“Jesus Christ.” Mickey spits more of the black shit, and uses some of the mouthwash that everyone suspects is mostly cheap vodka with a lot of the water frozen out, and hydrogen peroxide. “Burning through pulmonary and renal filters like I'm shaking off a hangover in a wildfire.”
The respirator that Blue has been wearing for the last 12 hours stings as she pulls it off her face. She runs a medicated beeswax chapstick along the pink silhouette where the seal was.
New Orleans had been the first time that she had seen an actually-decomposed body. She had seen her grandmother die in the hospital, which was sad, but expected, and something she had planned for. The dead guy, meanwhile, had bobbed up from under some wet wood they were clearing out of a flooded jail. Like the wood, he had been stewing in the floodwater. The rank, grotesquely-bloated figure had startled Blue, but she had done what she thought she was supposed to, and sucked it up to move him. Mickey had grabbed her arm, and silently shaken his head, which she had understood to be extremely grave on his part. He had found two others to help, and they had lifted the body with one of the bright-yellow tarps that they rolled up into bodybags like necrotic burritos, sealed with duct tape.
Later, Mickey had explained that the skin would have slid off in her hands, and that the cheap paper jumpsuit was all that was holding it together. Not “him.” “It.” He had also said that the body hadn't been dead since the hurricane, that there would be less left if it had been.
Mickey says that depersonalization is important if you don't want to go crazy. Considering all the boys who had tried to like Blue, and all the girls who had liked her until they suddenly didn't, she has to agree.
He rips a foil package with green print on it with his teeth, the way people who are frustrated with ketchup packets sometimes do. “I'll show you mine, if you show me yours.”
She snatches the little tool he's twirling around on his finger, edges shiny in the way of metal things that have been carried around a lot. “You're so fucking gross.”
Mickey strips the black tank top with the band logo off. It turns inside-out as he does, eating the three intertwined gears along with the legend.
NAIL FACTORY
END OF THE WORLD TOUR
1997
Nail Factory started out in the Louisiana club scene. They were only off by two years.
Mickey hands Blue a flask. The alcohol is that chemical cold on her hands. The pulmonary filter looks like one of the plastic cartridges that screw into the sides of Blue's respirator, but engineered to slide into something, like a tape cassette as executed by someone who makes very expensive military equipment. Whatever is actually in it can't be paper, or even the asbestos that Mickey says is in most military gas masks. It's something that works when it's wet. It's something designed to be wet.
She fits one end of the tool into the panel high between his shoulders, and presses until she feels the pop. It peels back as she pulls. She reverses the multifaceted chunk of metal, and fits it into the thin edges of the slot. The old cartridge comes out with it. The inside is dark-gray. She drops the drippy rectangle into the trash can next to the picnic table, which had started out as a drum of JP-8 on a big Knight-Pike truck. A little bit of air escapes the slot, which makes Blue think of tracheotomies that you see old smokers with on TV shows since the politics of cigarettes had shifted. She presses the new cartridge in until it clicks, and runs her palm over the panel until it reseats.
Then, she takes a slug from the flask.
“God, what is that?”
“Let's call it Everclear. He takes his own slug. “That sounds respectable enough.”
“Respectable. That's what I think, when I get someone's mucus on me.”
He rolls his shirt back on, and grins. “Way to make a girl feel special.”
Blue lays in the cot, and stares at the ceiling of the Tyvek tent while Mickey reads a battered paperback. A man overlaid with old printed circuit board patterns looks up at the legend, in that old machine-readable font that was designed for electromagnetic sensors.
The Shockwave Rider.
She wishes that they could share a bed, instead of these shitty little cots in the temporary barracks set up by the “crisis site management” agency. She holds her hand out, examining the glossy black polish, which is the same stuff that Mickey is wearing. When she had seen him stripping the old, chipped coat off and carefully layer the new one on under the red lights that made everything look organic and warm, she had said it seemed dangerous to wear around. He had said yeah, he probably wouldn't go into a shitkicker bar like that, but was it any more dangerous than hanging around mercenaries with Bushmasters?
