Baylon rushed in to check on him, faithful to the end. The umbra tendrils knotted around Dred, their foul energy like black lightning. The unfocused slits of his eyes turned toward Baylon. Dred spat a tendril at him, an ebon tongue lodging on his mouth, the two locked in a dark kiss. Baylon back-pedaled, his body skittering from beneath him as the leeching strand smothered his inhuman cry. It scorched holes into his skin, searing it like tissue paper over a match. Like digging out chunks of his face with shards of glass, the pain was his desperate night of the soul. His muted screams reduced to a dull lowing, his large eyes embracing the inevitable. His flesh reduced to red chaos, puddles sopping under the tread of the wheelchair. Hate his only coping mechanism against the pain.
Dred hyperventilated, choking on the stink of hot blood, trying to find meaning in a meaningless world arriving only at the pure white depths of his loathing. The plasma screens of his televisions flickering to life. With a wave of his hand, the cable spread of channels all shifted to the same image. King.
Psychosis. Self-annihilating violence. Sociologists only guessed to make themselves feel better and justify their own useless existence. They didn't know what it took to survive on the streets, where the rules of the civilized world didn't apply. Where polite society had turned its back. They wouldn't keep him away, sealed away in this chamber, away from the game. His back spasmed. He knew when it all went wrong. He could hear the manic screams of people as he unremembered the pain of the bullet ripping through him. Devoured whole by the shadow and absolved from what he would have to do in the name of his holy cause. His left leg kicked out, wracked with exquisite pain. The metamorphosis happened quickly now, much like giving birth to himself. The throes of labor pain, with Baylon's vitality as a mystic Pitocin. He regretted that King couldn't be here to witness it, nor know the hand he played in his rebirth. A phoenix rising from the ashes of his own body.
'I am…' His mouth opened and closed around the syllables letting the word break in the echoing emptiness, a stillborn child given voice. An awful laugh of a broken soul knitting itself back together. The laughter of the damned. He wiped flecks of Baylon's blood from him.
He rose from his wheelchair and stood. Walking stiffly on undead legs, he shuffled to a shelf and the box that sat in the middle of it. Opening the box, he lifted the gold gun. His Caliburn.
Soon it would be his time.
'None of it was real.' Prez scratched at the frayed edges of the peeling wallpaper. Some pieces pulled free in strips, lifting patches of drywall with it. Still, he continued to channel his nervous energy focused on the last bits of paper. A distraction to break the tedium, he wanted to dig his fingers into something real. Most of the homes on the block stood abandoned, boarded-up windows proving little deterrent for a body looking to get out of the cold. Stacks of stuff waited to be hauled out, the previous owners prepared to take everything not nailed down. Clay tiles from the roof. Iron grates from vents. Pile of fixtures. Door knobs and jambs. Cabinet handles.
He sat down on a couch, in direct eye line of a mirror. To wear his game face, as affectless as a Noh mask, all day every day. He washed it, shaved it, presented it in every way, treated it as his own until it became the only face he knew. He scraped behind his ear at an itch of the greasy build-up hidden there. He stank of unwashed armpits and a sweaty crotch.
'Ain't no one up in here but niggas. Niggas can't get a job, got no place to be. You want to be black? You want to be African American?' He emphasized the 'can' syllable of each word with a sarcastic bite. 'You need to move your ass to the suburbs.'
He thought he knew what life was about. He thought he knew what he wanted. Gold-capped teeth. A fine whip with fresh rims and a bumping stereo. Gold chains were still chains. And a blast was still a good high. The idea of life and success putrefied in his mouth. His past a horror of broken promises, his present bleak, his future one of dying dreams, he threw a cabinet handle and shattered it. Putting flame to the blackened bulb, he sucked on the glass dick. Prez let the smoke issue from his mouth. The tendrils slowly swirled around his head.
'Me? I don't want to feel nothing.' Tears burned down his face. Angry that they'd come so easily, he lacked the will to wipe them away. 'I don't want to feel nothing…'
Only history could tell you certain truths. Puddles of shadow darkened the streets from failed street lamps. The truth was people were slow to learn, if they ever truly did. A stiff-necked bunch, the lot of humanity, destined to repeat their follies, re-live the same hurts, and need the same healing.
The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department announced that it would soon open a command center within the Phoenix Apartments. Captain Octavia Burke was put in charge over it. The recent spate of tragic deaths awoke the city to the forgotten blight within itself, where poverty and crime had been given free rein. There were talks of organizing crime patrols and offer job training and mentoring programs. Community leaders applauded themselves, joined in choruses of a community coming together and staying together.
(120 Degrees of) Knowledge Allah's gait dipped with each step of his limp. The pain bothered him more when rain threatened. No clouds dotted the skies but he knew a storm was coming. The mathematics of circles. The sidewalk stopped abruptly giving way to a worn-down-to-the-dirt grass path which cut in front of the beginnings of a construction site.
To little trumpeting, the mayor announced the ground-breaking on a new set of apartments. A high-rise with an emphasis on security. Camlann. The Camlann Apartments.
Though not a playwright himself, with no gift for words or even the subtleties of speech because those sprung from understanding the human condition, the human heart, and he'd stopped trying to be human long ago. But he understood the gift. How writers often stood outside of their own lives, watching people, the intricacies of their interactions, the interplay of bodies and language as they danced around certain truths. Observers in their own lives, unable or unwilling to live them, contenting themselves to scribble their accumulated elucidations in lieu of having to participate in the messy thing called life. And he pitied them.
Merle saw things with the double vision and distance of a writer. He saw the here and now, but he also saw the story being played out and the characters, the roles, they played out. He knew his part in the greater scheme of things and he pitied himself.
Merle withdrew a bud from the inner pocket of his coat and dug his finger into the earth. A squirrel ran up to him then stopped, scratching around for an acorn.
'Sir Rupert. Where have you been? The days were dark and dangerous, not the time to be running around willy-nilly.'
The squirrel rested on its haunches, turning its head left and right on the look-out for predatory eyes.
'We must take care of the old ones. Preserve the ways as best we can.' Placing the bud within the hole, Merle gently folded the pile back over it. It was his seed to plant, but he hoped the next age treated Green better than this one had. He thought of King and his brethren with a pang of regret as he understood how things had to end.
That was the way. The streets had their own legends, their own magic.
