Delirium (Debt Collector 1) Read online

  Text copyright © 2013 by Susan Kaye Quinn

  March 2013 Edition

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  The Debt Collector Serial

  EPISODE 1 – Delirium

  Contains mature content and themes.

  For YA-appropriate thrills, see Susan’s Mindjack series.

  Delirium is approximately 12,000 words or 48 pages, and is one of nine episodes in the first season of The Debt Collector serial. This dark and gritty future-noir is about a world where your life-worth is tabulated on the open market and going into debt risks a lot more than your credit rating.

  Summary

  What’s your life worth on the open market?

  A debt collector can tell you precisely.

  Lirium plays the part of the grim reaper well, with his dark trenchcoat, jackboots, and the black marks on his soul that every debt collector carries. He’s just in it for his cut, the ten percent of the life energy he collects before he transfers it on to the high potentials, the people who will make the world a better place with their brains, their work, and their lives. That hit of life energy, a bottle of vodka, and a visit from one of Madam Anastazja’s sex workers keep him alive, stable, and mostly sane… until he collects again. But when his recovery ritual is disrupted by a sex worker who isn’t what she seems, he has to choose between doing an illegal hit for a girl whose story has more holes than his soul or facing the bottle alone—a dark pit he’s not sure he’ll be able to climb out of again.

  “The street-smart science of LOOPER meets the cold, just-the-facts voice of DOUBLE INDEMNITY in this edgy, future-noir thriller that will have you holding your breath, looking over your shoulder, and begging for more.” —Leigh Talbert Moore, author of The Truth About Faking, The Truth About Letting Go, and Rouge

  “Do you owe more than your life is worth? No worries. A more deserving person than you can benefit from that excess life—and someone else will get paid with it. Enter the Debt Collector.” —Dianne Salerni, author of We Hear the Dead, The Caged Graves, and The Eighth Day (HarperCollins 2014)

  My jackboots are new, the latest ultra-light material out of Hong Kong’s synthetics district, and they make a strange squeaking sound against the hospital floor. It’s the kind of sound that might gather snickers or a raised eyebrow, but no one looks at me, at least not on purpose. I stroll past the ICU desk, taking my time, breathing in the antiseptic smell that masks the odor of death held back by machines and drugs and round-the-clock care. The nurses duck their heads and study their charts, ignoring me. As if catching my eye might mean I’m coming to collect their debt, rather than Mr. Henry’s in Room 301.

  The floor is so highly polished that I see the reflection of my trenchcoat running ahead of me, black as a midnight grave, a spook that lives on the surface of the oft-scrubbed tiles. It reaches the door to 301 before me and disappears in the dim, flickering light coming from the room. The spook has gone back where he belongs, into the dark recesses of my soul, assuming I still have one. If I was a betting man, I would say the odds of having a soul keep getting longer with every transfer I do. The older debt collectors, the ones who are still alive, don’t have anything shining out of their dull-glass eyes, even when they’re hyped up on a transfer. There’s no telling what my eyes look like.

  I stopped looking in the mirror a long time ago.

  Mr. Henry’s hooked up in all the usual places—tubes in his arms and monitor patches hovering over his temples and the blue-veined skin of his chest. His knobbed knees and shriveled legs stick out the end of the blanket. I don’t know if he’s tossed the blanket aside or the nurses just forgot to cover him up again after his sponge bath or whatever they do to prepare patients for a debt transfer. Goosebumps raise the hair on what’s left of his legs into a small forest of gray fur. I tug the thin, white-weave blanket over his exposed legs, and Mr. Henry opens his eyes.

  They’re pale green and watery—washed out and used up like the rest of him.

  “You’ve come for me,” he says.

  I pick up one of the hard-backed, plastic hospital chairs, the kind that makes you uncomfortable sticking around the ICU, just in case all the death-waiting-to-happen doesn’t do the trick. I carefully set it down, backward facing at the head of Mr. Henry’s bed, and settle in. I don’t answer him, just study him for a moment over my laced fingers.

  “What’s your name, son?” he asks, which makes me lean back and mentally check over his file again. No, he’s not an Alzheimer’s patient. He shouldn’t think I’m his son. And I’m only twenty, but no one’s mistaken me for a boy in a while, not since I started collecting.

  “Lirium,” I say. It’s just my collector name, short for Delirium. Some punk collector thought it was funny when we went through training and it stuck. I don’t use my real name anymore, so it’s as good as any. Most people don’t ask.

  “Is it going to hurt, Lirium?” His hand wanders out from the blanket, shaking a little and fluttering around his chest, like it’s searching for something. Then it lands on the rail of his bed and grips it.

  “No, sir.” Relief gushes through me like water from a busted hose. When patients have been properly prepared, that’s the question they ask. It means they’re ready. I should thank the nurses on the way out, if I can get one of them to look at me. “It won’t hurt at all, Mr. Henry. In fact, it will be a relief.”

