by D. J. Molles
Rat was beside him, breathing heavily, sharing his focus.
Getty grabbed their shoulders, started pulling them back. “Let Rat blow that shit.”
“If we leave it up it could deter…” Walter stopped himself. He’d been thinking it might keep soldiers at bay for a bit, but they wouldn’t come on foot. They’d come in armored guntrucks. And the chain-link fence was about as much of a barricade to them as a sheet of paper. The fence would be useless as a defensive measure.
Well, then how the hell are we going to defend?
He looked beyond the gate, saw the buildings.
Yes. Short, squat buildings. Small windows. Stone walls. That was where they had to go anyways. So they would go. And they would hope that it took the gunships a while to come. Once the gunships were there, the stone walls would mean nothing. They’d be incinerated and buried in rubble in seconds flat.
Just like that poor kid…
Rat had unslung the launcher from his back. He shouldered it and didn’t hesitate. He activated it. Some component in the thing made the very slightest whining noise, and then there was an ominous kuh-shlunk—one of the five rounds being auto-loaded into the chamber.
Rat made himself small. “Head’s down, guys.”
Walter barely had time to hunker before there was a loud POP and a vicious, rushing HISSSSS. A white smoke trail billowed out of the back of the launcher and something fast and green shot out.
A second later there was a flash and another cloud of smoke and the gate stood in tangled ruins with a gaping hole in the center.
A smattering of things peppered Walter’s face and hands and head, but none of them were big enough to cause any real damage outside of a momentary sting.
“Nice,” Getty said shortly, and then was hauling himself upright with a groan. “Let’s move!”
The three of them ran.
The tangled maw of the damaged gate grew in front of them, but slowly. Walter realized how gassed he was. How his running was little more than a stumbling jog.
The horrific boom.
Jesus, it must have drawn attention, didn’t it?
Would someone have heard it? Seen it?
Walter felt it like an iron cord had been cinched around his stomach and was being ratcheted tighter and tighter.
The one currency that meant anything to him at that moment was time.
And his accounts were plummeting towards the red.
They clambered through the ragged gate, trying not to snag themselves on the sharp, smoking ends of the wire fencing that were everywhere, like going through a briar patch.
Walter went for the building directly in front of them. It was the largest of the three that were in the small, fenced in complex that made up the network hub. No one worked in any of these buildings, but occasionally maintenance crews had to get in and fix something, and the buildings were there to house the servers and give the workers enough room to access them.
He turned as he neared the building and looked behind them. He could just see the SoDro Offices looming up, a darker shape than the other structures. Most of the Town Center was made out of brownstone concrete. The SoDro building was black steel and tinted windows. It looked untouched.
Somewhere in those windows, Bobbi was hiding, watching.
He felt a hand grab his shoulder and pull him along. “Come on, Walt! She sees us!”
Then they were at the door to the building.
Rat was already there. He tried the handle. No go. It rattled loosely, and clearly it wasn’t turning any tumblers. “Locked,” he announced to them.
Walter grimaced. Looked the door over. It was a big ass door. A big metal thing. “Can you blow it?”
Rat made a disconcerted face. “Good chance it’ll wreck some components inside. Might be the ones we need.”
Which would then render this entire operation purposeless. It was already hanging onto the very edge of being a fool’s errand—might as well not shove it over the brink.
“Here,” Getty said, and he took a knee, slinging off his backpack.
Walter huddled over him.
The pack opened. It revealed about a hundred things that Walter had no idea what they were used for, and a single thing that he knew quite well. It was a small, two-foot demo bar. He handed it to Walter with a slight smile.
“One doesn’t run about these environs without a breaching kit.”
Walter snatched up the demo bar. Turned to the door.
Getty shouldered up to it. “Come on. Put the flat-head in, right at the latching mechanism. There. Good. Shove it in. Now press it back and forth. You feel it giving?”
Walter did. He strained at it. Felt the flathead of the demo bar slip in a little more. He pressed back and forth again. Something metal popped. The door gave a little more.
Abruptly they were drenched in a horrible noise.
Walter jerked and almost dropped the demo bar. It was a horrendous screeching and he could actually feel it poking at his eardrums like an invisible finger and it was physically painful.
“Christ!” Getty jumped, then grabbed Walter and steadied himself. “It’s just the alarm!” he shouted over it. “Keep going!”
Walter was working his hands before his brain. But as he struggled with the door and the pry bar, he wondered if there was anyone monitoring the alarms? Surely if anyone had been monitoring things like alarms, they long ago would have called it quits? With a war going on a few blocks away, there’s no way that they would send anyone to investigate an alarm.
Right?
Sure.
Pop.
The door gave.
And then, satisfyingly, it simply swung open on well-oiled hinges, and Walter felt a giddiness rise up in him that lasted for about a half second before it was trampled by his need to get the hell inside of the building before they were seen and obliterated by a CoAx gunship.
Automatic lights blinked on as the three dusty, bedraggled men tumbled into the building.
It was a big square, nothing more.
