Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity (13 page)

He closed his eyes. And something wet splashed across his face.

Oh god
, he thought,
I had so much love to give.

Then he felt the wall behind him shudder, and gently cease to exist. When he opened them again, the fat man still loomed over him in his stained underwear and red suspenders, sword lodged firmly in the panels above, but now his jaw was slack, and his eyes were unfocused. His knees wobbled, shook, then gave way. He sat down heavily, and began to cry.

Red gingerly twisted around to look behind him, and found the entire wall missing: Not broken, not shattered into debris, but simply vanished. Streams of glistening gunmetal gel congealed all across the floor, the fat man’s back, and – as the hand he’d raised to his cheek and brought back sticky would indicate – his own face.

Red looked to James for explanation, but the spritely man simply winked, straightened his tie, and turned away without comment. When he reached his bag, he tossed in something that looked like a pint glass bolted to a showerhead, and picked out the disc-shaped fan. Red heard the cyclical ratcheting of a crank being turned, a building whine, felt a hot thwack, and the next apartment was breached.

 Zippy was up and through the opening before the ringing in Red’s ears had even started. Through the rapidly fading tinnitus, he heard a crack and a short, sharp scream.

“Red rover, red rover,” Zippy called out, laughing.

James strode back and dropped the fan into Red’s lap. It was warm to the touch, and hummed pleasantly, like a distracted schoolteacher. He plucked something else out of the canvas bag, kicked at it once, and then walked away. Red took the hint. He stood shakily, and the movement sent the hardened gel, now brittle, flaking off onto the ground. Stepping gently over the weeping, suspendered, would-be samurai, Red hefted James’ disc fan and slung the bag over his own shoulder. Working the crank as he went, he followed them through the irregular opening at the far wall. He’d barely touched his foot down when a wave of crackling ozone broke against him. When he looked up, a good section of the building seemed to be politely deconstructing itself, right in front of James. A panel of grey, diamond-thatched metal unstuck itself from the plastic behind it and rolled away; a pin-up smartposter of A-Cat, the goat-like avatar of a popular simporn actress, blinked in mid-loop, froze, and then disintegrated; a large bedframe (that apparently served as the keystone of the structure), collapsed at its vertices and fell into a pile of unattached beams. James reached out a hand and lightly pushed the entire neighboring apartment complex over. Zippy pressed down on her springboard leg and vaulted through the wreckage, already rapidly subduing the few shocked tenants not trapped in the rubble.  James threw a slatted tube back at Red, and said: “The fan now. That’s number three, going forward. All right, mate?”

He held up three fingers, and Red obediently tossed him the hefty black disc.

They moved at a brisk jog, punctuated by brief pauses every few feet for James to devastate another wall, security gate, or entire building. Red learned the shorthand quickly: One finger meant the slatted tube and its chemical wave, which seemed to unbind the molecular structures of flimsier nano-materials. It had a row of blinking red lights along the barrel that counted down to a solid green square, indicating when it was charged. Two meant the pint-glass, with its thin handle and translucent reservoir. Red could see the liquid sloshing around inside the clear plastic when it was primed; it glimmered dully, like the reflection of lights in water, and it apparently melted steel into a rapidly-coagulating paste. The fan, with its primitive crank, was three fingers, which James mostly used to blow out fiber-board and other, more slipshod barriers. Finally, four indicated a chunky cube with a handle on either side and a cone-shaped depression in the center. It blasted forth a wave of inaudible sound that resonated with the strong, cheap graphene panels favored in sturdier constructions. Whenever James twisted the handles together, a loud silence pervaded, as if somebody had forcefully extracted all sound from the room with a giant syringe. A small ripple would appear on the targeted panel, and echo outward from the impact point like a pebble dropped in a still pond. On its rebound, the ripple met its own wake, and the nigh-invincible graphene layers unraveled themselves like a deck of shuffling cards.

