Kade. I’m Kade. That’s what I’m called. But what’s happening?
A cold trip to an uncertain place. Care seems distracted. I can hardly see or think, my skull filled with noise. My head won’t come back to me.
Unbearable weirdness. Coming to and this nameless guy is next to us. There is something alluring about him, unspoken power drawing you in like gravity. His demeanor is calm and sure, but there’s an underlying... something. Something wrong I can’t quite place. Is it him or just me?
We walk toward a tall apartment building of mottled grey brick in a slummy bend of roads, silent and empty apart from some streetwalkers. Noises of faraway murder streets nearby. Or am I just imagining? Care and him don’t seem to hear anything. She’s glued to him, looks back at me only occasionally.
I’m shaking inside, quiet without, disoriented, unsure. The darkness is everywhere so that even the streetlights barely touch it. It’s in the dreary toxic smells trapped in the fog that hangs off your body. It’s in that clamor of crime and sin off in the distance in every direction.
Only the two people in front of me seem to be separated from it, but not separated at all, simply secure in it, in some way I can’t understand. Caught up in the claws of the shadow town but not yet crushed by it. I wonder if anyone or anything can be separate from it all.
I’m cut off from my body as if by a glass wall. I clamor to crawl back inside, pounding on the glass, but my body keeps walking alongside Care and this guy. I hate it here.
Inside the building it’s warm. We walk up many stairs to the top, a huge dingy penthouse littered with trash, bottles, and antiques. I feel trapped. I’d rather the piercing cold that keeps my mind alert than this void outside my body.
The guy closes the door behind him. I nearly jump. Even through the glass in my mind, I smell fear. But whose?
“Sit down if you want,” the kid waves to the messy room. He’s younger than us, I think. He must be sixteen or seventeen but looks much older. When he throws his jacket off, his arms are long and lean. I follow Care to a soft couch. She brushes off some empty cans and papers to make space
“I’m Dryden. Sorry about the mess, but this place is the closest thing to home I got. We’re safe enough here.”
I want to question further, but nothing comes out of my mouth.
“Safe. Good. You sleep here?” Care asks.
“Sometimes. Not usually. Nowhere’s safe to stay for long.”
“No doubt!” Care says smugly. “How long you been on your own?”
“A while,” he replies. Everything he says is unhesitating, precise. “How long have you two been on the streets?”
Care and I look to each other silently.
“You don’t need to tell me anything. You can even pretend you’re not all alone.” He stares past us. “But I can see who has a home and who doesn’t- people who know where they’re gonna sleep and where they’re gonna get their next meal. They walk and talk different from street people. But being different ain’t so bad, is it?”
“People with jack shit will make fun out of whatever we got, right?” Care grins.
Dryden winks and she giggles.
“Sure, fun,” he goes. “Rich kids shoplift for fun. But who walks into a store with nothing on and comes out wearing bags of stolen shit if they don’t need it bad?”
“You go around smashing in heads for fun?” she asks annoyedly.
“I know how to defend myself, and that includes defending who I want. That guy followed you all the way from the store. He had a plan the moment he spotted you. I followed him and you from the store. I was watching before that.”
“What was your plan when you first saw us?” I’m able to spit out.
“Just watch you. How old are you?” he asks.
“Fifteen,” Care says quickly. Damn it. She looks young, but she can’t be that young.
“Twenty,” I say. Care passes me a glance, knowing I’m not that old. Seventeen, eighteen, maybe older. Do either of us really know?
“You must be older than me. But still young inside for sure. Living on the streets hardens you. Makes you grow up too fast. Makes you do things you’d never think you’d do.”
My eyes fix on his, and his on mine. “Like what?”
“Like offing that guy,” he says. He stares into me deeper and deeper till I’m looking through his eyes into his head. “Never killed before. But he had it coming.” He keeps staring. Unknown energies exchange. He slowly looks away.
Too much going on, too little control. I shift uncomfortably in my seat, pounding on the glass wall that separates me from myself. Why can’t I make my body get up and run out of here? Would he even let us?
“You guys hungry or thirsty?” he asks. Care looks at me. The kid gets up and we watch closely as he pulls two glasses from a light wood cabinet and fills them from the sink slowly. He comes over and holds them out to us. “Sorry, just tap water.”
Care takes hers, looking at it for a moment, drinks.
