Concord Moon

Chapter One: Not With a Bang

1

That's me, the punk in the seventh row at the Tool concert.  See him?  Eyes caked in his mom's Maybelline, surrounded by friends of equal if not greater volume - that's a fat kid joke, don't worry about it.  And, somewhere in the crowd, is my killer.  Do you see him?  If we could pan the camera a little slower, maybe give you another chance to search the sea of faces with all those flashing lights and glinting eyebrow rings.

Don't worry.  I didn't see him, either.

We could Tarantino this story, go back to my life before graduating high school, back to the small-town drama and the painstaking effort of such things as 'Getting My Hair As Long As I Wanted' or the ever-dreaded 'Passing AP Calculus Without Wrecking My GPA'.  Because all that shit is behind me - hell, it stopped mattering the moment I locked eyes with ... well, I don't even really know who.  The thing about these people, these Monsters of the Night (or whatever) is that they can do shit like that to you - take everything you ever saw or heard of them and just turn it to ash, leaving a smoky residue on the inside of your memories where their face used to be.

Want to know what sucks the most about all this, chickadees?  I don't know who this guy even is, but I miss him.  I miss him like an amputee missing a limb.  Like somebody had carved my heart out and thrown it over the side of a speeding boat, there to be lost in the depths of the Pacific ocean.

So there I was, dear readers, muddy and aching and confused, crawling out of a ditch along the Interstate highway, missing a stranger the way army widows missed their husbands (or wives, because this is the twenty-fist goddamn century, isn't it).

I woke up near Concord, California.  This is important, because the Tool concert was in Wisconsin.

So imagine this; some family gets a pet cat, right?  Maybe the thing scratches up the furniture or shits in their bed or sleeps on the baby's face or some obnoxious shit like that.  So they take kitty dearest for a drive to the country, and kick it to the literal curb.  A month later, the cat shows back up at the house, pissing on their doorstep and raiding the garbage for leftovers.  Happens all the time.

Me.  I'm that cat right now.  Somebody took me for themselves, tried to turn me into something I wasn't, and kicked me to the curb when it didn't work out.  Only 'home' wasn't a place, it was a person, and I could still feel the tug of it.  Whatever it was that stray goddamn cats had, I had that now too - that sort of homing beacon, I guess, and it drew me into Concord the way it could draw Fluffy back to a careless suburban family.

There were tire tracks in the drying clay of the roadside, deep ridges that I stubbed my foot against in the clumsy shuffle of the freshly murdered.  I was soaking wet and shivering, and hunger gnawed around inside my ribs in sick-heavy throes.  The world had yet to stop its attack on my senses, and the passing light of a semi-truck left me staggering back to the safety of the ditch, falling to my hands and knees to wait for the psychedelics to fucking relent.

Did I mention the hunger?  I licked the salt and grit of mud from the corner of my mouth just to have a taste of the blood that still lingered there - a dried up crumb that I bit between my molars and sucked on like a goddamn Jolly Rancher.  Further down the road an empty pickup truck sat with its hazard lights blinking.

I staggered up against the warm metal of the truck door and peered inside, there to find old blood (dry, unappetizing) staining the seat and a lone baseball cap on the dashboard.  The cabin of the truck reeked like tobacco and gasoline - as good as toxic waste to my poor overwrought sense of smell, but I held my breath long enough to climb in and try the keys that had been left in the ignition.

The engine coughed, sputtered, then roared to life on the third attempt.  I slammed the door shut and backed the truck onto the road, knocking the baseball hat off the dash to the seat beside me because it was a fucking distraction.  I'm not asking any of the right questions right now - like where this truck came from, where its owner was and what the hell that blood was doing there.  These are important questions.

Pay attention, chickadees.  Do you see him, the hitch-hiker off the exit ramp with the tattered camping pack?  The one who witnessed it all with his thumb out in the breeze?

His name is Parker.

Pay attention.

I don't know it yet, but his name?  Parker.