Something was wrong. All my instincts were screaming to seek shelter, to run. Daybreak was hours ago, I could feel the warmth. I opened my eyes, wondering why I wasn’t dead, and was pretty confused when I saw the thick black tarp over me. It was propped up by four thin poles, as if I were being sheltered from the rain. Naturally, curiosity overpowered my sense of self preservation, and I sat up to get a better perspective on things. The metallic scent of dried blood came from my right, and woke me up better than a cold toilet seat in the middle of the night. The body of the girl was still there, clearer now in the daylight. The police were here, which was new. Two women and a man were kneeling over the body, and it took a second to work through the grogginess to realize that they were CSI. I had only been conscious for two minutes before the man in the group turned around and noticed I was awake. I was wrong before; this guy wasn’t wearing any uniform. Black suit, white shirt, tie, and a lump underneath his coat that suggested he was armed. I’ve watched enough television to assume this man was FBI. It was a regular alphabet party. As expected, he walked over slowly. I wasn’t going anywhere; from where I lie, any motion away from my cover would result in a rather gruesome skin rash, followed by death. Judging by his expression, I would have rather dealt with the Sun. The man chose to stand a few feet away, leaning on the corner of the Bank of America with his arms crossed. Already he didn’t like me, but I can say I wasn’t a fan of his aftershave. Eau de Roadkill with essence of peppermint. “So,” he began, with a croaky voice that suggested years of smoking, “Why’d you gank her, corpse?” Well, I was awake now. “What did you just call me?” He smirked, an ugly expression on his grizzled face. “Look, freak, I’m seeing a sliced-up broad with almost no blood in a covered alleyway, and a corpse right nearby. Open and shut case. I just wanna know why her, you know? Human killers got an M.O., so maybe you do, too.” He drew a thin cigar, one of those top-shelf specialty store kinds, and lit it. The smoke he billowed was sickly sweet, and I gagged. This only widened his grin. “Or were you just hungry?” I could see that he had already made his mind up, sure, but I might as well go on record. “Listen, I hadn’t used any of my rations in a while, and I was seriously hurting.” “So you ate her, then?” he interrupted. “No, you belligerent tit, listen to me! I could already smell the blood. It was on the ground, she was already dead. There was this kid, and-” Another interruption, “A kid? You sayin’ a kid did this to her?” As much as I didn’t like the guy, he had me. I didn’t know what the kid had done, or why he was there. Could have been that I just made the assumption, like Roadkill McFed did. I looked up at him. I put on my best “I don’t know” face and shrugged. He had already made up his mind, though, of course. Racist. The girl was bagged and taken away, and the crime scene was roped off. The suit walked away with the police as they discussed what I had said. I called out, “You’re not just going to leave me here, are you?” I got to see a rather endangered bird as a response. So much for professional courtesy. It seemed as though this tarp was my interrogation room, and my holding cell. They gave me no order to stay, so I suppose all I had to do was wait for dusk. Just before the agent disappeared from view, I could see it; dangling on his wrist was a small trinket. I was amazed I hadn’t noticed it before. A jagged circle surrounding a sphere, with a crescent looping through the top. That man wasn’t only a federal agent, he was a worshipper of Forusyth. Now, gods come and go. I tend not to fret about it, I came from Egypt, and those losers sure aren’t being revered anymore. I must say, though, that I haven’t seen a gaggle of deities so passionately worshipped as the ones that were trending now. Take Forusyth, god of life and hater of everything else, for instance. A little more than a decade ago, worship of that particular cloud-squatter reached an unprecedented level. Congress and the Senate were dominated by them, which caused a massive surge of taxpayer money to the Church of Life and its interests. Their invasion became bad enough that it started the Corpse War, but that’s another story. They all but disappeared afterward. Needless to say, I’m not Facebook friends with Forusyth, or any of his groupies. When you’ve lived as long as I, and you better hope you won’t, you learn to get used to boredom. I can safely say, though, that two hours of sitting under a black tent, getting gawked at by passerby gets old very quickly. I was about to count the bricks on the panaderia again (there are 226 on the wall I could see) when I felt a disturbance under my butt. Not the typical post-Taco Bell disturbance, but a shift, as though the ground beneath me was sliding around. As I watched, a thick head of dazzling red hair rose from the shadows caused by the tarp.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Jul 2013 07:21:35 +0000
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