Chery Pie
Guess where we're going if we swing real fast?
Hidden Tracks is a series of stories inspired by heavy metal songs that meant something when I was the right age to let them all the way in. Each one takes its title from a song and finds the fiction living inside it. You don’t need to know the songs. But if you do, I hope you feel what I felt in somebody’s basement a long time ago. Someone else understood.
See all Hidden Tracks stories →
It was 3:00 a.m. in Cincinnati.
Vance sat in the driver’s seat of Rig 14 with a back that had been forty-five for the last six years. Snowmelt hissed under the tires. The heater coughed dry air at his knees. He reached into the diagnostic kit on the dash, past the sterile gauze, the Narcan, the trauma shears.
In the bottom corner sat a small red sachet.
It looked like a packet of fast-food ketchup. No brand name. Just a white label stamped with a string of alphanumeric code ending in W4RR4NT.
Vance didn’t open it. He pressed his thumb against the plastic and felt the soft give inside.
He imagined cinnamon. Warm crust. Sugar bubbling at the edges. Something sweet enough to drown out the smell of piss, road salt, and old ambulance vinyl.
That was all. Just the thought of it.
Enough to keep the gray from swallowing him whole for another few minutes.
“Dispatch says we got a Swinger in OTR,” Miller said.
Miller was new. He still had the shine. He still wore his jacket zipped all the way up like the job might respect him back. He still thought the Bitter spray was a life-saving tool instead of a weapon.
“Which street?” Vance asked.
“Vine. On a fire escape. Caller says he’s been rhythmically head-butting a brick wall for twenty minutes.”
Vance put the rig in gear.
“Hell of a hobby.”
The wipers dragged across the windshield. Storefront gates. Dirty snowbanks. Neon reflected in black slush. Cincinnati in winter looked like a city that had been left out too long and brought back in anyway.
Miller checked the canister on his belt. “Figures it’s OTR.”
Vance glanced at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Miller shrugged. “Known area. High utilization. We’ve run this block three times this month.” He said it the way someone reads a memo. Already written off.
Vance looked back at the road. “Careful. City might put that on a brochure.”
Miller laughed once, thinking he’d scored something.
“You think he’s deep in it?” he asked.
Vance turned onto Vine. “Nobody calls us when they’re having a good night.”
They found him three stories up.
Thin tracksuit. No coat. No gloves.
He stood on the fire escape landing, rocking on his heels with the patience of a metronome. Forward. Back. Forward. Back. Every few seconds he tipped into the brick wall in front of him.
Thud.
Creak.
Thud.
Creak.
Vance climbed first. The metal stairs shook under his boots. The man didn’t turn.
Up close, he looked younger than Vance had expected. Late twenties maybe. His forehead was split open in a wet red crescent. Blood ran down the bridge of his nose and over his lips. His eyes were wide and leaking clear, steady streams of tears.
His mouth was stretched into a smile so wide it showed every tooth.
Pink foam clung to the corners.
“Sir,” Vance said, calm and low, “you need to stop moving.”
The man gave a little shiver, like someone had spoken to him from far away. His tongue slipped out and caught one of the tears running down his cheek. He smiled wider.
“Hit him with the Bitter,” Miller shouted from below.
Vance looked down. Miller was on the sidewalk with one hand on the rail, already reaching for his own canister.
“Vance.”
“I heard you.”
He pulled the spray from his belt anyway.
The Bitter was a sensory overwrite. Department issue. Pressurized silver canister with a black trigger and a warning label wrapped around the middle. It tasted, according to training, like copper and burnt hair. In the field it usually tasted vomit and betrayal.
Officially, it interrupted euphoric dissociation.
Unofficially, it brought people back to the part of the world that hurt.
Vance looked at the man again.
The man looked back this time, really looked at him, and his face changed. Not recognition. Not fear.
Gratitude.
He smiled so hard the skin split at the corners of his mouth.
A fresh thread of blood ran down his chin.
“Why aren’t you spraying him?” Miller called.
“He’s concussed,” Vance said.
“He’s frying. Use the protocol.”
Vance kept hold of the canister, but his thumb eased off the trigger.
The man rocked forward.
Thud.
He rocked back, laughing soundlessly now, eyes wet and shining.
Thud.
Vance saw the red sachet in his mind. Saw his own thumb pressing into it. Saw the ugly little mercy of it.
Ten years of overdoses. Ten years of bad apartments and back alleys. Ten years of screaming mothers and dead bathrooms. Ten years of winter in a city that could make concrete look tired.
Somewhere in a building with good windows, someone was reading a quarterly report they liked. Clean saves, tallied in a column, converted into something that bought a view of a different city entirely.
Dirty, rotten, filthy, stinking rich.
Below him, Miller barked, “Vance.”
The man on the landing whispered something.
Vance leaned closer. “What?”
The man’s lips trembled. His teeth were pink.
“She said,” he whispered, “there’d be enough for everybody.”
Vance had heard that before. Not those words exactly. The promise under them.
Enough for everybody.
Gone before you understood what you’d swallowed.
He had her in his pocket.
Then the man tipped forward again.
Vance caught him by the shoulder before his forehead hit the brick. The tracksuit was soaked through and ice cold. Under Vance’s hand, the pulse was rapid and irregular.
“Why aren’t you spraying him?” Miller said again, and now there was anger in it. Fear, too. The kind that always dressed itself up as procedure.
Vance looked over the rail at him.
“He’s happy, Miller.”
“He’s dying.”
“Yeah.”
“Then do your job.”
Vance stared at the Bitter canister in his hand.
He thought about all the times he’d used it. The way people came back gasping, clawing, sobbing, their heaven burned out of them in one breath.
Like dragging someone back into misery counted as a clean save.
Vance holstered the canister.
Then, slowly, he sat down beside the man on the landing.
The metal grumbled under his weight.
The man turned and looked at him with that same wrecked, grateful smile.
Vance matched his rhythm.
Forward.
Back.
Forward.
Back.
Below them, Miller swore. “Vance, what the hell are you doing?”
Vance kept rocking.
“Nobody calls us when they’re having a good night,” he said.
The man didn’t answer.
Below them, the city kept going.
After a while, the man’s eyes fluttered. His smile loosened. His head sagged against the brick.
Vance reached into his jacket pocket.
He felt the small red sachet between two fingers and pulled it out.
Even in the dark it looked cheap. Stupid. Bright as a toy.
Down on the sidewalk, Miller squinted up at it.
“Vance,” he said. “What is that?”
Vance turned the packet over in his hand. White label. Black code. W4RR4NT.
He pinched the corner.
Miller saw the motion and went still for half a beat.
Then he started up the stairs.
“Vance, don’t.”
The metal steps rang under his boots.
Vance tore the packet open with his teeth.
The smell hit him first.
Cinnamon. Butter. Hot sugar. Something fresh from an oven that did not exist anywhere in this city.
Miller climbed faster. “Vance.”
Vance closed his eyes.
His shoulders dropped.
His mouth filled with saliva.
On the landing beside him, the man made a small sound.
Vance tipped the sachet into his palm.
Dark red syrup glistened under the fire escape light.
“Don’t do that,” Miller said, closer now, voice gone thin. “Jesus Christ, Vance, don’t.”
Vance touched one finger to the syrup.
“Vance.”
He put the finger on his tongue.
Miller lunged the last two steps, hand out, but too late.
The city vanished.