Hectoring Jack

From the Fall the world has been divided into two cities. Under a car in one city lay a predatory denizen of the other.

The man laying under the car let his chest rest lightly upon the hot oil stained bitumen of the Tarmacland car park, holding himself prone, flat to the ground.

It was hot here in the Devil's city, thought the emissary, the viral headway. He had no particular allegiance to his city of origin but was more accustomed to its cold concrete and lifeless stone. He watched people pass, their legs marching along. No one noticed him.

The chameleon maintains its form whilst adopting the texture of its surroundings.

He had anticipated the heat and was dressed only in a gray cotton sheet loosely sewn as a long kaftan with broad open sleeves. It drapped over his back and piled in silhouette upon the ground around him. As he sweat, wode ran in blue stains from under his arms into the ashen fabric.

Quite still, he watched beads of blue moisture fall from his brow.

From the conglomerate of arcades that was the shopping complex, people rushed and clambered under the weight of full plastic shopping bags or strained behind laden trolleys. People like Jack Holt.

The way Jack Holt bent his knees as he walked with equal bundles of tangled bags in each hand drew a watchful eye to him. Reaching below his gray-blue robes, the emissary sought the surgically fine blade strapped to his ankle. He took it with his right hand and snapped it open but kept its cold blade flat to his leg. The man would walk past him. He knew this. He had followed him here before.

Jack Holt stopped his steady march to twist his arm about, readjusting the bags, relieving his fingers. The man under the car began to control his breathing and ready himself.

Holt was walking again, close to the parked cars on his right so as to allow traffic to pass. He came upon the car that hid his hunter and seemed to pass unhindered. Then, in his final stride, he felt a shard of hot pain that shot up the length of his spine. His attacker moved out from under the car in one movement, slashing the blade through tendon cut clean. Jack Holt winced loud with an animal cry and fell back clutching at the wound that rushed hot blood to his hands.

His right ankle hung loose and open and a sudden nausea of shock dilated time. He felt himself slowly falling onto his back with his right knee to his chest and his desiccated ankle searing numb in his hands. He looked over his left shoulder to see the back of a running man, a bizarre and lucid figure, large and in a gray dress smudged with blue. Holt shouted angry, elongated vowels. In a dream he felt about him amongst the scattered contents of his shopping bags. A tin of whole peeled tomatoes found its way to his hand and he hurled it at the viral headway that was gone. The tin turned a gentle arc, bounced on the bonnet of a parked car that let out a sweltering scream in alarm.

- M. Plumber