Big Trey looked at them, then at Lil Trey’s corpse, then back at DD; his face twisted, half-disgust, half-sorrow. “Listen, boss-man—what these bitches got, this, this is really ill, man…”
Rice: “Says the on-command rapist enabler. Just step the fuck off, Sasquatch.”
“Hey.” Dorfmann raised his hand, abruptly hard. “My call, not yours, even if we partner up on this, and that’s a way fucking big if. ‘Cause I’m still not sure how much I trust you, Zombie Hooker from Mars—”
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me!” Rice exploded. “You shot me in the fucking chest, you dork, and I’m the one offering you free fucking money—does the Aryan Brotherhood only take retards these days, or what? You unbelievable fucking pussy!”
“Okay, okay; Jesus!” DD took a second to get composed, then braced himself against the other side of the kitchen island, lowering his voice like he thought 5-0 might be outside right now, listening in. “So…how soon before we can start to ship this shit?”
Far too many fricatives to that sentence for comfort, which Rice almost felt like telling him—but didn’t, ‘cause she’d already been shot more than enough times today. Besides which, at least he’d finally remembered that the primary active ingredient in dealing was making fucking deals.
—
Later, though—long after DD and Big Trey had gathered Lil Trey’s remains up in a couple of sacrificed pillowcases, and departed—
“I’m beyond pissed, Clarice,” Horatia began, almost conversationally. “Using the reagent recreationally is perhaps the single stupidest thing you’ve ever done, let alone using it this much—and now you’re planning to play Scarface with some moronic meth-head meatbag?” Considering that her voice didn’t even rise while cursing, Rice actually found herself paying attention. “Not to mention how we don’t know nearly enough about prospective side effects to begin mass-producing anything…”
“Those seem pretty cool, to me.” In an infomercial announcer’s voice: “‘Side effects may include: if it so happens you end up getting shot in the chest, don’t even worry…plus, as an extra-special bonus offer, free head-ripping ability!’”
Horatia shook her head. “You really don’t get it, do you? For fuck’s sake, Rice—is it really too much to ask that we occasionally approach the science part of all this like, oh, I don’t know…scientists?”
Rice straightened up, grabbing for the old familiar sweet, hot flush of rage—though now, even with effort, all she suddenly found she could conjure was an offputtingly uncomfortable tinfoil-bite sting which rippled her nerves, from dry mouth to equally dry crotch. “Define terms, bitch,” she said. “Did we, or did we not, just already spend three months manufacturing this exact same shit in large quantities, then selling it to people to get high on?”
They stared at each other for a long moment. Then:
“Oh, fuck,” they both said, at pretty much the same time.
—
It wasn’t until two weeks after the first major incident that TV newscasters co-opted the street-name, and started referring to people who unwittingly overdosed on reA, wandered into some public area and spontaneously combusted in a spray of potentially contaminative material as “Dusters.” Rice and Horatia watched shaky black-and-white security camera footage of one poor bastard, as narrated by an equally shaky voiceover: he came weaving up to the counter of an all-night Tim Horton’s, abruptly dissolving seconds later in an explosion which covered the horrified, easily infectable people around him in dried-out human matter.
Horatia stared. Muttered to herself: “Heart attack, aortic embolism, or…for him to go off like that, he must’ve died weeks ago, overdosed and just not noticed. So—one of the initial buyers, the first wave…”
“Yeah, I guess.” Rice tried vaguely to summon some faces from that particular party run, but couldn’t. “Eeeugh.”
“We’ve released a plague of zombies, and all you can say is ‘eeeugh’? Rice, this is bad.”
“Look, that’s not going to be me, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“What? How? How is that not going to be you?”
Rice grinned, and lowered her voice, conspiratorially. “Human flesh spackle. We got it; they don’t.”
“I really wish you’d stop calling it that.” A pause. “Besides which…they aren’t supposed to OD!”
Which Rice supposed was true—but to be fair, they probably weren’t supposed to be taking drugs at all. In lieu of saying so, however, she started macking on Horatia instead, to change the subject—Horatia relaxed into the clinch initially, but soon drew back, nose wrinkling. Said: “Your tongue tastes…weird.”
Rice took a swallow, considered the result. “Huh. It sort of feels weird, too…”
She turned away, snagging an empty coffee cup, and spit. It came out black. “Well,” Rice said, at last. “Probably some new kinda side-effect, huh?”
Horatia, b
arely able to keep herself from spitting too: “Oh, you think? You see? You see?”
“Man, stop being all Plan 9, and let’s just fix this shit.”
“Again, how? You don’t know— I don’t know! Anything! Because both of us were too goddamn busy getting high or fucking with each other to ever run any motherfucking tests!”