Plasticity Read online

  Cyrus crouched behind a tree to look out at the scene, but other trees and bushes obscured his view. He heard the sirens making their approach, and had to think fast. He looked out across the back yard, but it was all open area. Nowhere to hide. He looked across the street at the small parking lot near where he had hit the other car, and he saw her again. The girl was nestled up against a car, peeking over the hood at the scene of the wreck. He had seconds before he would be unable to make any decisions for himself, and the cop was preoccupied with whomever he was barking orders at, so he chanced it. Over the fence as quietly as possible, then across the street, staying out of the cop's peripheral vision, and behind a parked car. This wouldn't be a good permanent solution, other cops were already showing up across the street, and he could hear a helicopter in the distance. He had to come up with a plan quick. Hide, hope to not get caught, and accept losing the girl. Or, try to grab the girl and get out of there within direct sight of a team of cops. Like so many other options in his life, he didn't like either one, but that didn't mean he didn't have to make a decision.

  A thought suddenly occurred to Cyrus. How could he be sure this was the plastic girl, and not the flesh one? They didn't need the flesh one. The plastic one being out in the world was the problem, unaccounted for prosthetics, potential lawsuits, et cetera. That's just what he needed. To pounce on the girl, and find out she was flesh. He would be exposed, and it would be for nothing, or worse, she could scream, attract the cops and he would get arrested. She could press charges for assault. He could go to jail. Then it wouldn't matter how long he was in jail, he wouldn't have anything to come back to. No wife, no house, no kids, nothing. Oh, and he'd probably be out of the job, too. There's no way they'd bring a convict back to their private security firm, once he got out. Christ, this day just keeps getting better. He snorted, still no decision made. Time was running out. He came up with a plan that might just get him out of having to make either of the dangerous choices.

  Cyrus crept out around the back of the car, still crouching, and walked softly to the car where the girl was hiding. He, apparently, wasn't as quiet as he had hoped. The girl turned her head toward him as soon as he stepped around the back of the car. She looked terrified.

  “Wait,” he whispered, holding his hands up. “Do you know that guy?” He smiled internally. He was going to play it stupid. Make it look like he wasn't after her.

  She relaxed a little, but then took on a glare, narrowing her eyes at him. “What the hell, Man? You drunk or something?”

  Shit, she saw me run from the car. Cyrus waved his hands, glancing at the cops, hoping none were looking toward them. “No, no. I uh,” Quick, think up the dumbest thing you can think... “I was, um, being chased. Yeah, some guy was following me, and I was just trying to lose him, then I guess I drove past a cop. I was trying to get away when I hit your friend there, and I wanted to make sure he was okay.” The girl had stopped glaring at him. Damn, he was charming. Stupid was always the best way to go. Nobody thought much of you, but they pretty much let you do whatever you wanted. And, people were a lot less suspicious of your motives when they thought you weren't capable of guile.

  “Okay, keep it down, if you don't want to get caught. We'll hang around and wait until he's done with the cops, and we can make sure he's okay. It looked like they were arresting him at first. I would have been a lot more pissed off if they arrested him for something you did.”

  Good, now he was in. That was, surprisingly, easier than he thought it was going to be. Now he just had to figure out how to tell if she was flesh or plastic. Of course, he could always just ask her, right? That was pretty damn stupid, and stupid seemed to be working out pretty well with this one. He stayed crouched behind the car with her until the paramedics left. His car was being towed away, correction, his wife's piece-of-shit-car was being towed away, and the cops were slowly thinning out. The helicopter was lighting up the yard behind the house, and the few remaining officers were attempting to gain access to the house. He knew the helicopter would be sweeping the parking lot soon, and they had better get out of here before that happened.

  “Say, um, Girl? If that light hits us, they're going to come after us. We look awfully suspicious hiding behind these cars, here.”

  “Hayley.” She said, looking around, and past Cyrus.

  “I'm Cyrus. Nice to meet you.” She kind of sniffed. Cyrus thought she might have been trying to feign indifference, but she didn't really achieve her goal.

