The Robin Hood Thief
H.C.H. Ritz
Contents
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Prologue
45 Days
44 Days, 16 Hours
44 Days, 8 Hours
44 Days, 6 Hours, 18 Minutes
43 Days, 16 Hours
43 Days, 14 Hours
42 Days
41 Days
40 Days, 14 Hours
40 Days, 5 Hours
30 Days
29 Days, 12 Hours
29 Days, 6 Hours
28 Days, 18 Hours
28 Days, 12 Hours
27 Days
26 Days
25 Days
24 Days
20 Days, 6 Hours
20 Days, 3 Hours
19 Days
18 Days
17 Days
14 Days
13 Days
12 Days
10 Days
9 Days, 15 Hours
9 Days, 14 Hours, 48 Minutes
8 Days
7 Days
5 Days, 16 Hours
5 Days, 13 Hours
4 Days
3 Days
2 Days, 16 Hours
2 Days, 14 Hours, 24 Minutes
2 Days, 14 Hours, 2 Minutes
2 Days, 13 Hours, 36 Minutes
2 Days, 10 Hours
Zero Days
Dear America
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Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by H.C.H. Ritz
Recommended: The Year of the Hydra
Recommended: Spindown
About Grey Gecko Press
To my mother, Janet
Who is, of course, the best mom in the whole world
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Prologue
When Helen M. Dawson daydreamed, it was always about being a hero. Not the superhero kind, with a cape—that wasn’t the right sort of dream for a practical person like Helen—but the kind who had money. As soon as she learned the meaning of the word philanthropist, that was what she wanted to be when she grew up. To have the luxury of generosity.
Such a state seemed—not mythical, for other people possessed it—but unattainable. She never had a friend who was wealthy. And as she got older, things got worse. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer.
Inflation stagnated, but so did wages. Environmental refugees heading north swelled the US population, Congress swept aside the remnants of the safety net like strands of a rotten cobweb, and the Supreme Court gutted the bankruptcy codes and allowed imprisonment for default on debts for the first time in two hundred years. The glitterati climbed ever higher and pulled the ladder up after them. By the 2040s, even the lowest rung looked unreachable.
But still Helen dreamed.
When she grew up, she daydreamed on her daily commute to work. She would have done so anyway, but the dreams let her cope with the world that she saw outside her car windows, especially the throngs of homeless and impoverished people begging on the sidewalks and medians.
One time, while she was still young enough to be naive, she was stopping at a light when a man in a dirty white shirt leaped in front of her car. There was a thump, and blood splashed up over the hood onto the windshield. From under the car, he screamed hoarsely and begged for help.
She got out of her car, stunned and sick.
The man cradled red-soaked arms tightly in his lap, sobbing. He wouldn’t let her see. “Just give me some money to go to the doctor,” he pleaded. “A hundred dollars, something. Please!”
While impatient drivers honked their horns and shouted behind her, she used her smartphone—it was that long ago—to transfer two hundred dollars to his phone. Then he struggled to his feet and disappeared into the press of the crowd.
She went into work shaken, horrified, afraid that he would call the police, press charges, sue. But when she told the story to her coworkers, they told her that she’d been scammed. The blood was fake. The man was fine.
She was dismayed, but by the end of the day, she convinced herself that everyone had to make a living somehow, and that was how he made his. It was a difficult world. A difficult time. She didn’t have two hundred dollars to spare, of course—no one she knew did—but that was life.
Then, somehow, twenty years went by, all of them spent working in the nonprofit world, all of them spent striving to help. Twenty years of discovering how pointless it could be. Some people didn’t want to be helped, and others couldn’t be.
She saw coworkers turn jaded and cold. But for Helen, twenty years of being confronted with reality only strengthened her commitment. If it was easy, it wouldn’t be heroic.
So she daydreamed. She fantasized about having so much money that the next time someone leapt in front of her car and pretended to be hurt, she could just go out there and help him up. “It’s okay,” she could tell him. “I know you’re having a tough time. How much do you need to make it through this week?”
And she could give him the money. He’d be amazed. He’d give her a God bless you and run off into the crowd before she could change her mind.
At times, she sensed hints of ego in these daydreams, wanting to be the one who helped. She thought about that a lot, because it was important to her. She didn’t want it to be about ego. Even if maybe it was, a little tiny bit.
45 Days
Helen had not fallen asleep in eight days.
She waited with a hundred other people at the diagnostic machines at Florida Hospital Orlando, in lines that snaked through the dingy, unclean room. Two hours passed while she waited for the MDRI machine, and then an hour and a half while she waited for the DCAT machine.
Not that it mattered. The heavy, suffocating fatigue rendered time a meaningless blur.
Three weeks ago, she’d noticed only routine sleeplessness plus some odd muscle spasms. But every over-the-counter medication had failed to help her sleep. And then came the heart palpitations. And the anxiety.
