Theta Waves Box Set: The Complete Trilogy (Books 1-3) (Theta Waves Trilogy)

by Thea Atkinson

  She felt along her jeans again, pinching at the pockets. Yes. Still there. Two crinkling smears of godspit and twelve whole hours to ungod each one of them onto her tongue and lay back in drug induced ecstacy. Plenty of time to forget the worry of the lurking man.

  If she hurried, she could gain her spot before sundown and be blissing out before the streetlights came on. She passed by several wiry men as she raced for her haven. Several spitters leaned back in darkened doorways, supporting each other as they surrendered to their god.

  One spitter moved as she passed by, reached out to her. "Spare a few bucks, sister?" he said. "I gotta eat."

  "Eat," she scoffed. "That what they call spitting these days? Find your own way to get your high," she told him, but she felt her pocket again, just in case her smears had fallen out. She caught sight of his eyes in the streetlight as he leaned toward her, his suspicious gaze falling on her hands and the way they fiddled at her pockets. He knew she was holding. He knew.

  "Greedy little bitch, aren't ya?" he said, trying to find his feet.

  "No less greedy than any of you," she said casually. He'd probably never manage more than a threat; he was still too deep in his bliss, trying to find a way to take the edge off encroaching reality, but she picked up her pace just the same. She couldn't afford to lose her packets. Not tonight. She'd been jonesing the last two hours just knowing they were in her jeans, just knowing she could pull them out at any time and escape this hellhole they called New Earth. She wouldn't lose even one to this gluttonous bastard who'd already tasted his fill tonight. Godspit. Hunger and gratification in one drug. Thirst and quench. Agony and ecstasy. God in a godless world. The irony was almost delicious.

  The drug had begun as a way to identify those poor souls who'd contracted HIV: a smear of paper across the tongue and voilà. The reaction between saliva and chemical turned the paper a bright violet if the virus was present and remained inert if the virus was absent: a handy test in an age when AIDS had begun to kill more people than Cancer. HIV had morphed and survived and morphed again until the pandemic of it wiped out a third of humankind even before the god came and rescued his chosen.

  The remaining destitute found a way to survive the agony of Earth. So easy to bastardize a good thing and turn it into something ugly. A mere brush of drain cleaner and the smear could paralyze the user in a miasma of dopamine. The gift, the thing that earned it the street name godspit in a world where the term god was akin to ruin and misery, was that it didn't deplete natural dopamine like other drugs did. The joke in spitters' circles was that the god himself had hocked a loogie at Earth as he departed with his righteous, and so now, no one seemed to care what its pharmaceutical name was.

  She hated to watch her johns smear non-deified papers across their tongues and prove their health to her. Each time they turned the strip to her, inert paper white, she mourned the waste of a good smear.

  Tonight, she would pass through both the shadows and the darkest part of night in just that state. And come morning, she'd trundle off to the survivor's station for a cup of coffee, an egg sandwich, and if things continued to go her way, another smear of her favorite distraction to take her through yet another night. And so on and so on and so on.

  She felt a familiar itch creeping up her spine as she anticipated the next few hours, felt along her jeans pocket for the piece of cellophane, her throat tight at the thought that they might have fallen out when she'd last touched them. When she heard the telltale crinkle, her heart tripped over on itself.

  "Thank sweet fuck," she murmured and had to steady herself against a pile of debris at the mouth of her little cavern.

  Even in the dark, lit by one remaining street light, she recognized the sections of I-beams that had fallen during the apocalypse and settled into just the right configuration to trap concrete hunks and bits of pavement to form a sort of cave. Most nights, she lay in the small niche perfectly unmolested. Most nights, she had the good fortune to pass through the deepest parts of darkness wrapped in her sleeping bag, soaked in the perspiration of such intense ecstasy the cave could have fallen down around her and she'd not have cared.

  Most nights.

