Under Dark Sky Law

by Tamara Boyens

  Argon coughed and sputtered, but replied in a hoarse cough, “Yeah—thanks for that.”

  “Looks like you were a few seconds from being ghosted,” she said. She moved to stand in front of the bathroom door where there was more candlelight to see by. In the dark corner she could see the shish kabobbed skeleton and an expanding pool of blood creeping steadily towards the bed.

  He cleared his voice and rubbed his throat, which was mottled with purple and red marks from the garrote wire. Some small trickles of blood were seeping down his neck from where the wire had bit down hard enough to tear flesh. “Yeah, that was way too close for comfort. I just took that one up the ass,” he said. He continued rubbing the wound, accidentally smearing blood over his face and neck.

  Xero flipped strands of her still damp Mohawk out of her eyes. They were on such short supply she didn’t even really have any bottom shelf product to slick through her ‘hawk and make it stand up right. It’s real purpose was for stage shows down in the pits anyhow, since it had such a theatrical effect, and there was always some kind of hair gel in the pits. Chemicals were one thing they never seemed to be in short supply of.

  “You know, I’m glad you’re alive and all that, but you’re now covered in both blood and semen, and there’s a dead body painting our whole floor red. So help me god if you try to fall asleep like that and ruin our last clean mattress I will let you join that skeleton in eternal peace,” she said.

  He sighed. “Don't worry—I don’t think I’ll be getting much sleep at this point anyway. What gives with this skeleton anyway? I thought you hashed out a deal with Calavera before we bounced out of the pits.” He coughed several times and silently gagged as he manually tried to adjust his squashed Adam’s apple.

  She knit her bushy brows together, her weight shifting between her hips, her fat lips pursed together in thought. “That is odd. Calavera is a total douche wad, but she typically honors our deals. That’s why I was thinking maybe one of her district enforcers is either a moron or running rogue. Or maybe this is just some copycat fuck dressing up like a skeleton for shit’s and giggles,” she said.

  Argon shook his head and winced, “Nah, you know what happens if Calavera finds people wearing her threads. You’d have to be an epic fuck up to even think about trying that shit,” he said.

  Her eyes flicked back to the pool of blood. At least it wasn’t headed towards the last of their sheets. “And Calavera wouldn’t have sent just one skeleton to fuck with us—if she was going to violate our agreement, she would have sent the whole division after us, not some ragtag scallywag wannabe ninja loser like this dude,” she said and thrust her thumb in the direction of the corpse.

  “Hey now, that loser almost had me snuffed from behind like a bad porno,” he said.

  She smirked. “No comment,” she said.

  She paused for a moment, her brows knit together, her eyes narrowed at Argon. “Can you tell me why in the fuck my weapons are missing from the bathroom? If this place was cased before we even got here, we might have an even bigger problem then we thought,” she said. “Unless you were stupid enough to do something with them.”

  He cocked his head to the side in thought. “No, even I have more sense than that,” he said.

  She crossed her arms and glared at him. “Are you absolutely sure? You’ve done stupid shit like this in the past,” she said and stopped herself from listing off all the dumb moves Argon had pulled at one time or another. It was just going to make her angrier.

  He swiveled his head around again. “No, it definitely wasn’t me…wait—I bet I know what happened. Trina was out here cleaning things up before she got jacked up with the zaps. You know how much she likes to make sure all weapons are cleaned and properly maintained. I bet you she pulled them out somewhere to work on them and then forgot about them when she started getting really fucked up and we had to boogie her on back to the pits,” he said.

  Xero slapped herself on the forehead. “Yeah, duh, I kinda remember now,” she said. She’d been out on a run that went badly when all that had gone down. Neptune and Argon had mainly handled the extraction, and she hadn’t had a chance to swing by the shack before jetting out of the domes and back to the pits to make sure no one was going to try and put a hit out on her.

  He hesitated, but continued, “I suppose it is actually kind of my fault—I didn’t check things after we left. Things have just been more rushed lately than I would have liked.”

  She let out a long exhale. “No, it’s just as much my fault for not doing the same thing, and more my fault that we’ve been sloppy. Speaking of which, we need to clean up this fucking disaster,” she said. As much as she loved yelling at people for being idiots, she was no fool, and accepted her responsibility as their head honcho to run a tight ship.

  They were silent for a moment, thinking of the possibilities and their options for dealing with the corpse and the resulting mess.

  “Fuck, I wish Trina or even Milo were here to clean this shit up. I really don’t want to drag this body around,” she said.

  “We might want to save the corpse or at least the head to show Calavera so she can get a bead on what’s up with this yahoo, if she is in fact on the up and up,” Argon said.

  She shook her head hard. Flecks of water flew from her hair and peppered her collarbone with moisture. “Man, I don’t want to cut off any heads tonight. Look, let’s just drag this thing out to the shed and get a message to Calavera to come figure out why goons dressed in his skeleton uniforms are trying to take us out in the flats,” she said.

  “What time is it? Looks like it’s starting to get light out, but Calavera gets pissed if you bug her at odd hours,” he said.

