And found Davie pointing her tiny mousegun straight at his head.
“Sit down,” she told him.
“Davie,” he said, hands open and pleading. “Come on, Davie, you know me.”
“I don’t think I do.”
“Davie, give me the gun,” he said. “You know I’d never hurt you. These freaks are setting me up.”
Davie looked towards me, then Rachel and Ami, then back at Rinehart.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” she snapped at Rinehart.
I smiled.
Again, I thought it was over.
“Sit down,” she told him, gesturing with the gun towards the closest chair.
Rinehart paused.
And everybody in the room suddenly realized that Davie couldn’t shoot him.
Rinehart grinned and lunged for the gun.
I had almost gotten my feet back under me by the time Rinehart had grabbed Davie’s hands. They struggled, and the mousegun discharged into the ceiling. Once, twice…
There was a sudden unearthly screaming from above.
We had never heard anything like it. The scream was pitched almost at the edge of hearing, and it reverberated throughout the air.
Then came the sharp groaning noise of metal under stress.
Everybody in the room slowly looked up.
(Except for Rachel, who could see what was coming: she started laughing.)
The air vent broke open and a torrent of furious squirrels poured down on Rinehart.
Now, by this point, I’m sure you’ve learned a little something about squirrels. It’s not like I’ve turned this into a field study of Sciurus carolinensis urbanis, the apartment squirrel, but you’ve probably figured out they’re a little more hardy, a little more savage than the average tree squirrel. They’re city squirrels; they’ve had to toughen up to survive.
And maybe you remember my question from a while back, when I asked the girls how I could put things right with the buggers.
Well, you can’t. It doesn’t matter how many acorn cakes you leave out, or whether you and your new girlfriend spend a rainy Saturday afternoon building tiny ladders and shoving them in the air ducts far from your condo. Squirrels don’t reason. They don’t forgive. They don’t forget. All they remember is a human being killed one of their own in cold blood, and they will try to avoid human beings from that point forward. And if they suddenly find their comfy vents shot full of holes and fall into a human-infested room with no obvious means of escape, they will scratch and bite and claw to keep the same thing from happening to them.
Last but not least, they don’t seem to remember faces. I suppose that’s only fair; I can’t tell one squirrel from another. So it’s not as though they were mad at me specifically. They were just mad.
The four of us watched as Rinehart disappeared under a teeming cloud of gray fur.
We had never heard screaming like his, either. The pain in his voice was incredible.
There were more squirrels than Rinehart had surface area, and those not scratching him to pieces swarmed over his body and came at us. The women and I climbed on top of the kitchen island. We couldn’t shoot them; there were too many squirrels, and the walls and floors were too thin to keep the bullets from entering the other condos. We used what we could scavenge as weapons. Rachel and Davie had armed themselves with dirty dinner plates and forks and were defending the south and west sides. I was positioned to the north and was using a cutting board and a paring knife to flip them off as fast as they could climb. Ami held the east with an empty wine bottle, and defended against the occasional aerial attack with a cheese slicer.
That’s how the police found us a few minutes later.
They heard the chaos and came inside when I flipped the lock. The squirrels saw the opening and flooded through the front door, nipping and scratching at the officers as they passed.
The condo was suddenly silent of the screeching cries of furious squirrels. Rinehart’s wounded mewling was the only noise to be heard.
Davie, Ami, and I collapsed in an exhausted heap on top of the island. Rachel, however, hopped down, washed the squirrel blood from her hands, dabbed them dry on a paper towel, and walked to the front door.
“Officers,” she nodded at her coworkers, and left without another word.
The Metro officers watched her go, then looked to the three of us, and then at the bloodied lump of middle-aged villain seeping fluids on my hardwood floor.
“He’s the bad guy,” I offered.
“Good thing, that,” replied one of the officers after a few long moments, then stepped outside to call an ambulance.
“What happened here?” a second Metro officer asked.
“It’s a long story,” I said. I slid down off the island and slid the still-twitching bodies of squirrels aside with my foot so I could reach the lower liquor cabinet and my second-best bottle of tequila. “Who wants a margarita?”
TWENTY-ONE
It was a happy ending for everyone except Rinehart. And Hemmingway. And Squirrelface. And the sniper and the Moldovans, who each spent a couple of years in jail.
And it didn’t work out between me and Davie, obviously, but I still consider ours a happy ending. When The Lexington required everyone to evacuate the building so the pest control company could poison the everliving shit out of the ventilation system, we escaped to Key West. We were married on the beach at sunset. There were dolphins.
It was the perfect marriage until it wasn’t, but we ended at a high point. Davie had been right when she said we were too different; I had been right when I said it would work out long enough. When we realized we were going in different directions, we decided to end it. We still keep in touch, and we’re always happy to see each other when she comes through town.
That’s the end of that.
How about that, just look at the time. I’ve been talking for hours. Mare, honey, I’m off to bed. I’m all alone tonight, so you better make this up to me tomorrow.
I’ll be waiting for you in the supply closet.
If you enjoyed The Russians Came Knocking,
here is a preview of Digital Divide,
an OACET political thriller starring Rachel Peng
DIGITAL DIVIDE — A Rachel Peng Novel
ONE
Three. Days. Three. Days. Three. More. Days.
