“Well, I’m sorry about that. I’ve had a bit of a rough week,” she said.
He licked his lips, and for a brief moment a look crossed his face. It was gone as quickly as it came, but it was enough to make Xero lean forward. Then she knew what it was that was bothering her. It was a dance. It was like they were two experienced hunters stalking each other, two lions tracking each other through the bush.
“I think that you will be most interesting to work with,” he said with just a hint of that edge she’d seen a glimpse of, but then he sat straight up again and it was gone, back to his soft and caring psychiatrist routine. “My name is Dr. Shepherd. Ezekiel Shepherd,” he said, pushing a name placard that had been moved sideways on his desk so that it was facing her again.
“Zeke, eh? That must have been a tough name to grow up with,” she said.
“You have no idea,” he said softly. “I usually just stick with Dr. Shepherd. However, you can call me something else though, if you’d like, Dr. Pietrovich.”
It was weird hearing someone call her that. She was old enough that she hadn’t been able to erase her real name from the hard copy records at the base of the dome census data. That meant it was also hard to truly hide her past life from anyone that really wanted to find it, but she’d at least covered her tracks enough that the typical government agent wouldn’t come across it in any databases. You’d have to really want to get some hardcore dirt to dig up the real information about her life in the domes. This guy had done some serious homework, and she doubted that it was something that had happened overnight. He’d been waiting for her.
“And what would that be?” she said.
“You can call me Xed. With an X,” he said and she failed to stifle a laugh.
She looked around, thinking back to the layout of the office, wondering how easy someone could hear inside. “You’ve got to be joking me,” she said, still leaking giggles despite her attempt to keep things serious.
“Don’t worry. This place is sound proof, and there are no bugs in here. I don’t expect you to accept that, but once we clean you up a bit, you can check yourself if you like,” he said.
“I may very well take you up on that. And you may as well just call me Xero if you want me to call you Xed,” she said. She couldn’t believe the ludicrousness of the situation. The guy sitting in front of her with neat rimless spectacles and a pressed blue checked dress shirt was claiming to be Xed. The Xed.
“Very well. I can tell you doubt me, but I assure you, if nothing else I have basic medical training, and I’m not going to do anything to you in the middle of a government office building. I really just want to have a nice chat with you,” he said, flashing her a politician’s smile that she knew was meant to be ironic.
If he had wanted to kill her, he wouldn’t have gone through all the trouble to bring her to his office either. There had a been a hundred other times he could have tried to get a hit in on her if that’s what he’d wanted. Besides, her ego said that despite his reputation, she was definitely faster and more of a seasoned combat veteran than him—if he tried anything, he’d be the one who’d end up laid out on the cheap industrial carpet. She looked in his eyes, showing him that hard edge in her own that said she wouldn’t think twice about slitting his throat if she had to. The look he returned said that he understood that fact, and they had a moment of unstated agreement.
“Sure,” she said. “I’d hate to ruin anymore expensive furniture items.”
She approached the desk and he pulled up a chair. They spent the next half hour collaboratively cleaning and stitching up her wounds. His medical kit had some of the long-lasting waterproof bandages that were hard to get ahold of in the pits, which was great because you could shower with them and not ruin fresh stitches. She didn’t know what the hell he wanted from her, but she’d have basically sold her soul for a fucking hot shower at that point. In her mind, the greatest tragedy of the last two days was not getting to use that whirlpool hot tub at The Niagara.
He grabbed her right arm and inspected the row of meticulous sutures that he’d sewn along the jagged slice from the skeleton stabbing. The strength in his grip was surprising, and she noticed that he was more muscular underneath his crisp but oversized dress shirt than she’d originally thought.
“Well that’s much better, isn’t it?” he said when they were finished. He started cleaning up medical supplies and the mess they’d made on the desk. They’d both been fairly meticulous, but some blood had still splattered on the dark wood.
“Sorry about the mess,” she said. “You got a rag or something?”
“I got it,” he said and extracted some sterile wipes, dragging one across the desk and leaving it sparkling with a sheen of disinfectant. “Good as new.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have any antibiotics, would you?” she asked.
He leaned back in his grey suede office chair. “What kind?” he said.
“Anything really. These wounds were open in a cesspool all night and I don’t really have time to deal with flesh rot. Old school penicillin would even do,” she said.
He leaned under his desk and came up with a vial and a large syringe with a large-bore needle. “I think we can arrange that,” he said. He started shaking the vial and partially removed the syringe from its packaging, but she stopped him.
“Let me do that,” she said. He handed over the vial and the partly unwrapped syringe. The vial was cold, labeled with the appropriate title, and factory sealed. If it wasn’t actually an antibiotic, he’d done a good job of hiding it.
“You’ve got a fridge down there? Didn’t you just move to this office?” she said.
“It never hurts to be prepared. These are strange times,” he said.
Xero snickered. “They are indeed,” she said. She was starting to like this guy.
