by D. J. Molles
It was the fight itself.
They both knew this.
So when Walt said, low and serious, “Stop fucking with me, Virgil. I’m not in a good spot right now,” Virgil sneered and raised his hands in mock-surrender, but there was a flicker of relief in his eyes, and he did not push Walter any further on that subject.
There was a moment of silence between them, and the spiking temper subsided to a low boil. Still there, just not quite so volatile.
“We’re all fucked,” Virgil said finally. “It’s not just you, Walt.” He looked at him, and this time, his eyes were true, and they had softened, just a bit. There was veneer, of course, as always, but behind it, Walt could see true regret. “I’m sorry about Carolyn. I don’t know what else to say to you about that. But we’re all on the losing end today.”
“How do I get her back?” Walt asked, and he heard the child in his voice again.
How do I fix this?
Someone tell me what to do!
Virgil didn’t respond. But Walt saw the tiny, subconscious shake of his head.
“Do you want out?” Virgil asked him.
The car seemed unearthly silent.
Virgil didn’t look at him. He watched the road. The driver watched the road, too.
It was like no one had spoken. Like the question had been a figment of Walt’s imagination.
Virgil nodded ahead of them. “All the ways out are road blocked. They got drones and gunships circling.” He shook his head bitterly. “I shoulda figured when they responded like they did. Shoulda known that they knew. Shoulda cut losses and run.”
“How did they know?” Walt asked.
Virgil shook that question off. “Answer me now, Walter. Because in five minutes we’re gonna be where we’re going. And at that point, I need to know if you’re walking, or if you’re staying.” He finally looked at Walt. “If you stay with me, then you’re in. You’re in, and you can’t go back. You have to leave everything behind. We’ll have to wipe you. Give you new ID. And at that point, you work for me. Because that’s the only way. There are no free rides, buddy. I can’t afford to just extract you out of the goodness if my heart. If you want out of the Agrarian District, you’re going to have to go with me. That’s the path.”
“And if I decide that I don’t want to work for you?”
Virgil shrugged. “Then we pull the car over, and you can get out. Take your chances with the CoAx.” He leaned toward Walt, just slightly, his eyes burningly intense. “I can’t promise you Carolyn, Walt. I need you to understand that. I can’t tell you that we’re going to get her back. But I can tell you that if you stay behind, the implausible becomes the impossible. If you go with me, if you decide to be a part of the resistance…you’ll have a chance. A small chance, but—”
Walt shook his head, closed his eyes, and waved a hand at Virgil, like the man was trying to push a spoonful of bitter medicine into his mouth, and Walter wasn’t having it. He wasn’t ready for that yet. He’d digest truth on his own. He didn’t want it crammed down his throat.
He didn’t want Virgil telling him how unlikely it was that he’d ever see Carolyn again.
And suddenly, very suddenly, things crystallized for Walt. Things realigned out of the detritus of his life. The paths were not familiar, but at least they were there.
When you’re lost in the woods and you find a road, it doesn’t matter whether you know what road it is, or where it’s taking you. All that matters is that you aren’t lost in the woods anymore.
Walter started nodding. Eyes still closed for a moment. Then he opened them. Looked at Virgil. “Okay. You get me out of here. You get me out of the District and I’m your man.”
***
In the early years of the CoAx occupation, back when it was more than just the Chinese and the Russians—British, French, Spanish, Israeli, they’d all been there too—there wasn’t much going on in the Agrarian Districts. At that time, the Districts had been around for almost a generation, and the newness of them and the ensuing outcries against them had mostly died down to a murmur.
When the resistance sprouted, it came out of the cities. Tight-packed urban areas where the compression of close-quarters spiked everyone’s temperatures and that was where the riots began.
From the riots were born quiet backroom meetings. The smarter folks gathering while the angry ones yelled and got beaten back by harried and confused cops and national guardsmen that didn’t know whether they were in the right or the wrong, and platoons of foreign troops that didn’t care because they were playing an away game.
