Angels From the Neon 1
Mikey stops taking his pills the day after Gerard takes all of his at once.
It’s a beginning of sorts.
Later, he realises that if he could think without the pills, then Gerard had been able to see with them all.
Collecting them altogether, all uniformly white, the mood enhancers, suppressors, stabilisers, uppers, downers and tranquilisers, Gerard had tipped them all down in one illegal handful.
Mikey had watched him, knowing on a purely intellectual level what his brother was trying to do. Like most things then, it hadn’t really bothered him. Now, it terrifies him.
He’d been in the next classroom over when he’d heard the smash. It took a while to process the noise; things didn’t break in Battery City, not when everything in it was so clean, white and manufactured.
When Gerard started screaming though, the thought that he knew what was happening had slowly swum into his mind. They were brothers and even if chair-throwing wasn’t genetic, Mikey later thought that maybe some of the reasons for throwing them were.
It had been Gerard’s eighteenth birthday. It usually didn’t mean anything, one year older was just one year older, but eighteen was important enough and according to Battery City, it was important enough to make Gerard an adult. Adults didn’t go to therapy sessions, or get given more plain white pills to take everyday. Adults had to be adjusted properly. Mikey watched impassively as it took five men in white, faces covered with masks, to get his brother into the back of the van. Eventually he would feel almost proud of Gerard. Whatever the pills had shown him, it seemed it had been worth fighting for.
Mikey was apparently better at pretending than Gerard. Without the pills he could think, his mind was less fuzzy and more angry than he ever imagined anyone could be but he knew that standing up in the middle of a classroom and hurling a chair right at the holo-projector was a one-way ticket to more pills and sitting in a little white room with stern people telling him how to think, even if he was now awake enough to know that what was being shown on it made him want to.
Gerard was in the clinic for three weeks. Mikey didn’t take his pills, went to class as normal and nobody said anything about his brother. He wondered if anyone else remembered Gerard when he wasn’t right there in front of them. Wondered exactly what the pills had been taking away from him all these years. Once, he wondered if he would forget Gerard if he started taking them again, but decided he didn’t need to know the answer that badly.
When Gerard came back, thinner, paler even than usual with deep shadows under his eyes and a look that made him seem crazier than when he’d gone away, Mikey hid his pills too.
***
When Frank hears the screaming from down the corridor, he’s half-tempted to stay where he is, lying back on the thin mattress in the corner of his tiny room. People scream in the clinic at odd hours of the day and night, but he knows that if there’s the possibility that they’re bringing someone new down past his room he’s gotta see them. The people they bring in only come in once. Once in the clinic is enough for everyone except Frank.
Frank doesn’t know if he’ll ever leave the clinic, and even if he does, he doesn’t know if he’s got a chance of being able to remember the people they drag past his room, but he thinks he’s got to try. Maybe the lights and the drugs won’t take one of them all the way away from the world as it really is.
The screaming gets louder, which is unusual.
Frank levers himself up off the mattress and stands on his toes so he can see through the strip of glass in the deadlock bolted door. They’re bringing someone in from outside, from out in the City he can see through his tiny window, and for once, the someone they’re bringing in is putting up a hell of a fight.
He’s young, probably only just old enough to be brought in. He looks like he should be a nice boy. He has short dark hair and a tie done up tight around his pale throat and he’s dressed in the black and white clothes that all the people they march past his room wear, but his eyes fix on Frank for a fraction of a second as the people in masks take him past the door and they’re shining and almost - almost - mad. He screams again, and vanishes round the corner.
In the weeks and months that follow the screaming, Frank doesn’t see anyone else who seems as alive as the boy with dark hair. The patientsclientsprisoners that shuffle past his cell are terrified of the men in masks and silent both before and after they are escorted to the room full of lights.
He thinks about him sometimes, the screaming boy, makes up names and friends and lives for him and occasionally if he’s feeling brave he’ll think about him in other ways - ones that he only thinks of in the dead of night and hidden under his blanket. It’s something to do while they pump him full of drugs that never work and show him the lights that do nothing to him but give him a headache.
Frank is one hundred percent convinced he’ll never see the boy again until he does. He’s not screaming this time, and Frank only knows someone’s coming from the sound of the footsteps on the tiles outside his room.
The boy, his hair a shade longer and his dark tie slightly looser on his neck, looks at Frank again through the small window. This time he looks sane. Well, as sane as Frank feels anyway, and that leaves a lot of room to manoeuvre. He blinks at him as the men pull him past.
Frank’s seen him twice, for only a few seconds at a time, but in this place it practically feels like they’re best friends.
Every few months they bring the boy back now. Frank wonders if the boy’s like him, immune to whatever the fuckers in this place give him, but he knows they let him go in between times, so whatever they give him works for a while before the boy goes off the rails once again.
It’s a flash of colour, bright red in the whitewhitewhite of the facility that Frank sees first. The boy has done something to his hair - paint or dye covers it, and it’s painted in stripes on his neck, right where the straps of the big black chair would dig in to hold his head steady when the movies and voices and bright lights start. Frank can’t remember ever seeing anything so real in his life as the firebloodmayhem red of the boy’s hair. The boy sees him though the tiny window and grins at him this time, wide smile full of sharp teeth and Frank wants. He wants so hard it’s painful and he doesn’t even know what it is he’s wanting.
It’s the last time he sees the boy in the clinic.
***
Right up until the moment it all goes Costa Rica, Ray thinks everything is just as shiny as can be. They’ve found an abandoned farmhouse out in the zones, and there’s cans in the cupboards, water in the tank and mattresses still on the beds. It doesn’t look like anyone has been around since the end.
