Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity

by Robert Brockway

  A dozen other voices broke out in laughter, all around them.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “Now see here,” Byron wagged his finger directly in the face of an eight foot stack of impending murder, “if you do not grant us entrance post haste, I assure you that Mr. Deng will have your guts for garters, good sir.”

  The giant of a man had a sickly grey pallor, a lifetime without sunlight making his ethnicity impossible to distinguish. A long, ragged scar ran down one side of his neck, meeting another scar running perpendicular across his collar bone. One eye was discolored and pale. Low-end media tattoos swirled dully beneath his skin; every single one depicting a cartoon version of the man himself performing an unspeakable act of violence on terrified caricatures of Penthouse kids that, if you squinted, looked a lot like Byron. But in spite of the plain and clear warning signs plastered all over every inch of the guard’s body, QC had to physically step in front of Byron and push him bodily away from the man, whose bloody rage was only being held at bay by his intense confusion.

  When Byron came jauntily bounding out of the darkness, having not only made it through the infamous Reservoir docks unharmed and unescorted, but also apparently having slipped their own security net, the guards burst into a flurry of activity. It was only when Byron mentioned their master by name that the guards stayed their spear arms and stood as they were now, in a holding pattern, waiting for some unheard subvocal cue before acting. Their patience was fraying thin, however, and Byron could not stop worrying at it. QC pleaded, reasoned, and dragged him away, but if Byron was one thing, it was slippery. He ducked, skittered, pranced and bound around her to resume his flustered berating.

  The scarred man was one of a pair of guards, barring the entrance to a U-shaped foyer just inside Little Deng’s palatial houseboat with a pair of crossed, serrated spears. They looked like repurposed lengths of nanobar to QC, and were tipped with shredded chunks of steel – their tips a random bundle of thorns and jagged edges. Beyond their spiky tangle, she could see a vibrant garden which seemed to be thriving beneath clusters of colored LEDs. If you left your gaze in one spot for too long, however, details began to seep through: A transistor here, a wad of optical tracks there. It was a good simulacrum, but a simulacrum nonetheless. The oasis was artificial. QC could hear laughter and playful, girlish screams from somewhere further inside the houseboat.

  A party. They were crashing a party.

  To his credit, Byron had picked up on this detail immediately, and initially tried to pass the pair of them off as lost revelers, but the fine droplets of arterial spray covering his neck and face detracted from the affable Penthouse kid facade. And QC - the skinny, white-haired punk in the scavenged clothes, century-old airship crew duster and blackmarket nanotech control panels – was not exactly passing as his date, either. When that gambit failed, he’d attempted bribery, but the impassive guards only cracked a knowing smile when he turned out his pockets and an empty c-ring inhaler clattered across the pier and splashed into the water. If there was any doubt that he was just another desperate junkie trailing some burnt-out whore in his wake, that little spectacle had eliminated it. Finally, he’d resulted to threats. Sad, ineffective threats, too politely worded to inspire fear in the any but the most timid of misbehaving children.

  Bryon tried to slide past her again, but QC was ready this time: She caught his forearm and redirected his momentum downward. She put him onto his face, settled a knee on the back of his neck, and offered a look of heartfelt apology to the two giant, grey men with death in their eyes…and in their hands, emblazoned across their chests, wrapped around their arms, and trailing downward into their pants (a particularly vivid tattoo on one’s hip looked to be brutally curbstomping something, but the victim was concealed by his waistband). The pair stared balefully back at her for a moment, but quickly lost interest. She dragged Byron away from the foyer garden and out of sight, shoving him down behind a thick, squat barge, sitting low in the water.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” She said, releasing her grip on his neck.

  “I was merely attempting to secure us entrance to our intended destination, milady,” he straightened his shoulders in a manner that conveyed indignity and authority.

  “You nearly succeeded in getting both of us raped and butchered, fucksquad.”

