"Sweet Summer Sweat"
Philadelphia – 1984
The stuffy scent of pressure-treated wood and insulation ruled the attic, in contrast to all the harsh medicinal smells in the museum downstairs. But it was the damp heat that hit him first, like walking out of an air conditioned Quonset hut and into a soupy jungle.
The attic was a simple place: a large rectangular plywood floor underneath a sloping ceiling. It was highest in the middle and lowest near the ends, where the slopes of the roof accommodated all the architectural flourishes visible outside. Two small windows graced the highest point of the attic and they faced the rising moon, bathing the place in obscene pale light.
Just standing in the place for a moment gave Penance the urge to flap his shirt up and down to ventilate his upper body. Looking into the far corner of the room he noticed Whip had a better idea: the girl had shed her shirt entirely and lay curled up with her face against the far wall, her back to the boy.
"Hot as hell," she muttered, "but it'll do, for the night. You try peekin' at me, kid, and I'll give you another kick in the balls, to end all kicks..."
Penance smirked as he took off his own shirt.
"Wouldn't some people pay good money for that, too?"
Whip didn't answer him, but he didn't mind. He could only imagine the look on her face. It was almost enough to give him a chuckle.
He walked across the floor and sat down beside Whip, balling his shirt up between the floor and the wall as a makeshift pillow. He sat cross-legged for a time, staring at the sky through one of the attic windows.
"You're not right about me, you know," he said.
"Not right about what?"
"You know what." Penance stared down at his sneakers and wiggled his toes about. "But, still: I'm kinda glad you're with me, Whip."
The girl only grunted indifferently, but Penance thought he could detect an emotion behind the grunt. That was enough to make him smile. He set his backpack by his side and unzipped the back compartment, allowing Galabeg's lifeless black eyes to survey the empty attic beyond.
The boy settled on his back and rolled to his side, getting comfortable. At first he faced away from Whip, but then he repositioned himself and faced her back. Instantly he knew that sleep wouldn't be easy, right now. He was tired, yeah, but he was also that special kind of tired, where you're too tired to actually fall asleep right away. He sighed, grunting in annoyance, and then he spent the next few minutes studying the contours of Whip's bare back.
The girl's milk chocolate skin glowed under the light of the moon, its smoothness broken in a few places by small raised mounds of flesh: healing scars. Penance blinked as he looked over them, like an astronomer mapping the flawed contours of Mars. As the girl's breathing turned into a steady rhythmic cadence he assumed she'd fallen asleep, and he dared to lightly trace a few of her more pronounced scars with a delicate finger, as if he were skirting the calm surface of a pond without breaking the tension.
"They bother you, or something?" Whip eventually spoke, not moving her body an inch.
Penance shook his head against his shirt-pillow.
"No," he muttered. "I like scars, actually. They, uh... interest me."
"Did I ever tell you that you're a weird kid?"
"Mmm-hmm. And thanks." The boy didn't stop tracing her back as he spoke. "It's just that, well, I don't get scars at all, you know, 'cause of being Immortal. The only scar I ever got, well, it was from before, and it was a really small one, over my eyebrow."
Whip turned her head toward Penance, blinking sleepily, and she squinted at his forehead. Penance pulled the dirty blond hair away from his forehead and motioned just above the scruffy hairs of his right eyebrow.
"It's a tiny little thing," he said. "Just a nub, really."
"What'd you get it from?"
"Jumping on my parents' bed." Penance smiled. "I kinda 'miscalculated' one of my jumps."
Whip snorted through her nose and shook her head.
"Sounds about right." She again faced the wall and lay her head down. "Well, most of the guys on my back there are kinda from the same thing; you don't learn to jump rooftops and scale brick walls without taking a few tumbles now and then."
"And the others?"
Whip didn't answer right away. When she did her bare shoulders shrugged and she shook her head.
"Well, every now and then I'd fall behind on my 'quota' for Ikey, the stuff I was supposed to bring to him. He'd sort us all out but good, any time anyone slacked-off on him."
Penance pulled his finger from the girl's back; he didn't respond.
"You wish you'd killed him now?" Whip asked.
"I don't know," Penance whispered. He quickly rolled away from the girl and curled his body up tighter, getting into a fetal ball. "Like I said: I'm just interested in scars, 'cause I don't get 'em."
"Not on your skin, you mean?"
Again Penance said nothing. After a moment he sat up and then got to his feet. He stuffed his balled-up shirt in his backpack, then kicked the pack on its side.
"Listen, Pen—"
"I'm not tired," he said, walking across the attic. "I'm gonna go downstairs and play with the exhibits a little."
He left the attic before Whip could say another word, tromping down the stairs and into the cooler air of the house proper. He passed the dining room and entered the parlor, where he found a piano resting in a far corner of the room. The boy sat at the bench and slowly opened the cover. He ran his fingers along the ivory keys, then tapped a few of them in rhythmic order, but without enough force to move the hammers. He whispered a tune to himself:
"And then Lord Arlen took his wife and sat her on his knee,
Saying, "Who do you like the best of us, Matty Groves or me?"
And then up spoke his own dear wife, never heard to speak so free..."
He stopped singing and removed his fingers from the keys. After a moment he closed the cover and hung his head, taking in the silence of the room around him. He could hear some birds cooing in the quiet darkness outside. In the back of his mind he wondered if they were—
Click.
The boy's eyes widened and the blood froze in his veins. Every muscle in his body tensed like steel rebar and he caught a breath in his throat: a noise pierced the quiet darkness.
It was a key turning in a lock.
The front door of the museum creaked open on squeaky hinges. Penance hopped off the piano bench, moving silently in his sneakers, and tried to make for the mahogany staircase. Loud footsteps scared him off, however, and he was barely able to duck beneath the dining room table before someone crept into the parlor, bearing a flashlight to illuminate the room.
