James Moore - Subject Seven

He shrugged and then remembered they couldn’t see him. At least he didn’t think they could. He hadn’t ever consciously linked to others before. When he was a child, the linking had been instinctual. Part of him thrilled to feel them again, the others out there, the ones that were at least a little like him. “You’ll have to figure that out for yourself. I can’t help you with that part. Not yet.”

“Why did you wake me?”

“You’ve been asleep for a long, long time. Don’t you think you’re overdue for waking up?”

“Where am I?”

“I have no idea. You’ll figure that out all on your own.”

“What do you want from me?”

Joe Bronx smiled. “Ahhh… That’s the very question I was waiting for.”

The sound of the garbage truck rumbling a few feet down the alley woke Gene Rothstein from his troubled sleep. He opened one eye first and looked around, seeing garbage, graffiti-covered brick walls and a rat gnawing on what might have been a piece of donut.

That woke him up in a hurry. He should have been looking at his bedroom wall and the poster of Lindsay Lohan in a bikini, not at a brick wall or a half-starved rodent.

“Ahh!” Under the circumstances, it was the best thing he could come up with to say.

Gene stood up, wincing at the pain in most of his muscles, and did his best to figure out exactly why he was in a strange alleyway. To add to the fun, he wasn’t even dressed in his pajamas. Instead he was wearing a ratty pair of blue jeans, shoes that felt too large for his feet and a T-shirt that fluttered around his narrow shoulders in the stale wind that blew across him.

“Ahh!” He looked around again, desperate for anything that looked familiar. There was nothing.

“Oh, shit, Mom’s gonna have a cow.” He muttered the words under his breath as he started for the closest exit from the alleyway. The rat looked at him indifferently and kept eating its breakfast.

Gene looked around at the buildings on the other side of the street and felt his stomach churn a bit. He had no idea where he was, but Cioffi’s Transmissions across the way didn’t even come close to looking familiar.

With no idea what else to do, Gene crossed the street to the garage and stepped into the air-conditioned reception area.

The heavyset woman behind the counter looked at him for a moment, her face twisted into a bitter scowl. “May I help you?” If the air hadn’t already been chilly, the tone of her voice would have cooled it off.

“Um. I think I’m lost.”

“Hon, you’re either lost or you ain’t.” She looked him over from head to toe and seemed ever so disappointed in what she was examining.

His stomach did another roll over.

“I’m supposed to be in North Tarrytown.”

The woman stared at him for several seconds, her dark eyes narrowing in suspicion. Maybe she thought he was joking, but he was deadly serious.

“If you’re supposed to be in North Tarrytown, then you’re lost. This is Brooklyn.”

Gene nodded and tried not to hyperventilate. Oh yes, he was lost.

“My mom’s gonna kill me.”

It was late September and Tina Carlotti was shivering as she woke up. She knew something was wrong immediately because there was something drying on her skin that left her feeling like she’d been rolled in glue.

She opened her eyes and frowned, trying to identify anything around her. There were sheets of plywood, old and warped, where her bedroom walls should have been.

Of course, she hadn’t been in her bedroom in a couple of days. Mr. Sizemore, the landlord, had locked the doors and changed the locks after her mom went off on another bender. She tried not to think about that. Her mom was a good woman, but now and then she was weak. When she gave in to temptation, everything else stopped mattering.

Temptation these days was heroin. Great stuff to make the world look prettier, no matter how shitty your life was, at least according to Mom.

There’d been a time when the family was in good shape. Her dad was a made man, in the mob and doing well. They should have been good; even after he disappeared, they were taken care of, but it didn’t last. She remembered her mom crying after a couple of old Italian men came to visit them in their house. A much nicer house in a different place, thank you. And Mom told her Daddy wasn’t coming back. She remembered it, but just barely.

She didn’t know the details. When she tried asking, Mom used her fists. So she learned not to ask. Really a no-brainer, that one.

Mom did something wrong. Something stupid. Another place where she didn’t know all the details, she just knew that it was the sort of screwup the big boys didn’t approve of.

Now? Now the future wasn’t looking all that sunny and Mom did anything and everything for another fix.

Tina didn’t like to think about that. She liked to think about her mother at home and being, well, her mom.

Still, none of that changed the fact that she was sitting in a place that was completely unfamiliar to her, in near darkness. She could see some light coming from beyond the boards that covered the windows. Enough to let her know it was the daytime, at least. That was something.

Tina stood up and immediately let out a squeal. It wasn’t until she really moved that she realized she was naked. The sound of her outcry echoed off distant walls. It was the only sound she heard, except for the angry squeak of a rodent she’d startled. The rat didn’t bother her. Vermin had been a part of her world for years.

She looked around more carefully, awake now and frightened. She’d never been fast at waking up and never really thought about it as a disadvantage, but now she was feeling differently.

No one was around to look at her in the nude, so she decided to keep it that way. She scanned the oversized bags of trash around her and started sorting through them for something to wear.

Nothing! The first three bags were absolutely useless, revealing nothing but torn papers and leftover wreckage. Whatever they were doing to the building around her, it looked like most of it was destruction, not construction.

She found a duffel bag a little deeper in the debris and figured out that was where she’d apparently been sleeping. A look at the pattern on her leg told her it matched the texture of the military green material. Inside she found clothes. They were too big, but with a little work she managed to make them fit. There was a men’s shirt that looked like it was made for a giant and a pair of baggy painter’s-style jeans that worked if she held them in place.

The sticky stuff on her skin was irritating, but she could wait until later to get to that. Right now she had to figure out where she was and try to get home. Her mom would be worried- Yeah, if she’s even woken up yet -if she didn’t get back soon.

When she was done dressing, she pulled the duffel bag with her. It was heavier than she expected, but she hoped maybe she could find some shoes to go with the clothing.

She pushed and pulled at the duffel bag until she got outside and then, winded, she sat on the package for a few minutes to catch her breath.

The day was bright but hazy, with a lot of glare from up above but no sign of the actual sun. Her stomach rumbled at her and she did her best to ignore it. She’d lived her entire life in Camden, New Jersey, which was not a place known for having a lot of extra food lying around.

Camden was a slum, pure and simple. She knew people who went out of their way to avoid Camden, like it was a bathroom with a broken toilet or something. She couldn’t really blame them. Most of the people she knew who lived there wanted to get out as fast as they could, before the drug dealers or someone even worse got to them. She tried not to dwell on that part of her world, but it was there just the same. It was always there, like an anchor trying to drag her down. She hated the city almost as much as she hated having to live there.