“Juno,” Deluski called. “You better get up here.”
My legs obeyed and started moving to catch up, my gaze slow to unlock from the beggar. What are you?
I stumbled over a clod of mud and forced my attention forward. Evie was standing next to another young boy with a lase-rifle hanging across his chest. Maggie and Deluski faced them, Maggie digging into her wallet. “He wants money.”
“Who is he?”
Evie said, “You have to pay to leave town to the north.”
The kid waited with crossed arms, one elbow resting on the weapon’s butt, the other on the barrel. His shirtsleeves were cut off, a scar tattoo of the letter Z raised on his arm, the scar tissue too perfectly lined to be made by anything other than a branding iron. I looked left, through the open window of a dance hall. Music played loudly, and a dozen armed boys sat at long tables with longer stares.
A pair of boys not much older than Evie came out squaring berets on their heads. General Z’s soldiers. They joined ranks with the first boy.
Maggie handed the kid a bill. He looked at the denomination and shook his head. Maggie added a second. And a third. He still shook his head.
Maggie pulled out yet another bill but Evie stopped her. “That’s enough.”
The soldier boy stayed where he was. Hand out. Waiting for more. Evie took his hand, closed his fingers around the money, and told him to quit. She put her hands on his hip and pushed. He resisted with a straight face and rigid body. She drove with her legs until he finally tipped. He caught his balance and swung the gun around. “I want more money!”
We froze. Maggie, Deluski, and I were caught in the sights of a pubescent punk playing soldier.
Evie took Maggie’s hand and told her to come. “You paid enough. He’s just playin’.”
Didn’t look like he was playing.
Evie pulled Maggie’s arm, “C’mon.” Maggie took a tentative step, and another, me and Deluski following in her cautious footsteps. I felt an uneasy sickness in my chest. We were foreigners here. Didn’t know the players, didn’t know the rules. Foreigners.
Another beggar approached, this one a child, a protruding bump under his shirt, head shaved bald with some kind of input jack embedded in the center. Christ. Where the fuck were we?
My head swam, anxiety creeping up from my chest and settling around my throat. I pulled the lase-blade handle tucked into my belt, held it tight in my fingers, thumb perched on the button. Deluski paused for a moment to give the kid some money, put it in the kid’s pincer-claw hand.
With my nerves now on razors, I kept moving, eyes bouncing left and right, watching, waiting for the next mind fuck. An occasional truck passed, workers standing upright in the truck bed, their clothes stained from a grueling day in the poppy fields. We passed homes with barred windows, guards sitting out front, resting on tipped-back chairs, weapons slung from their shoulders, glum frowns slung from their chins.
We reached the edge of town, the last streetlight falling behind us, the pitch black darkness a relief to my overloaded senses. Maggie passed her flashlight to our guide. To me she asked, “Can you see all right back there?”
I kept my eyes aimed up ahead, where Evie and Deluski lit the way. “I’m good.”
* * *
We crunched our way up the trail, weeds and dead branches snapping underfoot. We’d ditched the road as soon as we’d left town. Told Evie we didn’t want to be seen, asked her if there was a back way.
The jungle trail was rough going. According to Evie, it wasn’t used much, not since the road was built. We tripped through vines and scrub, my lase-blade slicing through the worst. We tramped through streams, pushed through brambles. My thorn-scratched, bug-bitten skin itched in a thousand places. Bug spray didn’t do shit in deep jungle.
The unmistakable roar of a flyer sounded up ahead. We were close. I covered my ears as the grumbling bellow passed overhead, foliage whipping in the wind. I dumbly looked up, caught a shower of sappy detritus in my hair, my eyes, down my shirt. I coughed and spat, shook shit out of my shirt.
Flashlights and laughter, both aimed at me.
I wiped my face with my empty sleeve. A too rare smile broke on my face as I had a good laugh at myself, first time since forever ago. Evie and Maggie brushed flakes of I-didn’t-know-what out of my hair while I winced against the pain of my burned scalp.
