Jase woke with a start, the faint remnants of what should have been pain flittering dully out of his nerves.

Cuffs prevented him from raising his arms and his legs were bound by a belt under blankets. Alarmingly, an IV dripped into the crook of his elbow. If the heart rate monitor beeping beside him and the bandages constricting his leg meant anything, someone was keeping him alive.

Hospital beds filled the room in varying states of occupation, most of them empty. The place was far from clinical, despite the tools indicating otherwise. There wasn’t much dirt, but the floors and ceiling were stained yellow with age. The only person in the room both upright and conscious was a slender woman in a lab coat, evocatively cross legged on a stool beside Jase’s bed. His heart monitor quickened at the sight of her, not because the shameless exposition of her legs, but of her more deliberate presentation of what was strapped to her thigh: an array of needles loaded with fluids of varying colors. On her hip hung a cattle gun, a necessity in her line of work.

“Are you lucid or merely conscious?” she asked mechanically without looking up from her clipboard.

Jase was slow and suspicious to say anything. “Where am I?”

“My clinic,” she answered with inverse interest.

“…Why am I here?”

“You collapsed outside the checkpoint.”

“I’m not dead.”

“I can see that.”

“Why am I tied down?”

“Standard safety precaution.” A patient across the room flatlined and the woman blankly excused herself to plunge his brains with the cattle gun and returned before Jase could make any headway with his cuffs. “Please, continue.” she impatiently stated.

“How am I alive?” he asked suspiciously.

“The border watch brought you here before you could succumb to blood loss and malnourishment–”

“But I was bitten.”

“Yes, I know, I dressed the wound.”

“Why am I alive?”

The woman closed her eyes and exhaled sharply. “Your malnourishment was worse than the bite.”

“Bullshit, bites have a hundred percent lethality.”

“Thirty-seven-point-two-one percent of the population prior to the outbreak were genetically predisposed to resist early stages of the base infection. Disinformation was spread so no one becomes brave or careless. Instead we have a population predisposed to suicide.”

“I’m… immune?”

“You can survive the fever in small increments. Assuming you aren’t devoured first.”

Jase only begun to digest the information when he realized he was wearing a hospital gown and his bag was nowhere to be seen. “Where are my things?”

“Anything on your person was stolen between here and the gate.”

This was annoying, but an inconvenience at best. “I have to go.”

“Perhaps you do, but in your time at my clinic your body consumed three and a half bags of IV fluid.”

Jase eased himself down and searched the doctor’s gaze watching him through emotionless spectacles. “I can pay you.”

“You may be telling the truth or you may not. I do not care, I’ve no shortage of income. I did not perform a service by treating you so much as make an investment for a future service.”

“What do you want from me?”

“There is an Armitage warehouse in the city, certain medical supplies need to disappear from the books.”

“I won’t do that.”

“It is in everyone’s best interest if you do. I am not physically prepared nor willing to be bothered to coerce your compliance. Just know I have invested more than IV bags into you.”

Jase was so focused on the doctor and the strap around her leg he failed to notice the dish beside his bed holding an empty syringe until a drop of the metallic yellow fluid dripped from the needle into a pan. His heartrate went up sharply.

“Symptoms will manifest within ninety hours, but the effects will be irreversible after eighty.” The doctor deposited a key on Jase’s lap and left to attend to her less able patients.

There was no shortage of clothing for him to pilfer from the waste basket. Most of it was going to the incinerator, so no one objected. His leg showed signs of several days’ worth of healing, an uncomfortable amount of time to be out, but enough to regain use of the limb.

The clinic was located in a slum outside the city, a perfect opposite of the surgical sterility where Jase grew up. The better part of the day was spent sizing up the place. As best as he could tell, this was a dead-end zone where the city’s trash ultimately arrived, whether material or human. Everything was jerry rigged or recycled, dirt was an accepted inconvenience, not a liability, and rats were not exterminated at the fist sign of pellets, rather they were baited in and hunted as potential food by children as if they weren’t a vector for disease. Starkest of all was the crowd. Every eye noticed you, half of them pegged you as prey, the rest as a potential predator.

