She shuffled out into the icy wind, which had picked up considerably during her drinking. She wound the scarf she’d had hanging limply over her shoulders around the lower half of her face, tucking the remainder over her shoulder to keep her neck warm, too. She slipped, but righted herself — ice, already. Roads and walks in Surfeit generally weren’t heated. Just plain dura-plast, which iced up pretty quick. Despite the wind and cold, she was glad she had walked. She didn’t own a sled — bad for business, people seeing her scooting around a foot off the ground. Her own AI horse — a heavily-modified, Frankenstein hunk of junk, but reliable transportation anywhere the ground wasn’t frozen — was safe and warm at home.
The pub was opposite a train station. After the war, Karren had come to Surfeit because it was the kind of place where people got around by walking and by train, by lococycle and by Wheelhaus. By sleds, which were still earthbound, really, when you got down to it. And, of course, by AI horse. Firmly on the ground, in any case. Surfeit’s sky was empty, most of the time. The odd vehicle overhead, almost always going from one more crowded place to another. You stopped in Surfeit if you lived there. You usually didn’t if you didn’t.
Cold as it was, it was clear, and there were no fewer than three moons in the sky. One whose disk was about the size of a dime, two that were blobs of reflected light.
There ought to be but one more train that night, she thought, checking the time. There had been one only a few minutes before, which the boy and his party had likely caught. She felt a pang of missed opportunity. Why did she always have to be so sensible? She could have brought a twenty-something guy home with her that night. She could just as easily have felt sorry for herself when he was asleep, or gone. She had always “saved” sex for relationships involving other intimacies. Seeing as how she had determined not to start any relationships for the foreseeable future, she could have indulged herself this once.
Her mood was more sour now than when she’d ordered her first beer.
She crossed the tracks, and on the other side, short of the platform, there was a canvas or cloth bag, left behind by somebody. Karren didn’t envy whomever had dropped it on their way onto the train, having to come back for it, if they even knew for sure where they’d—
It wasn’t a bag, it was a person. Collapsed, from the looks of it on his way to the platform, balled up in a vain attempt to stay warm. No jacket, no scarf, no boots.
She hurried over to the man.
He was alive, but he was barely even shivering anymore. His eyes were closed, a tortured look on his face. The lines were distinct, making him look about late 30s. He had mousy brown hair past a well-receded hairline. He was dressed in a flannel long-sleeve shirt, denim pants, walking shoes with white socks.
She had to get him someplace warm. Her house and garage were a ten-minute walk. She scooped the man up and turned back to the pub. She hadn’t been obsessive about fitness since she was in the Corps, but the man was on the small side. She could feel the cold of his body through her jacket. She wanted to check his hands, but they were tucked into his long sleeves, and she didn’t want to uncover them ’til they were warm in the pub.
Presently they arrived back at the pub. The man and unemployed woman were still there. She called for a towel from the bartender, and blankets, layers. The bartender hurried into the back and then reemerged with towels and a blanket. Karren propped the man up in a seat at a table. He was conscious, had awoken groggily during their walk back to the pub. The man’s shoes were frozen, but his socks still soaked through. Karren carefully removed them and dried the feet. That towel, now damp, she set aside. Ice had also stuck to his clothes when he’d been prone on the ground and as it melted, it got the clothes wet. Karren didn’t think that was as urgent as his extremities.
She wrapped a second towel around the man’s head, carefully drying his ears — his hair had collected ice as well. She had him take his hands out of his sleeves, and she dried them and wrapped them in a third towel. “Do you have one more towel?” she asked the bartender. He hurried into the back again.
The man was sucking in breath through clenched teeth, no doubt from the feeling returning to his hands. Karren asked him what had happened. His teeth chattered and he shivered violently, which Karren knew was a good thing; it meant he was warming up. He shook his head. Karren draped the blanket over his shoulders, and he drew it tightly around himself.
