Altitude, Chapter One

Hi everyone!  So it's been about four years since my last blog post.  In the last year or so I've been working on an idea for a book and I've finally finished the first chapter.  Feedback welcomed!  There's a link to the pdf file (which I personally find more readable) right here.  Or you can just keep reading below.  Enjoy!

Chapter 1: Monday, 6:00 AM. Cambridge, Massachusetts

The red solo cup splintered satisfyingly underneath Jessica’s right heel as she passed the door of the Final Club.  Behind her the shattered red plastic dispersed into the gray snow like blood splatter at an HBO crime scene, and she allowed herself a small grin.  Despite the pretentious names, hundreds of years of practice, and a generous infusion of inherited wealth, the members of Harvard’s all-male pseudo-fraternities couldn’t come up with a better container with which to intoxicate themselves and their female guests than the sad plastic chalice used by every other juvenile male organization in the country.

The sun had not yet technically risen, but the low gray clouds had started to transmit diffuse light from beyond the horizon, so that the spaces in between the streetlights started to lighten.  Jessica ran harder as she reached the corner of Harvard Square, her footsteps annoying the tired beggars tucked against the red brick buildings in their sleeping bags and wool hats.  She liked running at this hour of the morning partly because no one was watching. 

She inevitably drew stares when she ran.  She was short and round, which meant that when she paused at stoplights she received the usual encouraging smiles from people who assumed she was making another unsuccessful attempt at losing weight.  She didn’t mind that so much.  It was when she started moving that she drew more unusual kinds of attention.

Jessica liked to run fast, and her snowman-esque physique belied her true fitness.  She had run every morning for the last six years, and although her waist had never lost so much as an inch, her muscles and lungs had risen to the challenge rather splendidly.  This resulted in the astonishing sight of a young, solidly constructed woman of not much more than five feet in height appearing to sprint flat out from intersection to intersection.  The looks this attracted were no longer of the typical there’s-another-chubby-woman-trying-to-lose-weight-bless-her-heart-there-but-for-the-grace-of-god-go-I-so-I’ll-give-her-an-understanding-smile variety, but instead more of the I-don’t-understand-what-I’m-seeing-here-and-it-makes-me-nervous kind, paired with some unavoidable chuckles at the surprising way in which her torso swiveled to keep up with the frenetic pumping of her tiny legs.

So she ran in the early morning, when the undergraduates were sleeping off their alcohol, the graduate students were sleeping with their foreheads pressed against their desks, and working people were trying to convince themselves that health insurance and a mortgage payment were worth waking up for.  She ran fast, and she ran far.  For the first five years she had taken other people’s looks a little more seriously, and had always stopped after three or four miles to avoid the inevitable cardiac explosion they predicted on their faces.  But for the last year, as she’d gotten used to running in the darkened pre-dawn, she had started to go farther and farther, pushing towards some unseen limit where she would no longer be able to keep sprinting.  So far it hadn’t arrived.

Today she only passed one conscious onlooker - a man in his pajamas with a crying baby strapped to his chest, wearing that look of complete desperation that new parents usually try to hide in polite company.  At this hour of the morning, it was clear that he was reconsidering the enthusiasm with which he had participated in bringing this small wet sack of miserable humanity into the world.  His expression changed as she passed him, through what she’d come to recognize as the seven stages of watching Jessica run: 1) good for you, tiger; 2) wait, is she really moving that fast; 3) is there someone behind her; 4) is there a ghost behind her; 5) should I also be running; 6) I really don't understand what I'm seeing here; 7) am I about to witness cardiac arrest?  There were actually three more stages which Jessica was unaware of because they took place after she passed: 8) relief that I didn’t witness cardiac arrest; 9) well isn’t it a strange world, and 10) I wonder if I can tell anyone about this without sounding insensitive.

Her internal odometer was somewhere around 11 miles - it’s hard to keep track of linear distance in Boston - when she arrived home.  She paused for a moment, leaning against the front door of the small house that contained five other apartments, stretching her calves and waiting for the March chill to stop the sweating, then went inside.

Five minutes later, a large black shadow detached itself from where it had been waiting under the opposite porch, and stepped into the light.  The faintly glowing clouds revealed a bald head on top of a heavy black coat, but the light was not yet bright enough to illuminate the eyes.  In six long steps, the head and coat reached the front door.  A large hand came out, grasped the door handle, and tore it off.

Six seconds later, two thousand six hundred and fifty miles away, Bob Young went into full panic.

