Dr. Adder

by Jeter, K W

  “Is all that true?”

  “Shit, who knows by now. Maybe it is. There’s only one way to find out.”

  And there’s nothing, Limmit said to himself, up here for me now. Except death. “Can you show me how to get down there?” he asked. “Into the Sump Line?”

  “Sure,” said Droit. “It’s not hard. But are you asking me for that info?”

  Limmit studied the other’s face for a second. “I’m sorry,” he said slowly. “I lost my head when I saw what became of Adder.” “Don’t worry about it,” Droit said abstractedly. “It’ll probably be all over for him in a couple of weeks.”

  “I can’t pay you anything, if that’s what you want. I must have lost the money I had during the Raid.”

  “That’s all right.” He sighed. “Nobody else is paying anything now, so I might as well give it to you for free. When you’re ready, I’ll take you down, find you a guide. Right now, if you want.” Limmit shook his head. “First I’ve got to tell somebody I’m going.” He looked around. They had walked back to one of the sections of alley familiar to him. The building in which he had woken up that morning was only a few blocks away.

  “I’ll wait for you here,” said Droit.

  “It might be a while. She may not be there yet.” Maybe she won’t come back there at all, he thought.

  “I’ve got nothing else to do at the moment.” Droit gazed back at the dark length of alleyway. “You know,” he said suddenly, “KCID never paid me for any of the data I gave him. I kept working for him because he seemed somehow to understand what was going on in L.A. I never did. I’d hoped he would tell me eventually. When the Interface got shut down, I thought that was some kind of end to something. That’s why I hurried back to see him. But he didn’t say a thing I wanted to hear.” He looked back into Limmit’s face. “I hope your message turns out better.”

  Mary sat on the bed and looked at him standing in the middle of the room. Somehow, while in the thick of forming the Siege Front, she had found this room and cleared it of its accumulated layers of trash. When she had first found him again, wandering in the Rattown alleys, she had brought him here and pressed herself to him through the nights. This morning, she had left before he woke up, heading for the Front’s headquarters. “What are you going to take?” she asked.

  Limmit walked to one of the room’s corners and bent over the warped cardboard box that held the few items and changes of clothing she had found for him. She had made this room into some kind of bastion against the piles of rubbish and dust that slumped everywhere else like decaying bodies. But already there was a thin layer of airborne dirt coating the box’s contents. He lifted out a shirt, still in the original plastic wrapping in which it had been unearthed. Dots of mold bloomed on the graying cloth beneath the clear plastic. He dropped it back in the box. What the hell do you pack anyway, he thought, when you’re off to see a two-ton messenger from the stars buried at the end of the world’s largest sewer?

  He straightened up and turned around to look at her. “Nothing, I guess.”

  She said nothing. He stood silently before her, then turned away. “All I ever seem to do anymore,” he said from the doorway, “is say goodbye to you.”

  The room was on the building’s second story. From its window she watched him emerge from the building and disappear, hands empty, down an alleyway. It always seemed so dark here. There would be even less light where he was going.

  To hell with him, she thought. Let him fall ass first into the abyss if that’s what he wants. There are others enough who need, deserve.... I’ll become another Mother Endure, but for the comrades of the revolution. Open my heart and thighs to my compatriots. I understand her now, she said to herself. She could feel the kinship linking her with that strange image of the slums. Has Mother Endure discovered yet, could she tell me, how many others it takes to equal the one who’s gone away?

  She stood up from the bed. In the corner of the room, the box of his clothes waited to be thrown away. She looked down at them, minutes passing, then left the room without touching them.

  L.A. was dark when Limmit reappeared. He came down the alley looking the same as before, the only difference a slightly preoccupied expression. Droit lounged against the side of the alley, waiting for him. “Let’s go,” Droit called out. He finished shoving aside with his foot the last pieces of trash from a circular area of pavement. “Wait’ll you see the guide I lined up for you.” “Guide?” said Limmit. “Oh, yeah. Sorry, something’s on my mind, I guess. How do we get down there?”

