Cesare let the miles lull him into a half doze. He didn’t want to be here, he wanted to be with Elizabeth. He'd never had control over his life, careening madly from disaster to disaster. Every time he earned a space to breathe, life sent him flying into another explosion of fire and shrapnel.

Cesare roused himself as they passed Fort Lewis. “Take the Lakewood Exit, they have a Transit Center in the mall.”

Viktor grunted, swerving over, cutting off a nice little BMW, a tight, mean grin crossed the man’s face as the driver laid on his horn. Cesare lead the way into the heart of Lakewood and to the mall that acted as a beacon for the homeless.

“Park it anywhere,” Cesare said, already opening the door with his duffel slung along his back before the truck had fully stopped.

Slamming his door, Viktor looked over the hood at him. “Why can’t we take the truck?”

Cesare didn’t stop walking toward the massive Transit Center, eyes running over the people, looking for telltale signs. “The places we’re going don’t have parking lots.”

Stopping in front of the board with its byzantine maze of bus routes, Cesare traced the colored lines. Coming up behind him, Viktor’s grumble was more for himself. “Why the fuck can’t we do this tomorrow. I was going to hit a bar.”

“During the day, the homeless are looking for food, clothes, shelter, or drugs. They hunker down in camps or squirrel into out of the way places when night comes on. We’ll hit the jungle and see what shakes loose,” Cesare said without looking at the man.

Taking a seat on a cement bench, Cesare looked up at the darkening sky. Viktor frowned in distaste at the pregnant clouds. “It’s going to fucking rain, isn’t it?”

“You won’t melt,” Cesare said, watching the busses come in. Running a careful eye over the people coming out, he didn’t see the markers he was looking for. People thought they could spot the homeless, but they only noticed the lost ones breathing on deaths door. Showering in the park, using rain and cheap soap to keep their clothes clean, most of his people passed, until their give a fucks ran out. But Cesare knew the look in their eyes, that fey, hopeless freedom.

Leaning against the buss sign, Viktor eyed the norms. He wasn’t looking for the homeless, he was tracking threats. Even lounging, he gave off a low resonance of violence. Those unlucky enough to meet his eyes stumbled away from the man, casting backward glances at his threatening bulk.

The people waiting gave a sigh of relief when Viktor followed Cesare onto the bus. Glad to see the back of him, they couldn’t make him leave, but each hoped he’d get lost before he did something they’d have to clean up.

Viktor claimed a bench for himself, insolently stretching his feet out, a tight smirk coming over his face as passengers passed the open seats next to him with uneasy looks. It was the primitive instinct of prey to leave predators alone in the feeble hope they weren't on the menu. Even their eyes jumped away from the man as if by not seeing him they could somehow be safe.

Cesare was left alone. His clothes were clean, and he didn’t smell, but he bore the look of the streets, something more than just being homeless marked him. They stayed away from Viktor because of the violence that stained the air around him, but they kept Cesare at arms length for the facts that birthed him. Who wanted to think about kids eating from garbage’s and sleeping on streets?

Hitting the heart of downtown, the bus ground to a slow stop, Viktor fell into step behind Cesare as he passed him. The collective relief of the passengers was an almost audible sigh, Cesare caught the bus driver slow relaxing of shoulders as he saw the back of the duo. Cesare no longer cared, the world had parted ways with him long ago and neither had missed the other much since.

He’d liked Tacoma, as much as any place he’d stayed. The city owned a realness few placed had, a gritty resolve not to put up with any shit. Honking at a stopped car was as likely to get the a man coming out of his car with a gun as hurry him up. Violence was always an option, you kept polite if you wanted to keep your teeth.

It was a good place. For the first time since leaving Primrose, a smile stretched across Cesare's face. The clouds thundered above them, the faint drizzle picking up tempo between one second and the next.

Viktor glared at the sky in personal affront at the rain. Shaking his long tawny mane, he took in the forest of umbrellas with disgust. “In what kind of shit hole does everyone carry an umbrella?”

Walking through the sheets of water, Cesare hitched his duffel bag tighter against his shoulder. “The Northwest kind.”

