Streetlethal

by Steven Barnes

  All that she knew was that she had an overwhelming urge to leave the growing chambers, leave the underground, take her chances on the surface.

  She stood by the ancient elevator doors, one hand on the button without pressing it, feeling as if she were on fire.

  What did she really know?

  Maxine's note: "Take them with someone you could love." She tried to laugh. There wasn't anyone who fit that description in her life. Could never be, ever again. Aubry was too ignorant, too brutal, too...

  She shook her head, trying not to think about him. What else? Cecil, Ornstein, Patricks, and Maxine No. Not Maxine (again, a tiny stab of fear ripped into her at the thought.) Please Max. Be alive somewhere, and happy. Please:. For me.

  Three people dead, at least. So, the drug was obviously valuable. New. Spectacularly different. Cecil's speculation: "Maybe if you take it with your sexual hormones pumping at full tilt?"

  She hissed out a single harsh syllable and sagged against the wall. "So, why won't I talk? Because I'm afraid they'll kick me the hell out if they know how much trouble I am, that's why."

  She felt as if she were floating as she turned and walked back to them. Without conscious prompting, her plastiskin was glowing again, a dim aura that hazed her vision.

  She pushed aside the curtain and entered, looking from one man to the other. Neither of them had moved.

  Warrick spoke slowly. "I do not mean to frighten you, Promise. But what we have here is nothing simple. And as long as it is an unknown quantity, it is dangerous in the extreme. Won't you help us?"

  Hardly listening to her own words, she began to tell them everything that she knew.

  Aubry's whole body ached, and that was the way he liked it. A good meal, an evening's rest in the room he shared with two other diggers, and an hour's slow stretching would drain the tension from his muscles and dissipate it into nothing. Tomorrow he would start with his mind a blank, a gray slate on which he might scribble the deeds of the day.

  Today he had been with a mining crew, extracting condensed chunks of landfill from the acres at the periphery of downtown Los Angeles. There was a terrific amount of organic material in the old garbage dumps, and Warrick had the equipment needed to extract the energy from it. It was almost amusing to think of the wasted wealth beneath the skeleton of old LA.

  Almost. There was little which moved Aubry to amusement any more. Life had become the same trap that it was in Death Valley, and he had had about enough of it. Soon he would decide what to do, where to go, and then...

  He opened the door of the converted basement, surprised not to hear coarse laughter and the never-accepted invitation to join in a game of cards or dice. There didn't seem to be anyone there at all. The single bulb in the ceiling, shining like an unfocused eye, reinforced the emptiness. "Wingnuts?" He swung his duffle onto the low cot he had called home for the past three weeks. "Foley? Where are—?" There was the sound of the door locking behind him. He turned, more curious than disturbed.

  "Hello, Aubry," Promise said. She was wearing a cowled robe—one that looked hand-stitched, and her face was deep in its shadowed depths. Her plastiskin was glowing. "Your roommates are gone for the evening," she said simply.

  He nodded, and sat on the edge of the cot, still watching her cautiously. "What do you want?"

  'To talk."

  "Talk?" He nodded, sitting back on the cot, hands folded behind his head. "All right. Talk."

  She swallowed, trying to smile. "Aren't you going to invite me to sit down?" The smile that she managed was a little girl's.

  They sat at opposite corners of the room, and there was no sound until Aubry cleared his throat. "You'll excuse me if I wash my shirt. It's gotten a little stiff."

  "Cleanliness is next to..."

  He stood and unbuttoned his shirt, and she recoiled a bit at the sight of him.

  He seemed to be unconcerned with her reaction, stalking across the room to put the shirt into a plastic basin. The big tub of recycled water above the sink gave a gurgle as he uncorked it. A trickle of yellow, brackish liquid started out, quickly growing to a steady stream. He took a bar of hard soap and scrubbed at the shirt, all of his effort generating only a thin film of suds.

  She watched him as he worked, watched the play of muscles across his back, and her nervousness increased. She looked away, scanning the room, and her eyes fell on an open book. There was a picture of a stalk of corn, and a couple of graph tables on the page opposite.

