9.

9.

Trent leaves the hospital and boards a bus for the West Side. We have traveled through this area often with Bill, its avenues like the treads of a scuffed and shit-speckled sole. The sidewalks fronted by grimy restaurants and dim stores, filled with people sucked dry and wrinkled by their problems. In a year or two, the luxury condos and trendy coffee shops will arrive, and these crowds will need to find new, worse places to live. As an entity who suffers from what the news calls “housing insecurity,” we sympathize with their plight.  

In contrast with the shabby block around it, Tricky’s Tacos is shiny red and white, with a mural of a sparkling-blue skull on its bricked flank. It’s that dead time between lunch and dinner, and there’s nobody waiting to order at the stainless-steel counter. A bored lady sits behind the register. In the back, a cook grunts as he runs a scraper over the smoking griddle. It smells like charred meat and Fabuloso.

Even without reading Trent’s thoughts, we realize he intends to pull one of Bill’s infamous ‘inspections’ on these people, probably because he needs more cash. Oh, you blithering idiot, this will end in tears. The kid lacks Bill’s deep, nuanced experience in screwing people over. Looping a tendril around a random nerve, we tug as hard as we can, hoping we can knock out one of Trent’s knees or make him vomit. Instead, his left eye twitches as he plows toward the counter, fearful but determined. We must learn what does what in this new body.

Trent’s heart hammers, but we have no intention of pumping him with dopamine or any other compound that might convince him this is a good idea.

Trent arrives at the register. “Hello.”

The lady looks up, her round face creased by more than age—it’s the deep sadness that comes with a lifetime of backbreaking work for little reward.

“I, uh, you know my uncle, Bill?” Trent flashes Bill’s business card. “I believe you, um, had an arrangement with him of some sort?”  

“Arrangement?” The lady’s hand disappears beneath the counter.

“Yeah, you know,” Trent points at the sheet of paper taped to the establishment’s front door, which has a green ‘B’ on it. “The, ah, health inspection thing.”

“Health thing?”

“Yeah, ah. You gave him some money for that.” He points at the sliver of kitchen floor visible from the counter, stained with the crushed remains of a roach. “Because there’s no way that gets a passing grade . . . ”

The lady’s hand whips into view, clutching a sawed-off pool-cue handle. She smashes the heavy wood into Trent’s extended forearm, bending but not cracking the bone. A firestorm of pain shreds his nerves, washes over us white and hot. We would shriek if we could. Trent does the screaming for us as he stumbles back, clutching his wounded arm. The lady swings at him again, missing his skull by inches.

Trent retreats for the door, whimpering in agony. Although we could squeeze out some dopamine for him, part of us wants him to really feel this. Pain is sometimes the best cure for stupid behavior. Besides, we’re busy with another mission: threading our tendrils into three promising networks of nerves and tendons between Trent’s neck and shoulder.

The lady has no urge to let the issue rest. She waddles from behind the counter, tapping the pool cue against her calloused palm, her wrinkled face flexing like a fist. “We don’t do that no more,” she mutters. “You don’t have no hold on us, devil.”

“I’m not a devil, okay? I made a mistake. I’m sorry.” Trent rips off his fake pearls and swings them in the air. “Here, take this.”

The lady swings the pool cue, sending the pearls across the restaurant. Trent shrieks and presses against the closed door, hands over his face. The woman works her sweaty grip on the wood, prepping to whack Trent’s head into the corner pocket, and—

We find ourselves pinned on the antlers of a dilemma. On one sharp point, we desire more pain for our boy, so he learns better. On the other, this lady is surprisingly strong for someone who seems a million years old, and if she manages to plow the pool cue into Trent’s face, she could do some serious damage to our home. Fortunately, we’ve woven our tendrils through all three of those nerve bundles, and we tug.

Trent gags, farts, and strikes out with his right arm, gripping the pool cue as the lady winds it behind her head. She tugs, trying to break free from Trent’s grip, but we exert more force than Trent even knew he had. We sense Trent’s confusion crackling down the pipeline from his brain, the first jolt of fear as he realizes his body is no longer entirely under his control.