  “Well, I seemed to ha-f…fucksquad?” His dignified posture broke, “Pardon, I’m not familiar with the expression, is it regarding a squad of f-no! No, you’ll not distract me! I can comport myself in battle perfectly well, thank you. You may remember just a scant hour ago…”

  Byron trailed off, catching himself in his own arrogance. She could feel his angry embarrassment churning in her own gut. She tried to meet his gaze, but his focus skittered away like a cockroach when the kitchen lights come on. But he couldn’t hide the dim purple haze encroaching on the whites of his eyes. The Gasflu was starting in on him.

  Great. The willful desperation of a fucking junkie.

  “You did really good back there,” she adjusted her tone, tried a different tack: “But these guys are ready for trouble, well-armed, and eight times the size of those two on the dock. Besides, I don’t see any scrap nanobar around here for you to feed the motherfuckers.”

  He smiled miserably.

  “They’re not letting us through, so we have to go around them. That’s just basic fucking problem solving, right?” QC spun on her heel and hastily dipped both feet into the water. She clenched her teeth, then plunged in before she had a chance to consider it.

  “Good lord! What are you doing?” He tried to catch at her shoulder, but she had already pushed off into the cold and foul smelling black water.

  “Basic fucking problem solving,” she answered, trying to sound nonchalant, but her chest was bound by the abrupt shock of cold, and her voice came out strangled. “Take off your shoes, though; they’ll weigh you down.”

  “You didn’t take yours off,” Byron replied sullenly.

  “Mine are cheap nano-bullshit. I don’t own anything that weighs more than an ounce. I’m assuming yours are something else…”

  “Fair enough,” he conceded, and kicked the thick black slippers away. He slid reluctantly into the water.

  “It smells,” he whined.

  “That’s nothing. In a few minutes the burning starts.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “It’s not going to be very fucking funny, no. Hurry up,” she whispered.

  QC pushed off of the dock and let the momentum quietly take her out. Out past the thin, sickly crescents of the dim dock-lamps reflected upon the water, to the distant edge of the squat barge. She could see the glow of Deng’s houseboat a hundred feet away, but there was Christ knows how many scrapped piers, unlit boats and other obstacles lurking in the darkness between them. They had to swim out and around before they could swim toward. She silenced every sliver of protesting reason inside of her, turned her face away from the light, and swam out into the black. Byron dog-paddled desperately behind.

  “I presume you are minding our current course? The nightvision and all,” his voice fluctuated with the effort of every shaky paddle, but QC knew the junkie in him would muster stamina from somewhere when a fix was at stake.

  “Burnt.”

  “Burnt?” Panic chased around the borders of the word.

  “I tried it earlier. Won’t click back on. I fucking told you, remember? It’s starting up that takes the most power.”

  “So…we’re blind?”

  “Yes.”

  “And we’re swimming.”

  “Yes.”

  “In the dark.”

  “Yes.”

  “As in, away from the light.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Byron.”

  He complied, but the absolute stillness of the immense body of water began to fire up engines of anxiety in her belly. She felt them rumble, turn over, and start. She broke the silence first:

  “Not quite the welcome you p
romised back there, dickhole.”

  “I can hardly be blamed for that! I do not believe they even informed Monsieur Deng of our presence!”

  Distant splashing.

  “You still think we won’t be stab-raped the second we get within ten feet of this guy?”

  “Quite. I’m one of his best customers, and have supplied him with nigh-endless funds over the many pleasured years of our acquaintance. Though I’m afraid I do not correspond as often of late.” She recognized the tightness in his voice; the cold of the water was steadily compressing them both.

  “Why’s that?” She whispered, mostly just to stay occupied. Byron seemed to catch her intent.

  “As you can see, the atmosphere down here leaves a little something to be desired. In addition to which, our dear friend Red, whilst being somewhat of a disastrous little man, is actually rather gifted at custom mixes and the procurement thereof.”

  “What’s your poison?”

  “I…hmm,” there was sudden, abrupt silence behind her. The engines in her stomach roared.

  “BYRON!” She rasped and spun, clutching at what she assumed to be his last location. And to her surprise, she slapped him squarely with the palms of both hands.

  “What?! What?” He whispered, in a panic.

  “I thought you were drowning,” she admitted sheepishly, and used her feet to push gently away from his body. They glided together into the syrupy darkness.

