"Adrian, I said come on!" Antoine said. "We can't stay here. The only place safe from the dust is underground."

"I don't want to go in there."

"I've been here a million times. It's fine. It's a secret place. Don't you wanna see?"

Antoine was always talking about the special secret places he knew about that he would show Adrian when he got older. Finally being in on his secrets was what moved Adrian's feet. Antoine took his hand and helped him down onto the track.

Death creeps through the streets over programmed

beats. A rabid dog in heat on a dead end street. Oil

slicks: the only rainbows canvas gray concrete.

Shadows of skyscrapers fall when Mohammed speaks.

Corpses piled in heaps. Sores and decay. Reeks.

Placin tags on feet. A Nike Air Force fleet. Custom

Made: unique. Still in box: white sheet. Ripened

Blue black sweet. White tank top, wife beat BREAK.

Hearts in two-step beat BREAK.

Dance pray work whip beat BREAK.

Neck back jump back kiss BREAK.

Now shake it off.

Their eyes soon adjusted to the darkness. They walked over the gravel that lined the area next to the train tracks. Strips of daylight slipped in from the underside of a grate above. The light illuminated the wall they walked past covered in graffiti, the bubble words so high passengers on trains would be able to see them. Antoine pointed out a small area where the words swirled to a round red dot surrounded by glowing white highlights. In it was a scribbling of black magic marker writing. Adrian couldn't read it.

"That's my tag," he said.

"Yeah?"

"I wouldn't tag something like that now. I didn't know any better back then. I hope the guys that did this don't catch me."

Adrian laughed. He could see his brother's eyes smile behind the shadows. A beat. The guys who did this were probably dead.

Adrian had always watched his brother work. Antoine sketched in his drawing pad, using magic markers to fill in the colors. The smell of the markers in his room was intoxicating. Cool beats and rhymes from MCs blasted as he drew curvy lines that stretched and twisted over and under and through. Spelling names, naming places, placing times, timing rhythms. Adrian begged and begged his dad for a sketchpad, too. When he got it, he did as Antoine did, only different. When he sketched, he drew faces. Faces of the guys down the way. Faces of the street lady with the shopping cart and the bags of cans. But the best work he would ever do was the memorials.

Memorials would spring up on the sides of shopping centers, on the walls of the playground, by the barbershops. They seemed to appear overnight, and no one ever knew whose work it was. They'd spelled R.I.P. in large elegant curvaceous lines for the many brothers who had passed on before their time. Some from bullets, some for other reasons. No one ever tagged them. They would stay up for years. Someone obviously cared for them, refreshing the paint. Adrian had made two of his own by now. One for a kid he barely knew from school, who hadn't had a beef with anyone, but got shot for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. One for his friend Steven who died of cancer in the summer of last year. Now that everyone was gone, Adrian felt lost. There were too many faces to remember. There weren't enough walls to paint them all.

Antoine took him deep into the tunnel. He stopped at a metal door and opened it. He turned on the light. It was a maintenance office. Inside, there was a room with a toilet and another with a desk and papers all around. In the corner was a small couch, and beside it was Antoine's stash - a box full of spray cans. Adrian picked up one with a red cap. It was heavy with paint and made a clack-clack-clack sound when he shook it.

"We can stay here for a while," Antoine said. "No one comes here anymore. We get power from the solar panel outside. So we won't be in the dark. Move underground. Always gotta go underground."

Adrian sat down on the couch. The weight of his feet was heavy. So tired.

"You bring your sketch pad?" Antoine asked.

"Yeah."

"Good, me too," he said. "You got anything new?"

A beat. He did have something that Antoine hadn't seen yet.

"Yeah, I've been working on something but it's not done."

"Can I see?"

"Not yet."

Antoine smiled. "That's cool. Now you're thinking like an artist. Don't never show your shit before it's ready."

"Did you bring any food with you?"

"A little. That store had a lot of stuff in it. I should've taken more."

"Yeah, me too."

"I think I'll go back there and get more stuff."

"But those things are out there."

"I know, but we haveta eat."

Adrian looked away. Everything was so bad. And their dad wasn't around to make things right anymore. Not like after their mom died. BREAK.

"I don't want you to go."

"I'll be back soon. Don't worry," Antoine said and flashed that smile of his. "They can't catch me, son! I got this!"

The smile was infectious.

"Okay," Adrian said and Antoine left him alone and, for the moment, safe.

** BREAK **

>> createdoc check_for_daemon.fi # check_daemon.fi -- check if daemon process # is running in the background ps -ef grep -v grep grep Gauns # if not found - equals to 1

if [ $? -eq 0 ]

then echo "Found daemon process..."

.eof

>> execute check_for_daemon >>.

Antoine left two days ago and hadn't been back since. Adrian waited in the cold maintenance office, too scared to move. The things were out there. Maybe they were in the tunnels. Maybe they were waiting for him out on the streets. It didn't matter. Antoine was gone. And he probably wasn't coming back. BREAK.

As his stomach twisted with hunger pains, Adrian sketched. Magic markers squeaked and scratched over the paper. The rhythm of his hand made music on the page. He drew face after face after face. Over and over and over again he drew. Strange faces. Faces of friends. Faces of the fellahs from around the way. Faces of the kids at school. Different faces. He stopped and looked over all of the pages he had done. The faces had merged into one. They were his brother.

Antoine. Antoine. Antoine. BREAK.

There had been a hum in the tunnel that was now silent, and the lights began to flicker. Had Adrian understood what that meant, he would have left the room then. It meant that power was no longer going to the pumps that kept the groundwater out of the tunnels. It meant that the underground was about to flood. The silence soon became unbearable, so Adrian opened the door. Water was flowing almost up to the steps of the office.

He packed his sketchbook and as many spray cans he could carry and walked out into the tunnel, stepping carefully through the dirty water. The further Adrian walked, the more flooded the tunnel became. He walked until the water reached his waist, holding his bag over his head. Wet and miserable, he climbed the stairs to the street. Adrian was afraid of running into one of those things. But he was hungry, and he wanted to find his brother. So he wandered down the long avenues of the city, listening to his feet scrape the ground.

In his heavy knapsack he carried the several cans of spray paint that made up the colors of his essential palette: red, green, gold, brown, black, several cans of white, yellow and a small can of blue. The remaining cans he left in the box hidden behind the couch in the maintenance office. He thought he could get them later. He pictured them underwater now.

He searched all of the places he knew Antoine liked to go - the old harbor that overlooked the next state, the cement park where the skateboarders used to hang out and practice their moves, the park in the square where the green market had met three times a week. All of them empty - no Antoine, no anyone. Only the lonely howl of the wind and the sounds of birds flapping overhead. And it was cold.

The sky above remained gray, the blue never returned. The dust had settled and formed an even layer on the ground. Adrian ventured out during the day and spent his nights huddled in the small corners of high-rise offices, his knapsack of spray cans for a pillow. Once, when passing the city hall, he saw an elk. It was wandering between the parked cars, then striding along the sidewalk puffing white cold smoke. It stopped for a moment and the two stared each other. The moment passed, and it made a slight sound like the whinny of a horse. For a moment, Adrian thought it was trying to speak. But then the elk turned its head and walked away, disappearing down the long corridors of the streets.