“I’m not God, young lady. I’m just a scientist who will save mankind, making it better for future generations.” He moved into the en garde position and nodded at me. “And, you’re standing in the way of history.”
He performed a smooth balestra and immediately lunged in. I parried and danced into a flèche, striking out as I passed him on his left. He blocked me with perfect efficiency and then turned to lunge once again. I leaped back, almost off balance, in order to avoid his blade.
He took immediate advantage and flicked downward and out with the tip of the saber. I felt the blade slice into my thigh, backing into his desk to avoid any follow-through from him. I used my momentum to fall back and kick my feet over my head, landing solidly on the opposite side of the desk. My eyes were on him and I ignored the separation of flesh across my thigh. I hoped that the healing factors of the Nanomere9 would jump into action as promised. In the meantime, I kept my focus on Thyssen. His expression was one of grudging admiration, but then resolution returned and he came for me.
As he moved around the desk, he removed his lab coat, tossing it on the desk and ripped at the remains of his shirt with one hand while maneuvering his blade with the other. I glanced around and saw that there was little of use in the room. The huge desk took up the most space. There was the meeting table, overturned and shielding Kel from the events occurring. On one side of the room were two tall refrigerators with glass doors, through which I could see samples, vials and a few syringes. This guy was nothing if not dedicated.
The two of us continued our little dance, lunging, parrying; I even managed a passata-sotto at one point, but Thyssen was far better at this dance than I was and easily avoided the tip of my saber as I straight-armed it toward his stomach. I was glad he couldn’t hear my thoughts because they were all laying odds in his favor. Once in a while, I would catch observers peeking into the broken doorway, and I wondered who they were betting on.
I parried as best I could but it appeared to be a losing battle. The blood was flowing warmly down my leg, the wound closing even as I continued the fight. I guessed the serum really did work. I had to wonder how long we could go on like this, each with such strength and healing abilities. Thyssen backed me up against one of the coolers and lunged. I’m not quite certain how I did it, but I sidestepped to the right so fast that his blade went in to the glass door behind me rather than my chest. The glass crashed to the floor and I ran in the opposite direction, moving away from Thyssen’s deadly advances.
I kept shuffling scenarios through my mind and, as he came at me with final purpose, I felt the seeds of a ridiculous plan begin to germinate. I could tell that Thyssen had tired of toying with me and was ready to end the play. He gained momentum and I decided it was now or never.
Just as Thyssen lunged, I leaped up onto the desk. He swiped at my legs, but I had already propelled myself into the air. I twisted as I soared over him, reaching out and grasping his head in my hands as hard as I could, my saber flying from me in my last, futile attempt to survive this confrontation. Using my body’s momentum and gravity’s undeniable force, I ripped his head to one side as my feet hit the ground, pulling him backward over my shoulder.
I felt and heard the snap as his weight collapsed on top of me. That part I had not planned. I pushed him off of me and stood, looking down at his neck, all twisted. His head lay at an unnatural angle, but the bastard still smiled up at me.
“I will heal,” he said, his voice crackling and gurgling. “You cannot kill me.
I stared at him in disgust and shock. This must have been why everyone here was so fucking scared of this guy. He had taken enough of the serum to not only reverse his aging process, but to elevate his healing factors to the point where death was all but out of reach.
“I think it’s about time we see how far the human race can get without your interference, you prick,” I said. I walked to his desk and recovered his lab coat. I folded it several times over and then moved to the refrigerators. I picked up the largest piece of broken glass I could find, over a foot wide, jagged and sharp. Moving toward the man on the floor, I saw his eyes widen in understanding.
“No,” he spat.
“Yes,” I replied, bringing the glass down into his neck with all the force I could muster. It was not quite enough and it took a couple of minutes of crude butchery to hack through his neck and finish the job. Throwing the bloodied glass aside, I sat back on the floor and saw that I had also cut into my own hands. The cloth of the lab coat had protected them for the most part, but I would need a little time to heal. After a few long breaths, I crawled over to the toppled table behind which Kel lay. He was struggling to sit up, his hand over the balled up compress.
“Lucky bastard,” I said, noting that the wound in his chest and shoulder already showed sign of healing. That lunatic’s serum really did work.
“You, too,” he replied. Then, without warning, he leaned in and kissed me.
CHAPTER 10
The sky was a brilliant blue and Uncle Derrick and I were driving back from a scouting trip in Tucson. We met the boy on the road, just outside of Tucson city limits. He was on the side of the road, squatting next to a motorcycle, fiddling with the engine. Derrick pulled over, and retrieved his Uzi.
“No sense in taking chances,” he said to me. I nodded and winked at him. We walked up slowly, the young man standing still and watching us with great interest.
“You cool?” Derrick asked. The boy, who was maybe two or three years older than me, raised his hands up, placing them behind his head.
“Yeah,” he said. “You?”
He and Derrick looked at each other for long moments, and then Uncle D lowered his Uzi. “Need some help?” Derrick asked him. The boy shook his head, lowering his hands to his sides. “I’m Derrick. This is my niece, Rock.”
“Rock?” he asked, with an amused expression on his face.