“I’m fine.” I place it on an end table.
“So what do you?” Care asks. “What’s your plans?”
“Same thing I always do. Survive and laugh at everything,” he answers. I think that’s odd. He hasn’t laughed at anything. But he laughs then as if reading my mind. “What about you?”
“Same as you,” Care says smugly. “And getting out of this shithole.”
I almost smash through the glass wall in my head. I start to remember the cop pulling his gun, the shock of waking up to him dead, Dryden standing over the body. I realize I’m caught in some mental game with Dryden, and Care doesn’t seem to realize something’s wrong.
“Getting out of town... that won’t be easy.” He looks past us into nothing. “No one ever seems to get out of here.”
“You’re telling me,” Care crosses her arms.
“So,” he goes. “I don’t wanna make this any more awkward for you guys, but I actually have to leave for a little bit.”
“Leave?” Care asks.
“I have to pick something up,” he says. “Business. Stuff to keep me warm at night, keep the ball rolling. You guys can stay if you feel comfortable. I won’t be long. Help yourself to whatever’s around.” He grabs a set of keys and walks to the door. “I’ll see you in a bit... maybe.” He winks handsomely and smiles, shuts the door behind him.
After a few minutes’ silence, we get up and snoop around. Mounds of papers, boxes, knickknacks... Half of it seems collected from dumpsters. Packrats aren’t picky.
“I wonder why he let us stay,” I think aloud, examining an old snowglobe, its base a grey metal painted like corroded stone, filled with what looks like angels and demons in battle. I turn it over and flakes fall about the scene. Winter. Kadence Winter... I feel a part of me trapped in the globe, looking back at myself, pounding on the glass.
“I wonder too. Guess he doesn’t see us as a threat?”
“Probably not. His babble about the streets is annoying, but it might not be all bullshit. He’s good with that baton.”
“Yeah...” she hums. “Wait, how do you know? I thought you were, like, out when that pig pulled his gun.”
I stop dead in my tracks. “You’re right, it’s like I wasn’t even there. But somehow I remember some of it...”
Care pulls a cabinet open. It’s stuffed with oatmeal and canned food. More than any normal home would have, though I wonder what a normal home looks like.
I walk next to Care and we each look to each other, nod, begin stuffing our bags full of food and water bottles.
“For a street kid he does well,” I note. “An apartment to himself, full of food?”
“Sounds like he sells drugs. Maybe there’s some stashed around here!”
“This fridge has a lock on it,” I note. “It’s pretty heavy-duty.”
“Well, lots of other shit. Might as well stock up. He might be mad if we go too crazy though,” Care slants her mouth sadly. “Nothing comes for free, right?”
A little closer to being myself. “That’s exactly what I’m thinking. We should be gone before he gets back. And he did say we could help ourselves. He’s got plenty.”
“Really? Just go?” she asks. Her shoulders slump.
“You want to stay? We don’t even know this guy. I mean, he puts on a nice face, but he bludgeoned that guy’s skull in, right in front of us, no questions asked. Plus, he’s lying about something. I know it.”
“Duh!” She smacks down a can of vegetables on the counter. “No one would last long if they told the truth about everything. It’s not like I trust him, but for what it’s worth, the guy he killed was about to rape us.”
“Yeah, but that’s my point. This kid’s dangerous too, no matter how laidback he acts. He’s some kind of trouble.” Almost me again... let’s just go!
Care turns about in front of a tall, conspicuous cabinet next to a dead grandfather clock and looks to me with eyes that seem unusually old. “I’m big trouble too. And so are you. There’s normal people, then there’s people like us. People that do things normal people would never do. Get it?”
“Yeah...”
“Yeah,” she prevails and opens the cabinet door. “Oh my God!” I walk next to her. It’s packed with at least twenty bottles of booze, shelf over shelf over shelf, the top bottles higher than we could reach.
“It’s beautiful. I officially love this guy.” She runs her nails across the bottles side to side with a series of little glassy clanks. She lands on a caramel bottle of spiced rum and skitters to the couch with it, sipping it in small gulps, savoring the flavor while I stand there. “He probably wants in our pants, you know."
“Yeah! That’s kind of what I’m afraid of!” I shake my head and sit next to her.
“I’m not, necessarily,” she burps, taking another swig.
