Xero pointed her finger at Argon. “I always knew you were a sharp guy. You’re a lucky bitch—I can’t think of a better chemist out there,” she said and looked at Calavera.
“We’re all lucky bitches—with a chemical weapon like that out there, we’re all in danger,” Calavera said.
“I work much better with Trina as my partner, but that wasn’t exactly an option,” he said.
“So why has he been messing with me, getting us to peddle Alphamine to the domes?” Xero said.
“The shit that he cooked up is nasty—toxic via the lungs and the dermis, but you know the domes all have decent venting systems in the event of any kind of chemical leak. He needs something to work as quickly as it can for maximum carnage,” he said.
“Oh fuck. Alphamine is a bronchodilator,” Xero said.
Argon nodded. “The more people he gets doped up on Alphamine, the more people die before anyone can vent the domes, and the easier it is to take over the local government. The intel Calavera gathered says that his initial test targets are going to be Phoenix, San Antonio, and New Orleans—domes big enough to make a statement, but smaller than the real hubs like Los Angeles or New York,” he said.
“I’m assuming Yuma was him too. Why blow up Yuma then if he wants to take over the domes, not just destroy them?” she asked.
“I have to say, I was pretty impressed that my skeletons had the chops to blow up a whole dome. Nothing like that’s gone down in my lifetime. Anyway, if I had to guess why he took out Yuma, I’d say because it’s the only real link between Phoenix and Los Angeles. Without Yuma, those dome enforcers will have a hell of a time trying to leap frog over that much desert without some kind of a way to refuel. People are liable to run out of oxygen in the dead zones and never make it across. Also, like you were saying earlier, Yuma was the only easy place to get premade Ketocillin this side of the Mississippi, and with that gone he had another easy tool for tricking your crew into distributing the Alphamine,” she said.
“Have you been reading the art of war or something? You’re getting good at this strategy stuff,” Xero said.
“Cállate la boca. I didn’t get this far just by dumb luck, you know,” Calavera said.
Argon put a hand on her shoulder. “I did help out with putting a lot of this together,” he said like a child eager to impress his teacher.
“Two halves of a brain do make one, I suppose,” Xero said, and they both made sour faces.
“Puta,” Calavera said.
“Ladies, let’s not fight. We’ve got bigger fish to fry,” he said. “It’s taken all this time, but I’ve come up with an antidote that will actually exploit the same pathways that Alphamine does—in fact it’s something of an analogous molecule. If you’ve taken Alphamine with it, the antidote will actually work better. I’m calling it Betadote for now,” he said.
Xero slowly nodded her head in approval. “Betadote, clever, I like it. I don’t say it often enough, but you are actually a genius. At least, at some things,” she said.
Argon sighed. “You can never just give me a compliment, can you?” he said.
“So, now what’s the next step?” Xero said. “We’ve got the antidote, so I assume we can give it to everyone we know to protect themselves. Question is, what about the people in the domes?”
“You can’t be serious, right? We have to give it to them. We can’t just let Xed murder everyone and let another Australia happen. We can take out Xed, but that doesn’t guarantee that he hasn’t set up provisions in case just such a thing happens. People need the antidote,” he said.
Calavera and Xero shared a look. “We don’t have to do anything,” Xero said. “What we should do is consider what’s in it for us. What do we have to gain?”
“Este marimacha over here is right. We have a few options,” Calavera said. It was that sense of ruthlessness that made them able to get along as partners.
She thought of Radar and how he had reacted to the dying dome citizens when Yuma had gone up like a Roman candle, and she was glad that he wasn’t here to witness this discussion. His parents had been dome dwellers. If they decided to let the dome people die, he’d be a million times more mad than when he found out that she’d fucked Xed again. Maybe even angry enough to kill her. Xero liked a man with real convictions.
“I think Argon’s right. There’s a lot for us to potentially gain from saving the domes. Think of the cash. We can hit this thing from two directions. We sell the Betadote and Alphamine cocktail on the black market and we make a ton of cash,” Xero said.
“What about the rest of the population that doesn’t buy shit off the black market?” Argon said.
“This is where we make even more cash. We use Sanchez, a buddy of mine on the government side. I saved his life in one of the skeleton attacks, and I seem to have built up a network of trusty sidekicks around that good deed. We tell him to set up a dummy government program, like an FDA vitamin regimen, otherwise everyone is going to die. They do shit like that all the time anyway—I’m sure someone can figure out a way to rig that up and keep it all on the down low. Trick is, we don’t give the Betadote away for free. We charge out the ass for it, and they’ll have to come up with the cash from somewhere. They’ll understand that making something like this isn’t cheap, and hopefully won’t mind a nominal fee for something so important. We walk away a lot richer, they all walk away a lot less dead, everybody wins,” Xero said.
Argon was trying to look disgusted at her plan to extort everyone for a lot of money in exchange for something so necessary, but she could see those same dollar signs floating through his imagination, curling the corners of his mouth into a smile. He wanted it just as much as the rest of them.
