The Last Frame

"Where are you taking me?”

The thoroughfare’s neon signs, muted through the Suburban’s darkened windows, slid the length of the interior like the cinematic reel of some clichéd B-movie.

“If this is about that parking ticket on the East end, I really intended to—”

The Suburban knifed a hard left. My shoulder slammed into the guy beside me, a fortress of gabardine wool, stone muscles and an even harder expression that crushed the remainder of my thought.

“This isn’t about my breech of contract, is it?”

The weight of the pretense became too much. I lapsed into the road noise rising from the floorboard to think. Someone had made the connection.

Todd.

Sixteen ways of bastard.

I flexed my right toe. The leather holster strapped around my calf shifted. Tucked a hand’s length down into my knee-high Doc Martens, it had become as requisite in my wardrobe as the 12-gauge stud in my right brow. Thank God I hadn’t yet transferred that detail to paper. Though I may have exaggerated the bust-line when I'd projected a part of myself into my kick ass Goth heroine, self-preservation had become sacred. The frame I'd completed at midnight still held secrets.

Skyscrapers dropped away, replaced by some secondary sense of the familiar I couldn’t pin. If it was happening again, there’d be a bridge tethered to the final station on the trans-city line. A man spouting Bible verses. Mirrors, everywhere.

I pulled in a deep breath, a tug of war between the compulsion to slip into relief that we were traveling out of the city, away from bridges and tracks and the book of Revelations, and hysteria-inducing odds.

Four men.

One slightly neurotic comic book artist who draws the future.