Infinite Games

12. Her

I was going to die out here.

Dying didn't scare me anymore. I knew what it held. But dying a second time? Come on!

Hypothermia would do me in. I could feel my body shutting down as I laid in the doorway of a closed jewelry store, struggling to keep my eyes open and my mind alert when the only thing I wanted to do was sleep.

It was time I let the Game Masters know I would be quitting. No use sticking around if loss was in the future. I had fought a good fight. Lasted a day in the land of the living. Final grade: A for effort.

But before I went through the whole ordeal of playing bingo again, I deserved to have a little nap. At worst, it killed me. At best, well... I hadn't really thought that far along.

The streets and shops around me swirled and plunged into the bottomless pit of sleep.

Disheveled dreams came and went, fickle as flies. None of them made sense except the voices.

"I think he's dead."

"Call 9-1-1!"

"Is anyone a doctor? Please, we need help!"

"Hello? Can you hear me?"

"He doesn't seem to be breathing."

"I can't find a pulse."

"Step aside! Make way!"

"Let's get him out of here, stat."

"Blankets! He needs blankets!"

"On it."

"The AED!"

"Clear!"

I was jostled violently. Enough to wake the dead.

"I've got vitals."

My left eye was pried open. Above me, the bright inner shell of an ambulance gleamed full-force. Bedside, a blonde paramedic in her thirties clicked on a flashlight and temporarily turned the world white.

"Am I dead?" I asked, trying to blink away the void.

She said something. Probably 'no.' But the silliness of my question pervaded reality. If I was truly dead, why in hell's name would I be here?

I was wheeled in to Los Angeles County Hospital, where they plugged an IV into my arm and brought forth the red jell-o cups that were a staple of patient hospitality. They even gave me my own monotonous white room, with a little flatscreen tv in a cage, too far away to watch or hear, and a small, locked window to watch the sun rise over East L.A. Sounds dull, but it was the best anyone had treated me since the cop yesterday.

Five emptied jell-o cups later, there was warmth flowing in my veins again, and the dying midnight blue my fingers and toes held had lessened to an angry scarlet. A potato-faced doctor said I was free to go.

I wasn't proud of my parting actions, but I stole a hospital blanket and more jell-o; stuffed the folded fabric in my shirt, the plastic containers in my pant pockets, and hightailed it to the streets. The day's routine rush had just started. There was a palpable urgency to the atmosphere. Traffic couldn't hold still. Car honks bickered like old men. No one inside a vehicle seemed fully combed or brushed up for their respective days, and exhaust fumes were the morning breath of the city.

Through this frenzied buffet of a merry-go-round, I roamed. Like a popcorn kernel between teeth I was stuck on the fact that Joon was nowhere to be found.

"Where are you?" I muttered to myself. The words were loud enough that passerby gave me the lunatic space bubble.

I was, relatively speaking, not in my right mind. Death was no mystery to me, and the games it played were my reality. Maybe, I had died again, and this was the final death. To search but never find. I stopped on the sidewalk, and looked directly above.

"You're cruel," I said to the sky, hoping the tent that floated in the clouds of Demimonde heard. "Cruel!! How long until I find her? I've played your stupid games, yet you sit up there and laugh. Devils!"

I gave them the finger, and walked on. As luck, or fate, or the remaining Game Master himself would have it, I found Joon Faye. Then and there.

My fingers traced the stuck-on lettering over and over. I had found her. Or rather, I had found her shop:

Tattoos by Joon Faye