She drew up a syringe full of the thick white liquid. “This isn’t going to be pleasant. I need a big muscle to shoot this into. Hope you don’t mind me getting naked in your office. Wouldn’t want anyone thinking you were being inappropriate on the job,” she said.
He stood up and came around to her side of the desk. “It should really go in the gluteus. Let me help,” he said.
Sure? Why not? She’d already established that if he was going to attack her, it wasn’t going to be here, or any time in the immediate future. There was something he wanted from her, and he seemed like the type that would be patient enough to wait for it.
She nodded and peeled down the right side of her jeans, exposing the upper side of her ass. He sterilized a patch of skin and gave her the injection with practiced confidence. She winced with one eye, but it really hadn’t been that uncomfortable given the size of the injection.
“You have a gentle touch,” she said, rubbing the injection site for a moment before pulling up her pants. It wasn’t the most intimate connection she’d ever had with a complete stranger, but it had certainly been a moment of unexpected intimacy.
“Thanks, I pride myself on having a certain finesse in my job. Can I interest you in any pain medication injections while I’m at it?” he said.
She shook her head. “No, I stay away from anything like that unless I absolutely have to,” she said.
“Interesting,” he said slowly and disposed of the medical waste.
She sat back down in the chair and he resumed his position behind the desk. “So. I have a few questions to ask you,” he said. “Would that be alright?”
“Well you just fondled my ass, so you may as well get to know me a little better,” she said and winked. The both laughed at her absurdity, and she felt herself getting comfortable around him.
“You have a point. I’m not usually so forward with people I don’t know, but then again I don’t usually provide emergency medical care in my office either,” he said.
“Right, because most psychiatrists keep refrigerated antibiotics in a secret cubby of their desk,” she said.
He bit the corner of his lip. “Like I said. You n
ever know when you disaster might strike,” he said.
“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours?” she said.
“Don’t you want to check this place for bugs first?” he said.
“I’ve got a scrambler in my pocket, and it would have picked up any obvious equipment. Plus, if you’re airing your dirty laundry on tape, we’d want that info to stay out of the same people’s hands. If we’re really running in the same circles, there’s not a lot of my information that would be useful to anyone. They already know,” she said.
He flexed his knuckles, clearly satisfied with her response. “I can see that you’re no fool. You’ve been around the block a few times,” he said.
“But you already knew that,” she said. “You clearly did your homework. So, the question is—what do you want from me?”
“So, I’m assuming you know who I am?” he said.
“I know who you say you are,” she said, but just from the short time she’d interacted with him, she knew he was telling the truth. She felt a kind of kinship with him, like they were operating on the same plane. It didn’t exactly make her trust him more, but it made her understand him on an intuitive level.
“I’m pretty sure we’re clear about each other’s identities, wouldn’t you say?” he said and she nodded begrudgingly.
“Yeah, I’m willing to go with that hypothesis for the time being,” she said.
“For the moment, I just want to offer you something—information, and maybe some help. If you like what I have to offer, perhaps we can talk a little bit more about a few business ideas that I have,” he said.
From the way he was looking at her, he was interested in business and pleasure, and that was just fine with Xero. She never had a problem with mashing together two good things. “Business ideas, eh? Have you ever even been out to the pits?” she said. He looked like a genuine lifelong dome dweller, but you never could be totally certain.
“I’m actually from the flats, but I have a limited resistance to the outside. Not enough to live in the pits, no, but I can travel there for short periods of time,” he said, and Xero was convinced that there was in fact no surveillance going on. That wasn’t something anyone would want to reveal, even jokingly. In these days, if anyone figured out that you’d developed atmospheric resistance potential, your days in the dome were numbered, you may as well toss your Zone Pass in the fire.
“How were you able to get away with working inside the domes if you’re from the flats?” she asked with genuine surprise.
“I am very, very good with computers. I can pretty much do anything I need to with the government systems, including obscuring my own birth status,” he said. “Unfortunately, there’s not much I can do for you on that front, without giving you a totally new identity. I’m just a few years younger than you, which let me escape the paper trail that’s still very difficult to erase, and you’re too well known of a government contractor for me to just make all of that disappear without extreme suspicion.”
“Yes, I know, I don’t really need anything like that anyway. But still, I’m impressed. Erasing your birth status is no easy feat,” she said. In fact, there was only one other person that she’d ever known who had been successful in pulling something like that off.
“I think you’ll find that I’m very capable in a variety of areas if you decide to accept my business proposition. However, as I said, I would like to focus on your needs first,” he said, leaning further over the desk again. “So, my question to you is, what can I do for you?”
“Well, for starters I could use a fucking hot shower. I don’t mind tangling with riffraff, but I’ll be damned if I like smelling like one,” she said.
“That should be easy enough to arrange. Beyond that, what else can I help you with,” he said.
