The Girl Who Kept Running

2. The Boy Who Smelled Bitterness

22 September, 2050

The train grumbled to a stop in the inky night. There was an eerie silence around Harry as he got off. The night seemed to be pregnant with sinister possibilities.

Only a few passengers got out of the cars with him. A few more were waiting on the benches to catch the next leg of the route. Factory workers would have left in droves in the hours before. There was a feeling of unease, he just couldn't shake off.

He had been unable to peel the image of the girl's face away from his eyes. The caramel skin, the wavy hair dancing about her temples, and those dark green eyes had been encroaching his thoughts again and again. But the strangeness of this hour as he stepped across the platform helped clear his mind.

Something caught his attention as he moved past the waiting area. It was a vomit-colored jacket that jumped at him - he would recognize that jacket anywhere in the world. The wearer of the jacket was a huddled figure slumped by the side wall of the long, stubby building hosting the ticket counters.

He approached and sat on his haunches in front of the unconscious man. The man's legs were limp, splayed before him. The open sides of the jacket revealed a threadbare shirt with so many stains of eatables and more, that its true color was lost. The head leaned into the wall at an uncomfortable angle. An expression of agony was fixed on the ridged hard-skinned face. It was a dead body.

The fingers of both hands had adopted different angles, positions, and distances from each other in permanent repose. They seemed to reflect the pain of parting from this pointless life that the man must have felt in stages, whatever the sequential progression of a spirit leaving the body must be. Frozen in time, already fossilized, ten snapshots of the past, and sinister clues to institutional failures.

At last, Harry let a deep breath out and struggled to keep the anger and shock from slipping through to the surface. He wanted to hug this dead body, but that would be a deliberate contamination of a possible crime scene. The man, of Puerto Rican descent, was Jorge, Harry's sole family through the lonely stretches of his childhood.

Harry stared at those fingers in horror.

At last, he exhaled slowly and steered himself clear of any oncoming avalanche of loss and grief. He was over those, determined never to mourn anyone ever again.

He turned his head around to view the scene. Passengers for the next train had appeared, lazily walking to the front of the building for tickets. A few vendors went about their business in wait for the next round of sales. Not a single head turned in the direction of the all too visible death on the side - a footnote to life no one had time to read.

The reek coming from Jorge's body was a potpourri of conflicting scents. There was a splash of the cheapest beer this side of the state border. There was the brunt of stale cigarette smoke levitated from a nightly chain session, the way he knew Jorge. A slight but distinct, unpleasant smell of burnt rubber was thrown in for good measure.

There was one potent odor that seemed to crown them all, the rose amid the perennials. It was pungent, but not very sharp. He couldn't place it but he had a feeling it was a riddle with a ludicrous, easy solution.

Somebody had stolen Jorge's shoes. Harry considered the possibility of a fight over them. A charity worker had only recently given them away. A good pair with no damage that could bring in enough value for a junkie's next shot of Tryptovam.

Examining whatever of the corpse's skin was visible, careful not to touch anything, Harry found no signs of struggle or altercation. But he did find prominent swelling surrounding the ankles, while the fingers of the hands looked stubby.