Vicious Circle

Everyone stared at him with varying degrees of awe and alarm, but nobody made a move to help him or assess the damage. I took the opportunity to thread my way through the onlookers, heading for the empty stretch of corridor around the open door—no-man’s-land. One of the two nurses who was blocking Pen—the male one—immediately turned his attention to me, clamping a heavy hand on my shoulder.

“Nobody’s allowed through here,” he told me, brusquely.

“Leave him!” Webb snapped. “That’s Castor.”

“Oh thank God!” said Pen, seeing me for the first time. She threw herself into my arms, and I gave her a reassuring hug. At the same time I looked down and realized that the two men on the ground weren’t wrestling after all: the conscious one was hauling the unconscious one away from the door, leaving a feathery-edged smear of blood on the carpeted floor from some wound I couldn’t see.

Pen’s eyes were glistening with tears as she turned them pleadingly on me. “Fix, don’t let them hurt him! It’s not Rafi, it’s Asmodeus. He can’t help himself!”

“I know that. It’s okay, Pen.” I put as much conviction into those words as I could muster. “I’m here now. I’ll sort this.”

“One of my staff is still in there,” Webb told me, cutting across Pen as she started to speak again. “We think she may be dead, but we can’t get in to find out. Ditko is . . . frenzied, in a hypermanic state. And as you can see he’s violent. I think I’m going to have to gas him.”

Pen wailed at the word, and I wasn’t surprised. The gas Webb was talking about is a mild nerve toxin—a tabun derivative called OPG, developed at Porton Down for military use but now illegal on any battlefield in the world. Ironically it had turned out to have therapeutic effects if you used it in tiny doses on Alzheimer’s sufferers: it blocks the breakdown of acetylcholine in the brain, slowing memory loss. Then someone found out that zombies could use it in much larger doses to do more or less the same thing—slow down the inevitable breakdown of their minds as the processes of butyric decay turned complex electrochemical gradients into rancid sludge. So now the gas was legal in psychotherapeutic contexts, and actively recommended for the dead and undead—a loophole that still had half the civil rights lawyers in the world yelling in each other’s face. The fact that it had sedative side effects just added to the confusion.

Using it on Rafi was a spiky proposition in any case, though. He was no zombie: just an ordinary living man with a tenacious passenger. And if Asmodeus was in the ascendant, it would take a big hit even to slow him down, which would mean that the side effects would be that much more painful and extreme. Some of them might even be permanent.

“Let me go in first,” I suggested. “Maybe I can calm him down with some music.”

Webb huffed and puffed, but unlike the big bad wolf he was actually very keen to avoid having the house blown down. He was looking for a way out of this that caused the minimum damage to life and property—especially property—and he had enough sense to see that I was probably it. After all, this wasn’t the first time Rafi had played up: I’d proved my usefulness many times before this. “I’m not legally responsible for you,” he reminded me. “You signed a waiver, and I’ve still got it on file. You go in there on your own recognizance, and if you’re hurt—”

“You’ll deny all knowledge of my activities,” I finished, nodding. “And you won’t put a penny in the collection box. Let’s just take that shit as read, shall we?”

I turned my back on him and took a step toward Rafi’s cell.

“I’m coming with you,” Pen yelled, and she pushed her way between the two nurses, who weren’t sure anymore what their brief was. I put up my hand to block her. “Better not, Pen,” I muttered. “Asmodeus needs me alive, and that’s the only thing I’ve got going for me here. Like you said, it’s not Rafi. He won’t hold back when he sees you: he may even take a smack at you out of pure spite.”

She hesitated, still not convinced. I left her there and went forward, hoping she’d see sense: there was really no time to argue about it while I could see Webb plutzing and quivering his way toward ordering a gas attack. I gave the door a shave-and-a-haircut knock as I went through. It would probably have been safer to take a peek round the edge of the doorway first, but I was going to have to go in anyway: this way I went in with a certain amount of panache, even if I came out again on my arse with my head flying separately.