They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy Page 16

  "Do you want to talk about him? Get some of it off your chest?"

  "Fuck. No offense, but I'd rather eat shit-covered glass than talk about it." As soon as she started going on about the counselors they had on staff, I shook my head, "No, no, I'm not doing that shit. That's not gonna help anything."

  "You might be surprised."

  "Uh huh, can I get another smoke?"

  She let me smoke in peace for a little while before she started up the good Samaritan stuff again.

  "Hey," she said gently. "I have to go reapply for my job. Do you need some more time here?"

  I crushed out my cigarette on the wall. "Fuck it, I'll go back. It ain't gonna get any easier the longer I wait." I looked at her through a cloud of smoke. "Did you really fucking quit?"

  "Yeah, I did."

  "Nuh uh. Bullshit."

  She half-heartedly put the shackles back on my wrists and opened the door for me. There were two paramedics waiting that had been standing outside while we were in the room. She told them to give us a minute and told me, "Don't believe me, it doesn't matter. I did it because I like to help people, Don."

  "Nobody likes to help pieces of shit."

  "I do. It gets me hot."

  "Huh. I heard it was Latina ass."

  She grinned. "Not during work hours, smartass. The guards will take you back. If you need anything, tell them to tell me."

  "Thanks."

  She put her hand on my shoulder. "It's never as bad as we think it is. We can make it through anything."

  A dozen guards led me back down the Power Line to my cell. My ribs hurt but not much. Felt like they were getting better already. The inmates in the Pib went nuts when I came back in. The guards had to threaten to call in a couple of agents to get them to shut up about me.

  "You got something from your arresting officer in your cell," the weight gain powder addict informed me. "It's been cleared, no contraband."

  They punched in the code to my cell, and the door opened. A plain brown box, stamped and initialed to certify that the guards had cleared it, sat on the bed waiting for me.

  "What is it?" I asked as my shackles were unlocked.

  "Turn and face the wall," the weight gain powder addict ordered before he removed the chains. "We just got here, Guillory. Open it and find out."

  Dick. The guards locked me in and left. As soon as they left the Pib, the shit heads in the cells started in on me. I didn't pay them any attention.

  I grabbed the teal card off the desk and held it up in front of the cameras for a privacy request. After five minutes of holding the fucking thing and waiting for a guard to get off his ass to come approve the camera shut-off, I dropped the card on the floor and opened the damn box anyway.

  One good rip tore it right open. Agent Red's shoes, his jeans, Seminoles jersey and Rosemary's black billfold with her badge and ID all fell out. A hand-written note on blue stationary fell to the floor.

  Don,

  I am giving you these things temporarily because I got a message about you. That is the only reason. Please do not interpret this as anything else. They told me about Red after you left yesterday, after you stood in my house and lied to my face and let me think he was okay. I know you think I'm stupid for believing I have visions, but I refuse to ignore them for any reason. Take these things and the time you have been blessed with to reflect on how your choices affect people. I will have these items sent back by the guards when I feel the time is right. Please do not try to contact me.

  She didn't even sign it.

  I crumpled the note up and shoved it back in the torn box with shirt, the shoes, the jeans, the billfold, everything. My pulse pounded in my ears. I didn't fucking know he was dead when I talked to her, that was bullshit to say I was lying. I didn't know. And where the fuck did she get off talking down to me like that? Her and Red fucking--fuck, man, they did more to cause this shit than I did.

  I stood on the bed and got as close as I could to one of the cameras. I shouted, "I need a guard in here now!" and threw the box at the camera. "Take this crap back. I don't want it. I'm about to go off in here. Give me some fucking sedatives."

  Nobody came. The Pib door didn't even open.

  "Send the guards in here!"

  Still, nobody came.

  Fuck 'em, they asked for it.

  I put my mouth to the food tray slot and shouted into the corridor, "Hey, which of you shit-dicks is G-Mod Killah? I'll blow anybody that gives him up. What cell's he in?" If I was gonna fuck somebody up, I wanted it to be somebody that really fucking deserved it.

