Chapter Eight
Rob Peerson was most excited to have evaded death row, though he suspected that this 'experimental rehabilitation center' was a type of psych ward for government experiments, and told everyone as much.
Rob was the perfect case for west coast social Darwinism, combined with an attitude of self-entitlement.
Raised in Seattle, WA, he became involved with heroin and methamphetamine by age fourteen.
Some folks involved in the IV drug circuit soon became burnt out freaks, and he had watched many head down that route; so Rob decided to do something different with his time; relegating himself to three weeks of stimulant use and one week of depressant use per month. This meant that he had three weeks of fighting, fucking and looting. Then a coma-like vacation that took place once per month.
It was important for Rob to make enough money during his period of central nervous stimulation, so he didn't have to work during his downer period. It was also important that he not maintain any long-term relationships, because the junkies didn't like that he did speed, and the tweakers didn't like that he did smack. Consequentially, he was shunned by both groups.
He was so emotionally unstable that even if he did come across a young woman likely to join him in a mutually co-dependent, drug addicted relationship, his selection of substances was so bi-polar that she would be hard pressed to share his affinity for extremes.
On the rare occasion that he did, he was such a careless psychotic that he would often leave her in terrible places and verbally or physically abuse her if she stayed there.
He tried his hand at pimping a girl once, but he was so jealous of her fucking other people that he slapped her for being a whore, and beat the shit out of the guy who had picked her up. Needless to say the opportunity to earn money by exploiting another human being did not last long. Rob soon realized his incompatibility for pimping, and opted instead to increase his involvement in drug distribution.
As with most other things, he was both great and terrible at his newly found passion. During his three weeks up, if he thought about nothing else besides making, buying and selling speed, then he did great. He was up as long as his body could physically hold out, and he was insanely productive.
Unfortunately, as time went by he became more and more paranoid, and less pleasant to be around. He began to accused people of ripping him off, when he was the one who was selling them short. He thought he was living the high-life, because he could always get some desperate tweaker to give him a blow job.
If it was a female, he called her a whore and give her a bag of shitty product, and if it was a guy, he called him a faggot, and threatened to leave his asshole so bloodied that he wouldn't be able to walk for a week.
His bullying within the homosexual community ended up causing a group of bikers to descend on him as he patrolled his square mile block on his bicycle. He was shot at, but they didn't hit him.
He fired back. It was probably a good thing that he missed, too.
When they finally caught up with him, he was so severely beaten that he ended up in hospital for the better part of three months. The only thing that was positive about that encounter, was that Rob got all of the morphine he could stomach, courtesy of the health care system.
Once he was that far into a morphine habit, it was difficult for him to make his usual swing back to the world of the speed freak.
He had also dramatically increased his tolerance by the time he left the hospital, which meant that in order to pay for his habit, he would have to increase the amount of drugs he sold, or move onto another form of income.
His meth distribution network had been annexed by another dealer, who incidentally was the 'faggot' that had given him a blowjob ten weeks earlier.
Since he had not done meth during his nine week stay in hospital, and had generally lost interest in both meth and blowjobs, he decided to pursue opiate distribution.
His new substance of choice worked out well for him for a while, until his scripts began being rejected by pharmacies because they were filed so frequently. Once that started to happen, he made the change from pharmaceutical morphine to street grade heroin.
Fortunately, Rob had saved up enough money from his script hustling and was able to purchase a sizeable quantity of black tar heroin, which he then cut down to a quarter strength, and distributed under the brand name, “Czechian Sunset”.
After the branding of his product onward, he considered moving back into pimping by feeding his product to underage girls, raping them, and then getting them addicted to dope, but he hadn't had an erection in eight months, and he was constantly strung out.
At the start of his sixth month out of the hospital, he had gone to get a pharm script fulfilled and found out that the prescription had been cut entirely. He could have killed the pharmacist on the spot for rejecting his request, but if he had, every pharmaceutically dependent junkie in the city would have wanted his head. Besides, he had a block of uncut dope buried in the back alley of the warehouse where he squatted.
Rob made his way home, began shooting up, and promptly became addicted to his own supply; this marked the descent of his time as an opiate dealer.
Within a month, his habit had grown unreasonably large, and he was no longer coherent, interested in fulfilling orders, or doing much of anything except sleeping, and spiking his body.
Eventually the police found his body passed out on a sidewalk downtown, overdosed, with a needle still sticking out of his arm.
They took him to hospital, where he was revived and given his history within the system he was immediately placed him on methadone, and released into the custody of a rehabilitation clinic. Four months later, he left rehab clinic, free and clear from any substances, and knocking on the door of his parents house in the suburbs…
“I saw this movie once, where they took these ex-convicts, and turned them into super soldiers,” Rob commented as they neared the end of their journey towards the lab. “That's probably what they're doing to us.”
Geeky dude in the corner over there will probably be super muscular, maybe I'll get x-ray vision or some shit.”
John held his head in his hands, and Rob looked around expectantly.
Not a word was spoken.
“Y'all sound like a bunch of corpses, thought the ‘death row’ departure wagon would be a bit more lively.” Rob laughed as they arrive at the facility before being led by a detachment of guards from the vehicle, through an underground car park and down five flights of stairs into the lab.