Red dutifully reloaded, recharged, and swapped out the appropriate weapons as requested. Eventually, the repetition and low grade shock settled like dust over the logic center of his brain, and the entire battle became an exercise in Zen. Red always kept an eye on the next obstacle, guessed at the material, and selected the appropriate weapon (most times without need of James’ count). He measured his steps carefully, modulating his pace so that he met up with James and Zippy just after they’d breached. James would toss the weapon back, Red would hand over the next, and then James and Zippy would sprint on to the next obstruction. In this careful and even manner, Red was able to avoid any pause in his own forward momentum, whereas the other two sped through openings and staggered to a stop at each blockade. While James and Zippy fought with stragglers and pierced fortifications, Red strolled up the stairwell city at a leisurely pace, juggling tubes and squares in slow motion as the world disintegrated around him.

And if there were oddities, disturbing incongruities in the storm swirling around his calm center, they were lost on Red. If, say, a particular giant, machine-faced sex-maniac walked right through the floor in front of him; or if Zippy and James seemed oddly unperturbed as they strode past a ring of dark-skinned children tossing a human head back and forth; or even if a shaggy, horned animal the size of a small house crouched on the landing between stairwells, its hollowed out guts containing only gleaming steel and a cache of bored looking commuters -- well, Red was too busy being serene to acknowledge them. He walked peacefully onward, the one ordered spot in a world of chaos, and politely handed destruction to a skinny little redheaded man in a tweed jacket.

Step, step, pass tube with right hand, step, receive square with left hand, step, shuffle fan between forearms and crank, step, crank, step crankstepcrankstep-

“Oi! Careful there, mate. You trying to blow a new hole in me arse?” James snapped at Red as he, still lost in his Focus Fugue, gently chucked the vortex cannon at the man’s turned back, and then walked forward into him.

“What? Is it over?” Red shook his head, trying to clear the spatial dislocation from his mind. His hands were still outstretched toward the glowering James, as if waiting for a returned weapon.

“The part where we blow the bollocks out of a quarter mile of residential property is over, yes.” James answered, yanking the bag from Red’s shoulder.

From a zipped-up pocket on its interior wall, he pulled a weapon that Red had not been factoring into the rotation: The shotgun-grip attached to the blender. The one James had used to rescue Red from the janitor’s monster, what seemed like a lifetime ago.

The one that turned human skin into a bomb.

James shoved Red aside, turned, and pointed it back toward the melted slag they’d just emerged from. A pair of identical twin girls stood just opposite the wreckage, blinking back at him in their ratty pajamas.

“I don’t think they’re gonna give you any trouble,” Red noted.

“Others’ll be coming, right soon. Only reason they didn’t tear us apart up ‘till now was the surprise factor. We kept our speed up and stayed ahead of the gathering tide of bloody murder coming our way. Now we’re stopped.” He motioned back towards Zippy, not taking his eyes off the space where the girls were still standing, rubbing at their eyes and goggling at the goo that used to be their bedroom.

Zippy was issuing calm assurances and cooing sweet nothings to the far side of an immense metal gate. It stretched to fill the entire height and width of the stairwell it was mounted in – the only structure Red had ever seen to do so. The gate had a presence to it, a sort of indolent defiance that told Red it was actual, ancient, heavy steel – not the thin panels nested between nano-tube mesh that he was accustomed to. From the general atmosphere of fear, tension, and annoyance, Red got the sense that they wouldn’t be forcing their way through this one. There were actual stakes to these negotiations.

“We blast our way into this one and we’ll get blasted right back out,” James filled in for him, “this here’s King Big Dick’s territory. Nasty bloke, if a bit…unsubtle.”

Somewhere below, muffled by the vertical distance, Red could hear a growing static of pained and angry shouts.

“No, silly! You’re being silly.
You’re
the one who’s all silly right now! Of course we wouldn’t be any trouble.” Zippy’s saccharine pleading wasn’t going well. Whoever was on the other side of that door was less than enthused at the prospect of letting armed maniacs inside.

