New Alcatraz (Book 2): Golden Dawn

by Grant Pies

  “A helicopter!” I said and laughed out of frustration as we jogged across the roofs. “I know we just made a pact to not ask questions, but now I am really curious about what you’re carrying.”

  The next building had a door on top and we ran towards it as they helicopter drew closer. Mercifully, the door was unlocked and I yanked it open, ushering Vesa through. It was another apartment building, and we zigzagged down the stairs, our footsteps echoing around the walls.

  I stopped midway down, on the fifth floor. A child stood in front of us near the doorway to his apartment. An older man came out of the door and stood behind the child, blocking our path down the stairs.

  We both stared at one another for a long moment. Then the boy motioned for us to go inside. Beyond the walls, the helicopter boomed as it made another pass over the area. I turned back to Vesa.

  “We can’t go back out onto the streets,” I told her. She nodded and we moved toward the apartment.

  Once inside, the man locked the door behind us. The apartment was small, but larger than I was used to. Vesa and I sat on the couch, both of us clutched our bags like they contained everything we owned. For me, it did.

  “Is that for you?” the man asked us both and pointed toward a window as the helicopter passed by.

  Vesa nodded. I didn’t move. At one end of the apartment were bunk beds, at the other, a small kitchen, and in the middle was the couch we sat on. In front of us were several framed pictures of a woman along with an urn, a statute of the Virgin Mary, and a single candle burning next to it. Other than the flame from the candle, the only source of light came from the neon lights outside, flooding in through the single window behind me.

  The young boy stood and stared at me blankly. I never felt terribly comfortable around children. The man moved him away from me and led him to one of the bunk beds, and then he turned toward us again.

  “You can stay here until they give up,” he said. “I don’t want to know what you did. I don’t care.”

  These days the only thing you could count on was that no one wanted to help the government. The rest of us looking out for each other was the only real weapon we had against them. The man lay down in his own bed and pulled the sheets over him. Vesa and I leaned back on the small couch. The springs were worn in the center and we sunk inward together. We sat shoulder to shoulder through the night, and listened to the constant droning of the helicopter outside.

  CHAPTER 9

  2075

  PHOENIX, ARIZONA

  Throughout the night, neither of us slept. We closed our eyes, but every time a car honked its horn or a door slammed shut, our eyes jolted open. We would turn towards each other to see whether or not the other had jumped up to flee the apartment.

  “Thanks again for opening your door,” Vesa whispered. “I owe you. I am sorry I got you mixed up in this.”

  “What exactly am I mixed up in, again?” I asked.

  “We promised, remember?” She said and smirked. Even in the darkness, her green eyes stood out, shining against her pale skin. She reached her hand to her face to brush her short bangs to the side.

  “I know…we promised.” I said. “Any thoughts on what to do from here?” Vesa just shrugged. She either had a plan, and didn’t want to tell me, or she was extremely adept at masking stress. “Okay…” I said and nodded.

  “I’m sorry,” Vesa said. “It’s just…”

  “No I get it,” I said. “No need to explain. Right now we wait here until sun up. Then we take it from there.” Neither of us said anything for a minute or two, and an awkward silence filled the air.

  “You know, I think I did you a favor,” Vesa said. “That apartment of yours was just sad.” She looked at me with a wide smile and nudged my ribs with her elbow. “C’mon, I’ve seen the inside of shipping containers with more style.” I fought a smile, but eventually couldn’t hold it back any longer.

  “Was it really that bad?” I asked.

  “It was pretty bad.” Vesa leaned her shoulder into me. “I think you could do better.” We both smiled in the darkness and snickered quietly.

  Sometime shortly before the sun came up, the young boy climbed out of his bunk bed and walked over to Vesa and me. The helicopter had gone away hours ago, but several patrol cars from the Technology Development Agency still roamed the streets outside. The boy looked at me, smiled, and offered me his hand to shake. I reached out and held his small hand in mine. He gripped my hand lightly and looked down with confusion.

