"Come on! Don't you trust me?"
Those were probably the stupidest words this redheaded dumbass could have ever said to me, and he knew how stupid they were because he had the biggest shit-eating grin on his face, showing every missing and rotten tooth in his mouth.
Red, as his "friends" called him, was something like a load shark. He sold and used drugs—a lot of it—and sometimes people like me, who had parents that liked to gamble away their money instead of buying food and paying for rent, would be in sudden need of a lot of cash to avoid getting displaced from our homes.
The eviction might not have been so bad if we were allowed to live on the streets, huddling under boxes to protect ourselves from the acid rain, but the mayor hated homeless people. He thought it made his precious settlement look "trashy," so the homeless were always taken to the Wastelands, where would have to find a way to protect ourselves from mutant creatures, leftovers of an ancient war.
"Come on, Red," I said, groaning. "I'll pay you back double."
Red held out his hand, wriggling his fingers, and that grin remained on his face.
"You really want to pass up the change to get a lower interest rate?" Red said, and he wriggled his eyebrows up and down suggestively.
"Please, I really don't—"
"Paying double would really be a lot of money. Think of all the loaves of bread you could buy with that. The nutritional paste. *Life-sustaining nutrients.*"
Never in my life had I wanted to strangle someone so much. Not even the drunk assholes at the diner made my skin crawl as much as this creep. He had power over everyone, and he used it against us at every chance he got.
As angry as I was at him, I knew I was going to have to take him up on his offer: shake his hand to have only 10% interest or not touch him and owe him double the money he would give me. I could not afford to pay him that much money. My debt to him was already substantial, and the idea of increasing it by so much was daunting.
With a sigh, I held out my hand to him, and Red's grin somehow widened as he grabbed my hand. I closed my eyes in anticipation of what was about to come. It began as a slight tingle in my hand. Then a full vibration chased the feeling all the way up my arm before a searing pain overwhelmed me, and it only took a few seconds for the pain to take over my entire body.
I heard myself let out little moans involuntarily, and then with a laugh, Red let me go, letting me fall to the ground as the pain left me. Something landed on my chest, but I would be too numb to look at it for a while.
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