Chapter 23
I drove along the rural outskirts to another lot a half hour’s drive away from my house. Mostly forest acreage, a modest estate lay nestled behind a wall of trees accessed by a winding, private gravel driveway.
A plantation style house waited for us at the end of it, my loud engine cutting through the call of birds to alert its occupants to my arrival.
“Leave your phone in the glove box,” I said as I pulled in front of the house to park outside of the front deck. “It’s a faraday cage.”
Mimi did so before I reached into the backseat to grab a canister of Ichor, then we stepped out into the late summer air.
I walked up to the front door with heavy boot steps, knocking a few times while looking out into the surrounding foliage knowing we had eyes on us.
The front door opened quickly. An older woman with graying strawberry blonde hair and a geriatric frock greeted me with a hopeful smile, glancing at Mimi as she stepped forward to hug me with gentle wrinkled arms.
“Hello, Jaxon,” she spoke. “It’s good to see you. And who is this?”
“Hey, Linda,” I replied. “This is Mimi. How is everyone?”
She swayed her head from side to side with a mild nod. “We’re managing. Little Viola’s been struggling; her body just isn’t making enough Ichor. She’s in good spirits, but her change is quickening. She has maybe a week left at this rate.”
“Or the rest of her life,” I countered, holding up the silver canister in my hand. “Get everything ready.”
The old lady didn’t play when she shouted back into the house.
“He’s here! Fred! Daryl! Bring the box!” she shouted.
Linda hurried us inside past the vintage furniture and up to the second floor, where over a dozen other occupants were present, peeking out of their doors murmuring my name.
Linda led us to a room at the end of the hall, where a young Hispanic girl in brown pigtails, no older than nine was resting in a white floral bed in her pajamas.
The entire right side of her face was encrusted with dark blue mineralization, with blackened veins running down her neck to her hands.
“Jaxon!” she cheered, sitting up straight at the sight of me as we came through the door.
“Hey there, Champ,” I spoke warmly, coming to the side of the bed to hug her delicately. “How you been?”
“Linda taught me how to paint and so I drew a picture. Wanna see? It’s a watercolor!” Viola offered.
“A watercolor?” I replied enthusiastically. “Well now you gotta show me!”
“Okay! Linda, can you help me?”
“Of course, dear,” Linda said with a smile as she went to the bedside table and opened the drawer to retrieve a white square of paper. “She spent a whole day on it.”
“Maybe not a whole day,” Viola giggled. “But most of it.”
Viola could barely grasp it, her mutated hand trembling while her left hand provided the precision.
She proudly held up a crudely detailed figure of a guy in trench coat holding a giant gun and a stick figure wearing a dress sitting on his shoulder, standing over three dark monsters with ‘X’ eyes denoting they were dead.
“Is this me?” I asked with a grin as Viola cheesed, holding the picture beside her face.
“And me!” she gushed. “It’s from the day you found me. Who are you? You’re pretty…”
She looked directly at Mimi when she said that.
“Hello, I’m Mimi,” she said in a sweet tone as she sat on the side of the bed beside me.
“I’m Viola,” the girl introduced herself. “Are you a Mutie, too?”
“Kind of,” Mimi said with a wink of her violet eye and a friendly smile, then looked at me in genuine disbelief. “You’ve been helping them?”
“As many as I can,” I confessed with a long stare. “Before they’re too far gone.”
“Yeah,” Viola giggled. “Otherwise he shoots them.”
“Viola!” Linda chastised. “We don’t talk about that.”
“You’re supposed to shoot the monsters!”
A large, portly man with sunburned skin dressed in green overalls arrived with a lankier, similarly pinkified companion carrying a cherry wood stained trunk between them. They shuffled into the room with sweaty, hurried faced and dropped the trunk on the floor at the end of the bed.
Viola’s face immediately became serious.
“Now, Champ?” I began. “I’ve brought some extra Ichor. You’re gonna be okay, but I’m gonna need you to be tough, alright?”
They busted out a few restraining straps along with a large gauge syringe, moving toward Viola who looked visibly concerned.
