Fix You

Long Shot

Inter-city Lab Delivery

The car was an old taxi, repainted badly to be solid yellow, and the title was typed out on a paper card stuck to the inside of the back window. It was crude, but served its purpose well enough and in the city, no one even gave it a second thought except to sometimes mistake it for a taxi. That actually could get rather annoying, but often enough the offenders would end up with a bullet through their heads so it was good target practice. No one thought twice about that either.

Jenks took a long drag from the end of his cigarette before lazily flicking it out the window, sending a casual glance at the rearview mirror to see if he could spot where it landed. A hair left of the stripe. Again. He'd have to adjust his target.

As he rolled lazily up to the flickering red light, Jenks stuck his head out of the window just a bit and angled his face towards the sky, sniffing as he saw grey clouds, not heavy with rain, but not fluffy and white either. They cast a shadow over the whole city, but that wasn't out of the ordinary. It was only really sunny two days out of the week, on a good week, and the rest of the time the sky was overcast and blank, lending to the general atmosphere of the city. Jenks was used to it, though, and found he didn't really miss the sun most of the time anyway. It was too hot. And bright. With clouds you could really save money on sunglasses. But he wore those all the time anyway, so that didn't really factor in.

The light turned green again and Jenks switched his foot back to the gas and sped through the intersection, only slowly down after nearly rear ending the bus in front of him. Collateral damage wasn't really good for the publicity, which they tried to keep nonexistent. Taking his eyes off the road, he glanced down to the piece of paper in his hand with the untidy scrawl dragging across its length. It was an address to the new location for pickup, as the other one had been disposed of after it served its time. Too much business to one place attracted too much attention. Besides, now that the feeding tube had been installed, they needed somewhere to get stuff for that as well. They could only starve the little brat for so long.

Jenks tossed the paper back onto the passenger seat and redirected his attention to the traffic, swerving to avoid a kid who'd wandered a bit too far from his dumpster. His death probably wouldn't be noticed, but Jenks was always surprised at the amount of caring mothers in the city, so it was better not to take the chance.

Yawning, Jenks settled back into the ratty seat of the car, reaching over and digging around in the trash that littered the floor for a pack of cigarettes. He located one fairly quickly and tugged a cigarette loose, flicking open the lighter lying in the ashtray and lighting the end of it before sticking it in his mouth. He settled back and let his mind wander, knowing the road he was looking for wouldn't come for another fifteen minutes.

There really wasn't much to think about in his life, other than the current experiment and the gossip surrounding it. He'd lost any chance of a social life when he'd joined the gig over twelve years ago as a high school drop-out hoping to earn some quick cash. Little did he know it was a lifelong commitment. But it wasn't all that bad either; he got food and drink, company, however quiet it could be at times, and he had unlimited access to anything out on the wide world of the internet to keep him company in his lonely life. Sure he'd been forever thrust into silence and secrecy because of what he knew, but there were far worse things out there. He knew: he'd come from worse.

But the current experiment. That's what filled his life now. Everything he did and everything he was surrounded the experiment and because of that, he knew everything he could know about it. He wasn't really supposed to know at least half of what he did know, but Sixty-two had a loose tongue and Donovan knew there wasn't much harm in him, or any of the rest of the crew, knowing anyway as they couldn't talk about it even if they wanted to. There was no way they'd squeal to the police or anybody else. Even if they did somehow get past the speech barrier they'd be blown halfway to hell before they got halfway to anywhere else.