-

Bob was not an especially early riser, but because they were separated by two time zones he ended up waking at roughly the same time as Jessica.  The circuit he had installed on the door handle had triggered a small chirp from one of the monitors in his basement as Jessica had left for her run, then chirped again as she returned.  The removal of the door handle caused a third chirp, which was unexpected enough for him to stand up from his chair and look over his main monitor at the screen displaying the stream from the webcam installed on the telephone pole opposite Jessica’s house.  The door sensor transmitted a single bit over a landline, while the webcam was transmitting video over a wireless connection to the neighbors, so the images on the screen were a few seconds delayed relative to the chirp.  This meant that Bob got a very clear view of a massive form completely blocking the doorway to Jessica’s house.  He froze, halfway between sitting and standing, as the door handle came out of its accustomed place and flew more or less directly at the camera, shaking the telephone pole when it impacted a foot or two beneath the lens.  The large figure hesitated for a moment, then bent its bald head under the doorway and disappeared into the house.

While his conscious mind had been completely frozen in disbelief, Bob’s well-trained subconscious had reached out for the landline at his desk with his right hand and placed his left index finger on a speed-dial number which he had never before used.  He figured he had about thirty seconds for the man on the camera to climb the steps to Jessica’s apartment.  Given the delay on the feed, a third of that time was already gone.  If she answered on the second or third ring, he might be able to save her life.  He kept his eye on the line to the sensor attached to the inner door and hoped she wasn’t already in the shower.

-

Jessica was in the shower when the call came through.  Her new phone was waterproof, though, so she was also checking her email.  Her phone didn’t recognize the number and she didn’t recognize the area code, which usually was a recipe for a telemarketing call.  She was enjoying the idea of a waterproof phone, though, so she answered on the third ring.

``Hello?''

``You’re about to hear a fairly loud noise.''

``What?''

There was suddenly a bang from the front of her apartment.  If it had happened twenty seconds ago, she might have mistook it for the furnace misfiring, which it did regularly.  As it was, she found herself unusually interested in its source.  “What was that?''

``That was the sound of a man named Kroger breaking into your house to kill you.''

Jessica did not know what to say to that.  Bob could hear the shower running and guessed she was on the toilet letting the water warm up. ``Leave the shower on.  He’ll hear it, assume you're in there, and take approximately two minutes to check the other rooms.  No time to flush.  Run.”  Then he hung up.  In his experience of making unsolicited calls with specific advice, the next three questions were ``What?” ``Who are you?” and ``How do I know you’re telling the truth?” and the answers to those were not particularly useful for saving someone’s life.  Besides, extra talking on Jessica's end would just tip Kroger off.  ``Betty Lou!” he yelled through the ceiling of the basement, “Kroger just showed up at her apartment!''

``What?  Bobby, if he lays a finger on her head I swear to Darwin I’m going to end both of you sorry little armpit scratchers!''

``I believe it,'' Bob said under his breath.

-

Jessica stared blankly at the phone.  What was that?  Who was that person?  How was she supposed to know if he was telling the truth?  Her head snapped up as a floorboard creaked outside the bathroom door.

The bathroom was a tiny, poorly designed afterthought.  Jessica was standing in an old tub against the back wall, beneath a tiny marbled window.  Directly across from her was the narrow door leading out into the living room.  On the left wall was the sink.  Directly opposite the sink was the toilet, situated so that the door couldn't quite open out to ninety degrees without smacking into its porcelain lip.  She pulled back the curtain distractedly, letting the water splash out onto the tile, and stared at the hint of a shadow in the uneven crack between the bottom of the door and the floor.  For a moment everything seemed frozen - the darkness underneath the door, the impassive porcelain sink and toilet standing impotent sentry watch, and Jessica with the phone in one hand and the curtain in the other.  The only thing giving the room a sense of time was the hissing and creaking of the ancient shower as it spat lukewarm water across half of Jessica's face.

Then the floorboard creaked again, and the shadow moved to the left, towards the rest of the apartment.  Jessica inhaled unsteadily when she realized that she had not been breathing.  Either this was a terrible joke, or there was someone in her house who wanted to kill her. Behaving as if there was a murderer in her house when there wasn’t one might make her feel silly.  Behaving as if there wasn’t a murderer in her house when there was one would make her feel dead.  Ultimately, not a hard call.

