Vicious Circle Read Online Free PDF Page B

across Pen as she started to speak again. “We think she may be dead, but we can’t get in to find out. Ditko is . . . frenzied, in a hypermanic state. And as you can see he’s violent. I think I’m going to have to gas him.”
    Pen wailed at the word, and I wasn’t surprised. The gas Webb was talking about is a mild nerve toxin—a tabun derivative called OPG , developed at Porton Down for military use but now illegal on any battlefield in the world. Ironically it had turned out to have therapeutic effects if you used it in tiny doses on Alzheimer’s sufferers: it blocks the breakdown of acetylcholine in the brain, slowing memory loss. Then someone found out that zombies could use it in much larger doses to do more or less the same thing—slow down the inevitable breakdown of their minds as the processes of butyric decay turned complex electrochemical gradients into rancid sludge. So now the gas was legal in psychotherapeutic contexts, and actively recommended for the dead and undead—a loophole that still had half the civil rights lawyers in the world yelling in each other’s face. The fact that it had sedative side effects just added to the confusion.
    Using it on Rafi was a spiky proposition in any case, though. He was no zombie: just an ordinary living man with a tenacious passenger. And if Asmodeus was in the ascendant, it would take a big hit even to slow him down, which would mean that the side effects would be that much more painful and extreme. Some of them might even be permanent.
    “Let me go in first,” I suggested. “Maybe I can calm him down with some music.”
    Webb huffed and puffed, but unlike the big bad wolf he was actually very keen to avoid having the house blown down. He was looking for a way out of this that caused the minimum damage to life and property—especially property—and he had enough sense to see that I was probably it. After all, this wasn’t the first time Rafi had played up: I’d proved my usefulness many times before this. “I’m not legally responsible for you,” he reminded me. “You signed a waiver, and I’ve still got it on file. You go in there on your own recognizance, and if you’re hurt—”
    “You’ll deny all knowledge of my activities,” I finished, nodding. “And you won’t put a penny in the collection box. Let’s just take that shit as read, shall we?”
    I turned my back on him and took a step toward Rafi’s cell.
    “I’m coming with you,” Pen yelled, and she pushed her way between the two nurses, who weren’t sure anymore what their brief was. I put up my hand to block her. “Better not, Pen,” I muttered. “Asmodeus needs me alive, and that’s the only thing I’ve got going for me here. Like you said, it’s not Rafi. He won’t hold back when he sees you: he may even take a smack at you out of pure spite.”
    She hesitated, still not convinced. I left her there and went forward, hoping she’d see sense: there was really no time to argue about it while I could see Webb plutzing and quivering his way toward ordering a gas attack. I gave the door a shave-and-a-haircut knock as I went through. It would probably have been safer to take a peek round the edge of the doorway first, but I was going to have to go in anyway: this way I went in with a certain amount of panache, even if I came out again on my arse with my head flying separately.
    Stepping over the threshold meant going from carpeted floor to naked metal: an amalgam of steel and silver in the ratio of ten parts to one. It’s there behind the plasterboard of the walls, too, shining out in a few places where Rafi has punched his fist through in a temper. My feet boomed hollowly on the metal plate, announcing my arrival even more emphatically than the knock. But Rafi didn’t seem to notice me in any case: he was on the far side of the bare cell, kicking savagely at a sprawled form on the floor. Not the nurse, thank God: she was lying motionless just inside the door, a spidery