“It’s not the most altruistic of plans, but it could certainly work. Only problem is, we’re going to need access to the dome so you can get in contact with Sanchez, and I assume we still want to kill Xed and try to prevent all of this in the first place,” Argon said.
“Xed’s gotta be dead—we don’t kill him now and this shit will all get messy as hell. Xed was our ticket into the domes before, but we can’t let him know we’re coming. We’ll need some time to set everything up, and he can’t know that we’ve made contact with Sanchez. We’ll need some kind of coming and going privileges,” Xero said.
Calavera bit her lip. “My hands are a little bit tied right now. I’ve got skeletons looking for me all over the place. When I tried to rendezvous with you in El Paso, you saw what happened. Xed wants me dead real bad so that I can’t tip you off. Lousy job he did of that,” she said.
She thought through all of her known connections, but none of them would be able to get her the dome access that they really needed to make this thing happen. Then she thought back to the satellite she’d spotted floating around space earlier. Her mind drifted into the past, when she’d been with Evan, before he died. He’d been so clever, so brilliant. He taught her about things she never would have learned otherwise. At the time he had told her how it was possible to hijack one of the satellites if you were able to get any kind of information about where it was traveling. There were decommissioned trains that still ran underground from the Tohono territory because the government didn’t have the authority to enter their lands and completely remove them. If she could use her language skills to talk with the computers and the native peoples, there just might be a chance of getting the thing running again.
“I think I have an idea,” she said.
CHAPTER 33
Xero banged her fist against the door of Xed’s upscale office in downtown Phoenix. “Ding dong, motherfucker,” she said.
A surprised Xed opened the door, and he struggled to get his facial expression under control. “What happened to my secretary?” he said.
Xero folded her arms across her chest. “She’s taking a nap. Can I come in?” she said.
Xed bit his tongue but gestured for her to come inside. She walked ahead of him and plopped her ass down behind his desk in the nicely
upholstered chair. She slid backwards a few inches and threw her feet up on the desk, smudging red Sonoran desert clay all over his papers. “Why don’t you have a seat—lay down on the couch if you’d like, tell me about how your mommy and daddy never loved you enough,” she said.
He hesitated, but actually obliged her by taking a seat on his patient’s couch. “What do you want?” he said.
“Like I just said. Tell me about your parents. What happened to make you so goddamned fucked up that you’d want to kill several million people?” she said.
“Calavera,” he said. “She found you.”
Xero didn’t respond. “I’m waiting. I can help you free associate if you want. I did a whole psychoanalysis cycle in graduate school,” she said.
Xed cocked his head to the side, thinking. “If you really must know, my parents were born in the domes, but they were kicked out when they had a child that was marked for the flats. They lived for awhile, suffering, but eventually they died. I grew up struggling to survive in the flats without a family. So yes. You could say that I hold some animosity towards the domes and how they like to handle things like basic human rights,” he said.
Xero pulled her feet off the desk, dragging a stack of ruined papers with her. “Funny how a guy like you could talk about something like human rights. You’ve got an odd way of expressing humanitarian efforts. Mass genocide hasn’t been considered humane since the time of the old world Nazis,” she said.
“New World Order. Nothing will change unless we make drastic changes. Sometimes, there has to be sacrifices. You should know that better than most,” he said.
Xero shrugged. “I may not make the most ethical of choices myself, but I’ve never claimed to be a humanitarian. I do what I do for selfish reasons, and I’m okay with that,” she said.
“We’re not so different, you and I. And yet, here you are, pretending like you’re better than me,” he said.
Xero clucked her tongue and wiped her feet on the light grey carpet. “No, I’m not better than you, and I can see that we are indeed a lot alike. With a few key differences—I’m not a mass murderer and a narcissistic despot. Something’s gone kablooey in your head man, you’re over the edge and under-medicated. And more importantly, you’ve fucked with my friends, and that’s something I can’t forgive,” she said.
“You haven’t even heard my offer. I was going to ask you to join me here to talk about another business proposition, but it seems that you’ve jumped the gun on me. Would you consider being partners? I admire the way you run things down in Tucson. The way you’ve implemented sustainable energy practices and a justice system that actually has some amount of justice in it still. That’s what we need in the domes. We need a world where people’s parents don't get tossed out into the open atmosphere to die just because they or their children have a genetic advantage,” he said.
She stopped and actually seriously considered his offer. Those were in fact things that she agreed with, and despite the relatively cushy life she’d set up in the pits, she too had been thrown out on her ass to die at one point, and she had a roiling hatred for the dome governments with all their arbitrary rules and inhumane regulations.
“Your offer is somewhat tempting, I must admit,” she said.
