“Can I ask you something?” she said.
Christopher nodded.
“That night of the meeting, when we were all offered the two thousand dollars or a place in the lottery–”
“You want to know why I didn’t just take the two thousand dollars?”
“Well, yeah.”
Christopher shrugged. “Two reasons, mostly. The first reason was the money. The second reason ... was the money.”
This managed to bring a smile to Alice’s face.
“What about you?” he said. “You seem pretty smart. Why didn’t you just take the two thousand dollars?”
“Well ...” Alice took a moment to think it over. “I didn’t actually decide for myself. I couldn’t make up my mind, so in the end I tossed a coin.”
She offered an embarrassed smile.
“Stupid, I know.”
Christopher lifted his eyebrows. “Is that what you’re telling yourself?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Come on. You entered the lottery for the same reason me and twenty-five others did. The thought of a hundred million dollars in your bank account. You were hypnotized by all those zeroes. You wouldn’t have been able to live with yourself if you’d turned down an opportunity like that.”
“No, but ... I really did toss a coin to decide.”
“Sure, tossing a coin may have allowed you to think the decision was out of your hands. But if it had landed on heads instead of tails, you would’ve gone with the best out of three.”
Alice was taken aback by Christopher’s succinct – and somewhat accurate – analysis. She realized he was a lot brighter that she first gave him credit for.
He was right about being hypnotized by all those zeroes. Once she started thinking about the money, and the infinite possibilities that would follow, it was a difficult thought to dislodge from her mind. That was simply human nature. Everyone dreams of winning the golden ticket, and waking up one morning to discover that all your problems have disappeared overnight.
He was also right about the coin toss, but with one notable exception: she didn’t do the best out of three when it landed on heads.
She simply ignored the result and put her name down for the lottery anyway.
Chapter 17
Alice and Christopher stayed at the café for another hour. Alice was pleasantly surprised by the unexpected turn of events; what began as a kind of obligatory duty on her part ended up being quite enjoyable. Christopher was funny to talk to. He possessed a dark sense of humor and frequently cracked jokes at his own expense. She assumed this was a defense mechanism he’d developed over the course of his life, a way of getting in with a joke before anyone else had the opportunity to.
It was something of an eye-opening experience. Alice liked to think of herself as basically a kind and decent person, but she wondered if she would have ever spent any time with someone like Christopher under normal circumstances. She remembered how she looked at him – how everyone had looked at him – the first time they all saw him on the night of the meeting. It was with a mixture of embarrassment, pity and repulsion. Despite being raised not to judge a book by its cover, sometimes the cover was so abnormal that it was impossible not to.
It was mid-afternoon by the time they finally parted company. Alice left the café and wandered over towards the bus stop, but had a change of heart along the way and decided to walk instead. She didn’t know where this sudden urge came from; the journey home was about two hours by foot. But it felt like the right kind of day for it.
She was in a buoyant mood. The disappointment from earlier, when Needlemouse had bailed on her, didn’t really bother her anymore.
A strange kind of feeling had drifted over Alice in the past hour or so. It wasn’t anything she could quite put her finger on, but she was overcome by an unusual sense of calm. She felt lighter, like she was walking on the moon. The dark fog that had dogged her for the last few weeks had lifted. Colors seemed more vivid, like they popped out at her. The world around her appeared to glow a little brighter than usual.
She felt an invisible weight lift from her shoulders, as the problems she’d been struggling with melted away. They didn’t seem like such a big deal anymore. It had been years since she felt this good.
She had no idea what had triggered this sudden rush of inner peace. For a long time now she’d been on something of a plateau, trudging her way through life experiencing neither highs nor lows. Maybe after confronting such a stressful situation head-on and coming out the other side in one piece, as she had done in these past couple of weeks, she’d experienced some sort of breakthrough.
She reached the bus stop and kept walking, oblivious to the fact that she had an ear-to-ear smile on her face.
For that one brief moment, everything seemed alright with the world.
Alice’s sunny disposition quickly evaporated the moment she arrived home and found a thin brown envelope slipped under her front door. This envelope was larger than usual – A3 sized – and it was blank, but she didn’t need to see a return address to know who it was from.
Inside she found a photograph of Levi Sassmannshausen, another of the lottery contestants. It was a new photograph, different from the mugshot taken on the night of the meeting. This one showed Levi emerging from a taxi and dragging a suitcase behind him. He looked nothing like his original photo, which depicted a well-groomed, sharply-dressed young professional. He now wore a baseball cap, sweatpants, and what appeared to be a bad wig. His face was hidden behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses and a three-week beard.
The flipside divulged Levi’s updated personal information. He was now known as Irvine Halpern, having recently changed his name by deed poll. His current residence was room 103 at the Traveler Inn Motor Lodge, a fleapit motel located an hour out of the city.
The Consortium was sending the contestants a message, and it had been received loud and clear: there was nowhere for them to hide. Levi had tried hiding, and he was found straight away.
The thought of leaving town and changing her name if things became too intense had also crossed Alice’s mind. She now saw that this would achieve nothing.
