"Gilt"

Burlington, New Jersey– 1984

He felt the heat of a pair of lips pressed to his.

Then he felt a surge of hot air forced into his lungs, ballooning his insides up with so much pressure he felt that he might burst.

Penance fought the face off his mouth, rolling to one side and belting out a string of sputtering coughs, hacking up foul water from his lungs.

Whip sat on her rear, pushed back by his efforts. He lay in the tall grass directly beneath the bridge from which he was thrown, still stark naked, the remains of braided rope still clinging to his neck like seaweed.

He coughed up one final mess of oily water, his body still trembling.

"Wh— what the hell were you doing?"

Whip, face still fresh with panic, motioned to Penance's body with a shaky hand.

"I— you... you were just so cold... not moving. Waxy-lookin'—"

Penance put both his palms to the grassy ground, slowly getting to his knees.

"Yeah. It's called 'being dead'." The boy spat in a vain effort to cleanse his mouth of the taste of river water. "Temporary inconvenience..."

He looked over at the girl; she was as sopping wet as he was, stripped down to her underwear. Her shoes and clothing lay scattered behind her, at the bridge's concrete base.

As the boy's faculties slowly came back to him he calmed down, remembering the particulars of his current situation.

"How did you—"

"Overheard some of the cops at the museum talk about taking you down to the station after checking you out at the hospital. By the time I got there I saw that federal agent shoving you into the cop car. I managed to slip into his trunk when he wasn't paying attention."

Penance again spat into the tall grass, but then he narrowed his eyes and looked back over at the girl.

"How do you know he was a federal agent?"

The girl sighed through her nose and looked off to one side; unfortunately Penance wasn't in the mood for dramatic pauses at the moment.

"Whip?" He barked.

"He's the one Ikey was workin' with to snatch you—"

"You met him, before? He saw you?"

"I— yes, but that was before the deal was made, alright? He was nosing around the neighborhood right after you offed the priest, and he asked me if I knew anything about the killing."

Penance grit his teeth; he noticed his backpack sitting beside Whip's strewn clothing, and he wordlessly got up and tromped over to it.

"Hey, back then I tried throwing him off your scent, okay?" Whip scooted around in the grass to face the boy. "And seriously: are you gonna throw all that in my face again—"

"That's not the problem," Penance retrieved a pair of boxers from his backpack and quickly stepped into them.

"Then what is? Other than me riskin' my hide drowning to save your life, I mean?"

"To 'stop me from being dead', you mean?" The boy took in their surroundings, scanning the weed-choked riverbank and the dense trees radiating all around the ugly concrete foot of the bridge. "Where are we?"

"Jersey. Technically," Whip said.

Penance motioned to the bridge above them, moving his finger to the other side of the riverbank.

"Philly's back that way?"

Whip nodded.

Penance looked first at the water, letting out an involuntary little shudder, then he grabbed his backpack and started wandering around the foot of the bridge. He circled the large concrete base as Whip scrambled to get to her feet and retrieve her clothing.

"What're you doing? Where're you going?"

Penance stopped at a small maintenance hatch set against the concrete column, held fast with a rusty chain. It had just enough give, however, to inch open, and the hole was barely enough to accommodate a small, skinny body.

Most of one, anyway.

"Up," Penance said.

The boy wedged open the hatch as far as it would go. He tossed his backpack inside and then strained with effort as he entered the crawlspace, legs first. He cut up his flesh something fierce as he forced himself inside. When he was done he left a mess of blood and torn skin on the rusted metal hatch.

And the remains of his boxer shorts, too.

"Son of a bitch," the boy mumbled to himself, shaking his head in the darkness.

X

X

X

He ignored Whip banging on the hatch, demanding he come out, and within about ten minutes he'd managed to scale up the innards of the bridge column— extra careful not to catch his replacement boxers on a ladder rung or a bent piece of metal— and finally reached a small maintenance walkway spanning the underside of the bridge.

