"Whippoorwill of Freedom"

Philadelphia – 1984

He poked his head in the door, eyes shifting back and forth quickly. The place was not so much 'run down' as it was falling apart, literally. It was once a corner apartment on the top floor of the abandoned block, but now a good portion of its walls were open to the elements entirely. It looked like the place had suffered some kind of catastrophic water damage in the past— maybe a faulty plumbing line, or its sprinklers— and suffice to say that damage was never repaired.

The moldy wallpaper once displayed some kind of bird motif— maybe chaffinches— and it looked like it had been left to rot some time during the Lincoln administration (it hadn't, of course; Penance knew that they had different designs in vogue back then). Everywhere there was debris and broken fixtures, except in a few choice places where they'd been swept aside.

Simply put? Penance would call the place 'quasi-post-apocalyptic'.

The girl— 'Whip'— called to him from the next 'room', as it was:

"Come on in, white bread. What're you, scared or something?"

Penance took a few steps into the apartment.

"At first I was thinking you'd have those guys waiting to jump me, again—"

"You got no money, and you got nothing to trade for money, kid. Don't gotta be afraid of bein' jumped, anymore..."

"Yeah," Penance mumbled as he stepped through the debris field, "well now I'm a little afraid of getting tetanus..."

Whip told him what he could do to himself; it made him smirk.

Penance joined the girl in the far room; it was once a corner bedroom in the apartment. The roof was almost entirely gone here, and the girl had a narrow mattress nestled against the far corner on the floor. She could sleep under the stars, he thought. That was nice, at least.

Penance stopped in the center of Whip's open-air room. His cigarette had nearly burned down to his lips, and he reluctantly tossed it on the floor.

"Hey!" Whip snarled. "Are you an animal?"

Her ferocity made the boy start. He followed her gaze, and then quickly retrieved the cigarette butt from that colossal mess that was— allegedly— a 'floor'.

"Uh, sorry," he muttered. "But, um..." the boy looked around. "You said you had food?"

Whip took a knee beside her mattress and stuck one hand underneath. She pulled out a pair of granola bars, and she tossed Penance one. The boy slowly moved to the far side of the 'room' and sat on a chunk of bricks that once composed the outside wall. His legs dangled in the breeze, and it was a good six story drop to the ground below.

"I'd tell you to be careful, kid," she motioned to the drop-off. "But I guess you know how to handle a fall."

Penance shrugged noncommittally. Whip motioned to Galabeg, still wedged in the front collar of the boy's Cal Ripken shirt.

"Dunno why you carry around that fox's head with you; I'd have called you a cat."

The boy shook his head. He worked his words around the stale granola bar:

"I don't have nine lives."

"Too bad."

"One's more than enough."

"What's your name?" Whip asked.

"Cameron," he said.

"'Cameron' what?"

"Penance Cameron."

It wasn't quite the introduction to rival James Bonds'. Whip's lips curled up in a doubtful smirk. She batted her eyes and grunted. As she spoke she started working to undo that massive French-braid ponytail at the back of her head:

"'Penance'? Right. Well, my name's 'Reconciliation'—"

"Your name is 'Whip'."

"—and those two friends of mine from earlier were 'Damnation' and 'Absolution'—"

"Hey, Whip,if we're gonna start arguing about weird names—"

"'Whip' is my nickname, kid. And, for a nickname, it happens to sound very, very cool."

Penance cocked his head:

"What's your real name, then?"

The girl looked to one side, her face scrunched in a scowl. That delicate constellation of freckles dotting the brown skin of her cheek seemed to swirl about as she tightened her lips.

"My real name's Will," she mumbled.

Penance smirked. He looked over at her:

"'Will' what?"

"That's my last name, you little tool!" She glared at him. "My first name is... uh, Willa."

"'Willa'," Penance turned the name over in his head for a moment, nodding approvingly. "Well, that name doesn't really sound so..." he paused, furrowing his brow. When he looked back at the girl his face beamed with a grin:

"Willa Will?"

The girl looked away.

He really did try not to, but he failed: Penance laughed, and it was a very long and spirited laugh, too.

