Phoenix (dystopian romance) (Theta Waves: Episode 1) (2 page)

What she worried about was if the new arrival would infer something remotely spiritual about what he saw--because lawlessness, hedonism, and debauchery were all very fine and good in this new world, but religion of any sort most definitely was not.

ACT TWO

Her stalker was still there two hours later. The sky was beginning to gloam above the buildings and the shadows had begun to stretch out as though they'd leaked from a bucket of tar.

When she looked up from tucking the ratty table awkwardly beneath her armpit, intending to be done for the day, he straightened up. If he was after a re-vision, he'd come soon enough, she knew, but the waiting had been murder. She paused, sending an enquiring glance his way. Just when she thought he'd amble over, he pushed himself against the graffitied wall and shuffled off up the street. He headed west, away from the slummier bits, higher up the hill where shoppers and business people did their best to make normal lives in a ruined metropolis.

She felt a moment of panic as she watched him saunter toward the better half of the super city, hoping he'd pause at the crest of the hill and turn down one of the streets that would mean he resided in the same half she did and not in the elitist section. That section kept the only real law in the city, in the entire globe. He didn't pause and turn. He kept on over the crest, and then she found herself hoping that he would have nothing to do with enforcing that global law that tortured and put to death anyone who even remotely sparked the mere idea of religion.

She realized her hands were clenching the edges of the table and told herself that nothing would matter soon, not even the possibility of being accused of religion-mongering because soon she would be lost in a spit-soaked haze where the only god she worshiped was Pleasure.

She felt along her jeans, pinching at the pockets. Yes. Still there. Two crinkling smears of godspit and twelve whole hours to ungod each one of them onto her tongue. Plenty of time to forget the worry of the lurking man.

If she hurried, she could gain her spot before sundown and be blissing out before the streetlights came on. She passed by several wiry men as she raced for her haven, several spitters leaning back to back in darkened doorways, supporting each other as they surrendered to their god.

One spitter moved as she passed by, reached out to her. "Spare a few bucks, sister?" he said. "I gotta eat."

"Looks like you're already pretty full," she told him, but she felt her pocket again, just in case her smears had fallen out. She caught sight of his eyes in the streetlight as he leaned toward her, his suspicious gaze falling on her hands and the way they fiddled at her pockets. He knew she was holding. He knew.

"Greedy little bitch, aren't ya?" he said, trying to find his feet.

"No less hungry than you, my man," she said casually. He'd probably never manage more than a threat; he was still too deep in his bliss, trying to find a way to take the edge off encroaching reality, but she picked up her pace just the same. She couldn't afford to lose her packets. Not tonight. She'd been jonesing the last two hours just knowing they were in her jeans, just knowing she could pull them out at any time and escape this hellhole they called New Earth. She wouldn't lose even one to this gluttonous bastard who'd already tasted his fill tonight. Godspit. Hunger and gratification in one drug. Thirst and quench. Agony and ecstasy. God in a godless world. The irony was almost delicious.

The drug had begun as a way to identify those poor souls who'd contracted HIV: a smear of paper across the tongue and voilà. The reaction between saliva and chemical turned the paper a bright violet if the virus was present and remained inert if the virus was absent: a handy test in an age when AIDS had begun to kill more people than Cancer. HIV had morphed and survived and morphed again until the pandemic of it wiped out a third of humankind even before the god came and rescued his chosen.

So easy to bastardize a good thing and turn it into something ugly. A mere brush of drain cleaner and the smear could paralyse the user in a miasma of dopamine. The gift, the thing that earned it the street name godspit in a world where the term god was akin to ruin and misery, was that it didn't deplete natural dopamine like other drugs did. Instead, it flooded a person's brain with the hormone. The joke in spitters' circles was that the god himself had hocked a loogie at Earth as he departed with his righteous, and so now no one seemed to care what its pharmaceutical name was; they only cared that it either marked you as clean or condemned you to the sanatoriums.

She hated to watch her johns smear non-deified papers across their tongues and prove their health to her, when she really wanted to reach across the table and grab the blotch from them, douse it with cleaner herself and surrender to bliss. Each time they turned the strip to her, inert paper white, she mourned the waste of a good smear.

Tonight, she would pass through both the shadows and the darkest part of night in just that state. And come morning, she'd trundle off to the survivor's station for a cup of coffee, an egg sandwich, and if things continued to go her way, another smear of her favourite distraction to take her through yet another night.

She felt a familiar itch creeping up her spine as she anticipated the next few hours, felt along her jeans pocket for the piece of cellophane, her throat tight at the thought that they might have fallen out when she'd last touched them. When she heard the telltale crinkle, her heart tripped over on itself.

"Thank sweet fuck," she murmured and had to steady herself against a pile of debris at the mouth of her little cavern. She'd found it a month earlier beneath a pile of rubble that had fallen from the bridge that joined the two super cities before the beast and the god waged their war.

Even in the dark, lit by one remaining street light, she recognized the sections of I-beams that had fallen during the apocalypse, both fortunately settled into just the right configuration to trap concrete hunks and bits of pavement to form a sort of cave. Most nights, she lay in the small niche inside of her cardboard box perfectly unmolested. Most nights, she had the good fortune to pass through the deepest parts of darkness wrapped in her sleeping bag, soaked in the perspiration of such intense ecstasy the cave could have fallen down around her and she'd not have cared.

She peered inside; relieved to see her spot was just as she'd left it that morning. The cat was still there, the handle of the plastic bag showing through the pile of rubble she buried it in.

"Here, kitty, kitty" she whispered, chuckling. Her cave was too good a find; she couldn't be sure someone wouldn't squat it when she left for the day, so each morning she buried the same dead cat beneath a pile of rubble in the back corner. The smell repelled the would-be squatters. She pulled at the handle of the plastic bag, holding her breath, and carted it twenty or so feet down the bank of the river where she buried it again until morning.

Now to get at it. Her mouth was already watering, her palms already itching, and she knew if she dallied much longer, went too far, she'd puke up her anticipation. She eased herself down onto a cement block just outside of her grotto and pulled off her sneakers then stripped off her jean shorts and T-shirt so that when the sweats came she wouldn't soak through her only clothes. Trembling hands extracted the drug from the cellophane, then, with urgency climbing her spine, she went feet first into her sleeping bag.

She had to get it right, lie back just right, make sure she was perfectly settled, her legs apart, her head cushioned by her pile of clothes. She licked her lips. Swallowed exactly three times. Shook her wrists out another five. She wanted terribly to just pull the strip off the smear and lay it directly on her tongue, needed it so badly that the rasp of her tongue against her palette brought shivers of goose flesh to her shoulders. She let them come. She let them travel down her back and legs. It was part of the ritual, this feeling of desperation, of delaying until she couldn't stand it anymore, until the tremors reached her toes where they turned to cramps that made her instep curl upward.

That was the sign. She imagined herself an expert diver gasping for breath before plunging headlong off at 20 foot diving board, dragging in air at the last second. Her fingers did the rest without conscious thought. Then the tremors, the inevitable shift, the one she'd been waiting for when the tremors changed to a shiver of pleasure so delicious she lost whatever breath she'd been able to take in, slipping as though into a bath of perfectly warmed oil where every movement was lubricated.

Moments, or hours later, left with the fuzzy feeling of ecstasy, but with the hot slippery feeling easing away, she realized she wasn't alone. A snake of dread crept up her spine, but the bliss enrobed it with oil, let it leak away through her toes. Something fired in her brain, snapping like an electrical current mating with earth.

She mumbled one word before the fog glazed over her consciousness.

"No."

It seemed that the someone had decided her panties were keeping her from enjoying a full state of bliss, then he decided that her breasts needed to be mauled and bitten, that his partner's erection needed attention.

Something might have niggled in the back of her brain, that she didn't want this, that if it weren't for the godspit she'd be fighting these two off, but that little tickle evaporated quickly.

It came again, yes, once more as she felt herself being lifted onto her knees, her backside pulled straining into the air, and this time she fixed on it. She tried to hold onto the thought, struggled to keep it as a coherent focus, telling herself that despite the bliss, this perception of danger was more accurate than the limp feeling of complacency she felt.

There was a new stink in the grotto, one of sweat and musk. Somehow she knew that the bliss didn't come with such a horrible smell, that she shouldn't be gagging on cock or being slammed into from behind. Even as she fought her way to the surface she felt her scalp burn as bits of hair ripped free and her chest heave as she gagged again.

She tried to scream around the smothering fullness of flesh. Instead, all she was capable of was squeezing out a few impotent tears. Her lungs lit fire in her chest.

Just as she began to find the wherewithal to beat against the form in front of her, it inexplicably disappeared. Her mouth was freed, gaping open as her lungs expanded. She sucked at the air, swallowing down great drafts of it, shuddering as she did so, scrabbling for the sleeping bag beneath her with her fingers. She heard sounds of struggle outside, and in the next instant the hips that had been marauding her were yanked away as well and she collapsed onto her belly, chest still heaving.

There was this odd sense that she was teetering on a very thin edge. The bliss called her from one side, even as pain and terror tried to pull her back its way. She stretched her arms out beside her, not sure which way she would fall, but certain she would. She waited, breathless.

Fingers closed around her bicep. She turned her head, thinking she might still fight her way through the fog, find a way to fight against what was surely coming next. All she could register was a shadowed face, the scuffle of boots against cement. Several grunts rumbled through the night air around her.

The hulking shadow reached in for her. "Are you all right?"

Was she? She wasn't sure what the correct answer was.

"They're gone," he said.

She searched her mind for an appropriate response. She didn't find one until he began tossing her clothes at her.

"Thank you," she whispered.

"No need to bother with that," he said.

She pulled on her underwear, pulled her shorts up over top. "Sure I do," she said, pulling the T-shirt over her head. Her skin still tingled and the fog still crept back into the corners where she'd managed to wave it off, but it wasn't as intense. "You're my saviour." The words were thick on her tongue like soured cream, but she grinned at him just the same, hoping he could see it in the dark. Leftover bliss on top of post rape trauma made her dark humour creep to her tongue.

He took her by the bicep again, and yanked so that she couldn't help but get to her feet, stooping until she gained the air outside her grotto.

"Careful," he said to her comment. "Those are loaded words."

"Yeah," she agreed, chastened. Not everyone got her humour. "True enough." She wondered if he heard the slur in her voice and let her gaze fall to his boots. "Hey," she said as the point of a leather toe scuffed along the pavement. "You're that guy."

She couldn't tell what look might have crossed his face in the dark, but his voice took on a wary tone. "Does it happen often?"

She shrugged. "At least once a month."

"Then you're lucky I was here."

"I guess." Once a month was nothing to what some women suffered. "Does it happen on the west side?" She wished she hadn't said it in such a sullen voice. She even cringed as she heard the note of envy in her voice.

"Only if the lady wants it to."

"An odd thing to say, "she murmured.

"Is it?" He stepped into the hazy light of the street lamp and she could see the grin that twitched at the corner of his mouth. Hair that looked charcoal in the day appeared as black as tar at night. But his eyes--so glacial in the light-- didn't so much as crinkle in humour.