John Ringo - Cally's War

“Hey, Janny, if you’re through buying it, can we, you know, smoke some of it now?” Thad asked plaintively, taking the cube she’d dropped beside the chair earlier and popping it into the player below the monitor. “This is such a cool movie. I mean, to watch it, you’d never guess it was based on a book by some old dude,” he offered knowledgeably. “That’s what the credits say, anyway.”

The younger man moved a dirty T-shirt and picked up an older hardback from the floor, opening it to the middle, where a section of the pages had been cut away to make a box for rolling papers. Cally tilted her head enough to read Oliver Twist on the spine as he set it down and scooted over to hand a stack of papers to his girlfriend.

The girl put the full bag inside an empty, slit the seal with a razor, and took a zipper baggie from inside the milk crate, noticing Cally’s raised eyebrows as she stuck a paper on the scale and added a careful amount from it, and an equal amount from the bag she’d just purchased.

“Premium North Carolina tobacco. Best cut there is. My old man’s a bounty farmer,” she tapped the bag of marijuana with a finger, “but he sure don’t grow this. Too bad, but he don’t. Good enough source of papers, though.”

She rolled it with expert hands, lit it, and took a deep drag, holding it for a moment. She blew the smoke out, tilting her head consideringly and giggled a bit, passing it to her toy-boy.

“Damn, Reefer, you’re right. This is some primo shit,” she said, and nodded to him. He picked up the stack of FedCreds and stowed them in his pack.

When it was her turn, Cally noticed the two buyers watching her, and Reefer just as carefully not watching her. She grinned and took a long pull, holding it as she passed the joint on. The other three people relaxed slightly as Cally let the smoke out, allowing a silly-stupid grin across her face. Wonderful evening. The only straight in a roomful of stoneds. Well, at least it’s the next best thing to anonymous and I don’t have to do any of the three. In any sense.

The movie had played through its preview sequence and Cally scooted back to lean against the futon. At least it was a decent movie, and she hadn’t seen it recently. After the second joint made the rounds, Janet pushed the scale and rolling papers away.

“No more for me. The munchies are hell on a woman’s figure.” She looked Cally up and down critically. “You should probably stop, too, Marilyn. If you don’t mind my saying so, you’re carrying a teenie bit extra on the hips.”

“Oh, I never get the munchies.” Cally smiled coolly, amused at the baseless slander.

“Well I do, dude.” Thad rummaged in the shelves of the desk and pulled out a bag, sitting back down beside Reefer. “Cheese curls?”

“Hey, sure, dude. Thanks.” He was clearly feeling more mellow as the drug took effect, and leaned forward to roll another one, skipping the tobacco.

“Ah, I’m not, like anal about weighing the stuff,” he laughed at the sour expression on his girlfriend’s face. “I love ya, babe, but you’re anal.”

She threw a cheese curl at him.

Cally sat on the opened futon and stared into the darkness, arms wrapped around her knees. Janet and Thad had gone to sleep, Thad completely out of it and Janet almost straight. Once the third joint had made the rounds, Reefer and Thad had got on like long-lost brothers. The older man now slept the sleep of the stoned, his snores competing with one of his music cubes to cut through the slightly irritating but completely nonintoxicating oak-leaf smoke. She sat in the darkness and didn’t know what she felt, whether it was coldness, or numbness, or tiredness. She lay down against his rather odoriferous arm and sighed up at the ceiling. After a whole day of it, she was getting a little tired of Reefer’s favorite songs… in again, I’d like to get some sleep before I travel, but…

She heard the snick of the apartment door unlocking and trained instincts must have warned her because she was already rolling off the futon, onto the floor by the door, as the door slid open and the two stocky women in security uniforms stepped through. What are the odds…

One of them tripped over Cally’s outstretched leg as she stood. The world had gone into slow motion as Reefer sat up and began to blink owlishly in the light the other woman had flicked on as she came through the door. Cally tripped over the falling woman, just happening to catch the second one, trying to maintain her balance, and bringing her down as well. On the way down, the top of her forehead “accidentally” bumped into the second guard’s temple, hard. Cally rocked back and sprawled on top of the first guard, just happening to be sitting on top of her shoulders, as she held a hand to her head and uttered a plaintive and bewildered cry.

“Ow!” She looked at a disbelieving Reefer blearily as Janet came hustling out of the bedroom. “I bumped my head!”

“Get off me, you stupid cow!” The first guard was swearing viciously. Cally shifted slightly on her shoulder blades and the woman jerked a bit and swore some more. She had clearly fallen on top of her own shock baton. The second woman lay on the floor, unmoving, as Janet, in a pink T-shirt, rushed across the room with a gray plastic pack in her hand and yanked the first guard’s slacks away from one hip, jabbing her quickly with a hypodermic. She went limp. The dealer checked for a pulse on the second guard before breathing a sigh of relief and injecting her with another hypo from the pack.

“God, you were lucky. To knock someone out, you have to damn near kill them,” she glanced up and down the empty corridor outside the apartment and shook her head slightly, closing the door.

“Ow,” Cally repeated plaintively, holding a hand to her head as she got up off of the now unconscious guard and stumbled shakily to the bed.

“What in the hell happened?” Janet demanded, looking from Reefer to Cally and back at the guards on the floor.

“Um… I just heard a noise, and it startled me, and I tried to get up, but, well, I tripped. Ow.”

“You tripped ?” she echoed.

“Like, wow. That was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” Reefer was rubbing his chin. “Yeah, Janny, I swear to god she tripped. It was, like, she was trying to keep her balance, and, like, there’s no room with the futon opened out and all, and they just all went over. Like… wow, just wow.”

“Do you have some Tylenol? I think I might have twisted my ankle, too.”

“Wait a sec, lemme see your eyes.” She held Cally’s chin with one hand and tilted it up to the light, looking in each eye in turn. “Well, you don’t look like you’ve got a concussion, I guess. Hell, your eyes look better than mine ever do after a night of partying. I think I’m jealous.”

“Uh… what about them?” Reefer had stood up and hoisted his boxers a bit, obviously torn between looking at the guards and looking for his jeans.

“Uh… Tylenol’s in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, go ahead.” Janet gestured Cally off before looking back down at the bodies. “Well, they were obviously alone, or we’d all be unconscious and on our way to being locked up now. It’s Greer and Walton. They’re greedy enough. I think they just wanted to either shake us down or steal the stash outright. Um… lemme think a minute.”

As Cally left for the bathroom, out of the corner of her eye she saw the other woman walk over to the kitchen-desk, pop something in her mouth, and pour herself a glass of water to wash it down with. She shut the door and used the facilities, flushing a couple of Tylenol down the toilet for good measure, scrunched her hair a bit to look more slept in, and went back to the living room to find Thad and Janet wide awake, if a little less straight than more. Reefer was helping Thad undress the women while Janet was spreading out a couple of blankets on the floor.