Armitage law enforcement patrolled the area, but with visible faces and little more than a passing investment in preserving order, they were far from the robotic entity of the peace keeping force. More like a behavior encouraging presence. For that reason, Jase stayed on busy roads, away from narrow openings.

A massive road wide enough to host a jet landing went from the main gate in the city wall to the outer checkpoint where he collapsed. Though by the absence of tracks it looked as if Armitage hadn’t used it for traffic in some time, in their absence the space served as a courtyard for a marketplace. Uncomfortably close to the far fence was a mass grave full of poorly lobotomized elderly remains. Whether they came exclusively from the slum or a citywide lack of a dedicated disposal system could not be gaged as financial status was unintelligible from naked bodies alone. At the very least, steps were taken to prevent the dead from stirring, and continuous construction efforts to widen and cover the grave prevented a smell from putrefying the slum or attracting something slightly more than dead.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

Jase resisted the compulsion to find the case immediately, despite the very real possibility his pursuers in the helicopter caught up with it. In addition to general seediness pervading every crack and rust hole, he was glancing over his shoulder as if someone was waiting for him to lead them back to the case before slitting his throat, among the various other reasons someone here might slit his throat.

The more tangible problem was the city gate. Entrance to the walled city was sparse and highly regulated. Armitage had its own form of ID chip distinct from the type Jase was used to seeing, and unlike in the ICC where misplacing an ID was like suspending civilian rights, possessing a chip in the slum was a status symbol held only by peacekeepers and laborers. Anyone who so much as looked at the gate without an ID chip in hand was stared down like a criminal, and anyone who got too close was turned away. Often violently.s

The slum didn’t have shops so much as pawn brokers and peddlers. The most legitimate businesses looked sketchy at best. He even found his jacket for sale, but lacking liquid funds and in inclination to reacquire it, he continued searching in vain for a working computer. Some of the shadier pushers offered a selection of counterfeit or stolen ID chips, proving to Jase the need existed at every level of society, but he knew from watching the gate, these fake chips lacked his professional quality and efficacy.

Shoplifters were common and brazen. As long as they got away no one cared if they were seen. Jase wasn’t about to risk drawing that kind of attention to himself for anything less urgent than a meal. He was more subtle about it.

With little way to move forward, the night was spent in the clinic. Plenty of beds were open for various reasons and the doctor didn’t seem to care if anyone wandered in for reprieve, she certainly wasn’t using them. Though only a few were so desperate to choose her beds over the street.

A very tired man limped into the clinic and slumped onto the bed next to Jase’s. “Never seen you. New here?” he asked unsolicited and received no reply. “Guess no one told you not to get hurt out here. Lost my leg in an industrial accident, she reattached it and now I can’t even go back home ‘till I do her errands, like she was doin’ me a favor. Bitch didn’t even ask. How’d she get you?”

“Starved to death,” Jase absentmindedly replied.

“Bet you wished they left you there, huh? Too bad she pays a bounty to people who bring her dying people like you and me, prolly so we feel like we owe her something or some shit. Can’t even die in peace out here. I hear the gangs won’t mess with her. Fucking bitch. A guy came in yesterday with a stab wound, guts spilling out all over the floor. He got to pay for surgery, walked out the next morning with all his guts and not a drop of ‘medicine’ in his veins. Lucky bastard. What makes her decide to act like a doctor for some people and treat the rest of us like guinea pigs? Guess it doesn’t matter, as long as we do the job, get our meds, and we’re out, right?”

Jase checked to make sure the man was still talking to him. “I don’t recall asking.”

“Just antsy. You get it. Word of advice: when your life’s fuse is burning, don’t sleep in.”

Jase woke early the next morning to the disconcerting sound of a cattle gun plunger. Shooting up in fear he was the recipient, his nerves went at ease seeing the doctor standing over the talkative bedmate. The man’s skin was stained vomit yellow and his veins bulged a putrid orange. His body was stiff as if full of concrete and his orifices dried and shriveled. The doctor apathetically noted each detail on her clipboard.