“You’re gonna tie her down?” asked Mimi.
Linda replied. “She might attack us if we don’t.”
Mimi looked at me. “Jax, please don’t let them. Let me help.”
“What do you wanna do?” I asked her.
Mimi scooted herself in front of Viola, pulling her legs onto the bed as she put herself directly in the young girl’s path, taking both of her hands into hers without hesitation.
“Viola? I want you to do something for me, okay? I want you to squeeeeeze my hands as hard you can—just look at me and squeeeeze while your friends give you your medicine.”
“Yes, Miss Mimi,” Viola nodded, then looked to Linda for approval, who then looked grimly at me.
I kept my smile and gave a thumbs up. “You got this, Champ.”
With everyone on board, and me standing guard, Fred and Daryl came over and took the Ichor canister to begin extracting its liquid gold contents.
Linda grabbed a bottle of iodine from the box, swabbing the right side of Viola’s neck while Mimi held hypnotic eye contact with the girl, who winced as the syringe was inserted directly into her carotid artery.
We all stood in silence as the girl started hyperventilating, widening her eyes to focus her stare on Mimi who maintained a calm, relaxed look.
I consciously kept my hands away from my cannon, holding out for the best possible outcome her mutations started to shift in color from green to blue and back again.
The darkened veins started to recede, peeling away like a drying graft as the hardened segments on her face started to crack and shrivel, falling off like broken eggshells and leaving healthy, glowing skin behind.
Viola’s breathing slowed, her eyes closed and then she laid back with a smile and fell asleep.
The girl was cured.
***
We said our farewells as I handed Linda a stack of cash from my heist, taking the rest of the Ichor with me. With our errand complete, Mimi and I headed off in the car, where she watched me with vibrant eyes and a peculiar smile.
“So that’s what you meant,” she said. “The Ichor is a cure.”
“Like alchemy turning lead into gold,” I replied with the window rolled down and my left arm hanging out. “The problem is how much the body changes before it can make enough. Viola was lucky. Any further and it might have killed her; the Mutie in her would’ve tried to take over.”
“Then it’s good that you’re out there,” Mimi replied, her body oriented toward me with no seatbelt on. “You said it does bad things to healthy people, but you turned out okay.”
I glanced sidelong at her. “The Ichor turns outward without a Mutable to fight. The people who take it see what we see. Others only see a hallucinating, hard-to-kill person—like a dude on PCP or crack—but they’re really just trying to defend from whatever those things are.”
“Hmm. Why do they use it then?”
“Because if they take just enough of it, it heals whatever’s wrong with them, the problem is they don’t stop. They get addicted to the rush and the heightened perception, pushing further and further until they become as rabid as the Muties it came from.”
We turned back onto the main road and accelerated to a brisk cruise.
“You think they’re doing it on purpose, then? Making Muties to get the gold for themselves.”
“I know they are,” I replied with a glare. “The question is why. They’re not curing anything with it, they’re just causing problems.”
“Probably money,” Mimi mused with a playful shrug. “Like everything else.”
“I think it’s something worse,” I replied, meeting her eye again. “That meteor didn’t come from space, it came from somewhere else. And somebody did it on purpose.”
“And you’re gonna stop them!” Mimi cheered.
“Eh. I’m not trying to get involved, I just wanna be paid for my trouble, carve out my own corner of the planet and be left alone.”
Mimi looked at me like I was serious. “Mmm, I think your heart is as gold as the Ichor you steal. You didn’t have to help those people, but you did. You didn’t have to help me, but you did.”
“Maybe I’m a sucker for some titties,” I teased with a smirk.
“You can suck my titties…” Mimi crooned seductively. “This is kind of like a date, you know.”
“I’ll hold you to it…” I quipped.
“I’ll hold you to it! Two ‘its’!” Mimi countered as she cupped the bottom of her big breasts and jiggled them in her black tank top before clutching the straps and laughing with a forward lean.
I was overjoyed. “Alright. Let’s swing over to the store to blow some cash, and then we can go for Hot Tub Party round two…”