Second Skin - Chapter 0018

Chapter 18 — Lead

There were worse ways to kill yourself.

The phrase flashed through Sebastian’s mind somewhere between the parapet and the ground, whole, ownerless, toneless, the way a street sign passes by a bus window. He didn’t have time to argue with it. The alley rose to meet his feet and that was it.

The sneakers hit first. The impact entered through the worn soles, took his ankles, his shins, his knees, and his knees bent until his chest almost touched his thighs; his right hand opened on the asphalt of its own and held what was left. Something burst under his left heel, a half-trodden garbage bag, which released a warm puff of kitchen waste. The sneaker sank into a crust of dirty snow until it touched the concrete. And that was it. No cracking in the joints, no twinge in his spine, none of the warnings his body had spent his life sending whenever he jumped from a meter-high wall. He was crouched, whole, in the middle of the alley, with his hood up, between an iron gate and five men.

The gate was behind him. Sebastian knew without looking. The fence was a meter or so away, maybe less, and so was whoever was leaning against it. He didn’t turn his head. He raised his chin just enough to see, through the yellowish lens, what was in front of him.

The men had stopped. They were in mid-step, all five of them, one foot in front of the other, like a video someone had paused. Sebastian could hear their breathing. He could hear the wind scraping against the garbage bags, a can rolling slowly in some corner, the hum of a car passing overhead, far away, and he could hear his own blood, loud, deep in his new ear. The yellow lens made the alley brighter than it was. It didn’t help at all.

His eyes had deceived him from up there.

The view wasn’t to blame; now it was the best on the whole street. It had been the distance, and the fading light, and the coats. From up there, with night falling, five figures in thick coats in a garbage-strewn alley could be anything. They could be the men who slept under the overpass, wearing three coats one on top of the other. A meter away, there was no mistaking them. Those clothes were a uniform. Sebastian knew the uniform without anyone having taught him, just as he knew the police uniform and the uniforms of the delivery men from other companies: the baggy pants, the open coat despite it being January, the flat-brimmed cap. And the mark. Each of them carried the mark somewhere, the same color tied to their wrist, embroidered on their cap, tattooed on the side of their neck, the signature that said who that piece of street belonged to. Two wore basketball jerseys under their jackets, baggy, brightly colored, with a number on the back. Nobody wears a basketball jersey in January, unless the jersey means something.

He had already seen the weapons from above, and up close they were only more real. A thin-bladed pocketknife, open, in the hand of the one closest to him. A wooden baseball bat, with black tape wrapped around the handle, resting on the shoulder of another. Two short iron pipes, the kind you find in any abandoned construction site, with rust already creeping up the hands that held them. And a larger kitchen knife, turned downwards next to a leg, held by the tallest man of them all, the one in the middle.

And they were tall.

Any adult is tall to a child, but these were tall among adults: of different heights, one towering over the other, and the shortest of them would have to duck to fit through many doorways. Sebastian, crouching, would bump their knees. Standing, I would bump their shoulders. The boys in the class had started growing taller the previous year, one after the other, as if someone had given him a warning he hadn’t received; the coaches put him in the weakest group; the stores still sold pants for her in the children’s section. He was thirteen years old and had a body that hadn’t decided to grow, and he was crouching before five men who had grown as much as they could.

For a moment, he forgot why he was there.

Fear crept in and took the place of everything. He knew it by name. It was the one from Thursday, hanging in the air inside a hand; the one from Friday, naked on the locker room floor with four boys on top of him. The small body before large bodies. His mouth went dry at once. His hands, inside the cut gloves, froze despite the heat the Scourge had sent through his arms on the parapet, and his bent legs began to beg to give way. The billboard, the phrase, the man in red and blue with his hand open to whoever looked: it had all stayed on the roof of another building. Down here there was the smell of garbage, a burst bag under his foot, and five pairs of shoes turned towards him.

He lowered his head. The hood covered the rest.

“What the hell is this?”

Tyrone spoke first because he was closer. He was two steps from the fence when the thing fell from the sky, its arm outstretched and the knife at the end, and the arm remained outstretched, in the same position, only now pointing at the nape of the neck of a boy in a black sweatshirt. He was tall, Tyrone, with dark skin and dreadlocks that reached his shoulders, his blue basketball jersey peeking out from under his open jacket, and he held in his hand the thin blade that seconds before had been convincingly pointing at the girl. The blade trembled slightly. It was his hand that trembled.

“Where did that son of a bitch come from?”

