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lb_leeThe Sacking of College Town
Word count: 2474
Description: It’s bulk trash day at Vaygo University, and M.D. and Biff go furniture-hunting.
Note: This story takes place directly after the events of Book Two. M.D. hasn’t wrecked yet, Biff has just jump-started his life again, and while they’re both low on cash and possessions, things seem pretty rosy for the moment.
In my many interactions with Biff, I had seen him in a few moods—mostly shades of angry. I’d rarely seen him smile, except in the event of outwitting the PIN, and even then, it had never been that intense an expression.
When I clambered into his window this time around, he was grinning. I immediately turned tail, but he’d already seen me.
“Where you been?” He demanded, hauling me in by my collar. “You late.”
“We have a schedule?”
“Here,” he said, tossing me a backpack. He already had one himself.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Has Christmas come early?”
He rubbed his hands together and chortled, which was even worse than the grin. “’S June.”
“Yeah, so?”
He gestured at me encouragingly, like I was a particularly dimwitted child he was trying to coax through the alphabet. “What happens in June?”
“…school ends?”
“Lease ends,” he corrected, grabbing a water bottle from the rusty old fridge. He even thought to toss me one. “Know what that means?”
I just stared at him. “Instead of all this rigmarole, you could just tell me.”
He rolled his eyes, but maintained his disturbingly good temper. “College kids moving.”
“So?”
“So, it bulk trash day.”
I paused. Calculated. My inner cash register went ka-ching.
Biff dug into his fridge. “You need shit? I need shit.”
Now I was the one rubbing my hands together and cackling.
“Good. We raid College Town now.”
I eagerly took the offered Tupperware and shoved it into the backpack with the water. We were obviously going to be out a while. “Hey, Biff, don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the head’s up… but why wait for me?”
“I need furniture,” he said. “And I can’t carry that shit by myself—not the whole way, anyway.”
I should’ve known this was too good to be true. My arms were spaghetti, and Biff lived a few floors up. The idea of lugging god-knew-what up all those mildewed stairs was a daunting concept, and I knew how much power Biff had in his stocky frame. “But… stairs! Floors!”
“I ain’t got a car; it’s you and me or nothing. No way I’m asking favors, after the shit you pulled. Get going, huh? We wait long, there won’t be much left.”
That, I couldn’t argue with. Moving the furniture would be less of an issue than gaining possession of it. Half the under-class of the city would be descending on College Town; it’d be a riot. So when Biff headed for the door, I said, “Window will be faster, come on.”
I jumped out and Biff was hot on my heels. He vaulted down the fire escape with the ease of habit, and took the last story’s spring-loaded stair down with a well-practiced leap and a hop at the end of its rusty, screeching descent. I just scrambled and dropped the way I was used to. I made it down first, but just barely, and Biff had caught up to me in a second.
“Which way?” I asked, and he waved right.
Even with all the smoking he did, Biff was still faster than me, at least for short distances on the flat. He took the lead, dodging and plowing through the crowds, me straining to keep on his heels when I didn’t have his bulk to shove through commuters. Two corners and an intersection (traffic was slowed to a rush hour crawl) and then we were down into the comparatively cool darkness of the subway station.
Biff paused at the packed stairway to catch his breath, but I threw myself down the rail with a whoop, zipping side-saddle past businessmen with briefcases and women in suits. The velocity nearly toppled me when I hit the end, but I caught my balance and was about to start running again when Biff grabbed the back of my shirt and pulled me up short in the alcove by the men’s room. He obviously hadn’t taken the fun way down; he was wheezing and clutching a stitch in his side. He held up a finger, and raised an eyebrow.
“Go for it,” I said.
He nodded, took a quick glance, and when nobody was looking our way, we both vanished. The station was packed, but all the people seemed utterly focused on their own concerns and if anyone noticed two people disappearing, it wasn’t important enough to care about. God, I loved Vaygo.
I knew that Biff didn’t plan to hold it long, so I darted out to vault the turnstile. A few seconds after I’d hit the ground, we both returned to the visible spectrum. So this was how Biff got around.
