claw machine
Haroun al-Rashid is a good guy.
He was born to good parents, lived in a good apartment on the Upper West Side with his two sisters and his loving parents. He played lacrosse, was great in math, and even planned to go to college. He spent most of his free time annoying his little sister and watching action movies with his friends—ones where the good guys beat up the bad guys and the superheroes always won.
He had a loving family and a caring environment and lots of friends. He was—well—he was good.
It happened fast, really—the addiction. He got injured during lacrosse practice junior year and was prescribed oxys for the pain. It was quick after that: scraping through his parents’ medicine cabinet, scoping out strangers’ parties, begging the pharmacist for a refill, asking anyone and everyone for just a little bit more. He wasn’t addicted, Haroun kept telling himself, through the shakes and the nausea and the never-ending urge. He just needed one more time. Every time—one more time—and he’d end up right in the same spot. He overdosed in his parents’ bathroom around Valentine’s Day, and then again at junior prom.
Two stints in rehab and his family gave up on him. He spent a few months on the street after that, and two years later he’s running around with Charlie Keene for his next fix.
He’s still a good guy, though. He’s just an addict, that’s all.
Haroun is twenty years old when Charlie comes to them with the idea. It’s January—dead winter—so they spend their time typing to keep warm and keep high, and Charlie’s suddenly got a solution for both. He brings them into it one by one, promising a roof over their heads and their drug of choice. Quickly a crew forms: twenty junkies total, including Haroun.
The first is Charlie, of course, and the second is Charlie’s wife Renee: red-haired and batshit crazy, and into angel dust like her husband.
Three is a junkie named Ava, with long frizzy brown hair and some chronic pain issues. Rumor has it she’s a mutant of some kind—that she spent some time on the Raft or on the run—but no one can confirm either.
Four, five, and six. Daria, lanky and dark-haired, and her older friend Frank, soft-spoken and lanky like her. Heroin addicts. Sometimes a couple, sometimes not, but they generally keep to themselves. Frank ropes in his cousin Gail, too, a thirty-some year old woman who’s quieter than them both.
Seven and eight. Zhiyuan. Messy black hair and a tattoo artist, although he’d gotten fired a few months prior for his drug use. Into angel dust like Charlie. His ex-military friend Jon joins him, and Mason, another vet, follows Jon to make nine.
Ten is Lyle, a meth-head who’s spent the last few years with Charlie; eleven is his older brother Nick. Twelve and thirteen: Glenn, a big guy with an opioid problem like Haroun’s, and Elliot, a quiet guy who’s half-covered in tattoos.
Fourteen and fifteen: Megan and her boyfriend Mateo, an ex-nursing student who used to steal drugs from her hospital; Mateo’s sister Alejandra makes sixteen. RJ—a nineteen-year-old opioid addict Haroun brings—and his friend Caitlin are seventeen and eighteen.
Nineteen is Riri, the younger sister of one of Charlie’s dead buddies, and she’s the youngest of the group. Fifteen years old and fiercely royal to Charlie already.
And Haroun makes twenty.
By February they’ve got the whole group together, and Charlie is ecstatic. “It’s gonna be great,” he keeps saying, with that cheek-to-cheek grin of his. “Got some government guy funding the whole thing. Whatever we want, whenever we want.”
Twenty people total, all hand-selected by Charlie for this mystery mission. He promises them shelter, safety, food, and all the drugs they could ever want. Some government guy will supply them with everything free of charge as long as they follow Charlie’s exact instructions.
Each of them agrees.
It’s unclear whose idea it is—the government guy or Charlie—but it’s a good idea. Force billionaire-playboy-superhero Tony Stark to build them a weapon. A great one. Once they have the weapon, they’ll be in power. And once they’re in power they can make the world good again. Stop supervillains, end hunger and war, do whatever the hell they want.
They’ll be heroes. They will.
Superheroes, even.
THURSDAY, MARCH 1
A government guy drops off all the supplies at a warehouse upstate. All twenty of the meet there, including Charlie. An off-road SUV, a black panel van, and a pickup truck. Each vehicle is stuffed with boxes, and inside each box is a ton of military-like gear. Kevlar vests, black masks, and rough black pants so they all match. Night vision goggles. Black undershirts. There’s boots, too, rubber-soled with black laces, and socks to match. Fake IDs for everyone, with everything right down to the eye color. Haroun’s new name is Hassan. There’s bulky guns and black-painted knives and burner phones, all labeled with their new names, all with one location plugged into them: a red dot pointed to a random mountain in New Hampshire.
