by D. J. Molles
Getty nodded. “Money over everything,” he said, almost like a well-known litany.
Rat sneered and mumbled it back: “Money over everything.”
Silence then.
Walter didn’t need it explained. He was intelligent enough to piece it together on his own.
That was what Virgil had been talking about, what Tria had been talking about. The Linklaters and the Honeycutts and several other resistance groups had found a home in the black market. They’d made plenty of money on the underbelly of this war, and eventually the interest in the cause took a backseat to the propogation of more money.
Wasn’t that the story of everything?
Follow the money, Walter’s Pops used to say.
Theories would abound for everything. But always the answer seemed to be follow the money.
Money over everything.
Money had supplanted freedom.
“So,” Getty said with finality, “We are very alone.”
Bobbi processed this for a time. But then she nodded. “I don’t suppose it makes much of a difference,” she said, but she was quiet, and Walter could tell that it did make a difference to her. Her hands were in her lap, wrestling nervously with each other.
“We can’t get a signal out anyways,” she continued. “Even if we broadcast a pirate signal, they’d see where it was coming from. And, apparently, we’ve no one to call.”
Walter stirred in his seat. Leaned back. Then forward again.
He was usually so in tune with body language that he kept his own to a minimum. There was no legitimate reason why he did this except for that he himself could read these things in others, and so doing them felt like he was broadcasting his thoughts, and he did not like that feeling.
But in that moment he was too distracted with a tumult of thoughts to really pay much attention. His brow was furrowing itself deeply, his feet were bouncing peevishly. His gut was doing flip-flops over itself and part of him was looking at what he was conjuring up in his consciousness and it was thinking, stupid, stupid, stupid, you’ll die for nothing.
But there was another part of him that was nodding along with it and thinking, You’ll probably die anyways. At least this way you did something. You finally did something. It took you your whole life, but you finally did SOMETHING.
“Can you broadcast from here?” Walter asked her suddenly. “The pirate signal?”
Bobbi eyed him. “No. We would need to hack a local connection.” She gestured out the window. “That network hub, right there, the one with the tower coming out of it.”
Walter had to lean slightly in his seat to catch sight of it. It looked like a long way off, but he was familiar with the building, and tower. In the morning dimness, he could see the long, thin spire rising up out of the Town Center, red beacon lights pulsing languidly.
“So how does that work?” Walter asked. “I thought they shut down the network.”
“Well, yeah, but it’s a misnomer,” she said. “You can’t really shut down the network. They just deny service for a geographic area. Which happened to be the entirety of District 89. Any wireless signal still goes through, it just gets intercepted and blocked. The tower says ‘no’ before the connection to the outside can be made.”
“But if it wasn’t wireless…” Walter gathered the things together in his mind.
“Right,” Bobbi nodded, once. “We’d have to physically plug in. That’s why we would have to be there. At that network hub.”
“But you could do it.”
“I could do it.” Bobbi frowned. “But then they’d find us.”
“How long?”
Bobbi shrugged. “No idea. Lot of factors there. I’d guess they’d see us and know what we were doing and where we were doing it probably within a minute. Maybe even less. How long it would take them to wipe us out after they found out, I don’t know. Depends on the elements they have that are unengaged and ready to deploy. We could last ninety seconds. We could last for thirty minutes. There’s no telling.”
Flip-flop-flip went Walter’s stomach.
Well, now you gotta choose. You’ve questioned your way out of all the excuses, now it’s just whether you have the sack or you don’t. So what’s your choice, Walter? What is it that you choose? Because it’s always a choice, no matter what. No one can decide for you. You can always decide what you are going to do, you just have to except the consequences of that choice.
Which would be his life.
And Getty’s. And Rat’s. And Bobbi’s.
“Would we have time to establish a live-feed?” Walter asked quietly.
Getty stamped his second cigarette out on the carpet and leaned forward, billowing smoke. He looked irritated. “I know what you’re thinking, Walter. But let me take this a different direction for a moment, okay? What if we don’t actually need to get out of the District? What if we can hole up somewhere until the borders open back up? Obviously not here. But there are other places.”
No one spoke.
“Live to fight another day,” Getty said. “We drop all this shit here and walk away like the rest of the peasants. Then when shit cools down, we can get back to fighting.”
But all at once, he realized that it wasn’t relieving the twisting feeling in his gut. In fact, it only seemed to twist his gut in the other direction. There you go, Walter. There’s your excuse. There’s your “out.” You can just agree with Getty, and I’m sure the others would agree too, because no one wants to die, and then you can be safe, just like you’ve always been. You can do what you always do, Walter. You can do what you’re best at.
Running and hiding.
“No,” Walter said.
Getty looked at him. He didn’t seem offended or irritated. Just curious. “No what?”
“I can’t run anymore.” Walter cast his eyes down. “I won’t. And besides, by the time all of this blows over, the propaganda machine will be churning. You know it. I know it. We all know it. And everything that happened here in Eighty-Eighty-Nine will just be some bullshit rumor that no one really believes.”
Getty sniffed. Worked some saliva around in his mouth. Took a sip of water.
