Wally

by Rowan Massey

  “No, sorry.”

  My heart sunk. “What about your new dealer partner? Where does he live?”

  “I don’t know where he is,” he said, his face turning serious. “He just kind of disappeared while we were chasing down Ten Block all the way to the border. Might have got shot or something. I don’t know.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and he shrugged.

  “At least Rydel is still too sick to fight,” he said. “So he can’t die anytime soon. He’ll get better and work in a couple months maybe. And I’m sorry about Spitz. That kid shouldn’t have been in the battle. Fucking stupid. Does he even know how to shoot?”

  “No, of course not.”

  I sat up, feeling the smear of cum and lube I was dragging over his blanket. He didn’t notice.

  “I need to go to Doc’s lab and find some,” I said, picking up the clothes of Nando’s that I wanted to put on after a shower. I grabbed a towel, too. I would just walk to the bathroom with that on.

  “Yeah, your hair still smells like smoke. Do I smell too?” he asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. “Let’s shower together, babe.”

  He got up and pulled some clothes for himself out of a box under the bed along with some soap. We put towels around our waists and went to the bathroom holding hands.

  I was glad I’d trusted him. Sometimes relationships were weird and rough apparently. Maybe that was a part of growing up and learning. Nando seemed to be growing up too, since he hadn’t come back totally crazy and scary. In any case, I decided again that Doc was wrong about Nando.

  I watched him turn on the water in the same shower we’d first fooled around in, holding out his hand and waiting for it to warm up.

  “I love you,” I said, actually feeling it.

  He turned and grinned at me, even though it made his jaw twitched with pain. “I love you back, babe.”

  We hung our towels over the shower curtain and got in. He got under the stream of water first, and I washed his hair for him. We both washed his body with soapy hands. When it was my turn, he washed my hair, let me rinse it, then kissed me.

  “Hey babe, I wanted to tell you something I figured out today,” he said, getting his hands sudsy to wash my skin. “You know how I keep saying I lost myself and don’t know how to get myself back and all that?”

  “Yeah, I remember.” How could I not? He’d said it more often than just that one day.

  “Today, out there with my gun and all, I…it’s like I had this epiphany, you know? This is me. This was me all along.”

  I turned around so he could wash my back and ass for me.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I’m a killer.” His hands slid to my shoulders and stayed there. He stood close and talked into my ear. I could tell from his voice it was hard for him to share what he was saying. “It’s what I’m good at, besides chemistry. People notice that I’m good in a battle, and that’s what’s going to take me places, not books. I know I’ve killed the wrong people recently, and that’s…”

  He paused because I went stiff hearing him talk about Veronica and the other two, but he kept going after giving my shoulders a squeeze.

  “That’s different. I made mistakes,” he said quietly. “I can put this talent in the right place and defend our home, you know? I want to keep taking care of Emporium. We have a rare place to live here. This is where I can be important, and I feel like that’s always been me. I was born for it.”

  I nodded and turned to look at him. “You weren’t so crazy this time,” I said. “Was the battle not as bad?”

  “It was just different.” His eyes got distant and his brows lowered. “Didn’t last as long, and I was more in control. I didn’t get carried away. The whole time, I was focused on doing what needed doing. I was really in the zone. It actually felt great.”

  “Did you kill anyone?” I put my arms around his waist and hugged him. I knew what he would say, but I needed to know.

  “Maybe one guy. They were in armored trucks, so it wasn’t easy,” he said, giving my neck a light kiss. “And I was thinking about you the whole time. Like, what would happen to you if I died or Ten Block won? I think you helped me focus. But I was also pissed as hell. What were you doing at Red House?”

  “I just wanted to hang out near you,” I said, and buried my face against his neck, embarrassed. He’d said he’d had to save me, but I thought I’d saved him. I wasn’t sure which it was, but I wouldn’t argue. I was just glad he wasn’t blown to bits.

  “Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “You’re a handful sometimes.”

