Chasing the Dragon Ch. 02

"Man, you devoured that!" Roxie was only halfway through her plate, even though she'd started first. "D'ya want more?"

"Yes!"

She slid her plate to him and turned back to the stove. Beez had stopped caring what it might be as soon as he realized it was good. It was funny how, not that long ago, he would have turned up his nose at even off-brand foods. His family hadn't exactly been rich by up top standards, but they lived comfortably enough that his family owned things that he saw advertised in vids and not the cheaper knockoffs. Delirious levels of hunger can really put things in perspective. Roxie had a surprisingly good hand at seasoning too. He'd been to jacket-and-tie restaurants more bland than this. As he chewed on another piece of bacon, he laughed quietly to himself.

"Credit box... fuckin stupid..."

"I'm glad to see you're finding your sense of humor. 'Was starting to think you didn't have one!"

"My brother was the funny one."

"Oh that's who the third body was. I was holding out hope your parents took one of 'em with 'em." It was a testament to his incredible malnutrition that he kept any appetite at all. "Were you there when it happened? Like, in the apartment?"

The front door being kicked open was the first thing he heard. His room was in the back of their apartment. Mom cried out first. His father shouted 'No', and after the first burst of gunfire, both were quiet. His brother Joey, who was a few years older, had been watching TV right next to them.

"BRANDOOOOOOOON!!"

His brother didn't cry for very long. Beez took a step towards his bedroom door before he swallowed hard and bolted for his closet. He'd had a crush on their neighbors daughter Eliza, a year younger than himself, for as long as he could remember. When he hit puberty, and incredibly stupid things started to sound like great ideas, he'd carved a large hole in his closet to be able to get inside the wall, and then another smaller hole he could peep through. That hole saved his life.

Eliza was in her room when he came diving through the sheetrock. She'd screamed briefly while he stumbled to his feet, but he only stopped long enough to cough the dust out of his lungs. He was spotted as soon as he ducked into the hallway, and only just barely made it into an elevator before the first of his many pursuers. He got off ten floors below, well short of the lobby, and paced frantically.

Eventually, he headed for the staircase, but he could hear their multitudes clapping up and down the stairs above and below him. On the 37th floor landing, he recognized a shape in the wall he'd always been fascinated by. His father had told him it was called a "Dumb Waiter", and that it was an anachromism dating back to the original construction of the building when the kitchen had still been on the Ground Floor.

He'd said it just like that too. Ground Floor. That was the polite way of referencing how the actual first 15 floors of their apartment building were in The Bottom and therefore no longer counted, because no one in polite society talked about The Bottom. It was a festering sore to be ignored and left to die on it's own.

Beez tried to pry his fingers underneath the covering, but it didn't budge. They were getting closer. He tried kicking at it, but it was too high to hit squarely. In desperation, he charged at it and dove, breaking through on the first try. The inside of the shaft was only a few feet by a few feet. Beez tumbled briefly before he managed to grab on to one of the two ropes inside. Although it only did a little to slow his fall at first, it snapped tight as the rope pulled taut against a counterweight below him. His hands burned fiercely as he slid a few more feet, but he managed to keep hold of it. The counterweight jerked and swung and eventually slowed his descent in the pitch black to something his stomach was much more comfortable with...

But after a minute, the light above him flickered. He heard voices, and then they cut the rope. He fell about 10 feet before he kicked his feet out and pushed himself hard against the opposing wall. His pursuers fired several shots down the shaft, but nothing felt or sounded like it passed very close. Several seconds later, the counterweight crashed down heavily, sending a terrible thud and a burst of air up past him. The smell was terrible, and that proved to be enough evidence for his pursuers. Going up proved to be an impossibility, and he wasn't certain what would be waiting for him at home, so he went down.

"No. I wasn't there."

"That's for the best," she said. There was a brief moment where, over her shoulder, Beez could see what he thought might be uncharacteristic sobriety, but then her grin was back. "So I'll bet you have tons of questions. Whenever you're up for it, fire away."

"Why did The Motherfucker give up when you started counting?"

"That's... that's a hell of a first question. He revolted once before, and I beat him."

"You? You defeated an AI?"

"Try not to sound so shocked..." There's that edge again, he thought.

