Neo-Cancer

Usually not one for gut feelings or intuition, Wolf still had a firm belief he would be dead by the end of the day.  Ripper wasn’t giving him any time to recuperate from last night’s ordeal, and Wolf was certain the gang’s leader wouldn’t let him live much longer.  Fine.

His leg was sore, and as he walked he could barely hold up his head, but he was careful to keep the others from seeing how bad things were.  A constant wind rushed down the basement tunnel as the Neon Knights dutifully escorted Wolf to the place of his next torment.  While his hands were not bound, there was no escape.  Just behind him marched Chimmie, big grin on his face, the obedient soldier who recorded everything with his video goggles.

The previous night’s ordeal in the cemetery was too easy, Wolf knew, and for that Ripper would punish him.  He looked over to Kenny who had a black eye and a cheek mottled with bruises from their fight with the corpse raiders.  

Despite sore muscles from the days of abuse, Wolf had been lucky last night, scaring away most of the feral punks who made careers out of digging up and robbing the countless coffins in the many cemeteries scattered through the derelict city.  Wolf realized it was going to be easy after he had planted a nice round kick to the throat of the biggest of them, then hammered with punches until the shaggy man ran away with the others.  The corpse raiders have no fight in them when it comes down to it.  

After they got what they needed in the mausoleum, Wolf had to help Kenny through the crypt maze as they hid from the splinter drones before making their escape.  If he didn’t feel like such crap he would still be laughing at Kenny’s creative way of throwing the drones off their tracks to avoid being sliced apart. 

A group of eight Knights escorted Wolf and Kenny down the tunnel.  No one spoke.  Escape from the torments that awaited would be impossible.  Wolf was hopeful today’s trial would be his last, but he wished the rules allowed him at least a few days to heal.  If today was the day he was going to die, he wanted to be standing upright when he jumped off into the Eternal Dream.  

As he passed down endless stone corridors, a stray memory snagged Wolf from when he was a kid, hiding from the rain in these very tunnels and playing in his imagination for hours.  One time he raked his knuckles bloody over the jagged brick, waving a branch while pretending to sword fight; he recalled Ripper laughing at his pain, the fiendish smile twisting across the child’s innocent face as he playfully lunged in for the kill.  All day, the boys played at fighting in the tunnels and on the sidewalks above, stopping to beg money from each adult who passed them on their way to work or home.

The Knights’ heavy footsteps shuffled beside Wolf as though from statues coaxed to life.  They had orders for silence.  My wonderful friends, he ironically thought.  He found it hard to believe he had known them almost his entire life.  Chimmie, Beach, Jabber . . . Only Fleck whose back he stared into was new to him.  The change from neighborhood child to adult had been more of a cultural mutation than a natural act, he understood, with everyone quick to adopt a persona, a wardrobe, and a code name.  

He doubted if any of them remembered being kids, playing Screaming Dead for hours in the basements of Trinity Court, or pretending they were pirates while looting the storage lockers, naively experiencing the world and what it surrendered to them, never knowing that someday imagination would fade beyond reach.  

Do they even care any more about those memories, about staying outside during the summer rain, getting soak to the shoes?  Childhood play fighting had evolved into boastful adolescent brawling just to keep up reputation, which quickly became the desperate, brutal fighting of teenagers trying to stay alive when the neighborhood had been held hostage by its government.  Wolf was sad so many years later it would come down to this final day of cruelty for him.

They passed through an old storage tunnel lined with slatted walls that secured the belongings of all those who once lived in the vast tenement complex above, those who had fled the city years back.  Here was where Wolf had found a guitar that, after he taught himself how to play, had changed his life for a time, but he pushed away the useless memory, didn’t want it any more.  An infinite row of yellow bulbs lured the Knights onward.  

These abandoned storage units had been rummaged through so often that now they seemed nothing more than heaps of old junk and piles of laundry.  One wall was beaten down to allow entrance, and Wolf saw several small children lounging amongst the abandoned furniture as if playing house.  When the Knights filed past them, the children jumped to their feet and clung to the wooden slats to stare, gawking at the small army that commanded their silence and respect.  Wolf watched them watching him with their wide eyes.  

As he passed by a chest of drawers and a dresser, Wolf caught sight of his own face in a mirror.  His was the skeletal face of cancer, Neo-cancer that marked its victims with the same death’s head mask of white skin stretched thin over raw bone.  The shades he wore to protect his eyes did nothing to dilute the image.  

The children still stared as if amazed, not at all afraid of him like so many of the others on the block.  He could not help but give an honest smile.  One of the little girls giggled, another playfully shrieked and ran away, and he felt warmed by having fed their imaginations, even if in a dark way.  He had once heard that children need limited doses of darkness in their lives if they were to build up immunities for the horrors in their lives to come.

After a decade of his disease, lost years devoured by cancer hate, Wolf clearly saw with full potency all he had lost since he had been forced to grow up.  Running through the basement tunnels.  Climbing over the rooftops.  Finding treasures in the storage units.  Playing in the streets and taunting the cars.  Seeing the colors his cancer now denied him.  Imagining a future.  Dreaming aloud.  