Every city had tides, the ebb and flow of humanity creating subtle pulls. The currents wound under the skin of concrete like veins, some moved the powerful into skyscrapers, others sent wage slaves home. Cesare knew them all, felt each current along the edges of his scarred soul, but the ones he lived in were the secret sewers for the decaying flesh of humanity. Every city had their shit pipes, and every homeless kid learned to feel them, or they died alone and frozen in some stairwell.

Cesare dropped into them as naturally as breathing. They all lead somewhere, each one terminating in a place of food, shelter, or drugs. Signs marked the cast-off ways, garbage that was a little too neat hiding someone under it, trashcans tagged with ownership, sheltered nooks with carboard just out of sight.

Viktor kept to Cesare's side, looking around with the wariness of an animal on foreign ground. The man’s eyes swept the streets and alleys, not looking for trouble, expecting it. Whether that was from his years of fighting or because he knew more than Cesare.

Viktor’s wife beater had gone transparent, sheets of rain turning it into little more than second skin. Chiseled by years of hard work and bloody fight, his body hooked the eye of the women they passed, cars slowing to take in the sight.

Cesare stopped when he hit the green belt. It was one of the places that had come to mind when he’d been told they were coming to Tacoma. It was called a lot of things, but Cesare always thought of it as the Jungle. Bracketed by two highways, it stretched for a little over a mile. A no-man's-land of dark trails and hidden places, where the shit of society went to rot in peace.

Walking beneath the trees was like waking from a beautiful dream to find yourself laying on the hard concrete, covered in your own filth with a needle in your arm. The stink ran under the skim of the forest, spoiled food, cooking dinner, shit, and garbage. The rank odor of the homeless and helpless. Garbage lurked in the corners of the trail, a boot to the side, torn trash bags fluttering on a branches, the soiled pages of an old porno mag in the black mud, used up and thrown away, the garbage of rejects

Cesare picked out small campsites set back into the woods away from the muddy track. Old tents patched with duct tape, tarps set as wind breaks, plastic cracking in the wind. Small dark places strewn with cardboard floors. Little hovels that stank of shit and disease. Dark places aching with eldritch currents of depression, loneliness, hopelessness and loathing for all life, the lowest of the low, were the rotting went to die.

Viktor’s eyes took on a yellow shine. “Why aren’t we checking those?”

Shaking his head, Cesare sidestepped a pile of human shit. “They're the outcasts, drugs hunger, psychopaths, mental illness, the ones too gone for even cast offs to accept. They’re too far gone to understand what we want, and they’d fuck us over just because.”

Viktor nodded, boots skimming over a used needle discarded on the ground. Under the trees, the night had already claimed the world, darkness cloaking the forest in a gloom of depressed madness. There were no calls of night creatures here, no stars shone into this sewer, no moon gave beauty to this blackness. A crawling insanity clung to the skin; a tainted skim of shame tainted loathing eating at the edges of the mind.

Cesare caught glints of firelight from a camp buried behind a blind of underbrush. Taking the trail, he looked the small camp over. Kneeling over the fire, a man stirred a pot coming to boil. Two lean faced kids watching from up turned buckets.

Cesare waited on the trail, his quiet voice just loud enough to carry the distance. “Ho, the camp.” The man looked up, hand reaching down for something beyond Cesare’s sight.

“I see you. What can I do for you?” A darting look sent the kids scrambling behind him and away from Cesare.

Cesare kept his hands at his sides. “Looking for a tramp, offering green for a few minutes. Not looking to disturb your grubbing or pawn your stuff.”

The man weighed Cesare with eyes that looked black in the firelight. Money was second only to air in this place. No one told the truth down here, and everything was for sale, if you had the right currency. Those dark eyes shifted to Viktor, taking in his massive bulk and dangerous air.

“You can come in, but the bruiser stays there,” the man said, body shifting in the way of someone with a weapon ready.

Cesare held his hand out to Viktor. Sighing, the feral man handed over a thick wad of folded bills. Pushing the wad into his pocket without looking, Cesare made his way into the camp.

“You mind if I finish this? The kids haven’t eaten, and this ain’t any good if it sits,” the man asked, little faces peeking hopefully from behind him.

Flipping a bucket over, Cesare took a seat on the opposite side of the camp. “All the same to me. Your grub, your camp, your time,” Cesare said, deliberately submitting himself to the man.

