4. RAVEN

4

RAVEN

Seconds—I can't even tell you how many times in my life a few seconds decided my fate.

Every thirty seconds, a violent crime is committed in the US.

Every twenty seconds, blood circulates through your entire vascular system.

Your heart pumps a quart of blood in twelve.

You blink every four.

Your heart pumps every second. And in that one heartbeat, there are, on average, four babies born around the world, and two people die.

Malcolm "Mac" Wright saved my life in sixty seconds. Not literally, but that's semantics.

I was nineteen, a year after the release from juvie, ten months of living in condemned houses, rooming with other drug dealers. That fateful day of our encounter, I was running from the police and hid in his backyard in the shittiest part of town.

He walked out the back door of the house, a stranger, a giant of a man, his short afro gray, his gaze on me curiously calm.

"Wanna make things worse, son?" He nodded at the gun I pulled on him.

That last word made me halt. Perhaps, that moment of stupor was what saved me then, or him. But again, semantics.

His eyes calmly studied the gun in my hand. "I won't care. I've been through it all. You? It's only a matter of time until you catch a bullet yourself."

The police sirens blasted past his house. My heart in my stomach, I smirked. "I have nothing to lose, old man."

Mac only looked at the sky, then said something that surprised me. "It's about to start raining." He squinted at the heavy clouds. "I have a stir-fry ready. If you feel like you want to stop running for a bit, I'll be inside."

With that, he turned around and walked back into his house.

It takes a special sort of heart to be able to stare at a desperate man with a gun and see hopelessness instead of violence. And it takes a lot of faith in mankind to say, "Let's talk."

I was stunned. For the first time, someone looked at me like I was a human and not a piece of shit.

Sixty seconds was how long it took between me angrily pulling my gun on him and awkwardly walking into his house.

That night, Mac fed me and gave me a bed. I talked for hours, and he listened. No one had cared about listening to me before. They called him "Father Mac," though he was no preacher and had no kids of his own. I came to find out later that he "saved" people like me.

A sixty-something-year-old man and a nineteen-year-old fuckup was a strange set of friends. In retrospect, Mac was and still is my best friend. The closest thing I have to a father. Definitely a mentor. He helped me clean up, taught me not to talk like a thug. Because of him, I could safely walk through the hood he lived in and not be afraid to be the only white guy around. Guys spat on the ground seeing me, but the rumor that I was "one of Mac's" kept them from drawing knives on me.

"Dealing drugs won't get you out of trouble," Mac said one time, though never told me to stop.

"I don't know how to do anything else," I replied bitterly.

"Are you good at dealing drugs?"

I laughed. He wasn't joking, though.

"Yeah. I'm great," I said.

"Then you can be good at business."

That's when I rang my acquaintance, JahSeh.

If I got anything useful out of juvie, it was him, a brilliant fifteen-year-old hacker who was busted for breaking into the local DMV system and falsifying his friend's driving records. He was the one who introduced me to the darknet.

Thanks to him, three weeks later, I sold my first set of illegal spyware bugs to a big drug mover.

Two months later, I sold several custom passports and clean social security numbers to my drug connections. All of that was obtained through JahSeh, who made a cut. His "fun" hobby and my connections turned out to be profitable.

Four months later, I got out of the hood and got my own place. But every week, like clockwork, I had dinner at Mac's.

Six years later, he was the only one I called before taking off to Zion.

"Something is happening in this country in the next week," I said and told him everything I heard at Archer Crone's house.

"Another lockdown?" he mused.

"I think it's bigger than that, Mac. Much bigger. You should get out of the city, head west, inland. Something is up."

He only hummed in contemplation. "I did a fair share of running when I was your age. I don't run anymore. But you be safe, kiddo. You know what you are doing."

I always believed in fate.

And fate brought me to Zion.