“Judging from the timing of your visit, I’m guessing you used the skeletons to find out what I had planned for this afternoon. As you’re considering my offer, I will tell you that if you decide to kill me, it won’t stop a thing. Everything is set to go off automatically, whether I’m alive or not. You won’t be able to escape in time. However, I have a spray that you can use. It will coat your skin and keep the gas from penetrating your nervous system. If you agree to certain things, then I will let you use the applicator machine before the gas is released,” he said.
She stuck an index finger in her mouth, pondering her next move. She pulled out the finger and used it to beckon him towards her. He smiled, knowing that he’d won. She stood up, leaving a weak trail of mud on his carpet like an old skid mark. His tie today was red against a white shirt, and she used it again to pull his face into hers for another sloppy kiss.
“You always have such a convenient handle with these ties,” she said after releasing him from the kiss. “Which is nice, because I like to keep my dog on a leash.”
He started to say something, but the rest of his air went into a strangled cry. Xero grunted as she stabbed him five times in quick succession, using her hold on his tie to keep him from escaping. Kidneys, stomach, liver, intestines, lungs. Everything but the heart. He would die, but just not as quickly.
“Damn, Xed, you fail the final exam. Couldn’t read my eyes, could you? Psychiatry 101—never trust a sociopath. Part of me will miss you, but I will enjoy the piles of cash I made selling the antidote to a few major cities. Thanks for helping me set up the underground supply chain—that netted me a nice extra chunk of change. Oh, and it will save a bunch more lives, too. Nice side effect,” she said, letting go of his tie but keeping hold of her knife. Never let your weapon go prematurely.
Xed stumbled a few steps and fell backwards onto the couch. It still had a stains from when Xero had sat there bleeding a few weeks prior. They were faint, but they were there. Xed’s fresh blood covered the old stains in a new blanket of dark red. Xero thought the splash of color looked rather nice, actually.
Xed was choking, gasping for air through his punctured lungs.
“Suffocating to death isn’t fun, is it? Fortunately, most of this city won’t have to die that way, thanks to the antidote we cooked up. Science is neat, isn’t it?” she said.
He was having weak spasms and grasping at his throat, hoping to get air. It was a little more suffering than she had planned, and she raised her knife to help finish the kill a little more humanely, but it was too late. He went still before she could give him a hand. She looked down at him with some authentic sadness. She kissed two of her fingers, and put them against his pale lips. One last one for the road.
“Good night Xed. The first one’s always free, but eventually we all have to pay the piper. Better luck next time,” she said.
CHAPTER 34
“Strike!” Xero said. “Looks like I’ve still got it.”
Neptune had restored the lanes that Milo had cratered, leaving a smooth and shiny surface for their balls to glide down. After the pins cleared she ran down to the end of the lane to make sure that they would reset correctly.
“No one wants to beat their boss anyway,” Trina said. “At least we don’t have to pretend to lose.”
Radar put down a neon green bowling ball that matched the color of Xero’s hair. “Trina, do you really think you should be exerting yourself like that? Are you sure you’re feeling okay? I know that this takes awhile to get used to,” he said.
Trina ran a hand through her freshly bleached hair and puckered her bright red lips as she looked down at the long scar that ran down her chest. A full four inches of it were visible before it disappeared into the cleavage of her shirt.
“I think being part robot is kind of fun. And Milo said I’m cleared for moderate activity now. Right Milo?” she said.
Milo stood up from behind the snack bar counter holding a plate of hotdogs and a few bottles of beer. “Emphasis on the moderate activity. You’re one of only a handful of people to have lungs like that. You’re lucky to have a doctor and the original mechanic in-house, but don’t push your luck,” he said sternly, but he was smiling from ear to ear. Xero had never seem him so happy. Sometimes you had to lose all hope to truly appreciate your blessings in life.
Neptune returned from examining the pin resetting mechanism and went to help Milo behind the counter. “I’m with Milo on this one. If you try to die again this fool right here is going to flip his shit, and I’m going to be really sad if I have to put him out of his misery Old Yeller style,” Neptune said and pointed at Milo.
Radar tried to stifle a laugh. “Being a robot does have it’s benefits. I’m not just the owner, I
’m also a client,” he said.
Xero leaned over and smacked him on the ass. “That’s for being cheesy,” she said, but he caught her wrist and pulled her into his chest. He planted a kiss on her open mouth. Instead of fighting, she let herself melt into it. Maybe it was something about killing Xed, or maybe it was finally pulling off a complicated technical move on her own by getting the old trains running again via that satellite, but forgetting Evan was beginning to look more and more possible. Plus, dating a robot was pretty cool.
“Hey, aren’t we here to have a strategy meeting?” Calavera said from Argon’s lap as Milo handed them both beers.
“Fuck it dude, let’s keep bowling,” Xero said. She picked up the neon green bowling ball and she hurled it down the lane. It rolled in a perfectly straight line down the greased wood, gaining momentum as it rumbled down towards the pins. Strike.
Under Dark Sky Law Page 24