The crowds on the platform were of a density I could only compare to a sardine tin. Biff wedged himself in; I lacked his muscle and steel-toed boots, so just followed in his wake.
“Is there a quicker way to College Town?” I asked hopefully.
“Nope.” Even with his blaring voice, he had to talk at a near-shout to be overhead. “We get off three stops down, at VU. Hang on.”
The train arrived, and what followed was an invasion of personal space on a scale I had never imagined. The sardines comparison was far too lenient. We were crammed, wedged, and squished into the train car, long past the point where my arms were pinned to my sides and Biff and I could count each other’s nose hairs. He kept a firm grip on my backpack and otherwise attempted to ignore the press of humanity, except to elbow someone who was looking at him without the appropriate level of disinterest.
Thankfully, the three stops passed fairly quickly, though the pressure in the train car didn’t improve. Then Biff shoved his way out, dragging me along behind him, and we followed the flood of people up the stairs, back into the evening sunlight.
I paused. I stared. I salivated.
“Yeah.” Biff was grinning again. “Nice, ain’t it?”
But I’d already descended upon the spoils like a starving vulture.
Vaygo had a monumental underbelly of the less-than-loaded, such as Biff, but it also had a sizeable population of the unknowingly wealthy. Not at Raige’s level—he was high up there, even by Vaygo standard—but the sort of people who would senselessly toss out mattresses and desks because taking it home was hard. The curbside was glutted with stuff, most of it less than a year old and labeled FREE.
Perfect place for people like Biff, whose furniture was held together with duct tape and balanced with decks of cards. And me, whose current furnishings were whatever Scorch and Flame had given me, and they hadn’t been planning for their apprentice to be humanoid.
The place was already crawling with other scavengers, and in some places, it’d already gotten violent; I saw two little old ladies in fisticuffs over a toaster oven, and a couple young bohemians snarling over possession of a phonograph. Me and Biff split up and waded into the chaos with a will.
It quickly became obvious that even with the backpacks and Biff’s muscle, there was no way we could carry everything we wanted; there was just too much of it. I had come with the intention of taking everything I could get, but found myself waffling between lamps, books, and rugs. Biff, obviously more seasoned than I, arrowed in on certain articles of furniture and ignored the rest.
After I’d stuffed my backpack with veterinary school and vertebrate dissection textbooks, given myself a bandoleer of Christmas lights, and bemoaned all the other things that I had to leave behind, knowing I’d never be able to use or carry it all, I went to find Biff. It wasn’t hard; he was busy bellowing with a heavyset young woman over who should rightfully own the folding table and chairs on the side of the road. It looked like violence might be on the horizon, but when I showed up, I guess the woman decided she wasn’t interested in taking on Biff and me, because she affected a look of complete disinterest and sauntered off.
“Folding, huh?” I said.
“Yeah. You get the chairs; I got the table.” He was already trying to find a way to carry it—the problem seemed less the weight than the shape of the thing making it inconvenient to carry.
I could already tell that his arms weren’t long enough to get it conveniently, so came over. “Here, no, we each take one chair and an end of that thing; that’ll be easier.”
He grunted acknowledgment and I came to take one end. I quickly realized that just because Biff made lifting it look easy didn’t mean it wasn’t heavy as lead—to me, anyway. After some careful rearranging, I managed to wrestle it onto my shoulder and wedge the folding chair under my arm.
“Jeez,” I panted, “it’s going to be diabolic getting this onto the subway…”
“We ain’t going on the subway,” Biff retorted. “We won’t fit.”
It was an obvious statement, but I still felt my stomach drop into my ankles. “You mean we have to carry it? All the way?”
“It ain’t that bad, it’s only a couple miles.”
I groaned.
“You got anywhere to be?”
“No,” I admitted sourly.
“Me neither. We got food; we got time. Now come on, let’s go before I fight someone else for this thing.”
I dropped my end of the table.
“Hey!”
“Shut up. I’m making this easier.” I left him with the furniture, returned to one of the loads of possessions I’d seen earlier. I found what I wanted, a kid’s red wagon, and dragged it back.
