Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity (23 page)

When she laughed – really laughed, not the precocious little girl’s giggle – she did so maniacally, like a villain from one of the old Gas serials.  Red could still hear it echoing, changing pitch as she hurtled down the inner circumference, her velocity carrying her fluently down and across the long, relatively flat bottom that acted as their living space, then partway up the opposite slope, and back again. When her pace slowed and gravity inevitably snatched at her, she’d try to correct -- to spin around and encourage momentum again -- but the physics were wrong, and she couldn’t help but drift to an awkward, spread-eagled stop between the battered portable stove and empty liquor bottles. Whenever Red took the slide, he emitted an involuntary, girlish yelp as he pushed off into the yawning void, and then canted downward and went rocketing though a wall of fireflies --the disposable tack-on LEDs that Zippy had thrown scattershot across the walls. It was like sledding through a starfield.

There wasn’t much to do, down there in the dark. So they drank cheap wine, and fucked, and slotted most of Red’s private stash into their veins, and it was plenty. Then, one day, or night (or whatever it was outside their insular little universe), Zippy grabbed his hand and started tapping insults into his palm.

“This one’s cunt,” she’d say, making a series of swoops and pokes in the meat of his palm.

“This is whoreson.”

And boatswain and halfbreed and fuckhole and son-of-a-bitch and Loon and cocksucker and lamprey and-

“This is fire,” she pinched the back of his hand sharply, followed by a series of light, random taps, and then she started to cry.

Red cried with her, for no other reason than he was high as hell and it seemed like the thing to do. It was the only symbol he remembered.

If the wine hadn’t blanked out all that knowledge, then time and the half decade of experimental drug use certainly would have. He couldn’t think of a good way to tell her she was tapping gibberish into his palm, so he just let her. It was nice to hold her hand again, anyway.

Far above his head, something looking vaguely like a wolf, or perhaps just wearing its skin, mounted up on an elaborate bladed motorcycle constructed of bone and sinew, then rode off downward, passing through the dock in front of him.

Zippy’s tapping devolved into irritated pokes moments ago, and now she was just digging her claws into his fingers in frustration.

The faceless, formless men in the darkness moved slowly, but unerringly. Red could feel each of their heavy footfalls pulse through the pier beneath him, followed by an answering sway. Their progress was a series of careful stomps and strange pauses. Red avoided the Reservoir like the plague, and he didn’t really test any maritime Presence scenarios. As such, he had never actually trod on any floating objects before. He found the sensation vaguely terrifying. Every action reverberated ominously. If they were close enough to something for the water to reflect it back, he could feel the shockwaves of his last step rock the dock beneath him even as he took his next. At first Red assumed it was a trick of the water, but slowly he came to realize that their captor’s steps were different: They always reverberated once, no more. One hard step, followed by a gentle, swaying shuffle. After a few thousand repetitions, Red finally understood: They were feeling for the returning ripples, and navigating by what they sensed there.

The stories were wrong; they didn’t have nightvision. They saw with the ripples, like bats in the dark.

Somehow, that was so much worse.

They passed by the occasional occupied shanty or houseboat, the objectively dim lights cutting what seemed like blindingly sharp stencils of radiance onto the splintering docks, but Red’s captors always avoided them, skirting the light rather than pursuing it. Though it became apparent that they were generally approaching some sort of large, diffuse light source, because the man shuffling immediately to Red’s left was slowly beginning to resolve. At first, he was just an amorphous something – a black blob against a sea of black -- but then Red started to discern the outline of limbs. Soon, there were textures – little more than a pattern of lighter and darker splotches at first – but soon followed by finer details. Eventually the man strode beside Red in perfect clarity: He was built eerily like Red himself -- average height, a thin frame, wider at the shoulder and narrower at the hip. He seemed malnourished somehow. Hungry. But something told Red the man did not want not for food. There were large bags beneath both eyes, and his skin was matte and thin. But where Red’s eyes were a dull, puddle-brown, the man’s were so light grey as to be nearly transparent. It was surely a trick of the wan, intermittent light, but Red thought he saw things whirring there, in the irises-

Red struck something sharply with his shin, and swore. He glanced down and instantly felt foolish for it, forgetting that he could not see his own feet for the complete and utter darkness.

Complete and utter darkness.

