"Do you think Nixon has a reincarnation?"
"Richard Milhaus Nixon, 37th president of-"
"No I know who Nixon is."
Anna scowled at the GPS mounted on the windscreen.
"I don't think anybody admires Nixon enough to want to be him. Red, this road look right to you?"
Red pulled the phone from its cradle and let their eyes trace over the map displayed on its screen.
Their nose was still broken, and their face covered in bruises; they didn't let it show, but they felt like shit.
"This address doesn't look right. I think you fucked up the zip code."
Anna looked out of the window at the desert landscape pouring by. "Who even gets fucking mail out here? I mean, is it coming on a fucking horse?"
"You know we're in a car right?"
The cool automated voice came from Anna's phone as Red finished keying in the correct address. "ROUTE RECALCULATING."
They remounted it on the windscreen.
"Shit, I mean, it's all gotta be wackjob Mormons out here, right?"
"Better than a wackjob Satanist?"
"No I - shut the fuck up. I mean, I don't wanna get shot at if we pull up. They'll probably think we're tax collectors or something."
Red looked out at the blank road ahead of them. There was no other cars on the road. No buildings. Nothing but the car, two girlfriends, and desolate wastes as far as the eye could see. It was kind of pretty, though. Put them in mind of Mars.
"Do you think the IRS hires sexy trans people now?"
"Get chasers to open the door more, right?"
"How often would that really be a factor?"
"More often than you'd think-"
They hit a cattle grid; Boleskine whirred for a second as the entire body shook, and Red swore and dropped their phone.
"Slow down!" They said, scrabbling to the side of their chair for it.
"No." Anna put her foot down, changed gears; watched the speed needle twitch up a few more gradings. "I wanna get here before the sun goes down."
Anna jabbed a finger at the phone. "2 hour drive to your destination."
"Have you actually checked to make sure that he's still there?"
"No, you check. I'm driving."
Red managed to retrieve their phone, looked at the incarnate app. "Oooh."
"Fucking what?! What is it?!'
"5 miles from your destination."
Anna grabbed the phone out of Red's hand. "Give me- What? How- the address was right like, an hour ago!"
"He's travelled 2 hours in one?" Red raised an eyebrow.
Anna looked at the map. "I guess he could have driven across the lake? That'd cut it down."
"Neither of those were in the spec, anyway."
"Slow down, he might be waiting by the side of the road or something."
"What, he'll flag us down?"
Red looked at the road. "Like, you know Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas-"
"Idk, send an @ to of the guys I know in the discord, ask if he wants to bring us some-"
"We're in the middle of nowhere!"
Anna vaguely waved a hand around. "That app had him miles off the road, I hope you know I'm not pulling off and getting stuck."
"Well we can't DM him because he's not in the server, so what?"
"Look, just keep a look out. I'll keep my eyes on the road, you look for any...fucking, hitchhikers or whatever."
There was a silence for a few minutes, filled only by the GPS occassionally chiming in to helpfully remind them to continue driving on the only road for miles.
"I mean, Nixon won 49 states, right?"
"That election was rigged."
"But no he had popular support. I mean, there was even the old bumper sticker, right?"
"Don't blame me, I'm from Massachussets. Because it was the only state that didn't-"
"Look, even if he had admirers in fucking, 1973 or whatever-"
"1972, he doesn't now! And besides, even if you look up to a guy, doesn't mean you want to be him."
Anna looked at Red. "I mean, Nixon was pretty miserable, right?"
"I've seen people 'carn as people who fucking killed themselves!"
"Yeah but. Like. Not in a sexy way."
"Speak for yourself." Red held up a pic of Nixon on their phone. "I'd fuck those cheeks."
"Why-why did you have that pic saved-"
"Also, did you just say carn?"
"Yeah. I'm inventing new slang. I'm on the forefront of things. I'm an influencer-"
"Shut up. It's incarnate. That's already a shortening of reincarnate, you are not shortening it further to fucking - Italian food-"
"Same root! Meat, flesh, et cet!"
"Et cet? Who's the one shortening words now-"
Another cattle grate, another Red phone drop.
