Free Clinic

This is a sample of what my latest novel looks like. Please read and enjoy. This was originally written as a saga, posted in small chapters for my sister, not unlike the way The Hobbit and Lord of The Rings was generated for J.R.R. Tokien's son. It later became a string and now, after revision, is up for publication.

Enjoy.

My best,

M.

CHAPTER ONE:

July 4, 2059 New Orleans, LA

THE RABID BOY AND WHAT THAT MEANT

It was the fourth of July and the only fireworks in the sky were the same ones had been going up and away sporadically for the last five weeks or so. You got so used to the rockets booming up into the night sky and others falling down in big fire piles that after a while you quit looking for shelter. Hell, there wasn’t much you could call shelter left anymore. After all the wards were either torched or flooded, the place was just a f****** beach-front lunar landscape for the most part anyway, at least top-side. All the noise was just that; it was just a bunch of loud b*******, like the voices coming from the speakers mounted on the body collection tanks that caravanned the streets and floated up and down the canals every day from sun-up to sun-down.

“The dead must be placed in the proper bins to avoid the spread of disease. Failure to comply will result in the sterilization of the area. The dead must be placed in the proper bins...failure to comply...” Over and over again until you just wanted to stick your fingers in your ears and hum. Once, I saw a guy actually throw himself into a proper bin. I can’t say as I could blame him. He had The Rash and looked pretty well f*****. They sterilized the s*** out his bin, my guess.

My work—the evening work, folks call it—pretty much sucked; picking up trinkets from the sterilized piles of charred bones wasn’t exactly fun, but I could get a few water chits and some MurREes for my mama when I turned my bag out at the Homesec clinic. Nothing was free there. Those folks were about as generous as they could be, my guess. And they did as much good as they could, given they were Homesec and had cellphees stapled to their heads.

“Hey, Sport!” called a scrounger looking guy, what looked like a mangy alco dew-boy from across the way as I was humping back toward the sixth ward fringe.

“Hey you, sport! Spare a MurREe? I got fresh water!”

I looked him over and thought that maybe he was a real dew-boy. There weren’t many of the good ones left. There were a lot of poiseners out there, but he had what looked like the real water catcher’s gear on his head and rain jacketed shoulders—looked like a Homesec stamp on it. He seemed legit to me.

“I got a couple of choco packs and I’ll firmlike trade for a half liter,” I said. “And I ain’t no sport, so sterilize that s***.”

He shrugged. “Didn’t mean nothin’ by it.”

Patting his side pouches, he said, “How about a two fifty? One choco pack? I can’t swing a halfie ‘till tomorrow morning.”

I thought about it hard. Good coldclear was tougher than MurREes these last few days, weeks.

“Swig?” I asked.

He didn’t look happy about that.

“Taste. That’s it.”

“’Kay. Deal.”

He reached into one his thigh cubbies and pulled out an old plastic dram thimble. From a decanting spigot up his left sleeve, near his thumb, he dripped a little of what looked like coldclear into it and handed it to me. I sniffed it and it seemed neutral enough. Don’t get me all sorts of wrong here: I was worried. I said to myself, who knows why, what the hell and downed it. Quicktime I was thinking that it was probably the worst mistake I’d made in my second dec of life.

I suddenly found myself face down, paralyzed; I was breathing bubbles of white muck that had quicktime filled my mouth, nose and throat.

“Sorry, Sport. I’ll be taking your bag now,” he growled, reaching down.

I looked at his face and saw bold, red-faced realtime happy surrounding bright blue, yellowed-whites eyes. Not only was the sonofabitch a poisener, he also had The Rash. I could smell it on him. I wanted to swear again, but I was on my way down.

The thought, How could I have been so stupid, slapped at me and my quicktime leaking realtime.

And then I wasn’t there anymore.

