Charlie was right. For someone who couldn’t jog ten paces without reaching for his inhaler, Marlow did a hell of a lot of running.
Not sprinting, not jogging, not running a marathon. No, his kind of running was the other kind. He never ran toward anything, he ran away from everything.
It’s what cowards do, said his head. He’d been five when Danny had died, so he couldn’t remember what his brother’s voice sounded like. He was pretty sure this was him, though, the big brother whose ghost lived in his mind.
“Shut up,” he whispered to him. “You ran away as soon as you were old enough to enlist.”
Needed to get the hell away from Mom, came the reply.
Marlow put his head down and engaged autopilot. He didn’t know where he was going. He didn’t care. As long as he kept moving he didn’t have to think about anything. Didn’t have to think about what he was going to tell his mom, didn’t have to think about what he was going to do with his life. He crossed the street, the sunlight boring holes in his skull, blinding him. A truck tore past, close enough to touch, cocooning him in exhaust fumes. Its horn bellowed, deep and loud, making his bones tremble.
What are you going to tell her? Danny asked.
He had no idea. It wasn’t like she gave a happy crap what he did with his life—she spent all day in her rum-and-Coke bubble. All she ever talked about was how proud she was of Danny, how much she missed him, how Marlow could never fill his brother’s army boots no matter how hard he tried—not that he was interested in trying.
No, better to run, better to keep your head down, your ears closed, your mouth shut. Run and find a good place to hide. His mom had found a home in a Bacardi bottle, Marlow was pretty sure he’d be comfortable there too.
He looked up, no idea where he was. There was a main road up ahead, though, and he marched toward it. He turned left, weaving between the crowds of kids skipping school and moms with strollers. An auto center, a nail parlor, a pizza joint, and there, so small he almost missed it, the faded green canopy of a corner bodega.
Perfect.
He started to cross, pulling back when an ambulance barreled past, siren screaming. Another followed. They skidded right up ahead, disappearing behind the buildings. Now that he was tuned into it he could make out more sirens, the air swimming with them. Not that it was unusual, of course. This was New York City. It was the day you didn’t hear any sirens that you knew you were totally screwed.
The traffic broke and he jogged across the street. The bodega looked more like a prison than a store—bars tight against the windows and half a dozen cameras aimed down at the sidewalk. There was a huddle of guys smoking cigarettes outside and they eyeballed him hard enough to make him stop, think about turning around. Then one of them laughed at something and they looked away, and Marlow stomped the last few paces and crashed through the door.
Inside it looked even more like a prison: a single chest-high shelf running to the back of the store, teeming with rows of dusty canned goods; beat-up refrigerators against the walls stocked with juice, soda, and beer; the aisles crammed with flimsy displays loaded with chips and other junk; up front, a small deli area, and behind the Plexiglas, a counter with lotto tickets, cigarettes, candy within an easy snatch of the cash register. It took his eyes a while to adjust to the gloom, the window bars keeping the sunlight out but trapping the heat and dust inside. It was like a sauna in here and he had to ease his inhaler out of his pocket, firing off a blast to stop his lungs from rattling.
He grabbed a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor from one of the coolers. But he could feel somebody watching him, and he was suddenly aware of how he looked—stooped and pouting like a sulky child.
He straightened up to his full five ten, clearing his throat, jangling the coins in the pocket of his sweatpants the way he’d seen older guys do. He strode as confidently as he could to the front of the store, stopping at the newspaper rack to pick up a copy of the Daily News, figuring it would make him look older.
Gradually a face became visible behind the glass, a woman who had to have been around when they signed the Declaration of Independence. She was so small she could barely see over the counter, but she had fire in her eyes and right now she looked like she was trying to make Marlow spontaneously combust. He coughed nervously and put the bottle and the newspaper in the hatch. The old lady didn’t move.
“Just these please,” he said, sounding like a church mouse. He looked at the counter, at the wall, at the ceiling, at his shoes, then finally at the old lady.
“Sure, kid,” she said with a thick accent that he couldn’t place. “Why don’t I grab you some smokes and a lotto ticket, make it a party.”
“Um…” Marlow felt every liquid ounce of blood rise to his face. “It’s not for me, it’s for my … wife. She asked me to pick it up on the way home from my … job.”
He thought for a moment that the woman was going to choke to death from laughing. She wiped her eyes with a leathery hand.
“Oh, right, we wouldn’t want to disappoint the wife,” she said when she had recovered herself. “What’s her name?”
Marlow reached into his head for a name and found nothing there. He stared at the front page of the paper, an article on Rio.
“B … Brazil,” he stuttered. “Brazilia.”
“Brazilia,” she said, nodding. “She sounds beautiful. Where did you meet?”
“At…” Marlow struggled again. “Look, I’m in a hurry, it’s been a bad day. Can I just pay for these and get going?”
The chime above the door rang out and the woman’s head jerked up, her hand reaching under the counter. She probably had a bat or something under there, although Marlow had no idea what good it would do her, she was surely too small to lift it. She quickly relaxed and Marlow glanced over his shoulder to see a couple of women walk inside, chatting furiously in Spanish. Through the open door he could hear more police blazing past on the street, sirens shrieking.
