Pavel Kravchenko - Project Antichrist

The alley lay wide and bare, like a dried river bed. Most of the windows shimmered with blue light of after-dinner TV programming. The sky was a blob of deep purple with streaks of pink running through. I turned right at the next street and walked along fences of various height and fashion, until I emerged on to a great, brightly illuminated avenue. The sign said “Broadway.” I stood for a minute, letting the lights and the car noise sink in. When I began to walk again, it was to the left, where in the distance the towers of the downtown were rising. About a block later it occurred to me that I should be looking for a service station. A service station would have a vending machine.

I found one soon enough, its hovering logo spinning slowly against the purple sky. The phone vending machine was outside near the door, and I couldn’t help speeding up when I saw it. Hi, Larry, this is Luke Whales. Now listen very carefully… Larry, it’s Luke. I don’t have much time. I talk; you listen… I ran through a few more openings in my head, trying to pick the best one. But as I reached the machine and got out one of my cash chips, I realized that I had no idea what Larry’s number was. I looked around, as though expecting it to be written on one of the pumps or flashing in the window. There were two cars at the station. One parked in front of the store, the other at the pump. The woman in the car at the pump was looking right at me through the window. I hastened to turn my back to her and found myself staring into the camera lens.

It’s a scene, I told myself. You’re a guy buying a phone at a gas station. Action!

It worked. My limbs relaxed. The fingers began to cooperate. I chose, paid, and the drawer slid out, with a shiny new phone to be claimed inside. Cake in the park. Took me about twenty seconds. Now I just needed to call information and get Larry’s number. I turned away from the camera and began to casually walk away, punching the numbers into the phone. On my fourth step two sirens simultaneously went off nearby, and in another five seconds, which I spent motionless with my mouth agape, two police cruisers flew in from two sides of Broadway, screeching to a halt in front of the station.

I had begun to run before I realized it. I hurdled a low railing and tore into an alley.

“Freeze!” a voice cried. “Stop or you’re dead!”

That got my attention. I froze and turned, lifting my left hand to shield my eyes from the high beams of the police car.

“He’s got a gun!” the same voice cried. And then he shot me. Or would have shot me, if he hadn’t been so excited. There was a thunderclap and a CHUH of an impact, which I thought at first was coming from inside my skull. But the bullet actually zipped by my ear, tearing a chunk out of the brick wall and ricocheting away.

“Freeze!” another voice cried, and I think it must have momentarily frozen the first cop, because he did not shoot again for another second or so. Which was long enough for me. I ran for the second time, and that time I ran like hell. The new, shiny, apparently gun-looking phone still in my right fist, I burst across the alley, doubled back and crossed it again in the opposite direction, ducking into a narrower alley that joined the first one at a ninety-degree angle and putting the building corner between me and the lights. I was wind. I created wind. It was a sixty or seventy-yard dash to the next intersection, and I didn’t as much cover the distance in so many steps, as swallowed the space in two gulps. I assumed the cops had given chase, but all I heard was the wind, all I saw were street crossings, city blocks falling away behind me. I ran, I turned, ran, turned, until I could no longer breathe. I hugged a wet tree and stood there hawking and maybe crying a little, when my quivering, treehugging shadow was thrown against the nearest wall once again by the headlights of a car. All that running for nothing, I thought. No chance at all. There was nothing I could do. I didn’t have enough left in the lungs to yell “Don’t shoot!” I could no longer run. I couldn’t even tense up in the anticipation of being shot. I just stood there, hugging the tree, waiting.

“Luke, get in the car!”

“What?” I gasped. It was Iris. I couldn’t see her behind the lights, but it was her voice. I let go of the tree. “Iris?”

“Get in the back! Let’s go!”

I cleared the beams and finally saw the old beat up Civic. Iris gesticulated from behind the wheel. Lloyd was in the front next to her, not talking or looking at me. I pulled at the handle and fell into the back seat. The car jerked into motion.

We had driven for a minute or so, before I sat up and asked, “How?”

It seemed like a bad time, though. A pair of police cars flew left to right through an intersection a hundred feet in front of us, Iris hit the breaks and Lloyd shouted “There!” and pointed somewhere to the left with his gun. With his gun!

The sharp turn threw me sideways.

“Goddamn I’m an idiot,” said Lloyd. “They’ll notice. We should have just kept going across. Maybe they’re too busy.”

“What do we do?” Iris asked.

“They’ll be looking for a car now. I think we need to park somewhere and stay low. They don’t know what car it was, and there’s a million parked cars on this block alone.”

“So we sit in the car?”

“Yeah, just be on the lookout, get low if you see a cop car passing by.”

“What if they have someone on foot just walking and peeking inside parked cars?”

“Then… we… go to plan B.”

“You have a gun,” I bleated. “Why do you have a gun?”

“Wait,” Iris said. “Look, this is Greenwood. We’re like three blocks away from my place. We can make it there.”

I looked out through the back window. About three blocks back, which may have been the street from which Iris swerved into that alley, a cop car passed slowly. When it almost disappeared from view, it stopped, reversed, and turned into the same alley. I turned and saw Iris’s eyes in the rear view mirror. Lloyd twisted in his seat.

“We can make it there,” Iris repeated, making a hard left and a right at the next crossing. Sixty seconds later, she pulled into a small fenced courtyard, cut the lights and the engine. We listened for sirens. They seemed to be going off all over the place, but none were close for the moment.

“Let’s go.”

Iris led us through a doorway into the building and up the stairs to the second floor. There was just one door on the landing. It opened into a tiny foyer, which was the sharp point of a “V” created by two corridors. Of these, we took the one on the right and followed it until it turned left again. Iris’s place was full of doors, turns and muffled voices. It was dark, the only illumination coming from rare, painted-over light bulbs. Behind one of the doors we passed a rock band seemed to be rehearsing. Lloyd constantly glanced over his shoulder. At some point he had put the gun away.

We came to the sharp point of a V on the other side of the building. Iris unlocked a door, leading us into a small, two-room apartment. The living room had a kitchen, a couch and piles of books.

“Don’t turn the light on,” said Lloyd. He went to the window and peeked around the side of the blinds. Iris nodded and went to the next room.

“This place is crowded,” said Lloyd.

“No one keeps track who comes and who goes,” she replied, unseen. There was a sound of running water.

While they made small talk, I stood glued to the door. The slowing of the pace was causing everything to catch up with me all at once. A cop nearly shot me. Iris came back with a car. Lloyd had a gun. I almost got killed. Just like that. For buying and carrying a new silver-colored phone. And Lloyd had a silver-colored gun. My eyes found his silhouette in the dark, but he began to talk before I could get the words out of my open mouth.