by Ric Beard
“What’s that all about?” She whispered to no one. “Tough girl is crying.” Looking down, she saw the woman’s handheld—they called them ‘Tabs’ here—sitting in her lap. “Let’s take a look.”
The woman in black took out her own handheld device and aimed it across the street. There was a faint clicking noise as it searched for a connection. Then an image formed on the screen—Shaw, smiling in the midday sun with her arm around an older man with shoulder length hair, their temples pressed together. The man wore baggy, fuzzy leather pants and a mismatched brown leather vest. In the background, two mountain ridges crossed in a V.
The woman in black looked up from the image and saw that Shaw had perked up. She was tapping the handheld furiously, her tears forgotten. She felt a vibration on her handheld and looked down. Then the image vanished, and a message appeared:
Who the hell are you?
She looked up and saw Shaw crawling off the bed and speeding to the window. The woman in black shot up and pressed her back against the wall, cursing herself.
How did she know I was here?
Then the answer came to her. Wireless encryption in this city was tighter than a noose knot. The intrusion could only be managed by line-of-sight. Lexi Shaw was a lot of things; however, stupid wasn’t one of them. She was a security and technology expert. But Triangle City’s technology was advancing at quite the clip if Shaw could detect the hacking of her Tab in the first place. This development would have to be reported, but for now, the hideout was exposed.
The woman in black grabbed her pack, pulled her pistol belt around her waist, and sped toward the stairs. She could slip into the back alley and into the old world sector nearby.
A parting glance revealed that Shaw’s bedroom was empty.
She’s on the move.
She skipped steps as she descended the last flight of stairs and burst through the door into the cold, night air. Her eyes shot to the door of the building across the street and the woman in black froze in the shadows of the breezeway.
Lexi Shaw stared back at her.
Chapter Eight
Rat-Shit Timing
Lexi burst out onto the street and stared into the breezeway across from her when she spied motion there. She reached up to tap her SmartGlasses so she could zoom in, but then she realized why it was dark outside. She’d left the glasses on her side table.
Shit.
Movement caught her eye in the shadow cast from the overhead arch of the breezeway. Without her glasses, she couldn’t make out who it was. As her eyes focused, Lexi made out the short, stocky form of a figure awash in black from head to toe. A wide-brimmed hat shadowed the figure’s face, and Lexi’s squint did nothing to make it any clearer.
The figure suddenly zipped back into the shadows and back down the breezeway. Lexi’s legs tensed as she stepped into the street, planning to give chase, but then her ears vibrated at the sound of a massive explosion in the distance. Then another…and another.
What the hell?
Her eyes diverted to the north as a rumbling bass shook its way down the road toward her. The vibrations tingled in her feet and Lexi’s arms shot out to the side, in case the ground beneath her began to shake. Peering down the road between the buildings, a plume of gray cloud painted against the purple, snow-filled sky, rose above the rooftops of the decrepit buildings a few blocks down the Old-World Sector.
Lexi’s head swiveled to the shadows of the breezeway and then back up the road to the rising plume.
Of all the rat-shit timing…
She sprung for the door to her building and ran upstairs.
The figure in black would have to wait.
Chapter Nine
The Time for Serious People
Glass from adjacent buildings shattered and rained down to the street below as a shockwave carried debris for two city blocks near the wall in the old world sector. Residents a few blocks away trickled out into the streets, chattering and pointing at the glowing area from which the blast had come. A plume of pulverized glass, metal, and concrete hovered in the air where a building had stood just a few minutes before.
Security bots converged on the scene over the next few minutes and halted at the edge of the old world sector. Once they were lined up in a row at equal distances stretching the full width of the street, they simultaneously hovered toward the cause of the disturbance. Speakers on the bots blared a message that could be heard a block away.
“A building has collapsed. Please withdraw from this area for your safety.”
It was S.O.P.
Standard Operating Procedure.
Kade Reynolds stood in shadows of the breezeway of an old-world shop of some kind, watching as the bots cleared the street of curious onlookers who’d wandered into the sector and milled about the cracked asphalt in front of the machines. Though not every day occurrences, collapsing buildings in a section of the city where they were all at least 120 years old happened from time to time. The preceding explosions were unusual, however.
Peeking out of the shadows and around the corner of the overhang, Kade could see the orange reflections from burning debris on the city wall to the north on either side of the debris cloud. Once the area was cordoned off, a few of the security bots hovered up the road toward a crowd of people that grew by the minute as citizens from farther away left their homes to see the intriguing sight left by Miles’s demolition. Another line of bots moved in from the east and started playing contradicting messages, ordering the citizens to return to their homes or allow a four-block radius for emergency crews to work. A few citizens spewed profanity at the bots and one was neutralized when he refused to move. The bots left him in the dirty street and hovered over his limp body as they guided the rest of the people away.
Safety and Security apprehension trucks arrived and swept past the bots in the direction of the implosion. The rear doors swung outward, and troops in black plastique riot gear with breathing apparatuses carried pulse assault rifles into the debris cloud. Two of the troops grabbed the limp body of the man who’d been stunned by the bots and dragged him to the edge of the old world sector, apparently having no interest in arresting him.
