Dr. Adder

by Jeter, K W

  Limmit had listened to her in growing amazement. “Who were they?”

  “Beats the shit out of me. The letters on their suits were PSS, I think. I’ve seen ’em around from a distance, and heard things from other loners. Whoever they are, they only nab topsiders who have come down into the Sump Line. Kinda scary. One guy said he had heard they were a bunch of weirdo gourmets from somewhere in Orange County, looking for new taste thrills. They don’t want us sewer dwellers, ’cause we’d taste too shitty.”

  What the fuck am I doing here? thought Limmit. This is what comes from reading all that damn science fiction—you get to the point where you can accept just about fuckin’ anything. “Seen ’em lately?” he asked, almost gaily.

  She halted abruptly. “Shh,” she ordered. “Listen.”

  Limmit strained, hearing nothing at first. Then, faintly, almost as if he were imagining it, he heard a soft, gentle sound somewhere far off above or behind them, as of rubber-shod feet moving, pausing, then moving again. “That’s them,” she whispered.

  “Sure it’s not Victor?” One pursuer would have been enough. She nodded. “He’s following us, too. But him you won’t hear.” He fell silent for a second, absorbing this. “What are my chances?”

  She looked at him calmly. “Pretty good.”

  “That’s a comfort. If you really think so.”

  Her eyes grew wider, then she broke into laughter. “That’s really funny,” she gasped between outbursts. “You were talking about your chances of making it. I thought you meant of getting killed. That's what’s pretty good.” She laughed harder, doubling over, her face growing red.

  He stared at her until she sobered and looked into his face again. Her grin faded at the sight of his taut expression. “A real riot,” he said grimly, bunched the neck of her frayed denim shirt in one hand, and ripped it downward. Her small breasts bounced forth, nipples erect. “Hey,” she said delightedly. “I thought you were so hot to get moving.”

  “Now there seems to be,” he said, smileless, pushing the torn shirt down from her pale shoulders and moving on to her pants, “a different light on things.”

  “There it is,” said Bandita, pointing. “The last stretch.” Her voice echoed hollow in the enormous space.

  Limmit studied the glassily flowing river, black as ink. He could see along its length, until it disappeared from sight in either direction, the narrow cement path bordering it. At even intervals, openings into other corridors appeared like mouths, similar to the one from which they had just emerged. Overflow drains, he thought. “If we had something that would float,” he said, judging the water’s sluggish speed, “we could ride the rest of the way.”

  She laughed. “Not hardly. It’s going the wrong way, dummy —toward Orange County.” She swung off down the silent water’s border.

  Well anyway, said Limmit to himself, thank God it’s the last ways to go. Several times he had woken up in the empty corridors, dark tunnels, luminous grottoes, once in a dead subway car filled with bone shards, that she had led him through, only to realize that he couldn’t even remember the purpose of the journey. Slowly, with an effort, it would come back to him, dragging fragments of what seemed to have been a completely separate existence before the Sump Line: Adder, Mary, the Interface, KCID.... Once, he had almost started sobbing when he realized he would probably never see Bonna Cummins again.

  Memory or not, he had followed Bandita, copulated with her, ate what she fed him—cans at first, but more recently, rats on a spit turned over a little fire. She caught them somehow when he wasn’t looking. They slept curled up like children or small animals. Sometimes, he had lain awake with her in his arms, listening to the faint gurgles and murmurs of the surrounding subterranean world, and for the sound of approaching feet, rubber-shod or not. How far down am I? he wondered; how long has it been?

  Lost in nonverbal, vegetative reverie, he collided with Ban-dita, who had suddenly frozen in front of him. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Be very still,” she said softly. Ominously, her usual manic grin was absent.

  He listened, but heard nothing. Then he felt it. As if the darkness somewhere nearby were thickening, coalescing into a form very close to them. “What is it?” he whispered.

  “Victor.” Her voice was small, strangely constricted. “He’s right by us now. We’re in trouble—this section of the Line he knows a lot better than I do. Part of his old Rattenfängerei stomping grounds. He could jump out at us anytime. I was hoping we had enough of a lead to get through here before he caught up to us.” She cautiously stepped forward again.

