Wally

by Rowan Massey

  Such a Colorful Feeling Book Two: Wally

  Copyright © 2019 by Rowan Massey

  Cover Design by James, GoOnWrite.com

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For information contact : RowanMassey.com

  ASIN: B07XM4G8X7

  For more about the author, please visit RowanMassey.com.

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  Look at the end of this ebook for the first chapter of the next book in the series!

  Such a Colorful Feeling

  Book Two: Wally

  By Rowan Massey

  PART ONE

  Most people thought our drug made us into freaks, but I say it made us happier than any other bunch of freaks in the world.

  Chapter One

  I always smiled as soon as we could see down the street to the edges of the crowd at our field. I couldn’t help it. It got me pumped up every single night. I ran and jumped around ahead of Spitz, my best friend. My heavy backpack banging against my back, I jogged towards the field until he yelled my name and made me turn back. I waited for him to catch up, then hopped in circles around him, being annoying on purpose. He was always more tired than me, even though we ate the same amount of food and did the exact same things every day together.

  Most people who come to the field are teenagers like us, but there are all sorts. Emporium was the first town to get fielders and the only one that still has hundreds of users. I’m proud of that. I was with the very first people to try it, back when I was twelve. Not many people from those days were alive three years later. They died. But me and Spitz were alive and loving every minute.

  “Wally,” Spitz poked my arm. “Look.”

  There were dead bodies under the last streetlight before the field. They were laid out by the crossroads and had the usual rubber-necking audience.

  “Not before we dance,” I said. “It’s a downer right now.”

  Fielders don’t get sad, not like other people, but at the end of the day, right before it’s time to go dance, I get a feeling sometimes, as if I’m walking just slightly downhill emotionally.

  I noticed a little group of tourists setting up folding chairs for themselves. God, they were awful. They came just to watch us dance with our faces dripping blood. They were always in their twenties; the kind of people who had a car to come in from all over the country. I couldn’t figure what could be so great about their lives—money or whatever—that they came all the way here to watch, but still resisted joining in.

  “They have no idea what they’re missing,” Spitz said beside me, reading my thoughts. I looked over at him. He was fifteen like me, equally skinny and filthy, but with blond hair. Poor guy wasn’t as good-looking as me either. We had similar piercings on our noses, eyebrows, ears, and lips; homemade loop things made of copper wire. We also had blue five-pointed star tats. My star was on my throat so that it moved when I swallowed. His was on his wrist. We’d done them ourselves, borrowing a homemade tattoo gun from a friend. They were our gifts to each other.

  “Poor fuckers,” I said, and I honestly felt sorry for the tourists, even if they did have clean clothes and cool headphones.

  “We could stand around all day explaining why one hour on fielders is better than living ten years without it. They won’t get it,” Spitz said.

  “Fucking sad.”

  It was all a repetition of things we’d said for years, but sometimes tourists just got to us like that, and we had to say it all again. That wasn’t really why he looked down on them, I knew. His girlfriend wasn’t a fielder, and he didn’t care about that. It was because they treated us like freaks.

  One of the tourists took a boombox out of a bag, put it on an overturned crate, and turned it on. I flinched. Spitz cringed beside me. The noise was tinny and terrible. I didn’t know the song and didn’t care.

  I ran at them like an angry bull, but I wasn’t really angry, just a little annoyed and very hyper. I was about to have some fun. Put on a little show. I was grinning my face off. As soon as I reached the speaker, I picked it up and smashed it down against the concrete in one satisfying motion. The music cut out.

  A girl in their group squeaked and hurried over to her boyfriend to hide behind him. Spitz showed up beside me, screaming like a warrior. He jumped into the air and landed on the broken pieces, smashing it more. I joined him, and we jostled each other like in a mosh pit, trying to be the one to give it more stomps with the heels of our shoes, and then kick the last of the bigger pieces.

  When Spitz slipped on a chunk of metal and fell, I laughed loud and gave him a little kick because he was about to attack me. He hated being laughed at. The kick was a preemptive strike. He grabbed my leg, and we struggled until I gave up and let him yank me onto the ground. I always gave up. He needed the ego boost, and I didn’t give a shit who won, so it all worked out.

  Everybody should know fielders don’t like music where they’re trying to dance. We have epic music going in our heads when we’re high, and playing it on speakers just throws off everyone’s fun. It was unbelievable these fuckers came all the way to see us and didn’t know that. We didn’t need music, lots of sex, multiple kinds of drugs in one day, families, jobs, school, or any of that normal shit because we had something so much better. Everybody thought we were just dead kids walking, but we’d found the cure to all the bad things in life. We were more alive than anyone and having ten times more fun.

  “Ooh! And there they go! Suck it!” I yelled. The tourists were fucking off fast. I couldn’t help laughing. “Hurry or I’m stuffing fielders down all of your throats, and you’ll thank me!”

  “Eat a dick!” Spitz added.

