Amped (13 page)

“That a fact?” he asks, staring pointedly at the streaks of dried blood on my temple. “Used a fuckin’ ice pick? Damn, Jack. I guess you’re not fooling around, huh? You trying to
kill
yourself?”

Not exactly.

I look up at him, focused on keeping my eyes wide open, round, and imploring.
Yeah,
my spit-smudged face says.
Yeah, I was shit-faced drunk and alone and I was angry. I thought if I turned on the Zenith I could walk outside and kick the living crap out of a guy named Billy. But it didn’t work and I messed it up bad and I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. I take it back, okay?

A hint of ozone sneaks into my next gulp of air. Shit. It’s been years since my last one, but you never forget the feeling of a seizure coming on. In the seconds just before, it’s easy to get fixated on little things. And this one feels like a real grand mal because I can’t seem to tear my eyes away from the glint of that vodka bottle under the couch.

“I get it,” says Lyle. “Couldn’t take it no more?”

The trapped animal whimper comes out of me again and I can sense the storm gathering inside, feel the churning thunderclouds overhead sucking all the oxygen out of the air. I allow the panic into my eyes and wrench them up to meet Lyle’s dark face. In the universal language of pain I’m chanting,
Please
help
me
. Please, please, please, oh please, don’t let another one hit me.

“People been talking about you around the park. Kind of was looking forward to meeting you, actually. Course, I didn’t think you were a coward at the time.”

He spits tobacco, this time on the floor.

“Life
is
tough though, huh? And for an amp, life is even tougher. Maybe you just couldn’t stand it no more. Working minimum wage. Got no lady. No respect. So I’ll venture to guess, and this is just conjecture here, but from the evidence … I’m supposing you’d had yourself enough. It came on down to a logical conclusion:
Life
as
an
amp
ain’t worth living.
”

Lyle stoops over and sets the bottle of spit and tobacco down next to my head. Then he casually grabs a handful of my hair in his left hand. He pulls my head off the floor, groaning theatrically like he’s tired. Then he pulls harder, tugs my head up, painfully, so we’re face-to-face.

“Know what, buddy?” he asks.

Lyle studies my half-lidded eyes. I can smell the tobacco on his breath mingling with the stinging flakes of metal that signal the coming storm. The creases of dirt in his tatted-up neck stand out like fault lines, pecked by tattooed crow beaks and clouded with feathers. I can just make out the silhouetted nub of the implant on the side of his head.

“I find that conclusion to be
personally
offensive
.”

And he decks me. Just sends down a right cross and bats it out of the park. A knuckle catches me on the eye, and I can feel the socket filling with blood.

My head hits the ground like a dropped watermelon. A pathetic whining sound warbles out of my throat. When I push my eyes open, I can see the crumbs and dirt on the floor mixing with my slobber. A spattering of fat bright droplets of my blood sit on the floor, mutely reflecting a square of window light from some place up high that I can’t turn my head to see.

Jim was right. Lyle is crazy. But being punched in the face is nothing compared to the electrical frenzy that’s about to slam into my brain like a Martian cyclone.

“You wanna die?” Lyle asks me, real soft.

I can’t tell whether it’s a question or an offer.

Lyle looks at the door. At first I think he’s going to leave me here, but then he spins back around, and the hardened leather tip of a cowboy boot connects in the pit of my stomach. My body bounces in the air like so much rubber.
No, no, no.
I’m wailing with my eyes, but who can see? The first tremors of the seizure jitter through my limbs like aftershocks.

“No problem,” mutters Lyle. And the boot comes again, harder this time.

“Unless maybe you
do
want to live?” asks Lyle. He circles around, methodically kicking: legs, arms, back. He avoids my head.

“Do you wanna live?”

Air hisses from between my lips. I’m empty except for the pain. Lighter than nothing. Never felt this way before. I fold myself up into my head and swim with the air down the black river of my throat. Up and out and over the teeth and tongue. With all the mental will I can muster, I reach down and tug on the dead meat of my tongue. I grab my molars and bend my jaw closed, and slowly but surely my voice comes. It’s almost inaudible but somehow Lyle
hears.

“Yes.”

Lyle stops kicking. I listen to his heavy breathing and the sick trickle of tobacco juice and spit oozing into the plastic bottle.
Then something lands next to my face with a
thwap
. Through a blur of tears I see a scabby brown satchel the size of a wallet.

“That’s all you had to say, brother,” says Lyle. “That’s all you had to say.”

I barely hear him. The storm is here. Thunderclouds burst and I feel ice-cold pinpricks of rain erupt all over my body. My limbs curl and I scream through clenched teeth. I’m lashed to a tree in a vicious storm that’s shredding me from the inside out.

Lyle’s dirty boots creak faintly as he squats next to me. But that’s part of another world now. He can kick me to death and I’ll never feel it, because he could never hurt me as bad as I’m hurting myself.

Somewhere far away, the laughing cowboy speaks to me. But my brain is broken. The sounds swell and ebb through my head like ripples on a pond, meaningless. And then, nothing.

