by Sean Platt
“What do you mean?” Rose felt her forehead beading with sweat. She wished Boricio hadn’t stayed back at the hotel.
“Well,” Marina uncrossed her legs and folded her hands. “Do you have any problems? Troubling pains you’ve been unable to get rid of?”
Without thinking, Rose admitted, “Yes, I have the worst, most crippling migraines.” She swallowed and added, “I have one right now.”
“And they won’t go away?”
“No,” she shook her head. “I’ve had them on and off all my life, but they’ve recently come back with a vengeance.”
“Would you like me to take your headache away right now, then make sure it will never return?”
Joking, Rose said, “Do that and I’ll sign my membership papers before leaving this room.”
“That’s not what I’m trying to do.” Marina stood, laughing, and held out her hand for Rose. “Come on, follow me.”
She crossed the room to a door behind her desk, swiped her thumb across a small pad on the wall beside it, then stepped through the doorway and gestured for Veronica and Rose to follow.
Rose looked at Veronica hesitantly. She nodded and Rose followed. If Boricio had been with her, there was no way in hell he would’ve let her go into the room. But Boricio wasn’t with them, and Rose didn’t want to offend her host and potential business partner. She trusted Veronica as much as she trusted Boricio, at least when it came to stuff like this. She figured she was at least safe from a brainwashing.
The room was sparse, and seemed to have no materials other than glass and steel. In the room’s center stood a thin metal chamber with a small oval window at the top. The doors were parted as if in invitation. Rose thought it looked like something from Star Trek.
“Five minutes in there,” Marina pointed to the tube, “and you’ll never get a headache again.”
Rose stared at the tube, then at Marina, speechless.
Marina smiled. “I know it seems impossible to believe, but it’s true, Rose. This is science that no one else has because so few people are willing to believe in miracles, even if they’re the sort that can be easily explained by science. And unfortunately,” she added with a sigh, “our government is in the business of preventing us from sharing.”
Rose didn’t ask what Marina meant, even though she wanted to know. Instead she said, “How does it work?”
“When we have more time, I’ll be happy to give you a longer explanation. For now, let’s just say it fixes what’s broken inside you.”
Rose looked from the machine to Marina, then back to the tube, raising her eyebrows. As if to answer her unspoken objection, Marina said, “The simplest explanation: The machine finds the cells in your body most in need of repair, then repairs them.”
“What’s it called?” Rose whispered, meaning to ask in a normal voice.
“The machine is called The Capacitor; it fixes your Current.”
Veronica appeared in the doorway, and said, “It’s completely safe, Rose.”
Even though a part of Rose was terrified, most of her was awed, excited, and curious. She stepped into the chamber as if pulled, then planted her back flat against the plush interior and folded her arms across her chest as instructed. The doors closed, and she heard a whir, like magnets, Rose thought for some reason.
The chamber filled with brilliant-blue light and spun her thoughts until they circled euphoria.
Before the whirring, Marina told Rose the treatment would last five minutes. But it didn’t feel like five minutes to Rose. It felt like a year somehow compressed into seconds.
Time meant nothing when everything else felt so empty.
Rose was blank: All she could see inside herself was an endless swath of nighttime, stars doused from her sky one at a time before twinkling back by the twos, brighter and more brilliant than before, clotting black with glittered intensity. Outside her mind and inside the chamber, which had gone from rather narrow and perfectly small to roughly the size of a sprawling meadow, bright-blue sparks crackled and leapt from her skin.
When the chamber doors finally opened, after five minutes or forever, Rose felt more whole — more aware — than she had ever felt before. She had a deep and sudden need to see Boricio, almost an ache, then that feeling faded into a placid calm and turned her headache to a distant memory.
“How do you feel?” Marina asked, beaming as the chamber doors parted.
Rose had no idea how to answer. She wanted to say, better than I’ve ever felt in my life, like I’ve died and gone to heaven, unreal, or any other of a thousand superlatives, but what she felt was too good to be true.