Thinking about the Bushmasters – the squared-off, black rifles that some of what she now knows as private military contractors stand around with – makes her eyes vibrate in their sockets for a fraction of a second. Something about their boxy, metallic brutishness trips an aesthetic and tonal wire in her head. Then, a buzz in her head turns to a warm, liquid wash. The current takes the high-frequency twitch with it as it flows away.
She dreams about Puzzle Box, the S&M club in an after-hours bar a date had taken her to in New York, and Black Cat, here in New Orleans. She drifts through the internally-inconsistent maze of attractive people, until in the center, she finds a body in a pool. It has baseball-sized chunks blown out of it.
The second time she had seen a decomposing body was also in New Orleans, while they were power-washing the chemical residue off houses that were subsequently being papered with eviction notices. Mickey had looked at it for a few seconds, and iced up with a truly cold expression. In his words, there's a type of person who gets pissed-off a lot, but angry only when it's serious. It had been a serious situation. He had told her that the wounds were from the same rounds the Bushmasters used, because the entrances were small, while the exits were big and ragged, and that the shots had been in the back. If they weren't from those guns specifically, they were from something equivalent. Something military, or at least military-style.
He had said to not mention it to anyone she didn't trust implicitly, and especially not around the Knight-Pike guys, the employees – goons - of the company running the PMCs whose shirt sleeves were emblazoned with a horse-headed chess piece over white and red checkerboard. He had also said that's probably why they started using brass-catchers, which were the ducted bags attached to the sides of guns so they didn't eject the casings wherever. She hadn't heard that term before, but she got the general idea.
Mickey is pouring hot water into the coffee maker when she wakes up. There's a little satisfaction in knowing that something made by putting a plastic funnel with a paper filter into the mouth of a dinged-up vacuum flask can can taste better than the output of any chain cafe.
She goes outside and brushes her teeth with baking soda. The weather is already getting brutal. The air feels like hot swamp.
Mickey hands her a mug. She didn't used to like black coffee. He checks the matte dive watch he wears backwards, with the face on the inside of his wrist, even though his rig could presumably show a clock in the corner of his vision. She checks her Casio, which she wears like a normal person, and whose cybernetics are mostly external. They have time for breakfast.
“Chef Boyardee, or Maruchan?”
“Eating something with cut-up hot dogs in it for breakfast is undignified.”
“Your loss.” He tosses that titanium camp spork of his in the air, and catches it as it twirls. “Gonna get scurvy, not eating any fruits or veggies.”
She thinks about the flexibility of the concept of sauce. “That isn't fruits or veggies, man.”
“What's the matter? Don't trust Ronnie's judgment on school lunches?”
Blue usually wants to strangle morning people. He goes back into the tent to heat some more water up. She watches the trucks and corporate minions of ALS and Knight-Pike scurry and mill around, until he emerges a few minutes later.
“Hey.” He wipes red off his face, and licks the back of his hand, holding a foam cup out with the other. “You hear those pops last night?”
“Pops?”
“I was out taking a piss. Gunshots. Like pistol caliber, I think. In bursts. Like those MP5s some of the goons have. Lot of pops and cracks out here. Sometimes it's back and forth, sometimes it's just one-sided. Either way, it's all going to be ghost stories. Plausible deniability, they call it. Who's to say anything different? Us?”
She knows what an MP5 is because they're in TV shows, and video games. What they called the “Game Boy Commandos,” the flex squad of NYPD cops who stand around on subway cars and mostly fuck around while scowling and racking overtime up, also have them.
After a week of being there, when they had started to see a lot of the evictions and field condemnations slapped on the doors of “evacuated” buildings, Mickey had spat and called it theft. He had said it was piracy. Blue had said that a lot of pirate crews were proto-anarchists, or liberated slaves. This, she had said, was the primitive accumulation of capital. Colonial violence, in the periphery.
Then, they had gotten on the bus back to camp, and hit the decontamination showers.
“Also found this. Roman found a few, too.” He produces a punched-out bubble pack that must have contained pills. “Bad mojo.”
Blue takes it, and turns it over in her hand. She doesn't recognize the weirdly-clipped chemical name in dot-matrix print, which seems like the pharmaceutical equivalent of a sequence of phonetic vanity plates. There's also a ratio of three numbers. What it lacks is a trade name, and a manufacturer. She raises an eyebrow at Mickey.
