Compared to red sauce, the marker proved easier to break down. In saliva, through enzymatic degradation, the stains desaturated to a faint pink in places but unseen unless inspected. Cooper squeezed out the rainwater. He put his shirt back on. It hid the chemical seeping into a patch of skin, with a rash breaking out in spots.

  Looking back, he should have applied the spit to his skin before bleaching his shirt. Now the bleed was seeping deeper, from skin to meat to bone, out of range of application.

  Despite a plague of large, red, hot, itchy lesions, Cooper felt as fine as he could. After a spell, he reacted the same to the setback as to a girl not selecting him or a client not selecting his work.

  He breathed with difficulty through the somatosensation, but the throughput seemed sufficient for life. He leaped, grabbed a wall, held his breath to scale it. He found he could! Cooper enacted his plan then. Simple as it was. Same as he was. He just wanted to go home!

  Step by step through a death grip, Cooper slithered the background webwork towards the urban frontage. At first, he felt as fine as he could, but then the stress ramped and his breath snapped short and shallow. He wheezed but faltered onwards.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  “No…problem,” Cooper muttered to himself. He found he could!

  In his mind, staying alive depended upon gasping a few final words with his dying breath. Rationally, his behavior made exceptional sense. As long as he could still mutter something to himself, he was still breathing, so he seemed likely to live for the time being.

  Suppose that someone, not him, possessed a terminal illness. As long as they could cook, clean, or gravedig, they weren’t dropping dead soon. That was a real relief.

  At a fork, he bent for air blowing in labored squeaks. The surround sound timbre shifted. Brass supplanted strings. Raindrops bounced as ball bearings, in a deafening racket. Believably, they clogged his mental machinery.

  Cooper couldn’t think. He could still creep, despite his mild mental distress growing to desperation. That was the bug in the code he lived by, feeling as fine as he could. When he then couldn’t, execution failed in blood red errors. Maladaptation led to decompensation in malfunctioning chain reaction. He might run or hide, but never get away.

  When the sirens screamed a higher pitch, Cooper took off, speeding into the blare. The city still hanged its criminals, but hiding on the run, he wouldn’t hang on alone.