A Glitch in Reality - Chapter 0034

Chapter 34

Kevin pulled the van over to the broken curb of a dead-end street, where the last working lamppost was already two blocks away, and turned off the engine before even stopping completely, letting the vehicle glide the last few meters in the darkness as if he didn’t want to reveal his arrival. Jack remained silent for a moment in the passenger seat, listening to the ticking of the engine cooling down, before turning to his friend.

There was a folded package in the compartment between the two, and it was to that that Jack’s hand went first. In the last few weeks, he’d spent more hours than he’d admit sewing it together, and the result was still ugly. Two vests taken apart and sewn together into one, the plates reused, the straps remade to open wide enough when Kevin’s body ceased to be merely large and became something else. There was no pattern for what Kevin had become. Jack had worked from memory, failing twice to get it right on the third try, and what he had in his hands was a makeshift patch, but it was a patch that covered the chest and the base of the neck, and on a night like that, that was worth more than beauty.

“It’s tight in the back,” said Kevin, turning his torso to test the looseness of the straps. He had already put the garment on before they went downstairs and tried it on again slowly, feeling where it pulled. “But it fits.”

“It was made to fit when you change, not to be comfortable now.” Jack ran his fingers along the thickest seam, checking if it had withstood his friend’s test. “If it tears, it’s your fault for growing up.”

Kevin let out a sound through his nose that sounded almost like a laugh. He didn’t need this. There wasn’t a single bullet Jack had seen that truly bothered him, and they both knew it. But Jack insisted, and Kevin understood the insistence without it needing to be explained, just as he understood almost everything about his friend. An extra layer of protection wasn’t for the bullet that already existed. It was for the one that could exist now, in a world that had begun inventing new things every week.

Jack turned his attention back to his own equipment. He removed the magazine from his gun, checked the ammunition column with his thumb, and repositioned it. It was full. The other four remained where they had been all day, sewn into inside pockets close to his body, positioned so as not to create bulk or noise when he moved. He cocked the first gun with a sharp click and fired. Then he stood still for another second, the two of them looking at the same dark street through the windshield, and there wasn’t much to say because the saying had already happened that morning, over empty plates, when they decided they were playing small. That neighborhood was the answer Kevin had brought later. It was to see the big fish they had come for.

“I’m just going in to look,” Jack said. It was a promise he made to both Kevin and himself, and they both knew how long promises like that usually lasted.

“I’ll keep an eye on the block.” Kevin settled his enormous body behind the steering wheel, and for a moment he seemed too small for what he was, tucked into that cramped space. “If you step out of line, I’ll know before you do.”

Jack nodded, pulled the hood over his glasses, and opened the door without making a sound.

Night greeted him with the smell of dry earth and stale smoke, the kind that clings to the air in places where something burned down and nothing was fixed afterward. It was a strange neighborhood for San Diego, one of those that lose their connection to the city as they move away from it, the houses increasingly spaced out, the yards ever larger and more sprawling, until the whole area acquired an almost rural air, like a zone the metropolis forgot to finish. Months before, it must have been peaceful in an honest way. Now it was peaceful in the wrong way, with the heavy quiet of places people flee from.

And they had fled. You could read it in the boarded-up windows, in the toys left on a lawn that no one mowed anymore, in the abandoned cars along the gutter with shattered windows and hoods open like mouths. The lampposts were all broken, without exception, and that wasn’t negligence. It was a message. A dark neighborhood is a neighborhood that belongs to those who can see in the dark, and lately those who could see there were the men who had evicted the families house by house, without any eviction order, just with the patient arithmetic of fear. The police had stopped going in. Jack knew this from the news and he also knew it from the silence, which was complete, without even the distant rumble of a police car to break it.

He crossed the first stretch on foot, and what for anyone else would be total darkness was for him merely a night of clear, green outlines. He activated the camouflage as he passed the last tree shadow, and the fabric responded by merging his body with what lay behind him, the entire suit and hood dissolving into the background of the street until only a blur remained, one that the eyes of an ordinary man would miss with the first step. It wasn’t invisibility. Jack never allowed himself to forget that. It was a disguise, and a disguise worked as long as no one looked directly and for long, which gave him a real advantage and a narrow margin, and it was within the exact width of that margin that he had learned to live.