“Snake-eater shit. They used to give it to bomber pilots, too. It's like high-end speed, with some stuff to smooth it out. Selectively binds to neurochemistry, relaxes muscles. Not your regular dexies or biker crank, you know? It's real easy to get real used to. It makes you all sour and twitchy after a while.”
Blue feels dubious about that one – it feels like something he could have gotten from Roman after a few drinks – but then she remembers a chapter of a book that called itself the secret history of WWII. There had been a chapter about how the secret of blitzkrieg was to simply be gunned full of Pervatin, the Nazi brand of speed, which was great until you got withdrawals in the Russian winter.
“That body.”
He holds his finger up to his lips. “Later.”
They go to the big LED board at the edge of the lot that the tent barracks are on, which had been a warehouse. Not a pour-and-tilt, either, but actual brick, which is now a big, rust-colored pile at the edge of the property. The offices and garage had become a field office for Agile Logistics Services. They look for their employee IDs, see that they're on power-washer duty again, and wait outside the repurposed school bus. The driver climbs into the plexiglass booth bolted around the driver's seat, smacks at the ignition, and they go out for the day's work. None of the drivers speak English, Spanish, or Vietnamese, so nobody really tries to talk to them. They just go where the big tablet clamped to the dash tells them to.
Mickey is watching the city go by the window as they go through the streets that have been cleared. “Where are we, anyway? Moving north, I think. Seventh Ward or something?”
Blue doesn't look up from her copy of Last Dances, a sci-fi novel about a collapsed century in which the cast navigating a 1918 Influenza and 1988 AIDS-era Philadelphia simultaneously. Mickey had given it to her after he had finished it, and started The Shockwave Rider.
“Tremé . Deep in it by now.”
“How the hell did you know that?”
He sounds legitimately impressed. She rips the cargo pocket of her work pants open and holds the mapbook out.
“Wherever you are, know where you are.”
“Good point.”
“Shit, I'm from here and I don't know the place as well as you do.” Roman's face appears between them, craned over the seat from behind. “I'm from southeast, though. More around Algiers, embarrassingly enough. Kicked around Bourbon.”
“And you moved to Alaska,” Mickey and Blue say in unison. “For the night life.”
The bus keeps moving.
“Supposed to use this, now.” The Knight-Pike guy slices open a big box with a bunch of warnings printed on it, and pokes at it with the expensive-looking, chocolaty cowboy boots he's wearing instead of the army-style ones. “New power washer juice.”
Blue looks at the big pistol in the nylon holster on his thigh, and those boots, and almost says something. The feeling of being told that you aren't funny, that actually, you're a weird asshole and nobody likes you. The feeling of having sex with a boy you probably shouldn't have, and not even being good at it. A brief, but intense, flash.
“Hey, don't act retarded.”
She pulls her respirator and big gloves on. “Yeah. Alright.”
Asshole.
She feels another twist of the little knives that live inside her chest and skull.
Blue can see Mickey winding up to say something of his own, and she shakes her head silently. Roman looks like he's drilling holes in the guy with his eyes, and thinking about the nasty dagger he keeps strapped to the small of his back, which he calls a V-42. Liquidators aren't supposed to have weapons, but Roman tells anyone who asks that he needs to open boxes and cut tape, and nobody in any position to argue with him has seemed to want to do so.
The Knight-Pike guy spits and goes back to the truck to sit on the tailgate, drink beer, and fuck around with the big computerized scope on his MP5. The queasiness stays in her viscera and the back of her head, like the bright after-image of a flash of light in the darkness.
Whatever the new detergent they're putting in the washers is poison-green now, like antifreeze, instead of the medicinal pink that reminds everyone of liquid Tylenol they had to take as kids. It seems to cut through whatever is in the streaks of brackish soot on the buildings, but the water looks weird and greasy as it runs into the sumps that had been dug for it the day before.