"Look, if we pass a guy, I'll turn round! There's no cops round here!"
"This road isn't wide enough, dumbass. You'll get stuck!"
Anna moaned. "I need a cigarette."
"Well, pull over if you're gonna get one. I'm not ending up in some sand dune-"
"This isn't that kind of desert. Dumbass." She imitated Red's tone on the last word.
Red stuck out their pierced tongue at Anna, who struggled not to break into a smirk.
"Would you clap Nixon's cheeks?"
"You clapped L Ron Hubbard's cheeks!"
"Damn right! And I'd fucking do it again. Answer the question."
"If we meet a reincarnation of Nixon are you gonna fuck him?"
"Well now that you've said that, I have to."
Anna started corpsing. "He'd be racist!"
"Ooh, hot. I hope he calls me a bull dyke-"
There was a loud thud as the car hit the child running out in front of it, hurling his body across the hood and shattering his frame against the tarmac behind.
"PULL OVER PULL OVER PULL OVER-"
Anna hit the brakes and swung the wheel; as Red has predicted, it hit the edge of the road, and came to a messy, juddering stop.
Annabelle Boleskine in neutral and peered at the spiderweb patterns on the shattered windscreen as Red frantically tore off their seatbelt, kicked open the door, and sprinted back down the highway towards the bloodied body lying in their wake.
It was a kid, as the size of the figure ragdolling across the chassis had made clear seconds ago; maybe 10 or 11 years old. He was Latino, with dark skin and hair, neck broken and scalp split open in five places to show red and white of skull. Blood was weeping out of every orifice; his twisted posture held one arm below him on the wet tarmac, another stretched out in a motionless claw on the road. He wasn't breathing.
"He's dead! ANNA! YOU FUCKING KILLED A KID-"
Anna came, at a slower pace, stomping along. Her face was coldset, but she was pale, and her hands were fumbling at her bag for cigarettes.
"CPR." Her voice was quiet. "Can we-"
"Fucking look at him! CPR? He doesn't have a fucking ribcage! He looks like a-"
"Shut up! Shut up. Look-" Anna knelt besides the body. She felt for a pulse. Nothing. His eyes were closed, already starting to bruise livid where his face had slammed into the tarmac.
"He jumped in front." She said, quietly, not looking at Red.
"What?! No! You hit him! You were going at 90mph and not looking you fucking hit him! You killed a fucking kid, Anna!" Red was starting to tear up. "What are we going to do?!"
Anna pressed the back of her hand, now obviously shaking, into his cheek. She didn't seem to know what she was doing.
"Anna you -" Red's voice caught. "You can't heal him."
"He - I -" Anna fought to regain her composure, then when she next spoke, she was cooly measured again. "I had my eyes on the road. He jumped out. I saw him. You didn't-"
"Anna..." Red stared with hollow eyes. "You.."
They were both interrupted, with a start, by a wheeze from the child.
Anna jumped back in horror, and landed on her butt on the road as she let out a little cry. Her eyes were wide as she watched him start to twitch, and move.
Air was dragged, with a horrible ragged sound, into ruined lungs. Torn muscles tried to pull on shattered bones. The head writhed on a broken neck.
"Fuck! Fuck, he's still alive?!"
"I didn't- I didn't- heal-"
Anna was trembling harder now.
Red heard that last word, and looked closer. They saw what was happening before Anna did.
Beneath the boy's skin, bones were moving. His skeleton was reassembling; knitting itself back together. Ribs that had visibly punched through skin on a blood-soaked shirt sank back down like control rods into the diagraphm, that began to pump as the heart beat strongly. Seeping blood stopped, and cuts closed. His breathing, at first gasping and gurgling from a throat filled with froth, become desperately alive. His hands scrabbled at the ground, eyes still closed as his unconscious body began to pull itself back together.
"We. Are. So. So. Lucky."
Anna, trembling, managed to claw the cigarette packet from the handbag. "Is that- him then? The- healer?"
"Oh shit, yeah. Let me look, one sec."
