by Ted Weber
“Why?”
“Just ‘cause.”
Rat defense in hand, he knelt, took a breath, and crawled into the pipe’s continuation. He pushed himself, crawling as fast as he could, knees banging against the concrete.
After a few minutes, Charles squeaked, “Wait!”
Pel turned. Charles and Waylee were far behind. Oops. He waited for them to catch up, then resumed at a slower pace.
How did Homeland find us? Maybe someone turned them in. But who? Not Waylee, obviously. Not Dingo or M-pat—they did the dirty work, setting off the EMP and knocking out the guards. And they both had records. Kiyoko? She let herself get captured. But she wouldn’t turn in her own sister, that just wasn’t in her.
That left Shakti, as improbable as it seemed. “Waylee?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think Shakti could have turned us in?”
She coughed. “Are you fucking kidding me? We might as well ask if you did it. Just get us out of here. Please?”
She was right. One thing at a time. “It wasn’t me, obviously, or we’d have stayed at the house and got caught.”
“Just shut up.”
“Shakti’s no snitch,” Charles said quietly behind him.
How would you know? He decided not to pursue it, though.
The pipe went on and on, nothing but more dank concrete. Pel lost track of time. He could ask Waylee, but it didn’t matter. Maybe they wouldn’t find any bigger pipes. Wouldn’t the outfall be the biggest one, just like a stream network?
They came to another intersection. He saw a manhole overhead, but this time, the cross pipe was three feet wide, like the one they’d been following.
The manhole cover clanked.
“Car?” Waylee asked.
“Some kind of vehicle.”
It clanked again. So they were under a well-traveled street. “Let’s take a left here,” he said. “This’ll take us south of the interstate, maybe somewhere the cops won’t be looking.”
“And we can pop up and call for a pickup,” Waylee said.
“Yeah.”
Manholes appeared more frequently above the new pipe, which meant more opportunities to stand and rub their aching knees. It felt like they were making better progress, and could escape this abyss more easily.
The flashlight began to fade. I should have been counting manholes or something to know where we are. “Waylee,” he whispered. “Flashlight’s going. I need the data glasses back.”
“Why?”
“I’ll bring up a white screen on my comlink and set the brightness to max.”
“That’s not gonna do much. We should get out of here.”
“It’ll be enough with the low light app.”
“Alright.” Waylee passed his data glasses back via Charles.
“We’ll save yours to make a call when we go back up.”
When the flashlight died, Pel switched to the comlink. It gave out a tenth the brightness at best. With low light vision, he could see, but Waylee and Charles crawled in gloom. Waylee started breathing rapidly again. Please don’t lose control…
The pipe ran on. Every muscle in his body ached. His knees and hands burned with pain. The stink of dead things and chemicals, the refuse and pollution from Baltimore’s streets, settled into his nostrils and deep into his lungs. He could barely breathe, like there was no oxygen down here, only toxic gases. This was a bad idea. Better to live in prison than die down here. They won’t find our bodies until the next storm flushes us into the river.
He shook his head. Focus. You’re going into hysterics. Waylee and Charles are depending on you. One good thing about winter, the bacteria would be less active. And they’d made it this far without passing out.
At the next manhole, he glanced at the comlink’s power indicator. Half the bars left. “Waylee, want to lead?”
She coughed. “No thanks. I don’t want you guys staring at my ass for hours.”
He laughed. “You do have a motivating ass.”
She sniffled and wiped her eyes. “Get us out of here, Pel.”
He looked at Charles, who hadn’t spoken for quite a while. “Keep following me, and focus on the light. I won’t go any faster than you can.”
They both nodded.
He clapped Charles on the shoulder and squeezed Waylee’s hand. “Doing good so far. We’ll go as far as we can until we run low on power, then we’ll have to surface.”
He turned right at the next intersection, hoping to find an exit with minimal traffic. Hearing another clank, he turned again two intersections later.
