SILVER: Acheron (A River of Pain) (The SILVER Series) (16 page)

Until today.

Standing outside it brings back a barrage of memories, and Silver considers turning around … but chances are, her Dodger is nearby. More than half of his butcher shop purchases were made here, and Silver suspects he might be casually employed as part of the pit crew.

Pit crews consist of up to six men, paid to wrangle the Chimera before a fight and to clean up afterward. There are no real entry qualifications, but it helps matters if you have a strong stomach.

Pit crews are essential in the smooth running of the butcher shop below stairs. In Silver’s experience, pit crews are some of the most reliable people you could ever meet in the Fringe District. If their shift started at ten, they’d be there at ten and not a minute later. Reason being, you tend to watch the clock pretty carefully when you’re waiting for your next fix.

That’s also the way most pit crews are paid—in drugs. It’s the one job in the world where being a crackhead or a speed freak is considered career aptitude.

Alice bumps into Silver’s shoulder, not looking where she’s going.

“Are we there yet, or what?”

Silver looks down at her, and immediately loses any appetite she might’ve built up over the last few hours of scavenging for supplies.

Rat’s feet.

Alice is munching on a handful of fried rat’s feet, often sold by peddlers at the street side.

“Where did you get those?”

Alice tips her head to a covered porch across the street where a raggedy, elderly man coughs and sputters into the gutter. So dehydrated he looks practically mummified, his long straggly, greasy hair is tied back with a girl’s scrunchie, and he’s wearing nothing more than some holey socks and a scruffy house coat. The house coat used to be tied around his waist with an old electrical cord, but the cord got chewed by the rats he surrounds himself with, so now it just hangs open.

There he sits, just chillin’ in the breeze, spitting up blood onto the ground.

Silver knocks the rat’s feet out of Alice’s hand and they fall into a puddle, making Alice pout.     

“What’s wrong with you?” Silver chastises her. “I’ve told you before: don’t buy food from anybody with more bodily fluids on the outside than they have left on the inside.”

Thunk.

The old man topples off the porch, quite dead, and lands on his face in the gutter, his legs all akimbo.

Alice lets a moment pass, just to be sure he’s not going to get back up again, then makes a rush for his corpse.

Silver tries to hold her back. “No more feet, please.”

“I traded him for those crispies. I want my stuff back.”

Wondering what in the world Alice had to trade, she grimaces when Alice pulls the scrunchie out of the dead man’s hair and puts it back in her own platinum blonde locks.

“You’re gonna get cooties,” Silver warns her.

Alice doesn’t care.

She nudges Silver with her elbow. “Buy me a drink, will you?” Rhetorical.

She doesn’t wait for an answer and skips ahead of Silver into the butcher shop.

Another moment passes.

Taking a deep breath, Silver enters the bar behind her. In the few short seconds that Alice had the lead on her, she’s already managed to get herself into some sort of trouble, simply by existing. A grotesquely fat man in a stained wife beater and soiled boxer shorts has set his eyes on her, and smacks her ass with a Chimera femur. He stole it from the mouth of a baby Chimera, no more than a month or two old, chained to a table leg. Hungry and teething, the sulking baby quickly starts to whine.

Alice, oblivious to Silver’s presence, reacts instinctively to the harassment and snatches the femur out of the man’s hand. Silver takes one step toward them, anticipating the man’s retaliation and assuming Alice’s vulnerability.

Wrong.           

The fat man gets to his feet, but before he can even make a fist, Alice puts all her might into striking him upside his head with the greater trochanter of the femur, causing him to stumble back against a table. Intending to promote male superiority and dominance, another man approaches her from behind, hoping to catch her off guard.

No such luck.

She trips him off his feet, smashes the shaft of the femur against the table top to create a nice, sharp weapon, and slams her knee down onto his chest, bringing the business end of the femur to his neck.

At which point, she notices Silver.

The bar falls silent, the makeshift throat-slasher still poised in Alice’s hand.

And, then …

CLICK.

The bar manager, a military man with more muscle than sense and a crooked nose, aims a loaded double-barrel shotgun in her direction—his finger already on the trigger.

“Surrender or die.”

It’s not really a choice, but he makes it sound like one. Alice, as if snapping out of a state of mind control, immediately drops the femur and bolts for safe cover behind Silver, though Silver is less than welcoming.

Refusing to comfort Alice in any way at all, Silver’s mind races at a million thoughts per second. Breaking in on that runaway train, the bar manager recognizes her and lowers his weapon.       

“I’ll be damned …”

In return, Silver offers him little more than a weak smile.

Pointing a mutilated finger—the tip of it bitten off by a Chimera almost a decade earlier—toward Alice, the bar manager scowls at Silver.

“That feisty little maggot belong to you?”

“If your clientele keep their hands to themselves, so will she,” Silver assures him, carefully sidestepping around his question. “Got time for a few words?”

