So that was where Logan ended up, in the ZUS, working for Jacques.
It was where the police had tossed him, just one more piece of garbage dumped in the social waste dump to rot. And, with no ID, he couldn’t safely leave.
There was no UBI in France, or, if there was, it certainly didn’t extend to the ZUS. Those who lived there had to make their money any way they could.
He protected the girls from their competitors and customers, while Jacques sold his drugs. Logan might not have known enough French at first to talk them out of trouble, but he was tall, and rugby lessons at school had built up enough muscles to scare away most men who might try to rob or hurt the girls.
The men who weren’t scared of him... well, he got into some fights and earned some fresh scars, but, when a man threatened the girls, Logan only had to imagine Alice’s face as Morgan’s men led her away, and he’d give them much worse than he got.
Jacques found him a place to stay, and kept him fed, if only on stolen rations through the black market. After a few months, he started paying Logan for his work, giving him enough money for a few of the good things in life.
And some of the girls would show their gratitude, now and again. Most of them had grown up living rough on the streets, running and hiding from the worst the ZUS could throw at them, and not always escaping. Most were just glad to finally having someone to look out for them.
One of the girls, Angelique, took a liking to him, and him to her. She’d left home in rural France and come to Paris to find a new life. And ended up dumped in the ZUS, just like him.
They became kindred spirits, both still dreaming of escaping to a better life.
Logan might be a criminal, but he was happier than at any time in his life. If happiness required him to become a criminal, then so be it. He hadn’t made that choice, they had.
Jacques had started small, living rough and making money with petty thievery in and out of the ZUS, as so many did until the cops caught them, just the beginning of a long career in and out of jail that would eventually lead to their execution.
But Jacques was smart enough not to get caught, and had found other, more profitable, business than stealing. He a was rising star of the underworld now, with over two dozen girls working for him, and good connections to the gangs who manufactured drugs in the basements, abandoned factories and offices around the ZUS.
In a few years, he was planning to be one of the big men of Section 19. One of the successful criminals the others all looked up to, and aspired to be.
“Things will change around here,” Jacques said one moonlit summer night as they strolled home along the dark streets of Section 19 after a hard day’s work. “When I’m in charge, I’ll clear up the streets. The vicious little thugs who prey on the weak might not be afraid of the flics, but they’ll be afraid of me. And you’ll be with me. I won’t forget the people who help me on the way up.”
Red and blue lights flickered on the walls ahead of them.
Cops. Or the flics, as most inmates of the ZUS called them.
Jacques grabbed Logan’s shoulder, and pulled him into the shadows at the side of the street. Then along a dark alley, where they could hide among the piled-up garbage as they peered over the crumbling brick wall at the end, toward the police vans parked in the street beyond.
Two cops lounged beside the vans, hiding their identities beneath their helmets and armour, and holding short, bulbous submachineguns at their hips. The red and blue lights on the vans reflected from the shiny metal of the guns as the cops watched the surrounding buildings.
Four more cops with guns, helmets and shields pushed a couple of dozen teenage girls and boys toward the open doors at the back of the vans. The girls stared down at the street as the cops shoved them, or at each other. The boys struggled with the cops, who thumped them with the shields, or the butts of their guns, until the boys stopped complaining and moved on toward the vans.
“Hey, flics,” a tall, muscular boy wrapped in a leather trench-coat yelled from the alley across the street.
The cops turned toward him as he flung a fist-sized rock at them. It clattered as it bounced off one cop’s shield and fell to the pavement.
Another raised his gun and fired a burst toward the boy, lighting the darkness with his muzzle flash and filling the night with the chatter of gunfire. Shards of concrete flew from the corner of the building beside the boy as he ducked back into the alley.
One of the boys in the crowd barged past the cops as they stared toward the alley, and ran away from them along a street that was now silent and empty aside from the thumping of his shoes on the concrete.
Until a cop raised his submachinegun, and fired. Blood spurted from the boy’s back, and he fell to the ground, then slid to a stop. The other kids watched in silence as the cop strode to the still-twitching body, then smacked the boy’s head with his truncheon until bone cracked. The boy stopped moving.
Logan ducked down behind the wall. He’d never seen someone killed before, especially not like that. He could almost taste his dinner of gooey black-market rations coming back up his throat as his body shook at the sight.
“What are they doing?” he whispered.
Jacques held his finger against his lips, warning Logan to stay quiet. Then leaned closer and whispered back.
“New toys for the aristos.”
“What do you mean?”
“Every few months, the flics round up a bunch of kids, and hand them over to the aristos.”
“Why would the aristos want them?”
“Mostly, they hunt the boys for sport. And the girls for...” Jacques grunted and thrust his hips back and forwards. “You know. Maybe some of the boys too, if they’re pretty.”
Logan almost smiled. This had to be a joke. The aristocrats couldn’t really be that bad, could they?
Then he remembered Alice’s face as she climbed slowly into Morgan’s car. Of course they could. Toffs and bosses were the same the world over, weren’t they?
