Authors: Mark Leslie
As he reached the next parking lot inside the Exhibition grounds, near where the adjacent Gardiner Expressway to the left began rising up out of the ground and became an overhead highway, he chanced a look over his shoulders.
The man in the gray sports coat was running after him. He was still at least one hundred yards away. Despite being winded from already running, Scott had been able to increase the distance between them, which was good. Because Scott had to start slowing down – he couldn’t keep the pace. There was stitch in his side, and the flesh wound on the side of his leg where the bullet had grazed him didn’t help matters. It was beginning to ache again. So far there hadn’t been a significant amount of blood loss, but Scott knew that continuing to hoof it at top speed everywhere wasn’t going to help.
He need to get somewhere that he could sit down, rest, check his leg out, and get his head back on straight.
Running and crawling and falling and smashing through windows, constantly on the run and evading the slowly growing horde that was after him was getting to be a bit too much.
To his left, on the other side of the Gardiner Expressway, he could hear, and see, the Eastbound GO train slowing down to pull into the station. It would stop for a couple of minutes and then head deeper into Toronto, bound for Union Station.
Scott tried to calculate how much further he had to run in order to make it to the platform and board the train. He glanced back, seeing the man in the gray sports coat still behind him. Not having gained any ground, but not having lost any either.
He was far enough way that if Scott just made it to the train before the doors closed, the man would not likely make it on himself. And Scott could get away.
He pressed on, doing his best to increase his speed, despite the stitch in his side, despite the throbbing in his leg.
As the Gardiner continued to rise to the full elevation that it maintained on its meandering stroll through downtown Toronto, Scott could clearly see the GO train as it slowed and eventually stopped on its arrival to Exhibition station.
Gray Suit was one hundred yards behind Scott and Scott still had to run at least that far to get to the walkway that led to the station.
As he ran through the third parking lot, this one smelling of a strange combination of horse manure and urine – likely both equine and human – he spotted a few parked police cars that were empty. He wondered if he might be able to find a police officer and enlist help, but figured that there wouldn’t be enough time to explain himself before Gray Suit arrived.
And, given the manner by which grey suit and the others at Digi-Life were telekinetically connected, there was a good chance they’d be able to come up with a convincing and consistent story that could put any of Scott’s bizarre claims spiraling into nothing.
No, he simply couldn’t risk it.
The police cars were parked there anyway, as were a few horse trailers attached to Toronto police logo’d trucks. This was a holding or parking area for them, and not an active place that officers were hanging out in anyway.
He raced passed the final section of parking lot and reached the Exhibition station ticket booth area and the gate that led underneath the tracks – that same gate he had raced madly up three years earlier when he’d spotted his father from across the tracks.
He hadn’t made it in time that morning.
But he couldn’t let that happen today.
Over the track-side speaker system, Scott could hear the following announcement.
“
Doors will now be closing. Please stand clear of the yellow platform lines.”
“No!” he yelled, and pushed even harder, racing down the sidewalk toward the train platform.
There were a few people scattered about. As he ran, Scott was struck with the sudden notion that perhaps this was a big mistake. Perhaps everybody here was turned and would be able to easily overpower him. Perhaps going towards any crowd was a huge mistake.
But his legs carried him forward; and as he raced past a few people who had left the train, getting off at Exhibition, they looked at him with slightly bemused stares. Being public transit riders, they likely sympathized with the poor guy who was likely about to miss his train. They’d been there, they’d all had days like that where they were just a few seconds from catching their train or their bus.
So they seemed, to Scott, perfectly normal. Not at all one of the pod-people who were after him.
That was a good sign.
He was a few yards from the nearest doorway onto the train when the latest announcement blasted.
“
Doors are closing. Please stand clear. Doors are now closing
.”
Twenty Years Earlier
Scott found out that the redhead’s name had been Jessica.
He learned that the reason he hadn’t seen her before was because she wasn’t from the same university. She had attended Concordia and was in town visiting a friend who went to Mohawk.
Jessica had been a friend of a woman named Charlene.
Charlene approached Scott in the library one afternoon about three days later.
“Say,” she said, strolling up to where he sat at a cubicle working on algebra problems in a notebook. “Aren’t you the head Wilson grind dancer from last Saturday’s party?” Scott didn’t even realize the sexy hot tall blonde had even been talking to him until she placed a hand on his left shoulder. Hot women simply never spoke to him at all, never mind talk about any sort of party. He had only, after all, ever been to one – that Halloween one.
And, though his room-mates high-fived and fist-bumped him and began to give him the nickname Scotty Grind, Scott knew that would be the last party he would ever attend.
He remembered musing that if this had been some sort of teen movie, he would have latched on to that nickname, become a central figure in the popular scene on campus and demonstrated the underlying message to the movie that being yourself was the coolest thing a person could be. Perhaps he’d grow cocky and change his behavior and attitude, treat the other nerds with disrespect until he one day fell from grace then had to redeem himself both in the eyes of his previous nerdy peers as well as the new cool friends he had made. He would explain that he had fallen trap to being someone or something people wanted him to be, rather than who he was born to be, who he naturally was; that he’d let the popularity and glamour taint his behavior, making him a cruel and mean person, turning his back on those other quiet and socially unskilled losers whom he had walked among most of his life. This would be a speech given in the cafeteria or in a central square of the school and, upon delivering it, everyone would stand quietly while he slipped away to go bury his nose in a book again. Then someone would begin that slow clap which would eventually inspire others to join in – and soon the entire school would be applauding his bravery, the extreme insight he had been able to help them see. And within minutes, the group would hoist him on their soldiers, and this nerd would again become the most popular student in the school – not because of some “cool” thing he’d done at a party, but because he demonstrated that it was cool to be himself. And there would be a montage of cool kids and jocks shaking hands with and laughing with the nerdy kids. Of the hottest girls in the school flirting with the Poindexters. The world would became a better place where everybody appreciated everyone else, begin to roll credits.