Next I knew, I was in a fire fight. I was hearing the howling of whizzers, those cutting mechs, ripping stuff to shreds as they went on their straightup path of chew, chew, chew. There was a steady ack! ack! ack! of small arms fire and then I was being grabbed up like a sack of barricade sand and tossed into a hmmvee and there were doctors, real doctors!, stapling me into a net and then I saw body parts explode like toy soldiers with fire crackers stuffed in their a****...and then I was nearly out. The last thing I remember was one of the medics (a doctor? He had the tattoo!) I was throwing my bag on my belly cubby and turning around, flash gun drawn, shooting out into the big, busy night.

Same day, different time...

“Wish it were simply rabies, Phil. He got foamed with something that should have killed him.”

I was back. But where? I smelled antiseptic and incense or something like that. I kept my eyes closed and listened realtime hard. My papa had told me about how important playing possum could be.

A gentle male voice, quiet but strong: “He’s coming out of it, Doc.”

“Don’t use that honorific, Phil. He won’t understand.”

A female voice. Gruff, shortime, but soft and teacher like.

When I opened my eyes I was looking at what I thought was God Herself. She was gorgeous: long dark hair tied into a tail, blue eyed, slightly Asiatic, almost pixie like face. She had hasty like rolled her sleeves down. Why?

The guy was tall, older, with gray hair and lots of scars down one side of his face: whizzer scars, my guess. He was a veteran, had to be. I saw what I thought was the remnants of a doctor’s tat just over his left eye, but I couldn’t tell through the scarring.

“What’s your name, young man?” the girl doc asked me. She had a Southern American accent, sweet like honey. Her eyes just sucked you in...

For the life of me, I couldn’t remember who the f*** I was for a couple of nanos. I just stared at her, swimming in those coldclear blue eyes, ignoring the realtime clump of make-up over her left eyebrow.

“Are you a mutee?” she asked gently. She amslanded me, then, and I thought I could get lost in those hands; their smoothtime movement in space was speaking with an accent I recognized straightup, from my childhood in Baton Rouge. I almost attempted to ‘sland back, but I found my voice instead.

“Are you God?” I croaked stupidly. I think I blushed. I can’t say I was realtime right, just then.

Her smile made it all good, though. And the underside girl-like laughter that followed nearly melted me.

“No,” she said. “My name is Katarina. Most of the folks around here call me Cat.”

So my savior is a cat, I thought, still not there realtime.

“I’m Sky. Sky Naysmith,” I managed. I wanted very badly to stroke her to see if she purred.

“Well, Sky, you know you got P’d, right?”

“S***,” I muttered and nodded. It hurt to nod.

Again, she smiled. “No. You made it through. And the Rasher was captured and, well, sterilized. You know what that means?”

I blinked a few times, trying to get the weird cotton crap out of my eyeballs, wondering how old she thought I was, for Falthwell’s sake.

“Good,” I said. “Did you get my bag back?”

She and the guy, Phil my guess, exchanged glances and then nodded, weird-like, at the same time.

“Do you know what rabies is, Sky?”

“Tricky question, right? Of course! Some kinds of animals used to get it before they sterilized them all. Now it’s called the foaming death or some s***, and only veterans are s’posed to get it.”

The Phil guy with the scars suddenly got all intense-like and looked switch-blade sideways at me. He hacked a part of lung up and then piped: “Son, you looked rabid to us when we found you. Your little thief pal toxed you up with a strain of it and you turned out to be immune. Do you understand that word? Immune?”

I thought, Well yeah! I may be black but I’m not brain dead...that meant that I couldn’t get sick from it, and I have antibodies and...well. my papa had explained all that to me when I was in my first half dec.

I didn’t have to follow that badger too far down the h*** before suddenly s*** started to make more sense than I wanted it to.

“You guys didn’t save my ass by accident, did you?”

There was another one of those looks between my new very cute female Doc and the veteran thug with the scars. I somehow knew that that one big look spelled serious big change for me and my not so tender eighteen year old body. I was straightup sure, for a fact, that whatever changes were up and coming would have nothing to do with post puberty growing pains. They would abso-fricking-lutely have nothing what so ever to do with that at all.

