a good amount of time wailing on it with the front of my head.  Speaking of my head, oh my dear sweet lord, it was throbbing like someone had rearranged my insides while I was out and left my heart where my brain should be.

Ow ow ow.

At first, the pain was so great I couldn’t even afford the brain cells to think about anything else.  In my mental check out line, I was trying to pay the cashier with a stolen credit card, and he was looking right back at me, knowing there was no way in hell I was “Lorraine Washewski,” and slowly reaching for the telephone to his right.

It was quiet and kind of dark; the sun was either coming up or going down.  Though I had no way of knowing what day it was anyway, so the passage of time was the least of my concerns.  The most of my concerns should probably have been reserved for the high pitched howls that seemed to be getting closer and closer.

Are wolves attracted to blood? I thought.  Because a lot of mine is out in the open.

I was starting to wonder if my brain and I were even on the same team anymore.  All it ever did was hurt or make sarcastic remarks.

No time for that now.

A wolf was curiously poking it’s head over the side of the ditch.

When faced with certain death, the human mind begins to set up barriers of desperation between you and the falling piano, alien parasite, mythical beast, or whatever’s mulling over the benefits of destroying you.  Even if it doesn’t make any sense, when you’re out of options, when you there’s just thin air between you and a set of jagged, chomping mandibles, there is no end to what the human mind can create to try and convince itself that you’ll make it out of this just fine; that in seven seconds, all of your organs will still be safely housed behind your skin.

But in its weakened, shattered state… my mind gave me nothing.

I stared up at that wolf.  He stared down at me.  And there was nothing but the distant rumble of traffic protecting me from what we both knew to be inevitable.

ka – POW.

In a turn of events neither I nor the canine adversary I had so readily invited into the afternoon’s proceedings saw coming, the wolf’s head exploded like an asteroid pulverizing the surface of a planet.  Fur and wolf brains became all to plentiful down in the ditch.

The carcass slumped over the edge, spilling whatever woodland creatures and fairytale characters left inside him uncomfortably close to my feet.

My mind returned from vacation.

Holy crap that wolf is going to eat m–oh.

The next guest star to pop over the ditch’s edge was a man in full SWAT gear.  He spotted what must have looked like a zombie in the midst of reanimation and thankfully did not put a bullet through my head.

“Eyes on!  He’s over here!” he hollered at whoever was behind him.  His attention returned to me.

“Sorry.  That was supposed to be a warning shot.”

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

Silence.

For once, I was reaping the benefits of professional medical care.  Watching Leif do everything but staple a bandage to his hand at the rest stop had concerned me about future injuries, which at the time, didn’t figure to be as frequent as they apparently were.

We all sat in silence.

I imagined the insides of commando transport vehicles to be alive with frattish cheering, taunting, and chest bumps. Weren’t these guys supposed to be yelling gruff nicknames and their positions within the squad to each other so I’d know what the hell was going on?

There’d be Slick the sniper, Bulldozer the muscles guy, Tattoo the heavy weapons specialist, Twitch had something quirky and wild like a big knife, and uh… uh… Captain Hammershark was the only bad-ass son of a bitch in the Military who was tough enough to keep them all together.

Yeah.  That’s what it was like.

Although seemingly it wasn’t.  Nobody looked at each other.  Nobody smiled.  Nobody even tapped on the window to the driver’s seat and made comments of a sexual nature about somebody’s closest relative.  I began to wonder if these guys had any idea what they were doing.

The one who had seen me first was seated directly to my right.  If anybody was going to speak to me, I figured I’d start with him.  We’d sort of bonded when he pulled me out of the ditch and I warned him that I may go catatonic at any second and get “bitey.”  Although the look he had given me made me wonder why he had chosen to sit anywhere near me in the transport.

His two fingers went to his ear.  Seconds later, everyone else did the same.  Except for me, of course.  I just sat there.

“Yes sir.  We are on route.”

Ah, we were on route.  Nope, that explains nothing.  I decided that the best way to approach this new gang was to make use of my well known sense of humor.

“That wasn’t Clyde, was it?” I asked, elbowing him playfully.

For a second, he and I both thought he was going to twist my elbow bones in a way that would put them through my face.  But instead, his eyes widened in shock.

He lifted his helmet visor.  ”You’ve seen Clyde?”

“Nnnyyyynnnyy…” I replied, not sure which lie to tell next.

Without breaking eye contact with me, he made some murmured comments into his radio, causing all commando eyes to turn and look at me in unison.

“What’s your name?” he growled.

There seemed to be a lot of bullets or fists coming my way in the immediate future.  Time to live out my fantasies before beaten or shot to be a bloody pulp.

“Russell Gunston,” I explained.  ”I’m a professional snowboarder.”

