“I’m Kel. Kel Reed. From Phoenix.” He looked at me with a peculiar expression that I didn’t understand, but it made my stomach do a little mini-dance. I could only stare back. I caught Derrick glance at me out of the corner of his eye but I played it off. He had a grin on his face when I turned to him and it disappeared at my withering look.
“So what’re you doing over here?” I asked Kel. We hadn’t seen him in over a year and it was a bit surprising to see him again so soon. With so few people in the world, I wasn’t certain if it was fate or simply inevitable.
“Same as you, I suppose.” He smiled at me and I had to turn away before he saw the heat in my eyes. That smile of his really was something.
Uncle D came around the front of the truck, double-checked the ropes on the deer he had bagged only an hour earlier. He shook Kel’s hand. We made a fire and chatted while we dressed the deer. I tried to keep from making eye contact with Kel, but I couldn’t help myself. It really irritated me that this guy had such a pull on me. I adjusted the hem of my dress and fiddled with the laces on my boots, pulling the buck knife from just inside the left one and going through the motions of sharpening it.
All the memories of Kel flooded my mind and my heart. Before I could help myself, there in the shambles of Thyssen’s office, I threw my arms around him and began crying like a little baby.
Kel held me and covered up his grunts of pain as I tightened my hug over and over, never wanting to let him go again. I could not fathom why I had suppressed my memories of him. I loved him. How could I have forgotten him? I was so ashamed. I remembered him looking at me in the house when I first encountered him on my return. He was hurt that I did not remember him, but he had not pushed it. He was always so damned kind.
“Why didn’t you help me remember?” I asked through my tears.
“I figured it would come back to you sooner or later,” he said. He pulled back and looked me in the eyes. “I was really hoping for sooner.”
We laughed out loud and then I heard the sound of someone clearing his throat. We looked up towards the door and saw several folks in white coats staring at us.
“Are you both all right,” the man asked. The sincerity and relief in his voice was only matched by the shock in his eyes as he glanced over at Thyssen’s body.
“It had to be done,” I said, hoping there was no one else with a grudge in this place.
“No,” he said, “We owe you a debt of gratitude. He was a tyrant and terribly dangerous.” An older lady looked around the man’s shoulder and stared at me with the most heartfelt expression of gratitude I think I had ever seen.
“I don’t know how you did it,” she said. “But, thank you.”
“I’ll make the announcement,” the man said and left.
“We have a lab-wide intercom,” the woman stated. “Now everyone will know we are free.”
There were a total of sixteen people in the lab, mostly technicians and staff. One other scientist — Hollister was taken away to be prepared for burial — took care of bandaging Kel and I. Dr. Cameron said that my cuts would be healed in a matter of hours and Kel’s wounds would only take a day or two more.
The rest of the folks were quite kind to us. Even the three remaining soldiers — Harmon was still alive — accepted the change of regime with pleasure. Thyssen would not be missed, that was for certain.
“We have the serum, now,” Dr. Cameron said to us as we prepared to leave. I did not want to hang around. I wanted to go home. I wanted to rest with Kel and put together whatever the rest of our lives might be. “There are folks who could use it. It can still be of value.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“In Northern California. In Lakeport, on the southern edge of the Mendocino Forest, there’s a refuge. It’s one of the last bastions of human society. We’ve had some covert radio communications with them. Thyssen never knew.”
I lifted an eyebrow. At least there was a little backbone left in this brain bank, after all. “What are you suggesting? That we take the serum to them?”
“There was a recent outbreak of measles and there isn’t a better inoculation on the planet than Nanomere9. You might even be saving lives, in the long run.”
“We’ll think about it,” Kel said, taking my hand. “For now, we have other priorities.”
I allowed him to lead me to the elevator. He punched in the code and hit the Garage level button. When the doors opened and Harmon cleared his throat, it was to get our attention away from each other. I would have been embarrassed had I not felt so damned guilty for not remembering Kel in the first place. Fuck them all. I had some catching up to do.
Harmon gave us the keys to one of the Humvees and shook our hands. “You take care,” he said with a wink.
“Thank you,” I said to him. Then Kel open my door for me and I crawled into the truck’s passenger seat. “I can’t drive?” I asked Kel. He still had the shoulder wound, after all. I laughed out loud when he replied.
“After last time? No.”
As we drove away from White Sands, headed for Alamogordo, I could not help but think that there might be a future for us after all. For so long, I had just been doing what I needed to do to survive, and later what I had to do to deal with Thyssen. Now the future was wide open and I had no plans other than to see where it would take me. I glanced at Kel and felt a sense of release. A weight had been lifted. I knew my father would have been proud of me, not for killing the man who almost destroyed the world, but for following my gut and conscience.
Staring out the window, I watched the gypsum sands flow over the dunes of White Sands and I wondered to myself what Northern California looked like this time of year.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
C.L. Stegall is the C.E.O. and a co-founder of Dark Red Press, as well as an author who writes modern, urban and paranormal fantasy. He was born in North Carolina but will always call southern California home. He spent ten years in the U.S. Army, as both an engineer and a linguist for Military Intelligence. He has written innumerable short stories and novellas. His first full-length fantasy novel, “The Weight of Night,” is receiving wonderful reviews. It is the first in his Progeny series of novels. His next series — Valence Of Infinity — will begin in 2012.
THE LAST PHARMACIST
by
John J. Smith
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First I would like to thank CL Stegall for his incredible editing expertise — you are the best. Thank you.
Then to Brian Fatah Steele for the excellent design and the creation of the Last Pharmacist cover, I thank you.
Finally, I want to extend my special thanks to the folks at Dark Red Press for their contributions, suggestions, and incredible support in the making of The Last Pharmacist.
Chapter 1
Jasmine Cooper screamed, “No!” when she and her partner banged through the door just in time to see another kid jab the syringe into his arm. The elastic tubing snapped just as he pushed the plunger. The drug of choice in the underground is a synthetic chemically made heroin, otherwise known as SCH, produced by the Last Pharmacist, a drug lord who is as elusive as the sun on a typical day above the underground city. One of thousands of cities built two or more years before the meteorite, Apophis, slammed into Earth and skidded across the Mediterranean through the Middle East and down to the Indian Ocean before heading back out into space and away from the earth’s atmosphere. The damage was devastating; the entire population at the point of impact and those in the path perished, and the fallout was nearly as bad. The earth lay in darkness for almost ten years before the sun finally broke through the heavy debris; but then the sun’s presence became sporadic as malefic storms continued their effort to cleanse the earth of the catastrophe.