Streetlethal

by Steven Barnes

  "What happens now?"

  "Not sure. Max ain't going nowhere for a while, so I guess I start with Luis."

  In a voice so small that she could barely hear it herself, Promise said, "I think Max was set up."

  Aubry's laughter was loud and harsh. "Do you, now? What a joke. I suppose you think Ortega did it."

  "I don't know. From what Maxine said, five years ago she was just another junkie, just like I was. And I know that I would have done anything, any damn thing, to get another fix. That's why I quit. That's why Max quit. But she's not a junkie now; and I just don't believe she'd kill her boyfriend. I don't know what to do, but I've got to help her to help myself."

  Aubry grinned nastily. "And how are you going to do that? Ortega's people know who you are now. They might even have pictures."

  Promise thought frantically. He's right. Not much time. I can run though, and keep running until they catch me.

  "If you're going to do something," he said, "it had better be soon. You'd better get on the job. The door's over there."

  "Or I can fight back, if I have the right weapon."

  After a long moment, Promise lifted her head and smeared her face dry on a sleeve. "You. You could help me. You're strong. And you know what I'm up against."

  "Not me, lady. As far as I'm concerned, your friend can be diced up for spare parts. Or stand trial and find out how she likes the sisterhood in the state pen." His voice got even colder. "Or come back onto the street, where I can get my hands on her." He grinned nastily. "I don't know if you're telling me the truth. I'm not sure I care. It'll be hard enough working by myself. Why should I drag you around with me?"

  Promise met his eyes. After a moment, he turned and studied the floor. She stood, taking the three steps between them as carefully as she had ever walked in her life.

  "You bastard," she said evenly. "You'd just throw me out on the street, knowing what's going to happen? Just what are you? What did they do to you up at that prison? I don't know what you went in as, but you didn't come out a man."

  His eyes flared, and she came just a step closer, until he could smell the perfume in her hair. "I'll bet they took your balls, didn't they? I'll bet that all you can get hard is your muscles—"

  His hand moved before she saw it, the palm slapping across her face. She rolled with it, but the shock still whiplashed her.

  Aubry started to turn away, and she saw the sickness in his eyes. Instinct told her that she had only a moment before he went over the edge.

  She grabbed his arm and pulled him around, making a spitting sound into his face. He grabbed her shoulders and pulled her to him, staring. She could feel it, the surge of emotional alchemy that was changing his anger into something quite different.

  With a flip of his wrist he tossed her onto the bed and stood over her, face a mask of warring emotions. She curled onto her side, watching him, and sneered. "What's the matter, big man—don't you remember what to do?"

  Promise melted the hardness of her face, her lips curving into a practiced smile. The tip of her tongue moistened them, made them glistening wet invitations. The burnt umber on the left side of her body faded, and in its place there was a pool of clustered lights, moving and changing hue to a heartbeat rhythm. "How long has it been, Aubry?"

  He moved like a man with rust in his joints, his big rough hands taking her by the shoulders to press her down. With surprising strength, she resisted. "First," she said, chin lifted to him, breath moist and warm on his face, "will you help me?"

  Aubry's fingers gripped savagely. "I can take it, woman."

  "Of course you can. And you can make me do whatever you want. But do you want me, Aubry?" Her voice was strong now, stronger as she felt his body tremble. "Do you want me?"

  He bent to kiss her and she turned her face to the side so that his lips brushed the glowing plastiskin. He pulled back and said, "As long as you don't stand between me and Maxine, I'll take you with me."

  "Do you swear?" Her skin pulsed in a slow rhythm, reflected in his eyes.

  His eyes were direct and honest when he answered. She knew he spoke the truth. "I'll do it." She closed her eyes and ran her hands along the undersides of his arms, feeling the hard muscle.

  "All right then," she said at last. Her eyes opened, and they seemed to be bottomless dark pools, but there was no scream of protest as he was engulfed in their depths.

  6. Cyloxibin

  Something hit the window, jarring the vehicle on its shocks without damaging the clear plastic.

  Aubry watched them disappear around the corner. "This is die fourth dive we've been to tonight. I'm getting a little tired of this."

