godspeed
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RYDER TOOK HIS RIGHTFUL PLACE in the Safeway express lane as penance for his numerous minor sins. He checked the big fisheye mirror overhead. The target and her mom were still dawdling through the freezer section, in deep meditation over ice cream. Time to kill, yet. Maybe he would stop by the video store before they snatched the girl, grab a couple flicks for later. Something with a happy ending. He looked at the kid working the cash register, a round soft boy with rose bright cheeks. The godspeed afforded him a razor glimpse of the boy in a school locker room, a white towel around his waist and three bigger, harder boys bearing down on him. The blood mist descended and the locker room dissolved before the towel was yanked away from the soft boy's hips. Ryder chewed the inside of his mouth. He knew how it ended. The soft boy was made to do things he didn't want to. Same as yesterday and the day before that. He would kill himself before graduation, before his wedding night if he could hang on a while. But the soft boy wasn't Ryder's lookout and he flushed the violent sweaty foreplay from his head just as the butterflies swarmed past him muddy yellow in the humming fluorescent, flashing by so fast it was like they weren't interested in him. He turned to see where the fire might be and saw the butterflies whirl counterclockwise twice around a pale barefoot girl in a red swimsuit, with eyes like black glass, standing just behind him.
Her small white hands were empty. She wasn't shopping. Her swimsuit was torn to the point of unraveling, as if fish had been nibbling it. Her skin was white and rippled, water damaged, and her black hair was midnight wet. Ryder gathered she had drowned, or would drown soon, and there wasn't a goddamn thing he could do about it. The least he could do was not turn away from her. Fat lot of effort that required. The girl was awfully easy on the eyes, or would have been if she weren't so deathly and overripe. She was a small thing, not much above five feet. The lean muscled legs of a lifetime runner, tight racing curves at breast and hip. Narrow waist he could circle with two hands, if ever given the chance. Black halo of hair falling to sharp collarbones. Dark eyes round as saucers, her mouth a red bow gone blue with asphyxiation. A sizable puncture wound marred her dark throat, the parasite kiss of a nail gun or a hypodermic meant for large animals. Blood seeped thick and black from a knotted wound atop her head.
Drowning was not her foremost concern, perhaps.
More likely someone bopped her on the head and shot a nail through her neck before dumping her body in a lake.
The drowned girl stared hard at him, like she had loved him and been betrayed by him in some other life, and he imagined it was on the tip of her tongue to demand what the hell he was doing there. Ryder stared back at her, just as hard, and tried to impart to her nonverbally that he would save her if he could, even as he called himself out for a liar.
You ain't no superhero, boy. And she's about as real as a girl on a billboard.
The drowned girl was not there, not by any dimensional precept he could put into words. She had not journeyed from some nether world to the 24-hour Safeway in the Castro looking for Ryder Fell, nor was she lost.
The contrary, Ryder himself was lost. He was the visitor, unmoored. He was adrift at the far edge of his natural sphere.
The ground at his feet was dissolving if it was even real. He had stepped into an unseen pocket of dark energy, a black hole the size of his fist, and was slingshot past an unknown vanishing point to land awkwardly on some other plane, where he was afforded the vision of this drowned girl for purposes unknown to him.
He knew that if he tried to speak with her, he would regain his senses writhing on the floor in the checkout aisle, spitting and gibbering like a mental patient, burning sores on the inside of his mouth and his pants soaked with urine. A circle of rubbernecks gaping down at him and sirens in the distance. The drowned girl, meanwhile, would be nowhere to be seen because she was never there to begin with, and if by some unlikely mutual violation of natural law she could lay eyes on him as easily as he did her, he calculated that she would be deeply unimpressed.
The lie was that he might save her, that he would stop her from taking that last swim. He couldn't rescue any of the passengers who wandered across his path. Not that it mattered, as most of them were maggot's milk by the time they entered his sights. If this girl in a rotting red bikini was still breathing somewhere, praying he would come pluck her from death's dread kiss, she was fucked royal. And not because he didn't care.
