Chapter 41

Alex absentmindedly placed an order on the grill, numbed already by the day’s monotonous routine. It even got to the point where he forgot what he put on the grill almost as soon as he placed it there. He glanced down and saw four patties sizzling on it.

Oh right. Double cheeseburgers, he thought, numbly. And curly fries.

He went to the bag of frozen fries and took out a handful, placing them in the mesh basket hanging above the deep fryers. Then he dumped it into the boiling oil. They sizzled and hissed immediately. He set the timer and went back to the grill.

Alex sighed. He resented his job, hated it, in fact, and wished he were anywhere else but that stupid café grill with its greasy smoke seeming to clog his nostrils and throat. It sucked even worse because he had to complete the shift alone. Kevin Fuller normally would have worked it with him but he vanished and no one had been hired to fill his spot.

Alex’s dislike for the pothead went up a couple notches.

“How long does it take to fry up some burgers?” his customer complained.

You should know. You’ve probably been here enough to have it timed by now, Alex thought but didn’t say.

“Sorry,” Alex replied, a half-hearted smile on his face. He went back to concentrating on the food sizzling on the grill in front of him. “They’ll be ready when they’re ready. Unless you like your meat still bleeding, then you’ll have to wait.”

“Whatever,” the guy replied, ambling over to where a variety of snacks and other junk food items were arrayed on a couple of black, wire shelves.

Alex went back to ignoring him and turned his thoughts to his current situation. He was back to being poor and working all the time again. He might have paid off his tuition but now he had car insurance and other bills to worry about as well as having money for extras. In this case, extras meant taking Cassie out.

The work was excruciatingly boring, dull, and the customers, more often than not, irritated the living piss out of him. He had also been forced to get a third job after Darius took the money from the Exclusive job and it disappeared. At the beginning, his grades dropped a bit while he tried juggling three jobs, schoolwork, a senior project (which included presenting his body of work to three graphic design alumni), and still trying to find time to spend with his fiancé. It was grueling work and mentally exhausting but after a week or two he was able to find a certain rhythm and everything, more or less, worked itself out.

Today, however, was just one of those days where the craziness of his hectic schedule caught up to him and it made him a tad bit irritable.

He suddenly scratched at his forearm, his fingers brushing against the long, thin scar there. He hated when he thought about his last conversation with Darius and how it ended but it bothered him all the time anyway. He couldn’t seem to block it out. Darius clearly wasn’t the same person anymore and Alex had a sinking feeling that he would never be the same again. It depressed him and often put him into dark, brooding moods. He wanted to blame himself, but the logical part of his brain stubbornly refused to accept that burden.

He was so absorbed in his thoughts he neglected the food cooking on the grill. The four patties poured more smoke out than normal and gained a decidedly burnt smell. To make matters worse, the guy whose order he just screwed up was back on the other side of the counter, his greedy little eyes locked onto the burning food.

Alex sighed heavily. It was the second time in his career as a grill cook that he burned someone’s food. Of course, the first time had been Cassie’s.

“You burned it,” the guy said, his voice a mix of astonishment and sadness, as if Alex just shot his dog instead of burning his food.

Alex groaned, slipping his spatula under the ruined meat and getting ready to throw it in the garbage. The guy on the other side of the counter, seeing what he was about to do, protested.

“Wait.” He held out one pudgy hand, the other one overloaded with snacks he’d gotten from the wire racks.

“Sorry about that,” Alex told him, trying to calm him down. “I'll just go ahead and redo your order.”

“Oh. All right then,” he said, a cheery smile replacing his look of horrified dismay. “Most of the dip wads around here mess my food up on purpose. I can either eat it anyway or starve.”

Alex stared at him for a second, trying to decide whether or not the guy was telling the truth. He figured he probably was. Some people were like that.

“Why don’t you go to a fast food joint in the city?” Alex asked him, honestly curious.

“No car, dude,” he replied, shrugging his shoulders in a nonchalant way. “I learned to live with it. If I make a big deal of it, it only makes them laugh harder. I figure if I just take it, eventually they’ll give up on it and quit messing with my food.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Alex told him, truthfully. It was pretty screwed up the way the guy was being treated. He’d gotten the impression that college meant an end to all that high school crap. It was a shame that most of it still went on. “Anyone here do that to you?”

He asked the question while throwing four new frozen patties on the grill. A genuine look of gratitude showed on the guy’s face and Alex pitied him even more.

“Yeah,” he answered. “There’s a few, but one prick in particular. Tall son of a bitch. Awkward looking. He’s a real piece of work. He made it a point to show me where he got the lettuce for my burgers.”

He looked deliberately at the trash can where bits of waste and stuff that fell on the floor went. Alex was disgusted by that and knew exactly which person he was talking about.

“Fuller,” Alex spat. “Don’t worry about him. He didn’t show up for work today and this is his third strike. I get to fire him now.”

Alex flipped the burgers and resumed their conversation.

“I’m Alex Porter, by the way. Sorry about burning your food. The last few days have been…stressful.”

“Yeah, don’t worry about it.” He stuck out one hand, the other one still loaded with snacks, and Alex shook it. “I’m Woody Freidman. Good to know decent people still exist in this world.”

Alex only chuckled. He tended the burgers a little while longer and then fixed them up, everything on them. He passed the food laden tray to Woody, who promptly took it.

“Well, thanks for the grub and the conversation. Later.”

“Yeah. Later,” Alex replied. He watched Woody walk away, headed for one of the three cashiers currently on duty. After he disappeared into the crowded throng of people, he looked at the clock. It was 9:30 pm. He groaned, realizing he still had half an hour till his shift was up and the cafeteria closed. It might not sound like a lot, but to Alex it felt like forever.