Everyone argues about the soot. Mickey says it's from some big chemical plants that burned and exploded, and whose pollution had drifted over New Orleans like the black rain after Japan was nuked. Roman says it's from that offshore nuclear power station, that it didn't scram effectively, and they'd all be hearing the clicking if they had anything that detected alpha particles. Roman also believes that the detergent has scrubber nanomachines in it, so Blue tends to take his claims with some skepticism. She suspects that the fixation on nuclear anxieties is some sort of epigenitic thing, a Cold War hangover so bad that they're shaking it off after inheriting it from the last generation. The big one is easy to think about, to be afraid of, but the Soviets had laid down and died, and Godzilla hadn't been the one who had killed everyone's friends. Blue knows for a fact that Mickey and roman both remember the worst of AIDS, and as things are, Cancer Alley is just a little west.
Roman also says that power washer duty beats digging burial trenches with a backhoe, though, which was one of the main jobs besides draining and clearing roads at first. He's definitely correct about that.
They drag the awful two-stroke engines on the dollies from house to house, skipping the ones marked with slashes of red gaffer tape on the doors. Nobody knows who puts the tape up, or at least, nobody on power washer duty. The people who put the tape up almost certainly don’t know what power washer duty is, either.
Once they've looped around the block and finished the last house, Mickey kicks the power pedal on his washer and keeps fuming.
Roman lights his fresh cigarette off the old one, and flicks the butt in the direction of the truck. “You don't gotta listen to that shit, you know.”
“Don't have to take that shit, you know.”
“You gonna fight these assholes, Mickey?”
Mickey sucks air through his teeth, and stares in the direction of the truck. “Thinks he's sheriff because he wears cowboy boots, and is an asshole.”
Blue barks, more than laughs.
On the bus ride back to camp, she thinks about the last time they all had gone to the Black Cat. It stays in her mind during the walk to the place itself, like a DAT track on repeat.
“Hey.” Mickey had looked at the smear of lipstick across his face. “Are you into this? I mean, you're clearly having a good time, or whatever. I know I am. It's just-”
Blue considered the detached determination with which she had smeared said lipstick. “It's fun.”
He sat up, and pulled a cigarette out of the packet with his teeth. “But not interesting. You can be like a safe, sometimes. Not everyone is a safecracker.”
The roll of leather, at the bottom of the inside pocket of her jacket, was still there, where it always was. Roman carried a knife around. Mickey had his tape deck. People put their faiths in odd little things.
“How comfortable are you with penetration?”
His cherry flared, bright under the rest of the red for a second. “Dealer's choice.”
She fished the roll out of her jacket, and opened it. She ran her hand down the leather, across the fine spines of implant-grade stainless steel. He looked a little disoriented, but picked one up, along with one of her own alcohol swabs.
“Jesus.”
“Do you know what acupuncture is?” She lit a fresh one off his. “Housewives are really into it. It's a dopamine rush, of course, there's nothing mystical about it. It's a way to be penetrated in a controlled environment. To be pierced.”
He fiddled with his earrings, and rubbed the back of his neck where some of those panels formed the interfaces for his cybernetics. “Makes sense, yeah.”
“I was never a housewife. Do you think you can follow my instructions, and put one of these exactly where I tell you? I prefer the big nerves that run along my arms. I think they call that foreplay.”
Blue had explained that she had other equipment, that was paradoxically less practical to travel with for how more pedestrian it was. The stun glove, a piece of feminine self-defense weaponry that had been customized with frequency generator hardware for electrical play. Fun, but it lacked the ritual and the physical intensity, for how much she liked the sound of plasma and smell of ozone. Wax, melted in large quantities in almost-boiling water, which she found more erotically-relaxing than per se sexually stimulating, but was a fairly enjoyably exchange of trust and intimacy. Most people were afraid of what she called the real stuff. That's when she got to the real point of vulnerability, of admitting something out loud.
It's what I get off on.
Something stopped her from saying that.
“It's what I like.”
Something about the soft, red light from the green strings running around the place makes Blue feel less like her head is in a vise. The fishnets look good, but feel rough.
“I think I prefer the vinyl.” The voltage shoots through her for a second, thinking about the feel of it running across her hand. “The glossy look is nice. I also like the latex.”
Mickey wiggles his toes under the crosshatching. “Not a Rocky Horror girl, huh? Never met a transvestite cyborg before?”
“God.” She starts to roll her eyes, and then looks off to the side.
He sits up. “Hey. What's with that? You stop yourself all the time. Not just with, you know, the assholes. Around me, even. I'm not going to bite or anything.”