“Trouble outside,” said the woman, shaking her head. “Always trouble.”
“Yeah,” he said, tugging his wallet out of his sweats. It was black and red, and when he pulled apart the Velcro fastener he felt like he was ten years old. There was a twenty inside, and a bunch of ones. He took the twenty and slapped it down in the hatch. “This cover it?”
“Sure, kid, wanna pull your ID outta there while you’re at it?”
Marlow looked at his wallet, then back up at her.
“It’s…”
“In your other wallet?” she said, folding her arms across her chest. Marlow opened his mouth to answer but she cut him off again. “The dog ate it? It’s in your wife’s handbag? Aliens abducted it? You left it at—the office?”
“All of the above?” Marlow said with what he hoped was a charming smile. He thought the woman might have fallen for it, but the distant roar of an engine filled the room, a crunch of metal, squealing brakes. Was that a scream, muffled by the walls of the store? She looked over his shoulder, shaking her head.
“Better not be your trouble, kid,” she said.
Marlow shook his head, standing aside as the two women walked to the counter and bought gum. He half thought about just turning and bolting with the bottle. It wasn’t like the cashier would be able to catch him. His lungs had already taken a beating, though, and by the time he was even halfway to working up the courage the women had gone and he was alone with the clerk again. He pinched the top of his nose, an ache brewing in his skull.
“Look, it’s been a real bad day. I wanna forget it.”
“Kid, you’re young, you’re healthy, you wouldn’t know a bad day if it bit you on the ass. No ID, no booze. I’ll sell you that newspaper and a bag of Skittles and you can count yourself as lucky as the angels. Deal?”
He looked at the bottle, licking his lips as he imagined the peace that lay inside.
“Lady, please.”
“Lady?” the woman. “You call me a lady?”
She leaned in toward the glass, and this close her wrinkled face seemed to take on a more masculine appearance.
Oh crap.
“Sorry, man, it’s—”
“Go on!” the little guy yelled, banging a gnarled fist on the glass. “Get out of here before I—”
Something outside exploded, not so much a sound as a tremor that rocked through the store and into Marlow’s bones, almost knocking him clean onto his ass. He gripped the counter hard, doing his best to clamp his jaws around a scream. The shock wave punched open the door, a roar like thunder pouring in from the outside world. One of the windows imploded in a spray of sun-drenched shrapnel. Behind the glass the cashier almost fell off his stool.
“Holy Jesus Christ,” he grunted, propping one hand on the counter and reaching under it with the other. When he came up again it wasn’t a bat he was holding, it was a shotgun, sawn off and double-barreled. He pointed it right at Marlow, finger on the trigger, everything shaking.
“Hey,” Marlow said, hands over his head, his heart jackhammering against his ribs. His ears were ringing. There was a smell in the air, not smoke but something worse, something that smelled like old eggs and acid.
“You better tell me what the hell’s going on,” the bodega guy said, his eyeballs practically bursting out of their sockets. His greasy hair was defying gravity, stretching up toward the ceiling like it was trying to make a getaway. Marlow could feel something on his skin, some kind of electric charge. “I swear to god I’ll cut you down right here and make your imaginary wife an imaginary widow.”
Another sound was filtering through the chaos, the pop pop pop of gunshots.
“It’s nothing to do with me,” Marlow said again, staring into the big, empty eyes of the shotgun. He wondered if bulletproof glass worked both ways. “I swear, I have no idea. I just wanted a drink.”
“Yeah? Some coincidence that. Go on, get outta here.”
Marlow backed away. Another siren wailed past outside, louder now that the door was open. The dust was aggravating his asthma, shutting everything down again. He tried to cough open his windpipe, reaching down for his inhaler.
“Uh-uh,” the man said. “Hands where I can see ’em until you’re out the door.”
Marlow backed off, arms stretched out to his sides. He’d made it four feet when another explosion rocked through the store, this one powerful enough to knock him to his knees. His vision flashed white, so bright that it felt like a physical force against his retinas. He used a shelf to pull himself up, lumps of ceiling smashing down around him like hail. The cashier opened his mouth, seemed like he was going to shout something at Marlow, but he never got the chance. The ceiling above him split in an avalanche of plaster and beams. One second he was there, the next he was buried.
Marlow waved the dust away, ignoring the pain in his lungs, running to the counter. There was a door to the side, knocked ajar by the blast but wedged tight with rubble. He shouldered it open. There was no sign of the clerk except for a hand and a leg beneath the debris. Marlow reached out, a jagged spark of electricity leaping from the man’s flesh to his own, but he felt no sign of a pulse.
Oh god.
Marlow held the man’s limp hand for a moment more, trying to will him back to life. The remains of the ceiling groaned. At this rate the whole building was going to collapse, so he clambered onto the bar again, retreating only when he remembered the shotgun. He dived down, snatched it up, spying a box of shells behind the bar and tipping as many as he could into his pockets. If things were as bad as they sounded, then he was going to need all the firepower he could get.
Marlow took one last look at the dead clerk’s hand. That could have been me. Then he sprinted across the empty room, slipping on the dust and rubble, once again running as fast as his sneakers would let him.