Bad Beat - Chapter 12 - Rest (Patreon)

The shift at the grocery store was murder on Gabriel’s body, which was still bruised from his brief adventure and near brush with death. Not to mention, he was also mentally exhausted.

He always felt like somebody was watching him, just waiting for him to reveal that he was the one the Electric Jackals were hunting. He was the one who had stolen something important from them. That even now, he had the contents of the warehouse on him, sealed inside his deck.

Still, despite all that, he dragged his protesting body through the shift, doing whatever his ridiculous manager had dreamed up.

Today, the list included pulling down several shelves, cleaning behind the products, then re-shelving those same products. Right in the middle of the morning rush.

People loved it.

Gabriel loved it.

His coworkers, who were swamped with shoppers, loved it.

But the command came down, so he had to do it.

In the end, by the time his manager finally deigned to arrive – three hours after the morning shift started – he took one look at it and told Gabriel to pull down all those products again, as a new promotion was starting and those shelves had been slated for it.

Gabriel looked up at the heavens, seeking relief from the madness, but he received only the harsh glare of the fluorescent lights to his face.

So, with a long-suffering sigh, he began pulling down the products – some kind of generic barbecue sauce – from the shelves, putting them back into boxes.

Just to be petty, when he took them back to the stockroom, he ‘lost’ a few of them in the shuffle, taking them away in his deck. He would fuse them later and make the best damn barbecue sauce imaginable, all while imagining his manager losing out on the opportunity to taste it.

Petty? Yes.

Satisfying? Also yes.

Gabriel was so tired by the time midday came around, he just walked around the shop and pulled together a few things that could be used to make a sandwich. One benefit of working for Freshway was the ‘company lunch’. They could take things, within reason, from the shelves and eat them in the store.

He inhaled it like a starving man, used that to muster the energy to walk home, and left the grocery store to the next shift.

Unsurprisingly, nobody even mentioned how miserable he looked.

Probably because they all looked the same way.

He arrived back at the apartment building looking just as run-down as when he had left that morning, shuffling like a zombie. In one of his hands, he was holding a grocery bag that he remembered filling, but for the life of him, he couldn’t remember what was in it.

Stepping into the atrium of the building, he caught the faint smell of stale smoke and old cooking oil, and the flickering light on the first landing was still doing its best impression of a dying star.

He was heading for the elevator, with only the thought of his bed keeping him upright, when he spotted movement.

From the corner of his eye, Gabriel saw two guys talking quietly, their voices low enough that the general hum of the city swallowed every word, even in the mostly empty atrium.

Two people, different ethnicities – one white, the other a bit tanner – but wearing similar colors.

Mia had given him a brief rundown on how to recognize gang members, and based on the blue shirts and white-accented jackets, he had just spotted a couple of them.

As he reached the elevator and pressed the call button, he saw them shake hands. One of them headed toward the exit while the other strolled in his direction.

Trying to keep his hammering heart under control before he threw up from nerves, Gabriel gave the man a tired nod and did his best to dissociate.

The man gave him a quick once-over.

His eyes paused briefly on Gabriel’s half-tucked, rumpled company shirt and exhausted face before he nodded back.

“Sup, man!” the guy greeted him casually.

“Hey…” Gabriel replied, trying to keep his voice neutral.

“Back from work?”

Gabriel didn’t even have to fake the sigh.

“Morning shift…” he muttered, forgetting for a moment who he was talking to.

The other man’s eyes immediately lit up.

“I hate waking up early…” Gabriel continued to complain.

“Oh? When do you guys start? The Freshway near my place opens at eight…”

Gabriel nodded automatically. He had heard the same question dozens of times already.

“Yeah, the one at the corner of Narrowstream and Sierra?”

He waited until the other man nodded before continuing.

By then, the elevator had arrived, and both of them stepped in. “That one is a Tier 2 location, as we call it,” Gabriel said, pressing the button for the seventh floor. “Busy, but not near any high-traffic areas. I work at the one near the subway station on Factory Boulevard.”

“Ah… big crowds?”

Gabriel nodded again.

“Yeah. We serve the morning rush,” he explained. “Mostly coffee, breakfast sandwiches, and the occasional night-shift worker heading home.”

The man chuckled.

“Sounds like hell.”