  Droit reached down, lifted a large metal plate by the hole near its edge, and pulled it aside. There was a metal ladder bolted to the side of the cylindrical hole he revealed.

  A dim light filtered up from the unseen depths below the alley. “This way,” said Droit, pointing with a spectral finger. Limmit stooped to the hole’s edge and began to clamber down, followed by Droit’s boots above his head, all that he could make out of him. He heard Droit pulling the metal plate back over the tube’s mouth.

  In a shorter time than Limmit had expected, he emerged into a small, low-ceilinged room, to one wall of which the metal ladder was fastened. In the dim yellow glare of some sort of gas lamp he could see masses of rusting and unworkable controls, dials, levers, wheels. He could make out the form of a girl as well, sitting cross-legged beside the lamp on the floor. Droit descended to his side and panted, out of breath. “Is this it?” asked Limmit.

  “Not really,” said Droit. “More like an anteroom, actually. The Sump Line’s a lot farther down.” He waved a hand at the girl, who had been watching them all this time with silent, devouring eyes. “Meet Bandita, Princess of the West Side Sewer Gypsies. She’s going to take you to the Visitor.”

  Limmit took a closer look at the girl as she rose from the floor and crossed the small space between them. “Hello,” she said, low and playfully ominous. Limmit told himself that she looked like the kind of girl who could screw you or eat you (literally), either one, and enjoy them both about the same. Childlike, with vacuum-black hair and eyes, and white skin made so pallid by, he supposed, underground life that it glowed faintly phosphorescent; no gray tones at all. Teeth like little sugar daggers. Clad in the ubiquitous denim and leather boots of L.A., made subtly antique and shiny by constant exposure to the sewers. “Hello,” said Limmit, at a loss for anything else.

  “Here’s where I leave you,” said Droit. “I’ll try to be waiting up here when you get back.”

  “Come on,” said the girl Bandita, taking Limmit’s arm in her hands. She came up to his shoulder. “Let’s get moving. I really wanna get back down in the Sump, with you.”

  “How?” said Limmit. “I mean, how do we get down?” He could not see any exit from the room other than the circular hole in the ceiling.

  Bandita pulled him over to one wall, stenciled L.A.W.D. ACCESS PERMIT REQ’D. She kicked at the wall and a section swung away, showering flakes of rust and revealing a pitch-dark doorway. “Go on,” she said, letting go of his arm. “After you.” Limmit put one foot over the door’s edge and felt around cautiously. “Hey,” he said. “There’s no bottom here.”

  “Just hold your nose,” she laughed, “and jump.”

  “Are you shittin’ me—” Limmit turned around and caught in his stomach the push meant for his back. He stumbled and fell backward through the black doorway. Framed in the yellow light from the room he had just been knocked from, he saw the sewer girl jump spread-eagled after him, a grin of fierce delight on her face, like a voluptuous bird of prey. Behind her, he saw Droit peering down at them from the door, holding the gas lamp and calling something he couldn’t understand. Dizzy from the rushing of his blood and having his breath knocked out, Limmit saw the square of yellow light swoop upward in giddy circles, shrinking from door size to card size to pin size, then nothing. Air welled up warm and pungent from below, but seemed to rush by too fast for him to suck any into his lungs. Panicking in the total absence of light he could not see, only f
eel the girl’s body reaching for him from above as he fell.

  Several bounding heartbeats later, he plummeted into something soft and damp. The momentum of his fall carried him deep into the center of whatever it was; then, energy absorbed, it slowly swelled back up, carrying him to the surface of its spongy mass. He felt the tremors from the girl’s impact into the substance. A light appeared and Limmit found himself and the girl in the small circle of illumination created by an electric lamp in her hand. She grinned maniacally. “Some fun, huh?” asked Bandita.

  “Loads,” he quavered, looking around. They seemed to be standing knee-deep in a small sea of some dirty-white, porous substance. “What is this stuff?”