  He held my right hand with both of his and turned it over, palm up. A long scar traced vertically down my palm. The only physical reminder of my incarceration in New Alcatraz, cut by a rock and burned by the scalding barrel of a rifle. The boy traced my scar with his finger and felt the raised skin. Thoughts of me tracing the scar above my father’s eye when I was a child in Buford flashed through my mind. I looked at the boy and then at the colorful urn sitting on the cabinet in front of me. The candle had long since burnt out, and now just a puddle of melted wax sat around the charred wick.

  Nothing much had changed since I was a child. Same society, same government. It was just a bit less concerned about hiding its true actions than it was a generation ago. I pointed at the framed pictures and the urn.

  “Is that your mother?” I whispered. The boy nodded his head. “Was she a good mother?” I asked, and the boy continued nodding. “I bet you miss her. Don’t you?” The boy looked down. “She misses you too. Wherever she is right now, she misses you more than you will ever know. And she would give anything for you to be happy.” My father’s words to me left my mouth. Even though my voice was low, I felt Vesa stir and sit up beside me. “You know, my dad once told me that our lives go in one big circle.” I traced a circle in the air with my finger. “He said that when our life ends, it just starts over again right back where we started. So if you ever get sad, and you miss your mom, just remember that you’ll see her again one day. Okay?” The boy nodded and forced a smile.

  “We should go,” Vesa said and peeked out the window. “There’s only one patrol car out now. We can easily avoid it.”

  I shrugged in acknowledgment and after a long moment patted the boy on the head and stood up. He turned and walked back to bed, where his father was still asleep on the bottom bunk. For the first time, I noticed the father kept two packed bags tucked under his bed. One large and one small. He slept with his shoes on his feet.

  Vesa glanced at me and walked toward the front door, stretching her arms and rolling her head back and forth. She exited first. I stood in the doorway and reached into my bag. I withdrew an orange, one Rose had given me a few days ago, and I set it on the cabinet next to the extinguished candle. The boy lay on his side in his bunk bed and waved his hand at me. I bowed my head slightly toward him and waved back. The boy rolled over and pulled his blanket over his head, and I turned and left the apartment behind me.

  CHAPTER 10

  2075

  PHOENIX, ARIZONA

  Vesa and I walked swiftly through the streets as the morning sun barely made it over the towering skyscrapers. The lights of the local shops stayed on all the time, their windows and doors were covered with bars, even when they were open. Only a few stray animals and a handful of workers filled the back alleys, where butchers carved meat and filleted fish before the streets grew too crowded. Starving cats with patchy fur circled their feet, waiting for anything to drop. The drippings from the butchers’ cutting boards poured down the street, and streams of blood flowed into the gutters.

  Our feet splashed in puddles of blood and old bathwater. The few people who shared the alleys with us didn’t even look up to see who we were. It was easy enough for us to avoid the few patrol cars still in the area. We cut through buildings and ducked down alleyways, staying off the major streets. Before long the sun rose over the buildings. Soon the crowds would return, and we could blend in with the masses of people. But with them came more police and agents out on their daily patrols.

 
“So, is there a plan?” I asked as we walked briskly through the alley. “Do you have a home? Or somewhere we can go?” I jumped over a large puddle of murky water filling a pothole.

  “Home?” Vesa said and took a big step over another pothole. She was slightly out of breath but we never slowed down or stopped moving. “Judging by your excuse of an apartment and your grab bag stashed under your bed, I am willing to bet a person like you sees how absurd the idea of home really is.” Vesa looked at me. “Did we just leave your home?” she asked, but I knew she didn’t want an answer. The gun in my back waistband was cold against my bare skin.

  She was right. My apartment was always only temporary. The time for permanent things had passed. Back there, the agents were surely cataloging each of my belongings. But I couldn’t think of one thing I would miss, or that would give them any indication of who I was. Anything that mattered to me was gone long ago. Home was just a parlor trick.

