Here, there, anywhere my heart desired. I travelled all around the world, meeting cool people, seeing cool places, eating really cool food… and you know what? I didn’t need much money to do it.
Instead of paying, I gave. I gave my gift to them. A little girl with a cleft palate? No problem. Your wife broke her leg? Easy. And the more desperate and more grave the problem, the more eager I was to pitch in and help.
Everybody was always so grateful, so thankful, and my big secret was, I felt like I was the one who was getting something out of it. Unless you can do what I do, you will never know the absolute joy of seeing the looks on the faces of the parents of a six year old boy who was dying of a parasitic infection, and you made that go away. You’ll never know the joy of watching that kid go run and play for the first time in months, maybe years.
They wanted to give me everything they had. All of them do. But I don’t want it. I don’t need all that. A place to stay for bit, some good food in my belly, maybe a little help in getting to the next place in my travels. That’s all I need.
So yeah. I’m Jolly. People have been calling me that forever; because I am exactly that… jolly. How could I not be? I don’t need much, and every day I get to do the miraculous for people who would never get the chance to experience it otherwise.
Of course, Big Pharma and the Medical-Healer industrial complex aren’t a big fan of mine. It’s hard to justify charging someone a hundred grand to fix their cancer when there’s a crazy guy like me out there who will do it for a home cooked meal and a good conversation.
That’s how I ended up in Trubuilt 187. There was this fourteen year old girl… cute as a button, and full of that crazy, spunky energy that seems to burst out of girls in their early teens… who was staring down the barrel of some serious spinal surgery. Scoliosis, bad enough that it was starting to compress her lungs, and the Healers wanted fifty grand cash to fix it.
These people didn’t have that kind of money. Insurance would cover surgery, kind of, but they would still have to shell out over ten thousand dollars in order to cover co-pays or deductibles or whatever other bullshit that insurance companies come up with to wriggle out of paying a bill. And with all due respect to surgeons, their best work is never as good as a Healer Trick.
Anyway, what was I going to do… let her suffer? Let this family of hard-working people go bankrupt and lose their house in a desperate bid to save their daughter?
Not this guy. So I fixed her up. And a couple of weeks later, the surgeon who just lost out on a seventy thousand dollar case, got all pissed and reported me to the authorities for practicing without a license.
Man, they threw the book at me. Most reasonable people would hear a case like mine and be like, hey good for him, doing the right thing. But you get a bunch of creepy lawyers in the employ of very powerful industries who have a lot of money at stake, and they will twist it all around and make it sound like you’re Al Capone. I got eight years.
I’m not a monk. I didn’t take it in stride; not at first. I was pissed and sullen and definitely not jolly when I first came to Trubuilt 187. I moped and muttered into my oatmeal at breakfast about how unfair it all was, until one day in the dining hall, a guard whispered to me, “Hey.”
I didn’t respond at first.
“Hey, man. You’re that Healer.”
I sighed, staring down at the mush on my plate. “Yeah.”
“Can… maybe… maybe you can help me out.”
“How am I going to help you out? I’m the inmate.”
“Look man, I… I need some help, like, Healer type help.”
“Check with the Mayo Clinic.”
“I tried that, man. You know I don’t have that kind of cash on my salary. It’s for my wife.”
Curiosity got the better of me. In stir, you get bored; really bored, really fast, so any distraction is welcomed. I gave him a shrug to let him know to continue.
“We’re trying to have a kid. Been trying. She… she can’t. Something’s wrong, endo… endo something.”
“Endometriosis.”
“Yeah. She’s in pain, all the time. At this point… I don’t even care about having kids, I just don’t want to see her hurting like that anymore. I can… I can get you money. Maybe not much, but whatever you need. I can’t keep seeing her hurting like that. So if it’s money…”
It was tempting. I mean, why not? Why not squeeze this guy for whatever I could get out of him? It was what the assholes who put me in here did for a living. They took the sick and desperate and squeezed them for all they were worth, and they got praised for it. Me, I helped people for free, and I got tossed into a cell in the most miserable prison in the country.
