Cacti Chp. 6

YOU THOUGHT IT WAS DEAD. YOU THOUGHT IT WAS GONE AND YOU COULD GO ON WITH YOUR MERRY, JOVIAL, FESTIVE, HEARTBURN ALLEVIATED, SURGICALLY REDUCED, GOVERNMENT COVERUPPED LIVES BUT NO I SAY. IT LIVES AND YOU SHALL ALL PERISH AT THE THOUGHT OF ANOTHER CACTI CHAPTER.

here ya go.

Chapter Six

Vincent was running out of the house. He burst through the flimsy screen door and was out past the lawn and into the street before he heard it crash back in place, giving his escape route away. He couldn't feel his legs as they sprinted beneath him, or rather any part of his lower body. He spun around the street corner, wondered why in the hell he was still in the street, and jumped into the nearest backyard. He thought he saw headlights through the fences he scampered behind, but they could just as well belong to the car of a college student in much need of some heavy sleep.
He doubted it.
Suddenly he felt it certain death to stay outside. He braced for impact as he met with another door, and sure enough it repelled him efficiently. He tried the knob and thanked the Lord for his luck while cursing himself for his stupidity. He didn't want to go upstairs for fear of being trapped, but before he could find a suitable hiding place light flooded the room. He was caught. Somehow they knew which house he had broken into. He should've closed the door!
A middle-aged man with a rapidly receding hairline came partially down the stairs in blue furry slippers and a matching, darker blue robe. Vincent looked up to see two little faces peering over the banister to see who Daddy had invited over so late at night, and he turned on his heel.
Vincent fled back outside and made a hard left back behind the fence line. Then he tasted blood. He must've bit his tongue at some point running. The taste filled his mouth and he turned to spit it out but nothing came. He rounded another corner and ducked through some pine trees once he had crossed the street.
Why the fuck did you just cross the street?!
His head admonished his every turn, screaming that just around that air conditioner was an entire swat team with bullet-proof vests and, more importantly, fully loaded AK-47s or whatever was now more powerful and standard issue thanks to the Second Amendment and all the safeties off.
Vincent tripped, thrashed his feet to shake off whatever had tangled him, and was only looking back for a second. His head had time to turn back around and his body achieve the stance of an eager runner before the image registered in his mind, resulting in a lunge-jump forward rather than a running start. He felt the fresh dew on his forehead as he turned around to the giant shadow advancing in the moonlight. He saw the trail of blood that meant a lot more than his tongue was hurt, but he didn't know what. He only ached like any man would after a triathlon compacted into five minutes. Still he saw the black line snaking to and past the feet of the shadow. The shadow pierced something back in his head, in that part they say you never fully tap into because it lets Miss Cleo have an explanation for her profession, and he stared but did not look. To look was suicide. No one was well equipped enough to look at this thing directly, and it would not even grant him that privilege in the moments before his cowardly death. Vincent felt he would rip his eyelids off trying to close them if it took just one more step...
Then his eyes did close.

Or rather, open.
Megan stared down from above Vincent's exasperated body. Her face hovered above his own, some three feet up and a bit to the left. In that instant he awoke he saw her smiling, with that kind, motherly smile where in some biological anomaly only the bottom eyelid slightly rises to give this look of affection. For that moment everything was white before it came into focus, except for her brown hair falling down around her. He again wanted to reach out and just feel something of so much invested importance, but then that was gone. Her face scrunched, and she looked back to the door. Nate stood in the opening, both hands above him on the door posts. He was out of breath, and some liquid had left a trail staining a line down his button-up olive shirt. Megan brought Vincent's attention back with a gentle hand on his cheek.
"Sweetie, who's Felix?"
"I don't know a Felix."
"You were saying his name just now."
"The only girls that I ever ran the bases with were Debbie and Cassandra at both of their graduation parties. I think I would remember a night with a Felix, she sounds very controlling."
"That's cute. I was right here though. You even shouted it the last time."
"That's why I'm here," Nathan's breath had recovered.
"I don't remember, I swear."
"Saying 'Felix'?"
"If Debbie or Cassandra graduated first."
"If I ever get my nails done again, the first thing I'm going to do is claw your eyes out, you know that?"
Both of the men winced.
"I really don't remember anything of last night." And it was true. Vincent could only make out vague shadows of his dream, like someone's feet clad in fuzzy slippers.
"Megan..." came from the door.
"That means he's close," she said, without taking her eyes off Vincent.
"Fuck me," echoed from a voice now rapidly descending the stairs.
Vincent started to sit up, and felt the sharp hollow point of a needle enter his left forearm.
"You just keep resting, sweetie, we'll take care of everything."

