Seraphina
The register’s digital display was a row of jaundiced 7-segments, flickering even though the sun through the window was still white-hot and unrepentant. The liquor store smelled of old mop water, bleach, and the ghost of cheap whiskey. It was the kind of place where the owner stapled up cardboard Shamrock decorations year-round, thinking they bought him some kind of absolution. I hovered in front of the vodka shelf, reading the same three labels over and over while trying not to count the security cameras.
It was late afternoon—the dead stretch where everyone in Los Alamos is still at the lab, everyone else still at the bar. I’d made it home after yesterday after the ankle and biker incident, and called in sick to work today. The need to self-medicate overrode the twinge of self-loathing. I held the bottle up to the window and watched the light warp through the glass. Maybe it looked poetic, maybe desperate. The store clerk was not impressedeither way; he eyed me with the crimped expression of someone who'd memorized the steps for a robbery, but never expected to survive one.
My phone buzzed with a weather alert—severe wind incoming. Not a warning, just a fact. I fished out my wallet and limped toward the counter, careful to keep my limp measured and non-dramatic. The clerk—face like an old potato, chin bristling with white hairs—rang me up without a word, just a cough to punctuate each beep. I offered my card, left hand still shaking a little from the residual adrenaline.
DECLINED, the register said, as if shouting it to the security footage.
I tried again. Same result. The potato frowned, shifting his gaze from the bottle to my ID. “Maybe you wanna try a different one?” he said, voice soft but not sympathetic.
There was a line behind me now. Two men in hooded sweatshirts, a woman with a basket of boxed wine and Red Bulls, and—worst-case scenario—him, standing apart but impossible to ignore. Black leather jacket with the scythe insignia. The burn-scarred jaw. Bloody Scythes, in the flesh. I felt his attention like a lead blanket. He didn’t say a word, but the silence behind me turned hostile, as if it might outlast the hangover I was about to buy.
My pulse went polyrhythmic. I fumbled through the wallet, found the emergency lab credit card I’d sworn never to use for personal purchases, and hesitated. The potato stared. The Bloody Scythe stepped up, his boots making no noise but his shadow doubling the room’s gravity.
“Come on, lady,” one of the hooded men said.
I shifted my glasses on my nose, feeling the red working up my neck and into my face. “I’m sorry. Just a moment.”
“The fuck, woman, c’mon,” the other hooded man said.
I didn’t look back, not even when I heard his voice.
“You two might want to shut the fuck up and let her pay,” he said.
I hesitated and turned in time to see him push his jacket back, showing the gun beneath.
“Here,” he said. He laid a twenty on the counter, not looking at me or the clerk. His voice was the same as in the canyon—detached, unhurried, as if observing a low-stakes experiment. “Let the lady get her medicine.”
I went cold and hot at once. “I don’t need assistance from someone under federal investigation,” I said, loud enough that everyone in the store heard. It was a gamble, but in this town, science trumped fear. Usually.
He gave me a slow look, the kind reserved for broken hardware or statistical outliers. “Didn’t ask if you needed it. Just making sure you get it.”
His tone was clinical, almost bored, but I could hear the flex beneath it. The clerk took the bill and rang it up. I hated being indebted to anyone, especially someone with a reputation for turning debts into leverage.
I slid the lab card across anyway, watching the clerk’s eyes bounce from the embossed Department of Energy seal to my name. Dr. Seraphina Dalton. It was accepted instantly, printing out a receipt half a meter long. I made sure everyone in the store saw it, including the biker. I signed my name with the finest, most legible print, and said, “I’m good, thanks.” Then I grabbed the bottle and limped for the door, pulse still riotous.
Outside, the wind had picked up. It snatched at my hair and at the bag with the vodka, rattling it against my shin like a warning. The sky was thin and mean, the sun carving the shadow of the liquor store sign straight through the windshield of my car. I unlocked the car with numb fingers.
I’m not really sure why I did it, but I looked back at the liquor store and caught him staring at me as he stood at the register. Atthat moment, exactly three things happened. I dropped my keys, and in my haste to pick them up, I dropped the bottle of vodka and watched the bottle shatter, sending my self-medication into a spiderweb’s sprawl. The third thing to happen made the first two things insignificant.
The black van screeched to a stop, and two masked men jumped out from the door that opened up on the side of the van. A part of me relaxed, the part that thought they were robbing the liquor store. But then reality set in when they started in my direction.
I screamed, but there was nobody around to hear. For the first time since I began working as a scientist in the National Laboratory, my work had put my life in danger.
4
Nitro
The bottle of Bulleit sat in my palm, the weight and shape as familiar as a socket wrench or a loaded mag. Even the color was the right kind of orange—like det cord, or the last light before blackout. I didn't really want the bourbon, not for the taste. It was a pretext, a ritual. The guy at the register eyed me with the same brand of dread he reserved for high schoolers and toothless regulars, and I got the feeling that if I stopped coming in, he'd have to invent a new reason to fear for his life.
The transaction was nearly finished when I caught the movement outside. Not the lazy drift of wind or trash, but the jarring stutter of a black van pulling curbside, grill hungry and nostrils flared. The sun on the windshield was blinding, but not enough to mask the violence of the door slamming open. Two men in dark hoods, one thick and slow, the other twitchy and precise, spilled out with practiced efficiency. They angled for the blue sedan at the edge of the lot—the same make and year asSeraphina Dalton’s, still shaking from her last minute of panic in the parking spot.
She never got the door open. The thick one caught her at the hinge, crushing her wrist in his hand. She shrieked—short, sharp, then all breath. The second man yanked the passenger door wide and, with the indifference of an airport baggage handler, hauled her feet-first into the open cavity of the van. Her heels banged against the concrete, her glasses skittering into the gutter, and she twisted hard enough to bloody her own mouth against his knuckles.
I didn't even feel the bottle drop. The register's potato-faced clerk shrank behind the counter, mouth making a perfect O. I was already through the doors, already running, the sidewalk and curb gone abstract beneath my boots.
The van’s engine caught and howled. I hit the ignition on the Harley so hard the starter whined in protest, then caught and roared, instant and alive. The back tire smoked on the patch of hot blacktop, and the bike lurched into the street with me barely in the seat, knees clamping metal, every reflex tuned to the geometry of violence.
