Virology

by Ren Warom

  Tuning Aunty Dong out a fraction more, he fixes on the roads from Shandong. They’ll be on or in a vehicle, that much he’d bet upon. The foothills won’t be enough, it’ll be the farm ’rises they’ve chosen to hide in. It’s perfect. Shandong is brimming with people and architecture amongst its mountains just as much as the rest of the Gung, but if there was anywhere that might be described as remote or inaccessible, Shandong would be that place.

  With his eyes glued to the roads, it’s not long until caterbikes and trucks start zooming in on the high road from the upper mountain ranges. One of the bikes has two passengers, neither of which look anything like any of the Hornets or their Cleaner and Haunt, but there’s something off about their appearance through the filters of the program and he follows the bike’s progress all the way in to the club district where it parks in a cheap carpark rise. He loses them there, but no matter—he’s realized what’s up—they’re wearing skins.

  Sending prayers of thanks to every ancestor he can remember the name of, he jumps up, straightens his clothes and races down to the street, tapping in a second IM link alongside Aunty Dong’s connected to the team she graciously sent down to work with him. They treat him like shit, but he’s about to make them give full respect by earning Aunty Dong’s admiration and approval. His time is now.

  Link me in to the club streams. The ones closest to that park rise. I’m going to say limit it to the largest. I’m looking for the places with the biggest crowds, the darkest dance floors. Probably the chain-discos. The cheapest, tackiest joints.

  Seconds later he’s filled with info, all streaming in waves. Makes him happy he left the hangover headache behind him a good seven hours ago after a bracing early morning atop the apartment blocks and enough sushi to mop up gallons of baijiu.

  Scanning the streams as he makes his way down to the street, he threads in to the crowds of clubbers, ignoring their snorts of laughter at his poor choice of clothes. Fuck them and their assumptions; he’s not been clubbing since his twenties, and he sure as hell wouldn’t have picked Hunin when he did. Jazz clubs and karaoke bars are more his scene.

  Reaching the area his targets parked, he looks over the streams from the nearest clubs, adding in to the intel on the matching program the faces of those two caterbike riders, partially obscured by helmets and darkness but still a bonus on top of body language. These two may be Hornets but that doesn’t guarantee they’ll be on the streams Aunty Dong secured, or not on them long enough for a good read. When he sees which club they headed into, he follows them in, nodded past by a bouncer whose wide grin betrays unprofessional amusement at his attire.

  These kids. They know fuck all.

  Hu Hai has a nose for bars and finds his way through the crush of the club in no time, propping himself up with a beer to start a long watch for his targets. Plan is, get close, get them talking, and hope they pull an almost full or full match. Once he’s sure they’re Hornets, he can follow them home. If only Aunty Dong would quit yammering, his night could well go perfectly.

  What KJ Did…

  Barrelling into Vivid’s room, KJ throws himself down on her bed in a sprawl of long limbs, looking like a collection of elbows and knees tied together with ratty black jeans. Rolling on to his belly, he props his head on his fists and stares at the back of her head as she tries to sort the contents of her floordrobe into “safe to wear” and “wash now before it walks on its own” piles, stuffing anything clean enough for dammit back into her duffel in an attempt to tidy that may last for a day or two if she’s lucky.

  Vivid’s good at many things, but neatness has never been her forte. KJ is endlessly charmed by this fact, like she’s charmed by his nervous energy. Odd friends make the best friends. After a few moments of being ignored in what can only be described as a pointed fashion, he clears his throat. Vivid’s back tenses. She chucks a filthy pair of jeans over her shoulder. The aim is uncanny, landing right on his head. KJ takes this as a positive.

  “I know you can see me.”

  “I have my back to you, Knee Jerk.”

  “You saw me come in, I mean.”

  “And?”

  He huffs, chucks the jeans on to her wash pile, threatening to topple it right back to the ground. “I’m bored.”

  She hisses at him and her avi, a soporific-looking sea cow, pops her head up through the floor to watch him with sorrowful eyes. He tries not to notice. Sea cows have excellent guilt face. “Aim better, or you won’t live to continue experiencing boredom.”

