Rain relentlessly poured outside. Leslie was free at last. The meeting lasted almost five hours. It was now 11:48 pm. She couldn't even imagine what she had missed. How much more controversy had accrued during the time she spent at Legacy, LLC. Did they reveal Van Complex' sex partner? Have they found out if Donna Prima would be banned from Hungary? Was Lenny Malcolm having an incestuous affair with his daughter?
Leslie pushed her way through the throngs of people that milled about, their faces pushed into screens, locked onto cell phones and absorbed in headsets that hung from their heads like crowns. As she barged through, earning no small amount of disdain from those doing the same, she thought about Donna Prima, and about her TV. She passed again beneath the billboard she had passed on the way to the towering office building where she had been kept for so long, but the still image of Prima’s augmented and glowing teeth did nothing to satiate the woman’s drive for more gossip. Her teeth wouldn’t look like that anymore, Leslie thought. She laughed to herself, but the laughter in her head sounded hollow and bereft of mirth, like the echo of laughter reaching her ears from a great distance.
The subway.
It was the only way to get back home in time, she told herself as she hurtled a handrail and skipped down a flight of stairs with her staccato footsteps echoing back at her. No one stared, except those whose shoes she stepped on, or whose bags she knocked to the floor.
Sorry, no time.
She saw the tunnel gaping in the sidewalk ahead of her and she redoubled her efforts. She flew with such haste that nothing she passed registered in her mind. The cops, who screamed at her to stop running, the children who laughed and pointed, the man who walked along behind her at a brisk pace, seeming to have no difficulty melting in with the crowd of humans leaving and entering the subway.
Down another flight of stairs and she jumped over the turnstile and the man who guarded the entrance looked at her with a faint curiosity but made no movement to stop her. He went back to his magazine: her sex tapes! They were released to the press.
On the platform, time slowed down and then disappeared entirely as she tapped her toes and danced on the balls of her feet. A small white mouse ran between her feet and then around and around as if trying to get her attention. When she paid it no mind, it scurried off before it was stepped on. She kept her eyes trained at the blackened tunnel to her left, waiting for the rush of rank air and the vibrating tracks that would signal her train’s approach. The more she stared into the gaping emptiness, the more time dissolved and the longer she figured she would have to wait. Across the tracks, the image of Donna Prima and her oral cleansing foam was repeated for the length of the other platform and when Leslie looked behind her, she found the same image, stretching through the station in either direction. She was ringed in by Donna and she felt like she could burst if the train didn’t show up soon.
“C’mon,” she muttered. “C’mon.”
Finally, after an interminable wait, the train’s light could be seen illuminating the cavernous subway tunnel and the tracks began to sing and screech in a falsetto tone that Leslie heard as the most beautiful harp music ever recorded. She squeezed her fists, clenched her jaw and waited still, and when the headlight of the gigantic metal beast beneath the city’s surface came into view, she rushed forward to be the first one on the train. She crossed the yellow line that said do not cross and she tapped her feet and she waited as the train drew closer and closer. Then it was a mere couple yards away and slowing down, she felt a great force on her back and a sense of flying, as if the train was barreling her away on invisible wings only when it was too late did she realize the deceptiveness of this elation.
She was falling already. The light surrounded her, engulfing her and driving everything else from her vision and that last thing she heard was a cry for help and then nothing but the faint beating her heart that might have been the train rolling to a stop before the platform.
Then nothing.
******
In the highest offices of Legacy, LLC, Armacost looked out over the stained and dirty cityscape that stretched into the distance, to the river, which also looked tarnished from this height, like a string of silver beads that had sat too long in a forgotten attic. He was deep in thought. He clicked his pen open, and then shut.
Open and shut.
Open and shut.
Until the doors opened, and then shut, and from over his shoulder he heard the cold voice of a man whom he loathed to hear and couldn’t bear to see. “It’s done.” The voice hit him like a torrent of ice water in the middle of winter and his spine quaked. He wanted his voice to sound strong, steady, but even to himself he sounded brittle. “Good. And the parcels?”
“They are in the basement, as you requested.”
“Security clearance?”
“Security clearance, sir?”
“What are the clearance levels?”
“Oh, sir. They have no clearance. They aren’t down there. In fact, I don’t believe they exist.”
“Good.”
The door opened, and then shut again.
“That’s very good, indeed.” With no knowledge of what it did, Norway held in his hand a heavy purple pill, dropped off by a few moments before he was told the task was carried out. The pill was found in Leslie’s apartment after the investigation team had checked all crevices for suspicion items. Perhaps he would give it to the man he loathed so much. Make him his own personal guinea pig.
No. No, not guinea pig. Gerbil. Gerbils were much better. Instead of trying to leave, he froze. He had company, at least according to the image projected by the wall of windows. For a horrible split second, he swore he saw the reflection of a man in a green suede suite and a top hat, sneering at him in disgust. Then he blinked, and the man was gone. He rubbed his eyes and made for the door. It had been a very long day. He was seeing things.
Nothing more.
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