Bobbi and Rat remained silent. It seemed to Walter that they were the neutral parties in this, but he also didn’t know if they knew exactly what he was thinking, although Getty seemed to think that he did. That was okay. It wasn’t really a discussion any more. It wasn’t a discussion because Walter had decided.
He straightened up. His gut was no longer in knots. That was the beauty of committing to a course of action. It removed the angst of analysis. Suddenly the world seemed clear and polarized, no longer as confusing as it had been before.
Still unpleasant. Oh yes, very unpleasant.
But clear.
“They shut down the network,” he said simply. “They shut it down and they sealed the exits. Like fuckin’ cattle, Getty. Like driving cattle along the ramp and into the slaughterhouse. All the stupid cows too damn dumb and panicked to figure out that they could just trample those fences down if they really had a mind to. That’s what we are. We’re peasants. We’re cattle. And they’re just driving cattle right now. They’re gonna do whatever they want to do.” Walter smiled and it was odd to smile there, but he couldn’t help himself. “I never understood how the guys with the cattle prods could not be afraid of being crushed by all these massive animals, but I guess, after you do it so many times, you know that they’re all gonna do the same thing that they’ve always done, because they’re cows. They’re not coming up with any new ideas.”
He let out a sigh, his first feeling of frustration, but then he knew that it wasn’t up to him to convince Getty or Bobbi or Rat. That was not how this worked. They were grown-ass adults and they would make their own decisions.
“They can do this shit because there’s never any outrage, never any consequences for it, because no one broadcasts it, no one talks about it, and when people want to know what the smoke clouds were, they just minimize it, say t
here was a brief scuffle with the rebels, and then they never talk about it again. And the world moves on.”
Walter looked at Bobbi. “I’d like to open a live feed, Bobbi. I know you don’t know me and there’s no reason for you to hinge your life on a hare-brained idea like this. But all the same. I certainly can’t do it by myself. I want to open a live feed and I want to broadcast what’s going on. I want to broadcast this firefight. I want everybody else to see what’s happening in the District right now. I want them to feel it. To understand it.”
“You think it’ll make a difference?” Getty said, his voice almost incredulous. “There’s a fifty-thousand workers in this District, Walter. How many do you think picked up a gun and fought last night? A dozen? Maybe two dozen? Do you really think this would make a difference?”
“I don’t know if it would make a difference,” Walter said, feeling some frustration in his chest now. “All I know is that no one has done it before. And we can’t just keep doing the same things, over and over and over again! We’re here. We have an opportunity. Let’s use it!”
“If you stay, you’ll probably die,” Getty said plainly.
“Yeah, probably,” Walter agreed.
“What if Bobbi doesn’t go with you?” Getty asked.
Walter looked at Bobbi. “Can you tell me how to do the live feed?”
Bobbi looked back at him, and there wasn’t much there. She had the look of a host whose guest has uttered something horrifically uncouth and she was determined not to give a reaction for the sake of not making the moment awkward.
And he knew at once that she was about to tell him things he did not want to hear, such as, no, you’re too dumb to figure out how to do the live feed, and we’re all getting the hell out of here, good luck to you, y’knocker.
“I’ll go with you,” she said.
They all stared blankly.
Walter, blankest of all.
Bobbi didn’t repeat herself. She simply looked at Getty, and in her was a glimmer of the same thing that was in Walter, that same elephantine determination that when the course is decided it is DECIDED.
Maybe Getty understood this too, maybe he knew it about her already or perhaps he just saw it in her eyes just as much as Walter had. He just looked right back at her, steady as a man who holds his finger to flame and doesn’t wince. “If you go, we’re all going.”
To her credit, this gave her pause.
Sometimes it was easy to wager your own life.
It was something else to wager with others’.
Walter didn’t know enough about computers for her to explain how to do the live feed and for him to actually be successful at it. And besides his lack of technical prowess, he doubted he could make the mile or so through the war-ravaged Town Center and get to the network hub all on his own.
He needed them. He needed them.
Bobbi nodded once. “We’re all in it now. What he said was right. We can’t keep doing the same things. They might take us out when we do this, but we will at least put what they’re doing on display. And they won’t have a chance to edit it. They won’t have a chance to spin it. It’ll just be the truth. And that’s something they haven’t had to answer for in a very long time.”
Getty sniffed. Rubbed under his nose. He didn’t look put-off. He seemed to be beyond that. He was simply introspective. Thoughtful of the consequences, as all of them were. All four of them imagining the worst, imagining the bombs, imagining the bullets, imagining bleeding out on a street in the middle of the District Town Center with the orange glow of a new dawn on their ashen faces but no hope of seeing the sun rise any further into the sky.
That’s okay, Walter told himself, and maybe he believed it, and maybe he didn’t, but he committed himself to it, and that was all that mattered in the moment. Commitment. He was committed. Bobbi, it seemed, was committed. And Getty and Rat were committed to her.
“We may not even get there,” Getty pointed out.
