Herring

Anders 'Herc'

~

This is gonna be a long ass night. But it's my story. I might as well tell it. I wanna tell this one. Lemme curse a little.

Someone's awfully happy today… well since you asked so nicely, why not.

Thank you :D

Isn't she adorable?

Oh shut it. Anywho! Let's get ittttt

~

The spotlight found me.

Me.

Standing at a freshly vandalized wall. Marker in hand. The phrase f*****g TIRED six inches from my face in letters I had personally authored thirty seconds ago.

I want to be very f*****g precise about what happened next in my brain.

There was a moment — just a flicker — where I genuinely considered staying still. Playing dead. Becoming one with the wall. Telling the light that I was in fact a structural feature of the building, a decorative element, a mural, anything —

Then two officers broke off from the convoy on foot and started toward me at a pace that was not a casual enquiry pace.

I ran.

I so f*****g ran like I had somewhere to be. Which technically I did — anywhere but here — so at least that was honest.

Falk Street, I learned in real time, is a spectacular place to be cornered and a catastrophic place to flee.

Falk Street. More like f**k Street!

The chain-link fence at the far end loomed immediately. I hit it at full sprint, hit it the way a body hits a wall when the brain is a full three seconds behind the legs, fingers hooking through the links, and I went up it the way a person goes up a fence they have never climbed before, which is quite frankly, badly — with too much noise and not enough technique and one shoe catching on the top and the whole thing rattling like a very alarmed instrument.

I dropped the other side.

Landed wrong on my left ankle. A bolt of something sharp and immediate shot straight up to my knee and I said, very clearly, in the dark, to no one —

Shit s**t s**t s**t!

Kept moving. Had to. You gotta be fast as f**k in these kinds of situations. Yoga class did NOT help with that. Well, I only ever watched em anyway.

Ankle or no ankle. Prison or a sprain, and I knew which one I could walk off.

The construction site was a horror. Dark and full of the specific obstacles that construction sites accumulate as if by legal requirement — scaffolding poles, sandbags, a skip that had absolutely no business being in the middle of a pathway, mounds of wet gravel that the rain had turned into a consistency specifically designed to betray your footing at the worst possible moment.

I hit two of those. f**k.

Went down on one knee on the second. Got back up. Kept going.

Behind me, the fence rattled.

They're faster than me, some calm and unhelpful part of my brain observed. They train for this.

Fantastic. Wonderful information. Thank you.

I came out the other side of the construction site onto a street I didn't immediately recognise — narrower, quieter, the kind of back road that exists between the city's real roads and has no particular ambitions of its own. Lamplight. A skip. A rubbish bag that had split open across the pavement creating a miniature obstacle course of someone's former domestic life.

I went through it.

Directly collided into a person. Great.

We hit each other at approximately the same speed from approximately opposite angles, which meant the impact was committed and mutual and neither of us won. I bounced off something solid — a chest, a shoulder, something wrapped in at least three layers of coat — and staggered back and nearly went down again, and the person I'd hit did the same, and we both stood there in the dark for one second just breathing at each other like two animals who'd run into each other on a trail.

He was — I don't know. Big. Not in a threatening way, just in a “this is someone who takes up space with ease” kinda way. Three coats, as I'd suspected. A beanie pulled low. A scarf around the lower half of his face. He looked, from the outside, like someone who slept rough — layered and weathered and carrying a bag that had seen better decades — but something about the way he stood didn't match any of that. He stood like someone who was perfectly comfortable with whatever was currently happening, which was insane, because what was currently happening was fuc—

The fence rattled again. Closer.

He looked in that direction.

Looked at me.

Looked at the marker still somehow in my hand.

Anders: "You the graffiti girl?"

Deia: "What — no — I — that's not the point—"

Anders: "Relax. I saw the fish. I liked it."

Deia: "Who the f**k are you?"

Anders: "Someone who's also had a long night. You planning to keep standing there or—"

The torch beam swung into the street mouth. Both our heads turned toward it.

We ran.

Not a discussion. Not a decision. We just — went. Both of us. Same direction. Like we'd agreed on something without using words, which I want to be clear I had not agreed to, I did not consent to this partnership, and yet here I was sprinting alongside a stranger in three coats through the backstreets of Seattle at eleven forty-something at night, ankle arguing with every step.

Deia: "I don't even f*****g know you."

Anders: "You really want to have this conversation at this speed?"

Deia: "Yes actually —"

Anders: "Left."

Deia: "What —"

He grabbed my arm and pulled hard left and we went down an alley so narrow I scraped my shoulder on the brickwork and had to tilt sideways to fit through it, and when we came out the other end we were on a different street entirely, one that sloped sharply downward toward —

Deia: "The station."

Anders: "You know this city."

Deia: "Why are you running?"

Anders: "Why are you running?"

Deia: "I asked first."

Anders: "You did. And I'm going to answer you fully and completely the moment we are not being chased. Which we currently are. So —"

He pointed. I ran. We both ran.