Using his thermal signature setting, Kade could see the troops checking the wall for damage. But Kade knew Miles used directional charges to avoid damage to the wall. Opening a hole for badlanders to flood through and attack the city would defeat the anarchist’s purpose. A secure wall was the one thing Miles had in common with the city’s leadership.
Compared to the security provided by that wall, the powers-that-be didn’t give a damn about the building that crashed to the ground because if an unsealed hole in that wall allowed dangerous wildlife or the badlander crazies of The Chain access to rain fire down on the city, a decrepit building would be the least of their problems. The older city residents had seen many buildings burn over the years, and though each collapsed building made for a new experience in a sense, they were still somewhat desensitized to such excitement. But he could see the younger people chattering and was sure they already had theories that the city was under attack. The more rational portion of the crowd was milling about saying it was a shitty old building no one cared about. But Kade Reynolds cared. Kade Reynolds knew who occupied that building.
The crazy son of a bitch had really done it. That meant it was time for a new level of diligence in The Underground. A crackdown was coming from two directions and very soon.
Let the games begin.
Kade tapped his glasses and normalized their magnification before turning down the street. Carefully avoiding the crowds, he glanced over his shoulder every few seconds to make sure he wasn’t attracting any unnecessary attention. Stragglers passed him by on their way to the source of the excitement, but he didn’t make eye contact with any of them. He turned onto a side street, looked over his shoulder once more, and slipped into a doorway. He rapped twice on the door and tapped his foot until an older man in gray slacks, a white shirt, and suspenders opened the
door. He was missing two teeth.
The man looked Kade in the eye.
“Hey, great of you to pop in while the city is in turmoil and the Security Services cops are swarming the streets,” he said, jerking his head in both directions to check the street before stepping back. After Kade crossed the threshold, the old man closed the door and looked up at a monitor that displayed the street outside. People were still passing on their ways to the destruction, but no one seemed to have noticed Kade.
“They’re all down by the wall and I’ve never seen that many bots in one place. Makes you realize just how much firepower the mayor has in-hand.”
The older man stared at him, his lips pressed tightly together.
“Could you please open the basement for me, Harvey?”
The man grunted and nodded. He gestured for Kade to follow him and set off down the hall. Kade followed, passing a side table with fake flowers and paintings that perfectly matched the dingy eggshell walls. They turned a corner and started down a dark staircase composed of oak planks and stopped about halfway down. Harvey reached behind a small print of a girl in a white dress running barefoot through a field, her long locks of blonde hair flowing out behind her. There was a hollow click from somewhere beneath the staircase followed by a momentary glow. Then there were the sounds of metal gears grinding as the upper half of the staircase rose into the air, revealing another staircase leading down in the opposite direction. Harvey gestured toward the opening. Kade patted Harvey on the shoulder, nodded as he passed, and gingerly set his feet upon the stairs leading into the obsidian darkness. A pressure panel clicked beneath one of his loafers on a stair, and a light clicked on a few feet ahead of Kade.
When he reached the bottom, another light ignited while the one behind him went out. This pattern continued as he walked to the end of the hallway, one light clicking on ahead of him as another clicked off behind. A cardinal steel door awaited him at the end of the hall. Unlike most of the doors at businesses and residences throughout the city, there was no palm-reading panel on this particular door.
Kade pulled a chain out of his back pocket with a key dangling on the end and jimmied it into the lock. Once seated, he still had to shake it a couple times to get it to turn.
The room inside was bright in contrast to dim red illumination of the hallway outside. There was a small bar in the corner with assorted liquor bottles and a small mirror above it with a drawing of a woman in a dress with ruffled shoulders and Coca-Cola printed next to her in script. An antique soda machine stood along the opposite wall.
He eyed the bottle with the brown liquid in particular. He longed for the thick burn on his tongue, leading to the back of his throat, and down to warm his belly—and more importantly, numb his brain of the visions of a long-gone friend. The whiskey called to him like a soft, warm woman after months without, but this was the time for a sharp mind. A time for which they’d all waited too long for him to be getting tanked. He would embrace this old friend when the work was done, but for now, he needed to keep that metaphorical dick in his pants and fight off the fleeting images of an even older friend the hard way.
Reagan.
She’d been his partner out there in the wild as they trudged through forests and across mountains in defense of the city. They’d watched each other’s backs in the worst of circumstances, opening the door to something deeper inside him that never had the chance to manifest, a door he wished he’d opened while there had been time.
That door slammed shut the day they took you.
Kade snapped himself out of the thought, eyed the liquor bottle and muttered, “You can do it, yourself.”
He walked on synthetic shag to the wall farthest from the door and tapped a panel. A glass enclosure lowered in front of him, revealing a monitor built into the wall behind. He began tapping until he saw what he expected—a red mail icon flashing in the corner of the screen. The unexpected surge of excitement served to push away the thoughts of lost love as he clicked the message.
Labyrinth is up. Time to get busy.