Gabriel huffed softly.

“You’re not wrong.”

For a moment, neither of them spoke as the elevator chugged upward, occasionally letting out a strange sound.

Gabriel could feel his pulse slowly calming down. Talking about work was safe territory, something normal people discussed every day.

Just two guys in an elevator complaining about jobs.

The stranger leaned against the wall, arms loosely folded.

“So what time do you have to get up for that?”

“Around three-ish,” Gabriel replied.

“Jesus. That’s brutal.”

“At least the paycheck never bounced…”

After a moment’s of pause, the guy spoke again.

“Seventh floor? You new?”

Gabriel’s stomach tightened slightly at that, but he kept his face neutral – or at least tired. He was so tired that he had no idea what his body was doing most of the time.

“Yeah… You know that building demolished by Bombshell?” he asked, not even having to fake his frustration with the bombastic heroine.

“Oh, damn. Sorry, dude,” the man replied with a wince. “You’re renting from Gary?”

“You know Gary?”

“Hell yeah! Man can drink! And he has this meat rub he breaks out during summer cookouts,” the man told him enthusiastically. Then he reached over and slapped Gabriel on the shoulder, sending him staggering forward hard enough that he had to steady himself against the elevator door.

“Shit! Sorry, dude… sometimes I forget myself!” the man apologized, reaching to help him.

Gabriel just waved him off. “No worries. I’m so tired that even a breeze could knock me over…”

The gangbanger smiled.

“Then that’s probably why you haven’t noticed that we’ve been on the seventh floor for a while now…”

Gabriel blinked and looked around.

They were indeed on the seventh floor, and the only reason the elevator hadn’t moved was that the guy had his finger on the button keeping it open.

He let out a sigh.

“Thanks, man.”

He stepped out as the gang member sniggered at him.

“No worries, dude! Go get some rest!”

Gabriel waved tiredly.

“Thanks…”

Then the man shouted after him.

“Name’s Carlos! See you later!”

He began to shuffle toward his door, very aware of the man’s eyes on his back.

Stopping for a moment in front of his door, he spent an entire minute pulling out his keys, inserting them into the lock, and opening it.

It was when his door closed behind him that he heard the ding of the elevator door closing.

Letting out a relieved sigh, he carefully put away his groceries, then marched directly to his bedroom, kicking off his shoes and pants on the way before collapsing face-first onto the bed.

Ten seconds later, he was snoring.

He woke up groggily to his phone buzzing incessantly.

Blindly reaching around, he found it on the other side of his bed and pulled it closer to his face, trying to blink the sand of dreams out of his eyes.

The screen was out of focus for a moment before he blinked and managed to focus again.

The top message was from work, saying he was scheduled for the afternoon shift the next day – causing him to let out an unintelligible grumble. The next ones, starting from when he arrived home, were from Mia. And each message was increasingly angry.

He clicked on the messenger app and typed out something hopefully legible, then began his waking-up process.

A few seconds later, he let out another groan when he had made the mistake of smelling his shirt.

He began pulling off the clothing, causing a brief spike of pain to shoot through his body.

“Augh!”

Looking over his shoulder, he saw a medium-sized purple patch spreading across it.

Exactly where he had landed earlier.

Experimentally poking it, he hissed and quickly stopped.

“Right. Bruised,” he muttered as if declaring its existence would help with the pain.

It didn’t.

He sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, letting his thoughts slowly catch up with reality. The room was dim, the cheap curtains failing to block out the late afternoon sun completely, and the stale air of his apartment clung to him like a second layer of grime.

And somehow, despite all that sleep, he still felt exhausted.

**

Gabriel emerged from his shower in shorts and a bare torso, absentmindedly poking the purple patch on his shoulder again while smelling something heavenly.

In his kitchen, Mia stood tapping her foot anxiously beside several containers of Chinese food on the table.

“I don’t know what you like, so I ordered some generic stuff…” Mia said awkwardly. She looked ready to launch herself forward to either check his ‘wounds’ or beat him senseless.

Even then, Gabriel could feel her eyes landing on the bruise on his skin.

“Thanks! I’m starving.”

She didn’t say anything, letting him grab a clean shirt and sit down at the table. He pulled one of the boxes in front of him and opened it, luxuriating in the steam rising up into his nose.

