Hearing his real name, Teardrop—Primero—lifted his head.
“Real brilliance lies in the ability to merge surplus with need,” Juan said through papery lips. “On one hand, every country on earth has a surplus of human leeches, chemically dependent castoffs, and the generationally impoverished. On the other hand, dictators, terrorists, and criminals around the world require a continuous crop of fresh hoodlums to carry out their dirty work. When I isolate the Rispoli enzyme, the need will be met. I will happily sell it to the highest bidder.”
“The enzyme?” I asked.
Juan shook his head. “The hoodlum. An endless supply injected with a hybrid of Sec-C and enzyme GF! In other words, a thug with no moral consciousness or memory, but fully equipped with the electrifying power of ghiaccio furioso!”
“Sec-C,” I said, putting it together, “was a failed attempt to create supercriminals out of addicts, and the lost and lonely. You snuck it into ice cream, and by the time they started to feel good about themselves, they were hooked.”
“Recycling the planet’s human garbage as weapons, yes. I failed with Sec-C alone. But mixed with enzyme GF—only six more vials!—and I’ll achieve it!”
“And then,” I said hopelessly, “you’ll let us go?”
Juan pinned his eyes to mine, his mouth a bluish line. With a sigh, he said, “Catching you was tiresome. I realized that I would have to be prepared to extract your blood on the spot, as you have a nettlesome habit of escaping. But now that I have you, why would I ever release a reliable source of enzyme GF? With a snip of the brain stem and a reliable life-support system, you’ll be my lobotomized fountain of Rispoli blood.”
Mine ran cold at the thought of it—lying in a motionless coma as my heart filled and refilled an endless line of plastic bags. I swallowed back the horror of it and said, “But my family. They’re of no use to you now. You could set them free . . .”
“I suppose,” Juan said vacantly. “Of course this is a money-making venture . . . I expect to earn billions. But all great achievements grow from emotion, and mine took root in revenge. Your great-grandfather ruined my grandfather’s life and made exiles of our family. So you see, I have the best of both worlds. I keep you, and when we’ve finished here—in a perfect act of vengeance—I’ll kill yours.”
The blood bag was filling like a crimson hourglass. I felt feeble life in my limbs but had little control and needed time, a few precious minutes, and said, “Sec-C was a failure, so Primero was a failure too?” I felt Teardrop’s laser gaze and sensed its coiled body ready to pounce, yet the force of Juan’s admonition held it in place.
“Oh yes. Completely,” Juan said. “Sec-C goes directly to the limbic system and suppresses memory, fear, hunger, and pain, so a user grows amazingly thin and can fight without feeling a thing! At the same time, it heightens pleasure and addiction zones, so the user feels sexy and always wants more.”
“¿Puedo? ¿Por favor?” Teardrop said impatiently.
“¿Qué?” Juan said, tapping a finger at the bag, which was nearing capacity. “Sí . . . you may begin.” He buzzed closer, pushing his skeletal face at mine. “Apparently, you killed a companion of his. Primero loved it obsessively . . .”
“No! It drowned while trying to kill me!” I said, as Teardrop inspected the scalpel’s pinpoint blade.
“And now Primero hates you with the same passion. That’s why Sec-C is a bust,” Juan said. “With every miracle drug comes side effects. It destroys pigmentation, rots the mouth organ, blots out sex characteristics, and erases short-term and most long-term memories. With too much Sec-C, users become infected, androgynous, amnesiac albinos. But wait, there’s more,” he said with a salesman’s grin. “Sec-C also drives love and hatred to explosive levels. Primero adored that sexless mummy . . . verdad, Primero?”
“Sí, verdad,” Teardrop whispered as a red droplet pooled in the corner of its eye, plopped on my shirt, and it swung the scalpel, nicking my earlobe.
Oh God, oh no, oh Dad! Daddy, please, I don’t want to be sliced to pieces!
“The problem is that all of the intense emotion causes too much blood flow, burning right into the ocular capillaries . . . the eyes,” Juan said, pointing at his own face. “Very special contact lenses, my design, to keep ghiaccio furioso out. The addicts, however, are immune to your power. The more blood-soaked their eyes, the less you can penetrate them. Ah, but again, there is a downside . . .”