Arrogant, ugly, and ready to use anyone or anything for their entertainment. Because they could, and there was no-one to stop them.
He should have guessed the rest of the world would be no better, before he sailed across the sea. It would have saved him a lot of time, and a lot of pain.
“Why doesn’t someone do something?”
“You wanna get shot to save them? Go ahead. The rest of us just try not to get caught.”
Jacques lowered his head as the cops pushed the kids into the van. Then turned away.
He was right. The only thing that could stop the toffs was a revolt, and how likely was that?
Logan’s father had done more to try to protect Alice when they took her away than anyone had for these kids. Did the cops buy off their parents, offer them a chance to get out of the ZUS in return for their sons and daughters, or just grab some of the many kids who were living rough in the streets?
There wasn’t much chance of anyone rebelling, either way. No-one cared. They just wanted to survive.
Either way, this wasn’t a world to be weak and pretty.
The end came a month later.
Angelique had gone off with a client, as Logan sat on his rotting chair in the shade of the derelict old bank and watched over the others. The usual suspects were scowling across the street, ogling the girls, and selling drugs and whatever they’d managed to steal the previous day. Staring at him, trying to intimidate him.
Just another day in Section 19.
Angelique screamed. By the time Logan reached her, she was crouched on the ground with a blood-stained lip and a bruise over her eye. The man she’d picked up stood over her, grabbed her by the arm, and pulled her to her feet. Then punched her again.
Logan wrapped his arm around the man’s neck, and pulled him away from her. The man struggled, and Logan’s free hand slammed into his kidneys.
Then the man grunted and stamped down on Logan’s feet, twisting hard in Logan’s grip as he did so, and pulling himsel
f free. The man turned, his face contorted in fear, and swung his fist at Logan’s face. Logan dodged.
Then punched the guy with all his strength. The sound of the man’s nose crunching just encouraged him to hit the face again, and harder.
The outside world faded away as the man’s face became the scars of the suit-wearing, muscular heavy who took Alice. Then the grey-haired wrinkles of Morgan’s lawyer. Then Morgan himself. Logan punched again and again, then slammed the man back against the hard stone wall of the bank.
“Stop,” Angelique yelled, and grabbed Logan’s arm.
But he was far too strong for her to pull him away. Logan continued punching, again and again, until the limp body slid down to the ground, and lay there, motionless.
Then he punched the man some more.
By the time he was done, standing over the man, sweating and gasping for breath, it was too late.
“What did you do?” Angelique yelled. She shook as she crouched and checked the man. He didn’t move as she touched him, and Logan knew from her eyes as she looked up at him that he’d just killed a man.
Her eyes were wide, her lips quivered, and her chest heaved. The dead man was dressed in a smart, tailored suit, not the T-shirts and rough cloth so common in Section 19.
He was an aristo, a toff, come down to the ZUS for a bit of rough entertainment with a girl he assumed no-one cared about. But someone would certainly care about him. They’d miss him soon, and come looking.
“Go,” he said. She didn’t need to be there, or anywhere nearby, when the cops arrived.
And they would, soon enough.
CHAPTER 7
New Strasbourg
The girl turned away from Bairamov, and pointed down the street she had just emerged from. It turned to the left off the main street through the village, and led between two rows of houses—the same kind of radiation-resistant curved bunkers as the others they'd seen across the planet—then petered out into the fields about a hundred metres away.
“Is that a good idea?” Desoto said.
Bairamov looked over the girl’s head, and peered down the street. “Please remember to say sir when you’re questioning my orders in future. Our beloved political officer said to show our faces and smile at the locals. You two are prettier than me. Get in there and do your jobs.”
“Yes, sir.”
Logan nodded to the girl.
“Let's see what we can do for you.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I have no money to pay for a doctor to help. Or any way to get them here if I did.”
“Don’t the mines have doctors?”
The girl turned, and led the way along the street. “Only for the miners.”
“What does your father do?” Desoto said.
“He lost his arm in the mines two years ago. He can’t work there any more. He has a pension, but it doesn’t pay for much.”
Logan fell into position a few metres behind the girl, taking slow and careful steps so he wouldn’t risk colliding with her if she stopped, and staying far enough back that she wouldn’t be in the crossfire if someone did attack them.
They were heading on their own into what may well be an ambush. What a great way to fill their day.
But if her father actually was sick, Heinrichs, the section medic, might be able to do some good. And, just maybe, that would make the rest of the village feel better about helping them find the insurgents.
Desoto moved ahead of him, watching the houses on the left of the street. Logan watched the right.
Smoke rose from a chimney at the side of the next house, and the smell of burning wood and roasting meat filled the air as they passed by. A wrinkled, grey-haired lady with squinting eyes sat on the steps outside the door, lifting the hem of her black dress to scrape at sores on her calves. She glanced up at Logan, then returned to her task.
A young boy, maybe six years old, sat between that house and the next, playing in the thick dirt with something long and yellow, with spikes protruding from the side.
Logan’s eyes followed the boy as he approached. What was that thing? The boy smiled at him and held up his hand. Empty eye-sockets stared at Logan from the dog’s skull he clasped tightly in his fingers.