Jessica knew that she was at this point supposed to become emotional, but that part of her brain seemed to be moving rather slowly.  She had never been very good at feeling what she was supposed to feel, anyway.  The part of her brain that was spooling up now was the part of her brain that she used most often - the problem-solving part.  Jessica wrote software for a living.  She liked breaking down problems into logical sections and dealing with them creatively.  And she liked puzzles, and riddles, and logical games.  She liked her job because it allowed her to take messy, real-world problems and turn them into rational, solvable projects.  The emotional part of her brain was starting to get interested in the quality and result of the new social interaction she was about to experience - presumably consisting mainly of an informal introduction followed by an unusually intense period of interpersonal conflict - but the logical part of her brain was more interested in how a short woman with no weapons might use the next sixty seconds to effectively prepare herself for a murder attempt, regardless of the outcome.  And in Jessica's world, that logical puzzle was infinitely more interesting than the social and emotional ramifications of meeting her would-be murderer.

It was a challenging puzzle.  She was too wide to fit through the tiny bathroom window, and the apartment was too small to hope that she wouldn't be intercepted on a sprint to the door.  Her assets included shampoo, body lotion, a loofah, a toilet plunger, her smartphone, a plastic razor, and Old Spice deodorant.  Not exactly an arsenal.  But she knew that her assailant would come through the door.  And he - or she (this is the twenty first century, after all) - would probably assume that Jessica was blissfully unaware of what was coming.  She stared at the smooth, rounded end of the toilet plunger.  If only it was a little sharper.

-

Kroger quickly came to the expected conclusion that the apartment was in fact empty outside of the bathroom.  He opened the fridge and found about two dozen Mexican Coca-Colas in glass bottles and nothing else.  He opened one, drained it, set it down, and cracked his knuckles.  Then he walked to the bathroom door and tore off his third door handle of the morning.  This one broke the living room window on its way out of the building. He placed his other hand on the remaining bulk of the door and shoved it open forcefully.

The bathroom was a small affair and the shower was directly across from the entrance.  Kroger had opened the door hard enough that it slammed against the porcelain of the toilet bowl, a few annoying degrees short of ninety.  He covered the distance to the curtain in one step.

-

Jessica was standing on top of the toilet, dripping wet and naked with the jagged broken end of the wooden toilet plunger in one hand, when the door handle vanished.  It was like that old trick where someone pulls the tablecloth out from underneath the silverware - the rest of the door seemed more or less unaffected by the sudden disappearance of the handle.  It was surprising, but not as surprising as how rapidly the door swung open afterwards, stopping a few inches from her face as it collided with the toilet.  Cold air from the rest of the apartment rushed in, and right behind it came a pressure wave from an enormous human being displacing about a quarter of the air in the room.  Jessica took a fraction of a second to take in the vast swath of black fabric covering the enormous torso, the bald head threatening to collide with the ceiling, and the massive hands coming up towards the shower curtain.  So much for the informal introduction.  Time for the interpersonal conflict.  She placed one foot on the wall behind her, jumped into the air with the other, and drove her shoulder into the small of the man’s back with the whole force of her diminutive body.

-

Kroger heard the motion behind him and realized his mistake.  Jessica’s collision with the small of his back was unexpected but not terribly inconvenient.  Normally he would have stepped forward slightly and shrugged her off, but the tub was in the way and he wasn’t sure he could get his foot up and over the edge quickly enough.  The safest reaction seemed instead to fall forward and catch himself against the back wall of the bathroom.  She was shoving him harder than he would have anticipated - he’d have to catch himself a little more gently than usual or else he might break through the tile.  But after he had arrested his forward momentum, it should be simple enough to roll her off his back to one side, catch her as she fell, and end the game.

Kroger flung out his hands in front of him, tearing the curtain off the rod.  It was only then that he was able to see the other half of the toilet plunger stuck to the back wall, jagged point sticking straight out in the approximate direction of his navel.

-

The bellow that accompanied the world’s largest splinter entering the skin above Kroger’s left hip shook everything in the room that wasn’t nailed down, including Jessica.  She fell ungracefully off the broad back of her assailant and landed more or less upside down by his right foot.  She rolled under the sink as he twisted around and swung wildly behind him.  His fist cracked the sink over her head as she scrambled backward.  She felt a flash of annoyance.  It was only two days ago that she had discovered that the sink was close enough to the toilet that she could lean forward and spit into it without standing up, which had added an extra layer of convenience to brushing her teeth.  Now it was broken.

That thought left her mind as a massive fist closed around her trailing foot.  Her foot disappeared behind strong fingers, and she felt the bones compress painfully.  She threw the other end of the toilet plunger at her attacker’s face as he started to turn it towards her, and the pressure relaxed marginally. She had soaped up generously before exiting the shower, and so when she grabbed the doorjamb and pulled as hard as she could, her foot came free.  Then she was up and running for the door.  She took the stairs two at a time and was out the front door and across the street before she had time to consider the social consequences of running naked through Cambridge just as the city was starting to wake up.