Chapter Six: Coursing with the Devil’s Blood

“You know, for a second there, you were a source of great concern to me,” Clyde said, pulling up an old, malfunctioning piece of furniture.  I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be a chair or an ottoman or a riding lawn mower without any wheels.

He clearly didn’t know what it was either, and spent some precious seconds trying out the most intimidating ways of sitting on it.  In the end, he went with legs straddling the sides with his torso leaning forward noticeably.  He probably couldn’t have selected a more “pro ass-rape” position.

“Namely, when you were tooth-deep in the parts of my neck with the most blood,” Clyde continued, assuming I would remember what the first part of that thought had been.  I didn’t.  I was woozy and hungry.  My hair felt like it was trying to escape from my head.  My brain seemed like a dead frog rolling around inside my head as I moved it.

My obliterated appearance didn’t escape Clyde, who leaned in and squinted, disgusted, but wanting a better look, like finding a dead hobo in a rest stop bathroom.  Which is what I probably smelled like.

He leaned back.  ”But now, I can tell you, with the utmost certainty, that the U.S. Government is prepared to acknowledge that you are merely an innocent bystander in their attempts to apprehend two of their most wanted individuals.”

“Then why am I chained to this chair?”

Clyde smiled snarkily and adjusted himself on the whatever it was.  ”We just want to know what sort of information you have become privy t–”

His very elegant shoe slipped and kicked something on the oddly shaped furniture to make a what sounded like a small engine start whirring.  I guess it was a lawn mower.

Leaping off the device, Clyde whipped the savage curved blade off his belt and hurled it into what looked like the most fragile portions of his former seat.  It gurgled and died.

He turned to face me, pretending we hadn’t both just witnessed him murder what could have only been a little old lady in the world of lawn mowers.

“Do you know what’s inside you right now?”

The answer was not a lot; a whole bunch of what would normally be inside me had seen sunlight in the past 36 hours.

“Maxwell Kynes, you don’t know it yet, but you are begging for your life,” Clyde continued, retrieving his blade from the lawn mower.  ”Your bloodstream is shrieking in terror, coursing with the Devil’s Blood… a substance capable of so much, even the Military’s afraid to touch it.  And I’ve watched U.S. commandos gun down innocent civilians while laughing and talking to their families on the phone.”

“The mind becomes quite absorbent while under the influence.  At least, it’s supposed to.  The version of the serum you’ve got seems to be more likely to cause violent diarrhea than anything else.”

“Hey, I’m controlling myself just fine, thank you,” I replied.  I had avoided producing such a mess so far and I was not going to have anybody suggest that I hadn’t.

Clyde finished off his cheeseburger, sucking the grease off his fingers with the precision and speed of a machine gun nest.  ”It slowly eats away at your brain until you hemorrhage so hard you’ll cough up spinal fluid.  And that doesn’t even make sense.”

A lot of this didn’t make any sense.

“You know… so much less than you should by now.  Just by being here!  By being in the rooms you’ve been in at the times you’ve been in them would be enough for even the simplest of dish sponges to soak up a wealth of information regarding your predicament.”

Now this was just embarrassing, and I hadn’t even started frothing at the mouth or anything.  No wonder I was retreating into deep states of unconsciousness.  My conscious life was a series of spotlights shining on my inability to comprehend even the simplest–

“Hey!” Clyde snapped his fingers in front of my face.  ”We’re talking.  Don’t drift off on me.”

He shook his head, chuckling.  ”I thought we were going to have a nasty old interrogation scene here.  But thank you, Max, for being as ignorant as… well, as a guy who would drink an entire glass of something pink and bubbly just because a girl told him to.  Kudos.  Now the government can delete your records worry-free.”

“Not my records!” I shouted, wondering what the hell could even be on my “records” right now, whatever they were.  My life wasn’t chock full of action sequences.  Did they mention the D&D game in the junior high library when I was 11?  The one Mr. Branahaugh broke up with a yard stick?  And then made some obscene comments and was fired?

The explosion rocked the front of the warehouse with enough intensity to send me airborne, still chained to the chair, and through the wall behind me.  One second, I was trying to re-imagine the bullshit argument Mr. Branahaugh was preaching during his court hearing, the next, I was on my back, in a ditch, possibly all the way across the street.

Sirens quietly began to fill the air.  My saviors had arrived.  Unfortunately, this dirt ditch was about nine feet high in any direction, so any rescue attempt would be… hard.

I hope there’s not any centipedes down here, I though.  Maybe I’ll luck out and lose consci–

Dirt.

Chapter Five: Neck Wounds Aren’t Sexy

Isabel’s eyes sprung open like reverse bear traps as her body surged with violence.  She inhaled so sharply I thought the truck was going to go down her throat.