Logan glanced back along the street. Bairamov and Gallo still stood at the corners, one on each side of the street, scanning their surroundings as Logan and Desoto followed the girl. Sweat dripped from Logan’s forehead, onto his eyes. He blinked it away, but his skin felt warm.
His heart was pounding, and that didn’t help. He could pull his hand out of the arm of the suit to wipe sweat away, but, last time he did it, the contortions required had almost dislocated his shoulder. He was in no hurry to try that again.
“Alice, suit temperature down five degrees.”
Fans whirred deep inside the suit, and a blast of cold air blew on his face from the vents around the helmet, forcing some of the hot air of the village away from his face.
He shivered as the temperature rapidly dropped, but he could feel the sweat drying on his skin as it cooled.
They were half-way down the street now, and the girl had shown no sign of slowing.
“Which house is yours?”
She glanced back at him and smiled, then pointed down the street. “Just a couple more houses.”
“Which one?” Desoto said.
She pointed at the last house on the left, beyond which the packed-down dirt of the street began to merge into the fields outside the village.
“That one.”
She moved on, passing the next house, with Desoto trailing behind her. Logan looked away from her and glanced toward the house ahead of them just as glass exploded from it, out into the street.
The sharp cracks of rapid-fire high-velocity rounds filled the air, and raised spurts of brown dirt as they hit the ground near Desoto’s feet, then rose up the front of the house behind him as the recoil took the shooter’s aim higher.
The girl didn’t even glance back.
At the noise, she ran headlong down the street, and hit the dirt behind the steps in front of the next house along. Then she covered her head and lay as low as she could, pressing her body down into the dirt, and fumbling with the bag that hung around her neck.
“Contact,” Logan yelled into his mike, and dove for cover at the side of the house as Desoto ran for the far side of the street. If putting a metre of dirt between them and the shooter wouldn’t protect them, nothing there would.
“Alice, visor down.”
The suit’s visor slammed down. The world outside the suit dimmed for a split second as the visor blocked out much of the sunlight, before Logan’s eyes adjusted.
Cool air thick with oxygen blasted into his face, giving him a sudden boost as it filled his lungs and spread through his body. He’d need it as the adrenaline flooded his body and his muscles tensed, ready to spring into action.
He glanced behind him. The green squares showing Bairamov and Gallo’s positions on the HUD moved around at the end of the street.
He switched his rifle to his left hand, and held it out around the corner, watching the sight display on his HUD as he swung it around to scan the front wall of the house.
The dark rod of a rifle barrel protruded from the broken window to the left of the door, and the shooter fired again as Desoto ran for cover beside a house on the far side of the street.
A round drew sparks from the right leg of Desoto’s suit as it grazed the metal and ricocheted into the wall of the house. The rest of the burst hit the wall as the rifle’s barrel rose, and threw a cloud of dirt into the air as the rounds ploughed into the dirt piled over it.
Desoto’s leg twisted beneath him as he ran for cover, and slumped down in the alley between the two houses.
“What’s happening?” Bairamov said.
“Shooter in the house beside me,” Logan said.
“I’m hit,” Desoto said.
The gun barrel still protruded from the broken window. Whoever it was, they weren
’t a very good shot. If Logan had been firing from an ambush like that, Desoto would at least be out of the fight with a badly-damaged suit, if he wasn’t dead.
That kind of inaccuracy said insurgent, and not one with much experience. Nor very smart, if he’d decided to take on a section of Legionnaires by himself.
Logan could fire at whoever was in there, and probably hit them through the wall. The rounds would still hit hard enough to hurt them, even if they didn’t have enough velocity left to kill. But there could be a whole family in the house, and only one of them was shooting.
“Can you see what’s in the house?” he said. “Can you see who shot at you?”
“All I saw was this house I'm taking cover behind, while I was running for it as fast as I could go.”
Logan glanced toward Desoto. The status around Desoto’s position on his HUD showed suit damage, but nothing beyond that. The hit had damaged the suit’s leg, but not the man inside.
As Desoto glanced around the corner of the house, the rifle fired again. Two rounds punched through the corner of the dirt pile as Desoto ducked back, and a cloud of dirt flew out from the house alongside as its walls finally stopped them. The rest of the burst blew narrow craters in the dirt near Desoto.
“Do you have a positive ID on your targets?” Bairamov said.
“I don’t have crap,” Desoto said. “Just some asshole shooting at me from a house across the street.”
“Do not engage without a positive ID.”
Logan glanced toward the girl. He could barely see her past the steps, but she was pushing herself up and staring his way, holding her bag close to her chest as her body shook.
He pulled the grenade launcher from his shoulder, crouched at the corner of the house, and aimed at the window. It was just a narrow slit from that angle, but he wasn’t aiming to hit the shooter. The rifle fired again, and more dirt erupted from the house near Desoto.
Logan selected smoke. The launcher thumped, and and it hammered against his shoulder as he fired a three-shot burst.
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