  Folding his long body into a yogic knot, KJ lifts his top and winks at Vivid’s avi, who sniffs and sinks out of sight. “Been there, got the flesh tee. Try harder.”

  “Bitch.”

  “Bored.”

  “So go do a puzzle. Make a pasta necklace. Bash a wooden spoon on a pan. Go braid Shock’s hair. He’s Slipping again; he won’t even notice.”

  KJ dismisses these suggestions in their entirety with a fart noise. “I want you to entertain me.”

  Vivid sighs and finally turns to look at him. Yup, that’s a stank eye. She does good stank eye. He feels positively dirty. “Why?”

  “We’re besties.”

  When all else fails, hitting someone with the truth, especially when that someone is Alana “Vivid” Bianchi, is your only remaining useful weapon, if rather dangerous. Vivid gets mad super quick, holds a grudge like superglue holds paper to wood and wouldn’t know how to pull her punches if you tied a rope to her wrist, attached an elephant and made it run in the opposite direction. To his great fortune, she takes this one on the chin.

  “This is true. So what manner of entertainment are we thinking?”

  “I want to go out dancing and get laid.”

  Vivid’s jaw does a brilliant impression of a trapdoor. KJ isn’t usually so reckless, but frankly he’s not usually so cabin fevered. This is valley of the unknown shit. He’s never encountered the urge to go out and do quite at this magnitude. Panic disorders and people time, especially in the big wide, don’t often converge in any such happy fashion. Turns out his panic disorder is a difficult bitch. It doesn’t take orders well. Right now, panic or not, it wants out. Fresh air. New places. And it’s willing to go mad and take him with it if it’s ignored.

  Gathering her jaw back under her control, Vivid resumes tidying. “You need to change that top before I’ll go anywhere with you.”

  He smooths his hands down his sweatshirt—pink and yellow with dancing bears on the front. He fucking loves this sweatshirt. It’s soft inside and makes people unreasonably angry. KJ’s anxiety’s a bitch, and yet the little devil on his shoulder who says getting cut to pieces by Li is about the worst that can happen to a body, or at least his body, is always encouraging him to poke at people’s comfort zones.

  “This stays on. It’s chilly in Hunin, and like anyone in the clubs will be sober enough to notice.”

  “If you wanna get laid you’ll rethink that.”

  He snorts. “They won’t be looking at my sweatshirt, Viv. So can we go? Please? We haven’t been dancing in ages and we have the skins Deuce made. It’ll be fun.”

  From the glint in her eye, he can tell she’s sold on the idea and halfway through a mental catalogue of all the clubbing gear she managed to bring with her for an outfit that might, under dim lights and through beer goggles look something similar to inappropriate. Knowing Viv as he does he makes a bet on panties, heels and black tape on her nipples.

  He’s only wrong about the colour of the tape. Gail only has green in the house. Viv’s disappointed for about two seconds until she realizes she has the perfect pair of matching panties with lurid green ghouls on black. She backcombs and sprays her hair into a bird’s nest of a faux hawk and all but drags him, still in his skinny jeans, Beng boots and bear sweatie, to the caterbikes.

  “Skin on,” she tells him.

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “Fuck off. But that reminds me, who is mom tonight?” The Hornets term for designated driver is mom. None of them spe
aks to their actual moms any more except Deuce. Parents can be a fucking joke when your life goes in a direction they weren’t expecting, as if your life were somehow theirs to direct.

  “You be mom,” KJ says, living his selfishness like a pro, activating his skin and hopping on behind her, skinny legs dangling. “Tonight I’m all about getting trashed, dancing until I can’t see straight and then getting reamed so hard I walk like I’ve shat backwards for a week.”

  Vivid’s skin blinks. Funny that it’s her behind that strange face. He can’t get used to it. “That is some visual,” she says slowly.

  He’d like to remind her of the many times she’s said similar or worse, but that’s not what good friends do with friends apt to get pissy quick, especially not when said friends are going out of their way to be entertaining. He gives her a quick squish and says cheerfully, “Put it in the spank bank, sweetheart. Now mush!”