So yeah, it was tempting. And I came right up to the edge… but I couldn’t do it.
“Naw, man,” I said. “It ain’t like that. You don’t need to give me money. Just… just be cool, all right?”
He arranged an excuse for me to get into one of those meeting rooms that people use to talk to their attorneys and brought his wife in to see me. It took all of about two seconds for me to see it. She was full of it; tough cobwebby fibrous tissue all throughout her pelvis. I could see the pain in her eyes, in her face, in the way she tried to put up a tough front.
She wasn’t a bad person. She didn’t deserve this. She was a nice lady whose only sin was getting a bad roll of the biological dice.
And just like that, I remembered who I was.
It was an easy fix. As the painful tissue melted away, her face began to relax, untwisting out of the tight grimace she’d had to keep in order to hold herself together day in and day out. Her shoulders relaxed and lowered. She’d be able to get a good night’s sleep that night for the first time in years. She was so happy, so relieved, that she started to cry.
Okay, okay, I admit it. I got a little misty-eyed myself. Cut me a break. I’m not a statue.
A few days later, I found a case of canned peaches under my bunk. After weeks of nothing but soggy, flavorless prison food, those peaches tasted like Heaven on Earth.
Even better, about a year later, that guard showed me a picture of baby Jessica, his brand new daughter. We laughed and joked and acted like we’d known each other for years.
And I started making friends. Fast. Word got around that I was the man to see if anything went sideways with your body, and all that I wanted in return, was that you be cool. Get me some snacks. Do me some little favors. Make my life easier. Don’t let anybody hurt me. That’s all I wanted, and in return… hell, I’ll save your ass.
The rules were simple. Anybody and everybody is welcome. If you’re in a gang, don’t expect me to deny care to someone in a rival gang. Any threats, any violence directed toward me, and you’re shut out. Nobody messes with the golden goose.
Life got a lot more comfortable for me. Make no mistake, it still wasn’t great… I was still stuck in prison, life can only get so good… but it became a lot better for me than for most.
It got me out of my cell for most of the day, which was huge. I spent most of my time in the infirmary, “volunteering”, as the warden called it. He loved it that his prison had the best track record in the country for the health of its inmates, thanks to Yours Truly. Stats like that get private prisons bonuses, and bonuses for the prison meant the warden got brownie points with his bosses.
Anyway, that’s why I was in the infirmary when everything went cuckoo the day of the riot. I was alone when the alarms went off; there was sometimes a guard with me, but a lot of times, they didn’t bother. They knew I wasn’t going to do anything stupid.
I can’t say that I was really worried when I heard the alarms; like I said, everybody knew not to hurt the golden goose who could fix all their health problems. Still, when people get riled up, they sometimes do stuff that’s stupid or counter-productive, so I took the precaution of locking the door, but after that, I went right back to reading the magazines that the guards brought in for me.
That didn’t last long. Pretty
soon, someone started pounding like crazy on the infirmary door. I peeked through the window and saw four male inmates in khaki uniforms, two of them beat up and bloody and the other two practically carrying the injured with their arms slung over their shoulders.
All four were covered in tattoos, gang tats, but I never could recognize which gang’s tats were which. It didn’t matter. One of them was carrying a metal baton and wearing one of those stab-proof vests that the guards wore.
“Oh, guys, what’d you do, kill a guard?”
“Dude, Jolly, you don’t understand,” the one guy said. “Shit’s going crazy out there. It ain’t just a riot. They’re like, killing people all over the place. The Users, the guards… everything’s going nuts.”
Shit. This was definitely worse than I thought. In that sort of madness, people might forget what I nice guy I am and mess me up before they realized what they were doing.
“All right, well, get in here and get them on the gurneys,” I said.
One had a hairline skull fracture, and the other was torn up pretty badly with lacerations, like he’d been mauled by a tiger or something. It took me a couple of minutes to put them back together.
