by Gemma Files
“Threw a—that was you?” Rice remembered, now—one more sound-bite, between videos on Loud; another (supposed) meth lab gone up in smoke, adding a boost to the simmering dog-day smog mix of August-end. “Yo, Dieter. Tell me you didn’t just blow our entire backstock of reA into the fucking atmosphere.”
At her tone, DD finally looked up, blank: Yeah, why? “You can make more, though, right?”
Rice and Horatia locked eyes, equally amazed—and for just a moment, a little of the old shared smugness came back, that communal telepathic prayer: Oh Christ, save me from fucking morons. And bitter as realizing just how stupid some people could be always was, it was oddly sweet, too. In context.
They packed fast, leaving most of Horatia’s equipment behind, and ended up in a “safe house” that had started life as DD’s first crack-house: no power, no phone, no cable. Its very walls themselves so saturated with chemicals even the air seemed to itch. There Rice lay in bed staring up at the ceiling, increasingly sleep-less, while DD snored obliviously on one side of her and Horatia kick-moaned through a nightmare on the other. Her once-talented tongue gone cold, stiff and silent in her own mouth, like something already dead.
So two or three weeks passed, long enough for August to collapse into a cold and rainy September, as Horatia continued to work furiously towards some sort of cure with what little Rice and DD earned on their last few reA sales. With none of them talking about what they’d do when the stock finally ran out, or how Rice—deprived of her sustaining spackle-baths—was getting drier by the day, let alone what the ever-heavier presence of soldiers and CDC mobile clean-labs in the streets of Toronto might mean…
Around 3:00 a.m., Rice’s aimless wandering took her up to Parliament, where a closed pawnshop’s window display TV had been left on, tuned to CityPulse 24. Pausing to watch a “Rewind” segment from 1987 on how to shampoo your dog, she couldn’t quite avoid reading the caption-snippets of news running beneath, words fading steadily in and out:
…fifth week of curfew, city councillors deny rumours that full quarantine of Toronto being considered…
…source in Prime Minister’s office hints that War Measures Act may be reactivated…
…Center for Disease Control consultants report possible breakthrough in identifying primary ‘Duster’ vector…
Curfew; well, that explained the empty streets. Rice got off the main drag, double-quick, and used alleys to work her way back while thinking about hazmat-suited strangers ransacking the loft, disassembling Horatia’s lab, shredding the mattress she and Horatia had slept on. She stopped across the street from “home” and its piss-stained concrete front steps, next to the pay phone, and felt a weird impulse—dug out change, dialed. By about the fifteenth ring, she’d almost convinced herself the man on the other end had long since done what she would have, in his shoes, and high-tailed it down to Gran-and-Grandad’s condo in Florida—
Click. “Hello?”
No air in Rice’s lungs. It was an act of will just to breathe, to force out the words—
“Hello?”
—but then she managed it, without even a crack in her voice to show for all her effort: “Hi, Dad.”
A long, long pause. “Clarice?” And…shit, it didn’t sound like Gilmore Petty at all. He had never sounded like that. “Clarice, is that you? They told me—” A wet, indescribable cough, almost a…
(sob?)
Yeah, right.
“They told me you were…dead,” he said. And all she could think to say, in reply, was:
“…I guess…I sort of am,” Rice told her father, before hanging up.
—
It was drizzling when she came in, sky beginning to go grey with morning; she found Horatia working by the wavering glow of a few tea-lights over a series of slides and eyedroppers. Alkaline catalysts, if Rice was reading the labels on the nearby bottles right, breaking up reA doses in different ways; measured by no more than hand and eye, with all Horatia’s ridiculous, incredible precision. She looked up at Rice’s entrance, and Rice wasn’t sure exactly what that look meant.
“Well?”
“I figured it out. The molecular key to let reA hook right into a cell’s master DNA, for full-on regeneration—so we can actually repair damaged tissue, not just shellac it up until it disintegrates. So nobody else will ever go Dust.”
“Regeneration.” Rice wondered if this was how other people felt around her, that stumbling feeling, perpetually out of step, too slow to catch up. “Like, eternal life-type regeneration?” The grin took her over, like something alien. “That’s—holy shit, ‘Rache, that’s great! You fucking did it!”