He’s not even sure where New Hampshire is, to be honest.
There’s instructions in the phone, too, from a number none of them know. Only two messages are inside.
The first: [tell no one]
And the second: [listen to Charlie]
At the bottom of the last box there are several taped-shut baggies of white powder, as well as clear-plastic containers packed with pinkish pills.
Haroun understands what it is. It’s a promise.
They leave behind Charlie’s crappy sedan and Nick’s half-crushed hatchback and most of their belongings behind, except what they can carry. A couple of them are leaving behind children, some spouses. All for the chase of something better: those plastic baggies at the bottom of the box.
Haroun doesn’t have anyone to leave behind. It’s not a difficult choice to make.
FRIDAY, MARCH 2
That box had enough dope inside to make the whole ride to New Hampshire swim in euphoria. They’re packed pretty tight in the three vehicles, six or seven of them in each, but it doesn’t take too long. Six-ish hours of driving, through Connecticut and Massachusetts, and finally to New Hampshire. plus a stop or two along the way, and they reach the base of Mount Washington. There’s a parking lot dug into the side of a state park, and they take a trail from there. Their burner phones designate a specific path for them to park, and another for them to walk.
So they walk.
It’s a little over an hour to get up the mountain. A crushed-leaf path, and the farther they go the less trail there is. When they finally arrive at that blinking GPS dot, there’s a cave-like entrance in the side of the mountain, and a rock covering over an entrance in the cave floor. Nick and Glenn haul the rock to the side, and beneath it is a metal door set with a nine-number keypad.
The instructions have already given them the password: 0-4-1-6-1-9-0-0. Renee jabs it in slowly, and when she’s done, it clicks, and Nick grabs the door and hauls it up. There’s a ladder, and a second door, and a second password for that door. 1-2-0-3-1-9-7-2.
The bunker smells damp, like sewage, and there are four floors total, each one darker and grimier than the last. The first floor has a row of ten locked rooms with red stars painted in the center. Daria gets ahold of the keys from Charlie and they peek in one together. Inside is a mattress with a massive stain and a tarp balled up in the corner. A rusty toilet, a matching sink, and a bucket bolted to the floor. The walls are covered in tic marks and what looks like Russian—every square inch of wall covered.
Someone spent a long time in here. Days. Months. Years, if the tic marks are anything to go by. And judging by the stain on the bed, they died here, too. The mattress is marred by an ugly blackish blotch—it’s more stain the fabric. Blood.
They unlock a couple more and find the rooms mostly the same. Past the red-starred cells there are closets full of soldier gear: more vests, more boots, stun guns and machine guns, and piles of black-denim jumpsuits in every size. There’s a mess hall and a sleeping area full of bunk beds, a medium-sized room with a chair in the center, and some storage closets filled with weaponry, dated electronics, and assorted medical supplies.
Haroun and Daria explore the lower floors together, but there’s not much there. A medical exam room filled with supplies, a room of long-dead computers, another filled with ten or twelve of those cuffed chairs, and a ton more of those creepy red-starred cells with one bed inside.
He cracks open the door to one cell and is hit with a wave of odor—like rotting meat—and finds inside a skeleton curled up on a grimy mattress with bits of flesh still clinging to it. Daria lets out a sharp scream, and Haroun shuts the door fast. He didn’t know skeletons could last that long; Charlie told them this place hadn’t been touched in at least a decade. He supposes it’s the super soldier serum.
So they mostly stick to the first floor. It’s the cleanest, and they can keep an eye on each other there. Every week a couple boxes get dropped off to the nearby post office—usually Nick goes to get it—and they get their fix, along with whatever other supplies they need.
Haroun’s only seen stuff like this in movies, really: creepy underground bunkers, military-grade gear, skeleton-filled rooms… So he tries to think of it that way. It’s like a movie, he decides. An adventure. A mission.
They’re going to be heroes, after all, once it’s done.
SUNDAY, MARCH 11
For the first few days, they party hard and spend a couple more days recovering. With their unlimited supply, they’re high all the time without a care in the world. It’s like heaven on earth here. Every couple days, someone goes into town and gets food and supplies, and when they’re bored enough they play games and blast music and take turns wandering around the creepy bunker and scaring the shit out of each other. Sometimes Zhiyuan gets out his tattoo kit and gives them new ones—like those octopus symbols on the walls he thinks are so cool. Haroun gets a big one on his shoulder; Elliot gets one on his back, and Ava gets one on her wrist.
