Chapter 11: No Going Back
The grey concrete of the mall garage had bled into the darker, decaying guts of the city. Chloe drove without speaking, her knuckles white on the steering wheel, taking turns at random until the storefronts and streetlights grew scarce. She finally pulled into the mouth of a derelict multi-story garage, a place where the city’s growth had stalled and left a carcass behind.
The engine cut, leaving a silence thick enough to taste—damp concrete, stale urine, and the iron scent of rust. Flickering light from a cracked streetlamp outside striped the dashboard.
John’s hand was still in his pocket, fingers locked around the card.
“Last chance to shred it,” Chloe said, her voice low and strained. She wasn’t looking at him. She was staring at the graffiti-strewn wall ahead, a chaotic mural of spray-painted tags and crude symbols. “Before you do something really, really stupid.”
‘Listen to the girl,’ Amy whispered, a cool thread of sound in the quiet. ‘For once, someone else is making sense.’
“I just need to know what it is,” John said, his own voice sounding pathetic to his ears. “What if he can help?”
“That guy at the mall didn’t want to help,” Chloe shot back, finally turning to him. Her eyes were hard. “He looked at you like you were a lost dog. A profitable one. You’re not calling him.”
A strange, defiant anger bubbled up in John’s chest. It was the same feeling he’d had holding the card in the food court—a desperate, childish claim to agency. He pulled the card out, staring at the ten digits. “It’s my life.”
“It’s your funeral,” Chloe growled.
Then she moved.
It wasn’t a graceful motion. It was pure, frustrated purpose. She unclipped her seatbelt and lunged across the center console, her hand diving for his front pocket.
“Wait—Chloe, don’t—!”
Her fingers didn’t go for the card. They went lower, grabbing a fistful of denim and yanking at his zipper. The sound was obscenely loud in the closed car.
‘OH, NOW THIS IS A DEVELOPMENT!’ Amy’s cheer was a fireworks display in his skull, bright and shocking.
John gasped, pushing at Chloe’s shoulders, but she was committed, her face a mask of grim determination. Her hand slid past the open zipper, into the gap of his briefs. Her cool, firm fingers closed around him.
A jolt, electric and terrifying, shot through his spine.
It wasn’t arousal. It was a system shock, a panic trigger. But his body, traitorous and obedient to its new, absurd rules, responded instantly.
The lace garters materialized not with a slither, but a snap. They spiraled into existence around his thighs, cinching tight with an audible click, the silken bands connected to the panties already there. A wave of heat, then a cold, liquid dissolution swept through him from the core outward.
Chloe yelped, snatching her hand back as if burned. She stared, open-mouthed, as the familiar, wrenching compression took hold. John’s lanky frame shuddered, bones whispering, muscles flowing, cloth melting and reforming.
He—she—sagged back against the passenger seat, now crowded by the sudden, uncomfortable presence of SexiWoman’s physique. The steering wheel was suddenly too close. The air in the car was choked with the scent of ozone and jasmine.
Chloe just stared, breathing hard, a smear of John’s old lip balm on her wrist.
‘Whoops!’ Amy chirped, her voice now clear and ringing from the heart-shaped necklace nestled in a generous new cleavage. ‘Too late for rational choices now. Hand it over, big guy. Or gal. Whatever.’
SexiWoman looked down at the business card, still clutched in a now-sleek, manicured hand. The gesture felt alien, the decision no longer his own. A deep, resonant calm had settled over the panic, a terrifying clarity.
“Nice try, John,” Amy said, the necklace glinting. “But you’re not going ANYwhere.”
SexiWoman’s other hand came up. With a contemptuous flick of a wrist, the card was pinched between two fingers. Then, with a slow, deliberate pressure that spoke of strength far beyond human, the fingers began to rotate in opposite directions.
The card didn’t just tear. It grated. The high-quality cardstock fibrillated, then compacted, the fibers screaming as they were ground against each other. The printed ink smeared into a greyish paste. The digits warped, dissolved, became nothing. It was a minute, violent act of obliteration.
A small, twisted column of pulped paper and ink dust spiraled down onto the car’s floor mat.
The silence returned, deeper now.
Chloe found her voice first, a brittle whisper. “You… you just…”
“He was holding onto a ghost,” SexiWoman said, the voice a harmonious, unsettling blend of John’s tenor and something else entirely. “It was a tether to a world that will package and sell him. Now it’s gone.”
‘The only person who gets to profit from this disaster is me,’ Amy added mentally, for John’s benefit alone. ‘And I deal in currency more valuable than money.’
From the dark, cavernous throat of the parking garage, a sound echoed. A slow, dragging scrape. Like something heavy being pulled across grit.
Then a metal door, somewhere deep in the bowels of the structure, slammed shut with a final boom that shook dust from the ceiling.
The headlights of Chloe’s car, still on, illuminated the swirling motes. In that moment, they both saw it. The graffiti on the wall ahead wasn’t just random. Amidst the swirls and tags, a single, freshly-sprayed symbol stood out—a stylized, lidless eye inside a simple crescent. The same symbol that had been on the kiosk man’s nametag.
He hadn’t needed a phone number to find them.
The card had just been a way to make John feel like he had a choice.
“Drive,” SexiWoman said, the calm voice now edged with a command that brooked no argument. “Don’t turn the lights off. Don’t look for the source of the sound. Just drive.”
Chloe fumbled for the keys, her hands shaking so badly the metal scratched the ignition. The engine roared to life. She threw the car into reverse, tires squealing against the grit, and blasted back out into the desolate street.
In the passenger seat, SexiWoman watched the dark maw of the garage shrink in the side mirror. John, a prisoner behind his own eyes, felt the last shred of his normal life—the life of choices, however bad—disappear with it, ground to dust on a dirty floor mat. The only thing left was the road ahead, and the two women in the car with him.