pauldron

MURDER SCENE!

22:00, 8/23/19; Klaus leaned over from the shotgun seat and said hit the ground running is such an alluring phrase, innt, slipping into a northern-midwestern kind of accent for the final word, and then miming his head exploding, little finger-leg soldiers trotting frantically through the air.

22:15, 8/23/19; Klaus blew a raspberry and sneezed in the same breath.

23:04, 8/23/19; The stereo lost signal on a Red Hot Chili Peppers song (with a spectacular garbling fizz) and Klaus burst into tears. When questioned, he explained it as tears of relief for such a butterfly effect, and that he was glad to be in a world with melting radio towers.

24:43, 8/24/19; Klaus recited what he swore to was, verbatim, a speech Sir Reginald Hargreeves gave at Allison’s sixteenth birthday party, including but not limited to you are a woman, now, and you must take the world by storm; but there can be multiple storms at once. Keep this in mind and keep this sawed-off in your skirt pocket, in response to Five claiming Klaus had the “memory of a goldfish with stage-4 cancer,” loosely paraphrased.

1:12, 2/24/19; Klaus, unprovoked, referred to Five as a gerteratic little popover.

And it goes on. Klaus is one hell of a Savant when you get him bored, get him rambling. Diego should start selling this shit. Chapbooks? Mad Lib starters?

“How long?”

“Same as it was,” Five checks that ever-present glossy pocketwatch, “two minutes ago.”

“Twelve hours?”

“Twelve, count’ em, twelve hours,” Klaus laughs from the backseat, stretched out, unlit joint held in a silent pout to the no-stinking-up-the-van rule, and says “Oh, I love Cherry Wilder.”

Five clicks the pocketwatch shut. Diego pulls a hand over his chin in the dusty way that means he's trying not to punch the dashboard. “I’m going to sleep.”

Five inclines his head- “incline” rather than “nod” because to nod he’d need a little pep to the motion and he looks nothing but calculated and stiff, like a pair of wool dress pants left to dry on the line- and twists a little in the driver’s seat. Stares out the picture windshield at their ‘mark’; a little ramshackle, falling-down farmhouse, punched in and waterstained as a carnival ticket, glassless sliding back door. Grass sprouts from the roof. It looks like a dead thing ready to pull from the ground and shamble away.

Diego shuffles himself, a deck of cards taking his shotgun shift, and tucks his head into the cradle of the seatbelt. He's dozed off in worse places.

--

The light is dull, blueish-black, nighttime air. The radio is turned off. Tuneless white noise fills the space, greedy. Diego thinks that’s what popped him upright; not woken, really, just gently dragged hands-and-knees-in the-gravel style slow, languid, if you can call road rash languid, but- he's not really awake. He hears things in bits and pieces and they flash behind his eyes, that fill-in-the-blank game of fog that comes at the verge of sleep. Standing against that dark tide, toes dug into the sand. Stubborn. Some elephantine rock formations patterning the scenery. Waves breaking on old, old crevices. All behind his eyelids. He doesn’t know, man. He’s tired, and hours cooped up with Klaus would give anyone a contact high.

It’s loud out there, with his ear pressed, voyeuristic, into the glass. Spring peepers. Cicadas. Crickets, probably. Night bugs and also Klaus, now, he should be counted in that group; he mutters augh, sorry, wrong button, from around Diego’s feet. In the ballpark, waveringly. He hears a click and cracks open an eye, curious but not suicidal- if Klaus sees he's awake he’s going in for the conversation and Diego’s had his fill of that, can’t stomach any more- and sees him shirtless, palely florescent in the dawdling, watered-down blue, and he’s fucking around with something mechanical down there. Takes him a sec, but there; he’s put the cigarette lighter in. So much for breathable air.