Agony (Debt Collector 2) Read online

  Text copyright © 2013 by Susan Kaye Quinn

  March 2013 Edition

  Smashwords Edition

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  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. For information visit

  www.DebtCollectorSeries.com

  Cover by Steven Novak

  www.novakillustration.com

  The Debt Collector Serial

  EPISODE 2 – Agony

  Contains mature content and themes.

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

  Agony is approximately 11,000 words or 44 pages, and is the second 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 tries to forget Apple Girl, but a rough collection finds him spiraling deeper into the abyss. He faces a one-way ticket to The Retirement Home for debt collectors, until his psych officer offers a way out.

  Recommended:

  read EPISODE 1 – Delirium first

  click to subscribe

  I hear the screams as soon as the elevator doors open.

  It’s a woman—I know that even before the high-pitched sound jerks me to a stop. I’m frozen inside the elevator, my jackboots welded to the floor, my hand braced against the stainless steel wall. The liquid-metal feel of it chills my palm. My right palm. The one I’m going to use on the woman whose wails are bouncing off the walls of the oncology ward. We all come into the world in this agony: first our mothers scream their pain, then we wail our own in that first breath of life. It’s a wonder more of us don’t leave the world the same way.

  Mrs. Riley is screaming because I’ve come to collect her debt.

  I shudder, and it vibrates my hand against the wall. I should call my psych officer, tell her I’m sick. It wouldn’t be a lie. I’ve had a couple of vodka benders since my most recent collection, and the last time I looked, I resembled a half-animated corpse. But drinking my way through the week isn’t what’s drained the life out of me. Vodka doesn’t make me feel like the marrow has been sucked out of my bones, as if they’re empty of life and might snap if I take too vigorous a jog to the bathroom.

  That hollow feeling is the hangover I get for giving a mercy hit to a dying girl; a hit that almost killed me. Some mornings I almost wish it had, but then I see that thought for what it is: a one way ticket to the madhouse the psych officers call The Retirement Home. Even on a good day, collecting feels like playing roulette. Red, I’m good for another day. Black, and I’m free-falling into a bottomless pit. Today doesn’t feel lucky. I should get another debt collector to take my place, but the truth is, I need my cut. I need to fill out my bones before I break altogether.

  The doors start to close. I bang my hand against the edge to stop them and lurch through the open space before I can change my mind.

  The screams fade, and I beat back the hope they’ve finally calmed her. The nurses try—I can’t fault them for not always succeeding in an impossible task. Preparing someone for collection has to be the shortest straw in nursing assignments. They don’t send newly minted nurses on collection prep rounds, but the senior nurses are savvy enough to get out of rotations before I show up. That means the nurses on duty are usually young enough to be pretty and experienced enough to know what they’re doing.

  Just the kind a guy like me would enjoy spending time with outside the hospital—except they all give me the same level of interest they would give the Grim Reaper. I don’t blame them. Everyone looks at collectors that way, and nurses have more cause than most. They witness what I do first-hand.

  I lumber past the nurses’ station, empty no doubt because everyone’s been summoned to Mrs. Riley’s room. My boots are finally broken in, so they don’t squeak. The only sound is the slight irregular rhythm of my steps. I can’t tell if I’m favoring one side or the other; my entire body complains as I move, the plodding of a man with fifty years more than my actual twenty.

  I mentally review Mrs. Riley’s file as the room numbers tick by, counting down to number 530. She’s one of the unlucky ones, not that anyone I visit could be termed lucky. Mrs. Riley, forty-two years old, mother of one (I’m not sure if it’s a boy or girl; the file doesn’t say). Just recently took out a business loan for her new start-up, leveraging everything she had, and then some, on the promise of future earnings. A life filled with potential ahead of her. Mrs. Riley had an MBA from some big school that specializes in that sort of thing. She had a business plan. It was a smart loan. She just came up black on the roulette wheel and got cancer right in the middle of the collapse of the textiles industry in India, her biggest supplier. It wasn’t her fault her potential got cut short at the exact same time all her bills came due.

  The bean counters are the ones who tallied up her debt, I tell myself. I’m just the collector. Each silent step across the polished tiles of the hallway inches up my hope that they’ve calmed her somehow. I reach Mrs. Riley’s door just as the screams start again.

  I freeze at the threshold, blasted by the full impact of the sound.

  Three nurses hold Mrs. Riley down. She’s shaken loose one of her IVs. It snarls around the snow-white shoes of the redheaded nurse holding Mrs. Riley’s shoulders, dripping a puddle on the floor. They’ve tried to strap her down, but only half succeeded. She has one leg trapped by the three-inch-wide nylon webbing across her knee, while the other leg kicks at a nurse trying to catch it. A wide reflow strap across Mrs. Riley’s chest pins one arm down, but the other flails free. The strap is one of those new materials that separates then recombines into one solid piece again, depending on how you tug on it, but the struggle has turned it into a sticky-tape mess. The nurse leans away, face scrunched, as Mrs. Riley claws at her with the free hand. The nurse seems inexperienced in dealing with frantic patients facing a visit from a debt collector.

