Dr. Adder

by Jeter, K W

  Even before the explosions following the bullets roared over his head, he clenched the cycle’s front brakes on hard for a second and pulled the bars around, sending the machine falling on its side into a whirling skid as he tried to throw himself clear. He clutched at a whore’s corpse on the road behind him, pressing the stale air from its lungs with his impact, his momentum pulling them both for a distance behind the sliding motorcycle, his face thrust into the smashed facial bones of the dead hooker. One blue eye had been smashed by an MFer’s pipe into jelly. He had jerked one leg free as the motorcycle fell, but felt it grind across the left for an agonizing second of shredding cloth and skin.

  Motion stopped. He unwrapped himself from the stiffening arms of the corpse, a smell of friction-burned dead flesh rising from beneath her, and limped toward where his motorcycle now lay. Behind him, at a distance, he could hear shouts and running feet.

  Two of the MFers were dead or unconscious as he passed them; the third gasped in pain and shock from the asphalt at Adder towering over him, then attempted to point a wavering gun at him. Adder kicked it aside and thrust the boot into the stark-white face. He righted the motorcycle. Miraculously, the engine roared into life. He straddled it, his left leg throbbing, and was swallowed up in the darkness beyond the Interface before his pursuers could reach him.

  As they got farther away from the Interface, the less light seeped into the alley. In the darkness, Limmit ran into something waist-high, metallic, and empty. An abandoned trashcan.

  It sent him flying and then sprawling into a wall. For a moment he lay there stunned, thinking he could feel the MFer’s pipe on his throat again. That passed, and he looked around the alley’s black shapes. No one else was there. He must have gotten separated from her among the alley’s twisting branches and turns. He thought he heard several sets of feet nearby running away from him in another segment of the alley, then approach, then fade away again.

  He shook his head viciously, trying to clear away the ringing confusion. Which way was north? he wondered. Looking up, he saw only a patch of flat darkness, defined at its irregular edges by the darker black of the roofs of L.A.’s abandoned buildings. He smelled something strangely acrid, like sweat, made faint by distance; some subconscious, crisis-risen sense registered the presence of death in one direction. Placing one hand against the wall of the alley, he rose and loped on, away from the scent.

  “I know everything,” said Dr. Betreech. He continued swabbing the blood and oil from Adder’s leg. “Droit phoned me— he managed to escape over the line into Orange County.” “What do you think happened?” asked Adder. He felt his strength slowly ebbing back, after the exhausting ride up into these hills. Luckily, Betreech had been waiting for him.

  “God knows.” Betreech reached up and took a can of aerosol bandage from the shelves lining the cramped cellar medical room. Spraying it on the raw flesh of Adder’s left leg and watching it congeal into a porous membrane, he shook his head. “If the rest of the GPC is letting him get away with it, then some unknown factor has come up. Some drastic change with Mox or you that we can’t see.”

  Submerged in thought, Adder swung his bandaged leg over the edge of the table and rolled his pants leg down over it. He looked up suddenly at the old man, now in his white lab coat. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “I’m tired,” said Betreech calmly. “I’m too old to fight or run. There’s a toxic capsule implanted in one of my molars—when they come storming in here, I can break it with my tongue and be dead in fifteen seconds. For some reason, I’m still afraid of a violent death.”

  “How long do you think it’ll be before they get here?”

  “An hour or more. It’ll take them at least that long to round up a vehicle and then find this place.”

  “Good,” said Adder. “Then there’s time for this.” He reached down and lifted the black briefcase. It had remained strapped to the motorcycle throughout—he hadn’t let Betreech pull him inside without it.

  “Do you think that’s going to help you?” said Betreech. “Or are you just trying to go down in flames in a big way?”

  “It’s the only weapon I’ve got,” replied Adder grimly. “And I don’t think there’s going to be much work in my old line for a while.”

  “Are you that confident I can graft it on all right?” He studied Adder, his own age-lined, gray face inscrutable.

  “I know how Lester Gass designed this thing, so that it could be attached out in the desert by nonmedicals. The glove has a grafting sequence programmed in, plus autonomic neural linkups. All you have to do is attach it to the stump—a boy scout with a dull axe could do it.”