“Yeah,” I replied. “Rock. You got a problem with that?” He laughed, shaking his head again.
“I’m Kel. Kel Reed. From Phoenix.” He looked at me with a peculiar expression that I didn’t understand, but it made my stomach do a little mini-dance. I could only stare back. I caught Derrick glance at me out of the corner of his eye but I played it off. He had a grin on his face when I turned to him and it disappeared at my withering look.
* * * * *
“So what’re you doing over here?” I asked Kel. We hadn’t seen him in over a year and it was a bit surprising to see him again so soon. With so few people in the world, I wasn’t certain if it was fate or simply inevitable.
“Same as you, I suppose.” He smiled at me and I had to turn away before he saw the heat in my eyes. That smile of his really was something.
Uncle D came around the front of the truck, double-checked the ropes on the deer he had bagged only an hour earlier. He shook Kel’s hand. We made a fire and chatted while we dressed the deer. I tried to keep from making eye contact with Kel, but I couldn’t help myself. It really irritated me that this guy had such a pull on me. I adjusted the hem of my dress and fiddled with the laces on my boots, pulling the buck knife from just inside the left one and going through the motions of sharpening it.
* * * * *
All the memories of Kel flooded my mind and my heart. Before I could help myself, there in the shambles of Thyssen’s office, I threw my arms around him and began crying like a little baby.
Kel held me and covered up his grunts of pain as I tightened my hug over and over, never wanting to let him go again. I could not fathom why I had suppressed my memories of him. I loved him. How could I have forgotten him? I was so ashamed. I remembered him looking at me in the house when I first encountered him on my return. He was hurt that I did not remember him, but he had not pushed it. He was always so damned kind.
“Why didn’t you help me remember?” I asked through my tears.
“I figured it would come back to you sooner or later,” he said. He pulled back and looked me in the eyes. “I was really hoping for soon
er.”
We laughed out loud and then I heard the sound of someone clearing his throat. We looked up towards the door and saw several folks in white coats staring at us.
“Are you both all right,” the man asked. The sincerity and relief in his voice was only matched by the shock in his eyes as he glanced over at Thyssen’s body.
“It had to be done,” I said, hoping there was no one else with a grudge in this place.
“No,” he said, “We owe you a debt of gratitude. He was a tyrant and terribly dangerous.” An older lady looked around the man’s shoulder and stared at me with the most heartfelt expression of gratitude I think I had ever seen.
“I don’t know how you did it,” she said. “But, thank you.”
“I’ll make the announcement,” the man said and left.
“We have a lab-wide intercom,” the woman stated. “Now everyone will know we are free.”
* * * * *
There were a total of sixteen people in the lab, mostly technicians and staff. One other scientist – Hollister was taken away to be prepared for burial – took care of bandaging Kel and I. Dr. Cameron said that my cuts would be healed in a matter of hours and Kel’s wounds would only take a day or two more.
The rest of the folks were quite kind to us. Even the three remaining soldiers – Harmon was still alive – accepted the change of regime with pleasure. Thyssen would not be missed, that was for certain.
“We have the serum, now,” Dr. Cameron said to us as we prepared to leave. I did not want to hang around. I wanted to go home. I wanted to rest with Kel and put together whatever the rest of our lives might be. “There are folks who could use it. It can still be of value.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“In Northern California. In Lakeport, on the southern edge of the Mendocino Forest, there’s a refuge. It’s one of the last bastions of human society. We’ve had some covert radio communications with them. Thyssen never knew.”
I lifted an eyebrow. At least there was a little backbone left in this brain bank, after all. “What are you suggesting? That we take the serum to them?”
“There was a recent outbreak of measles and there isn’t a better inoculation on the planet than Nanomere9. You might even be saving lives, in the long run.”
“We’ll think about it,” Kel said, taking my hand. “For now, we have other priorities.”
I allowed him to lead me to the elevator. He punched in the code and hit the Garage level button. When the doors opened and Harmon cleared his throat, it was to get our attention away from each other. I would have been embarrassed had I not felt so damned guilty for not remembering Kel in the first place. Fuck them all. I had some catching up to do.
Harmon gave us the keys to one of the Humvees and shook our hands. “You take care,” he said with a wink.
“Thank you,” I said to him. Then Kel open my door for me and I crawled into the truck’s passenger seat. “I can’t drive?” I asked Kel. He still had the shoulder wound, after all. I laughed out loud when he replied.
“After last time? No.”
As we drove away from White Sands, headed for Alamogordo, I could not help but think that there might be a future for us after all. For so long, I had just been doing what I needed to do to survive, and later what I had to do to deal with Thyssen. Now the future was wide open and I had no plans other than to see where it would take me. I glanced at Kel and felt a sense of release. A weight had been lifted. I knew my father would have been proud of me, not for killing the man who almost destroyed the world, but for following my gut and conscience.
Staring out the window, I watched the gypsum sands flow over the dunes of White Sands and I wondered to myself what Northern California looked like this time of year.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
C.L. Stegall is the C.E.O. and a co-founder of Dark Red Press, as well as an author who writes modern, urban and paranormal fantasy. He was born in North Carolina but will always call southern California home. He spent ten years in the U.S. Army, as both an engineer and a linguist for Military Intelligence. He has written innumerable short stories and novellas. His first full-length fantasy novel, "The Weight Of Night," is receiving wonderful reviews. It is the first in his Progeny series of novels. His next series – Valence Of Infinity – will begin in 2012.