  Sedatives are only allowed when the patient requests it. Otherwise, the law specifically states that patients are entitled to meet the debt collector and live every moment right up to the end. Prisoners on death row get the same courtesy. Never mind that it would be a lot easier to collect a debt from someone who has the life in them muted by drugs. The point was to make it hard on the collector—at least that was the consensus when the laws were written. Collecting should be justified, rare, and above all, difficult. Then people—especially politicians who want to be re-elected—can talk about how collecting is humane. But then there aren’t any lawmakers who have to collect the debt themselves.

  Mrs. Riley’s face is contorted with rage, but I can still see the hollows of her cheeks and the ravages of the failed cancer treatment in her lack of hair and the paper-thinness of her skin. The screaming stops when she sees me in the doorway with my black trenchcoat and boots. She gives me a look that would shrivel the heart of any ordinary person. It bounces off me like I’m made of steel, but I’ve seen that look before, and it doesn’t bode well for the collection. Better to get this done quickly.

  I stride into the room, full of purpose.

  All three nurses hold still, as if frozen by the soft sound of my footfalls. I march straight to the head of Mrs. Riley’s bed and stand just out of her reach.

  The inexperienced nurse recovers first. “I’m sorry, Lirium, we tried—”

&nbs
p; I stop her with a raised hand, and her eyes go wide, as if I had wrapped my fingers around her windpipe. Whatever she was going to say wouldn’t help with the patient, but I regret having to cut her off. The nurses know me, but they don’t generally chat me up, much less apologize for not convincing a patient to go easily to their death. They keep their distance, and I let them. But in spite of my best efforts, I feel something when she says my name. It’s just my collector name, but still: it tugs at me.

  I’ve been holed up in my apartment too long.

  “Mrs. Riley?” I focus on her anger-mottled face, but I don’t wait for a response. “I promise this isn’t going to hurt, ma’am.”

  Her mouth works, but she doesn’t say anything, like she doesn’t have words for the outrage. I don’t tell her it will be a relief. I don’t say that her debt will go to someone who will do great things with her life energy. Someone full of potential to make the world a better place. Someone just like her, only who came up red on the roulette wheel instead. I simply turn over my left palm, the one I used to silence the nurse, and activate my screen implant. I bring up the recorder and turn it back to the patient, face out.

  “Mrs. Riley, I need to record your final statement, if you’d like to make one. It’s optional, ma’am, but if you’d like to make one, please feel free to take your time.” I lean a little closer, to make sure she can see the recorder already started in my palm. She should see her image, bald and trembling. Sometimes seeing themselves, ravaged by their disease and on the path to death anyway, will shock them into compliance. Or perhaps despair. It doesn’t take much to tumble down that deep, dark well, as I know too intimately.

  Just as I think she’s going to be the kind that refuses to admit what’s happening, Mrs. Riley tears her free arm from the inexperienced nurse and sails it toward my hand with the recorder. I think she’s going to hit my hand, maybe hoping to make a poetic last statement of sorts by destroying the recorder, but instead her bony fingered fist slips past the recorder and punches me in the face.

  I reel back, even more shocked than I am injured. The strength of the dying always surprises me. As if life conjures some extra battalion of energy right at the end. The nurse holding down Mrs. Riley’s leg gives up that fight and edges toward me, hesitating. The wide-eyed look on her face, plus the metallic taste of blood in my mouth, tells me Mrs. Riley managed to split my lip or something. I wipe my face with my right hand, and it comes away bright red. Facial wounds—they always bleed like you’ve cut a major artery. My lip starts to throb just as Mrs. Riley screams again, limbs flailing against the nurses’ hold once more.

  I don’t hesitate and she doesn’t see me coming. I slam my right palm on her forehead and push her head deep into the pillow. It slides a little, greased by my blood, but I maintain the contact and start the transfer.

  My hand heats immediately, her life energy pulsing into my palm and up through my arm. She stops flailing, her arm and leg dropping as if she’s been knocked unconscious, but she’s not. She’s awake and staring at me with wide-eyed horror. I know what she’s feeling now. I know the life-stealing blackness that crowds her vision and the despair that fills her chest with darkness. I know because I feel it. Every damn time I have to pay out.

  Mrs. Riley will only feel it once.

  In that way, she may be lucky after all.

  Her life energy pulses stronger in me now, juicing me, a high like no other. My body pulls it faster and faster, like it’s starving for the liquid-rush feeling and can’t get enough. My palm is hot with the transfer, too hot, and I realize that Mrs. Riley had longer to live than the bean counters calculated. Not a tremendous amount, just a month more than their estimated two weeks. But it’s enough to fill me with an unexpected burst of energy that has my hand shaking. I have to push her head deeper into the pillow to make sure I keep contact through the last drip of life force draining from her body.

  It’s a blissful feeling—and it fills my bones.

  Mrs. Riley’s eyes are still open, but there’s no life behind them. I pull my hand back, leaving a bloody handprint with five bloody fingers on her hairless head. My stomach heaves, a violent storm of disgust and jittery-high brewing and threatening to bring up my breakfast. The nurses are silent. Motionless. I hear the distant ding of the elevator arriving, calling me, and I have to leave the room.

