The Anomaly's Enigma

It’s four in the morning when Frank starts to shake me awake, and the minute I feel his arms gripping mine with strength and determination, I know something is up. I open my eyes to see Frank staring back at me with this look of complete fear in his eyes and I wrinkle my eyebrows at him. It’s too early for this shit, but Frank wouldn’t be telling me to get up if it weren’t important.

He’d said we would stay here one more night and then find a new location in the morning. The Conte left not long after he’d arrived and there didn’t seem to be any indication that Frank thought he would do something last night. He’s waking me up now though.

“You have to get up right now, Gerard.”

“What?” I ask groggily. My eyes feel crusted over and my body is literally screaming at me to go back to sleep.

“This is not a drill, Gerard. The apartment is on fire.”

“The what?” I ask, feeling my body pull into an upright position so fast I get a head rush.

“Up!” he shouts, and then he climbs out of the bed himself.

I see Frank run out of the room, and he starts shouting at Mikey about getting up and I just sit there, trying to figure out how I am where I am right now and what the hell is happening.

“Gerard, get dressed,” Frank says, “both of you, get dressed, put on your best running shoes, and get up!”

Frank starts tearing things apart in the living room and I don’t know what the fuck he’s actually doing, I just know to listen to him. I hurry out of the bed and pull on a pair of sweatpants, then a jacket before I run out into the hall. Funny thing is that I don’t hear any fire alarms so I don’t actually know how Frank knows the apartment is on fire. And then I smell it.

I don’t know where the smell is coming from I just know that I can all of a sudden smell the smoke everywhere. It’s like someone built a campfire and I’ve stepped into the middle of the flames. I gag almost instantly, before coughing and spluttering. Frank comes over to me with his giant gun in his hand and he kicks Mikey’s door open.

“Hurry up!” Frank yells at him.

“What’re we doing?”

“Someone’s trying to draw us out, and they don’t care how many people they kill in the crossfire,” Frank says, “bad thing is that we have to abide.”

“What?”

“We die here, or we make a run for it,” Frank says, “Which sounds better?”

Mikey comes out of his room not a moment later with his glasses askew and a stance about as tired as I feel.

I realize that I don’t actually feel as tired as I had a moment ago though, because I can feel the adrenaline pumping through me. It’s like I can literally feel the blood moving through my veins, carrying energy to every part of me.

“Shoes. Now,” Frank orders, and I evaluate him to see that he’s already dressed and has his shoes on. I quickly shove my feet into the only pair I brought with me, and look over at Mikey who looks completely scared.

“Alright, here’s what we’re going to do,” Frank says, and then he coughs into his arm, before continuing to talk like he’s not choking on some sort of smoke. “We don’t have enough time to plan this immediately, I just need the both of you to stick tight to me. Someone is probably out there waiting with a gun to kill us.”

“Who?”

“Who do you think,” Frank scathes, “we run out, stay behind me until we start running. Then you get in front of me so I can cover you from behind. We’re going to head towards the business part of town. We need cover. If we have time and cover, we’re stealing a car. You hear shots fired, you run like your life depends on it, because it does. You listen to me at all times. If I get shot-”

“Frank!” I say disapproving of his pessimism.

“If I get shot,” Frank repeats, “You find cover, you get out of the city, you run. You hear me?”

I cough and shake my head slowly, but Frank gives me this glare like he is not messing around and I groan before nodding. My nod signals to Mikey that he can agree too, so he nods similarly.

“The fire isn’t too bad yet, but I could smell that from a mile away,” Frank says, “are you ready?”

“Ready to go out there?”

“Yes,” Frank says.

“No.”

“Okay then,” Frank says, and he grabs the doorknob anyway, “let’s go.”

The apartment we’re staying in is on the third floor, and Frank heads immediately for the stairs once we’re out of the little space. I can definitely smell and feel the smoke from the fire in my lungs now although I still don’t see it. It’s more the fumes that tell me what’s happening rather than anything else.