“Yeah.” Horatia nodded, not looking too triumphant, for someone who’d just broken the Grim Reaper’s back and made it say “auntie.” “‘Did it’ for the next batch of users. Not so much for anybody who already...” She covered her face with one hand. “I mean, um...”
“...Not for me,” Rice finished, toneless.
Horatia stared miserably at her, too upset even to nod. And right then—
—was when DD stumbled out of the bedroom, holding his throat with both hands, as if choking on something. Eyes so wide with fear and fury Rice could actually see the madness brewing, he advanced on Horatia, who recoiled, slipping backwards off her stool. “Yah, fahk’ng, bihhhhtch,” he wheezed, and Rice saw thick, dark drops of blood squeeze between his fingers, as blood flaked off his sodden shirt. “Cuht mah fahk’ng hroaght—”
Then let go of his neck and lunged at Horatia, mouth still working—but the gash across his larynx gaped wide, shrinking his voice to a bare wheeze. Living Dead Girl-fast, Rice snapped out an arm; they wrestled for a second before Rice pinned him, face to the floor, open throat whistling. Rice shot Horatia an exasperated look, and Horatia just shut her eyes, comprehension dawning.
“Riiight, ‘course. You shot him up too, didn’t you?”
“Well, duh. But he would have hooked himself up anyway, I hadn’t—am I right, D-man?” She put her head down next to DD’s: “I let you up, you gonna behave?” This induced a renewed bout of struggling, but Rice had far too good a grip to break, without risking further injury. “One more time, Dieter. Behave.”
Helpless, DD finally nodded, so Rice turned him loose; he stood up, shooting Horatia a hateful glare, and pinched his throat back together. To Rice: “Hwheeerre…th’fahk…hyouhh bihn?”
“Out; who’re you, my—?” Rice stopped, remembering the phone call, and began again. “Doesn’t matter. You missed the big news, dude; Horatia cracked the code. Now we got something that’ll buy our records clean of anything, even the Dust-plague. Isn’t a government on this planet won’t set us up for life, once we start shopping immortality to the highest…”
But here, suddenly, she stopped. DD lifted his head too, a dog sniffing prey, as sick dismay whitened Horatia’s face.
Screeches of rubber on wet asphalt; the clunking slams of car doors; the hammer of boots on the ground. The grey light filtering in through the filthy, half-shuttered windows began to wash with alternating red and blue.
And a megaphone-enhanced voice whipcracking through the morning quiet, all the old standbys: “This is the Ontario Provincial Police…building is surrounded…exit through the front door, hands above your head…”
Rice took a deep breath, mostly to steady herself. Said: “So,” to neither of them in particular. “That’s it, then.” She looked at Horatia, gone green in the weird light. “If DD and I go out the front door together, we’ll probably distract them enough you could maybe slip out the back…”
“No. Forget it.”
“Look, one of us needs to get out of here alive, okay? And given you’re the only one knows the Highlander formula…”
“No!” Horatia backed away, until she stood silhouetted against the light from one window. “Rice, I am not leaving you, so don’t even try to make me—” She staggered and fell to her knees, glass breaking behind her with a clean tinkling punch, as a spreading blotch dark
ened her shapeless green sweater.
“‘Rache!” Rice dove across the room to catch Horatia, while DD hit the floor on the other side, peering upwards; felt something snap inside her as she did so, grating inside her ribcage as she lowered Horatia across her lap. “Oh Christ, no, please, no…”
Horatia sighed. Then said, in a ridiculously clear voice: “oh, give me a break, Rice.” She parted the hole in her sweater, probed the wound beneath, then let her head fall back. “No, that’s it. Clean shot, police marksman. No repairing that.”
Rice touched the matching hole in her own chest, from which the paste-on jewel had long since been lost. Sparkling powder drifted down, scattering across her fingers. Amazingly, she found herself smiling.
“You fucking liar,” she said, tenderly. “So what, more tests? or did you just absorb it, by osmosis?”
Horatia sat up, shaking her head. “Sample doses. Thought I was still below the critical exposure threshold.” A beat. “Guess not.”
“Hmh. I think maybe I do love you, you know that?”
Horatia just rolled her eyes. Cool: “Well, I know I love you.”
“Bitch.”