And then her pupils permanently shrank to tiny pinpoints.
Every time she caught sight of those unnatural eyes in a mirror, her stomach did a slow flip of misery and fear. They whispered to her that this wasn’t ordinary insomnia, but something new and malevolent.
She knew from some news article years ago that people subjected to intense sleep deprivation, such as military recruits, would fall asleep within seconds once given the chance. They suffered intense sleepiness. Helen was unutterably, unendurably tired, but falling asleep was no longer a possibility. It was like the part of her brain that governed such things had simply ceased to function.
Instead, she felt wakeful, restless—even driven. She couldn’t keep her eyes closed for longer than a moment—but neither could she hold them open for long. Open for an instant…closed for a moment… open again… closed again… a pattern without ceasing for eight days, in relentless purgatory.
The fatigue was a heavy gray blanket over her, weighing down her limbs and dulling all her senses. Her mental state was one drawn-out and drowning plea for release: God, let me sleep. Just let me sleep.
Helen had arrived at the dark, outdated ER just after lunch, knowing how long the wait for the diagnostic machines would be and hoping others had come in the early morning.
Signs directed incoming patients to the triage kiosks. At Helen’s kiosk, the programmed hologram, a female with glasses and brunette hair in a bun, blinked in and out of functionality, but he
r speech was unnecessary anyway. Everyone already knew what she would say: that emergency rooms in public hospitals like this one were obligated to provide emergency care to indigent applicants, but only if they might die without it. The holograms invited those who weren’t that sick yet to return once they were.
They left unsaid the fact that, given the overpopulation and the shortage of health care workers, indigent applicants who qualified for care might still die before they received it. Whereas the ultrawealthy went to private clinics that offered immediate care for every sniffle and cough. There was nothing between the two extremes.
As the brunette woman directed, Helen pressed a finger in the hollow of the triage kiosk for a pinprick blood draw, then typed her symptoms on a worn keyboard: Severe insomnia. Heart palpitations. Drowsiness and fatigue. Anxiety. Constricted pupils. Muscle spasms.
Moments later, the machine informed Helen, in erratic and indifferent tones, that she qualified for emergency care, and relief warred with a hollow fear that grew in Helen’s stomach.
Now, three and a half hours later, the soft programmed voices emitting from the diagnostic machines blended with the news coming from the monitors hung at regular intervals, many of the screens not working or with half their pixels burned out.
Helen’s heart pounded in her ears and chest, as it had for days now.
She double-checked her e-paper—the new version of what they used to call a smartphone. The ultra-thin, hard, plastic-infused glass unfolded along pre-determined lines and snapped into place in the desired size of the moment.
Currently, it was at memo pad size, and when Helen pressed the button on the edge to wake it up, it read, “DCAT machine A.” An electronic diamond code appeared next. The diagnostic machine would read the code and apply the proper screening.
As she waited, a reporter from LSTV spoke from a monitor just above Helen’s head. Something about the continually encroaching sea coasts. The city of Houston was pushing an initiative to relocate its eastern half. Galveston and New Orleans and a hundred smaller cities were already lost to the sea.
Helen unfolded her e-paper to paperback size and tried to read a book she’d checked out from the library.
She realized soon that she was reading the same page over and over, none of the words sinking in. She turned the device off.
The line inched forward. At long last, only four people stood between Helen and the DCAT machine. A large ring extended from a pedestal. It split in the center and opened to release its latest victim.
Most of the people in line were on their Earworms—tiny wearable internet devices. A stem fit along the temple, counterweighted behind the ear with a built-in speaker, and a crystal at the tip projected holographic images directly into the pupil. They were among the more expensive gadgets, and Helen had saved up for two years to get one for her daughter, Mandy.
Thinking about her eighteen-year-old daughter made Helen’s stomach clench with anxiety. She couldn’t afford to be seriously ill. She needed to be there to help her daughter finish out her retail management job training program and find work—and above all, help her avoid debt that could get her imprisoned.
The person in front of her stepped into the DCAT ring. Helen’s heartbeat jumped up again. The diagnostic process frightened her. What if it was bad news? Or, worse, what if they couldn’t help her? God, that was a horrible thought.
She shifted her purse to the other shoulder. She folded her e-paper to notepad size and it automatically flipped to her notes. She had a to-do item written down: Dog food. She needed to get dog food when she got done here.
Anger tempted, but she was just too tired. This was a recurring fight with her daughter: Mandy was supposed to be responsible for the short, stout, blond mutt, and yet Helen always ended up buying and setting out the dog food.
It was Helen’s turn at the machine. Whether she wanted it to be or not.
She stepped up to the screen and scanned the diamond code on her slip of paper.
“It’s a brain scan for Helen M. Dawson,” said the avatar—a blonde woman this time. “Is that correct?”