Relaxing, the man nodded at the kids, shyly, with scared animal eyes, they went back to their seats. The man wasn’t old but he’d blown past young years ago. Faded jeans and a plaid shirt with the sleeves pulled up, the man was a few days past clean shaven. Bushy dark hair gave him a slight afro that had nothing to do with style and everything to do with not having the money to get it cut. Still, he was as clean as you could get on the streets, with the air of a man who'd been homeless long after he’d thought he’d be.

The two kids were in that timeless place between five and ten, all sunshine and happiness with life an endless adventure. Dressed in thread bare clothes washed thin as bed sheets, they were as cared for as you could get out here.

The man filled two bowls to the brim, handing them to the kids with clean spoons. The littles dove in with the ravenous hunger of kids who eat once a day when lucky. Smiling over at them, the man pulled out a smaller bowl for himself, scrapping the pot along the sides to fill it. Taking a seat between Cesare and the kids, he started in on his food.

“You said you were looking for a tramp. He owe the bruiser?” the man asked with forced casualness.

It wasn’t uncommon. Some guy gets his stuff jacked and sees just enough of the thief to know he’s homeless. Instead of writing off the loss, he hires a tramp to track him down and get his licks in.

“Naw, I’m no one’s dog. The guy’s getting paid by the kid’s family to make sure he’s doing okay, and has enough money to live off of.” The man’s eyes narrowed, most kids that ran had damn good reason to split. “Not like that. They’re not trying to force him back, they just want to make sure he’s okay.”

Mulling it over, the man finished his meal in silence. “You sure about that?”

Nodding, Cesare broke up a stick and tossed it into the fire. “I’ve met them. I’m at the school where they want him to attend. I wouldn’t sell out a fellow tramp.”

Sighing, the man looked over at the kids, worry creasing his face, making him look older than his years. He didn’t want to get involved, nothing good ever came of getting into someone else’s problems when you were drowning in your own.

“What does he look like?” the man asked.

“Asian, about my height, maybe a little shorter. Long black pants, too big for him, swimming in a jacket two sizes too large. He’d be looking to disappear, doesn’t like to be touched, but nothing crazy.”

Shaking his head in the negative, the man opened his mouth to say it when the small girl stopped him with a tug on his arm. “Dad, that could be the kid on 6th Ave.”

Thinking it over, the man nodded slowly. “There’s a kid that might be the one you’re looking for, he usually sets up shop on 6th Ave. Seen him there for about a week, but I’ve never talked to him so I can’t say for sure. Not sure where he sleeps, just know it’s not the Jungle.”

Taking out the wad of money, Cesare stripped off a few hundreds and handed them to the guy without a word. “What the fuck?” There was a note of worried wonder in the man's voice. In his world that kind of money cost flesh, humiliation, or abuse.

Without turning, Cesare's words filled the silence. “Everyone needs a breathing space. And it’s not my money.”

Cesare didn’t bother handing Viktor the money or going over the conversation, the feral thing had heard the conversation. They knew this was Cesare's show. If they found the kid it would be because of Cesare, Viktor job was to keep his skin intact or force the kid into the truck.

In a place like this, money had a scent, the sharks that swam in this ocean of shit could taste it in the air. Viktor marked them out as they slithered from the darkness of the forest. From the shadows of a tree, gleaming eyes measured the intruders to their domain. A flash of a knife out of the corner of the eye as one played with a razor. Rats knew a cat when they laid eyes on one, Viktor was sure death for anyone that crossed his path. But even cats had bad days, opportunity might show her treacherous face, giving the rats a meal.

Cesare picked out the familiar figures of his childhood. The huddled, half dead figures of heroin junkies strung out on their latest fix, the smell of vomit and sickness hanging from them like tattered dignity. The small camps of meth heads strewn with broken and torn apart things, obsessively stripped in a crazed idea they'd get them to work. The black places of death where the dead rotted in their own filth.

Viktor didn’t ask, eyes tracking the figures that slipped between the trees with slick grace. There was a watchfulness to him that spread out into the forest. If the gutter rats decided to attack, they’d be dead before they hit the ground. What they wanted was for the cat to break a leg, make a mistake, open a window they could jump through.

