Geek Mafia: Mile Zero

by Dakan

  "Oh, I call bullshit on that," Paul said. "You told me it's all in your head. The only place thieves and hackers can't get at it." He stood up and went to get a pad of paper and pen from the kitchen counter by the phone.

  "Well, I'll meet you halfway. I won't use any computers. But I'm going to have to write this shit down."

  Winston sighed and leaned back in his chair, rubbing his eyes with his hands. He looked very, very tired all of a sudden, although Chloe suspected this was just another mask he was adopting. The world-weary veteran who might not remember all the right details. "Just make sure you burn that paper when we're done."

  "Of course," said Paul, tossing the pen and paper to Chloe. "You two get started. I'll brew you some coffee.

  Don't want you falling asleep on us, old man."

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  Chapter 36

  THEY'D been at it an hour when the phone rang. They had no way of knowing if Winston was just making all these people up or if they were actually real Crews out there in the wide world, but he'd gone through about half of his list already, and Chloe's head was beginning to swim with the possibilities. It would be hard to choose just three. It might prove actually harder to choose three that weren't really traps.

  The truth was, this whole exercise was a stalling tactic to allow her some more time to decide what exactly she wanted to do about Winston. Turning him over to Isaiah along with the killer went against her every instinct. Well, every instinct except her desire for revenge, which loomed large in her brain, like a storm cloud ready to burst at any moment. She wanted to believe that Winston's info would actually be useful in some way

  - useful enough to justify letting him and his friend go.

  It was Bee calling on the phone from upstairs. Chloe answered her cell and heard Bee say, "Eddie's outside.

  And he's got his friends with him. And they've got guns."

  Chloe's heart jumped into her throat. "Ok, lock the place down."

  "Cops or no cops?" Bee asked.

  "No cops!" Chloe said, her voice too loud. Paul and Winston both looked at her in surprise. "And call Sandee." She clipped the phone back onto her pants and put the wireless earpiece on so she could remain in contact with Bee.

  "What's going on?" Paul asked. He'd taken over note-taking duties after fifteen minutes of Chloe's painfully slow stenography. "What cops?"

  "Eddie's back," she said. "Bee says he's got guns."

  "Fuck," said Paul, standing up and stuffing the notes he'd taken into his back pocket.

  "They're coming to the door," Bee said in her ear. "Three of them that I can see."

  "They're at the door," Chloe reported as she stepped to the front door and threw the deadbolt.

  "Can we get out the back?" Winston asked.

  "Bee? Back?" Chloe asked.

  "I don't know. The camera back there's on the fritz..."

  "Did you disable our rear cameras?" Chloe asked Winston.

  "I suppose I did," he admitted.

  "Well then, no telling how many guns are back there." Someone pounded on the door, Eddie no doubt. "Who is it?" she asked in a singsong voice.

  "It's Edd-ieeeee!" he shouted back in a matching tone.

  "We're not decent," Chloe said, motioning for Paul and Winston to head upstairs. Paul grabbed Winston by the arm and dragged him toward the stairs. "Can you come back later?"

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  "We don't have to come in," Eddie shouted. "Just send the guy who murdered Raquel out, and we'll take off and let you and your trannie friend be indecent together."

  Chloe whispered to Bee, "Where are they? What's up with Sandee?"

  "They're all by the front door," Bee said. "Sandee's locked up tight in the shed, and they don't seem to have thought about looking in there."

  "Not yet anyway," whispered Chloe. "Tell Sandee to stay put; we'll come to him."

  To Eddie she shouted, "I don't know what the fuck you're babbling about, but would you please just get the fuck lost!"

  Eddie resumed pounding, but the reinforced door shrugged off his blows with ease. "No I will not! We saw you with him! Now either give him to us or we'll tell Isaiah."

  "Yeah, you go run to daddy and tell him all about it," Chloe shouted back as she retreated to the kitchen to lock that door as well. She took a peek out the back window through the porch but didn't see anyone, which didn't come close to meaning that there wasn't anyone out there.

  "Let us the fuck in!" she heard Eddie shout from the front. No way the neighbors were not going to notice that. She hoped they didn't call the cops. As a matter of fact, she should probably be proactive and stop them from doing just that.

  "Bee," she said, "Shut down everything. Lock her up and say goodnight."

  "Really?" Bee asked. "What if we need to call...?"

  "There's no one to call. We're all here."

  "Ok," Bee said. "Here goes."

  "I'm coming upstairs," Chloe said, and she ran back into the front room. As she did, she heard the motors of the automated storm shutters kicking into action. Tough aluminum screens descended from rollers above every window, a common enough safety feature in the hurricane prone keys. Outside the front door she heard Eddie or one of his friends express surprise with a muffled "What the fuck?"

  She ran up the stairs as the house around her turned dark. Eddie and company could probably tear off the shutters if they had something to pry them out of their tracks, but it's not the kind of thing that would go unnoticed, and it would take a lot of time. She was betting they would continue to concentrate on the front door. She wanted to ask Bee for an update but she knew that wasn't possible. There wasn't a phone within five blocks of them that worked now unless someone had a satellite phone.

