you can check out any time you like Who: Emilie Galloway and Rodeo Hawkins Where: The Mall What: Rodeo meets his meat. When: Afternoon, September 1 2018
mirrors on the ceiling, the pink champagne on ice. she said, "we are all just prisoners here of our own device." and in the master's chambers they gathered for the feast. they stab it with their steely knives, but they just can't kill the beast.
The gas-burned Texas air is scorching as ever, but Rodeo has goosebumps as he walks through the abandoned mall in search of his spooky little girl.
He'd seen Emilie on the interview posted to the Freenet, and he's been chilled ever since. Her appearance had been shocking, and there were points where he could hardly peel his eyes away from the slow leak of darkened blood coming from her injection site. That vulnerability he feels towards Emilie's tempestuous ocean eyes had tied his heart into knots as he watched her tell her story, watched her bleed and twitch and saw at her fingertips. There's no doubt that the first bite of green poison she tried was from one of his dealers, and the weight he is feeling over using this drug as a weapon to nuke the underground is crushing him. The man who he'd been targeting, the man who posed a threat to his supremacy in this city is long dead now. Sister Slaughter lost that war, and his children will likely never rise from the ashes of his washed out empire. Emilie is the face of his collateral damage.
He has to find her.
It isn't quite time for him to replenish her stock yet, so he doesn't think Emilie is expecting him. Still, he doesn't intend to sneak up on her. He's doing what he always does when he comes into the mall to meet her-- he walks the empty halls, announcing his presence to her by singing in his gritty mahogany drawl. He's let her come to him this way before, but the other times he's always brought other patches with him. Today, he is alone. The guilt he feels over what this drug has done to Emilie is his alone to bear. He could have burned the warehouse full of Prax to the ground when he found it. Instead he let greed and grudges blind him. Now Emilie is on the verge of paying with her life for that blindness. He can't have that on his chest, too.
"There she stood in the doorway, I heard the mission bell," Rodeo sings, his voice carrying in the echoing mall as he walks. "And I was thinking to myself, this could be heaven or this could be hell."
He keeps a watchful eye, but he isn't peering into hiding places looking for her. She'll come to him.
"Then she lit up a candle and she showed me the way. There were voices down the corridor, I thought I heard them say..."