Whip held up a finger, and she snarled at the boy:

"That's the last time you ever get to say it, white bread! Far as you're concerned, my name is Whip."

"Where'd 'Whip' come from, anyway?"

"When I was a kid—"

"You're not, still?" Penance chuckled.

"I'm older than you are, kid. Now shut the hell up and respect your 'elder', hmm?"

"That's good advice. "I wish more people did that, actually..." Penance lay back on the exposed bricks, resting his head in his arms. He winced as the spiked dog collar around his neck dug into his flesh. He had to reorient himself and cup his hands around the back of his neck to lie comfortably.

"We lived in this hole-in-the-wall shack on the city limits. Sucked, really. It was always cold in the winter, and we'd get bad pest problems— like raccoons and possums. The woods were right outside our busted kitchen door, and..." she shook her head. "It just really sucked, you know? But at night there were these birds— I never saw 'em, 'cause they were so quick and small— and they'd go on calling into the woods, making a racket. They were just another nuisance, but when I was really little I thought they were sayin' my name. Sounded a little like it, I mean. Like they were calling to me." Whip rested on her side on the ratty mattress, fist to her temple, and she shrugged. "It'd make me smile, sometimes. Even when..."

She quickly looked up at the boy; her brown eyes changed from soft little globes to tiger's eyes in an instant. She slowly relaxed, but she remained in a guarded pose.

"...the birds— they just sounded nice. That's all."

Penance stared up at the sky for a moment. He mouthed the girl's full name, soundlessly, a few times over.

"They were whippoorwills, is that right? That's the bird you heard."

She nodded.

"Well, you're right, you know." He said.

"About what?"

Penance smirked:

"The name does sound pretty cool..."

Whip got up and moved to a ruined fireplace against the wall. She reached up into it, and when her hand came out she held a sooty bottle of bourbon; it was half empty. Penance stared at the golden liquid inside that bottle. Whip cracked the top and took a rather dainty nip of it. She wiped her mouth and noticed the boy staring at her.

"You, uh, want a belt?" She held out the bottle. "I mean, I wouldn't normally offer it to a little kid like you, but, um, since you already smoke, and all..."

The boy's eyes lingered on the whiskey, watching the bright amber liquid slosh in the bottle. He realized he was licking his lips. Penance quickly turned away and looked back out at the view. He shook his head gently.

"No, thanks," he mumbled. "I, uh, can't."

"Don't have a taste for it?"

"No, that's not it. I'm an addict..."

Whip chuckled. She wedged the bottle back up inside the fireplace.

"That's pretty funny. You're a weird kid, Penance. You know that?"

"Yes, I do." He looked back at the girl, his face less somber. "And thanks."

Whip again lay on her mattress. The girl began absently breaking apart her granola bar into small pieces, leaving them balanced on her chest.

"Seriously: I just can't do 'Penance'. Think I'm gonna call you 'Pen', if that's alright."

"You wouldn't be the first."

"I'll bet. So, can I ask you a question, Pen?" She looked over at the boy, and her deep brown eyes were deathly serious.

Penance shrugged:

"It's a free country," he mumbled. "Right now, at least."

"How did you survive that fall?"

"I told you—"

"Don't care what you told me," Whip interrupted. "I saw you fall straight down, and I saw you splatter on the concrete. Should've been able to scrape off what was left of you with an ice cream scoop."

"I'm lucky," Penance said.

Whip scoffed. The girl began throwing those bits of granola up into the air, catching each one in her mouth.

"'Luck' is makin' it home before it rains. 'Luck' is getting' an extra bag of chips from the vendin' machine. What I saw happen to you is nothing short of blessed. You got someone upstairs looking out for you, Pen."

Penance grit his teeth. He again stared into the sunset, shaking his head:

"No, I don't. And I'm not 'blessed', either. Not by any god you're thinking of, anyway."

"Well, lucky or not, kid, you better watch yourself on these streets. Philly is a hell of a town to live in, if you got nothin' to live on. And, no offense, but you're a little runt, you know. If I were you I'd mosey on over to a shelter, somewhere. Maybe you should get yourself put into the system. Nice white boy like you should get himself a cozy little foster home—"

Whip tossed another small piece of granola into the air. Before it landed in her mouth, however, a fearsome white blur sailed into it, obliterating the tasty morsel. Penance's little dagger landed in the ruined wall behind her blade first, its wooden handle still quivering from the force of the throw.