Cesare led the way into a darkness dotted with the failed detritus of humanity. A fire in the distance pulled him toward it. Old plywood, wet and rotting, peeked out from behind frayed blue tarps, faded gray duct tape holding edges down, all of it coming together into a strange little home. The fire pit was deep enough to hide the light until you were almost on it. Sitting around in cushioned lawn chairs, an elderly couple warmed themselves, trading words and reading from old paperbacks.

“Ho, the camp,” Cesare called out from the trail.

“We see you.” A voice like gravel drug across raw flesh, answered back.

He was old for this life, wrinkles hiding everything beyond a hardness bone deep. Dark pants and a black jacket wrapped around a rip cord body of leather and twine. Cold eyes looked over the two of them as the man kept his hand in his jacket, knife or gun, whichever way it fell, Cesare would bet the man knew how to use it. Fading dark hair showed a scalp of raw hide.

“What can I do for you?” Setting his book down, he gave them his whole attention.

“Wanted to ask a few questions about a tramp, see if you might have come across him,” Cesare asked, stretching his hands out over the fire. The oldster relaxed when he saw Cesare's hands. Next to him Viktor copied him, eyes roaming over the woods were the rats waited.

“What’s your business with him?” She had a wavering voice, an injured bird that had never been made right again. As old as the man and stick thin, with the watery eyes of those that life had ridden hard and fucked over. She was all but enveloped in a motley collection of men’s clothes.

“His family wants to make sure he’s okay. Keep him flush so he doesn’t have to make money the hard way.” The two nodded in grim understanding.

The one thing you could always sell was innocence. When you're young, you think you'll never run out, but every soul's given a set amount. It’s never truly lost, its butchered into knowledge, the kind that eats at the mind with diseased little teeth. Until one day, you realize you'd sold the only things you'd liked about yourself, leaving you with loathing and memories you can’t escape.

“Whatcha got for a description, kid?” the old man asked after a long look at the woman.

Cesare gave him the same one as the last guy, the man was shaking his head before he’d even finished. “Sorry, haven’t seen any Asian’s around. Me and the woman keep close to home these days, my old bones don’t like working the leather like they used too.”

Grinning, Cesare pulled out the bill fold, stopping as the man waved it away. “Keep your green young’un. I got all I need, and the rats would hassle us if we got any. Better for you to deal with that than us.”

Hitting the darkness of the trail, Viktor stepped close, his words no more than whisper. “Leather working?”

“Walking, it’s an old saying for people who walk a lot or make their living on the soles of their feet,” Cesare said, looking for the next gleam of firelight. Sidestepping around the man, Cesare started down the path.

“Why don’t you shake hands?” Viktor asked, sweeping the forest in never ending vigilance.

“That’s for outsiders. In the gutter, you never know when someone’s going to use it as an excuse to get close and shank you. People out here like their distance, better for you, better for them. We show respect by giving each other space to move,” Cesare said, absently meeting the glazed eyes of a meth addict curled around a tree, either dying or high.

Viktor’s quiet voice came from behind him. “How long did you live … like this?”

Cesare stepped over a stream of rain, piss, and shit, cutting through the trail. That was the problem with rain in a place like this, it made small rivers of the garbage and toilets in the area.

“I’m still living like this, where do you think I spent Winter Break?”

“This is a sewer,” Viktor said.

Cesare looked around, taking in the rats with their flickering eyes and razor blades, the hidden masses of broken men and woman. “It’s not so bad. Better than some places. You can cut a place for yourself if you have the strength or cunning to make one, like that couple back there. A place to set your stuff down, where people might not take it just for a fucks giggle. If you’re lucky and a midnight guest comes calling, someone might even hear your scream and help. There are worse places to be.”

Viktor’s sound of disgust was thick and vicious as jagged steel stroked along tender male bits. He was a guy who'd fought, ripped, maimed, and crippled more men than Cesare could imagine, but this cesspool of mankind’s waste was a sight that filled him with loathing. There was a cleanness to the carnage of war. You lived or died, there was honor in that.

This … there was no honor here. They'd sold it long ago for a hot meal and a warm bed. There were no hero’s to be had in this orgy of self-destruction and slowly decomposing spirits. Only survivors lurked in these shadows, scarred, deformed souls, grotesque mockeries of who they could have been.

The early blush of night had turned into the long hours of darkness, any fires that had been here long since gone out. Even the rats had taken to their beds, the forgotten who called this place home begging Orpheus for his silent favor. It was the only escape they could afford.