So the resistance milled about in the confines of the cities.
But then something happened.
When they got serious, when things began to get more organized, the resistance saw that the city was betraying them. Nearly every instance of a resistance cell being captured and sent to DTI had something in common.
They’d been caught because of a citizen reporting “suspicious activity.”
Tough lesson for the resistance.
A boon for the Fed and the CoAx.
But eventually, as with anything that exists outside the boundaries of legal society, the resistance had to adapt and overcome, to figure out a new way. And the new way was a great pointing finger, like an age-old placard imploring wild-eyed youth to “Go West, Young Man.” Except for it wasn’t “West” it was “Into the Agrarian Districts.”
Because there were no neighborhoods in the Agrarian Districts. The Agrarian Protection Act had razed the neighborhoods that were there, and forbade the formation of new ones. And without neighborhoods, there were no neighbors. And without neighbors, there was no one to peek out of their shuttered windows and think to themselves, “Well, that doesn’t look very legit. Maybe I should call someone…”
And so the resistance fled to the Agrarian Districts, and that was how it had been for a while, for a very long while, as Grandpa Clarence became an old man, and Pops became a man, and Walt followed Roy and Virgil as they became young men.
Oh, yes, the resistance branched out. They perfected being the cautious, underhanded people that they were. And these days, there was very little delineation between the black market and the people that ran the resistance. It all just happened under everyone’s noses, with everyone that painted outside of the lines splattering their colors just as fast as they could, while the Fed and the CoAx raced to white wash over them.
But the resistance would always have a place in the Districts. Like it was home. Like they were some wild, vining plant that had gone off in a million different directions. But if you traced the little stems back you’d find a lot of roots in the Agrarian Districts.
And Agrarian District 89, Walter’s Home Sweet Home, had been the bitch of the bunch for the CoAx for quite some time.
So it wasn’t all that surprising to Walt when they pulled up to a cracked black-top driveway that had been repaired with sealant so many times that it was a complicated cross-hatchery of black-on-black, probably more sealant now than the original black-top.
The house itself was an unkempt box with a gray roof and white siding. The railing was ancient wrought-iron that was beginning to rust now, and the closer they got to the house, slowing to a stop in the sealant-predominant driveway, the more mold and dirt Walt could see clinging to the poly siding. The gutters were filled with leaves, the downspouts hanging askew. The few scraggly landscape bushes were gasping their last breaths, muscled out by big weeds that were choking them to death.
On the small front porch, an older man stared at them suspiciously from a sun-bleached plastic chair that had once been green. He was gray-haired, but his face was hard. His forearms lean and muscled. He wore tans.
The driver pulled them to a stop, then shoved the shifter into park.
He glanced, through the rearview mirror, up at Walt, and then Virgil.
Virgil caught the glance. He worked his jaw—a flash of annoyance, perhaps.
“Walt,” Virgil motioned to the driver
. “This is Getty. He’s one of my guys.”
Walt nodded, slightly bewildered at the sudden introduction. “We’ve talked.”
“Right,” Virgil said. “Just thought you should know his name.” Virgil unlatched his door and pushed it open with a knee. “Come on. Quickly.”
They were like mice in hawk territory.
They shuffled out of the car, and though all three of them tried to hide it, Walt noticed that they all did the same thing—they glanced up at the sky, looking for that little hovering speck that might be a drone, watching them. Listening for that low hum that might turn into the roar of a flight of gunships closing on their position.
Virgil had his hands shoved into his pockets. Getty took up behind him, and Walter trailed them, around the car, down a concrete walk, and up to the brick steps of the stoop.
Virgil stopped at the bottom step. He pulled his hands out of his pockets and ventured to put one foot on the first step. He seemed unwilling to push the ornery man on the stoop any further than that.
“Hey, Merko.”
The old man—Merko, presumably—looked at Walt. Then he sniffed, and looked out, away from them, over their heads at nothing in particular. “Can I help you gentlemen?”
Virgil cleared his throat, tensely. “I’m supposed to meet Tria here.”