This wasn’t, of course, a movie.
It was real life.
Scott knew that the nickname would likely last a few weeks, and whenever one of his room-mates used the nickname or mentioned how awesome he’d made the party, Scott simply grinned and slunk back into whatever solo activity he’d been involved with – usually playing a game or working on some sort of program on his computer -- and the whole thing continued to make him uncomfortable.
And now this gorgeous blonde woman, someone who, just last week, would have walked past him and not even taken a second look at Scott even if his hair were on fire, was standing beside him and looking down at him.
Her hand, soft and warm, sent a strange series of tingles through his shoulder and into his chest. It was so exciting that Scott thought he was having either a stroke or a heart-attack.
“Uh,” Scott managed to say. “Yeah.”
“That was one of the most amazing parties I have ever been to,” the blonde woman said. “And everyone knows that you’re the guy who started it all; I mean, Wilson was doing his funky chicken thing, but it wasn’t until you jumped in and starting grooving with him that it turned into a thing for everyone.”
“Uhuh,” Scott said, feeling his throat going dry.
“You turned it into the Wilson Grind Dance; and the party into the Grind Party. Everyone’s talking about it.”
“The Wilson Grind Dance,” Scott repeated the words slowly, and he realized that he sounded like a Neanderthal or some sort of Wildman, like Tarzan, who’d been living among the wolves or the apes, slowly learning the language that other humans spoke by carefully repeating phrases and sentences.
“I knew that was you, sugar,” the woman said, and the hand on Scott’s shoulder slid down to rest on the back of his shoulder blade. “And I just had to say thank you.”
“Yeah,” Scott said.
“My name’s Charlene,” she said.
Scott nodded.
“I know your name is Scott. Or Scotty.” She giggled. “Scotty Grind. That’s what everyone is calling you these days.”
“Hmm,” Scott mumbled.
“You’re not very talkative, are you, Scotty?”
Scott slowly shook his head back and forth. He looked at Charlene’s silky blonde hair, at the regal curve of her nose, at the deep blue gorgeous eyes and quickly glanced away. She was hot, absolutely gorgeous. Women like Charlene simply never even looked at guys like Scott. This was bizarre and uncomfortable and he had absolutely no idea what to do.
“That’s okay,” Charlene purred. “You’re not known for being a talker. You’re known for your moves.”
“My . . .” Scott managed to say, really slowly “. . . moves.”
“Anyways,” Charlene said, taking her hand off of Scott’s shoulder. “The redhead you were dancing with is a friend of mine. Her name is Jessica. She doesn’t go to McMaster. She’s from Queens. But we’re besties. I just came to tell you that she has the hots for you.
Scott blinked at her. “She does?”
“She hasn’t said that, but I can tell. She was my best friend all through high school, and we’re still tight – we talk and email almost every day. So I can tell. She hasn’t said a single thing about you, and she normally doesn’t shut up about guys – except for the ones she really has it in for, you know. She gets all nervous and stuff – kind of the way you’re acting right now. She pulls her cards up to her chest and doesn’t let anyone in; not even me.
“I mean, I’ve asked her about you, about what you guys said to one another, and she hasn’t said a peep, tried to slough it off as nothing. But I can see the longing in her eyes when she mentions you.
“She has the hots for you and she’s trying to deny it. But I know.”
“You . . . know,” Scott said.
“Yeah. So that’s why I came over. I figured you should have her phone number and her email.” She unfolded a small notebook page and dropped it onto the desk in front of him.
Jessica Stevens
867-555-5309
Scott nodded, his throat now as dry as if Charlene had poured a tall glass of cinnamon into his mouth.
“Call her,” Charlene said, and sashayed across the library floor.
Scott watched her and could sense every other guy in the room staring at the display of her hot tight ass swaying back and forth under one of the tightest mini-skirts he had ever seen.
Call her
, she’d said.
Scott continued to stare at the doorway where Charlene had exited for at least a full two minutes after she’d gone.
This certainly wasn’t a teen movie, and, though he had been the talk of the Halloween party, he certainly didn’t know how to embrace this new revelation.
When he stopped staring at the afterimage of Charlene’s swaying ass in the doorway to the library, he turned his attention back on the phone number and email address on the desk in front of him.
Today
“
Doors are closing. Please stand clear
.”
“Ahhhh!” Scott yelled, punching his legs down harder and faster than he had ever done before, still a dozen feet from the train as the doors began to close. The flashback to that morning when he’d raced down the platform, seeing his father inside the train as the doors closed just seconds before he got to the train, haunted him.
Not today
, he thought, and leapt from the platform and toward the narrowing space between the doors that were closing in from each side.
His right shoulder slammed against the door on the one side and he half-stumbled, half-fell into the train car on his left as the doors sealed shut behind him.
“Geeziz, mister,” a young white male with thick beaded dreadlocks who couldn’t be more than twenty, had been sitting in the bench seat perpendicular to the doors with his bicycle propped in front of him. “I’ve never seen anybody so desperate to catch a train. You almost killed yourself getting on.”
Scott shook his head, slowly gathered himself to his feet.
“If I missed this train,” Scott said looking out the opposite window and spotting Herb and the security guard racing down the platform, “my boss would kill me.”
The young man nodded, seeming to be in agreement with Scott; not realizing, of course, that Scott was speaking in the literal sense.
And with that he walked past the young man and headed up the stairs to the mid-level section. Each GO train was divided into a lower section and upper section with two mid-level sections at the front and back of each train, a combination of a landing area with a small section of seats between them. It was on these levels where the doors allowing passengers to pass between train cars were.