Twisted City by Jeremy Mac Read Free Book Online

sexually, earning her the roles by Vincent Maddick himself as
Madam Jizell, M.D.
    She
examines Bruno’s shoulder.
    “What
happened?”
    “I
got shot by an arrow.”
    “And
your face?”
    “A
dog attacked me.”
    “I’m
not even going to ask.”
    She
goes to a desk and opens the top drawer, plucking out cotton swabs, gauze,
iodine, and surgical tape. In the beginning she was fully stocked with this
kind of stuff and much more, including a plethora of pain killers, but lately
she’d noticed a significant dent in her supplies.
    The
shoulder wound is no longer bleeding so she wets a towel and wipes off the
dried blood from around the wound. She takes a cotton swab and dunks it in the
iodine, then swabs deep inside the wound while pouring a little more iodine
over it. Bruno clinches his teeth and hisses; it hurts worse than getting shot
with the arrow did. After it is clean she packs the wound with ointment and
dresses it with a couple of layers of gauze taped to his skin. It takes a
little longer to clean and patch his face, it is badly
chewed from the dogs canines, needing several stitches but being less painful
as the cleaning of the shoulder wound had been.
    “I
would tell you to rest up a while but I have the feeling you either won’t or
can’t,” she says to Bruno. “So with that being said, just try to keep the
wounds as clean as possible.”
    “And
I’ll see you in the next few days, eh,” Pan says, a suggestive grin curving his
thin lipped mouth, eyebrows dancing up and down.
    “I’m
sure,” Jizell says.
    Pan
and Bruno live together in the same pad, and their own physical appearance
reflects their living quarters: Squalor. It is really nothing more than a place
to keep their personal items and to lay their heads. Each packs a few supplies
and Bruno snatches another one of his many clubs. On their way out of Maddick,
Pan recruits five men to go with them, under Vincent’s strict orders, and then
they leave into the vast city of Claxton on the hunt for a boy named Mongoose
and his dog Max.

13
     
    It
is in the upper area of the northern most end in an
office building. Lathan has been there only once before, years ago, but he
remembers it well. He is sure that James knows of the building as well, may
have had clients who’d worked there in fact, but it is no business of James’
nor anyone else’s what his interest is with the building. At
least not for now. Which is why he didn’t ask about
the building, what condition it is in, and if it has residency but even if so
he is positive that what he is after will still be safely intact.
    It
is the last thing he thought about before dozing off into a long, deep,
dreamless sleep. He doesn’t have many of those. He usually slumbers in broken
naps and awakes after an hour or two from a distressing dream or from the odd feeling
of being watched by someone who isn’t even in the room or sometimes he awakes
with a start for reasons he cannot understand. It’s become routine, something
he’s grown accustomed to.
    The
next morning he awakes to Taya banging relentlessly on his door, bright eyed
and bushy tailed.
    He
uses the bucket of water that was brought to him yesterday by the buildings
water boy to freshen up, dresses, and then leaves with Taya.
    They
hop in a cycle rickshaw and Taya enthusiastically takes Lathan on a tour of the
town. It is built off of what was salvageable from the city; food, clothing,
furniture, anything beneficial. Books were transferred from one of the city’s
biggest libraries to an office building here, bringing in truckloads of
bookshelves and refurbishing the entire floor to create their own library.
Antiques and artwork were also salvaged and is now preserved and on display
within the same office building, on the second floor, serving as the towns art
museum.
    With
a handful of medical doctors on call three floors of another building were
redesigned to create a hospital equipped with enough medical supplies and intel to treat