The Stroke of Midnight: A Supernatural New Year's Anthology
Page 27
"We won't let you go down that road," said the pills.
Had I known that Brant was still alive, that he would be calling me on the phone, I never would have come downstairs. I'd have stayed up in the bathroom with that Selena…
A lady cop let me in to a sterile chamber like an airlock. Or at least she must have once been a lady. The body armor didn't give many hints on that score.
"Hands on the wall," she said harshly. Even when they found I was empty handed, they didn't unlock the big bulletproof doors until two officers flanked me each one holding a device in his hand. They didn't even say hello.
I paid the desk cop more than I wanted to and got more than I wanted to in return.
Four cops surrounded Brant and they looked small in comparison. He was a big, hefty, white guy with a G.I. Joe haircut and a dumb looking smile on his face. No cuffs, just four peace officers with those same devices in their hands.
"Thanks," he said.
"No problem," I said when we got outside. All six cops escorted us out and hovered nearby until we were in the department's pickup called Truck 9 that I had borrowed. "So you got some explaining to do. What's all this about?"
He looked at me hard in the eyes with an obnoxiously amused expression on his face. "You're still taking them," he said. "You don't even remember getting out of bed this morning."
"Yeah I take them. That's part of the deal. What's the problem?"
"Glen, they're killing you. That's what got me stuck in there, I stopped taking them and they found out. Broke into my unit when I was out, and they found the seal on my pills was still intact. I should have been smarter about it, should have flushed the pills down the drain morning and night and kept going back to the pharmacy for more…"
"Actually, you probably should have kept taking them. They are there for a reason."
Brant laughed, as he watched a couple of girls walk by through the truck window, his hair brushed the ceiling of the cab and his bulky figure blocked much of the glass when he turned to watch them go by. "What reason, Glen? Listen to yourself, pal, you're brainwashed."
I stayed quiet for a little while. Brant was angering a part of me, but not the deep down self that I still had left; he was pissing off the pills, the chems. Deep down I wanted him to keep going. "Come on man, it's the only way we'll be stable." My voice said. "There was a defect in the procedures, remember? I take the meds so I can function, Brant. I don't want to go ballistic. I want to be able to work and live my life."
"You really believe that? Wow. You're even dumber than you look Prock." My hand left the steering wheel and I punched the roof of the truck softly, but not softly enough to keep it from denting upward. I pulled back short, knowing that the outburst of anger would only make him laugh since that's how Brant was. Also I didn't want a hole in the roof.
"You ask for my help then call me stupid? What the fuck kind of way is that to be treating an old friend. Huh? I just bailed you out of jail!"
It felt good whenever the pills and I agreed on something to be angry about. My emotional state was usually like those Venn diagrams they teach you in school, one circle was the way I really felt, one circle was the way the pills wanted me to feel, and the thin pointed oval where the two overlapped was usually the bastardized, numbed-down, emotion I acted on, no matter how phony it felt. When someone pissed me off and I had a good justified reason for anger, the chems let me feel the same thing I wanted to feel. So spitting out that one word: fuck, felt almost as good as sex. I said it again, "Fuck." Brant didn't react in anger though as I expected him too. He nodded at me, intrigued.
My radio spat out the alert tone followed by a message from dispatch. The falsified, robotic voice carefully pronounced the location of the fire. It was an apartment building nearby. I keyed the mic and said, "X14 responding in truck 9." Then to Brant I said, "Damn it, man. Talk about shitty timing. When was the last time you fought a fire?"
"Not in years," he said.
Black smoke rolled out the third story windows, pushed by the heat and orange light that was brimming against the openings, ready to spill out in a blast of fire. The five-story housing unit was like so many others in Esperanza, packed to the gills with occupants.
I parked the red truck nearby with the red lights still flashing. Time seemed to slow down while I got dressed. I had beaten the engines and ladders there, having already been in the neighborhood. I didn't have an air pack, but I could get one when the rest of the boys arrived if I needed to.
The building was in full alarm, but the foam sprinklers were failing, probably clogged, or maybe they lacked the water pressure to function. A throng of evacuated residents tried to get my attention and tell me everything they could over the sound of the wailing claxons. I held the radio to my mouth. "X14 on scene. Heavy smoke from third floor, commencing primary search."
My radio crackled, "Copy that X14." The commanding officer's voice competed against his engine's blaring siren.
"They let you run in burning buildings by yourself, man? What a privilege." Brant called after me sarcastically.
I sailed into the first floor, where there was no smoke. I hustled anyone I saw out of the building, but didn't pause to make sure they had followed my instructions. I found the stairwell and leapt upwards toward the fire floor landing to landing.
I skidded to a stop in front of a metal fire door with a big white 3 painted on it. There was nothing but black on the other side the grid-work of wire that reinforced the glass window. It was hot. The smoke was a toxic mixture that escaped around the edges of the door in reaching tendrils that smelled like burnt cooking oil mixed with some kind of synthetic flooring.
I sucked in one long breath of air, filling the extra pair of lungs, before slipping into the door on my hands and knees. I forced my eyes up into my head, rolling them all the way backward, revealing the synthetic lenses on the other side. A thermal display filled my view in a gray scale that allowed me to see through the smoke.
