Chapter 16: The Distribution Test
POV: Marcus
March 15th, 2008. Three days after the Krazy-8 incident. Marcus's phone buzzed while he was restocking pharmacy shelves with medications that would never cure the kind of sickness spreading through Albuquerque's streets.
"We have product," Walter's voice carried through the speaker with carefully controlled excitement. "One pound. Can you really move it like you said?"
Marcus glanced around the pharmacy, confirming that Lisa was busy with a customer and couldn't overhear. "Yes. Meet me at the original cook site in two hours. Bring the product and your disbelief."
The desert looked different in afternoon light, less apocalyptic and more merely inhospitable. The RV sat exactly where Walt and Jesse had left it, a monument to amateur chemistry and desperate ambition that had somehow produced professional-grade results.
Marcus arrived first, using a door to scout the area for DEA surveillance or cartel presence. Finding neither, he settled behind the same cluster of rocks he'd used during his previous observation, waiting for his new partners to arrive with their first real batch of blue meth.
Walt and Jesse pulled up in the Pontiac Aztek, their body language radiating the nervous energy of people who'd committed to a course of action without fully understanding its implications. Jesse clutched a backpack like it contained his life savings, which it probably did. Walt moved with the careful precision of someone who'd spent the last three days second-guessing every decision.
"You came," Walt said, emerging from the car with visible relief.
"I said I would."
Jesse hung back, clearly still processing the impossibility of doors that appeared in solid matter. "This is really happening? We're really doing business with someone who can teleport?"
"Teleportation implies technology," Marcus corrected. "I prefer to think of it as creative problem-solving."
He examined the product while Walt and Jesse watched anxiously. One pound of crystalline blue methamphetamine, packed in vacuum-sealed bags that reflected Walt's obsessive attention to detail. The color was perfect—that distinctive azure that would eventually become Heisenberg's trademark. The crystals were uniform, properly formed, visually striking even to someone who'd never used the product.
"Quality looks good," Marcus said, shouldering the backpack. "Now for the real test."
He created a door in the empty air twenty feet away. The portal opened to reveal a Phoenix apartment that smelled like cigarettes and desperation, where a contact Marcus had cultivated over weeks of careful negotiation was waiting with cash and questions he'd been paid not to ask.
Walt and Jesse's jaws dropped as reality split open to show them a room two hundred miles away.
"Jesus Christ," Jesse whispered.
"Different savior," Marcus replied, stepping through the door. "Be right back."
Brief POV shift: Walt
Walter White watched a man walk through a hole in space-time and wondered what kind of universe he'd stumbled into. The cancer diagnosis had been devastating, the decision to cook meth had been desperate, but this transcended both categories entirely.
"He just walked through the air. Through nothing. Into somewhere else."
Jesse was muttering profanity in multiple languages, his young mind struggling to process impossibility. But Walt found himself calculating instead of marveling, his scientific training kicking in despite the violation of every physical law he'd ever taught.
"Not teleportation. The door suggests spatial manipulation rather than matter transmission. Some kind of dimensional folding? Wormhole generation? Both violate known physics, but if the technology exists..."
The implications were staggering. No vehicles meant no transportation logs. No border crossings meant no federal oversight. No shipping meant no tracking, no interdiction, no evidence trail that could lead back to the source.
They could move product anywhere, instantly, without leaving traces that conventional law enforcement could follow. It would revolutionize drug distribution, make traditional smuggling operations obsolete overnight.
"This changes everything. This makes us unstoppable."
When Marcus returned eight minutes later with fifteen thousand dollars in cash, Walt was already planning expansion on a scale that would have been impossible with conventional methods.
Back to Marcus POV
"That's... that's impossible," Jesse said, staring at the money like it might evaporate.
"No," Marcus replied, counting bills with practiced efficiency. "Just improbable."
He handed Walt nine thousand dollars—sixty percent of the take, as agreed. Kept six thousand for himself—forty percent for services that no conventional distributor could match. The mathematics were simple; the implications were revolutionary.
Walt accepted the money with hands that trembled slightly, probably from adrenaline rather than fear. "How many contacts do you have?"
"Five states currently. Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Texas, California. More if demand justifies expansion."
"And they all pay this well?"
"Better, actually. This was a test run at below-market rates. Premium product commands premium prices, and your blue crystal will command the highest premiums available."
Marcus watched greed flicker across Walt's features, the same expression he'd seen in the television show when Walter White first realized that cooking meth could make him wealthy instead of just solvent. The cancer had given Walt a death sentence, but the blue meth was offering him financial salvation on a scale he'd never imagined.
"We can make two pounds a week," Walt said, his voice gaining momentum as possibility expanded in his mind. "Can you move that much?"
"Easily. I have contacts who'd take five pounds a week if we could produce it. But scaling up means more methylamine, more pseudoephedrine, more equipment. More risk."
"I'll handle supply chain management. You handle distribution."
Jesse, who'd been silent during the negotiation, finally spoke up. "Yo, are we sure we wanna expand this fast? I mean, this is all happening pretty quick."
Both Walt and Marcus ignored him, focused on logistics that would transform a desperate partnership into a regional drug empire. Jesse's concerns were valid but irrelevant—the momentum was building, and momentum had its own logic that overrode caution.
"Two pounds weekly to start," Walt said, extending his hand. "More if the market can bear it."
They shook hands over Jesse's protests, sealing an expansion that would reshape Albuquerque's criminal landscape in ways that none of them could fully predict. Marcus felt the weight of that handshake, the moment when careful intervention became active empire building.
Jesse watched the exchange with growing unease, already sensing that he was becoming the third wheel in a partnership that had grown beyond his understanding or control. "This is moving too fast," he said to no one in particular.
Ryuk, invisible to everyone except Marcus, materialized behind Jesse with that eternal grin that suggested he was enjoying the show. "Fast is fun," the death god whispered, though only Marcus could hear him.
Marcus pocketed his share of the money and created a door back to his apartment, leaving Walt and Jesse to process the afternoon's events. Through the portal, he could see his kitchen table where maps of the Southwest were spread like battle plans, marked with pins that represented the infrastructure of the empire they were about to build.
"One test run," Marcus called back through the door. "Two weeks to set up expanded operations. Then we find out what happens when blue meth hits the market at scale."
The door closed behind him, leaving Walt and Jesse alone in the desert with more money than either had seen in months and questions that had no comfortable answers.
In his apartment, Marcus spread the cash across his table and began calculating the mathematics of empire. Fifteen thousand for one pound, distributed in eight minutes with zero risk and maximum efficiency. Scale that to two pounds weekly, factor in premium pricing as the product gained reputation, add multiple distribution networks across five states.
Conservative estimates suggested revenue of fifty thousand per week within a month. Optimistic projections reached into six figures, numbers that would transform everyone involved from small-time criminals into major players in the regional drug trade.
Walter White had wanted to secure his family's financial future. Instead, he was about to build an empire that would consume everything he claimed to protect.
And Marcus Sullivan, who'd started as an observer trying to prevent tragedy, was now the architect of that empire's distribution network.
The partnership had begun, but Marcus was beginning to understand that partnerships, like chemical reactions, often produced results that none of the participants had intended.
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