Jerome had no idea. He looked around as if the alley would answer: the alley’s entrance, way back there, thirty meters of darkness to the street; the fence; the overturned dumpster with its lid open; the brick walls rising on both sides, no door, no lit window, nothing. Then he looked up. The fire escape zigzagged along the facade, black iron against dark brick, with the lowest landing about four meters from the ground and the access ladder retracted. It was high. But it was doable. A crazy kid could hang there and let go, and land on his feet if he was lucky, and Jerome had seen crazy kids do dumber things for much less. Someone chuckled behind him, short. Jesse.

“I have no idea, Tyrone.” He pointed with his bat at the iron up there. “That son of a bitch… jumped from up there?”

Jamal answered. Not to the question.

“Deal with him.”

Jamal was the tallest of the five, a head taller than Tyrone, with skin much darker than any of them and his coat buttoned up to his neck. He stood in the center of the semicircle, his knife hanging loosely by his leg, and Jerome noticed, looking at him, that Jamal was the only one who hadn’t yet glanced at the boy. Not once. His eyes remained fixed on the fence, on the girl, with the patience of a dog standing in a kitchen doorway.

“Let’s not waste any time. If we want to enjoy the rest of the night, we have to be quick.”

Jerome shook his head and left.

No rush. A boy that size, alone on the ground, was the kind of thing you could solve with a conversation and a shove, and he’d solved about ten of those already. He stopped a step away from the kid. The kid didn’t move. He remained crouched, his hood pulled down over his forehead, hiding everything from his face, his right hand resting on the asphalt, and he seemed to be looking at Jerome’s sneakers with considerable interest.

“Boy, boy.” Jerome’s voice came out softly, like someone talking to a lost child. “You showed up in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

He looked up over the boy’s head, toward the fence, and what he saw there made him smile. Still smiling, he swung his hips and swung the bat.

He had hit that bat against a lot of things. Car windows, ribs, knees. He knew the strength of the wood and the sound it made, and he delivered the full blow, from the shoulder to the temple, at the exact point where the black hood hid the boy’s left ear.

There was no sound.

The bat passed through the spot where the head had been and continued on, and Jerome followed, pulled by his own arm, half a turn of his body, and he had to dig his foot in to avoid falling. When he looked again, the boy was in the same place. Crouched, with his feet in the same spot, but his torso had gone backward, from the waist up, at an angle that no torso can hold, and now it was returning, slowly, like a spring. The hood had slipped.

Red hair. Real red, the color of copper wire, disheveled, and beneath it ski goggles that were too big for that face, with a yellow lens that covered everything, from the eyebrow to the middle of the cheek. There was no eye to see. There was the lens, Jerome’s distorted reflection in it, and a closed mouth.

“But what…”

The boy disappeared from underneath.

That’s how Jerome saw it. One instant the redhead’s head was at his belt height, and the next it wasn’t, and what rose in its place was a sneaker. He saw the instep come up from below, saw the worn sole, and the chin received the kick with the sound of teeth clashing. The head snapped back. The alley turned to sky, a dark strip between two buildings with the zigzag of the stairs reversed, and up there, against the sky, the boy’s body was still rising. Jerome felt a weight on his forehead. A foot. The same foot, resting on his head as if it were a step, and pushing.

Then, the floor.

Jamal saw Tyrone fly.

He’d turned his head at the noise, the snap of Jerome’s jaw, and arrived in time to see the boy detach himself from Jerome’s head with a shove and fly through the air towards Tyrone without touching the ground. Tyrone was waving the knife in front of his body. He was waving it as if swatting away a wasp, both arms raised, his mouth open, and the boy fell into him through his arms. Jamal saw the hands. Small hands, gloved hands with cut tips, one gripping the knife’s wrist and the other the free forearm, and he saw Tyrone’s arms spread to the sides like opening a coat, his chest exposed in the middle. Both sneakers sank into his chest.

It was a kick worthy of the fight videos Jesse watched on his phone. Tyrone’s arms slipped from the boy’s grasp from the force of the impact, and his body flew backward, horizontally, his dreadlocks scattered in the air, four meters down the alley without touching anything, until he hit the other guy, the one who had stayed further back with the pipe in his hand and hadn’t had time to get out of the way. The two hit the overturned truck bed. The metal rang like a bell and they rolled together across the ground, Tyrone on top, and stopped against the wall in a tangle of legs.

Jamal’s heart leaped inside his coat.

What the hell was that?

A mutant. A damned mutant. He’d heard of them. Everyone’d heard of them, everyone knew someone who knew one, but mutants were things that went to special schools, that appeared on television in uniforms, that lived on the other side of town, far away from everything he did. They didn’t fall from the sky into garbage alleys, wearing thrift store sweatshirts. What a disgrace.

He looked for the boy.