“Here,” I said. “Wheels. It’s an amazing invention you Earthlings came up with a few thousand years ago. We should take advantage of your evolutionary progress.”
Biff didn’t argue with me. I suspected that for all his posturing, he hadn’t exactly been thrilled at the idea of hauling a table on his back for a couple miles either.
We had to keep a hand on it, to keep it from falling out, but the table stayed on the wagon, and the chairs, though obnoxious, weren’t nearly as heavy. Thus armed, we started making our way back to the south side.
It was a long slog, even with the wagon. Vaygo June was broiling, enough that I could strip down to short sleeves. Biff had a human heat tolerance and was dripping sweat and chugging water within short time; I got the feeling that when he stopped, it wasn’t so much out of fatigue as incoming heat stroke. I didn’t have to worry much about that, so took advantage of the rest and Vitamin D, and he pretended not to notice the lack of sweat on my skin. I appreciated being unworthy of comment for once.
Eventually, the sun went down, and things started cooling off a little… maybe down to the high nineties. We made it back to the Block, and then came the part I’d dreaded: the stairs.
It actually wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought, for me anyway. Biff’s housemates were available for this leg, and while the old woman and the curvy one looked about as strong as me, there was also a dreadlocked woman who seemed to be made entirely of legs and sinew, and she was willing to put her back into things. Biff, who was apparently still capable of toting heavy weights up stairs after a couple miles, dug in, and they wrangled the stairs and bickered while I wandered around the first floor of Biff’s building. It seemed to be an anarchist bookstore; maybe the dreadlocked woman manned the desk. Normally, I’d be curious but after the exertion, I wasn’t much interested in reading, so I settled for devouring the rest of the stuff in the Tupperware.
The curvy woman didn’t seem to speak much English and after some polite smiles and waves at me, she left to pursue her own business. The old woman parked herself behind the bookshop desk but twisted in her seat to keep a squinty eye on the stairwell, as though supervising. She seemed to be ignoring me, but I got the sense she was keeping tabs on me with her peripheral vision.
Watching her watch them, I couldn’t help but wonder how she’d made sense of everything. I’d never asked exactly what explanation Biff had given his housemates for his sudden change, if any, and he’d never told me. I had to admit, the old woman’s expression wasn’t giving me much to work with.
“You known Biff a while?” I asked her finally.
That squinty, suspicious gaze got turned to me now. “Yeah. You?”
“Yeah.”
The conversation ended. Apparently she had her own way of dealing with things. Far be it from me to protest; if she was satisfied with whatever her own explanation was, so be it.
Apparently even Biff had physical limits, and the stairs finished him off. Labor ended, he parked himself on the fire escape and devoured cold leftovers from his fridge, watching the start of the bar crowd clustering on the streets. Down there, despite the hour, it was still crowded.
Here, though, there was no crowd, only walls to climb, hurdle, and leap. I pulled myself up onto the roof and skittered along for a bit, but quickly found that some of the tar paper and cement was falling apart and returned to Biff’s part of the roof before I broke my neck. He’d finished his dinner and was just leaning on the rail, watching.
Air pollution made Vaygo sunsets spectacular. The colors were practically hallucinogenic, pinks and blues and yellows with the occasional smog-induced streak of scarlet or green, all reflecting off windows and glass. The whole south side glittered.
Below us, the city crawled on. Cars honked. People shouted. The white noise of thousands of footsteps and conversations and radios. The smell of pulled pork and chiapas and car exhaust.
Maybe I couldn’t live on Earth. And maybe I didn’t want to. But if I could see this every once in a while, that was good. That was perfect. In Treehouse, everybody looked up, and I would’ve had to fend off a ton of conversations and greetings. Here, nobody looked up. Here, among thousands of people, Biff and I might as well have been alone.
“You got anywhere you need to be?” I asked him.
He stretched, settled more comfortable against the rail, and crossed his arms. “Nah.”
“Good. Neither do I.”
I lay on the warm concrete, and we watched the sky go from acid trip to dark.
Word count: 2474
Description: It’s bulk trash day at Vaygo University, and M.D. and Biff go furniture-hunting.
