NORTH TO SOUTH - CHAPTER ONE

Skimming the event horizon

Dino woke up half-tripped, eyes gunked up, mouth tasting of the psychedelic mistakes he made the night before. That’s assuming it was the morning now. Time flows different when you are removed from the regular’s plane of existence. Location was beyond him in this early stage of consciousness. Like time, it was information that his scattered brain would have to slowly calibrate as his system rebooted from a dream.

“Maybe it is all a dream,” he muttered to himself, though he wasn’t sure if the words had actually come from his mouth or someone else’s, in this world or some other dimension. 

His senses were here, but not complete. A curtain slowly drawing back to reveal the shit he had found himself in, that he had placed himself in, that he…fuck…where was he going with this? He could sense too that Skid was nearby. He didn’t need sight, smell or touch to know he was in his proximity. Skid was there alright, like some deformed twin of no known origin, of skeptical association. 

“Fuck are we, man?” attempted Dino.

“Where we should be, Dino,” came back the reply. It was muffled, dry like a parched landscape where nothing much grows.

“You all there?

“Yeah, man. I’m all here,”

Skid, while not what could be described as conventionally good-looking, did have a magnetic quality hooked into his eyes. That was, at least, when his eyes could actually focus on you, or maybe that was part of their gravity, of their clarity. Maybe it was the drifty-ness of them that spoke some truth to guys like Dino or the street wahines that seem to come and go from their lives. The world is ever-changing, continents shifting, sea levels rising, weather lurching from a quiet sleep to a fit of anaphylactic panic. Skid reflected this existential flow in his focus, one that was there, tight to you, and then elsewhere all at the same moment. 

Dino grasped the setup they were marooned in. A stretch of concrete for sure, a basketball court with no players, a car park with no wheels, a basement open to the weather, no house to hide its shady going-ons. Who knew in that precise moment, the point in time where kiffers like Dino were waking up from their systematic comas. There was glass on the floor, sunlight too, so daytime it must be, and that was as reliable as Dino’s calculations would allow him to be.

“It’s the morning, man,” he started again, hoping that Skid wasn’t just some astral projection.

“Morning…night…no matter to me.” Came the reply. Yep, it was Skid alright.

“You all there?”

“As much as I was before, dude. I can’t move my shit, though, feet might be gone or something,”

“I can see them, Skid. You all there, for sure. Shit was bad at Frank’s, I thought he actually shot me,”

“I saw the bullet, man, like in fuckin’ slow motion, like a movie, man. Trails and all as it burnt through the air right in front of my eyes. Sick, man, fuckin’ sick,”

“I can’t see a hole, man. You sure?”

“Yeah, man, that thing passed straight through you, you were like an app…app…fuckin’ apparition,” 

Dino laughed and let out a howl like a feral beast that was evolving in front of itself, an evolution in real time. “Bullet proof, man, I fuckin’ knew it, dude,” 

Skid was stiff, the murky traces in his veins had caused a shutdown, a pause in muscle movements, a short trip to locked-in syndrome for the junkies and shamans alike. He’d been here before, so he knew what it would and wouldn’t do to him, he knew the limits of this intoxication and his body well. Skid didn’t fear this type of thing either. He was built for it, wiry frame of leanness and rigidity, of corners and twists that meant he was storm-resistant and primed for self-destruction, the type of self-destruction that kept you on the edge rather than let you fall in. Skimming the event horizon, he called it, or Dino called it, one of them at least had coined the term. Or maybe he had just invented it then and there. That was it, skimming the event horizon, that was where he was.

The challenge for them both was that Frank wouldn’t be firing those type of bullets forever, the types that permeated the kind of kiffers that Dino and Skid were, the types they represented, those that drifted between worlds to such a level that their bodies were here and there and nowhere at the same point in time, allowing for bullets to fly right through them. Here and now, though, they were in no condition to control fate. They were stranded.

“We’re fucked if we don’t move,” said Dino, his senses starting to come online at last.

“I know. I’m going to try and stand up,” but despite the declaration, Skid was still.

“I got you, man,” Dino got to his feet, legs shaking and balance coming and going like a memory. “I got you, Skid,”

Skid let out a grunt as Dino fished him up off the floor.

Dino was heavyset, but none of his frame seemed to contribute to any strength, any capable exertion. Like some block of butter, rigid in the cold, slick in the heat, no use to any one in a crisis. But Dino, and he knew this more than anyone, had a burning inside that he could focus, that he could harness. A bubbling to the surface that once he had the reins of it, fuck, he could fly if he had to. Bullets pass through him. A magic ferocity and physicality when he needed it. Dino couldn’t describe it in regular’s terms, it was for the realm of the kiffers, they got what it all meant. 

A view from high, just below the clouds with the magpies and mosquitoes, gets a schematic of the setting they were starting to grind out of. In some parts the streets were locked into grids, others saw deadends and bends and twists, cabling and nodes that made a maze of this end of town. Locals got it, they navigated the wires ‘cause it was in deep, a schema of heres and over-theres. Dino and Skid were fluent, it didn’t matter whether their heads were clear or not, they could just walk and walk till they got somewhere they needed to be. Sometimes the wind just took them, sometimes they drove the journey themselves. But it’s all the same in the end. Volition, fate, instinct.