He wasn’t there. Where he’d been crouching, there was only Jerome, lying on his back, blood running from his nose and down to his ears, motionless. To the left, the dumpster and the two of them huddled together. To the right, the wall. Jesse was behind him, Jamal knew without looking, he could hear Jesse’s footsteps receding and the pipe lightly tapping against his leg with each step. The alley had two walls, a fence, and a strip of sky, and none of it had a boy inside.

Then he heard the breathing.

It came from above. He raised his face.

The boy was coming down. He was clinging to the brick wall two stories above, like an insect, and had already detached himself from it when Jamal looked, and was coming down with both feet forward, knees bent, red hair swept back and the yellow contact lens pointed at his face.

Jamal didn’t have time to raise the knife.

The impact hit his face with a crack he heard inside, in the middle of his head, the bone of his left cheek splitting open, his nose twisting to the side, and the blood reached his mouth before the pain, warm, tasting like coins, going down his throat. He weighed one hundred and ten kilos. He had already taken a bottle to the head and remained standing. But the ground lifted from under him as if someone had pulled a rug out from under him, and for a moment, in the air, he weighed nothing. Then the back of his neck hit the asphalt.

The lights unfolded. The patch of sky split in two, the fire escapes slowly rotated in a circle, and the entire alley began to swirl around his head like water going down a drain.

It was in that swirling darkness that he heard the gunshot.

He recognized the noise before anything else. Jesse. Jesse had been carrying the pistol on his hip since the summer, despite Jamal having said a hundred times that a barrel doesn’t leave a trace, but a bullet does. Three shots, one on top of the other, and the sound bounced off one wall and back amplified, and Jamal, lying down, waited for the rest.

The rest came close to his ear. A noise of metal hitting concrete, scraping, sliding, and stopping against his left ear; he felt the coldness of the thing against his lobe. Before he understood, he heard a bone break. A dry sound, like a green twig. And a scream that he took a while to recognize, because he had never heard Jesse scream, and this was Jesse screaming.

He couldn’t stay there.

What kind of monstrosity was that? That size. That size, and it had knocked five men down like bottles on a shelf. Jamal turned to the side, braced his hand on the ground and felt the alleyway tilt to the opposite side; he braced his other hand, rose to his knees, and blood trickled from his broken nose straight onto the asphalt in thick drops. He was big. He was tough. That had always been the only thing no one had been able to take from him. He stood up.

His hand found the pistol before his eyes. It was right there, where it had stopped, and he picked it up and pointed it ahead, where his eyes told him the thing was.

Things were piling up on Jesse.

Jamal no longer thought of her as a boy. She was small, the size of a child, and her left hand was on Jesse’s collar, holding him down on his knees, while her right hand moved in and out of his face. A tooth fell out of Jesse’s mouth. Jamal saw it, white and small, coming out and falling to the ground, and then another. Jesse’s right arm hung by his side. It was bent in the middle of the forearm, where no arm bends, and through the torn sleeve of his coat, something white and wet was protruding from the flesh. Jamal’s heart froze.

He pointed.

His hand trembled. There were three things in front of him, three small bodies in black sweatshirts, one on top of the other, moving with a delay, and he didn’t know which one to aim at. He closed one eye. There were still three. It didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter. The thing let go of Jesse, who fell sideways with his face on the ground, and turned its head toward Jamal.

The yellow lens. No eyes. Nothing in that face that said anything, not anger, not fear, not the laugh he’d seen on the faces of people who knew they were going to win. And then the thing did something Jamal didn’t understand: it looked back. A quick glance over its shoulder, at the fence, at the girl leaning against it. It returned to him. And it planted its feet firmly on the ground, slightly apart, without moving back an inch.

He opened fire.

Each shot lit up the alley in white for an instant, and in each instant he saw something. He saw the black sweatshirt jump on his chest, where the bullet entered. He saw the small body stumble back half a step. He saw the sweatshirt jump again, more to the side, and the redhead’s head shake with the jolt, and the back foot drag on the asphalt. He lost count. He pulled the trigger and the gun responded, and the thing remained there, in the middle of the three, being hit, and for a second Jamal felt, even with his face broken, even with the blood running down his throat, the dirty joy of someone who wins. He had hit him. He had seen him go in.

The bolt jammed open. His finger kept pulling a trigger that was no longer doing anything, two clicks, three, and the silence that followed was the loudest sound of that night.

The thing hadn’t fallen.

He was still standing there, his chest pierced, small, round holes scattered across his sweatshirt, one almost at the collar, and he remained standing. He was breathing; Jamal saw his chest rise and fall, a little faster than before. And he stared at him. He couldn’t see his eyes, the yellow lenses only reflected the glare of the distant street, but he knew he was being stared at, the way you know when a dog on a leash has decided something.

