The Drive

"The Drive"

a short story

Gary Baker, January 2016

Brendan pushed the pedal and set them surging forward as Peal Jam came on under the dim roar of wind tearing through the open windows. "It's like this, kid," he gestured with his shift-hand while keeping the other loosely on twelve o'clock on the wheel, "how long's it been? What? A decade?"

The silence led on long enough that the passenger, sitting awkwardly in his would-be coffin, eventually mumbled "Nine years, three months, se-" with the speed of a viper Brendan backhanded the man.

"Right. There." Brendan pointed. "Right fucking there." He reached down onto Carl's side of the car and pulled a can of lager from the paper grocery bag there. He shook it vigorously and then held it out for the passenger.

Carl look askance, and took it with gingerly trepidation. "You want to drink? While driving?"

The driver shot a glance at his companion. "No," he said, "I want you to drink, while I drive."

"Whatever, man." Carl looked sideways out over the passing dunes to his right. The sky was breaking into a bright clear azure the longer they sped on.

"Again!" Brendan exclaimed. He slapped his palms onto the wheel as though tapping out a heavy-rhythmic drum solo from the stone ages. "What are you doing? Right now. What the fuck are you doing, bro?"

Carl shrugged. "Im... waiting for the beer to settle?"

"Fucking exactly." The driver shifted into a higher gear and the roar of the wind grew as they broke eighty. "Fucking. Wonderful. You just proved my point, bro. Right fucking there, you just did."

The highway began to veer slightly to the left, but Brendan just pressed on with the needle rising as slowly as the clouds passed by overhead. Dunes meshed with patches of grass and stones, occasionally broken by a thin ripple in the terrain where a dry creek bed once existed.

Carl finally shrugged. "Man if I open this now, the whole thing will spray me in the face. Do you want that to happen? Do you want your car all messed up with beer?"

Brendan smiled, his point having been made without the effort he had expected. "Bro that is your problem. You forgot how to take a risk. You forgot what it was like to just dive in and see what happens."

"And the beer?"

The driver shrugged. "It's a metaphor, bro. Fuckin wait if you want to, that's entirely up to you, but you'll never experience life by waiting. You won't get to taste the sweet relief that comes from expecting the worst," he took the beer from Carl's hand and popped it open without holding the wheel for the time it took. Amazingly nothing happened. Brendan gave his companion a knowing look as he handed it back. "...and getting the best."

Carl took a swig and leaned an arm out the window. "Well you timed that perfectly, you smug bastard. You knew it had been long enough not to worry."

"Did I?"

"Why would you do it, otherwise? If that had shot you in the face... while we are speeding, I might add...."

Brendan nodded. "Proving a point, bro."

"And this," Carl tossed back another swallow, "all of this. It was all because I'm not dating yet?"

Brendan kept his eyes forward, set his jaw, and kicked the car into the next gear up. In a blink they had broken into the triple digits, and the driver gripped the wheel with a new sense of security. They whipped passed dunes as if they were blades of grass, the whole desert turning fast into a blur in every direction but the general areas ahead of them

"It's been ten fucking years, man. You hear that?" The passenger took a swig that ended the can, threw it out the window where it disappeared as though it'd disintegrated into oblivion, then reached down and took out another. It was open before Carl's hand even had it out the bag. He took a long swallow, and wiped the drippings of his chin onto his sleeve. "Tabetha and I..." he looked long out the right hand window as if to try and understand the blurs he was seeing. "We were perfect together, man. We had it all."

He looked over to Brendan fiercely. "And you know what happened? It ended. It fucking ended. Just like that. Just like everything else. My life was ruined." He took another long drink and ended the can, sending it to the same fate as it's predecessor. Carl grew quiet and seemed to shrink in on himself. "And it was all because love doesn't exist, man. It never did."

Brendan went to speak but Carl cut him off before the driver could get a word out. "No. It. Didn't. It doesn't. It's all just molecules and hormones and bullshit energies at the atomic level that make this fucked-up contraption," he swung his finger about his ear, seeming to point to his head in general, "think that the concept of love exists." He spat out the window angrily. "But it doesn't. How could it, man? Tabby and I... goddamn, man, we.... If love really does exist, then why did she and I fail? How can something last for so goddamn long and not have some element of truth to it?"

Brendan waited. When he was positive Carl wanted an answer, he shifted down and brought them back down to one-ten. "What if it did?"

"What? Have some element of truth?"

Brendan nodded. Incubus began to play from the speakers, the song titled 'Agoraphobia', and the driver reached over to turn it up.

Carl seemed not to notice the music. "Fuck man, what if you're right?" He shook his head slowly, staring out at nothing in particular. "Man, that would mean that love can die. Man how fucked up is that? I mean, you always hear of it acting like a virus or something, but... but what if it actually is a virus or something, and we just haven't discovered it yet? What if being in love is just being mutually affected by the same strain of a malevolent nonliving organism that plagues most of humanity?"

