Orgonomicon (11 page)

She'd paused in her rambling story to make
Scott get her another drink and insisted that he have one too; his
six weeks down the drain, he felt he might as well. He owed it to
himself for doing such a good job, and he needed it to be able to
listen to her.

Robert had been in the military, too, an Army
grunt; he, too, had taken orders for the good of his country and
done things he'd never wanted to and never dreamed he was capable
of. She'd blamed her miscarriage on him, on the way he'd beaten her
and knocked her down the stairs, but eventually she'd gotten
pregnant again and had Scott. She wasn't completely sure that he
was Robert's son, but Robert hadn't said anything and she didn't
feel like it really mattered. Only once, when Robert was too drunk
to control himself, was she able to get him to answer why it was so
important that she be raped all the time; he told her it was so she
was never able to collect herself up all together again, and she'd
believed him. It made sense.

Scott didn't want to hear any more of it, and
she told him he needed to listen, that there was more of it that he
needed to hear. He tried his best to let her go on.

Buzzsaw called out to the other man, "You
wanna see how it's done? I'll show you how to get results. I got a
nasty mess cooked up for this one. Tune this in."

SEL6210 hesitated—of course he did, that was
how he was—and Buzzsaw yanked at the cable that connected his
headset to the rad-station. The man made it no secret that he
despised him, and Buzzsaw didn't care.

SEL6210 re-attached the electrode above his
right temple that activated his ocu-receptors and allowed him to
see the data flowing across the featureless black screen of his
visor. SEL6210 was familiar with the radionic workstation's
curse-routines and so quickly made out what the man had dialed in
for his victim—Buzzsaw caught the other man reacting and chuckled
in anticipation of the grief he was about to inflict.

"You realize that's probably going to kill
her," SEL6210 asked him and Buzzsaw shrugged.

"Omelets, breaking eggs. Hah. Who cares
anyway?"

"We're supposed to manage the assets, not
destroy them."

"I'll take that chance. You just sit back and
watch the show. Not much longer now." Buzzsaw watched the man
squirm uncomfortably and loathed him for his squeamishness. "Buckle
up, jerk, you're in for a show. Hey, you might want to take a
recording of this one for later. I get the feeling it's going to be
a tasty lethal."

Good Lord, thought SEL6210, the man's
actually
enjoying
this.

Manny took the paperwork back to the old
house; the boy came running out the door and down the steps to
greet him. Karen stood in the doorway, hands on her hips and a
frown creasing her puffy face—she looked like she'd been crying—but
her depressing gloom wasn't enough to put him off the joy he was
feeling at finally getting to see his son again. Nothing was going
to take that away from him.

He caught the boy up in a hug as the little
guy came hurtling across the sidewalk to him and a quick flash of
light, some subtle vibration, passed between them; Emmanuel felt as
if a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders, as if a giant
oil-saturated rug had been peeled off his head and shoulders and
left him free and clean. Karen seemed to have noticed something
too, because the glare in her eyes had softened and she seemed to
him a little less sharp-edged.

"I brought the paperwork you asked for."

"Yeah, that's fine. Do you want to come
inside and talk about it? I've been thinking about things. Come on
inside." Manny didn't believe what he was hearing—it didn't sound
like the normalized hostilities he'd gotten used to—could she have
actually come to some kind of realization? He had to find out.

He followed her inside and took the cup of
coffee she offered, refused the poundcake, and asked her what she
wanted to talk about.

"Always getting straight down to business,
eh? Shouldn't surprise me by now. It's just that I've been doing
some heavy thinking lately. I've been in and out of the doctors a
whole bunch of times now and it's got me thinking about how I might
want to spend the rest of the time I've got left to me."

Manny had the million expected questions and
she fended him off the best she could—how did you answer questions
that had no answers?—swallowed her anger and searched his eyes for
some hint or remnant of what had made her fall in love with him in
the first place. He was handsome, and he was the father of her
child, but that wasn't enough, was it? There had to be love… She
could tell that the boy felt it for him, and that was important,
but did he have any feeling left for her, after what they'd just
been through, after what she'd done to him?

He didn't
look
like he hated her, when
she looked into the big brown eyes she'd known for the past nine
years. She made her pitch: he cover his half of the rent and the
bills, kick in some money to take care of the kid, and help out
with the housework every now and then and he could set up on the
couch. It would be better than anything else he could afford out
there in the real world and it would help her to raise their kid.
They could decide later if they still wanted to finalize the
divorce, but she was not about to share a bed with him again
anytime soon and he shouldn't get any ideas to the contrary. He was
barely welcome again in her house, and only on the condition that
he keep paying his fair share, but she was going to give him this
much of a chance and he'd better not mess it up. He could start
showing his gratitude right away by driving her to the doctor's
office the next morning.

Manny slept fitfully that night, troubled by
bad dreams of invisible enemies. In them, he was protected by a
clear light that came from his body yet wasn't his own; the
threatening forces weren't actually after him so much as they were
simply attacking anything that moved, and the clear light made him
invisible to them. The boy was around somewhere but didn't need
protection; if he'd been more aware, he might have noticed that the
boy was protecting
him
.

The next day, Manny was wakened by his
ex-wife kicking his feet; it was not a pleasant way to wake up, and
she wasn't being sweet with her words, either. He was going to get
his ass up off her couch and then drive her down to the doctor's
office. It was weird to be in the old car again. He hadn't felt
okay letting her just take it when she'd kicked him out, but what
could he do? He'd put all the work into it and paid for all the gas
and the insurance but the title was in her name—therefore it was
her car. He'd drive her around like a chauffeur and be happy he got
the chance to do so. It was starting off to be a day of
tongue-swallowing.

