Annihilation Engine Seven, Part Two

I'm parked a few blocks away. I dig my hands in my pockets while I walk. I tend to rub my keys together as I go. I run my thumb over the teeth of the car key, reading the notches, the scratches. Laney and I used to collect keys.

We had a little fort in the woods made out of an abandoned chicken coop. Anytime we'd find a lost key lying around, we'd take it and hang it up in the coop. There was a big bag of tacks that Laney must have swiped from somewhere and we'd tack each new key up alongside the others. We used to make up stories about the keys, how they opened doors to the moon, or fell out of the pockets of gangsters, or some angel left them so ghosts could get into heaven later on, if they wanted.

This key just starts up my old Camry. It's real beat up, this old thing. It's like some kind of zombie, rolling along groaning and shuffling. It's fifteen years old in a state where cars don't last eight years before rusting out and collapsing. Sitting behind the wheel, I turn the key and the car shudders. I keep thinking about that old chicken coop. We must have had about a hundred keys all over those walls. Whenever one of us would close the door, all the keys would flutter around on their pegs. They looked like little, silver fish all swimming in a school, shivering on our wall.

I've got a few places I like to check first whenever I'm trying to track Laney down. There's a McDonald's across the street from the library, sometimes she hangs out in the parking lot. There's a bus stop near that Filene's in the strip mall. She never takes the bus, but likes to sit on that bench for some reason. There's the old cathedral with the over-grown lawn. I go to all of these places first. I really hope she's there. If I can find her and talk her back, then I won't have to go to the last place. I hate it there.

One way or another, she always winds up at the old brick armory. This crumbling, busted up, blister of a building squats along a drunken bend of the downtown sprawl. About a dozen traffic lights surround the oddly shaped structure, roads cut around it at all angles. This building sort of sprung up in the most inconvenient place, growing like an abscess, a city planner's nightmare.

I get this pain in my head just looking at the thing. I park my car around a corner and jog up to the front walk. A grey, cement walk runs down a few steps and through a hole cut into the middle of the building. It's a dreary sort of tunnel, unlit and perpetually damp. It leads to a long courtyard circled with a black metal catwalk leading up to all the different apartments. It looks like a huge, winding fire escape, tacked on as an after thought. Maybe they built all these different little rooms up three or four stories with no thought as to how exactly people would get up there. Just doors opening into a dead fall over the cracked cement and sprouting weeds of the damp grey courtyard. Standing in the middle of the whole thing, I could be in some Eastern Bloc housing designation.

Bean lives up on the third floor. He probably doesn't know where Laney is, but I have to check. I don't know how that fat piece of crap can make it up all these rickety goddamn stairs. He probably never leaves. He must have a dozen different burn-outs bringing him food or whatever. The railing's bent and twisted away by his door. It's rattling under my foot. Maybe he can't leave. One step and the whole thing might peel away, sending him twenty feet towards a quick splatter and a well-earned reception in hell.

It's dim inside and it smells like vinegar. The humidity makes me gag. It's so swampy the wallpaper's bubbling in pockets.

Bean, too lazy to complete sentences, calls out from his couch, "What you want?"

I don't even want to look at him. I reply from the doorway, "Bean, I'm looking for Laney. You seen her?"

"Oh I know what you're looking for," and I know he's smiling. I can hear his great, leathery jowls peeling back in that so-pleased-with-himself grin.

"Hey man, I don't want to fuck around. I gotta find my sister," I get this shiver down my back. The boards squeak under my feet. The whole building is moving to pin me down.

"You know what you want," his accusation is punctuated with a shudder of protest from the couch as his bulk shifts around. I can't see him, but I know he's rolling forward on his hands and knees.

"Bean, man, has Laney been here?"

"Uughh," he grunts as one hand slinks down under his elastic waistband jeans.

I feel a pain spinning around in my back, like a knife. Something's swimming around in my guts, pulling the viscera apart and rearranging it.

Bean digs around, curling his fingers around his wrinkled penis, pushing it through the zipper. "Uuuunnh," it touches the ground.

The walls are drooling syrup. The ceiling sags toward me. That noise again from the drug dealer, "Uuughnn," but maybe he's not making it with his mouth.

I push my hands through the floor and slide away between.