FROM THE JOURNAL OF A NAMELESS SOUL part two by nexus_dragon February 12th: 6:37pm I'm holed up in a forth generation flybait room up in the grand city of San Francisco. I think I'm safe for the moment. The streets are a bit cleaner, and Market Street has enough characters to hide the Devil himself in. Some kid with a pocket- marked face said the locals called this place the Tenderloin District, though it doesn't resemble anything to give it's name. I'm tired, and I'm cold. This room has holes, and there's not enough blankets to cover a square foot. One of these years I hope someone finds these pages, scattered as they are. I've taken the liberty to leave them here and there. I don't need someone to come along and put the pieces together too quickly. It's sort of a marker guide in case one day some forth estate journalist decides to tell this story. Not that I expect my five minute limelight. I'm not that lucky. Like I said, I'm only trying to live to another sunrise. But perhaps by keeping a loose-leaf journal, it will help someone to understand one day. Briefly, I escaped with one-hundred and twelve others out of the biblical Hell back onto Earth. That's not my story, though. It's someone else's to tell, if they choose. My story happens afterwards. Mine, and to some extent, Lucas'. When you've lived and died to live again, perspective changes. Life changes. Who we are, what we are, the reasons for being. When I died, space shuttles were the top story in the local sci-fi journals sold for a quarter. Computers were a fictional concept for writers. No one had heard of William Shatner and Star Trek. Lucas knew them though. He knew about computers, and cellular phones, trips to the moon and around the planet. Products of different times, I guess. He was a kid with nimble hands and a green touch (and I don't mean the plants). It was a quality we shared. It was a quality we found common ground with, and a quality we built a plan with. Lucas ended up in San Quentin after tapping a corporate account. As fate decided (or so he said), his ISP address imprinted itself onto the company's mainframe drive. It means nothing to me. It's Latin (and since my language skills are atrocious, you know what that means). Then he chose the wrong friends. Sad story. Myself, I think it's like my gun with the plugged, melted lead barrel. It wasn't supposed to happen, but impossibility (or a Devil) proved otherwise. By the time I died, I must have hit over two hundred banks. It's a record untouched by time. One thing we learn early is cashes, and I spent enough time with the old man to know how to hide certain things. His gift was booze. Mine was money. And let's just say while we didn't know Capone, we had the opportunity to see him a number of times. Lucas had accounts hidden within bank branches, and I had a cashe buried underneath Broadway. We were going to liquidate our holdings and meet back at an off-track waterhole off the short end of 17th Street. I never saw him again after we shook hands. Between that, a local serial killer, burning churches, and enough tension to match the size of L.A.'s smog, enough filtered through my thoughts to assemble the pieces. It was time to run. The Devil is never too far behind chaos. Through Santa Monica I met a few others who were kind enough to keep me updated. We're not hard to find, if one knows what to look for. There's a resonance, an aura, a feeling when one of us is close. Or maybe it's something of me. I've never bothered to ask others if they could do the same thing. One time I saw a guy with a worn overcoat and short, grizzled blond hair walking through a rain-wasted alley. He scared the **** out of me. I ran knowing he's linked with what little time I have left. Those I met in Santa Monica said something about a "green-eyed" serpent chick who was killing us as she found us. I simply assumed that's what happened to Lucas (and the only time I wish I hadn't assumed, because what really happened was far worse). I didn't bother to find out if it was true or not. So now I'm in San Francisco. For how long, I don't know. It's far away from the politics that plague our little community and the stench of death. The population is a den of mazes built by that Greek master, Minos. I'm safe for now, maybe even for a few months. Though I doubt I'll stay. Something compels me to keep running. Why? A curious sensation, perhaps foreshadowing. Maybe it's the idea of staying in one place for more than a week. Likely, though, it's a dream of one man with a black trenchcoat and a pale, grim smirk who's says its all about time. That time would become my enemy. I don't want to know. There's a train on a six o'clock track I plan to be on. Where it goes, I really could care less. It will be somewhere else, away from the dreams that haunt me and away from the blood spilled by my kind. Between angels and devils, there's a rain of a different color I've been swept up in. And right now, it's time to run again.