The Lurkers & Other Strange Tales

by Benedict, S. Lee

  An orphan.

  In Butcher’s Alley.

  II

  They called it Twitch.

  It was the latest synthetic to hit the filth-ridden streets of Butcher’s Alley, and because of the extended and very intense high it created—much longer and more potent than triple-meth or o-toxin—the stuff was becoming extremely popular throughout the slum.

  The drug got its name from the tiny spasms it evoked when its users were in the throes of oblivious euphoria. Harry Lau, the local synth-dealer, told Raj it reminded him of the way dogs would twitch when they were chasing rabbits in their dreams. Raj had never seen a dog before, so he couldn’t say he knew anything about that. If a dog had made the grave mistake of wandering from the upscale areas of the city—where some people still owned pets—into Butcher’s Alley, it would no doubt have wound up in someone’s soup inside half an hour.

  Hard Harry, as the dealer was known in the slum, was the miscreant in whose employ Raj found himself after his parents’ deaths. News of a freshly orphaned street rat had spread quickly in the area around Fleet Street, and the ashes of Raj’s parents were still smoldering when one of Lau’s underlings approached him and offered him a job. Lau needed mules and sub-dealers to move his illicit product, and Raj was just the sort the crime boss sought out for such work. It wasn’t that Raj wanted to work for Lau, running his dirty little errands, but saying no to Hard Harry wasn’t something one did if drawing breath was a priority.

  Besides, Raj had to eat one way or another.

  Two weeks after his parents’ demise, Raj found himself standing outside the old Beacon Road Abbey. The drizzle in the evening air was chilling, and he was trying, unsuccessfully, to keep warm around a smoking trashcan fire.

  The Abbey had ceased to function as a church long before Raj was born. It now served as Hard Harry Lau’s headquarters. It was no longer a place of hope; it was instead like a rancid bile duct from which poison steadily spewed forth to the unfortunate residents of the Alley.

  Lau was inside, waiting for important guests, and had given Raj instructions to usher them in once they arrived. Raj received no other information regarding the meeting. He didn’t know whether to expect three people or thirty. And it wasn’t his business. Raj had always been a curious boy. But not too curious. Sometimes, in the Alley, inquisitiveness could get a person killed.

  Raj rubbed his hands together over the sparking fire. The scent of burning wood filled his nostrils and made his sinuses itch maddeningly. He leaned in a little too close and inhaled some of the dark smoke. His throat burned as he coughed lightly.

  “Where is Lau?” said a rasping voice behind Raj.

  Surprised, he spun on his heels as his heart leapt into his throat.

  The denizens of the Alley often talked about the Reaper Man as if he were something real, since death was so pervasive throughout those insidious streets. And if it were so, Raj couldn’t imagine a more fitting representation than the dark figure standing before him at that moment.

  The man was tall, maybe seven feet, and was dressed in a long, black robe, a priest’s cassock. A hood was drawn up over the man’s face, concealing his features. Raj could only see the stranger’s pale, pointed chin, jutting out from the blackness inside the hood. Even the man’s hands were hidden from view, each tucked into the opposite sleeve and positioned serenely over his stomach.

  A white, multi-rayed star was imprinted on the front of the man’s robe; the star pulsated gently with a ghostly glow. Raj recognized the symbol as a religious icon that had been seen quite a lot around the Alley of late. It was the emblem of the Church of the Celestial Prophet, a religious organization that sometimes proselytized among the down-and-outers of the slum.

  Raj wasn’t sure what the particular tenets of the sect were, but the acolytes were often known to take up residence in halfway houses the church had established throughout the tenement. Those who didn’t subscribe to the order’s particular brand of salvation usually viewed it and their followers with suspicion and a certain level of revilement.

  The priest wasn’t alone. He was flanked by two other members of his order, dressed identically. Behind them were a half-dozen acolytes, dressed in rags. Whatever new gospel the Church of the Celestial Prophet espoused, it didn’t do much to better the material well-being of its disciples.

  Each follower carried a plastic crate in his arms, the contents of which weren’t obvious to Raj.

