Indian Country Noir (Akashic Noir) by Sarah Cortez;Liz Martinez

with bullets
with names on them.

    Two faces. Walking in the waking world.
    Something inside me felt cold, but it wasn't really me.
Grandpa was upset.
    The station already smelled like meat turned bad from the
mass of sweaty bodies perfumed for the day at the office, but
what I saw pushed out a shockwave stench like a body cooked
in burning wreckage. Or a fresh, dug-up grave stacked with
the dead.
    Two-face didn't single me out. It was stalking the woman.
    I moved. Didn't think twice. Not scared. Hell, Grandpa'd
been talking to me since I was a kid, saying he's in my blood
and telling me I should do this or that crazy thing. Scared
always bounced off of me, even in that shit-and-rock country
they sent me to after I enlisted. This was just one more dream
I was walking through.
    I left a wake of curses. Guess I was the only one running
who wasn't invisible. Put out a hand, caught a flap of cloth
that felt slippery. Kept the other tight for a punch to what I
hoped were ribs.
    Two-face raised an elbow and I barely cleared a broken
jaw. The thing shrugged and I heard the buzzing of a nest full
of hornets barreling into my ear drums.
    I went down, sparks flying. No concussion or ringing eardrums, no smoke curling from singed cloth. No flashbacks either. Got up quick. People muttering didn't bother me. I'm
used to folks thinking I'm crazy. Best four years of my life were
in the service. I was normal there. Bugfuck as I wanted to
be. Grandpa didn't visit me. Not even in dreams. No signs
or warnings. Reality was the dream. I'd been sent all alone to
the mountaintop in a shit storm to find my way, my tribe, my
vision.
    You had to make it on your own, is what Grandpa told me when I came back and he started speaking to me again.

    Where's my way, my tribe, my guide?
    You on the path for it now.
    Thanks for nothing.
    I followed in the big man's wake, catching up, thinking
about what I was going to do-jump up and grab the choke or
go low and take out the knees. He stayed mostly man, which
made it easier to think. Of course, when you have to think
about these things before you do them, they don't turn out
well.
    I wasn't fast enough. Good thing, or else I wouldn't be
talking about it now. And the woman, she'd be dead.
    He caught up to her and shoved. She screamed as she
went flying into naked air, and when she stopped flying she
vanished into the track pit.
    A gust of warm, humid air blew in, then surged out of the
tunnel.
    The man kept moving on through the crowd as I came to
the platform edge. A few suits shouted, stirred from their iPod
cocoons by a sense of having just missed something. I knew
the feeling. A young girl in a school uniform pointed down
at the tracks. A knot of teenage boys whooped and laughed.
Maybe there was something down there, maybe there wasn't.
A fat rat plodded away to the other side of the station. Fast
food wrappings and newspaper pages danced in the air. A roar
was building.
    The big man wasn't so big anymore, like he was making
his way down a different horizon line than everyone else. He
looked back at something way behind me, maybe the distant
crowd of its and his victim, and then he dipped below the
range of shoulders and was gone. There was no two-faced
man. No woman either.

    Grandpa settled down inside me. I never knew he could
get upset like that.
    On the uptown side of the station, a twenty-something
who looked like he'd stayed up from a night of clubbing broke
into a free-form flow like he was the headliner and we'd all
come to hear him and the sound of that train coming was our
love and adulation taking him higher and higher. I have no
idea what he was rapping about.
    So I jumped.
    The lights of the lead subway car were the eyes of that
thing I'd seen on the second take of Mr. Muscle, only they
were flashing with the fire from full clips being dumped on
me.
    My hand settled on something warm, soft. Moaning.
There she was. I grabbed an arm, pulled.