Note: This story takes place directly after the events of Book Two. M.D. hasn’t wrecked yet, Biff has just jump-started his life again, and while they’re both low on cash and possessions, things seem pretty rosy for the moment.
In my many interactions with Biff, I had seen him in a few moods—mostly shades of angry. I’d rarely seen him smile, except in the event of outwitting the PIN, and even then, it had never been that intense an expression.
When I clambered into his window this time around, he was grinning. I immediately turned tail, but he’d already seen me.
“Where you been?” He demanded, hauling me in by my collar. “You late.”
“We have a schedule?”
“Here,” he said, tossing me a backpack. He already had one himself.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Has Christmas come early?”
He rubbed his hands together and chortled, which was even worse than the grin. “’S June.”
“Yeah, so?”
He gestured at me encouragingly, like I was a particularly dimwitted child he was trying to coax through the alphabet. “What happens in June?”
“…school ends?”
“Lease ends,” he corrected, grabbing a water bottle from the rusty old fridge. He even thought to toss me one. “Know what that means?”
I just stared at him. “Instead of all this rigmarole, you could just tell me.”
He rolled his eyes, but maintained his disturbingly good temper. “College kids moving.”
“So?”
“So, it bulk trash day.”
I paused. Calculated. My inner cash register went ka-ching.
Biff dug into his fridge. “You need shit? I need shit.”
Now I was the one rubbing my hands together and cackling.
“Good. We raid College Town now.”
I eagerly took the offered Tupperware and shoved it into the backpack with the water. We were obviously going to be out a while. “Hey, Biff, don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the head’s up… but why wait for me?”
“I need furniture,” he said. “And I can’t carry that shit by myself—not the whole way, anyway.”
I should’ve known this was too good to be true. My arms were spaghetti, and Biff lived a few floors up. The idea of lugging god-knew-what up all those mildewed stairs was a daunting concept, and I knew how much power Biff had in his stocky frame. “But… stairs! Floors!”
“I ain’t got a car; it’s you and me or nothing. No way I’m asking favors, after the shit you pulled. Get going, huh? We wait long, there won’t be much left.”
That, I couldn’t argue with. Moving the furniture would be less of an issue than gaining possession of it. Half the under-class of the city would be descending on College Town; it’d be a riot. So when Biff headed for the door, I said, “Window will be faster, come on.”
I jumped out and Biff was hot on my heels. He vaulted down the fire escape with the ease of habit, and took the last story’s spring-loaded stair down with a well-practiced leap and a hop at the end of its rusty, screeching descent. I just scrambled and dropped the way I was used to. I made it down first, but just barely, and Biff had caught up to me in a second.
“Which way?” I asked, and he waved right.
Even with all the smoking he did, Biff was still faster than me, at least for short distances on the flat. He took the lead, dodging and plowing through the crowds, me straining to keep on his heels when I didn’t have his bulk to shove through commuters. Two corners and an intersection (traffic was slowed to a rush hour crawl) and then we were down into the comparatively cool darkness of the subway station.
Biff paused at the packed stairway to catch his breath, but I threw myself down the rail with a whoop, zipping side-saddle past businessmen with briefcases and women in suits. The velocity nearly toppled me when I hit the end, but I caught my balance and was about to start running again when Biff grabbed the back of my shirt and pulled me up short in the alcove by the men’s room. He obviously hadn’t taken the fun way down; he was wheezing and clutching a stitch in his side. He held up a finger, and raised an eyebrow.
“Go for it,” I said.
He nodded, took a quick glance, and when nobody was looking our way, we both vanished. The station was packed, but all the people seemed utterly focused on their own concerns and if anyone noticed two people disappearing, it wasn’t important enough to care about. God, I loved Vaygo.
I knew that Biff didn’t plan to hold it long, so I darted out to vault the turnstile. A few seconds after I’d hit the ground, we both returned to the visible spectrum. So this was how Biff got around.
The crowds on the platform were of a density I could only compare to a sardine tin. Biff wedged himself in; I lacked his muscle and steel-toed boots, so just followed in his wake.
“Is there a quicker way to College Town?” I asked hopefully.