When both the comlink and data glasses had dropped below 10% power, he stopped at the next manhole. “Not sure where we are, but we’ve been crawling for three hours. We’ve gotta be pretty far from the river.”
Waylee and Charles nodded.
Pel dropped the duffel bag and pocketed his comlink. He clambered up the rusty manhole rungs. At the top, he waited for the sound of cars driving over but didn’t hear anything. He pushed up on the cover but it was a lot heavier than he expected. He could barely budge it. Fuck.
“Need a hand?” Waylee said, her voice unsteady.
“Yeah, but how?” Only one person could stand on the rung.
She took a deep breath. “Give me the tire iron and I’ll stand below you and use that while you push with your hands. Charles, hold my feet so I don’t fall.”
Pel shrugged. Worth a try.
He placed his palms against the bottom of the cover. Waylee stood on the rung below him, pressed against his body, and jabbed the edge of the cover with the tire iron.
It was too awkward and too dark. The iron slipped and flew toward his face.
He swung his right forearm over and it hit there instead. “Watch it!”
“Sorry. I’m sorry. You alright?”
“Let’s try again. Stick the iron in the crack.” That’s what she said. He almost smiled. “Then we’ll try to pry it off.”
He pushed as hard as he could. A sliver of blinding daylight appeared. Waylee jabbed the flat end of the tire iron there, and shoved it through.
“Okay, now pull down.”
As Waylee levered the heavy cover up, he pushed it toward the side. They got it off the inner lip and resting partly on the pavement.
He saw a narrow arc of a two-lane street. A car approached. He ducked.
The car passed to the right of the manhole.
“Okay, we’re gonna have to climb out of here as fast as we can.” He waited until he couldn’t see any more cars, then helped Waylee push the cover to the side. Once he had enough room to stick his torso out of the hole, he had plenty of leverage to shove it the rest of the way off.
He jumped out. They were in a neighborhood of single-family homes. He had no idea where. No one visible. Waylee passed him the duffel bag. Then he grabbed her wrists and helped her out, and finally Charles.
They used the tire iron to wrestle the cover back in place, then walked briskly down the nearest side street. He led them to a sheltered spot between a garage and a wooden fence.
Waylee looked at her navigation display. “I can’t believe we crawled that far.”
“Call J-Jay for a pickup,” Pel said. “Don’t forget to run the ID spoofer, and don’t mention any names or…”
Waylee narrowed her eyes at him.
“I know, just being cautious.”
As Waylee made her call, he glanced at the street. What if Shakti told the cops about our hideouts? They could be setting a trap. Waylee knew her friends, though. She didn’t trust people blindly.
He removed the nearly-dead batteries from his data glasses and comlink. He’d installed spoofing software on all their comlinks, but wasn’t sure how well it would fool Homeland Security. Best to ditch the links altogether, Waylee’s included, before they reached J-Jay and Bess’s house.
What to do next, he had no idea. The hideouts were temporary. What then?
13
Waylee
Grime cascad
ed down Waylee’s body and circled the drain of her former drummer’s shower. J-Jay had played in Dwarf Eats Hippo for three years, and even lived in the band house for a while, before he lost his edge and turned to playing jazz standards. “Chance to make a living at this,” he’d claimed.
Picking them up from their tunnel exit more than compensated for selling out, though. Risking arrest instead of collecting a $100,000 reward certainly wasn’t selling out.
J-Jay and his girlfriend Bess had given them new clothes and thrown away their storm drain-fouled garments. Bess promised to remake her hair after the shower—replace the red, white and blue cornrows with something more discreet. Waylee didn’t know how she’d repay them, but she’d try.
They’d stay in West Baltimore until midnight or so, then J-Jay would drop them off at her friends’ townhouse up in Charles Village. It would be safer there. Artesia and Fuera were plugged into the People’s Party and its allies, and they had a high-bandwidth Comnet connection – although Pel had been paranoid and wiped their comlinks and data glasses, then thrown the husks down a storm drain.