“I noticed.” I sigh deeply. “You seem ready to give it up.”
“So am not!” she almost yells. “Think I’m an easy lay when I’m drunk?”
I shake my head.
“Good. I’m easy all the time!” she winks.
“God,” I smack my forehead.
“What? How should I know? Not like I ever had a choice.” She lifts the bottle in front of her eyes, swirls it around and sips. “Hey, are you really twenty?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Are you really fifteen?”
“Is this asking-me-things-I-don’t-know time?” She taps the side of the bottle with her fingers to a broken beat. “No, I think I’m a little older than that now.”
“Why’d you say that then?”
“I’ve spent the last few years having to pretend I’m still a kid so I didn’t lose value. And Matty still lost customers over the years. Ain’t that a bitch?”
I shudder. “What’s more horrifying is that he was allowed to do that to you. Just can’t get over it. No one deserves that.”
“I’m over it, hon, don’t worry about it. At some point, I just decided to roll with the punches. Guess that’s why I’m kind of a brat, huh? Me, I’ll be young forever.” She giggles. “Why’d you tell him you were twenty?”
“I didn’t want him thinking we were so young and stupid. Easy targets. Guess it doesn’t matter anyway, he sees right through us.”
“Let him think that,” she yawns. “This stuff is weird. Tastes different.”
My brow furrows. I snatch it from her and have a small taste while she leans back, closing her eyes. “Tastes salty, maybe? I don’t know how it’s supposed to taste.”
“Maybe he jacked off into it.” She yawns big.
“What’s wrong? You look tired” I say. Her eyelids seem heavy. It was open when she picked it up.
“I’m exhausted, hun. I’m tired and sick. Running on booze and... bread.”
“Too much?”
“Bread? No, I’m still hungry!” She laughs to herself quietly and shakes her head, leans further back into the seat.
“Are you okay? You should eat something.”
“There’s something in the drink, maybe,” she slurs.
“Are you messing with me? Please don’t kid around...”
I run over and shake her. She slumps over to her side. A hot, nauseating air blows over me. I shiver with inner cold. “Fuck. We gotta go. Now!”
“Can’t... stand up... please...” she whispers almost inaudibly. Her breathing slows. I feel noise in the building and panic. I run around till I find a dirty steak knife in the sink, run back to the couch, sitting next to her.
A rustling at the door. I tuck the knife in between the cushions and sink into the seat. I close my eyes and try to relax my muscles. My shoulders drop and my head leans against Care.
The door opens. Two pairs of footsteps. It slams shut and locks.
My eyes crack to see a tall older man with wide owl-like eyes, holding Dryden tight around his hips like a toy. His skin is weathered and loose over a spindly body, covered in bulging purple-blue veins. He has a scraggly, peppered beard and a grey, balding head. Crooked yellow teeth appear as he smiles lightly and often.
“I told you.” Dryden waves his hand over us. “Aren’t they beautiful? Look at those lips.”
The old man grins and nods, walking closer. His face is pure demon terror. I stay mostly still, move my head only in jerks to watch, twitch my legs like a good doll.
The man’s papery fingers stroke my lips sideways and up-ways. A vision blasts inside my skull, my hands holding a thick wooden club. Another club strikes at me and I parry and counter, jabbing the opponent’s stomach. Words flash through my consciousness almost undetectably. Practice. Harder. Deeper. Strike through. It all fades away. I see the old man again, walking away as Dryden begins to speak from an old armchair in front of us.
“I feel bad for you guys,” Dryden says. “I like you two, but you broke the number one rule. Never trust anyone but yourself.”
Care mumbles, drooling. “Looks like... you did, too.”
Anger crowds out his suddenly vampiric face. “You really are dumb. You think two little girls can survive out here on their own? No one can. No one. You either have someone that watches over you and what you got, or you are the one that watches over your people and protects them while they work for you. There’s no in-between and no space for free-roamers. You get in line or die.”
I grin and fake choke-spit, laughing and drooling. That’s right, make him emotional, distracted.
“Just because you couldn’t... make it on your own... I’m supposed to... be somebody’s bitch... like you?” Care mumbles.
He rises to strike her, but the old man returns with a cardboard box in his arms and sets it down on the coffee table between us all. He puts his hands on Dryden’s shoulder, sitting him down.