“Nope.” Even with his blaring voice, he had to talk at a near-shout to be overhead. “We get off three stops down, at VU. Hang on.”
The train arrived, and what followed was an invasion of personal space on a scale I had never imagined. The sardines comparison was far too lenient. We were crammed, wedged, and squished into the train car, long past the point where my arms were pinned to my sides and Biff and I could count each other’s nose hairs. He kept a firm grip on my backpack and otherwise attempted to ignore the press of humanity, except to elbow someone who was looking at him without the appropriate level of disinterest.
Thankfully, the three stops passed fairly quickly, though the pressure in the train car didn’t improve. Then Biff shoved his way out, dragging me along behind him, and we followed the flood of people up the stairs, back into the evening sunlight.
I paused. I stared. I salivated.
“Yeah.” Biff was grinning again. “Nice, ain’t it?”
But I’d already descended upon the spoils like a starving vulture.
Vaygo had a monumental underbelly of the less-than-loaded, such as Biff, but it also had a sizeable population of the unknowingly wealthy. Not at Raige’s level—he was high up there, even by Vaygo standard—but the sort of people who would senselessly toss out mattresses and desks because taking it home was hard. The curbside was glutted with stuff, most of it less than a year old and labeled FREE.
Perfect place for people like Biff, whose furniture was held together with duct tape and balanced with decks of cards. And me, whose current furnishings were whatever Scorch and Flame had given me, and they hadn’t been planning for their apprentice to be humanoid.
The place was already crawling with other scavengers, and in some places, it’d already gotten violent; I saw two little old ladies in fisticuffs over a toaster oven, and a couple young bohemians snarling over possession of a phonograph. Me and Biff split up and waded into the chaos with a will.
It quickly became obvious that even with the backpacks and Biff’s muscle, there was no way we could carry everything we wanted; there was just too much of it. I had come with the intention of taking everything I could get, but found myself waffling between lamps, books, and rugs. Biff, obviously more seasoned than I, arrowed in on certain articles of furniture and ignored the rest.
After I’d stuffed my backpack with veterinary school and vertebrate dissection textbooks, given myself a bandoleer of Christmas lights, and bemoaned all the other things that I had to leave behind, knowing I’d never be able to use or carry it all, I went to find Biff. It wasn’t hard; he was busy bellowing with a heavyset young woman over who should rightfully own the folding table and chairs on the side of the road. It looked like violence might be on the horizon, but when I showed up, I guess the woman decided she wasn’t interested in taking on Biff and me, because she affected a look of complete disinterest and sauntered off.
“Folding, huh?” I said.
“Yeah. You get the chairs; I got the table.” He was already trying to find a way to carry it—the problem seemed less the weight than the shape of the thing making it inconvenient to carry.
I could already tell that his arms weren’t long enough to get it conveniently, so came over. “Here, no, we each take one chair and an end of that thing; that’ll be easier.”
He grunted acknowledgment and I came to take one end. I quickly realized that just because Biff made lifting it look easy didn’t mean it wasn’t heavy as lead—to me, anyway. After some careful rearranging, I managed to wrestle it onto my shoulder and wedge the folding chair under my arm.
“Jeez,” I panted, “it’s going to be diabolic getting this onto the subway…”
“We ain’t going on the subway,” Biff retorted. “We won’t fit.”
It was an obvious statement, but I still felt my stomach drop into my ankles. “You mean we have to carry it? All the way?”
“It ain’t that bad, it’s only a couple miles.”
I groaned.
“You got anywhere to be?”
“No,” I admitted sourly.
“Me neither. We got food; we got time. Now come on, let’s go before I fight someone else for this thing.”
I dropped my end of the table.
“Hey!”
“Shut up. I’m making this easier.” I left him with the furniture, returned to one of the loads of possessions I’d seen earlier. I found what I wanted, a kid’s red wagon, and dragged it back.
“Here,” I said. “Wheels. It’s an amazing invention you Earthlings came up with a few thousand years ago. We should take advantage of your evolutionary progress.”
Biff didn’t argue with me. I suspected that for all his posturing, he hadn’t exactly been thrilled at the idea of hauling a table on his back for a couple miles either.
