The Streets Of...

This week's story is for those times when you're wondering if home has remained where last you left it.

The Streets Of... an In Council story by M. K. Dreysen

Spend enough time away and the memories start to fade. Other things have come and gone, other places. Turn left for... head north to get... there's a good place over that way... don't, you remember how bad they were last time...

Do that often enough and you start to question whether you're at home anymore. Whether the decades, all of them in another city just a few hours to the west, one with its own chocolate bayous and hurricanes and streets for wandering... whether home has changed while you were concentrating on other things.

Not that Dwight Thompkins has called these streets home in those decades. He's even avoided the word, the question, "Where you from?" just doesn't come up as often anymore. The accent has faded just as much as has everything else.

He walks between the streetlights more out of a sense of obligation than anything else. Unlike the crowds, few as they are in the summer heat but they'll be here just the same, Dwight isn't here to drink and revel. He's just here to remind himself of what it was like to be...

But he's made a mistake. Made one thinking that he could capture some of his younger self here between strides. That was the big one, really.

The smaller one... they're following him.

Who are they? He uses his nose, first. They're in no hurry, so neither is he. He walks the lights and stays close to the restaurants and hotels. For now. Places whether the traffic keeps the musk and the sweat of those who follow him stirred. The passage of his fellow man, a few of them wrinkling their noses in automatic reaction, stirs the dankness away.

He knows the smell, in an indirect manner. Most would associate it with drunks in alleys, the unwashed homeless stranger with a hand out. Dwight doesn't know this scent well enough to pin it as other than not-human. Or not quite.

He uses his eyes and ears, next. The briefest of glimpses, t-shirts and jeans and beat up old sneakers. Hats and wild hair and markings that pass for tattoos at a distance.

And the only sounds of passage that of others reacting to a feeling they can't identify.

If he wanted to, Dwight could ask one of the beat cops. They're out, getting comfortable, getting an eye on the world as it is tonight. If Dwight asked, gently, he'd find one or two who'd tell him they had heard of a new gang.

A gang with oddness as its primary member. Names that didn't match up in the few bust records. Faces that didn't hang together on the streets, not normally. Yet the rumors told of a misfit collection, none of them ever picked up for anything that held them longer than a few hours.

And precious few busts even of graffiti for this bunch.

Dwight didn't ask the cops, nor any of the bar and restaurant workers changing shifts for the busy hours coming. He walked here and there in the high traffic areas, stopping for an occasional cup of coffee, or just a place to have a seat for a bit and watch. Listen. Smell.

When he let his mind get out of the way, he felt them there. Just that hint of other, these weights of hunger orbiting the edge of his conscious reach.

When he'd had enough of the waiting, and when the cops had gone inside, the great pause between the late dusk crowd and the true partiers coming in a few hours, when the traffic had subsided as much as it would before the wee hours, Dwight found a corner, at the head of an alley that led away from the Quarter and into the warehouse district.

He paused there. And then he did something that, if a cop had been watching, would have earned him a resigned shake of the cynical head and a smirk at what was going to happen.

Dwight pulled out his phone. Like he'd gotten lost and needed directions.

He kept his awareness open. He felt them, the moment they changed from watchers to hunters. The moment where they paused.

And then swarmed. Five of them.

Dwight thumbed the app, a creation of his own. The screen came to life, radar-like, identified the targets from the background noise, tracked them as they rushed in.

And when they'd closed, three brief flashes of light, or maybe it was lightning, swept across the onrushing crew.

Three of them dropped in place. The fourth one swayed, stunned.

The fifth one, the one that put Dwight Thompkins, too old and too slow and suddenly all too aware of the fact that he'd come far from home with precious few of the tools that made up for age and infirmity, into the hospital, didn't slow down at all.

****

"Mister Thompkins?" the nurse asked. "Are you with us?"

Dwight knew it was the nurse because of his presence; Momma's nurse had that same feeling when she came to check on her. This deep well of care, under a hard shell the world had tucked around her.

