Walking Dead

by Greg Rucka

  “Outstanding.”

  “Excuse me,” I said again.

  They all stared at me, seemingly having forgotten I was there.

  “I assume this means you can make me one?” I asked Sharala.

  “Oh yeah, hell yeah.” She was almost dismissive. “Couple of weeks, sure. Limor lays everything out—she's fantastic, I love her, I would have her babies if I could, seriously.”

  “Thing is, I need it sooner. End of the week, if possible.”

  “That's harder. You gotta do the Gerber plots, then have the PCBs made. We can get those done in town, but it's more expensive. And some of the components, they'll have to be ordered.”

  “And I need it boosted.”

  That caught her by the curiosity. “How much?”

  “It has to be able to blanket a house, a big one. Some of the exterior.”

  “But still this scale?”

  “It can scale up,” I said. “Just needs to be portable, something I can carry.”

  “Sure, yeah, you get a bigger battery, a power amplifier, that's one way to do it. Just factor up the math.”

  “Wait.” The one with the pens in his pocket was staring at me. “Why?”

  “Why?” Sharala asked.

  “Why does this guy need a Wave Bubble, one that's stepped up?” He was still staring at me. It was a fair question, and I was a little surprised it had taken this long to be asked. “Why does he need to jam all forms of communication going into or out of a great big house running between eight hundred megahertz and two point eight gigahertz?”

  All three of them gave me the hairy eyeball.

  “I've got to do something,” I told them. “And I don't want the people I'm doing it to making any phone calls while it's being done.”

  “Yeah, see,” he said. “That kinda sounds like something maybe Sharala and Solomon and me wouldn't want to be a part of.”

  “What's your name?” I asked him.

  “Augustyn.”

  “Auggie,” said the one in the glasses. Solomon. “We call him Auggie.”

  “You guys mind if I close the door?” I asked.

  “Why?” asked Sharala.

  “Because I want to answer the question, and I don't want us being overheard while I do it.”

  “Go ahead,” Auggie said. “But, man, you try anything and we'll shove a soldering iron so far up your ass you'll have smoke coming out your nose.”

  I nodded, turned to close the door. None of them had moved when I turned back, each of them watching me as if trying to determine how I myself was wired.

  “Let me tell you about a girl,” I said.

  Sharala, Auggie, and Solomon, it turned out, were all “makers,” and all of them were looking to change the world. By “makers,” I learned, they meant those who actually built things, who tinkered and dinked and took apart and put together and built workshops in their garages. They differentiated themselves from “abstracts” and the “normals.” The “abstracts” were the abstract thinkers, the ones who, as they put it, sat around all day dreaming about what could work, would work, how to make this more efficient and that more powerful and this more elegant without ever getting their hands dirty. Professor Blackstone, who had referred me to them, they said, was “abstract.” Conversely, Limor Fried, the creator of the Wave Bubble, was, by their account, a Saint of Makers.

  “And the normals?” I asked. We were at a restaurant a few miles from the campus that they had suggested, a place called Metro Pizza. So far, they'd worked their way through a cheese pizza and a pitcher of beer, and seemed eager to start on a second round of each.

  “Normals are the ones who do it for a living,” Solomon said, pouring a fresh glass of beer for himself. “They get their degree and then they go to work for The Man. But never mind that, this stuff about this girl, Tiasa—this shit's for real?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I hadn't told them everything, because there were things they didn't need to know to help me. But I'd told them about Tiasa, about how she'd been taken from her home, about how I'd been chasing after her for a month.

  “Still doesn't explain the need for the Wave Bubble,” Auggie said. Of the three, he was the most suspicious, not because he distrusted me, I'd realized, but because he was very concerned with how what he made might be used.

  “Where she is now—where I think she is—the people who have her, they've got some police in their pocket,” I said. “All of these people are using cell phones, they don't like landlines, they don't like anything that can be traced. I don't want them calling for help when I go to get her.”

