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Scarcely a man is now alive... and it's all yours." "So what you want off me?" "Time." "I don't dig." "I have something you want," his hand touched the package. He drifted away into the front room, his voice remote and blurred. "You have something I want... five minutes here... an hour someplace else... two ...four... eight... Maybe I'm getting ahead of my- self.... Every day die a little.... It takes up The Time...." He moved back into the kitchen, his voice loud and clear: "Five years a piece. Nobody gives a better deal on the street." He put a finger on the dividing line below the boy's nose. "Right down the middle." "Mister, I don't know what you're talking about." "You will, baby... in time." "OK. So what do I do?" "You accept?" "Yeah, like..." He glanced at the package. "What- ever... I accept." The boy felt a silent black clunk fall through his flesh. The Sailor put a hand to the boy's eyes and pulled out a pink scrotal egg with one closed, pulsing eye. Black fur boiled inside translucent flesh of the egg. The Sailor caressed the egg with nakedly inhuman hands -- black-pink, thick, fibrous, long white tendrils sprouting from abbreviated finger tips. Death fear and Death weakness hit the boy, shutting off his breath, stopping his blood. He leaned against a wall that seemed to give slightly. He clicked back into junk focus. The Sailor was cooking a shot. "When the roll is called up yonder we'll be there, right?" he said, feeling along the boy's vein, erasing goose-pimples with a gentle old woman finger. He slid the needle in. A red orchid bloomed at the bottom of the dropper. The Sailor pressed the bulb, watching the solution rush into the boy-vein, sucked by silent thirst of blood. "Jesus!" said the boy. "I never been hit like that be- fore!" He lit a cigarette and looked around the kitchen, twitching in sugar need. "Aren't you taking off?" he asked. "With that milk sugar shit? Junk is a one-way street. No U-turn. You can't go back no more." They call me the Exterminator. At one brief point of intersection I did exercise that function and witnessed the belly dance of roaches suffocating in yellow pyre- theum powder ("Hard to get now, lady. |