“I’m not a bitch,” Dryden scowls.
I listen to the old man walk to the fridge, unlock it with a key. He brings over a six-pack and some bottles of booze. The old man pops two beers open and Dryden washes down some whisky with his beer, by the smell. I watch nervously, eyes half-open, head lying on Care’s shoulder. My hand is tucked into the coach, fingers on the steak knife.
The old man removes items from the box meticulously. A series of balls attached by strings. Black dildos, slender and thick. Two folding knives. A giant ziplock bag full of powders and pills and marijuana. Lubricant. Lotion. Handcuffs. Paper towels. An unlabelled glass bottle. His dark eyes seem full of delight. Dryden grins smugly.
“Point is,” Dryden goes on, “you never get anywhere if you don’t do things right. Life isn’t magic. Don’t follow the rules, life stomps you out. You can’t always get what you want.”
The old man folds a paper towel and douses it with the unknown liquid in the glass bottle.
“You’re lucky we found you before someone else did. I know we look rough on the outside, but me and Bill are sweet people. Just like you. Trying to survive in a bad world, you need friends. You’ll be better after knowing us.”
“A lesson handed down by gentle hands,” the old man agrees. “We’re all just tools in the end.” He slowly rises, rag in hand. “Time for sleep.”
The man creeps toward me, smiling hugely. My heart thumps with each step. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t...
The rag reaches for my face. My eyes shoot open and my grip tightens around the blade.
I scream and plunge the steel deep in his belly. With a twist, his hands empty and a bottle shatters on the carpeted concrete. He jerks, exhales. I rip it up and scrape the bottom of his ribs on the way out. He falls back with a push, his head jerking in last-moment gasps.
I turn to Dryden who is on his feet snarling. His face has become sharp like cut stone, his eyes thin and black.
I lunge at him as his baton flips out from nowhere, knocking my knife away, nearly crippling my right hand. I ignore the pain and step in, wrapping my left arm around his right, trying to rip away his weapon, or at least keep him from swinging it.
Keep going, keep fighting! But the thoughts are knocked away as he smashes the side of my head with his fist.
Locked together for the baton, his left jabs aim for my face and fall on my raised arm and all over me, till I think the bones in the back of my injured hand will snap. Incredible breaking pain shoots and surges down my forearm. We start throwing blows with our knees till they feel like they’ll shatter. They impact each other and our abdomens and sides of legs randomly, as we try to time the knee strikes just right and fail.
He lands one in my stomach. I nearly vomit, stunned as time grinds to a halt. Don’t stop. Don’t stop. Don’t stop. Pop, throw, go. Distract, displace, destroy. Imperative commands from nowhere fill my head. Dryden smashes the side of my knee and I let out a painful cry. I growl and headbutt just under his eye. His baton clatters to the floor. He punches harder at my right side, but I know the pain has him distracted.
I find an opening, knee his balls. He coughs and cries out. Pop them hard so they’re distracted.
I feel my left leg wanting to give out, but I roll with the feeling and spin my hips, pushing off with my right foot. He tumbles backward, crashes over a wooden dining table covered in old papers. Throw them to a weakened position, giving yourself a moment and space to maneuver.
Go. Destroy them like lightning, before they regain footing or composure.
I limp-dash over, jump up and fall on his chest with both knees, shooting the wind out of him with a wheezing deathly knell. He pounds at my sides and legs desperately. I jab his face with my left fist like a metronome, interjecting with right elbows. His face bulges, growing bright red. He claws at me all over. After twenty seconds, I can’t feel my left fist anymore. It’s torn open from hitting teeth. He lies there, squirming. I give three quick, hard jabs to the Adam’s apple and he chokes like some inhuman thing broken and dying. I stand and get his baton
I whack him in the skull to stun, then shatter his hands before he tries to hide them, then begin swiping across his legs and balls with the weapon, till he’s defeated.
I raise my hand for a final, lethal blow, till I look to Care. The fight and murder pour out of me, replaced by compassion and pain.
I collapse the baton shut and put it in my coat pocket, limp over to the coffee table. The old man is blue and Care is very pale. Her breathing is shallow but it’s there. I grab her purse, some liquor bottles, the big bag of drugs, and the pocket knives, stuff them all into our big clothes bag, throw it over my shoulder.