At the end of the street was the house. It was the only one with light, and so it seemed larger than it was, two stories rising alone in the darkness while the neighboring houses sank into abandonment around them. The ground floor windows gleamed a dirty yellow, and there was movement behind them, shadows crossing the gaps in the curtains. Jack slowed his pace and approached from the side, close to the dead cars, using each carcass as a shield, until he was close enough to try the first window.

He saw nothing. The curtain was drawn from the inside, thick, and all it let through was the color of the light and the occasional shadow of someone walking. He stood there for a moment, calculating, and then decided to go around the house in search of a better vantage point. He went to the right, passed under a tall, dark window that must have belonged to an empty room, turned the corner, and reached the backyard.

The backyard said everything about the men who lived there. They didn’t take care of the place where they slept because they didn’t think of it as a place to live. It was a dumping ground for everything they had broken and stopped wanting: rubble piled against the fence, scrap metal rusting in the tall grass, torn garbage bags from which the night had dragged things, a rotting sofa lying face down near a wooden deck leading to the back door. Jack started to move forward, skirting the rubble, and that’s when the backyard gave him what he hadn’t anticipated.

There was a dog.

He was chained to the ground, lying on his side with his muzzle between his paws, and had been asleep until that moment, his ribs rising and falling slowly. Jack stopped the exact moment the animal’s ears perked up. The dog opened his eyes, raised his head, and looked around without seeing anything, because there was nothing to see. But there was something to feel. His muzzle twitched, sniffed, found in the air the scent of a man he didn’t know, and that was enough. The dog stood up and began to bark, loudly, urgently, the sound tearing through the silence of the entire neighborhood and echoing back against the empty houses.

From inside the house came an answer. Heavy footsteps, a chair being dragged, a muffled voice cursing, and then the rhythm of someone coming from the back. Jack moved before he could think. He crossed the last few meters in absolute silence and squeezed into the shadowy space under the deck, huddled between the wooden posts, just as the back door burst open.

A man came out. He was of Latin origin, with light caramel-colored skin under the light coming from inside, and he carried a short-barreled .38 revolver in his hand, held somewhat loosely, as if hoping not to need it. He stood at the edge of the deck, well above Jack’s hidden head, and scanned the dark yard, searching for the intruder the dog swore existed. He saw nothing. There was nothing for him to see. And when the certainty that he had been unnecessarily pulled from his chair began to turn to anger on his face, the man did what men of that type do with their own irritation. He unleashed it on whatever was closest and couldn’t retaliate.

He grabbed an old sneaker that was lying on the deck boards and threw it forcefully at the dog. It hit him squarely. The animal let out a sharp yelp, lowered its ears, retreated as far as the chain would allow, and cowered with its tail between its legs, immediately silenced by fright and pain.

“Shut up, you bastard!” the man shouted, his voice rising and breaking at the end. “We’re trying to work in here, damn it!”

He spat on the ground in the yard, cast one last contemptuous glance at the cowering dog, and went back inside, slamming the door hard enough to make the whole wall tremble. And it was precisely in that movement, the second the man turned his back to the yard and opened the door for himself, that Jack emerged from under the deck, climbed the steps behind him silently, and stepped across the threshold close to the man’s broad back, entering the house an instant before the door closed.

Jack’s footsteps made no sound. It was one of the things the suit guaranteed, and it was the one he valued most, because a gun silences a man after he’s already screamed, and silence prevents him from screaming. The man with the .38 continued on, unsuspecting, crossing a filthy kitchen towards a hallway ahead, and Jack stayed behind, standing by the sink, letting the distance between them grow.

The kitchen had seen better days and seemed to have given up hope for another. Stale bread hardening on the counter, plates piled with dry leftovers, silverware thrown in the sink among pans encrusted with grease, the stove dark with burnt residue around the burners. The smell inside was of forgotten food and cigarette smoke ingrained in the plaster. Jack breathed through his mouth and took a step forward, mapping the path, when he heard the man with the revolver stop up ahead in the hallway and notice something that made him turn back.

There was no time for another shadow. Jack did what the place offered. He bent his knees and jumped, his hands and feet finding the ceiling and fixing themselves there, pinning his entire body upside down against the grimy kitchen ceiling, motionless. The man with the .38 returned through the door just below, passed directly under him muttering to himself about the dog and the wasted time, never thinking to look up, and continued back to the hallway and the brightly lit room he had come from. Jack followed his every step with his eyes, without moving anything else besides that.