THE LAST PHARMACIST
by
John J. Smith
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First I would like to thank CL Stegall for his incredible editing expertise – you are the best. Thank you.
Then to Brian Fatah Steele for the excellent design and the creation of the Last Pharmacist cover, I thank you.
Finally, I want to extend my special thanks to the folks at Dark Red Press for their contributions, suggestions, and incredible support in the making of The Last Pharmacist.
Chapter 1
Jasmine Cooper screamed, “No!” when she and her partner banged through the door just in time to see another kid jab the syringe into his arm. The elastic tubing snapped just as he pushed the plunger. The drug of choice in the underground is a synthetic chemically made heroin, otherwise known as SCH, produced by the Last Pharmacist, a drug lord who is as elusive as the sun on a typical day above the underground city. One of thousands of cities built two or more years before the meteorite, Apophis, slammed into Earth and skidded across the Mediterranean through the Middle East and down to the Indian Ocean before heading back out into space and away from the earth’s atmosphere. The damage was devastating; the entire population at the point of impact and those in the path perished, and the fallout was nearly as bad. The earth lay in darkness for almost ten years before the sun finally broke through the heavy debris; but then the sun’s presence became sporadic as malefic storms continued their effort to cleanse the earth of the catastrophe.
Jasmine dropped to her knees and grabbed for the kid’s arm, a young small boy of about thirteen years old, grabbing at the syringe in hopes of removing it before the plunger hit the end of the tube. She was too late and he lay back with only the whites of his eyes evident as the drug raced through his body. His mind became numb. He never felt his heart stop. His last breath smelled of illegal distilled alcohol.
Realizing it was too late; Jasmine wiped the tears from her eyes and gently laid his arm across his chest. He was the fourth this week. Children either too young to remember what it was like to feel the sun on their face, or those who were born in the underground and never experienced the beauty of a fresh spring day. Kids bored, frustrated, with the life of a mole and left to their own bad habits and vices. They were the ones who lay victim to a drug that law enforcement failed to stop.
The best medical and scientific minds could not artificially provide the heath care that the sun gave the body, and the lack of that ‘taken for granted’ beam brought on depression, cancer, the increased susceptibility to heart attack, diabetes and other disorders. It was also, at least partly, to blame for the sky-high rates of multiple sclerosis that occurred in most cities. It wasn’t the total lack of sun causing the epidemic but the mere fact that living underground for too long drove the most rational person close to insanity, which gave the Last Pharmacist the advantage.
Jasmine looked up at her partner with pain in her eyes as if the young boy was family, and although she had never met him she still felt the family’s pain when they heard the news that the police were too late to save him. It was like that. One, sometimes two, out of five would lay in their own puke, if they lived that long, before authorities could get through the door.
“He changed the 911 code in his key pad,” Officer Long said as he stepped around the body. “I don’t understand how he was able to do it without setting off the alarm.” The doors in the underground cities were built strong enough to stop all imaginable impacts, and without a key card and code, it was virtually impossible to penetrate.
“It was on the net,” Jasmine offered in a tone just above a whisper. “The scanner found it last week but no one know
s how long it was posted.”
Gendarmerie Police Officer Jim Long reached down and helped Jasmine to her feet.
“Oh, God,” Jasmine murmured. “I thought for sure we’d make it...”
“Jaz,” Officer Long whispered, “Most don’t survive. I don’t know where you get your information or how you know, but very few of these kids survive. Hell, Jasmine, most are found after someone reports them missing but yet you know before anything happens or before they’re reported and you save nine out of ten...”
She pulled a handkerchief from her sling bag and wiped her eyes, and then wiped it across her forehead as if wiping away the anxiety that came with these types of scenarios.
“Officers Long and Cooper to base,” Long said into a microphone pinned to his left shoulder. “We need EMT assistance at 9700 Kansas City Corridor, Sector Forty-nine, Sub-terrain Ninety-two. We have a SCH Heroin overdose.”
As usual, there would not be a reply but Officer Long heard the base call out to the EMT team. It took an ETA of thirty minutes in that sector, which would be ample time for the team to complete their report on their datapad. A medical examiner would then take the data and complete the entry with the results of their autopsy. That information would then be stored and opened for anyone to see. In the underground, there were very few secret documents. There was not enough disk space or room to store any flash drives of frivolous documents. There also wasn’t enough security to make one feel safe about storing a document they wanted kept from prying eyes.
Jasmine put the handkerchief back into her sling bag, and pulled out the datapad and handed it to Officer Long. Jasmine did most entries. He only did DOA. It was an agreement they made when they became partners. She didn’t do DOAs very well. In fact, it would be a sleepless night as it was and even worse had she typed the specifics in.
They stepped out into the corridor and watched as Officers Guy and Sanford rode toward them on newer, updated Electro Glides that were based on the old Segway technology and design but used less battery.
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