“Do you even know how to take a pulse?” Leif asked.

I thought about this.  There was a… certain way to do this…?

“Ah… you just touch the…”

“That’s her wrist bone.”

We had a moment of eye contact that thankfully remained wordless.  Isabel glared at me, confused, as she eagerly caught her breath.

“How far are we?” she asked in a hoarse whisper, retrieving a primitive first aid kit from under the driver’s seat.

“About 17 miles,” Lief replied.

A soft growl of thunder overhead made him cautiously enter the vehicle.  He coughed nervously and looked at me.

“We should go.”

___________________________________________________________________________________________

The truck was moving faster than it should have been.  Judging by the mechanical choking going on under the hood, it seemed to be begging for its life as we cruised down the lifeless stretch of highway, surrounded on either side by thick, coniferous onlookers.

Judging by Isabel’s face, my attempt to label her a corpse had done nothing to improve her mood.  The crude bandage she had thrown together from the truck’s first aid kit was wrapped around her neck like a parasite, but still managed to look more appealing than the reddened disaster keeping Leif’s hand in one piece.

With all the wounds being passed around this group, and my pants filling with feces every few hours, I began to wonder why the hell it was so important for a guy like me to stick around.  I was like an older relative, completely malfunctioning mentally, incapable of making my own decisions, so far past the threshold of sanity, my normal life was a speck of dust on the other side, as my body’s shell continued to push forward without purpose or control.

Sort of like this truck.  I get so poetic when I’m being chased by helicopters.

Wait, what?

As I let my spectacular thoughts run a train on my brain, I had been gazing out the window, wondering why sleep wouldn’t come.  In doing so, a pair of black, silent choppers had appeared in the sky, just above the tree line, one very close, the other somewhat smaller in the distance.  I looked out Leif’s window.  Two more.  It was probably time to say something.

“I–”

The back of the truck left the ground as a missile streaked downward and struck the patch or road just behind us.  Leif screamed like a duck and pushed the gas even further, sending a cloud of thick black smoke out from under the hood that would no doubt hang in the atmosphere above these woods for centuries and wreak every kind of environmental carnage on the area.

Isabel sat up in the back seat and let out two panicked coughs.

“Is is it them?!” Leif demanded.

Isabel shrugged, decided to paint the inside of our vehicle with sarcasm.  ”No, it’s the cops.  Pull over, I’ll see if me and my bloody neck wound can flirt our way out of this one.”

It was the last close to humorous thing any of us would hear for awhile, so I should have laughed, because I did think it was pretty funny.  Ha.  Neck wounds aren’t sexy.

The back of the truck slammed back on the ground and the helicopters continued to whisper alongside us without firing.  Nobody spoke, as if the sound of our vocal chords vibrating was the trigger behind any more explosive onslaughts from their arsenal.

I couldn’t imagine Leif was having 100% visibility out the windshield, with all the smoke, and sooner or later, we were going to hit a bump or a turn or an animal bigger than a badger and this ride was going to come to an abrupt and violent stop.

Isabel leaned up into the front seat between us.

“We’re not even close, are we?”

“It doesn’t matter, they’ve got a lock on us.  If they weren’t positive they had us, they wouldn’t just be following us. Somebody’s probably notifying Clyde right now.”

He turned and looked at her.  ”You know he’s on his way.”

Isabel reached next to me, low, and I thought things were about to get quite strange, but she merely yanked my seat belt out of retirement and set it to use before doing so to her own.

“There’s–”

A second missile shut everybody and this time, the truck just couldn’t stand it.  The sound of old metal and rusted car parts being incinerated baked the air and the back of the truck left the ground once more, this time sending us upside down and sliding toward a turn in the highway.

We plowed right through a guard rail and into the woods, terrifying the local wildlife as well as myself.  Sparks soard from the roof of the cabs grinding the pavement until we hit the dirt and came to a complete stop, nestled angrily between two vibrating pine trees.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

Floo… wait.

No, this wasn’t the floor.  This was… different.

A chair!  I was in a chair.  And no poop this time.  All right, all right.  Good start.

I went to scratch my nose and realized my hands weren’t moving.  They were tied behind me.  Less good.  Less good than I thought.

I looked around.  Somebody had disemboweled a warehouse.  Where you’d expect to find a forklift or some crates or maybe the opening scene of an episode of Law and Order, where the dude is found with a tire iron embedded in his skull and Briscoe says something like “I guess that really drove the point home.”  Except he’s Lenny Briscoe, and it would have been clever and made sense.  I miss you, Jerry Orbach.

