XIII – I have no eyes and I must blink (Part 2)

- / Glitch - /

"Adela, wait!" shouted Edward, running after Brad's convertible like a dog chases a truck.

Yet the girl did not hear. He was nothing but a sweating black dot in the car’s rearview mirror.

Edward snorted, "That jerk did it on purpose! he referred to Officer Haig, the man who had stopped the boy as he ran to warn Adela about the plot to harm her.

"He made it in the tables,” remarked Elizabeth, still trapped in the boy’s head.

Edward cupped his mouth with the hands and screamed at the top of his lungs, "Adela, wait!”

The roar of the engine in Brad's car drowned out his voice.

“Wait please, Adela!” he repeated himself. “Please don’t go! Wait, please—“

His throat dried and closed. The boy collapsed to his knees, gasping. His efforts were futile. Elizabeth watched as he agonized. He was so red that he looked like a breathing strawberry.

Edward insisted, “I must stand up and”—he coughed as if he had a melon in his throat—“go after her.”

“Look up, Toothpick. Hope is blinking at you.”

His eyes flashed green. He saw a distortion in a nearby brick wall as if an emerald spotlight lightened the surface. “What is that,” he asked Elizabeth.

“You died.”

“What?”

“I’m just kidding. You’re seeing a Glitch’s Rift, which is a mark that you can break reality at that point.”

“I don’t remember seeing those before…”

“The 25th Hour probably happened.”

“What now?”

“We don’t notice it, but reality has to be taken off the air and re-generated again to fix glitches. When that happens, new contextual glitches appear. Which asks for a new 25th Hour and so on”—she snorted—“ why am I even telling you this? Adela’s getting away! Jump on that wall!”

“B-But—”

“Do it! It is your only chance! You like that girl or not? Put your bloody head into those bricks!”

“Isn’t it dange”—he swallowed his fears—“No, this is for Adela!” he said, silencing all voices of common sense in his head and running as fast as he could into the distorting wall.

Elizabeth faltered. “Wait, is he really doing it—

Edward closed his eyes and threw himself head first into a brick wall.

“—toothpick, no! It was a jest!”

“What—”

The boy jumped into the Glitch’s Rift and fell in the middle of a street away from where he previously was. He grated his body on the unrepaired pavement and slammed his chest against the hard ground, hurting himself. “Damn it,” he bemoaned, contorting. “It hurts so much!”

“Wow, you really did it,” remarked Elizabeth, baffled. “Toothpick, she is just one girl. Were you really going to break your neck for her?”

“B-But you told me to do that!” he protested, standing up and looking around. He did not recognize where he was. “What happened to me? Where am I?”

The suburbs of Chicago were all the same: hole-infested streets, barricaded homes, and broken glasses. Even a master photographer would struggle to find beauty in the city.

Elizabeth ignored Edward’s question. She ranted instead, “I am glad that glitch was a Wrong Warp. If it were something else, we’d be in the hospital now! Bloody hell, Toothpick! What is wrong with you? Can’t you understand irony? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph; you could have just borrowed a bloody phone and talked to the bloody girl. Or maybe ask her mother where she bloody went, if possible. You have any idea how bloody foolish this was?”

“So that glitch is like a door that should not be there?” he asked. “I think I’ve never been here.”

“Ever heard of the curious case of Gil Perez? He leaned on a wall, fell asleep in the Philippines and woke up in the City of Mexico. We could be anywhere. You did not give me time, so I could not tell where that warp led to.”

“But you told me to jump—”

The ground quaked. Elizabeth guided Edward’s eyes towards an incoming convertible about to crush him.

“Watch out!” she warned him. “No one is paying attention to the road.”

Brad, the driver, drove with the eyes planted on his phone. Adela ranted by his side:

“…so I just stopped studying, because my mom would not stop shouting at me for no reason. I texted Sammy, that weird girl who went emo after she started high school, and said we could do Dr. Welsh’s work about 9/11 together because the way things are at home, I cannot finish a single line…”

“Yeah, babe,” replied Brad without pulling his eyes away from his phone. “That movie was really good.”

Edward flinched. His grated legs hurt as he tried to stand up and move away from the car. “I-I’ll move away!” he warned Elizabeth, hurt. He was running out of time.

“Pass the baton,” she replied.

“A-A-Alright,” replied Edward, confused. The boy closed his eyes and when they opened again, a bright purple-aura colored them. He became Thief King Edward.

Edward, speaking as a figment of the man’s mind, ordered, “Okay, roll away now!”

“Roll away? I refuse to dirt my clothes. He shall stop for the King,” replied Thief King, yanking a rock from the damaged pavement and throwing it at the windshield of Brad’s convertible.

“No! I can’t pay that back!”

The stone mauled Brad’s windshield. “What the &$%&?” snorted the jock, lifting his sights from his phone to face the catastrophe that a single rock caused. The rock drew a web of broken glass. His windshield became as if the eyes of a spider.

Adela recoiled. “There is a guy there!” she said, holding his shoulder. “Sto—”

The car braked so fast that Adela felt as if the whiplash yanked her heart from her insides. Yet Brad did not have his possible victim’s welfare in mind.

“That &$&%¨#¨$ will pay for this!” he grunted, leaving the car. He laid upon his convertible’s hood and checked the damage. He ignored Thief King, the man whom he almost killed.

Adela, however, yanked a first aid kit from the glove compartment and rushed to assist Thief King. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll help you, mister!”

She squatted, rested the first aid kit on her thighs and unzipped the first aid. “I’m sure I have some painkillers here—”

A collection of female underwear filled the box. She dropped the first aid kit and only stared at the clothes, catatonic. “W-What is this?” she asked with tears creeping down her cheeks.

Edward rumbled, “poor Adela. Why would she think Brad would be more loyal to her than to anyone else? He is not worth her. You should do something, Elizabeth.”

Thief King touched the girl’s hand. “What are you doing with your life?” he asked, narrowing his eyes at her. “You know well he is not worth you.”

Adela glanced at Brad.

He dialed his phone and cursed out loud, “¨&$&$&% me! Mom, you listening”—he glanced at Thief King—“can I get away with killing a &$*%# who stood in front of my car? Wait,” he flinched, “what do you mean I’m already on probation?”

Thief King concluded, “He’s not changing. Being like that was how he got the girl.”

Adela nodded, morose. “Come,” she mumbled, glancing at the gratings on his leg and raising him from the ground. “You’re hurt. Brad doesn’t have first aid, but I know a girl who lives nearby. She might be able to help.”

“Don’t cry, girl,“ said Thief King, spotting a tear shining like a pearl over her pink cheek. “You are dodging a bullet.”

She smiled. “Sure,” she said, glancing at Brad, expecting him to react to her leaving with a stranger.

Yet the jock only had eyes for his car. “Damn it, where is the closest workshop in this slum?”

“But where are we?”

“You live somewhere else? This is Hughes Road, Judy Park.”

Edward flinched. He was in the neighborhood of the blackmailer.