The heat was fierce on my ear lobes and my eyes, but I could feel my skin shedding it like water off a duck's back. I saw at a glance there was no one in the main hall. So I kicked in the doors to the units one by one.
One door opened into a small dwelling much like my own. Three victims, a family, lay overwhelmed by the smoke, collapsed near an open window–not burned, but probably dead all the same.
I stacked the victims and pulled a strap of webbing from the pocket of my pants. I felt the urgent need for air starting to gnaw in my chest, but I forced myself to stay calm, looping the strap around the victims so I could move them all at once. I dragged them out to the stairwell and closed the door behind me. I inhaled deeply, smoke clinging to my gear. The plastic flashlight on my helmet was melted and dripping. I ducked back inside.
I blinked.
"One more beer won't hurt you, Glen, come on."
"All right," I said. I could still smell the fire, but apparently it was over. My red suspenders were hanging down on either side of the barstool. The exertion of the rescue attempts had been enough to tire even me. My shoulders slumped a bit and I felt satisfied. My kind didn't get to feel tired too often.
"Brant," I said. "How long you been off the pills for?" This was me talking. What time was it? I must have been late getting home, late sucking down those poisons. The clock on the wall confirmed my suspicions.
"I got off them as soon as I left the department. Best thing I ever did."
"I heard you got some kind of severance pay?" I said.
"Yeah, I'm flattered you were keeping tabs on me."
"Well when the first of us started dying, I took an interest. What's your story?"
"I got hurt on a structure fire and filed for compensation with the union behind me. I think they paid me off just so they could get rid of me. The chief was not a fan of mine–hated me. Fuck, he hated all of us. He thought we were out of control, a liability. He took my injury as proof that he was right."
"You don't look hurt." I said. The fresh
beers clunked down on the wooden bar in front of us. Brant smiled his sly smile and finished his first one, leaving a spider web of foam clinging to the sides of the glass that caught the red neon.
"Maybe I'm not, but I'll never tell that to the state treasury bot that cuts my checks."
"Listen, Brant. This is gonna sound weird, but did you ever have visions? When you called I thought I was having sex with some lady with a dead mother named Selena…"
"Hell yes I've had visions. Hallucinations. You know there are some of those pills that are worth taking and some that aren't. I've started remembering more and more over time. They knock you out for most of it, but I've started piecing together what they did to us."
"Yeah?" I said. He was right. The entire summer was a blank, and I had been told that I was unconscious for all of it. That fear of encountering another augment seemed so childish now. I didn't get any sense of doom from this man beside me.
"I looked into it too," he said. "You know those extra lungs in your chest? Those layers of extra tendons? They don't grow those in a lab you know. They came from dead guys. Dead firemen."
"No," I said.
"I swear. There are so many dead firemen in us, we have to take half those pills just to keep our bodies from rejecting the implants. Remember signing those organ donor forms when we started? Hell yeah. So did those poor bastards." He poked a steel enforced finger into my chest indicating the men whose organs were inside my rib cage.
"But that's not all I found out, pal. You know those pills that keep you normal in the head? That make you sane enough to drive your car, fuck your wife, all that normal stuff? Well those are bullshit. Those are what I stopped taking. You might not believe me, man but…"
I picked up the receiver out of my pocket, said excuse me, and went outside. "Cara, hey, how are you?"
"Good honey, I saw you on the news, are you all right? Where are you?"
"I'm at a bar with an old friend from the program."
"Oh," she said. Her tone told me she didn't like the sound of that.
"How long will you be out?" She asked in a tone that could only mean she wanted me to come home right now.
The pills were waiting for me again, one step ahead. They seemed to be glaring at me. Like the off-angled eye stalks of snails, piled in the paper cup.
"How much does the state pay you to feed me this shit?" I asked her. I knew I was coming down off the drugs and that this hate was not meant for her. It was the paranoia that built into a panic if I was late taking the drugs. It was the pounding headache that doubled with each of my heartbeats. "I'm sorry," I said.
"Do you need help taking them?" she asked patiently.
"No." I said. "I got it this time." I smiled at her, closed the bathroom door and the guy in the mirror looked at me. I looked right back at him. Who could say what he was thinking about, but I was thinking about beers with an old friend, and questioning who and what was really on my side.
"Honey, why are you so sweaty–should we take you to the doctor?" Cara asked beside me in bed. I was shaking slightly. Before answering her, I pictured the hospital, the peace officers, the questions.
"No," I managed to say through the tremors. "No I'm just too hot. I'll sleep on the couch." My answer though was that some of the pills went down my throat, but some of them had gone down the drain. The big white ones. And the thing keeping me up was the memory of listening to them scream as they disappeared.
I did the same thing in the morning after shaving. Some went in some stayed out. I looked like an absolute stranger in the mirror and so did my wife.
"You look like hell," I said to the man in the mirror. He said the same to me and then he and I both vomited in the sink.
When Cara left for work I went back to bed and the day passed by in mere moments. I was glad that I wasn't on shift today and that my radio never clicked on, demanding that I come in for coverage. It was all sweat, all sickness, all pain, all day.