--Miles
Kade had known this exact message would be there when he heard the crash and saw the debris out on the street, but now that he saw it, he was surprised to find his heart thumping against the inside of his chest as if he were in a full sprint. A deep breath didn’t assuage the momentary feeling of urgency. He looked over at the rows of liquor. His eyes hovered there for a moment before he cursed and paced around the room.
Fuck it.
He poured himself a large snifter and guzzled it, shivering as the warm liquid predictably burned its way down his esophagus and into his stomach, and savoring the instant calming effect. He set the glass down with a clank and walked back to the terminal.
It was time. The day they’d all waited years for, and worked for, and planned for, was finally here. Now it was time for him to execute. Time for him to fall into character.
He opened a console on the terminal and pinged outbound. A response came back in green lettering on the monitor that read:
Secure.
Setting his Tab on the table next to the flat, glass keyboard, he established a wireless connection to the in-wall computer. He activated the algorithm that would log in a hundred false users. Bringing up a paragraph of text on the Tab, he sent it across the wireless connection and pressed return on the glass keyboard.
CorpKill62: To my partners in The Underground.
Tremor is compromised. As you all no doubt have seen, there was a building near the wall that imploded and disintegrated just a short time ago. Our leader has fallen. A martyr is born. It is time for a new era in this city. An era where the politicians do the bidding of the electorate, instead of the other way around. An era where the corporate kings don’t rule over the public as if they are serfs. An era where equality is the rule and not the exception. Miles played his role, and he played it well. He will be missed, and his name will be our rallying cry as we erase tyranny from our city. But now he is gone, and we must move to the next phase.
Losing Miles could easily create a vacuum. I am ready to step into that vacuum and start the next phase of our war on injustice.
Another message popped up in his stream.
Labyrinth: Laying it on a little thick, aren’t you, CK?
Kade smiled and pasted in the next message from his Tab.
CorpKill62: This is the time for serious people, Labyrinth.
Labyrinth: Then be serious. No one wants to hear you rant and rave about your grand ideas. There’s already a plan. Now we’ll follow it.
CorpKill62: And who is we?
Labyrinth: We! We, The Underground! All who can read these messages and have acted to get us this far. The doers.
CorpKill62: Miles was good for the movement when it was growing. I am thankful to have called him friend. But now they’ve killed him. It’s time for an escalation.
Labyrinth: What kind of escalation?
CorpKill62: How about taking out the oil trucks?
Labyrinth: God dammit, Corp. Miles has shot that idea down too many times to count. How are you serving his name by doing what he already stood in opposition to? Why would you want to attack the fuel? People in the city use that to stay warm!
CorpKill62: It’s not like we live in the Stone Age. They all have electric heat!
Labyrinth: Not nearly all of them have working heat.
CorpKill62: You’re just naysaying. It’s quite manageable. We have plenty of reserves for our population.
Labyrinth: But our population is soon to grow.
CorpKill62: You mean OKC Immigrants?
Labyrinth: Not to mention those brought back by the expeditions. Ever hear of Myrtle Beach?
CorpKill62: We have enough people to grow our own population. We don’t know anything about OKC people, and we don’t need a bunch of scavengers coming into this city and taking up resources. Especially not when there are still people living in the streets in the old world sectors.
Labyrinth: That sou
nds nothing like Miles to me!
CorpKill62: Exactly. It’s time for the new guard to take action. It’s time for major impact. We just weaken ourselves by letting unknown entities come into our city.
Labyrinth: I’m guessing history wasn’t a big subject for you.
CorpKill62: I know plenty of history. I know people like Vaughn ran oil companies that lied about their explorations. Lied about how much oil the world had left. Miles’s whole approach to this movement was consistent, sure. He wanted to win the long game. But now it’s time to think about the end game and start pushing toward it.
Labyrinth: We continue in a controlled way. We interrupt. We delay. We make the cost of doing business intolerable until they change their ways. This was always the plan. Miles believed in the immigration of Oklahoma City folks because it provided for strength in numbers. Miles hasn’t been gone for an hour and…
CorpKill62: But Miles is GONE!! It is up to us now! It’s time to get out from behind our terminals and start taking real, tangible action!
Labyrinth: We can take action while remaining anonymous. It’s how we’ve always done things. It has worked!
Kade pasted in the next response and waited for a minute before clicking send to account for its length. When the city read the logs, it would appear they were typing in real time.
CorpKill62: Anonymity doesn’t mean sitting on your ass with your fingertips tapping glass. It’s time to form the militant arm of this group. Miles knew that day might come. Now they’ve killed him in such a public way that a weak response would serve only to make us appear weak. We have to play the game our way.
Labyrinth: We have access to supplies beyond our wildest dreams because of all the glass tapping.
CorpKill62: If you want to keep glass tapping, make yourself useful and keep those supplies coming because I am taking whoever is with me, and we are going to start disrupting. We can hit their shipments, we can hit the places where they work, where they eat and where they live, or we can sit back and continue to tap tap tap away and shut down a commuter bus, or screw with factory machinery. But we’ve been doing that and look where it has gotten us! They’re still just as powerful. They’re still pulling people off the streets and making them disappear for the crime of disagreeing with them!
