Obviously That's Not Acceptable [AFitN - 08]
A Friend in the Neighbourhood - Chapter Eight
This is Chapter Eight of A Friend in the Neighbourhood, a serialised novella in Twelve Parts. You can also read it on my website, jondauthor.work. A collected edition for ereaders will be available after the full run. Header image by Esteban Lopez.
Maxim launches himself forward with a surprisingly practised ease, hooking one shoulder under the unfixed bar-booth table’s lower half. He raises it in one swift motion to block the window, landing on its side with a thud. On the street, three distinct Deacons continue hammering at the glass. Enormous cracks spread through it with the sort of sickening sound that implies whatever strength it has is waning fast.
“What do they want?” Maxim asks, confused. Deacon shrugs.
“I don’t know - I’ve encountered others but they, well, they’ve been weird but not violent.” He raises a hand, cowering now alongside the one-time drug runner, behind the flipped table. Two fingers touch the edge of his sweater neck, wondering if he should say something. It’s just another wrinkle, after all. Strange duplicates are already a mile beyond what Deacon himself can explain.
“Well, they have to want something, right?” Behind them, the glass continues to crack. For all the threat of danger posed, at least they seem to share Deacon’s relatively low level of physical ability. The table, acting as a support, seems to have slowed them enough for the time being. Maxim offers Deacon a hand in a friendly gesture of support. Deacon smiles but refuses it, suddenly overwhelmed with laughter.
“I’m sorry -” He splutters, trying to suppress the laughter even further. It is a largely useless gesture. “It’s just -” The absurdity of it all breaks through, coalescing in a blunt fit of pique. “God. I don’t even want to know how I ended up here. It’s all just so, so… nothing. It means nothing. It is nothing. I’m just some dumb idiot!”
“Yeah well, you’d be surprised how far dumb idiots get.” Maxim pivots, swivelling to his knees to sneak a peek around the flipped table. “OK, still only three of them - two look like they’re business-y types and one works at Marcy Burger, that mean anything to you?”
“Well, I like that one they do with the avocado and -”
“Got it,” Maxim cuts him off with a wave of his hand, only to turn with a surprising jolt at the sound of a clearing throat.
“C’mon guys,” the bartender sighs, “obviously that’s not acceptable.”
“The uh, well, I mean -” Deacon barely gets his thought off the ground. It’s the first time he’s really looked at anything other than the attackers or the table between them. No one else in Backspace seems to have even noticed. There are curious looks and suspicious mutterings, but not a single eye is fixed on the window beating ceaselessly with the sound of crashing fists.
It shatters with sudden aggression, shards flying around the rectangular edge of the table like some victim’s chalk outline. A stray fragment catches the bartender on the cheek, leaving a small but virulent cut; he doesn’t even flinch.
“OK, that’s messed up,” Maxim half-whispers in disbelief.
“And yet you’re still doing it. Please, guys - I don’t care what it is. Just put the table back.” He doesn’t wait for them to respond. Instead, the bartender puts one hand on the top and extends his foot out to the lowest leg, leaning backwards as a fulcrum. The table collapses back in place with an echoed thud as Maxim and Deacon both scramble out from beneath it.
“No point staying here then,” Maxim sighs, stepping away from the table as the three false Deacons scramble their way through the mess of broken glass and cruel-seeming debris.
“Yeah,” Deacon agrees, thinking just a moment too slow to realise his mistake. A fast-food uniform-clad hand reaches form him, grabbing for his wrist. It is a momentary glance, but it’s enough - Deacon instantly recoils in pain, hand clutching the now open wound.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” Maxim doesn’t get it, can’t see through Deacon’s grasping hand, and so chooses to take the initiative. “C’mon,” he grunts, scooping Deacon up over his shoulder as best he can. They force their way onward, pushing through confused onlookers staring at these two strange individuals acting as though the world was ending. The bartender shouts as they press back through the bar’s winding guts, but the voice drowns out quickly enough. A shared loading dock for the building opens onto a taxi rank, and Maxim waves down the first one to stop.
Their pursuers are slow, wounded by the glass, but still appear as the cab pulls close as if they too had been summoned. Maxim doesn’t hesitate, urging the cab forward. A confusing back-and-forth about destinations trades between them, but Maxim wins out in the end. It’s nothing to Deacon. It all means nothing. The pain is different this time - searing, agonising in a way that the first touch had not been. The first touch had been a short, sharp shock - this was a heavy, aching intensity he had never felt before. Not a single thought lingers in his mind about his own safety, only the newfound fear of what a third touch might bring.
Maxim lives in an old, creaking townhouse in a quiet, sleepy neighbourhood. It has a quaint, understated feel to it. So much of the man - who Deacon first met as a bluster of pomposity and shirtless arrogance - seems a strange and unexpected contrast to the warm and inviting mid-century feel of the home. None of that occurs to him, of course. The pain overrides just about every thought he has left.
“Well,” Maxim notes as a thought in and of itself. He whistles quietly, inspecting the wound but keeping a healthy distance given the strangeness of it. No blood, no pus, no seepage or apparent ‘damage’. If he didn’t know better, he’d almost say it was fine - except, plain as day, there is a large, thumb-sized section of Deacon’s wrist missing. The outline matches Maxim’s almost perfectly, and the depth is shallow but serious enough. Bone and sinew alike breathe the open air, and yet still no blood or other injury.
“Well?” Deacon asks, trying to push through the pain.