The only thing slowly resolving into light was the man opposite him. Red looked over slowly, trying not to draw the man’s attention. But the man must have seen him, because he turned simultaneously, like a mirror image, and smiled. Then he reached up with his hands -- both encased in thin, metallic gloves up to the elbows, ribbed with a network of tiny spikes, terminals and connectors -- and slashed Red across the face.

Red cried out and bent double. Someone probed his prone form with a toe. Red did not move. A voice said ‘hold,’ and the unseen captors all stopped as one. Somebody dragged Red to his feet, and somebody else shined a bright little cluster of yellow LEDs in his face.

“He bleedin’. Looks deep.”

“The fuck he do that? This Ancient Oswald’s place, ain’t it? Jack shit here to cut your face up on. Lights. Short burst.”

A dozen identical yellow clusters flicked on in the darkness, swooped about in a tight little circle, and snapped off. The whole thing took less than a second.

“Yeh. There’s nothin’.”

“What’d you do?”

“I don’t know,” Red answered, and put a hand to his face. It came away wet. “I’ve been seeing things. Side effect of a Beta, maybe? Hell, it could be a delayed reaction from any number of hallucinogens. Most of my Rx mixes are pirated – maybe somebody spiked a ‘feed. Could be anything.”

“Anything? The fuck you mean anything?”

“He saying a drug just slashed his face open.”

It wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” he answered anyway, “I uh…I guess I am.”

Though objectively he knew it to be impossible, Byron could, nonetheless, smell the man’s face burning off. It was in his body language, Byron decided. The frantic scrabbling at the face and panicked kicking of the feet put Byron in mind of a scalding wound. It was perfectly rational, as the closest analogue Byron had for the immediacy and intensity of the man’s apparent pain was a nasty burn, and so his mind simply filled in the blanks: Supplying the acrid stink of charring meat and the sizzle of fat on bone - though of course, in reality, there was no such thing. Perhaps the oily iron scent that some strains of fast-acting nanobot emitted could be detected, but the skin itself was generating no reek of its own, surely.

The screaming fellow was the first to dismount one of the flat, featureless boats and mount the gently rocking deck of the floating drug laboratory. QC had spun up at him from her crouch behind the barrier wall and caught him full-face with a thick, wet mouthful of disassemblers. The heavyset man with the flashing cosmetic mandibles had merely clutched at the bridge of his nose, at first, more confused than hurt. But then a look of fluctuating disbelief overtook him, and soon he was executing a spastic jig across the damp plastic planks of the drug lab. After a few moments of nervous misfires, the man’s system shut down entirely, and he laid himself out flat, absently kicking his heels against the diamond-scratched runners.

The little blonde girl caught the next boarder in mid-air with a low, hard kick, just as he was leaping from his skiff onto the lip of the barge. He crumpled silently and sunk into the water below with hardly a splash. Byron briefly considered fighting – truly, he did; he’d fared quite well against those assailants out on the piers, after all -- but that bravado had come to him spontaneously, overriding any higher functions. He hadn’t had time to think, then, and that instinctual response was the key to his successful attack. Now, however, he’d had whole minutes to contemplate the danger, while Little Deng’s security forces organized into two-man parties, mounted their perfectly flat silver planks, and silently pulsed across the water from the manse. It was contemplation that paralyzed Byron, and it was now doing so with gusto.

He felt his heartbeat thrum behind his eyes. His lungs struggled to draw in thin, anxious pulls of air. No, he could not fight. Instead, Byron undertook the most helpful action that sprung to mind: He handed QC a short length of pipe, clapped her soundly on the back, and then hid behind a barrel.

Beyond the first wave, Byron could only hear the resulting melee, as he was not willing to risk ducking his head out for fear of being seen.

The sounds:

A low, sad keen. Presumably the man with the spittoon for a face.

Splashing. The fellow QC had sent into the water?

Swearing. Byron had once read that martial artists have something they call a Kiai – a sound they scream upon striking that gives release to the force they’ve built up inside. QC’s Kiai seemed to be “motherfucker.”

A dull pop. It did not echo.

Muffled barking. The men, hollering orders in a language he could not understand.

And silence. 

