Chapter 14
VI
"Stay between Rogue and Sting," Armen says.
It’s neither a question nor a negotiation. Just the assumption that I'm here and I'll follow whatever instructions the guys throw my way. For the most part, they're right. They've got more street smarts than I do, so I listen.
To a point.
But if a giant army tank comes barreling down the street, guns a-blazing, you bet your ass I'll be hightailing it out of there as fast as anyone else. I won't be waiting for someone to tell me what they think I should do.
A gate closes behind us and the sound it makes, metal on metal, is an ugly grind I've heard a hundred times. Today, it’s somehow different. A little more ominous. A little more final.
Then the air hits me.
It's chilly and open and filled with something I can't name, like when it's about to rain, or like the smell of streets that haven't been cleaned in years.
Or, maybe it's the sensation of the sky above with nothing between us, no cracked skylight, no dirty window, no leaking vent that lets the rain in.
After months inside the Rot, the outside air feels almost aggressive.
My lungs don't know what to do with all of it.
And yes, I've been outside before. There were the club outings I’ve been to a bunch of times, always at night, always moving from one point to another without stopping.
But those were controlled excursions, and I wasn't looking at the city so much as moving through it.
This is different. This is daylight, we're not going to the club, and I am alert to the point of an anxiety attack.
As if sensing that, Armen's hand finds the small of my back and I realize I’d stopped walking.
Buck up, girl.
I look around at streets that are both familiar and foreign at the same time, which shouldn't be possible but is. Not long ago, I knew every block of this city. I could have walked it blindfolded.
Maybe that's the problem. Inside the Rot, without realizing it, my memories of Rothwell quietly reverted. Not to what it was when I arrived but to what it was before the shit hit the fan. Guess I was living with a before-times Rothwell, complete with memories of when I was growing up here, the city my father ran, with the Saturday market and the coffee cart and families who’d been there for generations.
That's the Rothwell my brain defaulted to when I wasn't looking.
And now, here it is. The real, current-day version in blaring broad daylight.
I knew it was bad of course, I mean, I watched the damn town fall apart. But knowing something and standing in the middle of it on a Tuesday morning are different things. There's a gap between understanding a fact and having it look back at you, poking and mocking.
The sad fact is today’s Rothwell looks like a city that was on life support before someone pulled the plug to let it die with dignity.
Although I don’t see any dignity here. More like utter humiliation.
Nearly all the storefronts on the block we're moving through are dark. Not just closed but also emptied by looters who were actually smart enough to grab what they could when they had the chance. It’s the kind of empty that comes after furniture and fixtures and signage have all been stripped away, leaving scraps behind.
Broken windows are for the most part clouded with grime, with a few taped up from the inside with cardboard.
One little shop has a hand-painted sign in the window that says OPEN that gives me a start.
When I look twice, I find the lights aren't on and haven't been for a while.
There are a couple die-hard businesses hanging on, I suspect more out of stubbornness rather than viability.
A dry cleaner with one fluorescent tube flickering.
A corner store with a hand-lettered price list taped to the door, every item more expensive than it should be.
A woman sweeping the step outside a hair salon, moving the same patch of concrete back and forth like if she keeps sweeping, something will change.
I recognize the neighborhood.
That's what gets me. I know these streets.
I walked them. I lived them. So did my dad.
There's a pharmacy three blocks north that used to be the good one, the one where the pharmacist knew your name and kept notes on your prescriptions and asked after your family.
I wonder if it's still there. I also, kind of, don’t want to know.
I watch Rogue instead.
He moves differently out here. Not like a different person, I mean he’s still Rogue, moving along like that loose-limbed unhurried guy he is.
but at the moment, there's an alertness underneath I don't see inside the Rot.
Or maybe I do see it inside the Rot, but out here, it has more room.
His eyes move constantly, just slightly, the way you'd miss if you weren't paying attention.
He assesses a doorway before we pass it.
He notes a man sitting in a parked car half a block up, decides he's nothing, and moves on.
He reads the street the way he reads the Rot's corridors, not looking for anything in particular but also keeping track of everything.
Sting is different out here too, though different in the opposite direction—tighter, more contained, his usual stillness compressed into something sharp.
He walks on my right and slightly ahead, and every few steps he angles his body without seeming to, putting himself between me and the street. I'm not sure he knows he's doing it.
Armen is behind us. I can feel him back there without turning around, the same way I always know when Armen is in a room before I see him.
I keep walking and try not to think about the pharmacy.
Three blocks from the Rot, there's a corner I have no business recognizing, but I recognize it anyway.
It's nothing now. A boarded-up unit on one side, a chain-link lot on the other, weeds coming up through the cracked asphalt.
Ten years ago, this was the corner where my father used to stop on Sunday mornings when we walked to the market on Clement Street.
There was a coffee cart there, a man who'd been in the same spot for years, where my father always got a black coffee and I got a hot chocolate.
I remember asking for extra marshmallows and being scolded by my father for my rudeness.
But the man running the cart just laughed and filled my cup until it nearly overflowed.
The cart is gone, the man is gone, and the corner is gone, in every way that matters.
I don't say any of this out loud. The city is full of corners like this and saying so doesn't make it any better.
I glance at Rogue and watch something cross his face, quick, as we pass a shuttered garage on the left. He doesn't say anything either.
We just keep walking.
Rogue steps in line to walk beside me without breaking stride, which is such a Rogue thing to do. He's just suddenly there, not looking at me but fully reading the street.
"You good?" he asks.
"Yeah."
He nods once, staying beside me for another half block and then drifts back to his position, reading the next doorway, the next parked car, the next thing I probably would have missed in my haze of memories.
I think about my father walking these streets, building his case, knowing what was coming and doing it anyway.
I think about the coffee cart corner and the extra marshmallows.
I keep walking.