They took the next left, pumping their arms and legs past a long wooden fence line that was bedecked with tattered posters lauding revolutionary heroes for having turned in all manner of spies, denialists, racists, transphobes, and whatever “cispigs” were. The fence gave way to a three story red brick building, or rather, the empty shell of one. A street side door was off its hinge and Turnbull darted in. They plowed down a long hallway, past mostly empty but sometimes occupied rooms, breathing in great lungfuls of the fetid, urine-tinged air. The few inhabitants they passed simply stared at them dumbly for a moment, then returned to their sordid business.
They burst out the other side through another broken door, moving south toward Sunset through a narrow alley. Junior glanced behind them – nothing, no one.
Turnbull led him on several more zigs and zags, until they were along Sunset at the edge of a large parking lot anchored by an old Ralphs supermarket that was now a “People’s Food Center.” The lot was bereft of cars, but full of people. They were gathering around the front entrance not in the usual sullen yet orderly queue, but in a milling, seething semi-circle.
“Come on,” Turnbull said, leading junior toward the crowd.
A thin, reedy voice rose above the angry murmur. “The rations have changed. Series B is half of what it was yesterday. That’s how it is. It isn’t my decision!”
“Fuck you, man. I want my rice!” someone yelled. Turnbull and Junior wended their way into the crowd; they could feel the unrest.
“It’s the rules!” shouted the sweaty manager at the semi-circle of angry people that was closing in on him. “To get in, you need to show me your Series B rat cards! You need twenty points to buy. Twenty!”
“That’s bullshit,” screamed a dark haired woman of maybe thirty, holding a crying kid of maybe four.
“You even have food in there today?” shouted someone else.
“Yes, but you need twenty Series B points to even come in!”
A large gentleman in a blue work shirt stepped forward. The perspiring manager stopped and looked up, just as the large gentleman grabbed his collar and threw him to the side. The manager crashed into a cardboard cutout of a smiling family carrying overflowing grocery bags beneath the words “THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC PRACTICES FOOD JUSTICE.”
“We’re getting us some motherfucking food, motherfucker,” he said, striding into the store, followed by the crowd.
“Come on,” Turnbull said, looking back behind him but not seeing anything. They entered the store. It was oddly hot – it had never occurred to Junior that it would not be like the air conditioned markets at home. It was also dim – the brownout was in effect and the sputtering portable generator echoing through the cavernous interior only powered the refrigerators.
The workers, all in white aprons, saw the mass of humanity flooding in and quickly made the calculation that if one can’t beat them, one should join them. They turned and rushed down the aisles to gather what they could for themselves.
What jarred Junior most was not the mass of agitated humanity streaming through the door toward the aisles. It was the store itself – the lack of any kind of color or advertising or even endcap displays. A good portion of the shelves were empty, and the rest were piled with a few dozen muted cans or packages. Back home, at an HEB or Kroger’s, besides having cool air circulating and bright lights, there would be displays, colorful ads, and brand signage. Here, none of that – there was so little, there was no need to advertise at all.
They rushed with the crowd, finding themselves in the personal care products aisle. A hundred or so eight-inch boxes of what appeared to be toothpaste sat on a middle shelf; the brand was in Chinese, but there was a smiling Asian woman showing gleaming white teeth that revealed the nature of the product to those not fluent in Mandarin. But there seemed to be no toothbrushes in stock.
Further down, there was a good deal of “Worker’s Friend” deodorant – just one brand, with lots of empty shelf space around it. One of the People’s Republic’s basic premises was that its residents should not be forced to make difficult choices, not between body odor reduction preparations, and not between leaders.
“Did you see someone following us?” Junior asked, catching his breath. More were piling in through the front doors as passersby saw that it was open season on the food center. They stood against the shelves and people passed by them as well as the unwanted toothpaste and deodorant. It was clear the score was the food; now there was yelling and fighting echoing up from the parallel aisles. A white puff of dust – flour? – arose one aisle over, followed by a stream of vicious obscenities screamed by what sounded like an elderly woman.