  Limmit nervously looked around in the damp gloom. That’s what happens, he thought, if you fuck around too much on the road. He followed behind her as they proceeded alongside the flowing water, their heads swiveling warily, peering into the darkness.

  Before Limmit could react, a dark figure leaped between them and sent Bandita sprawling into the tunnel wall with a furious swing of a metal pipe section. “She’s mine!” the figure, an emaciated and wild-haired wraith, shouted at Limmit, and jabbed the metal pipe straight at his stomach. He jerked away from it, but caught the end of its thrust, which sent him sprawling onto the damp concrete. The figure leaped astride Limmit’s chest, pressing down against his throat with the pipe. “She’s mine!” he shouted again. “You can’t have her!”

  The pipe felt the same as the one the MFer on the Interface had strangled Limmit with; pressing his life out the top of his head in a bloody mass. He stopped tearing at Victor’s back, and began beating against the side of his head. Blood sprang from one ear onto his fist. The contorted face continued to leer and grunt through the growing gray haze. Then, miraculously, the pressure stopped as it had once before, on the surface.

  “Mary?” croaked Limmit, dazed and weak. He rolled on his side and retched blood and phlegm. His vision cleared, and he saw Victor and Bandita, one side of her face red with blood, struggling a few yards away, the metal pipe swaying between them in their hands, gradually forcing her to her knees. Limmit reached into his boot and extracted the blade that had remained there so long. Dizzy, but with a burning calm, he lunged forward and grabbed one of Victor’s wrists, the hand still clamped to the pipe. The emaciated form’s eyes widened in shock as Limmit methodically sliced across and down through the blood vessels and tendons of his arm. Victor gasped and let go of the pipe, the blood flowing satisfyingly warm across Limmit’s blade and hands, before he collapsed into unconsciousness at Limmit’s feet. Limmit smiled wanly at Bandita, sank to one knee and puked again, then fell the rest of the way on top of the other figure.

  He woke up, unknown hours later, to find both Bandita’s and Victor’s eyes observing him. She had bandaged Victor’s forearm with strips torn from her shirt, and then bound him immobile as well with the same. His eyes flicked between her and Limmit, glaring. “Well, what now?” said Limmit groggily. He rubbed his throat tentatively. “Why didn’t you kill him right on the spot, while he was out?”

  She shrugged. “Something could still happen to you on the way,” she said. “If it did, I wouldn’t want to be left all alone down here. I mean, he does care for me in his way.”

  This is too much, thought Limmit. “You know,” he mused aloud, “back on the surface, when Dr. Adder asked me to work for him, he said he figured that my being from someplace else and comparatively unhooked on images would give me an advantage out here. I’m really beginning to think he was dead wrong. I don’t think I can understand any of this shit, let alone deal with it.” He leaned back against the tunnel wall.

  Bandita cocked her head strangely at him. “Did you say,” she asked eagerly, “that you worked for Dr. Adder?”

  “Yeah, I suppose you could say that.”

  “Wow,” she breathed ecstatically. “What’s he like? I mean, up close. I’ve only heard of him down here, never really seen him or anything. But you—you’ve actually touched him and talked to him and everything. His right-hand man, practically, I bet!”
Her eyes glowed with admiration, and she stroked and plucked at his sleeve in a fit of conflicting desire and sudden shyness.

  So even down here, thought Limmit bitterly. Right-hand man—what she didn’t know made that a cruel joke. A strange mixture of emotions pressed against his heart, suffocating him. “For your information,” he said, “the last time I saw him, Adder was a helpless, brain-damaged near-corpse. No hope of recovery. Almost certainly dead by now, I hope.”

  Her eyes narrowed at him. “You lying turd,” she spat. “That’s impossible. I don’t think you ever worked for him at all.” Her expression betrayed her shock and fear.

  “Look,” said Limmit. A great weariness seemed to flow over him like sludge. “I’m not going to argue about it. Since I came down here, I’ve been pushed off cliffs, shot at, near fucked to death by you, and been had at with a goddamn lead pipe. Can we just get moving now? I really think I’ve had enough.” He rose to his feet, massaging his aching throat. Strangely, his thoughts seemed more lucid now than they had for a long time, as if the fight had knocked loose a cumulative miasma from him. He turned and looked away from her, down the opposite direction of the tunnel. Shee-it, he thought. After all this, that damn Visitor better have something good going.