“I don’t know,” Rose said, working not to stutter. “Did you guys put some kind of drugs in the air?”
Veronica giggled and shook her head no. “It’s amazing, right?”
Rose swallowed and nodded, not knowing what to do or say or think. She had no idea if the feelings in her mind and body, and The Current between them was real, or whether it was a placebo designed by lights and wizardry inside the chamber — a magician’s trick — and Marina’s power of suggestion.
Marina took Rose by the hand and led her out of the small room and then away from her office. “Don’t answer now,” she said. “It’s too soon. Your body will want to process what’s happened, and your mind requires time to settle around its newly repaired cells. Your body will accept this more easily than your brain. But don’t worry,” she took Rose’s hand in hers, “everything will get easier to understand. And believe me, you’ll never want to live without The Capacitor ever again. Fortunately, now, you won’t ever have to.”
Rose was still silent, shuffling on her feet without any clue what to say in response to Marina.
“It’s okay that you don’t know what to think,” Marina said, reassuringly. “It would be far odder if you did. I’d take offense if you were to blindly believe, and would wonder about your character; faith is empty if never questioned.”
They ascended the stairs, walking toward a second-floor meeting room where Marina said they would meet the Brothers. Just outside the room, they ran into the siblings approaching from the other direction. Because the Brothers didn’t like to be photographed, Rose had found little while searching online, other than a few photos taken away from the set, and mostly from far away. She was startled when she saw them, though it took her a few, long seconds to figure out why.
In the few photos she had seen, one of the brothers — she wasn’t sure which — was a bit heavy, if she was being kind. Boricio, on the three occasions Rose had found a picture said, “Reason there aren’t more pictures of fatty-fatty fat fat is that most photographers get sucked right into his gravitational pull right after they’re snapped,” “At least that motherfucker never has to worry about getting kidnapped,” and “Think those are Double D’s?”
Now, standing before her, both brothers were model-thin. The difference was striking: Rose wondered if that was the work of the machine.
Could you nuke fat cells like that?
Is this what being rich means in the 21st Century?
The brothers were pale, strikingly so, with almost-white hair, despite being in their early 20s, and piercing, blue eyes.
The Brothers were also nothing like Rose expected: They were calm and soft-spoken, overly kind and well-mannered. One never spoke over the other, always waiting for what Rose thought seemed like exact turns. One would ask a question, then wait for Rose to respond in full before the other brother would follow up. The length of each question seemed the same, almost precisely. Most odd, it seemed that the brother sitting on the left — or was it the right? — asked logic-based questions while the other one seemed more focused on creativity.
By the end of the conversation Rose’s head was swimming, and she could barely tell up from down. She certainly couldn’t tell the Brothers apart.
“Would you like something to drink?”
“Sorry?” she said, feeling pulled into a daze by her ankles.
“
Would you like something to drink?” the Brother repeated. “We’re going to down to Marina’s office for a few minutes, just the three of us. Would you care for something to eat or drink while waiting?”
“No, thank you,” Rose shook her head.
Her world moved at half speed as the Brothers followed Marina from the meeting room and back into the hall, leaving Rose alone with Veronica.
“Well?” Veronica said.
Rose looked at her agent, silent.
“Well?” Veronica tried again. “What did you think? Amazing, right?”
Rose could remember almost nothing from the last hour, and only knew it had been that long because the small clock on the corner desk said so. She remembered leaving Marina’s office and then running into the Brothers at the end of the hall. She remembered excitement and bubbling energy, but couldn’t draw a single line between her thoughts or memories. Rose did remember, however, that yes, it was quite amazing.
“Yes,” she said. “It was amazing.”
As Rose spoke to Veronica, her fog slowly lifted. By the time Marina returned to the meeting room — without the Brothers — Rose was giddy, smiling ear to ear and eager to hear the good news she knew would be coming.