Frank hurdles down the stairs two at a time, making me worry if he’s going to break an ankle, and I see other people running out of their apartments too, evacuating the building. So at least people are paying attention to the fire alarm rather than ignore it. I hear it now that we’re in the hallway but it’s faint, like someone’s tampered with it. Now that I think about it, it’s likely someone did tamper with it if this is, in fact, arson.

Frank seems to think this is arson though and I tend to agree with him. Why else would it happen on the same exact day that Conte paid us a little visit? It’s all a plan. That traitor. He gave me and Frank up which is just awful. Why would he do that? What kind of a man could sell a person out when they’d helped them? I don’t want to think about that in the slightest actually.

We’re out of the building almost so quickly, I barely even feel the difference in the air temperature when we step outside. The weather feels like a sauna, just like the inside of the apartment building had felt. That can’t be a good thing, I’d imagine that would aid the fire if anything.

I didn’t actually see the source of the fire or anything that would lead you to believe anything was wrong, but I’m no fireman so I don’t know how these things work. I just know that I don’t want to be in there.

Frank grabs onto my sleeve quite forcefully, because apparently I’d stopped to look back at the building without even realizing it. Now that we’re outside I actually can see some of the orange flames billowing out in the windows of some of the apartments. It’s not a big fire, but any fire like that is enough.

“No dawdling!” Frank yells, and he pulls me down the street so quick, he might have actually pulled my arm out of its socket. Everyone is paying way too much attention to the fact that their house is on fire to notice that Frank is packing heat. His gun looks bigger than it probably is because Frank’s kind of small, but it’s intimidating all the same.

There’s a loud banging sound that fills the outside area, and I realize with a dropping heart that it’s a gunshot. Frank was definitely right. This was absolutely a plot to draw us out. It worked too.

“Run faster!” Frank says, as we hurdle down the street faster than I have ever run.

“You okay?” I ask them both. Mikey has the longest legs and doesn’t seem to hear my question while Frank chooses to ignore it.

I just pant out a groan and continue to run.

There’s the sound of another gun shot, and it makes me flinch painfully, but I don’t stop sprinting behind Frank. I can’t. He falls back only slightly, and pushes me ahead of him until both Mikey and I are running ahead of him. I think he’s using himself as a human shield of some sort to stop either Mikey or I from being shot.

There’s another shot and it only increases the size of the weight I can feel dragging behind me, even though no such thing is there at all. I’ve been shot at a lot in my life. Several more times than most people, as most people are never shot at to begin with. Right now, I remember every single second of panic I’ve ever felt in my life, as the sound of that gun echoes into my brain louder than any sound in the world. I think it might just deafen me, as I’ve never heard anything so loud and treacherous in my life.

When it was Frank shooting at me, that had been so long ago, it seems like a million years. But when it was him, it never really connected that someone wanted me dead. Right now, it’s a billion times worse because they’re not only trying to kill me, they’re trying to hurt Frank and Mikey too. Honestly, I would strangle someone with my own two hands and feel no remorse whatsoever if they so much as pointed a gun at either of them.

Frank makes us turn on the first side street one we come to, around the side of another, even trashier apartment building.

Honestly, I’ve never been much of a runner. I was never good at things like track, and when we used to have to run laps in gym class, I feigned asthma more than a few times. Right now though, I’m really regretting all those bad grades I got in gym.

I feel the earth pounding under my feet, each footstep sounding like a clap of thunder to my ears. I hear my uneven breathing in my throat which feels like it’s closing in on itself. I feel a guttural terror in my stomach like I’m being chased by someone from a horror movie. None of this feels at all real.

Twenty minutes ago I was asleep in bed. I was scared, but at least I was alive with my health and Frank. Right now, I feel like I’m dying or like I’m about to die from a strangers gun and I don’t know how to handle that.

