Roadside Assistance, or: The Tale of Santa Carla
For the prompt: "waiting for AAA on the hood of the car". I have decided that seven years is too long to be writing in a fandom without a name for the city where it takes place, and so for anyone who isn't sure about my name choice, I recommend that you look into the movie Lost Boys.
Evening settled over a highway that ran in a semicircle around the city of Santa Carla, the murder capital of the country. It settled red and filmy like wax dripping into water, quiet except for the sound of an ancient Volvo sputtering and stalling out on the roadside. It was the only automobile in any direction. The Volvo rolled to a resentful stop at the bottom of a scraggly ditch, nose pointed vaguely upwards towards the dimming sky.
Edgar stumbled out of it, feet uncertain on the slanted ground, and tripped up the hill behind him in an impressive display of discordination. The Volvo steamed slightly. Edgar regarded it with all the nervous betrayal of a child who's been snapped at by the family dog.
"Well," he said, dumbly, after a few moments, "I guess I'll have to move dinner with myself back an hour." He sat back on the browned grass and added, "That's very rude, you know. I don't know how I'll ever forgive myself."
Now, where was the nearest pay phone? Somewhere along the roadside there was bound to be an emergency box, but that could be miles away and he'd never paid much attention to them before. He'd passed a gas station a few minutes back, if he could just make it that far. Walking alone at night wasn't the safest thing a body could do, but it was that or try to flag down help—
Edgar's surface memory dredged up a delightful replay of a news story from a month or so before, the one in the Taco Hell. Even the roaches dead. Edgar rubbed his forearms, boy it was chilly, he should really get his jacket from the trunk and stop thinking about overly detailed news reports.
Even the roaches.
Of course Santa Carla had been the murder capital for about as long as anyone could remember, Edgar considered as he pried his jacket free from a stack of national geographics that he had been meaning to donate for months now. If it wasn't one thing killing people it was another. But if you could afford to leave then you had already left decades ago, or you were terminally stubborn, or—like Edgar—your sentimentality got the better of you. That was the city, a sink hole in the emotional fabric of the world. If you weren't light enough, it would swallow you down someday as well.
Edgar left his car empty of any real valuables and trekked along the shoulder of the road, head tucked into the collar of his pale canvas jacket. He felt uneasily visible. He felt that a sort of kinship with deer was creeping over him, to be honest.
The convenience store started off as a yellowish speck against the wine-dark hills, but step by step it grew into a yellowish splotch. It had been built on an intersection that didn't see much use, and probably would continue not to until the brightly lit thrumming heart of the city expanded over it and pushed out all the current inhabitant to make way for new ones, ones with cars and daily commutes.
Edgar paused at the door, one hand loosely around the protective iron bars over it, and caught his breath for a moment before stepping inside. The floor was grungy and dimly lit, and the freezy machine in the corner made a dull buzzing noise of strain. The clerk at the counter was listlessly flicking through pages of a softcore pornographic magazine. Edgar swallowed and averted his attention.
"Can I use your phone?" he asked, "my car got stuck a little ways down the road and I—"
"Buy something."
Edgar blinked. "Buy…?"
"Something," the clerk agreed, his lids heavy like a sleepwalker's.
Edgar glanced uncertainly around the room, gingerly picked up a pack of gum, and offered it open palmed to the boy behind the counter. "Will this do?"
Shrug. "Dollar fifty. Phone's in the back room." He jerked a thumb towards the hall with the bathrooms and what appeared to be a five foot high stack of beer crates.
Edgar shelled out the $1.50 and ducked back into the hall, just in time to catch a young man backing out of the restroom in an accidental shoulder-check.
The kid had been holding the hem of his shirt away from his stomach, glaring down at it like the fabric itself had done him some grave injustice, but when Edgar bumped into him he whirled with enough tightly wound energy to make Edgar take a reflexive step backward. He had very gray eyes, and bad skin, and a flash of something behind the eyes that would have made Edgar dial animal control if he'd seen it in a pet.
"Excuse me," Edgar said, faintly. "I should have been watching where I was going."
The kid glared at him for a moment and then dropped his shoulders, instantly as lazy and ingratiatingly harmless as a cat. "Yeah," he said, "you should've."
And then he brushed past Edgar, smelling of cigarette smoke and something faintly metallic, shouting to the boy at the register that it wasn't washing out, you're full of shit.
A little dizzy and a bit distracted, Edgar made his call in relative peace and only had to be prompted to finish a sentence twice. The tow truck driver knew this stretch of road, it turned out. Edgar left the back room feeling accomplished—the tow would cost money and so would the repairs, but at least he wouldn't be spending the night camping out in his car while the temperature dropped around him. He'd have them call in a sub for him tomorrow, if necessary.