  “Shit, where's he going?” Cyrus looked at Hayley, then followed her eyes to see her friend get into his car and drive off. Cyrus laughed again, internally, Dude just bailed. That's some interesting crazy, right there. “Well, if he's gone, we can't talk to him anyway. Might as well hide.” She looked over the car to make sure none of the cops were looking their way. “Alright, let's go. We can wait at his place until he gets back. Unless you got a phone we can call him on.” She waited for a response.

  Oh, God. My phone. “I, uh, my phone is broken... and it's still in the car that just left on the back of a tow truck.” He smiled weakly. Sometimes the truth works out for you, but usually only when the truth is worse than the lie you would have made up.

  She half-grunted as response, and grabbed his hand. “Come on. It's upstairs.” She led him to the building across the parking lot, which appeared to be a cheap fourplex on the cusp of deserving the pejorative term “run-down.” He shook his head in disbelief. Dude got hit leaving his house. One unlucky dude. At the door to Dude's apartment, Hayley shook the door handle. “Well, I haven't ever actually been here. So, you're going to have to give me a few while I try to figure out the lock code.” She began punching in numbers on the keypad. Each series of numbers was met with two beeps and a corresponding flashing red light.

  “Are you just guessing random things?” Cyrus asked her, as quietly as he could, but he was getting antsy.

  “Yeah, I am. I told you, I've never been here. How would I know his code?” She didn't seem to understand the idea of being quiet. Or, maybe she just forgot.

  The helicopter was swinging around, and it was starting to sweep their side of the street, when they heard a voice from below them.

  “Ahoy, there, criminals. You breakin' inta Alan's place, or what?”

  Hayley leaned over the railing and looked down at the girl below. She had never seen her before, but Alan had talked about her. She glanced across the street, hoping they had not attracted any attention, but it was too dark to tell, now. “Emerald Blonde?” The girl scrunched up her face, turning it from the face of a button-nosed elf, to a wrinkled old gnome in the blink of an eye.

  “Yeah, I guess you'd be friends of Alan, then. Come on down here, and I'll let ya in. You call Lydia 'Day-Walker' and yer out, though. Got it?”

  They both nodded, enthusiastically, and rushed down the stairs. The Emerald Blonde let them into her apartment, and they sank against the wall, waiting and praying. She eyed them suspiciously as she closed the door.

  “Get ya sumpthin' ta drink?” Her mode of speech made Hayley imagine pirate leprechauns. She felt a little rude just thinking it, but she couldn't help herself.

  “I'll have a whiskey, if you're buying.” Hayley looked at Cyrus, who was smiling wide, like he'd just robbed a bank and gotten away clean. She was finally having the second thoughts she should have had five minutes ago. But, the Emerald Blonde just laughed melodically, and Hayley could hear glass clinking in the kitchenette.

  “What aboutchu, Hayley?” Hayley's head snapped toward the kitchen, completely shocked for a second, until she realized that, if Alan had described the girls living below him well enough that she could recognize them upon first look, it would stand to reason that they would be equally able to recognize her.

  “Um, no thank you.” Hayley was calming down, happy for the help, and she was beginning to doubt whether she would have been in any actual trouble if she had been caught by the cops. She had worried they might be involved in her kidnapping, but i
t sounded more unlikely by the moment. The police would have been able to find her by now, if they had been involved, she imagined.

  “Didn't think so, but it's rude if I didna ask.” It sounded like she had dropped her accent for just a second. It stuck in Hayley's head, and made her pay more attention to the short, blonde, elf-girl after that.

  Cyrus, on the other hand, seemed to be paying an inordinate amount of attention to Hayley. It almost looked like he was leering at her, but when Hayley met with his eyes, she didn't see anything untoward in them. Still, she wasn't quite ready to accept this guy at face value.

  The Emerald Blonde came back into the living room with a bottle and two glasses, and set them on the coffee table. She gestured to the couch, before setting herself down on the floor and hunching herself up to the coffee table. They shuffled between the coffee table and couch, and planted themselves in the couch's over-stuffed cushions. Hayley became aware of the shear size of Cyrus, then. He seemed to take up almost two thirds of the couch, and his right knee was dangerously close to touching Hayley's left knee.