"Alright. Who were you keeping tabs on?"

"Several people, mostly unsuccessfully, but the one that went to your parents house is a man named Viktor. He even spells it with a K. It's like, 'thanks mom and dad, now I have to be an evil henchman'. "

"Why unsuccessfully?"

"I can't be everywhere at once. I have some, er, assets that keep their eyes peeled for me. Sometimes, I get lucky."

"What can you tell me about Viktor?"

"New subject." She took his plate, which was empty, and filled it up again. Beez sighed, and took a few bites.

"What do you need me to help you with?"

"I was hoping you'd ask! So these people I track? They're invisible 99% of the time. I don't know where they live, and I don't know where they go, and I don't know what they do. Now, I watched you salvage some scrap into a fake electronic key card to get money from those idiot boxes. That takes some talent, and I'm thinking I could use that talent to track these assholes down."

"If you don't know anything about them, why are you targeting them?"

"They were all together someplace they shouldn't have been."

"Where was that?"

"New subject."

"Are you gonna do this every time I ask a question?"

"No. New subject."

"What happened to The Bottom?"

Roxie came to a full stop to stare at him over her shoulder with one raised eyebrow. "Is that not a popular topic of conversation up there?" The boy shook his head. "Alright, well what I know is what my mom and grandmom told me, and they both died when I was nine, so you're getting 16 year old news, and even then it's not much.

"Sometime, I dunno, 100 years ago? Long Chemicals cracked some part of the human gene code or something. They rushed human testing ahead of schedule. One of the clinics it was being tested at was bombed by some right wing nutjobs, and whatever it was they were testing was released into the water system around New York. Lots of people got sick, but that was it at first. Long Chemicals lost some huge classy lawsuit, and the people who got infected got basically nothing because there was so many of them. The mutations didn't start until the next generation of kids started showing up.

"Now, separate from that, New York City started building upwards. They'd kinda run out of space, so they started figuring out ways to use the space they already had to expand. It didn't start as a way to shut off the freaks from the socialites, but over about 30 years, thats what happened. Buildings that had been on both sides of the divider slowly boarded off and evacuated the lowest parts, and the folks who gave birth to kids with three legs got run out of their neighborhoods... That reminds me, I need to go see Three Legs..."

Roxie drifted off for a minute, smiling softly and biting her lip. Beez coughed politely, and she continued. "Anyway, that's all I really know about it."

"Ok, next question. When you say things like classy lawsuit, and I know what you mean is class action lawsuit, do you want me to correct you?"

There was a long silence after that.

"Can I ask a different question now?" They'd finished eating, and Roxie had stared him into helping to clean up. After that, she'd gone and sat down on her couch. Beez hesitantly stayed in the kitchen.

"I suppose."

"Are you a..." He almost said freak, and then he almost corrected himself to say mutant. "What I mean is, do you have..."

"Yes. No, you can't see it."

"It? Oh, I thought it made you super strong..."

"No, that's in my suit. The Motherfucker put a bunch of servings in here to help me do stuff like throw whiny teenage boys through windows. I don't know how he knew I was going to have to do that, but that jerk has smarts."

It was gonna be hard not to correct her. Then his face lit up.

"Am I super strong too?"

"No, he didn't think you'd need it. He put some other tools in there though. OH!" Roxie leaped over the back of her couch and rooted around in her jacket, which she'd left near the front door. After checking about the 15th pocket, she exclaimed and tossed him a tiny green box. Beez screamed and dove over the island in the kitchen. He felt very silly, lying there on her kitchen floor with his hands over his ears, when it didn't explode.

"Did it have to be green?!"

"What? It's my favorite color!"

The boy got up and walked around the kitchen. The tiny green box had partially slid underneath her refrigerator. When he opened it up, he saw two small blueish discs, just about the size of his fingertip.

"Are these contacts?"

"Yeah, they should help you find your way around here much easier, plus I think The Motherfucker made it so your suit works through them."

Works through them? What the hell, he thought as he sat down on the floor. He split two fingers from one hand to spread out his eyelids and popped the first one in. After a few blinks, he looked around, but nothing seemed different in the apartment. With a frown, he popped in the other contact and waited for the magic.