Surveillance was so pervasive and all-encompassing that there were few places one could go for absolute privacy anymore. The photograph of Levi looked like it had been sourced from CCTV, or perhaps a surveillance craft. Anytime you were out in public you had to assume you were being watched.
Even inside your own home, you could not be completely safe. The feds didn’t have to bug suspects’ houses anymore; thanks to the ubiquity of modern appliances vulnerable to hackers, most people did the bugging for them. Cameras, microphones and motion sensors were built into nearly every electronic device on the market. The product manufacturers always insisted that these were secure and unable to be hacked into, but there was no way to guarantee this. Once something was plugged into the network, it could easily be compromised. Just about any private residence could be invaded with the right equipment and knowledge.
It was shortly after Alice arrived home that she began her downward spiral. Within a matter of minutes she was incapacitated by feelings of nausea and severe anxiety. It was as if her whole body had given up trying to function. She felt suffocated, like an invisible anaconda was wrapped tightly around her body and gradually squeezing the life out of her.
She crawled into bed and stayed there for the next three days.
She had no idea what had brought this on. One minute she was happy and free, like she didn’t have a care in the world. The next, she was mentally preparing her final words.
She wondered if maybe she had inhaled fumes from the passing motorists on her walk home, and those feelings of inner peace and goodwill were actually the early symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning.
This was as sick as she had been in years. She hadn’t felt this bad since the time she was withdrawing from Xylox. That period of her life was a deep, dark pit of misery, and one she had absolutely no intention of ever revisi
ting.
Elixxia Pharmaceuticals unleashed the wonder drug known as Xylox onto an unsuspecting world eight years ago. It was an immediate success, proving to be an effective treatment for a range of ailments. It was an antidepressant, a painkiller, a stress reliever, a weight-loss supplement, a sleep aid and an anti-anxiety cure, all rolled into one miraculous white capsule.
It was also the most successful treatment available for drug dependency; ironic, given that a significant proportion of the people who tried Xylox ended up addicted to it. For the most part, it simply turned the wrong type of drug addict into the right type.
Not only did Elixxia help win the war on drugs, they also discovered a way of transforming junkies from a burden on society into a lucrative consumer demographic.
Four years ago, Alice broke her wrist after being knocked down by a moped while crossing the street. It was nothing too serious, but she did suffer some recurring pain and discomfort. She had only just started at The Daily Ink, and she didn’t want to miss too much work, so she asked her doctor to write her a prescription for Xylox. The doctor didn’t need to be asked twice; Elixxia enjoyed a cozy relationship with the medical profession, and doctors were showered with generous kickbacks every time they recruited a new patient into the Xylox family.
Elixxia’s ultimate goal was to introduce Xylox to the entire population – whether they needed it or not. They would have put it in the water supply if only the government allowed it.
For Alice, Xylox was a miracle cure. Her ailments quickly disappeared and she was able to get on with her life.
But it wasn’t long until Xylox was her life.
She started taking it whenever she felt fatigued – which, given the hours she was putting in at her new job, was most of the time. She’d take another dose when her mood was low; her low moods usually coinciding with periods when she stopped taking Xylox. Pretty soon, she was taking it just to take it. Instead of taking it when she was sick and fatigued, she needed it to avoid feeling sick and fatigued all the time.
This all occurred around the time she was still dealing with the shock of her mother’s sudden death, as well as Lachlan abruptly disappearing for the first time. Both of these events contributed to her mental instability, making her all the more susceptible to addiction.
Three months after she started, she was barely able to set foot outside the house without pharmaceutical assistance.
That was when she began supplementing her daily allotment with lemon drops, the low-grade Xylox knockoffs manufactured by Goliath and sold on the streets for a fraction of the price. They weren’t as good as the real thing, but if she took enough at once they made her life slightly more bearable.
(The authorities were eager to shut down Goliath’s operations, devoting many millions of dollars and thousands of police hours towards achieving this. It wasn’t so much the health implications or the crime issues that troubled them; it was more that the counterfeit pills were cutting into the profit margins of one of their major corporate sponsors.)
Alice’s daily routine involved forcing a handful of white and yellow pills down her throat just to make it through the workday, then crashing back down to earth at around nine p.m. every night.
Her rock bottom moment came after she’d been addicted for almost a year. She found herself back in her doctor’s office, having burned through another two month prescription in less than three weeks. The doctor sensed her desperation and informed her that it was unsafe to continue taking the pills in the quantities she was consuming them, and he would not be writing her any more prescriptions.
He then went on to say that if she could demonstrate that she was “mentally imbalanced” in any way, or if she could somehow prove she had an “insatiable physical desire” for Xylox, he would make an exception and write her a new script.
Alice interpreted this request, along with the leering grin that accompanied it, as an invitation to trade sexual favors in exchange for the pills. And for one brief moment she actually considered going through with it. But she was mercifully struck by a moment of clarity. She recognized that she had a serious problem and got out of there as quickly as possible.
