I tried to pull Selene away, but I was a step too slow. She got a hold of the officer’s arm, invading the horse’s space, making it rear. The cop tumbled off and hit the pavement hard. The horse was on its back legs, kicking with its front, its hooves getting dangerously close to her face. I grabbed Selene around the waist, yanked her away before she got kicked.
The cop was getting his feet back under him, his expression equal parts dazed and pissed off. “You crazy bitch,” he said.
Selene was struggling in my arms, crying and panicking. Her small fists pounded my chest, ordering me to let her go. She slapped my face, and it surprised me, made me relax too much, enough for her to break free. She ran to the officer, but he had his hand up, ordering her back.
“Please,” Selene was screaming. “My daughter, we can’t find her.”
“Step the fuck back. Now!”
“You have to help us!”
“I’m not warning you again. Step back and lay down on the ground.”
His voice hitched. His horse was screaming, rearing up on its hind legs, and breathing loudly, its hackles raised. Selene was too distraught to think straight, and none of us had any fucking clue what was going on.
Gunfire rang out in the distance, and fresh smoke rose into the air.
“I told you to get back!”
She stumbled forward, tears lining her face. “Please, listen. You have to listen.”
Stepping forward, he told her to get back again. He pulled himself taller, squared his shoulders, and pushed his chest out, the promise of a threat in his eyes. His hand went to his belt and pulled out a stocky black device with yellow striping. He fired, and she screamed, jerking away. She fell to the ground, but he kept his finger on the trigger, sending jags of electricity through the Taser wires and into her body. Fifty thousand volts, nineteen pulses a second, punched into her.
“Get down, on the ground,” he yelled at me.
I raised my hands, slowly lowering myself onto my knees.
“Down!” he yelled again.
People were lining up on the street, watching the spectacle. We knew some of them from PTA meetings, neighborhood garage sales, and block parties. They stood there, whispering and watching, hands over their mouths. Nobody dared move or speak too loudly.
I flattened myself on the street, my arms spread out, head hooked at an odd angle so that I could see what was happening. Selene’s body relaxed then stayed still. The horse had calmed down since the threat of violence was past. I waited for my wife to move, but she didn’t. She made no sound, no groans of pain, no whimpers, none of the crying I had become used to over the last few hours.
I kept waiting for her to move. The officer rolled her onto her stomach, straddled her, pulled her arms back, and handcuffed her. He only had the one set and seemed confused about what to do with me. No car. No handcuffs. No radio to call for back-up.
He tried to pick her up, but she was dead weight. He thought she was being funny or trying to resist. “C’mon,” he told her and dropped her. He checked her pulse, his mouth opening to a tiny O. Then he looked at me. He had a funny look in his eyes—confusion and maybe sympathy, but not all the way. He was young, probably new to the force, but not so new that he was unhardened or shocked.
He uncuffed her, and slipped them back on his belt. He rolled her over onto her back again, surprisingly gently. He didn’t know what else to do or how to handle the situation. Far off in the distance, the first faint sounds of gunfire rang out, the single reports of pistols and the rat-a-tat-tat of automatic weapons fire. He stared at me again before mounting his horse. His mouth opened, closed, and opened again. Then without a single word, he rode off.
I stayed on the ground until I no longer heard the galloping of hooves on concrete. Selene’s body was still, and I crawled to her, on my hands and knees. I was sobbing, yelling at her to come back to me. I cradled her, rocking back and forth with her corpse held tight against me.
She had died from what was euphemistically called “excited delirium.” It sounded a lot better than it actually was. It used to be a cute legally and medically aesthetic way to say somebody had overdosed on cocaine, but it had grown into a catch-all phrase used in autopsy reports for people who were Tasered to death. Selene’s panic had ratcheted up her catecholamine levels, and her blood pressure was high. Her fight-or-flight reflexes had increased her heart rate as she tried to get the officer’s help. Those things never mixed well with the introduction of sudden, intense jolts of electricity, and they combined to trigger cardiac dysrhythmia. She had gone into cardiac arrest and died.
That was when it all started to break down, when society started to crumble around us and the world changed. In the days and months that followed, reports trickled in, carried by word of mouth, about the lives lost in Hawaii in the first waves of the attack and the US carriers that were sunk off Pearl Harbor.
Downtown, a small sleeper cell had detonated a non-nuclear EMP bomb. Power went out, cars died, and people were trapped underground in immobile subway cars. The civilian infrastructure screeched to a halt. Internet servers went off-line, although the cybernetic implants in our heads and some of the newer peripheral devices were shielded well enough that they remained undamaged. With nothing to connect to, though, the chunks of metal and strings of wire were useless.
But all that was noise. For me, Selene was the first loss, the first victim. The world fell apart with her death, and the world was inextricably different because she was gone.
Chapter 6
The burlap bag was rough and itchy. It stank of sweat and copper and made my skin crawl. When they pulled it from my head, the sudden brightness stung my eyes. My eyelids closed in painful reflex, and purple shadows shot up against them. Brief people shapes, the glow of light, and shapes I hadn’t had time to process and recognize danced around me.