  This isn't really true, but I imagine it will be better than what he’s feeling now, all the aches and pains of the cancer slowly eating him from the inside out. This is where I usually tell them that transferring out is a good thing and how paying their debt will make the world a better place. I tell them it’s better for everyone—they get relief from having to live the last painful stages of their disease, they’re no longer a drain on the resources of the world, and someone else, someone in the height of their productivity, whose contributions to the world will be long lasting, will receive their debt and do even more with it than they can imagine. And I get my cut. Everyone wins!

  I usually leave out that last part.

  But today, the words stick in my throat as Mr. Henry draws in one shaky breath after another, his watery eyes searching my face for the truth behind my words.

  Instead, I ask, “Do you have any family? Any message you want to give them? I’ll see that it gets to them personally.” This part is true, although I usually wait until I’ve paid out and recovered. It’s easier to face the families that way.

  “No,” Mr. Henry says and looks away, staring at the vid screen on the wall, noiselessly playing some reality game show. I think it’s the one where you finish a desert obstacle course and win a ton of cash. I don’t watch TV.

  “There’s no one that’s too concerned about me anymore,” Mr. Henry says.

  I nod. If the man had family, they’d have to be some hard cases to let him rack up so much debt that his life doesn’t cover the balance. Then again, some families do that on purpose.

  “Wait!” he says. It’s a croak filled with urgency, and I briefly wonder if he’s got dementia on top of the cancer. “There’s a cousin of mine! Nick! Yes…” He turns his watery eyes to me. “I’d want Nick to know,” he says. “That I’ve paid my debt.”

  “Does Nick have a last name?”
I hold up my left palm and activate the screen implanted in my hand. All Agency collectors are required to get the implant. Some don’t like it, but I find it useful. “Does he live in the Los Angeles area?” That’s about 50 million souls, but if I have a last name, it should be possible.

  “I don’t know.” A thousand wrinkles find a home on Mr. Henry’s forehead. “I haven’t seen him in… I don’t know, maybe 20 years?”

  “Last name?” I look up from my palm.

  “Fisherman.”

  I tap it in. No Nick Fisherman in the greater Los Angeles area. I keep my face neutral. “Yeah, found him right here,” I lie, swiping to clear the screen. “Living in Santa Barbara.” I bring up the recorder and hold my palm out to him. “Would you like to record something for Nick?”

  Mr. Henry’s shaky hand reaches out and pushes mine away with the strength of a gnat. I lower my hand. “No,” he says. “Just tell him for me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  There’s a moment where we don’t say anything. I stare down at my hand, pretending to do something while I let Mr. Henry collect his final thoughts. Then I hold the screen up to him again, already recording. “Mr. Henry, I need to record your final statement, if you’d like to make one. It’s optional, sir, but if you’d like to make one, please feel free to take your time.” It’s the standard language we’re told to use, and it usually works to settle them in. Plus it signals that we’re almost done.

  Mr. Henry looks at his image on the screen for only an instant, then turns his gaze to me. “No final words.”

  “As you wish, sir.” I tap my palm and rest my hand on the back of the chair. I lean forward and ask quietly, “Are you ready, sir?” I only ask them when I think that they are. I give Mr. Henry a smile, honestly grateful that he’s making this so easy on me.

  He nods, and I extend my right hand, gently placing my palm on his forehead, like I’m an old-time preacher who’s giving him a benediction. Only I’m not healing him, I’m killing him.

  If only it didn’t feel so damn good.

  Mr. Henry’s life force, what’s left of it, starts to trickle into me, a liquid gold rush of feeling that’s the best high I’ve ever had. My body pulls it faster and faster, and soon the trickle is a gush. When I first touched him, his skin was cool and clammy, a paper-thin barrier between my hand and the aging flesh beneath it. Now it heats up with the transfer, a warm kiss on my palm as his life energy drains from his body into mine.

  I look away so I don’t have to watch Mr. Henry’s frozen face.

  Being a collector is something like playing roulette: the bean counters, for all their calculations and actuarial tables and consultations with medical experts, don’t really know how long you have to live. But they tally it up, and when your debts—medical bills, taxes, that foolish vacation you took in the Bahamas on credit—when all of it is no longer worth your future productive contribution to society, otherwise known as the price of your life on the open market, they call in the debt collectors.

  But sometimes they’re wrong.

  Sometimes, a debtor really had an extra year of life, when even the smartest doctors thought the debtor didn’t have six weeks to live. No one really knows until a debt collector pays them a visit. The debtor still loses—they get transferred out no matter what—but that’s when being a collector feels like hitting the lottery. You get a full life-year rushing into your body at once, filling you with the energy of hundred men in one hit. You’re alive in a way most people never experience, even while they’re living life at its best—full of health, money, sex, power—all the things that make people feel on top of the world. Collectors who find a powerful hidden reserve of life force get all of that, times a thousand, in one powerful rush, making them feel like they’re invincible. Like they could literally fly if they wanted to.

  They don’t often survive it.

  There’s no hidden cache of life inside Mr. Henry’s frail body. I keep my palm to his head, drinking down every last drop of his life force, but it’s only about six weeks worth, just like his chart said. Still, my body sings with it.