  “How do you know they've got the cops in their pocket?” Solomon asked.

  I indicated my face.

  “Go to the feds,” Sharala said. “Or the state police.”

  “And what if someone tips these people off first?” I asked. “Then I lose her. I can't take the risk.”

  “This one girl, she's there, maybe, but… but there are other girls there, too. You're just going to leave them there?”

  “No,” I said.

  “What're you going to do for them?”

  “I'm working on it. Look, I've told you guys as much as I think it's safe to tell you. I'm dealing straighter with you than I've dealt with anybody in a long, long time. Are you willing to help me or not?”

  “Of course we'll help you,” Sharala said.

  “I'll pay for the equipment, anything you need,” I said. “I'll pay for your time.”

  “We'd do it for free,” Auggie told me.

  “But money's good, too,” Solomon added.

  “So what do we do now?”

  “Now?” Sharala asked, with a grin that seemed almost too delighted for her face to hold. “Now we make shit.”

  CHAPTER

  Thirty-two

  I went apartment hunting that afternoon. I found myself a cheap place on West Cheyenne for six-fifty a month, and had a rental agreement with Matthew Twigg's name on it by four in the afternoon. That gave me just enough time to get to the DMV before they closed at five. With the rental agreement in one hand and my Washington State driver's license in the other, I was able to provide proof of residency, and left just as they were locking the doors with a brand new Nevada State driver's license.

  I raced down to Tropicana, jockeying through traffic and watching the clock. My haste wasn't truly necessary, but the more I got out of the way now, the less I would have to do later, and the plan I was forming—such as it was—was going to keep me fairly busy for the next few days. According to the rental's clock radio, it was seven past six when I pulled into the parking lot of The Gun Store, and when I went inside I got eyefucks from just about everyone behind the counter, which is never a nice thing, and all the less pleasant when the people delivering them are also wearing firearms, as all of them were.

  I made it easy on them, though, because I knew what I wanted, and they had it. I picked up a Glock 19 and one hundred rounds of nine-millimeter, and while I was at it I acquired a small Benchmade knife from their selection. They ran my brand new driver's license while I listened to the sound of gunfire in all calibers coming from the shooting range. They even had submachine guns and a Squad Assault Weapon available for rental. The check on Matthew Twigg came back, and nothing in it said I wasn't to be trusted with a pistol.

  Next task was to find an electronics or, better, an office-supply store, but the hour had gone late enough that I didn't think I'd be able to manage it today. I headed back to the hotel, ordered up some food, and set about checking the pistol I'd purchased, fieldstripping it and reassembling its parts before loading it and stowing it deep in my messenger bag. I was sore and tired, and when I looked at the clock, I realized it was time to call Ballygar.

  Alena answered this time, sounding miserable.

  “What's wrong?” I asked.

  “I've been sick,” she told me. “Throwing up.”

  “Something you ate?”

  “No, sick.”

  “Oh.”

&nbs
p; “Yes.” She sounded very far away, and small, and it made me miss her all the more. “I feel awful.”

  “I think I've found her,” I said. “If everything goes well, I could be in Ireland in another seven days or so. Maybe less.”

  “When you reach her, speak in Georgian,” Alena said. “That will help her.”

  “I'll remember that. Can you put Bridgett on?”

  “Here she is.”

  “Bridgett?”

  “She gets angry when she throws up,” Bridgett said. “It's funny.”

  “Nice to know you two are still getting along.”

  “Things are better.”

  “That's good to hear.”

  “Yeah, she's been so tired the last couple of days she barely has the energy to insult me.”

  “Ah.”

  “I hear her right? You're close?”

  “Think so.”

  “Good,” said Bridgett. “I want to go home.”

  “You're not the only one,” I told her.

  Sharala, Auggie, and Solomon met me for breakfast the next morning at a greasy spoon close to the campus.