"I think they're broken," he said as he reached up his left hand to grab the counter to pull himself up, and nearly fell backwards when he saw a blue screen floating over his left arm. "What the..."

He rotated his arm, and the small holographic interface rotated to float an inch or two above the top of his forearm. He pushed his hand through the bottom of it, and then again through the top of it with no effect. Then he tried tapping one of the buttons. It took some time to figure out the spatial distance for manipulating the interface. Sometimes he pushed through it and sometimes he just wiggled his fingers in the air above it, and neither performed any significant action.

"This thing is amazing!"

"Come in here and check this out then." Beez barely looked up as he stood and walked into the living room, but when he did, lots of pieces started to fall into place. Almost every surface in the room had a holographic control overlay on it now.

"It won't happen immediately, but eventually you'll learn where everything is, and you'll just be able to find this stuff without the contacts being in. I don't have them in right now."

The boy took a beat to reevaluate her. Roxie lacked book smarts and probably hadn't had any sort of higher education available to her, but she wasn't as stupid as he'd thought. Bat shit crazy, but not stupid.

"I doubt that nap earlier will actually pass for sleep, so you might want to crash. That room can be yours."

Beez nodded and paused after one step. "Hey Roxie?"

"Yeah?"

"Thank you."

She just looked at him and nodded, looking slightly embarrassed to be doing so. Beez turned and walked off. He had bizarre dreams that night. Mr Bubbles led the men in gray to Roxie's house, only it wasn't Roxie's house, it was his parents apartment. Eliza didn't live next door, it was Roxie, and he peeped on her while she beat the snot out of some faceless man. When Beez finally went out to go to school, he saw his dad peeping on his mother and his brother having sex. Then Mr Bubbles broke through the door, and he had to run to the roof so he could take a helicopter to get to the bank. On and on, all jumbled together. It was tense, and he woke up in a sweat, but it wasn't a nightmare. For the first time in over a week, he'd only had the regular kind of crazy dreams.

He was shocked by how hungry he was again after his shower. There were a clean looking pair of socks and a new pair of boots outside his door when he stepped out, so Beez put them on. They fit perfectly. Damn The Motherfucker. He was scanning me the whole time.

"So are you really not gonna tell me how you beat an AI?"

"Some other time," she said from the couch. "There's pancakes in the fridge. Just heat them up."

Roxie was sitting on the couch listening to music again. She seemed to be staring off into space, her eyes unmoving. Every time Beez glanced over at her, it looked like she was thoroughly investigating a single square inch of carpet.

"Are you ok?" He sat down in one of the chairs and stuffed a forkful of syrup covered greatness into his mouth. "Ohm mah gawd. Thish ish diwishish..."

"I'm fine," she said, finally looking over at him. "I was just thinking."

"Have you been up long?"

"I didn't sleep."

Beez paused with his third mouthful halfway to it's destination. "You didn't sleep at all?"

"Nah. I only sleep a little every few days or so." Suddenly, she grinned and popped up off the couch. "You should have something to wash that down with. How about...a nice juice box?"

The boy felt like he was making a strong statement when he accepted the box with a raised eyebrow, but Roxie just grinned wider and bounced down the hall to her room.

He feared her. It would be silly to deny it, but he was gonna have to start standing up for himself at least a little. She'd kinda respected it when he'd done it yesterday. Maybe it wouldn't be awful, and maybe she'd stop looking at him like a puppy in need of saving. He hadn't sorted out the random hungry looks she gave him from time to time, but everyone down here looked at him screwy. Then again, she's insane. Let's not forget that. Hmmm, grape...

Mom's pancakes were good today. Better than usual. His mom had very little cooking talent, which is why they ate out all the time. Maybe these were leftovers they'd brought back from a brunch or something. Beez shrugged when he realized it didn't so much matter where they came from so much as that he was getting to eat them.

Suddenly, there was a soft whimper. He delicately set his plate down and slipped past the kitchen. As he looked straight down the hall, he could see a tiny pinhole of light. Crap! I left my peephole uncovered! Beez slipped down the hall and into his bedroom and was just about to cover the hole back up when he heard another louder whimper. He leaned his eye up to the hole, and Eliza was down on all fours. Well, her knees and one hand, anyway. The other hand was reach back between her legs to stroke her Holy Crap!