Slowly, I opened them, adjusting to the dim light. A single bare bulb hung overhead. I could hear the hum of a generator. The walls were bare drywall, chipped and stained.
My shoulders ached. My hands were cuffed tightly behind me, and the chain link had been woven through the slats of the chair’s back. My leg hurt as the morphine started to lose its grip. I’d bled through the gauze, and all the moving I’d done over the last few minutes had reopened the holes on either side of my thigh. Blood beaded and dripped, making little smacking noises on the concrete floor.
The man who had taken the sack off my head was already exiting, slamming the door shut behind him. It hit the frame with a heavy clang followed by the tinny click of a lock latching.
My back was to the door. Not a situation I particularly enjoyed. I wanted to see what—and who—was coming at me. This was part of the process, though, a way to amp up the anxiety, charge up the fear, and make me wonder.
The room was small. Not much to see. Not much to do but wait.
We had driven for maybe an hour, but that estimate was useless in determining where I was. They had driven in circles, changing up their route, and doubling back. We could have been back at the Bank of America for all I knew. But I figured that was a bit too humorous and a bit too ironic for these guys.
The dampener jammed into the side of my head had started chattering away during the drive. Somebody had been pinging my brain wirelessly, checking for traps, mining as much info out of me as they could. It had taken them awhile to crack the firewalls and memshells and work on defusing the digimines that checkered my neural weave. They were well trained and proficient, and their hard work overcame the technology and my patchwork security. They plundered as much as they could. They were no doubt busy reviewing and piecing together the data trove while I sat chained to a chair, guessing at what they knew or thought they knew.
The message was pretty simple. Lying was pointless because they’d siphoned off my entire life during the drive. The downloads wouldn’t be enough to prevent what was coming, though. Memory was subjective and deeply layered, but some finely tuned questions and proper motivation could
work together to create new angles on interesting answers.
They were waiting for the morphine to wear off a bit more before they got down to questioning me. They would want me pliable and in need, willing to barter information and answers for painkillers.
I knew the ploy: dope me up, get me feeling good, and get me to forget about the pain and used to feeling numb. Then they would let it wear off, let the pain come back in, and make me hurt. They would ask me questions, find ways to make me hurt in other ways or other places, and ask me the same questions in different ways before promising me more morphine and asking me more questions.
The interrogation would give their techies time to piece together the data dumps and work on comparing it against my answers, and then they would question me even harder, believing they had a more complete, but not quite full, picture from which to pry loose more information and more truthful answers. Then, maybe, they would reward me with a shot of morphine and start it all over again.
The walls were thick, but muffled screams made their way toward me from somewhere down the hall. The scare tactic didn’t work too well because the noise was blunted and dull. I could hardly hear it. Closer but still barely audible, voices came through the door. Their conversations were muted and indecipherable.
I wondered about this unit’s military bearing. The clean, fresh battle fatigues their commander wore struck me as strange, out of place. Where would militarized insurgents stuck behind enemy lines for years get fresh uniforms? Whoever they were, they weren’t local.
A number of active cells hiding out in the wastelands and demilitarized zones routinely threatened to topple the peace. The Northern Alliance, their allies, and the PRC were mutually agreed that these rogue factions were terrorists. Once upon a time, they might have been called heroes, before the war degenerated into the usual politics.
The politicians in charge, the ones who claimed they were solely responsible for spearheading the war against the PRC in the fight for California and much of the Western Seaboard, had quickly grown fatigued. The war took up too much bandwidth, and the constant reports of violence desensitized the public. Americans were quick to turn their fear and anger into confusion and apathy. Nobody had the patience for sustained combat. Not after the first year, definitely not after the second. Nobody had been satisfied with the slow campaign, and when the Pacific Rim Coalition found themselves unvanquished after days, weeks, and then months of fighting, much of America had given up hope. Our leaders had promised a swift resolution and a quick victory.
That didn’t happen.
A war-weary nation and its handwringing politicians quickly turned on its own people and chalked up California as a loss. The liberals cried and pointed fingers, refusing to believe they bore any of the fault. Tea Party conservatives shrugged off any responsibility and blamed Los Angeles for the PRC invasion, saying that the state’s liberal attitudes had angered God, and this was punishment. The porn industry and scores of violent TV shows, movies, and video games that had for so long corrupted and plagued American children, they said, were the cause for our exile. We were too liberal and too weak. We had been more concerned with having abortions and legalizing drugs, DRMR, and prostitution than with resisting the enemy.
Indifference became a national pastime, but it did not stop the war. It didn’t save New York or DC or halt the millions of deaths across the eastern front. It didn’t stop the militia uprisings. The PRC and their Russian and Iranian allies burned the White House to the ground. Their minor dictatorship wasn’t able to stop domestic terrorists from smuggling backpack nukes into the nation’s capital and wiping it off the map.
I remembered reading in high school that the average lifespan of a democracy is two hundred years. By the time America fell, the country had been well overdue for change. It had been even longer since a foreign army had set foot on US soil. Maybe we were overdue for a lot of things. Chaos reigned, and nobody knew who the enemy was. Militia groups struck out against the police, the Army, the National Guard, and the PRC along the western fronts. Terrorist cells and minor factions rose up to join the frenzy. UN Peacekeepers constantly found themselves under attack.
