Ice Cream and Venom by Kevin Long Read Free Book Online

smells of stale blood, it makes me feel hemmed in. I hate the thought of what he did while wearing this thing, and I start to have a panic attack. I run around frantically, and nearly black out, when I suddenly realize that I'm in the second floor cafeteria, and I calm down. I think, rationally, that it will give me some pleasure to use this helmet to save lives, not take them.
    The security in the CDC was never what you'd call good. It operated on the theory that since the place was full of nasty bugs, no one would want to break in. The Terrorist Wars of the early 21st century proved that wrong, but for some reason, security never improved. I worked at an insurance office just inside the overpass exit, and when I discovered the CDC had a better cafeteria than any of the restaurants around, I repeatedly snuck in with a clever disguise consisting of (A) sunglasses, (B) a clipboard, (C) a tie, and (D) a scowl: the unquestioned symbols of authority in pre-metahuman America. No one ever bothered me. Thirty years later, I find some stale Coke in glass bottles behind the cash register. I guzzle it down, the first thing I've had to drink in two or three days.
    But of course they're waiting for me. They file in, while I'm there. I don't even try to escape. The semi-blasphemously named Demiurge himself actually comes in. "Hi, John," I say to him. He hates it when you call him by his real name.
    * * *
    "So, wait, let me see if I've got this straight," I said to Blacknight, "The plan is to get something from the CDC that can shut down the metagene and take away their powers?"
    "No," he said, "The real plan is..." He was dead twenty-four hours later.
    * * *
    They had me up on the roof. They'd not gotten around to beating me up yet. Mostly, they were showboating. They're gods without worshipers, after all, and I might be their last chance to impress upon someone how much better than me they are.
    "We know all about your little scheme," Hivemind says in his German accent. Is there still a Germany, I wonder? Is there still even a Europe? No matter. He holds up a diagram I'd torn out of a book, and one of my semi-legible semi-burned handwritten notes. "I can read your thoughts in this. I have read your thoughts in this" and he indicates the paper that I'd so painstakingly pretended heavily at a couple days ago.
    It's possible to record thought waves in organic matter, but the quality of the recording is crappy, and hard to reassemble.
    "Never seen it before," I lie.
    "You lie!" he snaps, "Your thoughts are all over this diagram." I smile—I actually peel back my cheeks and genuinely smile for the first time in who knows how long—because he knows I'm lying, but he doesn't know the nature of my lie, the purpose behind it. That looks good for me. Well, bad for me personally, but good for my overall scheme, anyway.
    "I will kill you for what you did to Clarion," Demiurge says. I steel a quick look at Superjunge, who's wearing sunglasses and avoiding my gaze. Clearly the truth isn't out, and I can't expect any further aid from that quarter.
    "Probably," I say, "But it'll nag you forever that you'll never know how I did it." I'm just stalling for time now, keeping them distracted enough by their hatred of me that they won't notice fifty or sixty refugees aren't anywhere to be seen. I look at Superjunge, "She died horribly, and it took a long time," I say. He looks away.
    "Your plan was to find the metagene blocker, which would take our powers away, and render us mortal. You hoped to find it in the vault here at the CDC," Hivemind says, "It is a puny plan."
    "It is a puny plan," I say, honestly agreeing with him.
    "You will explain this diagram to us," he says, "and how you came to possess such information."
    "Ok, sure. Well, firstly, that diagram is a page I tore out of the Starfleet Technical Manual, published in 1975. I got it in a comic book store in Buckhead. I think it's a first edition, not that it matters now." I'm honestly telling the