by Reed King
Now all we had to do was figure a way inside.
We took cover in the trash of an old alley, where decade-old shiver vials cracked underfoot. I cleared a space of debris and pulled The Grifter’s Guide from my jacket. Luckily, it had survived the swim without losing its ink, even if some of the pages were stuck together. It took me a while to thumb through the entries, but finally I landed on San Francisco. Like always, I had to squint hard to squeeze the meaning out of all that static type, but pretty soon I got into the flow of it.
San Francisco’s a sorry place for selling, what with half the population mostly shut-ins, but it’s a fine city for diving dumpster …
… the Laguna-Honda Military Base is like the city’s scrotum, impregnating the rest of San Francisco with its tech and that bloat of self-importance …
The biggest problem with a population of shut-ins isn’t a declining birthrate or the increased energy demands: it’s the farting. That’s why the city built more than two hundred miles of ventilation duct beneath the city streets to suck foul air from the worst offenders and pump it out over the ocean: the most sophisticated fart pipes in the world …
“Smells just like I remember it,” Barnaby said. Being so close to the reconstructed laboratory had him keening for the past. “Just like ocean brine, methane, and urine, mixed with a little LCD crystal.”
“You can’t smell LCD crystal,” I said.
“I can.” Then: “They burned my father in one of the big waste incinerators and blew him out to sea. Every time you breathe, you’re probably inhaling a little of his fur.”
I held my breath until I couldn’t stand it.
“I hope dying doesn’t hurt,” Barnaby said. “That’s what scares me the most, I think. I’ve never had a high tolerance for pain.”
A bad feeling wrapped a fist around my insides. “Don’t think about it,” I said. Barnaby was my friend. He was an annoying friend, for sure, but still a friend. And I would lose him too. Maybe that was the law of the new world, and the only thing that joined everybody together: you could never hold on to anything for long.
“I can’t help it.” Barnaby sputtered a sigh. It occurred to me how thin he looked, and how old. “Some people say it’s the nothingness of death they can’t comprehend.”
“It will come when it comes,” I said, like an idiot.
“And for me, imminently,” Barnaby said. He just managed a smile. “Just as soon as you figure out a way through those gates, I imagine. But,” he added quickly, “I suppose I should be thankful. Dying for a cause so noble can hardly be counted as dying. My death will save the world.”
“Sometimes it seems nobler to end it instead,” I said. “Although I guess we’ve done a hotshot job of that already.”
Barnaby eyed me contemptuously. “The world has always been ending, Truckee,” he said. “But you may have noticed that it has so far been stuck continuously in edits. Besides, a man bleeding might be minutes from death, or he might only have cut himself shaving. You don’t just walk up and shoot him.”
It was a fair point. I turned my attention back to The Grifter’s Guide. I must of read every word a hundred times, trying to wring each one of them for a new idea.
… security on the base is tighter than a Saam’s asshole, and there’s good reason why. The Nautilus laboratories are responsible for some of the RFN military’s most significant pieces of IP, including the deadly SR-42 drones and the “Stealth Destroyer.”
Supposedly, “Ground Zero” has all the food, fresh water, juice, and tech required to relaunch civilization after a MEE: mass extermination eventuality. We’re talking fire starters and batteries, fresh water for five hundred years, nuclear-exposure-abatement pills, and even—so they say—seedlings, real seedlings, for every single wild-growing edible plant, legume, and fruit on earth.…
I let out a short cry. Barnaby lifted his head to stare.
“What?” he said. “What is it?”
I felt a blush creep on. If I’d been wrong about Tim … if we’d abandoned him back in that foxhole with the Russians on the march …
For a second, I even latched on to the idea that Barnaby was the one with his brain cabled to the server. But that was crazy. Rafikov had donated her brain tissue long before her ThinkChip™ had hit the market. And besides, President Burnham had no doubt considered the possibility closely and discarded it too.
Tim had to be the one firing intel back to Rafikov, even if he’d only lent her his brain to squat her server.
