A’Llyn has previously been published in QuantumMuse, Nanobison, and Knights of the Dinner Table.
[Also, this story was submitted under a different title. --Ed.]
Friends in Need
by A’Llyn Ettien
In the back of the cop car, in handcuffs, Amy felt surreally out of place. From everything leading up to this, her mind kept replaying the bit where the young cop—younger than she was, barely more than a kid—said “ma’am, you are under arrest.” In her head his enunciation splintered, clearer and sharper with each repetition, until every syllable was weirdly distinct, like individual slivers of glass. Then she would think “how the hell did this happen?” and a heated wave of shame, more social embarrassment than regret, really, would flood over her and blur things out until the replay started up again: “Ma’am, you are un-der ar-rest.”
Arrested! How was she going to explain this to the kids, and how was she going to be able to scold them with any authority when they got in trouble? And as far as that went, part of her protested indignantly, they hadn’t arrested the guy. Sure, arrest the two women and let the guy walk off. It was elementary school all over again, when she used to get in trouble for fighting while her brother got a pass.
On the other hand, Sang was the one who smashed the guy’s face with a mug of beer for, if she was going to be completely honest, no evident reason. Pushing her memory past the part it kept skipping on (“ma’am, you are under arrest”), she looked for the grave insult that must have turned Sang from relaxed drinking companion to raging bar-brawler. Something slimy in the way the guy slid up beside them at the bar, maybe? She didn’t get much from him one way or the other, not even a checking-out glance as he filled in the space next to Sang, attention forward to the bartender. Just one medium-sized, unremarkable slab of average guy, as best she remembered, and then he—what, he had jostled Sang slightly and turned with a polite smile, an “oh, sorry,” and Sang shot him a glance, not even really paying attention, and then there was a tense half-second where Amy’s focus shrank down to a point on an odd stiff chill in Sang’s posture. And then Sang swept her mug off the bar and into his face, left handed across her body, as if she’d been practicing.
Then background shouting, encouraging hoots of ‘fight’ from somewhere down the bar, flailing arms, and Amy snatched up her own mug and smacked the guy in the head as he grabbed hold of Sang, and he went down. More shouting, and she thought he came up again…yes, there it was, she’d broken the glass over his head this time, and blood—quite a bit of blood—was instantly all over him, as if it had been in the mug instead of in his head. For some reason she recalled his hair starting to spike up and get crusty in sections, which had seemed interesting at the time. More flailing, and Sang grabbed her arm as if to tug her off somewhere to the back of the bar, but the crowd gave way in front instead and there stood the law. Amy froze up, Sang was yelling something, and “Ma’am, you”— skip that, skip that. She had seen the guy sitting up as the cops hustled them out, waving off concerned members of the crowd, so presumably he was more or less OK. She felt vaguely guilty in retrospect; she’d gotten into some stupid shoving matches, but she’d never made anyone bleed before. Honestly, she didn’t see Sang’s problem with him, but it must have been some previous issue, from when she knew him in other circumstances.
The siren came on, near and shocking inside the car, and she blinked and looked up, aware of her stiff face suddenly, as if it were a dazed mask. Were they in that big a hurry to get to the police station?
In the headlights an old sedan, weaving slightly, picked up speed.
“What’s going on?” she whispered, casting a glance sideways. Sang’s face looked unfamiliar, carved into strange, mobile angles by the shifting streetlight cast through the back window. Amy, looking at her, reflected that she didn’t actually know her neighbor that well. Maybe she’d owed the guy money.
“It’s a high-speed chase.” Sang’s voice was low and a little hoarse, but mockingly formal. Amy vaguely recalled someone’s arm around Sang’s throat, dragging her off the guy. It must have bruised. “They suspect the driver of that automobile may perhaps be intoxicated.”
“Quiet back there!” snapped one of the cops. The older one, driving. Sang gave the suggestion of an eye-roll, like a conspiratorial child barely tolerating the grown-ups, and Amy recognized the always-entertaining person she had gone to the bar with, though now overlaid with a foreign cast.
Ahead, the speeding sedan veered right and sideswiped a guardrail. Brake lights flared, the car wobbled back into the lane, and then pulled right again and came to a jerky stop on the shoulder. The cop car pulled in behind, sirens shutting off.