“Aaah, that’s the stuff!” he exclaimed, then dug in with enthusiasm.

After a few minutes of eating, polishing off almost the entire contents of the takeaway box, he looked up at Mia, who was sitting at the table, waiting for him to finish.

“Thanks for getting me some food. I was starving!” he declared happily.

However, it seemed that was the signal Mia was waiting for as she practically exploded with questions, each one rising louder and pushing her farther out of her chair, until she was standing over him, almost yelling.

“What the hell happened? Are you alright? Where is the stuff? Why didn’t you call me when you got home?”

Gabriel chewed the latest bite, swallowed, then raised his fork to ask for silence as Mia stood in front of him, breathing heavily, eyes begging for answers.

“In no particular order: I fell asleep. I’m good, a bit sore, but that’s all. The stuff is in a safe place they’ll never find. And I froze.”

Mia blinked, processing his answer before letting out a snort.

“Froze?”

Gabriel shrugged – wincing slightly at the pain in his shoulder – before nodding. “As difficult as it is to believe, this was my first time stealing from a notorious gang’s hideout in the middle of the night.” He smiled slightly, trying to hide his frustration with himself. “I froze when they showed up. The door hinges squealing didn’t really help.”

He eyed her. “Did you do the thing?”

“Of course I did,” she snapped. “The phone was wiped and attached to the bottom of a taxi.”

“The headset?”

“Smashed and thrown into several trash bins.”

“Hopefully that’ll be enough false trails for them to follow,” he said, going for another bite of the food only to see that the box was empty. Putting it aside, he pulled another box closer – revealing a still steaming pile of broccoli doused in sweet and sour sauce – and began to shovel it into his mouth.

“Anyway. I’m sure you kept an eye on the situation. So, your Goth-ness, what’s the world on the street?” he asked between forkfuls of broccoli.

Mia sent him a withering look – for once, she was without her heavy goth makeup and simply in a black V-neck T-shirt and sweatpants. The black bunny slippers were still there, though…

She collapsed bonelessly into the chair and let out a moan. “God damn it! I was wondering what happened to you. And you were just sleeping! How can you do that to me?”

“I mean, you clearly have a key to my apartment,” he said with a pointed look. Mia refused to look away. “You could have, you know, checked on me…”

She didn’t have an answer to that. Instead, she huffed and crossed her arms in front of her.

But after a few moments of silence, she began to talk.

“Word on the street is that it was a rival gang. Everybody heard the shot, so they had to say something.”

Gabriel listened intently.

“Nothing is officially happening, but there are more people in the building than usual.”

“I know… I was interrogated by a guy in the elevator,” he said.

Mia’s eyes widened. “Who? Do you remember his name?”

Gabriel thought back to the midday trip to his bed and focused. Thankfully, his enhanced memory kicked in and saved him.

“Carlos. I think… I was a bit out of it by the end of the conversation…”

Mia let out a breath, visibly relaxing. “That’s good. While Carlos is not an idiot, he is low on the totem pole. Probably just a cursory check, as you live here…”

“That’s good, right?”

“Hopefully,” she replied while biting her lip anxiously. “I haven’t tried to infiltrate their system, so I don’t have eyes on them…”

Gabriel just waved her worries away. “Well, after today, you won’t have to worry about it.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Really?” She looked around, staring intently at the empty apartment. “Because I don’t see any pallets of electronics.”

He smirked.

“Let’s leave that as a trade secret,” he said. “What did you do with the laptop?”

She let out a frustrated noise. “Had to destroy that, too. Didn’t want anything leading back to me…” she added a slight whine. “It was so fast…”

“Don’t worry. I’ll get you a better one…” he promised with a grin.

Mia leaned forward and pointed a finger at him. “You better mister, or I’m going to do something that you’ll regret.”

Gabriel nodded, nonplussed by the threat, then a thought occurred to him.

“Hey. How come you’re here?”

Mia blinked in surprise. “What do you mean?”

“Shouldn’t you be at work, or something?” Gabriel asked curiously.

“Nah,” Mia waved it away. “I work from home.”

“Oh? What do you do?”

She smirked.

“I write erotic fanfiction about superheroes.”

**

**

A/N: And with this we are officially 8 ahead.