  “So don’t argue with me,” he heard her say behind him. “Argue with this, fuckhead!” He spun around and saw Victor’s metal pipe in her hands, flying at the side of his head.

  He woke up again, this time his head throbbing painfully. He reached up to the side of his face and his hand encountered a sticky fluid. He opened his eyes, wincing at the dim light, and looked around him. He was lying in the same spot where Victor had jumped them, but Victor and Bandita were gone. Instead, he was surrounded by six men in rubber skin-diver outfits. One, with gray hair and a thin mustache over a chrome and brown plastic pipe, cleared his throat. He looked like the insurance-selling father in old TV family comedies.

  “We saw your friends,” said the man, in a voice resonant with trying to be both authoritative and friendly, “hightailing it down the tunnel. Too bad we didn’t get here a little sooner. Could have saved you from a nasty crack on the head.” He took his pipe from his mouth and tamped it down with a blunt forefinger. “Lover’s quarrel?”

  Limmit laid his throbbing head back on the cold tunnel floor. “You might say that.” He closed his eyes. “Go ahead and eat me, I don’t care.”

  “Tut, tut, my boy. Do you believe all those horror stories that girl pumped into you? She’s a sly one, all right. We’ve had a hell of a time, tracking you all this way.”

  Limmit cocked one eye open and squinted dubiously at the gray-haired man. “If you’re not going to eat me,” he said, “then who are you?”

  The man smiled beatifically. “My boy,” he said expansively, “I am your father.”

  Limmit shut his eye wearily. Goddamn L.A. is all the same, from top to bottom. “Like fuck you are,” he said.

  “Only metaphorically,” said the gray-haired skin diver. “Am I your father, that is.” He closed the lid of the first aid kit and tossed it into the center of the inflated rubber raft, smoothly gliding with the dark river’s current. One of the five other rubber-suited men pushed aside with a paddle the random small heaps of sewer fluff in their path. “You see,” he continued, pointing to the orange letters SPS on his suit, “we represent the Orange County Society for the Prodigal Son. My name’s Endpoint, Albert Endpoint. I’m the Chief Exalted Patriarch this month.”

  “That’s nice,” said Limmit, drowsily trailing one hand in the raft’s wake. With his other hand he fingered the bandage on the side of his face, and wondered vaguely if they might have injected a tranquilizer into him when they had found him unconscious. “What’s your society do?”

  “Don’t put your hand in the water like that, son,” said Endpoint. “You don’t know what’s down there. Yes, well, what does the SPS do? I presume, of course, that you’re familiar with the biblical story, the parable, of the prodigal son? You are? Well, the SPS consists of fathers who have lost their children to the temptations of the paths of wickedness above us in L.A. Nothing would make our hearts more joyous than to see our sons and daughters return to us, contrite, to be welcomed with love and charity.” His voice had to Limmit’s ear a canned quality, like a memorized recruiting speech. “Unfortunately, however, there seems to be a low rate of return from L.A., even now that the infamous Interface has been shut down. Too many of them are caught in the magnetic influence of Dr. Adder.”

  “I could tell you a little about him,” said Limmit, smiling ruefully at the water.

  “Doubtless you could, my boy. But as it is, the SPS sends a team of members out each month to accelerate, shall we say, the process of remorse and eventual return we feel is sure to occur to all of our errant children, given enough time.” Endpoint’s voice had lapsed into a canned recitation. “Due to certain, uh, legalities, we’re forced to operate underground, as it were, picking up the ones who venture down here into the sewers. Naturally, given the still-small, membership of the SPS, the chances of us hitting upon one of our very own children is quite small. But the principle is what counts, right? And when the returning prodigal son sees the warm and generous welcome provided for him by that month’s Patriarch, never does he return to his former evil ways.” At times, Limmit thought, listening to this Endpoint is like hearing a pamphlet read itself. “Believe me, in Orange County we really know how to slay the ol’ fatted calf.”

