The price of chemical ecstasy was a dear one, paid in flesh and spirit. - Steven Barnes

It would have been a terrible thing to die a fool and a liar. Truth, at any cost, is worth the price.

It was on one of those terrible, fever-clouded days when the serpent beneath southern California awoke. It stretched from slumber, shedding its skin, the screams of its wrath heard in the shriek of tortured steel, of splintering wood and concrete.
Maxine was torn from her slumber by the moans of the dying and the awful sound of her ramshackle apartment shifting on its foundations. “Earthquake!” She pulled herself from the bed, stumbled from her building into the street, and watched the lurching structures and snapping powerlines, the buckling sidewalks and exploding water mains, as a seismic debt long outstanding came due.

Truth could not be spawned in lies and deceit.