Cesare sidestepped onto a smaller path. It wasn’t long before the two of them crossed that invisible line between the garbage and those that threw it. They came out of the Jungle along a street, cancerous lights gnawing at nights velvet darkness. Houses lined the street, big lawns of cut grass and blooming flowers wrapping around wood and brick, driveways marked by cars people wished they had. They owned that place somewhere in the nebulous area of well off but not rich. The moon showed her favor here, beams cutting down between the clouds, shading the street in shadows that pulled away from the necrotic, florescent suns.

“Someone should do the world a favor and take a flame thrower to that hell hole,” Viktor spat into the night.

Taking his bearings, Cesare started walking. “You’ve never been weak, have you?”

Coming up on Cesare’s side, Viktor looked down on the slight boy. “By the time I was your age, I was teaching grown men how to kill in other men’s wars. Years before that, I was out there killing myself. If you're saying I don’t understand, then your right. All they have to do is get a job and pick themselves up, it’s not rocket science.”

The blessed midnight silence wove around them, the fey feeling of the world asleep, the solace of safety. People hurt you, they abuse, maim, and cripple, giggling in glee. The only safety was when they were somewhere else, only the night held that blessing, a private gift to the misbegotten. “What you can’t understand is weakness, not homelessness. You've never looked in the mirror and seen nothing worth fighting for. To have an addiction so powerful it's a vengeful god with a noose around your neck. It’s easy for people to say they should do this or that, but if it was easy, don’t you think they’d do it. Some of them don’t have the discipline to hold a job, or they can’t deal with authority, maybe they never learned to function in the real world. Kids who grow up in places like this, it’s the only world they know. They don't fit, and the world never lets them forget it.”

Cesare slipped onto a side street, looking for a bus sign. “It’s funny, you ask people who they hate, and they’ll tell you about the people that have fucked them over, ex-lovers, family, friends, it’s all the same. But what they really hate is weakness, our own and others. Being homeless isn't a crime, their only sin is being weak and needing help. Call it drug addiction, broken homes, mental illness, or antisocial disorder, it amounts to one thing, that they can’t change what they are, broken. And we hate them for it as much as we loath ourselves for not helping them.”

They walked in silence for a time before coming to a bus stop. Cesare stretched out along the bench, laying his head against the back. Viktor silently leaned against the bus sign, watching the empty street. “You’re a real cheery bastard, Cesare.”

“You’re the one that asked me along, I sure didn’t volunteer for this shit,” Cesare said without opening his eyes.

“Don’t worry kid, you'll be back weeding the garden and mooning over her big ass before you know it.” Viktor's low laugh filled the night. Damn the man, Cesare did miss looking at Elizabeth's big ass, better than being out on the streets walking through the graveyard of his past.

The truck was sitting where they’d left it, looking like just another rusting hulk. It was thanks to that camouflage that it still had windows. Taking the path of least resistance, Viktor swooped into the first roach motel that came across his headlights.

The hotel was a faded whore, pockmarked with peeling paint, lesions of rot showing along well used walls. She'd been fresh faced once, a beautiful thing of new pant and hard wood, those years were gone, leaving her with a future of decay. Her neon sign was a scarlet wound calling to gutter sharks looking to rent for an hour. For all that, Viktor was buying.

The door to the room was swollen with damp, with a grunt of effort, it gave up its secrets to Viktor’s vicious temper. Without a look, the man tossed his bag onto the closest bed before stalking into the bathroom. As the sound of the shower filled the space, Cesare's lip curled.

Cancer yellow nicotine stains ran tendrils up the walls in strange alien growths. The carpet was threadbare thin from hard use, whether it had started shit brown or worked up to it was anyone's guess. The beds were small things with hard mattresses, blood spots along the edges a sure sign you wouldn’t sleep alone. Plywood side tables of stained wood with tattered bibles completed the image of a room selling nothing but sickly hope and diseased rest.

When he’d been on the street, this was the best he could look forward too. Back then, he'd save his money for a month to get a night in a place like this. Hot water, sheets, and laundered blankets, a real bed instead of a corner in a stairwell. It would’ve been a night where he could forget his life. Time had revealed the treasure to be nothing more than a tawdry, infected whore with rotting teeth.