  “I gotta say, it is nice ta meetcha. We kinda thought you was either made up, or one of them girls from the strip club Alan likes.”

  “The Junkyard?” Hayley was a little surprised, again, that Alan would share this much information with these girls. He seemed so shy and quiet, she really didn't expect him to be so... so... much of an over-sharer.

  “Yeah, or the other one.” She smiled.

  This was news to Hayley. He had taken her to The Junkyard a few times, but he had not mentioned that he went to any other clubs. “Other one, huh? I didn't know he went to other ones.”

  Cyrus, was quietly following along, not caring to interrupt, but he was almost certain this was the plastic one he was after.

  “Yeah, ol' Alan's a big ol' pervert, he is. Adorable, really.” The Blonde had a certain way about her that Hayley found charming, but, at the same time, she was having a hard time getting a read on her. The accent seemed to come and go, without rhyme or reason, and her colloquialisms were a mish-mash of southern U.S. and pirate-talk.

  “I guess he would be a pervert, going to strip clubs all the time.” Hayley sort of chuckled, but she felt a little bad talking about Alan in this way.

  “Oh, ho, ain't just strip clubs what make him a pervert. I think he thinks these walls is thicker'n they are. We get to hear everything he does up there, and he don't use headphones.” She winked. Cyrus actually laughed for the first time since Hayley and he had met. Hayley would have blushed, if she could have. She knew she should not have been so surprised, The Junkyard being as outrageously perverse as it was, but still, she had figured Alan to be a bit of a prude. It was odd finding out that she was more of a prude than he was. And, it did sort of turn her on thinking about Alan being some kind of sex obsessed pervert, which was cause for alarm. She was discovering that this new body had awakened a bit of unnerving sexual interest that she could not have imagined having when she was flesh.

  “So, what brings ya inta town, here?” The blonde had knocked back her second glass of whiskey, while Cyrus was still sipping on his first.

  “I need to talk to Alan about something, but he took off before I could meet with him.” Hayley glanced side-wise at Cyrus, implying that it may have been his fault she missed him. The Blonde saw it, though, and thought it might have meant something else.

  “Hey, if I hadn't hit him, he would have been gone already, anyway. Don't blame me.” He looked like he was feeling better, now.

  “Ah, so it was you makin' all that noise out there. Good job on that fence, there. Taught it a good ol' lesson didnya?”

  Cyrus was mildly shocked at these people. He was obviously, at the very least, someone who wrecked his car running from the cops. He could have been a murderer or something, they didn't know. But they were casual about, verging on uninterested in, whatever criminal activity he could be guilty of. He found himself liking these people, in spite of himself.

  “So, how's the cabin goin'?” Again, the Blonde was surprising Hayley with her wealth of information she had thought would be more private. She looked at Cyrus, who seemed a little too interested in her response, but the cat was out of the bag, a bit, already, anyway.

  “Well, that's what I wanted to talk to Alan about.” Hayley was not going to go into too many specifics, but she felt it was kind of nice to talk to someone about it. Talking to anyone who wasn't Alan, for the first time in months, was feeling pretty good. “Some little brat showed up last night, claiming to own the place. Says her father left it to her when he died.”

  “Hmm... sure, could be, I guess. Although, Alan's parents bought that land a while back. Law says they own the land and whatever's on it. Exceptin' maybe resources the guvverment would want. Ain't no law gonna protect you from that.”

  Cyrus laughed again, his dark cheeks taking on a rosy sheen. “You got that right.”

  “So, you know for sure that his parents bought that land?” Hayley was excited to get more information, especially anything to contradict the evil doll that was trying to evict them from their home.

  “Oh, yeah, sure, of course. They was rich, before they died. Well...” She seemed to think for a moment. “I guess they're still rich, just being corpses means that Alan has to take care of it.” She knocked back another glass. “Alan is an oddball, fer sure. Keeps workin' that dumb job and drivin' that dumb car, all the while sittin' on fat stacks. Stacks got even fatter after his parents died. He don't touch none of it, almost.”

