Elysium (13 page)

Then Adrian saw it. He turned to his brother. Antoine had his finger to his lips to tell him to hush. It moved like an animal. It had a strange stride. Adrian had to stare for a long time to accept what he was seeing. It stood on two legs and walked like a man. But its head was not a man’s. At first it seemed like a hat. Adrian squinted. The darkness was thick and the dust was still falling, so he felt like he may have been mistaken, but the creature seemed to have antlers.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Someone pounded on the window. Adrian jumped back. His heart pounded as if it would leap out of his shirt. “Come on! I know you’re in there. I can see you. Let me in!”

Antoine had the gun pointed at the glass. Adrian watched his brother move.

“What do you want?” Antoine said.

“Don’t leave me out here! Please let me in!”

Antoine faced the shadow. He stared at the dark figure for a long time.

“Whoever you are, leave us alone.”

“You can’t leave me out here! Dammit, they’re coming!”

“What’s coming?!” Hector yelled.

“Oh, God,” Antoine gasped and backed away. “Everyone grab something! That broom, something heavy. Anything you can hit with!”

“What’s going on?” Hector said.

The shadow man left the window and ran swiftly down the street followed soon after by a pack of other shadows. The sounds of hooves pounded the pavement, shaking the floor and making the windows tremble. Some of the shadows stopped and began banging on the pane. There was no time. It broke open like the crash of a wave against the rocks.

Shattered glass flew everywhere. Hector used his body to cover Adrian. A large shard slipped into the neck of Mr. Kim. He dropped to the floor and gulped for air as the blood gushed out of him. Antoine pulled Hector and Adrian to their feet and yanked them into the back storage room and locked the door behind them. The things thumped mercilessly against the door. Adrian and Hector pushed hard to block their entry. Antoine tried the back exit. It was heavy and locked. He shot around the knob several times until a big hole opened, then pushed the door into the alley. Antoine and Adrian ran out, but Hector slammed the door shut behind them, using his body to keep it closed.

“What are you doing?!” Adrian said.

“Run! I’ll keep them here for as long as I can!” Hector shouted.

“You can’t do anything! Get out of there! Come on!” Antoine screamed and pulled at Adrian’s shirt, dragging him away.

Adrian cried, “Helen, why?!”

If he had remained for a moment longer, he would have heard the answer, “Because you saw the real me.”

.
.
.

*REPAIRS COMPLETE*

9.

Adrian and Antoine ran until their lungs burned. Adrian’s side ached with pain. He stopped to catch his breath.

*BREAK*

>>

>> opendoc /w process_data.fi

# process_data.fi -- update data,

# from hierarchical tree, sort

# and process data

.
.
.

parent = pop(hierarchy_data);

child_1 = parent->left;

child_2 = parent->right;

.
.
.

>>

>> execute process_data

Two brown boys chased by fast-moving shadows and something-like-hounds. The galloping hooves drove them onward. They raced into an empty lot. Old soda cans, trash.

Broken glass, everywhere.
People pissing in the stairs like they just don’t care …

Red bricks that used to be a part of a building stood one on top of another. You could almost make out how the rooms were once laid out. Antoine knew this area well. He had been here many times with his friends for his nighttime sneak-outs to do God knows what
’til the break of dawn
. Adrian had always helped him to creep back into the house. Their Dad never knew. If he had, he would have killed them both. In exchange for his silence, Adrian got the stories. The stories of who did what, when, and how. The stories of the music and the rhyme and the rhythms and the beats. He did this every night, every night, every night, repeat.

Antoine pulled at him when Adrian slowed. A beat.
And you don’t stop.
They passed the graffiti practice walls on crumbling buildings designated for demolition with official letters from the city plastered on their doors. No one came to this place anymore. So the kids used the walls to work on their art. On the sides of these broken brick buildings were bold splashes of color. The smell of paint still lingered in the air. Empty spray cans littered the grounds among the other trash that Antoine and Adrian ran through.

They headed for the foundation of an abandoned apartment building that still stood erect. Adrian followed Antoine as he scrambled down into the basement. Antoine held a part of a boarded-up window open. Adrian didn’t want to go inside. The fear made him crawl down fast.

Don’t push me cause I’m close to the eeeedge,
I’m try-in’ not to lose my head …

Their bodies were small enough to slip through. Antoine could still get on the bus for a ten-year-old’s price even though he was fourteen. Adrian would be twelve and a half in the fall.

They landed in the dark. Adrian was breathing hard. Antoine put his hand over his mouth to make him quiet. The thing that was following them growled by the window and paced back and forth, sniffing. Antoine stretched his neck to look behind them through a small hole in the wooden board. The animal was made of flesh and metal. Its green eyes glowed. The silhouette of its master was tall against the moon, with antlers that spiraled up like twisting metal pipes. The thing heard its master’s call. After a time, it padded away. The sounds of its feet grew distant, then silent. Antoine took his hand off his brother’s mouth and Adrian drew in a deep swallow of air because he had been holding his breath.

“Where are we?” Adrian asked.

“Shh. Don’t worry,” Antoine whispered.

“It smells like piss,” Adrian whispered back.

“I know.”

“Can we go home now?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I told you why before.”

“Maybe Dad got better …”

Antoine didn’t say anything for a long time. He walked into the light that shined through the large hole in the roof. Adrian went up to his big brother and gently pulled his jacket sleeve.

“Dad’ll get better, won’t he?”

Antoine looked down. A beat. “I don’t think so.”