When the man disappeared, Jack let go of his feet first and then his hands, letting gravity bring him back, and touched the kitchen floor with the lightness of a falling leaf. There was no crack, no thud. He crouched down right there and began to move slowly down the hallway, close to the wall, and it was then that the voices from the next room began to reach him clearly.

He stopped at the door frame, at the point where the light from the room spilled into the dark hallway, and risked a glance.

There were seven men. Jack counted them all at once, the way he had learned to count people in a room, without lingering on any one. In the center of the room was a long, solid wood table, and on it lay the reason for everything. Packages wrapped in plastic, stacked in two crooked towers, and beside them a mass of white powder spread across the tabletop, from which one of the men was drawing a line with the corner of a card, scratching the surface with the patient concentration of someone accustomed to it.

The man with the card finished lining up the powder, lowered his face, inhaled it all in one long swipe, and threw his head back. He let out a deep groan of pure pleasure, his eyes closed, and remained there for a moment, floating in it, before bringing his knuckle to his nose and beginning to rub it.

“Damn,” he said, his voice already altered and slurred. “This one’s the real deal.”

He was a bald man, and the bare skin of his head and entire face were covered in tattoos. Under one eye was a tear scar, and his arms, exposed by his tank top, bore skulls drawn one on top of the other until almost no clean skin remained. The other six resembled him to varying degrees—bald, scarred, some with the same markings on their faces—all with that aesthetic that cartels use as a uniform: men who have deliberately erased everything that could individualize them and replaced it with symbols that make them all the same. Jack scanned them one by one, noting where each one was, what each one had in their hand, which one was the one with the .38 who had just returned and was settling back into a corner.

One of the men was sprawled in an armchair a little away from the table, a sweating beer bottle in his hand, his legs spread wide. He was the one who answered the one on the card, without even bothering to lift his head.

“Of course it’s good,” said the man in the armchair. “We only work with top-quality materials. It’s no coincidence that we charge what we charge.”

A third person, seated at the table next to the one who had sniffed the package, was distractedly fiddling with one of the packets, and it was about something else that he struck up a conversation.

“Speaking of which,” said the man at the table, without taking his eyes off the plastic he was clutching between his fingers, “are we really going to change suppliers? Because I heard something awful. They say the guys from the north side got Rodrigo. They killed the guy. They finished him off and half his men in one night.”

The sentence made the room’s temperature change. The beer man stopped with the bottle in his tracks. The card holder, still sniffling, turned his face towards the one who had spoken.

“Did they kill Rodrigo?” the tearful man repeated, his tone no longer possessing the numbness of before. “What do you mean, killed? Rodrigo moved heavy loads for the whole city. Nobody comes close to Rodrigo.”

“Well, yes,” said the one at the table, shrugging with the discomfort of someone delivering news no one wants to hear. “They arrived. And it wasn’t with people. It was because of that.” He lowered his voice slightly, as if the subject, spoken too loudly, might attract what he was naming. “They’re saying a metahuman appeared among them. One of the black guys from the north side unlocked something. And that’s what opened the way to Rodrigo.”

The silence that followed was of a kind Jack recognized. It was the silence of tough men confronted with something for which toughness is no use. Two of them exchanged a glance. The one with the .38, in the corner, lightly gripped the butt of the gun he had sheathed. In recent weeks, rumors had been swirling throughout the city, sightings whispered by people doing the impossible, and each of these rumors had cracked another piece of the old balance between the San Diego gangs, a balance sustained by numbers, weapons, and fear, and which didn’t know what to do with a card that none of the old rules foresaw.

The man in the armchair placed the beer on the armrest and leaned forward for the first time.

“Then things are really going to get ugly,” he said, and there was a hint of worry in his voice that he tried to disguise as calculation. “If the others already have one and we don’t, it’s only a matter of time before they come after our weight the same way they came after Rodrigo.” He looked at the one with the tear, who seemed to be, among all of them, the one with the most access to what came from above. “Does the boss have any idea how to deal with this? Because we have plenty of weapons, but from what they’ve said, weapons didn’t solve anything for Rodrigo.”

The tearful man didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he smiled slowly, and it was a strange smile, like someone sitting on information that others don’t have and who has been amused by it for some time.

