Title: Between II - The Long Walk 6/10

Author: ebonbird (ebonbird@hotmail.com)

Rating: PG

Summary: This is the sequel to "Between" which is

available @ http://ebonbird.tripod.com/stories.htm.

Though based upon episodes 89-104 of Gatchaman I this

story only loosely follows those events.

Contributing tunes: Time Has Come Today - The Chambers

Brothers; Pusher Man - Curtis Mayfield; Spanish Eyes - Back

Street Boys; Never Can Say Goodbye - Jackson Five; All I

Want - Angel Moon; Plenty - Sarah McLachlan; Mighty Love -

The Spinners; Gymnopedie 1, 2 and 3 - Eric Satie; Could I Be

Your Girl - Jann Arden; Ooh Child - The 5 Stairsteps; Paint It

Black - The Rolling Stones.

Disclaimer: The characters do not belong to me. They

are used without permission. Tatsunuko, Co. Leave me

be, this is flattery.

Comments & Criticism: yes, please.



Thanks to BeckyD, Lori McDonald, Naa Dei-Nikoi, John

Duffin, Sal, Stephanie Wilson, Wildcat & Kim Wylie

for beta-reading and encouragement.



******************

6.



In the envelope on the front passenger seat of the G2

were five blank credit cards. Taped to the back of each

was scrawled a pin number and on a separate piece of

paper was a name: Sara Holliday, MD.



Joe smiled, a simple, tiny twist of his lips.



Headaches, light sensitivity, vertigo, and the occasional

blackout, those were Joe's first indications that his health

was going to shit.



Headaches, he could excuse by skipping meals. Light

sensitivity could be attributed to increasingly long nights.

Vertigo lost cause for alarm when he'd been drinking

hard and was chatting up some girl under dubious

lighting; and it helped that during the course of the war

every one of Joe's teammates had begun to manifest

signs of prolonged stress and strain. Joe wasn't the only

science ninja who avoided all but the most cursory

physical examinations, his mistrust of ISO medical care

profound since the time Nambu had strapped him into a

centrifuge for the purpose of dislodging shrapnel from

Joe's brain.



Shrapnel from his brain.



Afterwards, Joe had filched Nambu's notes, seen that

Nambu had scrawled in his horrible, over-educated

handwriting, "Permeability Stability Experiment #22" and

decided that the next person he let touch him in a

medical way would be more than just some guy with a

Ph.D.



Joe may have gone from mission to mission without

stopping until his heart failed if it hadn't been for the

blackouts. Those were much harder to ignore. Tapping

his steering wheel with his hand he spoke, "I did go to the

ISO meds one more time after Nambu and the stupid

centrifuge thing. You know what they told me? They told

me I had migraines. Everyone told me I had migraines."



He reached under the bandage that covered his eye, and

ripped it off.



"So I took my ass to doctors."



To a second floor walk-up in Utoland's Chinatown that

Mr. Kim across the street from the Snack J swore by. Dr.

Gao took Joe's money, checked his tongue, his eyes, his

sputum and told Joe that he had too much anger in him

and needed to see a therapist. The second took his

money, made him shit in a pot, stuck him full of needles

and asked if he'd been in any car accidents lately. The

third had a practice off an alley off an unnamed street in

the one of the worst quadrants of Utoland City. The brick

walls, once red, had faded to the color of thinnest sliced

rare roast beef and the ground surrounding it was

covered by hundreds of abandoned sneakers. Dingy

whites and grays and palest browns, wrinkled cotton,

plastic, and leather, tumbled atop one another,

compressed by age, compacted like a surreal stretch of

well traveled beach. Faded fliers continued the washed-

out motif up the leaning walls, stippled the bloody pink

brick weak gray and weaker yellow. The sky, high above,

was a narrow splice of white.



He'd breathed easily, and not stumbling over the

graveyard of tennis shoes at all, made his way to the

doctor's front door. Knocked. Was let into a dark, very

clean, very cold, and very empty sitting room by a short

woman in a doctor's coat. Flashed his roll of soiled cash

and demanded a catscan.