“It’s… I mean, and this is a weird thing, but like, it’s almost self-cauterised. Sort of like whatever did it has, at some tiny and imperceptible level, tied everything off, stemmed every tide, you know? If I cut myself and squeezed, I would expect to see blood - but here…” Maxim squeezes his wrist gently. It’s a welcome sensation - the pressure briefly interrupts the dull, throbbing agony. “Nothing. It’s just a hunk of meat.”
“Thanks,” Deacon half-grunts. “You make a gal feel special.”
“Hey, I’m not a doctor.”
“You live like one,” Deacon points out. Maxim laughs.
“That’s one of those blurry edges, right? I own my home in this godforsaken city. Got to have done some terrible stuff to do that.” Maxim sits back, leaning against the back of his chair. They share a paired corner of an ornate, wooden dining table, a plush and frankly lush feeling towel placed delicately under Deacon’s wrist as a seemingly unnecessary precaution.
“… Hey, that’s an idea.”
“What is?” Maxim asks.
“What you said before - you’re not a doctor.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“No, no - let me call someone.” Deacon fumbles for his phone - grateful as he is that the wrist injury is on his non-dominant left hand, keeping it raised on the table still weirdly limits his range of movement. It's just another thing to adjust to.
Ten minutes later, Kelly Han arrives.
“Well,” she notes as a thought in and of itself. It’s just about the only reaction anyone can have. She looks, strangely enough, like a normally dressed person. Not a single shred of self-made clothing to be found. “I guess I’m glad I left work for this.”
“Any ideas?” Maxim asks. Kelly shoots Deacon a curious look that asks first if he’s trustworthy, and then second if she’s supposed to think he’s hot. Deacon’s face equivocates on both.
“Look, I’m a vet nurse. A trainee one at that - the best I can do is vaccinate a shar-pei.” She prods curiously at the open flesh. It stings - but not nearly as much as a living cross-section should.
“Hey!”
“Sorry,” she apologises, not really meaning it.
Deacon brings her up to speed in record time, distilling the basic events down to a handful of panicked, insistent sentences. Kelly strokes her chin curiously as she returns to examining the wound.
“Well, I mean, it’s definitely magical, right? No getting around that.” She snaps her fingers insistently. “Show me the other one.”
“What -” Deacon asks, before realising he had forgotten entirely about the wound at his neck. With a reluctant tug, trying carefully not to scrape the scratchy turtleneck against his wrist as the sleeves come off, he strips to his waist. Even in the mirror, it’s plain enough the wound on his neck hasn’t changed. It’s a quiet, small relief of a thing. If it isn’t getting worse, he decides, then it can be lived with.
“That’s gnarly,” she laughs, “where’d you pick that one up?”
“From the first doppelganger I met - at the magic tchotchke shop.”
“It seems like your friend Adra is the obvious person to ask for help,” Maxim offers unprompted, “but if she’s anything like the bartender at Backspace, proximity may be the devil of it.”
“I think she’s valuable - but I think I need to bring her something concrete. Some sort of… not proof, necessarily, but just something to focus on that a new ‘me’ can’t interrupt.”
“I haven’t met any of these clones yet,” Kelly offers unprompted, “but it sounds like they have some sort of influence on people.”
“What do you mean?” Deacon asks.
“It’s - hm. Between your magic friend, your boyfriend and the bartender, not to mention everyone at the bar, the way you’ve described it, it’s like they override certain things. Your magic friend had to serve the customer, Carey couldn’t tell the difference despite talking like you were one person, the bartender couldn’t even see them - that’s not everyone seeing them like you, that’s them making everyone see them how they need to be seen.”
“That’s a surprisingly solid idea,” Maxim agrees with a surprised look on his face. “I can’t disagree.”
“You seem surprised.” Kelly’s face is locked in pure suspicion.
“Only because you’re working with third-hand information, I promise.” He laughs, standing up from his chair. “I guess we’re a little too close to it.”
“Speaking of,” Deacon interrupts, “I’ve been thinking.” He winces suddenly, the dull ache of the wound reasserting itself unexpectedly. He pauses, right-hand raised as a sign that he doesn’t need help.
“Deac’,” Kelly sighs.
“I’m fine. I’ll… manage, I guess.” He takes a deep breath, centring himself. “So far, only Maxim seems to be immune to whatever whammy these fake-Deacons spread. He’s also the only person who’s been around them that I’ve caught up in my luck-slipstream.”
“Thanks again for that,” Maxim grunts through folded arms. “What about her?”
“Not to my knowledge,” Kelly answers through doubtful eyes, “right?”
“Maybe in our ‘tests’? I dunno. Never intentionally. Same for Carey and Adra, even Waylon.”
“So, let’s find someone who you have caught up in that slipstream.” Maxim pulls out his phone, summoning another cab. “Where are we headed?”
“I guess the house-fire victims?” Deacon thinks about it for a moment, then waves it off. “No, the house was gutted. They won’t be there. They could be anywhere.”
“They’ve also been through enough,” Kelly interjects pointedly. “The same probably goes for any random acts of charity - too mobile and not worth dragging into this.”
“The cop, then.” A shiver crosses down Deacon’s back. “I hate to admit it, but he’s the only one I can think of that’s probably somewhere predictable. He was just some desk jockey who would’ve been caught up in my lucky escape. He even went so far as to mix me up with someone else.”
“At some places, that’s enough to lose your job - sounds like slipstream to me.” Maxim tosses Deacon his turtleneck, before disappearing to the bathroom. He returns, moments later, with enough materials for a make-shift splint. “We’ve got a few minutes before the cab arrives. Let’s wrap that thing up.”
“On it,” Kelly agrees, finally in her element. Deacon just smiles. It feels nice to have someone helping him for a change.