At once the face burst into blisters, sneer becoming a draw of panic and pain. The air was full of the smell of burning flesh and boiling sweat. The hands came away from his shoulders and he rolled free in an instant. At any other time he might have been hypnotized by what had happened to the giant who was now rolling on the floor, hands covering his eyes against an unknown force, but now he was bent on one notion.
“Run,” he whispered.
Like a shot, faster than anything he had ever dreamed before he was running. Before he knew what was happening he was through a door marked red with the word ‘exit’.
Night enveloped him like a cold blanket. His bare arms bristled in it, hot lungs drawing the cold air in until he was certain they would freeze and then shatter. The notebook flapped in the frosty air as he pumped his arms. His feet skidded twice in the snow that lined the parking lot in which he had found himself, but he never once lost hold of the ground.
Behind him the sounds of the younger cop screaming at his partner hit Jonah's ears for a moment, but was then lost on the wind.
Jonah ran blind down an alley, veering left and then right and then left again, crossing sidewalks and streets, avoiding people wherever he saw them, no matter how far off they were. He ran until his legs burned and his lungs felt like they were breathing an icy fire. As the sound of sirens filled the air he leaned back against a chain link fence, desperate to catch his breath. The reality of what he had just done came down on him and his knees grew weak under it. Several minutes passed before he could move again and he went at a brisk walk in desperate search for a place where he could find shelter from the cold and hopefully something warm to wear. Once that was accomplished he would work out a way to get out of the city once and for all.
Jonah McAllister shuddered against the cold and imagined, however briefly what his mother would say when he failed to return home for Christmas.
Part Two
Sandy Jenkins Reads a Book
Sandy Jenkins was a creature of disgust.
She was disgusted with her name because of its ordinariness, disgusted with her job for the same reason and disgusted with the people around her for their failing to notice it. But the thing that disgusted her most was her body.
It was a bloated, saggy mess that was becoming riddled with wrinkles and cellulite. Even at thirty she felt old and stretched out, as if somehow her girth had been struck by more years than a thin woman would be. She would spend hours walking around the city in vain attempts to force it to comply, weeks on water diets that left her weak and sick and still there was no hope on the horizon. She would look into the mirror in the morning and for the first few moments she would see the grossness that the other women whispered about huddled around the water cooler.
She was disgusted with herself for caring what they thought.
Her disgust she buried in two ways: when she was eating she would eat, no point in holding back when it never did anything anyway; and when she was not eating she would read about people who did not have such ordinary names or jobs or lives. Her bench at work was littered with magazines about celebrities and gossip, her shelves at home running over with books about places that had never existed and people who had never lived and whose names that left her feeling tongue-tied.
She was in the middle of reading just such a book, this one about an alternate timeline in which civilization had never left the Greek empire. She kept the book below the table at the deli where she was eating her lunch salad, almost pressed into the rolls of her fat out of embarrassment. Its heroine, beautiful and forceful daughter of the Aegean sea, Aegera, was confronting the despotic king.
"Shit," she cursed under her breath so that the other patrons of the diner wouldn't hear. Every novel in the last few years had some kind of despotic king.
She was in the process of flipping a forward a few pages to see how long this confrontation went on for when her reading was interrupted.
The man at the table across from hers was muttering something. He would mutter something and then he would scribble something down in the ratty notebook he had perched on the table and then he would go right back to muttering. Several of the other people in the deli looked up, rolled their eyes and went right back to eating. Sandy read the same line over for the eighth time and then shoved her bookmark between the pulpy pages, thoroughly disgusted.
When she sat alone in her one bedroom at night she was aware that it was taking less and less time for her to reach a state of thorough disgust with any given person. A fuse which once had seemed infinite had grown shorter and shorter as the years wore on. It was something she tried to stop, but as with her body, her temper refused to obey.
As her outsides got softer, her insides got harder.
“Excuse me,” she said, clearly directed toward the loud muttering.
The man did not look up, but was silent for a moment as he scribbled something down.
“Excuse me.” Louder this time.
He looked