Edgar's head was whirling with such small details as he pushed out the front door, stepped onto the curb, and found himself face to face with the same youth he'd walked into a few minutes before. The kid stood casually right there in the way, feet planted on the asphalt, blowing pale smoke from between his dry lips.
"Hey," he said, grinning.
"Hello… again," Edgar replied. He attempted something in the phyla of a smile that, he imagined, came out much grimmer, and tried to step around the boy.
"Mmy," the kid said, twisting his head to watch Edgar scuttle around him. "Name's Mmy."
Edgar felt more than heard the kid turn around behind him, swing into a step just short of catching the heels of Edgar's sneakers with the tips of his own shoes.
"Like the pronoun?" Edgar asked, staring straight ahead as he tried not to speed up perceptibly.
"Yeah," the kid said brightly, "but with two M's and a Y."
"So… not at all like the pronoun, then."
"Where are you headed?" Mmy asked, ignoring the comment entirely.
"Um."
Edgar felt the hairs on the back of his neck lifting but he fought to keep his posture loose. He fixed his eyes on the distant purple horizon, dimming with each second. Even the roaches. But this man—whoever he was—could hardly pass for a day over nineteen, and the faceless psychopath of the grim newscast had been terrorizing the city for years now. Too long, surely, for a teenager to be behind it. Edgar's hands clenched into fists, and he quickly hid them inside the packets of his jacket. That was, he amended, all assuming you thought a single person was behind it.
"My car," he said, at last. "I parked on the roadside."
"You got something against parking lots?" Mmy asked him, every little sound of shifting cloth amplified as he trailed along behind. Had there been a stain on his striped shirt? The lights had been poor outside the store, but Edgar thought he had an impression of darkness—maybe redness.
"No," Edgar answered. "Where are you going?"
"Wherever the party is," Mmy replied, a wide smile in his voice.
Oh. A wave of relief crashed over Edgar. "I'm sorry," he said, genuine warmth bubbling up through his voice, "but my car is wrecked. I can't give you a ride anywhere. Maybe your friend at the register—"
Mmy gained a step or two, fell in shoulder to shoulder with Edgar. "Who, Chico?" he said. "Nah, that bastard couldn't drive a little red wagon to the mailbox."
"Ah."
He could offer to let Mmy tag along on the tow truck. It wasn't as if the driver would know or care whether Mmy had been there before, and out here in the boonies it was a long walk to anything resembling a bus station. He could use the company, probably. Better the smiling hoodlum than the sullen driver at the end of his shift, Edgar could easily imagine the difference.
But what he said was, "Like I said, I'm wrecked."
Mmy gave him a sidelong look, lips curved sharply upward. "Are you?" he said. "Wrecked?" His bottom lids were dark with more than shadow, maybe bruises, maybe kohl, but Edgar had to look away before he was certain. The asphalt gave way to dried grass, and they both carried on walking.
"So why the celebration?" Edgar asked, after a while. "Are you celebrating?"
Mmy plucked the cigarette from his pale lips and gesture generally at the falling darkness. "It's a brand new day."
"Night," Edgar corrected, and then slapped a hand over his own mouth.
"What?" Mmy asked, brow wrinkling.
"It's, uh, it's nighttime. Brand new night."
Mmy mulled that over for a minute with a stormy expression, and then as suddenly as the eye of a hurricane breaking over the water, returned to his smile. "Brand new night," he repeated, "yeah, sure. That suits."
Edgar's cheeks burned.
"Lemme ask you something," the younger man said. "If you could kill anybody—I mean, anybody, no consequences—who'd you gank?"
Edgar frowned, ignored the faint surge of unease returning to his bloodstream. "I wouldn't," he replied. "Consequences aren't my concern."
"Oooh, a moralist," Mmy cooed. "Awright smart guy. If you had to kill somebody, who would it be?"
"What, like to save myself?"
Mmy shrugged, impatient. "Whatever, I don't care. Think up a scenario and answer the damn question."
Edgar thought up a scenario. He answered the question. "I suppose," he said, "if God came and told me—if it was part of the plan—I would probably find one of those priests. Like you hear about on the news? You know. Those priests."
Mmy nodded sagely, as if he knew exactly what kind of priests and furthermore could tell Edgar a thing or two about them if Edgar was interested. He wasn't, except that he maybe was.
"Me," the younger man said, after a moment, "I wouldn't kill a stranger."
Edgar glanced over at him. There was a kind of earnestness in his speech, an unfocused, thoughtless honesty. He moved in the same way, with long steps and a loose stride.
"What's the point in killing a stranger, right? They don't know you, they're not invested. You pull a knife on them and all they're gonna think is, oh, here's another random wacko in a city of random wackos. No connection, right?"
