Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity

by Robert Brockway

  Then he felt the wall behind him shudder, and gently cease to exist. When he opened them again, the fat man still loomed over him in his stained underwear and red suspenders, sword lodged firmly in the panels above, but now his jaw was slack, and his eyes were unfocused. His knees wobbled, shook, then gave way. He sat down heavily, and began to cry.

  Red gingerly twisted around to look behind him, and found the entire wall missing: Not broken, not shattered into debris, but simply vanished. Streams of glistening gunmetal gel congealed all across the floor, the fat man’s back, and – as the hand he’d raised to his cheek and brought back sticky would indicate – his own face.

  Red looked to James for explanation, but the spritely man simply winked, straightened his tie, and turned away without comment. When he reached his bag, he tossed in something that looked like a pint glass bolted to a showerhead, and picked out the disc-shaped fan. Red heard the cyclical ratcheting of a crank being turned, a building whine, felt a hot thwack, and the next apartment was breached.

  Zippy was up and through the opening before the ringing in Red’s ears had even started. Through the rapidly fading tinnitus, he heard a crack and a short, sharp scream.

  “Red rover, red rover,” Zippy called out, laughing.

  James strode back and dropped the fan into Red’s lap. It was warm to the touch, and hummed pleasantly, like a distracted schoolteacher. He plucked something else out of the canvas bag, kicked at it once, and then walked away. Red took the hint. He stood shakily, and the movement sent the hardened gel, now brittle, flaking off onto the ground. Stepping gently over the weeping, suspendered, would-be samurai, Red hefted James’ disc fan and slung the bag over his own shoulder. Working the crank as he went, he followed them through the irregular opening at the far wall. He’d barely touched his foot down when a wave of crackling ozone broke against him. When he looked up, a good section of the building seemed to be politely deconstructing itself, right in front of James. A panel of grey, diamond-thatched metal unstuck itself from the plastic behind it and rolled away; a pin-up smartposter of A-Cat, the goat-like avatar of a popular simporn actress, blinked in mid-loop, froze, and then disintegrated; a large bedframe (that apparently served as the keystone of the structure), collapsed at its vertices and fell into a pile of unattached beams. James reached out a hand and lightly pushed the entire neighboring apartment complex over. Zippy pressed down on her springboard leg and vaulted through the wreckage, already rapidly subduing the few shocked tenants not trapped in the rubble. James threw a slatted tube back at Red, and said: “The fan now. That’s number three, going forward. All right, mate?”

  He held up three fingers, and Red obediently tossed him the hefty black disc.

  They moved at a brisk jog, punctuated by brief pauses every few feet for James to devastate another wall, security gate, or entire building. Red learned the shorthand quickly: One finger meant the slatted tube and its chemical wave, which seemed to unbind the molecular structures of flimsier nano-materials. It had a row of blinking red lights along the barrel that counted down to a solid green square, indicating when it was charged. Two meant the pint-glass, with its thin handle and translucent reservoir. Red could see the liquid sloshing around inside the clear plastic when it was primed; it glimmered dully, like the reflection of lights in water, and it apparently melted steel into a rapidly-coagulating paste. The fan, with its primitive crank, was three fingers, which James mostly used to blow out fiber-board and other, more slipshod barriers. Finally, four indicated a chunky cube with a handle on either side and a cone-shaped depression in the center. It blasted forth a wave of inaudible sound that resonated with the strong, cheap graphene panels favored in sturdier constructions. Whenever James twisted the handles together, a loud silence pervaded, as if somebody had forcefully extracted all sound from the room with a giant syringe. A small ripple would appear on the targeted panel, and echo outward from the impact point like a pebble dropped in a still pond. On its rebound, the ripple met its own wake, and the nigh-invincible graphene layers unraveled themselves like a deck of shuffling cards.

