A Short Story a Day

by David Michael

The building door clicked closed behind Reese with an unexpected finality, and an unexpected speed, almost hitting her in the ass. Maybe her limp was slowing her down. She rubbed her hands on her hips to clean off the disgusting, gooey substance that had covered the doorknob.

She limped across the street, forcing herself to keep her pace normal–as normal as it could be with a pronounced limp and a reason to run like Hell less than a minute behind her. Pre-dawn traffic had already started, but wasn’t heavy.

She tried not to think about poor Galahad, left alone in his apartment with a murderous blob of a beast, and only her simple request and a teddy bear–a cocoagundy, she corrected herself, a fuzzy goddess named Sonata–to protect him. She hoped it would be enough.

She had never asked the man his name. And he had never offered it, even when she called him “Galahad”. Just as she hadn’t told him her name. But then, he hadn’t asked for her name either. She found herself wondering what woman in the man’s past had so completely flattened him like that. Who had he kept wanting her to be?

On the other side of the wide street, she turned left and walked until the first alley opened to her right. She walked into the alley, where the shadows gathered in one last stand against the soon-to-arrive morning sun.

The alley’s pungent smells of rotting food, old alcohol, stale piss and less easily–or willingly–identified  refuse wrapped around her as she limped along. She saw a few pairs of eyes, human, feline, and reptilian, peeking out of the shadows within the shadows, but she only stared back at them, silently daring them to find out if she was as wounded as she looked, until they disappeared again.

She found herself wondering if she should’ve killed Galahad. She had killed so many people in her life, even before going to work for the Old Man. Men who touched her had always been a favorite target. That Galahad had helped her–and hadn’t even tried to put a move on her–wouldn’t have stopped her before. Now, though, she … She wasn’t sure she recognized herself anymore.

She should’ve killed him. If for no other reason than he refused to kill her when she offered herself.

The alley came to a tee and she chose to go right again.

And it might’ve been a mercy killing. The Old Man’s summoned beast had been following her around the past several days, leaving a trail of goo-covered skeletons in its–and her–wake. People who had tried to kill her on sight–and failed, damn them–people who had talked to her but sent her away, people who had helped her, and anyone else who happened to be along her path. The beast didn’t discriminate. Almost all them were dead now.

Reese, walking death. More fatal than Typhoid Mary. Maybe she recognized herself, after all. More clearly than ever before.

And now the beast had caught up to her again. The beast that, like Galahad, refused to kill her, even though she knew–and the two of them, man and beast, had to know, as well–that killing her was in their best interests. She never hoped to understand men, but murderous, unfeeling beasts who worked for the Old Man should know better. It took one to know one.

But even she had become reluctant to kill.

Not that it seemed to matter, with the beast following her around and doing the killing for her. Except the one killing she wanted most.

Muffled gunshots came from her right as she stepped out of the alley to another street. Back from the building where she had left Galahad. She paused to listen, but the shots ceased as quickly as they had started.

The sounds of a city waking up resumed.

She thought of doubling back to check out what had happened. But either Galahad was alive or dead now, and there was nothing she could do about it. She had asked the beast, before it let her walk out of Galahad’s apartment, not kill the man. From the sounds of the gunfire, she decided she should’ve sent a memo to the cops as well. She wondered how they had become involved. Maybe the rookies last night had recognized her, even though she was walking with Galahad at the time.

Sirens and flashing red-and-blue lights burst out of the distance as multiple police cars roared out of the night, from Reese’s left, squealed around the corner to her right. She heard other sirens, saw other police cars heading the same way.

Back to the apartment building.

Reese, still standing at the mouth of the alley, took a deep breath and let it out slow. Going back would be stupid. If the beast didn’t kill her–and the bastard blob probably wouldn’t–then the cops would. Or the beast might kill the cops and she would watch and enjoy the show. Either way, she thought, she might come out on top. Or bottom.

She walked along the street, up to the corner. By the time she got there the last of the sirens had been turned off. But the spectacle was in full flower.