We had to keep a hand on it, to keep it from falling out, but the table stayed on the wagon, and the chairs, though obnoxious, weren’t nearly as heavy. Thus armed, we started making our way back to the south side.
It was a long slog, even with the wagon. Vaygo June was broiling, enough that I could strip down to short sleeves. Biff had a human heat tolerance and was dripping sweat and chugging water within short time; I got the feeling that when he stopped, it wasn’t so much out of fatigue as incoming heat stroke. I didn’t have to worry much about that, so took advantage of the rest and Vitamin D, and he pretended not to notice the lack of sweat on my skin. I appreciated being unworthy of comment for once.
Eventually, the sun went down, and things started cooling off a little… maybe down to the high nineties. We made it back to the Block, and then came the part I’d dreaded: the stairs.
It actually wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought, for me anyway. Biff’s housemates were available for this leg, and while the old woman and the curvy one looked about as strong as me, there was also a dreadlocked woman who seemed to be made entirely of legs and sinew, and she was willing to put her back into things. Biff, who was apparently still capable of toting heavy weights up stairs after a couple miles, dug in, and they wrangled the stairs and bickered while I wandered around the first floor of Biff’s building. It seemed to be an anarchist bookstore; maybe the dreadlocked woman manned the desk. Normally, I’d be curious but after the exertion, I wasn’t much interested in reading, so I settled for devouring the rest of the stuff in the Tupperware.
The curvy woman didn’t seem to speak much English and after some polite smiles and waves at me, she left to pursue her own business. The old woman parked herself behind the bookshop desk but twisted in her seat to keep a squinty eye on the stairwell, as though supervising. She seemed to be ignoring me, but I got the sense she was keeping tabs on me with her peripheral vision.
Watching her watch them, I couldn’t help but wonder how she’d made sense of everything. I’d never asked exactly what explanation Biff had given his housemates for his sudden change, if any, and he’d never told me. I had to admit, the old woman’s expression wasn’t giving me much to work with.
“You known Biff a while?” I asked her finally.
That squinty, suspicious gaze got turned to me now. “Yeah. You?”
“Yeah.”
The conversation ended. Apparently she had her own way of dealing with things. Far be it from me to protest; if she was satisfied with whatever her own explanation was, so be it.
Apparently even Biff had physical limits, and the stairs finished him off. Labor ended, he parked himself on the fire escape and devoured cold leftovers from his fridge, watching the start of the bar crowd clustering on the streets. Down there, despite the hour, it was still crowded.
Here, though, there was no crowd, only walls to climb, hurdle, and leap. I pulled myself up onto the roof and skittered along for a bit, but quickly found that some of the tar paper and cement was falling apart and returned to Biff’s part of the roof before I broke my neck. He’d finished his dinner and was just leaning on the rail, watching.
Air pollution made Vaygo sunsets spectacular. The colors were practically hallucinogenic, pinks and blues and yellows with the occasional smog-induced streak of scarlet or green, all reflecting off windows and glass. The whole south side glittered.
Below us, the city crawled on. Cars honked. People shouted. The white noise of thousands of footsteps and conversations and radios. The smell of pulled pork and chiapas and car exhaust.
Maybe I couldn’t live on Earth. And maybe I didn’t want to. But if I could see this every once in a while, that was good. That was perfect. In Treehouse, everybody looked up, and I would’ve had to fend off a ton of conversations and greetings. Here, nobody looked up. Here, among thousands of people, Biff and I might as well have been alone.
“You got anywhere you need to be?” I asked him.
He stretched, settled more comfortable against the rail, and crossed his arms. “Nah.”
“Good. Neither do I.”
I lay on the warm concrete, and we watched the sky go from acid trip to dark.
no subject
Date: 2014-07-03 05:44 am (UTC)• she affected a look of complete disinterest ^ sauntered off.
→ ^ and
• the occasional smog-induced street of scarlet or green
?→ stripe
no subject
Date: 2014-07-03 03:58 pm (UTC)Lovely imagery!
no subject
Date: 2014-07-03 04:13 pm (UTC)--Rogan