Free A New Day in America by Theo Black Gangi

expected. Three cops man the three towers in lawn chairs with rifles on their laps.
    The pigeon coop tent is just as twitchy and unsettling as it was yesterday. The junkies are bruised and broken. Cops’ stares are hard. Junkie beating is clearly a popular hobby. The rotten apple smell is heavy in the air like a sauna.
    Nos heads past the line as he holds his breath. The junkies curse at him. A cop gets in his way.
    “Hey—the line.”
    “Get out of my way. I’m going to see the doctor.”
    “We don’t want any trouble here,” says the cop.
    “Then make a counter-offer.”
    The cop gets distracted. The junkies smell his fear. Nos brushes past him.
    The doctor is injecting another victim as Romo sits and looks on, powerful and smug on his stool. Romo is likely a cop too violent for the old civilized New York, marginalized in the force for excessive force. Then the world ended and opened up to him and his kind.
    “What the
fuck
did you give us?” Nos announces in the plastic-covered room to whoever cares to respond.
    “Just the cure, Sergeant,” says Romo the hard-ass. “Has some unfortunate side affects. Very addictive.”
    Nos looks at the doctor, who hides behind thick plastic-framed glasses and shoots up a junkie. The rash covers the patient’s back with red-pocked bumps. The pink fluid pulses into his track-marked arm and a visible relief washes over him, his face gaining color. Nos cannot look at the pink fluid. His very blood craves it.
    “The fuck did you give us?” Nos repeats.
I’ll have peace, but not like this
.
    The doctor looks away. He is the white lab coat power behind all of this. Nos wants his eyes. The doc never looks at people, only vials and needles. He never even looks at Romo.
    “Come join the force,” Romo answers. “Best offer I got. Keep you satisfied, healthy.”
    “The inoculations?”
    “Good,” says Romo.
    Nos addresses the doc. “The inoculations, doctor?”
    Romo opens his mouth to speak.
    “Let him answer,” Nos commands.
    Romo stands down.
    “The inoculations work,” the doctor says, still avoiding eye contact. “The infected need
treatment
.”
    Bullshit
, thinks Nos.
    “How about it?” Romo asks. “I’m sure you need another dose of the cure. How you’ve held out this long is absolutely beyond me. You’re sick, and you need it. Scratch the itch.”
    The
itch
begs and craves.
Just one, deal with the rest tomorrow. One more won’t matter
. He’ll be able to see Yvette again. The doc will pump him full of that fluid, and he’ll take Nay back to riverside and watch the water until he sees her. Maybe Nay will feel her, too.
    “Well?”
    Nos turns and walks out.

Chapter 21
Return of the Controller
    Nos doesn’t look at a soul, only counts the heartbeats as he passes through the pigeon coop, past the hound dog cop up onto the hill.
    It’s been a while. Maybe too long, maybe he’s lost it. Maybe the years of drinking and brawling and hiding and self-pity have dulled the soldier in him. Beating up scavengers on bikes was one thing—these men would be armed, healthy, and strong. Even the bikers got to Nay. He is weak from the cure.
    He tells Nay to lay down and covers her in the orange and brown leaves. “You have to stay still now, at all costs, OK hon? Breathe, and nothing else.”
    She nods.
    “You understand me?”
    “Breathe,” she repeats from the cover of leaves. “And that’s all. What are you going to do?”
    “They didn’t tell us what we need to know, Nay.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “We have to get the answers.”
    She looks about her, thinking, thinking. “Are you leaving me?”
    “No, sweetie. I wish I could do this alone, but you’re coming with me. No choices today. There’s only one way to go.”
    He pulls the ski mask over his face. He lays belly-flat in the leaves and steadies the sniper rifle at the castle. The .50-caliber bullets better suited to stop a tank or a helo.
    “Cover your ears, hon.
    Through the Leupold scope