Art

Good thing Chuck was several steps ahead of the mostly-disinterested pack. For once, it was a good thing he wasn’t very good at his job. Mostly, he didn’t care that he kind of sucked at this. And that was a major contributor to his continued suckage at this and most other jobs he’d ever tried. And it’s just as well, because he likely wouldn’t last any longer in this role than any in any job he’d previously held.

Being those precious few steps ahead put him around the corner with just enough time to view, only half-register, and reroute the shambling party away from what was half-in and half-out of the alley between what was once a small but thriving pet store and the tenement halls on the corner of 8th and Clover.

It was Samuel Allen Dresden. He could only see the prone young man from the shoulders up, and even though the body – or at least Chuck assumed it was a whole body – was lying stomach down, its left cheek plastered to the dirty, cold sidewalk pavement with dried, caked blood. Though Sammy’s face was turned away from his view, Chuck could tell it was his friend from the unmistakable thick, black, curly hair and the ill-fitting, much too large for Sammy, red leather jacket adorned with what seemed to Chuck to be at least two-hundred zippers, that Sammy wouldn’t be caught dead not wearing…

They hadn’t yet become really close friends. They met in Thornhill’s Engineering Calculus class last semester, and Sammy and Chuck had had enough in common. Sammy was in the Computer Science major at a local community college, and Chuck had switched from that major to the Digital Animation track. Chuck was probably smart enough to continue with Comp. Sci., and had already graduated almost a decade earlier as valedictorian with his Computer Programming/Data Analysis degree, so he hadn’t even bothered to look at the curriculum for this new major when he first returned to school for a new degree. But after it took him two attempts to get a passing grade in Statistics, and that being topped off with Thornhill’s Calculus from hell, he decided that if this is where the math started in that major, well, he didn’t need that much math in his life. So he switched to a more tech/art track instead, Animation.

Sammy and “Chucky Baby” as Sammy called him, had only hung out and played video games at Sammy’s mom’s apartment about four, maybe five times. And for whatever reason, a fast friendship never really blossomed. In the short time they’d spent together, they enjoyed each other’s company and had fun, and Chuck even sometimes called Sammy Sambo because of their mutual adoration for those 80s Stallone “Rambo” movies. Chuck just chalked up not getting closer than they did to timing and them both probably being in some sort of transitional stage in life that neither really recognized at the time.

But now, Chuck saw his friend; lifeless, bloodied. A metal pipe that shared Sammy’s blood was barely peeking out of the alley beside the unnaturally still body. No more video games or thanking his mom for the unsolicited strawberry lemonade Crystal Light drinks she would bring them while they played the original Final Fantasy on the classic Nintendo Entertainment System they both loved so much. No more exams. No more struggling, crying out in the dark, dank alley. No more convulsions. No more anything.

The main reason Chuck thought he even took this job as a Southside Ghost Walk Tour Guide was to get that copy of Ultima he finally scrounged up on Craigslist. It was going to be a gift for Sammy. Sammy talked about how it used to be his favorite, and that his old, worn-out copy had finally gone kaput a few years earlier. It was a hard game to find an original cartridge of.

For now, Chuck knew he needed to quickly cut this tour short, get the small, listless mob back to the tour launch, and figure out what the heck had happened to his friend.