Shadows hide the body in the alley, where it cools, and decomposes, and stinks to high heaven.\u00c2\u00a0 The blood beneath the corpse is coagulating, not quite dry, no longer flowing.\u00c2\u00a0 There hasn\u2019t been breath for fifteen minutes.\u00c2\u00a0 The three bullet wounds, one in the face, two in the chest, create a perfect isosceles triangle, which points due east, to where the full, spherical moon hangs low in the sky.\u00c2\u00a0 You can see it straight down the alley, as though it\u2019s tethered to the body.<\/p>\n
I walk toward the moon.\u00c2\u00a0 The gun in my hand is cold, my finger itching, my blood hot.\u00c2\u00a0 The city smells fresh and crisp and dangerous, which is partly wrong.\u00c2\u00a0 I feel out of place.\u00c2\u00a0 I don\u2019t know how to live in a city.<\/p>\n
At the end of the alley is a rectangular door made of metal, colored gunmetal gray, but it\u2019s thin and battered and dimpled and rusted.\u00c2\u00a0 By the ways of doors, it\u2019s not really very much at all, and the lock\u2019s already been smashed open.<\/p>\n
Stairs inside.\u00c2\u00a0 Descending into pitch dark.\u00c2\u00a0 Neither moon nor streetlight penetrates, and there\u2019s nothing inside to lead the way.\u00c2\u00a0 The door opens soundlessly, but the corrugated floor is also metal and every my every footfall echoes.<\/p>\n
Somewhere down there, I hear machine shop noises, heavy machinery pounding and clanging and striking.\u00c2\u00a0 I imagine sparks arcing from sheets of metal being driven through behemothic tools operated by sweaty men in blue shirts.<\/p>\n
At the bottom of the staircase, the path continues dead east, and though doors line either side I take none of them.\u00c2\u00a0 I\u2019m surprised when the passage ends abruptly at a dead-end, giving me two choice but no direction.\u00c2\u00a0 I review what I\u2019d already seen.\u00c2\u00a0 The body.\u00c2\u00a0 The alley.\u00c2\u00a0 The gunshot wounds.\u00c2\u00a0 What can I be missing?<\/p>\n
Either hall leads to lighted rooms, or lighted corridors.\u00c2\u00a0 There are no answers here.\u00c2\u00a0 I\u2019ve missed something.\u00c2\u00a0 The metal door?\u00c2\u00a0 There\u2019d been a window above it.\u00c2\u00a0 I went down.\u00c2\u00a0 There had been patterns on the door, clues I hadn\u2019t noticed.\u00c2\u00a0 I\u2019m not as young as I was, or as spry of mind.\u00c2\u00a0 I turn to retrace my steps, but my opponent has already discovered me.\u00c2\u00a0 She stands in the dark, so that her dark hair melds into the shadow, and the black dress she wears hides her perfect body perfectly.\u00c2\u00a0 I can see no curve of her, neither hips nor lips nor neckline, but I can feel the gun trained on me, and I know she stands dead center.<\/p>\n
\u201cLower the gun,\u201d she says.\u00c2\u00a0 I comply.<\/p>\n
\u201cKick it to me,\u201d she says.\u00c2\u00a0 I kick it to her.<\/p>\n
\u201cKneel,\u201d she says.\u00c2\u00a0 I hesitate, but finally settle on my knees.\u00c2\u00a0 The corrugated flooring presses painfully into my skin.<\/p>\n
She smiles.\u00c2\u00a0 I can almost see her straight white teeth through the gloom.\u00c2\u00a0 But she doesn\u2019t say anything more, so I do.\u00c2\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019m not alone,\u201d I tell her.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t care.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI have backup,\u201d I tell her.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t care.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWho was the man in the alley,\u201d I tell her.<\/p>\n
She says it again: \u201cI don\u2019t care.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou didn\u2019t kill him.\u201d<\/p>\n
I imagine she shrugs.\u00c2\u00a0 She does that sometimes.\u00c2\u00a0 But no matter how well my eyes adjust, I cannot see where there is absolutely no light.\u00c2\u00a0 When she shrugs, the V of her neckline must move, and the teardrop diamonds dangling from her ears must sway.\u00c2\u00a0 She must be barefoot, carrying her heels in one hand, else how could she have come so silently behind me?<\/p>\n
After some time passes in silence, I tell her, \u201cYou can kill me now.\u201d<\/p>\n
