Blood: Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Well, it wasn’t right after that. Maybe 30 seconds after.

When I got up, there was a horrible, sharp pain in my side. My hand naturally went to my side, feeling bandages around my stomach. There was blood on it. I had been shot. After this, I got to know my surroundings. I looked up to see a white room, stained with blood, spit and shit. To my left was a metal door. There was a banging on the other side. I heard a voice, speaking in an accent, sort of colombian, “open the fucking door.”

I stood up. I didn’t know where I was but I had a bullet wound and there were angry voices on the other side of a banging door. I walked around, trying to find any sense of direction as to where James and the white kid went. I became frantic, as memories rushed back into me. I remembered killing, me, killing a lot of people. I remembered doing drugs. I knew why I was in this situation.

And suddenly, I knew where I was.

I walked over to an open window. My scar was fresh. It hurt like hell. I could see James and the white kid a few blocks away. I looked down. There was a stant of a roof that I was over. Whatever building I was in, I was on the third floor. I started thinking. I could jump across to that ledge, and then fall on the dumpster. Or I could climb to another room.

I thought too long. The door behind me burst open, despite the bolt latch locking it shut. A man with deep, mexican looking skin burst in, one more person behind him. He whipped out one of those comically large barreled revolvers and said, “don’t move,” in a sharp colombian accent.

I jumped out of that window.

As I hit the ground, I heard a crack. I didn’t care. I had adrenaline and what I assumed was cocaine rushing through my veins. I ran in the direction that I saw James and the white kid running in. I couldn’t see them, but I knew where they were going. They were heading toward The Felony Cafe in Albuquerque, New-fucking-Mexico.

I ran across the street, and remembered the gun resting on my back. I ran twelve blocks before getting to the felony, to find James and the white kid inside, drinking tall, hot coffee drinks, and trying to grip them as hard as they could to warm their hands from the cold outside of which they had just escaped. When I walked in, we made eye contact, and I walked to the counter to order a piping hot americano. I sat down at the table they were already at, in this small, musky coffee shop. They looked at me, amazed. Or at least James was amazed. The white kid just sort of looked out the window at nothing, looking disinterested at me being alive. Again, sometimes I forget that James is black.

“How the hell did you get out of there?” James asked, looking at my leg. “What happened here?”

“Oh,” I said, starting to feel the sting of a broken bone in my leg, “I guess that happens when you jump off of a three story building.

“Well, we need to get you to a hospital.”

“UNM’s isn’t far from here,” said the white kid, cutting into a conversation while still staring out a window.

We took the bus. We didn’t exactly want to pay actual money to get five blocks away. When I got there, we all sat in the waiting room at the ER for about ten minutes, and a doctor called us to get my leg checked out. I was disappointed when his first question was, “how did all this happen?”

When he asked this, I was debating in my mind which lie to tell him. I settled on “I just tripped kind a hard I guess.”

“Really. You tripped,” he said, in disbelief, “and then somebody hit your leg with a baseball bat right? Because this is a pretty bad break.”

“I may have tripped out of a window.”

“Right. Well let's set it.” he said before pushing my leg uncomfortably to the side, making me hear a crack. “Okay, come here,” he said, signalling me to sit near the end of the padded seat I was on. He had pushed a wheelchair to the end I was scooting to, and I plopped myself down, harshly, into the seat.

We wheeled for a little while toward a sign that pointed to the right, saying BONES AND CASTS in large comic sans letters. We turned and he tried to make small talk. “So, how long have you been living in new mexico?”

“Just since this summer.”

“Oh, well did you apply for the university?”

“No, i’m just here with some friends for work.”

“Where are you from?”

“Tallahassee.”  the hall felt insanely long.

“What do you do for work?”

“Well, we actually just recently got fired.”

“Okay, then what did you do for work?”

I've had very few jobs, but me and my friends have been bulking up since we have gotten to Albuquerque, mainly just to seem more intimidating to clients. So what was I supposed to tell him.

“I work in construction.”

“Oh, really. You working on digging up that road?”

“I was. For a little while.”

We finally arrived at another room where they had me sit in a chair that had a gigantic extendable leg coming out of it. I lifted myself into the chair, and propped my leg up.

“Well, see, we’re gonna have to break it again.”

“Why?”

“It wasn’t set right.”

“You just set it five minutes ago.”

“I did it wrong.”

“Are you lying to me.”

“Um”-I could see him getting more and more nervous, “no.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not, we have to do it.”

“I said don’t fucking lie to me”-I looked him dead in the eye, and tried to look intimidating. I gripped his arm as hard as I could with both hands-“or I might have to break it.”

He didn’t give me any more trouble. My leg got a walking cast, and I walked right out of the hospital.

James and the white kid waited for me outside, in the waiting room, getting coughed on and having to deal with people that seemed like they were about to die, right there. When I walked in the room, they both shot up out of their chairs and we walked back outside. The cold air hit us with force. There was a storm coming.