  “It would be better if you ran and hid out, rather than try to fight them.”

  “Don’t you think I know that? I just want this in case they catch up with me.”

  Betreech sighed wearily. “I don’t believe that. But go ahead and take off your shirt—it’s probably the last thing I’ll ever be able to do for you.”

  The sensation was like blood circulation being restored to a limb—an intense, near-painful tingling beneath the point where the metal receptor of the flashglove lapped over Adder’s stump. The feeling went on for a minute, then faded as he felt the weapon’s expanded sensory range begin to switch on, like the opening of eyes from his wrist to elbow.

  Betreech studied the dead-white face, the angles sharper and more knifelike than ever, as if more had been removed in the amputation than his arm. “I warned you,” said Betreech. “I could have given you a local anesthetic. Even a high-velocity bonesaw is no picnic.”

  “No,” mumbled Adder, rolling his head on the sweat-soaked towel below. “Didn’t want... anything to interfere. With getting control of it immediately.”

  “Do you think you’re in control of it now?”

  Adder closed his eyes and nodded. “I can feel it. All of its programs ... I can see your body heat—like a photo. And the machines in the other room, running hot.” The eyes flew open. “What’s that?”

  “There’s nothing.”

  “In the corridor outside. They’re here.” Adder slid off the table and faced the closed door, then turned around, his mouth open in surprise and his metal arm flashing upward, as he felt a small, sharp pain in the small of his back. Betreech stood behind him with a hypodermic, wetly tipped with red. “You,” emitted Adder as a warm, numbing wave swept through him. His heart beat again and the paralyzing warmth surged over his head. He collapsed beside the surgical table, dimly hearing the door opening and footsteps inside the room.

  From the floor, unable to turn his head, Adder could see, through miles of black-bordered, wavering liquid space, Betreech and an MFer with a red armband looking down at him. “You took your time getting here,” he could hear Betreech say to the other as the black border swept toward the center of his vision and he lost consciousness. “There’s my part of the deal.”

  “What did you hit him with?” asked the MFer with the red armband.

  Dr. Betreech looked down the silent length of the Interface. The mounded bodies on its surface were lit pale blue by the lights overhead. He felt freezing cold in the night air, and wished he could stand by the bonfire the last dozen MFers had built in the center of the street. But that’s where Adder is, he thought, right where they dumped him out of the car. And I don’t want to see that.

  “I said, what did you hit him with?”

  “What?” Betreech’s thoughts broke off and he turned to face the MFer. “Oh, I didn’t hit him with anything—the injection was a normal saline solution, just to make him think he was threatened. A black placebo.” He hugged his coat tighter around his frail body. “I knew more about the flashglove than he did. At the CIA camps in the desert, they found it was necessary to keep the glove bearer unconscious for six hours after the grafting. It takes that long for the neural connections to fully complete themselves. If the bearer’s slightest impulse initiates any of the glove’s attack programs before that period is over, the
feedback knocks him out, paralyzes his higher conscious centers. Takes weeks to recover.”

  “That’s more time,” said the MFer, “than Adder’s got.” “Look,” said Betreech, suddenly shaking with impatience. “Can’t we get on with it? Why don’t you just shoot him and take me on in to see Mox?”

  “Those weren’t my orders,” said the MFer, smirking. “My orders were to bring him here, have my squad stomp him to death here, and leave him here. Right in the middle of the road.”

  “For God’s sake,” said Betreech bitterly. He turned away from the MFer’s cruel and smug face. “It’s like kicking a corpse.”

  “It’s more fun than that. They say he’s started to twitch and mumble a little. Last gasp, no doubt.”

  Betreech slowly swiveled to face the MFer. “He does what?” “Twitches and mumbles. Why? What’s wrong?”

  “Christ,” whispered Betreech hoarsely. The few spots of color in his gray face disappeared, as if sucked back inside. He ran toward the bonfire, followed by the baffled MFer.

