Read Online Fantasmagoria by Rick Wayne - Free Book Online

bursting.
    Fucker.
    Vernal lifted the extinguisher and sprayed Derk in one long stream. The scrawny dealer had been reaching for the phone and turned to swat at the foam. He tried to block it with his palms as best he could.
    Vernal dropped the empty canister and cocked his wrist. Derk, dripping white suds, looked at the stinger.
    “You know what this is?” Vernal asked.
    Derk nodded. It jingled the metal in his ear.
    “I want you to give your people a message. Understand?”
    Derk nodded again.
    “Tell them I’ll make an even trade for the key. They’ll hear from me tomorrow. Got it?”
    Derk nodded a third time and Vernal walked to the door.
    He stopped and took a deep breath through his chipped teeth. “I’m going away, Velma.”
    “Okay,” she nodded, her eyes drifting open and closed.
    “For good, I mean.”
    Velma nodded again. It shook her hair and revealed the thinning spot on the top of her scalp. Hair loss was a side effect of Neverod abuse, along with weight gain and creeping, permanent illiteracy. And of course the burns. The drug was heat-activated but degraded fast. The best highs came by injecting the inactive form under the skin and then burning it with an electric lancet, sending the activated chemical into the blood stream. Lancets left only pinprick burns, which were easily hidden, and so they were popular with the well-to-do. Poor people defaced themselves with power tools, or stole the soldering iron from their missing daughters’ arts and crafts set.
    “I’m not coming back,” Vernal clarified.
    Velma didn’t say anything.
    Some little gnat of a feeling, a maggot that had burrowed under the cockles of his heart, lifted its head and wanted Vernal to tell his sister what he knew, not about her family, but why he was leaving, where he was going, what was happening to her, the city, the planet, everything. Leaving her here was a death sentence. That was certain.
    But how do you convince a nearly illiterate junkie of the end of the world?
    Vernal knew she’d never leave, not as long as she had any hope for her daughters. But the truth wouldn’t be the last thing he left her with. Truth had never done anything but cause him trouble anyway.
    Vernal swallowed the little gnat and sneered at Derk. The dealer would call his handlers the moment Vernal was out the door, and they would call Pimpernel. Vernal looked at his sister, half asleep and holding the cigarette with a two-inch ash ready to fall. At least it would be over soon. If the Traveler was right, everyone and everything had less than forty-eight hours.
    And then it would all be gone.
    Vernal walked into the hall and left his sister forever. As he trundled down the stairs, he could hear the clicks of the phone.

 
     
    (NINE) A Fate Worse Than Death
     
     
     
     
     
     
    There is a fate worse than death.
    It starts simply enough with headaches, nausea, and vomiting, but soon the skin reddens and starts to itch before erupting into open lesions. Then come hair loss, dizziness, and cognitive impairment. Cancers erupt in every major organ, and a long, painful agony ensues as the body dissolves like a carcass soaked in acid. Depending on the level of radiation exposure, this could happen over a period of weeks, or mere days.
    Early in his illness, Gilbert could manage brief periods of physical contact with others without making them irreversibly sick. But now, anyone in the same room with him for more than a few minutes died in less than a week. His latest tests showed that he killed rodents and house plants in a mere twelve hours.
    Gilbert watched from behind tinted glass as the scar-faced man in the back of the limo opened the door and stepped onto the busy, neon-lined sidewalk. The street was bustling, and he was greeted by a small crowd of lingerie-clad mechanoids on the front steps of Kosi Nova’s Social Club. For the entire drive from the airport, where he had arrived in his own zeppelin, the scarred man had sat in the back being