Snaps and flashes of memory seeped back into Red, as the last vestiges of his Focus Fugue sloughed away. He tried to gather any kind of relevant information from the vast whorl of violence and confusion that the last few hours had been. A series of still images came to him, like portraits, or frozen landscapes: Zippy skipping beneath a large black web that held an entire sleeping family, all plugged into a mass-inhaler system and dosing up together. A cartoonish animatronic octopus caught halfway between the wave from James’ sound cube and an unraveling wall. A broken vase (a real one, ceramic) shattered into disorderly fragments. Must’ve been worth a fortune.

What was it doing down here?

A screaming Asian man. A woman on the toilet. A giant. A horned beast full of passengers. Dark-skinned children, their flesh dissolving into metal, catching and tossing a desiccated human skull…

“What was the deal with those kids?” Red asked suddenly, the disturbing sight leapfrogging its way up his mental queue.

“What kids? The twins? I don’t know, mate. The things creep me out too,” James answered, his unblinking eyes locked on the girls.

“No, the little kids with all the metal on their skin. And the…the skull? The severed head? Did that not stand out to you? Is that just normal down here? Another day in the neighborhood, just me and my trusty severed head?”

“What the bloody Christ are you talking about?”

“You saw them. You had to see them. The two of you walked right by them. They had a kind of liquid metal spilled on them, and they were playing hot potato with a rotting skull.”

“You’re twisted off your arse right now, aren’t you?” James finally broke eye contact with the girls and stared over his shoulder at Red.

“No! Well, yes. But this really doesn’t feel hallucinatory. There’s none of the euphoria or suspension of disbelief, you know? This feels alert. Sharp. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it feels like Presence. You seriously didn’t see those kids? Or that sex-giant? What about the big cow…vehicle…thing?”

“Good God’s Arsehole! You’re out of your friggin’ gourd, mate. We’re lucky you didn’t blow us all to hell.”

“Yeah…” Red reluctantly admitted the possibility, “I guess so. I did crack my back down there and got kind of a rush. Felt like uppers, which seemed useful at the time, so I didn’t make a thing out of it.”

James chuckled in disbelief, but said nothing. Red could pick out distinct voices now, welling up from the smoking tunnel they’d left in their wake.

“Thank you, mister! You’re the bestest!” Zippy squeaked, and hopped up and down, gleefully clapping.

The gargantuan steel slab began to shake, and the ground shook with it. When it finally thumped and abruptly withdrew, Red’s subconscious shuddered in horror. Something that big and heavy should not move: It made the very walls that hemmed in his world seem unstable. Before the surge of panic had a chance to fully latch onto him, though, a dingy mound of rags limped into view and beckoned them all inside. Zippy walked through first, her body language all purity and earnestness, like a dog greeting its returning owner. Red followed clumsily, the soreness and stress already settling around his bones. James came last. He inched carefully backwards over the threshold in short, even steps. His weapon never wavered from the twin girls, one of whom was now holding up a primitive camera. Just before the colossal door sealed shut behind them all, she depressed the button, and an antiquated flash kicked out.

Red smiled reflexively.

“This is wrong,” QC said, pushing the little Asian boy down and stepping up onto his back. He stood, heaving her upward, until her palms slapped against the lowest rung of the access ladder.

“Hm, indeed. This does feel a tad…impolite.” Byron tried to courteously mount the human footstool, but simply could not find a genteel way to climb another human being. The boy grunted and heaved again, tossing Byron the few feet he needed to take hold.

“Impolite? What? Oh, the kid? No, fuck that kid. Fuck him. Hey kid,” she shouted downward, motioning to her own eyes to draw his gaze. When she had it, she reiterated: “Fuck you, kid.”

He held up two skinny middle fingers in response. After a silent beat, they both laughed. 

“That’s Chen,” she clarified to Byron, “he doesn’t need your shitty pity. Unless you have a four foot vertical leap, nobody passes this way without paying his toll. He banks more credits in a day than I do in a week. I was talking about us. Our fuck-stained situation. It’s all wrong.” QC spat the words into the greasy air around her.

 “What ah…sh…sh…situation?” Byron stammered, sounding a bit too far below her. She halted her own ascent and peered back down at him between her legs.