Gregg Hurwitz - The Survivor

Cielle made a noise in her throat indicating, somehow, that she found this romantic.

Jason stood there hunched pathetically in the driveway with his bag and guitar case and sad-sack eyes. “If you leave me here, you might as well kill me yourself.”

Nate looked at him a moment longer, then stomped on the gas pedal. The Jeep lurched backward out of the driveway, leaving Jason there, his hands extended plaintively.

When Nate stopped in the street to yank the gearshift into drive, Janie was looking across at him. “What?” he said.

“They’ve seen him now,” she said. “They could come after him. No matter how much of a pain in the ass he is, it’s our fault.”

“He’s a kid!” Nate said. “He’s got parents. We can’t just-”

Cielle now, from the backseat: “He’s emancipated. His dad’s dead. He hasn’t talked to his mom in months. ”

The words flying. There was no time to discuss this and even less to decide. Jason was shuffling toward them, his hands still out as if catching rain.

“Mom, please, ” Cielle said.

“Oh, for the love of Christ.” Janie cranked down her window. “Get in.”

The waterworks shut off immediately, and Jason hopped in, tossing his bag and guitar into the back. Grimacing, Nate took off, eyes rotating from wing mirror to rearview. Five blocks away. Ten. On the freeway now, exits sailing past.

He almost dared to breathe normally.

“So what went down back there?” Jason asked, one hand covering his eye. Silence. He glanced around. “O- kay. ” He leaned forward, taking in Nate’s face. “You’re all bloody.”

Nate’s mouth was sour, laced with the bitterness of spent adrenaline. “Yes, Jason. I’m all bloody.”

“Dude, you can call me Jay already. Jason sounds like you’re all angry. ” He blinked a few times, awaiting a response that Nate withheld. “Where we going anyway?”

“We,” Nate said. “Great.” A big green freeway sign flew by overhead. He squeezed the steering wheel, the nerves of his fingers giving off a worrisome tingle. On the lam with a deteriorating medical condition. Hardly ideal. “We can’t use credit cards. Can’t make reservations. Can’t book flights. So just this second, Jason? I don’t know.”

“Huh.” Jason chewed his lip. He turned to Cielle. “Gimme your phone.”

She passed him her iPhone, and he clicked around. Nate watched in the mirror, irritated. Janie kept her thin arms crossed, doing her best to stop them from shaking. Cielle cried silently, tears slipping down her cheeks. The trauma catching up to them.

The gentle iPhone tapping continued, and finally Nate said, “What the hell are you doing?”

“Facebook, dude.”

“Do you really think this is the best time for-”

“I’m looking up my friends in the Los Angeles network. Well, it used to be a network, but now it’s listed as ‘current city.’ Lame.”

“Quiet would be good right now, Jason,” Nate said.

“Like this dude. Status update: ‘Can’t wait for two weeks in Maui.’ Then it links to his Twitter account for the real-time skinny. See? Cool. Here’s his latest tweet: ‘Rocking it with the Ps at the Grand Wailea.’ Ps stands for ‘parents.’”

“Yes. I figured.”

“Then there’s the location-map icon with the tweet. Here. Yup. Dude’s in Maui all right.”

“Fascinating, Jason. We just squeezed out of that house with our lives, and now you’re-”

“And I’ll scroll back a few tweets to find an old one. Like this. ‘Dear Funky Smell in my sock drawer. Please go away.’” He brayed a quick laugh. “Now I’ll click this location-map icon. And here.” He shoved the phone at Nate.

“What?”

“It’s a house in Silver Lake,” Jason said. “With no one home for the next nine days.”

Nate took the iPhone, glanced down at the screen. A neat little map. Janie looked across at the device, too, and then they looked at each other, and her eyes reshaped themselves with a touch of amusement, though they were still wet.

Cielle wiped her tears, leaned over, and kissed Jason on the cheek. He leaned back, crossing his arms, gangsta style. “ Boo- yah!”

Janie, deadpan, her eyes still glassy: “He was kinda growing on me till the boo- yah.”

“I hope they have a hot tub,” Jason mused.

“I thought you said this was your friend,” Nate said.

“Don’t you know anything?” Jason snickered. “No one’s really friends on the Internet.”

* * *

They drove east in silence, Janie reading the electronic map and issuing directions in a flat, almost lifeless voice. Jason took Cielle’s hand, giving her knuckles a quick kiss, and Nate was surprised to feel not disapproval but a tremor of appreciation. His daughter had endured an edge-of-hell scare, and Shithead at least knew to offer a bit of comfort. Drinking in the silence, they tended their private worries, the thrum of the tires carrying them into the unknown.

Nate exited at Silver Lake. Home to hipsters, slackers, aspiring artists, indie musicians, and other redundancies, the hilly, tree-intensive neighborhood sits east of Hollywood and north of downtown. Nate navigated through a gauntlet of cafes, boutiques, coffee shops, Pilates studios, gay bookstores, and martini clubs, each crowded with a full rainbow of patrons. They drove past the famous flight of stairs where Laurel and Hardy had lugged that player piano up and ridden it down a time or twelve, and then they were winding up toward the reservoir and the address marked on Cielle’s iPhone by a virtual guitar pick.

The architecture varied, Spanish bungalows interspersed with sleek Neutra knockoffs and a few actual Neutras. They reached the house, a modern structure of glass and concrete, and Jason let out a whistle. Leaving the Jeep up the street, they zombie-shuffled back toward the front yard, bruised and bloody and hollowed out, dead on their feet. Circling like predators, they assessed the doors, windows, and gates for vulnerabilities.

In the side yard, Nate found an unlatched window letting into the laundry room and jiggled the pane up. No alarm. The smells of detergent and fabric softener wafted through the gap, a reminder of normal lives lived normally. Turning to call to the others, he found his voice missing. The circumstances had dawned, reality riding in on the household scents, rattling him into speechlessness. He swallowed hard, dried blood crackling at his hairline, and tried again.

The sun broke the horizon, sending a plane of yellow through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Light crept across the great-room floor, claiming the Oriental rug, the paisley-shaped coffee table, Shithead Jason sleeping in a swirl of blankets, finally reaching the base of the couch, Nate’s bare toes, shins, knees. At last he was squinting into the glare rather than watching it stalk him. After a fitful few hours of sleep, he’d awakened as if jolted by a live wire, and sat silent watch as Jason snored at his feet and his wife and daughter slumbered in the bedroom up the hall. He’d left the house only once, creeping outside to swap the Jeep’s license plates with those from the Range Rover parked in the garage.

Now Jason stirred and rose, rubbing his black eye, his hair practically on end. Yawning, he regarded the furnishings. “Who knew MonkeyBiz12 came from serious dosh?”

Nate elected to interpret the question as rhetorical. He closed his eyes, breathed, tested his muscles. Left hand weak. Right hand tingly but functional. He raised his left foot and rotated it, as if stretching his ankle. It seemed to be back online, another morning semirecovery. Padding across the kitchen, he set down the Beretta on the counter, found a glass of water, and swallowed his pills. Antibiotics for the mostly healed stab wound in his shoulder. Riluzole to slow the ALS symptoms. Fat lot of good the latter were doing of late-not so much as a charitable placebo bump. If his condition worsened, it would be too risky for him to break cover and go to a doctor. He was over the crest already, the brake lines snipped; there wasn’t much he could do now but buckle up.