They spend a couple weeks after that planning out the whole thing. First they need a hacker, someone who can get into Tony Stark’s tech without too much trouble. Charlie gets a message from the government guy reading only: [SCOTT LANG] along with an address and map coordinates.
Once they get the hacker, they get Tony. And once they get Tony, all they need is a way to make him work—someone to make him obey.
There are a couple options for whoever they kidnap. There’s his fiancé Pepper Potts, but she’s CEO of a major company and under as much security as the fucking president. There’s his best friend, James Rhodes—but again, the man’s a military guy, an air force officer. Their odds of successfully kidnapping the guy without running into some major obstacles are slim.
They offer up both choices to Charlie, who in turn explains them to the government guy, who in turn rejects both of them. Charlie gets a text from the guy of just a name: [peter benjamin parker] along with a list of information about him. Five minutes later, they get another text: a link to a blinking dot somewhere in Queens. That must be Peter Parker.
According to the info, Peter Parker is a superhero—a mutant. Spider-man. Haroun’s heard of him. So has everyone else. They’ve seen the news clips of him climbing into burning buildings, the viral videos of him stringing burglars from shop awnings. Haroun saw one recently of him pulling a family out of a crushed car; another of him stopping a traffic accident with his bare hands.
But who cares?
So what if he’s a teenager? So what if he’s a superhero?
They’re gonna get their fix. At this point, they owe that government guy, whatever his name is. If they want to get more, they’ve gotta keep following instructions.
And if he’s gotta slap around this Peter Parker a little to get what he wants, he’ll do it.
Peter Parker’s a superhero. He can take it.
One day, a box gets dropped off with something new. Charlie peels off the shipping tape and finds rows and rows of little glass vials encased in foam. Haroun cracks open the second box and finds syringes, dozens of them, all empty and tipped with thin needles. “This’ll take him down,” Charlie says with a grin. “Just take a whiff.”
He waves one of the little glass vials in front of Haroun’s face. It does have a smell, he realizes. A thick, tangy odor like rust.
Haroun stares down at the little bottles as Charlie plucks out a syringe from the box, plunges its needle into the glass bottle and draws out the plunger, filling the syringe with liquid.
It looks harmless. Clear—like water. Charlie tilts the syringe side to side, examining it, and grins his wide smile. “Perfect.”
Haroun wonders what it’ll feel like, when they knock the kid out with it.
He doubts it’ll even hurt.
SATURDAY, MARCH 24
They track down the hacker first.
It’s not hard. Government guy provides them with the address, and a few of them drive back down to New York to catch him. He’s working at some tech company and living with his girlfriend, and he has a daughter who doesn’t live with him. An ex-wife, too.
They stalk Scott Lang for a few days and wait until he and his black-haired girlfriend have a fight. The girlfriend storms out, proclaims something about staying with a friend, and slams the door shut behind her. Scott spends most of that night staring at his phone, turning it off and on and off again. He showers. He drinks. He watches television. Nothing too interesting.
Around ten pm, Scott calls someone several times. They’ve bugged his phone, so they can hear most of it from the van, where they’re parked outside. On the third time, a woman picks up. “...I just put her to bed,” the woman says. “She’s had a long day.”
He and the woman argue for a little while. It’s not malicious, just tired banter, and eventually the woman says, “Scott, it’s late. Tomorrow.”
“Wait—wait—I’m sorry,” Scott says. “I lost track of time—just let me sing to her, Maggie, please.”
A sigh. “Alright. Just… quickly, okay? She shouldn’t be up this late.”
There’s some rustling and movement and talking on the other end, until at last someone picks up the phone again. “Daddy?”
“Hey, peanut,” Scott Lang says, relieved. “You have a good day at school today?”
“Mm-hm.”
He and the little girl chat a little, and he sings some song to her, and eventually the little girl yawns and the mother takes the phone back and hangs up on him mid-sentence.
Scott cracks open a bottle of cheap wine, microwaves some pizza rolls, and falls asleep half-drunk over the covers.
And that night, when no one is there to see, they do it. They catch him at night while he’s sleeping. He’s still a little drunk.
He puts up a good fight, but he’s no mutant—without his suit, he’s actually not that strong. He lashes out once, kicks with both feet and Mason pistol-whips Scott Lang so hard that his head bleeds, and they drag him out as fast as they can.
They drive through the night and into the morning, and they’re back in the White Mountains by noon the next day.
