Hours later, Horatia walked in on them, took one look—then walked back out, twice as fast. But she had to come back, eventually. All her stuff was there.
Rice sat in the dark, alone, ‘til she heard the key in the lock, but didn’t bother to turn around when the door opened. “Where’ve you been?”
“Does it matter?” Horatia sat down, heavily. Then said, after a long pause: “You…listen, I think you need to stop. Doing…things. Like that. You need to, Rice.”
Rice let out a breath which—even to her—sounded more like a sigh, especially in context.
“…I don’t think I can,” she replied, at last.
“Why not?” No answer. “And more to the point—Jesus, Rice, what the hell? Pegging some straight thug in the middle of our goddamn living room? Why would he even go along with that?”
Rice’s hands rose in a flourish of dismissive disbelief. “I don’t know, man—I mean, that is a little weird, isn’t it? Maybe he just likes having somebody tell him what to do.” But now it was Horatia’s turn to sigh, sharp and angry, and that finally made Rice look at her directly, laying on the charm. “Hey, c’mon, though—it didn’t mean anything, ‘Rache, you know that. Not really. Not like—”
“—Like us? And I’m just supposed to, what, take that one on faith, because you tell me to? You lie for fun!”
“Not about that,” Rice snapped back, without even thinking it over first. Which, once again, was…
(Surprising. Uncomfortable. Inconvenient.)
…typical. Especially coming from somebody who’d never, ever, in her entire life, known when to leave well enough alone.
“‘Scuse me,” Rice finally said, softly, as though lack of volume alone could really negate the reality of what she’d just let slip. Then walked out herself, shutting the door in Horatia’s still-gaping face, and prowled downtown Toronto’s increasingly empty streets until dawn.
—
Between the rising did you say you loved me/Uh…maaaaybe tension, Rice’s increasingly permanent crazy-high and physical deterioration, and Horatia’s insomniac cure-hunting mania, DD took on far more of the business end of reA sales than anyone had really planned for—and un-higher-educated as he was, he certainly knew how to move product. Too well, it turned out. But with Horatia too desperate for formula fixit funds to care, Rice too stoned, and DD just too plain greedy, their peripheral awareness of Toronto’s response to the duster phenomenon—the reappearance of surgical masks as a fashion accessory; who health warnings triggering a free-fall economic collapse; ever-more-frequent and deadly street riots, whenever some poor calcified bastard went up in public and set off a crowd-wide bug-out—remained just that: peripheral, at best.
When she thought about it at all, Rice could only chalk the authorities’ helpless flailing up to her own personal conviction: smart just made you stupid in different ways. As long as the who remained stubbornly certain it was a viral or bacteriological vector they were looking for—subconsciously influenced by five decades of movies, for all Rice knew—they’d never put two and two toget
her with the cops on the reA drug, barring some lucky (or unlucky) break.
So (un)life went on, work vs. play vs. some arcane combination of the two—nothing Rice couldn’t work around, just business as usual. Until the day it wasn’t, any of it.
—
“Yo, cook-bitches!” DD shouted as he came through the loft’s door, loaded for bear with a gun in either hand, and all tricked out like some pimpy Elvis from Hell, otherwise. “Grab your crap, we’re on the run!”
Rice, thankfully fully-dressed this time, was checking her LavaLife profile on Horatia’s laptop, trying to figure out whether adding “vitality-challenged” to her profile would be more a draw than a drawback. “What you mean ‘we,’ White Power man?” she asked. “Better yet, where’s your posse?”
DD found Horatia’s camping-sized rucksack, and got busy shoving the wads of cash which lined his ridiculous suit inside it. “Uh—dead, I guess. Big Trey started givin’ me shit about…shit, so we drew down, and I took his fuckin’ head off. Then the fuckin’ cops show up, but they got, like, Feds with ‘em and everything. Plus these other people started breakin’ in, all dressed in plastic bags and crap…”
“The CDC broke up your firefight?” Horatia had just emerged from the bathroom; as Rice stared: “Prime Minister called them in on Monday, to help with the who initiative. Don’t you even vaguely try to keep up, these days?”
“That’d be a ‘no.’” To DD: “So how the hell did you make it out?”
DD didn’t miss a beat. “Threw a lighter into the main cook tanks and booked out the back. You need to do the same, and fast.”
“Threw a—that was you?” Rice remembered, now—one more sound-bite, between videos on Loud; another (supposed) meth lab gone up in smoke, adding a boost to the simmering dog-day smog mix of August-end. “Yo, Dieter. Tell me you didn’t just blow our entire backstock of reA into the fucking atmosphere.”
At her tone, DD finally looked up, blank: Yeah, why? “You can make more, though, right?”
Rice and Horatia locked eyes, equally amazed—and for just a moment, a little of the old shared smugness came back, that communal telepathic prayer: Oh Christ, save me from fucking morons. And bitter as realizing just how stupid some people could be always was, it was oddly sweet, too. In context.
They packed fast, leaving most of Horatia’s equipment behind, and ended up in a “safe house” that had started life as DD’s first crack-house: no power, no phone, no cable. Its very walls themselves so saturated with chemicals even the air seemed to itch. There Rice lay in bed staring up at the ceiling, increasingly sleep-less, while DD snored obliviously on one side of her and Horatia kick-moaned through a nightmare on the other. Her once-talented tongue gone cold, stiff and silent in her own mouth, like something already dead.
So two or three weeks passed, long enough for August to collapse into a cold and rainy September, as Horatia continued to work furiously towards some sort of cure with what little Rice and DD earned on their last few reA sales. With none of them talking about what they’d do when the stock finally ran out, or how Rice—deprived of her sustaining spackle-baths—was getting drier by the day, let alone what the ever-heavier presence of soldiers and CDC mobile clean-labs in the streets of Toronto might mean…
Around 3:00 a.m., Rice’s aimless wandering took her up to Parliament, where a closed pawnshop’s window display TV had been left on, tuned to CityPulse 24. Pausing to watch a “Rewind” segment from 1987 on how to shampoo your dog, she couldn’t quite avoid reading the caption-snippets of news running beneath, words fading steadily in and out: