It Rained On Stoker Street

Chauncey had a shot.

That’s what the small, typed letters on the paper implied at least.

Brown eyes lifted from the stained paper and over to the coffee-coated hands of the stranger who had given it to him. They narrowed beneath the fringe of loose, black curls going wavy and droopy underneath the oppressive humidity.

A man had bumped into Chauncey several minutes back, spilling his exotic-looking coffee across himself. The motion was dramatic and left Chauncey sore on his shoulder from where the man had rammed into him but the man had managed to slip a stained, worn piece of paper into Chauncey’s hands without a soul noticing. Not a single one.

Chauncey cupped his coffee against his palm, enjoying the warmth.

The stranger stood a few feet away, towelling off the mess that was the front of his suit and his hands. There was something vaguely off about him and how he was blotting the unsweetened tar that passed as good black coffee from his person but Chauncey chalked it up to the way his red and black tie slanted towards his right hip. He frowned. Maybe it was the too-loose watch slipping around his wide wrists. Or the black belt missing a loop on his left side.

A chance.

What would that be like?

Dark eyes skated from the stranger down to the paper.

Stoker Street.

1224, Apartment Z.

Pluck a feather from the cardinal’s arse, slip it through the door. Wait ten Mississippis.

Bring a gun, you’ll die before you touch the bird.

The typed letters held roughly the same line with a few jumping below the rest. Others were dark, several of the vowels coloured completely in by the thick, fresh ink of a typewriter. Chauncey swallowed thickly. It was risky to carry that kind of note around.

His gaze jumped back to the man who was methodically pressing napkins to his thighs, pulling them away soaked.

It was bold.

And it would need to be covered up by something to be fully misplaced in the watching eyes of the government and its people.

Chauncey ran a thumb across the weathered strip of old parchment before crinkling it up in his palm and shoving it into a pocket as though it were trash. He shouldn’t have even looked at it inside one of the cafes. Chauncey brought his mug of steaming coffee to his mouth, swallowing with a half-hidden grimace.

The governments ran these places.

And that man was not Government. Which meant what they were doing was punishable by death.

Chauncey’s hand nervously settled on his scarf. The man shot a glance in his direction sharp enough for Chauncey to read his warning. He dropped his hand. Chauncey was here, like most the others, out of a sense of duty. If his face didn’t show on the café registers for the week, he would be hunted down and sent into the Bucket. Something few survived and something he would rather never see again.

His right hand floated away from his scarf and his nervous habit of fiddling with it to make sure it hid his scars.

Chauncey was full of them anyway but strangers and government officials alike always turned a blind eye to the other scars. The ones on his otherwise soft, young face. The dark ones twining around his tanned wrists. The ugly gash on his back. Chauncey inhaled deeply, feeling the tight skin of it stretch with the movement.

The tall, lanky stranger raised his pale eyebrows and held his arms out to the side. A spectacle sideshow to beg forgiveness.

Chauncey drank from his mug. The drink had turned tepid. He sniffed and set it down, acting bored like the other patrons. The attention of the government run café still clung to the man’s frame. If the stranger really was a safe haven, Chauncey would know soon enough.

A middle-toned laugh burst from the man as he shook his head at the crowd. Nimble fingers plucked a chocolate chip from his shag of strawberry blond hair. The pale eyes raked over the group of onlookers, giving them each a slice of attention before piercing through Chauncey like steel beams.

The show had started.

“Boy,” the man said, glaring at Chauncey. “Today is not my day.” There was a dangerous undertone to the way the man emphasized “today” that had Chauncey bringing his drink to his mouth to hide his reaction. The blue eyes swept the room again. “Maybe things will be better by sunset.” They landed briefly on Chauncey again.

Today at sunset then, Chauncey thought, setting his drink down. Good thing bringing up the sunset. If one thing denies being sick, it’s looking forward to the sunset march.

“Here’s to that!” some woman shouted, holding up her drink.

A few more cheers chimed in but Chauncey was already thinking about his escape.

He had a shot after all.

The stranger slipped out without another glance in Chauncey’s direction. Chauncey watched the heavy wooden door bang shut behind him out of his peripheral vision.

