Derrick, adept at lettering, had contributed the title. Using Seth’s pen and some Liquid Paper, he’d settled on the title Satan Sings; it fit the modified picture, and they both laughed after they put it back on the rack. You had to look twice to see where he’d altered the curve of one letter or the angle of another. That was the whole point.
“Don’t mean to offend again, but what the hell is this?” asked Buckler, turning to his host, who had no ready answer.
SOLO III
Alex heard the key turn in the lock just in time. He’d been sitting at the front counter, resting his head on his hands. Hidden away inside the store, he’d located a few places where, in waking hours, the energy felt less malevolent to him; the counter was one of them. His sensitivity to energy fields had grown quite acute during his time sleeping on the street. The crazier guys you meet out there talk about this kind of thing all the time, but if you listen past the crazy you begin to see their point. Every corner has an angle. Every room’s got a shape. The front counter felt warmer than the dark, claustrophobic booths. Warmth matters.
He jumped up; he’d been sleeping in the arcade for at least a week now, possibly more. His sense of time was pretty shot, but maneuvers in the dark were second-nature instincts by now. He made it back to his booth just as the front door opened; settling in, imperceptibly silent, he began hearing the sounds of people out in the store.
There were two of them, a man and a woman. The woman was older. The man was nervous. Alex wished he could form a picture of them inside his head; he was very afraid of being found out, all five of his senses sharpening in preparation for flight, and he wanted to know what he’d be up against, if it came to that.
They talked; they both seemed to be asking questions, which felt off. Was there somebody else with them who wasn’t talking yet? Derrick’s boss, maybe? Away from the world for some time, Alex struggled to conceive of realistic scenarios that would explain the muffled tones drifting down the halls to his hiding place. Curiosity gave way to obsessive, dark thoughts, real fear; he gripped his elbows in his hands, breathing in and out through his nose as slowly and evenly as he could.
One of the people outside knocked on the arcade entrance after a while. His heart jumped. At this distance, he could make out what they were saying.
“These are the TV booths,” Evelyn Gates said. “There’s seven of them. I can have all this stuff emptied out at my expense if you like, this was really the previous tenant’s responsibility.”
Buckler sensed the advantage; she hadn’t been any better prepared for the scene inside the store than he had. She was trying to smooth over it by talking through her pitch. He recognized the rhythm of it.
“No need,” he said. “Maybe a little break on the price for the effort, though?”
“Comes out the same,” she said cheerfully; she knew more about the costs of moving abandoned belongings than he did. “The building’s sound; the roof’s original, but it’s got a protective rubber cap on it, so no water can get in. The previous tenant installed an alarm system, and that conveys, since they didn’t give notice. The neighborhood is zoned—”
“Residential and retail,” Buckler interrupted. “That’s why I like it.”
Evelyn Gates felt the hook sink cleanly into the mouth of the fish.
“Residential and retail. We’ll need to walk through it again before we finalize,” she said, her deal-closing voice growing fainter to Alex as the two interlopers walked back toward the store’s entrance. They stayed awhile longer, examining fixtures and furniture, but their words were a muddy drone in his ears again, too muffled to make out. After a while, he allowed himself to accept that they were gone; still, he waited another half hour before emerging from the booth. He was a smart kid. This place was doomed. He knew the night’s visitors, seen correctly, were raiders making land on the shores of a crumbling kingdom. They would be back, and, when they came, would bring more of their kind with them.
But they wouldn’t be back tonight. He fetched a bag of potato chips from under the counter, something Seth had left for him earlier, and went back to his booth to sleep. When you feel like you’re safe for an hour or two, you sleep. You never know if you’re going to get a chance to later. This was another thing he’d learned from the friends he’d made in his time away from town.
MINOANS IV
Sleep was deep and dreamless. He lay motionless for an age; he didn’t know what time it was when he finally woke up. The absence of natural light in the arcade offered no clues. It’s said of Alex that he could remain in the company of others without speaking for hours at a time; perhaps his sleep in the empty store lasted ten or twelve hours at a stretch, or more. The comfort of the booth offered security the outside world couldn’t match.