Whip got to her knees and stared at the knife for a moment. She then looked back to Penance, at first awed, and then royally pissed.

"Y— you could've killed me!"

"Only if I wanted to," Penance sneered at her. "Point is I don't need any foster homes. Or 'systems'. I do just fine on my own."

Whip looked back at the knife. She pulled it from the wall— with great difficulty— and surveyed the silvery blade.

"What's up with this thing, anyway?" She mumbled as she ran her fingers along the blade's mottled surface. She surveyed all the strange banding patterns in the steel. "This thing is weird. What's with all these squiggly lines? A good blade is supposed to be all nice and smooth, isn't it? This thing almost looks like it's made out of water." She looked up at Penance. "Whoever made this must not have known what the hell they were doing."

Penance shuffled over to the girl and took the weapon back:

"You'd disagree, if you were on the wrong side of it..." Penance knelt down and wedged the little knife back into his sock, nestled alongside his calf.

The sound of bells brought him back up to his feet, alerting like a deer in the glen. He narrowed his eyes, and then he moved to the far 'wall' of the room, gazing down toward the ground.

"Are those church bells?" He asked.

"Yeah. St. Hubertus is right across the street. It's the only real reason we see any 'proper' folk around this block at all. And then only on Sunday. We're run-down and out, for most anything else. They say the only things left in this neighborhood that's still runnin' are the kids— from the police— and the bells of St. Hubertus."

Penance stared down at the place. It was a Gothic-influenced church, small in size but grand in its design. The walls were weathered stone, all of them burned down to a cold, hard gray. Two flying buttresses supported the main building on either side— obviously an artistic choice. The only buildings Penance had ever seen that needed a flying buttress were several orders of magnitude bigger than this building. A round stained-glass window graced the main worship space, and it leered out across the street at him, like a cold and empty eye. All the beauty of the window, of course, would only show on the inside; it wasn't the kind of thing he could see from where he was. All in all the church was very pretty, but still the building was a poser, Penance thought, trying to pretend that it was built in a bygone era. He didn't really mind the forgery.

In fact, it amused him a great deal.

"Nice place," he mumbled.

Whip shrugged:

"If you're into that kinda thing. It's 'trendy' for the well-to-do to come down and worship. Funny how they gotta walk into this busted-ass neighborhood to do it, though, and they all act like they're touring a leper colony, or something."

"You're no leper, Whip. A ball-buster, though?" Penance shrugged.

The boy's eyes were drawn to a small kit beside Whip's mattress. It was a makeup case, and it held an assortment of personal products. Many of them were quite old, and their bottles covered with grime, but the contents inside were obviously treated as if they were liquid gold. Penance selected a small tube of hair dye, and he looked it over thoughtfully.

"What color is this?"

"Uh, blonde, I think."

The boy smirked:

"Thinking of going towhead?"

"Please, white bread." Whip casually tousled her long, free-flowing hair. "It'd take about a dozen tubes like that to dye me up. And blonde isn't exactly my color—"

"Mine, either." He held up the tube. "Mind if I borrow it, though?"

Whip considered the little bottle for a moment, and then finally she gave him a grudging nod. Penance pocketed it, and then he moved to the far side of the room, his back to the setting sun, and stared at the sheer six story drop before him. Below him the sunset couldn't reach; the alley down there was covered in darkness, and completely invisible to the eye.

"You're gonna dye yourself up, hmm?" Whip said. "Change appearances? Why? Do you have to? Is someone lookin' for you?"

"You never know..."

"You got family back in Baltimore?"

Penance looked back at Whip, and she motioned to his Cal Ripkin shirt. Penance shook his head, again looking away:

"Family? No, no family. Just a few people who might miss me. Just a little bit. But they'll get over it."

"Will you get over missin' them?"