“At least not without me doing it first.”
She closes her eyes, and lets the red wash over her. The pistol that Mickey had bought for her off a short, fidgety guy is still on the table opposite the bed. He had said that the military was switching to the results of something called the Millennium Combat Pistol Program, which means all the old M9s shifted to reservists and Guard units. Those, he had said, were very easy to walk off with. The edges of the Beretta were shiny, like that tool of Mickey's, but it was apparently in good condition. Carried constantly, but barely used, in the way a lot of military equipment often was. This is a contingency, mickey had said, only to be used if that's the only real option, only weighed against likely results, and never shown off or spoken of in the absence of implicit trust.
She had asked if he had “acquired” one for himself, and he had said yes, a titanium Smith & Wesson 7500 series in the same 9mm, well before he brought it here. Don't leave home without it, in the cadence of an old advertising jingle.
Then, she tells him about the implant. About she is, in fact, also a cyborg, although not in the way most people use the term now. About how she was almost nonverbal until high school, and barely even then. About how that's probably when the seizures and atypical migraines started, although they were always probably more or less indistinguishable from the horrors of overstimulation and alienation she was suffocating under, even as a small child. About how the wetware controls those seizures and migraines. About how it also finds that knife inside her, and twists, hot with embarrassment and cold with dreadful paranoia, when she fails to maintain the mask.
“The mask.”
“The person costume.” She looks at the fleur de lis wallpaper, which is probably gold-on-blue in normal light, wondering if it will blink first. “The cheap suit you pull on and wear for everyone, even though it doesn't fit.”
She sits up, pivots, and straddles him. Her hair falls around his face, closing them in their own little tent.
“If I try to get out of it, the thing tightens. It yanks me back in.” She smiles at the opportunity for honesty, which seems to make him uncomfortable. “Like being cut up by piano wire. It hurts me before someone can.”
“The mask.”
She half-expects it to do its thing, there, and stop her, but it doesn't. That's probably because Mickey has never really told her what to do, or ordered her around. He's only ever shown her the ropes, tried to keep her safe.
She only feels the phantom twitches in her mind because she's anticipating it. Roman, being the ex-Catholic's ex-Catholic, says that people have to believe in the devil because otherwise you'd have to admit that the horror is all biochemical, that hell is in your brain and endocrine system, and that eliminates half the options in the fight or flight response. She can't argue with that.
Mickey sits up and takes a long, uneasy drink of his bourbon. He leaves a black print on the rim. His lips and his eyelids have the same slick darkness and red gloss as the vinyl.
“Absolutely evil shit. It's like... so, this story I've heard a few times, I guess some people's research says this is true. You know MK-ULTRA, right? There was a military equivalent, too. Different drugs, though. Where that left off, they tried hardware, what we'd call wetware now. Started in the late-70s. Thing about the size of a dime, embedded in the skull. Stimulated pain for noncompliance, pleasure for what they call 'executing objectives.'”
“I doubt it.” The wallpaper starts so arrange itself into a regular pattern as the very expensive dissociative starts to lose its edge. “There are no carrots. Only sticks.”
He looks at her for a second. “Follow me.”
“Where?”
“Technical boy.”
They collect their clothing up, and get dressed. His pistol looks weirdly-square, because of the flatter styling, and the angular box of uncertain function in front of the trigger guard. He puts it in the left inside pocket of his grimy vest, which is apparently designed for guns as part of biker fashion. She puts hers in the green nylon holster clipped to the inside of the waistband of her jeans.
There's a house opposite the Black Cat, formerly separated by a fence that had been perforated and curled into the mud by the wind. The windows must have blackout curtains, or something equally opaque. A generator inside a serious-looking chain link enclosure sunk into a concrete pad is chugging, injecting power into the place through a ropy, orange cable.
Mickey bangs on the back door with the palm of his hand. It doesn't sound like wood. It's way too solid, and doesn't have any give. It must be metal, with a veneer over it. He grins at a little fisheye attached to it with matte-gray epoxy.
The door opens about three inches, and stops dead. A bright, brown eye hovers in the crack. “It's midnight, man.”
That thousand-watt grin. “One, actually. You're a night person, Mister Mugler. Got something you'll find really satisfying.”
