by Scott Allen
Red Walker
Scott Allen
Copyright 2020 Scott Allen
Smashwords Edition
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CHAPTER ONE
Dana was startled awake with his neck collar, ankle bracelet, and wristband all vibrating madly. It was 5:30 in the morning – much too early. His wristband display said in red letters that he needed to see the Matron immediately. That was when he looked across the room and saw that the other bed was empty, and that Rowan was gone. The stained sheets were rumpled and had splotches of blood on them. Rowan’s collar, ankle bracelet, and wristband lay on the floor. The collar was broken and twisted. He was shocked. There was going to be trouble.
He leapt out of bed, fear driving an icicle through his abdomen. He reached under the bed and pulled out the laundry basket that contained his clothes and threw on a black shirt, pants, socks, and shoes.
There was a split-second, descending the stairs almost at a run, where he could look at the person sitting at the Matron’s office desk, although he couldn’t see her face. It wasn’t Matron Sydney, the usual overnight Matron. He didn’t recognize the upper body of whomever it was. It was a much younger woman with a low-cut pastel blue blouse. That particular shade of blue scared him. He began to tremble.
In the office were three women. The younger woman at the desk was flanked by two heavier women in pastel blue blouses and blue pants. They had their arms crossed over their chests, He knew that all three must have stern, hostile expressions, although he didn’t dare look. Dana kept his eyes on the floor as he approached the desk. He was no fool, as frightened as he was. He knew the penalties for having an attitude.
“Dana, my name is Matron Riley,” said the woman at the desk, in matter-of-fact tones. I’m from Male Control. I will be here temporarily until we can replace Sydney. These are my colleagues, Officer Reese and Officer Logan.” She pushed a short-range control box forward on the desk, into his vision. She was letting him know that she could deliver a powerful, painful shock to his neck any time she wanted. Then her voice became sharper. “What do you know about the disappearance of your roommate, Rowan?”
“N..N..Nothing,” Dana stammered, staring at the control box.
“Nuh, Nuh, Nothing.” mimicked Riley. “Our video record shows that you were facing the wall all night, which means we have no video record from your neck collar of what Rowan was doing before he ran. Do you always face the wall? Or was this by pre-arrangement with Rowan?”
“He never said anything to me about running!” Dana was getting desperate. He really didn’t know anything. “Yes, usually I face the wall all night! It’s more comfortable!” That was true.
Sharper still. “How did he get his hardware off? How?” She almost screamed the last word.
“I don’t know! Honest, I don’t know! I thought that was impossible! I didn’t hear anything!”
“Where is Rowan?” Again, almost a scream.
“I don’t know! I don’t know!” Dana was now shaking and almost sobbing as he stared down.
There was a long, uncomfortable silence. He knew that all three were staring at him, judging him.
“Well,” said Riley in a resigned tone, “either you know something or you don’t. We’re finding out now by reviewing all the uploads from your neck cameras and mikes at MC. It will take a while. Clean up the mess that Rowan left in your room and leave his things in his basket outside the door. You can go about your normal work. Don’t get any ideas. You’re dismissed.”
Dana was still too terrified to feel any relief. He turned and walked out, careful not to run up the stairs. When he reached his room – the last of three on the second floor hall – he sat on his bed and put his head in his hands and tried to breathe normally.
Dana looked at his wrist. Five-forty-four in the morning. Had he just woken up fourteen minutes ago? His rattled brain was wracked with questions. The big one was whether MC would find anything incriminating in his or Rowan’s neck video and audio. He didn’t think so. He and Rowan had shared the room for only 5 months, and had barely talked. They had shared banalities about the weather or about having a long day at work. They had never complained to each other about anything – the food, the restrictions, the hardware, the work, the humiliating donations - they both knew better. Certainly, Rowan had never said anything about knowing how to get his hardware off, although it looked like it was a bloody process. He had never spoken about running – that would have been suicidal if MC had discovered it. Dana concluded he was probably in the clear with Male Control. But, one could never know.
Dana stared across the room at Rowan’s bed, a narrow plastic-frame bed with a thin mattress. The walls above it were bare, revealing a wide crack in the plaster. For the first time, he noticed that Rowan’s blanket was missing. There were only the bloody sheets. As he stripped them off Rowan’s bed, more questions came to him. Since it was possible to remove the hardware, how did Rowan do it? Like all boys, he had his hardware installed at 13, with larger pieces installed as he grew. It always required a special tool to seal the two edges together or take them apart, sometimes burning the wearer. Each ring appeared seamless and shiny, except for flat spots containing the cameras, microphones, and screens. No amount of pulling or twisting seemed to have any effect on the hardware. All boys tried to remove their hardware, and all failed. If they were caught trying to remove them, they got a painful shock on the ankle or the neck. They all gave up trying. Except, apparently, Rowan. What did Rowan know that no other male knew?