It didn’t take long after that for things to get tense. Normally, my status in the prison as the golden goose kept me so safe that I wouldn’t have given my safety a second thought. But with as upside-down as things were looking… I started to wonder. Two of them had makeshift shivs which were stained with blood, and with the third guy wearing a guard’s vest and carrying a guard’s baton, I was more and more certain that they had killed a guard on their way here.
“Yo, man, we got a lot of sodas in here,” one of them said, opening up the little fridge we used in the infirmary to keep the insulin cool. “This your shit, Jolly? You mind?”
I did, actually, but the air was starting to get thick with a sort of quiet malice. The four of them were trading looks and not talking, which was getting me more and more on edge.
“Sure. Help yourself.”
“Thanks, man. So what kind of drugs you keep around here, anyway?”
Oh, great, here we go, I thought.
“Not much, guys. You know I don’t need them. When the nurse or the PA comes in, they dispense…”
“Don’t…” the one with the vest said, holding up a hand to cut me off. “Don’t fuck with me like that, Jolly. You know where the shit is. And, you know better than to stand between guys like us and what we want.”
This was going sideways fast. I felt like I was driving a car in a sudden skid, desperately steering right and left to try to correct my way out of it, to no avail.
“Hey, take anything you want. I’ve got no reason to stand between you and anything. I’m just saying that I never use the stuff, you know? So if you’re looking for Oxy or something, I mean, it’s in one of the locked cabinets, but they only give me the keys for the door, not the drugs.”
“You lying to me?”
There were more looks amongst each other, and out of the corner of my eye, I could see hands tightening around shivs as they adjusted their grip. I started to panic a little bit. From growing up with brothers in a tough neighborhood, I know how to fight as good as the next guy, but I’m not exactly a killer. Not mention that there were four of them, three of them with weapons, and they were killers or they wouldn’t be in this place.
“Take ‘em,” I said, holding up the keys. “Take them and see. I’m not lying.”
A few seconds of his staring at me, and my heart felt like it was trying to punch its way out of my chest. If this went down the wrong road, there was nothing I was going to be able to do to save myself.
“Naw, it’s cool, Jolly, I believe you. You got anything else in here for us?”
I shrugged. “Just magazines, I guess.”
“I see you’re wearing those sweat pants they let you wear. And those Jordans somebody gave to you.”
Like I said, I did a lot of favors for people around that prison, so I got to wear what I wanted. But now… now it was looking like all bets were off and I was about to get jacked for everything I had.
“Guys… I just helped you out.”
“Oh, you were always going to help us out. One way or the other.”
I was still searching for an answer to try to keep things on an even keel when the door burst open again… I’d never locked it once I let the gangbangers in… and four more inmates came into the infirmary. Well, three inmates and a little civilian lady who was wearing a guard’s vest, carrying a big purse and looking scared out of her mind.
The one guy was huge and seemed to fill up the entire room, but it was the lady with wound in her side and the gun in her hand who grabbed everybody’s attention. She held the gun on the gangbanger who had been intimidating me and gestured for him to step away.
“All of you,” she said, “on that side of the room and against the wall. Drop that baton.”
The two gangbangers with the shivs made their weapons disappear up their sleeves with practiced ease, but the big guy must’ve spotted it. He pointed at them with his baton and shook his head. They looked at each other and then grudgingly dumped their shivs on the floor.
“Not you, Jolly,” said another lady wearing a tank top. Damn, she looked good. One hundred percent my type. Okay, who am I kidding? I’d been in prison for almost two years at that point... any woman was my type. But she was pushing my buttons enough that I was distracted right out of the fear which had been choking me.
“Jolly,” she said, pulling me out of my distracted stare. I hadn’t heard what she’d been saying to me.
“What?”
“I said, she’s been shot. Help her.”
“Yeah, sure, sure thing,” I said, helping the shot lady over to a gurney.