Penance looked back at Whip, and he scowled at her dangerously. Whip held up a hand:

"Look, kiddo: I don't mean to pry, but—"

"Yeah, you do," he snarled. "And it's kinda pissing me off. I don't give two shits about anyone in Philadelphia, in Baltimore, in this whole damned country, or anywhere else, you got it? I do just fine on my own—"

"Whatever you say," Whip interrupted. "But, then, you do talk to a stuffed fox head, don't you?"

Penance was ready with a sly comeback, but Whip's words caught him in the throat. He swallowed, hard, and he took Galabeg out of his shirt front and stuffed the thing into his back pocket.

"Look, never mind," Whip shook her head. "Just tell me this, kid: with the granola bar, and the hair dye, and that cigarette, are we all squared away, or what?"

Penance considered the girl with a tilted head. He very slowly shook his head, clucking his tongue.

"We're close," he said. "But no."

"Why the hell not?"

Penance held up a finger:

"One: my balls still hurt—"

"I said I was sorry—"

Another finger:

"Two:" he said, "you made fun of my name—"

"Hey! I told you about my weird-ass name, too—"

Another finger:

"Three:" he said, "you made fun of my fox head. Only I get to make fun of my fox head—"

"I was just sayin' that it's a little creepy—"

Another finger:

"Four:" he said, "you keep trying to treat me like some delicate little thing, Whip. I'm not. Really, I'm not."

"I never said you were, but—"

The boy crossed his arms and leaned forward, scowling up at the girl's face:

"In fact, you have no idea how tough I really am!"

All at once, and to the girl's everlasting horror, Penance took one giant step backward. It was a step into thin air. Penance's body disappeared from view instantly, hurtling down the six story drop like a tossed sack of flour.

X

X

X

OK. All things considered, that might've been a littlechildish.

Or, you know, a lot...

Penance had already dusted himself off and disappeared into an adjacent building by the time Whip made it down to where he landed. He thought about the baffled girl searching around for him, finding nothing but a caved-in dumpster and a few footprints in the dirty asphalt. That made him feel a little crummy, all in all, but it was for the best.

The sad fact was that he kinda liked Whip. If not 'liked' then 'tolerated'. He could've stayed up on that ruined rooftop chatting with her for hours. He could've, but he didn't want to. Philadelphia would be behind him in a matter of days, and Whip, too. And right now that meant he'd be leaving behind a one-time acquaintance who let him bum a cigarette. That he could do. That was easy peasy. If he stayed around the girl any longer, however, things might be different: he'd be leaving behind something else, entirely.

Another friend.

Penance might've wanted someone to talk to— desperately, in fact— but the last thing he needed right now was another friend. Right now he was nowhere near the composure needed to be able to cope with losing another one of those, when the time inevitably came.

But, then again, maybe he could just hang around Philly a bit longer—

The boy shook his head, and he grit his teeth together.

"Eh, shut your gab, Galabeg," Penance looked to his back pocket as he walked. "I know, alright? Of course I do..."

This cautious behavior was a matter of survival, and it took precedence above all else. It was the reason Penance's age was in the triple-digits, and that his head wasn't buried in some makeshift grave right now. He didn't have the freedom to deviate from this behavior, he knew, even if he wanted to, and even if someone like Whip made him want to.

The feeling would pass, in time. He was just being emotional, really.

And yeah, that was a liability in and of itself. He did his best to rid himself of emotion in these situations— keep himself from being 'delicate', and try his best to be strong— but for some reason his feelings were quite strong, sometimes.

Go figure.

He crossed the street far down the block, to avoid any chance of Whip seeing him, and then he took to back alleys as he made his way over to St. Hubertus. If nothing else he could get a good night's sleep on the grounds, maybe plan his next move from there. He ducked into the window of another run-down building near the church grounds, looking for a shortcut, and instead he got lost in a small maze of construction tape and scaffolding. The building was undergoing heavy renovations, and as Penance stumbled about, nearly blind in a sea of plastic sheets and equipment, he felt a familiar scent trickle up his nostrils. It was a dank must, and it was a special type of must that had only one possible source: bound paper.

