Kai
1670 Words
They ran.
David didn't realize how scared he was until his legs were already moving. That was the thing about fear — it didn't always announce itself. Sometimes it just showed up in your feet, in the pace you were keeping, in the way your chest was doing something that had nothing to do with the running.
Be alive. Just be alive.
"TOBEY!"
His voice bounced off the empty park structures and came back to him without an answer. Lia was right beside him, bear somehow still under her arm, scanning left and right with those sharp medical eyes of hers.
"TOBEY!"
Nothing.
They pushed past the maintenance area, past the back of the prize stalls, past a row of staff lockers that had been thrown open and emptied — and David was already calculating worst cases, already doing the thing his brain did when it was frightened, running through outcomes in order of how badly they hurt—
"Over there," Lia said.
He looked.
A clearing behind the last building. And in it — Tobey. Standing very still. Which was wrong because Tobey didn't do still. Tobey did constant motion, constant noise, constant energy. This stillness was the forced kind.
The man behind him was the reason why.
Tall. David's age, maybe a little older. A kaishen like Lia, with sharp features and eyes that had been through something recently and hadn't finished processing it yet. He was holding a gun and he was holding it with the kind of steadiness that meant he knew how.
The barrel was against the back of Tobey's head.
Tobey, to his credit, looked more annoyed than terrified.
The man's eyes went to David and Lia the moment they appeared. Calculating. Threat assessment. Fast.
"Before I shoot," he said, voice flat and controlled, "I want to know who you are. And what your business is here."
"Okay—" David stepped forward with both hands visible. "Okay. Just — calm down. Please." His voice came out steadier than he felt. "He's just a kid. Whatever you think he did, whatever this is — he's sixteen years old." He took another step. "You want to point that at someone, point it at me."
The man looked at him for a long moment.
Then he pushed Tobey aside and pointed the gun at David.
Tobey stumbled, caught himself, looked at the back of the man's knee, and made a decision.
He kicked the gun.
It was a good kick — precise, unexpected, the kind of kick that comes from someone who has spent a lot of time on streets where knowing when to kick things was a survival skill. The gun spun out of the man's hand.
The man turned and kicked Tobey back.
Tobey went down hard, hit the ground with impact, and stayed there for a second with the expression of someone reevaluating their choices.
David was already moving.
He crossed the distance fast and the man turned to meet him and what followed was not a clean fight — it was two people who had learned things in different places using all of it at once. The man was good. Fast, technical, efficient. He fought like someone trained rather than someone desperate, which made him different from anything David had encountered recently.
But David was angry. And angry and trained is a specific combination.
They went back and forth — strike, block, redirect — until Tobey, still on the ground, reached out and grabbed the man's ankle at exactly the right moment. The man's weight shifted. His knee hit the ground.
David had the gun in his hand before the man had finished kneeling.
He pointed it at him.
The man looked up.
Something moved through his face — not fear. Something quieter than fear. Like a door closing behind him that he'd known was going to close eventually.
He smiled. Small and resigned.
"Do it," he said. "You beat me. Take my life."
David looked at him.
At this person — kneeling in an abandoned amusement park, alone, having held a gun to a teenager's head, now inviting someone to shoot him with an expression of complete acceptance.
He lowered the gun.
"No," he said.
The man blinked. First real reaction.
"I'm not going to do that." David crouched down to eye level. "You're human. So are we. Out here that's not nothing — that's everything." He held the man's gaze. "This was a misunderstanding. That's all it was."
Silence.
Tobey sat up from the ground, rubbing the back of his head. "Hey." He looked at the man. "Sorry for the kick."
The man stared at him.
"I mean—" Tobey gestured vaguely at the gun situation. "You had a gun on my head so I think we're even but still. Sorry."
Something shifted in the man's expression. Not quite a smile. But the place where a smile might eventually grow if given enough time.
"Sorry," he said. "For the interrogation." A pause. "And the gun."
David stood. Held out the gun handle first.
The man looked at it. Looked at David. Took it slowly, like he was waiting for the catch.
There was no catch.
"What's your name?" David asked.