  I shove the nurse who almost came to my aid out of my way, probably less gently than I could have, in my haste to get out. Mrs. Riley’s life energy is pulsing through me, making my steps fast and unsteady. I reach the elevator just as it’s about to close again and slip through the doors. I stalk to the back of the stainless steel box then turn and pace the perimeter, a tight circle that keeps bringing me back to the polished surface of the walls. They reflect a warped image of my bloodied face. I stop, wipe my chin with the back of my hand, and pace again. My stomach drops as the elevator moves, whisking me away to some floor, and I realize I forgot to hit the button.

  I turn to face my reflection and punch that instead.

  Pain lances up my arm, and the stainless steel dents in. I jerk back and see the dimpled impression my fist left behind—along with a smear of my blood. The elevator sways to a stop, and it’s enough to unsteady me. I fold in on myself, my trenchcoat fanning around me as I curl around my injured hand and sink to the floor. Whoever was going to come into the elevator doesn’t. The doors close again. I still haven’t pushed the button.

  I’m staring at the abyss and I know: I’m in serious trouble.

  I sit across from my psych officer, Candy Kane Thornton, and try like hell to look normal. I’m not exactly sure what normal is, or what Candy’s typing into her palm screen after she glances at me, but I need to avoid the “you look like shit” response as well as the long, drawn-out sigh that usually precedes the “What am I going to do with you, Lirium” lecture. I need a change in my collection duties, but I don’t want her to think she has to retire me. Or worse, somehow discern that I’ve done an illegal mercy hit. I haven’t been to see Flitstrom, the bean counter, so he hasn’t had a chance to find any anomalies in my tracker from the mercy hit. Candy can’t see how much life force I’m carrying just by looking at me, but then I can never tell what she’s really thinking. She approved a new apartment for me on the east side just two weeks ago, so she knows something is up.

  Candy taps her palm screen one more time and folds it in her lap. Her bright red nails are long, pointed daggers that sprout from her fingers. I have no idea how she navigates the screen embedded in her hand without drawing blood. That thought reflexively draws my hand up to my face. I cleaned up, but I still look like I’ve been in a bar fight. I cover the motion by running my hand through my hair and returning Candy’s stare. My split knuckles are taped together with a series of small band-aids from the hospital. They’re like little white arrows pointing to how messed up I am. Candy’s gaze is drawn to them, then returns to staring at me in a silent standoff. I’ve never figured out if her crazy-green eye color comes from contacts or implants, but they’re unnerving. Her too-red hair curls on her black suit jacket, which is low-cut, tight, and reveals a tattoo on her breast that I should only know about if we’re dating.

  Candy doesn’t do demure.

  She’s waiting for me to speak first. I did call and request the meeting after all.

  I clear my throat. “So,” I say, with extreme articulateness. “I was thinking about maybe getting some medical needs training. Um, you know, if there are slots open.” My voice is a wreck, and I sound like an idiot.

  Candy doesn’t say anything for moment. Then she says, “You look like hell, Lirium.”

  Shit. “Rough collection.” I hope she buys it. It’s the truth, after all, and that makes for the best lies.

  Candy nods her head.

  “So, I was thinking that medical needs training would be, you know, something new. I could use a change of pace.” I would still have to collect, but if I trained for medical needs payouts, maybe it would fill some
of the holes I’m carrying around in my soul. I would be saving lives, not just taking them. I flash back to the burning-hot feeling of goodness that came after the mercy hit. Giving Apple Girl’s dying sister a life force hit gave me a taste of something that I wanted. Needed. Badly. Medical needs transfers go to people who have high future potential, but who need the life energy hit to carry them through a operation or treatment they’re undergoing… maybe it would give that same pure feeling of goodness afterward. It had to be better than paying out to perfectly healthy people who happened to be high potentials.

  Candy gets up from behind her desk, which is shiny black and reflects the bleak white light from the overhead panels. Her office is in the seedy section of the east side of Los Angeles, but the interior looks like an art deco installation in Manhattan. The desk and chairs are spare and lacquered, and bio artwork on the wall oozes a blood-red gel in constantly changing shapes, but the rest of the tiny room is stripped of any personal effects. There’s nothing to indicate that Candy has a life outside of this oasis of retro slickness, and I can’t imagine her anywhere but inside these walls.

  She trails her fingernails along the desktop, dragging out a scritching sound that makes my teeth ache. She sits on the edge in front of me, legs bared from her too-short skirt, and she brushes my pants leg with her foot in an accidentally casual motion that’s entirely intentional. Her bright red heels click as she crosses her ankles. I know other collectors have psych officers who force them to do all kinds of things, just to keep out of retirement. I keep waiting for the day Candy asks me to play sex worker for an afternoon, but it hasn’t happened yet.

  She towers over me. I’m slouched in her chair, still folded up, like back in the elevator. I shift in my seat, straightening, but I still only come up to her chest. I try hard not to stare and mostly succeed.