Messiahs by Matt Rogers (bookstand for reading txt) 📕

Jace didn’t notice.

Pinned in place by Slater’s bulk, he brought the gun up and put it to the side of his head and blew his own brains out.

10

His head still down from the shoulder charge, Slater felt bits of blood and brain matter coat the back of his skull.

He froze, realising he wasn’t hit.

He rolled off the body, sitting up beside Jace’s corpse.

King stared back from the driver’s seat, his face white.

He said, ‘What just happened?’

Slater couldn’t hear. His ears whined painfully. He managed to lip-read the words coming from King’s mouth, but he couldn’t muster the energy to respond.

King swallowed, blinked hard, looked all around to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. Then he shook his head back and forth, swinging his jaw, bringing himself back to reality. Lucidity gripped him.

He grabbed the door handle. ‘We’re ditching this car. Now.’

Slater thought the stench of a corpse might make him sick for the first time in years. ‘Yeah.’

He frisked the body with more care and came upon a concealed pocket sealed within the lining of the kid’s waistband. He pried it open and withdrew two small glass vials filled with cloudy liquid tinged the colour of gold. Inscribed on each vial was a word indented in the glass: BODHI. Slater held them up for King to see.

King said, ‘What is it?’

‘Beats me. Must be the stuff that made him superhuman.’

‘Which drugs are soluble?’

‘Almost all of them,’ Slater said, speaking from personal experience.

He pocketed the vials and continued frisking.

Came up with nothing.

‘No ID?’ he said. ‘No keys? No wallet? No phone?’

‘I don’t think he was planning to make it back tonight,’ King said. ‘Those two vials were backup, in case he didn’t have enough stuff coursing through his system to incentivise him to finish the job.’

Slater sat, still stunned. ‘You think?’

The dead boy’s eyes stared vacantly at the roof.

King said, ‘This was going to happen, one way or the other. I’d wager we kept him alive longer by interfering. If we weren’t there, he’d have killed himself as soon as he confirmed Mickey’s demise.’

‘But why?’

King said, ‘Bodhi. That’s Buddhist. It means knowledge, wisdom, enlightenment. Freedom from the banality of life. What does that tell you?’

‘Not much. But it sure sounds like you’re going somewhere with it.’

King said, ‘Remember the Manson murders? He made them worship him using LSD. I’m sure he used similar jargon. You take buzzwords from Buddhist philosophy and combine it with powerful substances and you’ve got a kid that thinks his drug addiction is a message from the heavens.’

Slater said, ‘That wasn’t a psychedelic. Trust me. I’ve taken my fair share. That … was like ten tons of crack to the brain stem.’

‘It doesn’t have to be exactly the same thing for the principle to apply.’

Slater soaked in the toxic silence. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’

They got out and walked away, moving as fast as discretion would allow. There was nothing in the vehicle to trace it back to them — they’d rented it under a false name, using fake documents generated for them by Alonzo back in the U.S. They hadn’t brought anything to ambush Mickey besides themselves and the Glocks concealed in the holsters at their waists.

They didn’t talk for at least a mile. It was three miles back to their villa, and Slater figured they might go the whole time without saying a word. The tinnitus from the unsuppressed gunshot going off inches above his head took the whole first mile to fade, and when he finally got his hearing back he let out a mighty exhale.

King took it as a cue. ‘So if it wasn’t a hallucinogen, what do you think he took?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

‘I’d wager you’re more of an expert on mind-altering chemicals.’

‘I’ve taken almost everything,’ Slater said. ‘I’ve never seen anything do that.’

‘PCP?’

‘PCP’s a hallucinogen,’ Slater corrected. ‘But I get what you’re playing at, and no. PCP makes you lose your mind. He was all there. He had the cognitive skills to get the gun in his hand and his finger in the trigger guard before either of us could stop him. It’s like it made him more lucid than he’d usually be, and it stripped away his concept of pain simultaneously. That’s a mixture of a few different things. I can’t put my finger on exactly what.’

‘Can we test it?’ King said.

Slater said, ‘We can use our doc if we go back to the mainland.’

King nodded knowingly.

Their “doc” was the reason they could maintain their gruelling schedules. Dr. Noah Pressfield risked his medical licence to provide King and Slater with testosterone replacement therapy, human growth hormone, and accurate microdoses of the safest, most expensive steroids on the market. They had no medical reason for the supplementation, so the deal took place under the table — no scripts, no justification, just a pinch of missing inventory for Dr. Pressfield to clear up each calendar month.

The need for artificial enhancement was an unfortunate necessity of the industry.

Trying to survive using the capabilities of their bodies alone would never work, and that had been a fact since they’d first begun their careers in black operations. To do things the human body is barely capable of, you need help. Wherever they’d gone in their careers and their lives, they’d quickly acquired the connections necessary to keep the supplies flowing. In their previous lives the government had taken care of it all, but they knew the doses, knew the reputable substances, and they’d taken matters into their own hands as soon as they’d come out free. They only took the best stuff money could buy, and they paid Pressfield a premium to make sure it was all lab-tested when it showed up on their doorsteps. The concoction accelerated their recovery and kept their muscles firing when any other body would have collapsed under the workload.

Every professional athlete dopes, and they were professional athletes of a different kind.

More importantly, no one was drug testing them.

They could