Her pussy was...was... big? engorged? puffy? He had no idea what vocabulary to use to describe it. The female equivalent of getting a hardon? The lips were so swollen, and so pink, so... impossibly pink...

He'd had a few fantasies where he'd be watching Eliza in her bedroom, and he'd lose his balance and fall through. He would be suave about it, and she wouldn't be mad. She'd invite him to stay, and they'd fool around, and nobody would be mad.

When he fell forward, Beez only felt embarrassment.

"Beez! I'm so glad you decided to join me!"

"How did you... Did you know I was peeking through the wall?"

Eliza coughed, although it kind of sounded like she laughed at the same time. "Of course I did, silly! You think girls just get down on their knees and present like this for the fun of it?"

"I guess not..." He couldn't tear his eyes away from her pussy. It was just so...so pink! Eliza smirked and cupped her hand over it. It was an entire handful! Her giggling brought him to his senses and he stopped staring, but he had no idea how long he'd been comatose on his feet.

"Eliza, I..."

"The neighbor girl," she mumbled. "Predictable, but I can work with that." She cleared her throat and continued louder. "You what, Beez?"

"I..."

"You... want to come over here?"

He tried to answer her, but his voice kept getting stuck in his throat so he nodded instead. The way she was looking backwards over her shoulder, the way her... her... her green eyes glittered in the light, it was everything he'd ever dreamed of with her. His fingers felt clumsy and awkward as he peeled his bodysuit down to his ankles. If I had this much trouble just sliding down clothes, he thought, she'll die of boredom waiting for me to untie shoes. Despite feeling like he'd taken forever, he was surprised and elated to see Eliza was only lightly rubbing herself. He waddled over and dropped to his knees behind her.

"Are they always this big?"

"No they are not!" When he began tracing his finger along one of her labia, she added "Oh that? Uh, sure!" She grinned and wiggled her hips a little. "Go on."

Beez stroked himself. He kinda wanted to just stare and touch her for a while, but it seemed like she was giving him signs. It was so curvy and wet, and so pink. He didn't think he could get the whole thing in his mouth, but he really wanted to try...

...but he made a hole in the wall to get over here! This was for real! This wasn't gonna be the only time they did this, it was the start of something new and exciting! Save something for next time, he thought to himself. His brain wanted to apply the emergency brake for just a moment, but when he looked down at his cock, hovering inches from her pussy, everything else melted away. He started scooting forward, and put a hand on her hip.

"Gently," she said. "It's sensitive..."

Beez nodded. Of course it was sensitive. That was the point, wasn't it? He pushed the tip of his cock up to her. She was so swollen he thought he might even have seen it throb with her heartbeat. He began sinking his cock in, and they groaned in unison. He knew she'd be wet from the dark stain in the carpet below her, but inch after inch of him was coated thickly with no resistance.

"I knew it would be this good," she groaned, finally facing forward. She gave a little "Oh!" when he finally came to rest against her swollen pussy. In the vids he watched, the guys usually kept going until they were pressed up against the girls thighs, but Eliza gave a little cry when he pushed harder. "Gently, Beez. Gently. It's delicate"

Hearing her talk was dizzying. He fell back slowly, pulling himself all the way out. His cock glistened, and her pussy had a small hole where he'd just been. He tenderly pushed a finger up inside of her and dragged his fingertip along the top of the inside. Eliza dropped her head down, resting her forehead against the floor, but her groan was quieter for this. Beez did not want to disappoint her. He'd been in love with Eliza since the 5th grade!

He withdrew his finger and immediately reinserted his cock. In a moment of wild curiosity, he put his wet finger in his mouth. She tasted like a flower he'd eaten once. Light in almost every aspect. Not sweet or salty, but... fragrant?

When he pushed, he pushed slowly. He could feel her throbbing around him. His pelvis never more than kissed her pussy, and she groaned deeply each and every time he touched down. He kept his finger in his mouth, sucking until he was sure every molecule was gone. Several minutes went by as he filled her as much as he could. He began thinking of her pussy like a flower, one he very much didn't want to trample or crush. Suddenly, Eliza arched her back up, and her left hand disappeared underneath her. The way she rolled her hips caused her pussy to slide underneath her and between her legs. Her butt cheeks were the closest part of her now.