The Altonevers (25 page)

“
You should be overwhelmed
with joy, you'll be an honorary member of the club,” Cider
says.

“
Oh yeah what club? the
guys that have had your chick?” the Ribbit laughs.

“
No, of the fumbling pencil
pushers I've given the slip. Anna, anytime now.”

“
I think,” her voice
breaks, “I've got his nose,” she strains to speak through her
nerves strung as tense as tightened steel cables.

“
Can it! put the gun down.
Now! silly little girl, you don't know what you’re doing, you'll be
hunted to the ends of eternity. Look, you can barely even look me
in the eye,” the Ribbit says down to her.

“
Shoot him,” Cider
insists.

“
She can't even shoot if
she wanted to. The way she's holding that gun she'll break her
little wrist. Looks like you picked the wrong bird to run with. Not
so clever after all, huh,” gloats the Ribbit.

“
Anna.”

Pipip pip pip
pip..pipip..pip...pip…

“
She dont go’t it kid, she
just d-”

“
POP!”

“
Click.”

“
AHHHHHHH....Dammit!” she
screams. The click is the sound of her wrist breaking to the .38's
recoil. She drops the weapon, and falls to her knees in pain. Cider
crawls out from under the faceless Ribbit to console her and lift
her to feet, throwing her good arm over his shoulder.

“
I can walk, Cider, I can
walk,” she says. He lets her go but keeps his hand on her
shoulder.

“
Tuck your arm into your
stomach, try not to move it.”

“
Thank you” she
says.

“
Thank you, you saved me
from an eternity in the tombs,” he says.
“Anna I’m sorry but we can't go to a hospital or anything, we
have to go now.”

“
I know...as always,” she
sighs, turning her face to his. He hugs her lightly, being mindful
of her arm.

pip pip pipip pip...

“
He would've killed me
too?” she asks.

“
He would've.”

“
We should be running,” she
says.

“
Quickly please,” he says
pulling her by her good hand into the dripping rain. Onto the a
narrow straight away then catwalks clinking under their fleeing
feet. The two are already in full flight down several flights of
stairs, avoiding the ladders when they hear a Ribbit shout, “You
there Freeze. I said Freeze!”

“
It's coming from the next
buildings over, it’s not us,” Cider says.

“
We're not going to stop,”
she huffs.

“
Stop now or I'll
shoot!”

“
Yahaahaahaaahaaaaa” they
hear a voice resembling Rojo's yell through the air, as though
shouted into a canyon from the next street over. Immediately
followed by a fervent exchange of bursting gunfire.

“
Do you think he made it?”
she asks.

“
Aahaahaaa!”

“
I'm sure he'll be fine,”
he says assuredly. The two keep on through the narrow fire escapes
built unevenly between the monolithic buildings and massive
floating fragments of city. Passing curtain covered arched windows
resembling tombstones.

“
Where are we going?” she
asks him, who's leading the way.

“
We have to get up, so we
have to go down,” he says.

“
That doesn’t make any
sense.”

“
Down is where our ride
is.”

“
Our ride?” she
asks.

“
There's more surface space
in the Shallows, more shadows to hide in, more crime, more cops,
and we need a ride,” he says. He stops at a window and lights a
smoke, taking a deep breath and leans his shoulders against the
stone gray facade.

“
What're you doing?” she
asks.

“
Were gonna go through this
window, door whatever,” he says, and she snatches the smoke from
his lips and throws it from the hundredth floor of this structure,
the thirty second of the one adjacent, and the seven hundred and
twelfth of the one across from that.

“
What's wrong with you,”
she slaps at him.

“
What is wrong with you?”
he asks like a scolded child. She contemplates the thought for a
minute, of what is wrong with her, with all that's around her. That
she’s already in too deep, too guilty to complain and unable to
conjure a better way to survive. She follows him through the open
door just as a Ribbit shouts and shoots at them. Chirping chips off
the stone facade around the window, she makes it through just as
the glass shatters and splashes around her feet.
They're standing in the living room of a stain
shirted man sitting in a beaten recliner, whose dead eyes reflect
perfectly the pornography he's watching. Paused holding fork an
inch from his fat red sauce smeared cheeks to look like a clowns
smile. His neurotic, shouting yellow gloved housewife is chastising
her child while chasing the kid around the dinner table with a
rolling pin.

“
Let's keep moving,” she
insists.

“
Yup,” he
agrees.