CHAPTER TWO:

July 5, 2059 New Orleans, LA

SKY’S ON FIRE

What I didn’t understand was a lot. Straightup. What I did know was that Katarina wasn’t right somehow and I also figured that the older whizzer-faced Phil was probably a Doc, too, and was just as likely hell-bent on not letting me on to it. I mean, for Falthwell’s sake, even I knew why Docs had to keep themselves invisible.

C’mon! There ain’t any secret there: the Docs were hunted like animals since the 30’s and were either put to work for the FED—into slavery, my Mama says, not to work—and forced to do all kinds of unspeakable crap for Homesec in the name of The People and For The Greater Public Health, or they were killed flat-out. I know all this for real: my father was a doctor, as was his father, and both of them died because of what they knew how to do. I knew all about The Rash, The Triages and the spoil-sport bombs by the time I was ten and I know now how messed up the world is because of Homesec and the Free Euro-American Democracies and all their smart little evil toys.

What really sucked was my only bloodline brother got his brain ate up by The Rash when he was my age and my two older step sis’s were slammered during the first Triage. My mom says my steppop got whacked during the first round of spoil-sports, but I think he’s still alive out there, somewhere. He told me, when I was just a punk, that he was an immune. Go figure, I thought.

So there I was (somewhere underground near the sixth ward division or the mutee parish, my guess) either being held hostage or being saved from sterilization by two folks who seemed to me to be two fugitive Docs. That Doc, Katarina, carbonated my hormones something fierce but her whizzer-scratched friend gave me the serious creeps. And I just knew something was big up for me from the way they were eyeballing each other, pretending I wasn’t paying any attention. I was waiting for a fake smile and a nogo-stick in my back any minute.

But that didn’t happen. What happened next threw me all sideways.

I was sitting up on the same stainless as I woke up on lying flat out. I hadn’t paid that much thought to realworld since I’d come to and what I saw was less what I expected: I was in a white room with six sides and there was a glarelamp up above me—one of those kinds that could be moved around, like in the old d-vids about docs’ death chambers—and there didn’t seem to be any tech anywhere. Katarina and whizzer face still stood there blocking me, hands visible and not sneaky like, in front of what looked like the only door in or out.

The Katarina Doc said to me, “Sky, we’re going to ask you a few questions. If you don’t want to answer, you don’t have to. If you want us to put you back top-side, we will. Do you understand?”

Whizzer face looked at me dead calm, creepy like.

“’Kay,” I said. I was still kind of waiting for some kind of tech to come popping out of the walls. But again something about the fem Doc’s voice made me feel all sorts of ‘kay, cool.

“Sky, do you remember the last time you were sick?” she asked.

I had to think about that one real hard. I’d been P’d more than once and once I got f***-all boozed up and had to be toted home by some shareware buds. (Day after that, I was real sick). I never boozed up that hard since. But I think I got her wave.

“You mean V sick? Like the Hoop or Pig’s Eye? Nah. Never had a V that I know of.” I couldn’t remember ever getting any V. Her asking me that sent off a couple of flares in my head. I’d never thought about it before. But I’d never had a V, I was sure. I was guessing I was like my step-pop. An immune.

She gave one of those eyeballings to whizzer face and he seemed to nod. I wasn’t tracking.

“Any of your buds get V sick, Sky?” asked whizzer face. His voice was calm, real serious and deep, but not so bad.

“You mean that I can remember? S***! I don’t know. I’ve only had a few in the ward and most of ‘em was insiders, like. You know? I didn’t roam much. My evening work buds stayed to themselves for the most part. We didn’t share much. Business is business, right?”

Whizzer face didn’t seem realtime happy with that. He made a motion toward one of the six walls and some kind of tech came out of the white wall. I knew it! I was a gonner.

But it was just a stool. He grabbed it and pulled it up close to where I was sitting.

“Sky! Listen up.” He pulled the stool closer, sat on it and looked up at me.

“We are not here to hurt you, bud. We’re here to tell you a little bit more about you than you know or probably want to know right now. But this is very important to a lot of folks, including some of your buds and your ma and to your step-pop especially.”

That was all it took to light my head total on fire. That last, “to your step-pop especially.” I knew he was alive!

