Running Dark

©2003

I run. It’s not an addiction, but if I don’t run three or four times a week I feel sluggish, like I’ve slept too long. So I run, before light or after dark if necessary. It insulates me from the guilt.

Tonight I picked up a follower. Not the first but persistent and drunk. Drunk worries me. I know what to expect of sober followers. Drunk followers might not know themselves. That’s what worries me. Usually followers can’t stay my pace. This one was having a pretty good go at it. Unexpected and unnerving as I’m armed and I’m fast. We headed across Shadowline into The Dark, electric light fading behind us.

Two blocks in, he realized we were aimed at the heart of The District, the ravages of war growing thicker on either side. I glanced across my shoulder at him. His expression had grown grim. I remembered my first gut reaction to The District and thought uncharitably he deserved whatever imagination conjured out of the shadows. He gave up the chase at the next intersection. I kept running toward the riverfront.

“Dangerous,” he yelled after me, “a woman running The Dark all by her lonesome.”
It was false bravado. He knew the truth. I heard it in the nervous octaves of his voice. Man was Midtown, part of the bulk of citizenry that had survived basically untouched. He didn’t belong this side of Shadowline. Did his drinking in The Light where the remnants of civilization provided electricity, where distinctions between men blurred and loyalties less likely to be definitive. He was at the bottom of the pecking order this side of Shadowline, and he was here because I hadn’t wanted to deal with a drunk.

I circled back, fools, both of us–him for following, me for feeling responsible.

He was leaning on his knees, sucking air, backlighted by Liam’s one blasphemy on The Light, a beer advertisement bleeding red all over the pavement. Somewhere in the dark thumped the bar’s generator. The Midtowner straightened and filled his lungs with chill air, whiffing it out in an exaggerated sigh, a thin cloud hanging in the gaudy light then gone.

“Cold,” he said, wrapping his arms around his body, though he’d just run four long blocks. As if trying to convince me, he shuffled from one foot to the other more or less in my direction. Man maybe wasn’t quite as drunk as he had been, all the fresh air and exercise. He glanced up and down the streets then over his shoulder at the bar.

“Not too busy,” he observed.

Might be, might not be, I thought. Liam’s was typical of The Dark black market businesses, discreet, quiet, selling to a select clientele in a well-defined neighborhood. Not that outside business was easily turned away–just that The Dark had definitive loyalties.

“How about we get a drink?” he asked.

“What you need is black coffee. Other side of The Line.”

“What could hurt? One drink.” He twitched his head at the bar and took another step or two in my direction.

I’ve carried a lash since the first follower. I rattled its supple, beaded tongues. It got his attention. “Cute, that,” he remarked, but did not come any closer. I pointed back uptown. “That street takes you to Shadowline. Three blocks. Two you’ll see the lights.” I turned on the ball of my foot with every intention of stepping up the pace. Man was in fair to good shape, but there was no question in my mind I could outdistance him. Stepping up the pace lengthened the stats in my favor.

“Hey,” he yelled, “back that way?”

Why do seemingly intelligent people do dumb things? I turned back to face him, jogging backward, intending to see the Midtowner headed in the right direction while I kept going in mine. Damned bastard must have sensed I’d do a fool’s thing. He was light footing across what was left of the separating tarmac.

I took a swing with the lash at his face. He threw up his arms and called me a bitch. I followed through with the hard front of my knee and made a frantic jump for the nearest deep shadowed escape. Just rotten luck my foot landed half on and half off the curb. Escape meant staying on my feet. Staying on my feet resulted in a twisting sprain that nearly meant no escape at all. I sweated to keep my leg under me as I fled for the denser dark under The District’s broken buildings.

Groaning and cursing followed my hampered sprint then, all too soon, running steps. He seemed consciously reckless considering his earlier reservations. I’d hurt him, and he had enough alcohol and violence in him to want retribution.

I realized I was running one side on my toes, my stride coming all apart. “Hug the wall,” I told myself, “don’t get back lighted. And, for heaven sakes, don’t fall.” I’d stay down if I did. All I wanted to do was curl myself around the pain and weep. I needed a bolt hole and now.

Tried to ignore the pain and concentrate on working out just which particular street I’d taken. I skip hopped along, fighting panic. My ears told me he slowed at every profitable black opening. My instinct told me he was reaching for my throat. I feared to look back, afraid I’d learn just how little advantage I had. I looked all the same, the compulsion too strong. His menacing shadow flitted in and out of faint red light. I pressed myself tighter to the bricks, my heart making a drum of my chest.

I thought I’d run down a transition street, once elegant townhouses and tenements standing as the Shadowline buffer between Midtown and The District. It turned out to be mostly a street of abandoned light industry and small businesses inside the once busy commercial quarter. Same grand last century buildings but converted and redesigned before the war till no logical floor plans remained. Walls punched out and doors sealed to accommodate each succeeding need. Uncertain shelter at best with the buildings open to so many wandering The District. But the unknown was much preferred to the known, and I was not going much farther, no matter what hid in the dark. Half a block and the next black opening was all I was going to get out of my painfully earned advantage.

The next likely opening turned out to be a useful doorway without a door. I gingerly set my foot up on the step and braced for the painful push up.