The kitchen is a mess, but not the nasty type of mess that comes from a total inability or unwillingness to clean.
“Sorry. Hey, when are those fuckers turning the water back on, anyway? They know how to work a goddamned pipe wrench?” He tries, and fails, to maintain eye contact. “And it's Thierry. He just thinks he's fuckin' cute.”
Blue resists the impulse to ask whether he is.
Mickey sighs. “Good question.”
The spare room has wire shelving lining three of the walls. It's piled full of an inscrutable collection of hardware. Some of it looks like it must be thirty, or even forty, years old. Reel-to-reel tape hardware gives way to what looks like old army gear, some sort of professional film editing deck, and then a bunch of skeletal PC towers full of disparate-looking components and carefully-arranged cables. There's also a bench with a hand-cranked press on it, a grocery bag of shell casings, and something that looks like an M16, but a little shorter, and with more aggressive styling on the plastic parts. The scope - or sight, or whatever it's called - looks computerized, like the ones on the Bushmasters, but more multifaceted and advanced. Curved and tubular, and sprouting protrusions of machined metal and expensive-looking apertures, instead of the angular, stamped steel that reminds Blue of overhead projectors from high school.
Thierry crosses his arms. “Sit.”
She sinks into an old dining chair wedged between the shelves.
“Tell him about the cybernetics.” Mickey taps on his head.
So, she does, albeit in a way that's less possessed of the mortifying ordeal of being known.
Thierry drums his fingers on his bicep. Now that she sees him in the light, he seems short and wiry, wearing clothes a size too big for him. His jaw is soft, but his eyes look like they have embers in them.
“Yeah. I think I can do that.”
He retrieves a laptop covered in duct tape, with some sort of radio suckered to it with adhesive Velcro. Mickey slowly walks around the room, observing all the stuff like he's in a museum, while Thierry alternates between rapid-fire typing, and squinting at the amber plasma display.
“I'm going to have to use the dev interface. Can you handle that?”
The time Blue had gone in for maintenance resurfaces from the muck of her longterm memory, and she starts laughing at the question. Needles.
“Why?”
Thierry gives Mickey a sharp look. “I'm going to reflash it. Disable the...” he makes that same teeth-sucking sound Mickey does when he's pissed off. “The cognitive therapy module.”
She has a lot of questions, but the main one is how soon they can get to it. Thierry rummages around in a bright-blue plastic tub, examining and replacing various sterile wrappers and cables the same cream color as hospital equipment.
“Got it.”
he holds up what looks like a wide-bore needle with a thin, looped cable next to it in the plastic packaging with a paper backing. The next thing he produces looks like some sort of modem, as executed by whoever makes X-ray machines and digital insulin pumps. He seats the box into the side of the laptop with the same bearing as Mickey operating a pistol.
“Alright.” He flicks an alcohol swab packet. “You ready?”
She turns around in the chair. The poster that had been behind her is of what could be an angel or demon, scars under its pectorals, holding a snarling snake that intertwines its legs. It looks like a tarot card from an alternate dimension. Putting her chest on the backrest and facing away from Thierry as he prepares, she feels more like she's getting a tattoo than a cybernetics procedure.
Something illicit and defiant, deliberately-repulsive to certain sensibilities.
“You'll never get a good job, never mind a good boyfriend,” Blue's mother had said with exasperated disapproval, when she got the same eyebrow piercing as some of the punk and goth guys at school.
He wipes some of that cold alcohol feeling across her neck. “Here we go.”
There's an electronic tone that increases in frequency as he probes a spot out, and then beeps. The pain is sharp, and then fades as the skin gives and breaks. She feels the probe click into something in her head, and her eyes vibrate for a second. She grits her teeth and tries to not think about what would happen if the thing just turned all the way off, if it were just a bricked octopus of wiring wrapped around her sparking brain. Some more rapid-fire typing, and then she feels the cool wash again. Another click in her bones, more weird pressure, but in the opposite direction. Thierry puts a little dot band-aid on her.
Mickey runs his hand through her hair. “You alright?”
“Maybe.”
“Answer for the ages.” Thierry drops the probe into one of those biohazard-marked sharps containers you see in hospitals.
