The Neon Tempest

101: Chapter Thirty-Four, Part One

Previously…

100: Chapter Thirty-Three, Part Three

Myra watches the tendrone slither into Geoff’s arm, burrow down to the bone, winces when she hears a measure of wet cracks, crunches, and pops that remind her of her abuelo working the cider press in the back of the cantina, feeding it full of pears and cranking its old wooden arm until he grunted and gritted his teeth, and had to give it a rest while the pears bled through the reservoir’s wooden slats. He’d wipe his forehead with a blue and white handkerchief and smile at her, then fill a measuring cup of the fresh pear juice for her to enjoy on the hush hush.

“Good one, huh?” the Chock says to her.

“What?”

“Happy one.” The street doctor taps his bulky goggles and the lenses whir, focus and refocus independently. “Pheromones,” he says. “Poof.” He spreads the fingers of one hand in a slow explosion.

The medical worm stirs in Geoff’s arm and he moans low, twists soft on the thin-mattresses metal bunk. His brow furrows in his sleep and blood wells from the thin incision the Chock made down his arm, from each of the permanent marker-circled surgical nicks at his joints. Blood wells from the cuts, bits of shattered bone, already setting infection and tiny black clots of debris, runnels down his arm, and drips into the saucepan set by the doctor’s feet.

Myra looks to Mister. “What now?”

“You heard her,” Mister says.

Calico growls, remains hidden, sitting on his plastic bucket, a shadow shrouded round by his polyurethane shower curtain.

The Chock appraises the drainage pulsing slow from Geoff’s arm, hmphs and nods, and pushes the medico goggles up on his forehead. “Wait,” he says. He unbuttons a pocket on his baggy cargo shorts and pulls out a dog-eared Archie digest, splits the thick little book at the middle and reads

Myra asks, “How long?”

“Til done,” he says without looking up from his comic.

They wait.

Mister fiddles with an electric tea kettle, then a hot plate, but can’t get either to work, so settles cross-legged on the floor next to the Kurasabi workstation with a pouch of dry MRE peanut butter. He cuts one corner away with his pocket knife and squeezes a taste into his mouth, winces and takes a long swig of bottled water. Myra looks at him and he nods his head to one side, towards the workstation’s curving, ergonomic chair. She shakes her head but he grimaces, nods again, rolls the chair a few inches her way, so she sits. She hugs herself, leans forward, props her elbows on her knees and waits, too.

At one point, the Chock looks up from his comic, grins a smile that glints gold and silver in the low light. He squints when he smiles, with the heft of the goggles weighing his brow, and crow’s feet crowd at the corner of his beady little eyes. “Jughead,” he says. “Boss.” HE goes back to reading.

Occasionally, something beeps quiet and pulses soft light within the goggles, and the Chock drapes his open comic on one knee, examines his patient, and removes this odd bit or that from Geoff’s arm with a pair of scuffed-dull forceps. Afterwards, he drops the tool in the saucepan and takes up his comic book.

“Is good,” he says, and waits some more.

To be continued…