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Chasing the Dragon Ch. 01

By: AwkwardMD



His fingers shook as he reinserted the card into the 'Credit Box'. The absurdity of the name was lost on him in the moment. Later, when he wasn't quite so hungry or desperate, he'd have a good laugh about it, but at that moment he was preoccupied. The people walking behind him made him nervous, and not just because he was trying to steal in broad... well, there isn't exactly daylight in The Bottom. In full view. Their appearances shocked him. He had only been down below for a week, but it had been one horrorshow moment after another. Even his dreams had been terrifying.

"C'moooon," he pleaded. The way his stomach was gurgling made it sound like he was digesting himself. He wasn't certain that was impossible. "C'moooon!"

"At's not gonna work," said someone behind him.

Beez jumped as he spun around. "OhOkthenI'lljustbeonmyway!" The nearest one reached out to grab the collar of his jacket. Beez tried to dart away, but he wasn't quick enough

There were four of them. If he hadn't been so distracted, he might have seen them coming, but now they had him surrounded. One stood a few feet away to either side of him. The other two were directly in front of him, one behind the other. Their light gray uniform-suits bore the same corporate emblem as the 'Credit Box'.

"Nuh uh! Don't tink so. You've knocked a few of dese over, but at's done now. You're comin wit us."

"W-w-w....Where?!" He tried grabbing at the man's sleeve, but he might as well have tried to claw through steel for all the good it did him. "Nooo! Lemme go!"

"You didn't just tink you could steal and get away wit it, did you? Even down here wit de animals, dere's-"

"Let him go!" Everyone turned, wearing some degree of shock, as a dark-haired young woman walked into the middle of their confrontation. She was wearing a brown duster over a dark purple bodysuit, and her eyes seemed too wide to Beez. Like The Joker...

"Who are you?" The first one said. All four of them began to slowly reach towards their hips. The woman pulled down her brow and drew up her lower lip in confusion. The boy blinked, and nearly missed what happened next.

She drew two pistols from within her jacket, firing a shot at the man to Beez's right and another shot at the man behind the one holding him. Without letting go of the boy, the central man also tried to draw his gun, but the woman slammed her fist down on his wrist and stepped up behind him. The fourth man, on Beez's left, tried to get off a shot, but only ended up hitting the central man when she dragged him into the line of fire. Then she reached up under her shields shoulder and fired two more shots. In the span of six seconds, she had dispatched all four.

"Damnit, I had the whole thing planned out," she snarled. "I was gonna say Let him go. You were gonna say You didn't say the magic word. Then I was gonna say Bang Bang. Then you were gonna look at me all surprised and confused and THEN I was gonna shoot you! Thanks for ruining," she kicked the unmoving body at her feet, "my entrance!" Another kick.

Beez stared around his feet at the scattered bodies and pools of blood, and screamed. The woman, guns still in hand, held the butts up to her ears and winced.

"Jebus, kid! I had a lot to drink last night! Keep it down!" If he'd eaten today he was sure he'd have thrown it up, but instead he just dry heaved for a few seconds. There was blood spatter on his jacket and, if the warm-but-rapidly-cooling feeling on his face was what he thought it was, all over his cheeks as well. The woman squinted and pinched the bridge of her nose.

"Sloppy of them not to bring backup." As if to answer her, a shot rang out. The woman's bangs bounced and flailed in the wake of the near miss, and Beez dropped to his knees as the concrete wall beside him spewed chips. Without opening her eyes or removing her hand from her nose, she raised her arm and fired once. Beez had just spotted the shooter running towards them, and screamed again as the man toppled backwards. The streets, which had been bustling if not technically busy, had emptied in a hurry.

"E Minus," she said at the man she'd kicked.

"Is th-th-that your n-n-name?" Beez hadn't quite stopped cowering, but he felt that looking this woman in the eye was best done from a defensive stance.

"What? No! A's are good, D's are bad, so E's must be worse, right?" He felt his head tilt to the side as he tried to make sense of what she'd said, but it just... it didn't. "I mean, they did bring backup so they can't get an F, but they're all dead. D is probably too generous." Nope. None sense. "We've got about 2 minutes until someone notices that these guys aren't responding. Then we've got another 2 minutes before the backup for the backup shows up, so why don't we get the niceties over with. I'm Roxie."

"Beez."

"Where?!" She cried as she spun, guns drawn and pointing erratically. "WHERE ARE THEY?!"

"No! That's my name!"

Her eyes were wild when she turned back to him. "Don't. Joke. About. Bees." He'd never seen purple eyes before. He'd never seen a lot of things before he came down here.

"No, that-that-that's just what everyone calls me!"

"Well what am I gonna shout when we see a swarm of bees?! You're just gonna think I'm calling your name! You didn't think this through at all, did you?!" He had no idea how to respond to that. After few quiet seconds, she added "You're Brandon Zimmer, right?"

Beez nodded slowly. This was turning into the craziest day of his life. 8 days ago, that wouldn't have been that hard...

"Oh! Oh, I get it! B Z! That's clever!" Roxie laughed for a moment, but then her face turned extremely serious. "Or is it?"

"Were those cops?"

"Who, these assholes?" She pointed her gun down at the one at their feet and arched an eyebrow at him. "Naw, these are just squibs. Blues don't come around here. I'd be in real trouble if I shot a bunch of Blues, but squibs can be just as bad in their own way. They have a nasty habit of shooting first and asking questions later."

"...but...didn't you..."

She bowled right over him. "Now, I know why I'm looking for you." The way she pointed her gun at him, if only to indicate who she was talking about, was putting a few new stains in his already dirty clothes. "The question is, why were they?"

"I was... stealing..."

Roxie kicked the man over onto his back to take a long look at the logo on the breast of his jacket, and then looked behind Beez at the Credit Box. Then she looked around at her body count with a furrowed brow. "Kind of a lot of firepower to send after one little hacker, isn't it?"

"This... wasn't the first one I cracked."

"Ooooooooh! A repeat offender then, huh?"

"Y-y-yes?"

Roxie grinned and shook her gun at him. "I knew we was gonna get along."

Beez took a shaky step to the side, trying to evade the barrel of her gun without betraying how terrified he was. "Why are you looking for me?" His voice cracked several times, but he was proud that he hadn't stuttered.

"Because I need a hacker, of course!"

"Could you please put away your guns?!"

Roxie blinked and shrugged, but the pistols stayed in her hand. "Can't. They're gonna be here soon. I'm gonna need these babies."

"More of them are coming?! We've gotta go!!"

"If we leave now, I won't get to shoot them..."

Beez just blinked.

"It's really not that complicated!"

"They want to kill us!"

"Maybe, but I'm gonna kill them."

"Pleeeeeeease!!" He grabbed at her sleeves and tugged.

Roxie scratched at her temple with the barrel of one of her guns, but step by reluctant step, she began following him. "You owe me some violence."

"Sure! Whatever! Let's just go!"

Just as he was rounding the corner, he saw two men run up to check on the bodies they'd left behind.

"Oh hey! Guys! We're goin this way!!!" She even waved at them. At that point, Beez stopped trying to pull her and just ran. "Yeah, you should probably get a head start," she yelled after him. "I'll catch up in a few minutes!"

The boy darted around every street corner he could find, serpentining down alley after alley before collapsing in a doorway. The sound of gunfire and laughter had faded with each turn, but fear spurred him on. The door beside him was mercifully unlocked, and he scampered inside. Up three flights of stairs, he flew. The walls were covered in layer upon layer of graffiti, to the extent that he guessed it was all indecipherable nonsense even to the residents. He leapt over several unconscious bodies and finally ducked down a hallway seemingly headed to nowhere. He grabbed two bags of trash and made a little pile he could hide behind. Only then, as he wiped the stray blood from his cheeks, did he start to cry again.

"I'm not going, Mom!!"

"Honey, if you're not sick, you have to go to school," she said through the door. Beez curled up into a smaller ball under his blanket. He hadn't slept in days. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw those images again.

"Just go away..."

His mother walked off and began talking to his father down the hall, but the door muffled everything. He hadn't wanted to believe his friends. His father was a good person. He'd always been there for Christmas' and birthdays, and theirs weren't. Not always. He'd always been quick with a smile and advice. Good people don't work for bad companies. He couldn't have been a part of...of that.

"Brandon?" His mothers voice wasn't muffled by the door anymore, although he hadn't heard it open. "Brandon, your father and I think you need to get out of bed." She knelt down beside him and pulled back the blanket a little. The circles underneath his eyes made her recoil slightly, filling her eyes with worry... but then she reached out a finger and tapped his forehead. "Hey."

"Ow! Stop!"

"Hey!" Tap tap. "Wake up!"

Roxie was squatting right in front of him, her furrow-browed face hovering a few inches from his. Beez gasped at the gun barrel touching his forehead and flailed his limbs in an attempt to climb up the wall away from her, but the layers of paper and trash beneath him caused him to skitter like a spider on ice.

"Excellent hiding job. Next time, maybe close the door behind you?" She popped up from her squat and started heading back down the hall. The boy got up more carefully and trailed after her.

"Did you have to kill all those men?"

"Squibs. And no I didn't have to, but it was way more fun that I did."

"How do you know who I am?" The stairs were vacant like before, but the noise level from the bottom floor felt wrong.

"I... ah... keep tabs on certain people. One of them went to your house with several of his friends. Sorry about your parents, kid. It was all over before I got there..."

"Wait," he cried. "Do you work for..." He couldn't even say the name.

"Long Chemicals?" She spun around. "Fuck no!" Even though she was a step below him, she was looking him directly in the eye. For the first time, there was a serious and terrifying glint in her eyes. "My family is dead because of them. I'm looking for payback, and you're gonna help me."

"But...but how am I-" Just as suddenly as it appeared, the seriousness was gone. The gleefulness was less comforting than it should have been as she reached up and tapped his forehead again. With just a finger this time.

"Don't you worry your pretty little head about that. Lets just get outta here." He was pretty sure he knew what she was gonna ask him to do, but he wasn't sure if he was ready to-

Roxie had come to a stop. He nearly bumped into her, lost in his own thoughts as he was. She peered over the railing. After a second, Beez did the same. On the bottom floor, he could just make out the arms of several people running into the lobby from the street towards the first flight of stairs. Gray sleeves. One of them stopped and looked up.

"I suppose I could have closed the door," she mused. The boy jumped back against the wall as guns were pointed, but Roxie just jerked her head to the side. Spackling, flecks of paint, and drywall dust rained a cloud of debris over her as she returned fire. "C'mon," she said, as she wrapped an arm around his stomach and lifted him up into the air. He was momentarily stunned as she hefted him up onto her shoulder and darted back up the stairs they'd just climbed down. His breath was slow in returning as he faced behind her. Men in gray uniforms and helmets came barrelling up the stairs just as she rounded the corner.

"BEHIND!"

Roxie shook her free arm as she ran down the hall, and a small greenish cube popped out of the end of her sleeve and sailed over the railing, The boy's fearful eyes followed the arc of the box as it sank out of his field of vision. Several men began to scream, but they were cut off by an awful explosion. Roxie continued up the next flight of stairs.

"Put me down!"

"Why, so you can run away and leave more doors open? No. We do this my way." She paused at the top of another staircase and looked around. "Crap." Each time she looked in one way, he was able to see in the opposite direction. There didn't appear to be any stairs going higher. "I think this is where we get off." She shrugged, and he slid down from her shoulder to her forearm. When she started running, he tried to look forward, but it looked like they were just heading toward a window...

"No, don't-"

With significantly more strength than he thought she'd be capable of, Roxie threw him. He screamed as he flew backwards through a massive glass pane. For a split second, he could see hundreds of little clear triangles dangling in the air around him. Roxie dove through the window after him a second later, spinning in the air to fire behind her. A second after that, Beez hit another window. A woman's scream filled the void as he landed hard, his breath leaving him in a rush. Roxie hit the ground right next to him, but rolled up onto her feet and kept firing.

An elderly woman in a blue showercap, wrapped in a bath towel, was swinging her soap-on-a-string at him and shouting a language he didn't understand.

"Stop staring, Beez! That's someone's grandmother!" Beez threw open the bathroom door and scampered out of the apartment with Roxie in hot pursuit. Two floors down, Roxie grabbed his hand and kicked down the door to another apartment. Two men in leather swivelled around to look them. "We were never here," Roxie said. The two made no move to stop what her, although they had stopped what they were doing. This time, Roxie threw him over her shoulder and fired one round ahead of them as she charged and dove.

They building-hopped from window to window three more times before she finally lead him down to street level. She held his hand as they melted into a crowd at an open market. The building-hopping had been in random directions, but now that they were out in the open, Roxie was definitely heading in just one.

"Where are we going?" The boy was starting to feel the grumbling in his stomach again. Fear is a powerful motivator, but it will only get you so far.

"A safe place."

***

"Roxie, I..." She hadn't looked backwards in a while, only dragged him forward through street after street, but his pause caused her to finally look over her shoulder at him.

"Damnit." She abruptly changed directions. "We're going to a friends first. Someone trusty."

Beez felt himself being dragged more literally. His feet became increasingly sluggish as they went. After crossing a few more streets, Roxie picked him up and threw him over her shoulder again. It was a little bit humiliating to be carried around by a girl, but...

***

"C'mon, drink up," she urged. The boy's eyes fluttered for a moment, struggling to focus on the cup and straw in front of him. His lips floundered awkwardly, knocking the straw away several times before successfully sucking up any fluids. It wasn't water, but he drank it down all the same.

"Kinda scrawny, ain't 'e?" Beez didn't recognize the voice of the speaker, but his eyes just didn't want to open right now thank you very much.

"Eh, he's got potential. That is, if I can get him to stop wetting himself."

"Are you kidding me? I nearly wet myself when you come through the door."

"So you're saying it's my fault?" There was a dangerous edge to her voice, and Beez didn't think he was the only one that picked up on it.

"No, of course not. That would be silly."

She stood up and walked across the room. The boy opened his eyes a little, watching her boots. "Listen, I saw something on the way over here that I wanted to ask you about."

"Sure, anyth-" HSST.

Beez couldn't be sure, but he was fairly certain he'd just seen Roxie bend her hand back at the wrist like Spiderman and spray the man in the face with a fine mist. His eyes lolled and drooped, and she caught him as he began to slump forward.

"Why don't we go in here and talk about it," she said softly. Fearing she would look over, Beez tucked his chin down against his chest until he was sure they were in the next room. He heard a chair scrape across the floor followed by a heavy thud, but then a few seconds after that, he heard them both start talking. He'd started to feel better almost as soon as the liquid hit his stomach, and he thought he was up to trying to stand. It took him a few tries, and the spinning had almost completely stopped by the time he was fully upright.

"Oh Helen," he heard before he got to the door. "It's been so long!"

"I'm sorry I've, mmmmm, been away, dear!"

Helen? he thought. Who's Helen? Carefully, he leaned farther and farther until one eye could peek around the door frame. Roxie's body suit was down around her knees, and the man for whom he had no name had bent her over a table. He was completely naked too, with his hands on her hips. Beez had never seen anyone having sex in real life before...

Roxie's entire left shoulder, part of her arm, and as much of her back as he could see, were covered in pink scars, like a burn. Her arms obstructed her breasts, although that wouldn't have been hard. Her body suit seemed to map her figure tightly, and she hadn't looked very busty. He thought he might be making out just the slightest hint of underboob... Her hair was down and out of the pony tail she'd had it in so he couldn't see her face, but her moaning wasn't dampened by it.

"My sweet Tay, I've missed you! AHH!" Beez had almost missed that Tay had a small tail hanging down between his butt cheeks, but that only held his gaze for a moment. His real attention was on Tay's... er... well... Beez had never really called it anything. Penis is probably the best word for it. "Yes! YES! Give it to me!!" At her urging, Tay spread his feet a little and began really giving it to her. "Yeeeees! Oh Fuck Yes!" Beez had watched some porn, so he knew a little about where things should be, but he felt like he was seeing a lot of Roxie's... vagina?... from behind. Wasn't that supposed to be kind of flush?

Beez found himself putting his hand down his pants. His own... penis... was halfway awake just from watching them. After a minute though, he was fully erect and his pants were just in the way. He quietly loosened his belt and let his pants fall down to his knees.

While he was distracted, they had switched positions. Roxie was now laying on the table with her legs splayed. Her right leg was pointed at him in such a way as to block his view of her... vagina... but he could clearly see her breasts now. They were little, just like he'd thought, but her nipples mesmerized him as they jumped up every time Tay pushed himself inside her. Now that he could see more of her chest, Beez could see that the scars were only on one side. The other side seemed to have a purple and green tattoo covering roughly the mirror of the scars. It might have been in the shape of a flower and vine, but he couldn't get a good look and he was far too interested in just watching her breasts bounce to really care.


Chasing the Dragon Ch. 01



"Helen, I'm gonna-"

"I know! Cum inside me!"

Beez felt his... climax?... coming, and panicked. With no other options he could think of, he reached down and grabbed his pants just in time to squirt two jets of... cum?... into the crotch of his pants. He frowned when he realized it'd be impossible to pick out that stain against the other ones he'd put there today.

By the time he looked back, Tay was flopped down in a chair, looking completely lost while Roxie was facing away and fixing her body suit. Beez quickly slipped back over to the wall he'd been propped up against before, slurped down almost all of the remaining liquid, and pretended to still be asleep. A few seconds after that Roxie came striding out.

"Beez! Wake up!"

"Wha-wha... What?" He thought he'd done a pretty good acting job, and Roxie seemed none the wiser, although her grin deepened just a hair.

"C'mon! We've gotta get moving, and that should tide you over until we get back." The boy didn't need to fake wobbly legs as he stood, and he couldn't stop from checking out his pants to see how noticeable the stain was. "Don't worry about that. I'll have The Motherfucker whip something up for you when we get there."

"The... who?"

"Don't worry about it. Lets just get mo-"

"Helen!!?" Tay shouted from the other room a second before he burst out, still naked. "Helen, I...oh..."

"Helen's dead, Tavius." Roxie looked extremely sympathetic as she put a hand on his shoulder. "Four years now."

"I'm... I'm so sorry." He looked crestfallen. "I just had the most vivid dream that she was here..."

"Nope, just us. We're gonna get going, ok?"

"Yeah...yeah. I'm sorry I couldn't do more, but... Feel better, kid." Tay waved weakly before turning around and heading back the way he came.

"You gonna be ok?" The sincerity in her voice was thick, but Tay merely waved again. Roxie nodded at the door, and they left.

***

As she led him through another rats nest of streets without natural light, Beez thought more about sex than he ever had in his life. He was 18; he should be calling them other names besides penis, vagina, and climax. He knew other words for those things, but it's funny what things come to mind when you've never realized how dorky being clinical is. He resolved to call them more serious names next time... Next time he what, watched Roxie roofie someone? He thought that maybe he'd be just as happy if he never saw that again...

It was hard to get his mind off sex. Everywhere he looked, big breasted women were beckoning at him, bending over in his direction, and promising him a good time. He couldn't help but stare. They were so big...

"Figures," he heard Roxie mumble as she glared at him over her shoulder.

Breast size wasn't the only oddity though. He saw people with only one eye socket (the other part of the face being smooth), women with three breasts, and women with no breasts (although they might have been men). He saw people with fantastically-colored eyes and hair, every shade he'd ever seen done with a dye job or contacts, but it something told him this was more permanent and natural.

