William Rose - The Seven Habits

About this time, a security guard kinda steps outta the shadows, right? I don’t know how fuckin’ long he’d been there, but I got to assume that he just showed up on the scene. Otherwise, he woulda pulled her off of me before she turned my head into Hamburger Helper. I’m still a little woozy, but I’m tryin’ to focus on this dude because I feel like I need something to anchor me to the here and now. Something concrete, that I know is real.

That’s when I notice that it’s the same guard who was starin’ me down on the day that I first started this whole Clarice Hudson chapter of my life. He’s got the sleeves of his blue shirt pushed up and on his forearm I can see this scar, right? Not like from a knife wound or anything. More like tribal branding, if ya get my drift. The ridge of pink flesh is in the shape of a figure eight, and that’s mainly what I’m focused on, because somehow that seems like the most real thing in the world. It was like his scarification was the only thing keeping me up on my feet. Like I said earlier, it’s weird what the mind will seize on when given half a chance.

By this time, Clarice is bawlin’ her eyes out and she’s kinda looking from her bloody hands, to me, and then back to her hands again. And the entire time, she’s just whisperin’ so softly that you can barely hear her over the rush of traffic down on the boulevard. “Why? Why? Why?”

Me, I know the score right away. She’s trying to come to terms with what’s happening to her, right? I figure she was, on some level, aware of everything that had been going down. She saw herself chasing me, saw her frenzied attack… but couldn’t do a damn thing to stop it. Kinda like she was a passenger in her own brain.

That guard, though? All he knows is that there’s this woman sitting on the curb of his mall with blood streaked across her face and lookin’ like she might be in shock or some shit. And, even though she’s questioning her inability to control her own actions, he interprets it entirely differently, man.

His hand drops to the pepper spray on that shiny belt of his and you didn’t have to be dimensionally unstable to see what was going to happen next. In his mind, he just stumbled across an attempted rape or mugging, and I’m the scumbag responsible for this crying, disheveled woman.

“You!” he hollers. “Don’t move!”

His voice echoed through the parking garage like it was God himself barking out the command. But do you think I’m about to stand there and try to explain all this shit away? You think he’d believe it was Clarice Hudson who fuckin’ attacked me? No way, dude. He’s makin’ his own flawed conclusions based on the limited set of evidence before him.

So what did I do? I take off like the devil himself was after my soul, man. I’m headin’ for that spiral down ramp because I know if I go for my car this dude will have my license plate number, right? And I can hear him callin’ out behind me.

“Stop! Stop right there!”

I glance back over my shoulder, just to see if he’s givin’ chase, but he’s back there speaking into his radio. The way I see it, this little party is about to get a lot more guests. By the time I make it to ground level, I’m positive there’ll be a shit load of other guards waiting to nab my ass. The cops will probably be along shortly as well, right?

I’m running down the ramp and thinking about how royally fucked I am, all because I couldn’t keep my ass at home and lay low like Steel told me. At the same time, I’m thinkin’ that there has to be some way outta this shit, ya know, because if I get picked up then there ain’t nobody out there looking out for Ocean. For mankind as a whole, even. So I do the first thing that comes to mind without really puttin’ too much thought into it. Just acting on impulse, ya know?

See, what happened is that I vaulted over the side of that ramp like I was an Olympic gymnast on the pommel horse, man. My legs and torso swing over the side and, next thing I know, I’m fallin’ through the air. Of course, this coulda turned out really bad. I mean, I wasn’t that high up, but all it woulda taken was for me to land the wrong way and my ankle woulda snapped as easily as a Dollar Bonanza pencil.

As fate would have it, I ended up in a dumpster piled almost to overflowing with crushed cardboard boxes, packing peanuts, and books with their covers ripped off.

You can imagine, I didn’t take a lot of time pondering how lucky I’d been to have such a cushy landing, fuck no. I scramble outta that dumpster with these little bits of Styrofoam clingin’ to my hair and beard, and hit the ground running.

By this time, I can hear police sirens in the distance, right, and I can tell by the Doppler effect that they’re gettin’ closer every second. There’s no doubt in my mind that a description of me is being broadcast to every flatfoot and prowler in the city. APB, BOLO—whatever the hell you guys are calling it these days—I’m positive that if I stay on the streets, I’ll be in cuffs within the hour.

I duck back in this alley, right? I just wanna catch my breath for a sec and try to figure this shit out, but that siren I mentioned earlier has been joined by another and I can still see the mall from where I’m at, ya know? Hangin’ around that place would be stupid on a stick, so I keep moving, kinda peekin’ around corners before dashin’ across streets and slipping into the next alleyway.

The back of my head is throbbing, I wince every time my feet slap against the pavement, and I’m feeling kinda sick to my stomach now. But I gotta keep right on running. No other choice.

By the time I’d gone six or seven blocks though, I’m spending more time crouched down behind dumpsters and pressing into shadows than I am actually makin’ tracks. Seems like there’s a cop car on just about every street and they’re cruisin’, nice and slow like. Checkin’ out passersby, that kind of shit.

So what do ya do when the fuzz thinks you’re a would-be rapist and have laid out the dragnet? Where could you possibly go to find even a modicum of safety. Me?

I head down to Price Square.

Because that’s where all the homeless are, that’s why. I figure once I’m there, I’ll just kinda blend in, ya know? I mean—let’s face it—all of the disenfranchised basically look alike, and they all look like me .

Gettin’ there was a problem, though. I was sure one of you cops were gonna see me darting across the street, sooner or later, or you’d start searchin’ the alleys once I didn’t turn up on the avenues. If I could just make it to where I had in mind, I knew I’d be home free, but I had no earthly idea how the fuck I was gonna get there.

Now, this is the point in the story where Ocean helps me , if ya can dig that. Ironic, no? Here I am doin’ all this shit in an attempt to spare her a life of suffering and she comes to my aid.

How so? The sewers, man!

I think about Gauge and Corduroy leading her through that network of tunnels with those rotters just overhead, and the undead bastards never had a clue. So I find me a manhole cover back in one of the alleys and dig out this piece of metal from a dumpster. It took a lot of grunting and muscle, but I finally pried that cover from the ground and climbed down the rungs of the ladder.

The sewers in Ocean’s time are dry, man. There’s still a lingering odor, but there hasn’t been a toilet flushed in years. Me, I’m not so lucky. I’m sloshin’ through brown water up to my knees and I have to continually yank my feet outta the sludge that’s built up on the bottom. Place smelled like one of those outhouses they put at campgrounds, after the summer sun has been bakin’ everything inside, and I keep reaching out for the walls to keep from slippin’ in this shit. The walls are pretty damn nasty themselves, they’re slick and gooey and there’s these little things that look like stalactites… only they feel kinda like jelly, or congealed snot. I didn’t even want to think about what I was putting my hands into.