The shower door opened. Pel stood there, naked and erect. His eyes wandered across her body. “You’re so hot.”
Normally sights like that set her on fire. But she felt nothing. “Not now.”
He entered the shower anyway. He kissed her neck, then cupped her left breast.
She planted a hand against his chest and pushed him away. She started to say something but tears came instead.
He wrapped his hands around hers, his excitement fading. “It’s okay. We’re safe.”
“What about our lives being over forever?”
He hesitated. “I don’t know about forever…” He picked up the washcloth from the shower floor and ran it up her arm. “Important thing is, we escaped. We’re not in prison.”
She pulled her arm away before he could reach her chest again. She didn’t want him trying to seduce her.
His face tensed with irritation. “Just trying to help you wash. And I need a shower too. We can save water this way.”
Not that tired line again. She turned off the water. “I’m done.”
He raised his eyebrows at her. “It doesn’t look like it.”
“They’ll have to clean the house after we leave,” she said. “A handful of skin cells, and they’ll have our DNA and pin J-Jay and Bess—”
“Yes, I told them how to destroy DNA. So I wanted to tell you, Dingo and Shakti are safe. You’ve gotta see the video he uploaded.”
That was good news at least. “I can’t believe you thought my best friend ratted us out.”
His face fell. “I was just going through the possibilities…”
“What happened to my sister?”
He stared at his feet. “Don’t know yet. The police have M-pat. I assume they’re questioning Kiyoko.”
“We’ve gotta help her, she’s just a little girl inside.”
He looked up. “We will. And she’s not just a little girl. Give her some credit.”
She turned away, not wanting to cry in front of him. She couldn’t hold out much longer.
His voice hardened. “I’m trying to help. None of this was my idea.”
Why did he have to say that? She whirled. “Stop being a baby. Just leave me alone.”
His eyes narrowed, he muttered something, and stormed out of the bathroom.
Waylee collapsed to the shower floor and lost control, blinded by tears, gulping for air.
* * *
M’patanishi
M-pat sat cuffed in the back seat of a parked BPD car while the feds busted into the band house. Most of the local cops had chased after Dingo.
The boy wasn’t right in the head, but sometimes he stood like a giant. He’d disrupted the siege long enough for the others to escape. At least for a while. They’d never lose those drones in an RV.
M-pat leaned back on the hard plastic seat and prayed silently, something he rarely did outside of church. Lord God, please help my friends escape. They are righteous folk, even if they don’t exactly follow Your path. Amen. He wasn’t really a proper Christian either, not like Latisha, though he’d come a long way since his corner days.
He could have escaped too during all the chaos, but there was no point. They’d have to release him anyway. The po-boys didn’t seem to suspect he had anything to do with Charles, just cuffing him as an irritant. Baltimore cops never gave more than one warning. And they got extra agitated when they found his Glock.
“Got a permit for that,” he’d explained.
He might as well have been parlaying with the moon.
M-pat watched two FBI agents and a pair of armored stormtroopers haul Kiyoko out of the house. They threw her into a black SUV. Poor girl.
Two po-boys, both of them rookie age, hopped in the front of the squad car. “They read you your rights?” one asked through the thick glass between them.
“Yeah. Now let’s get this nonsense over with.”
A few minutes later they arrived at the Southwest District station. It looked like a brick schoolhouse with square concrete columns in front. When they threw up these institutions last century, they must have hired a low-bid architect with one design and no imagination.
M-pat had been here a dozen times as a youth. The booking room hadn’t changed, all white and gray and flickering fluorescents. No air flow to speak of, and it smelled like sweat and stale coffee.
His escorts steered him to a familiar booking officer on the other side of a steel grate, then took off the cuffs. The booking officer, probably past retirement now, smirked. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”
“Been walking the straight path,” M-pat said. “This here’s uncalled for.”
The officer looked unimpressed. “Empty your pockets. You know the drill.”