“Meh. Heh.” The old man rubbed under his nose, wiped snot on his tans. Walt noticed that his right hand was staying very close to his side. There was a weapon there. “I don’t know you gentlemen, and I ain’t buyin’ whatever you think you’re sellin’. Hop on, road gear, before I call the cops.”
Virgil shifted his weight hastily. Glanced up at the sky again. Then back to Merko. His voice came out as a hiss. “Come on, y’knocker, we ain’t got all day. You want to bring the whole shit show down on our heads?”
Merko was unconvinced. “Don’t know you. Never met you. Don’t know who—”
The front door flew open.
A woman stood there, leaning out. She was tall, and lean to the point of being skeletal. That was really the only impression that Walt got from her in that instant—that she was a skeleton. An angry skeleton. With white hair and cold, hateful eyes.
“It’s fine,” she snapped at Merko. “Let ‘em in.”
Merko shrugged, then gestured to Walter without really looking at him. “Don’t know who that guy is.”
The woman in the doorway glared at Walter and danced on her feet a bit, a fury of impatience. She didn’t like being out in the open here anymore than they did. Who wants to dive into water with chum floating all around them?
She thrust a hand out at Walt. “Who’s that?”
Virgil glanced at him, and Walt didn’t miss the resentment in the look.
Little tagalong, screwing shit up again.
“He’s with me,” Virgil declared, as though he was doing something noble on Walter’s behalf. Then, as an afterthought, he said, “Four-by-four.”
The woman in the door rolled her eyes and didn’t waste another second hanging out of the door. She threw up a hand, shook her head, and then disappeared inside, her voice trailing after her: “Well, get inside then.”
Chapter 11
The interior of the house made no pretenses.
Once you made it past the angry old man named Merko, it didn’t even try to hide what it was. There were no pictures on the walls. No decorations. The furniture that was there was compact and collapsible and largely made of plastic—there today, possibly gone tomorrow. There was a sense of the temporary to everything about it. A sense of hastiness.
There was logic to that. To not bothering with disguises. This was not a house for hosting parties. Your friends weren’t going to come over for some beers to watch the game. This was a place, owned by a person that didn’t exist, and if you were standing in it, you knew damn well what it was because you were there on underhanded business.
Virgil followed the woman into the house, with Getty trailing behind. Walter went in last. Getty sidestepped him and closed the door behind them all with a last suspicious look up into the night sky.
Inside, the windows were covered with dark curtains. They might’ve been sheets. No light fixtures on the ceilings. Rough openings in the polyboard were visible—openings that fixtures were supposed to cover up, but there was nothing there but bare bulbs, and only a few of those.
The place was dim almost everywhere, and then starkly bright underneath the cold white glow of the bulbs.
The tall, skinny woman swept her way into the main room—what Walter would have guessed was the living room. She stopped there and turned to them. Walter stood behind Virgil for a moment, then didn’t like the sensation of that, so he stepped forward and stood beside Virgil.
To their left, there was a gray folding table with three computer units and several monitors dancing around in the air. They were controlled by a man with large, dark eyes, and heavy, dark circles under them. He had a face that would have been sallow if it weren’t for his substantial beard.
Walter could see him through the projections of the monitors, could see the intensity and focus of a man who spent all of his time with computers. But the man didn’t see him. His eyes flicked back and forth across whatever it was he saw on those monitors, and his hands swiped around, moving this window there, this application here.
The woman snapped her fingers in front of Walter’s face. “Earth to you, fuckhead.”
Walter looked at her, taken off guard. “What?”
She jabbed a bony finger at his PD. “Take it off.”
He looked at it. His fingers went to it and then hesitated.
It wasn’t a pleasant sensation to remove something that was biometrically attached. These PDs that the Fed handed out like hotcakes to every fifteen year old upon entrance into high school, they were supposed to be “easily detachable.” But people rarely did. They were small and unobtrusive. They were completely water-proof and ridiculously durable.
