Free Euphoria-Z by Luke Ahearn Page A

dirty water and smoke shit a skank asks me to, and I need figuring out?
    He insisted on entering the van last. He sat by the door and left it open, claiming to need the night air and that he was claustrophobic. The girl shot a glance at the guy, a quick glance that seemed to be asking for direction.
    Cooper sat on the edge of the open door and halfway in the van. Now they were all in closer proximity, and the electric lantern more clearly illuminated the couple’s faces. Cooper could see just how ragtag these two really were. They looked as if they had been on the road for a long time. It was a lifestyle for them and not just a short-lived adventure. They were barefoot, and the bottoms of their feet were black. The girl had more hair on her legs than the guy. She had a nose ring and he a skimpy beard that looked as if he had been growing it out for years but didn’t have the coverage for a full beard. And, of course, they smelled like shit.
    “I’m Willow.” She smiled. “And that’s Ben.”
    “I’m Cooper. How did I get here?” He cut to the chase; he had no patience for dirty druggies. They might be trying to be nice and he shouldn’t judge and all that, but he got the strong impression that they were just simply shitbags. He had never met anyone who looked like this who was normal in any sense of the word. Not that he wasn’t sympathetic to people in need; he’d spent many, many hours in school and as a scout helping the truly unfortunate. The people who really needed help were usually the unseen ones and not the ones you saw on the street collecting money all day every day.
    He had grown up in the small, safe town of Monterey. But the town was also a stopover point for transients who traveled up and down the coast. There were seasonal travelers, kids on an adventure—most were on the road for some negative reason such as abuse, neglect, drugs, or mental problems. He grew up seeing, and often interacting with, many of these people. He had gotten good at reading them, and most were nice, but none were to be trusted because of the desperation of their circumstances.
    Downtown was especially bad because the passenger bus lines and city buses stopped at a big stop in downtown Monterey. Between Los Angeles and San Francisco there wasn’t much in the way of cities and towns other than Monterey and Santa Cruz. Here was where a lot of the drifters got off and then hung out for days, weeks even, panhandling, stealing, and getting into trouble.
    The citizens tolerated, even encouraged, the homeless, the panhandlers, and transients. By the time the feel-good citizens got tired of the problem, it would be a huge mess. There were large homeless camps all over the peninsula. There were also churches and shelters that fed and clothed them. And there was no end to the idiots that would hand cash out their car windows. And the real troublemakers were the cash collectors, not the family living in their car or the mentally handicapped vet.
    “We saved your ass, bro.” Ben was dead-faced.
    Willow nodded as she looked at Ben and cracked a small smile.
    That little smile made Cooper uneasy, but what really made him nervous was what caught his eye just behind Ben in the shadows. He would have never seen it if he were inside the van and if Ben hadn’t leaned over to take the joint from Willow. There was a metal loop, a simple cargo hook, welded to the floor of the van next to the wall. It was a common enough thing for a van to have, but there was about an inch of chromed silver chain looped through it that ran under the carpet. It looked like the chains found on handcuffs. He knew he might just be paranoid, but there were too many little red flags, an uneasy feeling about these two. They were off, had a vibe about them he didn’t like. Maybe it was waking up in the dark in the woods during an apocalypse, but he knew it wasn’t. There was something off about these two.
    “We saw you get shot at and then hit that car. We had to