The New and Improved Romie Futch (40 page)

Next, we got down to gathering every last micropad we could find and dumping them into the tank, taking repeated trips through the hallway to explore various offices, stepping over the four writhing human grubs, trying to avoid eye contact. We had to hustle. It was only a matter of time before one of our prisoners busted through a cellophane shackle or gnawed through a muzzle.
They were slowly worming their way toward the entryway that led to the elevator, but we'd set up a blockade of office chairs.

Most of the micropads seemed to be stored in the messy office room where Josh had been working. As Trippy busied himself with their death by liquid, giving the aquarium a good tasing after each fresh immersion, I staked out the rest of the place, roaming through empty rooms, most of which had no furniture, only indentations in the carpet where desks and cabinets had once stood, but I gave all the closets a scan just in case.

I was finishing off the last room, kicking through a pile of empty manila files from some defunct orthodontist office, when I heard a scream. I ran out into the hallway, thinking I'd see one of our prisoners braying, having chomped through his mouthpiece of wadded-up toilet paper and tape. But no, all four captives were still muted worms. And now Trippy was hollering.

“Romie, man, get in here!”

I ran into the computer room, but all I saw was Trippy standing baffled beside the dead tank. And then somebody let rip another bellow, coming from somewhere behind the tank—but there was nobody there.

Trippy slipped behind the tank and frisked the wall with his hands.

“Holy shit, Romie, a secret passageway. Are we in a movie or what?”

Sure enough, an unobtrusive door was embedded into the drywall, wallpapered in the same mint flower print. Trippy found a plastic lever-knob and opened the door. A funky scent wafted out: meaty, septic. The room was windowless, but we could make out the familiar ergonomic shape of a medical recliner, the jerking body of an unfortunate subject strapped into it.

“You fucking assholes!” screamed a familiar voice. “You won't get away with this.”

I groped along the wall, located a light switch, and filled the room with acidic fluorescence.

There was Skeeter Rabin, looking dangerously skinny, flailing against the straps, his huge tarsier eyes bugging with astonishment. When I noted that he wore bloodstained medical scrubs, my heart sank. They'd probably been cutting him open, removing organs, filling his body with bioengineered animal parts, transforming the real Skeeter into something else. I sniffed, detecting a creepy, waxy animal smell in the room—the smell of guts and flesh and taboo inner fluids, mixed with some sharp chemical, that unmistakable tang of disinfected butchery that emanated from supermarket meat departments. There was a lab table in the corner, cluttered with stainless-steel medical instruments.

“Romie, shit, Trippy.” Skeeter was laughing and crying, an astonishing gush of tears dripping over his knobby cheekbones. “Thank you, sweet Jesus. Thank you, sweet God. Get me out of this fucking straitjacket.”

•  •

There we were, three warriors at rest, tucked into the darkest corner of an Applebee's, huddled around a pitcher of Bass and a plate of flaming hot wings, the walls plastered with mass-produced Americana: segregation-era spirit pennants and sports paraphernalia. A fake-vintage photo of three midcentury cheerleaders hovered behind Skeeter's skull-stark head:
Death and the Maidens
. Their tits stuck out like Cold War missiles, ready to nuke Russia to ash. Shouting into megaphones, they cheered Skeeter on as he sucked radioactive sauce from a deep-fried drumette.

“Fucking delicious,” he said, for he hadn't eaten since yesterday afternoon, had been receiving medical downloads all morning:
basic human dissection, gross anatomy, human physiology. He'd changed back into the cutoff jeans and Motorhead tee he'd been wearing when he arrived at Future Solutions United three days ago, five pounds heavier, his brain still bustling with the humanities lore we'd received at the Center.

“Okay,” said Trippy, “now that you've got a dozen wings in your gut, give us the full scoop.”

“If you'll allow me to begin in media res,” said Skeeter.

“Was hoping you'd start with your birth trauma,” said Trippy, “from which, according to Otto Rank, you're still trying to recover.”

“Well, bo, I was actually doing all right,” said Skeeter, “living gratis on my uncle's houseboat in Santee, trying to finish a novel before my stipend ran out, flirting with this divorcée who ran the marina, no Internet, no phone, just me and my laptop—no distractions but these loud-ass Jet Skiers who do stunts out in Cantey Bay every weekend.” Skeeter grinned. “That and the increasingly frequent appearances of Kelly Ann Flemming, née Dubard.”