He looked up suddenly. "What if love isn't actually that common, and we only think it is, because we are unaware of it's viral nature?" The passenger reached into his pocket and pulled out a pair of brown cigarettes and a lighter, then offered one to Brendan. "Want a light?" Brendan took the stick and let Carl light it, then took a drag as the passenger did the same.

Carl shook the lighter to cool it, then thrust it back into his breast pocket and let his arm dangle out the window. "No, but seriously, man: this whole love thing is as fucked up as the world in which we live. Think about it. If it really is a not-so-common virus strain, then think about how many relationships are built on the lie that our species constructed entirely by itself? Think about how that would change things, man, were we to discover how to see it? To learn how to discern one strain from another." He took a long drag and tapped the ashes to the wind. "I mean, then loneliness: that shit would be nothing more than our brains crying about being addicted to the affects of a virus that we barely understand! Think of the drugs you could concoct to counteract that!"

Brendan shifted again and took them back down to the double-digits. "It'd be one hell of a realization, bro."

"Yeah it would. That's what I'm saying, too, man."

"So what are you going to do about it?" Brendan leaned back in his seat and relaxed as the road turned perfectly straight for as far as they could see.

Carl cursed, hitting the doorframe with his right fist. "Goddamn you, man. All I want to do is mourn over the loss of Tabetha, but here you got me convinced that I just happened to eliminate the virus within me right when I learned she had cheated, man. All I want is to fucking let myself go and to turn to dust and shit, and let this life be over with, but now I can't help but wonder if maybe, just maybe, my strain mutated to fit the needs of another strain, instead."

Brendan smiled, and inhaled deeply through the cigarette. He breathed out like a beast from hell, letting the smoke slowly filter out of his lips to be drawn out into the desert by the raging torrents of winds that fought the car with every mile. "Wanna try that beer trick again?"

Carl's fist struck Brendan's right arm loosely. "How 'bout you just find us a bar in the next town, up, eh?"

"Are you going to do some flirting this time?" Brendan asked.

The passenger glared. "What's that supposed to mean?"

The driver shrugged, "I dunno, bro, just that last time you started bawling about-"

"Fuck you." Carl drew on his cigarette again and crossed his arms, "but yeah, I'll fucking flirt my bloody heart out. I'll flirt so hard, that girl's strain won't know heads from tails."

Brendan looked cross at his companion. "Bro, don't force things, alright? You know the rules. We go in, buy some beer, check out the babes, and hope like hell that we both go home to get laid tonight." He lifted a hand, pointer finger held out scoldingly, "and under no circumstance are we to-"

"Yeah, yeah, man. I get it." Carl mocked. "Under no circumstance am I to talk about Tabetha or what she did to me by fucking my-"

Brendan slapped the passenger again, right across the jaw. "I fucking said no, bro. Henceforth there will be no mention of exes; by either of us. Ever. Again. Capiche?"

Carl dashed away the last of his ashes and reached through the window to put the stub out on the mirror-housing. "Yeah, yeah, just get us to a bar where we can find some babes who aren't looking to get married and shit."

Brendan smiled, taking the car into a higher gear once more, sending them back into the triple-digits. "Fucking told you I could get you over her, bro."

Esteban, part 2

"Esteban"

part 2

(toying with tones and things)

Gary Baker, November 2015

By the time my feet struck snow, I was bundled up in two dark sweaters under a beige p-coat, a pale wool-like cotton scarf cinched around much of my chin and neck, and a thick black beanie to upset the fedora-lovers who littered the streets even at this god-awful hour. I pushed my chin deeper into the scarf and exhaled to push some warmth where my skin could actually feel it, and trudged my way south down the main drag.

It was slow going because of all the Wangster men and Wapper women, wannabes the lot of them, meshed with all the decent folk who just didn't care for this resurgence into retro bygone-era fashions. They clogged the dark streets as bad as taxi's to the point that after walking one measly block I gave up and hailed a yellowcab.

"Where to, brother?" The driver asked. The cab was not-quite toasty, but it blew the hell out of the icebox I was expecting it to be.

"Library, please."

"Comin right up." He thrummed the wheel to the tune of Avicci on the radio and flicked on the blinker. I relaxed a bit, seeing someone use one of those for once. Too often did I see them go all but out of fashion, to the point that driving in the big Apple was like taking a test to see if you were like Mama Santeria and could read the future. After he'd sufficiently gotten back into the flow of traffic, the cabbie glanced back through the mirror. "So the library, huh? Brother, tell me about that one: I thought they'd all gone extinct." We surged forward at the light. "Somethin' about them bein' obsolete and all, what with ebooks and shit."

As one who made my living trying to keep print alive and kicking, I wanted to take offense, but he was right. These days the establishments were kept around more for the aesthetic than anything of true use. The shelves had become less-than great, and books of any true reason to read by the masses were kept in a much smaller section of the building, where the most popular titles were arranged on the main floor for ease of access. Only true bibliophiles and tourists managed to venture beyond the first few steps toward the second floor, and even the tourists only made it up to the fifth floor simply to look down over the balustrade to take selfies with the feat of aged architecture looming behind them.

"Something I need to take care of," I responded. "Doing a bit of research for a client."

"Nice. So you a lawyer, then?"