  She peered inside; relieved to see her spot was just as she'd left it that morning. The dead cat was still there stuffed inside a plastic bag. She could just make out the handle where it showed through the pile of rubble she'd buried it in.

  "Here, kitty, kitty," she whispered and chuckled to herself.

  Her cave was too good a find and she couldn't be sure someone wouldn't squat it when she left for the day, so each morning she buried the same dead cat beneath a pile of rubble in the back corner. The smell repelled any would-be squatters. She pulled at the handle of the plastic bag, holding her breath, and carted it twenty or so feet down the bank of the river where she buried it again until morning.

  She hiked back up the hill to stand in front of the cavern.

  Her mouth was already watering, her palms already itching, and she knew if she dallied much longer, went too far, she'd puke up her anticipation. She eased herself down onto a cement block just outside of her grotto and pulled off her sneakers then stripped off her jean shorts and T-shirt so that when the sweats came she wouldn't soak through her only clothes. Trembling hands extracted the drug from the cellophane, then, with urgency climbing her spine, she went feet first into her sleeping bag.

  "Got to get it just right," she whispered. It was important that she lie back just right, make sure she was perfectly settled, her legs apart, her head cushioned by her pile of clothes.

  She licked her lips. Swallowed exactly three times. Shook her wrists out another five. She wanted terribly to just pull the strip off the smear and lay it directly on her tongue, needed it so badly that the rasp of her tongue against her palette brought shivers of goose flesh to her shoulders. She let them come. She let them travel down her back and legs. It was part of the ritual, this feeling of desperation, of delaying until she couldn't stand it anymore, until the tremors reached her toes where they turned to cramps that made her instep curl upward.

  That was the sign. She imagined herself an expert diver gasping for breath before plunging headlong off a twenty foot diving board, dragging in air at the last second. Her fingers did the rest without conscious thought, and the smear lay on her tongue and fizzled for a second. Then the tremors, the inevitable shift, the one she'd been waiting for when the tremors changed to a shiver of pleasure so delicious she lost whatever breath she'd been able to take in, slipping as though into a bath of perfectly warmed oil where every movement was lubricated.

  Moments, or hours later, left with the fuzzy feeling of ecstasy, but with the hot slippery feeling easing away, she realized she wasn't alone.

  A snake of dread crept up her spine, but the bliss enrobed it with oil, let it leak away through her toes. Something fired in her brain, snapping like an electrical current mating with earth.

  Someone tugged at her panties. She heard herself mumbling, made out one word before the fog glazed over her consciousness.

  "No."

  This wasn't part of the bliss ride on godspit. This was too strange. Too...vile.

  Something might have niggled in the back of her brain, that she didn't want this, that if it weren't for the godspit she'd be fighting these two off, but that little tickle evaporated.

  It came again as she felt herself being lifted onto her knees, her backside pulled straining into the air.

  This time she fixed on it. She tried to hold onto the thought, struggled to keep it as a coherent focus, telling herself that despite the bliss, this perception of danger was more accurate than the limp feeling of complacency she felt. She heard something squeak in her mind.

  "Most nights," she mumbled out. Most nights she was left unmolested. Not tonight.

  All she was capable of was squeezing out a few impotent tears. Her lungs lit fire in her chest.

  Just as she began to find the wherewithal to beat against the form in front of her, it inex
plicably disappeared. She sucked at the air, swallowing down great drafts of it, shuddering as she did so, scrabbling for the sleeping bag beneath her with her fingers. She heard sounds of struggle outside. She collapsed onto her belly, chest still heaving.

  There was this odd sense that she was teetering on a very thin edge. The bliss called her from one side, even as pain and terror tried to pull her back its way. She stretched her arms out beside her, not sure which way she would fall, but certain she would. She waited, breathless.

  Fingers closed around her bicep. She turned her head, thinking she might still fight her way through the fog, find a way to fight against what was surely coming next. All she could register was a shadowed face, the scuffle of boots against cement. Several grunts rumbled through the night air around her.

