Free Oh Hell No! (Pulse Science Fiction Series Book 3) by John Freitas

Oh Hell No!

     
    Loriei leaned against the cracked
brick of the building behind her. As she bent over and held her shaking knees,
she saw more glass broken on the ground than was left in the windows above her
head. She was not sure what the building had been used for before the city had
mostly collapsed with the rest of the world. Even if she went inside, most of
the floors and furniture would be collapsed down into the middle and stirring
the debris would probably bring out the homeless creatures whose hosts had died
in there at some point in the past.
    She was having a bad day. Someone
had stolen her car out of the paddock where she had it hidden. Hidden, but not
good enough apparently. Walking through the city in the open was deadly, but
today was a special day. She could not afford to hide in her bunker today – the
world couldn’t afford it.
    “That’s not right,” she said to
herself feeling the blood pound inside her head. “The car was stolen back when
you were a little girl back when your parents were still alive. They are dead
now and you are not a little girl anymore.”
    Loriei knew she needed to get back
to the bunker and out of the open. Her father had always told her it wasn’t safe
to be in the open anymore.
    “That’s not right.” She whispered
to herself and the broken glass. “You don’t live there anymore. You need to go
somewhere else.”
    She had a last name, but even when
she could remember it, she didn’t use it anymore. It had been her parents’ last
name too, but she barely remembered them. She had a doctorate and the title
that went with it. Her only value to the world was her ability to
compartmentalize that knowledge safely away from the other bits eaten away from
her memory. Loriei knew like everyone she would one day lose it all and become
like most of the others that wandered the ruins of the city.
    The city had a name too and she
used to remember that as well.
    One fat louse fell from her bald
head and landed in the glass at her feet. Its legs writhed in the air as it
struggled on its back. It was a small one – only a couple inches thick. As it
struggled back to its feet sliding the shards aside with its mass, Loriei saw
it was striped black and white instead of the adult gray. This was a member of
a new generation of lice that infested her skull and skin. The husks of this
one’s dead parents had been falling to the floor of her bunker for days, so she
knew a few new offspring were on their way. This little guy had lost its grip.
    A piece of skin fell from her
scalp and slapped raw against the ground. The louse poked at the loose skin as
if it was considering it or just trying to find its way.
    It scurried through the glass
displacing more shards until it found the toe of her shoe and then climbed back
up her rail thin leg. She did not bother to swat it aside. As it disappeared
under the frayed edge of her baggy dress, she considered that one of its
ancient ancestors might have been hurt by the sharp glass. Those creatures were
much smaller though and were not as strong as the generations immune to
pesticides and treatments.
    The creature used the protrusions
of bone under Loriei’s black and gray spotted skin as leverage to climb her
body under her dress. Loriei felt the progress as pain and itch. She fought the
urge to scratch knowing it would make the itch worse and accelerate the damage
to her mind. Serotonin would stunt the pain for a second and then would jump
the track from the neurons to make the itch worse. More scratching would
produce more serotonin which would eventually accelerate the life cycle of the
lice. They would feed more and burrow deeper. She would drift away from herself
more quickly than she already was.
    The immature louse climbed out of
Loriei’s dress at the neck and scaled up her skinny neck to the base of her
skull. She found herself fearfully hoping it did not attach there. She could
not remember exactly why that scared her, but she knew there