She moves close.\u00c2\u00a0 I can\u2019t see her, or hear, but I feel the vibrations of her movement in the floor.\u00c2\u00a0 She comes close enough that I can see the vague outline of her.\u00c2\u00a0 She kneels in front of me, gun still pointed.\u00c2\u00a0 Her dress must have a long slit on one side for her to arrange her legs that way.\u00c2\u00a0 \u201cI don\u2019t care to.\u201d<\/p>\n
We look at each other, peering through darkness, searching for something in the abyss.\u00c2\u00a0 Her eyes are almond-shaped, a little too narrow, but set wide apart.\u00c2\u00a0 She shoves the cold barrel of the gun into my chest.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you kill me,\u201d I tell her, \u201cyou lose your shadow.\u00c2\u00a0 No one else will ever catch you.\u00c2\u00a0 No one else can read your telltale signs.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re a madman,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut an honest madman.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re a fool,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd you\u2019re a ghost,\u201d I tell her.<\/p>\n
She smiles.\u00c2\u00a0 And she kisses me.\u00c2\u00a0 It\u2019s not insubstantial.\u00c2\u00a0 And it\u2019s shapeless.<\/p>\n
And then she\u2019s gone.\u00c2\u00a0 Her sweet lips, the cinnamon scent of her skin, the hard iron barrel of her gun.\u00c2\u00a0 The floor bounces as she retreats.\u00c2\u00a0 I find my gun before I pursue her.\u00c2\u00a0 But already, the back-up is here, the police, men and women in uniforms and armed with regulation-issue police weapons.\u00c2\u00a0 They flood the stairs with light.\u00c2\u00a0 Laughing, she runs right through them.\u00c2\u00a0 She doesn\u2019t care.<\/p>\n
And I follow.\u00c2\u00a0 The police are perplexed.\u00c2\u00a0 They always are.\u00c2\u00a0 They see nothing and no one.\u00c2\u00a0 They feel my feet pounding on the metal flooring, and they see the door fly open before my hands.\u00c2\u00a0 They smell the potential of my gunpowder.\u00c2\u00a0 And they find their murderer, hiding, cowering in what had been the dark, though they may never find the gun he used.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou didn\u2019t see them,\u201d the murderer insists, but I don\u2019t stay to hear what else he might say.\u00c2\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t matter.\u00c2\u00a0 She\u2019s standing at the far end of the alley, backlit, her perfectly curved body forming a perfect silhouette.\u00c2\u00a0 She points her gun at me.\u00c2\u00a0 I raise mine, but too late.\u00c2\u00a0 She fires.\u00c2\u00a0 The gunshot is like thunder, so the police come running.\u00c2\u00a0 The bullet is like lightning, piercing my chest.\u00c2\u00a0 It creates a straight line that draws me to her, but also leads me away.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s already gone before I drop to my knees.\u00c2\u00a0 It\u2019s hard to breathe.\u00c2\u00a0 My heart palpitates and my hands sweat and I drop my precious gun.\u00c2\u00a0 I\u2019ll need that later.\u00c2\u00a0 I close my eyes and whisper her name, a promise, a curse, an admission of defeat, a vow of vengeance.\u00c2\u00a0 I hit the ground hard.\u00c2\u00a0 It\u2019s a long time before I open my eyes again.\u00c2\u00a0 Days, perhaps weeks.\u00c2\u00a0 There\u2019s another corpse in the alley facedown, five bullet wounds this time, all in the back.\u00c2\u00a0 The body\u2019s cooling, and the spilt blood is tacky and drying.\u00c2\u00a0 The wounds form a perfect pentagon, and when I can determine a reference point, I will know which direction to begin my pursuit.\u00c2\u00a0 She\u2019ll be hundreds of miles away by now.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe this round will be mine.<\/p>\n
My gun lies on the ground beside me.\u00c2\u00a0 It\u2019s not insubstantial.\u00c2\u00a0 I lift it, test its weight, and I follow the line created by the bullet wounds and the barrel of my gun.\u00c2\u00a0 It leads directly east, toward the low-hanging sickle moon.\u00c2\u00a0 At the end of the alley, there\u2019s a door, dimpled and rusted metal, and a window above it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Shadows hide the body in the alley, where it cools, and decomposes, and stinks to high heaven.\u00c2\u00a0 The blood beneath the corpse is coagulating, not […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12,6,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}