  "Cry for some more shots, pussy," somebody shouted back down the way.

  "Shut the fuck up!" I yelled at the guy. "G-Mod, you're a fucking bitch! I'll burn this fucking place down if you don't man up! Fuck all you assholes, tell me which cell he's in."

  "Don't move," came over the speaker in the ceiling.

  "Fuck you," I told the cameras. "Fucking put me to sleep, that's the only way I'll shut up. And tell Agent Jaspers I didn't know Red was fucking dead. Tell Tank to tell her that because that's bullshit."

  "Beast, hey, you a fucking bitch," somebody yelled down the Pib.

  "Don't move," the speaker said again.

  Heavy fists pounded on cell door 12 across the corridor from me. "Das Biest, burn the whole place down! You're a bitch pussy if you don't! Burn it, man, won't hurt me!"

  I grabbed all of Red and Rosie's shit to shove it out the food slot since the guards wouldn't come get it.

  Then the air hissed and everything went white.

  Chapter 17

  A Short Trip Through Hell

  When the white and the noise of rushing air went away, I stood in a rocky desert valley. I still had a thin layer of concrete cell floor under my feet and everything Rosie had given me. Empty red-orange sand stretched out in every direction. There wasn't a damn thing on the horizon.

  Fucking Tracey had gotten to me even on the inside. And that voice on the speaker, that fucking voice. That was Lee.

  "Shit," I muttered. "You gotta be fucking kidding me."

  The prison grays were thick and stiff and heavy, so I burned them to trade up for the Red's jeans and jersey. I shoved Rosemary's billfold and badge in my pocket and read her note one more time before I set it on the sand and watched it slowly burn.

  A few yards away from where I came in, someone had arranged a bunch of rocks into an arrow that pointed what I figured had to be north going by the sun. Then I thought if I was on the other side of the world it could be south, but then I realized I was fucking retarded because the sun still set in the west even on the other side of the world, dipshit.

  So I found a nice flat slab of rock and sat my ass down on it. Tracey could go fuck herself because damn if I was gonna do what she said and go where she told me to go. She could come fucking find me.

  "You're a bitch," I called out, letting the echo come back to me. "Come and get me."

  Out of nowhere, a bullet clipped the rock a few inches from my leg.

  "Jesus fuck," I shouted, rolling myself off into the sand.

  Another bullet hit just behind where I had been sitting. Neither of them came with the sound of a gunshot.

  I backed away from the rock. No other shots rained down, and I stopped back-stepping. That got me a ricochet ten feet away that scared the piss out of me.

  The sniper or whoever the fuck just wanted me moving.

  "You shooting at me now, Trace?" I called out. "That's bush league. How much that sniper cost you?" I checked out where the last shot had struck in the sand. The bullet had left a good-sized hole in the ground that I probed with my finger. I had to dig to reach where the bullet had finally stopped. It had gone straight down.

  I looked up in the sky, and another shot hit nearby. It was a goddamn flier was shooting at me from somewhere farther up than I could see even with a clear blue sky.

  I gave a middle finger skyward and got moving the direction the arrow pointed.

  I practiced my fi
re while I walked through an empty wasteland. The balls of flame I created crackled and popped in the air, barely doing what I thought them to do. It was like trying to keep a forest fire in a jar, I was so pissed off. I couldn't get the spheres to move right, couldn't get the shape I wanted to them, they just burned hot.

  I got past the fact that I was gonna get blamed for this shit and end up doing more time for an escape so I could think about what was really going on here. Something was fucked about the whole thing. Tracey didn't want me dead or she would have just killed me. She had Lee, I knew that voice was Lee's, tap into the holding cell cameras with those nanites to feed her a picture so she could grab me. But why bring me out to the middle of fucking nowhere? If this was just somebody being stupid, it was far beyond Tracey's kind of stupid.

  "If this is for another job, I'm out," I shouted at the red-orange sand.

  What the hell was all this for?