  “So I’ve heard,” said Limmit softly. “Let me see if I’ve got this right. It’s your intention to adopt me? Like I was your lost son?” “For the time being, yes. As this month’s Chief Exalted Patriarch, I’m going to make a home for you with my family back in Orange County.”

  “And that way the return of the prodigal son is accomplished?”

  Endpoint nodded.

  “Then I’m sorry,” said Limmit, smiling in dreamy triumph, “to inform you that it won’t work out that way. I wasn’t born or raised in Orange County; I’m from Phoenix. An orphan, too.” Minutes passed while the six SPS members, in their skin-diving suits, huddled at one end of the inflated raft and conferred in whispered tones. Limmit sat at the rear of the raft, looking back at the river. Every second drew him inexorably away from his goal, the Visitor. For some reason, he found himself feeling that he could give a shit. Events below the surface seemed to follow their own weird logic; maybe this was just some roundabout way of getting to his destination. I’ll ride along with it for now, he thought. Besides, they’ll have to let me go in a minute or two.

  “Ahem,” came Endpoint’s voice. Limmit slowly swung his head around. “We’ve come to a decision,” said the mouth around the pipe. “Concerning your case. Inasmuch as we’re dealing with spiritual father-son relationships, it would be foolish of us to insist upon an actual physical return to Orange County on the prodigal son’s part. All that is necessary for Orange County to be the son’s home in spirit, if he was not born there, is for him to achieve knowledge of it. Then it becomes his spiritual home, and thus his home in fact.” Endpoint leaned back with a satisfied expression.

  “What does that mean?” asked Limmit.

  “We’re going to show you around,” blurted one of the other men, “before we officially welcome you home.”

  “Great,” murmured Limmit, and slumped over the raft’s tubular edge, staring at the dark water rushing beneath. Kidnapped by lunatic Orange County fathers, he thought. At least KCID had been right about one thing—beneath L.A. is where the action is. “Tell me,” asked Limmit, looking around at Endpoint in mild curiosity. “How come you guys wear those rubber skin-diver suits?”

  Endpoint looked uncomfortable. “Well,” he said stiffly. “Most of it down here is a sewer, isn’t it?”

  The inflatable raft remained below, tied to an outcropping of rusted valve handle. The first of several metal hatchways and doors slammed shut below the last SPS member on the ladder, shutting off Limmit’s view of the raft twisting on the end of
its tether in the dark, silent stream.

  With Limmit sandwiched in the middle, the group threaded its way up from the sewers to the closed doors of a large freight elevator. As Endpoint thumbed the elevator’s call button, he grinned at Limmit. “How’s it going to feel to be back on top again, eh?” he asked. The other SPS members pulled small bags filled with clothes and shoes from behind a metal panel, and started peeling off their rubber suits.

  Limmit, exhausted from what had seemed miles of clanging stairs and ladders, grunted and nodded. Back on top, he thought wearily. Hot shit.

  All the way up in the elevator, a journey so long that Limmit worried once that the machine had gotten stuck between levels, the SPS team laughed and congratulated each other like triumphant hunters. The elevator doors slid open first onto an enormous, humanless sea of silent automobiles underneath a gray cement sky. Two of the men, with much handshaking and back-thumping from the others, departed down the even lanes of cars. “They live in one of the other complexes,” explained Endpoint to Limmit. “This is the largest, Casa del Solituda.” The doors slid shut again.

  They opened again at random intervals, disgorging the rest of the SPS team, with the same ritual, into carpeted hallways lined into seeming infinity with numbered doors. Finally, only Endpoint and Limmit were left in the rising elevator. “Good thing it’s after midnight,” said Endpoint, checking his wrist-watch. “No one will see us.”

  The doors revealed another hallway, identical to the others, and Endpoint hustled Limmit by his elbow from the elevator.

  It wasn’t until he was standing inside the Endpoint conapt, in the little kitchenette to one side of the entranceway, that Limmit realized how much filth and exhaustion he had accumulated on the Sump Line. His nose recoiled as, isolated now, the combined odors of sewage and sweat hit his nostrils. I feel like the plague, he thought, trying not to stain the gleaming chrome and warm vinyl surfaces.