That room I was in. That was our apartment. It was on the top story of some building that was just a little bit away from the university. We didn’t have a place to stay.

“Let’s go over by the airport,” I said, sounding smart, “they have a shit load of hotels over there.”

A bus ride and a 20 minute walk left us at night time, plopping no luggage at a suite. James claimed one bed, the white kid at the other, and me on the chair.

I stared out the window as the four o’clock sunny skies turned into 5:30 dark night skies. The storm started. First rain, then hail, then snow. I stared as people ran, avoiding golfball sized hail, of which dented cars and broke windows. Half an hour later, it was a clear cold night.

“This jagged weather,” I said, “what the shit does it do? It rains for half an hour, then the skies are clear. No matter this shitty state has a drought.”

Sleeping on the couch was hard. While me, the guy with a broken leg was sleeping on a hard, decorative object in a room with two beds, with two people to fill them. All because we were cheap people.

When I woke up, it was like I was in a different state. The roads were skidded with ice, snow was on the ground, and James was watching spongebob. Loudly.

“Ha,” he would say after every joke.

“Shut up,” I said.

“Ha,” again, this was annoying. “Ha.”

Sometimes I forget James is black.

“Ha. Ha. Ha.” he looked jaggedly at me.

“James.”

“Ha.”

James stood up, and walked toward me. As he stood, I could see the white kid sitting in front of the door, dead. He had fallen on the door, and blood skidded on the white paint.

“Ha.”

James had blood on his right arm, just like he had when he killed that gang leader. He walked menacing to me. I hadn’t processed the situation.

“Ha.”

James was very close. Closer than he ever had been before. Closer than he had ever been to me. He pulled out a knife and got ready to stab me.

“Ha.”

I stood up, and thought about how to get myself out of the current situation. It had been clear that James was mentally unstable for a while now. He just would stay with us, and we liked him enough.

“Ha.”

He lunged himself toward me. The force of his body hit the window all at once, and it broke. He fell to the ground two stories below. The knife he was carrying pushed into his neck. He was dead.

I rushed to the white kid. He had knife wounds in his neck. I rushed to the phone on the nightstand in between the beds. I dialed only 9 before the white kid was behind me.

“Wake up. Wake up now. It is time to go. Get the fuck up.”

Then I woke up.

When I woke up, I was hanging from the ceiling. I could feel cold metal in the backs of my feet. I was cold. In front of me was a metal door. To my left was meat. To my right was meat. I was in a freezer.

Behind me, I could hear somebody talking to me. “Let’s go,” said the white kid as he cut me down from where I was.

I got a better look. Behind me was the white kid and James, and we were all locked in the freezer, which became more and more obvious as we banged more and more on the door. I walked around the room, feeling less claustrophobic than I thought I would. The cold started getting to me. I wasn’t used to it ever being under 50 degrees in Tallahassee. I knew that outside that door was the warm florida air, that would fill my lungs, making the walk in freezer seem colder than ever. There was a small chair in the edge of the room, which, as far as I know, was where either James or the white kid broke out of. They chose some cheap wood.

The door in front of me wasn’t so much bloody as it was just wet. That was strange, because it was definitely under 30 degrees in here. I walked and touched the door. The water on the door turned to ice. My hand was frozen inside of it. I was stuck. James and the white kid both pulled on me as hard as they could. They couldn’t break me free.

“Shit, what is happening?” I said, confused and scared.

“You’re freezing,” James said, acting like he knew anything about the current situation.

“Well, what do we do?”

“Nothing,” said the white kid, getting more and more serious, and looking deadly.

Shit. I was going to die. All this was my fault. Tallahasse was on the other side of the door, and I was stuck in the lock in freezer at subway. I knew why we were in here too. I fucked over the gang by killing leaders, and they jung me by my Achilles tendon, and they were going to kill me. And now, I have to be awake for it.

Then my old boss opened the door. I fell over onto the ground, and looked up at him. “What are you doing here?”

As far as I know those were his last words. He was shot through his head from the side, and I got up and ran. The airport was four blocks away and I knew how to get there. We were already going to go, so we bought tickets. The flight was in an hour. No luggage. No problems. We ran out the door faster than we ran when we killed those people. The warm florida night hit me like a bullet. I took a big breath in, feeling the humidity in my throat. It was august, and it was hot. 80 degrees felt good after almost freezing to death.

We ran hard and fast all the way to the airport. We planned to go to albuquerque, just because we heard they have good connections. Like, drug connections. We were already going to be on the run from the bloods for the rest of our lives. We may as well get paid for it. The banditos, they are a gang in Albuquerque, Mexican. They mostly just ride motorcycles around. They are pretty cool. We wanted to be one.

The plane was barely even boarding by the time we got there, but there was no possible way that the bloods knew which plane we were getting on. We got on, and in no time we were on our way to Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The flight had one stop in Atlanta, for some reason, and then we went to the Sunport Airport, on the east side of Albuquerque.