“The boss knows how to handle things,” he said finally. “They may have theirs. But we have ours too.”

The entire room frowned at the same time. It wasn’t a rehearsed reaction. It was the genuine confusion of men who belonged there, who were part of the cartel, even if as a small cog in a much larger machine, and who still hadn’t heard of anything of the sort from the inside. The one with the .38 uncrossed his arms. The one at the table dropped the package.

“What do you mean, ‘ours’?” asked the man in the armchair, and there was something almost offended in the question, the suspicion of someone who suspects they’ve been left out of something big. “We would have a metahuman and nobody here knew about it?”

The one with the tear savored the smile for another moment before answering. He scratched his nose again, leaned back in his chair, and blurted out the name as if throwing a good chip on the table.

“Doug,” he said. “Looks like the bastard managed to unlock his powers. Who would have thought, huh? To think that idiot would have that kind of luck.”

The name pierced Jack like a needle.

He remained motionless in the darkness of the hallway, his face a hand’s breadth from the doorframe, and for a moment the sound of voices in the room receded far into the distance while his own head made too much noise. Doug. He knew that name. Not from the mouths of those men, but from Kevin’s mouth, weeks before, in a conversation that now seemed to belong to another entire life. Their first job. The first venture of their activities, the risky robbery where it had all begun. The drug dealer named Doug, from whom they had taken drugs, a gun, money, and even the jewelry the man kept. Jack remembered the weight of that bag, remembered the nervousness of the escape, remembered thinking, at the time, that it had been too big for what they were capable of carrying. And here, in a city that size, amidst thousands of possible names, it was that name that came back to him through the mouth of a bald, tattooed man in a room where he shouldn’t be.

“And how did this happen?” asked the man in the armchair, craning his neck, and it was exactly the question Jack wanted to hear. “That guy? I remember him. He was a nobody. How did he suddenly wake up with power?”

The one with the tear made a vague gesture with his hand, the gesture of someone passing on a rumor and not taking responsibility for it.

“It’s hard to say for sure.” He leaned forward, speaking more softly now, and the others moved closer to listen. “You remember the story about the loss, right? It was Doug again. The boss left a shipment with him to keep safe, something like forty thousand in drugs, plus the rest. And the idiot let them steal it all right under his nose. He lost the entire shipment in one night.” The man at the table whistled softly, remembering. “Yeah. I bet my life that imbecile was dead. That the boss would have his skin ripped off in a public square to serve as an example. Forty thousand is not something to forgive.” He smiled again, this time wider, almost with frustrated admiration. “Except the bastard didn’t die. He disappeared for a few days, and when he came back, he was different. He came back with that drug inside him. Go figure. Sometimes luck chooses the worst sons of bitches to shine.”

And there, crouched in the darkness, with seven armed men just a few feet away and his breathing almost uncontrollable, Jack gathered the rest alone. The forty thousand dollar shipment that Doug had lost was the same one Jack and Kevin had taken. The night that almost cost Doug his life had been their first night together. They hadn’t simply robbed some random drug dealer and moved on. They had cornered a man at the worst moment of his life, facing certain death at the hands of his own boss, and somewhere in that grip, in that pressure of being crushed, something in Doug gave way and opened a door that should have remained closed. The first encounter, the small and risky beginning of everything, hadn’t been a clean start. It had been the spark that ignited an enemy. And the enemy was now on the cartel’s side, with the boss, and there was something inside him that no one there knew how to measure.

“And what is his power?” asked a fourth man, who until then had only listened, leaning against the wall on the other side of the room. “Have you ever seen him use it?”

The one who had the tear shook his head slowly.

“Not much. Ever since that happened, Doug’s been glued to the boss. He follows him everywhere, never leaves his side. What I saw wasn’t much.” He paused, and something in his face shifted slightly, losing some of its amusement. “But what little I saw didn’t seem simple to me. Even if the guy is an idiot, what he has inside isn’t stupid at all.”

The man in the armchair remained silent for a moment, digesting the lukewarm beer forgotten in his hand. Then, he sketched a half-smile, the first genuine relief that had crossed any of their faces since Rodrigo’s name had been mentioned.

“Good,” he said, leaning back again. “At least now we have a metahuman on our side too. That’s something.”

And the man, with tears in his eyes, nodded silently, raising his colleague’s bottle in a silent toast to a fortune he still didn’t fully understand.