“You knew my step-pop? Well, he’s dead,” I said, waiting for hope.

No more eyeballing between Doc Cat and this guy. Whizzer face smiled at me, looked me square and what I saw in his eyes sent me sideways, like I said. I could see it.

“Oh yes, Sky. I knew your step-pop. I also knew your blood dad and your blood grand. I was a student of your blood dad’s, a long time ago.”

I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to ask so many questions, to drink from the fire hose Doc Phil had stuck out so bad but I couldn’t find the valve. And inside of me, I felt a fire building. I’d never felt anything like it before.

It felt like a switch flipped in my life and suddenly I was about something besides digging leftovers out of the mess that the world had left me. I didn’t feel f***** over anymore. S***, for just a nano, I felt real.

“What am I that makes me so important to you folks?” I finally asked, bringing myself straightup.

Doc Phillip (I would never call him whizzer face again after that day, except maybe once) smiled his whizzer scarred, slightly crooked smile and said: “It’s not what you are, Sky. It’s what you are made of.”

Doc Cat spoke up then: “We need your DNA, Sky!”

She looked suddenly unhinged, like she had The Rash and wasn’t thinking in realworld.

“You are an immunity machine, young man! You are a priceless commodity to humanity right now. We need you.” She was almost screaming and pleading at me at the same time.

All of a sudden, Doc Phillip looked full alert realtime and reached into his white coat, pulled out some kind of tech snapper from nowhere and popped Doc Cat. She dropped to her knees, her unreal blue eyes staring into nowhere with a questioning, scared look and short-like evaporated into a thin white smoke that was sucked up into the walls.

I jumped off the stainless and headed toward the one door of the room. Doc Phillip dropped the tech and said, real quicktime: “We need to get out of here. Now!”

“We?!” I nearly screamed. I was lit up.

“Yes, Sky. We, us, whatever! You saw her. She was Rashed or something worse.”

I could see the sense in it. I didn’t know what was going to happen next, but I knew it wasn’t going to happen in this underground. I, we, had to make contrail. Quickime.

“Can I trust you, Phil?” I asked, as if it mattered.

“With your life, Sky. We need to go. Now!”

The trip out of the room was nothing like what was next. Not even.

CHAPTER THREE:

A COSTLY ANALYSIS

July 7, 2059 Baton Rouge, LA

Doctor Saul Solstein (yes, Doctor Solstein) was sitting at his deskport in the confines of his private, v-proof bunker underneath what had been one of the United States’ best medical research facilities. The Kaiser/ Kline hospital had become both world renown and world demonized during the latter part of the 2020’s. The decade of clear seeing, the media pundits called the 20’s. To Doc Solstein, it was the decade of destruction of everything left of humanity that was still humane. It was the beginning of another holocaust.

His own virology team had betrayed him and the world in general in just two short years. Everything they had worked for as cures became weapons in the hands of the new wolves in sheep-skin-cloaked Nazis who called themselves senators. What was then the Department of Defense had mutated into what came to be called Homesec, a disturbing mixture of Homeland Security and weaponized identity cleansing, brutal law enforcement and genetic profiling. Hitler’s ghost was alive and well in the senate, or so believed Saul Solstein.

When the United States became, or perhaps created, the Free Euro-American Democracies, it was hell on earth. Twelve of the original fifty states of the previous union seceded, the wealthier creating their own sovereignties, a few becoming wild- cards—holding allegiances to the original constitution and the rule of just law.

Notably, California, Oregon and Hawaii dropped out and formed their own PanPacific Commonwealth, or as it would become to be known, PanAsia; there was nearly a full blown war started because of that concerted action. The real war was yet to come, however.