All the heads turned back to their documents and laptops and idle chatter about useless things the government would like to hear. The lovely weather. Aspirations that fell within the lines. Weak support for the newly elected. A current of gossiping whispers swept across the room like a dwindling brook before expiring completely. Silence fell.

Chauncey’s fingers danced around the pale blue keys lighting up the incorporeal keyboard in front of him. He had to buy time. Not much, but enough that it didn’t seem like he was following him out.

No connection was the only kind of good connection.

It was good the man was so forgettable but Chauncey would have to leave soon anyway. That sort of commotion would be checked into. Quickly. Being remembered in any café was rarely a compliment and often a fast way to get sent on a sunset march to the Badlands with the other infected. The lopsided scars underneath Chauncey’s thin layer of clothing burned as though he was being held under the flame again beneath the orange glow of an angry sunset.

There wasn’t much time before summer. Before t-shirts were mandated. Before Chauncey’s streaked arms would expose his trip to the Badlands.

He wasn’t supposed to return.

No one returned to the cities after being escorted out. It was suicide. But Chauncey had a problem. Something itched inside him to be back home and home was the city. It was the old ruins of Chicago.

It was still pretty.

The park once only on the shore had crawled ever wider, consuming most of the old city loop with old trees that pushed apart the gravelly remains of broken sidewalks. Chauncey spent most of his days underneath their shade and lived in the rundown hotels overlooking the wide shores of the lake. In the winter, even from the dingy apartments of the hotel rented out by drug addicts and Infected, he could smell the caramel delights of Christmas popcorn and chocolates wafting through the city as though the centuries hadn’t aged it from its young splendor.

Chauncey liked watching the old city be strung up with crooked lights and halfway sick aspirations. The ancient nobodies hobbling around from injuries and sickness living in the old quarter by the lake still managed to raise a pine in the middle of the city.

To Chauncey, it looked like home.

It was a lousy reason to come back.

Even the thugs in the Badlands didn’t want to go back to the city, to any city, decorated for Christmas or otherwise. Chauncey wet his lips and continued typing aimlessly, stringing random words together to appear busy. He shouldn’t have come back but with no marketable talents and no survival skill to speak of, he wasn’t going to last in the Badlands. He had managed to survive out there for three months, every day gathering a new scar, before realizing he had to take his chance fooling the authorities.

His luck was running out.

If the café hadn’t recognized that he wasn’t supposed to be there already, they would soon.

Chauncey waved a young girl skinny from bad rations over to him.

He picked up his half-emptied coffee with an inward grimace. It should have still been hot but its heat leached into the air. A mistake for the girl but a lucky shot for him. He could escape without excuse.

“It’s cold,” he said, pinning the young girl with a hard look. “Do you expect me to drink cold coffee? Government issued already tastes like piss.”

A few chuckles moved through the crowd confirming his belief that they were watching. Had been since the stranger bumped into him.

Slamming the metal cup onto the ground. “I don’t drink cold coffee.”

“N-no, of course not, sir. As you shouldn’t.”

She was already on her knees, cleaning the spill with the hem of her apron and shaking hands. A shine overcame her eyes as she looked up at him. Reese, as her dirty nametag implied, held herself together well enough to call a cleaning bot over. It hummed at his feet, slurping up the cold brown liquid and polishing the tiles while Reese fiddled with the loose handle of the metal mug.

“I am so sorry. If you would like-”

Chauncey stood up in a huff, pushing the table away and screeching the wooden legs of the chair across the floor.

“I would have liked my coffee to be hot or at least warm.”

The chuckling roared again.

He scooped his belongings into the black canvas backpack. They were out of fashion and generally only used in the Badlands as they were easier to stuff full of food and bulky weapons than the standard issue briefcases. Chauncey would have worried it would call him out but he had stolen his from a dead government official lost two hours out from the city. The small pin of a silver arrow impaled in a black heart still hung on the outside, forcing people to leave him alone.

Except in the old city where it only made him friends.

“Sir,” she pleaded. “Let me make this right. I-”

“It is wrong already,” he grumbled, slinging his backpack over his shoulder. “You made an error as did I. Should’ve known Starlight Street Café would be a dump. I’m going to Goff.”