  The caterbike revs up to the tune of her enthusiastic retching noises and they head off down the mountain pass road toward Hunin and party time. KJ lifts his face into the breeze and, for the first time since running full tilt from Jong-phu with sec drones at his back and panic scrambling his signals, he feels like any other twenty-four-year-old out there.

  “Look out, Hunin!” he crows. “You’re about to be penetrated!”

  * * *

  Nervous and wrecked and mutilated he might be, but KJ knows how good he looks when he dances. Music tosses him outside of the damage in his head and on his skin, both as physical as each other, neither fixable, and gives him back to himself for a short while. None of the Hornets knew who he was before Li Harmony carved him up and had him thrown in an alley. Wi Ji Lin was at Cad, learning piano and entertainment, mainly dance—ballet, contemporary, Latin.

  He’s good at piano, but dancing, that’s his gift. He was expecting to go places with it. Failing came as a rude shock, even more so when it became apparent how few opportunities there were for playing piano, and the only dancing on offer involved thongs, oil and a pole. He’d done that for a while, just to hold on to dance. Until they tried to get him into private work, starting with lap dances and graduating to prostitution disguised as companionship. That stopped being fun super-fast, so he quit to become the single worst drug dealer in Li and Ho Harmony’s employ.

  The mistakes you make when you run mindlessly from a bad situation, thinking there’s nothing worse. Fail life lesson numero uno: there’s always worse, and KJ is a star at winkling the worst of two evils when given the chance. So now he can’t strip because people would puke. Hell, he probably couldn’t even get up the courage to go alone on stage any more, his fight/flight response so borked he sometimes tries to do everything at once and ends up freezing and blacking out. Classic hypoxia.

  Thank fuck for the Hornets and their willingness to take him in based on an affinity for code he didn’t know he had until he was forced to learn it, to overlook all his ticks and twitchiness and let him be his best self—which even on a good day is someone else’s worst self.

  Yeah, KJ’s a mess, and anyone in this club who’s been watching him dance and imagining having him writhe against them like that in a corner, pants down and panting, would run a minute mile to get away from him if they knew what this sweatshirt hid. Thankfully for his libido, his pride and his delicate heart, he has no intention of taking it off, not even in this nuclear heat of bodies and lights. He just closes his eyes, forgets everything but what was and lets loose, knowing eyes are on him and loving it.

  Thirsty work though, and burns the buzz off fast. He needs another drink. Preferably long, cold, and with enough alcohol to down a mammoth, to drown any threatening flood of panic thoughts his idiot monkey brain might want to pelt him with.

  This whole business of enjoying himself, of forgetting, can be a fine balance.

  “Want a drink?” he bellows in Viv’s ear.

  “Something with a stupid name and three umbrellas,” she yells back. “Extraneous fruit. Possibly on fire.”

  He shoves both thumbs in the air. “I gotcha back.”

  Spinning lightly, he ducks under the flailing arms of some guy built like a tank and clearly on something very good and starts to walk-dance his way to the bar. Once there a few pointed smiles and shimmies get him in front of the cutest server so he can order two heavy-on-the-alcohol cocktails, one free of anything but a mixer stick and some ice, the other packing pretty much every available extra going. He knows how to treat his bestie, even when she’s designated mom and shouldn’t technically be imbibing. Fuck technicalities.

  He’s leaning over the bar observing the cutie mixing up their drinks when he notes an older guy edging in on his left. Dressed in what can only be described as dad clothes, he’s Chinese and kind of ugly handsome. Looks exhausted too, which is the most interesting thing, how he looks cool, relaxed and yet about to fucking drop where he stands. He’s also staring at KJ and smiling widely at him. Uh oh, creep alert. Sirens at max.

  “Having fun?” dad clothes shouts over the din.

  KJ tries not to flinch. Is this a come on? Because if so, hell no. He’s had his eye on a slinky Latino dude carving up the floor. They’ve eye fucked several times already, so he knows he’s on to a winner. This guy is not a winner. The only club he’s dressed for is the cricket club and he’s bowling a maiden over right now. Dot ball. “Um… sure. Music, dancing, booze, what’s not to love?”