So, Albuquerque is a decent sized town. Like, there’s a downtown, and uptown, west side, east side. Fucking everything. On the east side is the air force base, and the University and College. We spent most of our time on the east side, because we were scared of the west side. We didn’t know shit about it. And there was enough shit on the east side, that we wouldn’t get bored, pretty much ever. Especially since we were coming from a different state.

That day, we checked into a cheap motel on central avenue. We didn’t have that much money, between us never getting paid, and our bosses we had killed not carrying too much cash. The room had one squeaky bed, that felt like shit, a Tv on the wall, and  a small bathroom, with no shower. It was as basic as it got. We all slept on the same bed, mostly because we were scared of there being a literal monster under it, and laid close together, because where it was humid as shit in florida, here it was the opposite. The highest points of albuquerque are around 7000 feet high, and the lowest around 4000. Suck it, Denver.

The city isn’t too windy, just really dry. To the west was a mountain. It was magnificent at first sight, but every other time after that, it was just a background piece. The day after, we were all greeted with a wake up call consisting of a loud, hard knock, and a get the hell up. When I walked outside, light was shining off all the cars, and it was around 80 degrees. James came outside with me, and the white kid followed soon after. We all stared at the mountain, just for a few seconds. Then, James taps on my shoulder, and I look behind myself to see him standing there, with a grin on his face, before he said “wake up.”

Then I woke up.

I was sitting in my childhood home. There was a large tv set to my right. The couch I was on was grungy and disgusting. I could see James frantically looking around the room for money.

“Why aren’t you helping?” he said, looking at me, staring into my eyes.

I heard a bang in the other room. The white kid was there, and he had knocked something over. Behind me, was my parents. Both of them were dead. I could see writing net to them that said “Viva Chavez.” whoever killed them, was from Venezuela.

I walked into the same room that the white kid was in. He had knocked my family’s safe on the ground. Using a crowbar, he grunted as he made an attempt at prying it open. My family would put money in here. Lots of it. We didn’t trust banks. We thought they would just get robbed and we would lose it. We were right though. By the time I turned eighteen, the bank that I had stored my money in had already been robbed three times. Just because I couldn’t afford to live in a high end neighborhood, just like it had been the rest of my life.

The white kid looked over at me. “Do you know the code?”

“Yeah.”

“Well then open this shit.”

James walked in holding fist fulls of jewelry and trying his hardest to stuff it in his pockets. I walked to the safe. 8-6-16. I cranked open the lock, and the safe opened. There was nothing. No money. They were bled dry. The safe was still three thousand pounds heavy. I felt inside. “What the shit?” it felt like we all thought.

We ran. The cops were almost definitely called. I knew what had happened, but I still didn’t want to be questioned or anything. I wanted to go.

All five of us had been tied down. Me, my mom, my dad, the white kid, and James.

We were in a circle, and there was a man who looked brown in the middle of us. He was holding a colt 1911 pistol in one hand, and a cigar in the other. He cocked his gun, shot my mother in the head. Made my father look, and then shot him as well. He picked up a phone, called 911, and left.

We went to a pawn shop across the street, and got rid of all the jewelry. We had money we had never touched before. Even though we left our finger prints, they would suspect mine, and I had touched the most stuff.

The airport was the next stop. I bought three tickets for Albuquerque, New Mexico. The plane would leave tomorrow. With the 20 dollars we had left, we slept on a park bench after we got drunk off a bottle of vodka. The white kid stop smoking crack the day after his mom died. Tallahassee kept us warm that night outside. The next day, I woke up feeling disorientated. My friends had slept with me all on one bench, and a cop had poked me with his baton to make sure I was alive. “Hey, wake up. Come on. Get the fuck up.”

I stood up and nudged James and the white kid to wake up.

“Why were you kids sleeping here last night.”

“We’re just tourists. Today is our flight back to Albuquerque. We figured we could just sleep outside, so we didn’t get a room.”

He believed me. “Whatever, just get out of here.”

All three of us walked over to the nearest gas station and “bought” coffee.

By bought I mean we stole.

We were all awake. We walked outside, and around the back of the building, I knew of a shortcut that could get us to the airport, and we could just wait there after we got through security. It was like, 9:30 am, and the flight was at 9 pm. Just get over there. It would be fine…

Someone saw us in the alleyway. I didn’t see them. They clubbed us in the back of the head, and we were all out cold, as far as I could tell. I heard somebody whisper “wake up.” in a girly voice.

Then I woke up.

I was in a wrecked car, flipped upside down. The girly voice was now next to me, screaming for me to wake up. I stared at her face, a cut on the forehead. A bruise on her cheek. Her name was Carletta. She owned the motel we stayed at. She was only 25 when her father died, leaving the motel in her name, and she was set for life. She was soon to give us her apartment in exchange for $500, and us having to pay the lease. She felt bad for us. Three people in a  new city, with nobody we know, not going to school. Not having a job set up.