Turning away - with relish, frankly - from the spasming, gasping little boy, eyes now open but unseeing, neck agonisingly bending back into place, starting to moan between gasps as vertebrae repaired themselves, Red jogged back to the car, and retrieved their phone.
The dot matched up perfectly with the child; they watched the blue dot, representing them, drift over across the greyish representation of the road, and overlap with the pulsing orange incarnated dot as they moved back to Anna and him.
He let out a scream of pain, head bending back as his spine arced. He cried out in Spanish, rolled over into the foetal position, spasming as the last of his wounds healed.
"What is he-" Red started.
"It...didn't....work..!" The boy's voice came, in English this time.
"Oh, so did he really..." Red looked sheepishly at Anna, who didn't look comforted. "Sorry."
"It didn't work!" He screamed, burying his face in his hands as he achieved full mobility. He barely seemed aware that they were there.
"Hey, kid. You...did you...are you ok?" Red tried.
He moaned something in Spanish.
"Do you know what that means?"
"I don't speak Spanish!" Anna snapped. She stood up, her hands now still enough to pull a cigarette from the packet. She put it in her mouth, and moved to put the packet away and retrieve her lighter.
The boy moaned, and suddenly reached out, grabbing at Anna's boot with a bloody hand.
Anna gasped, and instinctively jumped back, out of his reach. Red moved forwards in response, taking his hand in theirs as he mumbled something incomprehensible.
Anna ran the back of a troubled hand through her hair, box still gripped in its palm, and moved to get the lighter for the cigarette in her mouth...before her eyes focused inwards and down on it, and widened. Her lips fell open, and the not-a-cigarette plopped out, and fell to the floor. The box fell from her other hand, hit the ground, and spilled its contents.
A single matchstick, that had been a cigarette about ten seconds before, was laying on the ground, still wet from her mouth. About a hundred matchsticks had fallen out of the clearly marked cigarette box, that had been full of cigarettes about twenty seconds before.
Anna stared, eyes wide, as Red turned to look, kneeling by the boy's side, one hand knitted with his left, the other on his hair, and saw. Saw her goth girlfriend, gaping open-mouthed, at a spill of matchsticks on the road.
"I don't..." The boy managed, weakly, eyes closed. His forehead was pressed against Red's cool hand. "I don't like...smoking..."
Anna's eyes were still wide as saucers. "Who is he.." She said, in a low voice.
"Kid. Kid. Who...who are you incarnated from?"
No response but a weak cough, and a gasp of pain as a result. A little blood trickled over his chin, from a still unhealed cut just under his lip.
Red, keeping one hand on the barely conscious boy's face, picked up one of the matchsticks. They examined it in awe.
"Transfiguration...healing of self and others...fast travel...who's that?"
Anna shook an unknowing head. She was starting to collect herself, although she kept making mournful glances at the lost box of former cigarettes.
"I don't know either, but some pretty major medic I'd bet, or something." Red looked down at the boy. "Hey kid, you're pretty powerful." They playfully slapped his chest; he cried out, and they cringed. "Sorry, sorry."
"Huh?" Red touched their face, their fingertips soaked red from his bleeding. No bruises. No broken nose. They twisted their shoulder, so recently painfully reset. Nothing.
"Man...that's something, huh?"
They looked down at the boy, who seemed to have drifted back into unconsciousness, head pressed against Red's side.
"Well, if he won't tell us..." Red took out their phone, clicked through. Tapped out a few lines of code, then gently pressed the boy's limp thumb to the screen.
"I mean, do you wanna take bets?" They said, as the progress bar rolled on the screen.
"No, c'mon! I mean...maybe he's fucking, carn of Jonas Salk or something."
"Jonas Salk could turn cigarettes into matchsticks?"
"Well, I dunno. Representation of better public health, I guess? You know how weird these things can be sometimes. Probably some famous doc, like I sai-"
Red froze, mid-expression, looking at the screen.
"Jesus. Fucking. Christ."
"What? C'mon, who is it?"
There was a long silence.
Anna grabbed the phone from Red, then stared at it with wild eyes.
She took a second to read the name of the person the boy was the reincarnation was, then dropped the phone, and ran.
