So I could feel consciousness slippin’ away from me, right? Now that’s an odd feeling. It’s almost like you haven’t slept for days and keep nodding off in the middle of a movie that you’re watchin’, only you’re playing the leading role in the film and you’re tryin’ to come to grips with how they can just write you outta the scene like that. Sure, you feel the panic eatin’ away at ya, and somewhere deep down inside, all these regrets and misgivings come bubblin’ up. All these things you woulda liked to have done or seen. All those missed opportunities. At the same time, you’re kinda detached from it all, like maybe the last time your head was pounded on the pavement, it jarred your soul loose and set it adrift in your mind.
This part of me watched everything through a hazy veil. Clarice fuckin’ Hudson was waverin’ in and out of focus, but I could still see the change that came over her. The snarl just kinda melted away from her face and her mouth hung open like a trapdoor. That weird energy that seemed to sizzle in her eyes, man? Gone. She raised her hands up in front of her face and just sat there on my chest, blinking at them like she couldn’t understand what they were doing attached to her wrists.
Her eyes flickered down to me and I’m sure I was moaning or something, and I was definitely trying to wriggle out from under her while pressing my hand into the wet, bloody tangles of my hair. I wasn’t so much tryin’ to stop the bleedin’ as I was protecting the wound. Even teetering on the brink of unconsciousness, see, I knew that if just a drop of her sweat or spit fell into that gash I was as dead as if she woulda continued bashing my brains out.
So, anyhow, Clarice fuckin’ Hudson kinda scrambles backward until she’s sittin’ on the little curb where the parking garage meets the entrance to the mall. At some point she’d managed to get some of my blood on her hands and she kinda absentmindedly wipes the sweat from her face and leaves this big ‘ole smear across her forehead and eye. She looks like she’s about ready to turn on the waterworks again. I’m staggerin’ to my feet, right, ‘cause at this point, I just want to get as far away from that mall as humanly possible. Shit, I woulda set up base camp on Pluto if I coulda. At the same time, I don’t really wanna turn my back on this bitch, ‘cause she might snap back into infectious mode at any second, ya know?
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.
And, damn, it was dark down there, man. I basically had to focus on these rectangular slices of light from where the glow of the city filtered through the drains and walk until I’d reached one. I’d peer out through the drain, try to figure out where the fuck I was from a very limited view, and then make my way to the next one.
I musta been down in those sewers for close to forty-five minutes, man., but eventually I figured I was pretty close to Price Square and should get topside again. I was startin’ to feel lightheaded and my heart was just pattering away in my chest. At the same time, it seemed like it was gettin’ harder and harder to form a complete thought. I didn’t know if this was from my head injury or from breathin’ in clouds of methane… but, either way, I didn’t like the options. If I passed out down there, man, I probably woulda drowned in raw sewage. They woulda found my body pressed against the grating at the treatment plant and it would been all she wrote for ‘ole Bosley Coughlin.
I ended up scaring the hell outta this group of Asian kids when I popped that manhole cover and pulled my sorry ass back onto the streets. This was over by the public library. Not that small annex over on 32nd, but the main one that has that fountain going at all hours of the day. You better believe I headed straight for those gurgling cascades of water, man. I stood under that sculpture of a cherub with the stream comin’ outta the cask tucked beneath his arm while all the muck that had coated me tainted the water brown.
After I thought I’d washed most of the shit off of me—and I’m being literal there—I made my way to New Horizons. It’s this little shelter about a block or so away from Price Square, see? They took me in, bandaged my head, put some hot food in my belly, gave me a pocket-sized Bible, and put me up in a cot for the night. You better believe that laying down never felt so good. Every muscle in my body ached and even though I’d had a bath of sorts in the fountain, I could still smell the lingering stench of sewage in my nose. I kept thinkin’ about how none of this ever woulda happened if I’d just listened to Steel, ya know? I mean, the dude may be something of a prick, but when it comes to this underworld stuff, he really knows his business.
Now, I’d be lying if I tried to say that I wasn’t also thinkin’ about Clarice fuckin’ Hudson, man. While I listened to the street people snore and mutter all around me, I kinda replayed the entire scene over in my mind. Not the chase or the attack, but those brief moments in the mall when I’d actually found myself feeling sorry for her. When we stood there facing each other like two opposing generals who’d realized the enemy wasn’t quite the monster propaganda made them out to be.
And, as I pulled that scratchy blanket up to my chin, I made a promise to myself—I would never underestimate that bitch again.