  "The book," she said curiously, "is that yours?"

  Aubry seemed embarrassed. "Yeah. Peedja loaned it to me. It's the 'C volume of some encyclopedia or other. Kinda boring, really."

  "Oh, yeah. I guess it would be. I'm glad to see you're..." Her voice trailed off.

  When Aubry had finished with the shirt, he rinsed it out with another stream of the discolored water, then hung it up. He poured the water into a second keg, then sat back on his bunk and wrapped his long arms around his knees. "Well? You had something to say?"

  She tried to speak, but couldn't force anything out.

  "You said that my roommates weren't coming back. I didn't know that you had so much authority around here. You work pretty fast."

  "Aubry..." she began.

  "I can't hear you," he said flatly.

  "Aubry," she repeated, louder this time, "I told Warrick everything. About you ... the Ortegas, the drug. Everything I knew."

  He was very still. "And?"

  "He encouraged me to talk to you."

  "About what?"

  "I need to apologize to you, Aubry."

  "For Warrick?"

  "No. Just for me."

  He raised his eyebrows. "Well. What brought this on?"

  "Please. I don't think you can believe how hard this is for me. I touch you, I hear you—but I see someone else, someone who hurt me badly."

  "And who was that?"

  She shook her head. "It doesn't matter now. What matters is—" Her eyes were burning again, and her hands were shaking. "What matters is that I've blamed you for things that weren't your fault, and I'm sorry."

  Aubry nodded his head slowly. "All right. I can accept that. If that's helped you clear your conscience, you can go."

  She turned away, lashed by his words. "Aubry, you have every right in the world to hate me—I haven't done anything to deserve better. But ... but I think that you're stronger than that, and I don't think that you're out of strength yet." Her voice was very timid now. "And if you aren't, and you can extend a little of it to me, I can make things better between us."

  He was silent, but somehow words were hanging in the air, as substantial as the heavy curtains in the mushroom farm. When he finally spoke, it was the heavy sound of an enforcement officer tossing a warrant onto a table. "Why?"

  "Because I'm over my head, Aubry. I can't handle it any more. I can feel it eating at me. I've been alone for too long, and I spent too many of those years helping other people feel wanted."

  She was crying now, choking on her tears. She ached with the urge to run. "I've had hundreds of men, Aubry, and each of them took just a little piece of me with him. Hardly enough to notice. Except for one; and he ripped my guts out."

  "I wanted something, once," Aubry said, and his voice was suddenly unfamiliar. It seemed another man's voice—a younger man's. "Didn't do nothing but kill me. Save it, Promise. If you've got a shell that works, stay in it. There's nothing out there worth having."

  She heard the hurt in his voice and knew that if she couldn't touch him, she would come apart inside. She stood, and crossed to him, sat at the edge of his mat and reached out for his hand. It seemed that he had retreated out of his body; it was so still, his hand so cool. But she held it anyway, held on for dear life, knowing that she could only say this once.

  "Listen to me. I know what you feel." He turned his head from her and pulled his hand away. "No—I do. It's like there's you, locked inside your body, and your body is all that stands between you and this little child who'
s lonely " She took his hand again, and this time he didn't pull away. "Lonely. And needs something, and doesn't know quite what it is. And so he's afraid to hope. And you feel locked inside.

  "Aubry—I'm locked too. You don't understand how the plastiskin works. In order to master it, you have to develop a sensitivity to your body that is unreal. The most advanced biofeedback machines and hypnotic drugs couldn't cut the basic training to less than two months. I learned to isolate sensation. I learned—" She lowered her voice to a whisper. "I learned to control my feelings. I learned it so well that they shriveled up and hid in a little box in my head." She gripped his hand hard, as tightly as she could, trying to give him something to feel, even if it was only pain. "Aubry, I want out of the box."

  The suspicion and hurt in Aubry's face submerged a bit, and Promise went on quickly. "Aubry, I want you to help me. If you will. If you would." She paused. "If it's not too late."