Black and white police cars with red and blue lights flashing and a scattering of unmarked cars with single flashing red lights on them had clogged the street, centered on the front of the apartment building. Police officers with shotguns, automatic rifles, and semi-automatic pistols hunched down behind cars, talking to each other with eyes wide, or crouched with their weapons drawn, pointing at the building. At the front of the traffic jam, closest to the building, two black and whites and another car sat, dark and empty.

One of the cops behind a car spotted her, a young man, probably in his twenties and a couple years younger than Reese. He waved at her to get her attention, gesturing for her to get back, as far back and as ar away as she could. Reese ignored him, and the cop gave her the finger and a look of disgust, then turned back to the building.

The door of the building had been propped open. The light inside the door was on, but no one was visible.

Lights began to turn on in the apartment building, up through the entire twelve stories. Reese noticed that more spectators had joined her, and had appeared on the far side of the scene as well. She wondered if the standoff would be long enough for the street vendors to show up.

Her eyes didn’t leave the open front door. She had expected a shadow, but the entire door went black. And then the beast was on the front steps of the building, looking like a towering, shapeless, moist pile of sparkling darkness.

The cops opened fire.

The surface of the beast rippled like a puddle in a thunderstorm as the bullets hit it. Behind it, the front face of the building chipped and glass shattered.

For a long second the beast remained motionless, then in flowed over the side of the steps. The cops fire followed it, more effective against the street lights and parking meters and trashcans, Reese thought, than the beast. The beast seemed unfazed, unslowed.

The beast flowed to the narrow alley that led to the back of the apartment building and poured itself into there, out of Reese’s sight.

The gunfire sputtered to a stop. Orders were yelled into the silence and a contingent of cops, guns held in front of them, began to move into the alley.

Reese watched the show for a few seconds longer before she realized what she had seen. She blinked and wondered what it meant that the beast hadn’t followed her trail–scent? footprints?–away from the building. Was it giving up on the chase early today? Or had their bizarre and fruitless little game taken a new turn?

Her gaze dropped where the alley the beast had disappeared, and down which a line of tense cops was following it one by ignorant one, and her eyes landed on an unmarked car that stood empty on the fringe of the cop jam.

Boosting a car hadn’t stopped the beast before. It had found her even then, forced her to take off on foot again. How many days ago had that been? Still, driving an unmarked police car beat walking with a limp.

Reese stepped out of the crowd of spectators and limped to the car.

The same cop as before spotted her and yelled, “Hey! Get back, lady. This is still a very dangerous situation.”

Reese smiled and continued walking. A few steps from the car, the cop started to walk toward her, bringing his gun up, yelled at her again, “Get back. Step away from the car.”

A few other cops turned to see what was happening.

The door of the car stood open, so Reese didn’t have to waste time with that. She stepped into the front seat, checked for the keys and found them hanging from the ignition.

The cop stopped a few meters from the car, gun pointing at her through the windshield.

“Get out of the car.”

Reese started the car, and the cop pulled the trigger. Reese returned the cop’s fuck-you-finger from before, though she didn’t know if he could see it through the spiderweb of broken glass that the windshield had become. He shot again, creating another spiderweb right in front of her face.

She put the car into reverse and stomped the gas. The car rocketed backwards, forcing spectators to scatter. She hit something and backed over it. Maybe a person, maybe the curb. She didn’t have time to check.

When she opened up enough room in front of her, she hit the brakes hard enough to finally close the drivers door. She shifted gears as two more shots bounced off the sloped windshield. Shards of safety glass were dislodged from the inside of the windshield but the glass held together.

She spun around with tires squealing and headed off into the morning traffic. She heard more shots, but none of them hit the car.

Six blocks later, with no sign of pursuit in her mirrors, she pulled into a parking lot. She used the butt of the shotgun conveniently left by the previous driver of the unmarked police car to smash in the drivers side window of a nondescript brown sedan. A screw driver from a toolkit in the trunk of the car proved useful in pulling apart the ignition so she could hot wire it.

A sloppy job of hotwiring, she thought to herself as she pulled out of the parking lot, shotgun on the seat beside her, but finesse had never been her strong suit. That was Sam’s part of their relationship.