Marina beamed, holding her arms wide. “They’re thrilled to be working with you, Rose,” she said. “The Billfold is the Maris Brothers’ next official project. They’ll be announcing it once all the contracts are signed next week. If you can stay a bit longer?”
“Of course, I can stay!” Rose said, excited, hoping Boricio wouldn’t mind.
Rose wanted to explode in excitement, and while she and Veronica talked a lot on the trip back to her hotel, she was saving her best words for Boricio.
She couldn’t wait to share the good news with him. She pictured him in the hotel room, waiting anxiously for her return.
Twelve
Boricio Wolfe
With Rose finally gone, it was time for Boricio to beat his id into submission.
He had a quiet covenant with himself, set into place after swapping the dead world back for his old and frisky one, after he’d been supposedly fixed by Luca the Boy Wonder.
But Boricio wasn’t really fixed, though he was a bitch and a half better than he had been before, and pigs in a blanket cozier with the demons who’d not bothered to stop wrassling inside him. Finally, Boricio had learned the right way to feed them.
Before all the shit that went down with that whole other world, Boricio was indiscriminate with his purging. But not anymore, he’d gone from bomber to sniper.
While Boricio had always been careful enough to never get caught, he was also never worried. Now he was obsessively careful, his purging had to stay invisible.
Fortunately, Boricio had never been prone to the weaknesses of other serial killers. For one, he never kept souvenirs, because mementos were for pussies. What sort of sick fucker kept ornaments to commemorate a purging? You put 100 random motherfuckers in a row, and 99 would agree that Boricio was a sick fucking duck. But Boricio said beer-battered bullshit to that: Sick was keeping shit after a kill.
Nor had Boricio ever stuck to patterns or taunted the authorities with cryptic messages. That bullshit about killers playing cat and mouse with the cops was just an excuse to get handsome actors waving plastic guns in well-lit shadows. Why the fuck anyone would ever want to play games with gumshoes was a fucking whodunit to Boricio. There was a right way to do it: purge, change the mother fucking channel, then return to regularly scheduled programming later.
You wanna prove you’re smarter than the cops, don’t get caught.
But not getting caught didn’t mean you couldn’t have fun at the playground. Boricio wasn’t the sort to leave a merry-go-round unspun, and there were plenty of ways to make merry at the scene of a purging. Doodles were a laugh, so was makeup. Sometimes he’d put costumes on people and dress them as famous characters. Other times, he’d not leave a whisper. Point was, you kept shit random, from your methods to victims.
And while Luca had made it so Boricio actually felt compassion for people, for the first time in his life, he didn’t — and couldn’t — turn off Boricio’s need to hunt and purge: an itch that only grew worse the longer it was left unscratched.
While Boricio couldn’t get rid of the itch, he was far more selective in who he chose to hunt. He picked people who deserved it, the assholes and dickheads of the world who just made shit worse for everyone — in other words, people like Boricio once was.
So, he tightened up his game, was more careful than ever.
Wanting a woman for more than her slippery fish was a new thing for Boricio, but it was true and he knew it like the billow of his own breath. Rose was deserving of his fiercest protection, even if that protection was from the knowledge of what he was. There wasn’t much in his life that he truly cared for, but Boricio would bloody his knuckles to keep his most sacred holy. Right now the order went: Boricio, purging, Rose.
Boricio went back into the bathroom, unbuttoned his pants, plopped his already hard cock into his open palm, wrapped it tight, then after 40 or so seconds of squeezing and jacking, blasted a half billion itty, bitty Boricios onto the porcelain, imagining he was cock-sprinkling Rose, just like they liked it.
It was good to free seed from his system, prior to a purging.
Boricio assessed his volume of man oil, nodded, then looked up to the mirror and ran his hand through his hair, admiring his smile without vanity — no different from admiring the gleam on a blade.