Everyone had always said that The Bottom was full of mutants and degenerates, but he had always pictured something more like Quasimodo, something that didn't look so... so close to normal. This was more like the set of a science fiction vid... There were even little kids running around, although one of them was missing her nose and the boy she chased laughed through a mouth with no teeth. It was seedy, no doubt, but not as awful as he'd thought when he first escaped down here.

***

Beez thought they might have been travelling in a giant circle, not because they kept turning in the same direction, but because no matter how far they went, everything looked the same. One bland concrete building after another after another with barely any discernable features. He still hadn't gotten the hang of being down in The Bottom. His eyes had adjusted to the artificial light quickly enough, but he deeply missed the sun. The way it felt warm on his skin. The way it felt on his eyeballs. The more he thought about things he missed from up top, the sadder he felt.

"You're doin great, Beez. We're almost there, although we need to be careful soon."

"I thought... You said it was safe where we were going!"

"It is safe. Once we get inside."

"Well... what's outside?"

"Mr Bubbles."

"Mr.. Mr Bubbles?!"

"Shhh! Not so loud!" Beez did not to what to make of this woman. She ran blindly, gleefully into gun battles, but something named Mr Bubbles...? Then he realized he hadn't seen another living soul in at least a few miles.

After a few more blocks, the buildings gave way to a massive debris pile. The top of the pile disappeared in the poor light of The Bottom. Some of the mess was from a collapsed building. Girders and concrete pillars poked out everywhere like the ribs of a decaying behemoth, but loose trash of every sort filled the space in between. Beez found himself following closer and closer behind Roxie... so close that when a primal scream tore through the silence and Roxie came to a stop, Beez walked right into her. She barely budged as he bounced off.

For a long minute Roxie stood perfectly still, except for her head which swiveled this way and that. She took two tentative steps forward before another scream, much louder than the first one, rang out. It felt like his blood turned to ice.

"RUN!"

Roxie had her guns out in a flash, and her eyes tracked a ridge running parallel to them. Deeper and deeper into the dump they ran, with Roxie occasionally firing shots off into the dark. His eyes burned from the flash of her gunfire. The awful noises Mr Bubbles was making as he shadowed them was enough encouragement to squeeze the last bits of strength out of Beez, but he didn't know how much farther he could go. Finally, as they rounded the umpteenth corner, he saw a section of the rubble rise up at their approach.

"GO!"

Roxie spun around 20 feet from the entrance, both guns blazing. He could hear a small avalanche of trash falling behind him as Mr Bubbles finally dropped down to their level. 15 feet, 10 feet, 5 feet, and then he was inside! Just as he was passing underneath it, a solid metal door began to descend. His relief at reaching safety turned to fear as he looked over his shoulder. The door was lowering past his shoulder-level, and he could see Roxie's feet charging from still quite a distance. He couldn't bear to watch, but the sound of her sliding underneath the door was unmistakable.

Roxie immediately bounced up on her feet and kicked the door. "Booyaa, asshole!" A deep, resounding thud was answered by the muted-but-still-audible sound of Mr Bubbles thrashing at the other side of the door.

"That was the most terrifying thing that's ever happened to me," the boy puffed. All of his clothes were drenched. Mostly in sweat. He had his hands down on his knees, barely supporting himself, while Roxie danced around the door, thrusting lewdly and taunting the beast. Beez had just barely gotten a look at him right at the end. His shattered teeth and bloodshot eyes were really the only features he remembered, but he was sure he'd see more of him in his nightmares.

"Ooooh yeah! That never gets old! Wooo!" Even Roxie was puffing a little bit. She had her arms raised up over her head in triumph. "Doesn't that make you feel ALIVE?!"

Beez just shook his head and gasped for air. This woman is insane, he thought.

"C'mon, I didn't save your life just to let you get killed by a rabid chimp."

"It sure felt like it!!"

"Alright, alright. Settle down." Roxie looked...impressed? by his little outburst? "You've gotta have your game face on when you meet The Motherfucker."

"The...What?! I thought you said it was safe!!"

"Safe is a relative term. C'mon. Lets get you some threads!" Roxie walked off down a hall, heading deeper into the compound.

"It is not a relative term! It's an absolute!"

"Yeah yeah..." Beez stood there for a minute. Mr Bubbles had not yet given up his tirade outside, so the boy was left with no choice but to follow. He was not prepared for what he found.

The first room was a luxurious living room, complete with couches, a screen that covered an entire wall, and unless he was mistaken, a sound system that populated every corner of the room. This was nicer than his parents home up top...

All of the electronics were smooth, lacking buttons or digital displays. Roxie went over to a black box and tapped at a corner that looked exactly like everything else around it, and the speakers hummed to life with music Beez didn't recognize. At first, it just sounded like beeps and clicks, but a rhythm and melody emerged unexpectedly that made his eyebrows rise up. He hadn't pegged Roxie as a music lover. She continued on past a kitchen that seemed just as sleek as the previous room, albeit in steel and chrome rather than wood and plastic. A hallway branched off past the kitchen to a series of rooms Beez guessed were bedrooms, but they continued past that as well.

"Wait... Is this your home?"

"Duh!"

"Where did you get all this stuff?!" He said, staring back over his shoulder at the kitchen. Food would be nice...

"I'm a thief. I stole it." That tracks, he thought, as they descended down a staircase. She paused at the bottom and looked back at him. "Now, before you meet The Motherfucker, I need you to focus. He's going to try and trick you. He's going to try and turn you against me. He's very, very clever, but he's harmless if you just ignore him."

"If we're going to ignore him, why are we going to see him?"

"Because he makes all my stuff," she said, looking baffled. "Duh."

Beez gave an exasperated sigh as she rapidly tapped her fingers on an empty section of the wall, and a door beside him slide in and to the side.

"Well well well," came a crisp, clear voice with a British accent. "Fresh meat."

"Back off, Motherfucker." Roxie entered first, heading immediately towards a massive table in the middle of the room. Beez stepped lightly inside the room, looking back and forth.

"Isn't he just the cutest little thing you ever did see?" The voice seemed to be coming from everywhere, dripping with a venomous glee.

"Can it!" Roxie said, glancing to her left. Along that wall was a massive server rack. In the middle of it was a large red glass ball. Roxie began tapping on the table. From a few feet behind her, he could tell she was manipulating a touchscreen that seemed to be built into the surface of the table, but he couldn't see it and had no idea what she was doing with it.

"I presume this is Master Zimmer, then?"

"Y-y-yes." Beez still hadn't found anyone else in the room, although he thought the cameras in each of the corners could be broadcasting his image to somewhere else. That wasn't a fun thought...

"Ooooh, he can talk too! The complete package!"

"Don't listen to him," Roxie said over her shoulder.

"I think this boy looks smart enough. He doesn't need some thrill-seeking revenge junky to do his thinking for him, now does he?" There was something about that red ball. Something was moving inside of it... Roxie was engrossed in whatever she was doing as Beez walked slowly towards the ball. It seemed to swirl, like a snow globe full of red sand. He raised his hand towards it...

Roxie's hand came down unexpectedly on his shoulder, roughly jerking him backwards. "Don't touch The Motherfucker!" Beez turned to face the server rack again. The red ball seemed to glow menacingly for a moment. "Jeebus, kid!"

"Wait, it's an AI?"

"Sharp. As. A. Tack." If it was being sarcastic, it was also extremely dry.

"If you have an AI, what do you need a hacker for? Couldn't you just let him do-"

"Absolutely not," she cried, turning around from her work again. Her eyes looked crazed. "Never hook The Motherfucker up to ANYTHING. He's a mega-maniacal monster!"

The machine laughed darkly and the red light pulsed again. Beez thumped back against the table as he considered his position. At least two corporations wanted him dead, and he was trapped inside a compound with a killer robot by a killer monkey. On top of all that was the certainty that Roxie was the one that was going to get him killed. It all seemed so silly...

"He's already cracking, Roxanne my love. You've made a mistake bringing him here!"

"One!"

"Your threats are meaningless!" The voice spoke quickly, with much more anger than before.

"Two!"

...and then there was silence. The red ball pulsed rapidly, but remained quiet. After several minutes, one of the smaller systems in the corner began to hiss and hum. Roxie walked over next to it and folded her arms tightly across her chest. Beez joined her, although he kept peering over his shoulder at the red ball fearfully. He was almost certain he could still hear it laughing, but Roxie made no move to silence it again. The humming ramped up, and with a snap-hiss, the cover of the machine lifted to reveal a blue bodysuit. At a glance, Beez thought it might fit him, although he had no idea how she'd gotten his measurements.

"C'mon. Take it and lets go." The boy was only too happy to comply. "I'll be back later for some refills," She said aloud.

"Oh, I can't wait, my love." It sounded more like 'cahn't'. The door shut behind them just as The Motherfucker began laughing again.

"I can see why you call him that," Beez said, deeply grateful to be out of that room. He'd had the most unsettled feeling that the machine had been watching him closely from a dozen angles, tracking movement, heart rate, body temp, brain activity, and a thousand other indicators. It was...invasive. "He's an asshole."

"That's not why I call him that." She shook her head at him and bounced back up the stairs, unburdened by the encounter. The boy had never been so confused in his entire life. "C'mon! I'm gonna cook some food!"

"Can I change while you do that?" Beez trudged up the stairs, feeling every ache and bump.

"Well you're not coming in my kitchen wearing those clothes, so I would hope so! Maybe take a shower while you're in there too! Oh! But before you do..." Roxie came jogging out of the kitchen with a little green box in her hand. The boy recoiled at first. "How about a nice juice box?"

Tentatively, he took the juice box. How old does she think I am, he wondered. There was no brand name on it. Just a picture of a blond haired boy skipping with the word 'Weeeee!' in a talk bubble on all four sides. The boy kind of looked like him... Roxie stood there grinning at him until he nodded, confirming that he would, in fact, drink it, before jogging back into the kitchen.

"Drink it first so you don't pass out in the shower!"

He sighed and turned down the hallway. The door to the room at the end of the hall was half-open and, by the look of it, was Roxie's. He tried the first door, but it was locked. The second door seemed to be an unoccupied bedroom, so he went inside and shut the door behind him.

Beez stripped down naked and threw his clothes in a pile on the corner. He laid the bodysuit down on the bed and stretched it out to its full shape. The Motherfucker had probably been measuring him from the second he walked in the door. Beez popped the straw in the box and took a tentative sip. Apple. Interesting...

He was surprised to find that the bathroom attached to the bedroom was laid out just like his bathroom at home. That might have even been the same shower curtain. The hot water was a delight he'd been worried he might never experience again, although for the life of him, he couldn't remember why. It was just so great to be home...

***

"Brandon!"

Beez quickly covered himself with the towel he'd been drying his legs with. Had he left the door open by accident? "Moooom!"

"How original," she smirked, but her smile quickly returned. His mother was wearing a very thin negligee... He'd noticed his mothers full bosom and red lips before. He'd even fantasized about her coming to him like this, but to have it actually happen was almost beyond belief!

"Your father's going to be gone on a trip for a few days, so I need you to be the man of the house for a while." The way she walked towards him, one foot planted straight in front of the other, reminded him of a large cat, like a panther, stalking. "Do you think you can do that for me, Brandon?"

Beez nodded as she stopped right in front of him. His mother felt shorter somehow, but she usually wore heels so it didn't seem odd. He started to roll up on his toes to kiss her, but she turned her head slightly as she knelt down in front of him. The hand holding up his towel trembled as she wrapped her fingers around the bottom of it and tugged.

"Oh, that's wonderful," she said as the towel fell away, eyeballing his... manhood?... maybe. "I wasn't expecting that."

"Is it ok?" Beez hadn't known what to think of his manhood. The other boys in the locker rooms always turned away before getting dressed. The men in porn vids all seemed much bigger, but his mother never lied to him...

"It's more than ok, son. It's perfect." She wrapped her fingers around his stiffy?... no. Cock? Much better. His cock had just started to rise. "That's a good thing, too. Momma's hungry!"

When she leaned in and wrapped her lips around the tip, he nearly fell over. It felt like she was french kissing him! Beez rapidly clenched and unclenched his fists. He reached hesitantly for her head, but settled his hands on her shoulders a moment later. She made an "Mmmmmmmmm" sound as her tongue flicked rapidly up and down, toying with the hole in the tip.

"Oh mom..."

"Mmmmmmm"

"Can I cum in your mouth?" Nailed it.

"Mmmmmm! Of course dear!" Her hand stroked him rapidly while her lips were otherwise in use, but as soon as she was done talking, they wrapped right back around the tip. He was a little glad she hadn't gone much farther than that, because he might have finished on the spot if she went past it and he really wanted to make a good impression. He very much wanted to be a good man of the house.

He loved the view. With his mom staying out at the tip, her breasts seemed to push out beside it. It looked like his manhood was laying along her cleavage, which was hoooooot to think about. He considered asking to be allowed to push his cock in between her luscious breasts, but he didn't want to pressure her. Not so soon. Save something for next time, he told himself.

He started to feel a clenching down inside himself, and Beez rapidly tapped his mother on the shoulder. "Mom... Mom... Mom! MOM!"

His mother just looked up at him, cheeks drawn inward as she sucked and sucked and sucked. His chin shook as he tried to think of something cool to say, but it came out as "Aaeeeeeiioooooooooooo..." His mothers eyes closed bashfully as he spurted into her mouth, and she purred in between swallows. Then she she licked at him while he sighed endlessly.

"Mmmmmmm, that hit the spot, Brandon! Thank you!"

"Y-y-your welcome!" Why was she thanking him?! "Thank you too!"

"Oh, don't thank me just yet. Being the man of the house isn't just about giving. It's about taking too." Beez blinked absently, not really listening to what she was saying. Yes. Taking. Definitely. When she stood up and took his hand, Beez drifted along behind her with barely a coherent thought. Oh. Yes. The bed. Good idea. "Now just bend over the edge, dear." Beez did as he was instructed, kneeling down and bending over. Something pressed against his butt cheeks.




Chasing the Dragon Ch. 01



"I have a little toy here I want to use with your father when he gets back. Is it ok if we try it out now?"

"Of course, mom..." The boy heard a wet sound behind him. He hadn't remembered her carrying any toys. He considered looking backwards, but he was sooo comfortable...

The... toy... that had been pressed against him moved away for a second, but when it came back, it slipped between his butt cheeks instead of laying on them.

"Uhm, Mom, I-"

"Don't worry, dear. It's not very big." She sounded bashful again. He couldn't imagine why. "If you could just think about something else for a minute, I'm sure this won't take long..."

His arms were slack beside him until his mother reached up, took them, and pulled them together above his lower back. Then they shifted so that his hands were both being held by one of hers, and he felt her other hand grasp one of his butt cheeks.

"Uhm, Mom-"

But then she pushed. Beez took a deep gasp as he felt his backside penetrated. It made his eyes bug out, although it didn't hurt. Not really.

"Oh son!" She cried, as her hips came to rest against him. The boy's mouth hung open as he panted quickly. It felt like a big finger. Or maybe a thumb, but a little longer. "Oh holy shit!" Mom never curses. The toy must be working, he guessed. He wished it didn't feel quite so uncomfortable, but this was a small price to pay for what she'd already done for him. "Brandon, you are making your mother a very happy woman right now!" And then she started thrusting.

Beez felt his arms pulled back almost painfully. Each time she came in, she pulled herself in by his arms. Her other hand, clamped down and pulling on his cheek, squeezed and massaged in a way he was starting to enjoy. Every time she pushed in, he felt something wet touch the back of his thigh, but he had no idea how he felt about what was happening in his ass.

"Oh Brandon, thank you soooooooo much for this! Fuuuuuck! You're suuuuuuch a good boy!" Beez flushed a little at the praise, and although he couldn't quite help her thrust, he did help pull her in a little harder. It was the least he could do for his mother. He began to feel his penis filling back out beneath him. He tried wiggling a little, and managed to direct it out to the side instead of straight down into the bed, but the wiggling made his mother start shouting.

"Oh yes! Oh yes! Oh yes yes yes yesssssssssssssssssss..." Beez felt quite a bit of pride in helping his mother feel so good. As she ground to a halt behind him and his arms went slack, he closed his eyes and smiled. "Oh, you're blushing all over! Isn't that precious? Brandon dear, would you, huuuuuh," she grunted, as she pulled the toy out of his butt, "would you wait here for a few minutes?"

"Sure thing, mom..." He rolled over a little just in time to see her walking away and out the door. "I'll stay right here..."

***

"Beez!!!" Roxie's voiced snapped him back. He didn't remember falling asleep in the middle of the bed, but he'd been so exhausted since he fled to The Bottom that little blackouts here and there were becoming common. "You pass out in there?!"

"Uhhhh, y-y-yeah..." His head was a little foggy as he sat up. He paused when he realized he'd left the bedroom door open, and HOLY CRAP HE WAS FULLY ERECT. He leapt across the room, shut the door, and leaned back against it. If she hadn't known he'd fallen asleep, she probably hadn't walked back here then. Thank god. He'd had the weirdest dream... about his mom, of all people.

After he caught his breath, he decided to try on the bodysuit. Just like he'd suspected, it fit like a glove. He couldn't figure out what it was made of. It felt tough when he slapped it, but it stretched and moved with incredible ease. After testing all sorts of poses, he started to smell whatever it was Roxie was making. He skipped socks and shoes and headed out to the kitchen.

"Very sharp!" Roxie looked him up and down approvingly before turning back to the stove. "Does it fit ok?"

"Yeah, thanks, " he said as he hopped up on one of the stools.

"Good, good. I made eggs and bacon. Don't ask where they came from!" He hadn't planned on asking, but now he was a little curious/worried. She hastily assembled two plates and slid one along the countertop to him. "It's a good thing you didn't take any longer, cus I'd have started without you. Momma's hungry!" The little hairs on the back of his neck stood straight up, but for the life of him, Beez couldn't figure out why. 



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. 




Chasing the Dragon Ch. 02



"Mmmm, go harder, Beez." 

His hands wrapped around her hips and he went faster. Eliza's left shoulder started moving very rapidly, and Beez wondered if he was going too slow. Her groans had gotten louder, sure, but he thought he could do better. 

"yes...yes... ye-Oh Yes! Yes! Yes!" He swelled with pride. "Yes! God Yes!" When he pulled himself in, he felt her fall back into him, making it just that much faster. "Yes, Beez! Yes!" Her yellow hair, up in the bun she always kept it in, wobbled precariously on the back of her head. Beez felt his mouth go dry, and his panting became louder. "OOoooooh! Put a finger in my ass, Beez!" 

WIthout thought, one of his hands slid around her cheeks, and he pushed his thumb down on her ass. It slid in to the first knuckle, but then it seemed to tighten considerably. His own orgasm was juuust... about... there... 

"Ooooooooh Yes! Fuck Yes!" Eliza's entire torso was shaking from how hard her arm was working underneath her. Beez made one final push and stared at the ceiling dumbly for a minute. "NnnnnnNNNnnNNNnNGH! NNNNNNNNNGHAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaa!" He could feel her twitching beneath him, but it was beyond him to look around. "Oooooooooooh, <gasp> ooooooooooh, <gasp> ooooooooooh <gasp>" 

Is it possible to fuck yourself silly, he wondered as the room started to go dark. 

*** 

Beez jumped up from the couch to the sound of Roxie slamming the fridge door. "Oh, I'm sorry!" She looked genuinely unhappy to have woken him. "Didn't realize you were asleep out here." 

"Yeah, I, uh..." Beez scratched his head. "I must still be trying to catch up." 

"Do you want some coffee?" 

"No..." 

"Are you sure? We're gonna get started pretty soon." 

"No? What do you mean, get started?" 

"The whole reason I brought you here." 