  The reaper-like figure spoke again. “Where is Lau? We are expected.”

  Raj noted the man spoke with a thick accent, and as his mouth moved, Raj noticed the priest’s teeth were sharp, like little jagged knives. It was unnerving.

  “Uh … thi–this way,” said Raj.

  He led the three priests and their entourage up the steps of the Abbey and through its double doors. Candles burned in the vestibule, casting flickering shadows along the walls.

  Raj approached another set of doors. He knocked three times.

  The doors swung open to reveal Hard Harry Lau, dressed lazily in grimy jeans and a soiled tank top. The crime boss was a cyber-junkie, which meant he was partial to biological modification. For many in the Alley, synthetics were an addiction. But Lau was addicted to surgically altering his body with cybernetic implants of various types, most of which weren’t visible—primarily muscular-skeletal enhancements that gave Lau extraordinary speed and strength.

  There was a reason Lau ruled in Butcher’s Alley, and it had very little to do with his intelligence. He was simply the toughest, cybernetically enhanced bully in the schoolyard.

  Lau’s upgrades, plus the massive (low-tech yet very dangerous) hand cannon that was always sticking out from his waistband, usually gave the crime lord a certain boisterous bravado, but Raj saw no sign of that then. In fact, his boss seemed rather docile at the sight of the priests and looked as if he might vomit at any moment.

  “Hey, you made it,” said Lau with a nervous energy.

  The lead priest gestured, revealing a bony, pallid hand. His followers sprang into action, carrying their crates into the sanctuary beyond, brushing Lau aside as if they owned the place. Their leader followed them in, and his two black-cloaked compatriots went back outside, presumably to keep watch.

  Raj observed quietly as the acolytes deposited the crates on top of each other. Then, their job complete, they filed back out, into the chilly night.

  Lau seemed to notice Raj for the first time.

  “Close those doors and get in here,” Lau said, harshly. “I’m gonna have a job for you when we’re done.” He then went back inside, where the strange priest was waiting for him.

  Raj quickly did as he was bade.

  The church sanctuary was a long room with high ceilings, constructed entirely from stone. Sculpted columns extended from the floor up to the ceiling along both sides of the room. A few rows of pews sat at the far end of the room, in front of a raised dais upon which stood an old altar.

  All implements of worship had been removed from the room, and a hundred lit candles decorated the altar and the floor of the dais around it. The pews that had once been in the back of the room had, at some point, been cleared away and stacked on top of each other at the sides of the sanctuary. The cleared area served as a sort of office for Lau. An up-to-date computer terminal sat on top of an antique desk off to one side. The acolytes had set their crates on top and all around it.

  Raj took a seat by the door. He knew to stay out of the way when Lau was conducting meetings such as this one. Though, in the past couple weeks, Raj wasn’t sure he’d ever seen Lau look this intimidated. It made the boy uneasy.

  The hooded man gestured toward the crates.

  “One hundred units of the synthetic we promised you,” he said in a raspy voice.

  Lau protested, though nervously. “I don’t know if I can move this much product in the timeframe you mentioned. A hundred vials is a lot to distribute. It’s too expensive for this filth from the Alley. I’ll never be able to sell it all
so quickly. Let me contact some associates uptown.”

  The priest moved closer to Lau, and Raj could visibly see the crime lord’s Adam’s apple bob up and down in an anxious reaction.

  “I’m not interested in your problems,” said the priest.

  Lau ambled over to one of the crates, trying to appear casual and unafraid. He opened one of the boxes and peered inside.

  “What’s the difference between the red vials and the blue vials?” he said.

  The priest sighed in exasperation.

  “That is not your concern,” he said. “One hundred ampoules. Three days. Then you will receive an additional shipment. Restrict your sales to Butcher’s Alley. Do you understand, Lau?”

  Lau swallowed hard. He nodded.

  “Yeah, yeah, no problem,” he said, muttering. “I’ll start right away.”

  “Good.” It almost sounded like the priest was purring. “Three days.”

  And that was that. The bizarre man swept out of the room, his cassock swirling around his legs. Moments later, he was gone, along with those who’d come with him.