“Lock the door,” my new patient said, keeping her gun on the gangbangers. “We don’t want any surprises.”
I had to agree. There were way too many surprises going on today already.
“Door’s secure, Cass,” the big man said, and it clicked in my head who they were.
“Oh, you’re the SWAT lady,” I said, peeling away the blood soaked bandages they’d tied around her. “The one who kicked that fat bitch in the liver. Man, you fucked her up.”
Cass looked at me and gave me a hard grin. “Yeah, that’s me.”
People started shifting around the room a bit… there were nine of us in there now, and the infirmary wasn’t exactly enormous… and I felt myself calming down. At least I wasn’t alone in the room with those assholes who wanted to mess with me, even after I had helped them. And if this was Cass I was working on, the big guy had to be Dread. They’d been cops, once, so I had a lot more faith in their good behavior than in that of the gangbangers.
“I’m not kidding, her liver was like mush,” I said, doing my diagnosis thing while I talked. “Oh, yeah, there it is. Forty caliber bullet, upper right quadrant. Well, a mesenteric vein got nicked, so you’re bleeding pretty good, but no worries, I got this. Only thing is, the bullet’s got to come out, so I’ve got to cut your skin with a scalpel.”
“I know.”
“The pain meds and lidocaine and all that is locked up, so I can’t give you anything. I can dial down your pain receptors a bit, but it’s still going to hurt.”
“Just do it.”
“You should secure that gun,” I said. “Listen, I don’t doubt your skills, but this is going to hurt and I don’t want you to clench up and shoot yourself in the foot or something and then I’ve got more work to do, you know?”
Reluctantly, she nodded and holstered her weapon. I noticed she kept her hand on it, though, and her eyes on the gangbangers sitting on the far side of the room.
“Go ahead,” she said.
She’d made it this far with a bullet wound, so she was tough, but she still jumped a bit as I sliced into her skin with a scalpel I took from a nearby drawer. I never liked doing that. I liked sealing cuts up, not making them happen.
Fortunately, t
he bullet was just below the skin, so I didn’t have to cut very deeply. Using a pair of forceps, I got a grip on the tangled chunk of metal and pulled it out of her.
“Cool,” I said, tossing the forceps and scalpel into the sink and quickly washing off my hands. “Now we’ll fix you right up.”
I sealed the artery first, then purged the beginnings of the infection that had started from whatever junk was on the bullet as it went into her, and then started in with sealing up the rest of the tissue damage. Now that I was back in the zone, doing what I did best, my mind was much more at ease.
“So you’re Cass, which must make you Dread, right?” I asked. “You’ve got some nasty cuts there, big man. I’ll take care of those next.”
“I have some too,” said the little civilian lady with the purse, taking a step toward me and holding up her arm to show off some superficial scratches. “I’m Mickey. I’m… I really shouldn’t be here.”
“Join the club,” I said. “Okay, Cass, you’re all set. Tissue’s all healed, blood volume has been restored, just give yourself a second or two to get used to it and you’re golden.”
Then, I started smiling at Hotness in the tank top, trying to think of something smooth to say to her, when those asshole gangbangers had to do something dumb and mess it all up. It was my own stupid fault. I’d tossed the scalpel into the sink and left it, forgotten, and while everyone was distracted while I dug the bullet out of Cass, the jackass gangbanger in the vest must’ve grabbed it.
Then, when Mickey stepped toward me to show me her arm, she also stepped away from her friends and closer to the gangbangers… and while I was blocking Cass’s view by standing there like a dummy trying to put the moves on Hotness, the gangbanger in the vest jumped up, grabbed Mickey, and put the scalpel to her throat.
***
“Fuck! FUCK!” Mickey shouted, frozen still with wide eyes. “Are you kidding me?”
“All right, bitches,” the gangbanger with the scalpel said, holding Mickey around the shoulders with one hand and hiding behind her. “Here it is. I want that gun. I want those keys. I want all your shit. And I want it, right now.”
Mage Hunters Box Set Page 28