Doc Solsein stared at his comset, windowed into his deskport, checking field operative feeds and trying to sort out what was happening at the facility in New Orleans. There was this young man who was apparently immune to both The Rash and a number of other badbugs that had been engineered to wipe out the stronger members of the population in what were called spoil-sports. The concept was elegant and evil in its simplicity. If we can’t have your tech, your land and your economic assets, then nobody can. The first Badbug War hadn’t been enough to satisfy the voracious appetites of the Nazi bastards running the system then. They created more Badbugs that not only wiped out the weakest, but also horribly mutated the strong. Fortunately, some of the strong did not mutate according to design, had unforeseen gifts encoded in their DNA that had lain dormant until their exposure. Not only did they prove immune after the fact, but they developed talents unforeseen even in the highest scientific circles. Such abilities as telepathy, focused telekinesis, and empathic abilities at a level never expected possible in h*** technologicus, began to appear in certain remnants of the survivors of the spoil-sports.

Saul thought it ironic that what was meant to kill actually improved some of the humans left to suffer. More than ironic, he thought, down right proof of God and His wisdom and His plan. Proof positive. He had taken to reading both the Torah and the other more important rabbinical texts with a jaded eye for most of his adult life; now he kept a pristine copy of the Talmud in his real-life possession at all times. He didn’t know why, it just felt right.

So why is this kid, Sky, so blinking important that it seems like everything got shut down in New Orleans? Saul was asking himself a lot of questions that appeared to have no easy answers.

He got that information in a rather hasty manner when his field operative Phillip Rollings Solstein, his son, tapped his line.

“We’re just outside of the sixth, moving at pace. Kat had the freaking rash, dad, or something we maybe haven’t seen before. I had to terminate her. There was no other choice, papa. I’m sorry.”

Saul nodded to himself and said, “Shalom, my son.”

CHAPTER FOUR:

July 5, 2059 New Orleans, LA

THE LONG DASH AND THE CRASH

When we hit the pavement, we hit it hard. I mean, I thought I was tough, but Doc Phillip was a freaking machine on two legs. He had nearly dragged my scared and sorry ass by my dreads out from that underground bunker. I didn’t know how much trouble we were really in, but Doc Phillip made it pretty hard to ignore that we had to make contrail likity-split like. Where to? I had no fricking clue.

I knew my way around the ward pretty good, and the parish for that matter, but I didn’t get it. The Doc knew shorts and cuts that made me feel even more scared and stupid than I really was. I’ll tell you though, when I started to hear whizzer fire chasing us down an alley near the old town (Bourbon Street it was called, just short of the river) I beamed in hard and ran like a rabbit with its tail on fire.

“Where in the f*** are we going, Doc?”

I was panting, having a tough time keeping up with the dark haired machine.

“Stay quiet and stay fast, boy! Keep those legs moving! The river! Move it!”

We bolted out of Rue de Charles and went heads-down through the old French market, eyes fixed on the burm that lead over the old rail tracks, one flick before the river.

I wasn’t surprised that there wasn’t any company other than the a******* chasing us. Doc nearly got another scar as we split hard over the burm and headed toward the old riverboat port. You have to understand only one thing about fricking whizzers: there ain’t much chance of living if you take a solid clip of hits. Doc dodged one of those kinds of hits by just a nano. If he had broken stride, I wouldn’t be telling this story. S***! I saw smoke coming off his hair!

“You know how to swim, son?” Doc said as we got realtime close with the water.

“I don’t know!” I yelled. “I ain’t never tried!”

“Follow me and do what I do, then!”

Now you folks have to understand that swimming in the toxic s*** called the Missipi River has been known to kill folks. I’d never had any work with the water other than my folk’s bathtub and dodging rain during the Big Acid when I was a kid. Say no more, when Doc started stripping down to his skivs and kicking his tech tennies off, I knew I was going to have to make a decision.

I did what I was told, for once in my eighteen, and followed his lead.

“Don’t breathe when you hit the water, Sky! Just hit it and I’ll be there!”

I had seen vids of people diving into coldclear, so I went with the idea: I closed my eyes, stuck my hands out and followed Doc into the muck. It wasn’t so bad, except that I had no f****** idea what to do when I got there. I didn’t float, like the vids show. But again, I kept up with instructions and I held my breath until I felt a tug at my trows.

Next I knew, I was in the air and spitting up nasty ass water with Doc tugging me along toward the far bank. I couldn’t believe how strong this guy was. Like I said, he was a fricking machine!