That thought was also short-lived, as she turned around to see her living room window explode outward in front of her attacker.  He landed heavily on the ground behind her and looked up.

This was her first good look at the man who had come to kill her.  She didn’t recognize him, but she hadn’t expected to - she didn’t know anyone that size.  The face beneath his uncovered bald head was fairly young, and probably handsome enough in other circumstances. It was currently somewhat distorted by an ugly emotion which she interpreted as halfway between contempt and rage.  He wore a black coat zipped up to his chin, covered with some kind of durable waterproof fabric.  Beneath the coat were tailored slacks, newly sporting a dark stain just above the hip.  Judging by the velocity with which he had just exited a second story window, she had to assume that the wound was primarily cosmetic.  And then the time for evaluation was clearly over, because he was picking himself up to charge.

Nearby, Stephen Mason was opening his front door and picking up the morning paper.  Jessica saw the motion out of the corner of her eye and dashed towards the Mason residence.

The situation now resembled a field test of a thousand recent psychology monographs on the inherent biases that govern our instant reaction to situations based on gender, clothing, social cues, and race.

When confronted by a naked, soapy, overweight, terrified latino woman, Mr. Mason stopped in his tracks and simply tried to articulate what he was seeing.  Jessica shoved her way past him as he was stuttering ``... hairy, m-m-m-mexican'', and was well into his house before he even noticed the massive bald white man in the nice slacks charging towards him at full speed.  In a weird mixture of courage and cowardice, Mr. Mason threw his newspaper at the man and then dove underneath his porch swing.

When Mrs. Mason saw Jessica charge through her kitchen in all her round, brown glory, she was holding a frying pan full of sizzling bacon.  This she whipped around in between her and the crazy person dripping water on her linoleum.  Jessica looked into her eyes, saw mostly hostility, and dodged left, up the stairs.  Statistics are surprisingly sparse, but it does seem to generally be the case that naked women tend to get farther in public than men.  When Kroger followed a few seconds later, Mrs. Mason was regretting her earlier hesitancy, and so despite his lack of nudity he received a pan-full of bacon grease in the chest, for which incivility Mrs. Mason received a rather hard shove that sent her up onto the kitchen counter.

Based on the commotion behind her, Jessica figured she had less than ten seconds before Kroger followed her up the stairs.  She threw a bookcase down the stairs behind her to make it twelve.  To the right was the master bedroom, To the left was Stevie Mason, the obese thirteen-year-old son of two rail-thin parents, standing at the door of his bedroom, barechested, with his mouth open, holding his pants up with one hand and holding onto his freshly washed t-shirt with the other.

Jessica grabbed his t-shirt, shoved him hard on the chest to get him out of the way, bounded across the room, threw open the window, and climbed out onto the roof.  When Kroger arrived at the window fourteen seconds later, he saw Jessica taking off out of the driveway wearing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shirt, riding a stolen bicycle through the slush.  He cursed, turned around, and stepped on Stevie Mason on the way back out to get his car.

-

Jessica was about two blocks down the road and starting to regret not grabbing some of Stevie Mason’s gym shorts when she heard a huge engine turn over.  She glanced over her shoulder to see a low-slung black Mustang with half of the interior completely filled with large, angry psychopath.  She downshifted and turned out of the street, into the Van Eyne’s lawn and through their flower bed.  The Mustang quickly closed the original distance and leapt the curb just as she made it to the backyard and ducked under the swing set.

She had forgotten about the new fence.  It was a short thing, only four feet high, but solid.  When she had first moved to New England, she had wondered why all the fences were made out of rocks.  Then she watched her landlord try to dig a hole for a new tree, and she understood.  Some of the rocks from that excavation may well have contributed to her current obstacle.

She really had no idea what to do.  The Mustang was coming up fast through the gardenias and there was no room to maneuver along the wall.  Fortunately, while her mind was stuck her body just kept pedalling full-speed, and when she slammed into the wall she sort of automatically threw her hands out and vaulted across.  Well, it was more of a flop than a vault.  She would have liked for it to play out like the climactic scene in Free Willy, where the captive killer whale jumps majestically over an enclosing sand bar, gently raining cleansing ocean spray on that child actor, but it ended up more like what would have actually happened with a real orca, with the child actor crushed or eaten and the top third of the barrier demolished by the whale as it scraped its cetacean butt across the gravel and into the ocean.  Not, in other words, an especially graceful maneuver.  However, it did deliver her to the other side of the fence, where she scrambled on hands and knees to get away from the wall.  She was anticipating a hail of rocks from the impact of the Mustang with the barrier.

