The Pseudo-Chronicles of Mark Huntley

Disaster - Part I - 11/09/04

Tuesday, November 9, 2004

Looks like I’ll be with you a little longer, at least.

I’ve been trying to come up with a way to tell this. I already tried to put it into fairy-tale form, something that Rence might like. The story of how the young vassal, Marcus, once found a magical sword in the forest, and after joining forces with a wandering knight, Sir Lawrence the True, and the telepath Na’omi, and the highborn lady Alyce, sought out refuge in the palace of a wizard, Rafael. And the enemy ambush, and the desperate battle between good and evil, as the forces of the angels and the demons clashed and death took root.

But that effort was a failure, and I deleted it all. Putting a mythic gloss on it didn’t help me deal with it. And it doesn’t help you, for when I am gone.

So from the beginning, the straight version. I’m going to do my best, anyway. I’ll try not to break into fragments of myself along the way.

I might as well tell you approximately where we were staying, where Rafael’s house is—it doesn’t matter now. What’s the best way to hide from a bunch of creepy aura people who have committed themselves to infiltrating the highest corridors of power that humanity has to offer?

Why, you go and hide among the lowest corridors. The places of anti-power, the neighborhoods where just living there sucks away your hope for justice of any kind. The places that are so poor, and so grim, that the purples would never bother to invade. You live alongside the forgotten people.

As it happens, D.C. has a delightful selection of these neighborhoods to choose from.

Rafael made his home in Washington Highlands, in Southeast. The neighborhood’s got a reputation for gracefully sloping streets, beautiful sunset views, and being one of the most dangerous places in the city. Killings, rapes, robberies, the daily sound of gunshots, it’s all here. About one out of three people who get murdered in D.C. get murdered here in this cozy little section of Ward 8.

But you know, once I learned about all these aliens actively plotting the downfall of humanity, even this neighborhood didn’t seem as scary. It’s a paradox—the most dangerous place can turn out to be the safest, depending on what you’re running from.

And actually? Even then—even when we were staying in the Highlands—people had started to go nuts, elsewhere in the city. Even then, “safe” had become an extremely subjective term. 

A lot of the residents of Washington Highlands live in big public housing apartment complexes, but there are some areas with regular one-family houses, and it’s in one of these houses that Rafael lived. 

Ugly from the outside, a brick box—seeing a whole line of these homes, they look like something from Auschwitz—but inside, not a bad place. Fortified.

We’d lived in this brick box for a few days under Rafael’s care, managing not to get shot, adopting the survival patterns of those who had lived in the neighborhood for decades. Don’t go out at night. Avoid this street, and this one, at any time of the day. Carry a minimum of cash in case you get rolled. Sensible measures, all.

And the five of us had formed a kind of bond, a weird sort of family, in our bunker. What we’d been through, what our surroundings were like—we had to, or else face mutiny in the ranks, right? We cleaned up after ourselves, and each other, and performed small kindnesses for each other whenever we got the opportunity. We watched a movie once in a while on Rafael’s little TV to relieve the tension. We grew closer.

Well, some of us grew a little too close.

I’m not sure what kind of conversations Rence and Alyce had on Friday, while Naomi and I went off to weasel our way inside Freiholt & Wagner, and while Rafael went off to do… whatever. The two of them spent at least a few hours together that day, holed up in the brick box with little to do.