He went to the fridge, grabbed a $1,000 bottle of goddamned water, cracked the cap and swigged, thinking that life was a giant load of spunk, with him drinking an expensive bottle of water from an expensive room, without leaving a body behind. He finished swigging, then dropped his empty into the trash and stepped out into the hallway.
Boricio smiled as he closed the door behind him; It had been too long since his last hunt. The trip to California was exactly what he needed. Now that Boricio was living with Rose on Paddock Island, it was harder than ever to purge. This trip came at a perfect time for both Rose and Boricio. She’d seal a deal, he’d flush his system and a couple of fuckers.
He walked the lobby then left the hotel, crossing the street to the Marriott across the way. Hotel bars were perfect for hunting, just not his.
Boricio went to the bar and ordered a Jack, neat. He sipped, wondering if his morning adventure would take him an hour or six, and wishing it didn’t matter. But it did. Boricio didn’t want Rose missing him, at least not for long. He wasn’t a dog, and Rose wasn’t the sort to hold a leash, but she was human, and a girl, which meant Boricio could only stretch his absences so far.
Purging was different than it used to be for Boricio. It had never been easier, or more rewarding, provided he had the time to settle into the job and get things done right. However, there was a new wrinkle to his post-fixed-by-Luca life.
On occasion, Boricio suffered blackouts. He’d just pass out, only to wake a few minutes to a few hours later. So far it had happened twice, and oddly both times during his purges, but he was lucky enough not to get caught either time. He hadn’t told Rose about the blackouts because he didn’t want her worrying, or more closely monitoring him for his safety.
That wasn’t the only weird thing to happen since Luca “fixed” him.
Every now and then, Boricio could hear stuff. Wasn’t no way to explain it other than that. It was like he could hear how others were buzzing, sometimes in colors displayed in auras around them, sometimes he could hear their thoughts, other times he could see their memories. People were opening up like a book to Boricio, always read and maybe bled. It wasn’t a sense that was always on, but it seemed especially heightened during his hunts, as if nature enhancing him for purging.
The heightened senses seemed to always lead him toward the perfect subject; victims who were asking for it, stuffing so many ugly secrets inside them.
Everyone had secrets. When purging, Boricio was drawn to the worst. Dep
ending on whether it was a sound or a sight or a scent that caught his attention, Boricio would get different glimpses into the evil the victim had done, their offenses surfacing with varying levels of clarity. The two clearest Boricio had seen so far was a man who had killed one girlfriend and a pair of hookers; he got away with all three murders, but hung the memories proudly in his mind’s foyer, so he could see them each of the thousands of times he passed each day. The other was a woman, so broken after drowning her baby, she wore her bleeding emotions like an apron on her withered body. Both were excellent kills, leaving Boricio’s soul feeling freshly showered.
Evil was indiscriminate, and Boricio didn’t give a dick about gender one way or the other, at least not anymore. Before his fixing, Boricio preferred honeypot to bratwurst, but then he met Rose and it mattered not at all. The purging was a secret to keep, good and plenty. The scent of sex meant nothing.
Boricio knew how to hide his killing fine, but had no desire to start keeping the sort of secret Rose would be able to smell, and, much to his surprise, found he didn’t want to. Boricio had no need to wax his candle anywhere else. Rose waxed it fine. He wanted only to calm his itching. For the first time ever, killing was almost an honorable profession for Boricio — cleaning the world.
Boricio sat for almost an hour and half, and was nearly about to swap bars since it was stupid to stay in one place too long, when he finally found what he was looking for.
Boricio had already let a pair of smaller fishies swim off. One was a horrible cunt of a woman: in the hotel cheating on her husband, paying for the room with money embezzled from her school, and wearing a stolen dress from Nordstrom’s. The other guppy wasn’t too different, just a husband instead of a wife and stealing from his father’s account instead of a school. Boricio considered paying a visit to both, but his instincts said he could do better, he’d waited this long after all. His instincts were true; a second before Boricio emptied his glass with a final swallow, he saw his subject: a short, balding man who liked to diddle kids with his diggler.