“I don’t know,” Turnbull said. “But it felt wrong to me. You know how in bad movies they say it’s too quiet? It felt like that. Anyway, we can slip out the back, lose anyone following us.”
“What’s in those packs, man?” asked a leering little guy in his twenties standing in the middle of the aisle. Behind him, three friends, two of them tall, but all of them thin, like most blue staters. One of the tall guys had a daisy tattooed on his left check – either he lost a bet or had jumped into Los Angeles’s least threatening gang.
“Just move on,” Junior said, annoyed.
“I asked you what’s in the bag, bitch,” the little guy said.
“One of my guns,” Turnbull said. The little guy looked puzzled.
“Here’s my other one.” Turnbull’s Glock 19 was out and pointed at the little guy’s forehead. “If you even think – not that you’re big thinkers – that I won’t splatter your fucking brains all over this place, you are dumber than you look. And I seriously doubt that’s possible. So you and the rest of the human centipede need to about face and get the fuck out of here, or I will drop all four of you, and no one will give your twitching bodies a second look while I piss on them.”
The little guy’s jaw started to quiver, like he was about to say something.
“Nope, don’t talk. Turn around, and run. Three.”
The little guy looked puzzled.
“Two.”
He stood there, confused.
“Dipshit, when I get to zero, I’m shooting you. One.”
The four stepped backwards, then turned and ran out of the aisle and off to the left somewhere.
“I thought we were a second from a clean-up on aisle five,” Junior observed.
“Let’s go out the back and –“
Sirens. The PSF was entering the parking lot in force. Turnbull stepped up to the head of the aisle to get a better view. There were at least a half-dozen cruisers piling in, stopping around an unmarked Ford that was already parked there. Two men in plainclothes were standing by it.
“They’re going to need riot cops,” Junior said.
“I’ve seen that Ford before. They’re not here for the riot,” Turnbull said as he was hit from the side by the Daisy-faced punk and sent sprawling.
Junior pivoted as the other tall one rushed him, grabbing the punk’s filthy t-shirt and swinging him around so that his body weight carried him past and into the shelves.
The little one charged Junior, a silver flash of steel in his hand. The knife sliced into Junior’s left arm, sending a jolt of fire up the nerves. Junior struck the little guy’s jaw hard with a right cross, and felt the teeth underneath give way and shift from the blow.
“Get the gun, his gun!” the fourth shouted at Daisy-Face and he grappled on the ground with Turnbull. The guy was tall but light; Turnbull was tall and heavy with muscle mass. Still on his back, he grabbed the punk’s collar with his left hand then reached across the tatted up face with his right, grabbing a hunk of hair and an ear on the right side of Daisy-Face’s head and pulling it hard across into the floor. Turnbull threw pulled the quivering thug off him and sat up. The cheerleader looked on slack-jawed as Turnbull reached under his shirt to produce the Glock.
“Zero,” he said, then he shot the cheerleader in the face. The thug’s head jolted backwards under a fine
pink mist; on the ceiling, the round kicked up a bit of dust where it hit. The thug fell, and only at that moment the looters seemed to notice what was happening. There was a momentary pause, and then the frenzy the store was already in kicked up exponentially.
Junior slammed the stunned little guy’s head into an empty shelf; he fell to his knees. The other big one hit Junior from behind. There was a loud blast – a gunshot – and the big guy paused for a moment, confused. Junior drew his Glock and shoved it against the punk’s abdomen.
“Wait!” the punk screamed. Junior pulled the trigger. Adios, liver. The punk crumpled.
Turnbull was on his feet. The store was utter chaos, and outside the cops were taking cover. He briefly considered taking some shots at them to suppress them, but he realized that would invite a massacre when they returned fire. To his right he noticed Daisy-Face trying to stand and casually shot him through the back of the head. His nose came apart as the round exited and splattered against a poster sternly warning that “RATION CARD CHEATS ARE FOOD CRIMINALS!”