In the center of the square were three rows. These rows were black metal shelving units stacked floor to ceiling with black servers and cables that connected everything to each other and bound together into giant spools and these were fed through ports in the ceiling. The three sections of servers stood there, green activity lights blinking like a confused audience.
To the left, a counter that seemed to be there to provide some sort of place for maintenance crews to work.
To the left, something similar, but with some metal storage built into the wall above, and two dumpy-looking rolling chairs that had been left idly in the middle of the floor by whoever had used them last.
Walter shoved the damaged door closed behind him. It didn’t latch, but it did hold.
Strangely enough, the alarm was only on the exterior, and when he closed the door it became just an annoying bleating in the background. But at least you could hear yourself think.
“Okay,” he said. “What do we do now?”
Rat was already heading for the service bay to the right. “Over here. This should be fairly straight forward. I just need to hardline in. Looks like they have the cables already staged for maintenance.”
He gestured to a series of neon pink cables, all with identical male ends. There were four of them at even intervals at the right service bay. It seemed simple enough to Walter: There was a problem with the system, the maintenance crews could simply plug in directly to the system and do what needed to be done. It was just that easy.
It’s never that easy.
Rat scampered to the service bay, reaching back for Getty’s backpack. Getty shoved it into his waiting hands, still hanging open. Rat grabbed it, fell into one of the chairs, and rolled to a spot in the middle of the service bay. He slapped the bag down, threw it open, and dove inside, yanking out a gray tablet, which he smacked unceremoniously onto the counter. The he looked up at Walter and Getty.
“Y’all watch the door, not me.”
>
“Bobbi’s watchin’ the door,” Getty said defensively.
But Rat was already back working at the tablet, flipping the monitor into existence, activating a projected keyboard onto the counter-top.
Bobbi’s voice: “You guys okay in there?”
Getty keyed back: “Ayuh. Solid. How’s it looking outside?”
“Clear for now.”
Getty nodded to himself and turned to Walter. “You okay?”
Walter stared back at him, almost disbelieving. “Jesus, man, you’re the one with the shot leg. Are you okay?”
Getty bobbled his head. “As good as can be expected, I guess.” He was rummaging for his cigarettes.
Outside, a series of concussions rumbled the earth.
Walter stiffened.
Getty didn’t seem to notice.
“Hm,” he said, looking into his pack. “Only one left.”
“Go on, then.”
“Well. I didn’t want to be rude.” He lit up. Crumpled the empty pack. Then tossed it, almost resentfully, into the corner. “I could go for some coffee. Or whiskey. You know?”
Walter nodded, because he figured that was the appropriate response.
“Either wake me up or fuck me up, one of the two,” Getty said, then puffed at his cigarette.
“What?” Walter asked. “All the shooting and the death not wake you up enough?”
“Ha.” Getty glanced up at him. Half smile. Then he frowned at his shoes. “No. No, I feel like I’m sleeping right now. And that’s kind of frustrating.”
Another series of concussions, slightly farther away than the last ones.
Rat’s hands, skittering across the keyboard.
“What do you mean?” Walter asked.
Getty huffed out a lungful of sweet tobacco smoke and shrugged. “I dunno, man. Just…feel like I’m about to bite it anyways. Wished I felt a little more alive. You know?”
Walter felt that thing, that big, monstrous, undeniable, unutterable thing, moving down around in the depths of him, and he nodded, because he did know. He did know what it felt to want to feel.
If you’d have asked him twenty-four hours ago, he would have commiserated as best his limited experience would allow him. Because that was the type of person Walter was. He always tried to share in people’s feelings, always tried to commiserate and make them feel normal.
But he wouldn’t have truly understood.
He wouldn’t have understood that some things that happen to a person are just too monumental for the mind to handle. If the mind had an ocean, then that ocean was also the place where the mind dumped the things that it could not deal with. It dumped them into the deepest place, into the place where the pressure condensed it down as it sank, down, down, down, it went, crumpling into a little ball so that no one on the sunny topside would ever see it, ever even know it was there, except…
Except that it changed everything.
It changed the waters.
It changed the tides.
It changed the very polarity of the earth.
The things that we can’t process, we don’t just forget them. They change us. They change us deeply. And they either do it in one fell swoop, in one cataclysmic shattering that will leave us raving mad, or they do it slowly, slowly, slowly, like wind and tides tearing down rock over eons and eons.
That thing was down inside of him now.
Carolyn
The crescent-shaped scorch mark
“I want my brother back!”
Carolyn
A child’s arm sticking out of the rubble
Virgil
Tria
Carolyn
A child’s arm
CAROLYN
Walter shook his head to clear it.
Getty offered him the half-burned cigarette.
Walter took it, took a drag off of it. Then took another, greedily, but Getty didn’t seem to mind. He felt the nicotine light off the back of his head, and then he handed it back.
“Alright,” Rat suddenly announced, and his voice sent electric sparks down Walter’s spine, out his arms, and into his fingertips.
He looked up.
Rat was sitting there with his tablet all plugged in, the monitor queued up, the network accessed. Just like that. Just that fast. He was looking at Walter.
“You gonna say something?” he asked.
