The Man Who Crossed Worlds (Miles Franco #1)

Chapter Twenty-Eight

I’d had a lot of people tell me I was a failure over the years. Teachers, foster parents, hell, even gangsters. They must’ve been onto something, because I couldn’t even die successfully.

I came to with an antiseptic smell filling my nostrils and a God-awful artificial light trying to claw its way through my eyelids. There was no pain, which was a plus, but I felt like I’d run a marathon carrying an elephant on my back. I considered slipping back off to sleep, but curiosity got the better of me. I opened my eyes. The ceiling was kind of boring, just a bunch of white tiles with holes in them. I didn’t know why I’d even bothered waking up.

“Well, look who decided to stop napping.”

I rolled my head to the side to find the source of the voice. “Christ, are you still here? You’re like a goddamn puppy dog. I just can’t get rid of you.”

“Asshole,” Desmond said. “You still look like shit, you know, guy.”

I tried to sit up, then abandoned the idea when my head started screaming. I had more tubes going in and out of me than I knew what to do with, including something pouring fluid into the vein in my arm and another one snaking under my blanket that I guessed was draining more fluid from my nether-regions. A curtain was half-pulled around the bed, and I could make out people in scrubs moving past outside.

I tried to work through my jumbled thoughts. I was having trouble getting my head straight, and the painkillers they were pumping into me didn’t help any.

Then I remembered. “Vivian? Is she…”

“A lot better than you.” Desmond nodded. “Todd was telling the truth. She showed up a few minutes after you couldn’t be bothered keeping your eyes open with half the police department behind her.”

“Is she here? I want to talk to her.”

Desmond dropped his eyes. “She…had work to do.” He paused, then pulled a crumpled envelope from his pocket. “She left this for you.”

What the hell? All I got was a letter? I took it and turned it over in my hands. It was thin, with my name scrawled across one side.

“This better be a check,” I said.

Desmond smiled, but said nothing.

I tried to sit up again, and it went a little better this time. A dull ache pounded through my head, and fatigue threatened to drag me back off to sleep, but I sure as hell wasn’t ready to go yet.

“I’ve got a present for you,” Desmond said in a too-cheerful tone.

“Yeah?”

He got up, peered around the curtain conspiratorially, then pulled it closed. He returned to his backpack and pulled out two bottles of German beer. “Sorry, they’re kinda warm.”

“Des,” I said, “you are Jesus returned to life. Think I’m allowed to drink with all this new plumbing?”

“Do you care?”

“Touché.”

He popped the tops off the beers and handed me one. I untangled myself from the pipes pumping air into my nose and took a sip. It tasted like life itself.

“So are we in Bluegate, or did they decide to abandon it and start over?”

“It’s still standing, for the most part,” Desmond said. “The slums and the Avenues got hit hardest, there’s a lot of people that got displaced. Hundreds of millions in damage. Billions, maybe. But the war fizzled out. The first shipment of Chroma was limited, most of it got shot up within hours of it hitting the street. Todd probably had plans for distributing more, but when that precious girl of yours got hold of it and you tore her husband’s house to pieces, well, that put a bit of a damper on things.Now the cops are working with the Vei to hunt down the last of it and find the manufacturers in Heaven.”