Dues of Mortality Read Online Free PDF Page B

without her glasses. They had been
foolishly left in the overhead visor of her car, which was sitting in
a repair shop in Ohio City. She only wore the damn things when she
drove anyway. Or wanted to impress a man with a vocabulary longer
than the ingredients on a milk jug.
    Her
apartment building in sight, Glenda blindly crossed a narrow divide
between structures and a rancorous chainsaw of a voice crackled from
the darkened space. “Hey, ma’am, spur some chain a day?”
    She
jumped, trying to catch up with her flesh. The voice belonged to a
man who’d sluiced from the alley, looking like a six-foot smear
of grunge and soot. He wore and abundance of ratty clothes and she
thought he had to be roasting in the late summer heat. He practically
fell on top of her as he skidded forward shaking a large plastic cup
in her face. She was so startled she’d nearly backed into
oncoming traffic.
    “ Ah,
oh my god!” she screamed.
    Coincidentally,
a police patrol car was circling the area and screeched to the scene
with a yawp of the siren as it scraped the curb. An agitated
policeman broke from the car like an enraged bull from its pen.
“Hey,” he yelled.
    The
vagrant paid no attention to the officer and continued shaking his
cup, just a toxic breath from Glenda’s face. “Come, o’
miss. Got some chain? I jus’ nee’ some chain. Please?”
His words were horribly slurred through his desiccated lips.
    Glenda
was about to tell him that she had nothing to spare, but before she
could say a word, the policeman had flattened the vagrant against the
nearest wall. The action loosed an object from somewhere on the
vagrants person and it clacked onto the pavement. It was a hyposhot:
a programmable, oblong, syringe with a retractable self-cleaning
needle. It was about four inches long by an inch wide. When ran over
the skin, it detected a healthy vein a lot like a carpenter's
stud-finder. It was a virtually perfect delivery system for
Halloxiphen (H-ball), which was highly susceptible to overdosing.
    “ H-ball
burnout,” the officer groused. “Jesus! It never ends with
this trash! We flush it and it floats right back to the surface!”
    Glenda
creased openly. How could anybody go near that stuff? From everything
she knew, H-ball was no less than nuclear waste on the brain. A few
years back, when it first started surpassing the meth trade, most
users were intrigued by the high that made your average opiates look
like cough medicine. It was only after the first couple trips that
they became aware of its hardcore reality-warping effects, the potent
hallucinations. Under such circumstances, dosages were easily and
often misjudged, resulting in permanent insanity or death. If an
addict was ever caught with an old
fashioned syringe it was usually sticking out of his
week-old corpse.
    “ Are
you okay, ma’am?” the officer asked Glenda.
    “ Uh,
yes. Yes, I’m fine,” she answered. She could almost swear
the officer was holding back a come-hither. In fact, the only thing
missing, Glenda thought, was the nigh sparkle of his teeth.
    “ You
sure?”
    “ Yes,
yes, I’m sure.”
    The
officer aimed his lips at the vagrants ear. “ You
know, I can’t believe I have to touch you,” he shouted.
“God only knows where you’ve been!” He lilted back.
“On second thought, I think I can smell where you’ve
been.”
    With
the right side of his face scraping the wall, the vagrant’s
barren eyes aligned with Glenda’s. It gave her the prickly
chill of a December wind. The way he looked at her. It was as if his soul was trying to siphon a piece
of hers for its very survival. She stood frozen to the sidewalk. She
didn't move until the officer stowed the vagrant into the back of the
patrol car and it faded from view.
    Minutes
later, Glenda approached her apartment door doing a juggling act with
her grocery bags. She just had to get her mind off the past few days,
she thought. It had all been like a roaring freight train on her
nerves. If