“But we can offer a replacement!”

“If I’d wanted one I would have told you.”

Chauncey started walking toward the door but a slender hand seized his wrist, holding him in place. The café went silent. Patrons were never supposed to be touched. It was a step out of line. A sign of being infected. He froze and turned purposefully cold eyes over to her, unwilling and unable to do anything but let the woman sleep in the bed she had made.

He would not forfeit his life to keep hers.

“Let. Go,” he snarled.

The waitress dropped him as though burned, bringing the hand up to cover her mouth.

Chauncey stormed off without a second thought about those sad, watery blue eyes. The wooden door kicked against his heels as he exited onto the street.

She would be punished. Of course she would be. A spilled drink and grabbing a patron were each individually worth a trip to the Bucket for a few days. Chauncey craned his neck to one side, forcing a pop as the hint of his scar peeped over his scarf. He didn’t like thinking about that.

The Bucket had a terrible air of malicious mystery around it for most. Had Chauncey not been tossed in when he was 15, he would have believed what the others did; that it was just an execution chamber. A quick way to get rid of the Infected, a subset of humans declared by the world government an immediate threat to world peace.

As though it ever existed in the first place.

The Infected were rebels. Free thinkers. It was in their blood. A simple little thing as desire woven into their DNA. Chauncey felt it pulse each time he watched the Government dig its filthy claws into someone new. Wasn’t it enough to rule without question? Couldn’t they just let the Infected live? He shoved his hands in his pockets and turned toward Stoker Street. He wanted them all to leave.

To crumble and let something new be born.

He wanted change.

Just like all the other Infected.

A shrill cry rushed down the street with the noise of a loud horn, interrupting his thoughts. Chauncey’s dark eyes snapped up. He couldn’t afford to stumble. His stride continued carrying him away from the café. At the intersection, he pivoted sharply to spare a glance over his shoulder.

There she was. Reese, the Infected waitress.

It was horrific. Her hands uselessly battered the back of the soldier dressed in all grey protective gear and her feet kicked furiously despite the shackles wrapped around them. The metal cuffs around her waist and thighs and wrists glinted in the lowering sun.

She already wore the red collar designating a drop at the Bucket.

The blue eyes turned towards Chauncey and connected. He swallowed thickly as tears blurred his vision. She could see him. Something broke on her face as a scratchy, high-pitched wail shook the street.

Chauncey wished suddenly that he had found a different way to exit the café.

She wasn’t going to last.

The intersection shifted from red to green and a ghostly pedestrian symbol flashed across the striped lines of the walkway. Chauncey turned away.

She didn’t deserve that. He subtly bit the inside of his cheek. Pain flared and the urge to cry dwindled. No one deserves anything happening here. Can’t save everyone. Not my job. White lines flashed across the dark eyes as he walked across a second street. Can’t fix it. Just deal like it with Tay. The green glow of the stoplights painted him sickly green and alien. People die here. All I can do is…

A high-pitched scream brimming with terror cracked like a whip through the streets. Chauncey froze, one foot still in the street. A gunshot popped. The cry went silent.

She never made it to the Bucket.

Brown eyes honeyed in the sunset as they swept over the scene around him.

No one even noticed the shot. The quiet following it.

Cars trucked by full of emotionless idiots gripping the wheel with the edges of their fingers, eyes dead. Fury pounded its fists against the side of his throat and screamed with his pulse in his ears. A woman nearby laughed. Another picked a coin off the ground. None of them were Infected. None had bad blood full of desire. And not a one even cared that someone had died.

Rage screeched in his chest like a hunting raptor, wings spread wide over a reddening sunset.

They weren’t thinking about the others. Chauncey was.

Who was the government marching out to the Badlands tonight? Who cried at the base of the Bucket? Who died today to be forgotten by the blue dawn of tomorrow? Not Reese. Never Reese. Chauncey would wear the name of the Infected waitress on his soul, repeat it hundreds of times until his tongue bled with her name.

His nostrils flared. It couldn’t be helped. It couldn’t be stopped. It couldn’t be fixed. His rage meant nothing beneath the sadistic fist of the eyes watching from the Tower stationed in the heart of the city.