  But he hugged me tight, and I felt warmed up on the inside like I was getting poured full of love from him. He was a killer, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t imagine having any other boyfriend but him. He was turning into part of who I was; the fielder who had landed a job with the doc and started dating his dealer. Since he’d accepted who he was out there killing, maybe I was starting to realize who I was too, and he was part of that, just like I’d been part of what kept him in the zone.

  “I wish you could come with me to the lab,” I said, “but the security guys would freak.”

  He laughed. “Maybe one day. I’m dying to see that place.”

  “I have to go,” I said, squeezing him again.

  “Yeah, I know. I have a shift at the door anyway.”

  We got out, dried off, and dressed. I went back to the room to get my boots on and take my things from the pockets of my dirty pants. Nando and I kept catching each other’s eye and kissing.

  “Be careful out there,” he said before I went out the door. He was frowning with worry.

  “I’ll be fine,” I promised, and left the building.

  At the lab, I fed the mice and checked on their health as fast as I could. They were supposed to get two drops of a drug in their mouths every day once the real experiment started, and I was glad I didn’t have to deal with that yet. I sealed up the feed container and left the mouse area to poke around for fielders in Doc’s big, metal drug cabinets.

  I didn’t usually do anything with those cabinets. They weren’t inventoried like the cabinets and shelves with supplies in them. There were big, white pill bottles organized and labeled on eight shelves inside. I easily found the fielders, but then wasn’t sure what to take because there were dozens of bottles to choose from. He probably had some bad batches in there, and I didn’t know how to look that sort of thing up on his computer.

  Picking up a bottle randomly from halfway back on a shelf, I read the label and noticed the date. That would be the key. I had to remember back over a month ago when there were okay batches. Each batch could last the field a week or two. Trying to remember drops and bad crawls accurately, I pulled out a couple more bottles and found one from three months back. If I remembered right, it had been a good one.

  I opened the bottle and spilled a few pills into my hand, but I stopped, thinking about how shitty we’d all been feeling. If it was because the current versions were fucking with our heads, going back to an old version could fix it. Doc had basically been hiding an easy solution from me. Why would he do that? He was smart. He would have thought of it, but he didn’t want to help. That was the only explanation. He just didn’t want to help us, not really, not in the way we really wanted.

  Anger made me clench my teeth for the one second I hesitated before dumping half the bottle into my palm and pocketing the pills.

  It felt fucked up to steal from the lab, but I was too angry to care. I was about to steal something else too. I still needed a phone. Looking around the lab, I didn’t see anywhere I hadn’t poked around before. I needed to look somewhere else.

  I went upstairs, locking the lab door behind me, and went to the little table with the drawer he kept a gun in. When I opened it and saw a flip phone next to the gun, I was surprised. For some reason, it had been the first place I tried. Maybe it just made sense to keep a phone there, or maybe there was a memory buried in my brain that had made me look in the drawer.
In any case, I took it and checked the battery. It was about half full.

  Taking the scrap of paper with phone numbers on it Fiona had given me out of my pocket, I called her up.

  “Hello?” She sounded drained.

  “It’s me. How is he?”

  “The same. He hasn’t moved. Did you get the fielders?”

  “Yeah, I got it. I’m coming right over. We’ll take him out to the field right away and not wait for tonight. We can all dance, okay?”

  She sighed in relief.

  “Thank you,” she said, her voice shaking.

  I tried to say a few encouraging things before we hung up. Putting the phone in my jacket pocket, I headed back out. If the fielders I’d stolen worked like I thought they would, I’d confront Doc when he got back. I told myself to remember how I felt and not be as forgiving as I knew I would want to be if I got back to normal. I didn’t want to think he was a bad person like his brother, but everything was pointing to that. I had to protect all the fielders from what he might be doing. He couldn’t just experiment on us without any consequences, no matter how much of a big shot he thought he was.