Teardrop jammed the small knife into my forearm, flinging my blood on the wall, and harpooned the scalpel into my leg, slicing flesh through my old jeans.
Oh God . . . oh Mom, help me, I pled silently. This isn’t how I want to die!
“So listen now, Primero,” Juan said, “and learn how you will die.”
Teardrop paused with the scalpel pressed behind my ear, ready to drive it into the vein that throbbed there.
“Eventually, too much blood will burn through, and then . . . hiss-boom . . . brain implosion,” Juan said coolly. “You will expire, just like the hundred Primeros that came before you. No criminal organization would pay for hoodlums whose heads blow up. But for those fueled in part by long-lasting ghiaccio furioso, there won’t be enough money in the world. And all that my customers need to keep their armies under control are a simple pair of rose-colored contact lenses like mine . . . for an extra fee, of course.”
Outside, a loudspeaker announced Dominic Hughes coming up to bat.
Uncle Buddy . . . I don’t hate you anymore. I need you. Help me, please . . .
Juan buzzed to the window, looked out at the field, and said, “The bag is full. Primero . . . kill her.” The creature leered down with its eel tongue, and I uttered it once more—Please!—as razor-sharp steel pierced my neck.
The muffled crack of a bat sounded close by.
The window exploded and Hughes’s foul ball caromed around the suite.
I threw my dead-weight arm at the wooden tray, clumsily grabbed the hypodermic needle, and drove it through Teardrop’s gloved hand. It had a high tolerance for pain but not for watching six inches of pointed steel bisect its hand. While it gaped in shock, I lunged at the five full vials, knocking a pair to the floor, where they exploded like tomato-juice bombs. Juan shrieked again, manipulating the wheelchair toward me as I grabbed the other three vials and tumbled to the ground, a savage boot nearly crushing my skull. I rolled away from Teardrop and awkwardly got to my feet on one side of the gurney, woozy and wobbly. Teardrop and Juan were on the other side with Juan scrabbling at the blood-filled bag. As I raised my hand to smash the three vials, the commemorative baseball bat on the wall grazed my knuckles. I turned, groping for it, dropping and crushing the three vials underfoot. Teardrop sprung over the gurney, the hypodermic piercing one of its hands and the scalpel firmly in the other as it hissed, “Ahora usted muere!”
I felt the blade rip between my shoulder blades as I pulled the bat from the wall.
I turned, swinging, cracking Teardrop across the face with the fat end, watching it twirl on one heel, gasp, and fall. The floor was drug-wavy beneath my feet. Juan was trying to free the blood bag from the IV stand, but his spindly fingers were too slow. I lifted the bat, assumed a home-run stance, and said, “Step away from it or I’ll knock your goddamn head off. It won’t take much.”
Juan buzzed backward, seeing truth in my eyes. “I still have them. You came here to trade, sí? Okay, more blood from your veins for your family.”
“So you can create an unstoppable army of criminals?” I said, unhooking the bag. “Screw that. This curse stays in my family.”
“It’s a neurological abnormality!” he bellowed, bobbling his head like a jack-in-the-box. “You will give me that blood or they . . . are . . . dead!”
“With only six vials to go?” I said, shaking my head. “You’re lying.”
“I mean it! I’ll throw away the whole grand scheme and kill them one at time!”
“I was a fool,” I said. “My family would never want me to sacrifi
ce myself, because it’s not fighting. It’s surrender. What the Rispolis are to the Outfit, who my father is . . . who I am . . . it’s sick. But it’s our sickness, and Chicago’s. Not the world’s.”
“I’ll murder them,” Juan chanted, his voice like wind carrying a distant scream. “I’ll start with the boy. So intelligent and sophisticated. He deserves a long life, and society deserves the goodness he would bring to it.” He buzzed closer, pupils jiggling. “First I’ll burn the soft flesh from his eyes, and then . . .”
And then I punched a guy who cannot walk.
A man with bones like straw and organs the consistency of rotten mushrooms.
I used my mom’s signet ring to brand Juan’s huge white forehead with the Rispoli R, the diamond teeth biting the letter into flesh for time immemorial.