  “It’s called sewer fluff,” she said. “It’s all over down here in the Sump Line. We used to have a guy in the Sewer Gypsies named Jezzy, real smart, knew a lot of science and stuff. That was because his father had been one of those scientists up north, who quit that to join us. Jezzy used to tell me it was some sort of combination organism, like a jellyfish, though I could tell you for shit what a jellyfish is. He said they spawn up north in some place called Alaska, and clogged up the water pipes coming from there, which is why the people in Orange County stopped using them. The fluff kinda creeps around, in and out of the water, and just grows, or else it dies sometimes. Sometimes it’s not there when you count on it, like to break your fall when you jump from one level to another. That’s how Jezzy got killed; really smashed him up. Though some say he did it on purpose, the rotten bastard.” Her face clouded with memory for a moment, then cleared. “Hey,” she said brightly, “wanna screw? This fluff is the best place for it. It reacts to your body heat, what Jezzy called thermotropic. Really snuggles you while you fug-gle. How about it, huh?” She leaped forward, clasping her arms behind his back and knocking him over onto the fluff s surface. She lay there, looking at him from atop his chest. Her arms seemed awfully strong to Limmit.

  “Do I have a choice?” he asked.

  Her laugh pealed off into the unknown reaches of the Sump Line. I have no principles, thought Limmit. At this rate I’ll never even get to the Visitor. Bandita’s hands flew from behind him to his belt buckle and, practiced, began their work.

  “God,” she panted, “I just want to eat you up all over. How I love topside guys.”

  Something in the dark air made Limmit feel giddy. “Is that a sexual position or a point of origin?”

  “Shut up. I’ve got better things for you to do with your mouth.” Portions of body surged all around him, weirdly illuminated by the small lamp left behind her on a mound of fluff. How can she be so fast? Limmit wondered. The heat-loving fluff squirmed beneath them; from the corner of his eye he saw their clothes as dark patches on a sea of white, undulating away as more tiny waves came rippling at them in the opposite direction. “Mff,” he said, his mouth full of downy flesh.

  “Like that, topsider,” breathed the girl into his ear, and sank her tiny sharp teeth into it.

  There seemed to be a small explosion somewhere in the distance. Limmit almost began to wonder what it was, then decided to attend to matters at hand, when the lamp exploded. Limmit jumped to his feet, bouncing and dragging the clinging Bandita to her knees. “Somebody’s shooting at us!” he yelled. Christ, he thought, has that gunman followed me down here already?

  He felt Bandita pull her head away from his body and look around in the total darkness. “Shit,” she said sourly. “That asshole Victor.”

  Limmit dived across the fluff in the direction he had last seen their clothes. He heard another shot, and a splat of fluff where he had just been standing. “Victor!” screamed the girl angrily. “Cut it out, you schmuck!”

  His eyes had become accustomed enough to the dark to detect the clothes against the faint luminescence of the fluff. “Come on!” he shouted to Bandita. “Let’s get out of here.” He attempted to stand on one leg to pull on his pants, but fell over sideways in the yielding mass. Another shot rang out, and the bullet penetrated the empty leg of his pants flapping above him.

  “Okay for you, Victor!” called the girl to the invisible gunman again. “See if I ever give you head again!” She huffed over to Limmit, on his ass struggling frantically to get his boots on, and gathered up her clothes. “Let’s go,” she snapped. “We don’t have to put up with this shit.”

  Limmit, bouncing and falling over the marshmallow-like surface, followed the twin pale moons of her buttocks to the edge of the fluff. She slid down its rounded slope, her bare feet slapping against a concrete floor some six feet from the fluff’s top. He jumped down beside her. “Hold out your arms,” she said, and he felt her load her wadded clothes into them. He heard the creaking of more rusted metal, and a shaft of light shot up from the floor. From it he could see her, compact breasts glinting with sweat, kneeling beside a trap door. “Down here,” she said. He looked, saw a floor several feet below, tossed her clothes down, and swung himself to it, holding on to the edge of the floor above. She jumped down lightly beside him, and the trap door whammed shut. Particles of rust showered down on them.

  “He won’t follow us down here,” she said. “He knows I’d cut off his balls in close quarters.”

  “You know him?”

  “I’d recognize the sound of his rat killer anywhere.”