  “We've got a design we like,” Sharala told me. “Limor, when she did the Wave Bubble, it was a little thing, could fit in a cigarette pack. The power you're talking about, we need to scale that up. So we're thinking of a toolbox, one of those big metal ones, which'll give us some design benefits, as long as everything's insulated. It's gonna be heavy, though.”

  “How heavy?”

  “Well, we're using a car battery for power, so, you know, that plus some.”

  “Doesn't sound like anything I can't handle.”

  “We emailed the Gerbers this morning, like, at three A.M.,” Solomon said. “We're having the PCBs sent FedEx, like, warp speed, they should be here tomorrow.”

  “In English,” I said.

  “Gerbers,” Sharala explained. “Think circuit diagrams, okay? PCB is printed circuit board.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Auggie slid a piece of notepaper over to me, a sketch of the design. The drawing was of a standard-sized toolbox, cutaway, notations all over it.

  “With the car battery, this thing should go two, three hours before burning out,” Auggie interjected. “And it's going to burn out, this much power, it's going to get hot, start melting components.”

  “That's more than enough time,” I said.

  “Cool. The other thing with the design, here, is that you'll need to attach the antennae yourself—we're using two of them, you can see here. You just pop the toolbox open, screw 'em on, then hit the Big Red Button and away you go.”

  “Big Red Button?” I asked.

  The seriousness with which they regarded me made it seem as if we'd been discussing a nuclear bomb, and not a cellular jammer.

  “There must always,” Solomon told me, “be a Big Red Button.”

  After our meeting, I made my way to an Office Depot and dumped a couple hundred dollars on a printer, plain and photo paper, extra ink cartridges, and a spindle-stack of CD-ROMs. Next stop was a Walgreens, where I bought myself two packs of white cotton gloves, the kind used for dermatological care.

  I'd checked out of the hotel before leaving for breakfast, and so headed to the apartment, where I set up a workspace on the floor. I got the printer unpacked and communicating with my laptop, and then, wearing a set of the gloves, loaded the tray with photo paper. Then, one after the other, I began printing off multiple copies of all the photographs that Vladek Karataev had taken with his BlackBerry. While the printer ran, I opened up the word processor and began writing.

  It was a long process. While the writing went quickly, the printing did not, and each time a sheet was finished, I had to don my gloves to remove it from the tray. It slowed an already time-consuming process immeasurably. I'd gone through most of the ink cartridges, and the world had shifted back into night, before I was finished.

  Then, again using the gloves, I loaded the plain paper, and printed out sixteen separate copies of what I had written. I put each aside, with a set of the photographs.

  Last, I began burning the CDs. On each one, I included digital copies of the photographs, and most of the video that Vladek had taken. As with the photographs, I left out all images of Tiasa Lagidze.

  “Wow, you look wasted,” Sharala said to me the next morning. “Have some coffee.”

  “Don't do coffee.”

  “You get any sleep?”

  “I was up all night,” I admitted. “Where are we?”

  “You want the good news or the bad news?” Solomon asked.

  “Bad news first.”

  “We're having difficulty tracking down the power amplifier,” Auggie said. “All the normal supply houses we go to for parts like this, they're out of stock. Sharala and I must've gone to every RadioShack in the greater Vegas area looking for one, no luck there, either. We think we found a guy in Canada, but the earliest it'll get here will be tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” I said. “And the good news?”

  “The good news is that the yellow boards arrived just before we came out to meet you,” Solomon said. “All four of them.”

  “Yellow boards are…?”

  “The PCBs, we told you this.”

  “You called them PCBs last time.”

  “They're the same thing.”

  “I see.”

  “We'll start assembling and testing today,” Sharala said. “We get the amplifier tomorrow, we could have the box ready maybe tomorrow night, the day after at the latest.”

  I did a quick mental calculation, which wasn't all that quick given my lack of sleep. “That'll work.”

  “Then we'll see you tomorrow.”