Before I could go back to reading, Barnaby butted the book closed, and squared his face right up to mine. “Listen to me, Truckee. I have a favor to ask you. One favor only, okay?” His breathing was quick and desperate. His eyes were huge. Yellow, I’d always thought, but up close I saw spokes of gold and brown, a Honee™ color, revolving around sideways irises. “I don’t want to go in the incinerators. I’ve never liked the idea of being burned. I don’t even like the sun. I’ve been very protective of my skin all these years, that’s why you see hardly a freckle.…”
“Okay,” I said, but he barely seemed to hear me. “Okay, I promise. No incinerators.”
His beard was quaking like some invisible hand was tugging on it. “I’ve always thought I’d like to be buried near a landfill … do you think you could do that for me, Truckee? A dumpster will do in a pinch. But a big one, okay? Somewhere with a view of the sky.”
Just then, I felt a little like dying myself. I wasn’t a hero. I wasn’t fixed for this job. I’d told Burnham that way back in his office—he’d got the wrong guy.
“Listen,” I told Barnaby, “if you want to back out, I don’t blame you, okay?”
He stared at me, breathing hard, like he suspected a trick.
“I’m tired,” I went on. “I’m going to close my eyes for a bit. If I wake up, and you’re gone, I’ll understand. I want you to know that.”
Barnaby looked at me for a long time. “But what about the war? What about Rafikov and her army? What about the noble cause?”
My chest felt like it was caving in two. “Fuck it,” I said. “You’re just a goat. You didn’t ask for any of it.”
His eyes softened my reflection to a blur. “What about you, Truckee? What did you ask for?”
I thought of my mother, incinerated before I could see her body, poured down into a shoebox plot beneath a green sky.
“It doesn’t matter now,” I said.
I made a blanket for myself of crusty tenting, and a pillow of an old purine sac still half full of urine. I’m not sure how long I slept, or whether I did, or if I just walked through queasy memories: of my mom pointing out the stars, of Billy Lou’s stumpy fingers walking blind over a math equation, of a chemical explosion and Evaline saying It’s all happened before, over and over again, until a vision of Rafikov’s cabled army of body sacks jerked me awake.
Next to me, Barnaby was curled up, sleeping.
* * *
For dinner, we scavenged, turning up an old homeless squat, where a skeleton was still rattling around in a sleeping bag. Hard to say what killed him, but I was guessing one of the first superflus, from the litter of pills and shots still emptied around him.
I took a deep breath, hooked him by the eye sockets, and pulled. The skeleton stayed mostly intact as I bumped it out of the sleeping bag, although when I plunged my hand around to feel inside, I knocked up against a few lost toe bones.
Barnaby gave a bleat and quick-stepped backward.
“Not many places to hide swag on the street,” I said. Stuffed into a hole in the lining were four crumpled packets of Cheez™, straight from Crunch, United, obviously black market. A good source of protein and energy punch, plus a zip of caffeine to keep you going.
Barnaby just shook his head. “And you say I’m the animal.” He did a good job of looking down his nose at me when I tore open the first packet and emptied the powder straight onto my tongue. “You shouldn’t eat that stuff, you know.”
“I’m not high on optio
ns.”
He sniffed, like that was a small point. “I’m serious. It’s absolute terror on your teeth.”
I ripped into the second package. “Sorry. I’m not sure I want dietary advice from the guy who eats shoe leather and rubberized tire.”
“Exactly. And my bite is still excellent.” He bared his teeth to prove it. “White Cheez™ is chock-full of acetate. Keeps the tang, but causes tooth decay. It was your friend Billy Lou who told me that.”
I didn’t want to think about Billy Lou. I shook another bit of flavor into my mouth. The second package was old, and had begun to degrade, but the bitter was still mostly hidden by all the kapow. “There’s no acetate in White Cheez™,” I said.
“Of course there is. It’s the most important ingredient.”
“I’m telling you, you’re wrong.” If there was one thing I knew about, it was goddamn Cheez™. “I worked the line for two and a half years, remember? I was a hand crank. I saw all the ingredients mixed together. No acetate.”
