Forcing his brain to turn over, Mr. F tried to replay what had happened to him the previous night, how things had gone so wrong. He had a hazy memory of being approached by someone he didn’t know. They’d seemed to be looking for him specifically, and he’d wondered if it wasn’t his family finally catching up to him.

And then he’d woken up on that concrete floor in a daze, hours lost to God only knows what.

Walking across to his space, he had to duck down as the wedge of ground rose up to meet the underside of the highway.

The junkie in Mr. F’s spot stirred and blinked a lot. “That you, Greg? I was just looking after your shit, you know.”

“I’m going to need it back sometime. But you can stay put now.”

“Okay. I’ll keep it safe.”

“Yeah.” Mr. F looked around. “So you see Chops tonight?”

“He was here a hour ago. You looking to buy? I got some I can sell you. It’s good shit.”

Mr. F put his hand into the pocket of the coat he did not own. “I got fifty.”

“I can only give you half of what I got ’cuz I’ma need some soon.”

“It’s cool.”

As the man sat up, a whiff of body odor rose up to join the smell of urine and feces and earth. Dirty fingers rummaged through the pocket of Mr. F’s own coat, and then a single Baggie the size of a sugar packet was produced.

Mr. F leaned down, aware of a curling anticipation in his gut and a buzzing in his head.

The man recoiled. “Dude. You stink.”

Fuck you, Mr. F thought.

Their hands were quick, the transfer of cash and H fast as a blink, and with that, there was nothing else to be said. No thank-yous or goodbyes or see-you-laters. The junkie lay back down to enjoy what was left of his float on a sleeping bag that was not his own, and Mr. F walked off.

He’d gone about a hundred yards before he realized that he didn’t have his gear. He needed a spoon, a lighter, and a couple of drops of liquid. Rage rose up at the impediment to his high, but he calmed himself down quick. With his new, super-sharp eyes, he located a used syringe and a bent-up spoon by a turned-over drum that functioned as a communal table. Then he found a discarded Bic by someone’s grocery cart of clothes and personal effects. The last piece came together as he walked up on a bottle of Poland Spring that had an inch of mud-colored liquid in it.

The don’t-give-a-shit about sanitation or sterilization was as familiar as the landscape of homelessness. He should have cared about the needle being dirty and what the hell was in the bottom of the plastic bottle. He should have cared about the purity of the drug. He should have cared about himself.

But he didn’t. He was only focused on what was coming, the promise of sweet relief from the screaming fear and paranoia in his head all that mattered. Everything else that wasn’t as-good-as, as-safe-as, as-smart-as, was collateral damage. Background noise. Negotiable to the point of being unimportant.

Even if those compromises were the shit that would bite him in the ass later.

As with all junkies, however, he borrowed against the future, going into an existential debt that didn’t have a monthly payment obligation, but rather a balloon at the end of an unknown term that very few could meet. Which was why the repo’s happened with such frequency, all those corpses piling up, the OD count growing ever higher as people entered the funnel with that first, tantalizing taste, and then got stuck in the trap, only realizing they couldn’t get out when it was too late.

The doorstep Mr. F chose was a familiar one and it felt right to sit his ass down on its hard transom and stretch his legs out. He took a minute to enjoy the view—and by that, he wasn’t even seeing the sleeping bags and the clusters of mumblers that were now a ways off. No, he was focused on the promise of no longer feeling anything bad.

His hands shook with excitement as he put the brown nub in the belly of the dirty spoon, poured a little soup on it, and flicked the Bic under the basin. The resulting swill was quick to its birth, but the syringe’s draw wasn’t smooth, the dried, caked-on grit inside its belly making the plunger fight its retraction. He nearly spilled everything.

But he prevailed over the obstacles.

When the needle was all set, he turned to the crook of his arm, and realized, as he saw that he hadn’t taken his coat off first, that he was out of practice even though he’d done this just over twenty-four hours ago. Even though he’d done this hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times in the last three years. Even though this wasn’t rocket science.

The first rule of injection efficiency was that you got your sleeve rolled. You didn’t load the needle and then have this kind of delay. But it was an easy fix. Ha-ha. He put the syringe between his teeth and shoved his sleeve up—except that didn’t work. He had been scrawny before, his body mass eaten away by priorities that didn’t include food. Now, though, he had muscles that he hadn’t noticed and that meant shoving what covered his arm up wasn’t as easy a move as it used to be.

Mr. F ripped the jacket off, popped a vein by pumping his fist a couple of times, and pushed the needle in.

The plunger went down fine, not that it would have mattered if he’d had to put all his newfound strength into it.

Mr. F exhaled in relief. Leaning his head back, he closed his eyes and opened his senses to what was going to come. He took a deep breath. And… another one.

Repositioning himself, shuffling back further against the door, he crossed his ankles. Uncrossed them. Recrossed them.

Anticipation curled in his chest and flushed his face. He couldn’t wait for the rush and the float, the buzz…

When he opened his lids back up and righted his head, he looked around, his eyes bouncing over the bundles of human flesh that were off in the distance as well as the zombies that shuffled toward the bridge and away from it.

The fury that jumped him up to his feet was so explosive, he turned and punched the door he’d been leaning against, his fist penetrating the panel, breaking through as if the dirty stainless steel was skin. When he yanked his hand out of the hole he made, the ragged metal ripped open his own flesh.

The blood that welled and fell was black like oil and it glistened in the low light. As it dropped off his hand and landed on the dirt at his feet, it was not absorbed into the earth.

It sat there and seemed to stare back at him.

* * *

Jo walked fast and kept her head down. She might have been raised in a WASPy household in Philly, but she was more than good with the New York self-protection code where you didn’t meet people you didn’t know in the eye, and thus made it clear that you were not interested in any trouble.

As she went along the street, she held her purse in front of herself and kept one hand in her windbreaker’s pocket with her nine against her palm. She was very aware of how many blocks were between her and her car. Not a smart move, but then the last thing she’d thought was going to happen was her doing an after-dark 5k that took her so far away from the damn thing.

The sound of high-heeled shoes coming at her was a surprise, and it was for that reason only that she flipped her eyes forward for a split second.

Well. Her chance of survival just went way up. If anyone saw that package, and had to choose between hitting it over the head and Jo? Easy choice. The gorgeous brunette was wearing some kind of fancy outfit with a brilliant pink ruffle around her tiny waist and ropes of necklaces bouncing on her perfect breasts. Her legs were as long as a city street and shapely as sculpture, and there was nothing apologetic or deflecting about her stride. She strutted like the model she had to be, and to hell with the risks associated with being a 120-pound female out alone after dark.