Life sucks, he thought to himself.

All he really wanted to do was go back to his room and sleep away the rest of his nightmarish day, even though he usually hated being there. The empty bed on Darius’s side was a constant reminder of how badly they screwed up. He, at least, managed to put his life mostly back to normal, but Darius was a lost cause. He often found himself wishing he would have been smart and just taken his friend’s original advice and gone to Darius’ parents for the loan, or even if he’d just sucked it up and gotten the third job to pay off his tuition like he’d been forced to do in the end anyways. Now he was back to being broke and Darius was a murdering, vigilante psychopath. All because he had wanted to take the easy way out, like usual.

“If I see you again…I’ll kill you.”

Darius’ words rang in his head like a demented track stuck on repeat.

“Hey, handsome.”

Alex looked up and saw Cassie grinning at him from the other side of the counter. She looked completely stunning, as usual. The lights from the ceiling caused the rock on her finger to sparkle impressively.

“Hey there,” he replied, a distant smile on his face.

“You okay?” she asked, catching the moodiness to his voice.

“Yeah. Working here, by myself again, just leaves me too much time to think,” he told her, a more genuine smile replacing his broody one. Cassie, he had found out quickly, had a way of lifting him out of his depression and he hoped that would never change about her.

“Thinking about D again?” she asked, genuine care in her voice.

“Yeah. Can't seem to help it,” he replied, his mood darkening again.

He hadn’t told her about the altercation with him in front of Anna’s grave. He didn’t want her to worry about him unnecessarily. He never lied to her, but he thought that little piece of information would only drive her crazy with fear.

“But you’re here now and that makes things a hell of a lot better.” He smiled at her.

“Really?” she asked, a pleased little smile on her lips. “Well, don’t you know how to make a girl feel special.”

“That’s because you are,” he told her, finding one of her hands on the counter and giving it a soft squeeze. Then he leaned in and kissed her with passion, despite all the people around.

“What time do you close up shop again?” she asked after they broke off their kiss, her eyes suddenly filled with a deep, sultry hunger.

Alex looked up at the clock. It was 9:45.

“Fifteen minutes,” he replied, meeting her sultry eyes with his own.

“I guess I’ll just wait here until you’re done. That okay?” she asked.

“I’d love nothing better,” he replied.

Alex only had to deal with one more customer. After they were served, he cleaned up and washed everything. He finished up by rolling down the heavy security grate to the Grill and walked into the cafeteria to where Cassie was sitting.

“Ready?”

“Yep.” She took his hand and led him away from the Grill and the crappy day he was having. “Good thing too, I was starting to get bored.”

“Ha. Ha,” he mocked, pushing her slightly with his hip.

“Hey!” she cried out in protest. “You’re lucky you bribed me with a giant rock.”

“Great,” Alex said to no one, rolling his eyes. “She thinks she's funny.”

“I am funny. People tell me I am all the time.”

“That’s because they’re too nice to tell you the truth,” Alex shot back with a grin.

They joked around and were about to leave but Alex saw something on one of the cafeteria’s TVs. He stopped abruptly, reading the captions on the bottom. Dimly, he remembered standing in front of the same TV a few months ago and watching the car bombing that Dr. Tiberius had died in. Distantly, he felt Cassie take hold of his hand and start pulling it, trying to get him to leave. She had seen what caught his attention first but was too late to stop him from seeing it too.

The TV showed a helicopter view of a skyscraper's roof. Firemen and police could be seen clambering around the base of its radio tower. There were a couple of large lights that helped the rescue workers see and the police to photograph the grisly scene. Up above, suspended from the tower itself was the body of Quentin Marks. The camera mounted to the helicopter either wasn’t allowed or couldn’t get a very good shot of the body, but from what Alex could see, it wasn’t pretty. The body was mangled, almost beyond recognition, and looked like whoever put him there used large nails to affix the drug lord to one of the tower’s metal crossbars. His legs dangled into empty air and flopped around in the stiff wind. Several firemen were climbing the tower itself, trying to reach the corpse but they did not look like they were having much luck. The wind was blowing really hard and made the situation too precarious to be entirely safe.

All Alex could focus on was the image of Marks' mutilated corpse and the obvious torture he endured right before his death. It sickened him and caused an involuntary shudder to run up his spine. He didn’t feel even a tiny amount of pity for Marks’ but it was still a horrible way to go.

Part of him had been waiting for this to happen. He knew, pretty much since he saw Anna’s body, it would only be a matter of time before he saw or heard about the drug lord’s gruesome death. He hadn’t, however, been prepared to deal with Darius’s brutality in such a glaring manner. It was going to take some time for him to get that image of Marks out of his head.

“Come on, honey,” Cassie said, her voice urgent and pleading. “You don’t need to see this.”

Alex ignored her for a moment as he watched the rest of the segment. He made himself watch it. In some ways, it was like a punishment. It was the price he had to pay for starting the events that led everyone to where they were.

Anna dead.

Darius gone and wreaking havoc on the city.

Cassie almost being killed.

All of it.

That mutilated body would probably haunt his nightmares for a long time, but despite knowing that, he still couldn’t force himself to walk away at first. So he stood there and watched until the scene switched back to the newsroom.

Seeing what Darius had done to Marks was like a blow to the face. Alex was suddenly glad his former best friend was gone. He didn’t want any part of him or what he was doing.

He finally let Cassie tear him away from the TV.

The two of them walked away.