She missed Sam. She would always miss Sam. But she seemed to be past the tears now. Mostly.

She wiped her eyes and wondered how many cops the beast had killed. At least it had finally done something she considered useful. She and Sam had never taken revenge on the cops that gang raped them both, two young women, strangers, brought in that night for two different violent offenses. Afterward, the cops put them, bleeding and bruised and battered with a broken nose and two broken teeth between them, into the same holding cell. That had been Sam’s idea, not going back for revenge.

Reese, nose still in a splint two weeks later, had been furious. “Why the fuck not?” she asked, tired of sounding to herself like her head was full of cotton, tired of sleeping with her mouth open, tired of seeing blood in her piss and shit.

“Three reasons,” Sam told her, touching her cheek with a soft finger. “One, it’s always bad news to take on an entire police department. Two,” she said with another light tap, “we owe them for bringing us together.”

Reese snorted, and it hurt like Hell. “We’re not together,” she said and turned so that her back was to Sam.

Sam only laughed and snuggled closer. Sam’s fingers stroked the side of Reese’s head, trailing through Reese’s hair and tracing the ridge of her ear. “Have you ever thought of growing your hair out?”

“What’s the third reason?” Reese asked, changing the subject. She hated her hair, too dark without being black, too thick without being manageable. And her hair hated her back. But both she and her hair liked the way Sam touched her, though.

“Because killing cops,” Sam replied, “is barely two steps above picking on deadhunters. Purely bush league.”

“I thought you were already bush league,” Reese said.

Sam laughed in Reese’s ear as she moved her hand moved down Reese’s neck, past the shoulder, down Reese’s arm to the bare hip.

Reese sniffed, focusing on the traffic she drove through. She needed to get out of Hell on Earth. Too many memories here. Too many enemies that seemed unable to kill her, either through incompetence or because, as she had been told the day before, the Old Man had put out word that she wasn’t to be killed.

Maybe the beast couldn’t cross the Wasteland. Not that this car could either. “Piece of shit,” she said, thumping the steering wheel.

That wasn’t fair. No car could cross the Wasteland. But Reese wasn’t feeling fair. Then she wondered if she had ever “felt fair”. Fair had damn little to do with life in Hell on Earth. And she wasn’t going to apologize to a piece of shit car that could barely do 100 klicks on the highway with the pedal down to the floor.

And the beast would follow her, even across the Wasteland into Suburbia. She knew that. The glimpse she had seen when held over the summoning fire had shown her a strange, brutal Hell that probably contained threats that would send the creatures of the Wasteland running away screaming. The Old Man’s beast wouldn’t be stopped.

But maybe it would be slowed. And she had always wanted to see the ocean again.

She took the exit to what had once been called the Lambert-St. Louis International Airport but was now named for Waylon Keeppon, the Missouri governor that oversaw the transition of control of the region from the government that still ran Suburbia to the Courts of Hell and the independent city-states. Most people that Reese knew called it either the Way Out or the Keep Out, depending on their particular sentiment.

“Do you have your passport?” the woman at the ticket window asked. She wore more make up on this one day than Reese had ever put on in her life. Even Sam had been unsuccessful in that regard.

“Passport?” Reese asked. “Since when did Hell on Earth have passports?”

The woman shrugged and batted heavily outlined eyes. “Suit yourself. If you’re carrying any weapons, those will have to be checked before you board–”

“No,” Reese said. She had left the shotgun in the car. After going back to get it three separate times. “No weapons. And no luggage. I just want to fly–”

The woman tapped her long fake nails on the metal countertop, interrupting Reese. “There’s a discount,” the woman went on when Reese stopped talking, “if you agree to be fully restrained during flight. In addtion to the required lap and torso restraints, ankle, wrist and head restraints will–”

“Just give me the damn ticket,” Reese said, counting out money she had stolen from Galahad.

The woman sniffed, but she took the money and handed Reese a boarding pass. “The next flight leaves at 2 pm, in 90 minutes.”

Reese picked up the ticket and left the ticket counter.

“Don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” the woman called after Reese.

“Too late,” Reese said.

Copyright © 2006 by David Michael.