She loved high heels, how their tak-tak-tak against the concrete implied purpose. A woman in heels had places to go, things to do. They kept her company on quiet nights like this, each step an affirmation.
Just. Three. More. Days.
Her shoes used to say Debt. Debt. Debt. Ninety. Thousand. In. Debt. Loans, oh God, those hideous student loans, and living off of credit instead of sense. Then came an eternity of paychecks in portions, divvied up and rolled into snowballs thrown against interest. Along the way, and she couldn’t remember when, her shoes stopped counting down the money and started counting down the time.
Twelve. Months. Two. Months. Thirty. Days. Ten... Nine...
Such a lame joke, the one where her shoes had been there each step of the way, but every Friday for the past eight years they had carried her to the ATM on her way home from work, telegraphing her progress.
Strange, though, how this ritual had changed. These visits were nothing more than comfort food. She had replaced the weekly receipt with an app which reported her balance in real time, and all of her bills were paid online. She couldn’t remember when she had last mailed a check. Her money no longer needed a chaperone: she was a bystander to her own finances as funds moved from her employer’s account to her own with happy reliability, then fled to her creditors as they carved it up like a Christmas ham.
These days, everyone might as well be Agents.
She slipped her card into the reader and stepped into the vestibule. The room was cool in the early August evening, and the door closed behind her to seal off the heat and the noise of the city. It was an old bank, done up in worn marble, and the vestibule still had hints of
its past life as a teller’s office before it had been adapted into an alcove for the ATM.
The screen danced, the bank’s animated logo twisting into an ad for loan refinancing until she entered her pin. Welcome, valued customer Maria Griffin. Would you like to apply for low-rate credit card? No? Would you like to be emailed about an exciting new savings account? No? Then please continue.
Her account flashed before her eyes, a very small, very manageable number.
I will never do this again, she thought.
He grabbed her from behind, one arm across her mouth and the other tight at her throat with the knife. She reeled, not at the attack itself but the shock of it. Muggings, yes, practically an annual event in D.C., but not in this familiar, empty room.
She lost sight of the knife as he threw her towards the ATM.
She tried to scream, tried to run, but it burned when she tried to catch her breath. A shoe slipped beneath her and she lost her footing on the floor. Wet? Yes, and slick, and...
Oh God. Red.
Her hands went to her throat and came back red.
TWO
Rachel Peng kept her back to the door so she saw them before they saw her. Most days, Rachel would have stuck it out in silence, but this morning had started off with an emergency trip to the hardware store. The handyman she kept on call would cover over the graffiti (CY-BITCH in neat black letters; she appreciated this tagger’s creativity and penmanship), but she had bought a five-gallon drum of paint for this purpose and, in the way of all necessary things, it was nowhere to be found. She knew it would turn up at some point, probably under the bathroom sink or some other place a huge tub of paint had no business being, but she was not in a mood to suffer fools or co-workers with axes to grind.
They rumbled towards the lunch counter, cut young bucks sporting a mix of cheap suits and uniforms, and she had one brief moment to relax when it seemed they’d pass her by. Then Zockinski went red, quick and hot across his core of autumn orange, and she sighed into her sandwich. Game on.
They came at her in a pack, Zockinski at the lead. “Hey, freak.”
“Not today, Zocky. Keep on moving.”
Rachel had never before said anything with an ounce of personality to Zockinski and he flashed sickly purple-gray, a color she was beginning to associate with doubt. Anger, passion, violence, those were the reds, and stability and peace were the blues. Odd combinations of surface colors showed internal conflict, maybe. She was gradually building an ontology of emotions, but she was self-taught and it was slow going.
Zockinski shifted back to a red-tinted orange and sat down across from her. “Freak,” he said again. “Cy-borg,” he spat, hitting the second syllable too hard to sound like a rational adult. His gang swarmed around the table, hemming her in her booth. They were beginning to pick up Zockinski’s hue, red spreading from him through his small crowd like a virus.
Mob mentality is literally contagious, Rachel realized. She reached out to the OACET community server and began recording, just in case.
“Walk away, buddy. Don’t make me break out the d-word.”
“Been called a douchebag before, freak.”
“And I’ve been called a freak by scarier men than you, Zocky, so that word’s lost its teeth. No, I meant ‘discrimination.’”
He and his mob instantly ran a fierce dark crimson. These days, cops were taught to avoid committing hate crimes the same way they were once taught how to avoid getting shot.
“Tell me I’m wrong,” she said, moving her lunch out of harm’s way. “Wait, let’s use the legal. Tell me I don’t have a case against you, with this…” she gestured at the group, “pinning me down, harassing me.
“Oh,” she added before Zockinski could respond. “By the way, you’re on camera.”
They glanced, almost as one, at the black half-moons mounted behind the register to discourage employees from pilfering the till. When they looked back at Rachel, she was shaking her head and tapping her temple, a sugar-sweet smile wide across her face.