  The guy steps closer and KJ has to fight the urge to step back. He loses. Tries to make it look casual.

  “Any recommends on what’s good to drink?” Chinese dad clothes guy is too close. “I’m drinking bad beer, and I’m not impressed.”

  He tips the bottle in his hand, but KJ has no need to see the brand. In fact his sheer horror at the poor guy’s newb mistake drives a little wedge into his unease, cracking it open just far enough to allow for him to ditch the “stop creeping on me” vibe and offer his sage advice.

  “Oh fuck no! Never drink the beer here, dude. They bulk buy. It’s horrendous stuff, like, the absolute worst. Cocktails only here, anything with good, hard liquor. I’d recommend the gin based. Their selection of gins is fucking amazing. I’m talking sterling quality. The owner’s a total lush for gin, he’s practically got a degree in the stuff.” His and Viv’s drinks appear on the bar. “Good luck ordering!” he carols over his shoulder as he hurries to put people between him and the odd intensity that his response has sparked in Chinese guy’s eyes. Creep magnitude up fifty percent. Yikes.

  KJ isn’t fond of being looked at as it is. Being looked at like that though? He shudders. That shit will give a guy nightmares. Grabbing his straw between his teeth, KJ takes a long gulp and sighs as it hits, warmth spreading down his throat and into his gut. He tells himself everything is peachy. Dancing, more drinks and a steamy hook-up with slinky Latino will make it all go away. And the unsettling conviction that even with all these bodies between them weird Chinese dad clothes guy is still watching will drop away like everything else does.

  Yeah. He keeps telling himself that, because this is the single thing he won’t allow his panic to ruin. Not ever. He’ll dance and drink and fuck and forget, and be himself for just a little bit longer.

  Shandong In Flames

  In his dreams, Shock floats in a haze of golden light and leaves. Sendai. This was his haven once, the place he thought was home, this leafy paragon of virtue, one of the Gung’s richest neighbourhoods. A ghetto for the wealthy, and the lucky. He was lucky for two years, then he lost it, and spent years trying to get it back. Wasted years. Desperate years. He regrets every day of every last one of them.

  Wings flutter in his face, soft feathers and clicking mechanisms, all the birds of Sendai. They float as he floats. Golden and silent. Follow him through gilded green light to Slip, where he evaporates to chains of gold, to his avi self, disappearing through warmth and leaves into heavy water, stretched to his limits, listening to the whispering of the code. Trying to follow the conversation as it talks amongst itse
lf—stranger conversation than he could imagine. Concepts rather than words. Spirals of complex sound that may be argument or song or gossip.

  He dreams this every night and isn’t sure if he’s actually there or not, considering where he begins—always in Sendai. VR is dreaming wide awake, so why shouldn’t he end up here when he sleeps as well? He’s not entirely real any more. Maybe when he’s unconscious, the part of him no longer human comes out to play. Twisting, he brushes aside the strands of his hair to watch a polyhedral world spinning beside him invert, the innards a panoply reminiscent of ancient Persepolis. All towers and fire.

  No. That’s not fire. Squinting through the crenellations of the polyhedral’s towers, he sees flares on the far borders of Slip. Something like flame. Spikes of energy maybe. They rise up, burst and fold, and around him Slip explodes in slow motion, in eruptions of gold, like volcanic magma, and conflagrations from sparks. A rapid chatter and roar interrupts the spirals of code conversation and leaves him spinning in place, hunting for the source, his hair whipping into his face, tangling in his lashes, catching on his lips.

  “Shock!”

  Shock lurches straight from complicated half subconscious, half slipping not-quite-dreams to fully immersed RL. Takes a moment to adjust, gasping like a beached fish. Staring directly into eyes so dark he can’t tell pupil from iris. Deuce. Anger and panic boil in his gaze like explosions through fire.

  “What?”

  “Incoming,” Deuce snarls. “We have incoming. Soldiers, maybe a hundred of them. We need to get out.”

  “Cartel?”

  “No. Not Cartel. Don’t know who. Fucking blatant, coming in on trucks and caterbikes, heavily armed. We’ve got minutes at best. Our window for getting out the front was gone before my avi even spotted them.”