  Laughing and whooping, we sat on the ground for a few minutes, panting. They’d cleared the trash out of the spot only to have us steal it from them, which made me grin. Calories didn’t come easy for us, and even I got super tired after horsing around.

  As soon as I caught my breath, I wanted to get out there and go dance, so I punched Spitz’s chest until he growled and got up. We scanned the place for our dealers as we walked. It was annoying the way they wandered around. They could pick a spot and get a line going like normal dealers, but they always got bored or something.

  The field was big. It was on top of a flattened hill in the middle of Emporium. A small patch of woods on one side, city lights on the other, evening sky overhead: no place like home.

  The crowd was only milling around so far, even though a few people were usually already dancing around the bright light poles that the volunteers had put down the middle. People banged each other up less if they could see while they were out of it.

  I got distracted a few times, looking to see which of our friends had already showed up, and checking out some of the hot tourists. Spitz had to pull on my sleeve to make me keep going.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Spitz said, and pointed.

  Over near a clump of trees, two guys in gang colors were talking to a bunch of fielders. Did we have new dealers again? It didn’t happen often.

  One of the guys wearing Dread Red’s red and black gang colors was around our age, maybe sixteen. That was really young for a dealer on the field. It was an important tourist attraction to our mayor, so it was a job for the best of th
e best. He had ridiculously sexy, curly hair, a crooked jaw, and when I got closer, I saw dark eyelashes and a nice body under his puffy black jacket. Damn, he was hot. I felt like drooling, and I knew I was staring. I noticed his gun wasn’t holstered at his belt. It was in a shoulder holster that looked like it was homemade using a seatbelt. I could tell he’d put a lot of effort into it. He raised his hands in a gesture of innocence, and I saw the tats covering his knuckles. His only piercings were in his ears.

  “Jesus Christ,” Spitz said, close to my ear. “Looks like you found your newest crush.”

  He’d noticed my staring. I elbowed him and edged closer so that we could listen to the conversation.

  “We’re gonna wait,” one of the fielders was saying. She was a short girl with three piercings in her bottom lip. “We don’t know you. Nobody told us we were getting new dealers.”

  “True, true,” said the other dealer. He was a tall black guy with an afro that had gone past sticking straight up and was growing down over his shoulders. “But if you don’t wanna die tonight, you buy from us. We’re the only ones showing up. The old guys got themselves shot.” He shrugged, holding his arms out wide. “What’re you gonna do. We’re your dealers now, kid.”

  “Well, I’m sure as fuck not going first,” said the guy beside her, and the others nodded their heads.

  We weren’t the only ones listening in on the conversation, and others seemed to be waiting around and watching, waiting. Spitz and I had been through this kind of thing before. We had dealers who took their jobs very seriously because the mayor thought we were important, like I said, but that also meant we were all used to having the same guys, who we knew almost like friends, for up to a year at a time. But I’d been around a long time and knew how to make the transition easier. People knew me and Spitz had been fielders from day one. They trusted us.

  I stepped forward, sensing Spitz right behind me, and grinned at the hot one.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Nando,” he said, and I thought I saw him check me out, his eyes traveling down my body. “This is Rydel.”

  “I’m Wally. This is Spitz. We’ve been around since literally day one.”

  Rydel laughed, his voice deep. He was at least twenty years old; a grown adult. “Look over here,” he said in a teasing voice, “they’re the original blood babies!”

  Spitz laughed. There were a lot of things people called fielders, and that was one of his favorites for some reason.

  So,” I said, “show us the pills.”

  Nando seemed relieved and immediately got his dispenser out. It was a metal tube of pills they used to make sure they didn’t give somebody more than they were supposed to when things got busy. It was a lot like a PEZ dispenser. He thumbed the trigger on it and dropped one into my palm. It was blue, like fielders always were. I rolled it between my fingers. It had the same thickness as the last several weeks, and the five-pointed star stamped on one side matched every fielder I’d ever taken.

  “Looks legit,” I said, smiling. I swayed in a flirtatious twist when I stuck out my tongue and took it. Nando smirked at me.

  Spitz got out our fifty cents and handed it over to the black guy, who was holding his hand out, making the gesture for money, but Nando took two nickles out of Rydel’s palm and gave it back to us.

  “Thanks for trusting us,” he said. “Tonight, I deem you king of the field.”

  It was a silly thing to say, and I laughed. He was smiling at me in a nice way that made my guts warm up.

  “Sweet,” Spitz said under his breath, pocketing the money.

  I looked around at the other fielders. A few were getting money out of their pockets, others looked like they might wait and see how we reacted. I wondered how long Nando and Rydel had been trying to convince everyone their drugs were from the same old source. I didn’t know why people were so paranoid. We got out of the way so they could buy their fielders.

  “Have a good time,” Nando said to me before turning away to do his job.

  Spitz and I headed towards the middle of the field where we were less likely to wander into the streets or dance into the trees. Before we got far, one of the newer fielders, a kid who was around thirteen, called our names.

  “Hey guys!” he shouted, running up to us. “Um, that old guy, uh…” he looked up at a tree, trying to think. The gold stud in his nose twitched. “The volunteer with all the questions. You know.”