  ◆◆◆

  The three of us felt weird going out to the field in broad daylight to dance on our own. It felt wrong and gave me a little thrill at the same time. I was doing my own thing. I’d stolen from the doc, and it felt daring.

  Spitz was a zombie as he took his fielders and even while the crawls did what they do. His face twisted, but he didn’t make a sound.

  Then, I was a piece of blue dust floating around the world, visiting every home. Babies were born, old men crumpled over from age, women gossiped, war was waged, children died of starvation, and the sun disappeared forever in some places, never went away in others. I was there for all of it.

  When I came back to myself on the field, I was still flying inside. I felt like hugging the world, but I ran and hugged Fiona instead. She was laughing for no reason, and loudly.

  “My trip was fucking hilarious!” she told me. “Oh god, I’ll never stop laughing!”

  I couldn’t help laughing with her, even though I didn’t know what was funny, until it snowballed and we were both bent over in pain. She collapsed onto the ground, holding her sides and crying, but still laughing.

  Spitz came out of it, and we were too busy laughing ourselves into insanity to notice. He tackled us with a big grin and tickled Fiona until she was spazzing out and screaming for mercy. I watched them, feeling extremely satisfied with myself. This was the sort of thing I’d imagined when Fiona had become a fielder. We were back. I was right about Doc being a dick. The old fielders had brought us back in the best way possible.

  It was still daylight, and the field was empty. Once we got our shit together, we decided to go find someplace that was open and get some food. We took turns pedaling the cart through the mostly empty streets because we discovered it was really fun to stand up in the cart while it was moving, and we each wanted turns. Me and Spitz whooped and yelled, pretending we were driving a chariot, making idiots of ourselves and probably scaring people who had locked themselves up all freaked out in their apartments.

  When we found an open stew kitchen and stopped to eat, we finally quit acting silly so that we could eat, but I didn’t stop feeling amazing. I’d forgotten what a ten really felt like.

  “Guys,” I said, “great batch, right?”

  “No kidding,” Spitz said, food in his mouth. “I was ready to kill myself.”

  Earlier that day, we would have gone serious hearing him say that, but now we knew it was over and didn’t matter anymore.

  “What happened out there?” Fiona asked.

  “Well…” Spitz cleared the food out of his mouth and leaned his elbows on the metal table. “My boss showed up and gave me a gun, saying, you know, time to go fight. You just got a promotion. So I went out there, but I didn’t know what to do. I just shot the gun where other people were shooting. It sucked. I was scared to death so I went and hid somewhere. I only had three bullets left. But I saw guys getting shot. People died. It’s not like dying on the field…”

  “I saw people who’d been shot in Red House,” I told him, poking at the gross stew in front of me. Those memories seemed far away. “It’s crazy how different it is.”

  Spitz nodded. “Yeah, I went home when it was over. There were a lot of houses burning out there. They threw fire and bombs all over the place.”

  “Wow,” Fiona said, shaking her head. “You’re my badass boyfriend now. Didn’t know what I was signing up for.”

  She was teasing, and Spitz gave her a kick under the table, making her grin.

  “This batch worked better for a reason, I think,” I said, and I told them what I suspected Doc was doing to us. It made them about as serious as they could be considering we still felt so good.

  “Ask him not to,” Fiona said, like it could be that simple.

  “I’ll talk to him when he gets back,” I promised. “I stole a lot of pills, so we’re good for now. All I want to do is go back to being a normal fielder again. I’ll do the job until Doc gets back because he really needs me to, but after that, I might quit and just go back to being happy.”

  They both nodded, agreeing that it made sense, but I knew it would be more complicated than that. If Doc didn’t give the field good batches again, I’d be screwed no matter what. There were only a certain amount of pills to steal from that cabinet.

  I would worry about it another day. Right then, I wanted to enjoy my ten and my family.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Five Days Later

  “Wow…Spitz…” What else could I say? Spitz and Fiona had come to me and Nando’s because we’d decided to try going to eat before dancing instead of after, but my best friend had on a black jacket with a red bandanna tied around his arm. His blue baseball cap had gotten replaced with a dark red skull cap. He didn’t look like himself.