“Aw, shit,” said Trippy.

“Get this,” said Skeeter, “just last Thursday I was chilling in the vastness of Lake Marion, sipping the wine Kelly buys by the crate, classic rock blaring from a half-rusted deck speaker, watching Kelly work her yoga-toned musculature as she reeled in a ten-pound catfish. Blue bikini. Yellow sun. Border collie napping in the shade. Kelly and I couldn't stop smiling at each other. I felt reckless, engulfed by dangerous joy, but goddamn: sometimes you just got to close your eyes and go for it.”

“Word,” I said, thinking of PigSlayer.

“And there was also the novel,” said Skeeter, “tucked deep inside me, a flame guttering in the wreckage of my life—not just the plot and the characters but a bona fide vision.”

“What's it about?” I asked.

“Don't want to spoil it by talking about it yet,” said Skeeter, though he did reveal that the idea had stormed his brain shortly after he'd settled into the houseboat, two days after he'd first met Kelly, that first misty morning on the lake.

“Coffee cup in hand,” said Skeeter, “gazing out into ethereal fog, I half expected a fairy hand to pop out of the water and hand me Excalibur.”

“All this time,” said Trippy, “and no static from Morrow and his goons?”

“Just the occasional migraine,” said Skeeter, “but no voices or anything like that.”

“Must've been the water,” said Trippy, who'd spent his last month living signal-free with his cousin on Daufuskie Island, in a flood zone notorious for its bad cell reception.

“I was feeling cautiously optimistic for once,” said Trippy, “normal enough to take jaunts to Charleston to visit an old flame. But then one day, ten minutes after I left Lorraine's house, as Romie already knows, Dr. Morrow tased me in a Best Buy parking lot.”

Skeeter shook his head.

“Same here,” he said, “but it was Blue Bay Hardware and Feed. I'd driven over there to buy kibble for Kelly's dog.”

According to Skeeter, as he struggled to stuff the jumbo bag into his trunk, a black Ford Focus eased into the space beside him. Seconds later he felt every muscle in his body tighten inexplicably, as though he'd jumped into an arctic lake, and then a pulsing heat penetrated his bones. He twitched. He fell, flailed upon the asphalt, and then he couldn't move. A hoodied hipster squatted over him, pricked him with a jet injector. He woke up in the room we'd found him in, strapped into a medical recliner.

“And there was our old friend Dr. Morrow, examining my brain hologram just like old times, except that I was shrieking
to high heaven. But he just sat there, pretending like he couldn't hear me.”

Skeeter had kept screaming as he descended into that familiar
BAIT
-download well and a childhood memory rose from the obscurity of a frontal lobe: the tragic death of Godzilla, his pet iguana, who'd passed away when Skeeter was ten.

“Thirty minutes later,” said Skeeter, “they had me shackled to a lab table, dissecting a fetal pig.”

“And you were totally knowledgeable about pig anatomy?” asked Trippy.

“Pretty much.”

“How'd they make you do it?” I asked.

“Well, let me tell you, bo: Josh stood there holding a Taser the whole time, bored shitless, thumbing his micropad with his free hand, snorting over E-Live posts, looking up every minute to make sure I stayed on task. Ashamed to say that after recovering from the horror, I sort of got into it, wanted to see if the diagrams and techniques in my head jibed with the real world. Plus, what else was I gonna do with the next hour, chained up in an empty room? And the pig was long dead, pickled and shrink-wrapped. But when they amped it up to primates, I couldn't handle it.”

“Uh.” Trippy took a tense sip of beer. “Dead or alive?”

“The first one was dead, some kind of rhesus monkey, but not pickled. Then they brought in a live one. I could hear it shrieking in the cage in the next room. Course, it was anesthetized when they spread it out on the table, but that didn't make it any easier. I flat out refused to do it, and then that little shit Josh tased me like it was nothing. Next time around, I was more cooperative. Proud to say the monkey successfully recovered from open-heart surgery.”

“You Ironic Man?” said Trippy.