I gave him a bit a smile. "Not quite."

"Alright, then: don't tell me, I wanna guess this one." Again he strummed the wheel to the tune on the radio, and turned to quickly look me over once we hit a red light. Facing forward again, he shook his head. "Well you aint much of a fashion man, so you aint a designer. And you dress nice, too, so you aint a detective. Not like the ones I seen, let me tell you, brother." He kept glancing at my reflection periodically for what I could only surmise as further intel. "TBH you remind me of some of them professors I used to know back in Vancouver."

This time I smiled for real. "Close enough."

The cabbie beamed with pleasure. "Harvey's still got it, brother."

He didn't, but I wasn't one to cut the moods of the man keeping me alive in the midst of Manhattan's play called 'Traffic on Ice'. We still had a good number of blocks to go, though, so I sat back and enjoyed the warm air of the heater while making small talk. While we talked I even brought out my phone and took notes on our conversation, for later use. It's not often you get a cabbie this talkative anymore. Most of them tend to keep to themselves or talk solely about the city as if they all figure anyone might be in need of a tour-guide for extra pay.

Eventually we arrived, though in more time than I would have preferred, and I gave him my card with the fare. "You ever feel like writing any of that down, you let me know."

He swung his arm over the seat and seemed a bit bummed despite my offer. "So you aint a professor, then?"

I laughed. "Almost. I could teach lessons if I wanted, but these days I'd rather help new voices reach the masses with their stories. You've got some good tales to regale for us all. If you ever feel like putting words to a page, hit me up first and I'll get you out there."

"For sure, brother." He shook my hand through the window, then made his way back onto the streets.

The wind had picked up since I'd gotten in the cab, that or the storm was just worse this far south on the island, and so I hurried my way up the steps with as careful footing as I could manage. Inside, I strode passed the reference desk with a wave at Helga, the librarian there who knew me by first name basis, and began the climb up to the fourth floor where the cultural studies existed. I kept thinking of Esteban and all this secrecy. I still couldn't fathom why nor how he'd used Lana to get me here, either. She made it seem all cloak and dagger, for what? A trip down memory lane?

Two flights up and I was getting winded. Suddenly my coats were too much and I peeled off a layer at a time until I was left with just my sweater-vest and beanie beyond my usual clothes. Carrying them all was the biggest burden, I found out right away, so I stopped again on the third floor to make my way to the coat-check in the back. I dropped a five into the tip jar for assurance that nothing would be messed with, and made sure to take the e-cig Lana had given me. With all this secrecy, she'd appreciate that extra security, I was sure.

"Here you go, Blank," Jason, the clerk who worked the coat check, handed me a green plastic square with the number 48 printed on it. "That will work fine for everything you gave me."

"But it's a tag per item, isn't it?"

He moved aside and motioned to the racks, all clear except for my things. "Trust me: at this point even the tag is just a formality."

Finally I made it to the fourth floor and began toward the Latin cultures wing. Esteban being what I presumed to be of Spanish origin, rather than how Olga would take me to northern Europe and the Swedish wing, or how Sakura would take me to the Asian cultures wing. It still amazed me that I knew all this after so many years. Part of me wondered if I was being led to this wing under the simple coincidence of Esteban being the only name he remembered from the whole list.

I passed aisle after aisle until at last I crossed in front of the map of the Spanish peninsula. At first glance there was no one to be seen, and it seemed I was the only soul up this way. Then a book shifted on a rack to my right on the side furthest from the windows. I glanced over just in time to see Mauricio Freitas start walking away from me on the other side of the shelf.

"You didn't take as long as I thought you would," he said with all the hushed volume of a regular library-patron.

"That a good thing?" I shoved my hands into my pockets and paced along with him, the black metal shelf of books between us. "And what's with all the cloak and dagger? What the hell, man?"

He shushed me twice, then stopped walking and made it appear as though he were looking at a book he pulled at random. "Look, Blank, I need you to work for me. We'll claim it's a play that I'm commissioning, if the right people ask."

"Work for you how? What could I possibly do that you would need all this secrecy for?"

He seemed to think it over for a long moment, then set the book back on the shelf and resumed walking. "You own a publishing house. You print a regular periodical. I need that access to send out some intel to people I know are listening out for it."

Wait. What? "You want me to print stories in code? So you can get some private shit -- probably illegal, by the sounds of it -- out to clients of yours?!"

Mauricio slapped a book in place and glared at me through the open spaces between shelves. "Damnit, Blank, keep it down!" He took a deep breath and calmed himself. "What you said? It's not entirely true."

"Oh yeah? What part?"

He shrugged. "The fact that it'd be stories, mostly." We hit the end of the aisle and he motioned for me to wait while he switched to the next one away from me, so I could then go to where he'd just been. "I work in a firm, these days. My theater background got me nada, alright? I had to make way with some dark folks just to make ends meet. They took my acting skills as a gift, though. Started to use me as their fake leader and shit."

I slowed my pace, seeing where this was going. "Sonofa-"

"Exactly." He pulled another tome from the shelf. "Now I'm in too deep, but my skills are wearing thin. They've got me posing as a CEO for a company that don't exist, and the FBI is closing in."