On the move again, Evie led the way until the bush finally thinned and opened onto an open field, where a pair of lamp poles dropped cones of light on a broad swath of poppies. We stayed low, flashlights off, watching for activity.
A building sat in the middle of the field, surrounded by several shacks. A two-wheeled track led to the road we’d avoided. A sizable group of people worked the far side of the field, canisters on their backs, sprayers in hand, rags tied over their mouths.
I scanned for guards, scoped five in total, two monitoring the workers, three more patrolling near the main building, a two-story structure constructed of slats and poles under an open-air thatch roof.
I asked Evie, “Is that General Z’s headquarters?”
“This ain’t no headquarters.” She laughed. “It’s just the doc’s clinic. Z runs whole villages up north. I portered a trip up there once.”
“You’re a porter?”
“My cousin is. He took me along as more of a runner. I don’t eat much so it don’t cost much to bring me.”
“Ever seen General Z?”
She nodded. “He comes to Yepala sometimes to meet with his lieutenants and the sheriff.”
“Who is the sheriff?”
“Carlos Aceves. He’s a mean man. You watch out for him. He always wears a panama hat. He and the doctor are friends, which is why he lets the doctor have his clinic here.”
“What kind of clinic is it?” asked Deluski.
She didn’t have an answer for that.
Maggie took a seat in the weeds. “That flyer we heard heading south—think the doctor was on it?”
“Probably. He’s always going back and forth to Koba.”
I dropped down next to Maggie. Might take awhile for that last group of workers to call it quits. According to Evie, they’d walk the road until they passed the mud, to meet a truck that could take them the rest of the way back to town.
Deluski and Evie sat down, Evie right next to Maggie. “Can I see your earrings?” Her tough-girl voice had been replaced by something softer and sweeter.
Maggie pulled them out of her ears and passed them to Evie, who held them low to the ground before turning on a flashlight. “They’re real pretty. Is that gold?”
“Yes.”
“What about the stones?”
“Emeralds.”
“They match your eyes. How’d they get so green?”
“They’re not my original eyes. I was born with brown eyes, just like you.”
Evie hung the earrings on a branching weed and studied how they dangled.
I turned my attention to the poppy field. Slowly, the workers peeled off, dropping their spray cans at one of the sheds and heading for the two-track road where a small gathering formed.
Evie took the earrings off the weed hanger and made to give them back but Maggie put up a hand. “You can keep them.”
“No. They’re too nice.”
“The way you’ve helped us, you deserve something nice.”
Evie forced them into Maggie’s hand. “Somebody would try to steal them by cutting off my ears.” Tough girl was back.
Workers continued to quit, my heart rate climbing as they did. Sneaking in there was going to be tough. Too much open space, and too many guards.
The last few workers headed in, the field lights flicking off right afterward. The compound, however, was still bathed in yellow as workers started to file down the road.
As a group, we moved into the poppy field and slowly started across. The deep dark made it difficult to pick our way through ragged rows of poppy plants, black leaves and stems and pods reaching up fr
om blacker earth. We detoured around the lamp poles, afraid somebody would turn them back on.
Maggie whispered, “This is as far as you go, Evie.”
I counted off some bills for her. “First sign of trouble, you go back the way you came.”
“Got it.”
We crept forward. Only three guards left. The other two were escorting the workers down the road.
We made our crouched approach, slithering through and around the poppies, our goal a wide stack of black tar bricks. Three guards, none looking this way. They were boys, young teens. General Z’s army was a children’s brigade. I doubted many survived long enough to be men.
We slipped behind the stack of bricks and peeked over them and around the side. I grabbed Maggie’s wrist, put my half-arm on Deluski’s shoulder. “You sure you want to do this?”
They both nodded. We had to know what was going on in there, had to know what game Mota, Panama, and the doctor were playing.
We had no choice but to break in and see with our own eyes. The local authorities wouldn’t help. Panama ran YOP.