The military was ordered to pull out of California. The disorganization of their hasty withdrawal was infused with bitterness and disbelief. Entire units went AWOL, ignoring the winds of political change. They stayed behind to fight, to carry out the orders of a country that had given up and ceased to be.
The state’s borders were redrawn in a cordial agreement between the PRC and the Alliance, the de facto recognized government of choice. The governments reached mutual decisions, while many of the people did not. People like me, and those of us living in Echo Park, were remnants. We had no country, no homes. We were displaced exiles with nowhere to go. We could try to brave the DMZ that separated California and a pocket of Oregon from the rest of North America and maybe die in the desert, either from exposure or the military and militia groups that patrolled it, keeping the nation-states secure.
Plenty of organizations fancied themselves freedom fighters. Could be one of them that had me handcuffed to a chair with a bullet hole in my leg. I wasn’t quite convinced of that, though. So far, a certain level of equality had been present in the proceedings. Not exactly kindness, definitely not respect, it was at least a professionalism of sorts. Militias were more down and dirty. I didn’t think a militia would have bothered to wrap my leg or waste precious morphine on me. I wasn’t convinced they would have taken a prisoner.
No, these guys were military. This was all part of a technique. They were softening me up or trying to. But the real brutality would come soon, the kind that would put even the militias to shame.
The voices outside grew closer. Their words, while still muffled, became more pronounced. I could pick up syllables and emphases, but not the conversation itself.
The door lock clicked again. Its hinges were smooth and oiled, but the weight of the door carried it open and sent it thudding into the wall. The men who entered were quiet, and I had no idea how many were sneaking up behind me.
“Jonah Everitt,” one of them called to me. “I’m Sergeant Kaften.”
A face caught up with the voice, stepping in front of me. I recognized him from the bank—the big black guy that I had pegged for being in charge. Nice to know I was right about something.
I nodded to him curtly. “Hey, Sarge.”
He was dressed a bit more casually than he had been earlier, his torso covered in a brown military-issue T-shirt instead of the combat jacket he’d worn at the bank. His left arm was a robotic prosthesis, a gift of the once-great United States. It seemed to work as well as his organic right arm and had full range of motion. The midnight-blue color of the thick Kevlar shell and the heavily reinforced joints and points of articulation gave it away as military. Under the Kevlar was a complex mess of wires and EMP shielding encased in tough plastic. The limb was well-crafted, but inhuman. Like his real arm, the prosthetic was controlled by neural impulses so slight that he never really had to think about how to move it. As good as the real thing, but probably better in a lot of ways.
He grabbed my jaw between one large mechanical paw and turned my head roughly. The robotics gave him an incredible degree of strength. This was him trying to be gentle. He held my head at an uncomfortable angle, his fingers, cold and rough, poking at me painfully.
“That’s a nasty cut you got there.”
His thumb dug into the gash. The bullet wound to my leg had made me forget about the pain in my face and the shard of bone I had pulled out of my cheek.
He snapped his fingers and held out a hand. Somebody behind me handed him a brown bottle and a wad of cloth. He jammed the cloth against the mouth of the bottle, upended it, then jammed the cloth against my cheek. The cool burn was antiseptic, and the strong stink of alcohol invaded my nose. I winced, felt liquid trickle down the side of my face to pool between my neck and shirt collar before evaporating in the still air.
“How’s your
leg?”
“Not well enough for your hospitality. Check back later.”
He slapped my cheek, but not hard. The gesture had a hint of joviality to it, as if we were old buddies, and he smiled. He took a chair from another man behind me, opposite from whoever had handed him the bottle. He sat across from me, crossed his ankles, and tucked his legs under the chair as he leaned forward. The gesture was oddly prim, but I figured, don’t ask, don’t tell.
“Tell me about Samuel Hodgson.”
“Who?” I asked, genuinely confused. I didn’t know anybody by that name.
“What about Jaime Kristoff?”
I knew the game here. It wouldn’t matter if I answered truthfully or not. This was just an opening volley, and they would ask me the same question a thousand times in a hundred different ways before this was over. I knew my role here. I could tell him and then keep repeating myself over and over. Or I could deny, which was probably what he expected. Either way, I was in for a beating.
“I don’t know Jaime Kristoff.” I smiled to let him know I knew how this game was played. If I was right, he’d already had my memories vetted for traps and downloaded. He knew what I knew. But he was at least smart enough to doubt it—and too smart to assume that because he’d found them in my head they were automatically vouchsafed and valid memories.
“All right,” he said, sounding disappointed. He puffed his cheeks then blew out a strong, disgusting huff of breath into my face. He nodded, his eyes darting over my shoulder.
Behind me, something cool wrapped around my index finger at the first joint, just past the nail. There was a quick, tight pressure, and then it released. Stomping my legs, I screamed as the pain flooded through me.
Kaften tore the bandage from my leg, and the man behind me handed him the piece of finger they’d cut off. He jammed it into the bullet hole without ever breaking eye contact with me.
Convergence Page 7