  They were in a long corridor without visible end in either direction, lined with pipes of varying dimensions. Fluorescent panels glowed down the length of the corridor with a few random blanks. This was the first good light in which he had been able to see the girl. His general impression was unchanged, even though he now saw she had a tattoo on one thigh, in the form of a cartoon’s speech balloon with its tail disappearing into her tangled pubic hair. The balloon contained the words FEED ME. He felt somehow relieved that it hadn’t been the snake cartoon of the Interface whores. “We’d better get going,” he said.

  “That’s what I say.” She slipped a hand into the front of his pants. “Let’s go—right where we left off.” She held on with the one hand, and spread with her foot the pile of her clothes into a rough bed shape on the floor.

  “This is insane,” said Limmit. “Fun’s fun, but you reach a point. I mean, I hate to disappoint you or anything, but all this sudden violence has left me, I think, temporarily impotent.” She grinned maliciously. “You must be in a bad way when that happens,” she said, “if even your fingers go soft.”

  He sensed the mass of earth between him and everything on the surface. No principles at all, he thought as she pulled him down to the floor and guided his hands.

  Limmit awoke sometime later, his head between the girl’s thighs. He sat up without waking her and looked around. They were still the corridor’s only inhabitants. A brief panic welled up in him. Jesus, he wondered, how long have I been down here? There was no way of telling. It had seemed to take a very long time to satisfy Bandita and then fall asleep. Days, maybe. He brushed away the empty cans she had fed them from and pulled his scattered clothes to himself.

  As he dressed, he suddenly sensed her watching him. Her crazy smile disconcerted him when he looked back. Christ, he realized, I’m depending on her. Not just to get me to the Visitor, but back out of here again. What if she’s really swacked on me, and doesn’t want to ever let me go. Maybe life underground has affected all the men down here, given ’em cocks like button mushrooms. In the country of the three-inchers, the six-inch man is king. He shook her hand loose from his ankle and picked up his boots. “Let’s start traveling,” he said.

  Her eyes seeped enigmatically through her lashes at him. “Whatever you say,” she said demurely, and pulled her own clothes together.

  When she had dressed, she pointed down one direction of the corridor. “That way.”

  Wordlessly, he followed her beneath the fluorescent panels. One flickered and went out as they passed under it. “Soon they’ll all go,” she said over her shoulder. “Someday we’ll all have to grope like moles everywhere we go down here. How do moles grope, I wonder?”
>
  He ignored the last. “Speaking of‘we,’ where’s the rest of the West Side Sewer Gypsies? Out digging up canned goods somewhere?”

  Her smile faded for a moment. “There aren’t any others,” she said. “I’m the last one. After Jezzy died, they all got wiped out by the Screamin’ Sludge Queens from the East Side. Except for me.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry, I guess. Then who’s this Victor who was shooting at us?” He had convinced himself that it hadn’t been Mox’s gunner; the ragged cough of this weapon had been too unlike the crisp puncturing of space he remembered from the surface.

  “Not at us, at you. He’s a loner, like I am now. His bunch, the Upper Aqueduct Rattenfängerei, got caught in a sudden back-flush of sludge from one of the lower levels. Stunk like shit. He’s gone a little crazy from it, I think. Has a thing about sludge and fucking—maybe that’s what he was doing when he got washed away by the backflow. I hung around with him for a while, but he was just getting weirder by the day. I mean, I like a little variety, but sticking my head under the sewer, mounting me from behind, and beating me with a rubber boot while screaming ‘It smells like shit!’ was all he ever wanted to do. I finally ditched him, to go guide someone else Droit brought down to me. A real fruity character named Lyle something. Victor shot at him, too. Would’ve killed him, actually—snuck up on us, knocked me dizzy, and was sitting on this fag’s chest with his shotgun about to blow his shrieking head off. Then a bunch of really weird guys, about five or six straight-looking middle-aged dudes, only wearing like rubber skin-diver suits with great big orange letters on them, busted in. Knocked Victor off, grabbed up the little fruit, and ran back up the tunnel the way they came, before I could even get up off my ass.”