The planetary authorities wouldn’t help either. This was General Z’s territory, a lawless expanse of jungle villages and O fields. The Lagartan army would never tame this region. Truth was, the pols didn’t want them to. Crush the narco-state and they’d have to stop milking the Unified Worlds for drug enforcement money, which they siphoned into their own pockets.
The three guards stood in a group, close enough that we could hear them chatting. We snuck from one stack of tar bricks to the next, approaching closer and closer, the first shed a few meters away. I looked at the main building. The windows, most of which were dark, were now in plain view. I checked the lighted ones, searching for moving shadows and prying eyes. All I found was eerie stillness.
Deluski led us toward the next cover, a low-to-the-ground enclosure of tarps and hand-hewn wood poles. We crawled over hoses to the enclosure’s edge. The clinic was a short distance ahead.
I moved around the enclosure, my shoulder getting wet as it brushed against the dewy tarp. What the hell was in there? “Wait,” I whispered to Deluski. I pulled my lase-blade, held it close to the ground, and flicked it on. I stayed hunched above the blade to block the light, fiery heat baking my chest and chin. I sliced into the tarp, a good-sized gash, and I spread the opening wide, using the light of my blade to peer through.
Dirt. Rocks. Sprawling squash vines. A garden?
I saw something move. Barely. I strained to see in the red light, spotted it again. A burrowing shell. I could see more of them now, lots of them, coin-sized shells dragging sluggishly across the dirt, along the squash vines and leaves.
Deluski tapped my shoulder. “See anything?”
I turned off the blade. “Snails.”
“Like the ones we saw at the gay bar?”
“I think so.”
Maggie elbowed me. “What were you guys doing at a gay bar?”
Deluski peeked around the side. “Let’s go. The guards are heading for one of the sheds.” We dashed behind the clinic, pressed ourselves into the wall. We hustled down its length, stopping at the first doorway, a shutter on hinges.
Maggie pushed open the shutter and we were inside, stealing down an empty hall, weapons-first. Humming lights fluctuated to the sound of an unseen generator. As we went forward, our legs were tickled by ivy and ferns that grew through cracks in the wood plank floors. An unoccupied desk came into view, and we stepped up to it. Maggie put her free hand on the seat. “Warm.”
We waited, listening. My heartbeat sounded in my ears. A toilet flushed. We followed the sound to a curtained doorway and stopped to surround it. A hand swept the curtain aside and a guard came through. Maggie and Deluski plugged his ears with lase-pistols.
“Drop to the floor,” I ordered. “Kiss the wood.”
The kid spread his hands and slow-moed down.
I pushed my heel between his shoulder blades, my toes pressing his head into the floorboards like it was a gas pedal. “Kiss it.”
I could feel the punk’s lungs rising under my heel, quick puffs up and down. His head went all the way down, lips on wood. I lifted my shoe so Deluski could relieve him of his weapon and frisk the little shit.
I put my foot back where it was. “How many guards?”
“Four,” he said, his voice cracking midword. I couldn’t tell if it was distress or puberty that frogged it. “Three outside and me.”
“Who else?”
“A nurse.”
“What about the doc?”
“He left, took a flyer to Koba.”
“Just one nurse?”
He nodded, his face mashing into the floorboards.
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
I put some extra weight on my foot.
“Upstairs somewhere,” he wheezed. “He makes rounds.”
“Does he come this way?”
“Sometimes.”
“Armed?”
“No.”
I let up. “Call him.”
“Manny.”
“Louder.”
“Manny! Get down here.”
Maggie and Deluski waited by the stairs. The ceiling creaked overhead. I looked up and followed the trail of whining planks to the staircase, shoes clomping down. He reached the bottom, stunned eyes sizing up me and my piece. He was built like a gym rat, his head shaved bald as a bent knee. Dark-skinned biceps squeezed out of a tight-fitting tee tucked into belted designer pants. He wore rubber gloves on his hands.
Maggie and Deluski closed in on either side of him. He froze except for a quivering lip.
Maggie waved her weapon at him. “What’s going on here?”