It’s difficult to get him to talk. He’s a pain in the ass and won’t do much more than crack jokes about Charlie’s shitty beard. They try starving him, waterboarding him, beating him bloody—but all it does is make the man grin through scarlet-stained teeth. “Fuck you,” he gargles, and he chokes out a laugh.
They spend a whole week trying to break him. Charlie’s swinging that hamer so much that the guy’s legs are more like ground beef than limb. But still he won’t do it.
By April, Charlie’s phone is blowing up again—government guy, as usual. He sends them more information: an address and a girl’s name that Haroun immediately recognizes.
It’s the guy’s daughter. Cassie.
That’s how they’ll make him talk.
THURSDAY, APRIL 5
He doesn’t go on the second mission—the one to catch the little girl. Renee hand-selects the group: Daria, RJ, and Mateo go with her, all dressed neatly as postage workers. They take the truck.
Haroun gets high and tries not to think about it. He’s still in that dizzy, melty, euphoric space when they come back with the little girl a couple days later.
Upon hearing his daughter’s voice, Lang immediately gives in. Renee tortures the girl just for good measure—just to hear Lang beg for mercy.
FRIDAY, APRIL 6
Now the hard part—the mutant kid. Peter Parker.
Charlie tells them very specifically what to do, and he chooses who goes: Haroun, Nick, Jon, and Glenn. He gives them the car’s information, access to the kid’s text messages, and they manage to track down the vehicle as the kid’s going to some Thai place in Brooklyn.
“Crash the car, snag the kid, vanish,” Charlie reminds them before they go. “Car’s registered to the kid’s dead mom, so just leave it when you’re done.”
Haroun’s never done anything like this before—snatching a kid out of his car on the way to dinner is not exactly his area of expertise, but Charlie does everything for him. He’ll do it—even if he doesn’t like it.
“Make it look like a wreck,” the bearded man adds, “and just take him. People abandon cars all the time.”
Nick drives.
It’s Nick’s truck, and they’re pretty close, so Haroun’s in the passenger seat beside him. Jon and Glenn are in the back. The drive’s quiet, mostly, and when Haroun moves to turn on the radio, Nick snaps, “Leave it.”
The guy’s been in a piss-poor mood today, souring with every moment the plan draws closer. He’s hated the plan since the moment Charlie looped them in. Nick’s got a few kids in a couple states—maybe that’s why he hates the idea so much.
They take a couple hours in New Hampshire, driving down towards Boston, and stop to eat at a drive-thru McDonald’s somewhere in Massachusetts. Jon devours a couple burgers and starts digging into a third when Nick jokes, “Come on now, Cap.” It’s one of their nicknames for him—he does look a bit like Captain America, after all—blonde-haired and blue-eyed and bulky with muscle. “Leave some for the rest of us.”
“Fuck off,” says Jon, taking another massive bit of his burger. Ketchup trickles down the corner of his mouth. Haroun shoves another handful of fries into his mouth and washes it down with a gulp of coke. “I’m not kidnapping a teenager on an empty stomach.”
Traffic eases up in Connecticut, and they make it through Hartford and New Haven before they finally cross the border into New York around the six-hour mark. They find Peter Parker’s car going through Brooklyn around six, tail him for fifteen minutes or so, and as soon as they pull out onto a small dark road with no one around, Nick hits the gas, they all brace themselves, and on impact Peter Parker’s shitty car flips and lands upside down in the grass.
Haroun runs up to the car with the others, and opens the driver’s side door. Spider-man wasn’t driving, he realizes, as they spot the woman dangling upside down in the front seat. Who’s…
Haroun’s still gathering his thoughts when Jon throws open the other car door with a grunt, grabs the kid by the arm, and yanks roughly.
The fight doesn’t take long: it’s a rough fight but takes no longer than ten minutes, and by the time it’s over, Peter Parker’s lying on the ground. He’s wearing light jeans and a Star Wars hoodie, and his eyes are bleary with sedative. His arm is crooked too, and he makes a small groaning sound before tipping his head drowsily into the grass. At last the sedative is doing its job, Haroun thinks, as Peter Parker lifts his slack wrist and drops it back into the grass.
“Why the fuck did it take so many doses?” snaps Jon.
Glenn’s moaning on about his broken arm and Nick’s still reeling from a hit to his stomach, coughing out onto the ground with his hand pressed into his belly. Even Jon’s face looks like shit—already swelling, his ear bleeding down one side. Haroun might have a couple bruises tomorrow, too, from the way that kid lashed out at him.