  He seemed to roll her words over in his mind, weighing them. "No," he said, and she was surprised by the tremor in his voice. "It's too late for me, baby. I just don't have anything left. Maybe I should have died with Luis. That would have been best. I would have done what everybody said I couldn't do, and done it my way, in my time, and made it stick. Now all I've got to look forward to is running and hiding and maybe growing old down here in the sewers. You were right, Promise. I did come out of the gutter. I should really feel right at home here."

  "I "

  He shushed her with a squeeze of her hand that stopped just short of the pain threshold. "No, baby. Just go away. I tried, you see? I tried to pretend that maybe my dream wasn't totally dead, that there was something good left in my life. But there just ain't, and that's all there is to it."

  "No, Aubry. Don't say that. I'm the runner. You're the fighter. Don't give up on me—please."

  He sighed massively. He looked as if he had carried hell on his shoulders for a thousand years. "Even the fighting was just another way of running. I'd hoped it would take me somewhere I hadn't been. What bullshit. I just ended up in one gutter after another. Sometimes it was a high-class gutter. Sometimes it was absolute piss. But a gutter is a gutter, and that seems to be where I belong—unless it's a sewer, and that's even lower."

  "Aubry, what if I said that there was a way out? A way to break through that?" Her hands shook as they searched in the pocket of her cowl, bringing out a glassine envelope holding two thick stubby shapes, the moisture from the mushrooms fogging the clear sides.

  Aubry looked at them. "Jesus Christ. Are you talking about drugs now?" The small glimmer of hope that had been in his face died away, replaced by disgust. "No thanks. My body is all that I have, and I'm not screwing it up like that."

  "No, you don't understand. We've been testing it for two weeks. It's less toxic than aspirin."

  "Aspirin can kill you too, lady."

  "Aubry... Aubry, listen to me. This is what everything was about. This is what Patricks and Ornstein died for. The reason Kato was killed." She was pleading now. "You saw how Cecil acted when he tried to analyze it—it just isn't like any other drug. Anywhere."

  "I don't do drugs."

  She threw the mushrooms down on the mattress and stood up, looking down on him with an expression that he couldn't read. "And when did you make that decision? When you were a kid, watching your friends fall apart around you? When you were a young man, with dreams of turning that body of yours into a empire? Well, you're not a kid anymore, and you're right, your dreams are dead. But you aren't, and I'm not, and I need something. Someone. I need you. You're the only decent man who ever wanted me, who cared about me. You worked for me when I was sick and couldn't take care of myself. And I don't have anything in the world I can give you except me, and I can't even give you that, because I cut that off a long time ago, in another life."

  She dropped to her knees at the edge of the cot and reached out for his face, turning his head against token resistance until he was staring into her eyes. "Suppose that there was a chance— just a chance that this would work. That it would help us to find each other, help me to break down my barriers. Wouldn't it be worth it?"

  He gritted his teeth, shaking his head slowly.

  "You're lying," she said passionately. "You're as lonely as I am. I know it. I can feel it. And we can help each other past the hurt, but I just ... I just need a little help." The tears, which had dried for a time, returned now. She held his head, burying her face against his chest. "I need help, Aubry. God, I need help. I never thought that I was going to get out of this box, but maybe there's a way, and if there's any way at all, I've got to take it. Aubry..." She looked at him, and for the fraction of a second before he looked away, there was a spark there, one that leaped the hollow between them. "Aubry... haven't you been hurt enough to take the chance?"

  He closed his eyes. His body was very still, almost as if he had fallen asleep, or gone into a coma, or died—anything to avoid her question. Finally he spoke. "All I have left," he said slowly, "is my image of who I am. What I was—what I used to be." He spread his hands helplessly. "That's all there is, Promise, and you're asking me to give up a piece of that, and I just can't do it. Not even for you."

  "I'm not asking you to do it for me. I'm asking you to do it for yourself. Both of us are trapped. I'm offering you a way out."

  "A way out." His laugh was harsh, but not loud. "God. I've been thinking and praying, wondering if there isn't some way out; and there just isn't one."

  "Then what do you have to lose?"

  He tried to be angry, but didn't have it left in him.

  "Aubry—please."