“We have to try,” Walter said, speaking with a conviction that he wasn’t sure was even inside of him, but he needed it, he needed that strength to come out of him, to come from him, and sometimes you just had to act like you could do something, you had to act like you were a certain way, like you were brave and courageous, and then maybe you could make yourself believe it.
Rat was nodding, suddenly and emphatically. “Yes. We need to. We have to. This is the right thing, Getty. It’s the right thing.”
Getty nodded. “Ayuh. Okay. But if we get our legs cut out from under us halfway there, hold onto that conviction as you die, okay?” He didn’t say this in spite. It wasn’t sarcasm. He was deadly serious. He meant what he was saying. “The worst thing you can do when walking into the gallows is hedge your bets on walking away alive. I’d rather fight my ass of the whole way there, so if they do get me on the trapdoor, at least I go with a smile, knowing I gave ‘em hell.”
Walter was taken aback at the pall of seriousness that fell on them.
No bravado. No chest thumping. No cheering circles.
All four of them were beyond that now.
But Getty was right.
He’s right, isn’t he?
Shit if I know, it was your idea in the first place…
“We’ll give ‘em hell,” Walter said. “To the very last.”
Getty nodded. “Okay then. Rat? Bobbi? Is it settled?”
“Settled.”
“Yes. Settled.”
Getty looked at Walter. “It’s your charge, Bossum. Lead it.”
Chapter 25
The streets were utterly devoid of civilian life by the time they stepped out of that apartment building and onto the street, a single-file line of four. If you had a mind to flee the fighting, you had done it already. The only people left were combatants, and both sides knew it.
If the gunships saw this group of four running along the streets, then Walter and Getty and Bobbi and Rat would be bits of gristle and ground meat, splattered all over these brownstone walls.
Walter took the lead. Not because he knew what he was doing, but because he knew the Town Center better than the rest of them.
He knew the nooks and crannies. He knew the places they could duck and hide when drones and gunships came over.
The majority of the fighting, that tumble of death and destruction that had rolled epically through the Town Center all night, was now to the west of them, and just slightly south of the network hub where they were headed. It hadn’t died as the night wore on, or dimmed with the rising of the sun. It had only intensified. But in its intensity Walter sensed the pall of death, the fighting for the last breath, the surge of energy and malice that overcomes one’s conscious mind just before it is snuffed out of existence.
He didn’t think that rolling battle would roll much further.
He thought that perhaps those resistance fighters that were left had their back to the wall now. Now it was do or die time for the fighters in this District, and that included Walter and his newfound friends that weren’t really friends, but strangely, somehow, more, and simultaneously less.
The decision had been made.
Walter was committed.
He was going to see this thing through to the bitter end.
“Walter,” Getty’s voice whispered behind him.
Walter looked behind him and saw that the column of four had collapsed in on itself and they were all huddled there at the corner this building with him. Getty was sweating profusely and looking pale and tired. His leg was worn, but he was still pushing. He had extra weight to bear now, too.
The safehouse had come with a bounty of supplies. Walter’s only regret was that they couldn’t take all the weapons and ammunition with them, and didn’t have enough people to use them all. They left what must have been thousands of rounds of ammunition, five suits of softarmor, and three battlerifles behind.
Now, they were all suited up, and even the softarmor, made lighter and more flexible than the armor the New Breeds wore—i
t was the armor of mere mortals—weighed them down. Along with the armor, they each had a battlerifle and three spare magazines for it.
Bobbi wore her battlerifle strapped to her back, and she held the giant sniper rifle in her hands. Her eyes up, always looking for the place where she could build a hide, then down at the streets, scanning for danger. Eyes cold. No longer prim. No room for that now. Like she was two people in one, and the other was gone for the time being.
Rat had his rifle in his hands and a compact launcher strapped to his back. Single use. Five shots. Rat said he’d never used it before. But he seemed confident he could learn.
Walter caught Bobbi’s eye. “You see anything good for you?”
She shook her head. “Too far away. You been to the hub before?”
“I’ve seen it.”
“Think of tall buildings. Landscape features. What can you see from the hub?”
Walter considered it. “SoDro offices. It’s taller than the other buildings.”
“Where is it?”
Walter nodded north. They were too deep between these endless three-story apartment units to see through them, but he knew the SoDro office building was six stories, the tallest building in the Town Center.
“Three blocks north of us,” he said.
Rat looked at her with some concern. “That’s a long way to go solo.”
She nodded. “I’ll be okay.”
It had already been agreed. Bobbi was the better with the rifle. Rat wasn’t quite as good on the computer, but a brief discussion between him and Bobbi had determined he had the prowess to complete the mission without Bobbi’s help. Which meant they needed Bobbi on overwatch.
Getty had made the final, pragmatic decision.
“Go then,” Getty said. “Move carefully. Let us know when you’re established.” He tapped the comm unit that each of them had in their ears.
Walter touched his own comm unit lightly. It felt awkward.
Bobbi said nothing else. She straightened a bit, then looked both ways, up and down the street, then behind them, then up above into the sky. Nothing but smoke and destruction all around them. She scampered lightly across the street, didn’t stop at the next corner, and then she was gone.