  Cyrus's ears had perked up, and Hayley had to stop and think if human ears actually did that. His face was calm, but he was giving off the vibe of a cartoon villain in the midst of rubbing his hands together and stroking his long mustache.

  “You plotting something over there, Buddy?” Hayley wasn't shy about calling people out, if she thought they were up to no good.

  “Hmm, yeah, you got a wicked look to ya. If you thinks about robbin' him, or sumpthin', just remember two things. One, he ain't got it on him, an' two, he got security. Lydia,” she called out, without changing position on the floor.

  “Yeah, Babe.” A response came from the hallway, before Lydia came into the room.

  Hayley's jaw dropped, and it sounded like Cyrus had stopped breathing. Lydia was nearly six feet tall, with skin like fresh cream, copper and gold hair in delicate curls bounced against her shoulders, and a small smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose served as an underline to her violently blue eyes. She was shaped like a thirteen-year-old boy's idea of a woman, like a comic book drawing, a wasp with tits, all packed into baggy sweat pants slung low and a college-branded sweat shirt, cropped at the navel. She was one of those people. The kind of people that made the frumpiest of clothes sexy, like a Hollywood vampire pretending to be a regular person. After a moment, Hayley cracked up laughing, fighting back the urge to cry out “Day-Walker, I get it!” She was quickly silenced by the serious look that Lydia had shot her way. Not a threat, implicitly, but as good a warning as Hayley needed to close her mouth.

  Fortunately, Cyrus broke the silence by clearing his throat. “I assure you fine ladies, I meant nothing of the sort.” He was feeling a little loose in the tongue, but he thought he might have found an opportunity to better his situation. And, with the way today had been going, it wouldn't take much to make his situation better. Not getting completely screwed would be a nice start. “I am private security. Hired to find this girl.” He gestured to Hayley, off-handed, as if he didn't care if she knew, while she took on the appearance of an animal caught in a trap. “But, it's starting to sound like Alan and Hayley might be more in need of my services, and with Alan's potential wealth as a factor, I am very inclined to switch sides.”

  Hayley was both disgusted by his brazen greed and disloyalty, and impressed by his honesty. Hayley was about to say something, but then something else occurred to her. “Um, what does being really sexy have to do with security?”

  Cyrus thought, for a
moment, that she was talking about him, then figured she was making a call-back to what the blonde girl had said before Lydia had been called out to join them.

  The Blonde wasn't confused. “Lydia, while being, potentially, the hottest chick in the world, is also nearly indestructible, and a master of war.”

  Cyrus raised a brow, and Hayley wanted clarification. “War, huh? Like a soldier, or something?”

  Lydia smiled at them. “Yes, a soldier, at one time, a long time ago. From purple heart to breakin' hearts.”

  The Blonde took the opportunity to laugh her musical tune again. “Alan's parents bought her.”

  Lydia flashed a quick look at the Blonde, but didn't seem to be upset. “It is true enough, though I wouldn't term it that way. Sounds... distasteful. They wanted someone to look out for Alan. They didn't like that he never took precautions, and he worked a shit job and lived in this apartment, with all the regular riff raff. They didn't want him out here, alone, so they made me a deal. There are rumors out there that this is the most expensive body ever. I'm not sure about that, but it is goddamn artisanal. I got shit in here you wouldn't believe. A regular one-man-army. They paid for the whole thing, and I got to leave a body that used to pee standing up, but couldn't anymore, in exchange for a body that would sit down to pee, if it ever needed to.”

  Hayley was impressed with these two. They seemed like they genuinely cared for Alan's well being, not just because he was wealthy. Poor Cyrus, though. He seemed down-right despondent, presumably because it was obvious that Alan didn't need any other protection. She reached out and patted him on the shoulder, forgetting for the moment, that he had been hired to find her, and she still didn't know by whom. Cyrus finished his whiskey, and leaned back into the couch.