Now, back again in the old neighborhood, detached from the HIVE, he hoped to escape the chatter of digitally engineered dreams, the fantasies that poisoned people’s lives by reinforcing solemn servitude.  Here he might perhaps find a way to think again, find a way to sink again into the things he feared he had lost.  To see as a child again . . . 

No.  Won’t happen, he realized looking at the grey tunnels through which he was led.  With the cruel taste of Time in his mouth, Wolf wished there existed a way he could have simply refused to grow up.  He took a deep breath, reality enveloping him once more in the present.  He wished he could wish away all the wishes.  This was real.

At the end of the storage tunnel was an archway that once held what appeared to Wolf like the door into a bank vault.  Down another short hall, he spotted a flight of steps leading up and out of the basement tunnels.  At last, Wolf saw grey daylight.  With Kenny still beside him, he followed Fleck up the stairs, the other Knights close behind.  

Down a short tiled hallway and through a set of double doors, Wolf stepped out into the courtyard of Trinity Court, the castle-like tenement complex he grew up in.  At once a massive roar of cheering people rose up and echoed throughout the brick courtyard.  He saw faces in almost all the windows that looked onto the scene.  The noise was so loud that Wolf’s digital hearing sputtered in staccato feedback, threatening to fail.  He was led to the center of the large courtyard.

When he had been a boy, Wolf used to enjoy playing in this yard, running between the abundant trees, racing over the grass and leaping over the hedge rows.  Wolf remembered spending most of his time out here, sitting on the benches now long gone, running around, waiting for his sister to come home from school. Then, when he was a little older, he would come here every day after school before all the schools shut down.  Whenever he was by himself he would stare up the brick walls and wait for newly made clouds to slip across the sky.  

The courtyard had been deep green back then, though it was dying just the same as the future rushed in and destroyed everything that ever lived in this magical place.  The trees now stood limbless and dead.  No grass.  The dirt was speckled with broken glass.  In the center of the courtyard stood a massive, dead tree that was now Ripper’s throne.  Within the hollowed out face, a high-backed chair of sorts had been hewn. Wolf remembered the many times he broke off new branches from the top of that very tree to make pretend swords, or bats to hit acorns across the courtyard.  Now above the wooden seat rose a trunk that stretched out its half arms to the cloudless sky.  

What was left of the tree had been sprayed with bright neon colors  registering to Wolf’s eyes as electric grey.  Ripper sat waiting for them upon his throne, lounging back with legs stretched out and arms folded in his lap.   His leering smile welcomed Wolf and Kenny as they were led up to him. 

At Ripper’s feet, a tattered woman carefully lit votive candles beside the neon tree, chanting in an Asian tongue Wolf now only heard from the older residents.  The regular citizens of Conall Street revered and idolized Ripper and his gang of Neon Knights.  They were the ones who brought peace to the streets after the riots against the government over a decade ago.  They were the ones who smuggled food and medicine into the forsaken neighborhood.  And they were the ones who fastidiously managed the commerce of sin that trickled in from the domed city to keep the streets alive.  

The woman bowed to Ripper, crying and chanting, setting bullet casings beside the votive that was nothing more than a jar with a wick and street oil.  But Ripper just ignored her, eyes locked on the approaching men.  

Standing on each side of Ripper and his crude throne were two of the Knights’ guardsmen, holding modified Bushman assault rifles.  One of the guards pushed away the old woman who had worn out her welcome, and she pleaded mercy from him as she backed away and disappeared in the gathering crowd.  Several weeks worth of glass jars surrounded Ripper’s tree, most filled with rain water but the few with covers still flickered.  

Ever since he had returned to the city, Wolf found it disturbing the residents of Conall Street looked upon the Knights as if they were some kind of saints or redeemers.  In this world of abandoned childhoods and crooked livelihoods, the Neon Knights still kept order in the streets, Wolf had to admit, even if that order danced on the edge of chaos.

Ripper’s spiky hair appeared to glow.  He thrived on the edge of chaos.  His impish expression indicated he had something unique in mind for the day’s festivities.  

“Wait here,” said Fleck, pointing to a spot four yards from where Ripper sat, then Fleck and the others walked up to Ripper and took places to either side of their leader.

Wolf was surprised they weren’t told to kneel.  Ripper stared into him, bemused.  Wolf had no time for this bullshit formality, and he daringly stepped away from Kenny and walked right up to Ripper.  Ripper rewarded him with a tight smile.

“—so then— what is to be my final trick—” Wolf asked. His electronic voice buzzed from the coin-sized speaker hanging below his throat.  

Ripper remained silent, staring into him.  Wolf sensed the gang leader’s thoughts smoldering with schemes upon schemes.  In the dull daylight of the courtyard, a slight rain drizzled on Wolf’s face.  He felt each drop as acutely as a needle sliding into his skin.  This is now, he reminded himself.  This is real.  Today is the day I die.  Wolf was okay with the idea.