Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  “And the Kooky Dame? What about those poor idiots who thought they’d get rich quick?”

  Ames bit her lower lip angrily. “The Dame’s skiing in Norway at the moment and her assistants aren’t taking me seriously enough. As far as they’re concerned, the statues aren’t people until their contracts are up. I’m trying to get the President to issue a National Warning, but even he’s balking; he doesn’t think Brovloski or Denardo are going to take the Gi, so doesn’t see anything to worry about.”

  “Oh? Who’s he think?”

  “Kumal Kumal Smith.”

  I rolled my eyes. “The guy just started a year ago. He can barely tie his own belt. Dead-Eye and the Basher will eat him for breakfast. And if he does win, it’ll be World War II out there, and no amount of planning and preparation can deal with that.”

  “I said as much.” Ames reset the program and told it to run again. “He actually suggested I go and bake some cakes and let the big boys do their jobs. I almost told him to go screw.”

  Ahhh, President ‘Willy’ Wilson. A good ole boy from the olden days of politicking when it was all right to be one hundred percent sexist and unafraid to air your views about women, foreigners and pretty much anything that caught your ire at the time. “You tell Rigible?”

  “I did.” Amily sighed. She hated having to rely on her boss for anything. “He’s working on it now. If I can get the Garden relocated to a rooftop for the day and the Statues locked into a damned Hotel, everything’ll be fine. I’ve got blanket permission from Willy for an ‘any means necessary’ approach to protecting Killem. If Rigible can get Willy to play ball, I’m going to put snipers and rocket troops up there. If not, I’ve got to figure out some way to keep the riot centered around Morita.”

  “Maxter’s not worried about his precious arena?” I watched a hundred thousand virtual jocks destroy downtown again.

  “Nah.” Amily pointed to a city map heavily markered in about sixteen different colors. “He’s toying with the idea of buying the second oldest city center and converting into a kind of multi-mega-plex so he can avoid this kind of problem; if he goes through with it, he’s going to build drawbridges. Any mob action, he blocks egress. The Council’s thinking of willfully footing any possible damages personally if Maxter goes through with the deal.”

  On paper, it sounded awesome. Much as I hate to like people who are absurdly wealthy, Maxter was a really good guy, always worried about this or that and always willing to spend a lot of extra money to ensure his projects were safety-Maxtered. He was a follower of the ideal, for sure.

  I snapped my fingers. “Your problem is that the Kooky Dame and Skycrazy don’t want you to use heavy munitions around their toys, right?”

  “Basically, yeah.”

  “Mega-rockets.” I grinned like a total idiot. “They’re these firecrackers that Morty released in Mexico about a year, year and a half ago for their Day of the Dead celebrations. They’re not legal up here because of an Outraged Citizen Lobby; at close range they can blind you, deafen you and in extreme cases, rupture internal organs.”

  “How is that going to help me?” Ames asked suspiciously. She could work around an OC regulation without too much difficulty, but only if it’d work.

  “Look, I don’t know how they’re made, or even what they’re made of; you need to email Morty at his EternaMail account with the quantity you want, but get this; they’re not normal firecrackers. They don’t use explosives or grain powders of any kind. They just … blow up. Ridiculously loudly, with a lot of smoke and flashing colors and all manner of existential weirdness, all for those crazy Day of the Deaders. Big party favorite. Sure, lots of accidental deaths, but whatever. Mexico doesn’t have the legal restrictions we do.”

  I didn’t mention how I’d used a few to scare a guy out of his bullet-proof limo a year or so ago. The whole deliverance had gone smoothly. Now that I think on it, that was the last truly successful delivery in a long, long time. Noise fines had eaten most of that paycheck, which still pissed me off. I mean, noise laws in a construction zone? Who are we kidding here?

