Jay then hopped up onto the rail like some kind of Chinese action hero and they zoomed off into the gray streaked east. Eddie was comfortable enough hanging over Jay’s back like some shot dear but was disturbed at how each and every hill was weirdly illuminated. Most of all he was disturbed by being labeled a ‘Cultivation deposit’. He had to unburden himself, “Yo Jay-Bone, we cool right?”

“What you mean Eddie?”

“I mean you ain’t taken me like da machine lady said to be cultivated by some crawly-ass doctor is you?”

“I jus’ had ta get on the rail Eddie. As soon as we hit DeeCee we’re bailin’ okay.”

“How do you know your way around and about all this weird shit Man? I mean I know you was built up in hear—I mean borne—but you grew up in my world.”

The wind was beginning to howl as they picked up speed and merged with a larger rail that was as wide as a sidewalk, so he barely heard the man’s deep voice. “I don’t know Eddie. Lately, since my future-brother came to visit me in the federal clink, I just seem to remember things that I couldn’t have known to begin with. Like that K-9 assault rifle; never saw or heard of one, but when I saw it I knew everything about it, what it was called down to the fact it has trouble discharging the thirtieth cartridge casing in wet conditions. I suppose I was the kind a…”

The rest of his words were wafted away in the howling wind as he hunched over the rail and Eddie hung on for dear life as the light streaked rail seemed to draw them on toward their destination at greater speed…

Eventually, hours down this lonely road, with the sun hidden behind the ominous cloud banks above, they came into a huge metropolis. The strange needle-like sky-scarpers and stacked domes were not what Eddie understood as an urban skyline. The lights in particular were mind-numbing, and somehow managed to be luminously legible during the day.

Well this is not much of a day. It’s like dusk all day long.

It is probably just the weather. Maybe all these lights just come on like this when it is overcast.

They zoomed through a tunnel that was shaped like a mouth. As they entered it the lips puckered and once inside the tunnel spoke to them, “Welcome to The District of Incorporation. Your first cleaning point will be in point-nine clicks.”

They then ‘wooshed’ out of the tunnel into a maze of branching rails that wound among the stacked plastic bubble buildings and needle towers. A large black gas bubble imbedded with a red pointer seemed to direct them to a pulsating purple light at the base of a soaring needle-tower, the top of which was lost in the clouds.

“Look at that shit yo!”

Just as Eddie exclaimed his wonder at the sight looming above them he was jerked violently as he heard the screech of steel tearing a lesser medal, “Wow, shit yo!”

Jay was flying through the air in an arc and Eddie was too, but he was sliding off of the man’s naked shoulders and had to claw violently to stay on his back. As his fingernails tore into Jay’s chest below his collarbones and he felt himself begin to arc around like a kid being swung by a parent, he saw the reason for this sudden perilous flight. Jay had stabbed into the housing of the tunnel as they exited with his big knife, and they were arcing around his hairy scarred hand, which still held onto the knife!

“Shit yo!”

His own protest and the groan of steel ripping through aluminum was interrupted by the pinging snap of the blade. When the knife snapped, Jay was left clutching a useless hilt as he flew in an arc twenty feet above the hard-looking surface below; and Eddie was flying with him, clawing the crazy man’s chest and shoulders to keep from flying free.

“I’m landin’ on yo crazy ass!”

This is like dreaming about flying when you are a kid, going in slow motion and doggy paddling in the air.

Then they smashed through a plastic window—no, this shit is not breaking —and the window repelled them and launched them down into the alley below. Jay smacked into the concrete first and Eddie landed on top of him with a thud that drove the wind from his chest.

I said I was landing on your ass.

Jay sprang to his feet from beneath Eddie. His nostrils were flaring and his head was swiveling in all directions as he dragged Eddie to his feet and then crouched, pulling Eddie down with him. Jay had some road-rash on his legs and arms. He discarded the knife hilt with disgust and then pointed with his chin at the flat roof above them. Once one was in this city it was apparent that most of the buildings were fairly low flat-roofed rectangles, like strip-mall buildings. They just had not been visible from a distance, dwarfed as they were by the domes and the needle towers.

Jay pointed with his chin, “The roofs; we’ll travel on the roof tops.”

He had to smile despite his deep fear, “Okay Tarzan, this is your jungle. Just don’t get a brutha killed.”

Jay then leaped like a crazed chimp onto the fifteen foot high roof and then hung his upper body down over the edge with one hand extended, to take Eddie’s hand. Eddie did his best layup jump and grabbed the hand. With barely a grunt Jay hauled him up and over the edge with one hand. Before he knew it he was squatting just like the crazy man, looking at the looming city around them as he rubbed his shoulder, “Okay Jay-Bone, we headed to the Smithsonian, right?”

“Yep, that’s what Three-Rivers said.”

“Well den son, we just keep scootin’ across this mess readin’ signs. You know there’s going to be a big ole sign for that joint.”

Jay, squatting as he was on all fours, turned and snarled a smile at Eddie, and he was off like an ape running across the roof of an alien world, with Eddie running his ass off to keep up…

Don’t you know you are going to fall to your death before the day is over fool?

You know son, I don’t know any such thing.

He looked off into the distance as the shadow-sun seemed to fall behind the distant cloudbanks.

He had no time to answer as he leaped over his first alley ever, and it wasn’t an East Baltimore alley, not even a 21st Century alley, but some alley that to him seemed to exist at the End of Time. He barely made it, and was near to congratulating himself, when the gravel-like covering at the roof’s edge slid beneath his shoes and he began to pitch backward…he wasn’t falling at all, but being pulled forward hand-in-hand, best friends breaking the law together at the End of Time.