Rehab was available, but out of the question on the money she was making. She was left with little choice but to quit cold turkey. This was an agonizing process, and it was months before she was able to function as a normal person again. When she finally returned to work, she struggled to make it through the day alive. Her career momentum was derailed after missing weeks of work. She watched as her peers attained promotions and advanced their careers, while her own went nowhere.
As unpleasant and uncomfortable as her symptoms were before she was prescribed the pills, it was nothing compared to the daily torture she endured while she was withdrawing. That was definitely an experience she didn’t ever want to relive. The same way that many recovering alcoholics refrained from drinking by reminding themselves of how bad their hangovers were, Alice simply had to think back to that awful period of withdrawal whenever she entertained the idea of touching Xylox again.
It was an idea she entertained, ever so briefly, when she opened her medicine cabinet to retrieve some aspirin and saw the ten lemon drops she had purchased from Gidget a few weeks back. The thought vanished from her mind just as quickly as it appeared, but it was there nonetheless. She instantly dismissed this; she knew what would happen if she ever succumbed to temptation. Her pain would disappear temporarily, then return with interest the moment the drugs wore off.
And yet something prevented her from throwing those ten lemon drops out. She was supposed to dispose of them as soon as she bought them, and the only reason she bought them in the first place was to get information from Gidget about where she could buy a gun. But it seemed like such a waste. It would be like flushing a hundred dollars down the toilet.
She knew that keeping the pills wasn’t worth the risk. But what else was she going to do with them? She could try selling them, but that wasn’t something she particularly wanted to do. A criminal record would not do her career any good, and she made a point to avoid contact with xombies if she could at all help it. Besides, she would be lucky to recoup one-fifth of what she paid for them.
She reached for the bottle of aspirin and made a mental note to flush the pills ASAP.
Chapter 18
Detective Olszewski leaned back in her chair and expressed a long sigh of frustration.
She glanced out the window of her office to make sure she was alone. The police station’s corridors were empty. It was late, and most of her colleagues had done the sensible thing and left for the day.
She reached for the small bottle of vodka hidden beneath a stack of papers in her desk’s bottom drawer. She always kept an emergency supply on standby for moments just like this.
The cause of Levi Sassmannshausen’s (aka Irvine Halpern) untimely demise was fairly easy to ascertain. His body had been discovered in a bathtub at the Traveler Inn Motor Lodge, the victim of an apparent electrocution. Forensics were investigating the circumstances surrounding his death, which presently fell under the heading of suspicious. It wasn’t unheard of for people to electrocute themselves in the bath, such as when a hair dryer accidentally fell in. But in this case, foul play seemed almost certain; the door to the motel had been kicked off its hinges, Levi was fully clothed, and severe bruising covered the entire left side of his head and face.
The fact that the electric heater in the tub was attached to a fifteen-foot extension cord was also a good indication that something sinister was afoot.
Footage obtained from a nearby surveillance craft showed two unidentified assailants fleeing the motel and escaping in a stolen vehicle sometime around three a.m. The burnt-out shell of the car was later found by the side of the road, some twenty miles away. At present, the suspects remained at large.
Detective Olszewski rubbed her eyes. Here was yet another dead body to emerge in recent weeks under suspicious circumstances. It was another family to notify. Anot
her pointless investigation to launch; one that was unlikely to ever reach a definitive conclusion.
But she didn’t need an investigation to know what was really going on here. Levi Sassmannshausen was simply another contestant in that stupid lottery. And now he was simply another corpse in the local morgue.
Olszewski had spent close to a decade in the field of law enforcement, but for the first time in her career she seriously contemplated throwing in the towel. This wasn’t what she had signed up for. She was an idealist who wanted to defend the rights of those less fortunate than her, giving a voice to the voiceless and putting away anyone found guilty of exploiting the underprivileged and the oppressed. She shouldn’t have to spend her days cleaning up after a bunch of rich psychos and their twisted competitions.
But whenever she tried raising the issue with her superiors, she was quickly shut down. None of them wanted to know about it. She suspected this was due to the fact that the billionaires and trillionaires bankrolling the lottery were also some of the police force’s most valued sponsors. No one was prepared to look too far into these contests if it could end up affecting their weekly paycheck.
Alice Kato had told her there were twenty-seven contestants in the lottery this time around. Levi Sassmannshausen was only the sixth to be eliminated, which meant she had twenty more bodies to look forward to in the coming months. This would be a massive waste of resources for an already underfunded police force; resources that could be better spent protecting the public from the scourge of drug dealers and xombies running rampant on the streets. Resources that could be spent investigating the kidnapping of Emilia Ulbricht by a bunch of self-righteous activists. Resources that could be used to track down and arrest the homicidal maniac calling himself Goliath.
She wondered about Alice Kato, and how someone as bright and level-headed as she appeared to be could get herself mixed up in something like this. It didn’t take long to reach an obvious conclusion: it was the money that drew her in. The same way that money was responsible, in one way or another, for the majority of crime that crossed her desk on a day-to-day basis.