A large, heavy hand clasped Byron’s shoulder and wrenched him up. Instinctually, he began talking:

“Hullo, gentlemen!” He exclaimed with mock relief. “I seem to be a bit lost here! Quite fortunate you came along, actually. You see, I found myself rather low indeed on my daily chemical sustenance this morn, and thought to visit my stalwart friend and erstwhile distributor, Mr. Little Deng, in hopes of resuming our formerly beneficial relationship. I suppose I’ve taken a wrong turn, though, haven’t I? Ho ho! I jest, I jest. Regardless, if you could now simply point me in his general direction, my over-zealous young companion,” he gestured at QC’s prone form, wrapped in a thin, clinging film, like forgotten leftovers, “and I would be in your respective debts.”

“Talks like a faggot,” said one man, whom Byron saw, with sinking heart, was covered with a familiar set of brutal media tattoos.

“That was uncalled for!” Byron reprimanded, and took a deep breath in preparation for another diatribe.

A gargantuan, vice-like paw clasped over his mouth from behind.

“Not anymore he don’t,” another voice added.

How very Spartan, Byron thought.

The men bound his hands to his feet and shoved rags down his throat. It took pathetically few seconds to immobilize him. With a soft grunt, Byron was hefted bodily from the sky blue plastic planks of the laboratory, and found himself rocking gently beneath one hulking grey arm like a bag of nervous, pasty groceries. The other fellow slipped a long, vicious hook out of his belt and bent to QC. Byron’s stomach clenched and his chest hammered, but the man merely secured it into an empty space of film to better drag the unconscious girl behind him. They were both tossed roughly into a planate skiff, and after a few unnaturally still moments – something in the plank apparently cancelling out the natural momentum of the water -- were dragged out again and thrown onto the docks behind Little Deng’s palatial houseboat.

“Get the boss,” one captor told the other, and Byron heard footsteps begin to depart. “He might wanna know why some uppity junkie and his pet bitch been throwing his name about.”

Byron waffled between relief and heightened terror: His central fear thus far had been being brutally murdered before getting to Little Deng. But now he found that he was less than enthusiastic for their meeting, after being seized in the man’s drug lab and attacking his employees. Byron had heard the stories about Deng, of course: That he deployed industrial scourer-bots – a particularly virile strain of nano-machine designed back at the turn of the century to strip old steel from the hulls of ancient, defunct freight ships – against potential thieves. And that he fermented the puddles that the offending parties left behind in ornate bottles behind his bar, drinking from a new one every night. But those were stories; Byron had always found the man himself to be personable enough. But then, Byron had always been in the act of paying him vast amounts of money for high-grade, unsanctioned Presence. That fact alone might have tempered the man’s otherwise irascible persona.

There was a soft, crystalline tinkling. A chandelier swaying gently in a spring breeze from an open window. Little Deng was here.

Byron was face down, the bulk of his weight on his own face. His gaze was immobile. He stared placidly at an empty patch of floor until two gnarled, bare feet shuffled into view.

“Who’s this we got here? This the little prince?” Deng asked, his voice quiet and skeptical.

“Salutations, Monsieur Deng,” Byron offered cordially.

Somebody was grabbing at him, hauling him up to his knees. The gnarled feet led upward into a pair of pale, smooth legs, followed by baggy cargo shorts, and then a ratty purple blouse cut from a constantly shimmering and shifting material, left open to a bare, sunken chest. Eventually Byron found himself staring Little Deng full in the face: He was smaller than Byron, with broad, flat, light-skinned features. A corona of long, chunky locks of hair wrapped around his head into a sort of turban. Into each lock, he had braided a motley of colored glass. The man tinkled like a champagne toast with the slightest movement.

“
Mussyour Deng
,” he laughed, “ain’t that some shit?”

Deng fancied himself some sort of tribal shaman, Byron knew, but he’d apparently drawn all of his reference points from the confused pseudo-history of the public access databases. Anybody could edit them, on a whim and without credential. The result was often a mish-mash of exaggerations, fallacies and juvenile pranks. It was not uncommon for the historical vid-feeds to be ripped and re-uploaded with altered audio; it was uncommon for anybody to care enough to fix it. Little Deng may have indeed been the merciless reincarnation of a Sudanese Rain God, but he spoke like a thuggish, 20
^th
century caricature. In the perpetual shadow of the Four Posts, all of the Reservoir dwellers’ skin inevitably faded to a sickly grayish hue, but Deng would have been pale anywhere. Here, living in perpetual twilight, he was translucent. So white that his veins stood out in bright green by contrast, like circuitboards beneath the skin.