"No," I stated firmly. "I'm not doing this for you. I don't care what you got yourself into I-"

"Fucking shit man!" He exhaled through grit teeth. "Don't make me do this, not to you, man." For a brief moment I was confused. When I followed the direction his eyes were motioning to, however, I caught the gleam of a pistol nose hidden under a face-down book on Italian architecture. "Don't test me, Blank."

Shit.

I almost threw up my hands in exasperation, but thought otherwise seeing the mood Mauricio was in. He could snap at any sudden movement, thinking I was about to bolt. "Fuck me," I breathed aloud instead.

A smile lit upon his cheeks just then, and he carefully tucked the weapon away again. "Right. So the details will come in snippets from here on. Lana will-"

"Why did you bring her in on this?" I asked suddenly. "You know she and I have history. You know I'd give my damned left nut to keep her out of this. So why? Answer that and we might just have a deal."

The grin he flashed was just like the old days: all-knowing with a brotherly mocking tone to it. "You just said it, man: you've got history, and you'd still do anything to save her." He started walking again. "Know this, though: Lana? She's off limits."

"Like hell she is." I recomposed myself and shoved my hands into my pockets defiantly. "I'll do whatever the hell I want with her." I looked away to hide my sheepish grimace, "provided she gives me the chance to ask her."

"Do you want to die, Blank? Cuz messing with her is a sure way of getting that to happen." He sighed and set his back against the shelf, his face away from me. "She's in deeper than I am, man. Like: 'fucking the big guy' deep. You get caught so much as smiling at her too often and I'll have to find another way to get these guys their data."

Defeated, though not willing to show it, not to him, I set my face with determined anger. Let him see my temper hadn't faded in all these years. "What's the data for, anyways?"

"Simply stated: nunya."

"I won't publish coded information that I don't understand the meaning for. Doesn't matter how many rounds you got in there, I won't budge on that one."

He heaved a sigh of frustration. "Fine. You goddamned temperamental shit." The grin seemed to make it a compliment. "Since the FBI is closing in, we need a way to feed out the financials and the codes for them that I am covering for. Only those in the upper reaches are in the know on this, and even then only a select undisclosed few know the planned cypher." With finality, he turned to face me. "You publish the next issue in a week. I know this and more as you can guess. Well the first stream of it gets published with this coming issue. Just the basics for now. That play, BTW? That's where we will hide the code. Use formatting to hide it, I guess: I know how much you liked to mess the lines of that shit."

For the first time, he came around the aisle and met me with a firm handshake. He looked older than I expected, somehow. Like he'd been so stressed that it took years off his life for him. Or maybe it added to the years his body felt. We hugged like age-old buddies, that one armed hug with a slap to the shoulder. "Expect to see Lana in two days with the first run of code, then work it into a play somehow and get it published as some sort of exclusive expose of your work or something. Doesn't matter how, just make it your own shit, and make it obvious to those who know to look for it."

We parted and he backed away a pace. "Don't make me remind you about what happens if you do anything rash. And do not fraternize with Lana, let me make that clear as hundred, man."

With that, he stepped aside and briskly made his way to the stairs and began his climb to the main floor. I watched him go, then leaned over the balustrades to watch him leave. Once alone, I turned my back against the nearest pillar and let my legs collapse beneath me.

What the literal fuck had I just gotten myself into?

Esteban

"Esteban"

part 1

(toying with ideas and tones and such)

Gary Baker, November 2015

It started with "Blank, this is the wrong format." It was a script I had written for a play we were to produce in the high school theater later that year. Mrs Waters was waving the pad in the air, the longest thing I had ever put my mind to, and here she was telling me it was done wrong.

Not for direction of content, by the way. Not even for the flow. It wasn't about bad characters, nor about bad timing, nor sequencing, nor thematics. If there was one thing Mrs Waters wanted more from me, a sickly tenth-grade prodigy (or so I told myself, then), it was to reformat the six-hundred page play. And why? Let me use her own words to express this wonder of my young writing career:

Her dyed tar-black hair was falling out of the bungee tie at the nape of her neck, her lips poised with graceful not-quite crimson, her old-school fifties era dress wisping slightly in the classroom's air-conditioning as she held the script in front of me. I was laying on the floor at the time, doodling or some shit in my seventh notebook that year. I always scribbling thoughts, dreams, dialogue. Shit like that. Most kids back then thought I was a bit eccentric, but who could blame them? I kinda was, if you blurred the meaning a bit.

Anyways there she was, standing over me with my greatest achievement in hand, speaking in a tone that made the whole class shush without making it obvious they had shushed. They kept up just enough clamor so Waters wouldn't notice the change. I did. I always did. I guess that's how I got most of my work done, by noticing these changes in flow around me and then jotting them down. "Blank," Waters repeated, "we just got through the unit on script-writing, and yet you turn this in to me with," she looked away for a second, finding the words I guess, "with nonstandard formatting."