Traffic was again moving above him, rattling the dark underside of the bridge with a regular, rhythmic quake. Metal struts lined either side of the tight walkway, making the sunlight fall in oppressive bands like light shining through jail bars.

He made his way along the narrow underside, undeterred by the rattling, the tight confines or the scattered and irregular sunlight.

A lithe body swinging over from one of the struts and blocking his path, however, did give him pause. Whip, now fully-clothed, managed to slap the side of his head with her wet braid.

"How in the world—"

"You can jump rooftops," Whip explained, "you can clamber around the outside of a bridge easy enough."

"Get out of my way," the boy demanded.

"Make me," the girl narrowed her eyes, her freckled face contorting with angry creases.

"You know that I can," he growled.

"That fed tossed you around like a little ragdoll. Is he what you are? Immortal?"

Penance nodded.

"Then why didn't he... you know..."

"Take my head?" Penance asked.

The girl nodded.

"He doesn't work like that..."

Penance nudged past Whip and moved on, ignoring her command for him to stop.

"You can't follow me across the water, Whip," Penance yelled back at her. "You need to disappear; get away from here."

"Why?"

"He won't be looking for me, now; he's looking for you."

Whip pressed herself past Penance and blocked his path, putting her hands on his shoulders and forcibly stopping him. When the boy looked up at her, teeth bared, she returned the dark look.

"Either break my wrists, or toss me from this bridge, or drop the silent treatment and give me some answers, kid!"

Penance squished his lips together as if he'd just bitten into a lime; he looked to one side, staring down at the Delaware.

"His name is Black Hat," Penance explained. "That's the name he uses, anyway, like I use 'Penance'."

"'Black Hat'?" Whip blinked. "Well, what the hell is his deal, exactly?"

Penance pushed the girl away from him and moved a couple steps past her. He didn't keep going, however. He figured that Whip was at least entitled to some answers. She was the one being hunted now, after all.

"I'm his deal," the boy explained, pressing one thumb to his naked sternum. "I'm his 'sport', I guess you could call it. He plays the Game, sure, but he's not interested in killing me; with me it's strictly 'catch and release'."

The boy turned around, crossing his arms over his chest.

"Whenever he manages to find me he kills everyone I've gotten to know. He scrubs everyone out of whatever 'life' I'm living at the time. And he rubs my nose in it. He—" Penance glared at his feet, tightening his arms around his torso, "he killed my foster mother back in Baltimore, right after I left..."

"Why?"

"We have a history," Penance mumbled.

"What kind of his—" Whip cut herself off, eyes going wide. "Wait a minute! Holy shit!"

"Connecting the dots?" Penance took a step towards the girl. "He won't stop with my foster mother, Whip. He knows who you are, and he knows that I like you."

The boy paused as Whip's eyes met his. He felt a small blush creep over his cheeks as he looked away.

"He knows that you're my friend. You know what I mean..."

"He's gonna kill me, then?"

"If he finds you." Penance pointed down the opposite direction of the walkway. "Which is why you need to get as far away from here as you can."

"Where are you going?"

"That's none of your business—"

"If I've got a maniac cop on my tail I think it totally is, actually. And you still haven't told me what this whacko's deal is. Why is he doing this?"

Penance turned away from the girl.

"He's my... he's my hairshirt."

The girl scrunched her lips.

"Your what?"

Penance looked over his shoulder at her.

"Hairshirt. You know—"

"No, I don't. What the hell is a 'hair shirt'?"

Penance rolled his eyes, again turning to face the girl.

"Back in the day religious people sometimes wore these shirts with little barbs in 'em. They'd catch on their skin and rub against them all day long."

"Not the most comfortable fashion..."