  So far the bookends of my life were the only things of note and everything between was just going through the motions. After I left St. Anthony’s Orphanage, life was almost normal. School, then college. Law school. Then a series of jobs with slightly more responsibilities until I ended up with the Android Representation Counsel. Once I had time to reflect, my time spent in New Alcatraz was the most I had ever felt alive, other than my time in Buford. And I had nothing to remind me, or any of the agents, of my time spent in either place. I only had my memories, tucked away deep in my mind. My mind was the only thing they couldn’t take from me. Not yet anyways.

  Over the last couple years, I lay on the cement floor of my tiny apartment and felt the cold ground at my back. I imagined I was lying on the ground deep in the underground vault of Wayfield Industries. Sometimes I woke early and went to the roof of my apartment building. I waited for the sun to rise and brush against my face. With my eyes closed, and the sounds of the city not yet ringing through the streets, I could almost believe I was back in the year 5065. Sometimes it almost felt like the morning I woke up in New Alcatraz on the coast with the cliffs behind me and the endless ocean in front of me.

  It wasn’t so much what happened during those nine days that made me reminisce. It was the connections I made with the people there. It was the reunion with my father and Red that I held most dearly in my heart. The short time I was able to spend with my mother.

  Inevitably, though, these reflections led to one conclusion: the death of everyone. I thought of my father traveling back to Buford to meet up with my mother in the year 2036, and eventually succumbing to radiation poisoning before my eyes as a child. Whatever dose of nanobots the Ministry injected him with was not enough to cure him indefinitely.

  I thought of Red’s similar fate in the conservation zone, how he only spent a few days as a free man.

  Then I thought of my mother. My murder victim. I thought of how she must have felt leaving a child behind in Buford, only to return to the present and be murdered by that same child as a grown man.

  No matter how much I cherished those times spent in New Alcatraz, I could never ignore how everything ended. It was not pleasant or happy. There might be happiness along the way, but endings, I’d come to realize, were never happy. Nothing lasts. Everything ends. And the longer I live, the more I realize that. In the end, all we really have is our memory. Our mind.

  “You know, I can make it on my own from here,” Vesa blurted out. “If they’re looking for two people, maybe we should split up.” She stated. I wondered when this time would come. When she would stop needing my help.

  “If that’s what you want,” I replied. “But there is some benefit to sticking together.” Vesa kept walking. She didn’t respond. “Fine. If that is what you want,” I said, and Vesa stopped to face me. “You take your computer chip. I’ll go this way. You go that way.” I pointed in two opposite directions.

  “Powell,” she started, “it’s just that…”

  “No, really,” I interrupted. “I can survive on my own. I didn’t show up at your apartment looking for help. I was doing just fine before yesterday.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want to stick together. It’s just that where I’m going, the people I’m meeting with, they wouldn’t be thrilled if I brought a stranger with me. You understand, right?” She tried to smile. Deep down I couldn’t help but feel like I was in grade school again.

  “Hey, that’s fine by me,” I said, trying to sound convincing. I wasn’t lying; I could take care of myself, but I had been on my own for so long that it had felt nice to have a companion for the last twelve hours. I started to walk away. “I may just be an attorney but I can take care of myself. Good luck with your chip,” I said and motioned toward Vesa’s bag.

  I turned and walked away from her. In the distance, I heard her feet shuffle away in the opposite direction. I made it only a few steps before Vesa yelled out to me.

  “Wait!” she shouted. Her voice ricocheted around the back alley. I turned and Vesa jogged toward me, so she could speak in a lower volume. “Attorney?” she asked, and tilted her head. “You’re an attorney?”

  “Was,” I corrected her. “I was an attorney. First private practice, then with the ARC.”

  Vesa’s eyes widened and she smiled.