  When I’m done, I leap up out of the chair, shoving it across the room until it bangs against the wall and stays there, askew. Energy sizzles in my arms and legs, and there’s a bounce in my step as I leave the room. Morning sun sneaks in from a window down the hall. The hospital ward is brighter now, the nurses are prettier, and the whole ward is a bustle of activity. I blow a kiss to a hot redhead in pink scrubs who’s sneaking looks at me as I stride down the hallway. Life pushes back the darkness for a while. The spook is gone and even my boots don’t squeak.

  I hum a little tune in my head as I pick up the pace, practically jogging with the pent-up energy of the transfer. At the elevator, I tap my foot, and the tune gains a little volume. I start singing it out loud, under my breath at first, then louder to the startled occupants of the elevator when the doors open. A part of me wonders if this was Mr. Henry’s favorite song, because sometimes that can happen—a bit of the last thoughts will come along with the transfer. I push that aside, telling myself it’s not my business to know, and give the button on the elevator a good-natured punch.

  I smile all the way to the lobby.

  The next morning, Flitstrom seems disappointed that Mr. Henry only had six weeks in him, a rare show of emotion for a bean counter. He leans across his scuffed, black metal desk, waving his handheld scanner across the tracker embedded in my forearm. The tracker logs how much life energy I pulled from Mr. Henry, and the scanner submits an official debt record. Getting the implant is required to work in the government’s Debt Collector Agency, but it beats working for the mob. Those collectors are lucky to keep all their body parts, assuming they can manage to collect at all under duress. They’re truly better off being caught and sent to prison, and that’s accounting for the fact that life expectancy for collectors in prison is a lot shorter than Mr. Henry’s prognosis.

  Flitstrom scans me again.

  “Were you expecting more?” I ask. If Flitstrom’s on the take, hoping to get some life hits on the side, I’m not interested. I drive my point home with my unimpressed look. Messing with government debt records is dangerous business, and we’d both likely end up in prison. That was drilled into us in training, not that it wasn’t obvious to anyone with half a brain.

  “No, no…” He waves off my accusation like it was nothing. “I was just hoping we might have a bonus for Mr. Whitby.” Flitstrom checks the readout a third time.

  “Is Whitby the payoff?”

  “Yes. He’s doing some brilliant work in genetics right now. His potential is off the charts.”

  “Yeah, Whitby sounds familiar,” I say, even though it doesn’t. I don’t pay attention to the payoffs—they’re all brilliant or famous or something. Making the world a better place with their brains and their lives. It’s not that I don’t appreciate what they do; it’s more that I prefer not to dwell on the part of my job where I finish a transfer.

  Flitstrom holds up his palm, and I touch mine to his, transferring the address where I’ll go for the payoff. Collectors are allowed to carry the hit for up to a day after we collect—a perk that lets us ride out the flush, and I usually take the full time allowed. But now that Mr. Henry’s debt payment is registered, I’m supposed to pay out his life force within twelve hours. Twenty-four under emergency conditions only.

  Flitstrom finishes up his bean counting in record time, once he’s sure I’m not stashing some extra life energy somewhere. Or that I’ve tampered somehow with my tracker. Before I know it, I’m cruising out into the midday sun and catching the Metro to the downtown office where Whitby does his life-saving work.

  The Metro is relatively empty, riders sparse between the morning and noontime rushes. The maglev rails give a soothing ride, rocking back and forth as we lumber along the line. The landscape slowly evolves from the grimy, stucco-covered, low-lying houses of the east side to a shinier rise of buildings that make up the downtown medical complex. Li
feLong Hospital is really an entire city, a gleaming cluster of chrome and glass buildings that huddle together against the smog and wait for a breath of ocean air to wipe them clean. I disembark at the center station and check my palm screen for the building. Whitby’s on floor ninety-three. Why do they have medical research labs way up in the air, anyway? Maybe they don't want the cancer-laden air clogging up the test tubes.

  None of my business.

  I flash my collector badge at the guard, and he waves me through. Collectors are a common sight at LifeLong. My trenchcoat and jackboots don’t stand out so much here, where black is de rigueur for the moneyed life-extenders and the people who support them. The all-glass elevator swoops me up, dipping my stomach and adding to the light-headed feeling of the transfer still riding inside me.

  Whitby’s waiting area is spotless white carpet and natural woods, a virtual clean-room-in-the-sky with its neatness. His receptionist is ridiculously beautiful: wide blue eyes, high cheekbones, flawless skin. Her hair is a cascade of luxurious brown that floats in perfect waves to an ample chest that’s snugly encased in a trim, black jacket. The payoffs are always good-looking, full of life and health and youth from their hits, but they seem to surround themselves with beautiful people, too. Or perhaps they simply attract them, with all their potential. Still, I’m suspicious that Whitby’s receptionist has had some illegal hits recently. She’s a bit too radiant.

  Her smile affects me—the heat of it is like a ray of clean sunshine on my skin. Add in the transfer still kicking around inside me, and I’m grinning back at her like a fool.

  I flash my credentials. “I’m here for Mr. Whitby.” I don’t have to explain why.

  She comes to my side, long fingers wrapping around my bicep as she guides me toward Whitby’s office. “Oh, he’ll want you to call him Tom, Mr…?”