  The hulking shadow reached in for her. "Are you all right?"

  Was she? She wasn't sure what the correct answer was.

  "They're gone," he said.

  She searched her mind for an appropriate response. She didn't find one until he began tossing her clothes at her.

  "Thank you," she whispered.

  "No need to bother with that," he said.

  She pulled on her underwear, pulled her shorts up over top. "Sure I do," she said, pulling the T-shirt over her head. Her skin still tingled and the fog still crept back into the corners where she'd managed to wave it off, but it wasn't as intense. "You're my savior." The words were thick on her tongue, like soured cream, but she grinned at him just the same, hoping he could see it in the dark. Leftover bliss on top of post rape trauma made her dark humor creep to her tongue.

  He took her by the bicep again, and yanked so that she couldn't help but get to her feet, stooping until she gained the air outside her grotto.

  "Careful," he said to her comment. "Those are loaded words."

  "Yeah," she agreed, chastened. Not everyone got her humor. "True enough." She wondered if he heard the slur in her voice and let her gaze fall to his boots. "Hey," she said as the point of a leather toe scuffed along the pavement. "You're that guy."

  She couldn't tell what look might have crossed his face in the dark, but his voice took on a wary tone. "Does it happen often?"

  She shrugged. "At least once a month."

  "Then you're lucky I was here."

  "I guess." Once a month was nothing to what some women suffered. "Does it happen on the west side?" She wished she hadn't said it in such a sullen voice. She even cringed as she heard the note of envy in her voice.

  "Only if the lady wants it to."

  "An odd thing to say," she murmured.

  "Is it?" He stepped into the hazy light of the street lamp and she could see the grin that twitched at the corner of his mouth. Hair that looked charcoal in the day appeared as black as tar at night. But his eyes--so glacial in the light-- didn't so much as crinkle in humor.

  "Some ladies like that sort of thing," he said.

  She crossed her arms over her chest, pulling away from his grip. "Being called a lady is a rarity in these days," she said. "If they can enjoy it, let them. Only a Westsider would be able to claim rape as a luxury, anyway."

  She stepped backwards, thinking to ease back into her cave, wave him away. "Now, since you won't accept my thanks, then at least get the hell out of here so I can get some sleep." She had about three hours of buzz left, judging by how she felt right then; she didn't want to waste it.

  "Is that what they call it?"

  She glared at him. "Call it whatever the hell you want." She made to stoop her way back inside but he chuckled in a way that made her turn her attention to where his hands bulged in his jacket pockets.

  "I don't think so," he said. When his hands came out again, they held onto two separate metal hoops that she knew joined together to make one set of inescapable handcuffs.

  The bliss still buzzed behind her ears, wanting to sneak down her spine, and even so, she knew her brain was doing its best to push it out, to replace it with fear. She realized in the moment that he suspected the same thing; that she was foggy from her high and incapable of running.

  "You bastard," she said and he shrugged amicably, stepping forward to snap the cuffs around her wrists.

  "It's not a bad line of work," he said, chatting. "Rounding up miscreants with even a whiff of religious fervor."

  She laughed outright, snorting at the end because the mere thought of it was ridiculous. "Religious fervor?" she asked. "Is that what you think I'm doing?"

  "It's not for me to judge," he said. "But when the west side ends up with some idiot on a soapbox, proclaiming his soul is evolving, the mayor tends to take notice."

  "That has nothing to do with me," she said.

  "Doesn't it?" He took her elbow. "It has everything to do with you. I've seen it."

  "You have no idea what you see," she said, intending to resist, but feeling her legs move along as he pulled her with him.

  She made the mistake of glancing toward the bridge as she stumbled along. Two lumps lay inert just yards away from her buried cat. There was a peculiar stiffness to the way they lay, their necks bent strangely.

  She snapped her neck toward her jailer. "You killed them," she guessed.

  His shrug confirmed it and she sighed, unable to feel pity.