  "Kamikaze," I said out loud. "That's where it all started. Fucking Kamikaze and his fucking client. Okay, so who's the client, Tracey? Who was the client that wanted to blow all that cash for some notebooks and computer shit? Whose bunker was that, Trace?" I kicked a rock and watched it roll and bounce away. "Doland? What did he do that was so special? What did he have? Never heard of the guy. And you got a psychic again to fuck with me and you gave Spencer's nanites to Lee. You wanted to kill Lee, but then you gave him something as important as nanites."

  I stopped and shaded my eyes and checked the sky for the flier again. Still nothing, but the guy would drop too low sometime, he would, and I would light his ass up. I got back to walking before he took another shot at me.

  "Why can't anybody read me?" I asked loudly. "What did you do to me? I can't be read, I got Rosie telling me I do cold shit, what the hell did you do?"

  I stopped to take a piss, shouting, "Don't shoot my ass," at the sky. That cold crap had to be bullshit. I zipped up and kept walking, concentrating on squelching the heat of the desert air around me. Then I pushed further than just toning down the heat and thought cold. The biting Ohio winter. That fucking wind that whipped up Three Rivers at the snow games. Cold. Cold. Ice fishing. I kept those thoughts going. Wasn't long before I could see my breath.

  I stopped walking and watched the steam curling out of my mouth in a desert.

  "Aw, fuck me."

  A fucking bullet came down next to me and made my ass jump.

  "Goddammit, I'm walking!"

  Fuck, Red's big-ass shoes were giving me blisters. I shoved my hands in his pockets. I was an idiot. "See, she was right, you asshole. Rosie knew what she was talking about. You can do ice. You don't know shit about shit." How the fuck could I have not known I could do that?

  After ten minutes of playing with ice, I came across what passed for a road in nowhere: a set of heavy tire tracks worn into the dirt that stretched the way I was supposed to go. The road had been marked around the dips and slopes with those little neon orange marker flags they use in road construction.

  "Got yourself a transport road, Trace. What're you transporting out here?"

  Pieces and chunks of teleported floors were all over the place. A lot of them. I wasn't the first to make this walk. And judging by the burn marks, the weird shapes molded into the sand, the cracks in the ground and shattered rocks, a shitload of the people that came in were Post-Humans like me.

  "Fucking great."

  The hot breeze shifted, and the smell of garbage and rot hit me like a punch in the face. I walked with my hand over my mouth and nose to try and block it as best I could.

  I heard the buzzing of the flies before I saw them. There were two bodies laid out in the sun that the sand tried to cover and the flies tried to dig back out. One of them was female, young and Asian in a dirty dress way too big for her. The other was a husky Mexican with a thick black mustache and a Harley-Davidson t-shirt. Their eyes had been eaten out by animals that had moved on to the tips of their fingers and toes and up their arms and legs. Just like Charlene said had happened to Will. Then the animals had gone for the soft stomachs.

  "Fucking shit," I muttered, trying to breathe through my mouth so I didn't smell it as much.

  The girl's face was a swollen mess. She had bruises shaped like fingerprints all over her neck and throat, which hung open to the world, torn, not cut. Somebody had branded her chest with 'LUPO.' It looked like each letter had been dug into her skin, like with a fingernail. The Mexican guy had the word 'SUCKS' cut into his forehead, but they were smoother, like a knife. Somebody had used the fucking guy to ruin Lupo's tag.

  A fountain of dirt kicked up from the ground next to me from a shot.

  I looked up again. Still didn't see anybody.

  There were five more Asian girls left alongside the road, all branded with LUPO. They stared up at the sky with nothing in their sockets to see with. After I passed the fifth one, the smell wasn't as bad.

  A hand-painted wooden sign beside the road said 'Your New Life - 4 mi/10km.'

  I burned it to shit. "Fuck you, Trace." I got back to practicing my fire.

  On the horizon, light reflected off of something in the sand a football field long. The smell of alcohol came on the breeze. It turned out to be a glittering field of glass with liquor and beer bottles of every color and brand broken to pieces across the desert floor like a paused fireworks show. A Wild Turkey bottle came sailing out of the sky and exploded like a mortar. It was a party dumping ground, probably lifters throwing their empties as far as they could.

