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shopping bags swinging from his fists and banging against his knees, and then blammo, Bracken put a hole through a can of Krylon Pastel Aqua and a geyser of depressurized paint exploded against Cloud’s gut and he thought he’d been hit, started hyperventilating, couldn’t understand how his legs still worked. By the time he figured out that human blood is not the color of swimming pool water, an adrenaline-fueled burst of speed had carried him out of Bracken’s range, and all five Immortals were in the tunnel.
    The only thing to do was keep going. See who gave up first, hope not to get hit by a train in the meantime, pray there wasn’t a second unit waiting at the next station. They could hear Bracken charging after, calling out their names so that they’d know he knew. Up ahead was blackness, utter and engulfing, the kind in which you can’t tell if your eyes are closed or open. Far scarier than actual blindness, according to Dengue, who would know.
    If you’ve ever been on acid, you know that the last place you want to be on three fat tabs is trapped inside a sensory-deprivation chamber with your heavily armed worst enemy afoot and an indiscernible number of rough hands yanking at you while strange, breathless voices demand you run for your life.
    Amuse lost his shit. He wrenched away, screaming, throwing wild punches through the air, catching Cloud in the stomach and freaking when he felt the sticky wetness. They tried to orient him,
Amuse
,
it’s us, we’re your friends, come on, we gotta go
. More flailing and incomprehension and the crunch-and-slap of cop boots coming closer, the crazed black tragicomedy of four sightless men trying to corral a fifth. Amuse had assigned his boys new paranoid-delusional identities by now; they were demons or goblins or who-knows-what. He started trying to bite them.
    â€œYou cocksuckers got five seconds to stop running, then I swear to Christ I’m emptying my clip.”
    That’s an actual quote, according to Dengue, and this is where the frame would freeze and the voiceover would begin if The Death of Amuse were a Hollywood movie: Bracken with his gun cocked, snarling; Sabor, Billy, Cloud and Dengue pushing Amuse forward like he was the flagpole and they were those Iwo Jima motherfuckers. And . . . fade to white. I would say something like
This is where the story starts to come apart
.
    Dengue might or might not have banged his toes against a hard flat metal edge, reached down and felt around and pulled a manhole from its mooring and felt a gust of hot rank air. Maybe the I5 dropped into an unmapped chamber, twisting their ankles when they came down on the decayed pilings of a long-abandoned train line. Maybe Amuse landed on his feet, or maybe he landed wrong and cracked open his skull.
    Maybe none of that happened and they kept running and Amuse broke free and scrambled the other way, straight into Bracken, and got shot in the chest. Or maybe the cop fired blind, and some grudge-bearing god grabbed his bullet like Aphrodite in the Trojan War and pulled it through Amuse’s dome. Maybe Sabor found a door, and they hustled down a staircase to a lower tunnel and Bracken followed—with five other officers behind him, their names lost to history. Maybe the I5 decided to turn and rush the Vandal Squad, on some last-stand shit, and in the blind insanity Amuse drowned facedown in a puddle, or the stress and the hallucinations were too much and he busted a ventricle all on his own. Maybe the crew inhaled noxious trapped gasses in that lower chamber, passed out, and woke up four instead of five.
    I’d heard all those versions, plus versions of those versions. Every graff vet had a different story, and Dengue’s memories kept changing, or he forgot what lies he’d told me last and made up new ones. The notion of stumbling upon a lower tunnel came up enough that I figured there was truth to it, the way anthropologists