Noir Car, Episode 13

Meanwhile, time was mean, making do by screaming lean through the hungry night in a slightly stolen and/or lightly lifted convertible with gleaming black highlights on black metal flake in a pitch black neighborhood of busted streetlamp glass music crunching under screeching wheels and black thoughts of vengeance in her brain. Black goes with everything, the ultimate accessory.

Around corners and up down-alley arrows she wound and the cracked maze of urban disuse and decay haunted the metal flake reflections but bounced off before they reached her, scared of falling in the furrow of her brow like an ice climber into a ravine. That's a furrow of thought, a furrow of anger, a deep trench of anxious fear that casts unlikely shadows on her milk-white visage. It's a night for shadows, shadows that jump up and escape laughing from their cage of daylight like flat funhouse ghosts on cheap sheet metal.

She drove faster to splatter the shadows, to shatter the fear-soaked miasma shooting from steam tunnels and into her line of sight. Clarity, clarity of purpose and resolve to do if not what's right then what's least wrong or at least most interesting was what's required for a kamikaze gambit to free a man who probably didn't even know how much trouble he was in. And that was just what she would do to him, disregarding any scars, nicks, cuts, abrasions, folds, tears, staples, or mutilations he had already gotten or would get at the hands of whatever friendly neighborhood hoods he'd gotten himself mixed in with this time.

The crumpled scrap exhibit A had sent her packing to Tulips, the very stinking arse of the city, and it was all downhill from there if her sources (lips loosed by a double scotch on the rocks and a sound pistol-whipping) were correct, and they usually were, sad to say. The screech stopped on a rusty nickel right in front of everything wrong with a city on the edge of the world. A warehouse tumbling to ruin off the jagged edge of the world that's round everywhere but here on the edge, a giant brick scab that God's aching to itch off his infected parasite planet, and such a lovely setting for a shootout. And that was hoping for the best.

TO BE CONTINUED
this episode written by Matt Fontaine