"Somebody in here?" A nervous voice sounded. The man moved around the dining table, shining his flashlight all about, and then he got to one knee.
Penance bit his lower lip hard enough to make it bleed. He watched as the man leaned down to look under the table. The boy slowly shuffled back on his knees as the flashlight's yellow beam neared his body.
A metallic ping sounded out in the hallway, like a coin bounding across the ground. The man leapt up at this, making a startled yelp, and he pointed his flashlight toward the hallway.
"C— come on out, you hear? Backup's on the way, and you're only m— making it worse for yourself!"
Penance strained his eyes to see through the darkness; he noticed a certain head of dark hair peeking out from the staircase. Whip cautiously looked up from her crouching position, locking eyes with Penance. She motioned for him to move to the stairs.
The boy nodded and drew a silent breath, waiting for the man with the flashlight to move further down the hall. When he was far enough away Penance rolled out from under the table and silently stalked to the stairs in a low crouch. He made it to the bottom and quickly moved to join Whip at the top.
But the stairs were dark, and the man's flashlight had been very bright. Penance's eyes were adjusted to the dark, but simply not enough to navigate the stairs flawlessly. That's why he stumbled, and that's why his knee bumped the side railing with a massive thump.
Another nervous squeal from the man; that harsh yellow beam of light danced as he spun around with his flashlight; Penance, meanwhile, took the stairs in twos.
He could outrun the man very easily.
But he couldn't outrun the bullets.
Three blasts sounded in the hall, and the first two whizzed by the boy's head. The third caught him in the upper back, just to the left of his spine, and it might've been a bee sting for all the effect it had on him.
Penance was running on adrenaline, and he could run pretty far on it.
He joined Whip on the upper stairs and the pair raced along the second-floor hallway, heading for the stairway to the third floor. The girl noticed him clutching his chest.
"W— were you hit?" She whispered. "Jesus: were you hit?"
"It's fine," Penance shook his head as he ran, but that run quickly started devolving into an awkward, drunken sway. "I'm... I'm fine..."
They made it to the final staircase, but then Penance stumbled to his knees. He clutched at his chest with all his might, wincing. His vision faded in and out, and every beat of his racing heart sent another cascade of hot, roiling blood out from the spaces between his fingers. He might as well have been damming up a flowing spring with his bare hands.
He could run pretty far on adrenaline.
But even he had his limits.
"Sh— sh—" his body started convulsing, thrashing in erratic spasms even as Whip tried to support him.
"Pen? Pen? C'mon!" She begged.
Penance's eyes glassed over and his lips grew slack. He managed to get out one single word:
"Shit!"
With that he fell backwards, tumbling down the stairs like a heavy sack.
X
X
X
His body landed at the base of the second floor stairs, limp as a noodle. Whip tried to go after him, but suddenly the railing beside her head exploded in a shower of splinters. The blast of a handgun echoed in the stairway.
"C— come out or I'll blow your head off!" A voice sounded.
The girl respectfully declined the offer.
She ran to the attic in a dead sprint and then hunkered down, trembling like a cornered animal.
Slow footsteps outside the attic punctuated the silence, hammering the floor like nails in a coffin. Whip got up and raced to one of the attic's small windows, struggling to reach it. Moving on instinct she grabbed Penance's backpack and slung it down on the floor beneath one window. She used it as a makeshift stepping stool and managed to grasp the base of one window, batting at the latch until it released. With superhuman effort she pulled herself up and out the window, reaching the roof.
The heavily sloped roof.
She slid down the side of the house, uncontrolled, and but for the grace of God landed hard on top of one of the excavation machines being used in the renovation. The steel roof of the machine hit her shoulder with the force of a baseball bat, and when she rolled off of that her body hit the ground even harder.
She got to her feet and struggled to race away from the backyard, cradling her bruised flesh in agony, limping something fierce. She figured the man would go through the back door to chase her, and so she raced to the front yard as fast as she could.
She miscalculated, however.
A flashlight bobbed and weaved through the front yard, and Whip barely managed to dive into a nearby hedge at the edge of the property before the man raced by her body, his shoes missing her fingers by a centimeter. The girl rolled onto her back, fighting the urge to scream, and she prepared to get to her feet and run.
She missed her chance, though. By now, with the sound of gunshots piercing the night, curious onlookers began assembling across the street. A few minutes later the first police cars began pulling up, followed by an ambulance, and then officers stormed the museum.
The girl lay in the dirt, stock still, thanking her lucky stars for every minute no one searched for her there. As the minutes ticked by her nerves settled and the pain in her body ebbed. She was able to tell that nothing was broken, at least, and she was in one piece.
It could be worse, right?
Suddenly the museum door opened and a whole gaggle of cops emerged from the building, six in all. Between all six of them they struggled to keep their grip on a certain figure who thrashed, screamed and kicked at them every step of the way.
Whip's lips grew slack.
Penance, bathed in blood from his neckline to his bare navel, screamed like a banshee, fighting the men who held his arms, legs and midsection taut, struggling to no avail. The cops carried the boy into a waiting ambulance and forced him onto a stretcher, where they immediately handcuffed his wrists and ankles to the railings. Three cops stayed with him in the ambulance and the others dismounted, wiping their foreheads and exchanging puzzled glances with each other as the vehicle drove off in the night, disappearing down the street. Its wailing siren echoed, eventually fading into nothingness.
Whip watched the ambulance vanish, her face ineffable. The girl's lips trembled. She appeared incapable of saying anything at all.
But eventually she, too, managed to get out one single word:
"Shit!"