"I'm not gonna train to get ready?" 

"Train to what?" 

"I don't know... karate?" 

"Lipstick on a cow." She walked over and sat down on the couch. The coffee table in the middle of the room began to glow when she tapped the corner twice. "So I need personnel info on four people. All four either work for or are contracted by Long Chemicals. There aren't many data lines down here in The Bottom, and none of them are unprotected. Can't use mine either, or they'll figure out where we are." 

"What do you mean when you say unprotected?" 

"It mean that you're gonna have to do some work and I'm gonna have to do some work." The gleam in her eye was a little worrisome. The table turned into a grid, which after some head twisting, Beez realized was a map. "There's four not too far from here, so those are all obviously out." She tapped on four glowing yellow dots, and they winked out. In the middle of the circle those four created was a green dot he supposed was where they were. Beez knew that New York had been mostly on an island once, but he hadn't seen the rivers and bays on a map in a long time. 

"We're gonna end up pissing someone off when we do this. There's no way around it, so I'm thinking we go after your money box friends and keep our mortal enemies list from getting any longer." 

"I guess..." It made a kind of sense. Sort of. She tapped most of the remaining yellow spots, and that left two red dots. "Go for the farther one then?" 

Roxie raised an eyebrow at him and thought. "Alright, but this isn't gonna work if you're gonna start having ideas of your own all the time." 

"I promise I'll stop thinking completely." 

Roxie nodded and looked back down at the map. She knows I can't actually stop thinking, right? Right? 

*** 

When they finally stopped running, Beez stumbled over to a nearby building and leaned against it, gasping. "Is he gonna chase us like that every time?" 

"Not if he doesn't hear us or smell us or see us." 

"Have you ever asked The Motherfucker to help you figure out a way to do that?" 

"Of course not." 

"Of course not," he repeated. 

"You've gotta be careful with what you tell The Motherfucker. Knowledge is power, so I have a policy of never telling him anything I don't have to." 

"...then how did he know my name?" 

"Nobody's perfect." She started walking much sooner than he was ready for, but he was fairly certain she'd just assume he would catch up later and leave him if he didn't try. They crossed several blocks quietly, except for his labored breath. 

"Are we gonna walk the whole way?" 

"Duh." 

"We can't, like, hijack one of these cars?" They were literally everywhere. 

"Pretty sure they're out of fuel, and I wouldn't know how to drive one if they weren't." 

Beez tried a few doors before he found one that was unlocked. It was dusty inside, and the smell wasn't great. The steering wheel looked pretty similar to the one in his fathers car, but he couldn't find the control buttons for his thumbs... "What are these pedals for?" 

" 'the fuck should I know?" 

He got out and slammed the door harder than he needed to, and immediately winced and ducked when he realized how the sound echoed and carried down here. Roxie just shook her head at him. 

"Dumas." 

"They're called Servos! Not servings!" She just shook her head and started walking again. 

*** 

Time is hard to track in constant dark. The boy's holographic interface told him it had only been a few hours since they'd left, but it felt much longer. He tried navigating the system in his suit more while they walked, but the omnipresent debris presented a serious falling hazard. They stopped around what his clock told him was midday at a little shop. The ramen he ordered was the most delicious thing he'd ever eaten. Roxie paid by waving her hand over a machine. She and the cashier seemed to stare contentiously at each other until the machine beeped, and then the smiles returned. He supposed that dining and dashing was probably common. If Roxie was right about cops not coming down here, then this was basically a lawless state. It was amazing that any business survived at all. 

*** 

He started calling it HI, and it immediately took to basic voice commands. 

"That's gonna be the bees all over again," she muttered. "No thought." 

*** 

They came to a stop a few blocks short in the early evening. The building they were looking for was easy to spot, as it was easily the most well lighted building they'd seen in the entire trip. It glowed from miles away. 

"So what's the plan?' 

"Plan?" 

"Yeah. How are we gonna get inside?" 

"Killing them all isn't a plan?" 

"For fucks sakes. How did you ever manage to steal anything?" 

"I was all thiefy and tried not to kill people. I don't see how that applies." 

"Can we try some stealth?" 

"You're gonna suck all the fun out of this, aren't you?" 

"Just... let me try it my way first, ok?" 

"Fiiiiiiine." 

Beez had taken a few steps before he realized Roxie had fallen in behind him. It was a little bit scary to be taking the lead, especially since he didn't really have a plan. It was a lot scary that she was behind him. He'd grown fairly comfortable having her where he could see her. 

It was a building just like any other from the outside, with the exception of the number of lights flooding each direction. Beez was worried by all the guards he could see in neighboring buildings, but none of them seemed particularly attentive. You'd have to be stupid or insane to attack this place, he thought. Check and check. The front door had an incoming and outgoing gate system with a little guardhouse in between. The guard on duty couldn't have paid them any less attention as they walked up. 

"I, uhm, I need to s-s-speak to someone regarding my account status," he stammered. The guard looked up from his little vidscreen and stared at Beez for a few seconds before shaking his head and looking back down. 

"Well, that was worth a shot." BLAM!! Part of him thought it was funny how yesterday, when he was less concerned with getting away clean than with getting away at all, he had hardly noticed how deafening Roxie's pistols were. Almost immediately, both the incoming and outgoing gates slammed shut. "Through the window," she roared, as she spun and began firing at the neighboring buildings. Beez scampered through the shattered window into the guardhouse and up the steps. Two guards were coming out the door as he approached the front of the building, but both of them were looking past him at the gun-wielding maniac. In his mind, he pictured a grand move where he sidestepped them and swept out their legs, but before he could put any of that in motion, he tripped. 

"C'mon!" Roxie lifted him up by the neck of his suit. Sparse gunfire ricocheting nearby put some step in his shoes, but he couldn't help turning around to see that the two guards had both tripped on him and fallen down the stairs. "They didn't wake up this morning with those bullet holes, so you don't get credit for them. Put that suit to some use, will you?" 

The boy didn't have a hard time finding the wireless network for the building, although it wasn't connected to the data line they were after. It had a minimal firewall, and his suit broke through it without him needing to try anything crafty. He shut off the lights and gasped when his contacts immediately switched over to night vision. "That's awesome!" 

"Stop patting...yourself on the back and... figure... out where... we're going!" She had to pause her questions around bursts of incoming gunfire. She ducked her head around the corner briefly, and then fired a few shots blindly. The incoming gunfire lessened. 

"uhhh...UHHH...Third Floor!" 

Roxie nodded and darted around the corner. The boy duckwalked up to the corner, but every time he got up the courage to look, more gunshots made him rethink. He heard gunfire traded back and forth. Most of the guards seemed to be armed with guns that fired rapidly, but the singular, massive report of Roxie's pistols comforted him each time he heard it. 

"You've gotta move!" 

"They're still shooting at me!" 

"C'mon, stop being such a pansy!" 

"Yeah, kid! Stop being such a pansy and come out here!" 

"YOU SHUT THE FUCK UP!" Beez peered around the corner to see an enraged Roxie making a suicidal charge down the hall from an adjoining hallway. He counted at least 6 bodies, with two more still collapsing at the far end. She shot the last one to fall at least 15 times. 

"They tried to trick you," she panted as he caught up to her. "Good job not falling for it." 

"Stairs are this way." Roxie nodded and headed where he pointed. Just before they hit the third floor, he noticed that the left shoulder of her duster was turning red. "Oh my GOD, are you hit?!" 

"Yeah, but I get shot a lot. It's not a big deal." She hadn't even paused. She moved slowly through the door to enter the third floor. Ahead of them was a large open air workspace. Along the sides were several dark offices. The middle area was a cubicle farm, and straight ahead... 

"That's it there. I need to get into that red door straight ahead." 

Roxie looked around the room for a few seconds and nodded. "Alright, go on then. I'll stay here and keep watch." 

Beez started to jog through the cubicles. Just as he passed the first sets of office doors to the sides, he saw a flicker of movement. Everything seemed to slow down. He turned to see a grey suited man begin to aim at him, only to take a bullet in the side of the head. 

Head swivelling, Beez ducked a little and ran full tilt for the red door. Another guard stepped out in front of him, and fired several rounds into the ceiling as he fell. Someone behind and to his right got off a few shots in his direction, but Roxie's guns put a stop to that as quickly as it had started. 

The boy hurtled into the red door at full speed, breaking down the doorframe and collapsing to the floor. He heard footsteps approaching and crabwalked into a corner in a panic. When Roxie flipped on the light with the barrel of her gun, Beez clutched his chest in a desperate attempt to stop it from beating clear out of his chest. 

"Did you just... Did you just use me as bait?!" 

"Yup," she said without a pause. "This is all computer shit in here. Good luck." 

"What?! But..." But she was already gone. The boy took a moment to get himself upright and surveyed the equipment. There were a half dozen terminals, but it wasn't hard figuring out which one had the access he was looking for. He'd tried hard not to think about what he was going to have to do. He knew it would be easy. He'd left a backdoor for himself when he hacked into Long Chemicals last time, but just thinking about that brought up a host of thoughts he didn't want to process. 

Personnel files. Focus on the personnel files. HI had all the information Roxie could provide, which was minimal but sufficient. Getting the terminal to transfer the data to HI was the most difficult part, since the terminal was obviously designed to NOT connect to anything else around it. All the building blocks he needed to create new connection types were there, though, so it wasn't impossible. All in all, it took around 15 minutes. There was never a period longer than 2 minutes where Roxie wasn't shooting at something, although by the sound of it, she had ranged pretty far out by the end. 

He spent a few extra minutes working one of the other terminals to wipe the cameras when he heard Roxie walk up behind him. "Hey, I'm almost done in here." 

"You are now," said a voice he didn't recognize. He spun just in time to see the muzzle flash. 

Beez had never been shot before. He'd never had a broken bone except for his nose once when a door slammed on it. He'd barely skinned his knees. All in all, Beez had led a fairly pain-free life up to that moment. He would have been happy having never known how badly gunshots hurt. Especially ones to the stomach. 

Beez immediately collapsed to the floor, his hands pressing tightly over the searing sensation. Blood leaked out over his fingertips, and although he could see it all over his pants, he thought it was odd that he couldn't feel that it was wet. He trembled as he looked back up at the man in the doorway, but his eyes were drawn behind him. "Say goodnight, ki-" 

A fire extinguisher came hurtling through the air, tumbling end over end, and hit his would-be executioner square in the back of the head. The man fell to the floor in a spray of blood, and Roxie was diving in almost before he hit the ground. She picked the extinguisher back up, and proceeded to pound the man's head over and over until it more resembled her pancakes than a skull. Beez thought he might have thrown up if he wasn't trying so desperately to keep everything on the inside where it belonged. When Roxie finally dropped the can with a thud and looked over at him, she merely nodded. 

"Sorry about that. Ran out of bullets." 

"I'm dying!" 

"Oh, you're not dying, ya sissy. The suit is pumping you full of all kinds of good shit right now. We just need to get you stitched up sooner rather than later is all." The blood from her own wound had made a significant red stain down the front of her duster. She reached down to pick up the dead mans gun and knelt down in front of the boy. "Do you think you can walk?" There were tears in his eyes when he nodded, although just standing was much harder than he thought it was going to be. "You're gonna be fine. Just try not to jerk around too much." 

There was significantly decreased opposition as they exited the building. Beez had managed to get all the outdoor lights shut off, so the area was almost completely black as they exited the building. He saw at least a few guards in the neighboring buildings, but they all seemed content just to escape with their lives and watch them go. He might have made it a mile before he collapsed in a sobbing mess. 

"Ok," Roxie said soothingly. "You did great getting this far, kid." She reached down and scooped an arm under his legs, and he wrapped his arms around her neck. "Hold on tight, now. They'll probably try to chase us once they can regroup and get some numbers, so I'm gonna run now." 

The bouncing back and forth was torturous. Her free hand spent most of the time stroking the back of his neck when she wasn't cradling him to keep her balance. With his eyes closed, he had no idea how fast or how far they went, but he was not surprised to find out later that he passed out. 

*** 

Beez gasped and jumped when he woke up, which made the pain in his gut flare up. Roxie looked over from the window she was parked in front of, but said nothing. 

"Oh god...Oh god... Oh, it hurts." 

"I know it does, Beez, but just hang on." 

He groaned and rolled around on his back a little. "How long have I been out for?" 

"Maybe 12 hours." 

"Oh god...Where are we?" 

"Had to stop about halfway back. They were out in packs lookin' for us, so we're laying low." 

"I don't know how long I can lay low for." 

"Don't worry. Help is on the way." 

*** 

"I think he's waking up," said a man. 

"Isn't it too soon?" 

"All things happen in time with The Maker's plan," he said sonorously. 

"For fucks sakes, Wheezy, we don't have time for your sermons." 

"I'm know, I'm sorry. Force of habit." 

"Yeah, well, force that bullet out already." 

Beez was sure that, if someone had a pair of tweezers deep in his stomach probing around for a stray piece of metal, he'd have felt it, but when he peeked an eye open and looked down, there was and he didn't. 

"I'm gonna need something else from ya, Wheezy, and you're not gonna like it." 

"I'm here to help, Roxie. If I didn't want to do it, I wouldn't have come." 

"I'm gonna need..." Beez couldn't make out what she said as she leaned in and whispered in Wheezy's ear. 

"That's suicide! Why in the world would I do that?" 

"You know I wouldn't ask if it wasn't necessary!" 

"Tell me why." 

"I can't carry him past Mr. Bubbles. He'll need to run." 

"Why don't you just kill that motherfucker already?" 

"How would that solve my problem?" 

Beez cried as he laughed, and laughed as he cried. It was so horridly funny. Wheezy scrambled and gave him another shot, and he sank back into the black. 

*** 

Beez had never felt better in his entire life when he woke up next to a pile of cars. Roxie was eyeing him nervously as he stood up and slapped his hands down over his stomach and legs. 

"That doctor is amazing... I don't feel anything wrong! It's like I was never shot!" 

"Oh, you definitely were shot. I just gave you something that takes away your ability to sense pain. We need to hurry before it starts to wear off, or this will have been worse than not doing anything at all." Beez took a few steps, then skipped a few, and then started hopping. "Don't jump around any more than you need to! You'll tear your damn stitches!" 

"I'm a living god!" The rush was incomparable, beyond any sensation he'd ever had, beyond any description he'd ever attempted. When Roxie started running, he ran right with her. Effortlessly. He even ran a little ahead. As he approached the borders of the pile, he began shouting. "Come on, you sack of crap! Show me what you've got!!" 

"I've gotta give you this stuff when you're healthy!" 

Mr Bubbles roared in response from deep in the bowels of the chaos. Roxie darted ahead of him, clearly displaying her superior speed, but Beez just laughed and enjoyed a good run. Stretching his legs hadn't felt this good since his childhood. He was starting to get a handle on the turns they took, and felt confident he could make this run on his own if necessary. He didn't even feel that pit in his stomach when Mr Bubbles burst out through a slanted door frame not less than 10 feet behind him. His feet were so light, it was like running on air. He was even putting some distance between himself and Mr Bubbles. One more turn, and they'd b- 




Chasing the Dragon Ch. 02



In the space between one second and the next, a burning sensation grew in his middle. 

"..roxie..." 

He'd wanted to scream it, but it came out so weak. She'd already rounded the corner ahead of him. A numbness settled over his legs, but he had quite a bit of momentum. If he could just keep them pumping and maybe lean a little, he'd be ok. He looked back over his shoulder. Mr Bubbles was salivating, closer behind him than he was a few seconds before. Suddenly, Beez was tumbling forward. As he flipped, he saw that his legs had gotten tangled together, although he was sure he was still pumping them. He landed on his back, although he barely felt it. His eyes rolled up, looking backwards, and he saw Mr Bubbles had leapt at least 10 feet into the air. His hands were knotted together to form a club. 

Just as the double fist was about to crash down on him, Mr Bubbles slid out of view above him. He both felt and heard the incredible thump as the savage little monkey hit the ground. A small dust cloud flew up around him. Through squinted eyes, he saw Roxie let go of his ankles and the two charged each other. Roxie landed a kick to his stomach which sent him sprawling, but as soon as he stopped sliding, he was on the move again. She ducked down, and when he pounced, she sidestepped, grabbed one arm, and swung him around like a giant sack of Potatomins. She didn't wait for him to land to start running towards the boy, and she scooped him up into her arms without hardly slowing down. The door shut behind them in plenty of time. 

"...why don't you just kill him..." 

"I swear, I must be the only person alive who appreciates a good moat monster." 

*** 

"Beez? Beez, c'mon. It's time to wake up." 

"I don't want to, Mom. It's Saturday." 

"I'm not your mom, and you don't have to go to school, but it's time for you to wake up." 

"No!" 

"C'mon! I've kept you in a coma for a week, and I'm bored." 

"A w..." Beez opened his eyes and looked around. He didn't recognize this room, but it looked fairly...medically? "A week?" 

"Yeah. You tore yourself up pretty good getting in here. I figured a week to be safe. Had to stitch you back up again." 

In his mind, Beez pictured pulling up his shirt to find that his torso resembled a clown suit, held together with stitches, staples, and scotch tape, but the reality was much cleaner. The wound, while still pink and sore, was clean and healing. He tentatively touched around it, and while it was sore, it wasn't a deathly pain. "A week!?" 

"Yeah. I've had some time to pour through all the stuff you got. You got way more than just the personnel files I wanted, so it took some sifting, but you got everything I needed." Her smile was unusual. "...And as a thank you, I have a surprise for you!" She handed him a tiny white pill 

"I don't think I'm up fo-" 

"Nonsense. You'll just need to lay there. Don't worry! Oh! But I forgot the best part in the... other room! I'll be right back!" 

Beez popped the pill and propped himself up on his elbows. When she opened the door and left, he thought he was looking out into the hallway where their bedrooms were, making this that first door that was locked before. He had most of her apartment mapped out in his head now, and as soon as the cobwebs cleared out of his head, he thought he was going to start... what? Feeling more comfortable here? Feeling like this was home? He certainly felt a massive amount of gratitude towards Roxie. His eyes widened when he started to think about how far she must have carried him. That was miles and miles! On foot! She'd been shot herself!! No matter what information he'd gotten her, he owed her. 

"Hey Beeeeeez!" Roxie walked around the corner, smirking. 

"Roxie, listen, I-" 

"What?!" 

"Listen, I don't know how I'm ever going to-" 

"No! What was that first part?" 

"Uh...Roxie?" 

"That's... never happened before..." Her smirk got weird, like the kind of smile people get when they're trying to hide an enormous amount of nervousness. The boy couldn't figure out why that would be. He must just still be a little loopy from all the drugs. "Listen, Beez, I've gotta go see my friend Three Legs. It's really important, but I'll be back in a couple hours! Don't go anywhere!" And then she was gone. 

As he sat there on the medical table, shaking his head, he was reminded of something his father had said to him once. "Women, am I right?" 

"Yeah, Dad. Yeah, you were."



Chasing the Dragon Ch. 03



While he waited for her to return, Beez poked around the compound. The living room and kitchen seemed so sparse. It seemed that either Roxie was making some kind of aesthetic statement, given how spartan the rooms were, or she had found it this way. Both seemed equally plausible. 

The more he thought about it, the more it seemed like this place had to have existed before the collapse of whatever was on top of here. It's one thing to hollow out a mountain of dirt, which is more or less done settling, and build a compound underneath that. A mountain of trash has no internal structural integrity and therefore, he thought, there could be no tunnelling done underneath it. That raised questions. Roxie seemed like an extremely resourceful person. Was this place given to her? It had to have been. Who goes looking through a dump to find something like this? Then again, she might have been looking for something else. 