Jase’s attention drifted toward the usually locked office where he spied cases full of vials through the crack in the door, but more interestingly to Jase, she had a computer.

As if she had eyes on the back of her head, the doctor calmly dissuaded him. “Don’t bother. Nothing is labeled and I keep more contagions than cures.”

He didn’t trust himself to reply in a way that wouldn’t make things worse. Instead, with his mind the clearest it’s been since his arrest, his thoughts turned to the case. Speculating about its contents was pointless and he knew no method of finding out aside from opening it, which he knew was beyond him. A more troubling issue was the identity and motive of the entity directing him to this city, an entity he called “Lupa.” By merely surviving he was playing into someone or something’s hands. Subverting their intentions and finding out who they are was his number one priority, but first he had to get his life back.

Jase scrounged around the place for a blade suitable for removing a month and a half of facial hair, a task made tricky due to his refusal to use the running water. Clean shaven, if not nicked a few times, he still looked as destitute as any other inhabitant of the slum, and likely would until he could get a shower and a full night’s sleep.

Even if he could get in the city like this, fulfilling his reaper’s wishes was another matter entirely.

“Find a new lease on life?” the doctor asked dissatisfactory, addressing the knives and bandages she did not give him permission to take.

“How do you expect me to do this job?”

“Scrub the books, seduce the floor manager, burn the place down if you have to, I don’t care, as long as it doesn’t lead back here.”

“I can’t do anything from outside the city.”

“That is a complication associated with the job. Not one I will concern myself with.”

“Can I use your computer?”

“No.”

Jase rubbed his eyes. An idea came in the form of his former bedmate who was dressed in a working man’s suit like he’d seen worn by slum residents working in the city.

“Does he need his ID chip?”

Standing at a corner with a comprehensive view of the courtyard in front of the city checkpoint, Jase noted movements and patrols of the peacekeepers. Even in his appropriated Armitage worker’s clothes and borrowed lab coat, Jase was nearly indistinguishable from a dreg who could have stolen such things; the ones the peacekeepers watched with hands on their weapons.

The current shift of peacekeepers was returning to clock out. Barefoot, he ducked behind a trashcan and shoved papers into the dead man’s shoes until they were no longer loose on his feet. Cutting across the courtyard to a maintenance shack, Jase scooped a puck of pitch black grease from a junked engine and ran it through his hair so it glistened with illusory cleanliness. He swiped a binding cord from a bundle of fluorescent lightbulbs to tie it back and watched the last of the peacekeepers file through the gate as he wove through the densely packed courtyard.

The commotion caused when the loose bulbs fell distracted a bookkeeper long enough for Jase to pickpocket his spectacles. Maneuvering through what amounted to a food court or maybe a soup kitchen, he snatched a biscuit, a suitcase, and a digital PDA from the tables of inattentive diners.

His path took him out of view for moment he used to straighten his hair as best he could and scrape the residue from his hands without sullying his disguise. He snatched a chunk of soap from a briefly unattended window, took a bite out of it and rubbed the rest into his armpits so when he emerged from the pathway he had the air of a physician on house call.

The only peacekeepers out were the three at the gate. In a few minutes, a fresh batch would start their shift, eager to find trouble where there might not be any.

Jase spit out the soap, took a bite of the biscuit and lowered his vision to the PDA. He couldn’t have told you what was on it as his attention was on his peripherals, but occupying his vision made him less suspicious.

He made it to the checkpoint, waved the dead man’s ID chip over the reader, got a clean pass, and went on his way as if it was the most natural thing in the world. He’d almost made it through when a peacekeeper abruptly stopped him.

“May I help you?” Jase asked, finding little difficulty feigning benign inconvenience, his disposition masking a surge of panic he had no idea how to address.

By all rights he should have been dead, but the officer merely said, “No organic materials are allowed past the checkpoint,” referring to the biscuit.

Apathetically, Jase disposed of it and infiltrated the city.