He hesitated, eyes clicking through his options. Deluski accelerated the decision making with a quick crack to the skull.
“A clinic,” he blurted. “It’s a clinic.” He rubbed his head with his gloved hand, checked his palm for blood. “What did you do that for?”
“What kind of clinic?”
“Listen, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. This shit’s not exactly a secret around here, but you best go see for yourselves.” He hiked a thumb at the stairs and rubbed his head again.
Maggie, Deluski, and I traded glances. Nods all around. Maggie told him to give us the tour.
We filed upstairs, all five of us. I kept my piece buried in the kid’s kidney. Deluski stayed with Nurse Manny, a fistful of the nurse’s tee bunched in one hand, weapon in the other, gun barrel stabbed into Manny’s spine.
We stepped down a short hallway, passing a room with a single bed on the left. “That’s the doc’s room,” said Manny. “My room is way over on the other side.”
Iguanas scuffled overhead, the rafters dotted with nests made from stolen fronds in the thatch roofing. We entered a long room, beds lined up barracks-style. We walked down the wide center aisle, my brain struggling to comprehend.
Maggie wandered, slack-jawed, her weapon hanging by her hip. She made to talk but her mouth just opened and closed like that of a dazed fish dying on a boat’s floor. Pigment had drained from Deluski’s face, his sand-colored skin turning a sickly olive.
My head spun, drunk on this fucked-up horror show. I felt ready to tip over. I drilled my piece deeper into my charge’s side, made him wince and bite his lip. I kicked his legs from behind. “Get down.”
Deluski ordered Nurse Manny down and looked for a place to sit, wobbly legs carrying him to the foot of an unoccupied bed.
I closed my eyes, just long enough to wish it all away. I opened them back up knowing it wouldn’t be gone. They were still here. The man lying naked on his back, a quadruple amputee, six black insect legs coming from his torso and scrabbling at the air like an upended beetle’s. The woman with air tanks for legs, hoses running from her metal thighs directly into her chest. The man encased in a bug shell, his face mostly hidden behind a chitinous mandible. The I-didn’t-know-what lying in a bath, skin looking like gray rubber, a triangl
e of thick gray flesh hanging over the rim.
A fucking fin.
One of them moved. Three weapons took aim. She slipped out of bed with a thump. Her legs had been shortened, no knees or feet, the skin of her thighs covered with dense, thick fur. She started into an ungainly, stump-legged crawl.
“Don’t mind her,” said the facedown nurse, his bald head raised off the floor. “She’s just going to the bathroom.”
She humped and bumped to the aisle’s end and turned for a toilet against the wall, used a step to get herself up. She looked young. Evie’s age or thereabouts. Her face was flat. Dominated by big eyes. Down’s.
What the fuck was this place?
Maggie put her shaky voice to the question.
“The doc does experiments here,” said the nurse.
“What kind of experiments?”
“He’s a genius, you know. Crazy, but a genius.”
The toilet flushed and the girl slowly began the return trip.
Maggie stepped over to the nurse, looked down at him like a lizard had taken a shit on the floor. She stared at the back of his smooth head, her weapon hanging tensely by her side. Hair fell in front of her face, sweaty straggles dangling over dark eyes. “Explain.”
“He’s trying to make more effective workers.”
“More effective?” She leaned down at him. “She can’t walk!” I kept a close eye on her lase-pistol. Didn’t want her doing something stupid.
“She can walk in space,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m talking about zero g. Hands are all that matter when there’s no gravity. You float from handhold to handhold. Legs just get in the way.”
“The fur?”
“Say you need to turn a wrench or something. Doesn’t work too good when your feet come off the floor. You have to anchor yourself, but do that with one of your hands and you’ve only got one left to work with.”
“The fur?” Maggie repeated, her tone maxed out on impatience.
“Works like Velcro.”
Velcro? Fuck me. I felt numb, my whole body ready to melt into the floorboards. Somehow, against all odds, I held shape as I watched the girl drag herself up a short ramp back to her bed.
KOP Killer Page 21