Joe hadn't recognized dark little Doc Holliday. He didn't

think she had recognized him. He undressed in front of her,

wincing at the band of pale flesh where his wristcom

should have been, and allowed himself to be tested by a

woman who once was ISO, but had left for a shadier, more

lucrative way of life. He stripped, stepped up, looked to

the side and coughed. He held out his arms for needles,

and bent his head for a band of semi-insulated

conducting material. She listened to him recite a list of his

symptoms with a dry expression, and gave him a series

of pills: Dilatin for the seizures, Osoparine for the

migraines and little pink pills that tasted a lot like baby

powder and hit like really good bourbon. Those gave him

back his reflexes and his coordination. After taking that,

he saw clearer than he had in days. When Joe asked Dr.

Holliday what they were, she ignored him.



Wiping at his weeping eye Joe frowned. "I didn't go back

for my results until I fell down during a mission."



He sat through debriefing, didn't say a word, and after

that went out and got very very sober. Went on an all

night walk-about that took him everywhere. Went to the

race track. Considered how badly he wanted to win the

upcoming race and instead visited his parents' grave. He

could have stuck a stick in a wasp nest and shook it

around with less consequence.



"When I went back to Sicily. I found out my parents were

Galactor. You think straight under those circumstances.

But I did go back to Dr. Holliday."



It took him two months to run out of the little pink pills

with the nasty sick sweet taste that sharpened him better

than pharmaceutical grade cocaine.



Holliday insisted on another examination.



"This was the first angiopathy you've had done?" Dr.

Holliday had asked.



He'd nodded.



"I'm not surprised, considering..." she'd begun, taking in

his appearance carefully, then shook her head.



She was former ISO, after all, Joe surmised. She knew

what it was like. Had Joe not been so worried he would

have noticed the darkness of her poreless skin, her

mouth, her nose, how everything was the same even

tone as the curve of her inner nostril. Sometimes when

she spoke her lips curved to reveal small even teeth,

charmingly gapped in the middle in which her tongue,

violet rose, bloomed like something chaste and at other

times obscene. He only saw these things when he

replayed the encounters in his mind and engraved them

in his memory.



"This might kill you," she'd said. "Your injuries."



"I have money."



The doctor shook her head.



"Lots of money. Insurance, too."



"It's operable, but the procedure might result in some

impairment of your fine motor skills. I'm sorry, Mr.

Asakura,"



Joe'd thought about killing her, knowing his cover blown.

Realizing that he was much worse off if he was thinking

about killing her, and her not already dead.



"The procedure could cripple you."



Joe'd looked at his wrist, at the pale band where his

wristcom should be.



"My daughter is a fan."



Joe had understood. Chuckling a little because in those

moments he'd forgotten he was a race car driver. "One of

the few."



The doctor's smile had been understanding. "Your face is

all over her room. You might not race again."



"Worst case?"

"Physical therapy. You might have to relearn how to

walk."



He'd done that before.



Foot on the peddle, gritting his teeth, Joe heard Jun's

voice in real-time: "So you can't race cars anymore, at

least you'll be alive!"



"A cripple?" Joe yelled back. "Blind?" And wiped at the

itchy moisture leaking out of his weak eye.



He was talking to himself.



Not good.



Joe's molars clicked together and his mouth closed into a

frown.



It wasn't for nothing that he was entertaining imaginary Juns

trying to talk him out of he was about to do. It wasn't for nothing

he hadn't pitched his wristcom out the window while going over

the causeway and let the wind carry it out into the bay. But he'd

strong-armed too many goons and undercover ISO agents in

goon's-clothing, broken into too many classified files, and

shaken-down too many corrupt officers of the law till he knew

more places of Galactor business and interest in Utoland City

than maybe Berg Katse, glam-rock leader of the organization,

his-or-her-freak-ass self to go back to Crescent Coral and let the

ISO quacks take a crack at fixing what was wrong with him.



