The Bodies We Wear by Jeyn Roberts Read Free Book Online

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    Gazer ignores me when I tell him I’m heading out. He’s curled up by the fireplace again, his nose in a book. How can he sit there night after night and read his life away? All he does is live inside those books. He hardly ever goes outside. He has no friends. There must be fire in his heart too. I know his past. I know what they did to his wife.
    How tiring it must be to be him.
    If I were him, I’d hunt down each and every one of them and take their lives slowly and methodically.
    I wouldn’t waste my time reading, that’s for sure.
    It’s raining as usual as I slip out the door and into the night. Drizzle hits my face and I tilt my head up appreciatively. My training session was particularly rough tonight and the rain is refreshing. It cools my burning muscles and actually wakes me up a bit. I first started training with Gazer when I was eleven. I used to get so exhausted I’d sit down and cry. Then I learned about the healing property of rain. When I went outside and stood in the middle of the dilapidated-church parking lot, the coolness of the rainwater would wash away some of that pain. I’d stand in the parking spot marked reserved for minister and feel the exhaustion and soreness drip off my body and into the ground beneath my feet.
    Heam was invented when I was five years old. It was created by two chemistry students in a university in Switzerland who were looking for something that resembled crystal meth, LSD, and Ecstasy. They wanted a new drug that would be easy, trendy, exciting—something that anyone with a little background in mixing chemicals could create cheaply and effectively. What they got was Heaven’s Dream, or Heam for short.
    Heam works in ways that no drug has ever worked before. It targets both the brain and the spinal cord, attacking the central nervous system, and breaking apart everything that allows us to live. Within five minutes after someone takes the drug, the body begins to shut down. Breathing grows shallow, the heart beats slower, body temperature drops, and the body enters a catatonic state. Shortly after, all communication between brain and body ceases and the person ingesting the drug … dies. The victim will be dead anywhere from two to ten minutes before the brain and body kick back into action. If you look at it in computer terms, it’s as if the body goes through a reboot. Everything shuts down and then starts up again. Although it’s been tested repeatedly on lab rats and chimpanzees around the world, scientists still don’t quite understand how this drug does this. There are plenty of theories but no real answers.
    The dangerous thing about Heam is that not all users become addicted. There have been cases of people dropping once or twice and then never trying it again. For many users, there are no side effects. No withdrawals. No consequences.
    But there is always the risk. The next level.
    For people who do get addicted, it is a never-ending world of pain. They completely cease to function in the normal world. They will do anything to get Heam: steal, sell their bodies, even kill. They are unable to keep jobs. Family means nothing to them. Babies have died, forgotten in their cribs. Spouses tear each other apart for one more hit.
    Addicts live in a semi-delirious state between the real world and the heaven their mind shows them. They can live this way for years. But their bodies grow weaker. Their hair starts to fall out. Nothing else matters, except scoring their next hit. There is no solid data on long-term Heam abusers. The drug is still only twelve years old.
    Scientists do know a few things. Statistics suggest that one out of a hundred users overdoses. Their body never reboots and they remain dead. With proper medical attention, the occasional overdose victim can be brought back, but with grave consequences. Like myself, they end up with battle scars in the form of red spiderweb veins across the chest and shoulders and an addiction to end all addictions.