  “Here, look.” I grabbed the spare seat, nudged my sister out of the way, and started plugging in new parameters. While I typed, I explained. “Most of these idiots are probably the sort of person who’s proud of the fact that they’ve never even gone to the suburbs, let alone another country, so they’re going to be completely ignorant about MR crackers. Those that have been to Mexico probably went there during an extended Spring Break, making it pretty likely they were in an alcoholic coma at the time and couldn’t tell you their name, let alone register explosions going off in their ears. You put concentrations here, here, here and … here, and maybe here for stragglers, and you can herd more than ninety percent of them towards River Sticks and onto waiting police vessels for processing. For the ones that are too stupid, drunk or enraged you can have cops in riot gear to pound them into runny oatmeal.”

  “How do you know the parameters for these firecrackers?” Amily asked, only a little suspiciously. Thankfully, like me, she was the sort of person who knew an awful lot of things for no other reason that she liked to know stuff no one else knew.

  “Ziegler emailed me two years ago, asked me what I thought about the whole thing.”

  Amily turned to look at me. “You talk to Morty Ziegler?”

  I raised my hands in self-defense. “Talked, Ames, talked. We went to high school together, for crap’s sake. We were in the Dungeons and Dragons After Hours Kill-A-Thon Club as well as the Computer Lab Friends for Life Group. He came over to dinner a few times.”

  “Yes, but this was all before he traveled through time and space.”

  I held my finger over the delete key. “Listen, sis, you can get all histrionic at me over a friendship that ended more than ten years ago and I can delete the parameters for the Mega-Rockets, thereby forcing you to get some and run the usual tests to determine their maximum range of efficiency or I can hit the ‘go’ button instead and you can see how this is all going to work to your immense and perpetual benefit. Ziegler picked me because I don’t give a rat’s ass if he’s a time traveler or a talking toaster.”

  Amily, torn between the desire to know why Morty Ziegler emailed me (it was actually to say happy birthday like he does every year, he’d just included the specs for the rockets because we’d spent the entire summer at eighth grade camp blowing up frogs and all the girls’ tents) and the lure of an easy fix, finally broke down. “All right, fine. For now.”

  I waggled a finger. “Uh-uh. You have to promise that if I show you this, you will never, ever ask about Morty.” I watched my dear sister turn bright red in the face. I almost thought she was going to hold her breath like she used to do at age six, but she didn’t. I understood her curiosity. Ever since his splash landing on the Eyesteen-Rosinburger Bridge, everyone has done everything they could think of to have even the smallest amount of contact with the world’s only time traveler. What they didn’t realize was that Morty had been damned near pathologically afraid of people before the incident and was even more so now. It wasn’t possible for anyone to cause him any harm, keep him against his will, or threaten him in any way because of what he could do, but you can’t get a guy to change his spots. Morty and I had last ‘talked’ (here meaning more than a single email apiece) in a series of re:mails maybe five years ago about his decision to maybe get a new hairstyle because of this Helen girl he’d met in Greece, but that was it; I just loved getting one over on Amily. I don’t think it’s weak of me to take those opportunities when they presented themselves. And neither should you.

  “Fine.”

  I ran the simulation. It worked, more or less. Amily added some touches and we ran it again. It worked better. We fiddled at it for another hour or so, trimming here and thickening there, until the simulation ran with five percent casualties and maybe a few hurt feelings. Definitely no damage to three biggest wastes of time and money in the city thus far, which would make Amily the shining girl in
the public eye once more.

  I was just happy to spend time with Amily that wasn’t all argument and nothing else. I could tell she felt the same way by the studious efforts she was making to avoid eye contact.

  “Now tell me why you’re really here.” Amily demanded after saving, backing-up, emailing and storing the best three sims to every department head in Force.

  “Um.”

  Amily groaned. “How much.”

  I surreptitiously crossed my feet behind my chair, an action that did nothing to confuse Amily at all; she was my twin, she had the same affection for footwear, just not illegal ones from Prague. “Four grand.”

  It sounded stupid exiting my mouth. I can only imagine that by her reaction it sounded even more stupid hitting her ears.