Back at the Black Cat, under that red light, she straddles him again, lowers her head over his again. “What now?”
He locks his legs around her waist. “You're creative.”
There's a tap on the door. “Yo.”
It's Roman's voice. He slinks into the room, picks his knife up off the nightstand, threads the belt through his black jeans and the sheath, and starts getting dressed.
Mickey blows him a kiss. “Where'd you wander off to?”
“Out. What, did I violate curfew?” He pulls his shirt on. “You two tend to get lost in each other. Found something else to occupy myself with. Going back to camp. Okay to walk back yourselves? Whenever you're done doing... whatever.”
Blue bites Mickey's lip and looks at Roman. “Your loss.”
He waves at them over his shoulder. “Have fun, you two.”
“We’re full of blood, you know.” Blue had slid one of the pins out of her arm with the instinctive expedience of a phlebotomist, keeping a straight face through the resulting jolt of neurologically-extreme sensation. “It’s rude to say, but we are. We’re full of upsetting things like blood, and fat, and all those icky little organs. We sweat. People and bodies are grotesque. Only deeply-evil puritans act like we aren’t, or at least deeply-neurotic ones.”
“The girl who loved the monster.” He had grinned a little.
Mickey didn’t look as uneasy as he did at first, but he did look like he had never done this before.
For once.
She had considered the pin. The metallic glint was tinted with a tiny bit of orange-red.
Blood doesn’t ball up and fall in big, fat Kensington gore drops. Not when it’s fresh, and oxygenated. It’s water, and salt, and other assorted fluid biomass. Looking at Mickey, it occurs to her that a human is about 0.04-0.08% sodium, which can add up to a few hundred grams, in terms of back-of-the-envelope math. Blood is full of salt. Humans need saline to live. They don’t just put water into you, if you go to the hospital dehydrated, after all. They give you electrolytes. The thrown balance is why you feel like shit if you just deal with a hangover by chugging water alone.
This place is also wet and salty, and hot. Seawater occasionally defeats the levees, washing the place in diluted, but immense, biomass. Bodies soon decompose and return to the ether here, which is a soothing equilibrium in some ways, if a somewhat repellent process for the speed of putrification and decomposition. Skin doesn’t contain bodies for long in the fever swamp of August in Louisiana,, presumably not even at the best of times. It ruptures, peels away, sloughs off.
Looking at mickey, his illicit clothes, his deep-black makeup, his practiced cool and ability to operate with detachment, she wonders what’s under that ill-fitting skin. Would it flay apart and fall away, if she were to rupture it? Would it be like that taut latex and vinyl they’re both so fond of, where a small point of failure in the surface rapidly opens up and spreads into a rending?
Or is he like all the other bodies out here? Does he have to die first, and then decompose, before anything inside is laid bare? What does that make their acts of intimacy and self-realization, if they’re enacted in this violent periphery?
Are we just necrophiles who haven’t noticed it yet?
She bites him as he grinds, and they both shiver a little. She feels her sweat dripping onto his face and neck, making their bodies slide over and stick to each other, imagining it. Both of them opening up and returning to whatever ether exists between them, whatever recombinant parts of each other they would reabsorb, free from being bound up in their own neat little containment suits of skin and affect.
It occurs to her that she’s close to his ear, so she may as well ask.
“Now that I’ve subjected myself to the horror of being seen by another, tonight… what about you? Would someone else be in there, if you were opened up?”
He squirms some more.
“Who’s under your ill-fitting suit? What’s in there, with all the blood and sweat? The steaming guts? The ballistic weave and reinforced joints? What’s she like?”
The language of gender had slipped out of her. He tenses underneath her, with her fingertips pushing into the plugs of his rig, and Blue loosens her psychic grip. The unease is back in full force.
“It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it. It’s just… can we do that later?”
Later, it is.
A Knight-Pike truck blows past them, blasting some shitty goon-metal. The guy dangling his legs off the tailgate fires his rifle into the air as they tear down the road. Blue is stunned and confused, but she sees Mickey click into a posture that feels like it could involve his pistol.
He slowly removes his hand from the small of his back. “Jeeeeeeeezus.”
“Drunk.”
“Shitfaced, is what those motherfuckers are.” He exhales for what feels like a full minute. “Let's get the fuck out of here.”