She ran.

Too fast for the alley. Three steps, maybe four, and on the last one she stepped up, jumped, and Jamal saw her small body reach the height of his head, his head, six feet three inches from the ground, and the last thing he saw was a knee.

Then, darkness.

Sebastian stood still in the middle of the alley.

His ears were ringing. A thin, continuous whistle, behind everything, and beneath it the muffled sounds arrived, as if through a door: someone groaning, someone dragging a leg on the asphalt, the wind in the bags. It smelled of burnt gunpowder, a sweet and sour smell he only knew from videos and hadn’t imagined so strong. He looked around slowly, the yellow lens making things a little clearer than they were, and what the lens showed was this: the one with the bat lying on his back with his face to the sky, the blood from his nose already darkening on his cheeks; the one with the dreadlocks and the one with the gun tangled against the wall, next to the dumpster, one groaning softly and the other silent; the one who had fired first fallen on his side, curled up, his good hand holding his bad arm and a sound coming from him that didn’t sound human; the tallest one fallen on his side three steps away, enormous, with the empty pistol near his open hand. Some worse than others. All on the ground. None of them would get up for a long time.

He had done that.

I knew I had it, and I didn’t know how. Things came in pieces and out of order: a chin cracking under his foot, a wrist too thin inside his hand, the handle of a knife scraping on the asphalt, something giving way under his clenched fist, a tooth. In thirteen years he had never thrown a punch that landed. He had taken enough hits to know where his hand goes when it doesn’t know how to hit, and his hand had known. His body had done everything, and he had been inside his body the whole time, deciding and not deciding, like on the rooftops, like in the jumps, only this time the other mechanic had done almost all the work. What his body had done to the man with the bat had no name in any of the videos he froze frame by frame.

It was hot.

It was really hot, in a way that didn’t suit January. The adrenaline was still coursing through him, swirling around with nowhere else to go, and the black sweatshirt had turned into a greenhouse. He pulled up the collar. He thought, with the part of his head that still thought small things, that it had been a stupid idea to go out in a sweatshirt, and the thought was as stupid as the idea, and so he stayed there anyway.

Then came the pain.

It arrived late, like a bill. It came from deep within his chest, and it was different from the burning of his muscles, the honest pain of cycling: something deep, hot, in several places at once. He lowered his eyes. There were holes in his sweatshirt. Small, round, with the edge of the fabric turned inward, four or five in the middle of his chest and one higher up, near his collarbone. He touched the tips of his fingers, the tips that his gloves left exposed. They came back wet.

He had been shot.

The phrase stuck in his head with the same street sign look as the other one, the one about the fall, and it took just as long to sink in. He’d been shot. Several times. In the chest, three meters away, with a real pistol, and he was standing, breathing. Of the first shot, he only remembered the sound, a tug on the back of his neck that threw his body to the side before he knew why, and the bullets singing off the brick. Of the second, the higher one, he remembered everything. The back of his neck had warned him, the same tingling as always, and he hadn’t moved. He couldn’t. Behind him was the fence. So he’d stayed where he was, and the bullets had gone in, and now, through the wire, he felt the Scourge on the other side, voiceless, holding on. Holding something closed inside him, with the same force with which he’d held back hunger on Saturday, a hand on a valve. That was all that kept him standing. He knew it with a certainty that didn’t pass through reason.

And then, like someone remembering a pot on the stove, he turned around.

He didn’t look at her face. He kept his eyes on the light-colored coat, the backpack strap, the zipper, and didn’t let them wander. He pulled the hood back over his hair with his dry hand. His voice came out the way it did.

“Get out of here.”

He looked around one last time. The alleyway, dark, deserted. The fire escape. The walls. He bent his knees and jumped.

Four meters up, and the brick wall received him: palms and soles stuck, and he didn’t even wait to feel it. He pushed. He crossed the alley in the air to the wall on the other side, higher up, stuck again, pushed again, and climbed like that, from one wall to the other, through the throat of the alley, like something climbing inside a chimney, with fire escapes passing by the sides and the sky growing above. He passed the parapet. He fell onto the gravel, hands and feet, returned to the edge, and looked.

The light-colored coat was running. It was coming out of the alley, its backpack bouncing on its back, and it reached the street, turned the corner, and disappeared.

His chest burned terribly. He pressed his hand against his torn sweatshirt and felt something move against his palm beneath the fabric.

” We have to go home. Now. ”

The voice came as it always did, too close, without passing through the air. Sebastian remained crouched on the windowsill for another second, his hand on his chest, staring at the empty corner.

He had absolutely no desire to disagree.