<Hmm. This is a short story, about a... read on. It's untitled.>
In this city, it is always noir. Filthy smog weaves complex patterns in the air above grimy streets, added to at every corner by the smoke from the omnipresent cigarettes, their red tips one of the few touches of colour in an otherwise monochrome world. Strange. Despite the smog, I can see everything. Every crime, every pathetic scrap of humanity roiling in its own filth on the antheap we call civilisation.
Sounds. The blare of car horns, muted by distance, providing a secondary theme to the leaden tones of the falling rain. A scream cut off, somewhere in a back alley. Sirens. Always sirens.
My rooftop overlooks a crossroads. There’s an abandoned church in one corner, thick glass windows staved in by grey bricks. It’s the last one of its kind, I remember. A man slipping through an open doorway across the street provides a reason. Behind him, the light of the speakeasy fades as the door creaks shut, taking the sound of the blues with it. Under the man’s arm, the bottle within the brown paper bag sloshes as he steps off the kerb into the road. He looks around guiltily. Holy water for his devout mother, I don’t doubt. Hah. Hah.
I raise my face to the night sky and hack my guts out, silent laugh turned to rusty cough by the largest of my troubles. Opportunistic raindrops trickle down the inside of the collar of my leather coat, washing the greasy fabric for the first time in months. I rest a gloved hand on the partially eroded shoulder of the gargoyle next to me. We make a great pair.
Something the good doctor said last time rises from the alcoholic fog of my memory and weighs on my brain.
“No-one lives forever, John.”
I turn to face her, a bitterly knowing retort rising to my lips, but another fit of coughing overtakes me and I land on my knees, bringing up the contents of my lungs onto the tissue she holds gently over my mouth, her other hand preventing me from falling on my face.
She waits until I finish, then pulls it away.
Another touch of colour. There’s red on the tissue.
“Lung cancer, John. I’m sorry.” She pulls me to my feet, her strength suddenly greater than any I can conjure.
I stand there while the world rocks slightly and she withdraws behind her desk.
Professional detachment. I’ve never really got the hang of it. She shuffles paperwork briefly. When she looks up, any concern she might have shown in the preceding seconds is gone.
“I can give you medication. You could go to hospital, spend you last six months in comfort.”
We both know she doesn’t believe I’ll take either option. She’s known me too long.
“What if I stay on the streets?”
She chews her lip for a second, and looks at me appraisingly.
“You’ll pass out in a back alley in under a week and die of exposure.”
A flash of lightning close enough to raise the hairs on my back brings me back to the present.
My eyes travel wearily over the rooftops. More rain drips endlessly onto blackened tiles.
After these thirty years, I’d definitely guess the joke was on me. The last superhero left on this earth, dying of lung cancer. I would laugh, but I’m worried about choking on my own blood.
There were others, once. Somehow, they’ve all disappeared. No-one is immortal, the doctor had said. The odds had run out. Only I had an unlimited roll of the dice. Now even that had gone.
There’s a swirl of red fabric down below. A woman getting into a taxi. It accelerates away fast – much too fast.
I throw myself off the rooftop, wincing as I land, but at least alive.
In fact, dying used to be the least of my worries. I was John Immortal, fated to walk the world forever. Early on, the joke had been made that the crime syndicates would take an eternity to clean up. That was OK. I had an eternity.
While I’ve been thinking, my body has been following the taxi on autopilot. When you can’t die, there’s a lot you can do that normal people wouldn’t. I dart through a back alley at around the speed of a horse, but I don’t feel a thing in my superannuated lungs or legs. The taxi will come to a stop eventually. On average, I’m faster.
Alcohol got old pretty fast, just as soon as I realised that immortality didn’t take the sting of a hangover away. So did nicotine, then women. A while back I got called a sociopath by an outspoken feminist columnist. In her opinion I made the fatal mistake of saving her from the gangsters, but not from being single.
The taxi screeches to practical halt round a hairpin bend, and I reach the door just in time to wrench it off.
There’s a horrible moment of uncertainty as I stare at the woman in the cab, my thoughts for a second impinging on what my body does. Then sheer momentum throws me through the door, and practically into her lap.
It’s at times like these when my degree in English comes in useful. I hurl myself back onto the seat, and prepare to drop a series of killer one-liners.
My gravely vocal chords are stopped from sounding by the look in her eyes. It’s complete and utter contempt. She raps on the rusty iron grid that separates us from the driver.
“On second thoughts, take us straight to Michelangelo. This one doesn’t need anything else done to him.”
It’s obvious that this is a conversation that has been going on for some time, but even with lung cancer I don’t let anyone talk about me that way. Reputation is important, if you spend your life on rooftops. You must have people in awe of you, otherwise they tend to ask questions like ‘Why do you bother?’
“Lady, I don’t know who the hell you think you are, but…”
An interruption. She knows who she is.
“John, you’re not really in a position to talk big. Are you?”
She smiles sweetly, and I realise what’s been bugging me about the whole affair since the beginning. It isn’t just her dress that’s in colour – she is, and so is the cab. Speaking professionally, it’s the first time that I’ve seen
lipstick that isn’t grey.
Another coughing fit, and our mouths match. She throws me a tissue disdainfully. I use it.
“You’re in a bad way, John. The last superhero, dying of lung cancer? People are bound to ask questions, and when you were seen getting into a taxi with what will be described as a scarlet woman, well…”
She smiles again, and flicks up a newspaper datelined tomorrow.
“Who is that on the front page?” There’s a faintly foreign tinge to her voice that I’m not entirely comfortable with: Immigrant crime gives me the creeps.
“Amateur.” Whatever else I was going to say is drowned out by my coughs.
She leans closer.
“What was that?”
In some situations, you’ve got to love hero reflexes. In roughly half a second, I’ve got her in a stranglehold, with the knife from my left boot held firmly across her porcelain throat.
“I said, Amateur. It was on the list of things plucky hero says in tight corner, or did you not get that far at RADA?” I spit more blood out the window. There are some things you have to do.
The driver hasn’t noticed. We keep on going, the headlamps picking out block after block in the fog in front of us.
She’s still calmer than she has any right to be.
“John, we both know you’ve only got two options.”
I jerk her head slightly. Good cop, bad cop.
“Really?”
“Yes. Either you stay in the car, with the knife held to my throat, until we arrive at where we’re going, or you kill me and jump out.”
“Yeah? And what’s wrong with the second of the two?”
I see her reflected smile in the driver’s rear-view mirror.
“You die, sooner or later.”
“Sooner or later everyone dies.” This is sterling banter (Well, for someone in my position), but it doesn’t get us anywhere.
“Yes, John. It’s worse for you, though, isn’t it?” She sighs expressively.
“Yesterday you were immortal, today even the buzzing of the flies seems to mock your brief span of time.”
I tighten my grip again.
“I probably wouldn’t have put it that way, but yeah.”
I can feel the tension in her body. She’s not as entirely self-assured as she appears to be.
Time to raise the stakes. I rap on the grid between us and the driver’s compartment. When he turns around, I motion with my knife at her neck, then fall passive. Let him make the decision, with or without her help.
From what I can see of his face, given an almost diabolical pattern of light and shade by the regular light of the passing streetlights, he’s begging her to sort it out. That’s strange, but it gives me a handle on what their relationship is – he’s just the grunt, she’s the important one.
Unfortunately, I don’t get to find out what happens next. Another random bout of coughing renders me helpless for long enough. She has evidently decided I’m too dangerous when conscious, and as soon as I release my hold she spins and hits me hard on the temple with the heel of her hand. I go out like a watchman’s lantern.