  Red dutifully reloaded, recharged, and swapped out the appropriate weapons as requested. Eventually, the repetition and low grade shock settled like dust over the logic center of his brain, and the entire battle became an exercise in Zen. Red always kept an eye on the next obstacle, guessed at the material, and selected the appropriate weapon (most times without need of James’ count). He measured his steps carefully, modulating his pace so that he met up with James and Zippy just after they’d breached. James would toss the weapon back, Red would hand over the next, and then James and Zippy would sprint on to the next obstruction. In this careful and even manner, Red was able to avoid any pause in his own forward momentum, whereas the other two sped through openings and staggered to a stop at each blockade. While James and Zippy fought with stragglers and pierced fortifications, Red strolled up the stairwell city at a leisurely pace, juggling tubes and squares in slow motion as the world disintegrated around him.

  And if there were oddities, disturbing incongruities in the storm swirling around his calm center, they were lost on Red. If, say, a particular giant, machine-faced sex-maniac walked right through the floor in front of him; or if Zippy and James seemed oddly unperturbed as they strode past a ring of dark-skinned children tossing a human head back and forth; or even if a shaggy, horned animal the size of a small house crouched on the landing between stairwells, its hollowed out guts containing only gleaming steel and a cache of bored looking commuters — well, Red was too busy being serene to acknowledge them. He walked peacefully onward, the one ordered spot in a world of chaos, and politely handed destruction to a skinny little redheaded man in a tweed jacket.

  Step, step, pass tube with right hand, step, receive square with left hand, step, shuffle fan between forearms and crank, step, crank, step crankstepcrankstep-

  “Oi! Careful there, mate. You trying to blow a new hole in me arse?” James snapped at Red as he, still lost in his Focus Fugue, gently chucked the vortex cannon at the man’s turned back, and then walked forward into him.

  “What? Is it over?” Red shook his head, trying to clear the spatial dislocation from his mind. His hands were still outstretched toward the glowering James, as if waiting for a returned weapon.

  “The part where we blow the bollocks out of a quarter mile of residential property is over, yes.” James answered, yanking the bag from Red’s shoulder.

  From a zipped-up pocket on its interior wall, he pulled a weapon that Red had not been factoring into the rotation: The shotgun-grip attached to the blender. The one James had used to rescue Red from the janitor’s monster, what seemed like a lifetime ago.

  The one that turned human skin into a bomb.

  James shoved Red aside, turned, and pointed it back toward the melted slag they’d just emerged from. A pair of identical twin girls stood just opposite the wreckage, blinking back at him in their ratty pajamas.

  “I don’t think they’re gonna give you any trouble,” Red noted.

  “Others’ll be coming, right soon. Only reason they didn’t tear us apart up ‘till now was the surprise factor. We kept our speed up and stayed ahead of the gathering tide of bloody murder coming our way. Now we’re stopped.” He motioned back towards Zippy, not taking his eyes off the space where the girls were still standing, rubbing at their eyes and goggling at the goo that used to be their bedroom.

  Zippy was issuing calm assurances and cooing sweet nothings to the far side of an immense metal gate. It stretched to fill the entire height and width of the stairwell it was mounted in – the only structure Red had ever seen to do so. The gate had a presence to it, a sort of indolent defiance that told Red it was actual, ancient, heavy steel – not the thin panels nested between nanotube mesh that he was accustomed to. From the general atmosphere of fear, tension, and annoyance, Red got the sense that they wouldn’t be forcing their way through this one. There were actual stakes to these negotiations.

&nb
sp; “We blast our way into this one and we’ll get blasted right back out,” James filled in for him, “this here’s King Big Dick’s territory. Nasty bloke, if a bit…unsubtle.”

  Somewhere below, muffled by the vertical distance, Red could hear a growing static of pained and angry shouts.

  “No, silly! You’re being silly. You’re the one who’s all silly right now! Of course we wouldn’t be any trouble.” Zippy’s saccharine pleading wasn’t going well. Whoever was on the other side of that door was less than enthused at the prospect of letting armed maniacs inside.

  Snaps and flashes of memory seeped back into Red, as the last vestiges of his Focus Fugue sloughed away. He tried to gather any kind of relevant information from the vast whorl of violence and confusion that the last few hours had been. A series of still images came to him, like portraits, or frozen landscapes: Zippy skipping beneath a large black web that held an entire sleeping family, all plugged into a mass-inhaler system and dosing up together. A cartoonish animatronic octopus caught halfway between the wave from James’ sound cube and an unraveling wall. A broken vase (a real one, ceramic) shattered into disorderly fragments. Must’ve been worth a fortune.