Damn. That kid was a fucking weapon.
“I… I don’t know,” Haroun admits, rubbing his sore side. He might’ve cracked a rib—or bruised a kidney. “Let’s just get this over with, okay?”
He’s already done with this so-called mission. So fucking done. The only saving grace is what awaits him back at the bunker—those clear white bags stuffed with powder, little orange bottles filled with pills…
Jon makes a scoffing noise, and he sniffs, and more blood seeps from his broken nose. That kid really got him good. “We gotta take care of her first.” He points towards the kid’s car, where the unconscious woman still dangles upside down. “We can’t afford to get caught.”
What?
“Take care of her?” Haroun echoes. He might’ve joined Charlie’s team, but didn’t sign up for murder—he’s only here to help drag the kid back to New Hampshire. “I’m no killer, man. I may be helping you, but I’m not killing her. She didn’t do anything.”
Jon grunts in irritation and a little pain, and then he fishes around in his pockets for a second, finds a crumpled receipt—maybe the McDonald’s one—and presses it to his bleeding nose. “She wasn’t even supposed to be here,” he complains, his nose stuffy with blood. “It was just supposed to be the Spider-guy—”
“Just leave her, Jon,” Haroun says. “She’s gonna die before anyone finds her, anyway.” With the way blood’s coming out of her cracked skull, he knows he’s right. “Just look at her.”
They both peer at the totaled car—a mangled mess of metal and plastic, caved in on the driver’s side from where Nick’s truck collided with it. It’d be a hassle just getting to the woman, to be honest. Haroun’s not even sure they can get that crumpled door to open.
“Fuck, fuck, fucking fine, let’s go,” Jon grumbles. “Grab him.”
On the grass, the kid gargles out something—a protest, maybe—and his eyelids flutter. His fingers twitch, his leg rolls to one side and then back again—how the fuck is he still fighting it?
“He’s still awake?”
Haroun fumbles for another syringe—finds one in his pocket, uncaps it, and stabs the needle into the kid’s neck.
Jon inhales sharply. “Christ, Haroun—the neck? Really?”
That’s how they do it in movies—and his first instinct. “Coulda killed the kid,” Nick jabs. “One wrong move and the whole plan’s bleeding out in Brooklyn, man.”
“Sorry,” he says.
The kid flails for barely a second, then his eyes roll back, and he goes limp against the grass. “You grab his arms,” Jon says. “I’ve got his legs.” Haroun loops his arms under the kid’s limp shoulders, and hauls him upwards.
He’s lighter than Haroun expected.
And as they maneuver the kid into the pickup, shoving him into the backseat as quick as they can, Nick says with a jerk of his head, “You sure she’s dead?”
It takes him a second to remember that there is a she, that Peter Parker wasn’t the only victim of that car accident. “Yeah,” he says. “Totally.”
“Go check.”
“What?”
“I said go fucking check—quick, now, before someone comes.”
So Haroun hurries back to the crumpled car. He climbs over the passenger’s side and presses his fingers to the woman’s blood neck. She doesn’t move but there—there it is—a flutter in the warmth of the woman’s neck. A pulse.
Haroun swallows.
She’s not dead yet.
One of her eyes is half-open, and her lips twitch like she’s trying to say something. She’s got a bracelet on her wrist, a gold bangle, like something his mother would wear.
He has to finish the job. They can’t afford to have this woman running around telling everyone what happened. But what would he even do? Jab this syringe into her neck? Strangle her? Slam her head into the dashboard?
He’s a good guy. He can’t kill someone.
“Haroun! Get your ass moving, come on! We gotta get out of here!”
“Yeah, yeah, coming!” he shouts back.
She’s Italian-looking, with curly dark hair and a flowery pink shirt. Mom jeans. He finds her purse hanging near her head, and he snatches it up, cracks open her wallet to peer at her driver’s license. May Parker. May. She’s smiling in her photo—in a way that they didn’t used to allow. He wonders if she got the photo retaken just so she could smile.
She’s the kind of person who smiles in driver’s license photos, the kind who takes teenagers to Thai places an hour away from their home just for kicks. Haroun can’t kill her—can he? In the movies, it’s easy. One hard stab to the chest, one blow to the neck, one shot to the head and she’ll be dead.
What is he supposed to do?
“Haroun!”
“Coming!” he yells again, and with one last look at the woman, grabs Peter Parker’s backpack and the woman’s purse, scans the car for anything else, and then runs back toward the truck.