To her surprise, however, she heard squealing breaks, a soft thump as the car came to rest against the stones, and a door swinging open.  She scrambled to her feet and started running.  She had cut through this yard on purpose - the T had a station just one more street over.  Across the street and through an alleyway, she could see the entrance in the light of the rising sun.  She glanced back to see Kroger's surprisingly lithe exit from the low-slung pursuit vehicle, and saw him more or less ignore the wall in his second long-legged step.  He was moving fast for a wounded, garbage-truck-sized person.

But she was also moving fast, despite being built like a triple-scoop ice cream cone (coffee-flavored).  The last vestiges of caring about odd looks from strangers had vanished by the second block of riding a ten-speed bicycle wearing nothing but a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles t-shirt, and so there was nothing to hold her back psychologically as she opened up into a full sprint across the road.

By sheer dumb luck she timed it correctly so that she just reached the other side as an early-morning cable guy drove past.  David Waddel, full-time cable installation technician and part-time World of Warcraft Orc, was on pace for arriving 45 minutes prior to the window Comcast had given a sleepy family in Somerville when he came between Kroger and Jessica on a quiet residential street.  The annoyed shove he received for his services moved his rear tires a full foot to the side and it took him until the next stop sign to get his van back under control.  Feeling somewhat rattled, he spent the rest of the morning at a Dunkin' Donuts.

Meanwhile, Jessica was running underneath a clothesline which Kroger would temporarily wear as a waistline accessory a few seconds later.  Like most people, Kroger was having a hard time processing what he was seeing.  His hip was still sore, and so he wasn't interested in running faster than necessary.  He had settled into an easy lope that should have caught him up to this diminutive, half-naked woman halfway down the alleyway, even with the interference of the cable van.  What he saw instead was a steadily widening gap between himself and his unexpectedly quick quarry.  He felt betrayed, as if the laws of physics and metabolism were trying to get away with something.  Then he shook off the confusion and accelerated, the big bass drum beats of his footsteps increasing in tempo but still much less frequent than the rapid-fire rat-a-tat of Jessica's feet slapping the frozen pavement.

She hit the escalator at the top of the T station and bounded past an ancient man clinging to the left handrail.  She tripped on her second bound and more or less rolled down sixteen steps, which hurt exactly as much as it sounds like it would.  As she grabbed the handrail to pull herself up, she felt more than heard the impact of her oversized traveling companion with the top of the escalator.

The next part was the tricky part.  She had worked it out while she was riding Stevie’s bike, and she thought it made sense.  Of course, she was also spending a good portion of her attention at that time on rediscovering how to shift gears, so it was possible she had missed something important.  Downstairs, a train was just pulling in.

Immediately after the escalator, the corridor took a sharp left turn, which made her temporarily out of sight for someone on the escalator.  It was about ten feet from the turn to the first turnstile, and then a second escalator took people down to the main platform to catch the train.  Jessica jumped over the turnstile - an adrenaline-fueled gymnastic act that she would be unable to explain under cross-examination - and then dove to the floor and crawled back to the corner where the turnstile barrier met the wall.

There was a crash as Kroger landed at the bottom of the steps, then two quick impacts as he covered the distance to the turnstiles.  She clapped her hand over her mouth as that enormous back once more materialized in front of her.  All he had to do was glance backward, and she would be out of ideas.

The barrier was not especially high, and she was hoping that only a small person would think of it as an adequate hiding place.  The man-mountain took two more steps, then stopped and turned slightly.  Her heart stopped momentarily.  He was looking at the platform and at the train receiving its early-morning passengers.  He hesitated for another second - a long time to hold her breath - then planted a hand on the railing and, eschewing the escalator, hopped over the edge to land on the lower level with a bang.  A young man in a hoodie clapped.  Jessica clambered back over the barrier and ran down the corridor to the opposite street exit, not sticking around to see if the man got on the train or not. 

At the top of the exit escalator was a Starbucks.  Next to the Starbucks was a narrow townhouse owned by an angry greek man named Henry.  Next to Henry’s house was the local police precinct.  It was now 7:30 AM.  As Jessica pulled open the heavy wooden door, the clouds decided to further dampen the rising sunlight by sending down some light sleet.