  "Think of it as a wilderness excursion. A broadening of your horizons." Promise squeezed his arm and then reached for her door handle. "Let's go."

  Aubry tch'd and got out of the car, all senses alert for violence or its seeds. Promise felt the hair at the back of her neck tickle as soon as she closed the door behind her, and walked swiftly around the car to take Aubry's arm. I don't know what's wrong with you, big man, but you're still my best bet, and I'm sticking close.

  Promise rapped at the door, and a panel slid back at head level. A vast flat expanse of face met them, eyes dull but not disinterested. "Marks or dollars?" the guard said, his voice growling up from deep in his throat.

  "Marks," she answered quickly. Technically, an establishment was obliged to accept dollars for goods and services. In reality, US currency was often refused in favor of the more stable Service Marks circulated by the multinational unions and trade guilds. The man grunted, glanced at Aubry, and opened the door.

  The guard startled them. He was both an Exotic and a NewMan, one of the supermen genetically engineered from XYY ova in the Male Separatist camps of New Mexico and Arizona. Hormonally enhanced and, some said, conceived and brought to term totally in vitro, they were barely human, towering hulks of sharply defined muscle and abnormally thick bone. Aubry and the NewMan regarded each other carefully as he entered. The NewMan wore makeup horns and hooves which, along with his physique, suggested a Minotaur without further elaboration.

  The NewMan sniffed hopefully. "You brother?"

  The mistake was a natural one, given Aubry's size. "Null-boxer," Aubry said. The friendly expression on the guard's face died, replaced by envy and grudging respect. NewMen were denied athletic competition with normal humans.

  He stepped aside and let them pass. The interior of the bar was blue with smoke. Aubry could smell grubs in the air, a minty mixture of citrus and burnt blood that tickled at his nose seductively. The chairs and tables were laid out like the twisting walls of a maze, the partitions of each booth linking to form corners, dead ends, and corridors. The Mark-size dance floor was the lowest ring in the Maze, and from the highest tier it was possible to survey the entire club.

  The two of them were seated, and Promise ordered an iced liqueur to Aubry's beer. She sipped at it gingerly, peering through the haze.

  The distortion beam flickered over the dance floor, and couples began to gravitate toward it. Once under the light their bodies were twisted into impossible funny-mirror freakshows, all with light and color and die visual effects of a brain-busting hallucinogen. He watched as a fat woman flattened into a ribbon of flesh that stretched to the ceiling. Her partner, a tall, unhealthily pale man made taller by platform heels, widened into a disk. Aubry sighed with disgust.

  Promise pointed to a darkened corner on the far side of the room. "There he is."

  "Now, that's more like it. Let's go."

  "Not us, just me. Let me talk to him."

  A trickle of suspicion ran its course, and he nodded. Aubry crossed his legs and watched her walk away, liking the way her body moved under the tight shift. He had never seen a woman move like that. It wasn't as if she was moving her body to make it attractive to men—it was more than that: totally, utterly feminine, and totally under control. The combination made him feel uncomfortably warm, and he withdrew, looking around the room with
cautious eyes. It felt strange to be in a roomful of happy people, even people pretending to be happy. In the middle of die Maze he had little to worry about from police, but it was still impossible to keep his eyes from roving, his back from knotting reflexively, if someone passed too closely behind him.

  Promise crossed to the other side of the room. He saw her approach a table which seated two large men, one of whom was clearly Oriental. That would be Cecil Kato. Promise hugged him.

  Aubry growled. Keep your hands — He caught himself just in time to stave off a sour stomach.

  The two of them finally rose and came to Aubry's table. Kato was dark for a Japanese, and Aubry wondered if there might be some Filipino mixed in. He seemed amiable enough, and slightly drunk. His body was very soft, as if it had never been subjected to the torture of exercise or honest work. He extended a broad, plump hand, and Aubry took it.

  "Cecil Kato."

  "Aubry."

  "Understand you folks have a problem."

  "Seems that way. Buy you a drink?"