Haroun climbs back into Nick’s truck; the whole team is a fucking mess. Glenn’s in the backseat, whining about his broken arm; Nick’s trying in vain to set the damn thing, Glenn howling in pain every time he tries. Jon’s muttering to himself with his hand pressed to his nose, and there’s blood draining down his chin and neck, droplets spotting the door panel beside him. Peter Parker’s in the window seat with a hood over his head and his hands tied behind his back, rolling around—every time the car turns, he shifts a little and bumps loudly into the wall. He’s unconscious, obviously so, not even twitching at their conversation.
His arm is still crooked. Broken, maybe, by the way his wrist bumps up. His head is bleeding, too, but just a little—a smeared trail down his left temple.
Jon drives on the way back, even though his face is all messed up, no one else on the road seems to notice. The window tint on the truck is pretty heavy—Haroun’s not sure other people could see through if they tried. “So the lady kicked it?” he asks.
“Oh yeah,” Haroun says. “She was cold when I got there. Nothing to worry about.”
“Good,” he says.
They’ve got a long drive back to the bunker. Seven hours with rush hour traffic, not counting stops. After an hour and a half, they’re far enough into Connecticut that they finally stop for medical supplies. A makeshift splint for Glenn’s arm. Painkillers, bandages, water, too. Haroun takes over driving then, and they make it all the way to the Connecticut River before Nick makes them stop. They switch license plates there, get gas, and change clothes, too.
“Gotta get rid of their shit,” Nick says, “before we cross state lines.”
Jon’s still in pain and Glenn won’t shut up about his fucking arm, so Nick pulls up to the bridge and tells Haroun to take care of it.
So he does.
He walks a few minutes to the bridge, sets both the purse and the backpack down at the edge. He unzips the purse first, filling it with stones, zips it back up and shoves it over the edge of the bridge and into the water below.
The backpack’s next. It’s unusually heavy, and it’s covered in sharpied doodles and food stains. He unzips it first—inside, a folder with half-crumpled papers, a biology textbook, a couple stray dollars, a receipt for a place called Delmar’s. A notebook filled with math equations. Another folder labeled Project Kevlar. Some stray legos. A case full of dull pencils. Lead-smeared notecards. A crushed energy drink can, candy wrappers, some stray legos.
Haroun pockets the cash and at last pulls out a cracked phone.
The kid’s phone has one of those bulky rubber cases—uncrackable, or it should’ve been. Somehow Peter Parker splintered the entire screen. He taps on it—it’s still got a little bit of charge left on it. There’s a couple unread texts from “Jason from APUSH.” A couple more from “MJ.” Even more from a guy named Ned.
The home screen is of three kids in weird yellow jackets, standing awkwardly beside each other in only the way high schoolers can. Peter and the big kid have their arms thrown around each other, and the third kid—a black girl—stands stiffly to Peter’s other side, grimacing at the camera.
Haroun holds down the power button until the phone screen turns black and taps the screen a couple times for good measure. He tosses it all into the backpack—the phone, the folders, the old receipts—and fills the rest with rocks to weigh it down. He zips it all up once it’s full.
Haroun hauls the backpack up to the edge of the bridge and drops it over the railing into the river below.
It barely makes a splash.
When Haroun gets back to the car, Nick’s mood has soured further. “What took you so long?” he asks, turning on the truck with a twist of his key.
“Nothing,” Haroun says quickly.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, fine, totally fine.”
The other man frowns at him. “If you’re not up to this, man…”
“I’m good. I am.”
Nick sighs, and he rifles in his pocket for a second and pulls out a little orange bottle. He shakes it; the pills inside rattle. “You want something for the road? You’ll feel better.”
Haroun takes it, and Nick does, to.
As Nick clamors in the driver’s seat, the high starts to come, rising up warmly into his head, and spreading down into his legs and toes. It comes and keeps coming, surging back up into his head again until he’s tipping his head up against the window just the way that Peter Parker is now. He forgets about the bleeding woman in the car and the hooded boy sprawled unconscious in the backseat. He forgets about the skeletons in the bunker and the little girl’s screams for her wounded father. All he thinks is more, more, more, and the relief washes over him in a pleasant, dizzying weight, like a warm body atop his. He’s a good guy—he really is—and this is all… Good. He’s good. So good.
Haroun exhales, and the breath leaves him in a smooth rush—a sigh—and all at once the whole trip is worth it.
Fuck. Nick was right.
Haroun does feel better.