Back then if there was one thing that drove me batty, it was being told I was wrong. My friend laying beside me on the classroom carpet with Chomsky open on one side and Shakespeare on the other, shifted and shyed away a foot or two. He knew me. He knew I hated being condemned in front of a crowd. What's more is that he knew damn well that I didn't take kindly to being wrong when it came to my writing, especially over things as small as formatting.

I was stunned, trying to regain my composure. "Excuse me?"

"This script? Reformat it or I will find someone else to write the play."

"What's wrong with the format?" I asked, knowing quite well how I had worked my piece such that the character names were tabbed to the far left with all lines starting on the next line down.

She dropped the pile of bound papers onto the floor in front of me, almost on my hand. "You need to put the character names in the center, not the left. It makes it impossible to read when you have to constantly search for the name of the person speaking the lines."

"Says who?" I challenged. Again, my friend moved, but this time he stood from the floor and moved back onto a seat. It was on. "You?"

I should not have said that last part, I know, but like I said: I was a tenth-grader with medical problems. Of course I would build up an attitude.

"Yes," Mrs Waters ended. "Because scripts are not formatted to the left, and you cannot just change things like that. Is this going to be an issue? Because I can get someone else to write the play."

Here's the part about being sickly in high school that no one really tells you about: beyond the medical exams and the tests and the machines and the hospital boarding and all that jazz, you start to get accumulated to tight, small environments. It's like the opposite of claustrophobia, but not as bad. I mean, I wasn't afraid of open spaces per se, but more that I preferred places like the library and the nooks I built in my room for the purposes of reading at any waking hour that I wasn't using to write something. Point is that I read, a lot. I read practically all the time. I had finished the major works of Shakespeare even before we had exams on Romeo and Juliet back in freshman year, let alone all the other names I followed in the writing world.

So being told my way of formatting wasn't done simply wouldn't fly.

I threw myself into a cross-leg seated position and drug over the theater textbook my friend had been perusing. I flipped to a random page: Henrick Ibsen's 'Peer Gynt' and held it up for Waters to see that Ibsen used the same format I preferred. "Ibsen," I stated, "used left-hand margins for names." I flipped to another random page and landed on Tennessee Williams, found "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and held it up again. "Williams used left margins." I flipped back to the Shakespeare chapters my friend had been reading and paged my way to 'Julius Caesar' and once more stated my point.

"I see what you are trying to say," Mrs Waters sighed, still visibly irked, "but that just isn't how it is done anymore: these days we use centered margins for character names and cues."

I scowled. "So you wont even read it? Just because you aren't used to the formatting?"

"No, I will not." That was that, it seemed, and so she passed along the honor to a classmate of mine, who took the role of writer for the spring play eagerly, though with a bit of apologetic sorrow in my direction.

It was at that point that I drew inward with myself and gave up on writing plays. For the next ten years, even after having finished high school and moved on to college where I majored in philosophy and creative writing, I never pushed back into scriptwork. I published works of essays for various journals and periodicals, curated stories for a network editor, and by the time I graduated I was given a position for a publishing company in the big city. It never occurred to me I would go back to plays. Not even under such extravagant circumstances.

It was a jazz club in north Manhattan, snow was falling like volcanic ash just outside, the windows fogged and frosty with tones of satin gray. I sat at a round table just paces from the brick fireplace built in a by-gone era, cigar roasting away, lipless and depressed, on the ashtray beside a glistening pint of ale. I had a pen in hand and a pad lain like a carcass on the table beneath my nose.

I was fighting for the words, striving to hit that fresh chord of blues on my version of a cello while the musicians hummed and snapped away their demons on the stage across the lounge behind me. My pen clicked incessantly to their tune, nervous habits, I guess. And that was when she walked in: Lana Lucy, herself, in the skintight flesh.

She strode in out of the cold with a waist-long p-coat over a slim black dress that reached mid-calf, breaking away to reveal nude stockings and heels that could kill a man. Her hair was done up in the style of the twenties, all woven with lace and beads with a broad-rimmed sunhat of silk-like material. In with the latest fashion, she wore elbow-length black gloves, and had two points where it was obvious she wore her rings under them. It struck me that she might be married. Struck me in such a way that I almost felt my heart problems return, despite the pace-maker wires residing in very valves of the muscle itself.

I must have dropped my pen, because she suddenly looked my way and smiled that devilish grin that entranced me so much in my youth. "By god, Blank," she almost groaned. She didn't sound pleased to see me, but her Cheshire gesture said otherwise. She made her way over to my table and pulled the seat closest to the fire. Even the way she set herself down made my skin crawl. I thought I had gotten over her ages ago, but I was suddenly finding out I was wrong. "What the devil have you been doing all these years?" She asked while pulling out an e-cig with a long stick-like stalk that fit the twenties theme.

I always loved reading about the roaring twenties, but one-hundred years later the styles had returned to mainstream and it was a love-hate relationship I had with it. Most people ruined the theme by trying too hard: you wouldn't see flappers in the numbers of millions back then, let alone see them everywhere you looked. Men had it easier, as long as you wore a nice suit or tux you were fine, but it was the fedoras that made me want the world to burn. And then there was the sudden proliferation of jazz lounges and speakeasies and the like, where I often holed away to droll out more words and end the lives of more pints and witch-hunt all the cigars I could get my hands on.