His jaw swung from its cranium, his eyes rolled back, and he slumped like a scarecrow in the wheelchair. He looked dead, but then he hadn’t looked quite alive, and I didn’t have time to worry about it; experience informed me that few organisms recovered from a blow to the head like Teardrop. I pulled out the electrodes, slid the blood bag into the waist of my jeans, and with the bat at my side, slipped through the door. The walkway was empty, but I knew it wouldn’t be for long; someone would come on the run to check the window shattered by Hughes’s baseball. I hurried along, realizing how brilliant Juan’s plan had been—they couldn’t get me in a car chase or on the street, but I never suspected they’d infiltrate my best friend’s head. The ramp to the main gate was nearby, and I was passing a closed door when I heard something that stopped me.
Samba music.
I turned and looked at a card next to a suite, which read MKK Fan Appreciation Day. I’d known there was a party for Sec-C users, but the shock of Juan’s chamber of horrors had pushed it from my mind. Now I stood bristling at the fact that Doug was partying while, if circumstances were different, I might be dead. I gripped the baseball bat and kicked open the door as the rhythms of Rio scratched to a halt. Across the room, a crush of jittery people buzzed and slurped in front of a soft-serve machine like a crush of ants attacking a piece of candy. Doug saw me, and his sticky mouth opened and shut before he said, “Oh. Sara Jane. You’re . . .”
“Alive,” I hissed as the crowd turned with a rose-colored glare. Every race and sex was in that jumpy crowd, but not every age; Juan hadn’t targeted anyone much older than twenty, from an acne-scarred redhead in an oversized Bulls jersey to an African American beauty with piercings and tattoos to a scruffy Latino dude who looked like he slept in alleys, and on and on. As they stared, I saw something that I’d seen in Doug’s gaze since I’d known him—a hungry need to be part of something. Almost every kid in America learns the dangers of controlled substances in grade school, sees classmates smoking weed and taking pills in middle school, and is fully versed on recreational use versus addiction by high school. A fact taught along the way is that, among other emotional triggers, people are drawn to the drug culture because it’s a social institution, like square dancing or a street gang, where the most forgotten loser can find acceptance.
That’s how I saw Doug now—a kid who had been systematically ignored by unfeeling, vodka-swilling, dope-smoking parents. He wanted not to be fat—to be liked, even adored, perhaps caressed. His mind was being fooled by Sec-C into feeling sexy while his brain prepared to explode inside its skull. I couldn’t allow that to happen. I would not allow it happen. I threw the bat on my shoulder and strutted inside, Outfit style.
“Um . . . pardon me,” a voice chirped. I turned to a cute, freckled face with chipmunk teeth and pinkish eyes. She crinkled her nose, lifted a clipboard, and said, “Welcome, newbie! I’m Konnoisseur Colleen! Name, please?”
“Is that Sec-C?” I said, nodding across the room. Through a glass window in the machine, it folded over on itself, pink, white, and slimy.
“Indeedie!” she chirped. “Good and good for you, as they say!”
“How much of it do you have to eat before your tongue falls out?”
Her eyes narrowed and smile evaporated. “What’s your name?” she brayed.
“Let me spell it for you,” I said, hocked deeply, and spit in her face. She reeled back, and I cut through the crowd, knowing I was an interloper and worse, a buzz kill. Doug huddled behind his fellow addicts, whom I shoved out of my way. His eyes jiggled as I quoted one of his favorite films, saying, “I’m ba-ack.”
“Uh . . . hey, Sara Jane,” he said, and broke for the door. He didn’t take a step before I got him by the collar into a walking headlock.
“This is called tough love,” I said. “You don’t like it? Tough.”
The crowd pushed behind us, gaining momentum, as Konnoisseur Colleen cried, “She can’t have him! He’s ours now! One of you—stop her!” And then it was a crush of humanity, but I was first out the door, hauling Doug, who was trying to slow us until I gave him a hard shot to the kidneys. He howled but moved, with both of us running up the ramp instead of down to the exit, trailed by MKK fans. As we headed for the nosebleed seats, a sunshine-filled entryway opened in the walkway. I pulled him onto the stadium rooftop with its junk food and beer stands, and its smoking fans who want a break from the game. It overlooks the main gate on Clark Street, and I hustled Doug to the edge, looked down eight stories to the sidewalk where people were having pictures taken wearing big, silly glasses, and back at MKK fans streaming onto the rooftop. I wrapped my arms around Doug’s waist and said, “Over you go! Move it!”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Hurry!” I said, fighting him as he scrabbled to stay on the roof, and saw I had no choice. I blinked the cold blue flame into existence, grabbed his gaze and said, “Jump!”