Losing interest in the new arrivals, the bar begins to slowly murmur back into life, and the fat prick and the skinny one quietly shuffle away into some other dark corner. The pint-sized baby Chimera lunges at Silver as she walks by the table, and clamps its jaws around the hem of her jeans.

She tries to shake her leg free, but the creature holds on tight. Grabbing it firmly by the scruff of its neck, she gives it a sharp smack on the nose and it lets go. Stunned, it’s too inexperienced to fight back when she picks it up by the scruff and dangles it in the air.

The electronic collar around its neck is marked with an identification number, J-1905; an old Jade’s collar, re-sized and recycled.

Without warning, the animal sneezes. Squeezing its eyes tight shut, the evolved tear glands ooze abstergent serum out onto its face in droplets. Some of the drips project into the air with the force of the sneeze, and land on Silver’s cheeks.

Gross.

She backhands the goo away, sensing Alice at her side. When the Chimera sees Alice, it begins to purr and coo, its little nubbin tail wiggling frantically back and forth.

Silver’s eyebrow darts upward. “A friend of yours?”

“Saboo,” the bartender cuts in. He takes the baby out of Silver’s hand and unclips it from the table. “This little fella’s called Saboo.”

“You’re not serious?”

“You have to take the babies away when they’re only a few weeks old,” he explains. “The trauma sends the sow back into heat again, so we can keep replenishing our stock.”

“You have a breeding pair?”

Altogether too proud of himself, the bar manager, Jake, breaks into a grin as big as his face. “Wanna see?”

That’s an invitation not to be refused. Jake takes them both below stairs to inspect the nuts and bolts of his business, tossing Saboo over the banister rail into a pen containing two more recently weaned babies.

The dirt floor is soiled with urine and feces, and it reeks of decomposition. Poorly fed on scraps and waste, one of the baby Chimera eats shit right out of the asshole of its brother. Silver’s no stranger to a sight like that, but Alice is visibly repulsed by the bestial rim job. So eager to feed, the Chimera paws against its brother’s buttocks, pushing its tongue deep inside the rectum, lapping up all it can.

Sensing Alice lingering too close to the edge of the pen, Silver pulls her back. “Careful.”

Alice shakes her head. “They won’t hurt me.”

“No, but that might.” Silver nods to an electrical box on the wall where crude wires are exposed, hooking the wire pen up to the main electricity supply.

Everything is electrified, mainly for the protection of the people who work down here. Across the room, another shock pen houses two adult Chimera—one female, and one male. The female’s saggy, swollen breasts wobble back and forth and ooze milk out onto the floor, and her enlarged, post-childbirth belly jiggles while the male penetrates her from behind.

After he ejaculates, they both fall over.

Nobody really knows for sure why that happens. Upon reaching sexual climax, male Chimera faint and collapse and take the female down with them. Still skewered onto her partner, the female really has little choice in the matter. He stays unconscious for up to three minutes, during which time he remains erect. A scientist’s best guess is that the delay in withdrawal increases the chance of fertilization, and has therefore proved to be evolutionarily successful.

“She looks a little old to be still knocking out offspring,” Silver notes.

Jake scowls at her. “Is that your medical opinion, doctor?”

Silver throws up both palms. “I’m jussayin’” Gear shift. “What kind of pit crew are you working with these days?”

Jake’s no fool. “Why? Who’re you looking for?”

Silver kicks at a used syringe, half buried in the dirt floor.

“Who says I’m not looking for a job?”

“Bullshit.” Jake snorts at her, lighting up a cigarette. “Maydevine’s got you all taken care of, I’m sure.”

He offers her a cigarette, but she declines.

“He quit the Division,” she imparts.

“No shit?”

“Commissioner Maydevine, now.”

“Fuck me …”

Alice, very much the third wheel in this little reunion, soaks up as much information as she can. Like Silver, Jake is wearing Hunter Division boots, though his are much older. It’s not long before he catches her staring.

“Dishonorable discharge, if you must know.”

“Oh, I wasn’t … I didn’t mean to …”

“I shot a guy in the balls.”

Alice wrinkles up her face. “That doesn’t sound good.”

“The Banishment and Enforcement Council didn’t think so either.” He turns back to Silver. “I never expected to see you in this boat.”

“You heard what happened?”

“The banishment of the Hunter General’s daughter made for pretty big news.” He takes a drag from the cigarette. “I was wondering how long it’d take you to fall back into old habits.”

“That’s not why I’m here.”

“Maybe not today.”

“Who’s on your crew?”

“Got a picture? Let’s speed this up.”

Silver pulls the crumpled paper out of her pocket and hands it to Jake, analyzing his reaction carefully. He seems more interested in the Omega watermark and the Police Division logo than he does in the picture of the Dodger.