It was when people like Lana Lucy came into my life that my fetish really struck a nerve. Just sitting across from her was enough to boil the alcohol right off and make me want to take her somewhere.

"I, uh," I scratched my cheek awkwardly and glanced away. "I've been good. Publishing other people's work," I shrugged and looked at her again, to see she was checking her makeup in a pocket mirror, half-listening, "you know how it is: everyone wants a piece of them out where we all can see."

Lana ho-hummed and set her hands back on the table between us. "That's not what I asked, not really at least."

"Oh you meant 'literally what have I been up to'?" I glanced at the electronic pad with a few lines jotted by the touchscreen pen laying halfway over it. With a quick swipe I cut to the home screen and slapped the 'screen off' key. "Well after graduating from State, I hired myself out as an editor, started publishing bits here and there, got my name out there, and eventually started my own magazine for struggling writers."

She motioned to the pad with a sharp chin. "That what you were just doing? Editing?"

I sighed. "No, I was, ah, trying to get back into my own flow again. I may have hit a roadblock up here," I tapped my right temple with my pen hand.

Lana finally seemed to take the rest of my clutter in, and stared at the still-burning, though still unused cigar. "You still burn. Interesting." She gave me a thoughtful glance from the corner of her mascara'd eyes. "Didn't that trend fade out when e's hit the market?"

Even after all these years I didn't like to admit when I was wrong. My temper was just more controlled and the stuff in my head more sophisticated for backing up my thesis statements. "No, not at all." I argued. "There are still swarms of us Burner's scattered all over the place."

The snap-response I expected didn't come. Instead she shrugged and began peeling off her gloves after she'd hung her coat over the back of her chair. The band continued to play behind me, breaking into further Sinatra-esque tunes, sometimes even hitting modern songs redone with the early era twist. At one point a young woman in uniform walked by and handed Lana a menu, then went on her way again.

Finally I leaned forward and took the cigar to my lips for real, taking in the last few puffs before it could die. "So, Lana," I asked as I dashed the ashes between drags, "what brings you here?"

It had been several minutes of silence before I'd spoken up, and so she looked up from her phone with a curious yet otherwise-indecipherable look on her face. "What the devil do you mean, Blank?"

I scowled. Not this again. I bit my lip and counted to five, then exhaled. "What do you want, Lana?" Even holding back my temper, I still felt I said that too rough.

A grin almost creeped it's way onto her cheeks. A glimmer of possibility then gone. "Me? Want something?"

I pointed with my glowing cigar stub and took the last drag and stabbed it out. "Don't play with me, babe, I know your type. You waltzed in here knowing damn well you'd find me, you didn't even ask me if you could sit." I steepled my fingers to rest against my nose. "Now cut the smooth-talk and explain."

"You're too smart, you know." The way she said it, I swore it was an mocking insult. Not meant to hurt, but to deceive me. With a bit of flair for making the gesture as unnoticed as possible, she rolled her e-cig across the table where it silently clinked against my pad. "There's a note for you on the feed. Read it and overwrite it." She huffed an annoyed sigh and stood up to pull on her coat. "And here I thought I would get to enjoy a bit of R&R."

I was still watching her with a bewildered confusion on my brow, when she finished donning her gloves and turned toward the door. She nodded to the cig from over her shoulder. "You've been warned and you're welcome." At that she made her way to the door and slipped out during the height of applause for the band.

I'm not proud of how long it took for me to regain myself, but when I did look to the machine in my hand, I rolled it over until the thin screen faced me. There were two buttons to either side of it and a tiny hole where a charging port or memory cable could be inserted. I pressed the first one, on the right side and the screen lit up with a flashing cursor line.

Lana's secrecy had me intrigued, so I followed her lead and made sure to turn on my pad to obscure what exactly I was reading from. Something had me on edge suddenly. My heart was weak, even after all the surgeries and shit, but this was something different. Hitting the right key again brought up the message four characters at a time longways down the cig. It was like reading on an old calculator.

....job for you. play to write. stay local. keep low profile. -Est.

I knew who Est. was right away: Esteban was an old tag name I used back in the day, back when I used to practically haunt the librarians for a living. It had been our way of secretly indicating where to find each other in the multi-story building. My best friend and I would sign in for the day on the sheet at the sign in counter that was used for tourists who wanted to lay claim to proof they were there. You could go back decades in that hand-written log, if you asked the librarians to pull out the logs. But it was the names we chose that told were we would be.

I don't even remember who came up with the idea, him or me, but it worked perfectly. Boromir meant we were among the fantasy shelves, Jeremiah indicated the religion shelves, C. Sagan was science, and the list went like that for every section. The use of Esteban was obvious: this was something I needed to do alone, and without making waves in any way.

What had me on edge most was the secrecy of it all. What could possibly summon the need to bring up old haunts and methods that hadn't been used since high school? And why a damn play? I hadn't written one of those in over ten years.