  At the edge of the bonfire’s heat and light, Betreech broke through the ring of laughing MFers, squeezing his frail body frantically between them. They stopped kicking and drew back a little as he looked down at Adder’s body. The knifelike angles of his face were obscured by puffy bruises and a stiff crust of dried blood. A thin stream of blood and saliva flowed from the battered mouth below his unconscious, lidded eyes, along with low, incomprehensible syllables. His legs and the one flesh arm, battered and filthy, jerked about erratically.

  “Do you have a gun?” demanded Betreech of the armbanded MFer.

  He dumbly extracted a large pistol from his gray coat and displayed it.

  “Then shoot him,” snapped Betreech, near hysterical, his voice rising in pitch. The tendons and veins in his neck stood out like thick cords. “Immediately.”

  “Why?” asked the MFer. “He’s out, isn’t he?”

  “Don’t you see?” Betreech shrieked to the circle of faces, flapping his arm at the twitching body on the ground. “The feedback from the flashglove only knocked out the highest layers of his mind, the conscious. The buried parts, the unconscious, are emerging, taking control! I should have known—I should have seen that the ADR would make him this way.” He choked, then laughed hysterically as he beat on the MF leader’s chest with his small, wrinkled hands. “Don’t you see? The Subconscious Man! Kill him!” He snatched the pistol from the MFer, turned, and pointed it with both quivering hands at Adder. The eyes of the figure on the ground sprang open, boring directly into the old man’s gray face.

  Betreech’s hands and forearms exploded in a burst of gore as the flashglove, with a shrill whine, flew and struck like a missile, pulling Adder to his feet. The second blow shattered Betreech’s head in a whirl of lethal harmonic vibrations. The decapitated body sank to its knees, then fell forward at Adder’s feet.

  Three of the surrounding MFers broke and ran; the others stood in horrified immobility at the sight of the near-crippled body, filling out from some inner, hidden source of strength, spotted with his own and Betreech’s blood, the alien look of the mind behind the eyes. The prehuman portions in control.

  When the remains of the last MFer in the circle had fallen, bloody and fragmented, to the street, only a few seconds had passed, a few seconds of flashing motion as the flashglove leaped through a fraction of its attack programs. The prehuman portions of Adder’s brain, looking about with reptilian violence and suspicion, sent his broken body staggering away from the fire and the sizzling pool of blood lapping up to its edge.

  The flashglove’s thermal sensors enabled him to locate the three remaining MFers, cowering in doorways. Their blood spattered and washed over his body, joining the other fluids. With his flesh eyes, the newly emerged mind sections saw the image before him of a stooped, painfully moving figure, drenched red from head to foot, a single gleaming forearm piercing the stiffening color. The flashglove flew up and shattered the reflecting storefront window. A universe of corpses exploded into splinters. The flying shards of glass opened new flows of his own blood.

  The sensors told him there was nothing still alive in the street. He could detect a small spark of body heat up an alleyway. He staggered toward it, leaving a coagulating trail behind, the flashglove whining restlessly.

  Stumbling around a sharp bend in the alley, he came upon a spread-eagled, breathing form, a gun with a bloodied grip beside it. He dropped to his knees beside the figure and sent the flashglove shattering into the skull. The body flopped spastically, and the metal forearm flew into its chest in an explosion of organ fragments and bone, the thick heart’s-blood spouting up at its attacker.

  The flashglove ceased its metallic whining. The blood-drenched figure swayed on its knees, then collapsed alongside the fragments of the other body, rolling slowly onto one side of the again knifelike face. His eyes faded, the mute look of a dying animal in them. The exhaustion of death, from the weapon’s cumulative feedback, set in. The flesh arm and legs curled toward his body’s center, toward the fetal position, but strength ebbed before the contraction was completed. After the blood of others stopped flowing from his body, his heart slowly and more slowly pumped his own blood out into the alley; his lungs grew cold. There was nothing behind the eyes now.