  "Hell, yes." Kato crooked his finger at a passing waiter. 'Tequila Mockingbird." He plopped his elbows down on the table and propped his cheeks up on the balls of his fists. His small, dark eyes scanned Aubry's face carefully.

  Knight pulled back into himself until he felt he had given up as much of his space as he could, until he felt like a compressed rubber ball ready to spring. The instant before it happened, Kato relaxed, a satisfied smile on his face. The waiter returned with a tumbler. The doctor drank, peering over the edge of the glass at Promise and Aubry with an expression that combined humorous curiosity with private knowledge. He put his drink down. "Cuervo and Thunderbird wine," he said. Promise rolled her eyes and made a gagging sound. "No sense of adventure, that's your problem."

  Promise reached out an expensively manicured hand and laid it on Cecil's arm. Her voice was low and sincere. "This could be serious trouble, Cecil. Are you sure you want to help?"

  Cecil took another sip, then put the drink down, screwing his face at Aubry in a little-boy mask of disgust. "Friend, you buy terrible drinks. So terrible, in fact, that I can't think of any reason for staying to finish it. Can you? I thought not. Do you have a car? Good. I'll meet you at the clinic in, say, half an hour."

  He stood away from the table, winking solemnly at Promise. He started to turn, then a thought caught him and he bent back down. "By the way, how's our friend Maxine?"

  Promise said nothing, but for an instant she lost control of the left side of her face and a flash of light peeped out. She lowered her head. Kato's smile went dead. "I think we had better make that twenty minutes," he said, and disappeared into the crowd.

  Although obscene graffiti speckled the ruined and ramshackle buildings of the Maze, there were surprisingly few superfluous markings on the exterior of the two-story building labeled "Inner Los Angeles Drug Clinic." There was a conspicuous lack of trash in the area. Parking his car behind the building, Aubry had the impression of neutral territory in the midst of a war zone.

  Promise struck up a cigarette, the momentary flare painting her face in shadow and white light. A muscle on the side of Aubry's jaw bunched as he fought the urge to touch her. Not now. Later—on his terms. "What is it with Kato? His clinic is the only clean thing on the block."

  "In the Maze."

  "Whatever. Does he walk on water, or what?"

  She blinked slowly and blew a mouthful of smoke out the window. "He's a crazy man, I guess, and he's been fired from more hospital staffs than he can count. But this is one of the few places people can come to get help. Most of them don't stay helped, but they know that Kato cares—he's proved it too many times."

  Kato's little double-seater wheeled silently up next to them. He eased himself out almost before it had come to a complete stop. Aubry whistled in silent amazement, wondering how the man had managed to wedge his bulk into so tiny a space. "A wild drug, you say?" he muttered, thumbing the rear door of die building. A rectangular block of reinforced steel and plastic, it hummed open. They followed him into the dark.

  "Where did you get that stuff?"

  The bottle bounced up and down in Promise's hand. "Max left it for me. Her letter implied that she'd been taking it and that it was like nothing else in the world."

  He looked back over his shoulder at her as he flicked the lights on. The hall was bare and thin-carpeted, but Aubry felt comfortable in the building, safer than he had in recent memory. "Do you believe that kind of story? Wonder drugs usually turn out to be somebody's kitchen-sink concoction, slapped with a fancy name and sold to any hype with veins big enough to swallow it. Well, let's take a look."

  Kato took a left turn into a sparsely furnished lab. There were a host of things that Aubry didn't recognize, a pressure inoculator which he did, and a rack of sealed plastic bottles, tubes, and slides. He flicked on the light and then a machine that looked like a tiny aluminum oven. "All right, let's have it, gorgeous." Promise handed it to him, and he shook it. "Hmm. Four of them. Any idea what the effective dosage is?" Promise shrugged. "Well, let's find out what it is, and then we can take a guess."

  He tweezered one of the tablets out, sniffed it, and crushed it into a tiny ceramic holder. Then he opened the door of the "oven" and dropped the holder into a rack,- screwing a metal cap on it. He closed the door and pushed a button. A shushed pumping sound thrummed through the floor. 'Take a few seconds to evacuate the air, then we can analyze this mother. Come on over."