“Since you asked, there’s a couple things I need. One, I need information, if you have any,” she said.
“About the ongoing attacks,” he said as a statement. “That is actually part of what I want to discuss with you. I don’t know a lot, but I have been able to gather some information. My weakness is that my reach doesn’t extend very far into the pits, so I’m limited to what I can see in the domes and the flats. Turns out pit dwellers don’t really like working with people outside their own persuasion.”
“Yeah, we’re real particular like that. Breathing the outside air for too long will make you real surly,” she said.
“So. What I do know is that these skeletons are involved, but they’re not working with the gang they’re associated with—Las Calacas. I believe you know their leader, Calavera?” he said.
She let out a long stream of air. “Don’t get me started on that. Yes, I know her. She trains really good enforcers, but she’s an idiot. She started a turf war with me when she moved into the Nogales territory after she abandoned Juarez. We had tenuous business relations when she was the leader of Juarez, but she decided my piece of the pie was just too tempting to leave alone. She never really made a dent in any of our forces, but it was taking too much energy to deal with, and it was difficult to really get at the heart of her organization down in the Mexican pits, so I decided to work out a truce with her just for the sake of convenience. That goes down, and then all of the sudden there’s skeleton attacks going on all over the place, and according to my guys, Calavera doesn’t know what in the fuck is going on,” she said, her hands balling into fists. Incompetence made her so mad.
“That fits with the information I have. As far as I know, Calavera has lost control of a big slice of her organization. They’re working with someone else launching these terrorist attacks, but I don’t know who those might be. Any of the known entities in these parts are denying any knowledge. I have a pretty good bead on what’s going on in the flats and domes, at least in the western half of the country, and I haven’t figured out who might behind everything. I’ve had some limited interactions with Calavera, and I have to say that I formed the same impression—good at battle training, but totally worthless in strategy. This is the most successful any terrorist cells have been waging an attack on the domes in the last ten years, and I don’t think she’d be capable of something like this,” he said.
“My assessment exactly. Her skeletons are a pain in the ass to deal with, but Calavera’s far from being a master tactician,” she said. True to her initial appraisal, this guy was no fool himself, and that was something she really valued in a potential business partner. Depending on what he was asking, she might very well accept his offer.
“So, at some point, we need to get a handle on what the fuck is going on in that respect. You’ve already experienced some significant upsets from their intervention, and I don’t want them to affect my organization either,” he said.
“You want me to help you take down whoever is in charge of this splinter cell?” she said.
“That may be part of the equation, but I’ll get to that later. Tell me what else you want,” he said.
It was an interesting negotiation strategy—figuring out what she wanted so he would have more leverage to work with during the bargaining phase. However, in this case she would let it stand, because there were some things that she really wanted, and there was a possibility that she would get the things she needed from him without giving anything up in return.
She cleared her throat. “I’m not especially proud of this, but one of my colleagues has gone missing. I don’t think he’s dead, because none of my associates have turned up any bodies, and they’re quite thorough, but he’s definitely MIA, possibly kidnapped. I want him back,” she said and gave him a description of Argon.
He cocked his head from side to side and clucked his tongue. “I can’t think of anything that rings a bell. Of course I can’t promise anything on that front, but I can put my feelers out into the domes in the off chance that your people missed something,” he said, pausing. “No offense--not that your guys are sloppy or anything, but I’m assuming I have better access to things afoot in the dome underground world.”
“None taken. I’ll admit that being based in the pits, we have some blind spots where the domes are concerned. So yeah, that’s one of the most important things that I want right now. The last thing I really need, I actually already sort of asked you for. I need antibiotics,” she said.
“I’ll ask you the same question I asked you earlier—what kind of antibiotics are we talking about here,” he said.
“I need Ketocillin, specifically. It has to be Ketocillin,” she said.
He sighed and wiped a hand down his face. “Ketocillin, even I don’t have access to any of that. At least not readily on hand. It would take some doing,” he said.
“Barring having any on hand, I need the next best thing. I need you to pass my psych exam and help me get through some of the political snafus so that I can go on my regularly scheduled run to Yuma. I can get to it on the backchannel, but it’ll be a hell of a lot easier if I’m out on an authorized run to get ahold of that,” she said.
“You have a sick crew member?” he asked.
Exposing vulnerabilities was not something that she liked doing with anyone, even potential future teammates, but in this case, there wasn’t a lot to lose and a hell of a lot to gain. “Yeah. Lung zaps. Real bad. Drug resistant—our resident medic says Ketocillin’s the only real hope to resolve it at this point, and that shit is hard as fuck to get your hands on nowadays. We can’t transport her anywhere else because of all the official and unofficial quarantine mandates. Yuma’s got a supply because of its position on the border of two states—California and Arizona both wanted easy access to that shit. I’ve got good connections to Yuma, so it’s an ideal spot for me to score some,” she said.
Under Dark Sky Law Page 10