Free The Shibboleth by John Hornor Jacobs Page A

do. Black cherry is awesome with Cool Whip.”
    â€œCool Whip? That stuff is crap. If you get Reddi-wip and you don’t shake it, you can huff the nitrous out of the can. It’s totally awesome.”
    â€œNitrous?”
    She looks at me, curious. “What’re you in here for again? You don’t know whippets?”
    â€œI read too many minds, and my head got all jumbled. I was incarcerado at Casimir Pulaski—”
    â€œIncarcerado?”
    â€œOh, yeah. Incarcerated. On lockdown. Caged.” It’s hard to track a conversation when lubed on antipsychotic medications.
    She nibbles her lip some more, processing. I can see the ole noggin at work behind those big eyes.
    â€œGo ahead and ask, if you have questions,” I say.
    â€œWhat’s it like? Surrounded by boys all the time.”
    â€œNot my favorite thing in the world. You’d probably like it less than I do.”
    She snorts and blushes. “Not hardly. The median weight of guys in here is like two-fifty or something.”
    â€œTo answer your question, it’s hard, really. I was … I am—” I don’t know any way to say it. “I’m not much liked there. I’m hated, really.”
    She snorts again. “Bull crap.”
    â€œNo. It’s true. You might not believe me—about the mind stuff or anything—but it’s true. They hate me there. Everyone. Bulls, admin. Inmates.”
    She looks at my scalp again, the bandage there. My left peeper, yellowed from the last black eye. “They do that to you?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œI stole something from them.”
    â€œFrom all of them?”
    â€œPretty much.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œMemories.” I don’t know how to say it, really. “Not the bad ones. I took the good ones and it was like—”
    Her eyes go dreamy for a second, and she smiles beatifically, a genuine smile. “Honey in the vein? Like cumming your britches and realizing you’ve found something you’d forgotten you’d lost and losing everything all at once and not even caring?”
    I wonder for a moment if she has the shibboleth and has been rummaging around in my attic. “Yeah. Kinda like that.”
    â€œYou’re just like me.”
    Normally I might snort or laugh or smirk—always smirking, always sneering—but there’s this wet blanket on me, and all spark of life gets smothered as soon as it lights in the heart, in the mind.
    I’ve got to get out of here.
    But I say, “Just like you?”
    â€œYeah. A junkie.”
    I shake my head. That’s all I can manage in my defense.
    â€œBullshit, honey. I can see right through you. You got the jones just like me. Something to take away the hurt, to smooth out the edges.”
    My head stills. Everything’s soft around the edges now, fuzzy, and part of me swoons while my physical body is steady, motionless except for the thrum of my heart and the tides of my tainted blood, teeming with foreign, lethargic molecules.
    It becomes still and quiet in the cafeteria as Rollie regards me, unblinking, and down the table a weak-chinned boy holdsup a clawed hand to the handsome girl sitting opposite him and I hear his voice now, still talking, and he’s saying, “My soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer, ‘Sir,’ said I, ‘or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore; But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping, and so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door—’”
    He stops, looking at me, a strange glint in his eye. The girl’s gaze joins his, and they stare at me, hard, unsmiling, like two crumbled bits of statuary glaring into the gray light of the cafeteria. I can’t help but shiver and wonder if there are Riders behind their eyes. And what was that he was saying? It sounds so familiar.
    â€œHey, zomboids. He’s new,” Rollie