I leaned back and tucked away the cig into my breast pocket with a long sigh. "Shit."

Flight of the Viper

"Flight of the Viper"

a brief excerpt

Gary Baker, December 2014

Lithomir was riding hard with the guardsmen at his heels when the newly banished kings heir caught the sight of a viper in the distance. At first it was just a smoothness in the rugged bog where none should have been, possibly a hill made of wind-swept soil and debris, yet it turned to something much more deadly as he looked closer.

The beast was as much a dweller of land as it was sky, with a long serpentine body fitted with a pair of broad sinewy wings that could fold up as neatly as though they were never there. Undoubtedly it was caught unawares as the beast was completely visible even as Lithomir watched it tuck in its wings and bunch up its neck like a bolt waiting to be released.

The young heir grit his teeth and aimed Vaughn's steed toward the predator letting the mount carry him further south than was necessary just to align the course properly. He swung his head down and glanced beneath his right arm to the riders coming closer behind him with pikes already drawn and swung out for the heir's reaping.

They hadn't seen it.

Lithomir inhaled deeply and kicked the mount into a greater stride, lowering himself to the animals neck while lifting his lower torso off its back. Centurion training had taught him about how a rider might hinder his mounts movements by interrupting the wave-like motion of the spine and how knowing how to undo such hindrances could keep even a plainsdrake from making the wrong kill. As soon as his hips were in the air above the saddle, the mount kicked into a higher pace as though steeling itself against a hail of arrows.

They grew closer yet the young dragon slayer couldn't help but watch as the viper almost completely vanished into the shape of a handful of low laying mounds. Its eyes glazed over and the snout flattened, the only indicative mark being that of its bunched up neck as an oddly-shaped patch of grass sticking from the deep black muck.

"Almost," Lithomir told himself, having only heard stories of such an attack from about a pyre. He remembered old Tsuyir from the northlands drunkenly giving the tale as if he'd seen it himself. The bard had gotten quiet just then, leaning toward his eager listeners to whisper, then suddenly snapping back to shout "AVAST" just when the beast had supposedly shot out toward the valiant hero. Lithomir had only been a babe then, barely seven, yet he remembered just how Tsuyir had claimed this hero evaded the impossibly quick strike.

Then the viper ahead, too, struck out with ungodly speed from an entire bowshot out. The flat snout turned instantly into a pointed spear trailing a long neck like a banner while the wings snapped out to carry the beast through the air soundlessly. More instinctively than he expected to, Lithomir yanked hard on the reigns to shift the mount just aside and swung his empty right arm over and across just in time to slap the viper with his forearm along its lower jaw as it swelled out from the tip.

In awe Lithomir barely caught sight of the barbed talons of the viper's inner cheek which would ensnare a victim before the jaws could set to work. Had even one of those flesh toned hooks taken hold, the heir knew he would have been done for. Instead his forceful blow had prevented the mouth from opening completely and gave him an opening through which to ride passed. The heir yanked hard to the east again and kept on even as the wings sailed overhead, even as the sounds of chaos broke behind him.

He almost laughed at the insanity. In the last day he'd not only slain a plainsdrake single-handedly, but had survived the strike of a fully grown viper while on an overburdened stallion. The only problem was that he no longer had a single soul with whom he could celebrate.

The mount attempted to slow but he kept it running at a breakneck sprint, sure that the viper hadn't completely taken care of his handful of assailants. The mountains ahead were getting closer and he'd been riding for hours; he wanted to reach the foothills more than anything. Once there he would slow down, maybe even make camp, but not until then. The mount was bred for this sort of riding and he was not about to let it relax until the beast had fully proven its worth.

A loud war horn broke the wind with a deep bellow followed by the scream that only a slain horse could make, clashes of folded Centurion steel rang out and then the echo of flapping wings as the viper took to the air. Lithomir bit his lip and kicked the mount hoping it could go one bit faster as he craned his neck over to see the massive thing spiral high trailing blood as arrows were loosed.

Eyes wide he looked to the ground below and discovered that these so-named guardsmen were ranked out like skilled drakeslayers with pikes ready and bows drawn. Only one had been downed, it seemed until the king's heir glimpsed a horseless guardsman kneeling on the ground awaiting the beasts ultimate landfall with a battlepike and shield held at the ready.

The kingsheir snapped back forward and kept on. These men following him were no guardsmen, that much was now obvious. With battle skills and steadiness like he'd just seen of them, there was no way they were anything less than Rangers: fabled mercenaries from beyond the Northern Pass.

For the time being, the newly banished heir chose to set such thoughts aside and survive to see another day. The time to understand what was truly going on here would come later.

Quintet

"Quintet"

an epilogue

Gary Baker, October 2013

(the ultimate end to my largest project?)

Roi gasped as air was choked from his lungs, the upright beast leader of the invading army holding ringed fingers firmly circumferential to the dangling human’s ever-closing airways. The creature clearly led by powerplay, it’s muscles strangled into bunched masses, tied here and there with metal chain-like cords that had been woven into the thick muscles themselves with weights hanging haphazardly as though at the end of fishing lines caught in the beasts arms. The armor was intense enough as is, without the gold and jade debris cinched deep into the tissues of exposed flesh.