  On the way back to the apartment, I stopped at the same Walgreens I had the day before, and then at a high-end photography store. At the Walgreens I bought first aid supplies, a couple of cheap towels, and a cheap cowboy hat; at the photo place I paid far too much for a Nikon digital camera, two lenses, an adaptor, and a sixteen-gig memory card.

  Back at the apartment, I took a shower, shaved, and changed the dressings on my wounds. Where I'd torn stitches in my side, the flesh looked angry and red, but when I gave the laceration a gentle squeeze, nothing issued from the wound in exchange for the pain I inflicted on myself. If I was carrying an infection, I couldn't tell.

  I finished tending my wounds, then I lay down on the floor of my unfurnished apartment and tried to get some sleep. I didn't think I'd be able to do it, but surprised myself when I awoke seven hours later, sore and stiff, but feeling marginally refreshed. I dressed and headed out, taking the car back to the rental service. I dropped it off there, caught a cab, and hit the first used-car lot I could find.

  After forty-five minutes and some haggling, I purchased, in cash, a ten-year-old VW Jetta with seventy-eight thousand miles on it. It wasn't the nicest car I'd ever owned, but close examination of the engine and tires had given me faith that I could rely upon it to do what I required.

  I drove my new used car back to the apartment, picked up my messenger bag and filled it with the Glock, the camera, and the lenses. Then I hit the interstate, heading east.

  The drive to New Paradise took two hours, and it was still light enough when I arrived in the town that I only needed one of the two lenses. I parked on the main street, put on my cowboy hat, and, keeping an eye out for cops, took a handful of photographs. I made certain to get at least one of the big wooden “Welcome to New Paradise” sign. Then I got back in the Jetta and drove to a local movie theater, where I paid to see something loud, with superheroes in it. I didn't pay much attention.

  By the time the film had finished, it had gone dark. I found the Albertson's I'd been directed to before, then followed the route Mike had driven for another mile, before pulling over at the strip mall with the Starbucks and parking. I took the messenger bag and went on foot from there, staying off the streets and out of the lights where I could. After twenty-three minutes I reached the stone wall bordering the Oasis ho
using development.

  Following the wall, I worked my way around it to the north. Streetlamps burned along the empty streets full of empty houses, and the best I could manage from my side was a spot that wasn't in direct light. The fence was close to three meters high, but the stone made finding handholds and footholds relatively easy, and I scrambled up and over, dropping down and into cover as quickly as possible, ignoring the stabbing pain that shot from my side. I checked the BlackBerry, saw it was eleven minutes to midnight.

  It was almost twelve-thirty before I found the cul-de-sac. Sneaking through the deserted streets had made me feel like I was traveling through a ghost town, and my paranoia certainly didn't help that. Every noise made me stop, ducking for cover. Twice I heard cars, and once I saw headlights, went prone beneath a line of untended and dying bushes. A New Paradise police car rolled past but didn't stop.

  There was an abandoned—or never occupied—house opposite the mouth of the cul-de-sac, and I went around the back, began trying the doors and windows. Nothing on the ground floor was open, and while I could get up to the second floor, working my way around the building searching for an open entry was going to be risky. The houses, however, looked like they all had finished basements, and when I noticed that, I went around again, searching for an egress. Building code would've required a way out in an emergency, if the house, say, was on fire. I found one on the west side, a dugout with a short metal ladder, dropped myself the five feet down into it, then ran my hands along the edges of the window, trying to get a feel for how it opened, if it slid up or would swing out. Closer examination revealed, barely, the hinges on the inside of the window, on the right-hand side. I put my back to the wall of the dugout, and my boot to the side opposite the hinges, and started pushing. Hard.

  It broke open with a pop, and I slid through on my belly into darkness, landing on a cold concrete floor. I righted myself, closed the window as best I could, then waited for my night vision to catch up with the rest of me. It wasn't doing very well, because there was almost no ambient light penetrating the house. I started forward carefully, feeling my way, and then stopped when I realized I was being a fucking idiot.