The bartender arrived with another towel, and Karren made to wrap the man’s feet. Instead, the man tried to stand. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, pal,” she said, but he was up and staggering toward the bar. He didn’t get very far before he sank to his hands and knees and began to crawl instead. Good that he wasn’t trying to walk on possibly frost-bitten feet, but what was he doing?
As four people stared at him curiously, the man dragged himself toward the side of the bar. “What do you need, buddy?” the bartender asked. The man didn’t reply, instead rounding the bar and crawling behind it. It became apparent the door to the back kitchen and storage area was his goal. The bartender protested, but it was so strange to see the man doing this, nearly frozen to death, that nobody moved.
Finally, Karren made her way to the side of the bar, intending to help the man or find out what he wanted. As she reached the side of the bar, in walked three Justice cops in full armor. They always wore full armor while on duty, but you still noticed — that was the point. Karren stole a glance in the direction of the crawling man, and he had almost, but not quite, made it through the door to the back. She turned her attention to the new arrivals.
Two cops wore all-black, stretch-tight material over bulky padding at the shoulders and elbows, midsection and thighs and shins. The other had the same getup, with a scarlet stripe from his shoulder to his opposite hip. They each had helmets with opaque face plates. One of the all-black cops lifted his up. He was a doughy, chubby-cheeked boy, the kind who tries to catch on with Justice because with Justice, nobody makes fun of him.
“Looking for a man, late 30s, about a hundred and sixty-five centimeters, thinning hair, big forehead. Probably had a flannel shirt and denim on. Seen him around?”
Karren looked at the man and the unemployed woman, and then they three all looked at the bartender.
“Ain’t been in here today,” he said. “Got a card or somebody I can call?”
“Just call Justice. Anyone who answers will be able to help you. That goes for you three, too.”
The scarlet-striped cop had begun to stride slowly but deliberately around the pub. Everybody watched him, including his two fellow Justice cops. He ducked down the hall leading to the restrooms. They heard both doors creak open. He reemerged and headed for the bar.
Karren knew why he had the scarlet stripe. His name was Makepeace, a Sergeant. He was the highest-ranking person in Justice who wasn’t a paper pusher. If their freezing friend had attracted the attention of Sergeant Makepeace, hiding him was a bigger deal than any of them thought.
Karren wasn’t rightly sure why she hadn’t spoken up that she’d seen the man. If nothing else, the Justice people would take care of his hypothermia and potential frostbite. It was just that she thought of the man crawling toward the back room, presumably knowing these cops were coming for him. Maybe he’d raped and killed a woman. She doubted it very much, but it was possible. It was also possible that he’d nearly frozen himself to death and dragged himself across the dirty pub floor because being apprehended by the Justice cops wouldn’t be justice at all.
Whatever. If Makepeace found the shivering man, he would bring his wrath down on the bartender, not her. Whatever horrors Justice and the Government visited on its citizens were none of her concern. She’d earned her peace and quiet in life fighting for that very Government, and if the bartender or anybody else didn’t like it, they should have fought at her side.
The bartender was a little shifty as Makepeace approached the bar. He rounded it and looked behind it.
“Don’t suppose you
have a warrant?” Karren said. It just came out. She wasn’t in the mood to defer to Government authority after the day she’d had.
The unbidden words chilled her as they lingered over the bar. They had been retrieved from a memory of years ago, the last time she’d said it.
Makepeace turned his head so his faceplate faced Karren. He glared at her (presumably) for a moment, then slapped the bar, making Karren jump, as intended. She darkened. Makepeace patted the bar, gently now.
“This place,” pat, pat, “ is open to the public,” Makepeace said. Since he didn’t raise his faceplate, the voice had a mechanical echo.
“That part of it isn’t,” Karren said. She kept her eyes on Makepeace’s faceplate, but at the corner of her eye she saw the bartender squirm a little.
Makepeace regarded her for a few more beats, then he opened the door to the back. He peered inside. After forever, it seemed to Karren (and probably the bartender as well), he released the door and let it shut.