When he threw up one of the drop cloths hanging beside him he discovered he was correct: a stack of books met his eyes, as tall as he was. The library around him was spacious, but it looked like the renovations had stalled at some point. A thin layer of dust covered the scaffolds, and it looked like no work had been done here for some time. The library was in limbo, it seemed, and its books were sealed tight beneath their protective drop cloths, waiting for workers that might never come.

There was something unbelievably depressing about that idea, Penance thought.

The boy wandered aimlessly through the stacks, making his way to the other side of the building. On the way he passed a small cart in the middle of the library near the main desk, and he tripped over the cloth protecting the books underneath. Penance scanned the books absently as he replaced the cloth; it was a mix of very odd titles, and it almost seemed like they'd been placed there for want of a proper place. Whoever put these books here just didn't know what else to do with them.

One title caught his eye: it was a book with a very cartoonish cover showing what looked like a little boy standing on top of the moon, or maybe an asteroid. Penance's eyes widened as he read the title.

It was called 'The Little Prince'.

"Am Flath Beag," Penance whispered, chuckling as the Gaelic rolled off his tongue. His chortles echoed in the empty room, and he shook his head as he covered up the rest of the books.

He found a small cemetery behind the walls of St. Hubertus, and he spent an uneventful night there leaning up against a tombstone, and staring at another tombstone with Galabeg perched atop it. He wasn't particularly tired, still energized from that little nap in the movie theater, and so he spent the night playing with a stack of rocks, building little 'castles', and listening to every birdsong that met his ears. There weren't many, of course, being so wedged into the tight confines of the city as he was, but every so often a little peep or two met his ears.

But no whippoorwills, he noticed.

Not that he was listening for any, of course.

He took the time to meditate, and he put his mind down in that little 'pit of darkness' until he saw the light: there were other immortals in the city, of course, and some were relatively close to him. Not close enough to be a threat, and in any event they'd have to be within arm's reach of Penance to actually know what he was, anyway. He was safe enough, for now.

Penance looked up at Galabeg:

"No, that's right, of course," the boy muttered. "Mister Corndog didn't need to be that close to me. But he was stalking me. He must've been following my trail for a long time before he jumped me. Someone else might pick up where he left off, but that's alright, 'cause I'm erasing that trail..."

Around 3 AM or so he decided to stretch his legs. He made a few lazy laps around the small cemetery, and on one of his rambling circles he noticed that the side door to the church was wedged open ever so slightly. He crouched low and approached it; there was blackness beyond, but a little further in a very wan light shone. Penance crept on his tip-toes, careful not to make a sound with his Reeboks, and he discovered a kitchen at the end of the little hall. It was relatively spacious, given the size of the church itself, and it must've been used both for parish functions as well as some kind of soup kitchen.

He made sure to look for any sign of life in the place, and he found none. All the kitchen's cupboards were stacked with canned food, and a refrigerator housed milk and meat, but none of that concerned the boy.

Penance was a great many things, really, but one thing he wasn't was a thief.

Instead he turned his attention to a small bathroom on the other side of the room; there was a tiny sink inside, along with a mirror, and that's all he could ask for, really. Penance took his shirt off and got to work dousing his hair in water, after which he mixed up a solution of the blonde hair dye and went to work scrubbing it into his hair. It was agonizing work, and when he was finished he felt like his fingers were ready to fall off, but when he finally got his hair rubbed dry and looked over the results he could appreciate all the hard work.

Or not, actually.

"I look like freakin' Madonna," he ran a hand through his new, dirty-blond hair, picking apart the clumpy locks as he went, and grumbling to himself as he did so. After a while he considered revising his opinion as he modeled before the mirror; after all, it could be worse, right?

"Could this actually be any worse?"

Given that Penance had just broken into a church to perform his little dye job, and given his obvious decision to tempt fate with his words, God decided to answer his question almost immediately.

All at once the bathroom door swung shut, hitting Penance in the arm and throwing him against the side of the little room. A loud screeching noise sounded on the other side of the door and then the door handle suddenly rose up a little bit, as if someone had just wedged a chair or something against it. A few furious pushes against the door confirmed this: Penance was locked inside the bathroom, and there was no real chance for escape.

He decided to sum up his current predicament with a philosophical musing:

"Fuck..."