“I'm serious. Not the most seamless surgery ever, and there was nothing pathological in the monkey's heart. I didn't have to
do
anything to it, just incise the chest, saw through the sternum, spread the two halves with a retractor, survive the freakishly violent sight of a raw heart beating in open air, wire the sternum back together, and stitch up the incision.”

“Fuck,” I said. “How you know the monkey survived?”

“Heard it moaning in the next room as it came to, and then they took it away. Just this morning they started up with the human anatomy shit. And I praise the Lord God Almighty—don't laugh at me, you agnostic motherfuckers—that you two arrived before they made me . . .”

Skeeter shuddered, took a big gulp of beer. He gazed at our faces like he could see beneath our skin, scoping those delicate muscles that raised our brows, wriggled our noses, and jerked our lips open. Like he could view tiny valves fluttering inside our eyeballs, ossicles beating within the arcane canals of our ears, mucus-smeared cilia wavering like windswept grass inside our nasal passages.

“But it's all over, dog,” said Trippy, a note of forced optimism in his voice.

“Hope so,” said Skeeter, shuddering like he was trying to shake a ghost off his back.

“Speaking of that,” I said, “who's gonna make the call?”

Skeeter had wanted to leave our prisoners taped and bound, insisting they'd bust free on their own; I was undecided; but Trippy had insisted that we find an archaic pay phone somewhere and report a burglary, just in case they didn't. That way the police would show up and make sure those bastards didn't starve to death, make sure we weren't on par with common murderers, no better than the corporate goons who'd tortured us.

“I'll do it,” said Trippy. “Since I know my way around Atlanta. There's an old bowling alley not too far away: still got a functioning pay phone outside if my memory serves.”

When our entrées arrived, we dug into mounds of grilled meat and greasy carbs, which took us back to the Center cafeteria, when the whole
BAIT
crew had hashed it out over tots and chicken tenders. Al and Vernon were still AWOL, though Trippy had talked to Irvin that one time.

“Had his number in the phone I threw into a pond,” said Trippy. “Along with yours, Romie. Bet you he's doing fine. Maybe he got out before Morrow installed whatever he's been tracking us with.”

“I pray that the connection's now busted,” said Skeeter.

“Even if they got our data stored in the cloud,” said Trippy, “bet you we set them back so far it'd be hell to get started again.”

“Totally,” I said. “They appeared to be operating on a low budget, no longer funded by a mega-conglomerate like BioFutures.”

“But don't forget what the contract said,” said Trippy. “They can sell their research to the highest bidder. Sit on it for years until the market's ripe. Speaking of contracts, must be something in the fine print that covers the shit they've been doing to us. Otherwise, why wouldn't they just get new subjects, nab some homeless people?”

“Also cost to consider,” said Skeeter. “We've already got the hardware installed in our skulls, pretty much forever, I reckon.”

My cell rang. It was Frisky Fish Marina. I solemnly slid Skeeter the phone. He took the call, spoke to Kelly Ann Flemming in soothing tones as he hurried outside. He had not told her about his stint at the Center, and she was likely freaked by his three-day disappearance, the discovery of his abandoned Corolla at Blue Bay Hardware and Feed.

“What the fuck will he tell her?” I asked Trippy.

“Hey, hon,” said Trippy, “I've been receiving anatomical
BAIT
downloads and performing compulsory surgeries on baboons, what's up with you?” Trippy wheezed out a half-assed laugh and shook his head mournfully. “Shit's convoluted. How to explain it to the woman in your life?”

And then I told Trippy about PigSlayer.

“For all I know,” I said, “this woman—if she is a woman—could be in cahoots with BioFutures, keeping tabs on me all this time by worming her way into my heart.”

“You'll want to keep an eye on her either way,” said Trippy. “Right?”

“True.”

He told me he was in a semirelationship with Lady L, who went by Lorraine now and had a master's degree in public health. While delighted by his new smarts, she was also baffled, particularly since he had no diplomas to speak of.

“Told her I was dabbling in online education. Doing free coursework with Academic Earth, knowledge for knowledge's sake.”

We both sniggered fiercely at this and then fortified ourselves with fresh gulps of beer.

“Reach rock bottom of your life,” I said, “place body and brain at the disposal of a corrupt research organization, get your mind tricked out by a mad scientist, and still, a man wants companionship.”