  “Powell the ARC attorney,” she said and laughed. “C’mon.” She nodded her head in the direction she’d been heading. “Come with me. I think my friends will want to meet you after all.”

  CHAPTER 11

  2075

  PHOENIX, ARIZONA

  Late in the day, after we made it far enough outside the city center where agents had yet to set up checkpoints, we boarded an elevated train that connected several of the different major cities in Arizona. Vesa never told me where we were going or why we were going there. I simply followed her. I had no other choice.

  “So why did you become a lawyer?” Vesa asked after a long silence. By now we were well outside of Phoenix.

  “Well, I never gave it much thought, at least not before I made the decision.”

  “Funny how most decisions we make are like that,” Vesa said. “People would rather spend their lives regretting than planning ahead.”

  “So like most things in life, it was simply a lack of planning,” I told her. There were only a few people still on the train. The next major hub we would pass through was Flagstaff. “Once I was out of engineering school, I never planned on what I would actually do with my degree. I just liked the process of learning. The idea of creating. I didn’t line up a job or even an internship like most of my classmates. So I had an engineering degree, no job, and the time for applying for graduate engineering programs had long passed. I figured I should apply to some graduate program, and the only schools still accepting applications were…”

  “Law schools,” Vesa finished my sentence and nodded her head. “So it wasn’t a dream of yours? To be a lawyer?”

  I laughed. “Maybe it was. Maybe it was a dream I didn’t know I had, or a dream some other part of me had,” I said. “But it doesn’t feel that way now, and it didn’t feel that way when I was practicing.”

  Vesa still clung to her bag, the computer chip that the Technology Development Agency so desperately wanted hiding inside.

  “You know what I’ve found? Most people who practice law don’t know what they’re talking about. But we know enough to trick everyone else. We like that the average person thinks an attorney can write down a few words on paper and somehow that changes what is right and wrong. We’re magicians, but better. More powerful. Instead of defying what everyone thinks our reality is, we simply change our reality.”

  “You don’t think they can? Determine what’s right and wrong, I mean?” Vesa asked. She sat across from me, slouched in her chair, her legs stretched out across the aisle. Her feet rested on the chair next to me revealing leather boots wrapped around the jeans that clung to her thin calves. The scratched leather that stretched and fit perfectly around her foot, and the divots chipped into the hard rubber soles, told me
this was her only pair of shoes. Bits of red clay were wedged into her soles, most likely desert dirt. Vesa must not live in the city.

  “You think someone can just deem something right or wrong? Like if fifty-one percent of people think murder is right, then it is? Or if that same fifty-one percent thinks there is no freedom of speech, then that right doesn’t exist? Legality isn’t the moral compass to follow. At least not for me.” I chuckled at the absurdity of the question. “You think what you’re doing, what you are carrying is wrong? Sure it’s illegal, but wrong?” I motioned to the bag in her hands. “Do you really think we should be running right now?” Vesa nodded her head and smiled. She knew how she felt, and only wanted to hear my answer to the question. “No, I don’t think someone can deem something wrong just by writing a law or handing down a verdict. And I don’t believe that I need a consensus to know what is right.

  “I don’t believe that an attorney or politician can draft a law that makes the same act illegal for you and I, while making it perfectly legal for those in power. They’ve simply taken the same act and given it different names depending on who is doing it. Enhanced interrogation when they do it. Torture when we do. After hours search warrant for them. Breaking and entering for us. What they call campaign contributions, we call bribery. No.” I shook my head. “I don’t think a person can simply make up what is right and wrong.”

  As I spoke, Vesa’s smile grew larger across her face. “I had a feeling I would like you the moment I barged into your...” She searched for the right word.

  “Apartment,” I tried to complete her sentence.

  “Are we still even calling it that?” she asked and laughed.

  I smiled back at her, and rolled my eyes. She asked follow up questions, not like she was debating me, but as though she was enjoying having found someone who agreed with her beliefs.