If drowning was on the menu, then it followed that her predicament was particularly time sensitive, and it wasn't like she had a global positioning beacon blinking beneath her skin. She wore no name tag that he could see and there was no zip code tattooed on her forehead. She was just a stranger in a bathing suit not long for this world. Her location and velocity, the time and place of her death, were impossible to know at once. She might as well be done with it and kill herself, as he would have the devil's chore locating her.
She shivered and hugged herself from the cold. She was not looking at him anymore, he noticed. Her eyes were fixed on a spot somewhere back of him, a vanishing point over his left shoulder. She had looked on him longer than most, and he liked her for it. Most of them wouldn't meet his eye at all. They stood still as garden gnomes and stared through him. They drifted away slow, taking small steps then vanishing. A few times, he had run across dead souls who turned from him and ran, disappearing fast as clouds racing across the sky. Now the cashier was ready for him, and so it was Ryder who turned away from her.
The dead did not seek his counsel. He wasn't meant to help them with unfinished business. He didn't know why they appeared to him, or he to them, but he believed there must be some reason. The supreme being who slapped humans and their puny solar system into existence was certainly mysterious, inscrutable, sometimes wrathful, but not a torturer. Even the prankster gods of Norse myth would not have devised a system of culling the flock in which the recently departed were handed a bus token and advised to chase down a mercenary thief descended from rogues and killers to serve as messenger or ferryman. The dead he passed in odd places might have appreciated some neighborly intervention before they breathed their last, but now they were post mortem he could offer nothing of value. His hands were empty and his powers limited. Ryder was not meant to play shepherd to the dead souls milling around him any more than he was born to heal the mad and crippled homeless. He gave the homeless cigarettes, when he felt agreeable and had cigarettes to spare. The dead and undead did not appear to need cigarettes, however.
Ryder shot the drowned girl a final glancing look as the cashier counted out his change, half tempted to come out and ask her what the hell she wanted and half wondering what she would do when it was her turn to the lay an offering at the barcode scanner. She still stared into the near distance beyond Ryder's shoulder, at something behind him. And it wasn't a blank stare, nor fearful. It was a look splintered with exhaustion, serenity, hope. Ryder turned and saw what she saw. A man stood in the blood mist between the check-out lanes and the doors to the street, observing the girl with a muted expression that fell somewhere between the look of a birdwatcher and a sniper.
The stranger's skin was sun dark and blackened with dust and grime and his clothes were strange, vaguely military. He wore a shapeless gray cap with short leather brim and glacier goggles on a strap around his neck, a muddy green T-shirt, ancient camouflage pants torn and patched numerous times loosely tucked into desert boots that buckled up the side. He wore a rock climbing harness and a small rucksack, with several small leather holsters and sheaths slung from a bandolier type belt across his shoulder and chest.
He stood silent as three children ran screaming past, their mother wearily trundling her shopping cart after them. She hollered at her brood to wait, and the smallest of them stopped just short of the stranger's feet, turned to wave at her, grinning demonically before turning to bolt from the store. The kid was inches away from the stranger and simply didn't see him, didn't sense his presence.
Ryder took a shallow breath. The godspeed was showing him something new. The guy who stood across from him, watching the drowned girl as intently as Ryder had been, was not from this sphere, not dead, not from the future. He wasn't a phantom. He wasn't exactly corporeal, either. Ryder heard the cashier asking if there was a problem and did he need something else, but he didn't answer. He didn't want to take his eyes off the stranger.
Ryder came out of the Safeway five minutes later, crossing into the last of blood orange light. He lit a cigarette, took a couple fast drags as he walked to the car. The target and her mother were inside, at the cash register. Ryder pitched the cigarette at a mirrored puddle and missed, kicking cherry sparks. He stopped and replayed it.
He never took his eyes off the guy, never blinked. Even with the kid behind the cash register yapping at him. Ryder eyeballed the stranger for a steady thirty seconds before he flinched, just barely, and slanted his eyes in Ryder's direction. The sun winking off a knife blade. The stranger flicked a hand in front of his face like he was closing a curtain, then vanished. There was no puff of smoke, no electromagnetic crackle. He was just gone. Ryder looked around to see if the drowned girl had any reaction to the stranger, but she too had departed the scene.
[temporary stop]
-will christopher baer, godspeed