  “The Indian doctor,” Spitz said, already rolling his eyes.

  “Him. He was looking for you two. Went that way.” He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder.

  “If you see him again, tell him we died,” Spitz joked.

  “Don’t tell him that,” I said, holding a hand up. The old guy wasn’t that bad, and I didn’t want anyone to think we were dead.

  “Tell him we might be dead,” Spitz said, and I hit him in the side. He just laughed.

  “We’ll talk to him after we dance. We already took our pills.”

  We turned and went on our way, but Spitz stopped, hissed, and started slapping his hands onto his head. I heard his teeth clack together with each hard thump.

  “Is it bad?” I asked, meaning worse than usual. He groaned loudly, and didn’t answer. That meant it was pretty bad.

  Then I felt it too. It was hell. I felt like vomiting. I scratched my fingernails over my cheek. Sometimes things were rough when the fielders kicked in. A creepy, crawling feeling would come out of nowhere, scraping the inside of your brain, and only pain could distract the monster. It crawled through my eye socket, and I pictured taking an ice pick and stabbing it into my head to scrape the beast out. The urge to stab my head with anything at all jerked at my whole body. I didn’t want the crawls all over my face. Dealing with it on the inside was bad enough.

  “Veronica. Do you see her? Where is she?” Spitz was stumbling and turning in circles, looking for our friend who always had a razor. If we couldn’t find someone with a razor, we’d use our knives, but that would leave worse cuts. We’d made ourselves throw our razor out when we spotted rust on it again two days back. No amount of careful sharpening had saved it.

  “Veronica!” My scream scraped at my throat, and I sounded bat shit to my own ears.

  “Wally! Over here!” I whirled toward the friendly sound, so did Spitz, and we ran towards her, gripping our heads, falling onto our knees, getting back up.

  Veronica was a tall brunette and a lot older than us. She’d been a fielder as long as we had. We both got to our knees in a hurry, facing her. She was sitting on a big, white bucket. We crowded each other to be first. She’d gotten her razor out as soon as she saw us and now ran a hand over my long, scraggly hair to get it out of the way, following her fingers up with a nice, stinging cut. I felt a trickle of blood cooling as it ran down my forehead. The small relief was everything.

  She cut Spitz next. I stayed kneeling, rubbing up and down the cut with my fingernail, like I was worshiping her in church, making the sign of the cross. When it was my turn again, I said some kind of thanks but was focused on that razor’s bite as she sliced into my head again.

  “You’re basically my goddess right now,” I told her, eyes half open, when she moved her hands over to Spitz again.

  “You would be my goddess too, but my girlfriend wouldn’t like it,” Spitz said, and Veronica smiled.

  Two more cuts each, and we were good. The crawling was turning into just a prickle. I could feel the happy part coming on. Life seemed better than ever. Veronica got out a cloth and dumped rubbing alcohol on it before cleaning the blade. She was good about that, since she did it for a lot of people with the same razor. She could get the alcohol free from the volunteers. She didn’t have to ask Spitz and I when it came to sharing a blade. We were together every minute of every day, and we would die together too if we could manage it.

  Spitz and I grabbed at each other to steady ourselves as we got up. Streaks of blood ran down his face all the way to his chin. I touched my own chi
n and it came away wet. She always knew the right pressure to use, like a surgeon.

  “I’m gonna watch you dance tonight, Wally,” she said. “You were all over the place last night.”

  “I was?”

  Her name was shouted out from the crowd, and she yelled back as loudly as she could, making my ears ring.

  “See you later,” I said, but she was distracted.

  We were distracted too. I didn’t want to be on the edge of the crowd when it hit. I’d end up in the middle of a street or something.

  We made our way to a spot in the field where bodies were close, and a lot more faces were streaked with blood, looking wide-eyed at the empty sky. Some people must have had pills from another day, or else taken them right after we did. I used to check the crowd for how many cut up people there seemed to be, so I’d be prepared for the crawls, but it had stopped mattering to me a long time ago.

  The dancing around us was awesome!

  Oh god, I loved it. I couldn’t wait. Everybody moved differently. Scary fast, slow as a snail, smooth, in flashes, all of them looking up at the sky. I loved the sound of them panting, giggling, stomping, and the rest of the crowd talking, shouting, and laughing.

  A girl flung her long, bloodied hair in our faces. We looked at each other in a heartbeat moment of not knowing how to react, then burst out laughing. That was living on the field. It was going to be a nice night. Every night was nice, and I felt lucky. So lucky.

  Spitz made a sharp sound beside me, and his head tipped back. I let him go so he could start swaying to his music. I waited for my own music, standing still, watching the insane dancing.

  Violin! Skilled and sweet.

  Kick drum!

  I was intensely aware of my fingers and toes. My face tingled and felt chilled. An orchestra soared so loud my ears roared, and the drums made me flinch, then shiver. I looked up, and the sky was in love with me, asking me to join it.