  He looked down at her; he really was awfully tall. "You want to thank me for that, too?"

  "No," she said. "I'd have gotten to them eventually."

  He snorted and graced her with a grin that made her stumble again. He noted the way her heel turned on a piece of brick and steadied her almost tenderly. "I figured a zealot like you would want to pardon that trash." It was a tease, she knew it must be, but she rankled at the way he called her zealot, as if he knew her.

  "Zealots turn into martyrs too easily," she protested.

  "Careful," he said. "That's religious talk."

  He stopped short as he said it, making her lurch forward.

  "What?" she asked, noting the way he stared into the darkness.

  "Seems that thank you might be appropriate after all," he said, inclining his head toward a burly shape ahead of them.

  She guessed his meaning even as the hulking form rushed forward, bat in hand, raised to lay a beating on someone--herself, she presumed.

  "Fuck," she said, because it was the only word that seemed to say it all.

  "If only it were that pleasant," he said and threw her to the sidewalk as the intruder fell upon him.

  Chapter 3

  She wasn't foolish enough to stick around to see who won the fight. She had one thought as she fell, hands scraping against stone, to the sidewalk. She could only think of one place she might be safe: the survivor's station. Run to Ami.

  She scrabbled to her feet, stumbling as she tried to work her hands in the cuffs, and backed away, watching the two shapes wrestle each other in the darkness. When she thought she might have made it far enough away that they wouldn't notice, she turned and sprinted down the street, careening stupidly as she ran, knowing that if the adrenaline could push out the last bits of haze, she might actually be able to manage the three blocks she needed to.

  She fell on the door, pounding against the wood with her fists until the wood yawned open and she could see in the hall light the man she recognized from the first months after the Holocaust, one of her first tricks, the only person who seemed to care about her at all: Ami. The one who supplied her with coffee and godspit and who begged her, off and on, to come live with him and help out at the shelter instead of living the way she did. His hair was tousled, and he was hitching at the waistband of a pair of flannel panamas.

  "What's going on?" He leaned out into the alley looking both ways. "What are you doing here, Theda?" His gaze struck the cuffs and he made a sound that could have been a curse.

  She caught his eye then, and what he must have seen in her face made him yank her into the foyer and close the door behind him.

  "You're high," he said, facing her. He swept the sandy colored hair from his eyes i
n a weary way, tucking a thick chunk of it behind his ear, then crossing his arms in front of him. He didn't seem able to drag his gaze from her restraints.

  "I was high," Theda said. "Now I'm just scared."

  His brow furrowed into a concerned line. "I've never seen you scared," he said inclining his head purposefully to her wrists. "Or cuffed."

  She shrugged, scanning the foyer in a fever to get out of the light and away from the door. "Can we go inside?" Her eyes landed on him finally and she noticed that his face had softened, but the lines of worry still creased his forehead. "I don't want him to find me here."

  "Who?" Ami reached for her and, pressing his hand along the small of her back, led her toward the staircase that would take them to the second level of the survivor station, obviously the place where he slept.

  "Are you sure?" she asked him.

  He nodded silently. "If something has you scared, then it isn't wise for either one of us to be standing here in the light." He reached out with his other hand and flicked off the switch then moved behind her as they went up the stairs.

  He opened the first door on the left and waved her in. "It's not much of a bedroom, but you can sleep here. I'll go see if I can find something to knock those off."

  She looked around at the masculine décor while he was gone, the remnants of a bookshelf on the opposite wall. A few books still kept their place beside several jars of drain cleaner with labels frayed and peeling. Theda chewed the inside of her cheek. Just seeing the drain cleaner reminded her that this man might be in possession of more godspit than she could ever dream of having in one stash. She had to swallow down a sudden waterfall in the back of her throat.

  He came back in just about the time she was rummaging behind the bottles.

  "I just store the stuff here." He took down a bottle and tossed it one hand to the other. "I've run out of prescription pads," he said, brandishing a ridiculously small bit of wire.