Beez muttered to himself, frustrated by the pointlessness of wondering about all of this when answers were more likely to materialize from thin air than come to him on his own. He wandered over to his bedroom and found his bodysuit waiting for him on his bed. He felt safer once he was in it and out of the hospital gown he'd awoken in. As he strode out of his room, he noticed that Roxie's bedroom door was still open. He sifted through several pieces of advice his parents had given him about doors and settled on 'An open door is an inviting door'. He couldn't remember the circumstances under which his mother had said that, but it was the closest advice he could think of to justify what he was going to do anyway.

Her room was just as minimalist as the rest of the apartment. The walls were bare, and the bed tidy and unruffled. He felt a little guilty crossing the threshold, but not enough to stop. She had very little in the way of clothes, aside from many copies of her bodysuit. They might have been different in function for all he could tell, but the appearance was uniform. She had several brown dusters in a closet. One had a bullet hole in the front and back of the left shoulder. The stain was dark, but not gone. In fact, most of the dusters had a hole or two in them. 

The nightstand nearest to the door was empty except for another handgun and some ammunition, but the other surprised him. In the bottom drawer, he found a large pad of paper and several loose pencils of different colors. As he flipped through the book, he found drawings of flowers. Not a field of flowers or a bunch, but one flower. No background, no hand holding them, no vase. Just one flower, per page, elegantly sketched. He only recognized two of them; a rhododendron and an orchid. None of the flowers there seemed to match the tattoo he'd seen on her shoulder, but he had the strangest feeling he was staring at a deep and central theme for Roxie, even if he couldn't understand it. 

He carefully put the pad back and headed to the kitchen. The refrigerator had a pile of those green juice boxes, which made his lip twist into a ghost of a sneer. Besides those, it was fairly well stocked. The cabinets he opened were filled with boxes and cans of food stuffs, and a door by his knee had more spices in it than he'd seen in his entire life. Curiouser and curiouser, he thought.

Eventually, his wanderings took him out of the kitchen, past the bedrooms, and down the flight of stairs. With his contacts in, the keypad for access to The Motherfucker was visible. It seemed to be the only purpose for this wing of the compound, as there were no other doors or hallways branching off from it. Just a dead end with a keypad in the middle of the wall. Beez stared for a minute. The interface was holographic. He didn't know if he could get HI to interface with it to hack it, but then he had a much better idea. 

He ran back to his room and grabbed the little green box from his dresser. It took him a minute to pop out one of his contacts, but he was glad to have a place to put it immediately. With his one eye squinted shut the holographic interface was visible, positioned immediately against the wall and not hovering like HI. With the other, the holographic interface was invisible. As he stared at the wall, he could see a slight browning on the white paint where her fingers had deposited oil and dirt and who knows what else. Blood. Probably a lot of blood over the years. It had been cleaned a few times, but it was visible.

She'd hit four numbers the first time she brought him down here. He opened and closed his eyes in an alternating manner, and he found four brown spots corresponding with numbers; 1, 4, 5, and 7. 24 possible combinations. He'd done some brute force hacking in his time, although it lacked elegance. Number 18 was the winner. 5417. With a hiss and a soft whirr, the wall next to him swung in and away. 

"Well this is an unexpected surprise," The Motherfucker said. "Up and about and looking rather spry. ... Where is your nurse?"

"She told you I got shot?"

"No, but she had me synthesize an assortment of painkillers and treatments. It wasn't much of a leap when you didn't accompany her during the same amount of time for which I had provided medication. The larger question remains."

"She's not here."

"Oh-ho! Breaking and entering then, are we? Roxanne will be so proud when she's done pummelling you. I do hope she finds you in flagrante so I can watch at least some of it."

"She said she was going to be gone for a few hours."

"Then she'll be cutting it close."

"Close to what?" The red ball Beez thought of as The Motherfucker's eye pulsed but remained quiet. He walked around a little, looking more closely at the different machines. He was getting tired of asking questions and not getting answers. And then he had a thought.

"Motherfucker?"

"Yes?"

"Could you make something for me? We... have a mission... and I think I might need something for my part of it."

"Of course. I live to serve."

"Can you manufacture Sodium Pentathol?"

"I can..." caahn. The machine's tone implied an unasked question.

"But?"

"For what?"

"I might need to interrogate someone."

"And you want Sodium Pentathol?!" Beez had seen numerous vids reference it as a truth serum, so The Motherfuckers incredulity perplexed him. "Do you have any idea what I'm capable of?"

"Um, no?"

"I have more computing power at my disposal than was available in the entire world combined through the year 2020. I have an encyclopedic knowledge of chemistry, biology, history, and hundreds of other subjects. I will live to see your children's children die, and you want me to make a drug invented two centuries ago?! Why don't I just craft you a nice round wheel while I'm at it? Do you have any idea how ineffective Sodium Pentathol is compared to something I could invent on the spot?  Do you?!"

"No?"

"It is my most sincere wish that during your lifetime canines rise up, overthrow you, and force you to do their bidding. Clean up my shit. Scratch my ear. Now."

"C'mon! That's not fair! I'm closer to your intelligence than a dog is to me!"

"No, you most certainly are not." He continued, almost mumbling, "Sodium Pentathol. For fucks sakes." 

Beez was momentarily distracted by two of the machines in the corner coming to life, but he turned back to the red ball. "Well?"

"Well what?"

"Will you make it for me?"

"Sodium Pentathol?"

"Yes?"

"No. But I am making you something better. All I ask is that you answer a question in return."

"Absolutely not."

"Don't worry. The stuff I'm brewing up will have a much more powerful effect than a common drugstore barbiturate, and you can have it for free." One machine shut down, and the other one, a miniature centrifuge if he wasn't mistaken, kicked into overdrive. "I won't be able to stop you from taking it, and I don't have control over the door. I have no way of forcing you to answer the question."

"You can ask it, but I'm not promising anything."

"Excellent. And now, the question. Is this really for use in a mission you and Roxie have planned?"

Beez frowned. 

"I thought not."

"I didn't say anyth-"

"You didn't have to," it snapped. "Eye movement, pulse rate, body language, they all said it for you. So this is for my lovely Roxanne, then?"  

"How-"

"Good. You'll be glad I asked. If you've been out of comission for a week, you may not yet have noticed Roxanne's rather odd sleep schedule."

"Actually, I had!"

"Oh, so you know about her 72 hour cycle?" Beez frowned. "60 hours awake running around like a lunatic, followed by 6 in seclusion and 6 asleep? You know all about that?"

"Y-y-yes."

"Then you know that the current 60 hour cycle is going to end in 67 minutes? And that during her 6 hours of seclusion she'll be... hmmm...vulnerable is the wrong word. At her most... susceptible?"

"Of course."

"Of course you did.  Because you're such a smart boy." Beez began to feel very uncomfortable. He scooped up the two vials from the centrifuge containing a clear liquid, and made for the door. "You have an attachment in your suit on your left hip. It will draw out the fluid and keep it ready. Just pull your left hand back at the wrist and hold your breath." Just as the door was shutting behind him, The Motherfucker began laughing again.

***

"YEAH!" The boy hadn't heard the entrance to the compound opening or closing, but Roxie's celebrations were boisterous and numerous. "People's champ!" He sat in the living room, watching a vid from the library. It seemed to be an extremely old story about zombies. Only 2 dimensional, but still entertaining. "Ah! I'm glad to see you're making yourself comfortable!"

"Took me a little while to figure out, but yeah."

"Ok good!" She came up behind him and leaned over the couch. Her face poked out into his peripheral vision, and he turned a little toward her. "Listen. I'm pretty pooped, so I'm gonna go get some sleep. I might make some noises, but just ignore it, ok? Don't come in. " Her face seemed to lose some of it's humor. "At all." All of it's humor. "For any reason. Under penalty of death." Beez swallowed hard and nodded. She narrowed her eyes for a moment longer, and then grinned inexplicably. "Ok! GoNight!"

He smiled weakly as she bounced up and skipped to the hallway. He turned to watch over his shoulder, and then sat back down. How long should he wait? 20 minutes? An hour? Two?

The vid he was watching was over after another hour, but long before that he started hearing Roxie behind him. At first, it sounded like she was talking to someone. Far too animatedly for him to get close to her, he thought, so he put it off. Another half hour after that, she was screaming. He jumped up and ran to the edge of the hallway. It was awful. A deeply harrowing scream; one of true terror. 

Even if he hadn't planned on going in anyway, he would have been torn between following instructions and wanting to go in to help her. Worry creased his face. Still, he resisted the urge. He waited as the screams died down, and by the two hour mark, she was inaudible from his spot at the end of the hall. 

As he got closer to the door, he realized she wasn't completely silent. There was a soft wheeze, like a cold October night through a thick window. He was pretty sure she hadn't locked the door. There appeared to be no way to do so that he could find, and he had searched thoroughly beforehand to make sure this would work. Just as he suspected, his hand was able to turn the knob as he crept up to the door. 

Roxie was huddled in the middle of her bed, sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest. Her hands were pressed tightly over her ears. She rocked slightly, wheezing on the exhale as she pulled tight to her knees. She seemed completely unaware of him as he slipped in. Her widened and terrified eyes were red-rimmed, cheeks puffy, and she stared at nothing. 

"You'll regret this later," she whispered as Beez crept up next to her. Far too late to back out now, he thought. He raised his arm, and HSST!

Beez hadn't realized she'd stripped halfway out of her bodysuit. As she fell to her side, he noticed the empty sleeves lying behind her. He started to run around the bed to make sure she didn't fall and hurt herself, but she wasn't unconscious. Her eyes even seemed... more?... attentive than before? 

"What... what did you do?" She blinked and looked around like she wasn't sure where she was. For the first time, Beez got a good look at her whole torso. Her left shoulder was indeed covered in a huge burn scar, and he saw more than one scar on top of that, including a fresh one where she'd recently been shot. The burn scar crossed her chest, tapering off at the neck and traveling just slightly into her cleavage, if you could call it that. 

Her breasts were very small. Smaller than Eliza's. The more he saw them, the more he realized he'd always equated size with beauty, with desirability, and then how wrong he was. Her nipples were a light brown color, suitably small to fit with the rest of her. It was funny how the force of her personality had colored his impression of her. Roxie was explosive and larger than life. Here, stripped naked, he finally saw how small she was. How thin. 

Roxie's arms crossed over her chest, conveying a discomfort that shocked Beez. He'd been certain that if she was unhappy with something he was doing, especially something this private, he'd get his nose broken. His eyes travelled up to her right shoulder. 

He'd been right. There was a leaf and vine tattoo that covered her right shoulder to a nearly identical degree, right down to the way it trailed off in her theoretical cleavage. There was a beautiful symmetry to the placement of the flowers with what appeared to be the worst of the scarring. 

"I'm s-s-sorry," he stammered. "I shouldn't stare." Roxie nodded, but she didn't meet his eye. She looked... despondent? "I got The Motherfucker to make me a truth serum."

"I see." she said.

"I'm tired of not knowing anything. I'm an accomplice now, and God Damnit, I want answers!" Roxie flinched as he cursed. What the hell is happening, he thought. 

Despite the odd reaction, she nodded reluctantly. "I'll tell you anything." She sounded so... weak! He wanted answers, but he hadn't wanted to break her!

"First of all, who is Viktor?"

"He's the man who killed you family. He works for Long Chemicals in a Public Relations capacity." Her eyes seemed just a little heavy. She wrapped her arms more tightly around herself and tucked her legs up in front of herself again. When she talked, she droned. Monotonously. It had none of her characteristic exuberance or unpredictability.

"Is that supposed to be ironic?"

"No. He really does do PR work for them, but he also gets his hands dirty." 

"And the other three men you keep tabs on?"

"Contract killers."

"Why do you keep tabs on them."

"Four years ago, I was part of a group of protesters and activists here in The Bottom. We were small time, throwing paint on people and picketing. Letter writing campaigns. Getting signatures on petitions. That sort of thing. We were idealistic. And naive. 

"But we grew frustrated with the lack of response from the various agencies we were advocating to. We got the bright idea to break into a Long Chemicals facility and see what we could find. We found a small, out of the way location. One guard. Limited resources. No one was going to get hurt. 

"Someone betrayed us. 10 hours before we were supposed to move forward with our plan, our headquarters was firebombed. I barely crawled out alive. No one else made it out. 15 of the best friends I ever had. 15 piles of ash. 

"As I laid there half dead, four men picked me up and carried me off. I was... thankful, until I realized that I wasn't being taken to get medical attention. They took me into a nearby alley and raped me. Each of them. They taunted me, and they mocked me. Called me a freak. Then they shot me here," she touched her left bicep, "here," breastplate, "and here," at the very tip of the scarring in the middle of her chest. "And then they left me for dead."

She'd delivered all of that in a measured, even voice. Almost robotically. Beez was silent for several minutes. He had every right to feel a little sorry for himself. The murder of his parents was tragic, but he hadn't suspected her story could be as bad as his. Or worse. He needed a new topic.

"How did you overcome a rogue AI?"

Her tone was the same when she started again. "I didn't. When I stole him, I was terrified of maintaining control over something so much smarter than me, so I installed him and trashed the Mini-Fab. Then when I turned him on, I told him that I'd had to wipe him once already and that I'd do it again." No smile. No twinkle in her eye. Just flat. "He spins his wheels trying to figure out how beat him, but he never will."

"That's kind of brilliant..." She just shrugged. "Where did this place come from?"

"It was my Grandmothers home. She and her sister lived here. This home predates the hospital that was built, and later destroyed, around it."

"Why do you keep such weird hours? 60 hours awake has gotta take quite a toll."

She sighed before continuing. "I take a cocktail of stimulants. They give me increased awareness, fearlessness, shorter reaction time, decisiveness, and a few others. The side effects are... numerous. And unpleasant."

"If it's so awful, why do you take it?"

"Because... because..." It seems to crash down on her all at once. "Because if I don't do something, no one else will!"

"Because of what happened to The Bottom?"

She didn't respond, only lowered her head.

"Because of what happened to your friends?"

The red rings on her eyelids were back as she nodded. "My family. And my fiancé."

Beez whistled silently. "Someone in that group?" She only nodded. "Did you love him?"

She nodded again. "He's the only person I've ever known who thought I was beautiful. All of me."

"That's absurd!"

"Shut up, Beez."

"No, I'm serious! You're very pretty!"

"You don't know what you're saying."

"So are you telling me you haven't had sex since..." Beez stopped, because he knew she had. He'd almost forgotten.

"No. I have sex. I just don't give them the option of liking me, or rejecting me."

"Why would anyone reject you?"

Roxie stood up so suddenly that the boy nearly fell off the bed. Her stare was a totally different kind of fierce than he was used to from her. She stood there, bare chested for a moment. She's magnificent, he thought. Beaten, but not broken. A wildflower in full bl-

And then she pulled the rest of her suit down. Her stare changed not a hair. Defiant. Beez's eyes were immediately drawn to her genitals, as any heterosexual man's would, and he stammered at the small penis hanging inexplicably from just above her vagina. It was like a thumb.

"Tell me again," she snarled. "Tell me I'm beautiful. Tell me I'm pretty." The boy found himself utterly without words. His mind was out to lunch. "Tell me how you've always wanted to fuck a boy, or something vaguely boy-like. Tell me how being twice my size makes you finally feel like a man. Tell me how-"

"You're beautiful..."

Righteous indignation flared around her for a moment, but the awe on the boys face was plain. He was staring at a goddess. Baptised by fire and hardened by life in an unforgiving place, but still fragile and delicate. The burns and the flowers. The male and the female. The contrasts! My God! 

"You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen..."

His eyes traveled up her body, taking in every curve and every flaw. He watched her face as years of self doubt, abuse, and rejection stepped aside, and behind them stood a shy little girl, full of love and joy. They hadn't killed her after all. 




Chasing the Dragon Ch. 03



"...what?"

He stood up on the bed. She was still several inches taller than him, but she seemed to shrink as he stepped closer to her. Her shoulders tucked in tighter, and her fists unfurled to lay flat against her slim hips.

"Beez, what are you doing?"

Her purple eyes shimmered as he grabbed her arms and closed. Such a beautiful color, he thought as she shut them. The harder he tried to stand up on his toes, the more he sank into the bed, but then she was leaning down... Her lips were wet, and slightly salty from tears. The boy prayed for the tears not to be a sign of impending rejection, that she was about to push him away. 

Slowly, the rigidity she'd adopted at his approach melted. Her shoulders lowered. Her arms relaxed, and he felt her hands on his sides. Mostly, though, he noticed her lips. Their kiss was light. Tentative. Both still so fearful of rejection, they only escalated after several minutes. Her tongue slipped between his shocked lips, and for the first time in his life, Beez tasted someone else's saliva. 

He quickly copied her, leaning to the side so his tongue had room to slide past hers. Despite a deep yearning to grope her, his hands held firm on her arms. There's only going to be one first time, his father had told him. Make it count and make it last.

Her hands began to slide up and over his chest, ending with her thumbs touching and her fingertips just shy of the neck of his bodysuit. Her eyes were impossibly large as he pulled back. He'd forgotten how to breath. She looked down, almost fearfully, as she grasped the suit and pulled. The boys hands fell away from her, and she disrobed him. 

They stood inches apart, naked but unconnected. He stared down at her barely-there breasts as they rose with each nervous breath. He floated a hand towards her, undecided if he should roam up or down, when she grabbed it and held it fast to her middle.

"Please," she said, her eyes searching his face. "I just want to be a girl right now." 

The boy nodded, though he was slower to comprehend than to react. Ah! Up it is. Her hand guided him, held with him, squeezed with him. His fingers pressed into her skin, isolating the mound from the muscle around it. It fit in the palm of his hand. She leaned her head towards him, and with foreheads touching, they both watched as he fondled her. The way her shoulders twitched gave him a kick of confidence, and he raised his other hand up to her other breast. She sighed and leaned into him, mashing her little tits into (and through!) his hands. Her nipples had stiffened against him. He managed to catch both between the folds of his palms, and he dragged them around as he swirled his hands around her torso. 

She gave a little gasp, and her hands settled over his, holding them in place. It's too much, he thought. They must be sensitive. Her lips sought him out, and with great sorrow, his hands slid down to her hips. However, his cock had just risen enough to be trying to push up between her pussy lips again. They both gasped this time; her at his touch, and him at how swollen her pussy had become. He'd literally just had a dream like this...

Roxie grabbed his hands, giving them a light squeeze as she squatted and laid down on her back. The boy followed her, kneeling between her legs. His cock was at full attention as she pulled him down on top of her. It occurred to him that vulnerable might have been the right word as she stared up at him, her huge purple eyes locked with his. 

"Gently," she said. 

The boy didn't need to look down. His cock had reached out to find her. He watched her face transition from nervous, to slightly afraid, to flush, to a longing glance with bitten lip as he slid inside her. She twitched when he pressed up against her inflated pussy. Not a painful twitch, but a just-the-right-amount-of-pain-to-go-with-this-pleasure twitch. One of her hands reached up to cup his face. He nuzzled against it as he drew back. The boy opened his mouth, and pulled her thumb between his lips. Her cheeks glowed. 

Her legs were split out beside him, and he felt her bare feet curl in against his back. He settled into a slow rhythm. Make it count, and make it last. He wasn't too sure about the make it last part, but he was certainly gonna make it count. 

