Theta Waves Book 1 (Episodes 1-3) Read Free

begun to kill more people than Cancer. HIV had morphed and survived and morphed again until the pandemic of it wiped out a third of humankind even before the god came and rescued his chosen.
    So easy to bastardize a good thing and turn it into something ugly. A mere brush of drain cleaner and the smear could paralyse the user in a miasma of dopamine. The gift, the thing that earned it the street name godspit in a world where the term god was akin to ruin and misery, was that it didn't deplete natural dopamine like other drugs did. Instead, it flooded a person's brain with the hormone. The joke in spitters' circles was that the god himself had hocked a loogie at Earth as he departed with his righteous, and so now no one seemed to care what its pharmaceutical name was; they only cared that it either marked you as clean or condemned you to the sanatoriums.
    She hated to watch her johns smear non-deified papers across their tongues and prove their health to her, when she really wanted to reach across the table and grab the blotch from them, douse it with cleaner herself and surrender to bliss. Each time they turned the strip to her, inert paper white, she mourned the waste of a good smear.
    Tonight, she would pass through both the shadows and the darkest part of night in just that state. And come morning, she'd trundle off to the survivor's station for a cup of coffee, an egg sandwich, and if things continued to go her way, another smear of her favourite distraction to take her through yet another night.
    She felt a familiar itch creeping up her spine as she anticipated the next few hours, felt along her jeans pocket for the piece of cellophane, her throat tight at the thought that they might have fallen out when she'd last touched them. When she heard the telltale crinkle, her heart tripped over on itself.
    "Thank sweet fuck," she murmured and had to steady herself against a pile of debris at the mouth of her little cavern. She'd found it a month earlier beneath a pile of rubble that had fallen from the bridge that joined the two super cities before the beast and the god waged their war.
    Even in the dark, lit by one remaining street light, she recognized the sections of I-beams that had fallen during the apocalypse, both fortunately settled into just the right configuration to trap concrete hunks and bits of pavement to form a sort of cave. Most nights, she lay in the small niche inside of her cardboard box perfectly unmolested. Most nights, she had the good fortune to pass through the deepest parts of darkness wrapped in her sleeping bag, soaked in the perspiration of such intense ecstasy the cave could have fallen down around her and she'd not have cared.
    She peered inside; relieved to see her spot was just as she'd left it that morning. The cat was still there, the handle of the plastic bag showing through the pile of rubble she buried it in.
    "Here, kitty, kitty" she whispered, chuckling. Her cave was too good a find; she couldn't be sure someone wouldn't squat it when she left for the day, so each morning she buried the same dead cat beneath a pile of rubble in the back corner. The smell repelled the would-be squatters. She pulled at the handle of the plastic bag, holding her breath, and carted it twenty or so feet down the bank of the river where she buried it again until morning.
    Now to get at it. Her mouth was already watering, her palms already itching, and she knew if she dallied much longer, went too far, she'd puke up her anticipation. She eased herself down onto a cement block just outside of her grotto and pulled off her sneakers then stripped off her jean shorts and T-shirt so that when the sweats came she wouldn't soak through her only clothes. Trembling hands extracted the drug from the cellophane, then, with urgency climbing her spine, she went feet first into her sleeping bag.
    She had to get it right, lie back just right, make sure she was perfectly settled, her legs apart, her head cushioned by her pile of