"That's the point," the boy said. "It caused them suffering: the suffering they rightly deserved for all the times they were sinful and wicked." Penance looked off to one side. "Black Hat... he comes after me like that, making me suffer, and for his pleasure, but that doesn't mean it's undeserved. It's punishment: the idea that at any time, on any particular day, of any particular 'life' I'm living, I could catch a barb from the hairshirt: have him find me and have everything upended and ruined, have the people I care about made to suffer. My suffering, well, I don't mind that so much, and if that were all there was then I'd be fine with it. Whip, I earned my immortality by being a wicked and sinful thing. What we are, all of us immortals, is godless and unholy. Now me, I complain about the sentence I've been given, yeah..."

The boy took a few steps forward, getting within a foot of Whip's face, and he looked up at her with dagger eyes.

"…but that doesn't mean I necessarily disagree with the verdict."

Penance turned away dramatically, again looking down at the sedate waters of the Delaware, and he let a nice pause come between them. He didn't like to toot his own horn in general, but seriously: even he had to admit that was one damn-fine little speech. The stuff of goosebumps, really. He gave Whip a moment to let it all sink in.

But it didn't quite 'sink' the way he wanted.

The sound began very faintly, so low that he didn't even know what it was at first. After a moment, though, the girl's chuckles culminated in a long, hearty belly-laugh.

Penance faced her, head tilted. When Whip was finally able to look up at him, still laughing—tears forming in her eyes, even— she shook her head.

"Are you fucking kidding me?" She managed through her laughter.

"What?"

"Do you even hear yourself, kid? Christ! Back in school they taught us that the Earth goes around the sun. Maybe you forgot about that, bein' born in the dark ages, and all—"

Penance grit his teeth.

"It wasn't the 'dark ages'. And we knew about that when I was born—"

"'Cause to hear you tell it everything revolves around Penance Cameron!"

The boy tilted his head to the other side, like a dog contemplating an optical illusion.

"I... what are you talking about? All I'm saying is that Black Hat is a punishment—"

"Black Hat is a God-damned psychotic killer," Whip interrupted. "Plain and simple! You're trying to nail your own scrawny little body to a cross and make this whole thing about you—"

"It is about me—"

"Mmm. It's about you letting that fool 'Catholic guilt' shit make you think you're the center of the whole fucking universe. A killer can't be killing 'cause he's a psycho, no! He's gotta do it out of a 'divine calling' demanding, specifically, that you be shit on. You didn't get your immortality from chance, or something you don't fully understand, or that you got it for reasons that you don't know. Oh, no! It's all perfectly understandable: all of divine creation have it out for little Penance Cameron, and he's squirming in their crosshairs." Whip had been making mocking, wide motions with her arms as she spoke, but when she was finished she leaned in close to Penance with a face of stone. "It's all... about...you!"

He felt the blood pounding in his head. Penance released some air through his nose; for all his rising anger it might have been hot enough to boil water on contact.

"All about me? What I'm saying is that I'm unholy, and sinful," he growled. "I'm saying that I'm like a worm—"

"And that's what gets you off," Whip retorted. "Some people take their guilt and their shame and they hide it, best that they can. Some people work through it, trying to rid themselves of it. But you? You wear your shame like a suit of gold armor!"

By now his face must've been redder than a tomato. Penance briefly found himself too angry to even speak.

"Do you understand," Whip whispered, "what I'm tryin' to tell you, kid?"

"No," he growled. "Think you'll understand when I tell you what you can do to yourself?"

He spun on the balls of his bare feet and started moving down the walkway as fast as he could. Whip didn't follow him at first, and so he figured he might just be able to put enough distance between them before doing something rash.

Like actually throwing her off the damn bridge.

"I killed my brother."

The boy's bare feet skidded to a halt on the grimy metal path.

He turned around, blinking. Whip met his gaze, eyes trembling. She gave him a brief little nod.

"It's true," she whispered.

"You said that he fell in the bathroom." Penance took a small step towards her.

Again Whip nodded.

"I wasn't lying. I just didn't tell you why he fell. You remember me talkin' about his problems: his palsy and all?"