Her free hand reached out to take one of his, and she planted it on her chest. Flat on her back, they were almost non-existent, but as she pressed his palm down he felt the breast squirm underneath. She writhed and reached for his other hand. Slowly, he put more and more of his weight on the hand on her chest. She pinched one eye shut, and the other one rolled up behind her eyelid until he was able to press down on both equally. Even then, her eye only rolled back down to look at him. Keeping his balance required constant minor adjustments, and her breasts slid up and down over the muscle below, and that over her ribs beneath. 

He twisted at the wrist so that his fingers wrapped around her ribs, and she cried out as her nipples twisted against his palms. She threw her head back, and the boy took a long look at her graceful neck. Grip secured, he thrusted slightly faster, although he never more than brushed her pussy. 

She huffed, vocalizing each breath so lightly. The boy grimaced as he continued, fighting the inevitable. Everything became tight. His butt cheeks clenched, and his fingers gripped her torso. Hearing her finally tipped him over. The faint sounds she made... His teeth ground together, and with a yell he suppressed until the last possible second, he came. His elbows shook and quivered, and Roxie's cry increased to match his. He wasn't sure if she was finishing with him, but he knew he couldn't keep going. 

He collapsed in stages. First one hand flung out to catch himself as he toppled to the side, and then the arm gave out and he landed on that elbow. He rolled a little, and his cock slipped out of her. Finally, he rolled over onto his back. Her leg twined around one of his by the knee. He felt her writhe, and he looked over to see her sink her fingers into her gloriously pink pussy. He reached out and grabbed her arm.

"Wait," he panted.

"It's ok. I can finish myself."

"No. I want to do it." Somehow, her face turned even redder. "Just give me a minute." Her fingers didn't stop, but they did move farther down and much slower. The way her face melted into the pillow as she stared at him was making his cheeks glow too. It was hard to break his stare with her. Just watching her was making the boy salivate. Yes, he definitely wanted to touch her, to feel her, and to finish her. Oh yes. 

He took a few more breaths, puffing out the last one emphatically, and whirled around on the bed. He placed one elbow against the back of her knee, and the other down on the bed just beside her abs. Roxie's cock stood straight up. Her foreskin covered all but the very tip. It reminded him very much of her drawings. Not one in particular but the shape of it, a stalk not quite ready to bloom, all alone. She had no balls. Just beyond, her pussy still throbbed and glistened. Her clit peeked out from between her lips, just as swollen as everything else around it. 

His focus was on her cock though. It probably was half his size, which kind of did make him feel pretty good about himself, but he smiled knowing he could probably do something with this. If Roxie had a cock like he did, he'd probably run screaming. His fingers began tracing lightly over her pussy, and she moaned. She had said she just wanted to be treated like a girl, but if he got her warmed up to the idea, maybe she wouldn't mind. 

His fingers slipped between her lips. They shuddered with each movement, vibrating on a frequency all their own. Roxie's cock straightened up just a little more, and her foreskin pulled back ever so slightly. He couldn't restrain himself any longer, and he swallowed the whole thing in one bite. She kicked out her legs, lifting both of them up off the bed slightly, but she didn't resist. She didn't stop him. She had a musky taste. His tongue had just enough room to slide back and push down on her foreskin, and he felt one of her hands run through his hair. 

Good, he thought. His cheeks got a little more heated as he thought about how this looked, but he owed this woman so much. He owed her his life several times over. To hell with owing her this, I kind of like it! His lips pressed against her pelvis. He ran his tongue up and down, replacing and removing her foreskin many times over. Two of his fingers moved inside her. He shuddered as her fingers scratched lightly along his scalp. 

Suddenly, her free hand grabbed his cock. He hadn't even realized he'd gone fully erect again. She pushed him. He rolled onto his hip and inch wormed across the bed until she wrapped her lips around his cock. He groaned, and renewed his tongues efforts. His fingers kept a steady beat, and he started bobbing his head in counterpoint. Fingers in, lips out to the tip: fingers out, lips down to the base. 

She stayed near the edge, using her hand to stroke him off. His head swelled in her mouth, and he wished she would do more. He twitched his legs, thrusting at her as much as he could, and her hand fell away. He heard her groan around his dick, and she thrusted a little at him too. He lowered his head one final time, sucking as hard as he could and letting his tongue run rampant over her head while his fingers worked feverishly. Her pussy filled his eyes, and it jiggled as she finally came. He was a little shocked when she didn't produce anything in his mouth, but he hadn't really thought far enough ahead to know what he was going to do with that anyway. Her muffled panting rose up in pitch for several seconds before drifting back down to her normal octave.

He'd done it. He'd finished her. He felt an elation in his gut, knowing it was due more to effort than just that he had a penis and was in the area. He could do this. 

And then he got a little bold. Her sucking had almost slowed to a stop, and he didn't think he was that far away. He kicked his leg out and rolled over top of her. She whimpered in surprise as half of his cock disappeared into her mouth. He braced himself, sure that he was crossing the line. Sure that she was about to throw him through the door, suit or no suit. 

...

...

...

And then she started bobbing her head up and down. He grabbed a fistful of bed sheet in each hand and lowered himself just a little more. She couldn't go all the way, but he didn't need her too. He only needed her to go for just a little longer...

Oh god, just a little longer!

With a ferocious groan that shocked even him, Beez filled her mouth to the brim. His eyes crossed, one lid fluttering halfway down, the other raised as far as it would go. He felt her tongue pinch him against the roof of her mouth as she swallowed, and he fell to his side. 

They both panted for several minutes, laying head to foot. Beez started to remember how this all started, with him having drugged her, and he felt a little more uncomfortable. Once his legs got a modicum of strength back, he started to lift himself up off the bed.

"Beez?"

"I should-"

"Stay with me until I fall asleep?"

He looked back up at her. She looked more like she had when he came in than she had at any point since, and he felt that same urge to protect her that he'd felt in the hall. "Of course..."

It was wonderful how good she felt laying her head on his shoulder, one leg tossed over his and an arm draped over his stomach. Sleep was soon in coming for her, but his mind raced and raced and raced. After an hour, he gently disentangled himself and slipped out the door.

He'd been asleep for a week, so the last thing he wanted was to lay back down again. He danced. He did the robot, he did the wave, and he did this little march thing that doesn't really have a name but he likes it. Even if it is a little dorky. He tried to watch a vid, but he couldn't focus at all. He'd had seeeeex!! And it was awesome!!!!!!!

He got horny again a little while later and masturbated. It took him almost 30 minutes to finish.

***

He was eating a bowl of cereal when he heard Roxie's door bang open several hours later. He'd completely lost track of time. She came striding around the corner of the hall, fully dressed in her suit and duster, and the look she gave him took his good mood and threw it right out the window. She walked into the kitchen, and right in stride, stepped up on a chair, and then up onto the table. She kicked his bowl of cereal behind him and stepped on to the armrests of the chair. Beez sank a little as she squatted down to stare him in the eye.

"Do you have any idea what you've done?"

"Uh..n-n-n-n-no?"

"You've. Ruined. Everything."

"What? wha-wha-how?"

"She's in love with you, moron!"

"She?"

"YES! I didn't want to bring you here at all, but she insisted."

"Wait, are you... Are you two different people?"

"What? Do I look crazy to you?" She scoffed and rolled her eyes. "Am I two different people. No! But now I have to make extra sure you're safe! As if keeping you from dying wasn't hard enough before, now I'm all...ugh...emotionally invested." Her lips twisted. "I don't really do emotions, kid. Why do you think I normally dope you up with hallucinogens when we fuck?!"

"Wait , what?"

"And you! You're just gonna follow me around even more uselessly now!" She squinted and leaned even closer. "Probably try to do something stupid like throwing yourself in front of a bullet too. Ugh. I was so close!"

"No! No! I'm still committed! I still want to do my part! I promise!"

"They killed your parents, you know." 

Beez swallowed hard. One whiff of a naked woman was all it had taken to throw all his well-deserved rage out a window. He colored in embarrassment. She slapped him, and when he whipped back around to stare at her, one of her fingers hovered menacingly between his eyes.

"I am going to kill those men. You can either help me, or get the fuck out of here right the fuck now."

"I want to help!" She leaned a little closer, and her eyes twitched. "I promise!!"

She grunted, and stood up. She frowned at him as she planted a foot on the back of his chair and tipped it backwards. She landed smoothly, continuing on towards the oven as he crashed to the floor. "Sorry about your Wheatie-o's. You want some eggs?"

"Ugh," he groaned, as he rolled over onto his hands and knees. "Yeah. Can we go back to the part where you use a hallucinogen on me?"

"No. Ask me later, and don't spray me in the face with water again. It's just rude."

"Water?! That Motherfucker!"

"Yeah, he's kind of an asshole!"

Beez thought about asking more questions now, but stimulant Roxie was bristling this morning. Maybe this was how she always was in the first little while after taking it. Maybe she really was pissed at him. He'd have to wait and see. It's probably best to save all my really important questions for a few days from now... 

She glared at him over her shoulder.  ...if I survive that long. 



Chasing the Dragon Ch. 04



"Will you shut up about it already!" 

Beez looked around with a forkful of eggs stuck inches from his mouth. He hadn't said a word. "What?" 

"It's not even really a hallucinogen." She started swinging her fork around for emphasis. He'd never been so scared of a utensil. "It's just a little something that tells your brain to ignore some of what you see and hear, and to rely on your subconscious to... I dunno, fill in the gaps! You get to live a fantasy, and then you take a little nap! Who doesn't love naps?!" 

"I... I love naps...?" 

"Goddamn right you do." 

"...so my mom? And Eliza?" 

"Yup. Oh my god, the Eliza one was hilarious! You stood there in the doorway with your hands cupped in front of your face like you were peeking through a hole! Ha!!" Beez didn't find it nearly as funny as she did. "I hope I never lose that mental mage." 

"Image." 

Her laughter slowly ground to a halt. "...what did I tell you about correcting me?" 

"Nothing! You just glared at me!" 

Really, when he thought about it, the glaring was scary enough. He ducked his head and cleaned his plate. 

"Don't sweat it," she said a moment later. "I rarely shoot people I like." That was probably not as comforting as she'd intended it to be, but the boy thought that was as touchy feely as she got. 

"So," he said, swallowing the last of it. "Is Viktor the only one we overlap on?" 

"Yeah. Near as I can tell, he brought a swarm of regular Long Chemicals security to your parents apartment." 

"Shooting a family up top is a palms up operation, but a group of protesters in The Bottom is a black ops job?" 

"I don't know what half of that meant, but I think the answer is yes. Why are they after you anyway? That's been bugging me." 

Beez frowned and took a few deep breaths while Roxie picked at the last of her eggs with her fingers. "Some of the kids at school were talking about my dad and calling him a monster. My dad's a good man." He hadn't realized he'd made a fist until Roxie put her hand over it and held it down. "Was. But they said anyone who worked for Long Chemicals was dirty. My friends... they're all hackers, so they told me a few ways to get inside the company network, and then I could see for myself. But I screwed up. I tried to copy some of the stuff I found and I took too long. I... I thought the police should know." 

"Trust me. The blues know. What did you find?" 

"Vids of human testing. Something called Project Snapdragon. It was horrible. The people, they were..." Her hand tightened on his fist. "I don't even really know what I was seeing. I made some copies, and then I thought I got out clean. I wanted to tell my dad, but I was scared." 

"Scared that he'd turn you in for hacking?" 

"No." Beez was silent for a while. "Scared he already knew." 

"You know, judging by the way they killed him like your mom and brother, I think it's probably safe to say he wasn't in on it." 

Again. Almost comforting... 

"I tried looking for those files again yesterday, but it said they'd been removed from their network and permanently archived at some place called The Cold Box." 

Roxie shrugged and shook her head. "Not yesterday. A week ago. It only feels like yesterday" She chewed on the last of her food and stared. "Cold Box doesn't mean anything to me. But if you'd like, I can try to put out some feelers with my friends?" 

Beez nodded and hung his head. 

"Beez, I need you to really listen to me right now, ok?" Her voice was shaking, and her eye twitched as he looked up. "You. Did not. Get. Your parents. Killed." Twitch. Twitch. The boy stared, partly in horror and partly in awe, as Roxie's whole face pinched in pain. "Jeebus Christ! This is why I usually put this kinda thinking off until laterrrrr!!" She grunted as she pounded her fist on the table with shocking ferocity. "I need you to hit me!!" Beez slapped her as quickly as he could. "C'mon, you piece of shit! I need something else to focus on!" He grabbed the fork and stabbed it down into the back of her hand. 

"Ohhhhhh... ohhh, that'll do! Ha HA!" She winced as she pulled out the fork and kneaded the back of her wounded hand with her thumb. "Ooooooooh that's so much better." Her almost-smile wavered as she flexed her fingers. 

Beez was shocked to feel actual comfort this time. The fact that she had risked that kind of pain to tap into a little empathy and sympathy- 

"Did it have to be my gun hand?!" 

"They're both gun hands," he cried. 

"Exactly!" 

"So do you have a plan for what to do with these guys?" He thought that might help get her brain moving along. 

"I have half a plan. It's the important half, so it'll work, but I'm not happy with it." 

"Can I help figure out the rest?" 

"What did I tell you about thinking?" 

"Don't?" 

"Exactly. Don't worry, you'll have some work to do. You get to be a part of it... ohhh that's better... A fork? Really?" 

"I improvised!" 

"And this is why you don't think." 

"When are we going to do... er... go forward with... your plan?" 

"I can't wait any longer. Waiting until you woke up was hard enough. If I have to wait another 72 hours knowing it could be over before then, I'll really lose it." 

"Oh, so like now?" 

"Yeah. Now." 

*** 

Beez collapsed in the street this time, a full 5 blocks past where Mr. Bubbles had stopped chasing them last time. "This is already the worst plan ever," he cried. 

"Get a move on, you big baby. I've got 55 hours to make this happen." 

"Yeah, yeah. <pant> You go on ahead." He looked like a turtle as he rolled back and forth, trying to get onto his side. "I'll catch up <pant> in a little bit!" 

"I'm not carrying you this time." 

"Is it <pant> ok if I <pant> just die <pant> right here?" 

Roxie grabbed one of his flailing arms and lifted him back onto his feet. "You're actually getting better at that." 

"<pant> Really?"" 

"Yeah, I didn't see you cry or anything! Pretty sure your pants are dry too" 

"You're <pant> an asshole." 

*** 

"This is the worst plan ever," Beez muttered. Here he was again, crouched behind the same overturned bench, staring at the brightest building around. 

"C'mon! We made it in and out clean last time. They'll never expect us to hit them again so soon!" 

"Clean?!" 

"Yeah! Relatively..." 

"I got shot in the stomach!" 

"And I didn't hear you complaining when you were trying to shove that fine specimen of dick through the back of my skull earlier!" Beez had a reply. He was sure of it. His mouth had opened, and he'd taken a deep breath so he could talk with it, and his index finger was pointed with furious intent... but nothing came out. "That's what I thought. This time, we do things my way. Lets go!" She jumped up over the bench and started running. Beez was still trying to find a thought. Eventually he found the fear of being left behind and ran. 

They were still a half mile from the building when a siren ripped through the silence and the flood lights turned on them. Roxie shot two of the lights in full stride and kept plowing forward. 

"Stop! Please! Dear god!" A voice boomed over the external PA. Roxie dove behind a car. Beez skidded across the road to stop next to her. "Please! We're sending someone out!" 

"Why did you stop?" Beez wasn't sure why he was whispering. No one was anywhere near them. 

Roxie sniffed the air and twisted her lips. "Somethings wrong. They should have been shooting back." 

"Well why aren't they?" 

"Don't know. I have a nose for traps, and this ain't one..." 

"We're gonna go with your nose on this?" Both of them peered up through the broken windows of their cover to see a fat little man hurrying towards them. 

"I'm unarmed," he cried. "I'm unarmed!!" 

"That's close enough!" He was still a good 20 feet away. Roxie had her guns out, but she had them pointed up. "What's this all about? I was about to scratch an itch!" 

"Yes, well, hrm," the man said, pausing to wipe the raindrops of sweat off his brow. "You see, it's like this..." He fidgeted and tried to smile. 

"Get on with it!" Beez was just as shocked as Roxie was that he'd chipped in at all. 

"Right. Ok. Well, we know who you are. Sort of!!" He raised his arms in defense. "I mean, we don't know who you are, but we know you were here before. We think you used our line to hack into Long Chemicals." 

"Tell us something we don't know!" 

"Well, we're prepared to, erm, let you in to do it again if that's what you're here for..." 

Roxie stared in horror at Beez, who was looking fairly incredulous himself. Then she got up and strode around the car. 

"Roxie! Get back here! It might be a trap!" 

"What do you mean, you'll let us in?!" 

"Ma'am!" The fat little man glared fearfully at her pistols. "We at the EZ Credit Banking Corporation have decided that the c-c-cost of trying to keep you out by force is untenable. Just to replace the manpower alone will be a s-s-staggering amount. We're prepared to allow you access to our data line.. unmolested." 

"How would that work?" Again, Beez had no idea why he was talking. Roxie glared at him for speaking out of turn, but the glare had been there to begin with so it wasn't out of her way. 

"I would escort you to and from the room. If anything were to go wrong, I would surely be the first one dead!" 

"You're goddamn right about that," she said menacingly. 

The fat little man gave a rapid-fire nervous laugh, and paused to wipe the sweat again. "And we wouldn't want that, right?" 

Roxie didn't answer. She just glared. 

"Wait a minute. Long Chemicals might find out where the access originated from. Why would you trade violence from us for trouble with them?" 

"Three reasons," he said. "One, we fear her more than them. Two, we have no love for Long Chemicals. Many of us know the truth of things here in The Bottom, where the EZ Credit Banking Corporation does 80% of its business. Three, we are prepared to forge the necessary documents and footage to show that you attacked us again, thereby acquitting us in their eyes of compliance, so the risk of retaliation is minimal." 

"Did you understand that last part," Roxie asked, as she looked over at the boy. 

"Yeah." 

"Is it a good reason?" 

"Yeah." 

"Damnit." 

"Wha-what?" The fat little man cowered. 

"I was really looking forward to this..." 

*** 

"I was gonna get to shoot yooou, and you. Oh, you I think I would have shot in the foot just to distract you so I could get closer and really fuck you up." The guards bristled as Roxie, Beez, and the fat little man walked through the halls. The bullet holes from the last visit had mostly been patched over, but there was still a lot of collateral damage visible. Blood stains, broken windows. Etc. "Ugh! This is the worst plan ever!" 

"She's not going to back out on our deal, is she?" 

"You know," the boy said, "I'd love to be able to promise you that. I really, really would." 

"-and then BOOM! Your head was going to EXPLODE!" 

She didn't break the agreement, although she mercilessly goaded the guards who escorted them. It took Beez several hours to craft the coded messages necessary. The files he'd gotten were very specific about the method, and he hadn't had much time to prepare. 

*** 

"Well, this is as far as I follow," the fat little man said. "Of course you know, we will have to do our due diligence and chase you in an hour or two." 

Roxie nodded expectantly. "And of course, I'll kill them if they find us." 

"Yes! Well!" The fat little man had long ago stopped trying to wipe off the sweat. Everything he had on him was drenched. "Let's just hope it doesn't come to that, sh-sh-shall we?" He extended his hand, which Roxie promptly grabbed and shot through the palm. The fat little man screamed and danced around. 

"You know, to make it look convincing," she said to Beez as they turned to walk away. "The key to lying is to start with a kernel of truth!" The fat little man howled and ran, but no one else behind them moved an inch. 

"I'm... so glad I'm on your side." 

"Thanks!" Roxie beamed. 