They froze. Everything about them stopped, even their kaleidoscopes of emotions, and Rachel watched as they tried to process something beyond their experience. She had seen this a couple of times before, an internalized struggle to take what was alien and squish it into familiar packaging so it could be safely handled. She didn’t think she’d ever fully shake the memory of watching it happen in her own parents.
Two of Zockinski’s group spun towards the counter, changing direction like sharks that had scented blood. The others abandoned Zockinski as he fumbled for a way to save face. Hill, his partner, tugged on Zockinski’s shoulder to get him to move. Zockinski paused, his surface colors moving through a full spectrum of reds before he finally went a dusky reddish-gray and slid out from the booth. Rachel guessed she had just seen him try and fail to find the perfect comeback.
A lone man, tall and slender, with curious yellows wrapped around a core of ultramarine, came up behind them.
“Goodbye, Zockinski.” Rachel said, ripping open her bag of chips. “This never happened.”
Zockinski muttered something unintelligible, a threat or thanks, perhaps, Rachel couldn’t say. The red had faded from him, so she chose to believe he had thanked her and offered, “I erased the recording.” He ignored her and moved towards his friends at the counter.
The tall man slipped into Zockinski’s seat. Rachel slid a wrapped sandwich across the table to him.
“You should have done that weeks ago,” Raul Santino said, studying his sandwich through wire-rimmed glasses.
“I’m under orders,” she rolled her eyes. “Be friendly, be courteous, be an example.”
Don’t mess it up for the rest of us, was what her boss had meant but hadn’t needed to say. She was their first police liaison and she was aware of the weight she carried.
It had been a fast six months since the human mind had gone digital. In point of fact, the cyborgs had been created five years prior, but a joint federal-level handwashing had hidden the Office of Adaptive and Complementary Enhancement Technologies from the general public. The Program had failed, the politicians had said, sadly shaking their heads. Such a tremendous waste of resources. Perhaps we’ll try again after technology has caught up with theory.
Except the Program hadn’t failed. Patrick Mulcahy, self-appointed head of OACET, had waited until a clear day in early spring when the cherry trees were almost ready to bloom. Then he called a press conference and took a frenzied media corps on a long walk around Washington to discuss how their elected officials had secretly invested in cybernetics. He explained how this particular technology had been sold to Congress as a method of communication for operatives who couldn’t carry external equipment into the field. Unfortunately, there was a wrinkle: it seemed the Agents who had received the implant were able to circumvent all electronic security. Passwords, firewalls, airwalls… these meant nothing. If a device could talk to another machine, an Agent could connect to it and take control of it.
Yes, even the nukes. Don’t worry. We live here too.
They had stopped at a streetcart for burgers. The media coverage had shown Mulcahy the golden boy, the all-American hero, laughing over a quarter-pounder as he changed the world.
The revelation that the U.S. government secretly employed three hundred and fifty OACET Agents had caused no small damage in Washington. The cyborgs were one thing, their government’s decision to sacrifice them another. Mulcahy had gone to the press armed with plenty of evidence to show how certain politicians had panicked and managed the potential OACET scandal through quick, quiet murder. There had been five hundred Agents, once.
Mulcahy and the other members of OACET’s administrative team had linked arms with the press and dragged a reluctant Congress into open hearings. The discovery process would probably last for years, but each day a little more information slipped into the news cycle. The Agents were agreeable about letting others carry out the inquiry, as they were more sympathetic if they weren’t thei
r own messengers.
Besides, they had better things to do.
Or they had seemed better at the time, Rachel groused into her chips. Mulcahy had approached DC Metro and suggested a liaison between their organizations, with Rachel acting as Metro’s first in-house Agent. The police would benefit from a cyborg on staff, and Rachel could put a human face on OACET for the local law. Metro had jumped at the idea, but it was now brutally obvious that someone high up in management had hitched themselves to the pro-OACET bandwagon without consulting the officers. Resentment was thick among everyone with boots on the ground except for poor good-natured Santino, who was forced to watch his own promising career collapse under their dead end of a partnership.
“What’s on the agenda?” Rachel asked. Mornings were spent doing paperwork filed by officers who claimed their cases had something to do with technology, and thus defaulted to Santino’s office. Scut work, all of it, with lost smart phones making up the majority. Afternoons were more interesting, with plenty of time to kill on the shooting range or crawling through the rubble of pawn stores to find stolen electronics.
Santino, engrossed in his footlong turkey sub, wouldn’t meet her eyes.
She groaned. “Passwords?”
He nodded. “Sixty-eight of them,” he said through a mouthful of sandwich.
She threw up her hands and slumped back in her booth. Passwords were meaningless busy work. When an officer seized a piece of equipment protected by unbreakable encryption software, they sent it to Santino. He would set it up, turn it on, and she’d reset the password to a universal code used by First Metro. It was tedious, made more so by the need to call the office of each judge who had issued the original warrant to ensure the equipment was covered in the search. OACET was too vulnerable to be caught up in accusations of misuse of power.
“Let me guess, they all have to be done by end of shift,” she said. Months could go by between password sessions, then suddenly dozens of machines would need to be opened and cleared as quickly as possible. Rachel suspected dickery.
Russians Came Knocking Page 12