“I’d like to thank you for not shitting your pants,” a robotic vocie said.  It sounded like a snarky version of Stephen Hawking.  So, yeah.  Stephen Hawking.

Clyde walked into the spacious room, gnawing on a cheeseburger.  On his neck was a metallic box, covered in a few colored lights and wires extending from the box into his throat.  He chewed slowly, purposefully, not breaking eye contact with me.  It was weird.

Then, as he swallowed his food, I could the detailed outline of the burger slide down the entirety of his neck. Disgusting. I’m sure my face indicated my feelings in this regard.

“What, you don’t like the show?” he asked, attempting to be sarcastic but failing because everything he said was coated in a monotone hum.  ”I thought you might, considering you made it possible.”

He detached the box from his neck and pointed at a ravaged, gaping wound in his throat, decorated with several scars from what appeared to be a dog or a wolverine, rife with fresh lunacy–

Oh.  Right.

I thought about what I could say to a man who had me tied to a chair after I had recently ripped most of his throat out with my teeth.  It was a social scenario many will never have to be familiar with, and hopefully I would not face more than once, so I decided it was best to be careful, and not polite.

I looked up at him, squinting with displeasure.

“You don’t have any diseases, do you?”

Chapter Four: Apparently, Care Bears Shit Pink

Quickly losing interest in the cow carcass, he turned to face us with a gentle smile.

“I didn’t come here to slash you open and spit in your guts,” he comfortingly stated.  “You’re in need of collecting.  I’m merely the collector.”

I don’t know if it was tension or just a lack of knowledge on how to reply to such a statement that kept the room silent. Personally, I had been in a state of confusion since Leif had started hacking up the cow.  Now, with a calculating psycho staring us in the face who was clearly recognized by both Leif and Isabel, I sort of wondered what had driven me to walk through the door of this bar once again.

“Where are the others, Clyde?” Isabel growled.  She sounded like a threatening dog keenly aware of its leash.

Clyde chuckled and slowly put his hands on his hips, turning to look at me.

“What’d she give you?  The pink bubbly?”

Before I could materialize a brilliant response that went beyond uncomfortable coughing, he had sat himself down at the table next to mine and smiled, happy as a clam.

He laughed so hard his head jerked back in sheer ecstasy.

“Why would you drink that?  It looks like Care Bear diarrhea.”

I shrugged.  ”I–”

“I know, I know,” he continued, obviously unaware that I had the ability to speak.  ”Everybody falls in love with Isabel.  Because she is just so darn…”

As he casually strolled over to the bar, eying Isabel like a statue, his head bobbed down and up like a raptor on the hunt.  A perverted gaze was all but falling out of his eye sockets as Isabel, for whatever reason, restrained herself.

“… smart.”

“YAAAAH!”

A gunshot pierced the air as Clyde leaned back, avoiding the bullet like a wet hornet.  Isabel stood behind the bar, a rusty six shooter in her hand, smoke rising gently from its aged exterior.  She blinked awkwardly at her intended victim, in the only way a person can look at someone they’ve clearly just tried to murder:  angrily.

But his eyes didn’t leave me all throughout.  Silence.

“And now,” Clyde stated, “I am very upset with you three.”

Floor.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

I was dry heaving in the passenger seat of a pickup truck.  We were moving pretty fast.  Leif was tearing ass down the freeway, which was all but empty.  It was sunrise.  It was—

“Why do I taste blood?” I asked.

There was no denying it; I used to get bloody noses for about an hour when I was in junior high.  The old taste of my own blood, the scratched state of aridity in which it leaves your throat… it would have been nostalgic had it not reminded me of sitting through church with two cotton balls crammed up my nostril.

“You took out a piece of Clyde’s jugular,” Leif replied.  His eyes turned from the road to look at me.  “A big piece.”

I had never had someone else’s blood in my mouth, though.  Hadn’t quite worked up to that yet.  Not really wanting to inquire further, I turned around to see if Isabel had made it to the truck.

…

A ton of blood was splattered on the back seat.  And skin.  Sitting on the right side sat Isabel, clutching a blood-soaked rag to her neck and closing her eyes tightly.  She didn’t move or speak.

“Yeah, you took a pretty big chunk out of her, too,” Leif explained.

I thought about how many times girls had rejected me; or how hard I had to work for a prom date.  How it seemed like the hardest thing in the world was to form a complete sentence in front of someone with a vagina.  How so many women had turned me down without me ripping their necks open with my teeth.

“Then you foamed at the mouth while we stopped the bleeding,” Leif continued.  “You also shit yourself again.”

I couldn’t even rationalize some heroism out of that part.  Awkward horror flooded the  cab of the pickup.    I shifted in my seat.  Gross.

“Let’s get me to a bathroom first next time.  I think.  Would be best.”