“
You think we'll find a
station?” she asks.“I don't know, maybe,” he says, “whatever we’re
looking for it ain’t this.” The two continue through to the next
window and the next, each a different room of people cooking and
arguing, playing, living lazily indoors. They trample through
people’s homes and gardens, through scenes of the private joys and
outdoor sights. Each an entirely different place from the last but
for the vaulted ceilings always above their heads, the only sign of
continuity through the stairwells, lobbies and halls, though even
this is fleeting. Leaving no shred of continuity when they reach
the first open prairie, running right under its clear blue skies
through an open window and onto the next. Once running off a cliff
and falling a hundred feet hitting the hardwood flooring of an
amphitheater stage while a full orchestra plays to a crowd. Anna
gets up embarrassed, as lady like as she can she shuffles to the
exit doors and onto the next. Sometimes hallways or the catwalks
break their dash from one window to the next space. Passing through
a powder pigment throwing festival, then to a conjuring sorcerer
standing on the shoreline commanding the oceans to rise miles above
sea level. Cider knocks down a cameraman when running through the
filming of a sitcom based on the degradation of theater in newer
media. The live studio audience button calls for a laugh and a sob
as they pass. Another having a mouse faced man looking at them with
the unsightly white eyes of blindness, there are two others in the
room which go unnoticed by the two already passing onto the next.
Housing a Chef still wearing his hat, but bottomless, cooking
scrambled eggs and flapjacks in the comfort of his own kitchen.
They fall through what looks like the skies of a thunderous
Jupiter's atmosphere. Then running through a lush sun baked brown
bark forest with saturated green foliage filling their eyes, and
the pungent aroma of a primal place salivating their mouths through
their noses in the seconds it takes to pass into the cold metal of
a capsizing submarine. Then into an empty tree house before
reaching a green field giving Anna the chills and stillness of
meeting Mickey. A violinist is sitting alone in a room under a
spotlight with his head down, playing the skins of his forearm with
the violin bow. Slashing his wrist deeper with each stroke and
splashing his blood to the carpet and walls around him. Onto the
next to see the universe from afar, as merely a membrane of an even
bigger mass, moving, resembling the growth of a baby's brain
forming in the womb. A massive lush lucidly detailed fungi filled
jungle with bundled tents suspended by bungee cords forty feet off
the blue foliage forest floor is before a dense technologically
advanced society’s city square brimming with screens and moving
lights. The places begin to blur, blending together in their
peripheral as they pass through as fast as they can. Through the
mechanized men and crude machines of an early assembly plant, then
wading waist high through a freshwater pond. Each having their own
effect on the senses for the second they pass each scene enveloping
them. Window after window, each scene's bleeding into the next and
blending more smoothly than the last. Until they all become rushing
colors spinning into a tunnel swirling around them. Lasting for
minutes or seconds or maybe hours, they feel nothing of the passage
of time as they pass from room to room. Each time shifting faster
until there's only a single unblemished black spiraling around them
too quickly to be seen as color, encasing the two as their feet
pitter patter through its vortex vacuum.
They suddenly spill out of the last window onto pavement,
deep in the depths of the Shallows, far below the massive blue
light hovering a mile higher than the highest buildings. Looking up
they see what seems like a massive scar of light cleaved between
the brown brick walls reaching miles skyward.

“
That was a trip huh” he
says, his eyebrows arched in amazement, and instinctively lighting
a smoke. Her face is holding a similar gaze.

“
We should stay off the
main streets,” she says.

“
We have to stay close to
it.” The two stick to the left at every fork of their broken path,
following the avenue as stealthily as tribal hunters stalk a river.
Each tired step scuffles against the sandpaper like pavement and
metal. Each breath echoes, and returns to them in faint clapping
sounds. After seeing no one for nearly a mile, she nudges him with
her elbow, nodding over her shoulder for him to see an
establishment vehicle parked on the opposite side of a four lane
main avenue. It's white and silver color scheme is clothing what
seems like a small stout rocket topped by two bulbous
sirens.

A block further they tuck into a
closed metal doorway sunken three feet into the side of a
building.. with emptied lungs, Anna's scared and hurt, her
fragility in these situations vividly show in her wild frightened
eyes, at least compared to his almost always steady as a stone
slate blue's. She's obviously overwhelmed, her shell is shocked,
and she's speaking with wavering words.

“
What do we do now?” she
asks.

“
Hold out your hand,” he
says.

“
It's fine. Let’s keep
going, we can't stop now.”

“
We have to get that
ride.”

“
How can we?”

“
A damsel in distress my
dear,” he says “If you dare to?”

“
Dare to what?”

“
I don't know. I don't know
if you can pull it off.”

“
Pull what off? asking the
guy for a ride and saying we got lost down here or something, that
we're actually from up there?” she says doubtfully.

“
Yeah actually, that's
exactly what I was thinking,” he says.

“
That's not going to
work.”

“
Oh yeah, and why not?” he
asks.

“
Well,” she says returning
his defensive tone. “We don't know anything about what's up there,
past the halo. So they won't believe us,” she says. He resigns his
demeaning disposition and leers at her, moving his lips around his
face for a minute.

“
I think...you're right,”
he says.

“
So...what do we
do?”

“
Improvise,” he says. The
two sink into contemplative poses, leaning this way and that,
interchangeably rubbing their chins and scratching their heads.
Deeply contemplating their circumstance, looking around, exchanging
passing glances in pondering their present predicament.

“
I got it!” she shouts,
pointing into the air as though switching on a light
bulb.

“
What is it,” he
asks.

“
No. No it won’t
work...damn,” she sighs, rubbing her chin and pacing in circles,
vainly trying to elude the pain of her rendered wrist.

“
I got it!” he
shouts.

“
What is it? what?” she
says dancing ecstatically in place.

“
It's a girl who’s to cry
wolf then,” he says excitedly.

“
What!? What's that? a pet
name from your petty crook playbook?” she quips.

“
Exactly, but I'm not
petty. I don't think so anyway,” he says. Stopping her reply by
holding a single finger over her forehead, confounding her face to
a bemused quiet.

“
I'll be right back, stay
here, I'll be right back,” he says, then disappearing around the
corner, leaving a puff of his smoke over his shoulder. He peeks
around another corner to the main street, fixating on one of the
open stores. The store sign’s yellow light outlines the youths in
their natural place posting in front of it. He hurries back as
quickly as he can, in dread of the Ribbits reaching her first. She
looks up and around in awe of the immense skyward depth of the
brick, vanishing in a horizon high above before it even reaches the
open sky.

“
Okay,” he says startling
her with his sudden reappearance, trailed by a puff of his smoke.
He begins to quickly explain while she stares and him listens,
intently watching his words.

“
It's that, here's what
we’re going to do” he says.