Barnaby was getting huffy. “Sodium acetate is the primary ingredient in Cheez™. It catalyzes all the important chemical reactions. Otherwise, you’ve just got a mess of drug solid.”
I spat out a little tinfoil and carefully wiped my mouth with my wrist. “What are you talking about?”
Barnaby did a quickstep of impatience. “For God’s sake, I’ve known fungal spores more observant than you are. How do you think Crunch, United, makes its Cheez™?”
My mouth was suddenly dry. That was the problem with Cheez™: it was manufactured to make you thirsty as hell for SodaWater™. “Chlorinated polyethylburitane mixed with crystallized glucolic acid and a suspension of liquid bicarbonate—” I began.
Barnaby interrupted me. “Makes pure Jump,” he finished. “It’s the sodium acetate that changes the whole chemical arrangement. Unfortunately, it is extremely bad for dental health.”
I closed my eyes. I opened them again. I tried to swallow. Couldn’t. Tried to spit. Couldn’t. “Barnaby.” Even my words sounded like they’d been run through a dust storm. “I need you to tell me what the fuck you are talking about. Okay? Can you do that for me?”
“Chlorinated polyethylburitane mixed with crystallized glucolic acid,” he said, very slowly, “and a suspension of liquid bicarbonate, compressed with high heat, makes the chemical composition tri-carbonated polyethylglycerol. Known on the street, variably, as Jump, Shake, Special-D, Hyper-Drive, High-Kick.”
“No!” I hadn’t meant to shout, but Barnaby leapt backward like he could duck the force of the word. “That’s impossible.”
“Of course it’s possible. I’ve seen it. I saw Billy Lou make the damn stuff a hundred times. He nearly blew off my beard half a dozen times before he got the solution right. That’s how I met him. I’d heard, you see, of a former chemist,” Barnaby said. “This was deep in the backlands, not far from the Pepsi–Little Rock Prison Camp—I could hear the construction of the pipeline whenever I tried to sleep. In only a few short weeks, Billy Lou had earned a reputation in the backlands. The dymophosphylase addicts—dimeheads, in your parlance—bragged that his was the best drug on the continent.”
I felt like I was freezing to death. Memories, snippets of old rumors, ideas started colliding crazy in my head, ping-ponging off one another like a bunch of swell-flies trying to beat it out of a bug zapper.
“But it wasn’t just shiver he cooked up. He’d been a chemistry teacher, before dissolution. Did you know that?”
I nodded. When Billy Lou was high, he used to tell old jokes that never meant anything to me, like, Don’t trust atom, they make up everything. Or: Does anyone know a joke about sodium? Na.
“Mr. Ropes had a nice little pharmacy still,” Barnaby said. “And with the money he made from selling his shiver, he’d set up quite a little trade. He had medications I hadn’t seen in forty years, along with the basics: sodium bicarbonate, acetaminophen, hydrochloric acid, various emetics. Some of it, I imagine, stolen from Crunch, United.”
For some reason, passages from the constitution kept touching off in my head. Work is of equal metaphoric but different literal value and compensation will be determined according to the latter. All crumbs shall be entitled to one twenty-minute lunch break and three ten-minute bathroom breaks per day, or be subject to the docking of their pay. Flip-flops are prohibited, as are topknots. But Billy Lou wasn’t fired for having a topknot or flip-flops.
Billy Lou Ropes was fired because he stole from the company store. Dymo, everyone said, or maybe that’s only what I heard, what we assumed, because of how Billy Lou was a dimehead, because of what happened when the Human Resources department stormed his squatbox, because of the stink of cooking shiver that cranked a hundred of Billy Lou’s neighbors into hysteria. Funny enough, it was because of the shiver he managed to give them the slip. All of those people, howling with high, stormed at the HR teams as soon as they crashed into Low Hill. That gave Billy Lou time to escape.
Almost like the whole thing was planned.
Almost like all along it wasn’t a great high he was after. But a diversion.
An escape.
