Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity by Robert Brockway Read Free Book Online

engaging in that vague and sinister sounding thing -- “business” -- down at one of Hockner Industries’ smaller chem labs. He’d brought Byron along (against both of their wishes) to show him something dull and explain something even duller. He spouted words like “family” and “legacy” and “disappointment,” while Byron fantasized about Romantic poetry, the roar of cannons, and the fragile armor of honor. His father had grown quickly frustrated, and abandoned Byron to the sterile void of a medical waiting room while he yelled about numbers. Byron had stayed all of a few seconds before strolling out the door, into the catwalk markets, in pursuit of new contacts that might mix his strains in the future. That’s where he found Red, chewing on the edge of a worn plastic bench with careful precision. His jaws weren’t grinding with the rabid abandon one would expect from the insane or massively drugged, but rather with a studied and moderated purpose. He would pause every few seconds, turn his head as if lost in consideration, and then return to primly masticating plastic. When he finally noticed Byron staring down at him, perplexed, he matched the gaze with pupils that occupied the entirety of his eyeball. Red put up a finger to preemptively silence Byron, indicating that he would be with him momentarily, then licked the pockmarked surface one final time, and settled back on his heels, calculating something with his hands.
    Byron wasn’t familiar with many drugs besides Presence and Voyeur (he took a low-grade cocktail of nootropics and amphetamines to get through the day, like everybody else), but even he, with his limited knowledge, could identify this as the work of a hallucinogen. A fact which spoke volumes to Byron. Hallucinogens were a black level ingredient, to be prescribed sparingly, if at all. No legal Rx Card would dispense the volume that this man had clearly taken. Which meant that the crouching, muttering fellow currently developing intricate algorithms for proper bench-tasting was either a mixer, a black market dealer, or a resourceful junkie with workarounds for the official dispensary. Any of these options would serve for Byron. He huddled next to the man cautiously, trying to be noticed without being distressing. He was debating how best to break the ice when the man tugged distractedly at Byron’s sleeve and said:
    “Come here. Does this bench taste funny to you?”
    Tangential, rambling revelries, flashbacks, and nostalgic details -- the gas was about to take him. Byron struggled, in a faraway place, to move his arm. He found it impossible. The kick was coming any second now: That ephemeral, delicate, imperceptible shift in being. It was like sinking into a warm pond, and every inch of you that fell below the water-line became water itself; flowed outward, expanding and deconstructing simultaneously. Just before his own body ceased to be a relevant concept, he heard the telltale stuttering hiss of Red’s half-broken door, opening. A deep, abiding panic fluttered through his chest, but the pond seized it, shook it, and returned it to bliss.
    The kick.

Chapter Six
     
     
    Red’s hands were bleeding freely, but he was up and moving again before the pain had time to register. He managed a scant few steps before catching a shoulder against something in the dark, and sprawled into another mound of ragged scrap metal and garbage. When he’d last seen the janitor’s monster, it was picking its way across the mountain of broken toys so slowly that Red had actually smiled with relief. But here in the gloom of the filthy, uneven hallways, each spill cost him precious seconds, and gave them to his pursuer. He could hear the faint pinging of the thing’s spokes climbing over the trash heaps, and the wet pops as it loosed itself from the muck, but it was the silence that tore at him: The quiet times when it wasn’t pulling itself out of or over the debris piles.
    When it was advancing on him,