The walk down Rampart is dark. The streetlights on St. Claude aren't turned on, so all they have is the sporadic light pollution. Blue checks her phone, which, of course, has no reception. She sticks the brick of plastic back in her pocket and asks Blue if he has any. He gets that unfocused look people sometimes have while doing something with their rigs, navigating a user interface that only they can see, and shakes his head.
They almost run into the sheriff as he comes around a corner. He looks lost. His MP5 is hanging loose off his shoulder, instead of slung across his back they way “professionals” are supposed to wear them.
“Hey.” He glances between them with dull, boozy eyes that also have a weird twitchiness to them. “I know you two. The fuck you doing wandering around out here?”
Blue tries to decide what to say, beyond telling him to fuck off.
Mickey gets that resigned look of dealing with someone he doesn't want to. “Out spending the money they pay us, same as you. We're going back, now.”
“You at some whorehouse, or something?” He slurs at them, looking back and forth from Mickey to Blue. “You just trade off or whatever? He gets guys, you get girls?”
It's worth saying. “Fuck off.”
“Fuck off... huh? You finally get the balls to get mouthy? And you...” He swings around to Mickey. “You. With your fuckin' painted nails and big attitude. You going to do something? Faggot? At least I could... at least I could call you a steer if you were from Texas.”
He's splitting his attention between them, but he sees her eyes hardening even more. Mickey looks like he's doing a version of Roman's cost-benefit about the V-42, the arithmetic of violent potentiality. The sheriff fumbles with the MP5, clumsily drawing it as Mickey goes for the inside of his vest. Blue doesn't think as she launches herself into the goon, twists the submachine gun out of his hand, and shoves it into his armpit. It feels like operating a nail gun that just keeps going, fully-automatic mechanical force being slammed directly into something softer than you think of it as being. His body muffles it, but not as much as it seems like it would.
The sheriff stands in place for a second, and then falls onto the pavement like a steak being slapped onto a cutting board.
Mickey is frozen in place. After a few seconds that look like they dilate into minutes, he shakes it off.
“Jesus Christ. What an asshole. Didn't even have the safety on.”
A puddle of what would probably be bright-red if not for the moonlight drains out of the armholes in his body armor. He flops around a little. Mickey would probably call it a chicken with its head cut off.
Mickey picks a brick up out of the gutter and smashes the scope. “Let's get out of here.”
They walk along parallel surface streets, dodging loud noises and other people. It's a long walk, even though it probably only takes 10-15 extra minutes.
Blue doesn't really sleep for hours, beyond lulling in and out. She can hear things moving around outside, quietly, but quickly. Eventually, everything piles on top of her and she passes out hard, into a mercifully-dreamless time-skip to the morning. Roman is up and moving when her eyes snap open, and Mickey is dragging himself out of his cot.
“Goddamn, I was worried about you.” Roman takes a bite of one of those awful, calorie-dense survival bars of his. “Asshole rodeo last night.”
She thinks about the dead Knight-Pike mercenary, and what his buddies would probably do about him. Mickey glances at him, and gives the okay.
“You aren't even on the fuckin' radar yet, babe. Way I heard it, some of those assholes were rolling around Bourbon, shooting off in the air and all that shit. Someone popped one with a rifle and he fell into his fifty. Shredded the truck in front of him. They've been scrambling since.” He lights his morning Newport. “Someone kicked the fuckin' hornet's nest. Call's going out, we're going home. They're going to rotate all new people in. Or they're bringing the hammer down. Either way. Everyone's packing their bags.”
Mickey starts making coffee. “Grapevine says there's some no-neck in camo and Oakleys, talking to the Knight-Pike guys. Has a business-casual type with him. More snake-eater shit.”
Blue has never been good at goodbyes, but she tries.
Shoving her duffle in the overhead storage of the charter bus, she thinks about Roman, and especially Mickey, going off in opposite directions from her. People meet, they have their little moments, and then they disappear into the world. That has generally been her position on the flashes of intimacy that may be stumbled across, at least.
She hopes they find the little notes she put in Mickey's book, and Roman's pack of menthols. A phone number, and an email address. It's more than she's managed in the past.
Read my weird little stories. They're free.