“Yes,” Helen said, probably louder than was necessary.
The ring split and opened and Helen stepped in.
A bright light came on and some interior part of the machine whirred and spun around her. Something buzzed inside the lower parts of the machine.
Then it stopped. The machine’s ring lowered and opened. Helen stepped out and looked for the report machine.
In line there, she fought to keep her burning, exhausted eyes open. Or maybe she fought to keep them closed. Who could tell anymore.
“Results for Dawson, Helen.”
Her eyes flew open and she stepped up to the kiosk. She tapped the Accept button and the machine spat out a short piece of paper. She read it as she walked back toward the stairs.
Sporadic fatal insomnia (sFI). No treatment modalities with statistical improvement of mortality available at this time. Based on degeneration of thalamus, prognosis three to six months. Go to pharma machine and scan diamond codes to request medications.
She stopped her feet from moving toward the stairs.
Sporadic fatal insomnia? That didn’t even sound real. It sounded like a joke. And fatal? How could insomnia possibly be fatal?
Three to six months?
She felt as if someone had punched her hard in the stomach.
She got out her e-paper, snapped it into half-sheet size, and took a snapshot of the words to search on. The first result was scientific.
Sporadic Fatal Insomnia. Extremely rare and invariably fatal neurodegenerative disease characterized by the accumulation of a misfolded prion protein in brain matter. One of the least common human prion diseases. Characterized by disrupted sleep and dsyfunction in motor functioning and autonomic responses.
Invariably fatal.
Her heart beat so hard she could feel it in her lips.
A site written for the layperson spelled out her doom in plain language:
The first sign of this exceedingly rare disease is a loss of the ability to fall asleep. The patient’s automatic body systems become unregulated, resulting in pinprick pupils, digestive difficulties, fevers, and a racing heart rate, as well as difficulty speaking, swallowing, and controlling bodily movements. The disease progresses over a period of months to stupor and dementia, followed by coma and death. There is no cure.
Helen’s stomach roiled. She held her hand over her mouth. Tears sprang to her eyes. On a visceral level, her body rejected this information even as her mind registered yes, this fits my symptoms exactly. This is what I have. This is how I will die.
As people finishing their scans jostled her to the side, she wiped her eyes with violently shaking hands and read the last paragraph again and again.
This couldn’t be happening.
She looked again at the strip of paper in her hand, as if it held her salvation.
Go to pharma machine, it said.
She read the sign on the wall next to her. The pharma machines were back on the first floor.
She put her e-paper away and threaded her way through the ever-present crowds, down the dim hallways where the LED lights were partially burned out. Down the stairs—the elevators never worked.
Her burning eyes were filled with tears. She blinked back the blur.
The pharma machines were tucked deep inside the dark, dingy little drugstore. Only one of the machines worked, and the line for it extended deep into the hospital’s lobby, where late afternoon sun fought to penetrate grimy windows and where the homeless in gray, stained clothes slept or lounged on every bench and the carpeted floor.
The air conditioning was failing against the heat and humidity of central Florida, or maybe it was the fevers the website had listed as a symptom. People stood wall to wall here, as everywhere, and Helen felt claustrophobic. Her heart rate would not settle down.
No treatment modalities with statistical improvement of mortality available at this time.<
br />
Why had they written it that way? Anger surged at the nameless, faceless people who’d written that text. Helen was a bookworm with an above-average vocabulary. But that wasn’t the norm. How cruel was it to give people this news in words they couldn’t even understand?
At length, her turn at the machine came. She scanned the three diamond codes. The machine clunked and whirred. Three pill bottles shot down into the dispensary bowl and another slip of paper jutted from the machine. She took everything and moved to a corner of the drugstore to look at what she’d received.
She read the text for the first drug:
This medication has been prescribed to provoke sleep in patients unresponsive to over-the-counter sleep aids. Sleep will be immediate and profound. Do not take this medication except while in bed in safe surroundings.
Thank God. Tonight, she would sleep.
It sounded like bliss. Like heaven.
The second drug said only, “This medication has been prescribed to improve wakefulness.”
One drug to sleep, one drug to wake up. She put the two bags into her purse, armed now against her disease.
The third bottle held a single black pill.
The sight of it took her breath. Then heat surged in her chest and rose to her forehead, bringing out beads of sweat she wiped away with shaking hands.
She knew what this was. Only one pill was black. The assisted suicide pill, legal for fifteen years.
The final act of millions of people was to take one of these. Sometimes, you’d find them sprawled on the streets, still clutching the pill bottle.
A few years ago, a coworker of Helen’s had taken his at his desk, just after lunch on a Monday. Another time, on a business trip to Atlanta, Helen had called for an automated taxi, and when she opened the door of the passenger compartment, a young, slender, blonde woman had fallen sideways out of the car, her empty medicine bottle spilling out of her hand and onto the pavement.
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