  “That bitch is such a friggin queen. We’ll just pass a message to one of her enforcers and they can figure out how to deal with it. I want that body out of here ASAP, and with the way shit’s been going down I don’t really want to involve our crew in things. I was trying to be discreet about even being here. I’m pretty sure Calavera will wanna deal with this personally once she knows what’s up. Even if she went totally insane, and she really is behind this, she’d still want to come and clean up his mess,” she said. Professional courtesy.

  She shivered. “Damn it’s actually getting really cold,” she said. The flats didn’t have any remaining temperature control like the domes, and the straggling biosphere often had unpredictable weather patterns. Xero hated being cold. Out in the pits, natural summer still hadn’t let go of the hot and dry desert.

  “I still don’t want to get any of my clothes fucked up with blood, and I was a total asshole with the soap and hot water,” she said.

  He shrugged. “You killed him naked, may as well clean up after him naked,” he said.

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Like you’ve ever given a shit about being naked,” he said.

  He was right, but she was tired, annoyed, and above all else she was cold, and she didn’t even have the energy for a properly venomous response. “Yeah, yeah, let’s get this thing over with,” she said.

  CHAPTER 2

  After dealing with the body and Calavera’s cronies, she got Argon to submit to a shower. As aggressive as they usually were with each other, there was a tacit rule in the Grease Weasels—if someone was almost vaporized, you went easy on them for awhile. You fucked them, you brought them cookies, got them nice things, and helped them out.

  There wasn’t much left in the way of hot water left, so they shared the shower. Argon knew how much she hated the cold. He wrapped his arms around her, and his body was hot enough that she could almost forget the water. Xero was tall, over six feet, but Argon towered almost half a foot higher than she did. She could still kick his ass in a fight, but he was muscled enough to hold his own, just as long as he wasn’t spaced out like he had been from the glory of his own dick.

  She did him the favor of gently cleaning his neck wounds with the last bits of the soap. He let out a sharp stream of air through his front teeth wh
en she hit a big chunk of raw skin. Their eyes locked, and there was more than just some small discomfort in those blue orbs. She grabbed his hips and bit his right nipple. It seemed like it wasn’t so cold in the shower anymore.

  They lay in bed again, and the sun was well on its way to rising. Typically she liked the nights under the dark sky law—they were peaceful in an old world sort of way. On good nights you could even see the skies through the haze of ozone burn. After the bizarre skeleton assault though, she would be glad for the light and increased visibility of daylight.

  Argon still felt like a nice warm furnace, and she snuggled him with her head pressed against his chest. She had the sheets balled up around them like a cocoon for insulation.

  “You’re never this affectionate,” he said.

  “The temperature must have dropped twenty degrees in the last five hours,” she said, “And you almost got ass raped to death. I hate you, but I don’t want you to die. You’d be a pain in the ass to replace.” They were really all they had in the world, and as hard as she was on everyone, she was almost afraid of what she would become without the Grease Weasels there.

  “Good to know,” he said, and squeezed her body closer.

  Normally that kind of affection would have incited some kind of retaliation, but instead she just sighed. There would be plenty of times in the future to smack him around some more, or at least if she had anything to do about it they would. Every day out there could be your last, and that’s the way they lived. Plan for the future, but live for the day. It was odd to think that there had once been a time when the worst thing she had to deal with was what kind of steak she was going to serve for that night’s dinner party, and if she had picked out a good enough wine selection to avoid social embarrassment.

  “We’re never going to get any sleep now,” she said. “We probably shouldn’t even be lying down like this, but if it’s just more of those skeleton creeps coming after us then we don’t have much to worry about.”

  He shifted in the bed. “That was my fault—I shouldn’t have been so careless. If I’d been alone that might have been it for me. But I’m not going to be able to sleep now anyway. I’ll just dream of being ass raped or something—you should just get some sleep and I’ll keep an eye out for trouble. It’s going to be a long fucking day,” he said.

  CHAPTER 3

  Much to her surprise, she managed to get a few hours of sleep. The smarter part of her thought it was foolish to let Argon keep watch after he’d already fucked up once, but the delegator in her said he would be more careful after reaping the harsh consequences of letting his guard down in the flats. The early morning passed without incident, and she was grateful for the rest. Things were already going to be difficult enough with their crew fractured like it was. Making big official runs was stressful enough when they had everyone in place. Of course, she could have asked the local supply chain to give her replacement crew members, but there was no way she was willing to take the chance of trusting someone that she wasn’t familiar with on a big run through multiple eco-zones and districts.

  In the light of day the blood stain on the floor looked further from being cleaned than it had the night before. She thought that they had done a reasonable job of mopping up at least some of the biohazard, but there was a clear area marked by a chunky stain that couldn’t be anything other than a large pool of blood left to congeal over night. Fail. This job was going to take them far out into uncharted lands, and they likely wouldn’t be returning for a long while—there was too much unfinished business in the pits for them to come all the way back here again immediately. She only hoped that maggots and roaches and other vermin didn’t try to move in while she was gone. Of course this area didn’t have much in the way of species that could survive the odd environmental conditions this deep into the flats. The river made sure a steady supply of toxins seeped into every part of the territory.