  “Four thousand! For … for …” Amily raised a hand, calmed herself. “You know what? I don’t want to know. I … I just don’t want to know.” She reached for her handbag and pulled out her checkbook. “I,” Amily started writing, “am going to give you this money. Free and clear, no interest rates, no holding it over your head at Christmas and the holidays, nothing at all. I won’t even tell mom and dad, and Jake won’t hear about it either. This is coming from my personal, hidden ‘rainy day’ bank account that only you know about.”

  “If?” I’m not stupid. I may seem like it some of the time, but those moments are usually planned out well in advance so that when I pull a rabbit out of my ear it seems that much more stupendous. My sister giving me four grand without any strings meant that there was a string so big attached to the check that it was going to divert planets from their natural orbits around the sun.

  Amily held the check out in front of me, blue eyes gleaming. “This money is yours, free and clear without any caveats but one. You take, and keep, for a minimum of six months, the job at UH.”

  “You hag. You utter, utter hag. You and Mom and Jane and probably Dad set me up! You all knew, somehow, I needed a ridiculous amount of money for no obvious reason and connived, in the dark with candles and … and hoods to force me into a real job. I have a job. I deliver pizzas. I like it, it suits me. I work when I want, for as long as I want.”

  “James, that job is a nowhere gig if there ever was one. You need the money precisely because you can work when you want. If you had a job you needed to be at every day, rain or shine, sleet or snow, new video game or explosive diarrhea, you’d be there. I know you. The only reason you got to school every day was because of the threat that the principal would call mom and dad.” She wiggled the money in front of my like a shiny paper lure. “Is it a deal?”

  I bit my lip and stared longingly at four thousand ‘string-free’ dollars. I imagined myself working at the Unbiased Herald for six months. I’d lasted longer than that doing scut work for Writ Off, and believe you me, doing bottom-of-the-barrel Writ deliverance is not a pretty sight. Since my Writs were few and far between, I could probably swing both without too much difficulty.

  Still, it was the damned Unbiased Herald, the only newspaper in the world that didn’t use verbs unless the paragraphs didn’t make any grammatical sense without them.

  But, if I didn’t pay my guy off, technically he could get paper on me (if he felt like running the risk of having his business shut down). There was also the possibility that he wouldn’t even bother with anything as fancy dancy as a Writ. He could just hop a plane and do me in himself.

  Unbiased Herald and six months of screamingly boring work (while trying to rekindle my long-lost Writman status) or running away from Sergei Setz and coming up with ways of explaining to my parents why a large Serb was at the door with a chaingun and an attitude…

  Damn. I could’ve used my brilliant Mega-Rocket scheme to bilk dear old sis for the four K and told her the truth about Morty Ziegler, thereby sparing myself from even considering the Unbiased Herald as a source of steady income.

  Amily folded the check up and stuck it into one of my shirt pockets. “Yes,” she admitted with a big, big smile. “you could have done exactly that, but didn’t, so now here we are, you, four thousand dollars richer and gainfully employed and me, filled with the satisfaction, not only of helping my brother out of a tight jam, but of catapulting myself to the top of the Parents Affection Timeline for the twelfth year running. I can only speculate how excellent my gifts will be this year at Christmas, and how absolutely run-of-the-mill yours will be. I’m thinking salt and pepper shakers again this year.”

  “Hey,” I retorted weakly as I hastened to flee my horrible sister, “I like getting socks and underwear for Christmas. I wouldn’t know what to do with all that expensive crap you get.”

  “Ta-ta, James.” Amily twittered, turning to her next chore; odds were that she was going be working on the Mellonballers concert right up until the week of the event. “Say hi to Janey for me, and please, don’t forget … Jake really, really wants to have you over. He’s gotten the high score on Face Blaster Mega, and wants a rematch.”

  “Pfft.” I snorted at the door. “Not going to happen. You know it, I know it, The Ziegler knows it. But for you, since you’re my sister, I can maybe make some time. If my new job doesn’t intervene. And he promises not to call me Jimster, Jimsteronomous, Jimson or any sort of James-based derivation. It’s embarrassing for all of us and demeaning for him.”