M-pat handed over his wallet and comlink and everything else but his shirt, pants, and socks. They patted him down again, then took digital mug shots and fingerprints.
An overweight detective wearing a Ravens tie met him in Interview Room 2 and read his Miranda rights again.
No, he wasn’t willing to answer their questions without an attorney present. “I wanna call a lawyer.”
The detective sighed, then led him to a small desk with a landline and a cardboard box full of lawyers’ business cards.
M-pat searched through the box but couldn’t find the number he wanted. In fact, the selection was pretty limited. “Can I see the city directory?”
“What for?”
“So I can pick my own lawyer rather than the scammers who pay you to put their cards in that box.”
The fat detective frowned. “You’d better be careful making an accusation like that.”
“You gonna honor my Constitutional rights?”
His eyes narrowed, then he brought over a tablet and opened a search program. “Who are you looking for?”
“Councilman Cutler. He’ll straighten this out.”
* * *
Charles Village neighborhood, Baltimore
Pelopidas
Pel followed J-Jay, Waylee, and Charles into Artesia and Fuera’s well-kept townhouse a few blocks east of Johns Hopkins University, where the two married African-American women worked as sociology post-docs. Dingo and Shakti ran to greet them as soon as they entered.
Pel put down his duffel bag and exchanged West Baltimore handshakes with Dingo. “Nice work. You totally saved our ass.”
Dingo grinned. “I sure monkeyed the po-boys this time.”
Shakti, wearing the yellow and red sari she’d donned for work, hugged Waylee. “Do I know you?”
J-Jay’s girlfriend had replaced Waylee’s bright cornrows with jet-black strands that hung straight down and still smelled like peroxide.
“Pretty boring, yeah,” she said in a quiet voice. Her eyes were still red and puffy from her crying fit. “Glad you’re safe.”
Shakti held her tight. “You too.”
Pel glanced at her. No cops here to greet t
hem. He felt ashamed for scapegoating Shakti. Truth was, their enemies were just too powerful. They never should have taken them on.
“My video’s going viral,” Dingo said. “A hundred thousand views and climbing fast.”
Pel turned back to him. “I liked the split screen with three camera angles. But it ends with the car spinning, then it’s over. If you hadn’t messaged me, I might have thought you died.”
“Yeah, car lost power when I hit that building. Maybe the second death of Dick Clark explains its appeal.”
That. “I thought you burned your mask. The rest of us did.”
His eyes dropped. “Nah, I thought it would come in handy.” He looked up again. “And it did. Did you like the band plug?”
“Thanks, but that’s even more evidence against us. Why don’t you give me the mask so I can burn it?” The townhouse was old and had a fireplace.
“Fair enough.” He started to pull off his backpack.
Pel threw up a hand. “Later.”
Shakti and Waylee ended their long hug. Shakti looked down. “So I got a message from the boss. Dingo and I are fired.”
Waylee’s eyes drooped. “Sorry. I…”
“Shitty job anyway. Mostly ad design, and no benefits.” Her voice turned Caribbean. “But how am I to register voters when we on the run, and what ’bout our fundraisers we got planned?”
Artesia and Fuera interrupted, taking turns hugging Waylee.
“Thank you so much for putting us up,” Waylee said.
Artesia patted her back. “Of course. Least we can do after you hosted our wedding reception.”
Waylee waved Charles over. “This is Charles. I hope it’s alright if he stays too.”
Artesia held out a ring-covered hand. “So you’re the so-called cyberterrorist the feds are looking for?”
Charles hesitated, then shook her hand. “It was just a prank. All I did was add a message to the MediaCorp news feed about a zombie outbreak in DC.”
“Too bad it was fake,” Dingo said. “Would be bad-ass, seeing all them DC lobbyists ripped apart by zombies, then turning and attacking Congress.”
Pel shook Artesia’s hand. “Thanks for letting us stay. Charles is no terrorist, but he’s a computer genius and he’s gonna help us get our message out.”