That evening I locked the bathroom door and stared at the pills. Dividing them into two piles. One group would sustain my life–a single life made up of many deaths. The other pile would do something else to me. I knew they would make this torture go away.
When that big white capsule popped inside me, the shaking, the pains, and the unbelievable paranoia would all melt away and I would feel the same as I always did. Sure it wasn't perfect, but it was at least comfortable. I've lived this long with two selves, I thought. I can keep going. I can hide in the dark closet while the medicine-induced substitute takes care of everything…
"Come on Prock," The pills said. "How do you know you're not dying right now? Maybe this is the thing we prevent. We can stop the pain. This feeling your having isn't withdrawal. We're not meth, Glen. We're medicine. What you're feeling is the defect of the procedure. It's the thing we're trying to cure you of."
"Really?" I said.
"What, Glen?" Cara said outside the door. I leaned over to make sure it was locked.
"Nothing," I said turning back to the pills.
"I know you want to quit taking us," the pills said. "But do you have to do it all at once? Just take a couple more to get you back on your feet, then try again tomorrow if you want to. You'll feel better."
I knew that if I took the pills again, then I wouldn't want to quit. It was only thanks to Brant keeping me out so late that I could refuse them the first time. Once they got their teeth in me again I knew they wouldn't let go.
"You're just like those fuckers on the radio," I said. "Trying to sell me something." I might have been strong, but those pills were heavy. How did Cara put them in the paper cup? I had to brace my foot against the washing machine to force them into the sink and it took both trembling hands to turn the water on. I smiled. I smiled as the pills screamed and went down the drain.
"Glen what were you talking about?" Cara said. It hurt to see that look of concern on her face. I hadn't really felt such emotion by looking at her face in a long time.
"Nothing, sweetness," I said. And I put my hands on her. I worked my fingers under the hem of her sweater to feel the creamy skin of her hip. I squeezed so, so gently and she smiled back. It felt good seeing her smile. I didn't know whether that good feeling was in my heart, or the redundant one crammed in beside it–some dead man's one, but that uncertainty was all of a sudden something I could accept. There was more unity in me than I could remember.
"I'm gonna make you some damn cupcakes," I said. "You're too skinny, look at you."
"Glen, you haven't baked anything in your life," she giggled running her hand up my arm.
"All right, then, I lied." I kissed her like it was our first kiss all over again and it didn't feel like someone else was doing it for once. The pains came again and I must have made a noise or winced, because she noticed.
"I'm all right," I told her. I was surprised to notice that I meant it. We didn't have the ingredients for baking so I walked down the dismal street, and I came back with synthetic, fuel stop cupcakes in plastic packaging. I got home and Brant called while I was riding the elevator.
"What's going on, Brant?" I said into the receiver in my hand.
"You sound good, man what changed?"
"Nothing much. Well, maybe a little… Why you calling me?"
"I've got court tomorrow. I was hoping you could be there," he said. In the silence that followed, which was colored by the hum of the elevator, I realized that Brant shouldn't be calling me. He should have family or friends to get him through this stuff and pay his bail and have beers with him. I felt bad for anyone that only had me to count on.
"Sure, Brant." I said.
I woke up with a strange feeling. There was continuity in my timeline for the longest period I could remember. Ever since I stopped taking the pills. I laughed at myself for talking to them, arguing with them. I still didn't feel good, evidenced by the fact I vomited in the toilet, but something was definitely changing in me. I did not feel like I was dying.
The courthouse was old. P
eace men were everywhere. People came and went and I asked some vaguely feminine looking clerk bot where the courtroom for Brant was located. It answered my question and brightly colored paper money appeared in a slot on my side of the glass, it was the bail bond returned to me, which I stuffed in my pocket. Brant must have arrived in court this morning.
The coffee was damn near undrinkable. Probably brewed by that same clerk, who would have no need for stimulants anyway. Brant was in street clothes seated at a table facing the judge, a man in a shapeless black robe watching impassively. The cops lingered on all sides of the room.
I sat as far from other people as I could near the back not wanting to block anyone's view. I guess I stuck out of the crowd anyway because the cops nodded to each other and pointed in my direction. Soon two officers of the law in mirrored helmets and matte black armor stood behind me at the ready.
I sighed and shook my head, but I said nothing as I nursed the bitter black coffee. The trial was not dramatic. It only took half an hour. The defense was weak. It was based on an emotional appeal, tugging on the heartstrings of the jury because of the sacrifice of the defendant: a wounded firefighter, trying to make it in a harsh world.
The state prosecutor was disinterested as he presented the irrefutable evidence that Brant was not only refusing his meds, but that he was hoodwinking the state, collecting disability pay unlawfully.
The prosecutor's aloofness was somehow more persuasive than any amount of passion would have been–the bored tone conveyed that Brant's guilt was a foregone conclusion. I shifted uneasily in my seat and perceived the two officers react slightly. I started to turn as if to say, "The fuck you looking at?" But I didn't say that. I caught the device in the officer's hand in the corner of my eye and was not interested in finding out what it was for.