~

A girl.
It's always another girl.
Do homosexual men always dream about girls?
I should look into being homosexual.
She had coffee. He watched as she brought the CAUTION! HOT contents of the pitcher to a collection of vagrants and waited the other tables in turn. She wore a miniskirt and her hair was back in a ponytail. He knew this because he only saw her from the back. Rather than turn around, she would simply appear at a table closer to his, still facing away. She was in a tight black short-sleeved shirt with nothing on the back. He became increasingly thirsty, and awkwardly aware that he was staring, which didn't normally happen in his dreams. Usually, when he wasn't flying with the most recent incarnation of the Da Li Lama or wrestling baleen whales, he could just sit in the middle of a city and watch people. He could even walk right alongside some, examining their casual facial compositions. He looked down at his little table and wished that someone would sit opposite him. He felt four years old again with no one there to take car of him. Suddenly his table jerked violently to the right, as if it were trying to snap him out of it. Vincent looked up, and no one else's tables had been disturbed at all. He didn't know quite what to make of that.

~

"Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck," Megan chanted as she sped down the interstate.
"Is that very becoming of a lady now?" Vincent yelled, half out the window.
"Yes actually, they changed the manner code and it's considered improper if I don't ask you for a spin whenever we're alone now. Dammit all to HELL!" she spun the wheel hard left, and the little car grudgingly obeyed to the point that it came in contact with the fake-mahogany siding of the sedan in the neighboring lane.
"I thought they had to come in those sweet black polished cars!" He yelled, back outside the car. "One would think, wouldn't they?!" Part of Megan's hair fell into her frustrated eyes as she moved back into her lane. A police siren first sounded and then descended the merging ramp quickly dissipating behind them.
"Oh, don't do it guys." Nathan whispered to himself from his perch on the side door.
The enhanced vehicle quickly caught up, unfortunately to the sedan first. And intercom blared the SOP for coercing a speeding criminal, then waited for the taillights to flash and the car to signal into the emergency lane.
What instead happened was that the police car managed to both implode and explode at the same time, producing a sort of crunched-paper-in-a-fireball effect.
"Megan?"
"What?!"
"I'm going to try my gun."
"Oh dammit to hell and back with a-"
"Get us next to the wall."

~

Vincent hard a clamor in the back of the little shoppe. He pictured the cartoony idea of a line of pans hanging by their handles all clattering at once, but didn't quite think that was the sound. The one waitress still hadn't turned around, and Vincent had tried to busy his mind with the other refugees but kept coming back to her. It wasn't that she was extremely attractive, though she was that, but more the way she moved, even if it was only away from him. He thought he saw a wisp, a faint green aura about her as she worked. She must have some hideous horse face, to be revealed only dream-seconds before he woke up gagging. Still, the didn't turn around, or even have to catch herself as the whole apparatus exploded to the left.

~

"Get as close to the wall as you can."
"Nate, the window's scraping the fucking wall already!"
"OK, well, see if you can get closer and-"
"How the fuck do I get closer to the w-"
"HOLD ON!"
From his jacket Nate withdrew a deep navy revolver with a barrel no shorter than eighteen inches. He let his hand off the handle inside the top of the car, and balanced with his legs straddling the door. He let one eye and both his hands take over as things began to slow down. Before they were completely stopped he felt suddenly pressured to fire early.
Click.
The front of the sedan, fully into the two front seats, disappeared. Or rather, was instantly incinerated in the ball of blue flame that erupted from Nate's gun. Megan's car went up on it's two left wheels against the wall, then fell back at almost the same speed. Megan was a good driver.
The sedan, having no driver, did not fare as well. The back end of the car, at its present speed, began a series of flips and spins in various directions, coming to a stop only after taking a number of innocent commuters with it. Nathan slid back into the car.
"Fu-"
"When did you become such a sailor?!" he yelled.

~

He had gotten up to warn the waitress that something was seriously wrong with the building they both occupied when again Vincent felt gripped by something in the back of his mind.
We will get you. Don't even SLEEP without knowing that. We will get you, and, the woman, and that BASTARD with the instrument. Just you fuckin' WAIT.
Vincent sat bolt-upright in the back of Megan's battered car murmuring 'Felix'.