  “He’s still my Spitz,” Fiona said with a forced smile. She gave Spitz a side hug. They were sitting on the end of the cart, Nando and I looking down at them.

  “You even have your gun holster,” Nando said, pointing at Spitz’s waist.

  I hadn’t noticed because he had it twisted around to the back, maybe to hide it from me. Spitz stood up and adjusted it to hang at his side like it was supposed to, looking shy about it.

  “I’m still a shitty shot,” he said.

  “Wow,” I said again. Nando elbowed me. “I mean, do you like it?” I asked.

  Spitz shrugged one shoulder. “It’s supposed to be just in case and to make the town look good. I’m still doing the same job.”

  “Well, I’m not,” Nando said proudly, crossing his arms and smiling crooked. He’d started smiling sideways in the past few days. He said it hurt less that way. “Did Wally tell you guys why I wasn’t on the field last night? I’ve got a job on the river. I’m a sentry. Can you believe it? I impressed people in the battle, and they have me training to eventually be a sentry leader. That means being a god damned boss over maybe ten guys or even more. It’s right next to the drug factories too. I got a tour of the inside and everything.”

  “Cool,” Fiona said, “does that mean you can work in the factory one day like you want to?”

  He smiled wider. “Maybe. I don’t know. Anything could happen.”

  “Well, you guys go ahead and be ambitious,” I said. “I’m just glad I’m back to being a real fielder.”

  I’d been spending two hours tops at the lab since Doc had left for New York, and the rest of my time was spent with other fielders. I had enough money for myself, getting paid by the security men, but I scrounged for plastic with friends anyway. My life revolved around being at the field every night, cutting heads before I went dancing myself, and coming off the field feeling like perfection. Without Doc on my ass about showering and being tidy, I’d gone back to being a little bit grubby. I didn’t give a shit about anyone anywhere seeing who I was when my bloody head and blue star tat was showing.
I loved who I was.

  Nando put an arm around my shoulders.

  “You mean running around like a little rat,” he said, and gave me a teasing shake. I smiled and bit my lip. He’d been calling me that, and I liked it. It was his pet name for me. We’d been acting extra romantic. I was his little rat and he was my warrior. I leaned my head on his shoulder, so fucking proud of him.

  “So Doc is back now?” Spitz asked. I rolled my eyes and nodded.

  “Yeah, now I have to actually work again,” I said, twisting my lips. I’d texted Spitz earlier in the day when Doc had asked me to go to the safe house and help him take care of Jace and the other guy, who turned out to be his boyfriend. All I’d done was make them sandwiches. I could tell they expected me to be a rude asshole like when we’d first met, but I was feeling like myself and didn’t care about them having the bunker and all that. It was embarrassing and seemed silly that I’d ever gotten jealous.

  “That sucks,” Fiona said. “Are you going to ask him about the fielder stuff?”

  “He’s really going crazy with work. I’ll have to catch him when he has a minute,” I said.

  Actually, Doc had come back looking like hell, and I couldn’t know what he’d been through in Manhattan, so I hadn’t asked questions or gotten mad about the fielders. I still had plenty of fielders I could steal, and I would ask for answers when he wasn’t working hard on two projects at once. He was really worried about the poor sick guy. I could tell how freaked out Doc was that Jace might die, and I felt sorry for him.

  My phone vibrated, and I took it out of my pocket and made a face at it. Doc had sent a text asking me to show up to the field early. I couldn’t imagine why. I could text back and ask or just say yes and do it. I’d end up doing it anyway.

  Nando was telling Spitz and Fiona about his job. I turned away from them to answer Doc and tell him I’d be there.

  “I gotta go,” I said as I hit send. “Doc wants me on the field early for some reason.”

  “You’re kidding,” Nando whined, and he kicked at the ground.