This one, the guy standing over Dwight after the pulse check and the other things that went along with a patient swimming up out of the anesthesia, had that same well of caring. The same hard shell over it. "Mister Thompkins?"

Dwight circled his tongue behind his lips, coughed. "Yeah, I'm here. How bad?" Then he fumbled around.

The nurse put the glass of ice chips into his hand. "You've lost your spleen. Doctor Rapon had to take it when they brought you in. Said you got lucky, though, that was the only organ that took any real damage."

Dwight smiled. "Yeah, that's me, lucky."

The nurse returned Dwight's smile. "You really are. A couple days to make sure there's no infection or bleeding, and you'll be home. New diet, a new daily pill, at your age..."

"At my age, you'd think I'd be smart enough to know better. It's been a long time since I could call this place home."

The nurse chuckled on his way to the next patient. "I guess so. What's the first rule of the Quarter for locals?"

"Don't go by yourself. I know. I just thought I'd be there for dinner and a quick walk."

"You have no idea how many times I've heard someone in that bed say that, Mister Thompkins. Get well and get out of here. And you won't mind me saying I hope I don't see you back here."

"You won't. I learned my lesson."

****

"You're not planning anything foolish are you? More foolish than loosing an organ, I mean?" Len asked.

The two brothers sat on Momma's front porch, Len in the swing, Dwight in the old rocker. He'd taken it because it was easier to get out of.

"Do you know them?"

Len held up his hand and wiggled it back and forth. "Know is a strong word. The cops do occasionally get lucky, you know? Bring them in because they're hanging around after someone got mugged. Or because someone kicked trash cans around the Garden District and the rich folks got a mad on."

"Five minutes later?"

"They're gone." Len shrugged. "I think they started out just like what they appear to be. Some homeless kids, runaways who bound themselves to the only ones they could trust." Len cocked an eyebrow at his older brother. "Sound a little familiar?"

Dwight looked away. They were sitting on Momma's porch. Home.

But across the river... His senior year, his last year at home, on more than a few nights Dwight had taken the old ferry into New Orleans. In search of. He'd found some of what he'd searched for with another young man, white, a year older and headed to college; Dwight and Richard had fumbled their way through a summer of nights that often ended in alleys or beneath trees in the park.

"Yeah. It sounds familiar." Dwight remembered mostly the pain when Richard had died later that year, a victim of being both too far from home and a lonely young man looking to find some small part of what he'd had with Dwight that summer.

But Dwight did remember as well what it felt like when they'd discovered they weren't the only unlikely duo wandering the night. "Ever wonder how they did it?"

Spell. Or gate. Sometimes all it took was a little bit of music and drugs and unfortunate timing. There were, after all, plenty of cemeteries and other lonesome places around the city that Dwight had called home once upon a time.

"You think you're going to untangle the mess, Dwight? When you've got just a little more than a month, a brand new pill to take, and you won't be able to walk more than a hundred yards for any of that time?" Len smirked.

Dwight sighed. His younger brother was right. Dwight Thompkins wasn't in any shape at all to be investigating his attackers. Too old too slow, and now far too damaged. And no point; however the little gang had managed to get themselves dragged halfway into somebody's spirit world, they'd done it in a city that sheltered way many methods for doing such a thing.

Tracking them down was impossible. It didn't make any sense, and what good would it do, anyway, Professor Thompkins? They'd attacked because he'd been stupid, just like he'd wandered into a mountain lion's territory and gotten ambushed. Nope, bad idea.

Then why, Dwight Thompkins asked himself behind the calm face and mind he showed to his brother, why oh why did he have this feeling about the question, of how that little gang had formed themselves, or rather who had done it for them?

Some little instinct poked at Dwight and told him that he needed this answer. And, poor as his prospects seemed to be, that he would indeed know the answer, and why it mattered, before the end of the summer.

Dwight sighed and pulled out his phone. "I guess I need to let my student know I'm going to need a little help with recovery."

"You'd best tell her how stupid you were."

"Yes, little brother, I'll be sure and tell Martha I'm an idiot."