  A shiver ran down Raj’s spine.

  As if to keep the frightening priests from coming back, Raj darted into the vestibule and closed the outer doors, which the priest had left wide open when he’d exited.

  When the boy returned to the sanctuary, Lau was stuffing a backpack with transparent cases. Inside the cases, Raj could see tiny bottles containing a silvery liquid.

  Twitch.

  Without looking at him, Lau spoke. “Take this stuff to the subs tonight. Tell them I want it distributed post haste. They’ll get more tomorrow, so they’ll want to make sure what I’m giving them now is gone by then.”

  Raj didn’t say anything. He’d learned a long time ago it was better to keep one’s mouth shut most of the time. He just nodded in acknowledgement.

  When the pack was stuffed as full as Lau could get it, he shoved it into Raj’s arms.

  “Now, go,” said Lau, without looking at the boy. And Raj went.

  III

  Night had fallen.

  Raj moved along the fog-laden streets of Butcher’s Alley as quickly and as stealthily as possible. He didn’t savor the thought of being out at night; it was a good way to run into trouble. Of course, before his parents died, Raj avoided spending time at home as much as possible, but the mean streets were no place to wander aimlessly, either. No, Raj preferred to while away his hours in what denizens of the Alley called The Shallows.

  The Shallows—the area that lay in between Butcher’s Alley and Uptown—was a relatively safe place. Decent folk still lived there, the remnants of a mostly extinct middle class. Some of the children still went to school, and the Constabulary even patrolled The Shallows on occasion.

  Raj liked to go to the park there. It wasn’t as nice as some of the parks that were Uptown, but it was a great deal better than anything that existed in the Alley.

  Raj spent many an afternoon lying in the grass, gazing at the impressive city skyline when the pollution wasn’t so bad. The great dirigibles soaring along the tops of the tallest skyscrapers were like something from Raj’s dreams. He would often watch them into the night, wondering at the dazzling digital images appearing on their surfaces and also on the facades of the buildings themselves.

  But Raj hadn’t been to The Shallows for several weeks. And he had no idea when he’d be able to go back. It seemed Hard Harry Lau always had some errand for him to run.

  Raj had muled synthetics before but not the new Twitch. As far as he knew, it was the first time Lau had ever dealt in the drug. It had been on the street for weeks, but until that night, Raj had no idea where it originated or who’d been moving it. No one else seemed to know, either.

  Raj found himself wondering what the Church of the Celestial Prophet was doing in the drug trade, but he came to the conclusion he probably didn’t want to know.

  Scary Jane was the first sub-dealer Raj visited that night. Despite her moniker, he didn’t find her particularly scary. Rather, to Raj, Jane seemed broken and mildly addled. Raj supposed they called the young woman “Scary” because of the ugly, plum-colored scar running the length of her face from northeast to southwest.

  One of the other errand boys told Raj that Jane was once one of Lau’s party girls, when she was much younger. Some loathsome individual ruined her face, just for fun. Allegedly, Hard Harry ruined the john for good and committed his body to the depths of the River. After that, the girl went to work for Lau as a trusted, mid-level sub-dealer.

  Coincidentally, Scary Jane’s patch was Fleet Street. Raj found the woman standing on the stoop of a dilapidated brownstone, only a stone’s throw from the flophouse where Raj’s parents had met their end. Jane was dealing to a vagrant, but when she noticed Raj, she wrapped up the transaction and sent the man on his way.

  “You got something for me?” she said to Raj as he climbed the steps of the brownstone. Her speech was laced with a slight lisp, thanks to the nasty scar tissue distorting her once-full lips.

  Raj knelt down and opened his pack. “It’s Twitch. And you’ve only got until tomorrow night to move it all. Then you’ll get more.”

  Jane’s look of utter shock was hard to miss. “What do you mean?”

  “Harry’s supplier is pushing him to move a hundred vials in three days.”

  Raj dug into his pack and pulled out two of the transparent containers. He glanced at them briefly and noticed each little box contained four ampoules of the silver liquid. The little bottles were decorated with shimmering, colored bands that looked like some type of LED. In a box, two of the bands were red, and two were blue.

