Box knife? I looked at the reflective surface.
“You heard what we said in the car? You know what tools we use here?”
“Light, fire, and growth?”
“Yes. If you see something, let us know.”
I removed the blade, sprayed it with the spray sealant, and scratched it with the bottom of the sealant can until the blade itself was uncovered. Blade replaced, knife in pocket.
“Can we have signals?” Evan asked. “In case we’re far away or something happens?”
“Signals are a fantastic idea,” I said. “Signal number one? Screaming? Screaming means something bad is happening.”
“Don’t be a jerk, Blake,” Rose said.
“I’m not,” I said, at the same time Evan said, “He’s not.”
“Ugh,” Rose said.
I tested the weight of the sealant in my hand. It wasn’t any heavier than a typical spray can, but my arm strength was practically nil. It was like the morning after my first day at work, feeling the impact of nine straight hours of physical activity.
“Can you sing?” Rose asked.
“No,” Evan said.
“Tweet? Chirp?”
“Dunno how. Maybe.”
“You’re a song sparrow,” I said, as I stuck the sealant can in the pocket further down my leg, “I think. You’re not rusty enough to be a swamp sparrow, not red enough to be a fox sparrow. Maybe a Le Conte or Savannah sparrow?”
“You know birds,” Rose commented.
“There was a point where life sucked. Then life became okay. Good, even. When I think about the between times? Two memories stick with me. There’s the time Alexis reached out for help, and there’s the time I was in my first apartment. No furniture, aside from a few things I’d borrowed. Living on the street, you have to deal with boredom. You watch people. Deal with them all the time, but not really dealing with them. They’re there. No television, no computer, needed to occupy myself, stay sane and keep from backsliding and missing out on the opportunity I’d been given.”
“Bird watching?” Rose asked.
I nodded. Talking while I prepared myself. Emergency blanket? Why the hell not? It was small. Back pocket. Flashlight went in my other cargo pocket, further down my leg, along with two batteries.
“I try to rationalize it now, but I dunno if it makes sense. I wanted to be away from people some. I paid attention to the birds outside my window, even fed them until Joel got pissed off. My landlord.”
“I know who Joel is,” Rose said.
“Evan doesn’t. I’m explaining this to him too. I got my tattoos because I needed to do something to make what I had permanent. I would have done the moment Alexis helped me, but I dunno how I’d even do that. The birds… above it all, I like the aesthetic, and I liked the idea of the detail contrasted with the vague watercolor… I’m yammering on, here. You gotta stop me before I do that.”
There was a noticeable delay before Rose said, “No harm done. Does it help you to feel more grounded?”
I felt like the delay said more than what had actually come out of her mouth. “Yeah. I guess it does.”
“How are you physically?”
“I feel like I got gently rolled over by a few cars,” I said.
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Only to me, I guess,” I said. I checked everything was secure in my pockets. All of the stuff would make running difficult, but I wasn’t in any shape to run.
I made my way to the fence that enclosed the area, leaving the kit behind, hand on can and wreath. Weather-worn signs were bolted to the fence. No trespassing. A man in a circle with a line drawn through it. Barbed wire ran along the top of the fence.
In a way, the ‘no man’ thing seemed ironic. Or prophetic, depending on how I looked at it.
“Evan?” I asked.
He flew forward. The locked gate in the fence swung open. I kicked the door open wider and passed through.
There were tools here, abandoned so long they had gone rusty. Had a crew come here at some point to revitalize the place, only to disappear?
Shovel, not so useful. Hedge trimmers, same. Both were so rusty I doubted they would serve their purpose.
The building loomed. Graffiti covered every surface that humans could reach without the use of ladders, paint peeled from red brick. The windows were dark.
Wasn’t even good graffiti, I noted. Big, bulging letters, scrawled letters. People making a mark on the world, showing that they’d been here once upon a time.
That, too, was ironic in a way.
Fucking up here meant being forgotten, being erased. There would be no legacy. No mark left behind.
My existence, recent events excepted, had been a quiet one. I hadn’t made a huge impact in my parent’s lives. I hadn’t done anything so defining that removing me from the picture would make the world a noticeably different reality for anyone. No angel would be getting his wings from showing me some Blake-less world.
Practitioner bullshit aside, I couldn’t see myself having kids. I’d yet to see any good parenting, and it seemed better to be safe than sorry. I had Evan now, but Evan would leave the world when I did. I had friends that would mourn me. I hoped they would mourn me. Being accused of child murder might have hurt me on that front. But mourning was temporary. Those wounds healed.
I wanted to make a disturbance. If the universe maintained a balance, then I wanted to leave something of an imbalance in the grand scheme of things, to be big enough that the world would hurt a bit for my passing.
I clenched the handle of the gas can and the larger branch of the wreath.
Evan’s parents had cared. That much had been obvious.
“You think mom and dad will miss you, Rose?”
“…The fake mom and dad from fake memories?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, of course. Why?”
“Nothing,” I said.
My number one rule here was that I wasn’t allowed to die. The others relied on me to be some kind of pillar that fixed them in the world. Refining that rule… I wasn’t going to go quiet or gentle. Most certainly not into oblivion, as this demon would have me do.
The thought gave me the extra strength and grit I needed to scrape up a bit more energy from the bottom of the barrel, to move forward and ascend the metal stairs to the front door.
Someone had blocked the graffiti-painted door with a two-by-four to keep it from fully closing. Snow had blown against the front of the door and made it into the factory through the gap.
I moved the door and stepped within, my feet touching down on a cloud of powdery snow.
Darkness. Oppressive. I quickly tossed the wreath down onto the ground and limped into the center of it.
I reached for the flashlight and clicked it on, eyes on the ground.
The inside was very much the same as the outside, though the graffiti was more pronounced here, where the urban explorers had been able to take their time. I’d always been under the impression that graffiti artists had a code, and wouldn’t paint over each other’s work, but this stuff overlapped.
With my eyes fixed on the ground, picking up details from peripheral vision and stolen glances, the vague, nebulous shapes and colors that the graffiti left on the walls all seemed like they could be the demon, lying in wait. They were grimy, painted with the illusion of three dimensions, sometimes given three dimensions where leaves or architecture allowed.