I needed an advent calendar; this was like a Christmas countdown.
The cannibals would put on their cooking pots soon.
A drone buzzed overhead, watching. Hopefully Magnus was too.
He still had not yet shown up to retrieve me which meant he had not yet retrieved Tommy. The only person who seemed to be trying their best around here was Dig Graves.
“Ga—hi—ta?” I asked him.
He did not answer.
“Ho—la—fee?”
“Shut up.” He gave my ass a pat. “Someone’s around the corner.”
I twisted and saw them walking on their heads in my upside-down manner, blinking through the dizzy gust running into my brain.
The lesbians!
Donning their tattooed skin and facial piercings and large boots, they paused when they saw us and held out their weapons to Dig. He pulled out a blade of his own. Both parties assessed their situation.
I wriggled, trying to pull up my hand and waved to them. “He—o.”
They did not greet me back.
“You know there’s a hit out on you?” The woman in the middle said, the same one who had eaten my shortbread and decided I could not join their group because my shortbread was not good enough even though I absolutely knew it was, and she had most definitely enjoyed it. “Most these cocks ‘ave been paid off to kill you. I heard Ernie from Haver talkin’ ‘bout it. Someasshole in a white jacket offered him a private cell for full the year, an ergonomic pillow and hot wings every Thursday.”
Dig lowered his blade. “Is that why everyone’s trying to kill me more than usual?”
“You betcha.”
“Fuck.”
She looked at myself, flung over his shoulder. “Who’s that?”
“Mine.”
“Alright.”
“Fight?”
“Hell no.”
Everyone went their separate ways.
I woke up when a metal door clanged open after having a nap over Dig Graves shoulder. The taste of the gag urged vomit to rise in my throat, and I yawned through it as he walked into an old mechanic’s and pushed the door behind him closed.
He walked past the ground floor where a truck was still mid-engine change from years ago and stomped up a staircase with missing steps, heaving me inside to the office space upstairs.
Fragranced with oil and steel, the room filled up with buttery light. Cleaned of dust and cobwebs, it was well organised with a mattress on the floor, its sheets tucked in neatly, the pillows plump. Weapons lined the walls on the studded board where tools used to be, and a desk and chair remained in the back corner as if business occurred as usual.
“This isn’t where we are staying.” Dig sat me upright on the mattress. “This is just one of my safe houses. We’ll head to my actual place, but we can’t be out on the streets, too many people out there. During the day we hide, during the night we travel.”
He pulled the gag from out of my mouth.
Three windows and a single door. Two of the windows had their locks broken and both were open, letting in crisp breeze. Jumping off the secondstorey would break my legs. I searched the room for rope. There should be something in here to assist me outside the window.
Dig brought out a pen and strode to the back wall which had been graffitied into a map. Hand drawn of the entire arena. The city of Tar spread out in its circle, showing the streets and carcass of buildings and jumbles of where the old vehicles were parked.