Junior was breathing hard. The little one was on his knees in the aisle, drooling blood.
“Kill that piece of shit and let’s go,” Turnbull said, sprinting down the aisle.
Junior shot the little one in the face and followed, dodging the looters, and heading toward the warehouse in back.
They got out through the loading dock, blending in with the mass of humanity carrying off whatever they could hold. A woman juggled a half dozen cartons of milk, dropping one, two, three of them before she got to the edge of the parking lot. Another tripped, sending a dozen cans of beans scattering across the pavement. For some reason, an elderly man was making off with the mop and a bucket the food center used to clean up spills.
They made their way out of the lot before the PSF surrounded the place. Even as they kept going they could hear shouts and gunfire from behind them. They kept to alleys and passed through abandoned buildings and yards as best they could, avoiding the main streets. They saw cruisers pass, but managed to take cover; no one bothered them and no one caught Turnbull’s eye. Exploiting his counter-surveillance training, he doubled-back, periodically rushed ahead, and generally zig-zagged his way west. The half-hour walk instead took them four hours to get to “TRISTAR FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC AUTO CARE” located on a side street off La Brea. There was one car out front, a Fiat from the 1970s, and it was on blocks.
They did not go right up to it. Turnbull positioned Junior to observe the front as he walked around a one block perimeter. Finding a good location on a porch of an abandoned townhouse, he sat and watched the rear of the building for about an hour. There was a fair amount of foot traffic into the convenience mart next door, but nothing into the repair shop. Yet it was obviously occupied; he could see vague movements through the filthy windows.
After surveying the surrounding area, Turnbull was fairly satisfied that the repair shop was not under surveillance. He could still be wrong, in which case he would be dead meat, but he was reasonably certain and that was the best he would get. He went back to where Junior waited and gave him his pack to watch. Then he headed over to the repair shop, knocked on the front door, and disappeared inside.
Junior waited for ten minutes, becoming more and more restless. His arm hurt where the punk cut him. He was almost ready to investigate when Turnbull appeared at the doorway and waved him over. He came as quickly as he could carrying the two packs.
The repair shop was dark, and a generator whirred somewhere out where the lifts were. The front door opened into a kind of waiting area with ancient vinyl bench seats. An office was to the left, piled with papers. To the right was a surprisingly compact work area; a yellow Volkswagen Jetta from the early 2000s was hoisted up, its transmission on the cement floor below. A black Lexus from the 2010s was on the floor at the far end. Its windows were slightly tinted, not so much to be noticeable, but enough to obscure the view of the curious.
Turnbull stood with a black-bearded man in a silvery-blue jumpsuit. The name tag said “Jackson” – evidently this was their host.
“You need better clothes,” Jackson said. “I can do that too. I’ve got a nice selection.”
“Where?” asked Junior, puzzled.
“Downstairs.”
The stairway down was hidden by a large, wheeled Snap-On Tools cabinet. Jackson pushed it aside and they descended. The basement area was about as large as the work space upstairs, but was divided with wood walls. There were racks of clothing in one space, a work table with lights and a computer set up in another – the forgery area. A third held sheet metal presses, lathes and drills.
“You make your own auto parts?” asked Junior.
“Sometimes,” said Jackson. “Mostly, we make guns. We can do a couple of STEN submachine guns a day. Real simple. That’s how the British designed them, so they could sub-contract the work out to local metal shops during World War Two.”
“How about bullets?” asked Turnbull.
“Harder, now that Mexico built the wall to secure the border. We also get some from the reds. But mostly, we make our own.” He pointed to a reloader. “Getting the propellant and primers is pretty easy. If you have connections you can get most anything. We get the brass from PSF training ranges. They make their people collect the shells at the training ranges, turn it in, account for it, and then we buy it through the back door.”
“So,” said Turnbull. “Will we be good to go by tomorrow?”
“Yeah, if you have the money.”