  “Oh, apologies! It is simply that – it…the answer to your query is rather embarrassing.”

  “Odds are we’re gonna be a fine film of pink floating around a motherfucking filtration tube in about ten minutes. Won’t be embarrassing for long.”

  “A point,” he conceded: “It’s the Gas.”

  “No shit, genius. You got haze in your eyes. There’s nothin’ special about a gas addict, or if there is, somebody should probably tell my ex-boyfriend. Boost his self-esteem a little.”

  “I ah…I require certain custom measures for the biography I follow.”

  “You’re a fucking biographiliac? Ha! No shit? I didn’t know you Penthouse-types used at all, much less slummed it in the god damn bios. Who do you follow? Christ? Caesar? Maybe you’re a Mary Murder type? Is that it? You like getting tied up by ‘Loons, Byron?”

  “Oh my, no; nothing so gauche as that,” he said, then choked and gagged on the water in his mouth.

  She felt it too: The numb, dancing tingle that preceded a chemical burn.

  “Who is it then?”

  “Byron.”

  “You follow yourself? Shit, that’s almost deep.”

  “No, Lord Byron. The original. My father named me in his honour. Lord Byron was a poet, a warrior, and an altogether better human being than most. The way he lived - it was fraught with peril, heartache and pain – but he was always and ever so purely himself. That ease, that confidence… it is a feeling I have never owned. Outside of chemically induced delirium, of course.”

  “So, what? They don’t make Gas for this guy’s time period?”

  “Not much interest in the Romantics, I’m afraid. A few of the more dramatic moments in his life have been documented – the Greek War of Independence has a few dedicated forums — but the vast bulk of it goes uncharted. I am charting it.”

  “Stop,” she held her palm out flat, and waited for him to swim into it. “There’s something here.”

  The glow from Deng’s floating manse towered over them, but the structure they’d impacted was dark and inert. She guided his hands to the surface, and together they felt around. After a few broad strokes, she recognized the uneven, scratchy mesh of a textured pontoon — the old nanotech, from before they mastered smooth surfaces. It was the same material that she’d seen supporting Deng’s houseboat, back at the foyer.

  “I think this is it. Pull yourself up,” she whispered, already gratefully hauling herself out of the water and flopping, exhausted, on the deck.

  He struggled quietly in the water below, but eventually made it up with an undignified wet smack, and shimmied onto his belly beside her.

  They both panted deliriously, silently laughing with relief. Then the world exploded in white.

  The spotlights hit QC directly in the face. Wholly unprepared for it, the light bored behind her clenched, shut eyes and drove in spikes of pain so deep they resonated in her molars. Byron, still face down on the deck, missed the worst of it, but was too exhausted to do much more than cover his face and frown.

  “You in the lab,” a guttural voice echoed from somewhere in the middle distance, its upper registers absorbed by the water. “We got snipers on you now. You move, you die.”

  “Lab?” Byron whispered.

  “The drug lab. We fucking swam out to his fucking drug lab,” she answered and, keeping her eyes so tightly shut against the light that they swam with rainbow tadpoles, she raised her hands in surrender.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Red was nightblind.

  Nightblind, and being led through a swaying labyrinth with deep, still black water instead of walls.

  Nightblind, being led through a maze bordered by drowning death, and surrounded on all sides by what he could only assume were gargantuan, murderous strangers.

  Red had been better.

  He, Zippy and James had first encountered the men in the blackness, been taken by them in the blackness, and now followed them through the blackness. They’d never so much as caught a glimpse of one, and so the men registered in Red’s mind as something between angry gods and unpleasant hallucinations. But when he flagged behind, they prodded him cruelly with something sharp and many-sided, and that was real enough.