“That’s not—”

He had to pause.  A pretty serious twitch had engaged his face as a rain drop or two struck the wind shield.  “That’s not always an option.”

“Shut up please.  Silence,” Isabel whispered.  I really hoped I hadn’t killed her.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

“Isabel and I were government property.  And Clyde, well… Clyde’s the government.”

Leif was aggressively unwrapping his hand-wound at a dilapidated picnic table.  The jagged nails and furious, rotten wood seemed to indicate that the last time someone had tried to enjoy a picnic at this table it had cost them dearly.

We were stopped along the highway at a rest stop that, like the picnic table, had abandoned the usage of its namesake long ago.  Someone called “HAZMAT” had decorated the side of the restroom with some yellow spray paint, informing us that we were to “EAT SHIT AND DIE,” while the little man on the restroom sign was bluntly stating “PISS ON THIS!” Such a vulgar arena, Rest Stop #4417.

Leif’s eyes kept darting above, as if at any moment, a bird of prey could swoop down and feed him to her chirping brood.  The clouds continuously greyed as Leif put the finishing touches on his re-wrapped hand.  His fingers still moved, thankfully, but there was a hole clean through his palm the size of a coin slot.

“‘Property?’  Like a mailbox?”

Leif looked up at me like mom used to when she’d catch me tossing her magazines into the fireplace out of boredom.

“We should go,” he replied.  ”Our only advantage is constant movement, like a squirrel.”

Good bye, Hazmat, I thought, and followed him back to the truck.  Isabel was unconscious in the back seat, the rag now sticking to her neck thanks to the generous amount of dried blood.  She seemed pale and unnaturally still.  I went to check her pulse.

“Come on, we gotta go,” Leif said.  He looked up and saw what I was doing.  ”Is she okay?”

Of all my poorly honed skills, I think delivering news is the worst.  I can’t get the inflections right.  I always think I’m smiling when I should be solemn and pissed off when I should be sobbing.  I could have never been one of those army officers assigned to inform families of deaths.  I probably would have shown up on a pogo stick or something.

“S… she’s dead.”

Chapter Three: You Guys Aren’t Really Aspiring Restaurateurs, Are You?

If I can bottleneck Kurt in the entryway to my cubicle I can nail him with the stapler, I strategized.  Yeah.  Yeah.

There was no way that viral hedgehog was barfing his way in here this morning.  No way.  Not with 15 minutes of sleep and two buckets of espresso churning through my bloodstream.  Or wherever ingested fluids go.

My fingers wouldn’t stop flicking, so I attempted to eat my way through my email.

New Memo Format from Corporate

Delete.

Everybody eat lunch at your desks, please.

Shut up, Lyle.

Sorry, but your paychecks have been destroyed in a fire.

Damn it, not again.

My mind was racing.  What was in that bar?  Why are my ears ringing?  Why do I jump three feet in the air every time I hear a ‘beep’?  The microwave went off in the break room and I almost put my skull through a ceiling tile.

I couldn’t even remember what it was my job to do.  Why did I even work here?

Movement!  Movement outside the cubicle!

I instinctively hurled my stapler through the entryway as hard as I could.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

This is a really old door, I decided.  It was a shade of grey that only occurs when it’s the dying stage of another color. This door remembered happier times.  Like when it wasn’t the bridge between a city street and a room where people fall off bar stools and shit their pants.

It was fuzzy, but I certainly remembered losing track of my brain inside this building.  Isabel.  She was in there.  Should I confront her? Did she like me?  Did last time count as a first date?  If it was, should I really show up where she works and ask her why she drugged me?

Being cool is so hard, I thought.

With a nightmarish CREAK the door was wrenched open and a pair of shaky hands grabbed me and pulled me inside. This decision just got a lot easier.

A man with a scraggly beard and clothes he must have slept in frequently was facing me.  He looked somewhat famil–

“Wait a minute you’re the guy from the–the—”

“Helicopter,” he finished, nodding.  ”You’re not a great co-pilot, turns out.”

“No, I’ve never flown a–wait, what the hell?!”

Isabel came circling out of the backroom.  When she saw me, she stopped for just a second before continuing on with whatever she had come out to do.  Good, I had obviously made an impression on her.

“Max.  We were wondering when you’d be back.  Why are you so free in the middle of the day?” she asked, as if what had happened in the bar last time hadn’t happened.

“I got fired today for knocking my boss unconscious with a stapler,” I replied.  ”Are you guys going to kill me?”

For some reason, I hadn’t considered this until I had gotten inside.  Now it seemed to be the most logical response on their part.

“No.  And sorry about all that violence,” the guy said, fixing the wrinkles in my jacket.  ”We just don’t need people standing outside, attracting attention.”