Penance nodded.

"I told you how hard it was for him, growing up and makin' friends, fitting in. Even besides the medical stuff, he was just the type to escape into his fantasy and sci-fi shit. Well, he made a real effort to put himself out there, be around people, and even got himself a fine-looking date for prom. He was so excited. Whole family was, really." Whip's voice cracked but the girl bit her tongue. She continued, bearing a faint warble in her voice. "Him and me, growing up, it wasn't really easy on either of us. He had his obvious problems, and me? Usually it's the older brother what helps the little siblings, right? Well, it was the opposite with us. Had to do so much for him, and all the time, 'cause even the simplest things weren't so simple, not with his problems.

"Bein' a fool kid you can start to feel neglected, and put upon. Not only do your parents ignore you, much of the time, but you're expected to pitch in and dote on your dear brother's every simple whim. That's how a fool kid gets to feel, at least."

Whip wiped at her eyes and drew a sharp breath.

"Well, on that day we fought. I was in one of my moods, and I was fed up. But him, he needed help gettin' ready for his fancy prom, and we being the only two in the house, well, I was on deck as the helping hand. But I got mad at him, angrier than I'd ever been, in fact. To have to lift and move him around in the bath was just a bridge way too far. So I tell him off and go running out into the street, trying to get myself lost. When I was ready I got myself found, again, walking back in the front door. Cops 'n medics were already there, and then I see my parents in the bathroom, standing over my brother's body..."

Penance, now several feet closer to the girl, swallowed an uncomfortable lump in his throat.

"I mean," he whispered, "Whip, that's really not your fa—"

"Don't. And anyway you didn't see what their faces were like when they looked up at me; how they looked at me. And also, due respect," the girl icily grumbled while wiping the last remains of water from her eyes, "a guy that puts himself up on a cross and wears that 'heroic suffering' shit as well as you do doesn't get to say what is, or isn't, someone's 'fault'."

Whip took a few steps towards the boy, until they were barely a foot apart, and she bared her teeth at him.

"Bottom line is that my brother died, and my selfish choice is the reason for that. Now, you say that all you immortals get that way 'cause you're all so 'sinful and wicked', right? Well answer me this: if you were to run me through with that little knife of yours right now, what do you think are the odds that I could get right back up?"

Penance weathered the girl's death gaze, never taking his eyes off her.

"A mistake, like yours, doesn't make you what someone like me is, Whip."

The girl scoffed, pushing the boy back.

"Yeah. Yeah, you're right. You are. You're real special, kid. You keep telling yourself that. And you keep actin' like you're more than human, by pretending that you're less than human!"

"That... doesn't even make—"

"Sense?" Whip cut him off. "'Sense' would be you getting off this whole martyrdom trip and figuring out that there's nothing 'special' about you; you're just a fucked up little boy in a shit-ton of trouble, and you need help."

Whip turned on her heels and stormed back the way they'd come.

"But no: you go off and be 'special', all by yourself. Don't bother even thinking you're anything like us lowly humans and our dull-as-dishwater problems!" She pointed back at him as she stormed off. "And of course don't ever think about letting someone try to do a damn thing for you. After all, they might end up getting under your skin... if you weren't wearing that nice, shiny armor!"

She raced off, but briefly turned to face the boy with a red face and bared teeth, having thought of one more pertinent piece of erudite information to add to her argument.

"Fuckhead!"

Penance watched Whip storm off, and he drew a long breath. He looked over his shoulder at a half-open compartment on his backpack; Galabeg's marble eyes barely peeked out of the shadows.

"I tell her that everything's my fault," Penance said, "and that she's not as bad as she thinks she is..."

Galabeg helpfully stared up at him with its usual lively expression.

"Yeah," Penance whispered. "I get the feeling you're right..."

He looked over at the rapidly retreating Whip.

"Somehow I think I really fucked up..."