Mona Lisa Overdrive

18 - Jail-Time

He was in Gentry's loft. He was watching Cherry do nurse-things to Gentry. Cherry looked over at him from where she sat on the edge of Gentry's bed. "How y'doin', Slick?"

"Okay ... I'm okay."

"Remember me asking you before?"

He was looking down at the face of the man Kid Afrika called the Count. Cherry was fiddling with something on the stretcher's superstructure, a bag of fluid the color of oatmeal.

"How y'feel, Slick?"

"Feel okay."

"You're not okay. You keep for -- "

He was sitting on the floor of Gentry's loft. His face was wet. Cherry was kneeling beside him, close, her hands on his shoulders.

"You did time?"

He nodded.

"Chemo-penal unit?"

"Yeah ... "

"Induced Korsakov's?"

He -

"Episodes?" Cherry asked him. He was sitting on the floor in Gentry's loft. Where was Gentry? "You get episodes like this? Short-term memory goes?"

How did she know? Where was Gentry?

"What's the trigger?"

"What triggers the syndrome, Slick? What kicks you into jail-time?" He was sitting on the floor in Gentry's loft and Cherry was practically on top of him.

"Stress," he said, wondering how she knew about that. "Where's Gentry?"

"I put him to bed."

"Why?"

"He collapsed. When he saw that thing ... "

"What thing?"

Cherry was pressing a pink derm against his wrist. "Heavy trank," she said. "Maybe get you out of it ... "

"Out of what?"

She sighed. "Never mind."

He woke in bed with Cherry Chesterfield. He had all his clothes on, everything but his jacket and his boots. The tip of his erect cock was trapped behind his belt buckle, pressing up against the warm denim over Cherry's ass.

"Don't get any ideas."

Winter light through the patchwork window and his breath white when he spoke. "What happened?" Why was it so cold in the room? He remembered Gentry's scream as the thing lunged for him -

He sat up straight, fast.

"Easy," she said, rolling over. "Lie back. Don't know what it takes to set you off ... "

"What d'y' mean?"

"Lie back. Get under the covers. Wanna freeze?"

He did as she said. "You were in jail, right? In a chemo-penal unit."

"Yeah ... How'd you know?"

"You told me. Last night. You told me stress could trigger a flashback. So that's what happened. That thing went for your buddy, you jumped for the switch, shut that table down. He fell over, cut his head. I was taking care of that when I noticed you were funny. Figured out you only had a consecutive memory for about five minutes at a stretch. Get that in shock cases, sometimes, or concussion ... "

"Where is he? Gentry."

"He's in bed up in his place, plastered with downs. The shape he was in, I figured he could do with about a day's sleep. Anyway, it gets him out of our hair for a while."

Slick closed his eyes and saw the gray thing again, the thing that had gone for Gentry. Man-shaped, sort of, or like an ape. Nothing like the convoluted shaped Gentry's equipment generated in his search for the Shape.

"I think the power's out," Cherry said. "The light went out in here about six hours ago."

He opened his eyes. The cold. Gentry hadn't made his moves on the console. He groaned.

He left Cherry to make coffee on the butane cooker and went looking for Little Bird. He found him by the smell of smoke. Little Bird had built a fire in a steel canister and gone to sleep curled around it like a dog. "Hey," Slick said, nudging the boy with his boot, "get up. We got problems."

"Fuckin' juice's out," he mumbled, sitting up in a greasy nylon sleeping bag grimed the exact shade of Factory's floor.

"I noticed. That's problem number one. Number two is we need a truck or a hover or something. We have to get that guy out of here. It's not working out with Gentry."

"But Gentry's the only one can fix the juice." Little Bird got to his feet, shivering.

"Gentry's sleeping. Who's got a truck?"

"Marvie 'n' them," Little Bird said, and lapsed into a racking cough.

"Take Gentry's bike. Bring it back in the truck. Now."

Little Bird recovered from his coughing fit. "No shit?"

"You know how to ride it, don't you?"

"Yeah, but Gentry, he'll get -- "

"You let me worry about that. You know where he keeps that spare key?"

"Uh, yeah," Little Bird said shyly. "Say," he ventured, "what if Marvie 'n' them don't wanna gimme that truck?"

"Give 'em this," Slick said, pulling the Ziploc full of drugs from the pocket of his jacket. Cherry had taken it after she'd bandaged Gentry's head. "And give 'em all of it, understand? 'Cause I'm gonna ask 'em later."

Cherry's beeper went off while they were drinking coffee in Slick's room, huddled side by side on the edge of the bed. He'd been telling her as much as he knew about the Korsakov's, because she'd asked him. He hadn't ever really told anybody about it, and it was funny how little he actually knew. He told her about previous flashbacks, then tried to explain how the system worked in jail. The trick was that you retained long-term memory up to the point where they put you on the stuff. That way, they could train you to do something before you started serving your time and you didn't forget how to do it. Mostly you did stuff that robots could do. They'd trained him to assemble miniature geartrains; when he'd learned to put one together inside five minutes, that was it.

"And they didn't do anything else?" she asked.

"Just those geartrains."

"No, I mean like brainlocks."

He looked at her. The sore on her lip was almost healed. "If they do that, they don't tell you," he said.

Then the beeper went off in one of her jackets.

"Something's wrong," she said, getting up quickly.

They found Gentry kneeling beside the stretcher with something black in his hands. Cherry snatched the thing before Gentry could move. He stayed where he was, blinking up at her.

"Takes a lot to keep you under, mister." She handed Slick the black thing. A retinal camera.

"We have to find out who he is," Gentry said. His voice was thick with the downs she'd administered, but Slick sensed that the bad edge of craziness had receded.

"Hell," she said, "you don't even know if these are the eyes he had a year ago."

Gentry touched the bandage on his temple. "You saw it too, didn't you?"

"Yeah," Cherry said, "he shut it off."

"It was the shock," Gentry said. "I hadn't imagined ... There was no real danger. I wasn't ready ... "

"You were out of your fucking skull," Cherry said.

Gentry got unsteadily to his feet.

"He's leaving," Slick said. "I sent Bird to borrow a truck. I don't like any of this shit."

Cherry stared at him. "Leaving where? I gotta go with him. It's my job."

"I know a place," Slick lied. "The power's out, Gentry."

"You can't take him anywhere," Gentry said.

"Like hell."

"No." Gentry swayed slightly. "He stays. The jumpers are in place. I won't disturb him again. Cherry can stay here."

"You're going to have to explain some shit here, Gentry," Slick said.

"To begin with," Gentry said, and pointed at the thing above the Count's head, "this isn't an 'LF'; it's an aleph."