A man’s hand snaked out of the black interior and took my arm. My heart stopped somewhere above my larynx, blocking all breath. He slipped the lash away and gave me a tug up. A second man took my other arm. Between them they swept me over the threshold and set my back against the vestibule wall.

There was a rattle of beads as the lash went from one to the other of them. I dug in a deep breath to get my heart started again then spent some time thereafter trying to still it. The utilitarian plaster at my back was icy through my sweaty jersey. I shivered, not entirely from the cold. My breath, sheets of mist, came and went rapidly, on the verge of hyperventilating.

The man between me and the lighter darkness outside was half a head taller than myself, long limbed and slender, and dressed to blend with the night. The reflection given back off the less shadowed street outlined a lean, hard-planed face typical of the street toughs in The District. Of the other man, I sensed only a shape along the wall, but I had gotten an impression of another tall but not so lean hard-tough. He held my arm, not tight as if I were a captive, after all, where would I go, but to give me support? It was a help and a hope.

I had often passed the men and women of The District on my jogs, some watched with cautious curiosity, most ignored me all together. None molested me in six months. The residue of war still a part of their daily lives, the siege-hardened Districters were secretive, clannish people, living by their wits and nerve and stealth as they had all through the war years. I had been careful in the extreme choosing the routes I ran not to cross over territorial boundaries but use them for paths. I sensed sometime ago approval among the Districters for my discretion. I fervently hoped these men knew of me.

When the war had started all commerce and shipping had ceased, the whole region essentially isolated. Bitter fighting had broken out among the blue-collar factions of old town that lined the rails and riverfront. War became inconsequential as people wrangled for food for their children and coal to heat their houses. Gangs grew out of the bitterness. Even the healthier, wealthier up-town cosmopolitans, hiding behind their bulkheads of steel and concrete, bickered, feeling the pinch of short supplies. Somewhere in all this, one man had stepped up and made order, one man with the diplomacy to negotiate a peaceful cooperation between the gangs and set into motion the salvation of the old district, organizing it to survive the war and giving birth to a black market that sustained both The District and to a great extent the whole city, much to authority’s chagrin.

We three listened for the approaching steps. My follower soon came into view, edging along at the curb, searching the dark doorway. He passed out of sight. The street gave back only silence and tension.

The Midtowner shuffled back crab-wise, leaning in to see into the vestibule without coming to close. I feared my heavy breathing had given us away. Whether he’d heard me or not, suddenly he was wisely cautious.

The lean Districter pushed himself off the wall. “You lost?” he asked in a quiet manner. Man on the walk jumped. So did I. It earned me a reassuring pat on my arm from the Districter’s companion.

“Don’t know but one runner this side of Shadowline,” the Districter said, stepping into the doorway. Midtowner quickly stepped back and tripped unawares into the gutter. He was suddenly breathing hard as I was.

“Can’t think of two,” the Districter went on, “so I’m guessing you’re lost.”

Man in the gutter nodded, eyes stretched wide.

“I set you straight, you find your way home okay?”

Man suddenly looked hopeful. He nodded vigorously in the affirmative.

“Provide a guide, you want,” offered the Districter.

Midtowner shook his head once emphatically. He suspiciously scanned the street right and left before setting off down the gutter in the direction of Liam’s bar.      The Districter stood in the doorway and watched the Midtowner jogging away. After a few moments he crooked his hand our way.

I gingerly pushed off the chilly plaster. Man at my side threw his arm across my chest like a father safeguarding his child. Two altogether different men strolled from the deepest dark past us and out into the street, turning to follow the Midtowner. I had not known they were there. Shaken, I slid down the wall till my tailbone was firmly on the floor.

I had often thought of the dangers of dealing with Districters. Their black markets had fed and fueled and bled the city all through the war years. But at this moment I was more keenly aware of their benevolence. I let out a sigh and sagged against the damp wall. My ankle throbbed. I recognized it was working up to a full-blown fever heat and unconsciously wrapped my trembling hands around it. After six months I had learned little more about The District than I had known the day I came here, until tonight.

All those months ago in the staff room of the hospital where I am a physician a longtime friend approached. Well over eighty and frail he’d supposedly retired. “I have a patient,” he said. No hello. No how are you? Just “I have a patient.”

That evening I took my first sally across Shadowline.

It did not go unnoticed when I began crossing regularly to offer my special skill, my MD license, but, as it turned out, also a license to spy. Weighted by guilt, all the same, it is my barter to report on The Dark. “Find out who runs the gangs,” I’d been instructed, a condition of being allowed to come and go into The Light.

What the old authorities wanted was a guarded secret I was not able to unlock, not so long as I was only in part of The Dark. All I’d ever learned was it was growing restless, and tonight I realized I felt a part of that restlessness. Like the men in The Dark, The District, silent and expectant, waited for a sign known only to itself. Cognizance maybe. Or justice. With peace in their grasp, the powers-that-be wanted normalcy, balances that comforted them, life as it had been once. Power brokering belonged to The Light, but The District was no longer willing to be obscure and neglected.

Tonight I’d been given the option to take that permanent step across Shadowline and oddly enough felt more than a budding allegiance. The District would take me in, the stranger, the helper, the spy among them. Whether they recognized me as one or all three, they had marked me for one of their own—they had acknowledged me as their runner in The Dark.