  It was hard getting ready for dome screenings when they had to be pre-processed in the flats. Not all municipalities had those limitations, but the Phoenix Dome was a huge pain in the ass about dome access. They weren’t without their reasons for wanting to bog down the process—Arizona was cursed with a political structure and cultural attitudes inherited from the old world, and they had one of the biggest and most difficult to deal with networks of outland pits. And Xero would know—she was the boss.

  Dome residents and officials were difficult to deal with because they were still highly stuck on personal appearances. Chumps. Out in the pits and the flats, those types of shallow evaluations had come to a complete stop. In the way of old school communism, the decreased social boundaries and limited availability of various types of clothing and even basic services like running water made it tacitly taboo to pass judgment on someone based on something as stupid as their clothing. A better way to judge someone was whether or not they’d jam an ice pick in your kidney if you looked at them the wrong way.

  “Do you want to check out that body before Calavera’s thugs get here and drag it off to dismember it?” Argon said.

  He was wearing a tattered pair of heart-studded boxers. At least he was smart enough to leave his dome gear off until they were ready to go. Regulations with Dome Drones prohibited them from carrying anything extra on their person. So what they had was it. Fucking federalies were always up their ass about one thing or another.

  “Yeah, we should take a peek to see if we can get any clues,” she said. “I’d know a genuine Calaca suit anywhere.” Xero had slipped on a pair of dingy underwear and a stained white tank top.

  Argon squinched his face up at her, “And when are we going to get cool work outfits like those,” he said.

  She rolled her eyes. “Don’t be such a fucking queen. We don’t need no stinkin’ badges,” she said and waited to see if the young man recognized the reference. He had been born in the domes, but he had been tossed out at an early age. No movies in the pits. No recognition crossed his face, and she scoffed. Figured.

  “I don’t want a badge, I want a cool armored uniform,” he said.

  She walked two steps and gave his thigh a light smack. “Armor is for pussies,” she said. “Go join Calavera if you want to parade around in a retarded outfit. She’s still just some two bit chola drug dealer. Stay with the Grease Weasels if you want fame and fortune.”

  He folded his arms, ignoring her swat like it was mosquito bite. “Fortune, huh? Where’s this fortune you speak of? And what about minions? Why don’t we have an army of minions to do our bidding,” he said.

  “Oh shut it. We’ve got more money than we could ever even think of spending, in the domes or out of them. And we’ve got minions aplenty—who the fuck do you think takes care of all the mundane shit we can’t be bothered with? We’re just more discreet. If you wanted to try and take down our power structure, you’d be hard pressed to figure out who the fuck is even connected with our organization. We do this work because it’s important—we don’t leave crucial shit for underlings to fuck up. We don’t let underlings come into any direct contact with the federalies. We do it right. So let’s get serious. It’s the power you want, and it’s power that we’ve got. Calavera can’t give you that. Also,” she said and winked, “I’m a better lay—I would know.”

  He grimaced. “I don’t know if I should be disgusted or turned on,” he said.

  Xero sauntered up behind him and grabbed his ass. “Well, Papi, next time you see her, see if she’ll let you wet your tip. She prefers pussy, but I hear she'll ride a dick every now and again,” she said.

  He ran a hand through his hair. “I’ll keep it in mind. And by keep it in mind, I mean no chance in hell. That psycho bitch would probably just cut off my piece just for funsies.”

  She reached around the front of him and grabbed his balls with her palm, hooking her thumb around the base of his cock. “Good point. That would be inconvenient to me, seeing as how this is my favorite part of yours,” she said and bit the back of his neck.

  A shudder ra
n through his body and he sighed. “We don’t have time for this—you got a good nap in, and now we’re going to be late to the domes if Calavera’s goonies don’t show up soon,” he said and pulled away from her grip. He was right, but that didn’t make it any less of a bummer.

  “You,” she pointed an index finger at his face, “are no fun,” she said. “But, thank you for the nap.” She smiled and her eyes squinted into a cutesy face. The excitement of the coming run was creeping up on her, and she was looking forward to getting off on big squeezes of adrenaline.

  “I’m supposed to help keep you in line, not keep you entertained,” he said.

  “Sounds like someone else needs a nap,” she said. “Come on, today’s going to be fun. We get to fuck with the Dome Drones and take a hike out to friggin Yuma. When’s the last time you went to Yuma?”

  He scratched the nape of his neck. “You’re delusional—Yuma has never been a great place to visit.”

  She blew a raspberry at him. “How would you know? You were in diapers when Yuma finally got a Dome. That place was a swinging underground hideaway before it domed up, but there’s some great spots in the pits out there. Dome’s pretty laid back too—we’ll probably be able to get away with staying somewhere fancy like the Super 8 without even having to forge our Zone Passes. Phoenix and San Diego are both too far away to fuck with them. Every time I go by there, new weird shit pops up. Who knows what we’ll find this time? Best of all, they left the dunes to the pits, and I’m on good terms with the territory boss. He’ll let us borrow a dune buggy for sure. You ever been cruising around in the Imperial Dunes?” she asked.

  He wrinkled his eyebrows and pulled his chin back till it was squished against his neck. “Wow, you’re really excited about this run,” he said.