Chapter 28
“Is it ready?” Walter asked. He swallowed on a dry throat that tasted of dehydration and stale smoke.
Rat nodded. “Gimme the word, I start beaming. It’s to a public outlet. I can’t promise you that people will see it. But it’s the best we can do. I’m not beaming until you’re ready.” Rat shook his head. “I hit the button and we have minutes. Maybe just seconds. Then they’re gonna be on us.”
And what Walter heard in all of that was, You have minutes, maybe just seconds, to live.
Was it possible to make a difference in the tides of things with only seconds left to your life?
Was it possible not to live for something, but still, in the end, to die for it?
Sure. Yes. All of that was possible.
Just as possible as it was that no one would ever see his message.
Just as possible as it was that his last meager seconds on this earth would amount to nothing. A life of nothing, followed by a death of nothing.
Who was Walter Lawrence Baucom III? No one in particular. Some grower. Another guy that died during the purge of 8089. Died trying to prove something. But you can’t just decide at the eleventh hour that you want to be a hero. True heroes were forged over time. Not fashioned abruptly, like field-expedient weapons.
No matter what happened, he was a nobody.
Does it change anything?
Walter looked at Rat. Looked at Getty.
Thought about Bobbi, huddled in whatever shadowy corner of SoDro Offices, staring at a network hub and waiting for it to be surrounded.
And he realized that it didn’t matter.
Call it peer pressure, if you like. It was a powerful conviction. It was the conviction that he’d already said something to these three people. He’d already said he was going to do this thing. And they had agreed to come along with him. He just couldn’t bale now. Couldn’t, and wouldn’t.
Which was horrendously stupid in the face of the consequences before him, but still…people in situations like the one that Walter found himself in, they often did stupid things. When the stupid things worked, they seemed like genius things. Brave things. When they didn’t, well, then they were back to being stupid.
Hindsight being what it was.
“Okay,” Walter nodded. He walked over to Rat. Over to the tablet that he’d hooked and hardwired into the network. Sitting there like a bomb ready to go off in the innards of the Fed’s control over them, and that thought gave him a little satisfaction.
Somewhere out there, there was a man or a woman who was watching everything that was happening in 8089 with a callus lack of emotion, perhaps drinking coffee as they coordinated this purge. And in a few seconds, they were going to feel something bind up in their guts and their bowels were going to loosen as they realized that something had gone wrong.
And Walter relished that.
He relished the opportunity to make them feel it.
He stood in front of the console. Straightened himself.
“I’m ready.”
Rat eyed him, up and down.
Behind Walter, Getty said, “Bobbi, we’re about to transmit. Be ready.”
Rat hit three buttons in quick succession.
The monitor of the console turned into a mirror. Walter was watching himself. He was watching the live feed that he was beaming out to whatever public outlet that Rat had found to stick it.
A second ticked by, as Walter stared at himself.
He was shocked at his appearance. His face was not the face that he was used to. This face was worn out. It was cold and on fire all at once. His eyes were raging things. His mout
h was pressed tight. His hair stood askew and filthy, and his face was smudged with dirt and soot and gunsmoke and bits and pieces of dark debris clung to his sweaty, greasy skin. He held a battlerifle in knuckles that had all been skinned, and bled, and smeared.
Rat shifted, the first note of panic reaching him. Fear that Walter had frozen at the penultimate moment—Oh, Jesus, we should have known better than to trust a fucking grower…
“I’m Walter Lawrence Baucom,” Walter suddenly blurted out. As if to convince himself. “The third, if it matters. And I think it does. Four generations ago there was a Walter Lawrence Baucom the first. And I think that he was the last man in my family to die free.”
Walter didn’t know where he was speaking from.
Maybe from that inner-ocean canyon where he had dropped the things he could not process.
Changing tides. Changing polarity.
Time is ticking…
“I’m a grower, and I live in Agrarian District 89. Last night, the CoAx shut down our District and cordoned it off. And now they’re purging it. As we speak, they’ve bombed half of our Town Center to rubble.” He looked absent for a moment. Out of the corner of his eye, he could tell that Rat was tapping his wrist—time, time, time!—but he didn’t pay it any heed. “I saw a kid’s arm in the rubble. Not sure if it was a little girl or a little boy.” He shook his head and focused on the console, on the camera that was beaming his image, his words out to the world. “This is what they do. This is what the CoAx does. And the Fed—our country, our leaders, our government—they’ve sold you out. And if you were ever thinking about doing something, if you’d ever considered saying ‘enough is enough,’ then maybe you should do something about it right now. Because the situation is only getting worse. It’s only going to get harder and harder to fight them.”
He leaned towards the camera. His face loomed on the console. Haggard. Dirty. Desperate.
“If you’re watching this, listen to me,” he said. “Please listen…”
And then the feed cut out.
A million important things to say log-jammed in his mind, like a pile up happening on a busy freeway.
“What happened?” he stared at the blank monitor.
Rat snatched his rifle up. He was already out of his chair. The rolling chair went spinning off into one of the towers. “Shit, they’re on us. They shut us down.”