“He got the reputation as a doctor of mercy, after he helped some poor parasitic man all riddled with fatal worms ease out of this life on a cloud of morphine. And he helped another, too, so heavy with tumors she could hardly lift her head. I thought he might agree to help me. I was, at that point, in near-constant pain. It had been years since I’d had company except for the skeletons in a former flu town just west of the Exxon-Mississippi. I know it’s not nice to speak ill of the dead, but even for skeletons they were an ugly lot, and of course conversation was entirely lacking. I had taken myself to the river with the thought of drowning, when, by chance, I overheard a group of body pickers mention Billy Lou. So I set out to find him.”
“You thought he would help you commit suicide?”
Barnaby looked down. “Mr. Ropes talked me into trying for a different end. He was close, he said, to cracking the mystery of a good friend’s death. A woman he’d loved, I think, though she was much younger than he was. I was like a father to her, he used to say. That was all right with me. I loved her. She was a good woman. A good mother. She’d had a son too. Poor boy. I understand he was left an orphan. I know what that’s like, and believe me, it’s no pail of nails for feasting.”
Barnaby didn’t notice how hard I was shaking. My teeth were clattering around like a moonshine addict’s with the tremens.
“He was convinced that she’d been murdered, killed by the Federal Corporation, after she discovered a discrepancy in the weight of the Cheez™ shipments.”
I was so dizzy I had to close my eyes. Fragments of data whip-scrolled through the dark of my imagining: her messages up the chain. The three-ounce difference she’d started recording, right about the time Production-22 was opening its first line. Sodium acetate was heavy. I knew that, too, from my first job as a hand crank. Remove it from the Cheez™ formula, and you’d get a weight difference. A small one, sure, but noticeable, especially in large shipments.
A difference of two ounces, or three.
“I thought it was conspiracy talk at first. He was still smoking shiver every night. And he’d started trying to unpuzzle the formula for a heavier street drug, a more powerful one. It turned the prefrontal cortex into a light display, and tweaked every neuron over a period of days, even weeks, before it passed out of the body. That’s what he said.
“He would get sober in the morning, and tinker in the afternoon, and dose himself in the evening. By night he would be raging, maudlin, incoherent, or all three. Once we even had to revive him, using a potent combination of Narcan, urine, and a pinch of tumorous poppy, which by luck we found growing out of the rotten corpses piled in an old chemical wasteland nearby. A whole field, actually, some of them eight-headed blossoms the exact shade of blood. It was quite beautiful.” Barnaby’s nostrils quivered, as if the smell of body rot were scenting the breeze even now. “It took him weeks to
get the balance right. But at last, he did.
“By then I had grown fond of him. I had spent hours watching his work. So that’s how I know exactly what made the final cut: chlorinated polyethylburitane, crystallized glucolic acid, and a suspension of liquid bicarbonate. Nothing more, nothing less. Poor Mr. Ropes.” Barnaby sighed. “I suppose he needed the high for courage. The very next day, he announced his plan for revenge on the Federal Corporation. I admit, a part of me envied him. He must have loved his friend very much, to have been willing to die for her memory. I’ve never loved anyone that much.”
I felt sick. I couldn’t sit down anymore. I needed to walk, to run, to puke, to do something. But as soon as I stood, vertigo punched me in the head and I had to lean against the side of the building.
It made a horrible kind of sense. The Federal Corporation had been manufacturing Jump all along—just like they’d manufactured dymophosphylase, gotten people hooked on shiver to ensure their product would always have high street value, then tried to sell them new product as a way of curing their addiction. It had all happened before. Just like Evaline said.
But this time, my ma had stumbled on the truth. Not the whole truth, maybe, but enough to make her dangerous. And Billy Lou was no idiot. He must of known from the start her death was no accident. He must of wondered what kind of product Crunch, United, was so eager to protect. How many ounces of Jump had we sent chugging out of Production-22? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?
He hadn’t come back to Production-22 for revenge. He came back to put a stop to it.
I couldn’t breathe. My heart was doing a cricket-hop toward my throat. I plunged my knuckles into my chest, kneading it down. Wrong. I’d been wrong about everything.
Barnaby squinted up at me. “Are you all right?”
“No,” I gasped out.