A spasmodic hacking came from DD, and they both looked over to see his chest rising and falling in what Rice realized, freakily enough, was laughter. He covered his wound with one hand, jabbed one thumb at himself with the other. “Sssooh hwhat’s that…maahke me?”
“You?” Rice grinned her old I’d-fuck-the-world-if-I-found-the-right-hole grin. “You’re the boy with the toys, Dieter. Just how many guns you got stashed around this shithole, anyway?”
After a second, his own grin almost reluctantly answering hers: “Mhor’n…enough.”
DD caterpillared across the floor into the bedroom, staying below the windows, and came back dragging a suitcase. Rice flipped it open. Boxes of clips and shells spilled across the floor, along with a half-dozen Browning automatics and a greasy-sheened shotgun.
Rice looked at Horatia, who took her hand and squeezed it hard. She picked up a pistol and slapped in a clip, just the way she’d seen in a thousand movies—and hey, she’d been right. It wasn’t that hard to figure out, with the right incentive. Then again, she always had been the smartest person she knew…
(…well—second smartest.)
“Okay, then,” she said.
HIS FACE, ALL RED
“You’re up very late, my dear,” the old man said, when Leah came over to hand him a menu and pour some complimentary water. It was 3:37 a.m. by the clock above the range, and the place was pretty much deserted—just her, him, and Amir and Gue back in the kitchen.
She shrugged, indicating the sign in the front window. “Twenty-four hours. Means somebody’s always gotta be up all night, and that’s me.”
He turned to study it a moment, quizzically, like he hadn’t even realized it was there, even though he must’ve passed right by it to get to the front door. Then replied, without much surprise, or interest, “Oh, well, yes.”
The old man had one of those crazy accents, prissy and kind of hot at the same time, every vowel struck like a bell—sounded like Gandalf, basically, or maybe Jean-Luc Picard. Leah couldn’t begin to reckon his actual age. Also, the nearer she got to him, the more she saw how his skin was kind of...flawless, creepily so. Eyes like blue glass, narrowed by smile-lines; perfect teeth, too, and wasn’t that weird, for an English dude? When he smiled, he looked like everybody’s favorite librarian. But he was wearing a decrepit, faded Lamb of God T-shirt that’d seen better decades and a pair of bright pink sweatpants, both much too big for his hawk-slim frame, with a cracked and battered set of Crocs Leah swore to God she could see his (slightly over-long) toenails through.
“What’s with the clothes, sir?” she asked, trying to make it sound funny, charming even—but she had to guess it probably didn’t sound like either of those things, because his good cheer faded on contact; he frowned slightly and looked down, studying the outfit like (again) someone had stuck it on him without his noticing.
“What is with them?” he repeated, genuinely baffled. Then: “oh, these aren’t mine; I found them in a trash-bin, I think. The one at the end of that alley beside your fine restaurant, with ‘Twister Relief ’ written on its side.”
“I don’t think that stuff is meant for...somebody like you,” Leah began, immediately feeling even sillier; now it was the old man’s turn to shrug, however, giving her an excuse to change the subject. “What was wrong with what you were already wearing?”
“Oh, it simply wouldn’t have done at all, my dear, not for a public venue. For one thing, my suit was almost completely covered in blood. And for another, I had been wearing it a good twenty years already, at least.”
Leah only realized she was staring at those amazing teeth of his—so white, so straight, so sharp—when he snaked his tongue out, unexpectedly, and licked them, like an animal. Completely out of left field, and gross, too; perverted, somehow, or at least profane. For anybody that age to be getting such an apparent charge out of being hungry, breathing in deliberately, holding it like a mouthful of weed-smoke...tasting the air itself, sensually, as though it were a steak he longed to take a bite out of...
“‘Covered in blood,’” she heard herself mimic as he stood up, seemed to almost eddy forward, near enough to touch. “‘C—covered in—’”
“Yes, dear. Just like that.”
“Whose...blood was it?”
“Oh, I don’t believe I ever got their names; professionals, you see. No element of friendliness about that transaction, I can tell you. Not like you and I.”
“...Can’t move.”
“No, of course not. That’s what the hypnotism is for, you see.”
Perfect teeth, so straight and white and shiny. She felt a tear streak down one cheek, thinking: He’s such an old man, and I’m not. I could—I should—
But she didn’t, of course, for far too long. And then there was a sudden, terrible pain, a tearing just above her collarbone, quickly followed by nothing at all.