  “What an angel,” said the distant nurses, as the long-retired day-care attendant, now an ancient and sweetfaced woman, hobbled out of the TV parlor, dragging one scarred leg behind her. “She’s so well behaved.” The TV went on chattering the news of the riot in L.A. to the Orange County nursing home’s other residents, slumped in wheelchairs or crouched in sofas behind their chrome walkers. The old woman went upstairs to her own tiny room and lifted her skirt. The TV’s images jumbled and blurred with her memories of a child’s punishment, completed at last, as she pressed, whimpering with senile delight, the dried flesh of her loins beneath her bloodless hands.

  ❖

  She was probably psychotic. Just meat, in her own mind and Limmit’s. You schmuck, he told himself savagely, even as he ground on between the so-far nameless girl’s spread legs. An easy pickup won’t help. No forgetting that the one who loves and saved your ass is waiting, worrying, somewhere else.

  “I’m going,” the girl beneath him moaned. It had taken less than a quarter-hour, from the point where she, with flared nostrils and wide mad eyes, had sneaked up on him in one of Rattown’s mazy alleys and had thrust her hand into the crotch of his pants, to reach this stage. “Going, I’m going.”

  L.A. women have no class, thought Limmit disgustedly, raising himself on his palms and looking at her. “The word,” he said with icy disdain, ceasing all vertical motion, “is coming. ”

  The girl’s skewered pelvic rotations ended. “Yeah?” she said coolly. “Better look to be sure.” His erection flagged at the tone of her voice, and she slid out from beneath him.

  Limmit rolled over on his hip and looked in astonishment at the clear yellow fluid dripping from his lower body onto the drenched bedsheets, becoming tangible as it cooled from the 98.6° F. it had been held at in the girl’s bladder. “Christ,” he yelled. “Why’d you do that all over me?”

  She had pulled on her pants and a shirt and, sitting on a small dry patch at the edge of the bed, leaned over and kissed him. “Welcome, honey,” she said sweetly, “to the land of piss-offs.” After she left, Limmit pulled himself from the sopping bed and looked around the dingy room for something with which to wipe himself off. The room, like every other space he had encountered so far in Rattown, seemed to contain nothing but stifling semidarkness and indistinguishable heaps of trash and dust moldering lumpish underfoot and in all corners. The only recognizable objects in the room were a small television, its plug snaking into the cable outlet in the wall, and another small, yellow plastic radio sitting on top of that. Weird, Limmit had thought when the girl had brought him to the room. Maybe there was a God, running a galactic dreck hustle, with L.A. as warehouse. The Solar Connection for top-grade,
super-refined shit. Or else it just grew openly here, no longer having to hide under beds. Inside and out of the people who lived in the slums. There’s a coil of gray fuzz, big as a boa constrictor, for every broken heart in L.A.

  In the adjoining bathroom, crusted with antique feculence, he found a gray towel that shredded only slightly with age as he ran it over his body.

  Outside, he picked his way through the narrow alleys, heading again for his original destination. This was only the second morning since the Raid, and his sense of direction still seemed scrambled—it was best not to wander away from the sections Mary had guided him through.

  That bitch back there had quarts of it, he mused, fingering in his jacket pocket the radio he had lifted on his way out of the aromatic room. Perhaps Dr. Adder had given her a specially enlarged bladder, holding copious amounts of fluid for the delight of those who cared for wet action. Perhaps somewhere in L.A. roamed or lay decomposing a girl with monster-diametered intestines coiled within her, capable of depositing, upon depraved and eager upturned faces....

  And that would be all that was left of him, thought Limmit dismally. Nothing remained of Adder except the corpses of his work on the Interface, and the few living who had come to Rattown before or escaped the MFers the night of the Raid. Limmit walked on automatically, feeling a great, numbly bleeding cavity opening inside himself.

  On the wall of the alley a series of identical posters were slathered, red ink on ragged-edged brown paper. Despite the crude artwork and reproduction, the more than life-sized visage on them was recognizable as Adder’s. Limmit stopped to study one of the posters. His death seemed to be turning Adder into something new. Like maggots, thought Limmit bitterly, animating a corpse. He turned away from the poster and moved on toward the headquarters of the Adder Siege Front, which had been the poster’s subject.