He follows his crew up the long dusty driveway, pulling his bike round to the side of the house, into what’s left of the shade. If he knows Rocket at all, he’s gonna ask him to ride to the Pegasus back on the route and pick up some more gas and Ray hates riding his bike hot. He walks into the house through the door into the kitchen, if it wasn’t for the dust and sand it could have been yesterday since it was abandoned.
Rocket is lounging on one of the battered couches in the living room; his boots are kicked up onto the remains of the coffee table. Full Force and Candy are both laughing somewhere in the house and probably taking advantage of the mattresses and the lack of prying eyes. The crew’s solid like only motorbabies can be, but if Ray has to see ‘Force’s junk going through the motions one more time he thinks he might not be responsible for his actions. They’re out of sight now though, and it’s rare enough that they get time to themselves. Besides, Ray can’t remember the last time he heard anyone in his crew laugh like that since the Drac that ghosted itself by falling off the cliffs out in zone four. It’s a nice sound.
“Shiny, Jet. Very fuckin’ shiny.” Rocket says, waving a hand at the room.
Ray nods. “Shiny.” He agrees, there’s no other word for it.
“Hey, why don’t you go back to the route and tank us up some more gas?” Rocket asks, as though Ray hadn’t been waiting for him to suggest it. “’Force and Candy ain’t gonna wanna be disturbed and I’m all out.”
Ray shoves his hands into the back pockets of his jeans and pulls put a handful of crumpled bills. It’ll be enough, especially if there’s an empty gas can in the garage of the farm.
“Shiny.” He repeats to himself.
Three hours later and Ray’s got the gas. Full tank in the bike and full can strapped on tight.
They others will be waiting for him, he knows, but he had to slide off away from a convoy full of Dracs on his way back and even though he’s good, and his name - or rather his fucking alias - is well known in the zones from riding with Rocket, Full Force and Candy Wreck for all this time, even Jet Star can’t ghost an entire patrol of Dracs on his own. Not when there are cans and water and mattresses worth going back for.
The only things back at the house though, are the cans, water and mattresses. His crew are nowhere to be seen; even Rocket’s old Dodge has gone. Tyre tracks in the desert cut over his, but there’s no-one around.
Ray thinks he knows what all the Dracs were doing in the vans.
***
They leave Battery City behind them the day Mikey turns eighteen. Gerard says he can’t remember what happens to him in the clinic, but sometimes he wakes up screaming into the night and he says he doesn’t want the same thing to happen to his brother.
Neither of them have been taking their pills for years now, every time Gerard comes back from the clinic with his head re-full of crazy and lies Mikey makes sure that Gerard never takes the dosage they’ve upped for him. Piles and piles of the little white pills go to waste down the trash chute as he watches his brother cry and scream about the drugs they’ve had to teach him how to need over again. The men in masks never seem to think of the possibility that Mikey’s in on the conspiracy to keep Gerard’s mind wide awake.
Gerard discovers paints and colours and art and music and beauty over and over, like they’re all new every single time he emerges back into the unrelenting greywhite of Battery City from however many weeks they’ve sent him away. Mikey makes sure of that, keeping Gerard’s notebook safe and hidden away from prying eyes because every time the pills stop working he shows it to Gerard again and Mikey almost feels as though he might cry over the things that they both might have never have known.
***
In the weeks before Mikey’s birthday Gerard starts seeing how far out of the city he can go without the men in masks seeing him. Turns out the answer is ‘not far’ but he can get to the outskirts in a few hours if he memorises the patrol routes and ducks into the sewers for a while. It’s enough to take him out to abandoned buildings and factories and to a corner of a crumbling parking lot where a rusting and battered Trans-Am is waiting just for him and Mikey to drive away from Battery City and towards something real.
Once they have the transport, they’re ready to run to the zones.
***
Frank doesn’t know how long it’s been since he saw the boy last, but it’s been a while. The red of his hair still shines like a beacon in his mind, calling to him about things he doesn’t - will never - know.
He hopes the boy didn’t give up, that he’s not now working out there in the City, happy with his dull life because the men in masks have finally figured out a way to make him be and stay that way. He hopes the boy can still remember the red too.
One day though, they come for him. The bald man Frank’s never been allowed to know the name of stands in his doorway flanked by two others. The bald man smiles at him, it’s nothing like the grin the boy had given him that last time long ago, this one isn’t so full of teeth and psychotic laughter about learning the meaning of real. This one is thin and victorious.
“Well,” the bald man says. “I think we know just what to do with you now.”
Frank snorts with laughter. Nothing has worked on him so far.
The men in masks take him away to a new room, full of shining steel. It’s not like the room with the lights or the room where they force pills down his throat. It’s brighter and colder than the rest of the clinic. Frank thinks he might be scared this time.
They strap him to a bed in the middle of the room. Frank turns his head sideways and looks at a small shiny box on the tray next to him. There are wires coming out of it.
One of the wires is firebloodmayhem red. It makes Frank smile.
***
Ray has been on his own for a while when he finally stops running. Avoiding the Dracs is certainly easier when you’re running solo, but he has to admit it was nicer having the backup of a crew he could trust.
The old roadhouse isn’t quite wrecked when he pulls his bike up outside it, but it’s close - almost falling down around the little girl’s ears as he sees her sitting on the tiny porch as though she’s been waiting for him.
“This your nest?” he asks her.
She peers at him and nods, just once, looking serious. The up-down motion of her head makes her curls bounce like Ray’s used to before he had them cut.
“Where’s your crew?” because no-one really has family out in the zones anymore, just a crew to ride with or stay nested with.
She shrugs.
Ray stares up at the old building. It looks like it’ll take some work, but the water tank seems milkshake and he can see an old generator rusting slowly around the side.
“Wanna learn how to tend bar?” he asks.
This time the girl grins.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Part 2