?
The address is only four blocks away, but they have Juniper. It takes five minutes to rouse him from his narcotic sleep, and another twenty to get him out of bed and explain what’s happened. The donor bags are empty; he’s flush with blood. They unhook the needles, bandage the vein pricks. His pulse is strong and his skin warm, but he moves slowly. Grated teeth. Sharp intakes of breath. When they help him into his jeans, a button-down flannel, he pops a few stitches, but tells them not to worry. “It hurts like a son of a bitch,” he says. “But I’ll live.”
He shakes out six ibuprofen and downs them with a quarter-empty bottle of Dewar’s kept on the bureau. Then he directs Lela to retrieve the .45 in the closet, tucked beneath his sweaters. She holds it in the air between them. “Is this for me or you?”
He leans on the bureau, holding himself up. “You ever fire a gun before?”
“Once. For an assignment. I went to the gun range where the Bloods and the 503 Boys practice and—”
“Then it’s for me.”
?
Outside, they pause to rest every few paces. Lela isn’t much help—Juniper is too damn big—so he leans against walls and street signs and newspaper kiosks. The streets and sidewalks are empty. The sky is the color of a bruise. Hemingway walks ahead of them, his ears perked, his tail tucked, confused by the alarms and sirens wailing from every direction. “It sounds like the end of the world,” Lela says, and Juniper says, “Maybe it is.”
It takes two blocks before they happen upon the first body. An older man in a flannel shirt and jeans, face-up on the sidewalk. A butcher knife sticks out of his sternum like an exclamation mark. Juniper says his name, “Mitch,” and hovers over him.
Lela shields Hannah from the sight. “Don’t look, okay?”
Then she says to Juniper, “You knew him?”
Juniper shakes his head indeterminately—yes, no—and says, “I can’t seem to protect anyone. I can’t seem to do what I’m supposed to do.”
Lela tells him they don’t have time for pity or reflection or anything except movement. “Just move. Just keep walking.” She asks Hannah to hold her hand and stare straight ahead and try to ignore the bodies. But soon that becomes impossible. There are too many of them. A woman lies in the road, her stomach a saddle shape from the car that ran her over. A man hangs from a tree, swaying by a rope. And others, dozens of others.
A building burns in the distance, a pillar of flame. Smoke in the air, blood on the asphalt, but no movement. Not until they spot the sign in the distance, GEEK. Its letters glow red but the windows are dark. A computer supply store owned by Josh’s friend. “Almost there,” Lela says—to the others, to herself.
Stepping off the sidewalk is the worst. The walled-in canyons of the streets feel somewhat protected, but there is such hollowness to every intersection. As though the blackness of the asphalt were a void they might fall into. Halfway across the road, she hears it, the rumble of an engine. And then the headlights snap on and seize them midstep.
A squad car. Forty yards away. Lela feels a momentary relief, until the engine roars and the vehicle leaps forward and eats up the asphalt between them. There’s nowhere to go, not with Juniper using her as a crutch. But he already has the .45 in his hand. “Wait,” she says, a part of her still wanting to believe the world isn’t upside down. If they just call out for help, wave the cop down, then he’ll hit the brakes, roll down a window, ask how he might be of service.
Juniper’s arm wobbles, but his aim is true enough to knock four fist-sized holes in the windshield. The driver slumps against the wheel, and at the last second the squad car veers to the right and jumps the curb and smashes through the plate-glass window of a tea shop. There is a clatter of tables knocked aside and then the steel punch of the grille striking the far wall. The siren gives a brief chirp. Plates and mugs continue to explode against the floor. Even from here, Lela can see a red glow throbbing from the car’s interior, the coded stream of the swivel-mounted laptop.
“It’s like I said before.” Juniper doesn’t holster the weapon, but keeps it by his side when he hooks an arm around her neck. Sulfur burns her nostrils. “Paranoia. It’s a requirement if you want to survive.”
They hump forward, reaching the far sidewalk. Twenty more paces and they arrive at the doorstep of GEEK. Lela presses up against the door. The aisles carry coils of Ethernet cables, blister packs of thumb drives, dead-screened monitors and tablets. Like everything else in the Pearl District, the store appears mismatched, a sleek electronics hub crushed between a sex shop and psychic reader.
They bang on the door—the sign there reads CLOSED—and shiver where they stand. Rain falls, dotting the glass and chilling their skin. Lela puts an arm around Hannah, draws her close. Hemingway yawns beside them, his jaws closing with a clack. The sirens and alarms continue to throb, and she beats the door again, needing to get away from noise, muffle it.
“There they are,” Juniper says.
From the back of the shop come two figures. One of them is Josh, all sharp angles and acne and uncombed hair. The other is short but cheats a few inches with his clunky Doc Martens. He is balding, the gleaming scalp offset by forearms patched with thick wiry hair. He wears khakis and a polo shirt wrinkled at the belly from being tucked in earlier. He stares at them through the glass, then twists the deadbolt and opens the door. He studies them each in turn, finally settling his gaze on Lela. “Just so you know, if not for my man Josh, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. Getting past him is like getting past Kerberos.”
“Thank you,” Lela says. “Thanks for meeting with us.”
“Don’t thank me for anything, honey girl. Not yet. You might have gotten past Josh, but you still have to get past me. How do I know I can trust you?”
“Can we talk inside? It’s not safe out here.”
He leans against the doorway, crosses his arms, no rush. “Tell me how I know I can trust you.”
Josh swats his shoulder. “Come on, Derek. They’re going to get killed out there.”
Derek makes a dismissive notion with his hand as if to knock the complaint from the air.
Lela wears a hoodie to fight the cold, but she pulls it back from her face now so that they can look at each other plainly. “Why would I mess with you?”
“You’re a reporter. You know this address, you know my face. Maybe this is all some ruse you’ve set up so that you can write an article.”