  What was it doing down here?

  A screaming Asian man. A woman on the toilet. A giant. A horned beast full of passengers. Dark-skinned children, their flesh dissolving into metal, catching and tossing a desiccated human skull…

  “What was the deal with those kids?” Red asked suddenly, the disturbing sight leapfrogging its way up his mental queue.

  “What kids? The twins? I don’t know, mate. The things creep me out too,” James answered, his unblinking eyes locked on the girls.

  “No, the little kids with all the metal on their skin. And the…the skull? The severed head? Did that not stand out to you? Is that just normal down here? Another day in the neighborhood, just me and my trusty severed head?”

  “What the bloody Christ are you talking about?”

  “You saw them. You had to see them. The two of you walked right by them. They had a kind of liquid metal spilled on them, and they were playing hot potato with a rotting skull.”

  “You’re twisted off your arse right now, aren’t you?” James finally broke eye contact with the girls and stared over his shoulder at Red.

  “No! Well, yes. But this really doesn’t feel hallucinatory. There’s none of the euphoria or suspension of disbelief, you know? This feels alert. Sharp. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it feels like Presence. You seriously didn’t see those kids? Or that sex-giant? What about the big cow…vehicle…thing?”

  “Good God’s Arsehole! You’re out of your friggin’ gourd, mate. We’re lucky you didn’t blow us all to hell.”

  “Yeah…” Red reluctantly admitted the possibility, “I guess so. I did crack my back down there and got kind of a rush. Felt like uppers, which seemed useful at the time, so I didn’t make a thing out of it.”

  James chuckled in disbelief, but said nothing. Red could pick out distinct voices now, welling up from the smoking tunnel they’d left in their wake.

  “Thank you, mister! You’re the bestest!” Zippy squeaked, and hopped up and down, gleefully clapping.

  The gargantuan steel slab began to shake, and the ground shook with it. When it finally thumped and abruptly withdrew, Red’s subconscious shuddered in horror. Something that big and heavy should not move: It made the very walls that hemmed in his world seem unstable. Before the surge of panic had a chance to fully latch onto him, though, a dingy mound of rags limped into view and beckoned them all inside. Zippy walked through first, her body language all purity and earnestness, like a dog greeting its returning owner. Red followed clumsily, the soreness and stress already settling around his bones. James came last. He inched carefully backwards over the threshold in short, even steps. His weapon never wavered from the twin girls, one of whom was now holding up a primitive camera. Just before the colossal door sealed shut behind them all, she depressed the button, and an antiquated flash kicked out.

  Red smiled reflexively.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “This is wrong,” QC said, pushing the little Asian boy down and stepping up onto his back. He stood, heaving her upward, until her palms slapped against the lowest rung of the access ladder.

  “Hm, indeed. This does feel a tad…impolite.” Byron tried to courteously mount the human footstool, but simply could not find a genteel way to climb another human being. The boy grunted and heaved again, tossing Byron the few feet he needed to take hold.

  “Impolite? What? Oh, the kid? No, fuck that kid. Fuck him. Hey kid,” she shouted downward, motioning to her own eyes to draw his gaze. When she had it, she reiterated: “Fuck you, kid.”

  He held up two skinny middle fingers in response. After a silent beat, they both laughed.

  “That’s Chen,” she clarified to Byron, “he doesn’t need your shitty pity. Unless you have a four foot vertical leap, nobody passes this way without paying his toll. He banks more credits in a day than I do in a week. I was talking about us. Our fuck-stained situation. It’s all wrong.” QC spat the words into the greasy air around her.

  “What ah…sh…sh…situation?” Byron stammered, sounding a bit too far below her. She halted her own ascent and peered back down at him between her legs.

  He had caught the bottom rung and held fast there, but apparently lacked the upper body strength to pull himself up the remaining distance. So he dangled helplessly, all limbs and apologies, as the boy struggled to push his feet upward from below. After a few desperate shoves, Byron seized the next highest rung and, by virtue of stepping directly in the middle of the already pug-nosed boy’s face, managed to secure an unsteady foothold.