Adrian knew that it was probably true. He didn’t want to believe it. Everyone that got the disease went strange — grown-ups and children, too. The dust changed people. The disease made them sick. Over the past few days they had seen people change. Folks with scales running up and down their necks gulping for air like fish. Monkeymen with bowed legs swinging from lampposts. The dust was changing their dad. If they were lucky, only his body would change. If they weren’t, he’d catch the disease and he would be crazy, too. It would make him do things that he didn’t mean. He might hurt them. Antoine didn’t want to take a chance, so he ran, taking his little brother with him.

Adrian began to cry.

“Don’t worry, Adrian. I got you. You’re my
boy
. I’m gonna take care of you now. I won’t let anything hurt you.”

They left that basement and walked uptown in the dimness of daybreak. The streets were a deserted mess. Cars stopped in traffic with no one in them. Newspapers and trash flying around. Smashed windows on the storefronts. And silence. Their footfalls echoed off the tall buildings. Behind the gray clouds it was speckly, like a monitor screen gone wrong. A small green dot hovered up there. Adrian watched it for a while as they walked until it blipped out of existence.

Whenever they heard something or saw something move, they hid. Abandoned storefronts, an old wreck of a house, and alleyways all made good hiding places. Something moved. It could have been anything. It could even have been someone who was still normal. Antoine wasn’t taking any chances with Adrian’s life. So they took cover and waited for whatever it was to pass.

Things fell apart so fast. Who would have guessed that the city could look this way so soon after the incident? That’s what their dad called it, the Incident. He seemed pained even saying that much. Now their dad was gone. But Adrian had Antoine. He was going to look out for him. He would always look out for him.

The sound of feet came from behind them. Antoine pulled Adrian into the entryway of an office building. They quietly went inside, climbed the stairs, and went to the second floor window to look down. Two men were strolling by. They walked with bowed legs. One of them had something in his mouth. The tail and the squeal suggested that it was a rat. The dust did this, and maybe the dust would do more.

They looked carefully before they went back to the street. Antoine walked as though he had no fear. Adrian had enough fear for both of them.

They came to a subway station and went down to the platform. Antoine jumped onto the track. The trains didn’t run anymore.

“C’mon,” Antoine said.

“I don’t wanna go down there,” Adrian said.

“It’s the only safe place right now. No one knows about it but me.”

Adrian still didn’t move.

A cold wind blew from deep inside the tunnel, carrying a nasty smell. Adrian turned his face away. He didn’t like enclosed places, especially dark ones. Plus mounds of garbage mired over the tracks from way down into the darkness of the tunnel, and he thought he saw something moving in there.

“Adrian, I said come on!” Antoine said. “We can’t stay here. The only place safe from the dust is underground.”

“I don’t want to go in there.”

“I’ve been here a million times. It’s fine. It’s a secret place. Don’t you wanna see?”

Antoine was always talking about the special secret places he knew about that he would show Adrian when he got older. Finally being in on his secrets was what moved Adrian’s feet. Antoine took his hand and helped him down onto the track.

Death creeps through the streets over programmed
beats. A rabid dog in heat on a dead end street. Oil
slicks: the only rainbows canvas gray concrete.
Shadows of skyscrapers fall when Mohammed speaks.

Corpses piled in heaps. Sores and decay. Reeks.
Placin tags on feet. A Nike Air Force fleet. Custom
Made: unique. Still in box: white sheet. Ripened
Blue black sweet. White tank top, wife beat BREAK.

Hearts in two-step beat BREAK.
Dance pray work whip beat BREAK.
Neck back jump back kiss BREAK.

Now shake it off.

Their eyes soon adjusted to the darkness. They walked over the gravel that lined the area next to the train tracks. Strips of daylight slipped in from the underside of a grate above. The light illuminated the wall they walked past covered in graffiti, the bubble words so high passengers on trains would be able to see them. Antoine pointed out a small area where the words swirled to a round red dot surrounded by glowing white highlights. In it was a scribbling of black magic marker writing. Adrian couldn’t read it.

“That’s my tag,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“I wouldn’t tag something like that now. I didn’t know any better back then. I hope the guys that did this don’t catch me.”

Adrian laughed. He could see his brother’s eyes smile behind the shadows. A beat. The guys who did this were probably dead.

Adrian had always watched his brother work. Antoine sketched in his drawing pad, using magic markers to fill in the colors. The smell of the markers in his room was intoxicating. Cool beats and rhymes from MCs blasted as he drew curvy lines that stretched and twisted over and under and through.
Spelling names, naming places, placing times, timing rhythms.
Adrian begged and begged his dad for a sketchpad, too. When he got it, he did as Antoine did, only different. When he sketched, he drew faces. Faces of the guys down the way. Faces of the street lady with the shopping cart and the bags of cans. But the best work he would ever do was the memorials.

Memorials would spring up on the sides of shopping centers, on the walls of the playground, by the barbershops. They seemed to appear overnight, and no one ever knew whose work it was. They’d spelled R.I.P. in large elegant curvaceous lines for the many brothers who had passed on before their time. Some from bullets, some for other reasons. No one ever tagged them. They would stay up for years. Someone obviously cared for them, refreshing the paint. Adrian had made two of his own by now. One for a kid he barely knew from school, who hadn’t had a beef with anyone, but got shot for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. One for his friend Steven who died of cancer in the summer of last year. Now that everyone was gone, Adrian felt lost. There were too many faces to remember. There weren’t enough walls to paint them all.