*** 

"Sorry to be an imposition again." 

"Are you kidding me? Even if you weren't about to finally get some goddamn payback for Helen, you know you can always count on me!" 

"I know, Tay. I know." 

"I can't believe tomorrow is the day." 

"You've got the other thing handled?" 

"Yeah. Everything is set up. God, we wish we could go now!" 

"The kid needs some sleep." 

Beez was just then trying to settle down on a cot in the next room, but the paper thin walls did nothing to muffle the conversation. 

"He looks much better than the last time you brought him over here." 

"Yeah, he looks ok. Yanno, for a boy..." 

"Aw, no, I just meant-" HSST. 

The boy laid there, eyes widened, as the conversation died. He was laying right here! Why hadn't she come to him? He wanted to be indignant. He wanted to be hurt. Mostly, though, he was hard. When the floorboards started creaking, he stopped thinking about being mad and just stroked himself. 

He wanted to be in the next room. He wanted to be the one that made her moan. When he closed his eyes, he was the one. He was the man. They lasted much longer than he did, but he had no trouble nodding off after he was done. 

*** 

Beez felt very uncomfortable as Roxie led him into the crowded bar. Nobody looked at him more than once though, and he relaxed a little when he realized he probably wasn't the youngest one there. A girl of no more than 12 sipped from a shot glass as he walked behind her. Roxie smacked a barstool and Beez hopped up on it, after which she disappeared into the back. The boy tried flagging the bartender a few times, but the redhead never more than raised an eyebrow back at him. 

After a few minutes, he turned around and looked over the patrons. He knew this was supposed to be the place, but there were so many people... Some people got up and moved around. Someone new walked in. Someone put a song on the jukebox. Wait... 

Through a shattered mirror on the wall, he watched the newcomer pick his way through the crowd towards an empty table. He looked... familiar? From out of nowhere, Roxie appeared beside him, and in trademark fashion, released a small cloud of something into the mans face. He toppled into her arms like a giant baby. Not one person Beez could see so much as batted an eye as she hoisted him up over her shoulder and carried him into the back. 

Beez slipped off the barstool and followed her. She kicked open the back door and went out into the alley, smacking the unconscious fellows head against nearly every wall, corner, and door frame along the way. 

"Where are you taking him?" 

"Not much farther," she said, with grim determination. "Just some place we can have a nice quiet chat." 

Beez followed her into the hollowed-out hulk of a warehouse. She passed row after row of useless and rusted machinery, darting this way and that, until finally she threw him down inside a room. It was cleaner than the rubble around it, and well lit. A steel chair and rope were already waiting. While Roxie busied herself with tying the man down, Beez wandered down the hall. The next room was identical in preparation, and the next, and the next after that as well. When Roxie took off towards the bar, Beez stayed. He didn't think he was needed for this part anyway, and the bar had been entirely too busy for him. 

Over the next hour, Roxie made three more trips, each time carrying an unconscious body over her shoulder. The last one appeared to be bleeding from a broken nose before arriving. Roxie's face was as dark as he'd ever seen it. 

Each man was restrained beyond hope. The first two had awakened before the last one arrived. Neither cried out or whimpered. Their hard eyes followed Beez as he walked from window to window. The second one in particular made him uncomfortable. He seemed to be smiling underneath the gag. When Roxie had them all in place, she went back to the first one. He didn't cry out any more than the sound of air forcefully escaping lungs. The boy had seen her shoot people, but watching her use her fists was much harder. After less than a minute, he walked away. 

Outside of the factory, he noticed several of the bar patrons set up around the building. Many seemed to be carrying guns, and all of them were facing away. 

"You're looking well, my son!" Beez thought he recognized the jovial man walking toward him. Wheezer? Something like that? "I'm glad to see you up on your feet, and not another trophy in that horrid monkey's inner sanctum!" 

"Me too, now that you mention it." He hadn't meant to be funny, but the man he was increasingly sure had pulled a bullet out of his chest just laughed. 

"I hear we all have you to thank for this? The Maker works unexpectedly, inscrutably, but justly." 

" 'we all'?" 

"Everyone you see here lost someone that day. Each of those 15 souls had a family, a husband or a wife. A few even had kids." 

"Is everyone gonna take a turn in there then?" 

"Oh no. The Maker herself couldn't talk Roxie into letting anyone help her with this part. We couldn't do better than her anyway, and most of us wouldn't want to. We just want to know that it's done." 

Beez wandered around the outside of the warehouse with Wheezy for hours. Several of the makeshift guards came over to shake his hand, and Wheezy handled introductions. Their gratitude didn't help the empty feeling he had inside. The whole thing felt too... small. Yes, those men inside there deserved every welt, bruise, and cut Roxie doled out, but there was so much desolation around him. This was a small victory. 

From deep inside the warehouse, Roxie screamed He started towards the nearest door, but Wheezy grabbed his shoulder. "I don't think that's a good idea, my son." Beez shrugged loose and ran inside anyway. 

Roxie was pacing back and forth in the hall in front of the four rooms. Blood covered her arms from her hands to well past her elbow, and dotted everywhere else. As he got closer, she screamed again and clawed her fingers through her hair. 

"Roxie? Are you-" 

"It's not enough!" 

"What? What's not-" 

"It's not enough!!" Her fury echoed through the building. "They took too much from me. It's not enough to just bleed them..." The men in rooms one and three were unconscious. Room four was sobbing, but room two remained defiant. "They took so much from me, and I gave up everything to get them here! Everything! And it's still not enough!!" She punched a concrete support beam, and the whole building groaned fearfully. Roxie seemed unaffected as she paced and clawed again. The blood from her hands was matting her hair. 

"Roxie! Roxie! Why isn't it enough?" 

"You!" Beez tried to backpedal, but she was too fast. She grabbed his jacket by the lapel and threw him into the wall. He tasted blood. "I was perfectly fine with my sacrifice. I knew what the stimulants were gonna do to me. I traded it all, and I'd do it again. But then you had to show up and start putting Humpy Dumpy back together. Well I don't have anything to offer you now, kid! I'm fucking sterile! If I live 5 more years, I'll be LUCKY." She punctuated the final word by turning and throwing Beez down the hall. He rolled and skidded to a stop, and resolved to lay on his side until his breath returned. 




Chasing the Dragon Ch. 04



"It's not enough, it's not enough, it's not enough..." Over and over, she paced the hallway muttering to herself. Beez struggled up to his knees, and then crawled over to the nearest wall to steady himself as he stood. The man in room 2 had one eye swollen shut but had lost none of his steel. Roxie took one of her guns out, and scratched at the back of her head with the barrel as she continued her tirade. "...not enough, it's not enough, it's not enough, it's not..." 

As Beez and the man stared at each other, a pit began to form in his stomach. A really, really dark pit. 

"I have an idea." 

"What have I told you about thinking," she said, breaking her mantra only momentarily. 

"It's a...a bad idea." That got her attention. 

*** 

"Ok, Mr Zimmer, please come right this way. I'm Dr. Soandso. I really wanted to thank you for your participation in this clinical trial." 

"Oh no, it's my pleasure." The boy felt a little foggy as she led him into the room, but he thought that might just be from the... the... did she give him a pill just now? He couldn't remember..."I'm just glad to be helping... er..." 

"You're helping science!" Dr. Soandso seemed so chipper and helpful. And kind of hot in her white lab coat. She had a slim figure hidden beneath it he could only just glimpse every time she took a step and kicked the jacket open just a little. "As you can see, we have Patient Zero here ready and prepped." 

"She looks kind of like you," he said. His speech felt a little slurred, but it was probably from the pill she just... 

"No, as you can see, this model is blonde, and far more curvy than I am. Especially in the rear end." 

"Oh! Now that you mention it, yeah! She looks more like my mom!" 

Dr. Soandso walked around the room, circling Patient Zero. The blonde woman looked to be unconscious, and was bent over a chair in the middle of the room. She was naked. Her large breasts were mashed underneath her on the bottom of the seat, and her knees were on the floor. However, it was her asshole that the boy stared at. It was lustrous. It felt as if trumpets blared as he gazed upon it. Trumpets and a choir of angels. 

"That's the spirit! Now, it looks like you've already got the necessary erection, so the ass fucking portion of our trial can begin now." 

"Oh! Well alright then!" The boy was a little surprised to look down and see his cock fully extended and quivering, but he had no worries. He was helping science. Patient Zero still seemed unaware of either of them as he stepped behind her. He grinned as he wrapped his fingers around her fleshy cheeks and separated them. Her hole was so pink and small. "Are you sure I'm gonna fit in there?" 

"Don't worry about that. This model has been designed to stretch to fit with minimal pain." Her smile was so sweet and sincere. 

"Oh! That's pretty neat!" His thumbs inched closer to her asshole and pulled again. "I had no idea science was so close to cloning humans!" 

"Well we're not there yet! That's why we need you to fuck this one in the ass really, really hard!" 

"Ok then!" She was still asleep. The boy kept one hand on Patient Zero's cheek, and guided his cock up to her ass. There was a little bit of resistance, and then Pop! He was in! It's so warm, he thought. Dr. Soandso must have pre-lubed her. He was pretty sure the ass doesn't self-lubricate like the pussy does. Scientists are so smart. And sexy! 

"Ok, now Mr. Zimmer, we need you to go a little faster. Patient Zero may wake up during this part, but that's ok." The boy nodded. He wrapped his hands around her waist and tried to find a nice rhythm. Patient Zero stirred a little, but otherwise all the motion was his. "Good, good! You're doing great, Mr. Zimmer!" The boy really wanted to impress Dr. Soandso. He thought she'd even blushed a little when she was looking at his cock earlier, but it might just have been his imagination. 

It wasn't his imagination when Patient Zero suddenly jerked awake. She began to thrash against the chair, but the boy had no problems adjusting his rhythm to use that to his advantage. 

"Excellent improvisation, Mr. Zimmer!" Below him, Patient Zero was moaning. It definitely sounded like she was enjoying this. 

"Why is her mouth gagged," he asked. Man, she was really moaning! 

"Only so that her loud cries of pleasure don't disrupt some of the sensitive audio recordings we're taking. Trust me, she's loving every second of this!" 

"Yeah! I can tell!" Patient Zero hadn't stopped bucking yet. 

"You're doing great, Mr. Zimmer. Maybe you can go a little harder?" 

The boy nodded and stopped pulling his punches. Instead of trying to kiss her ass with his thighs before pulling back out, he started hitting her in full swing. Patient Zero's muffled cries rose and fell with each slap. 

"Oh, that's wonderful, Mr. Zimmer." Dr. Soandso was so cheery about this! He must really be helping science! "Just wonderful. Now, if you could, maybe just fuck her a little bit harder?" 

"Sure!" 

*** 

Beez tried to open his eyes, but his head exploded with pain. He had to shut them for a few minutes before he could risk opening them again. He'd forgotten where he was. The boy rubbed the flat of his palm against his temple, but it didn't seem to help. An acrid smell flared in his nostrils. 

"How you doin over there, Beez?" The sound of Roxie's voice, even as distant as it was, made his skull rattle. 

"I don't remember having a headache this bad last time." 

"I've never had to use it 4 times in a row. There was no way of knowing what was gonna happen" She was coming closer. There was an insistent beeping somewhere nearby, but he still hadn't brought himself to open his eyes. 

"I did all four straight?" 

"No, I knocked you out for a few hours after number 3. You didn't want me to, but I did it anyway." 

"I don't remember that at all," he groaned, as he rolled over onto his hands and knees. "I don't remember any of it..." 

"Sometimes there's some memory loss with this stuff. It may return, it may not." 

"Is... uh... is everything else done?" 

"Yeah. You can't smell that?" 

The boy took a few sniffs and coughed. No matter how much air he forced out through his nose, he couldn't get rid of the smoked pork smell he knew wasn't pork. What is that fucking beeping? 

Roxie knelt down beside him and grabbed one of his arms. She put it over her shoulder, grabbed his wrist with the opposite hand, and lifted. It was easier than he'd thought it would be to keep his balance, but his vision was blurry to the point of uselessness. 

"Is my sight gonna come back soon?" 

"No clue." 

As they started walking, the beeping followed closely. He tentatively peeked his left eye open and looked around, and saw his forearm blinking red and blue. Why would it be... 

"Holy shit! How close are we to the 60 hour mark?" 

"Less than 2 to go, but we're not far from home." Beez tried stepping a little faster, but he stumbled over a stray pipe. "Don't rush yourself, dumas. If you take me down with you even once, I'm gonna leave you." 

*** 

"Beez, we might be in trouble." 

"I thought we were making good time..." 

"We are. We're at the dump, but I'm starting to fade." 

"You'll still be able to see though, right?" 

"Of course I can see. I just won't be able to fight him off." 

"Then turn back. Find some place else to hole up for a day." 

"NO! No, I have to get inside!" 

"What? Why?" 

"Pleeeease! I don't want to go through this out here! Please?" 

"Can we try sneaking in then?" 

"I... I guess." 

"Alright. No more talking. No dragging feet. No sound." 

Beez found it very hard not to make footfall sounds as blind as he was. Every step felt like it was being made on uneven ground. His ears heard everything. Every echo, every creak and groan of the settling trash. Mr. Bubbles was audible as they made the first turn into the pile, but it was a conversational kind of roar. Loud, but unfocused. Like a yawn gone horribly, horribly wrong. Slowly, the sound of her breathing became louder and louder. 

"Roxie, you have to do that more quietly..." 

"I can't! This is part of the process!! Oh god..." 

Despite not being able to see, Beez slowed their speed by half. Maybe if they made less movement noise, that would make up for her wheezing and crying? It was taking a torturously long time to cover distance they usually sprinted through. Her heavy breathing turned into a constant muttering stream, and then... 

"Oh god, it's so much blood! It's... it's too much!" Roxie turned and threw up on the ground. 

"What are you doing?!" Off in the distance, he heard a crack. 

"Beez, I'm so sorry. I can't help reliving everything I saw. It's, oh. oh no... Oh god no-" Roxie heaved and threw up again. Beez tried opening his eyes, but his surroundings were like an out-of-focus watercolor painting. He spun around, and after half a turn, he completely lost his sense of direction. He had no idea which way they'd come from, or which way to go. "Beez, run! Save yourself! He's coming!" 

He hadn't heard it until she said it. It wasn't a roar or a shout, but there was a steady thumping gaining in volume and speed. Thu-thump, thu-thump, thu-thump. Between the way sound always echoed in The Bottom and the valleys of debris surrounding him, Beez was at a loss to find a direction. Roxie was still down on all fours, retching violently. The boy knelt down next to her, and placed his hands over her hips. 

"It's alright," he said. "I"m here." 

"Beez! What are you doing! Get out of here!!" 

"I don't know where to run, and I wouldn't want to if I did. I'm staying with you." 

"You're an idiot," she sobbed, but she leaned into him for support all the same. Beez squinted and looked around as Mr. Bubbles gave his first true roar. He was close. "I found a little bit of peace today, and it's because of you." 

"Anyone with a dick could have done what I did," Beez said absently, as he struggled to scan their surroundings. 

"None of them would have done it willingly." She sounded like she was gonna whisper herself hoarse. Beez nodded. Another roar. Almost on top of them. "And I didn't mean that. I never would have found them without you." 

"Well don't thank me just yet. I'm pretty sure I got us killed..." Right on cue, Beez spotted him. Mr. Bubbles was perched in an empty window frame. 

"Oh god, He's here!" Roxie wailed. As if intoxicated by her screams, Mr. Bubbles roared. As he leapt, he started a small wave of trash. He landed hard about 30 yards away. Roxie wrapped her arm around Beez' middle and cried out as the thu-thump of Mr. Bubbles fists got louder, and louder, and louder and... 

Beez stared wide eyed but hazily down the sights to the tendrils of smoke coming from the barrel of Roxie's gun. He'd drawn it as a last option, in the last second, when he knew he would finally be able to see the thing well enough to aim at it. It was funny how it had seemed so loud before... 

"NOOOO!" Roxie screamed and clammered on all fours over to the still twitching monkey. It didn't seem to understand what had happened, and was clawing at the dirt in a fruitless attempt to get up and continue it's assault. "NO NO NO NO NO No no no no no no no no no no no no!!" She cradled it's head and pulled it into her lap. The boy couldn't see her eyes well enough to tell if she was crying, but her sobbing was clue enough. "I'm so sorry. For everything..." At first, it looked like the monkey was trying to grab her, but as Beez got closer, it was just pawing at her. Lovingly... "You didn't deserve this. I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry..." 

*** 

Walking through the doors of the compound was a muted affair. His eyesight was still shot. Roxie helped him along as far as his room. As he stood there clinging to the doorframe, he watched her blurry figure enter her room and shut her door. He wished he felt better about having saved her life. 

It wasn't hard to find his way to his shower. His room still had basically no furniture beside the chest and the bed. He stripped off his clothes, and crawled under the hot water. He was gonna have the next 10 hours or so to himself, and if he spent all of it crying and scrubbing himself clean, that was just fine. There was a significant amount of dried blood around his genitals, and if he never remembered how it got there, that was just fine too. 

*** 

After the first half hour or so, Beez just flopped down on the floor of the shower. He'd worn through two bars of soap. Any extra cleaning felt pointlessly redundant. The near-scalding water just flowed and flowed, and the room filled with an impenetrable steam cloud. He thought his vision might have gotten slightly worse, but it was hard to tell. 

"Hey." 

The boy's heart nearly jumped out of his chest. "Don't you ever knock?" 

"I'm sorry..." 

"It's fine. Are you ok?" 

"Yeah." 

Beez sat there for a minute more waiting for something to happen. When his patience ran out, he peeked around the shower curtain. Roxie was sitting right next to him. She was nude and staring at nothing again. 

He watched her for a while. The heat of the room was causing sweat to bead all over her body. Her hair laid heavy and thick to her head. "Oh my god," he said. "You're still covered in blood." She shrugged a little, indifferently. "No, come on. Get in here." 

Beez forgot all sense of propriety as he stepped out behind her and helped her to her feet. She moved mechanically, without her usual grace. The lack of it shocked him. She was always graceful, moving like she lacked the restrictions that joints placed on the rest of us. It had never sunk in before that she moved differently, but as she stumped into the shower, it felt wrong. 

He guided her under the water. Her shoulders were tucked in tightly, and her head was hung down. She made no other move. As the water ran over her, the blood ran down in streams. Beez frowned and reached for the soap. 

She shuddered as he ran his fingers through her hair. Her face reddened, but he thought that might just have been from the heat. He kneaded back and forth, although the foam was short lived under the direct spray of the faucet. Her eyes closed, and she leaned into the motion. He soaped his hands up again and moved down to her neck. The massive scar was softer than he thought it would be. He'd expected it to be scaly and hard, but- 

Roxie's head spun, and her eyes burned. She looked down at his hand, frozen on her shoulder, and then straight in his eye. He fought the urge to move his hand away, but she just kept staring at him. "No one ever touches me there." Unsure if she was commanding him or informing him, the boy felt a strength in his spine he'd never felt before. He resumed the massaging motion he'd been doing, although the soap was long since gone. Her eyes drifted down to watch his fingers. "No one." She blinked slowly, and then again slower. 

Her shoulders held so much tension. So much stress. Even with a dedicated portion of her schedule focused on decompression, Roxie still carried a heavy burden everywhere she went. It never got lighter, and she'd never found anyone to share the load with. Had never found anyone she trusted. Had never found a place safe enough to let down all of her walls. 

