Crowe and Coyote

PART II, Crowe and Coyote I

PART II

The J bullet drifted along its railings silently, a big electric dove settling down for the long wait. It was grey, outside and in, and the day was grey, shrouded in the sort of toxic fog that would have been (would be, Moll reminded herself) giving Elaine a hard time. Sure, most of the tox had been filtered out in the city, and only the Sensitives were affected short term. By the time the moisture rose to the Upper Levels, the tox would be gone entirely.

Outside the city--whatever existed outside the city--it would burn the lungs, cut through them like a fistful of razors. A man would die in ten minutes, a child or small woman in less.

Moll tried not to think of much. She tried, really, not to think of anything. She watched the city streets pass by, the workers hurrying to and fro, the glittergirls lounging, admiring each others' nails and popping narcotic gum. She counted stops. The J was a long route, and the stops were infrequent.

There was stop two, at the corner of Amaryllis and Purslane. There was stop three, by the side of Sunrise Super Shopping. The J drifted. Moll drifted with it.

Stop four; Murmuring Pines Apartments. A collection of tall buildings, grey and dingy, just like any other buildings. Even in the fog she could see the graffiti crawling across them, changing and mutating as the walls themselves struggled to erase it. She was a fan of old-fashioned paint, herself. Smartwalls like these adapted to graffiti viruses, learned from them, eventually overcame all but the smartest of them. Sure, it was less work for a tech-savvy artist. But with paint--

--well, somebody had to spend a few minutes scraping off paint.

She exited the bullet, waved indistinctly to the driver. There were few people hanging around, at midday--most of them off at work. There was an older woman standing on her postage stamp balcony, sipping a cup of coffee. There was a man under the building eaves, tall and thin, one half of his head shaved, the other half a mass of bright blue spikes. He wore a jacket, in the popular big-shouldered style, that was covered in flickering multicolored studs.

He caught her eye for a second, looked away. He began sauntering down the street. Moll, knowing her man when she saw him, followed.

The path they took seemed aimless, listing even. This was not a nice part of town, and he seemed very comfortable in it. The man bought a vinyl holosquare of popular singer Mandi Caradino from a vendor, gazed at it for a few moments before rolling it up and tucking it under his arm. He waved hello to a soydog vendor. Moll began to get antsy. This seemed, for a dangerous venture, awfully casual.

He turned around for a moment, as though looking for someone. His eyes caught Moll's, slid away. He turned down an alleyway in between two very sketchy massage parlors. Moll followed.

She made it perhaps two steps down the alley before a pair of skinny and multi-studded arms burst out of the wall and pulled her in.

She was, suddenly, not in an alley at all. She wasn't much of anywhere she recognized. She had, apparently, simply stepped through the wall, and into this. It seemed to be a basement space, the skeleton of the building visible through holes in the drywall. The room was narrow and filthy but brightly lit, tube lights burning down on the two rows of plastic chairs backed up against the long walls. The men and women in these chairs had to sit almost knee to knee with each other. One man was clutching a bloodstained rag to his arm, his face grey. A woman with a shaved head was holding a plastic baggie full of what looked to be human teeth. When she smiled at Moll, gums bright, it was evident the teeth were mostly her own.

"Pain' ze down red," the near-toothless woman mumbled.

"Same to you," Moll said, numbly. This nasty place was, obviously, a waiting room. A PAINT waiting room.