Edgar nodded, slowly.
"I'm working on my thesis," Mmy continued, stepping over the ragged remains of a blown tire. "I'm mostly done with the research and I'm moving into the implementation stage."
"Oh," Edgar said, "you're not in high school, then?"
Mmy shot him a grin. "Not for a while now."
"I teach in a high school," Edgar confided. If he kept both hands on the conversation, maybe it would stay on a linear track. "I have a test I'm supposed to be monitoring tomorrow, but the way tests are these days, a sub will do just as good a job. The text books make me feel… irrelevant, sometimes, you know?"
"Like they could just replace you with a tape recording and no one would know the difference? Sure. My folks are bad for that. Talk about shutting you out of the family dynamic."
"Ah," Edgar said, wisely, "a tragic scenario, I'm given to understand. It's all a bit distant to me." He paused, pushed his hands into his pockets. "No real family left to speak of, these days."
Mmy tilted his head. "You must spend a lotta holidays with friends."
Edgar shook his head. "Not really any of those, either."
Mmy made a thoughtful noise, almost like a purr. He stepped closer, threaded his arm through Edgar's, and said, "Eh, you aren't missing much."
For the next few minutes, as yard by yard the highway unwound behind them, Mmy filled up the darkness of the falling night with meandering anecdotes and vague philosophical treatises on the ephemeral nature of morality. It was a bit Nietzschian, Edgar told him. Mmy shrugged. Edgar asked him if he had ever read Machiavelli.
Edgar's car appeared at the dip of a hill, lit up with stripes of reflected light pollution, faintly pink underneath a punchbowl sky. Edgar gestured down towards it with a chivalric sweep of the hand.
"So your stepmother," he prompted, picking up the conversation where it had stalled a moment before. "Bit of a drama queen?"
Mmy smiled brightly in the general direction of his companion, but his eyes were unfocused. "Yeah," he said. "But forget about her. She's not gonna be a problem for much longer."
"Divorce papers in the mail?"
"Not exactly," Mmy said, and levered himself up onto the hood of the Volvo. His boots left rubbery marks on the metal. "Get up here."
Edgar obliged, clambering up with the rusty skill of someone who hasn't done much climbing in the last decade. The wheels made a faint noise of protest, but they held. Mmy grabbed his arm and pulled him closer, sliding Edgar bodily across the surface of the hood like so much loose laundry—the strength of it was unexpected.
Mmy let his hand settle where it landed, on the hood beside Edgar's hip. His arm brushed a diagonal line down Edgar's back whenever he drew in a breath.
"We need tunes," the younger man noted.
"The car won't start," Edgar said, by way of apology. Not strictly true, but how would anyone else know that?
Mmy hummed disapprovingly, but he stayed put. "I should have an argument section in my thesis," he remarked, at last, "you know, pretend like I don't agree with myself. Try out the other side."
"Oh you'll want that," Edgar agreed, his shoulder leaning against another shoulder, "definitely. Basic components of an essay, actually."
"Really demonstrate it," Mmy went on. His hand slid up from the hood of the car and over Edgar's hip, dragged at the dress shirt underneath the jacket. "Start to finish."
"Sure," Edgar said. "You might work out something you want to… in…tegrate?"
Mmy twisted around, got his free hand on Edgar's shoulder and pushed him down against the windshield. The mechanisms below them gave off nervous warning squeals. Outlined against the murky reddish sky, Mmy's hawkish features became indistinct, a shadow with glittering wet eyes. Edgar swallowed.
A white beam of headlights burst over them, cutting between them and redefining the edges of Mmy as he reeled back and slid off the hood. His lips were pursed.
Dazed, Edgar shoved his glasses into place and looked over into the source of the light. A car honked once, briefly.
"Hey," a muffled voice called out, "you Edgar Vargas?"
Oh. The tow truck. Edgar turned back to where Mmy had been standing, but found him already half way up the hill and moving quickly.
"Don't," Edgar started, barely more than a wheeze, "Don't you want a ride back to town?"
"I wasn't looking for a ride," Mmy called back, and then disappeared over the crest of the hill.
Edgar stared, mute, at the empty darkness for a few more minutes, until the tow driver came over to him and pushed a release form into his hands.
The next morning, Edgar would carefully close his copy of the newspaper, too afraid to finish the headlines. It would sit, half buried underneath practice tests, for months until the landlord came to clear out the previous occupant's possessions - typical procedure for vanished tenants in Santa Carla - and pulled it out again.
Wife of Dealership Proprietor Murdered, he would read, survived by husband and stepson, and he would wonder why such a relatively tame story could have been worth saving.