He shot a sweaty hand out toward me.  ”I’m Leif.”

I went to shake when the subtle drops of a brand new rain storm began to fall outside.  The old door rattled peacefully. Leif retracted his hand even quicker than he had offered it and wordlessly power-walked back behind the curtain.

Isabel smiled piteously.  ”He, uh… he doesn’t like the rain.”

She came around the bar and clicked all of the many bolts on the front door into a locked position.  ”Can I get you a drink?  Ha ha, just kidding.”

I didn’t find this funny and neither did the soiled pants hanging over my shower rod.

“Why did y–”

“The short answer is, because you were the first person to walk through the door,” she replied.  ”We needed your help.”

“Was I… helpful?”

“No, not at all.  But supposedly you’ll get better.”

“Better at what?!” I shouted.

The rain intensified above us and from the back room there came a sound of somebody being hacked to death.  Why this wasn’t a cause for alarm to either us, I didn’t know.  Isabel stood up and headed for the curtain and, going against most of my common sense, I followed her.

Leif was hacking away at a large piece of meat hanging from the ceiling with a rusty cleaver.  There didn’t seem to be any precision or reason to his actions.  He was just doing some old-fashioned, wild-eyed meat hacking.

“He really hates the rain,” Isabel explained.

“My dad was a butcher,” Leif replied, slamming the meat cleaver into the counter top.

“I think it may take away from your sales; filling the bar with rusty blades,” I recommended.  “It will probably make people think something awful is about to happen to them.”

“Anybody with the ill judgment to walk through that door should be prepared to be awful-ized,” he said.

I nodded.  “I don’t know, that suit the other day looked pretty confident.”

Terror instantly splashed on both of their faces.  This was new information.  I had provided something.  I would have been proud of myself had my words not absolutely mortified everyone.

I looked from one of them to the other.  ”You guys aren’t really aspiring restaurateurs, are you?”

Isabel broke the shocked silence between the two of them to look me deeply in the eye.

“Y… You saw who leaving this bar?”

“Hello.”

This new voice was a combination of an elevator plummeting 50 stories and the screams of those trapped inside.  A sea of rain swept over the roof as several gusts of wind took turns punching the storm.

The coat rack was standing in the doorway, nicely dressed as he had been days before when he was farther away. This up close and personal vantage point, along with the rigid fear so effectively gripping Isabel and Leif was making me weary of the notion that this guy had just come in to get out of the rain.

“I came by the other day.  No one was home.”

He smiled at me.  ”Well.  Max was.”

At his side was a curved blade with four finger grips.  It sat on his belt like more of a good friend than a murder weapon.  The colorful stains indicated heavy and willing usage.

Leif closed his eyes.  I noticed his hand shaking uncontrollably.

“How… did you get in here?” Isabel asked, head in her hand.  They had both become incredibly resigned to fate.  She rubbed her temples, expecting to die.

“I unscrewed the hinges on the door,” he replied.  “You were having a pretty long conversation.  Lots of shouting.  Especially from the new guy.”

Yup, the door was completely gone; neatly removed from the equation.  The rain began to take over the section of flooring just inside the doorway.  Leif, clearly seizing, began to slowly extend a hand toward the meat cleaver—

The man spun and, in one deft move, sent his blade from the holster on his belt through Leif’s hand.  The only thing more disturbing than Leif’s shrill, embarrassing scream at the six inch blade pinning his hand to the wall was this guy’s nonchalant chuckle at how the incident had concluded.  He sounded like he’d told a joke we’d all heard just long enough ago for it to be funny again.

Except all of us found his sense of humor horrifying.

His eyes turned to the hanging meat.  ”Now that, my friends… is an unfortunate cow.”

Chapter Two: Impossible and Stupid

Because I didn’t update Saturday…

When I was a kid, and I would get a cold, my mom would always get this pink medicine from the doctor’s office.  I called it “bubble gum juice” because of its taste and color and because I was a kid and I was an idiot that couldn’t pronounce “amoxicillin.”  Pink is probably the least threatening of colors, but when I’d open the fridge and see it sitting there, I’d know somebody in our house was diseased.

Isabel informed me that bubble gum juice and the drink in front of me also had the same parameters:

“You’ve got to drink it all.“

This was why, when I brought the drink to my lips, I expected to taste bubble gum.  What it tasted like was a metallic orange, with a little bit of the inside of a shoe.

“Why’d you choose today to start drinking, love?” Isabel asked.  She took the glass off the counter and began a reckless toweling of its interior.  “The rain?”

“My co-worker puked a week’s worth of frozen dinners on my desk,” I replied, rocking back and forth a little.  Why had I come in here?  Dear god, why had I come to the city at all?  What was I trying to prove?