The sun caught the spread of glass around them, an illumination of the debris of war. Beautiful. Twinkle, twinkle, my little stars. But sharp fuckers too. Skid’s legs, now he got a good look at them, were sprinkled with these minor protrusions, unnatural scales struggling to cling on as he moved.

“Blood?” he breathed into Dino’s ear.

“Yeah, man. Just pop ‘em out,” came the response from Dino, although Skid couldn’t see his lips move.

“Ok,”

He took a deep breath and held it. The air filled his lungs, forced his stomach to inflate. That pushed on his intestines, syphoning the breath through tight passages in his gut bypassing the organs and digestive system. From there it squeaked its way, sitting just under the fascia like some tribune from the cenotes and pock marks in his legs. A gentle tightening of his torso forced the air once more, now up to the surface of the skin where it gently pressed against the foreign objects stuck in Skid’s leg. And with that the shards loosened their grip, and he shed his spines.

“I did it,” Skid mumbled, his head so close to Dino’s that they could feel each other’s skulls hum.

“Yeah, alright, mate. Let’s get out of this shit-hole,” Dino replied.

Once at the edge of the concrete block they had been camped in, Skid’s legs regained their momentum and as he stretched his body, clicking the bones back in their joints, the wind began to pick up his feathery sails. Dino, too, his sails lifted as they floated across the street to the safety of houses on all sides. 

“Your cousin’s near here,” stated Skid.

“Mick? Yeah, haven’t seen him for a while,”

“Worth a visit?”

“Fuckin’ parched, man, Mick’ll have something for us,”

“Does he know Frank? Like, would he dob us in?”

“Yeah, nah, if he does know him, then he fuckin’ hates him, I reckon. Blood thicker than water, that’s what they say,”

Skid nodded his agreement because his mind was already there, scanning Mick’s house for traps and shady shit. His consciousness checked the front windows first, though a buildup of something grey and green was obscuring his view into the living room. Instead, he went to door and squeezed himself through the letter box, oozing his vision and being between the pages of ads and magazines stuffed in such way that it made Skid think Mick might be wanting to keep him out. Inside was clear, as far as he could tell, Mick sat watching the TV with a tinnie and a fag.

“He’s got smokes,” Skid said.

“Mick, oh yeah. But we’re not there for a smoke. We gotta rebuild our strength. We’ll never make it south if we don’t have something to eat.”

Mick’s house, as Skid already knew, was just a block away. They made it there before the heat of the sun got going.

“G’day, Mick,” Dino said as the front door opened.

“Don’t know no Mick, mate,” came the response. 

“Yeah, my mistake, man. Wrong name, I guess”

“You’re here to pick up, right?”

Skid chipped in, “That’s right, mate. Mick or no Mick, don’t matter to us,”

The guy grabbed a small backpack and gave it to Skid. “Here it is, then. You know the address?”

Dino paused but not for long, of course he knew the address. Dino could see where they would be going, fuck, his projection was already there. The pause in his response allowed him to track backwards to his current location in time and space, checking the corners and cracks as he travelled the walk in reverse. It gave him sight over the journey they would need to make to go from here to there, from now to then. 

“Got any water?” Dino asked.

“Hose out the front, mate” was the reply. And with that the front door shut.

The backpack was padlocked. The only way in was to tear the thing apart in a rabid fit, something they had both telepathically told each other was great idea. Skid was keen, his eyes, cloudy again as his optic chemtrails revved up, were trying to scan the insides of the bag, pupils dilating rapidly as he reached to break through the opaqueness. But this backpack was not giving up its secrets easily. Dino too was going through his routine of inspection, taking deep inhales through his nose to gather up the traces of the treasure inside. He caught a whiff, for sure, shards maybe, their milky, icy forms hidden beneath a weak canvas.

“Could be Frank’s,” Skid started. “Shouldn’t mess with it if it’s Frank’s,”

“Good shit, though, if it is,” came Dino’s retort.

“Think it through, mate, we can’t just take it if it’s Frank’s. He’ll mince us,”

“I’m bulletproof, what’s he gonna do?”

“Not use a fucking gun, Dino. I said mince. Come at us with that fucking machete he has,”

“I ain’t seen no machete, heard about it, fuckin’ rumours, but ain’t never seen it. Probably got something to trim the garden, fuckin’ shears or something. I’m not afraid of shit,”

Fortunately, Dino’s senses were always a step ahead of his mouth. His tripwires were always set to make sure his confidence didn’t have him believing his own horse shit all the time. It was a reflex, an inbuilt alarm that he had installed over the years of being in shady situations. Oh, those tripwires had been sprung alright, his balls were tightening as his chakras filtered in the brutality about to come his way.

“Fuck!” he shouted at Skid, “Run!”