The Seraphim: A Cyberpunk Novel

Four - Jacob

The air tasted like fried oil and sewage. Jacob Boyle, the seventeen year-old netrunner, smothered the roll of moonleaf with his heel. He was being followed.

Rain spat, first a soft putter of drops, but slowly dropped harder from the tar-colored sky. He lowered his headphone ears and looped them around his neck like a piece of techno-jewelry. 

Jacob threw up the hood to his black leather jacket and pocketed his hands. His shoulders narrow, he pushed his way through the crowds of people in their nylon windbreakers and plastic umbrellas. The wheels of the cars splashed in the cracked asphalt. The crunch of the tossed aside Styrofoam containers and swishing of the scattered plastic bags that soaked in the collecting puddles echoed through the wide street. Bus hydraulics hissed and the brakes squealed and screeched. The footfalls of his stalker masked in the clamor of city life.

Street vendors cried out to passersby mostly in el'Shae. Their long necks hung over the bar of their stands and their skeletal fingers waved people on. 

Jacob stopped under the neon-wire tubes that flickered bright greens and reds and blues over the glossy-washed street. The rain pattered and beaded on his shoulders and hooded head. The crimson and gold bracelet she gave him interlocked between his fingers inside his pocket.

A clamor of clashing steel and sizzling of iron and flame. Couples and off-shift employees waiting in line. His eyes glossed over the advertisement boards written in the language of the Shae Aelfs. The writing like an elegant calligraphy hanging over stores and stalls, outlining each chipping painted letter with a neon tube that flickered in the darkness. The skin on the back of his neck still crawled.

Alie's Noodle Stand was an old rusted truck with a single open window with a ledge that held napkins and some beverages on display. Jacob flattened a few Osean bills from his pocket and waited behind two lanky shaes, a man and woman, who waited under the awning set up in front of the truck. Jacob kept his eyes low. The aromas of the brown sugar sauces, the stir-fry of vegetables and the boiling of rice noodles spilled out of the window. 

The couple stepped away from the counter with their take-out containers and huddled close as they walked down the street in the beating rain. Jacob stepped up, looking over the counter and into the food truck. Alie wiped his oily hands with a cloth. His hair black and greasy, his leaf-shaped ears piercing through the wet strands, his almond-shaped eyes gray and narrow like his neck.

"Hey, Oánháiko," said Alie. The corner of his fractured lips creased and exposed his yellow teeth.

"One small container of egg-noodles."

"You got it." Alie turned to the pot of boiling water and vanished out of Jacob's sight. The street wasn't completely cleared, there were still a sizable number of people drifting down the sidewalk shrouded in a rainbow of flickering neon lights and shopfronts.

Jacob tried not to look behind him. He could feel the eyes burning through the back of his neck. He cursed himself for taking his medication before going back to West New Serapha. Not that he wanted too anyways when the primary school nurse injected him with a full dose of anxtonin.

Alie returned with a styrofoam container in one hand. "That'll be five," he said displaying his crooked teeth.

He reached up with the bill and took the container in the other hand.

Damn, he thought, as he approached a crowd waiting on the corner huddled by the skeleton of a bus stop. Remnants of its shattered glass walls still were scattered along the uneven concrete. The lighting hanging above the crossing was red and there was a police drone hovering above, its red antenna winking red as it was scanning the crowd through its optics.