“I lack motivation,” I confessed.

Isabel didn’t seem put off by my instant embrace of honesty.  She just nodded and smiled; put the glass back on the shelf.  There weren’t a whole lot of glasses.  Or liquor bottles.  In fact, if she hadn’t made me a drink without prompting, I wouldn’t have really known what to ask for.

“This morning I had dry cereal for breakfast,” I continued.

Isabel cringed at the sadness of my admission.  “Wow.”

“I know.  I feel like half my life is pretending things are better than they are.”

“That’s sad.”

“Yeah, but I like to pretend that it isn’t.”

The pit-patter of new rain blessed the rooftops.  I knew it was a good thing I had come in here.  The way the day had gone, some added precipitation would have had me raising my fists in the sky, screaming “WHY?!” at the heavens, before being pulverized by a cement truck.

A small crash spilled out from behind the curtain.  Isabel’s head jerked up at the sound, and then relaxed again as a few seconds passed.

“Damn rats,” she explained.

Rats? I thought.  Rats that break into your bar and break stuff?  This is a terrifying city.

“You’re right, though, about pretending,” she said, totally interrupting my brain-spasms.  “Gotta tell yourself something. Some days, you’re just waking up in hell,” Isabel said out of the blue.

I stared, wide-eyed, at this poetic of rendition of… something.  I couldn’t quite understand what she was saying.  It felt like amoxicillin was pouring out of my ears.

Isabel smiled and leaned toward me on the counter.  A lazy smile occurred across her lips.

“Sorry, love.”

I cocked my head.  “For what?”

How did I get on the floor?

The room had quite instantly become sideways, and my barstool was no longer home.  Darkness was happening… fast.  As I began to fade into a perplexing abyss, something like the sound of a trash compactor and a werewolf having phenomenal sex.

“Use a condom, it’s a full moon,” I tried to say, but only a mouthful of foam got out.

Another set of feet crept carefully out of the back room.

“W-Where did he go?” a man’s voiced asked.

“He fell of his bar stool,” Isabel replied.

The man proceeded over to me and tapped the ass of my pants with his shoe.

“Oh, man,” he muttered, backing away.  “Speaking of stool…”

Black.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

I AM IN A ROOM OF SEVERE TERROR, said my brain.  It was as if it had spent hours mingling at a party that I was just arriving for.  PANICPANICPANICPANICPANIC.

My mind and I rejoined each other just in time to notice a guy sitting next to me in the pilot’s chair.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” he screamed.  He turned to me, seeing the look of a baby deer just waking up during rush hour.  “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”

Everything that left his mouth was a terrified scream as he his hands scrambled around a bunch of controls.  There was a set in front of me as well.  It was yelling and blinking and panicking like a lost tourist.  It seemed as though we were on auto pilot, and he was drunk.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!

My eyes went to the windshield.  All I could see was ground.

Out the window next to me, an engine ignited and blew up, sending pieces of metal bashing against the side of the aircraft.

Oh my god! exclaimed my brain.  Was it a goose?!

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!”

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Floor.

Facedown, arms at my sides.  Just like how I had planned to spend the night.  The last fumes of sheer terror left as I gathered my surroundings.  They weren’t crashing.  They were just sitting there, like a normal apartment.

What struck me was the smell blowing in the window.  The world was soaking wet.  And covered in dead worms.  Ew.

I stood up, which was… exhausting.  I never slept with the window open.  I’m afraid of walking into my kitchen in the morning and being bombarded by stray cats.

Naturally, I made for the window, cautious of any curious meowing.

Oh yeah, I recalled. There’s an unseemly bar down the street.

A man stepped out the front door.  He looked like a coat rack with a suit jacket hanging on it; so governmental he could have left a trail of memorandums and dead prostitutes in his wake.

The wet, darkened ground was in a hurry to soak up the sun.  He paused to… stare up at me.  From all the way over there.  He was… stop it.  I recoiled a bit from the window.  The longer I stood there, the more it seemed like much more of a spot where something horrible could happen.

I peaked again.  He was gone.

Of course.

“That’s impossible,” I said aloud for some reason, “and stupid.”   My head hurt.

Floor.

Chapter One: A Terrified Goose Walks Into a Bar

I had this really, really intense vision of a goose squawking in terror and flying into a jet engine as I narrowly avoided getting splattered by a bus on my way home from work.  Instead of the hungry roar of the steel beast full of commuters, and the inevitable cursing of its driver, I heard the panicked screech of a doomed water fowl, seeing its short existence flash before its eyes before becoming a permanent part of the atmosphere.

Clearly, the cop’s speech hadn’t effected me at all.