The whizzers had stopped and we were only about a couple of flicks from the old far wall when Doc let go of me.

“Swim, kid,” he said. He was like all calm and s*** all of a sudden.

“Sink or swim!”

My guess, I swam. I paddled around, scared as all hell for a nano, but I got the feel for it. I knew I couldn’t float, but it made body sense that if I kicked my legs and danced my hands that I could keep my head up and breathe.

“They’re not done with us, Sky,” Doc said, keeping his breath all regular like, bobbing around like he was used to this kind of crap.

“Do you think you can make the next twenty meters?”

“No choice,” I managed. The taste of the water was all wrong and sticking to my teeth like brown glue.

“You’ve got that right! So, follow me and take it easy. I’m here.”

And so I did. I realtimed that swimming was something I would like to do again in clean coldclear, not this brown muck. Yeah, I was out of breath and hurting in muscles I didn’t know I owned; but we hit hardground in good time, without Doc having to tug me out, and I felt weird-like good, considering.

“We gotta bail, Doc?” I kept trying to get that taste out of my mouth.

“As soon as you can get used to gravity again, yes.” He reached over and gave me a pat on the back. He was spitting the nasty out of his mouth too.

“Sooner the better, okay?”
“What the hell is going on here, Doc?” I asked, pulling myself realtime and standing tall.

“You, Sky, are very important to a lot of folks. Some are good, some just plain bad, and some down right realtime fuckered up. I’m a good guy. I promise you that. Deal?”

You had to see the look in his eyes. I’d never seen such brutal honesty in my whole eighteen. This guy seemed to be the real deal. Not only that, but he had just saved my ass. Fair is fair. Again, the why of it was still to be figured.

But I made the deal.

“Just tell me what’s next, Doc. I need some clue. Please.”

“How are your legs, son?”

“Huh?”

And then the whizzer fire started again. My legs, it turned out, were damn good and we were once again hauling it like two rabbits with tails on fire.

The next hidey h*** came in a flick. As we were running, Doc grabbed me by my trows again and tugged me off toward what looked like some kind of tool shed or something. This time, Doc was all hard ass and realtime like tossed me into the little shack. He flew in after me and landed on my skinny black back with a not-so-good-feeling thump.

“Ready for a ride, Sky?” he said, breathing real hard like.

“No choice, Doc,” I said again. And I smiled. It felt good to smile, even though I was scared enough to wet trow at any nano.

All realtime, he digs around and pulls some kind of tech out from the underside of a trash can and snaps it open. I thought it might be audiotech or some other kind of demon snapper like the one he wasted Doc Cat with. All wrong!

Again, all realtime, I started hearing whirlys and buzzers from outside the shed.

Then s*** hit it hard, real hard.

I’d seen the backdrop idea of being extracted from bad sits on vids. But getting realtime pulled ain’t fun at all, not at all, folks. There’s nothing more realtime messed up than flying into the bigblue when you’re scared the piss out of heights, I can tell you that!

Baton Rouge, LA same day...

When Doc Saul saw his incoming on his deskport, he became ever the more determined to make sure that this kid, Sky, survived. Of all the names on his list, this young man’s name impressed him dramatically. Unfortunately, he and his prime were downed, just short of the next marker. He knew that he could do nothing to change the situation on the ground; it was a source of immediate frustration. But he put his trust in his God, his operatives and the fickle hand of fate. He knew that atonement was looming.

He wished so much that there was a temple left on the continent. He wanted dearly to go to temple and review his work, hopefully with God on his side.

He knew very strongly that vengeance wasn’t an option. Only atonement and forgiveness. He knew this to his core, made it his mantra.

He would wait, hope and pray. There was still a chance! Sky, he thought, stroking his gray old beard, what a wondrous name for a child! Especially one born during a time of the nearly complete genocide of his type.

I look forward. I would love this child as my own and help him to know how to build a better world.

This has to be my atonement for the crimes against man and God that I have allowed to be committed. There is no other option.