"Kai."
"David." He nodded toward the others. "That's Lia. That's Tobey."
Kai looked at each of them in turn. Quiet and assessing in a way that wasn't unfriendly — just careful. Like someone who processed the world through observation before anything else.
"Lia." David glanced at her.
She was already moving, medical bag off her shoulder, crouching in front of Kai before he'd registered she was coming. "Hold still," she said, in the tone that meant it wasn't a suggestion.
Kai held still. Watched her work with an expression that was trying to be neutral and was losing to something that looked a lot like surprise.
"You're a medic," he said.
"Nurse," she corrected, not looking up.
"In the middle of all this."
"Somebody has to be." She pressed two fingers below a cut near his temple and he didn't flinch, which she noted. "This is superficial. You'll be fine."
"I know," he said.
She glanced up at that. Their eyes met briefly. She went back to work.
David looked around the clearing. At the five blinkers on the ground at the edges of it. Still and permanent.
"You did all of those?" he said.
Kai looked where he was looking. "They were already in the park when I arrived. I cleared it before I set up." He said it the same way someone might say I made coffee. Completely without drama.
Tobey looked at the blinkers. Looked at Kai. Revised something in his internal file about this person.
"So what are you doing out here alone?" David asked.
"Supplies," Kai said. "Ration. I've been relocating—" He stopped. Looked at Tobey with something that wasn't quite accusation. "Which is also apparently what someone else was doing. In my storage area."
Tobey opened his mouth.
"There's enough to go around," Kai said, before he could speak. "I wasn't going to use all of it anyway."
"Generous," Tobey said.
"Practical." Kai stood up slowly — Lia was done, stepping back, clicking her bag shut. He rolled his shoulder once. Looked at the four of them. "I was also trying to get into that car before your friend arrived." He nodded toward the lot where the Zyrtec jeep sat. "Newest model. Haven't been able to c***k the identification system."
"The Zyrtec Z9?" Tobey's head came up. "That's what you've been trying to hack?"
"For two days."
"Two days." Tobey said it the way you'd say bless your heart. He was already walking toward the van, reaching inside, pulling out a small device that looked like it had been built from four different things that weren't meant to be one thing.
Kai watched him. Arms crossed. Skeptical in that precise, quiet way of his.
Tobey approached the jeep. Looked at the door panel. Looked at his device. Pressed something.
The jeep's system hummed.
Profile identification complete, it said, in a voice designed to sound reassuring. Welcome.
The doors unlocked.
Kai stared at the jeep.
Stared at Tobey.
Tobey spread his hands modestly.
"Street kid," he said. "Know a lot of stuff."
Kai was quiet for a moment. Then he looked at David with an expression that said several things simultaneously, the main one being: where did you find these people.
"We should move together," he said finally.
"Yeah?" David said.
"There's an abandoned military branch. Forty minutes north." He looked at all of them. "Weapons, ammunition, possibly vehicles. Better than what we have." A pause. "I've been planning to breach it. More hands make it simpler."
David looked at Lia. She gave him the small nod.
He looked at Tobey. "More the merrier," Tobey said immediately, already transferring supplies from the van to the jeep with the efficiency of someone who had been packing and unpacking his whole life.
David looked at Kai.
"Alright," he said.
They loaded everything into the Z9 — supplies, ration, Lia's medical bag, Tobey's device collection, the stuffed bear which nobody commented on. The jeep was clean and smooth and smelled like a car that had never been driven through a blinker collision, which was a nice change.
Kai got in the back. Sat by the window. Said nothing.
Tobey got in beside him and immediately started talking.
Kai looked out the window.
David started the engine.
"North?" he said.
"North," Kai confirmed.
They pulled out of the amusement park slowly, past the Ferris wheel still catching light at its peak, past the game stalls and the go-kart track and the ride that was three hundred and fifty feet tall, and David didn't look back at any of it.
But he felt it.
The afternoon they'd taken for themselves in the middle of everything. The bear on Lia's lap. Her hand in his at the top of the world.
Still here, he thought.
He drove north.
- Writer