Trying to forget the smell of Kurt’s barf, I put the key in my front door and hoped and prayed that my plan to fall face down on the floor and go to sleep for 48 hours wouldn’t be hindered by a neighbor trying to make small talk or a gathering of uncollected mail causing me to slip and crack my skull.  I was a closed door away from the serenity of my dismal living room.

But house keys have this tendency to really dick me over when they feel like it, and today, they must have been pretty upset with me, because there was a click, there was a snap, and by the time I knew what was happening, my key was now lodged in the keyhole, laughing and giving me the finger in that way that only house key-related mishaps can.

I peered through the window.  There was my stuff.  My chair.  My table.  My refrigerator full of produce that I try to convince people at the supermarket I’m going to eat but always wind up being another set of culinary delusions of grandeur.

Balls, I thought.  BALLS.

I turned to my right.  There was a bar at the end of the street, I remembered.  I’ve never used the phrase “I could really use a drink,” before, because I don’t think I’ve ever been that cool.  But this seemed like the stars were aligning for just such an utterance.  Too bad nobody was really around to hear me.  A mother and child were about halfway down the block.  As they got closer, I muttered to myself, loud enough to be audible:

“I could really use a drink.”

It sure felt cool, but I think the mom thought I was trying to segue into asking her to join me for a drink, which I was not.  I don’t think.  Is that normal?  I really shouldn’t have been verbalizing phrases I had no business wielding.

I’m going to that bar, I thought.  And I am going to get raucous.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

There was a girl behind the bar.

She was wearing an old t-shirt and a new ponytail.  The place was empty, but she looked at me like I was the first to arrive at a crime scene.

My success with women has been heavily based on my keen ability to initiate the conversation.  Still standing all the way across a pretty large, empty room, I said the coolest thing my mind could manufacture for me.

“Are you closed?”

She looked like she was about to respond, but instead turned and looked at a curtained-off doorway behind her.  The makeshift door danced slightly, thanks to the passing breeze of an air vent.  She turned back to me.

“That depends on what you mean by ‘open.’”

Awkward pauses are never really the way to go with girls.  They make everybody think you have no idea what you’re doing, and if you’re anything like me, you don’t.  So a few years ago, I decided just to avoid horrendous lulls in conversation altogether.  If I felt one coming on, I simply filled the silence with whatever first came to mind:  Clapping.  Whistling.  Words that didn’t necessarily form a sentence.  It was extremely effective, though probably a bit offputting.

Well, this was my first awkward silence in about three years.  It felt all too familiar.  The inability to make eye contact.  The deafening sounds of the room settling.  Car horns ten blocks away that in any other case would have been rendered inaudible.

“I didn’t… say open?”

“How about a drink?” she asked at the same time.

Damn it.

The simultaneous recovery.  The last thing you want as the end result of an awkward silence is both parties starting to speak again at the same time.  You wind up colliding like a couple of goons and everybody feels ridiculous.  Like eating a cake and finding out it had a baby possum in it.

What was I going to do?  Turn around and walk out wordlessly?

Yeah.  I was.  I went to do it and caught a glimpse of some guys in creative looking hats outside the door.  It’s not that I bought into that cop’s bullshit about the color and size of hats or whatever, but, yeah, okay, it was.  That’s why I didn’t leave.  I was scared of the hats.  Okay?  Jesus.

“Wow.  You are thinking way too loudly, my friend,” she stated out of the blue.

Her voice had a bit of Britain to it.  It was nice.  She could have quite naturally transitioned into a song of some kind.  Perhaps a tune about making new friends.  It would have lightened the mood a bit.

“What are they calling you?” she asked, her fingers drumming on the counter top.

“Max,” I replied.  It felt good to know the answer to a question.

“That’s a hideous label, Max.  I don’t like the ‘a’ sound.  And the ‘x,’ while an interesting letter, is wasted by a monosyllabic combination of two painfully regular counterparts.”

I knew I should have told her my name was Russell.  Russell Gunston, professional snowboarder.  I was only stopping in town tonight on my way to an Extreme Sports Festival on a secret island.  I was also gifted sexually.

“It gets my attention,” I replied.  By the time I responded, she was halfway through concocting me a drink.

“I’m Isabel.”

She slid me something pink.  Normally, I don’t drink colored drinks, or drinks handed to me from strangers, or alcohol, really, but I didn’t think the first time an attractive human female was interacting with me in months was a good time to start dropping my beliefs all over the counter.

I looked down at the drink.  It bubbled once.  Isabel smiled at me.  She was warm.  Genuine.  Ponytailed.  Interested.  It was weird.

She raised her eyebrows invitingly and nodded toward the creation between us.

“This is my favorite drink.”