The storm dissipates. My tree wafts gently in the wind. And then my tree is gone and I’m back on the linoleum, smelling the ripe manure on Lyle’s boots. Above my head, his skinny arms move in precise jerks, tattoos flashing, a blurred confusion of flying, fighting crows. One of them has a flaming torch grasped in its claws.

Lyle’s brown satchel is open and glistening with rows of delicate instruments. Beat-up implant maintenance tools. Familiar but filthy. I’ve only seen the sterilized, surgical steel versions in my father’s office.

Lyle turns his head and smiles at me sort of crooked. He leans over and takes a closer look at my port. Some glint of recognition is in his eyes. Did he see the Zenith? Recognize it?

With quick flicks of his wrist, he turns my implant back on. As he works, he speaks in a quick whisper: “Maybe I had you wrong, brother. It ain’t easy to trust the machine. Knowing it’s inside you. Been called the classic anxiety attack of the new century. Panic
brewing way down in the reptile part of your brain, three hundred million years old. Older than language. The alien inside. Fear in you like claustrophobia. Leaves you
clawing at the roof of your coffin. Except you don’t want out of it—you want
it
out of
you
.”

A shiver pulses from my temple and spreads through my body. Lyle’s hands are moving in efficient bursts in my peripheral vision. I think of Nick and his cube as Lyle keeps talking.

“Gotta understand the machine’s a part of you. Lose the amp, you lose your mind. Brain is the sum of its parts. Hindbrain’s got your instinct for survival. Limbic is where love and hate live. Neocortex has got your imagination in it. And your amp is another part. What it does is up to you.”

A final twist of his hand.

“Friggin’ ice pick,” he says, shaking his head. “Every amp should have his own tools. Doctors are illegal. Now, how’s that feel?”

His words come into focus before my eyes do.

“Better,” I whisper.

Lyle’s hands go under my armpits like steel clamps. He drags me over to the recliner, rests my back up against it. He disappears for a second, then comes back and hands me a glass of water in a mason jar and some ice cubes wrapped in a fast-food napkin. I sip the water and press the ice to my face.

I look up to thank Lyle and then stop flat. His face is serious, carved out of wood.

“You got a Zenith, like me,” he says. “I can tell just by looking at the port. How the fuck did that happen?”

Of course he would recognize it. It was wide open. I say nothing.

“Fine, me first,” he says. “I was too smart for the army. Went to Special Forces. Volunteered to join a new operational detachment. Echo Squad. Watched a hundred other soldiers wash out. They were teaching us meditation, breathing techniques, visualization.
Weird shit for the service. Twelve of us made it into the Zenith ODA. And when they told us we were going under the knife we said
sir, yes, sir
.”

Lyle laughs and he sounds more genuine, less insane. I get the feeling he isn’t seeing me, just his memories. Old friends and comrades.

“Me and the other boys showed up soldiers and they made us into a new breed,” he says, face darkening. “Twelve of us. Brothers. Only four of us left that I know of. Rest have been hunted down and killed.” He pauses. “So, let me ask you again. Where’d you get that Zenith?”

Moving slowly, I set the mason jar on the floor. Biting my lip from the pain flaring in my ribs, I manage to shrug my shoulders. “Dad’s an implant doctor,” I say. “I got hurt bad when I was a teenager. He did what he had to do—to fix me.”

I take a couple breaths, then continue. “I tried to turn it on.”

Lyle tilts his head, thinking. “Turn it on?” he says. “Can’t use a friggin’ ice pick to turn it on. What’s the matter with you?”

The realization settles on his face. “Wait one goddamn second. Nobody ever taught you to
use
it
? You got a cherry turbocharged hot rod in your head and you never even started the engine?”

I shake my head. Lyle stifles his excitement.

“Well, goddamn. You are just shit out of luck, buddy. Did you hear me? Somebody is
killing
Zeniths. Somebody in the government. Murdering us one by one. Did you know that?”

I nod.

“Jim told you, huh?” asks Lyle. “Well, he may have built the hardware, but he don’t know jack about it. Not like I do. I’ll show you some shit that will curl your toes, son. I am going to
wake
you
up
.”

I sip my water and jam the ice against my eye. Lyle is standing and pacing with excitement. Now, he stops and looks at me again, remembers what just happened.

“Listen. That Zenith makes you live your life
harder
than regular people. Walk around with your eyes open wider. You see more, hear more, understand more.”

Lyle grabs my shoulders, leans in.

“There’s one thing that regulars know deep down and it scares the shit out of ’em. Being an amp don’t make you any less human, brother. Being an amp makes you
more
human
.”

He leans back on his haunches and I can see the gears spinning in his head as he scours my face for some evidence that I heard his message.

“More human,” he repeats. “Don’t forget it.”

“Thanks,” I manage to say.

Lyle nods. He stands up and stuffs his tool satchel back into the waistband of his jeans. Grabs his plastic bottle.

“No big deal. You just owe me your life is all.”

Lyle stands in the doorway while an awkward second ticks by, like he’s making up his mind.

“Get yourself cleaned up,” he says. “I’m going to show you what amps can do.”