He turned to Karren again. “Thank you for your service during the war, Ms. Considine,” he said. Justice cops could pick up your identity, and just about anything else, from your fone. That she had fought in the war would have taken a GovStream query, though. The hairs on the back of Karren’s neck stood up. “I’d be out of a job, if it weren’t for veterans like you.” He rejoined the other two cops as Karren flushed. The woman who had lost her job was looking at her sourly.
“This suspect is dangerous, even if he doesn’t seem so at first,” the cop with a face said. He was staring down the bartender. Karren thought the bartender might crack, and say the man was in his back room. But he didn’t. “Make sure you let us know if you see him.”
That seemed like the trio’s cue to leave, but Makepeace chimed in. “Justice is authorized to use any means, including deadly force, to prevent obstruction of one of its operations,” he said. “Business owner, bystander, Marine Corps veteran, it doesn’t matter. Think hard about turning our fugitive in if you should encounter him.” Hard to tell, but Karren thought Makepeace glanced at her one more time before the three turned and left.
Don’t suppose you have a warrant. Justice had answered that question years ago by hauling off someone dear to her, right out of her own home. Someone she should have protected.
Someone who would still be with her if she could manage to keep her mouth shut.
Karren exchanged another look with the bartender. Then she rounded the bar and opened the door to the kitchen. She immediately spied the blanket she’d put over the freezing man, looking like it covered a pile of… something. The man was balled up under it. She knelt down and told him the Justice cops had come and gone. He rose to his knees, teeth still chattering. The towels around his head and hands were still there, but loose.
“Did they ask you about me?” His speech was clipped. Part of it was how cold he was. Part of it wasn’t.
Hunched down, Karren circled the man’s shoulders with her arm to lend him support if he wanted to stand. He stiffened.
“I would rather that you didn’t touch me, please,” he said, urgently, in that clipped cadence. That convinced Karren: he was Spectrum. Repulsed by touch, monotone speaking voice, and he’d yet to make eye contact with her. She backed away, and now knowing what she knew she saw on his wrist the tell-tale cloth medic-bracelet with a charm on it worn by sufferers of certain medical disorders. She couldn’t make out what was on the charm, but she had no doubt it identified him as Spectrum.
“Sorry. I see the bracelet, now,” she said. She rose, and the man got to his feet, unsteadily, but she didn’t try to hold him up. He began to stagger back out into the pub. She trailed behind him.
He sat at a table and tightened the towel around his head. Karren sat across from him, and helped wrap his hands back up. “You need to wrap your feet up,” she told him. He nodded, and Karren went and fetched that towel. Two towels on the floor by an unoccupied table — it was a wonder the Justice cops hadn’t noticed, or hadn’t thought it was suspicious.
“What happened?” Karren asked.
“Civil disobedience,” the man said. He introduced himself as Kidd. Michael Kidd.
The man and the unemployed woman left. The bartender shrugged and said he was closing for the night. Karren asked if he had any room for Kidd to stay and stay warm for the night. The bartender glared at her. “I’d like to keep my pub, and myself out of jail,” he said.
“I have room,” Karren said to Kidd, “but getting there is the issue. It’s a ten, fifteen minute walk. Fifteen in this weather.”
“What if they come there looking for me?”
“You hide,” she said.
Karren asked the bartender if he at least had a sled or a Wheelhaus she could borrow. She’d bring it back first thing. The bartender said they could borrow his Wheelhaus, drop Kidd off, she could bring it back, then walk herself back home. It was much better than the notion of having to walk Kidd to her place, so she agreed, gratefully.
They rode to her place, Kidd making himself unseen as possible. Karren went in with Kidd and showed him where everything was. He was to sit still on the couch, warming up beneath that blanket and those towels, ’til she got back. When Karren took the Wheelhaus back the bartender asked after his blanket and towels, and Karren promised she would return them the next day.
When she reached her place again and came inside, Kidd had been a good forty-five minutes under the blanket and towels, and he was grateful to be able to take them off. Karren thought it quaint that he’d kept them on after they’d become uncomfortable, but when you were Spectrum, you were very literal, very detailed, very rules-oriented.
