Departure--Chapter 1

Chapter One

It was going to be one of those days, and it hadn’t even started yet.

In small town Pennsylvania, you can set your watch by the once-daily moaning blast from the firehouse siren. Matt had long ago pawned his last watch, so the siren was instead his alarm clock. It woke him just in time for the crack of noon.

He could almost hear his eyelids squeak like rusty hinges as they peeled back from his eyes. There was another sound too, like a distant unseen jet crossing the sky, but more sinister, and pulsing. What the hell is that? he thought. He lay still for a moment and tried to remember where he’d gone to sleep. He failed.

When the slow down stroke of the town siren finally died away, he turned his head to the side and regretted it instantly—his neck burned, his head throbbed, and the pulsing rush in his ears got louder and faster and resolved itself into his rushing pulse. At least that mystery was solved.

He had to pee, and maybe puke too. That thought brought a grimace to his face and a groan to his lips. He dragged himself into a sitting position at the edge of the naked mattress and immersed an unshaven face in shaky hands. The familiar stink of his dirty clothes pile comforted him. So he had ended up in his own digs after all. “Damn,” was all he could manage.
He sat like that for several minutes trying to remember how messed-up he’d been the night before, and, for that matter, how he’d ended up in his own bed. A pocket-sized mirror was lying on the nightstand, and if memory served—a big if, there, folks—the empty bag beneath it had held half an eight ball of cocaine the night before. He was supposed to sell that shit to the idle rich come to play in the beautiful Poconos, not snort it himself. And not only because he couldn’t afford the luxury of coke, either. What it really came down to was that he didn’t trust the product peddled by Frankie Liuzo, the local pusher boss. He had no idea what he had been celebrating, or who had helped, but it must have been pretty important for him to splurge like that. Or he was pretty drunk.

“Holy shit.” he mumbled, taking a deep breath that hurt his head no more than every other movement he made. He sat a moment longer and tried to remember what other drugs he had ingested to make his head hurt so much. A hit of E maybe? He decided he’d rather not know. Really, he was just trying to put off moving as long as he could, no matter how badly he had to take a leak.

Predictably, that bastard Murphy prevailed. Just as Matt was about to force himself to his feet, a muffled rendition of Eine Kliene Nachtmusik shrieked from his cell phone and lanced directly into his aching skull like the some nightmarish dentist’s drill. Matt tried his best to block out the ringing as he let out a savage string of curses and threw himself off the bed, leaping for the phone.

At least he tried to leap for the phone; it turned out to be more like a lurch, and it earned him a sore knee and a bruise on his elbow when he “found” his battered old skateboard buried beneath a mound of soiled clothing. He did finally manage to come up with the phone, and he answered it with a labored “Hullo?”

“Hey, Matt!” screamed the grating voice he’d come to dread this past year. “You owe me four hundred bucks for that coke Friday, you piece of shit! I didn’t give you that fucking cell phone so you could disappear with my shit. Where’ve you been, huh? If you stiff me again, I’ll—”

“Hey, Frankie, I’m good for it,” Matt cut in, thinking what a blessing it was that Frankie could not see his face through the phone. “I’ll be at Markley’s tonight around nine. I’ll have your money with me.” He hoped.

“You better, fuck-face, or I’ll come looking for you! And I won’t stop at your fingers this time.” An ominous click followed by silence told Matt he had less than nine hours either to figure a way out of this latest mess or to leave town.

Hold on a minute—Friday!? He checked the date on his phone, and sure enough, it was Monday morning…afternoon...Shit. So it was a full-on binge and a lost weekend.

He looked around his room for something to sell, but other than his phone, a broken CD player, and unmatched bits of cigarette-burned furniture, everything of value had been hocked long ago to feed the habit that had gotten him little more than three broken fingers. Frankie had been in a good mood that time.

The thought of cigarettes roused him. He reached hopefully for the limp pack of gas station generics lying in front of his empty closet, but hope was denied.

Having such a worthy mission in mind perked him up a little. He ran his fingers over his stubbly face and began the task of climbing to his feet. That accomplished, his hand went to the grab-bag pile of dirty laundry at his feet and pulled out today’s prize: a wrinkled black Limp Bizkit t-shirt. He sniffed it, grimaced, and pulled it over his head.

He took a moment to ponder just why it is that town scuzzbags always have names like Frankie Liuzo. It never occurred to him as he slumped off to the bathroom that Matt Wexler was a name only one step above that of town scuzzbag, and falling fast.