The uninfected, the clean, were ruthless. They had no empathy. It was a simple matter of protecting their idea of peace and slaughtering any who disagreed. Half the country had been turned to a wasteland anyway. There was plenty of space to toss any Infected unable to fit into mainstream society. Unable to squash their desire.

It was nothing but a lie. A remedy to feed the withered souls of corrupted official dancing with their own egos. Nothing mattered to the uninfected, nothing. The old gods were dead and the new had been slaughtered. Reese was another fly caught in a trap. She was no rebel. She wanted nothing other than survival like the rest of the weak Infected pleading innocence.

Chauncey wasn’t that way.

He was a fighter. An Infected fighter.

Deep in his blood sat the undeniable urge to bring redemption to a world gone callous with the taste of greed. He had seen the old city. Fallen in love with its tall trees and quiet shoreline. He wanted it back.

And he had tried to get it. Once, with a group of his Old City friends, Chauncey had rushed into the towers with the dream of toppling them and the souls within to erect great memorials to those who had died. All he wanted was a true safe haven. Peace or no peace, Chauncey wanted everyone to live the life they chose and fought for the dreams that came under starry skies.

But he had ended up in the Bucket. Then the Badlands.

It didn’t kill the dream and it didn’t kill him.

Chauncey returned, vowing to be better. To fit in. He tried to see the beauty in the sunrise and drank the coffee and alcohol passed around the government owned cafes but it was bitter on his tongue. He found himself returning each night to vomit it up into his planter, one hand around the scars on his throat.

The red collar haunted him.

Chauncey staggered sideways, bumping into the corner of a building.

The scars burned fiercely beneath his scarf and the well-applied makeup below that. He could still feel the way it bit into the skin of his neck with sharp teeth, holding him down like a predator. Bile crept up his throat. With it came memories. The tortuous memory of the heat from rotting corpses and sunlight crept up on him again, dripping red across his cheeks and fluttering in his chest.

The Bucket was a hole in the ground. A suicide trap designed to use the desire to be free against the Infected. The collar came on, its sharp blades sinking into the soft flesh of its victim, and it pumped hallucinogens into their blood. It filled them with horror and despair, waiting for the desire to be rid of the collar to peak. When it did, when the person tried to rip the collar off, it tore them apart.

They died in seconds leaving a mess of blood and tears.

But he had escaped.

The paper in his pocket was rough against his fingertips, grounding him back in the moment.

Sweat prickled across Chauncey’s scalp. It made the palms of his hands wet. Somewhere down some alley a child wailed. A pop. Another scream. Another gunshot.

Silence.

This was the safe haven.

A flock of screaming geese raced overhead, their shadows rippling across Chauncey’s face.

Rain followed behind them, starting as a light sprinkle and quickly becoming a heavy downpour. The city crawled away into its hiding spot but Chauncey stood unmoving.

Why had he lived? He could vaguely remember hands pressed around his throat. A piece of fabric tied there. Dim lights and a thread weaving in and out of his neck.

"Don't be them." Chauncey blinked up at the rain. Someone in the Bucket had said that. "Don't ever be them, boy." But he had become them, hadn't he? Cold, callous, selfish. "Infected's just a fancy word for saying we care." Chauncey's heart quickened. The shadow in his mind began to fade. "Don't quit caring. Don't let 'em win."

The rain smoothed his hair flat against the sides of his skull. Water rushed in rivers down his face as he sat with the understanding that he had failed. Whoever had saved his life had wanted him to be an outlier. A survivor. But he hadn't done it to let him become like the rest.

Failure drowned him from within. He had become like the rest. He had allowed that woman to die because he wanted to find someplace safe.

"Never again," he muttered. Water dripped from his lips into his mouth. "I'm sorry, Reese." The clouds screamed overhead, flashing bright white. "I won't be them anymore."

Looking up at the street sign in front of him, Chauncey’s face fell flat.

Stoker Street.

He took off at a sprint down the dark road.

Enough was enough. It didn’t matter if he escaped the city. It didn’t matter if he made it to a true safe haven or not. Street lights flickered on, casting yellow light down the bleary black alley.

Chauncey was Infected.

And he wanted to watch the city burn.