Karren wanted to know the details of Kidd’s “civil disobedience,” but Kidd wasn’t offering. He said he wanted to take the train to the next province over, Bounty, where he would be safe. Karren was skeptical, first, of the idea he’d be safe in Bounty. Different local Justice department, but there was no good reason Bounty cops wouldn’t hand him over to Surfeit’s if they happened upon him. And no reason Bounty’s Justice cops wouldn’t hunt him down themselves, come to that, if Kidd was “wanted” badly enough in Surfeit.
For now, he was safe, and warming up. It looked as though there wouldn’t be any lasting damage to Kidd’s hands or feet. They worked out how and where he would hide if there came a knock on the door, and Karren left him on her loveseat to fall asleep or not as he wished.
For her part, Karren had difficulty sleeping. Twice she dozed only to be roused by what she thought was a knock on her door. That was preferable, she decided, to the times she heard knocking at her door in her dreams, and didn’t wake up out of them.
The next morning, Karren was able to tease some details out of Kidd.
“We were protesting,” he told her. “When you’re Spectrum the Government can commit you to HealthCare for what they call ‘re-education.’ Most of the time, you never come out.” To Karren’s mind, that brought into question the effectiveness of the “re-education.”
“I’ve seen Spectrums here in Surfeit before,” Karren said. “They don’t seem to be hiding.”
“Keep out of trouble and they’ll let you be,” Kidd said. “Protesting isn’t keeping out of trouble, I guess. Protesting re-education gets you committed to HealthCare for re-education,” Kidd said. The whole setup was chilling, and Karren could understand wanting to protest it.
“Justice broke us up and they were arresting everybody. Me and my two friends, we got away, got on the train headed to Bounty. But they were waiting for us a couple stops down the line. I lit out on foot while they were busy with my friends.” The weather had turned even uglier, and Kidd had only made it as far as where Karren found him.
“Which in its way was lucky,” she told him. “I guarantee they were watching the train. If you’d boarded it, assuming they didn’t catch you in the act of doing that, they would have had you within a stop or two.”
This prediction did not have its intended effect on Kidd. “I’m warmed back up
and the weather is better,” he said, as though Karren knew neither. “I need to get on the train and get to Bounty.”
She remembered Makepeace’s interest in Kidd. A man escaping from Justice cops trying to arrest him — would that be enough to get Makepeace personally interested? Maybe… But if Kidd boarded the train, it didn’t matter whether it was Makepeace or a rookie Justice cop after him.
“You won’t make it,” she told him, finding herself getting frustrated. He was no concern of hers, now that he was saved from freezing to death, but she reeled at his unwillingness to believe he had to avoid the train if he wanted to avoid “re-education.”
“Kidd— Michael? Michael, Justice is looking for you. Sergeant Makepeace is looking for you himself, and he only gets involved in priority cases,” she guessed. She felt safe saying so. “They’ll have people watching the train. That’s where you were last night, and they’ll figure someone with your— they’ll figure that a Spectrum will try the train again. You’d be handing yourself over to them.”
“I have to get to Bounty,” he said simply.
“I understand that.”
“I can’t walk, it’s too far. I have to take the train.”
“Michael, quit thinking of the train as an option.” But he wouldn’t.
She let him go. She nodded at him in lieu of shaking his hand and wished him good luck, knowing it wouldn’t do a damn bit of good, and let him go. Even told him which direction was the train station.
And that was that. At a certainty, Kidd would be picked up by Makepeace and Justice, and that would be the last anyone would hear from Michael Kidd.
That, she could live with. She’d done more than her share of trying to convince him not to take the train. He’d made the choice to try it anyway. Whatever he got, he was earning.
Trouble was, all she could think about was Makepeace slapping that bar to startle her. Ten years earlier, when she was the one with the uniform, somebody did that to her he’d regret it. But not now, and not Makepeace. Now, Makepeace was getting exactly what he wanted. Makepeace was going to win.
Defiant, She Advanced: Legends of Future Resistance Page 12