“Sit tight, ladies.” The cops shrugged off their seat belts and got out of the car.
Amy glared after them as the older one paced in measured cop fashion up to shine his flashlight into the sedan window, the younger one waiting alertly near what she absently thought of as ‘their’ car. (“Ma’am, you are under arrest.”)
“So,” said Sang, her tone conversational. “Why did you hit him?”
Amy blinked sideways, pulling her gaze from the scene ahead. “You did.”
“And if I jumped off a bridge--?” Amy heard a mixture of amusement and disbelief in her voice, which seemed not exactly appropriate to the situation.
“Well, no, but—you’re not an irrational-violence kind of person, so I figured if you thought he needed hitting, you must have a good reason.”
Sang’s head dropped, casting her face into shadow, and she gave Amy a sidelong look through wisps of hair. “You’re a good friend.”
Amy waited, wanting but not wanting to ask Sang’s own reason, and then for a minute they both watched the unfolding drama centered on the car ahead, whose driver, visibly unsteady on his feet, had emerged and was vehemently declaring outrage and innocence. Scattered words drifted back to them from the rushing stream, drawing the younger cop forward. He was pretty good at looking cool but watchful. Amy thought that next time Sang said “you look bored and listless—let’s go out and have a drink!” she would say no. Even though she had been bored and listless, for weeks now really, and had enjoyed being out with a friend, and had felt something almost like exhilaration at the prospect of doing something different, when the fight came up. Adrenaline could be fun. When it wore off and left you in the back seat of a police car with spilled beer down your front…less so.
(“Ma’am, you are under arrest.”)
“Well,” said Sang, “let’s get out of here, shall we?”
“What are you talking about? We’re locked in. And in handcuffs.” She rattled them for emphasis, still not entirely believing they were real.
“S’OK,” said Sang. “Give me your hands.”
So maybe Sang was an escape artist, and could cleverly pick the lock. Who knew? Not that running into the woods would improve anything. Resisting arrest and all that. Amy slouched into the seat. Creaky vinyl. Probably easy to clean. Cut down on spilled beer stains and whatever.
“They’ll track us down and we’ll get in more trouble for running than if we just sit here.”
Sang looked over her shoulder through the back window, apparently uneasy for the first time that evening. “They haven’t booked us yet. They don’t even know our names.”
It had not occurred to Amy that cops wouldn’t know their names.
“That’s why they arrested us so fast,” Sang said patiently. “I wouldn’t cooperate when they asked for ID.”
Oh yeah. Sang had been shouting something confrontational that Amy had been too stricken to register.
“And you keep yours in your shoe. Amy, no one in that bar is going to be able to identify us. If we get away now, we’ll be fine.”
Amy thought that might be true, but there were a lot of ifs involved. The reckless energy that got her into Sang’s fight in the first place was fading fast. She watched the show ahead, where the sedan’s driver was now failing spectacularly to demonstrate his mastery of a Roadside Sobriety Test.
Sang sighed, and answered the unspoken question. “I hit him because he was looking for me, and I couldn’t let him get a good identification. He’s a searcher, and they collect pieces of information—reactions, expressions, the way you do things. They latch onto you and just watch and wait until you do something that puts the last piece in place so they know it’s you. You can’t fool them over time, so you just have to smack them down as soon as you recognize them, then get away.”
“So you knew him?”
“No, but I’ve seen the look.” Sang sighed again. “I have to get out of here.”
Amy stared at her. Great. She’d gotten arrested helping a paranoid weirdo beat up a total stranger. “And why was he looking for you?”
Sang looked back, face earnest and alien, a complete stranger in vaguely familiar skin. “It’s kind of like the army. If you have the talent, they just conscript you. We’re all supposed to spend our lives working on the Gateway Out of Here. But you know, some of us don’t so much care about getting out of here, so we’d rather spend our lives doing other things.”
Amy chewed her lower lip, the better to make a noncommittal face. “Who…conscripts you?”
Sang, unexpectedly, laughed. “It’s a good thing you’re not a psychiatrist or something. You’d have to look understanding and sympathetic about peoples’ loony ravings, and you’re not that good at it.”