  In the middle of the glass firing range was a rock half the size of fucking Delaware. A chain had been wrapped around it twice, and the ends of it came together on the wrists and waist of a middle-aged barfly-looking scuzzy motherfucker. He sat against the rock, no shirt on, just a pair of shorts half-way off his ass. Nasty lumps were on both his legs where broken bones were trying to push out of the dark, sunburned skin. He had a pile of shit five feet away from him, probably the length of the slack in the chain.

  The guy didn't move. He was fucking dead. His eyeless face seemed to follow me as I walked past. Someone had spray-painted 'COULDN'T SHUT THE FUCK UP' on the rock above him.

  A keg landed and threw a shower of broken glass into the air.

  I didn't stop walking. "This shit isn't you is it, Trace," I muttered to myself.

  What the fuck had I been dragged into? Fucking weird shit in that bunker, serial killer shit, science shit, notebooks, hard drives, Posters out the ass. What the fuck was this all for? I got snatched out of fucking SCEIA custody in Washington, DC. They were gonna notice.

  Tracey had gone beyond a Kansas City. She was in over her fucking head.

  About the time I started thinking I was being tricked into walking myself to death, I came to a plywood and corrugated aluminum shack. A canopy had been set up next to it to shade an old wooden table with four rickety old chairs. Enough bottles to stock a biker bar were arranged on the table in rows by height, all the labels facing me, all of them unopened.

  Three Mexicans stood in the shade around the table: a rail-thin middle-aged man with a heavy mustache in a striped button-up shirt and cowboy boots; a beefy woman with long black hair and bad teeth; and a little girl about elementary school age that looked just like the man, had to be his daughter.

  When they saw me coming, they took seats at the table, both adults at the ends and the little girl across from the chair they left empty.

  "Hot one, isn't it?" the Father asked in English with no trace of an accent. The other two chuckled.

  "Can I stop walking now or am I gonna get shot?"

  The Father clicked his tongue and nodded. "You can."

  "Where am I?" I asked.

  "You're in the right place, a little later than we expected. You took your time, huh?"

  "Well, getting shot at slows me down." Apparently, we were gonna act like all this shit was normal or something.

  "Really. It's supposed to do the opposite. Where'd you get those clothes?"

  I glanced down
at the jersey and shrugged. "Just appeared out there."

  "Huh. Shoes, too?"

  "Yeah. It was like a miracle."

  The Father knocked his knuckles on the table. "I'll be damned. We're just gonna have to call you Moses, I guess. Moses, this here," he pointed to the little girl, "Is Mr. Earle, you can call me Uncle Bob and across the table from me there is Prairie Dog."

  The other two laughed. The Mother said, "Cut it out with that crap." She stuck her hand out to me to shake. "Come sit down, holy man. Name's Two-Stroke."

  The Father and little girl groaned. The little girl said, "Ahhhh, there it is. How long you been waitin' to drop that one, you wily fuckin' kyke?"

  "Quarter kyke you mincing little twat. And I told you I was going to," the Mother said with her hand still out to me.

  I sat down in the empty chair but didn't shake her hand. None of them had accents. The voices matched the bodies, but the words didn't.

  The Father went on, "I'm sure you've noticed things right here at this table don't quite add up?"

  "Yeah. You guys have taken these people over," I replied.

  "Absolutely right, Moses. These are psychic proxies for this little get-together. It's a one-way connection just for communication. It's hot as hell out here, so I let the beaners do it because they're built for it. That means anything you do to these bodies will solely be suffered on their heads and not ours. That make sense?"

  The little girl chimed in, "So stand down and use your words."

  "But don't use words that have the letters f, d or l in them," the Mother said, getting more laughs from the other two.

  The little girl nodded, "Yeah, or this conversation's fucking done."

  I wiped the sweat off my face. "What? What the fuck is this? Is Tracey here?"

  The Father shook his head, "Do you know who we are?"

  "Yeah," I shot back. "You're a bunch'a guys that're scared to meet me yourselves." I stared down the little girl. "Which you fucking should be."