We pull Trent’s arm back, wrenching the weapon from the lady’s grasp. The cook emerges from the kitchen, gripping a knife so large it qualifies as a machete, although the look on his pockmarked face is one of almost sublime boredom, as if this sort of thing happens a few times per day. Perhaps it does. If you can depend on humans for anything, it’s stupidity and lunacy in equal measure.

“I’m sorry!” Trent whines. “I don’t know what’s happening!”

The cook is a little too close for comfort so we twitch the correct nerve, hurling the pool cue at him as hard as we can. It is nicely balanced, twirling end-over-end with no loss in altitude, so it hits the cook in the middle of the sternum. The man is a hulk in a stained, too-tight apron, and so he’s more startled than hurt, but at least he drops the knife.

“I didn’t mean to do that!” Trent tells him. “I’m so sorry!”

The lady, undeterred by this odd turn of events, pops a rabbit jab that takes Trent in the jaw, sparking pain down to his lower back. Trent’s vision wavers, and we squirt a touch of adrenaline into his blood, along with some dopamine, which should keep him from panicking or blacking out until we can extract ourselves from this hilariously miserable situation.

The lady launches another blow, twisting her hips to put some force into it, and we swing up our right arm to block the punch. The impact vibrates Trent’s body like a tuning folk.

“I don’t understand!” Trent says.

Since we know the bundle that controls the right arm, we find its analogy on the left and tug. Trent shoves the lady back (“Sorry!”), giving him the space he needs to tear open the front door. On the sidewalk, he bounces off a random passerby before smacking into a parked car, which drives the wind out of his lungs. His leopard-print jacket is torn around the right pocket, his left shoe untied and threatening to flop off.  

The restaurant door bursts open, and the lady plods out. The sunlight glints off the cook’s huge knife in her left hand.

We dump more adrenaline into Trent’s blood, hoping it will power him down the street before she can carve him up, but his body is tapped out. For the first time since our wild ride with Frank, we feel the stirrings of true fear. If Trent is killed, our chances of jumping into this lady’s body are slim. And even if we managed to squirt our way into her mouth, something tells us her badass immune system would instantly vaporize us.

Trent shoves away from the parked car and stumbles into the street, wheezing through bruised lungs. A car honks and swerves, missing him by inches. He’s gained some much-needed distance, but this lady refuses to give up. She shifts sideways and squeezes through the narrow opening between parked cars, hollering about thieves and righteousness and God in hoarse Spanglish. Pedestrians take one look at her blade and run in the opposite direction.

Meanwhile, Trent has recovered enough to shamble down the middle of the street at a slightly faster pace, maybe enough to stay ahead of the lady until she gives up or someone calls the police. But if we’ve learned anything in the past few minutes, we’re dealing with a determined geriatric, and she might prove willing to shuffle a marathon in order to chop Trent’s head off.

Rather than use his newfound lung capacity to run faster, though, Trent pulls out his phone. We consider using our control of his right arm to toss the device away—it’s not the time for calls, to put it mildly—but he might have the germ of a good idea here. Dodging an onrushing car, he flicks through his contacts until he arrives at one marked ‘Blue Jean’ and hits it.

Whoever’s on the other end answers on the second ring: “Yo.”

“Listen, it’s me.” Trent takes a deep breath. “Where are you?”

“Trent?” It sounds like a woman.

“Where are you?”

“Don’t yell at me!”

Trent glances over his shoulder at the lady picking up a little momentum. The sight of her grinning at him, the knife easy in her grip, makes his rectum clench painfully. “Sorry,” he gasps, pumping as much energy as he can into his own stride. “I’m in trouble. Pick me up?”

“Um.” There’s a messy history in that long pause. “Sure, where are you?”

“Running south on Broadway,” Trent says. “Just passed tenth.”

“Okay. I’m in the pizza car, okay? Stay on Broadway.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know, jerk. Two minutes?”

“Hurry.” Shoving the phone back in his pocket, Trent tries to accelerate, but his knees are aching, along with his throat. We do as much as we can, squeezing out chemicals and choking off pain receptors, but it’s like trying to plug holes in the hull of the Titanic right after the iceberg hit.

We might not make it through the next two minutes.