The entrance to Westlake Station was the kind of public space that at midnight has precisely three people in it: a man asleep on a bench with the conviction of someone who's made his peace with the world, a woman mopping something that hadn't been spillage so much as a sustained commitment to chaos, and now us — two people arriving at speed through the top escalators with the energy of people who had made a series of connected decisions they were not entirely at peace with.

We hit the escalator. It was going up.

We went down it anyway.

Deia: "This is a horrible idea —"

Anders: "Third best idea I've had tonight."

Deia: "What were the first two?"

Anders: "Don't ask."

The escalator fought back. Every step down required two steps of actual effort, which was — it was genuinely absurd, the whole thing was goddamn absurd, I was descending an escalator backwards in the wrong direction with a man in three coats and an unspecified backstory while somewhere above us at least two officers had presumably made it over the fence and were currently doing their jobs —

We made the bottom. Burst through the turnstile — through, not over, he somehow vaulted it and I just ran straight at mine and it snapped open on impact which I was going to think about later in terms of my relationship with public transport infrastructure —

Platform. Southbound. A train was sitting there with its doors still open, the soft mechanical bing of imminent departure already underway.

We looked at each other.

We sprinted.

Deia: "Go go go go —"

The doors closed on us. Literally on us — I got one shoulder through before the rubber seal clamped down and for one suspended, magnificent second I was half on a train and half in a station in what I can only describe as the most committed commute I'd ever attempted, and then Anders grabbed my arm from inside and pulled and I came through and the doors sealed behind me and the train moved.

I stood in the carriage.

Breathing.

He stood across from me.

Also breathing.

The three other passengers in the carriage looked at us with varying degrees of interest and returned to their phones, because this was Seattle and this was the last southbound train and they had places to be that did not involve caring about us.

Deia: "Okay. Who are you?"

Anders: "Anders."

Deia: "Anders what."

Anders: "Herc."

Deia: "That's not a name."

Anders: "It's mine."

Deia: "It's a nickname."

Anders: "Everything's a nickname if you think about it long enough. What's yours?"

Deia: "I'm not telling you."

Anders: "The wall said Deia."

I stared at him.

Anders: "Bottom right corner. Small. You signed it."

I had. I absolutely had. Completely unconsciously, the way you sign things when you make them, because I was apparently a tagging artist now with attribution habits and no sense of self-preservation.

Deia: "That proves nothing."

Anders: "Okay."

He smiled. Not the full thing — just the corner of it, above the scarf. Which was — I noted it. Filed it away in the “things I do not have time for right now” drawer, which was a very full drawer tonight.

Deia: "Why were you running? Actually. I want the actual answer."

Anders: "Wrong place."

Deia: "Wrong place."

Anders: "At a very bad time."

Deia: "That's not —"

Anders: "It's the honest answer. You want the long version, you're going to need to buy me a coffee. I take it black."

Deia: "I was almost robbed tonight you know."

Anders: "I know."

Deia: "What do you mean you know —"

Anders: "Falk Street has a reputation. Those two — they've been working that block for weeks."

Deia: "And you just happened to be there."

Anders: "I happen to be in a lot of places."

The train pulled into Pioneer Square. He stood.

Anders: "This is me."

Deia: "You're getting off here?"

Anders: "Unless you want to keep talking. In which case."

He gestured at the seat like he'd stay. Like it was the easiest thing in the world. Like we hadn't just vaulted a turnstile together six minutes ago and hadn't been running for our lives before that. He was — he was completely unrattled. Not the fake calm of someone suppressing panic. Genuine. Settled. The kind of calm that lives in a person who has been in worse situations than this and found them interesting.

Deia: "Get off the train."

Anders: "Alright."

He moved to the door. Stopped with one hand on the rail.

Anders: "For what it's worth — the fish was pretty damn good."

The doors opened.

He stepped out.

Deia: "Wait — how did you —"

The doors closed.

The train moved.

I sat down on the seat he'd been standing next to and stared at the dark tunnel walls going past and tried to work out what the hell had just happened in the last forty minutes of my life and came up completely empty.

Who the f**k was that.

Pioneer Square station. Empty platform, bare concrete, the particular acoustics of underground spaces that make everything sound like it's already being remembered rather than currently happening.

Anders Herc Chantel — which was not a name, which was emphatically a collection of sounds someone had been assigned and simply refused to argue with — walked the length of the platform without hurrying.

He pulled the phone from his inner coat pocket.

Looked at the screen.

Three missed calls. One message. He read the message. His expression did not change significantly. He typed a reply with his thumb, single-handed, unhurried.

Put the phone away.

Looked at the southbound tunnel where the train had gone.

Deia, said the wall in his memory, small letters in the corner, slightly crooked, the handwriting of someone who'd written it fast and hadn't cared whether it was perfect.

He thought about that for a moment.

Then he walked up the platform stairs and back into the city, which had been many things tonight and had not finished being them yet.