  Red had no sense of place, no sense of distance, and no sense of time. All he had was the soft, insistent lapping of the omni-present waters as they stomped and stumbled along the darkened piers. Twenty feet to Red’s left, where he was certain there was nothing but water and black, he could plainly and clearly see two burly men in painful-looking, furry bondage suits haul a carcass up onto the saddle of a horse. When the horse turned, Red saw that it had no head; just a flat expanse of silver metal with two parallel handles between the shoulders. The men laughed, and the sound was all wrong. It was deep, but with hints of something metallic and fragile; like windchimes clattering in a storm. Each man took one of the handles on the unhorse, turned, and walked away as one. The unhorse clopped dutifully behind them.

  Something about darkness made the hallucinations worse.

  Somebody seized his hand. It was thin, with long, strong fingers. Zippy.

  “Hold my hand?” She cooed, in her little girl’s voice, but her fingers spoke rapid signs into his palm.

  Staccato taps, strokes, and swooping presses – she taught him this, once, four years ago, during a drunken week spent squatting in the housing of a defunct ventilator fan. The walls were smooth and cylindrical and massive, large enough around to pass a mid-sized airship. The towering blades had been disassembled long ago for repairs, and then forgotten, leaving the huge, empty circle of the housing entirely vacant. The razor-wire mesh that cordoned off the space was ruptured at one edge, halfway to the apex. Zippy flung a rope down, but they only used it to climb up, opting to slide down the sweeping curved slope like children instead.

  When she laughed – really laughed, not the precocious little girl’s giggle – she did so maniacally, like a villain from one of the old Gas serials. Red could still hear it echoing, changing pitch as she hurtled down the inner circumference, her velocity carrying her fluently down and across the long, relatively flat bottom that acted as their living space, then partway up the opposite slope, and back again. When her pace slowed and gravity inevitably snatched at her, she’d try to correct — to spin around and encourage momentum again — but the physics were wrong, and she couldn’t help but drift to an awkward, spread-eagled stop between the battered portable stove and empty liquor bottles. Whenever Red took the slide, he emitted an involuntary, girlish yelp as he pushed off into the yawning void
, and then canted downward and went rocketing though a wall of fireflies —the disposable tack-on LEDs that Zippy had thrown scattershot across the walls. It was like sledding through a starfield.

  There wasn’t much to do, down there in the dark. So they drank cheap wine, and fucked, and slotted most of Red’s private stash into their veins, and it was plenty. Then, one day, or night (or whatever it was outside their insular little universe), Zippy grabbed his hand and started tapping insults into his palm.

  “This one’s cunt,” she’d say, making a series of swoops and pokes in the meat of his palm.

  “This is whoreson.”

  And boatswain and halfbreed and fuckhole and son-of-a-bitch and Loon and cocksucker and lamprey and-

  “This is fire,” she pinched the back of his hand sharply, followed by a series of light, random taps, and then she started to cry.

  Red cried with her, for no other reason than he was high as hell and it seemed like the thing to do. It was the only symbol he remembered.

  If the wine hadn’t blanked out all that knowledge, then time and the half decade of experimental drug use certainly would have. He couldn’t think of a good way to tell her she was tapping gibberish into his palm, so he just let her. It was nice to hold her hand again, anyway.

  Far above his head, something looking vaguely like a wolf, or perhaps just wearing its skin, mounted up on an elaborate bladed motorcycle constructed of bone and sinew, then rode off downward, passing through the dock in front of him.

  Zippy’s tapping devolved into irritated pokes moments ago, and now she was just digging her claws into his fingers in frustration.

  The faceless, formless men in the darkness moved slowly, but unerringly. Red could feel each of their heavy footfalls pulse through the pier beneath him, followed by an answering sway. Their progress was a series of careful stomps and strange pauses. Red avoided the Reservoir like the plague, and he didn’t really test any maritime Presence scenarios. As such, he had never actually trod on any floating objects before. He found the sensation vaguely terrifying. Every action reverberated ominously. If they were close enough to something for the water to reflect it back, he could feel the shockwaves of his last step rock the dock beneath him even as he took his next. At first Red assumed it was a trick of the water, but slowly he came to realize that their captor’s steps were different: They always reverberated once, no more. One hard step, followed by a gentle, swaying shuffle. After a few thousand repetitions, Red finally understood: They were feeling for the returning ripples, and navigating by what they sensed there.