“Come on!” I shake her. Her head hangs forward and alcoholic poison and spit pour out, her eyes barely-open slits.
I hold her face against mine. “If you can hear me, I’m getting you out of here. We have to go now. But you have to help and walk with me. I can’t carry you alone.”
Her head swings in a circle, looks straight, eyes wiggling and closing. She blinks slowly, grunts. I lift her up with all the strength I have left, carrying her and the heavy bag to the door.
“I’ll kill you,” Dryden spits from a collapsed windpipe.
“If you could have, you would have.”
Why did I say that?
Muttered curses follow us as the door slams shut behind. We trip and tumble down a bunch of steps. I’m a bag of battered bones, but somehow the crippled two-girl mutant rises again.
Cold air smacks us, jostling Care a little from her near-coma. Vehicles whistle in the distance as we stumble off, a few distant ghosts watching silently, my muffled grunts following each step in a fog of pain.
A dirt path through some woods, barely enough moonlight to see ahead. Roots and fallen branches claw at my feet. A rock topples me and the stolen bottles clank. I cry, looking behind and ahead. The darkness seems alive, a mob of shadows lurking on the trails behind and up high in the branches. I shake them away in my head and lift her.
A gravel road with a moonlit grassy field ahead. A grey truck rumbles past with blinding lights. We tumble away from it into a bush and Care vomits. The vehicle vanishes as we hide. We limp across the grass and around some trees. A dim light a hundred feet off catches my eye, drawing me like a moth to a flame.
A cinderblock building appears, about twenty-five feet long. I lay Care down and run to the other side. Park bathrooms. The women’s room door swings open, bleak dirty concrete inside littered with trash. I toss the bags in, run back, and find her throwing up more. I drag her inside, drop her limp body in the least putrid stall. I seal us in with the deadbolt, dropping to my knees.
Her puking rings through the small building. I wait, listen. Light breathing, the little noise almost drowned by my panting.
My left hand is bleeding and shaking. My right arm quivers. I gasp and moan and grit my teeth and cry and rock back and forth.
I sit and shiver in pain for countless minutes, listening for her life. Care pukes again, screaming her stomach away.
I dig through our bag for anything. Water. I chug a bottle down and go into the stall to set one next to her. She’s pale and quivering, barely alive. I leave her and sit back in the middle of the bathrooms, surrounded by smelling filth and debris, old wrappers, used needles.
I almost nod out over our stuffed bag, then find myself searching through it more as if by survival instinct.
Fingers touch the big, stolen plastic bag, buried under liquor bottles and bunched up clothes. I take it out and rip it open. Powders and pressed pills in baggies. Pill bottles, vials, cigarettes, perforated sheets of paper with psychedelic designs, dark packets, mushrooms, bags stuffed with sweet-smelling herb, a little under a hundred in cash. Looking for something... Have to keep watch...
A baggie of white powder. I turn it over. “Amph” written on it in permanent marker.
“Speed...” I’m sure even as I say it aloud.
Got to stay awake, I think. But if it’s the wrong stuff, puts me to sleep...
I nod like a junky then start awake, hoping it was only a moment. Care’s still breathing across the room, moaning from the stall. I’ve got to do something. I can’t pass out now.
I lick my pinkie and stick it in the bag. It’s bitter-tasting stuff. I roll one of the twenty-dollar bills into a straw, put it to my nose, and sniff up a bunch. More than I meant.
I shiver from feet to shoulders. I pull a menthol cigarette from the bag, start it with a lighter from Care’s purse, watch the flame dance tiredly at the end of the paper. I rise from my hands to my knees and look around, then...
I wake up, head throbbing as I lift it off the bottles. I limp quickly to Care. She’s asleep, her head lying on the toilet seat leaking spit, her vomit-encrusted hair in a ponytail.
I peek outside. It’s cold and dark still. I lock the door with my broken hand, fingers twitching and shaking. I pick the cig off the floor, light it. My whole body is awake. The pain is still all over, but almost in the background.
A mirror over the sink. I look in it, pinching the cig from my mouth with my left hand, pulling the skin down under my dilated eyes. They look full and empty, animalistic. My face shifts and distorts into an evil grin, creepy and disconcerting. I laugh. The weirdness turns to funniness.
“Fuck,” I whisper. “At least I’m awake.” My body groans in reply.
My hand runs across my