  Amily laughed. “Fine. Get out of here and go see those idiots in the firing range. This time, try not to win by so much, and don’t be so damned showy. Ferguson nearly shot his foot off last time.”

  I shut the door, absurdly pleased with myself. We hadn’t yelled or anything.

  As I’d warned my mom and dad in a pathetic attempt to get out of going to a interview for a job I didn’t want at a place I think I hated, it was very, very late by the time I was ‘allowed’ to leave HQ; Rigible and my sister kept normal hours and had left hours and hours ago, but me? No such luck.

  It has become a rule of etiquette that I swing by the firing range to hang out with the bluecoats who’re down there, endlessly (and sometimes aimlessly) trying to improve their hand/eye coordination by shooting holes in things that don’t shoot back. The reason for this unspoken but ironclad expectation is quite simple; someone who shall remain nameless (my sister, who blabbed in an attempt to force me into choosing a career way back in the dawn of time itself) let her commanding officer know that I had taught her how to shoot, and was even better than she was.

  All quite true, of course, but difficult to explain. I’d been a Writman for close to two years by then, and Writ Off has one of the best training facilities in the country. Because I hadn’t much cared for armbreaking and granny killing, I’d spent every waking moment in the firing range, translating my skill with Face Blaster 2000’s lightweight plastic gun into the same with real-life weapons. Hasty consultation with head office led to forged documents detailing that the summer following my induction into Writ Off (mercifully, I’d been in Orange County for an International Writman seminar), I’d decided to take a lot of Guns and Ammo lessons in Orange County instead of drinking my face off, which is the lie I’d told my folks. An ex-Writ Off agent who actually worked at one of the ranges would testify to my presence and my uncanny ability with murderous weapons when pressed, so all bases were covered.

  That being said, I’d become a bit of a local legend with the bluecoats, who for the life of them (yes, collectively) could not imagine why somebody as good with a gat as I was wouldn’t want to be a bluecoat or, if I failed the intelligence tests (ha ha) a serviceman in the Army. After about a year of hound-dogging me with no perceivable ground gained, the bluecoats in question gave up trying to press me into service (personally I think it has everything to do with Amily and the whole supercop thing she’s got going on) and switched to betting me I couldn’t do this or that with a gun.

  I do not want to give the impression that I’m better than bluecoats . The job they do is a thankless one filled with long hours, an eternity of paperwork, the usual suspects of alcohol and drug addiction, brok
en marriages, anger management problems, the works. Because the city is as big as it is, the police force is easily three times as large as the biggest, nearest comparable city, and even then, like all cities, there just aren’t enough cops to do the job right. That’s why Amily does what she does and why Writs and deliverance will never, ever, no matter how hard CoPL tries, be deemed illegal. The men and women who hit the streets on a daily basis are really quite good shots, but they don’t find themselves in bizarre situations where figuring out how to shoot around a corner isn’t just an exercise in out-of-the-box thinking but a matter of next-second-survival. They’re not allowed to practice trick shooting in the firing ranges because it’s not really all that safe (unless you know exactly what you’re doing, you can kill yourself or lose a favorite toe or finger) and the Oversight Committee frowns on that sort of behavior.

  That being said, I enjoy the hell out of hanging down there with the bluecoats, firing hot lead at mobile and static targets, running the gauntlets they’ve spent hours dreaming up and weeks perfecting. It gives me the opportunity to feel appreciated for my skills, and so what if the reasons for my talent are different than they’ve been led to believe? They enjoy having me around (not too often because no one likes losing all the time and I don’t want my Emergency Cash Cow to dry up) and it takes their mind off how desperate the situation outside the four walls truly is.

  I’d raked in nearly five hundred dollars that night, and I was only a little suspicious of the amount; the boys and girls in blue are uncannily prescient when it comes to friends who’re in the deep end without water wings. They know better than to offer money outright because I am (just like they are) made ferociously uncomfortable by straight up handouts. Too noble, I guess, or too stupid. I have no problem begging for money because that’s me, humbling myself all by my lonesome.