  He sat, shivering, and she thought that he wasn't going to say anything at all. Then he buried his forehead against his knees and sighed: "I'm just tired of hoping...."

  "Then give up the hope. Give up the image of yourself you've been hanging on to. Be here, with me, right now. Extend a little more of yourself to me—just a little. Let's see what happens."

  He swallowed hard. She could hear the effort rasping in his throat. She reached out to stroke his stubbled cheek. He leaned against her hand, eyes closed as gently as a baby's, and the tension left his body like a passing wind.

  "For years, I've had a dream," she said, holding his hand. "I dreamed that there was someone, somewhere, who would make love with me and not at me. That I would feel that, just once. Just once. The way people do who trust each other. Who know that there's going to be a tomorrow together To hell with that—that there's been a today, Aubry, that today existed at all."

  "Today," he said sluggishly, as if he were already under the influence of a narcotic.

  "Today, Aubry—right now. It's all that we have."

  She heard him swallow a lungful of air, pull it deeply into his lungs, then exhale slowly, nodding. "All right—you're right. I've got little enough to lose." He finished die sigh. "Let's give it a shot."

  Promise picked up the envelope where the two fleshy mushrooms waited patiently. She opened the slit with her thumb and pulled one of them out, looking at it, turning it around in her hand. She flared her nostrils, sniffing at it, catching no scent. She flicked her tongue at the underside of the cap. It was virtually tasteless.

  She handed it to Aubry. He held it up in front of his eyes until it obscured his view of her face, until she seemed a woman's body with a mushroom's head. There was a slight aura of light around the curved edge of the mushroom. As he turned it in his hands, felt the texture, the subtle graining, he began to feel warmer, the last of his trepidation fading away. The broken stump of the plant was stained a slight blue, and he examined that, then nibbled at the end.

  He chewed it slowly, making a face at her. "Definitely had better."

  She smiled shyly. 'That remains to be seen." She broke away a chunk of cap and put it into her mouth, chewing rapidly, swallowing with an obvious effort not to taste it. "I'm not sure I'd want to make a salad out of these."

  He pulled the mushroom back from his lips for a moment, then made his dec
ision and popped it into his mouth, chewing it down into mush, tasting it, trying to find the place in his mind where the taste wasn't unpleasant.

  Then, a little at a time, he swallowed.

  Having finished, he lay back again, watching her chew daintily at the remaining cap. "If you just go balls-to-the-wall and swallow it, you won't have anywhere near as much trouble."

  "That's easy to say." She popped the rest of it into her mouth and downed it quickly. Then she folded her hands in her lap and gave him a sickly grin. "Well. Here we are—"

  "Looks that way, doesn't it?" He narrowed his eyes, and they smoldered hot enough to burn. "Well, if those were the hors d'oeuvres, where's the main course?"

  Promise smoothed the cowl back from her head and reached out her hand to him. "I trust you, Aubry Knight. You have never hurt me, and you have never deserted me, even when it would have been the sanest thing to do. You are a man of honor, and kindness." She lowered her voice. "And you are my last hope."

  He slowly, gradually, pulled her to him. Her stomach tightened leflexively, and she relaxed it. She felt her automatic, play-for-pay smile slip onto her face and she quelled it, facing him without artifice as a lonely, frightened woman who needed something she didn't completely understand.

  He waited for her to relax, easing his grip, then smiled as she twined her fingers through his and pulled herself closer, until their faces were inches away in the room's dim light. He smelled of hard work and fatigue.

  Aubry leaned forward and brushed her lips with his, rubbing his bristled chin against her softness.

  He heard her breathing go shallow, heard her restrained gasp as his fingers stroked the robe down from her shoulders, as he traced a line on them with fingers strong enough to shatter concrete, gentle enough that all she felt was a trilling breath of excitement.

  He sat back from her and gazed appraisingly. "I don't suppose that the drug has come on yet?"

  "Then we'll just have to make do, won't we."

  Her fingers ran over his chest, over the hard flat muscles that thickened his midsection. She threw herself against him, pressing as hard as she could. "Aubry, hold me, Aubry—I'm just so damned scared."