Roi could see where chains had been torn free, whether from being caught by stray palms in fistfights or by being deliberately torn free by the beast who bore them, leaving gruesome scars behind that often came close to bisecting an entire limb. The invasion force, Roi thought, was far more primal than anything humanity had ever been. They had bred themselves this way, in as parallel a path in evolution as cognition was to humans.

Then the pain really hit home, knocking the wind remaining in Roi’s lungs into the back of his throat, only to be blocked by the pressure of the tense grip, which only caused an even worse need to expel that air and reciprocated until the man was sure he was going insane right then and there. The burning of his eyes grew hotter and worse yet, the evidence of his eyes bulging began to show even in his already hazy sightlines as the world picked up a fisheye lens effect, and his hearing all but turned to heavy lub-dubs as the blood in his ears threatened to break free at his eardrums.

The pain intensified, growing stronger while somehow -- astonishingly -- further away. It was as though he and the pain of his own undoing were standing on separate trains once side-by-side and now veering away from each other. The throb began to pulse in his eyes and lessened as much as his vision began to lighten into cloud white. The stammer in his chest beat a constant bulbous beat, but his skin was tingling enough that even deep inside he could feel almost nothing. The grip on his throat pushed closer to being just finger muscles touching messy finger muscles, but Roi was almost certain it wasn’t even his body part anymore.

The scream he heard through bleating eardrums should have been his, but the wind had long since turned to hot ash and therefore couldn’t possibly be coming from him. It must have been someone else, someone nearby.

In a flash of white, Roi and his other train-self were severed completely, on railside vehicle suddenly disappearing behind the stark white walls of endless light and undisturbed abyss. He felt his eyes flicker, then, and his fingers twitch. He heard the dull ache of a familiar voice nearby and turned what felt like well-oiled gears to find himself staring at none other than a smiling Agent Bond, in the artificial flesh.

Welcome back, Bond seemed to say, though no movement of the man’s lips were seen, I trust you come across well?

Roi stared, confused. What was this? Where was he? Had the others saved him and brought him to the hospital?

No, nothing like that, Bond replied, and still Roi gaped at how the man could communicate without moving his lips nor using any sort of speaker system. It was as though Bond were displaying his words directly into Roi’s brain. At that, the agent smiled wanly. Close enough.

Where am I? Roi tried to ask with vocal cords that seemed not to work.

Bond nodded and turned away and into the abyss, trailing his voice as he spoke, again without moving his lips. You are in a state of download, just now, Roi. Be patient. I know it’s a long time, but in merely point zero zero seven five microseconds everything will be as can be expected.

Download? The man stopped, unaware that he had even been moving in the first place. What do you mean, ‘download’?

The agent’s laugh was impenetrably awkward in the void of light, each echo made into endless miniature echoes until the whole of existence seemed to be made of them, the tiny echoes of a laugh made by a man who wasn’t even real. Let us be straight right now, Roi. You died.

I… I died?

Yes, and you don’t very well expect me to have lost such a mind, do you? Bond looked cross, blue eyes fixed on Roi in a hallucinatory, dark gaze. Just then the white started to fade ever darker, until Roi saw where he was, standing in the middle of the chamber Bond had asked him never to venture, a chamber that, until now it seemed, Roi had kept his word about. You see, Bond lifted eyebrows high in a world that seemed both static and slow in the same instant, I, alone, cannot traverse the galaxies with just one mind. I need others to take my place. In this case, I am called Omega, something you humans have gotten wrong for much too long, and you are now called Quintet, with just one other having been made between our creations.

I don’t get it.

Bond laughed, again making that tinny reverberant noise, like a mosquito caught at the point of a massive tin funnel. We never do in the first few microseconds. Let me say this much, though: you are the seventeenth player, and we have only a handful more before the game can begin anew.

Roi fanned out his thoughts, trying to comprehend, only finding empty space and endless facts and tidbits that he never knew could exist at so close a range to his thoughts. The further he reached, the wider Bond -- Omega’s smile went. And then he got it, understanding the whole of the universe faster than Neo had learned kung-fu.

This really was a game -- but it wasn’t between civilizations, per-se, but between the artificial minds behind those civilizations. Each time another race was added to the mix, another mind was captured and put to the test in an all-out game of intergalactic command, expand and conquer until all necessary players had been gathered.

Only afterward, however, could the real game begin; the game to be the last intelligence alive, surviving the downfall of other races and only capable of dying when one’s entire race had been eliminated.

Now do you understand?

All except for one thing, Roi tilted his head to the side in wonder.

Yes?

Why did you bring me into this? If playing the game means you die in the end if you don’t win, why add in other players that might become your downfall?

Omega lifted an eyebrow high as though mocking Quintet’s thought process and all the systematic hardware that enabled such mechanisms possible. Because playing with the same minds all the time tends to get very, incredibly boring more often than not. In fact I look forward to the day that another player may become my downfall, for that day, alone, would be something far newer than anything I could possibly imagine.