There had been no breakfast. After kicking
him awake, she'd let him shower and get dressed and then it was off
to her appointment. It was more than he needed, certainly more than
she owed him, which was nothing. Now he was getting the chance to
pay off some of his debt to her.

Whatever. That was a white rabbit best not
followed.

Manny took the directions she gave him and
didn't press her as to why she needed the appointment; he tried
once asking her where they were going but she'd shut him up pretty
quick and firm and he'd taken the hint. It was certainly about time
he'd gotten something right.

She couldn't bring herself to tell him that
she was being checked for cancer, that there was the very real
possibility that she was going to die soon. Death had been on her
mind a lot, lately; it wasn't something she felt comfortable
sharing with anyone, least of all him. She was trying to get him
further out of her life, not deeper in. But then she'd seen him
with the boy, and she felt the love the boy felt for his father and
remembered a little of what she'd seen in him, and the uncertainty
of life and death became even more real still to her, and then she
wasn't so sure at all what she wanted to do about him. The itch on
her leg had gotten worse, was spreading. Everything was falling
apart.

When she'd first gone in, it had been to have
her irregular periods examined. The doctor had taken a look at her
insides, and then a second, and then scheduled her a couple
appointments with different specialists. Then the strange moles had
shown up, scattered over her body but mostly on the skin over
swollen lymph nodes, and she'd started to get
really
scared.

They couldn't figure out what was wrong with
her; one doctor speculated about complications from ovarian cancer
and that had been the last straw for her. She hadn't been speaking
with Manny for months but maybe it was time. They'd biopsied
several of the moles, a painful coring-out process that left behind
big, weeping holes that took forever to heal. It was the perfect
metaphor, she thought, for the rest of her life and it's awful
process of removal. She was afraid they'd just keep cutting her
away, like Swiss cheese, until there was nothing left of her and
she died. Death hung always over her.

She scratched absentmindedly at the crusty
patch near her ankle; it had been bothering her for weeks and
hadn't responded to anything she'd put on it. She'd tried aloe vera
gel, arnica and aluminum stearate, zinc oxide and hydrocortisone,
flaxseed oil and coconut—nothing did any good, it just wouldn't
heal, remaining scabbed over and irritated and red. She tried to be
careful about not picking the scabs off, but after a while all the
itching at it would inevitably pull the corner up somewhere and
drive her nuts with the need to scratch. It was absolutely
crazy-making.

She picked at the oozing, reddened skin and
felt something tickling her fingertip, something thin and questing
that slid up under her fingernail. She shrieked involuntarily and
pulled her hand quickly back, pulling away with it a six-inch
length of blue thread that clung to the wound as it tore out from
under her skin. She screamed, and then promptly put it out of her
mind, just as she was supposed to.

Scott couldn't take it anymore—his mom's
horror story was too much, the beer going to his head after not
drinking for all this time was too much, the oppressing dankness of
the whole shady apartment was too much. He needed to get out.

"Get more beer!" She'd yelled at him; he took
a ten-dollar bill out of the cookie jar and grabbed his old bicycle
off the back porch. Trusty old bicycle, you could count on an old
Schwann, they were from back in the days when people knew how to
make things right. The old bat hadn't thrown it away; he supposed
he was lucky. He pushed off into the night, headed for the gas
station, and slowly picked up speed. He never saw the black sedan
coming around the corner and careening into him, never saw the
blood and the stark fear in the drunk driver's eyes as he squealed
away from the accident.

The red glow of the taillights receded into
the distance and Scott pushed himself up onto one elbow. He was
pretty sure he had broken bones but surprisingly little of him
actually hurt. He held his hand up to his face and watched the
blood absorb back into the skin; in just a few seconds, the tissues
had re-woven and most of the smaller cuts and gashes had already
healed.

"What the hell is happening to me?" Scott
moaned into the indifferent night as another white jet liner
streaked across the sky, leaving twin rows of a thin, dissipating
haze that spread slowly out to obscure the face of the full
moon.

Agent Buzzsaw held the vial of black liquid
up against the thin moonlight and shook it, slooshing the oily
contents against the insides of the glass tube.

"That isn't what I think it is? What the hell
are you doing with that, BUZ4937? Field agents aren't allowed to
get anywhere near that stuff! We're not even supposed to know it
exists? Where did you get that?"

"I got it. That's all that matters. I use it
for various things, and that's all you need to know."

"Various things like what?"

"Like it makes a good focus for rad-work, for
instance. Now fuck off. I'm not answering any more of your
questions."

"You'll answer to internal affairs when they
find out. How did it not come up in briefing?"

"Yeah, makes you wonder, don't it? Maybe they
wanted
me to have it, asshole."

SEL6210 couldn't take the man any longer.
"I'm going out for some air. I'll finish up when I get back. We've
got all night."

"Don't expect me to take up your slack."

"Not expecting anything of the sort, just
need to get out and stretch my legs."

And get the stink of your awfulness off me,
SEL6210 thought to himself. He didn't even care if the neural net
passed the thought along to the man, so long as the precious few
seconds of lag time were enough to get him out of his presence.

One got used to having a chip embedded in
their brain after a while. He'd come to think of it as his
emergency flight recorder, like the black box on an airplane, a
lifeline back to the system that kept him alive and safe. And he
was never lonely—it talked to him all the time.

It had been awkward at first, invasive, but
he'd gotten used to it pretty quickly. He'd never had any privacy
growing up with his authoritarian father and snooping mother, so he
was already pretty used to the feeling; it was only a difference of
degree.

It was such a slight difference to give your
whole self away.

William was three years old when he began
losing the memories of what he'd been in his last life. This time
around, he was going to be a little human boy, like those around
him. He wanted to fit in, to be accepted as one of them. This time,
he wanted all on his own to do what they said, if it meant he could
belong.