  “Jesus Ass Christ, Byron,” QC swore.

  “Well, I’ve made it!” He protested, his tone equal parts apology and indignant excuse. “I’m not exactly the athletic type, now am I? Huffing Gas and snuggling up in a cozy recliner has many virtues, madam, but ‘working the biceps’ does not number among them.”

  “If you can’t keep up,” she began harshly, but became too aware that she was attempting to yell at a man while staring downward past her own ass, and tempered her tone: “Just pick up the pace, okay Byron?”

  He nodded grimly, and returned the brunt of his focus to his clumsy hands and the working of the ladder.

  We got away, QC tried to reason with herself. It wasn’t graceful or perfect – fucking junk nanotech – but we did it. We’re gone. Whatever the Gentlemen were there for, it wasn’t wetwork, so we’re probably okay. Everything’s fine, just take a breath. Take it easy. They don’t want you dead; they didn’t even fire on you.

  They didn’t fire at all.

  Nothing.

  No stunners, no cripplers, didn’t even raise an alarm. They just watched us run. We burned an A-Gent, and there was zero retaliation. What the fuck?

  “Son of a whore,” QC coughed, having reached the top of the ladder and poked her head up directly into the grimy, pork-tinged exhaust vent of a micro-diner. Byron was too focused on his own limbs to notice in time, and inadvertently climbed his head right into her behind. He raised a hand to her thigh by way of apology, but insecurity took him, and it fluttered away before making contact.

  QC squinted against the warm specks of grease spattering her face, hefted herself over the edge, and rolled to one side. She took a deep breath, dug her fingernails into her palms, and pocketed the rage for later. She heard Byron sneeze and exclaim a few feet behind her, and then they were up and moving again.

  “The motherfuckers let us go,” QC finally spoke, after the red had gone out of the edges of her vision.

  “I know! Isn’t it lovely? That puts us plumb out of this whole drama then.”

  They had reached the end of a short chain of shanty roofs, and Byron was nervously eyeballing the space below: A crowded catwalk, lined with blackmarket pharmacies and unlicensed Gas dens. QC tried to read his expression, but couldn’t decide if he was anxious about the po
tential for unwanted human contact, or excited at the throbbing hum of the drug commerce.

  “No. Pry open that shithole brain for one second and process it: They weren’t robbers. Those were Gentlemen – not a knock-off gang or some cheap contractor doing a bad impression – real, honest-to-fuck A-Gents. You saw Red’s ratnest apartment; wasn’t a damn thing in there worth a palmful of crap to an actual A-Gent. So that means they were there for Red, only Red wasn’t there for them. Get it?”

  “I’m not stupid,” Byron chuffed, then added: “But no. I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “You find some bitches crashing in your mark’s apartment, you grab ‘em, you torture ‘em. You use ‘em to find the fucking mark and burn ‘em when you’re done so they can’t warn him.”

  “Good lord!” Byron gasped with naïve horror.

  “What you do not do, is just let them awkwardly jog away holding onto each other’s asses.” She gave Byron an eye, letting the last words burrow into him until he blushed.

  “Unless,” She continued uncertainly, “unless…shit.”

  “What? Whatever is the matter?”

  QC stomped in frustration as the realization hit her, “Unless you’re gonna follow ‘em. Let them lead you to the mark.”

  “They’re after us still?!” Byron flailed and goggled back at the top of the empty ladder, twenty meters back, as if expecting them to come barreling up it any second.

  “Nah. That’s for the low-rents. That’s chumpwork. If you got the means, why take the risk? A strain of tracker ‘bots. Pok pok pok,” QC mimed a submolecular blowgun at Byron. To his credit, he flinched with every imaginary blow. “We wouldn’t even feel it. Then they just wait for us to run right into Red’s loving motherfucking arms, which, to be honest, is kind of what I’ve been doing. Then whoosh – they hose the three of us down with phosphorous. Problem solved.”

  “They…they would do that?”

  “Well, yeah. I mean, if they’re on a budget. Phosphorous is cheap and quick. Unless they really wanna invest in making us hurt. Then who knows? Probably a quarter of Industry is up there right now, just churning out new and interesting ways to wreck somebody until they shit brain matter.”