  The metal-frame swivel chair in front of his computer screen received his bulk with a squeak, and he hummed as the screen cleared and started its program run. "Any idea where she got this?"

  Promise sat on the edge 6f his desk and peered over his shoulder. "Max said something..." She chewed at the inside of her lip. "She might have been saying that she and her boyfriend Ornstein—"

  "Larry Ornstein?"

  •That's the one. She said it came from County General. Does that make any sense?"

  "It might. This is a standard sample bottle. We'll see." The screen began filling with abstracts, geometrical symbols, and numbers. "We're getting something. Now we'll see."

  Promise looked over at Aubry, the lines of her face drawn together in tension. He nodded silently, standing back near the analyzing device. He touched it with the tip of his finger, drawing his hand back quickly. It was hot.

  The screen's abstract shapes gave way to formulas, and Cecil leaned his face up close to it. "Phew. Will you look at this mess?"

  "What is it, Cece?"

  "You tell me. It's a looong organic chain. Look at this." His finger traced a line on the screen. "CH 2 , CH 2 , Nitrogen, Carbon, Carbon, Oxygen. Holy... what in the world? Will you look at that carbon chain?"

  His face was a mask of frustration mixed with delight, like a small boy who's found a butterfly that doesn't match any of the pictures in the book. "Wait a minute. I want to query something." He typed for a minute, and the screen cleared, then swiftly printed a reply in white script. "This looks like a synthetic organic to me. Part of it reminds me of a Psilocybe, or a mescaline." He turned around in his chair and grinned at them both. "You know, this does look cobbled together, but it was no kitchen-sink job. We've got eight, maybe ten separate tryptamine derivatives. Must be psychoactive as hell." He threw up his hands. "I don't know what it is, but I bet I know who does."

  "Who?"

  "The central computer at County General. Maxine... Larry... the sample bottle... this analysis... I'll lay you odds that this is one of the antagonist drugs we experimented with before they clamped down. Ornstein had access."

  Promise pulled in close to him. "Can you get into their bank?"

  "I can damned well try. I've been feeding the results of my work into them for the past four years. They change their codes, but in a remarkably unimaginative manner. Let me try." His fingers flew over the keyboard.

  Aubry felt lost, and it wasn't a comfortable feeling. He scratched an ear and tried to think of an intelligent quest
ion. "What's this antagonist crap?"

  Cecil chuckled. His fingers were a blur. "Grubs are cross-tolerant. Self-limiting. If you take too many in too short a time, the effects drop off and you have to take a humongous dose to get high. Well, the search started for a substance that produced a mild set of grub responses, but blocked the cravings and rendered the drug itself ineffective."

  "Tall order." Promise watched the computer blink: RESTRICTED ACCESS. Cecil cursed and started over again. "Did you have any success?"

  "Sure. What we wanted was something we could use as a skin implant, that would disperse its drug over a period of— oh, say six months. That would give us time to do a little head-rewiring. I mean, why bring someone back into the real world unless you're going to give them the emotional tools to survive, eh? What did Patricks do to this program?" Inspiration spread across Cecil's face like a wind-whipped brushfire. "Wait a minute. Once, when I was in Dr. Patricks's office, I caught the first three elements of his wall-safe combination—it was an arithmetical progression of his own name. I'm going to try that."

  The screen cleared, then he typed:

  PATRICKS

  QBUSJDLT

  RCVTKEMU

  And the screen read: ACCESS DRUG REHAB PATRICKS EYES ONLY QUERY?

  GRUB ANTAG RESULTS FINAL PROGRAM?

  Promise kissed him on top of the head, and he beamed like a fourteen-year-old science fair medalist.

  ANALYSIS.

  "Look at this. Except for binding agents, we've got a match."

  PHYSIOLOGICAL.

  The screen filled with figures, and he scrolled them as quickly as he could absorb them. "Fairly standard here. A lot like the popular hallucinogens. Pupil dilation, heartrate increase. Breathing fast and shallow, digestion inhibited, sweat increased, skin blood vessels constricted. Let's see-—we have some other adrenal activity inhibition "