For most people, they were like wedding bands—you pretty much just left them on and got used to it.
And wasn’t that an apt comparison, Walter thought. Do you, Walter, take the Fed, and all of their propaganda, to be infused into your daily life, to fill your mind with entertainment, to keep you from thinking for yourself, to hold them closely on your body ‘til death do you part?
“Walt,” Virgil prompted.
Walt clutched it between his forefinger and thumb and ripped it off. The skin underneath was pale and moisture-wrinkled and vaguely unpleasant smelling, like a creature that had just crawled out of a cave, blinking and hissing at sunlight that it’s never seen before.
The woman snatched the PD from Walt and took two steps away from him to hand it to the man sitting at the table with all of the computers and monitors. She thrust it through one of the projections and the man reared back, surprised to be yanked from his digital world by this intrusion.
“Wipe this,” the woman commanded. “Quickly.”
The man frowned at it, then grabbed it, resolutely. “Ayuh. Sure. Road gear.” He snatched up a cord and plugged it into the datajack on Walt’s PD. He spoke without looking up. “Hey, Tria, if you were curious, there are no drones in the area. Because I can do things like that, you know. So...you’re welcome.”
Oh, so she’s Tria, Walt thought, and then realized with the sudden flash of someone waking out of an unpleasant daydream that his PD had been taken and was currently in the process of being wiped.
“Hey, whoa,” Walt reached out a hand. “That’s my shit! That’s got my whole life on it!”
Virgil put a hand on his chest to stop him from approaching the man at the computers, who didn’t seem terribly concerned with Walter and spared him only the barest of glances while he worked.
“Price of doing business,” Tria said, coldly. “Price of freedom.”
Tria ignored him again. She looked at Walter. “Don’t question me, okay? That will make this all go a lot smoother. Right now, you’re on the ragged edge of
disaster. I’m the only thing keeping you from a short trip to a long stay in DTI. You want your PD back? Then take it and get the fuck out of here. Otherwise, it’s getting wiped.”
Virgil still had his hand on Walt’s chest. He waved Tria off. “It’s fine. He’s fine.”
Tria looked to Virgil. “Who is this guy anyways?”
“He’s an old family friend,” Virgil said. He gestured quickly between the two of them. “Tria, meet Walter Baucom. Walt, this is Tria. One of my uncle’s lackies.” A sneer crept over his lips at this last, quiet statement.
Tria didn’t bother to extend her hand to Walter, and Walter hadn’t expected her to. She had looked him up and down during the introduction, and he’d returned the favor.
Stick thin woman. Fashionably dressed, but understated. She was an urby, no doubt about that, but unlike most urbies, she was not dressing for attention.
Walter figured that was a byproduct of her shady career.
Tria was already ignoring Walter again, back to glaring at Virgil. “Thanks for the warm intro. But what I really wanted to know was why is he here right now? I was sent to extract you. Not an entourage of yokels.”
Virgil removed his staying hand from Walter’s chest and stood there, his posture forward-leaning, his jaw jutting, the fingers of both hands rubbing together. Walter knew the body-language well. It wasn’t just that Virgil was pissed, it was that he was about to Make A Stand on something.
“Tria, you see a leash on me?” his voice had devolved to a low, grating sound. “You might feel the need to cow to whatever my uncle says, but I don’t. If he is pulling me out, then he’s pulling us both out. Otherwise I’ll find my own goddamned way.”
Tria was unimpressed. “Good luck with that, Cowboy.” She shook her head and turned away from him. “Fed’s looking the other way on Eighty-Eighty-Nine. CoAx is on the warpath. Chicoms in particular. Every exit out of this shithole is blocked by a squad of New Breeds and there are flights of gunships taking off from CoAx County every five minutes.”
As Tria spoke, Walter’s eyes had wandered to the man at the computer. He had placed Walter’s PD off to the side and his attention had been drawn away, to the monitors on his right. And whatever he saw on those monitors was making him frown in a way that Walter did not like.