I’m making twists and turns whenever Frank tells me to so that we lose whoever shot at us. He tries to tell us that we’re probably not even being followed, but that it’s worth the extra caution to lose someone if we are.

We’re running behind Chinese restaurants, behind boutiques, between apartments, through a long series of alleys that seem even less safe than the scene we’re leaving behind, but still, I don’t yield. With the hour being so late we don’t even see that many people out on the street. There’s a few people who are obviously drunk, but very few people give us a second glance. We’re just three weirdos running through downtown New York with the sun just starting to peak out behind the skyscrapers up above us.

“Can’t keep running,” Frank says, and from the sound of his voice, I know he’s in a bad shape.

Frank points out a neither fancy nor trashy looking hotel up ahead of us, wedged between two privately owned firms that look like offices of some sort. I don’t stop running until we come close enough to the light of the street lamps in front of it for me to see if anyone’s behind us.

My brain isn’t focusing anymore. We’ve run several blocks, my heart is beating so far out of my chest, that I think I might have dropped it. Frank looks like he’s ready to murder someone again.

“Frank,” I splutter, my words sounding strangled from the lack of oxygen in my lungs, “your gun. You can’t go in there.”

“What?” Frank asks. “Oh, fuck.”

“What the hell was that about?” Mikey asks, looking from me to Frank like he thinks we actually have the answers.

“I made a miscalculation,” Frank says.

“Miscalculation? Is that what you call being shot at?”

“Don’t get mad at him!” I say.

“I’m not, ugh,” Mikey groans, “I’m just pissed that this is happening! All my stuff was in that apartment! Or at least all the things I care about.”

“Wrong,” Frank says. “The things you care about from now on are yourself and Gerard.”

“And you,” I point out.

“I don’t expect Mikey to care about me,” Frank shakes his head, “We need to get inside. Quickly.”

“You have a gigantic gun, you can’t just check into a hotel with that thing behind your back!” Mikey says.

“Then one of you goes to check us in, and you do it quickly,” Frank says, pulling off his sweatshirt and wrapping it around the gun. “I can get it through there quickly, I just can’t check in myself.”

“So this is all happening?” I ask, my head feeling dizzy, “We actually are like running for our lives from a gunman who just set everything we owned on fire?”

“Doesn’t feel real,” Frank says, “but we need to get fucking inside, so someone for the love of god, check us in!”

Mikey nods and makes his way to the door, while Frank grabs my hand and starts to drag me into the shadows under the streetlight that hide a person from view.

None of this can actually be happening. I don’t get it. It’s just not real. It can’t be. I feel like I’m in a really bad action movie or something. This is all so sick, and not in the good way.

“Frank,” Mikey says before stepping into the hotel, “I don’t want you to believe I don’t care about you.”

Frank smiles lightly, a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes, and it doesn’t sit well how little Frank thinks of himself after hearing it. I know a lot of the mechanics of the way Frank’s brain works. He still believes himself to be a murderer, and there’s nothing I can say to get him not to think that.

Honestly, I believe Frank’s a good person. I know with certainty that if Frank hadn’t killed all those people he did, they’d be dead anyway. Frank isn’t a bad person. It was just his job, it’s not who he is.

A lot of the times people try to tell him that he’s important or that they appreciate him, it flies right over Frank’s head because he refuses to believe it. He truly doesn’t understand how important he is to people. Not even me, he doesn’t know.

Frank thinks he’s selfish. He thinks he’s selfish for staying with me, like it’s a fight he’s been losing ever since he came to my apartment almost five years ago and admitted to liking me. He’s believed that he’s been taking advantage of his love for me, and that the way I feel for him isn’t parallel. He’s wrong of course, I love him just as much, if not more than he loves me, but a long career like that of his past has morphed and twisted the way he sees things. But I fucking love this man more than words can say.

Frank looks at me with his big brown doe eyes, and he says softly and indirectly, “Thanks, Mikey.”