“I have the money.”
“Well, I got a guy coming in tonight. He’ll do your papers up, get them entered in the PSF system. You should be able to cross into the Secured Zone no problem.”
“You got us wheels?”
“See that Lexus upstairs? Sweet. And no trackers. I reprogrammed the GPS myself so it can’t send.”
“Gas?”
“Full tank.”
“Sounds like we’re good to go,” said Turnbull. “Any loose ends?”
“My arm,” Junior said.
“Yeah, we need a place we can fix him up and where we can crash.”
“Got those too. I got anything you need, as long as you got the money.”
“Shit,” cried Junior, pulling back his arm. Turnbull locked it down to the table and pushed the needle through his skin again, then through the outer side of the wound and pulled the suture tight.
“Next time, don’t get cut.”
“Oh, okay. Sounds like a plan,” Junior replied, annoyed. Turnbull handed him the rubbing alcohol.
“Since you’re such a baby, you can pour it on yourself.” Turnbull got up and lay down in his cot. A stylish grey suit hung on the wall next to him, selected from Jackson’s inventory.
Junior continued cleaning up the knife wound. It was one of the power hours, so the TV was on. On the news, they were announcing the widespread public joy at the new and improved ration allocations – apparently the populace was thrilled to be getting less. Turnbull changed the channel to People’s Court. But this was not the old People’s Court where quarter wits argued over who committed what petty tort against whom. Here, some poor, pale, middle-aged schlub was dragged before a jeering audience of mouth-frothing community college students and accused by a shrieking, teary-eyed creature of “microaggressing me as a trans person of color by invoking his male gaze.” Seated in a chair center stage and flanked by two PSF thugs, the terrified protagonist stared in horror as his accuser fell to her knees wailing “You are eye-raping me!”
After ten minutes of this, the crowd declared him guilty by acclamation – he never said a word – and the announcer appeared on camera to announce that “Justice was done and always will be done to hate criminals, deniers, racists and economic criminals! Long live the battle against rape culture!”
“I don’t get it,” Junior said, dabbing his wound with an alcohol-infused cotton ball. “Why it’s still a rape culture if they’ve been in charge of their own country for a decade? Doesn’t
that say something about the People’s Republic?”
“You’re applying facts and evidence and logic to it,” Turnbull said, turning off the tube. “None of that matters. Nothing matters. It’s all a lie. It’s all about power. That whole kangaroo court thing, that wasn’t about who was guilty or innocent of what, but about who gets to use the power. Now, those college students are going to leave there and go back to their shitty, cold dorms and be back to having no power again. But for a little while, there in that studio, the people who really have power lent them some power for a little while. And they took it out on that poor guy. He’s probably off in some rehabilitation camp learning how everything bad that ever happened to anyone was his fault.”
“This place is crazy.”
“No,” Turnbull said. “It’s not crazy. It’s the opposite. There may not seem to be any rhyme or reason for what’s happening, but there is. Like I said, it’s all about power. Pay off this group, let that group have some latitude, then balance it against another group. It’s a balancing act. The problem is sometimes, in a balancing act, you can lose your balance and it all comes crashing down.”
“You think we’ll find her tomorrow when we go to UCLA?”
“I don’t know. I’m still wondering how they picked up our scent and followed us to the food center.”
“Do you think they know why we’re here?”
Turnbull lay back on his pillow. “I don’t know. But if they do, then tomorrow they’ll be waiting for us.”
10.
Martin Rios-Parkinson stood in front of his mirror and scrutinized his haircut as he listened to the report over his cell phone. The corner of his mouth trembled, half fury, half fear.
“We would not be in this situation if you had ensured the loyalty of your people,” he said. “I do not need to remind you that we must recover the hard drive. And if we do not, it is on you.”
“I understand,” replied the reedy voice on the other end. An incompetent, but one department had to have a gender non-binary head and xe was the best one available. That was the problem – there were always considerations beyond competence.
People's Republic Page 11