  Raj passed the two containers over to Jane, who accepted them with what seemed like a measure of reluctance. She produced a handheld datapad from her jacket pocket and accessed the app that would sync the amount of product she’d received with Lau’s computer system back at the church.

  A lot of people in the Alley didn’t have access to things like datapads or high-end computers, though run-of-the-mill comm devices were still fairly prevalent. But Lau made sure his people were outfitted with the latest tech, and he’d even footed the bill for some of them to have certain cybernetic implants like his. He viewed it as a business investment.

  Jane typed numbers into the pad. “I’m not so sure I want to handle this stuff,” she said in an uneasy voice.

  “How do you mean?” said Raj.

  “You’ve heard what people are saying about it, right?”

  Raj shook his head. All he’d heard was the streets were clamoring for it; people were practically climbing over each other for the stuff. When they could pay the price, that is.

  “They’re saying some people are having bad reactions,” Jane said. “And I mean really bad. Rumor is this stuff can make your head explode.”

  Raj was stunned. At once, his mind went back to that night two weeks ago when he’d found his parents’ mutilated bodies, their faces gone in a mess of gore.

  He hadn’t given much thought as to how his parents died. He figured someone wanted their synthetics and murdered them for it. But if what Jane was saying was true, maybe it was the Twitch that did it to them. Raj had no idea if Twitch was what they’d been taking that night, but maybe …

  “Come on,” he said. “You can’t believe every urban legend that gets floated down the Alley.”

  Jane waved her hand in front of her face, dismissively. “You’re just a punk kid. What do you know?”

  Raj zipped up his pack and headed down the steps and toward his next stop, two streets over.

  Jigsaw Ramirez was the next sub-dealer on Raj’s list. And though he’d been acquainted with Scary Jane’s backstory, Raj had no idea how Jigsaw earned his peculiar moniker. But unlike Scary Jane, Raj thought Jigsaw Ramirez was, indeed, very scary.

  As Raj rounded the corner onto Mission Avenue (Jigsaw’s patch), the sub-dealer immediately spotted him. A sinister smile crept over the degenerate’s face, and a sick feeling bega
n to grow in the pit of Raj’s stomach. Jigsaw liked to torture and berate the orphan whenever the opportunity presented itself.

  “Well, if it isn’t Rat.” Jigsaw sneered as he said it. “What synthetic goodness doth ye have for me today? Twitch, I hear.”

  Raj didn’t make eye contact. “It’s Raj. And yes, you heard right.”

  “That’s what I said, Rat.” The sub-dealer’s tone was mocking.

  Raj prayed silently that silly names were the only torment Jigsaw had in mind tonight. Raj put his pack on the ground, opened it, and pulled out two of the clear plastic containers. Eight ampoules. Four blue, four red.

  The sub produced his datapad and pulled up the tracking app. He entered the information and held out his meaty hand to Raj, dropping the other hand, the one holding the pad, to his side.

  As Raj passed over the two plastic containers, he noticed something strange. On the datapad, Jigsaw had recorded that he was receiving six vials of Twitch, rather than eight. He’d obviously made a mistake, and Raj was about to say something when an uneasy feeling prompted him to hold his tongue.

  Jigsaw admired the bottles of Twitch like they were diamonds. But then his mischievous smile faded when he noticed Raj was still hanging about.

  “Begone wiv ye,” Jigsaw said with an indignant sniff, waving his hand toward the street.

  Raj didn’t need to be asked twice. He closed up his pack and went on his way, surprised he’d gotten off relatively light that time around. Jigsaw’s mind had obviously been preoccupied. That meant he was up to something.

  When Raj reached the corner, he stopped and looked back the way he’d come, just in time to see Jigsaw pocket two of the Twitch vials.

  He was skimming the product.

  Under normal circumstances, Raj might have made an effort to forget what he’d seen. He had no desire to put himself into the middle of Lau’s dealings with his underlings. Raj might just as easily have seen nothing at all.