Dana’s heartrate, which he could see on a part of his wristscreen, was still much higher than normal, but coming down. He knew his heart rate was monitored by Male Control, but they would surely realize, probably with satisfaction, that it was high because of fear rather than anger or over-exertion. He employed a technique he had taught himself to bring down his heart rate, which was simply listening to his breathing and ignoring everything else. As his heart rate came down, he could think more clearly.
He realized something didn’t add up. The act of taking apart the hardware should have triggered an alarm at Male Control. Rowan must have started working on getting the hardware off as early as he could – around midnight or before. He would have wanted several hours to sneak through the dark streets, avoiding patrols. Yet, apparently MC had not realized he was gone until shortly before 5:30. Why hadn’t a group of MC patrolwomen with weapons come bursting into the dorm in the wee hours of the night? Dana was baffled.
And, where was Rowan now? Their male dorm was just south of the small downtown area of Valley, Oklahoma. It had been a long time since Dana had seen a map of the area. He knew from a short geography lesson in school that he lived in southeast Oklahoma, and that the state of Arkansas was to the east, and Texas to the south. How far away, he didn’t know. But, he had never been more than 3 kilometers from his dorm in the past four years. Before that, he had lived in Oklahoma City, with his mother for his first 12 years, then in a boy’s one-room school with five other boys for five more years before coming here. In neither of those places was he allowed to go more than a kilometer from home, and always accompanied by his mother or a Matron.
Dana had a vague notion that beyond the suburbs there was open country, with hills, trees, grasslands, rivers, and lakes. But, beyond some green hills to the southwest, he had never seen these thi
ngs. He had seen changing picture screens of landscapes on the refrigerators of some of the homes where he had serviced appliances, but he couldn’t always be sure that the women living there posted pictures of the surrounding area, or somewhere else. He knew better than to ask. So, where was Rowan now? Was he hiding in some derelict building not far away? There were plenty of those. Was he sleeping in some glade outside of town, waiting for night to resume running? And, where would he run to?
That thought made Dana glance near the doorframe at the hooks where they hung their workpacks and jackets. Yes, Rowan’s were gone. He had obviously filled the pack with supplies before he ran, including his blanket. Dana quickly examined the hardware pieces before throwing them in the basket. Each had blood all over it. The collar had been cut and then twisted off, but with what? Dana shoved the sheets into the laundry basket with Rowan’s few other possessions and set it outside the doorframe. There was only a doorframe, but no door. Nothing men did was supposed to be behind a closed door, so they didn’t have one.
CHAPTER TWO
It was six o’clock. The other four men in the dorm would be waking at 6:30, and there would be the usual rush for the bathroom and shower cubicle at the other end of the hall, which could only accommodate two men simultaneously. Passing by the other two rooms, seeing all four men asleep, Dana quickly slipped into the cubicle. His hands still shook a little, but he splashed cold water on his face anyway. It made him think about the cold shower he would take that night. There was no hot water. In the summer, it wasn’t so bad, because the dorm water pipes were warned a bit by the weather, and he would be hot, anyway. Only the matron’s office was air-conditioned. But, this was Spring, and the pipes would be cold. He carefully raised the toilet seat (“like a good boy” – he remembered the phrase from school) and urinated, then flushed. He ran a comb through his short brown hair. He would get a jump on the work day. He went to his room, took down his yellow workpack, and carried it out. He decided against a jacket. His wristband said the temperature was 18 degrees and no rain was expected.
Downstairs, he had to pass by the open door of the Matron’s office. He carefully avoided looking in. He walked into his work cubicle, a two-meter square space open on the side facing the vestibule, that contained his tools, manuals, shelves with spare parts, and a box containing his food for the day. He supposed Matron Sydney had put the six waxpaper-wrapped nutrition bars in it as one of her final acts at the dorm. When Rowan had run, that must have ended her career there. He didn’t know, and knew he would never know, what happened to her. He was certain she was being grilled much worse than he had been. He felt sorry for her. She was an older lady, and had always been as nice as her position allowed, offering a kind word when he returned from work, and perhaps even smiling at him on occasion, although he never saw her face. Did she have anything to do with Rowan running? Almost certainly not. Suicide to do something like that.
Dana began nibbling on a nutrition bar. It had the usual grey color, bland and slightly sweet taste, and crumbly texture he had grown to loathe. But, there was nothing else. Sometimes, he arrived at a home to repair an appliance, and the woman, or women, who lived there were preparing a meal. He had seen and smelled mouth-watering things - meat, vegetables, fruit, bread -things he remembered from growing up with his mother - being prepared, but had never been invited to partake. That was forbidden. Like all men, he was not supposed to put on muscle weight or have too much energy.
He pushed a button on his wristband, and brought up his worklist for the day. There were three addresses, each one with a distance vector from the dorm, 0.6 km, 1.2 km, and 1.0 km in what looked like the opposite direction. Good. Not too much walking today. Dana touched the first address and the work order came up: “Jenna, apartment 505. Oven works, rangetop does not. Genlite Model 77. Moving team moved it away from wall 2 days ago.”