Amy flushed. “It’s not that, it’s just--”
“It’s OK. I know, it’s insane. I don’t even have time to explain it, but it’s like--you know Buffy the Vampire Slayer?”
“Sure.” Amy had been a loyal follower until she started skipping TV to work nights, and then the baby…
“It’s not that, I’m not saying that’s exactly true--although for all I know it is--but it’s sort of like that.”
She looked though the back window again.
“The basic point is that there are things that look like magic co-existing with the reality-based world we know and love, and most people never notice. Which is also magic, right? But some people can see it and work with it, and among them there’s basically this royal line, and everyone else is supposed to obey them. Because of the royal power and everything. It’s very feudal. They have this project to move on from the earth to the whatever is next and better, and everyone who can is supposed to be working on it. You can’t decline, right?—because they’re the law, they’re the nobility. But hell with them, I want to live my own life, so I ran off. Now I pretty much live on the run, since they just keep trying to track down everyone who might be useful. They don’t like to miss out on potential labor, you know.”
With a clink of handcuffs, she put her hands up to press the sides of her head, looking weary.
“Of course, you can’t know that my perspective is right, what do you know about the politics of this ‘ooh, magic!’ world you can’t even see? Even if it’s true, I could just be a criminal slacker evading my appointed role. But you’re a good friend, and you stood by me once tonight, so maybe you’ll help me again.”
Amy didn’t bother with the noncommittal face. She watched the latest installment of the sedan driver’s saga, in which the protagonist gives up attempting to walk a straight line and makes a break for the trees, both cops in pursuit. Lukewarm pursuit, it looked like; the cops were jogging, not sprinting, and the would-be escapee, having lost one shoe, seemed about to fall over at every other step. It must be pretty prickly out there in the underbrush, Amy thought.
After a few seconds she turned back to Sang. “I have to be honest—I think you’re a raving loon. But you’ve always been a good neighbor, so whatever, tell me what you need and I’ll help you as much as I can.”
Sang’s face seemed to literally light up in relief and joy, shadows melting off her skin. Amy felt better; any decision that could make someone look so happy must stand a good chance of being the right one. Even if Sang was insane, she might as well be happy, right?
“Just lend me some focus, that’s all. I had too much to drink to pull it together on my own.” Sang held out her hands again.
The request made no sense, of course, but this was hardly the time to start worrying about that, and after a moment Amy reached across the seat to take Sang’s hands. Cold, dry fingers squeezed painfully tight, and Amy felt a weird, ticklish suction, as if something were being skimmed off the surface of her skin. She shivered, and it stopped.
Sang pressed Amy’s hands together, sandwiched between her own palms. “Like that, but let it go. Pay attention to the direction.”
Amy tried to imagine she was letting go of direction, or something. The sense of skimming resumed, and Sang’s hands grew warmer, almost feverish.
“Sang, are you OK?”
“Shhh.” Sang’s face was distant, and blurry. Amy stared, then squinted, trying to bring her back into focus, but she seemed to be dissolving. The solidity of the world, which she had never much bothered to be aware of, began to drop away around her, peeling off on all sides in almost-visible layers, like segments from a giant orange. She clutched at Sang’s hands, but they seemed to have turned to wisps of down in her fingers, and she could hardly feel them. Her head was spinning. And the car was – underneath her somehow, very far underneath her, flashing lights tiny and distant on the side of the tiny, distant road.
(“Ma’am, you are….”)
A trail of streetlights arced along the line of Sang’s back. She tried to speak, but seemed to be made of air, with no way to shape words. Or possibly she was water, and the whole world was water, rushing by, clear and chill.
She scraped through leafless fall branches, sweeping into the ground somewhere. There was a taste of wind and dust, then a growing bitterness in the back of her mouth. She thought she recognized the reedy patch behind her house, and Sang’s clothesline, and then she was standing on the ground, holding Sang’s hands. Sang pulled away. Amy wavered and sat down hard.
She was solid. The ground was very solid. Their abrupt meeting knocked her teeth together, and bumped her tailbone. Ow. She was not in the back of a cop car, which was really no less strange, she supposed, than having been in one in the first place. No handcuffs in evidence, that part felt right. Sang was…probably solid, though it was hard to be certain since she was doubled over a few feet away, throwing up as if everything inside her had to come out immediately.
