Reaper's Touch

Gus: White Out

"We don't choose to be addicted; what we choose to do is deny our pain."
— Unknown

Gus couldn't think, couldn't see, couldn't hear, couldn't feel. The blizzard had caused white out conditions. Back in the day, before the city was here, he might have wandered out into the wilderness and gotten himself completely lost and frozen to death. Now, he couldn't get himself lost. There were too many lights. The streets were too familiar. Even if he'd had the willpower necessary to change his path, he knew it would still take him to the same place: the dope man's house.

As a general rule, snow covered things, hid things... but in the slums, it absorbed the mess and filth like a paper towel. The snow turned moldy gray just seconds after touching the concrete. Then it mixed with the grime and turned black. Gus kicked the charred clumps out of his way. His mind kept whispering,

"Jeff is d-"

Gus shook his head and the thought broke apart like a dry leaf.

"Jeff is-"

He cracked his neck from side to side, distracting himself.

"Jeff. Dad. Jeff."

He smashed a chunk of dirty snow with his shoe and squinted through the blinding storm at a street sign.

"Dead."

Almost there. He pushed the thought away again and again, never allowing it to fully form into a complete sentence.

At a sketchy ATM, he withdrew every cent from his bank account. There was two grand in there that he'd been saving for Hex's engagement ring, but he would think about that, and Hex, later. He would think about all this later, he told himself. Just not now.

Gus's old dealer, Doc, had been arrested last year, but Jesse had mentioned that his baby brother, DF, ran the business now.

"Mouse? Holy shit, so the rumors are true," DF said after he opened the door of the small, familiar house.

DF had always been smaller than his older brother, the baggy shirts and pants he wore engulfing him like sheets. A single diamond stud in his nose stood out like a headlight on his dark skin.

The house, which was really more of a drug den, was the same: rundown, bars on the windows, a chain link fence surrounding the patchy front yard, which was barely the size of Jeff's booth at the tattoo shop. Gus shook his head to get Jeff out of it. Water went flying off the messy ends of his hair, which was soaked with snow.

"Well come on in, get the fuck out this blizzard," DF said, turning sideways so Gus could slip into the house.

"Where'd you disappear to? Shaggy told me you were back," he said.

"Don't matter. You got that shit?" Gus asked.

"What do you need?"

"I needa crash here for a couple days. I don't want nobody findin' me. People come lookin', don't tell 'em I'm here or that you seen me. 'Kay?"

"Sure. But what do you need?" DF asked meaningfully.

"Everything you got. If I OD, don't bother bringin' me back."

"What happened?"

"It's your job to hook me up, not be my friend," Gus said. "I'm dead serious. Don't save me. I don't plan to go back. Just get me unconscious fast and don't let me wake up for a good long time. Got it?"

"A'ight, bruh."

Gus followed DF into the kitchen, where an odor of rotten food was seeping from a pile of crusty dishes in the sink. The kitchen was like the rest of the place: dingy and neglected. Drug addicts crashed here all the time. There was one on the couch now, sleeping like a corpse, buried deep under a layer of chemicals.

"Shaggy's the only one from your crew who still buys from me. The others are clean, in prison or dead. Hex is clean. I heard you were too."

"For awhile," Gus said softly.

"You ever tried Fenty?" DF asked, holding up a bag of white powder.

"It's an opiate," Gus said.

"I forgot. You don't drop that shit."

"I will tonight," he said.

"They call it Drop Dead. I dilute it to be safe, but it's still strong as a muthafucka. You could OD easy," DF said slowly.

"Does it look like I give a fuck? Come on, I need to slam that shit fast," Gus said, irritated.

"You can crash in the other bedroom. I'll fix you a hit. It's gonna cost you a hundred."

Gus took the wad of cash out of his pocket and peeled off five twenties. He slammed the money on the counter.

"Start me a fuckin' tab," he said.

Without another word Gus walked back to the grungy bedroom, which was stuffed with boxes, and curled up on the single dirty mattress on the floor that had no sheets and no bed frame.

"Dad is de-"

The voice started again. Gus pounded his fist into the mattress.

"Dead. He's dead."

"DF! Hurry the fuck up!" Gus shouted.

"Dad is dead."

"No!" Gus screamed out loud.

He picked up an empty liquor bottle off the cluttered carpet and slammed it against the wall, the brown glass shattering, wet with whiskey, and he stabbed a piece into his forearm so deep it made him lightheaded. Then he wrenched it from his flesh and sliced the side of his ribcage open. The pain tasted like metal in the back of his throat.

"Dead."

The voice was a weakened whisper.

It was then that DF came into the room and handed him the loaded syringe.

"You need me to shoot you up?" he asked.

"No," Gus said.

Shooting up wasn't his preferred method. The ritual of smoking always made him feel more relaxed. But on occasion he'd slammed Ice, usually at the end of a binge when he needed the high to be as fast and intense as possible, like rough sex.

Gus took his shirt off and tied it tightly around his bicep until the veins appeared. He smeared away the blood from his cut so he could see his target. Then he slid the needle in, watching his blood rush up the tube like lava. He pressed down hard on the plunger and waited a few seconds before it hit his brain like a tsunami.

Drop dead.