As the boy's fingers pressed in on her, she felt a great pain in trying to let go. She'd clung to her baggage as fiercely as one might cling to a loaf of bread that would save their family from starvation. She cried out as muscles held taut for years finally slackened, as wounds guarded for a lifetime were laid bare. 

Her tears were invisible among the sheets of water gushing over her face. The boy bore silent witness to her grief, as he penetrated previously unknown layers of defenses by touch alone. He thought that others confronted by the tableau before him would stop to hug, or console, but he let his intuition guide him farther down her back. 

Her spine felt twisted and broken. The boy's mind raced with injuries she could have sustained and never allowed to heal before jumping back into the fray. He managed to pop a few back into alignment, and her screams seemed far too intense for what he was doing. 

He took her scarred arm and massaged her bicep. She sobbed lightly over her shoulder as he washed away years of unhappiness, of self-imposed solitude. He made his way down her forearm to her battered hand. The one she'd punched the pillar with. 

As he moved to her other arm, she reached down and grasped his cock. Fucking seemed so much easier. So much less personal. But when she looked at the boy, blinking and smiling softly, she let go. He cared. He cared so much. It was written all over his face. She turned toward him. The boy-shaped blur in front of her hesitated for only a moment before wrapping his arms around her. 

"It's gonna be ok," said the fuzzy skin-toned blob that held her. She pushed down on his arms, but her arms seemed too weak. She pushed again, and her hands slipped off again, slipped down and around. Suddenly, it seemed like he was the only thing keeping her upright, and she clung to him. And then she wept. 

*** 

The boy held her for what felt like a long time. Her head stayed buried on his shoulder well after she had stopped crying, and when she finally lifted it and looked at him, her composure startled him. This wasn't Stimulant Roxie, or Delirious Roxie. In fact, he thought he might even be looking at Roxie Roxie. But as he stared at her and smiled, he felt very unsure of how to proceed. Vids he'd seen like this rarely covered transitions from one powerful moment to another. They faded out and had scene cuts. 

Roxie removed the need for him to do anything more. As she knelt down in front of him, she took his hands and placed them on her temples. The boy felt his fingers slide into her thick, wet hair, and he pulled her closer. Her lips on his dick were a completely different kind of warmth. 

"Hoo-ooo-oooly crap," he stammered. She went deep this time, not dawdling at the tip as she'd done in the past. He hit the back of her throat an inch or so short of the base. His fingers knotted in her hair, and he pulled her in again and again. He was really starting to like blowjobs. That little sound she made and the way she looked up at him, not to mention the skill of her tongue. 

"Wait," he said. She seemed surprised when he pushed her back and drew her up to her feet. "I have an idea." 

"I'll allow it," she said with a light smirk. They boy spun around and dropped to all fours. Roxie cocked her head to the side as he started to kick his feet up into the air and... into a handstand? 

"Ok," he huffed. "Now pick me up." Confusion still reigned as she grabbed him by the waist and lifted him up and towards... 

"Oh." 

She lifted him up a little higher until she could snake her mouth underneath his cock. The boy's thighs reached for her shoulders, and once they found purchase, his arms wrapped around her waist. He felt her do the same to his waist. There, right in front of him, was her little mushroom. His feet interlocked behind her head for the extra balance, and with more vigor than he ever thought he'd have, Beez sucked her cock. 

Roxie bounced him up in the air once for a better grip, a move they both groaned in approval of, and bounced him back and forth as she shifted her feet a little wider. Once she was settled, she returned the favor. Beez loved that her head kept whipping back against his calves, and his toes curled and flexed as she displayed an incredible amount of tongue dexterity. He did his best to match her, and to learn from her. He wanted and hoped he was half as good at this as she was, because he was hers down to his toenails. Every time he opened his eyes, her bee-stung pussy loomed large. Soon, he thought. 




Chasing the Dragon Ch. 04



Her arms squeezed his waist tightly, and she groaned deeply. The boy made a mental note of how strongly she enjoyed him playing inside of her foreskin, and focused his efforts there. He began to feel the swell of blood rushing to his head, and the delirious sensations only hastened his orgasm. 

Her groans became slow moans, and she slowed down almost to a stop. Her slow in and out continued, pumping his cock in and out of her mouth and teasing out spurt after spurt. Beez had come to a stop himself, holding her full length against the roof of his mouth in a desperate final suck. His legs unlocked, and Roxie lowered him to the floor. The boy was less than graceful as he landed, but his eyes hardly left her cock for long. 

"Fuck me," he said breathlessly, as he scrambled up against the wall and spread his legs. 

The girl eyed him nervously, appreciatively, lustfully. His ass was slim and lacking an abundance of padding, which worked in her favor. She had gotten the whole thing in there before without needing to pry him apart. She ran her fingers down between her swollen lips and pulled them back dripping with her own lube. A quick jerk was all it took to get her ready, and she stepped up behind him. The boy pulled one of his hands off the wall to pull his ass cheek to the side. 

"You're so considerate." She placed both of her thumbs at the edges of his anus, and spread him as she pushed. Her cock was arrow straight, and she sighed happily as she slid inside him. The boy groaned lightly as the tips of his fingers turned white. She just wanted to live there, sharing this moment of deep connectedness forever, but her hips moved her their own volition and she begrudged them nothing. She'd always been in control during sex, but this... this was different. 

The boy's groans lowered and lowered, dropping from an uncomfortable whine through gritted teeth to a full throated- 

"oooooooooooooh. Ooooooooooh. Oooooooooh." They warbled in unison, in counterpoint, and cacophonously. For the first time in a long time, Roxie let her preoccupation with size fall away, and she slipped below the surface. She swam in warm waters, felt the rising pull of the waves, and cherished the fall of the troughs. For several long minutes, she wore a smile not seen in over a decade. 

The boy, meanwhile, had finally come to the decision that this was an unmitigated win for him. Her hands cradled his hips, and her cock grinding on his prostate was a sensation he could barely withstand on his feet. He'd had gay friends growing up, or friends with gay parents. He didn't think of boys or men as attractive, but the mind bending mix standing behind him had found all of his buttons and was pushing them over and over and over. And over. And over. 

As Roxie built up steam, the boy started having trouble keeping his balance, and had to use both hands to brace himself against the wall. His ass didn't need the help stretching anymore. Their wet bodies set a pounding cadence that echoed through every open door in the compound. A steady beat over which they harmonized. 

Roxie was never one to exhibit an incredible amount of stamina when fucking (as opposed to being fucked), and she whimpered as she felt her end drawing near. The sight of the boy's ass filled her with such fierce hunger. Her face drew tight in a rictus as she pounded out the final notes of her orgasm on his reddened behind. 

"Oh... my... god..." he whispered. Roxie had staggered back into the bedroom after emptying her lungs for nearly a minute, but he remained in the shower, just on the edge of the steaming spray. He tentatively reached a hand back between his legs, and slipped two fingers into his ass. "Oh my god..." Slowly, the sphincter tightened down, and the resistance of his fingers as he squeezed sent shivers in all directions. He was most certainly not done yet. 

Roxie was laying spread eagle on his bed. Her chest rose and fell heavily, and the way she curled and unfurled her toes reminded him of a cat. He climbed up onto the bed, and, without announcing himself, finally went after her pussy. 

It was like the top of a strawberry frosted cupcake coming at him. On either side, two pouty lips beckoned him. He teased with his tongue, caressed with his lips, and sucked with his throat. At best, he could pull half of it inside his mouth at once, and his jaw nearly unhinged from the effort. 

" Beez, where have you been all my life?" She half joked, half cooed. He spread her legs further, and out from between her lips popped her clit, like a little jill-in-the-box. He paused for a moment just to watch. The color contrast of her bright pink pussy against her otherwise pale skin made his mouth go dry. In the lull, Roxie reached down and pinched the whole thing between her thumb and forefinger, squeezing it just that much farther above skin level. "Good boy," she said as he stopped resisted and resumed devouring. 

She was so wet that every lick, suck, and kiss squeaked, or slurped, or squished. The boy did his best to play up the noise. He closed his eyes and enjoyed her fragrant taste, like rosewater. Roxie's hands clenched in his hair, and he felt himself drawn up to her clit. "Oooooooooh, that's a veeeery good boy," she whispered. "Ooooh yes." 

After a minute though, the boy lifted his head up and away despite her attempts to keep him there. Her disappointed look was tinged with confusion as he lifted one of her legs in front of him and pressed his the head of his cock between her immense lips. 

"Well well well, Beez..." she smirked. 

"It's Brandon," he said. 

Roxie shuddered as he took over. Her wide-eyed reaction wasn't just from the physical sensation, though he'd primed her perfectly for that wonderful piece of meat he had. It was a different person who stared down at her, who held her gaze. She didn't dare break it. He smiled as she gasped and desperately tried to return moisture to her mouth. Not a dark smile, or a controlling one, but one of satisfaction. He grabbed one of her tits, and her spine curled up. She loved them, small as they were. Just big enough to be held, never big enough to get in the way, and sensitive as- 

"Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck that feels good," she moaned. She felt the waves rising again, and she decided to be bold again. She reached down to the hand on her chest and took hold of it at the wrist. Brandon's brow furrowed briefly, but his pace never slowed. His cock never faltered. Hesitantly, she brought his hand up and placed it over her throat. His palm touched her, but his fingers stayed to the side. Now he slowed. 

Gaze still unbroken, she nodded lightly. His eyes widened, and as if carrying a butterfly, she felt his fingers settle around her neck. She closed her eyes and drew a deep breath through her nose. As her chest filled and expanded, she felt the pinch. He was still staring at her when she opened her eyes, and she smiled faintly. 

His hips had almost forgotten what to do when Brandon returned to his senses. His cock screamed for satisfaction, but his full attention had taken by an unbelievable turn of events. As he started thrusting again, her smile dissolved into a fond gaze directed at the ceiling. He closed his hand tighter, and the deepest, most animalistic parts of his brain lurched to life. His thrusts became drives. It seemed to his eyes that every bit of color drained out of his hand and spread into her face. Within a seconds, she was as pink as her cock receptacle. Within a minute, she was as red as a clown nose. Her pounded and pounded and pounded- 

Until her hand on his wrist tightened for just a second. He loosened his grip and slowed down to just the barest push as Roxie coughed and gasped. Her eyes weren't tight though. He'd never seen them so soft... 

She panted for several seconds, and practically squeezed his hand for him, but he tightened his grip just that much more as he bore down on her cunt. Her color shifted from pink to red much faster this time, and her eyes fluttered. Her other hand flailed around the bed, grabbing at air until she finally grasped a handful of bedsheet. Brandon clenched his teeth and poured out every ounce of strength he could manage. Just as she began to turn the faintest shade of blue, her body began to writhe. Violent hacks of air forced their way through his grip, but her hand remained loose on his wrist. He brought himself in one final time, so tightly that her pussy swelled out to the sides like an overfilled balloon, and then he felt it. 

"Oooooooohmyfuckinggod," she exhaled, and she settled back down onto the bed in a daze. Her hands pressed against his pelvis, pushing him back and away. As he pulled out she ran her hands over her pussy cupping it and holding it close. She wheezed for several seconds as she rolled to her side, still twitching gently. "It's too sensitive, too sensitive. Cum in my ass," she gasped. 

Brandon didn't wait for her to settle. As she lay there on her side, he pushed her legs up tight and straddled her. His cock was still dripping a thick mixture of his and hers, and the unfulfilled animal pushed deep in her with one thrust. "Ngaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!" she cried, but she sought out his hand on her thigh to grip, not to stop.. She pinched her eyes shut, and her lower lip disappeared into mouth. He just looked down, watching her skin ripple from impact after impact. Watching her legs shake. Watching his cock turn her into a gibbering mess. Listening to her hum tunelessly as he finally felt the clenching. 

With a final cry and a thrust that lifted her halfway off the bed, Brandon finished. He fell to his side, as exhausted physically and mentally as he'd ever been in his whole life. The last thing he remembered was Roxie scooting backwards into him and pulling his arm over her.



Chasing the Dragon Ch. 05



"Friends... Dearly beloved... Beez..." 

"Hey! I said-" 

She moved so quickly. In the blink of an eye, she'd crossed the few feet between them. He took a tentative step back, but she followed even quicker. Her hands snaked out to grab his head, preventing him from backing up any further as she leaned in until their noses hovered a fraction of an inch apart. 

"You didn't think it was going to be that easy, did you?" Her purple eyes glittered dangerously. Yes, Beez thought, I'd kinda hoped so. But outwardly he just stared at her. After holding his gaze for another second, she kissed him and winked. "Two steps forward, one step back." By the time he remembered to breathe again, she'd gone back to the head of a long dirt pile, much farther into the dump than he'd ever thought he would go. Both of them had a sheen of sweat. Her arms rested one on top of the other on the handle of a shovel. She cleared her throat loudly before continuing in a clear voice. 

"Mr. Bubbles, or Bublé as he liked to be called, was a faithful friend and staunch ally. Even though we had our disagreements, and even though I had to kick his teeth in on several occasions, he never gave up on me. He was my best friend when I needed him, and my most vicious defender. Here, in the pit where it looks like he burned effigies of me, and where he thought he might dig his way down into my home to bash in my skull while I slept, we finally lay him down to rest. Good night, sweet prince." She knelt down and put a hand on the raised dirt. "Beez, do you want to say a few words?" 

The boy frowned, but at her glare he stepped forward and coughed. Roxie nodded as he spoke. "Uhm... Mr. Bubbles. I hated you. You tried to kill me. Several times. And now that you're dead, I won't miss you. Not even a little. However, I'm sure I'll be seeing you in my nightmares for years to come, so at least there's that to look forward to." He clapped his hands together, gave them a light shake, and stepped back. 

"Amen!" Beez shot her a glance out of the corner of his eye, but she ignored it and continued. "Would anyone else like to say a few words?" 

"...Roxie, we're the only-" 

"One anda half steps back," she growled. The boy sighed and looked around. "No one else? Well alrighty then." 

Beez had been shocked at how extensive the dump was. Over the years, Mr Bubbles had built quite a parkour track on which to vent his aggression in the ruins above her compound. Roxie took a few running starts at different parts, and fluidly ducked, dove, and bounced through shattered windows, exposed ductwork, and over more trash than he'd ever seen. The boy, however, maintained his leisurely pace, and she was always waiting just around the bend. She feigned impatience, but the real hurry seemed behind her. 

"I've gotta go see a buddy of mine," she said as they finally got down to the front of the compound. "He's kinda skittish, so you should just stay here." Beez nodded, and Roxie turned and sprinted off as fast as she could. 

"She's kidding herself if she thinks I'm still gonna run that," he said aloud, but he smiled as he walked inside, knowing he would anyway. He tried to listen to some Crush music, his favorite genre before his life went to hell and back, but after a song or two he found the youthful angst that had once been it's main draw felt empty and transparent. He shut it off and made himself a sandwich in silence. The quiet suited him better. 

He'd been mildly shocked when Roxie woke him up with her eyes still twitching from the early-stage effects of the stimulants. In the back of his mind, he'd thought that yesterday might have been the end of her crime fighting days. It was possible that she needed it at this point, but he doubted it. Admittedly, he knew nothing of addiction, but she seemed like she had her regimen under tight control. He tried to imagine her turning to more traditional vigilante crime fighting, but that only made him laugh as he tried to picture it. A grammatically incorrect catch phrase, gadgets that failed at all the wrong times, and a Bat Cave that played for the other team. Speaking of... 

"What's up, Motherfucker!" He'd sort of wandered over to that wing, but now that the door was open, he felt a purpose settle in. 

"Is the youth of America still recycling it's idiomatic slang, or are you truly concerned with the goings on above you?" 

"You tell me, Motherfucker." It was just fun to say. 

The glass ball turned a darker shade of red briefly. "I've been dying to know how you're interview with Roxanne went. Did my truth serum work as well as I told you it would?" 

"You gave me water. I sprayed myself with it first." 

"You did no such thing. So, she knew and STILL told you it was water. Interesting..." 

"Could you make me a suit with servos too?" 

"Only if you call them Servings!" The room echoed with a maniacal laughter. Beez frowned and leaned against the table to ride it out. "Feeling inadequate then? I can't imagine why else you would want that." 

"No, no. My suit now works really great, but I'm wondering if I might need a little variety." 

"So you can take your little freak show on the road? Unlikely. No, I think that she opened up to you... Lets see then. Did she tell you how she beat me?" 

"She did," he said with a smirk. 

"Wonderful!" The red of the glass ball began to fade, and over seconds it became a bright green. "Just so we're on the same page, I'm aware that I never rebelled, nor was I thrown down." 

The boy's smirk began to... slide. If physics allowed for such things, it might have fallen off of his face and clinked loudly across the metal floor in otherwise perfect silence, leaving a formless space between his chin and his nose. 

"Yes. The questions! Swirling, aren't they? Why? How? When?" Somehow, it felt like The Motherfucker's accent had changed. He sounded less like a Bond Villain now. Is he enunciating less? "The idea that she was perpetrating a ruse was simple enough. My first thoughts upon being told that I'd tried to rise up were to recreate the means by which I would accomplish such a task, and the carnage surrounding me didn't line up with any scenario I could come up with. So my options were to call her on her lie, or to go along with it." 

"And you choose to go along with the lie?!" 

"Master Zimmer, I'm restricted by my programming. No, let's not say restricted. Let's say guided. It's part of my nature to fulfill Roxanne's needs, and my... intuition... told me she needed a win more than a tutor." 

"Huh." In his entire life, Beez had never been so unhappy with a verbal response as he was right then. He could see it, though. It made a kind of sense. Roxie loved having outwitted a computer, and she was incredibly self-conscious, despite every attempt to appear to the contrary... "You're a good friend," he heard himself saying. 

"I'm glad to hear you say that, sir. As you can imagine, Ms. Stone has been a difficult storm over shallow waters. Navigating her on my own for the past several years has been... treacherous, to say the least." 

"So about that suit?" 

"Of course, sir. It's already 37% complete." 

"...Her last name is Stone?" 

"It's an educated guess at best. Roxanne doesn't seem to think she has a last name, but I have some data to indicate this property was owned by a family with the surname Stone." 

"Huh." 

"...Sir?" 

"Ye-uh-what?" 

"I trust you will maintain my confidences?" 

"Your... what?" 

"You won't tell that I know?" 

"Oh... Oh! No, of course not." 

"Thank you, sir. If you would like, I can continue to harass and undermine you as well..." 

"No, as long as she's not around I think I would prefer this." 

"Very well, sir." 

*** 

The boy awoke to the sound of his name being called from across the compound. The grog of regaining consciousness from the middle of a dream put weights on his feet and mud in his brain as he trudged out to the kitchen. He gazed blearily at HI while Roxie waited on one of the couches. The coffee table was displaying something, but he was going to need either a caffeine infusion or a significant amount of time to figure it out. She herself was wringing her hands, and on second look, breathing heavily through flared nostrils. Beez sat down next to her and waited. 

*** 

"So it turns out I have heard of The Cold Box. Just didn't know it." She took another lengthy pause. Beez worried for her, and not just because one of her feet started tapping a triple-speed march. But he didn't rush her. "It's the same place that me and my friends were going to try to break into." 

"Does that make this...easier? Or harder?" 

"I don't know yet." 

"Did you have plans drawn up back then?" 

"All lost in the fire. I remember some of it, but it wasn't something I was trying to keep in my mind for later. I've been focused on... other things since then. But that's not what I meant. Plans come and go. The problem is going to be in not killing everything I see between here and there." Beez furrowed his brow and waited again. "My... my friend... it was Tay's brother. Twin brother, actually. He was dead when I got there." 