“No! You can’t make me do anything!” Doug said with a crooked smile, his eyes redder than I’d ever seen them. “I can actually say no to you!”
“Say no to this,” I said, clipping him with a left hook on the chin and pushing him over a low railing and off the roof. I was about to follow when Konnoisseur Colleen snagged my ankle.
“Got you!” she yelled, tasting the heel of my shoe as I hammered her mouth, lost my balance, groped at nothing, and fell through the warm air over Clark Street.
Below, Doug lay on his back gaping up at me. He scrambled and rolled, giving me just enough room to land next to him on Dominic Hughes’s huge inflatable glasses, which huffed and bowed. He lifted his arms and squealed, “I’m bleeding!”
“That’s my blood!” I said.
“You’re bleeding!”
“No, a bag of blood broke. I was carrying it in my . . .” I hesitated, knowing the MKK fans were regrouping inside Wrigley Field. “I’ll tell you about it later! Let’s get out of here!”
“No!” he said, sliding to the ground. I followed, looking at Doug’s dancing eyes, jumpy hands, and sticky face, as he said, “Those are my friends! This is my life!”
“Those are junkie wannabes and you’re wasted. I just punched their leader in the head, maybe killing him. And this?” I said, showing off my blood-soaked self. “It came out of my veins. It was the culmination of that maniac’s master plan, which I destroyed. Are you sure you want to waltz back in there, since I was your ‘special guest’?”
He absorbed it through a drug-addled brain and said, “Let’s get the hell out of here!” We sprinted to the El station like our lives depended on it and darted onto a train. When it was safely barreling toward the Loop, I realized something.
Besides an “abnormality,” Juan never told me what cold fury actually is.
It meant that I still didn’t understand the greater part of myself.
I was alive, though. Brain intact, Doug at my side. And for now it was enough.
23
A PRIMER ON WHAT HAPPENS WHEN AN addicted friend is deprived of drugs.
First he’ll get pissed off and start babbling nonsense, kicking over furniture, and being abusive to small Italian greyhounds. Second, he may seem like a life force, but in fact
he’s suffering from withdrawal, and it could kill him if he doesn’t kill himself first. Finally, and most important, he will call you every vile name under the sun, including a few you’ve never heard before. If you’re going to save his life, you must turn off your feelings. Ignore everything he says and call 911.
Of course, I couldn’t do that. I had to take care of Doug on my own.
All Saturday night and into the early hours of Sunday, he raged around the Bird Cage Club pinkly foaming at the mouth, damning me to hell for ruining his new, svelte life. I cracked the notebook to chapter six, “Metodi” (“Methods”). Not finding what I’d hoped for, I flipped to chapter seven, “Procedimenti” (“Procedures”), came up dry again, and nearly gave up when I decided to try to chapter five, “Sfuggire” (“Escape”), and there it was, a short, scribbled section that read:
How to Shake Free of Hooch, Horse, and Nose Candy
Addictive substances are good business but STRICTLY FORBIDDEN for Outfit members; incapacitation affects one’s ability to earn. To kick a habit, mix and administer three quarts of “Screaming Banshee,” as indicated below; you will need:
A) Vinegar, six raw eggs, ginger, cayenne pepper, and one medium-sized herring
B) Lots of towels, and a bucket
C) Handcuffs
D) Someone large to apply the handcuffs, as juiceheads and junkies hit, bite, and claw
I removed the steel bracelets from Johnny, who sat benignly, gazing past the scene; Sec-C had left him in a constant state of compliance. Doug, on the other hand, was in a boiling tantrum, and when he turned to scream about the size of my nose, I was standing there. He looked at what I held and said, “Those are my handcuffs!”
Flicker & Burn: A Cold Fury Novel Page 24