… but you don’t want to think about that right now, so you step outside for a smoke to clear your head. Encroaching deadlines alone make you want to vomit and a gorge rises in your throat. The light of the setting sun feebly penetrates layers of chemtrail goo, the downtown skyline glows neon with UPMC holograms, and the Allegheny laps against the concrete pillars that support your little corner of paradise.
No thoughts, now. Just sensations.
Relaxed at last, you allow yourself to wonder what the hell you’re going to do with Doc if the Zyklon D doesn’t finish him off. Sell him on eBay? What with the hyperinflation, the thirty thousand dollars left in your account won’t even cover tomorrow’s chili-soy dog or your next pouch of tobacco (which, what with the targeted taxation, costs about twice as much as a 4-pack of hollow-tipped tracking bullets) but of course there’s no way you can afford to ship him. Maybe you can barter him for a Primanti Bros. sandwich. Maybe he’s already dead.
Nope.
“You win, Doc.”
He slithers out of the Bell Jar and zips around your office, scattering documents and overturning makeshift furniture.
Beep. Another message from Jeffy.
“Sophie, for Christ’s sake, get back to me. Psychotropics scan came back negative; as for fields and shit, the Cathedral’s so rife with esmog I didn’t even bother. I did find something interesting on that five-headed fucker’s corpse, though: subdermal biotag, same kind UPMC implants to keep tabs on their ‘patients’. Check the ones you took back with you to see if they have ‘em, too. I need to communicate with you in a purely professional capacity about this shit, and if you’re not interested in doing your job I’ll find someone who is. Ciao.”
Every year at finals time the Cathedral gets evacuated for one reason or another (usually a simple dirty bomb or biotoxin hoax) but this instance has more loose ends sticking out of it than the head-stump of that cyborg chimera. As your curiosity grows, your personal financial and literary crises fade into irrelevance.
Doc knocks over a rack of taxidermy you use for target practice, unhooks his jaw and tries to gobble one of the smaller specimens, which you find oddly inspiring. Had Doc been asked, “Do you want to live?” you know what he’d have answered. You promise yourself that, no matter how weird things get, you’ll deal with it somehow and triumph.
You can autopsy the chimeras and report back to Jeffy, chill him out, later tonight. There’s something you have to do first, though, something it occurs to you Doc can actually help you accomplish. You grab your gear, lower the drawbridge, whistle for Doc to follow and hit the streets.
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