Chapter 7 Seraphina
Seraphina
The stoplight at Trinity and Canyon Road lasted three hundred seconds, but in Los Alamos, time was a snake—slow, venomous, and always ready to coil around your throat.
My Accord idled at the intersection, the dashboard clock shedding its half-dead glow across the letters on my knuckles.
They spelled out the same thing every night, that I was running out of time, places, and excuses.
The sun had long since knifed itself on the horizon, leaving the sky a bruise of purple and copper.
The mesa’s silhouette watched, black and blank, as if hoping I’d screw up the exit this time.
A Harley idled in the lane beside me, exhaust rumbling through my car’s firewall with the persistence of a cardiac arrhythmia.
The rider leaned into his own gravity, posture aggressive even at rest, helmet dangling from the bars because what’s life without another variable?
I recognized the shape of him—the burn-scarred jaw, the military-short cut, the bouncer’s neck.
Seager “Nitro” Culberson, as inevitable as a relapse.
In a town of specters, he was the only ghost that ever haunted back.
I hadn’t seen him since the night with the van, the shots, the aftermath that felt more like a beginning than a resolution.
I was supposed to keep my head down, let the Bureau handle it.
Instead, I’d spent the days since crafting hypotheticals.
Who hired the hitters? Why go after me? Why let me go?
Every simulation ended with a coin flip—either I ended up dead, or the world got a new kind of bomb.
The vanishing in-between was what really gnawed.
My hands gripped the wheel, wrists raw from the anxiety rash I’d cultivated since childhood.
I thought about rolling the window down.
I thought about what I’d say if I did. He stared straight ahead, jaw locked, the profile cut from a war memorial.
The red of the light reflected off the chrome and up into his eyes, making him look demonic or maybe just tired.
At 00:02 on the countdown, I cracked the window.
He didn’t look over, but I spoke anyway. “Why didn’t you ever call me back?”
The engine noise made it hard to tell if he’d heard, but his grip on the throttle flexed, knuckles whitening. I tried again, louder, the way you raise your voice for the deaf or the willfully stubborn. “After you pulled me out. You just vanished.”
He turned his head slow, like an owl locking onto prey. His gaze met mine, dark and bottomless, and he smiled the way some people flinch. “You made it clear you don’t want my help.” His voice was even, but it scraped the air like steel on a sidewalk.
“That’s not what I meant,” I said, then hated myself for how quick the words came. “I just—” I had no ending to the sentence, so I let it dangle.
The light went green. Neither of us moved. A chorus of horns erupted from behind, more startled than angry, like a flock of geese flushed by a coyote. The Harley’s pipes drowned them out, but still neither of us crossed.
I licked my lips. “Let’s talk somewhere else,” I said. My voice was soft, almost drowned by the engine, but he caught it.
He nodded up the block, toward The Atomic. The neon above the door flickered, the bar’s sign a ring of isotopes orbiting a dead sun. It was a place you went if you had no fear of disease, or if you had a particular thirst for decay.
I nodded, and he broke left into the turn lane, boot scraping the curb. I followed, the Accord rattling in his wake. As we pulled away, the horns faded, but the pressure in my chest did not.
We drove in tandem, predator and prey, or maybe just two animals too exhausted to maintain the fiction of the chase.
The sky went darker with every block, the headlights behind us thinning as we left the populated part of town.
The Atomic’s parking lot was half-full, the rest of the street deserted, save for a parked squad car two blocks down, engine off, windows fogged with the breath of its idling cop.
He took the best spot, nearest the door, and killed the Harley with a flick of his gloved hand. I parked beside him, rolling the window down all the way this time.
He got off the bike with the economy of a man who’d been shot at more times than he’d eaten a home-cooked meal. His eyes never left the bar’s entrance, but his voice looped back to me.
“You sure about this, Doc?” he asked. The nickname landed soft, but with an edge.
I wanted to say no. I wanted to say, “Drive until you hit the river and never come back.” But my own inertia had already doomed me. “It’s fine,” I said. “I just need to know what you know.”
He nodded. “Inside, then.”
The Atomic had a double entry—vestibule to slow the winter, or maybe to screen the drunks from the real drinkers.
I followed him in, the space between us measured in microns, not feet.
The bar’s interior was a haze of amber light, fake smoke, and the low mutter of conversation.
Atomic-symbol murals crawled up the walls, and a TV above the bar showed a college basketball game, but nobody watched.
He took a booth in the corner, back to the padded wall, scanning the room with the hypervigilance of someone who’d spent too much time in rooms like this, waiting for the wrong person to walk in. I slid into the seat across from him, my hands folded tight around a cocktail menu.
The waitress approached, already rolling her eyes at the sight of him. “What’ll it be?”
He ordered whiskey neat, and I asked for a dirty vodka martini. She didn’t write it down.
The silence between us was not a vacuum; it was a centrifuge, separating out every unspoken thought and spinning it until the only thing left was truth.
I spoke first. “Why did you chase the van?”
He didn’t answer right away. The drinks arrived, set down hard enough to threaten spillage. He waited until the waitress was out of range.
“Because I recognized the type,” he said. “Not local. Not cartel. Military, but not the uniformed kind.”
I let that sit. “You think it was a test run?”
He shrugged. “Or a message. Either way, you were the package. I just intercepted.”
I sipped my drink, cold and briny. “You ever consider that maybe I’m bait?”
He smiled again, and this time it almost reached his eyes. “You’re too smart to be bait, Doc. But you might be a lure.”
I laughed, brittle and brief. “That’s comforting.”
We drank in silence for a while, letting the noise of the bar erode the distance between us.
I wanted to ask him everything—about the men in the van, about the scar on his jaw, about why he kept showing up at intersections in my life.
Instead, I asked the one question that had been curdling in my chest since that night.
“Do you ever get scared?”
He looked at me, the kind of look that flays all pretense. “Every fucking day,” he said.
I nodded, and we drank, and for a moment the weight of the world shrank to the size of a glass between our hands.
Outside, the cold deepened, and the wind gnawed at the door. But inside, in the radioactive hush of The Atomic, we were just two damaged vectors intersecting at the only point that ever mattered right here, right now, before the next disaster.
I debated how much more about myself or my work I should reveal. We were taught to be careful of strangers in Los Alamos. But he wasn’t a stranger. Strangers don’t come to your rescue or save your life. I looked into his eyes and began my story.