If there was any part of his work he liked, it was this. He had to rule down the possible problems to one or two, so that he could fit all of the tools, spare parts, and lunch into his work pack without going over 10 kilograms. This was an old stove model, as he would have guessed from the address. It was in a part of town with old, run-down apartments, occupied mostly by younger women who had not yet given birth. The fact that the oven worked meant that electricity was getting to the unit, but since the whole rangetop was not working, the problem was probably in the distribution switch unit that supplied the four burners. He took a model 77 distribution switch unit off the shelf and put it in his workpack.
The second address looked like it might be a more complicated problem. It was in one of the middle-value suburbs, and an automatic ice-making unit on a refrigerator would not dispense ice. That could be something simple, like a frozen or clogged part, or a problem with one of the control switches or the two little electric motors. He put a couple of parts in his pack.
Finally, the third address was a house in the upscale suburb. It seemed that the lady who lived there wanted two light bulbs replaced in ceiling fixtures. At one of the other two addresses, Work Control would have told the women to replace the bulbs themselves. This woman must be important. She had not only given birth to at least two children, he guessed, but held some high administrative post in town, or maybe even the state. She needed type C bulbs, and Dana put two, each in a protective box, in his pack.
As a final check, he touched a spot on his wristscreen and got an estimate of the number of steps required to hit his three worksites. Seven thousand, two hundred. It was a comfortable margin below the mandatory maximum of nine thousand.
Dana put the tools he thought he needed into the workpack - nothing that could be used as a weapon, of course – and weighed it at the scale just outside the Matron’s door. Nine point two kilograms, including two bars for lunch. He was on his way out the door, into the sunshine.
CHAPTER THREE
It was a perfect, cool, sunny day, welcome after a long, cold, rainy winter. Dana knew exactly how to get to the first address. He had been working in appliance repair in Valley for 4 years, and knew every street within a two-and-a-half kilometer radius. He even knew he could cut his step count down by slipping through alleys, but that might raise suspicions at MC. He now wondered if they really tracked him that closely, but he didn’t want to risk it. He followed the route on his wrist screen.
Very few people were out walking. There were a few women, about half pushing wheeled baby carriages, usually in groups of two to four. Sometimes they crossed the street to avoid his path. Of course, they had no neck collars or ankle rings. He never looked up to see their faces. But, he noticed they all had wristbands with displays on them, but they usually were not shiny metal. They were held on with colored bands that usually matched their clothing. Frequently, they were speaking into the display. None of them wore pastel blue. Women frequently rode in vehicles, but MC patrol officers especially.
Overhead there were birds flying, singing in the Spring sunshine. He knew they were real, because birds that were really camera drones didn’t sing. He could hear those flying around even in the worst parts of winter, whereas the real birds would be gone. As long as he kept his head down, the camera drones passed over him without pausing.
He had to avoid broken sidewalk pavement, fallen bits of masonry, and large patches of tall weeds that had overgrown the sidewalk, so it was imperative in any case that he keep his eyes downward. The tall weeds were the worst, because if he brushed against them, he would get chiggers on his clothes, which would eventually reach his body and make him itch badly. He didn’t want to show up on a service call scratching himself, because it might be misinterpreted by some woman. So, when a patch of weeds blocked his path, he looked around to make sure there were no male control officers in sight, then carefully and quickly stepped out in the street to get around the weeds.
At the first address, the run-down apartment house, he discovered that the elevator was broken. He trudged to the 5th floor, arriving out of breath. He stopped. It might raise alarms in
the young woman in 505 if he were breathing hard. He gave it a minute. Then, he knocked, and lowered his eyes.
Jenna swung the door open and said, “It’s about time! Do you know my oven has been sitting in the middle of the kitchen for two days? I actually have climb over the counters to get to the refrigerator!” He could see that she had a control box in one hand and knew he had to be careful. He noticed that she was wearing skin-tight grey pants and that she was slender, with flaring hips and slim thighs. It made him afraid that his body would respond, but it didn’t. The suppression injection was working, as usual for this time of the month.
Dana said, “I’m really sorry, ma’am. Work Control makes the decisions about when to move appliances. I don’t have any control over it. I’m really sorry for your trouble.” Two days ago, a team of three or four burly women had wrestled the stove into the middle of the kitchen so that Dana could reach the back of it. When he notified work control that the job was completed, a team would come to move it back.
“Well, just get it fixed.” She backed up to give him as much room as possible. Dana could tell she was a frightened to have a man in the tiny apartment.
Dana slipped off his pack next to the stove and took out a small socket wrench, and began taking off the back of the control panel. Soon, he had uncovered the distribution switch unit, used a multi-tester to confirm that it was shorted out, and had begun removing it. The silence in the apartment was uncomfortable. The woman had moved as far as possible away from him, and was watching him intently with the control box in her hand. He replaced the distribution switch unit, and then realized that the stove power cord would not reach to the wall outlet. The moving team had moved the stove too far by 15 centimeters.