Not that it'd make a difference.



Joe reached into his pocket, dug out a flat pillcase, flicked it open

with his thumb. There were eight pills there. Pink. Precious. He

choked two down. Dry swallowed them. The pressure behind his

eyes began to lessen and the colors of the world shifted back

towards normal.



Hearing the far-off wail of sirens Joe hitched forward and peered

into the rear-view mirror. Trucks and cars sped along behind him

but no patrol cars, no motorbikes. He tilted the rearview mirror

and hunched down, squinting. There were no planes in the sky.



A tinkling staticky noise sounded. Joe flipped the catch on the

glove compartment. The sound became louder.



Joe fished out his wristcom. Turned it over, again. It emitted the

thin sound he was used to: the bird scramble.



"Le' me alone, Jun." he said.



The wristcom grew warm in his palm, its bright primary colors

beginning to glow. An electric tingle ran through his skin,

quicksilver, like Jun's first kiss before searing his palm.



"SHIT!" Joe shouted, flinging the wristcom to the mat and

flattening his tongue against his hand.



Joe snorted, slammed his foot harder on the gas.



If Nambu hadn't caught up to him by the end of the afternoon the

ISO wouldn't have anyone to blame but itself.



* * *



The tires of the car rolled over a coffee can as Joe pulled into the

driveway of the gas station/carwash.



Joe popped the trunk, leaned back as he opened it so the hot air

rising out of it didn't add to his haze. Joe had to rub his temples

anyway. Slammed the trunk shut. Slung the bag over his

shoulder and started to walk. The band around Joe's head, the

invisible one that had been there since Jun had screamed at

him, loosened a little. He looked around, really looked around.

He'd never been there during the day.



Daytime, Hana Drive was ghetto. Nine out of ten storefronts

were boarded up windows, if they had them, painted over,

papered or soaped. It was discount auto part stores and pawn

shops. Empty was the word. Quiet, and a little too clean.



Nighttime, it was valet parking only up and down both sides of

the road. Taxis and limos depositing already lit partiers on the

sidewalks in front of the clubs, public and private. The painted

buildings didn't look shabby by the light of the neons and the

spotlights pointed up at the semi-tropical sky, not at the well-

painted, badly-built buildings. Inside sheet-rock and concrete

block buildings and warehouses that had gone from mid-range

office space to low rent public housing, to squats then crack-

houses and back again, people partied, and Galactor had its

way.



Commercial Hana drive was only one of several places in

Utoland City where Galactor had its way.



There was a rock, sitting on the sidewalk and minding its own

business. Joe kicked it forward and strolled after it, towards P

Infinity.



Seven levels of dance floor on half a city-block.



It wasn't that every other girl that picked him up at P Infinity

turned out to be a Galactor spy or Devilstar assassin trying to

find out if his having the same build as Condor Joe made him

Condor Joe that brought the place under his suspicion; it was

how damn busy the loading dock was, all fucking night long, and

how P Infinity never served food.



Joe heard truck backfires, running engines, the sounds of people

moving heavy things into a warehouse.



The big guy out back in the black shirt and pants was sweating

and angry looking. He saw Joe coming from a ways away. Joe

sauntering; step-step-step, kick. Step-step-step, kick. The rock

never going too far to his left or to his right.

The bouncer narrowed his eyes, "No soliciting."



Joe smiled at him, rubbed his hand over his mouth. "Nothin's for

sale," he whispered.



"What?" said the bouncer.



The rock shattered to the right of his head and he covered his

face with his hand, crying out in surprise, failing to block the

feather shuriken that took him through the left eye.



It was the last clean kill of Joe's day.







******************

end 6/10







"I hate women who say pretty=stupid.

They're really misogynistic men in drag."

~~~BeckyD



ebonbird's fan fic cache http://ebonbird.tripod.com

the storm archive http://ebonbird.tripod.com/stormarchive.html





_________________________________________________________________

Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com