—
When Leah came to again, everything hurt: her eyes, her guts, her skin. It was bright outside, enough to make her wince and flinch at the same time, cowering back, shoving herself as far underneath the table the old man’d been sitting at as geometry would allow for. Thank God, though, the two women standing in front of her seemed to have already figured out they should probably close the blinds before she woke, or lose their only witness to spontaneous inhuman combustion...
(What? )
...and oh, such an additional pain, so sharp and coring, to even think—let alone voice—that name. The one she was now forbidden access to, forever.
I don’t know where this is coming from, any of it, Leah realized, suddenly sick. Or how I know it...what I think I know, even...
Eyes flicking first left, then right, as though bracing herself for further attack; hands fisting so hard she could hear her nails grate on the floor beneath, scratching the linoleum, like claws. But the vertigo that immediately welled up made her want to put her head between her knees and moan, like a poisoned dog, so she did, while the women—sisters, they were definitely sisters, she could smell it on them—simply stood there and watched, the taller one projecting an aura of quiet authority and genuine sympathy even as the smaller simply rocked back on her bootheels, her sniper’s gaze never wavering from Leah’s face and one hand sneaking behind her back, feeling for some kind of weapon.
Better put me down quick, bitch, you want to keep me there, the unfamiliar mind-voice (that doesn’t sound like me) whispered in her head, gleeful-sly, all its worst instincts pricking up in anticipation of slaughter. Better not let me get a good jump in, ‘less you want to be wiping little sis’s blood off the wall...
Leah shook her head again, just once but sharply, to dismiss it. And made herself look back up, trying her level best to not only look harmless, but be so.
“That old man...is he still here?”
The taller one shook her head,
blonde braids swinging. “Long gone, I’d say. Given the temp on your friends.”
“Gue—Amir?”
“That’s what their badges said, yes. And you’re Leah, right?”
Leah nodded, sniffed, eyes blurred and stinging. But when she put up a hand to wipe away the tears, she drew it away smeared with red.
“Oh Jesus,” she said, staring at the result, no matter how the word hurt to use. “Oh God, oh Christ. What happened to us all?”
The taller woman sighed, and took a moment, like she wanted to choose her next words carefully. In the meantime, Leah found her eyes drawn to the tattoos she could suddenly see crawling up along the woman’s arms, weaving underneath the sleeves of her shirt to climb the sides of her long neck like vines. They were snaky, deep-carven things, some of them roughly keloided as though self-inflicted, a strange contrast with the woman—girl, really, Leah now understood—herself, who seemed gentle, almost sad. I want to help, her gray eyes seemed to say, though they both knew that was impossible.
(Yes, yes we do)
(How, though? Why?)
“His name is Maks Maartensbeck,” the tall girl began, reluctantly. “Professor Maartensbeck. Highly respected in our field; did a lot of good, once. Saved a lot of lives. But he hasn’t really been that man for a very long time now.”
“Then...what is he?”
“Oh, Leah, come on: you’ve seen the movies. He came in here at night, put you to sleep with a look, drank from your neck, then ripped your friends apart. So if you just let yourself think about it for a minute, I kind of think you already know.”
(Running her tongue along the inside of her lips, across her teeth, and feeling skin part, seamless. Knowing without even having to check how they would shine just as brightly as the old man’s now; white-sharp like the new moon. Her empty stomach contracting, and the rush and pulse of blood—not her own—rising in her ears, more beautiful than any remembered song.)
The smaller woman was visibly tensed now, biceps gone hard beneath the sleeves of her many-pocketed East Coast gangsta parka; she had thighs like she pumped prison iron, so cut Leah could see definition even through her jeans. Such a tough little cookie, with her narrowed brown glare and her dirty blonde Boot Camp haircut, and Leah felt herself beginning to kind of long to see what exactly she was reaching behind her for, the roots of all Leah’s brand new dental accoutrements set aching at once. With the bad voice whispering yet again, up and down the dry rivers of her veins: Yeah, go on ahead and whip it out; get it over with, ‘cause I’m tired of talking. Sun’s up, my head hurts, and better yet, I’m—I’m just, just so, so—damn—