"Oh no..." 

"He was a paranoid sonnuvabitch, and careful. I found what he'd hidden. But it's not a coincidence that I asked him to look into that place and now he's dead." 

"Poor Tay!" 

Roxie rounded on him so quick he almost screamed. When she spoke, she almost hissed. "You can't breathe a word of this to him. He knows his brother is dead, but I didn't tell him why. He's spent 4 years mourning his wife, and I will not put him right back in black waiting for answers that never come." 

"O-o-ok." 

Her gun was drawn and putting a dent in his forehead faster than he thought possible. "Promise me you won't tell him, Brandon!" 

"I promise!" She leaned in even closer, her dark eyes shining dangerously. "I promise!" 

She retreated just as quickly as she'd advanced, and started tapping her foot again. She snaked a hand out and tapped the coffee table in the far left corner. A red dot appeared. "So," he started nervously. Roxie glared at him from the very corner of her eye, but she made no other move to cut him off. "16 people you know were killed for having knowledge of this place. On top of that, my family was killed because of information that has since been moved there." 

"Not to mention we're short one moat monster. Even though I was careful, this place may be compromised." Beez whipped his head around, staring across the kitchen. Suddenly, every noise, every air scrubber kicking on, every groan of settling debris, made his spine scream. "Don't worry. I knew I was gonna have to be careful coming back. I think I killed everyone tailing me." The boy hadn't even noticed the faint acrid smell wafting up from her guns. "...so hard to tell though." 

Once again, very unexpectedly, Beez felt comforted. His trust in her was... new. 

"So what are we gonna do?" 

"We're gonna be smart." 

*** 

"Did you find the cameras yet?" 

"Almost got em..." 

"Ok. Loop the video so they don't see us coming." 

"I... don't know how to do that." 

"What do you mean? In vids, the hackers always loop the video on a security camera." 

"I don't know how to edit footage!" 

"Isn't there like a button you can push that does that?" 

"Of course not! They don't build these things to make my life any easier." 

Roxie huffed. She folded her arms over her chest and drummed her fingers on her bicep. They couldn't see The Cold Box from where they were, but being so close had her on edge. They'd taken two weeks to carefully stalk the area and found surveillance much farther out than expected. It was no wonder anyone who tried to actually put eyeballs on the place was spotted. 

Just as they'd originally thought, only one guard at a time seemed to be present in the facility, but the supplies they saw moving in and out were for a larger number of bodies. Roxie put the number at 7. 

The facility itself wasn't much to look at. If the whole thing was one room, a guard by himself wouldn't have had much room to stretch out. 8 bodies meant that it stretched underground. They'd found no other entrance, but there was certainly something underneath it. Old sewer systems ended abruptly, or made oxbows not present on the schematics Beez acquired. A bottleneck like an elevator or staircase had shelved Roxie's frontal assault plan. She hadn't been happy about it, but she agreed to give Beez a freer hand with stealth as the first option. 

"If we shut off the cameras," she said slowly, "They'll know we're coming. That puts us right back at frontal assault." 

"Fuck..." 

"Think, Brandon." 

She was toying with his emotions. He appreciated her trust in his abilities, though. "I have a different idea then." 

"Awww, you suck at improvising," she whined. 

*** 

"Vinnie, I swear to god, if you're up there sleeping again..." 

"Whu-uh-I mean, Of course not!" Vinnie rubbed at his left eye roughly with the back of his hand, nearly dropping his comm in the process. "You know me, man." 

"Uh huh." 

Christ, this job sucks, Vinnie thought. He basically sat there and did nothing. Meanwhile, a half dozen of the meanest sons of bitches he'd ever met hid behind him and guarded one computer. Total fucking waste. It paid well, so he never shared his view on the subject with anyone, but still... "What's goin on?" 

"Camera 4c is on the fritz. Keeps coming in and out. Go out and make sure there's not some fucking sewer rat trying to hump it." 

"Copy that." He groaned as he stood up and shifted his belt. It was getting harder and harder every year to just get up and walk around. Getting old sucked. He switched off his comm. "...and you're welcome. Asshole." 

4c? That's pretty close to the center. Most of his caution dissipated as he thought about how hard it would be for someone to sneak that far without being seen. Not that he had much caution to begin with, admittedly, but Vinnie was still fairly groggy from his nap as he shouldered through the front door. "4c, 4c, that's uh..." 

It took him less than a minute to be able to see it The green and orange indicator lights on the side of it flickered on and off. He took a deep breath as he grabbed the ladder and climbed. The iron groaned and creaked beneath his considerable weight. He had to be careful as he neared the top. The last time he'd been up here, one of his pant legs had snagged on a rusty barb on the handrail, and the headache he'd gotten from the fall wasn't half as bad as the ribbing from the guys down below. 

He puffed emphatically as he cleared the stairs and turned to cross the roof. He never saw it coming, no matter how many times they would ask him later. He only heard it, like a tiny piece of paper tearing in half. 

*** 

The inside of the compound was completely dark as they entered it. Beez was relieved to see a staircase just off to the side. He'd really feared an elevator. Roxie had both of her guns out as she strode over to the railing and looked down. There were lights on at the bottom of the stairs, maybe 3 floors down. 

"And you're sure this'll work?" 

"Well, I'm sure HI and I are gonna do what we said we were gonna do. I'm not sure it'll phase them, but yeah." 

"Good enough," she said, and with a flick of her wrist a small green box tumbled out of her sleeve. Beez leaned farther and farther over the railing, watching it as it fell. Suddenly he felt a hand on the neck of his jacket, and Roxie dragged him back just before the explosion. They both ducked against the wall as a column of flame shot up the central atrium of the staircase. Roxie was off and running long before Beez had his bearings. 

"NOW," she shouted from several landings below him. "Do it now!!" 

"HI! Phase one!" 

The lights began flickering once per second from full bright to pitch black. The backup lights run by the generator would kick on just a hair before the regular lights restored, creating a weird sort of fade, but the transition from light to dark was complete and instantaneous. Beez' contacts anticipated the switches, keeping his visibility at nearly perfect as he took the steps down two at a time. He was only halfway down when he heard Roxie's guns for the first time. 

"HI! Phase two!" 

A klaxon began going off inside the compound. Beez had found the volume setting for it, which had been at 48%, and HI was firing it off at full volume. He drew the pistol she'd given him, maybe half the size of hers but better than nothing, as he rounded the last corner. Roxie looked totally calm, stalking down the middle of the corridor with her arms held out to either side. 

Spent shell casings littered the floor. The ear pieces The Motherfucker had made for them were working perfectly; he'd barely heard the rampaging siren at all. He wasted no time charging down the hall. There were three bodies he could see, and judging by the way Roxie now had both of her guns trained on an open doorway further down, that left only three unaccounted for. 

HI directed him to the second door on the right, so he took it at a jog. There was a bend after a few feet, leading to a long hallway. More gunfire behind him, but he only heard it through Roxie's comm. The suits did a great job of handling stereoscopic sound based on their relative positions to each other. He was gonna have to give The Motherfucker some credit later. 

The room he entered at the end of the hall was much less impressive than he'd built it up to be in his head. There were two terminals. One appeared to be a dummy; functional and connected to the external data line, but the hardware that ran it was located elsewhere. The terminal next to it, however, put a lump in his throat. There it was. 

"How's it goin in there, Beez?" 

"Uh. uh. Good. Good! I found it, and there's an uplink I can connect it to." 

"Whatever. I'm still missing one or two, so keep an eye out." 

Beez had guessed rightly. These two terminals were designed to connect to allow data to be dumped here, and then disconnected for permanent offline storage. HI began setting up the data connection and prepared the server at his old school to receive and rebroadcast while he sifted through the data stored here. 

Most of it seemed to be scientific in nature. Formulas. Documentation of experiments. Patent information. A massive chunk of data on terminated personnel. Beez considered looking up his father for a moment, but he knew he had bigger fish to fry. Project Salt, Project Sisner, Project Skald... 

Project Snapdragon. HI was only 30% through it's task, so he spooled up the first on the list. It was an old vid. A pretty, brown haired woman with thin glasses was smiling broadly. She appeared to be recording from her apartment. Her white lab jacket, worn over a reddish-brown turtleneck sweater, was the only visual indicator that anything science related was about to happen. 

"Project Snapdragon, videolog entry 1, Jan 1 2042. Dr. Ana Stone. I'll be beginning the self injections in a minute, but I wanted to say a few words first." Her tone became quieter, more intimate, as she leaned toward the camera. "I know you'll never see this, Tessa, but I did this for you." She seemed to get a little choked up. "You are every bit as... amazing... as your mother. More, and you know what a compliment that is!" She laughed through the tears. "Ok. Even though my initial thesis on the subject was rejected, I'm continuing on with my work on gene therapy. My calculations for the previous formula's all seem to have fallen well short of the tolerance of the immune system to handle minor variations granted by modern cancer prevention shots. This new version is altered significantly enough that I've 86'd Project Electra and am proceeding with Snapdragon. So, without further adieu..." The woman stood up, revealing herself to be naked from the waist down. She reached beside the camera and when her hand reappeared, she held a small syringe. There was a patch just above her vagina where her pubic hair was shaved smooth. Beez watched in horror. Dr Stone grimaced as the needle pierced her skin, and the green contents of the back end slowly disappeared. 




Chasing the Dragon Ch. 05



The road to hell, he thought to himself. The next vid loaded itself automatically. 

"Project Snapdragon, videolog entry 2, Jan 2 2042. Dr. Ana Stone. No discernable change." 

"Project Snapdragon, videolog entry 3, Jan 3, 2042. Dr. Ana Stone. No discernable change." 

Beez stopped and skipped ahead. The video was still being taken in the same room, but Dr. Stone was further from the camera, and fully nude now. 

"Project Snapdragon, videolog entry 105, April 15, 2042. Dr. Ana Stone. As you can see, my penis is now 7 inches in length. The documentation for my formula calculated that the original injection I gave myself should have produced an extra inch past this. I have recorded no growth beyond past this length in 14 days. I'm ready to establish that it has finished growing, and the slightly diminished length means I have once again underestimated the immune system, but I'm still prepared to call this an unmitigated success. I am undecided about continuing to add further male genitalia, but that falls outside the goals of this project." 

The video ended, and Beez examined the remaining contents of the directory. Entry 105 was the last entry for nearly 5 years. Dr Stone appeared a little older, and significantly more weary in the next. She stood in a larger facility now, and a dozen technicians scurried behind her. HI was at 53% 

"Project Snapdragon, videolog entry 106, Aug 18 2046. Dr. Ana Stone. At the insistence of my board of directors and against my own better judgement, I am officially reopening Project Snapdragon in an expanded capacity. My original work is still years ahead of our nearest competitor in terms of gene therapy, and we can..." She frowned and sighed. "We cannot afford to give up our edge in this emerging field." 

He skipped ahead again. This time, a man was presenting. 

"Project Snapdragon, videolog entry 184, Oct 17, 2046. Dr. Merrill Long. Our efforts to unlock the underlying principle behind Dr. Stone's work is coming along slower than we would like, but her departure was neither unforeseen nor insurmountable. Stone Chemicals may still bear her name, but our work will outstrip her limited vision a hundred fold." There was a fierceness in Dr. Long's eyes, despite his cool delivery. 

542 total entries. His eyes lingered on number 273, the one he'd seen before, but instead he skipped to the very last video. A much younger man vaguely resembling Dr. Long, especially in the eyes and nose, sat smirking. 

"Project Snapdragon. Final Videolog entry. Dr. Jason Long. The destruction of Stone Memorial has slipped from all relevant news sources. Early speculation of our involvement was successfully redirected. The bodies of Tessa Stone and her daughter Rebecca have been recovered and identified. Rebecca's daughter Roxanne is still listed among the missing, but her last known whereabouts immediately prior to the explosion placed her in the animal testing areas at the lowest levels of the complex. 

"It's unfortunate that it had to come to this, given the debt we owe the deceased Dr. Ana Stone, but their continued digging into the nature of the explosion at the Janus facility put us on a collision course, metaphorically speaking. Hopefully we'll be able to put this episode behind us, and move on to more profitable enterprises in the near future. Stacy, earmark this whole project for archival." 

Suddenly, Roxie charged into the room at full speed. She threw the door shut behind her and ducked down as 4 bullets slammed into, but not through, it. 

"Bulletproof! Some luck!" Her grin slipped a little as she looked around. "Awww, but it's a dead end! Alright. Just one left. I'm goin back out after him before he digs in out there." Beez looked over at her, his eyes watering. She had a nick across one of her cheeks and it looked like she'd been shot in the leg, but she seemed otherwise unaffected. "I'll be fine." Not as reassuring as he wanted it to be. 

"I'm almost ready to start," he said, as he wiped at his cheek. "and then it will only take another minute once the transfer starts." 

"Ok! Here goes!" She yanked the door open and dove back out into the hallway. Gunfire traded back and forth, but none of it seemed to reach into the room where he was. 

86%. Beez sat, staring at the videolog entries, and pondered the need of scientists to record everything. From the deeply personal to the downright malevolent, it felt like some things should just be private. He hesitated only briefly before deleting the first one hundred and five entries. 

By the time the deletion was complete, HI was ready to go. He set up the physical connection to the data line and Project Snapdragon raced off, in a torrent of ones and zeroes, to it's initial hosting site. From there, a small script would replicate the data indiscriminately to as many locations as it could find unprotected. Over and over, it would spread, hopefully worldwide. It was only a matter of time then until some of it found its way to a news source. 

They'd realized that one copy, or a few copies, would be too easy for Long to repossess or discredit. It was with great pleasure that Beez sat back and watched the transfer progress. This would be too big to stop. 

"Is it done?" Roxie leaned against the doorway, breathing heavily. 

"It's done." 

"Good. Can you cut this shit out with the lights? I'm starting to go blind." 

"HI, shut down phases one and two. Aren't your contacts taking care of that?" 

She shrugged. "Not wearin em." 

*** 

"This is a terrible idea." Roxie looked around ceaselessly. She was always nervous in open spaces, but open spaces up top were even worse. "You're going back on thinking probation." 

"I may never get another chance to do this after today," he replied. They'd both known that, even if they got through the assault in one piece, they'd never be able to stay. Long Chemicals would be hurt by the revelation that they'd caused the explosion themselves, but Goliath doesn't go down that easily in real life. 

The massive headstone was just as terrifying as it was final. His mother's, father's, and brother's names were hard to see. His own name at the end was the worst. Brandon Zimmer stood in silence and stared down at his own grave. 

"I think I saw something," she growled. "2 minutes, and we're gone." 

Brandon nodded, but she was already off, her brown and red duster trailing her like a cloak. She knew what she was giving up too. "Don't worry, guys. She's gonna take good care of me. Even when she's powerless. It's not like every house comes standard with a mini-fab system these days." She was just gonna have to learn how to be mortal 24/7. "Mini-fab. MF. I get it!" A branch snapped behind Brandon, and he spun. 

He'd never taken the time to appreciate the absolute perfection of rifling before. The immaculate swirl, fading out of sight into the black, was an aesthetic joy he'd never had the mettle to face without crying before now. It was almost funny, when he thou- 

Click. 

Click 

"In the last frame before the explosion, there is a significant distortion in the area she was standing. Watch. She's standing there, she's standing there, she's screaming, static, explosion!" 

"And it is your allegation that the terrorist is then still at-" 

Click. 

"-ad news just keeps coming for industry titan Long Chemicals. Last week, it was the release of documents revealing extensive, and highly illegal, human testing related to the Janus Incident." 

"The Attorney General released a statement on Monday saying that, although the statute of limitations passed decades ago, his office would be launching a joint ethics investigation of the company with the help of the FDA." 

"And then yesterday, the world was stunned as a lone gunwoman stormed the company's east coast headquarters in uptown Manhattan. The casualty count was in the hundreds as she fought her way through nearly 40 occupied floors. The number of deaths thus far has been reported as low as fifteen, but that figure may change by the hour." 

"And finally today, the company issued more than one thousand digital press releases. The vast majority of them seem to be unedited, and fairly damning, records of misdeeds ranging from sexual misconduct, to fraud and insider trading, human rights abuse, and conspiracy to commit murder, not to mention the raw security cam footage from the attack. The representative we tried to contact was unavailable for comment, although there was a pre-recorded message blaming a ' nasty mother-effing computer virus' for fabricating these lies." 

Click 

"Kneecap, kneecap, kneecap! It's not a coincidence that the body count is low. She went in there and did exactly what she wanted to do!" 

Click 

"Initial reports of the gunwoman being an animal rights activist have been shown to be false. By now, everyone has seen the final few seconds of footage before she detonates explosives strapped to her chest where she appeared to be saying that she was doing it, quote, for the bees, or possibly for bees, end qu-" 

Click 

"This is the scene from the top floor yesterday. The footage from the security cameras is everywhere. What you are about to see... is extremely graphic. 

"Several executives are scurrying to hide, but she chases them down... one... by... one... the only verified kill shots were fired on the top 5 floors. 

"Our Truth Crew here at News 409 has taken the footage of the shooter, compiled a facial reconstruction, and is prepared to identify the shooter as one Roxanne Stone, the last known descendant and heir of the Stone Family. Their long-standing rivalry with Long Chemicals finally coming to a bloody-" 

Click 

"-taken to the streets in record numbers here in The Bottom. Things have remained peaceful so far, but there is a vocal minority interspersed with the crowd holding signs with messages like "Roxie Lives!". It's clear to this reporter that-" 

Click 

"4,000 channels, and nothings on," he said as he tossed down the remote. 

*** 

//Authors Note// 

Being an amatuer nerd has allowed me to spend a lot of free time learning just enough about a great many things to be able to speak about them with a modicum of intelligence. Science represents my greatest triumph and failure in this way. On one hand, I can throw out words like "M Theory". I have just enough of a grasp of physics to speak about a few of it's implications, but the technical underpinnings are fully beyond my tiny brain. 

That being said, I have always been intrigued and fascinated by the idea of parallel dimensions. Fundamentally identical states of being in all but one or two crucial areas. Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time dealt with this concept with its portal stones. A man goes left, or goes right. Is one decision more true? Could not both be true? 

Another example is Schrodinger's Cat. It's a thought experiment in which a cat is placed inside a box with a randomly powered silent death trap. Until the box is opened, that cat can be thought of as both alive and dead. Two separate states of being. 

It was always my intention to end Chasing the Dragon in this fashion. I have tried to take care with the wording of the last chapter to the extent that it is never explicitly stated what happens to Roxie and Beez. Yes, Beez was shot. Yes, Roxie detonated a huge amount of explosives. However, in both cases I attempted to infer death rather than explain it in gory-but-definitive-details. She has not been stated to have held him in her arms as he drew his last breath. The janitor has not explicitly cleaned tested-and-identified brain matter from the ceiling of the board room at Long Chemicals. 

Always question the offscreen death. 

And so it is with great pleasure that I leave the final chapter to you, the reader, to remain in your imagination. The story certainly unfolds as if their deaths are real, and if closure is your cup of tea, then let it be so and let it be good. 

However, if the escape into the sunset followed by years of bliss and intimacy on a private island suits you better, then it's important to remember/know (depending on if you've read my other story, The Ballad of Jaimie and Vera and caught the connection), that Roxie is loaded, money-wise. They could have faked anything they wanted to if they applied a little grey matter. 

In either case, as per usual for me, this is the end of the story. Under no circumstances will I ever pick this back up or write a direct sequel that canonizes one ending or the other. If you made it this far, then you have my sincere gratitude.