“Are you OK?” Amy hunched herself a little closer. The retching sounds were making her queasy as well, and she was leery of getting too near, but didn’t want to be unsympathetic.
Sang, barely visible in the dimness—her back porch light was supposed to be motion sensitive, but apparently the detector had broken again—waved her off. After a couple of minutes she stopped heaving and sat back.
“Always the worst motion sickness ever,” she said weakly.
They sat in silence for a while, and then Amy, for lack of a better idea, pushed herself to her feet. “We should go inside,” she said. “It’s getting chilly.”
She took Sang’s hand (solid) and hauled her to her feet, and they made their way, weaving unsteadily, to the back door. Footsteps clumsy on the wooden step: solid. As Sang fumbled with the key, the porch bulb came on, lighting up her pinched and tired face.
Amy steered her into the kitchen to a seat at the table. “Tea?” she asked. “Water? Aspirin?”
“Just water, thanks,” Sang said as her head drooped forward onto a stack of magazines. Amy filled a glass and set it near Sang’s elbow, and she raised her head and sipped feebly. Amy, hovering, wanted to do something else. She now felt jittery and energetic, and peeked out the window. Then she pulled the curtains closed. The little kitchen felt out of place around her, more distinct and real than it had any right to. The beams of the overhead light reflecting off the battered tabletop should have had weight against her arms.
“Is that guy going to come around here?”
“Probably.” Sang’s head was on the table again, her voice muffled by her arm. “If I’m still here, I mean. He won’t bother if I’m gone.”
“Where will you go?”
“Better you don’t know.” Sang looked up over her own arm. “Not to get all mysterious on you or anything.”
Amy sat down. “Can you even go anywhere? You look kind of sick.”
“No, I’ll be fine. I just need a few minutes to recuperate.” She finished the water.
“Thanks for the help. You’re a good friend. I’ll miss you.”
She kept saying that. If it were true, Sang must not have many friends. Not that Amy had a ton herself.
“I wish I could go with you.” Her own remark startled her, and she suspected herself of lying. But no, she did wish it: to be a good friend, to leave the boredom of her own life, to learn more about the hidden world of ‘oooh, magic!’
Sang looked at her doubtfully. “I suppose you could…”
The possibility shimmered between them for a moment, tempting and new. Then Amy shook her head.
“I couldn’t just run off and leave my kids. And trying to take them would be way too hard.”
Sang nodded. “You’re right. Honestly, it’s not much of a life to drag a friend into anyway.” She smiled. “Maybe another time.”
“Come back when I’m 55 and the kids are all grown up and never call me,” said Amy. “I mean, I always did want to get more involved with freaky invisible politics. Ask anyone.”
Sang laughed. “I’ll see what I can do.”
She got up, less shaky than before, and began roaming through the small house, tossing things into a bag. Amy made a few hasty peanut butter sandwiches. She felt ravenously hungry as she worked, and ate three spoonfuls of peanut butter, which was the richest, deepest, roundest thing she’d ever tasted. Shockingly quickly, while Amy was still marveling at the wonder that was Store Brand Chunky, Sang stood with packed bags in hand, hesitating on her own threshold.
“Take anything you want from the house,” she said. “Not that there’s anything great, but if you need extra silverware or a radio or anything. Work or the landlord will probably report me missing in a few days, and the cops might come and ask if you’ve seen me. You can tell them whatever you want, but they’ll think you’re less insane if you just say you didn’t know me that well and have no idea where I went.”
“OK.” It all seemed indecently sudden and shifty.
“And look extra-specially law-abiding so they don’t recognize you, if it turns out to be the same cops.” Sang gave her a worried glance, but Amy shrugged. Cops now seemed the least interesting of the things she had to think about.
Sang looked around the room one last time, and Amy followed her to the door. “Well…good luck.”
Sang smiled. “I’ll see you in 15 or 20 years, then.”
And standing at the kitchen door, still technically under arrest, Amy thought she really would.
Copyright 2007 by A’Llyn Ettien