  Bee had gotten her hooks right into Verizon's switching box for the neighborhood and installed a kill switch for just these kinds of occasions. It was controlled by a wireless receiver that Bee could activate with a call from anywhere. More importantly, Bee had similar kill switches in three of the local cell phone towers that provided coverage for this part of the island. No one was going to be talking to anyone for the next hour at least - probably more depending on how long it took the phone techs to figure out what was wrong.

  The door to Bee's room was open, and Paul was standing there, waiting for her. She rushed in, and he slammed it behind her and started throwing deadbolts. Chloe looked at the wall of screens and saw that Bee had them all showing different views from around the house. She saw the interiors of every room from Chapter 36

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  multiple angles along with three different views of the front of the house, two of the side and two of the interior of the shed. Eddie, Marco and the big guy Quentin were all on the front porch, huddled together and trying to decide what to do.

  "I thought you said they had guns," Chloe said.

  "They do," Bee insisted. "Tucked into the back of Eddie's pants. And the fat one has one too." She clicked at her screens, and one of them showed a piece of video from a few minutes earlier. It was Eddie getting out of a car that was parked across the street and tucking a pistol into his shorts.

  "Ok, I believe you."

  "If you give me a phone, I can call for help," Winston said.

  "No phones," Chloe said.

  "I know you don't trust me, but..."

  "She means no phones work," said Paul. "We shut down all the phones in the neighborhood."

  "Why?" asked Winston.

  "So no one can call the cops and so no one can call for reinforcements," Chloe snapped. She was looking at the screens. Sandee and the killer were in the shed. Sandee had a shovel in his hand, ready to take the head off of anyone who came through the front door. On the porch, the boys were still debating tactics.

  "Which means you can't call for reinforcements either," Winston pointed out.

  "We don't have any reinforcements. And right now we outnumber them."

  "Assuming there aren't more out back," Winsto
n said.

  "And whose fault is it that we don't know that?" she snapped.

  "My people would be able to take care of..."

  "Enough!" shouted Paul. "We're on our own. Let's formulate a plan."

  "Maybe they'll go away," Bee suggested. On the screen they continued to huddle. It looked like Eddie and Marco were arguing. The fat guy stayed out of it.

  "If they do come through the door, they're in for a nasty surprise or two," Paul said. "I say we let them break themselves on the defenses and sweep up whatever remains."

  "I hate just sitting here like that," Chloe said. "But I don't see any other option."

  She watched the screens as the argument on the porch came to some sort of conclusion. Marco tried to use his cell phone but failed to get a signal. He threw the phone at Eddie, who was yelling at him and then stormed down the steps and back toward the car. Eddie flipped him off and then motioned for the big guy to bust down the door. As Chloe watched, Eddie drew the gun from behind him and held it barrel down as the big man slammed his whole body into the door.

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  Even from their position upstairs and at the back of the house, they felt and heard the building shake from the blow. The guy was sumo big and sumo strong. He slammed again. Chloe knew the deadbolts would hold, but she was worried about the door's frame, which was no doubt already splintering under the onslaught. She turned to Bee and asked, "Is everything ready?"

  "All charged up," Bee replied, her eyes glued to the screen, her mouse cursor hovering over a button on the screen marked "LIVINGROOM DOOR 1E."

  "This ought to be good," said Paul.

  "He's pretty big," Chloe pointed out. "He might be able to take it."

  "No way," Paul insisted. "He'd have to be an elephant."

  "We'll see," she replied with a smile.

  About a minute later they did see. The door frame burst on the eighth blow and showered splinters as it gave way and the door came off its hinges. One more kick sent the door crashing back into the room, right on top of the metal plate hidden under the doormat.

  "Oh shit," said Bee. "They're going to walk right over it." She moved her cursor off the activate icon on her screen and over to another button marked "LIVINGROOM WALL 2A"

  Chloe watched on the screen as Eddie followed the big guy into the room, both of them clambering over the door, which covered an electrical plate that would've sent a charge arcing through their bodies strong enough to knock them both unconscious. No one had ever considered the possibility that a broken-down door would cover the defense mechanism. Shit. Now all their furniture was about to be ruined, which totally sucked. She liked that couch.

  Eddie was shouting something, waving his gun around like an idiot. It was a revolver, maybe a .38, if she had to guess. Didn't seem like the kind of penis-replacement, nickel-plated automatic she would've assumed Eddie would tote. She guessed that he hadn't brought a gun at all and had been forced to buy that off some crack dealer or down-on-his-luck local. She hoped he didn't get trigger happy when...

  The room suddenly went white. Even upstairs in Bee's room they could hear the loud whooshing sound as a tear gas grenade hidden in the room's ceiling fan filled the whole downstairs with noxious fumes. Fortunately their room was sealed tight, because the entire house was going to stink to high heaven for the next few weeks, she was sure. With the storm shutters down, there was nowhere for the gas to go but out the front door and up the stairs.

  There was also nowhere else for Eddie and the Big Guy to go. Eddie, who hadn't made his way more than a few feet into the house in the first place, retreated back out the door, coughing and wheezing. Chloe could see him stumble down the stairs and into the yard. She didn't see the gun and hoped he'd dropped it on the floor somewhere. The Big Guy had just run straight ahead when the gas flooded the room, and somehow he'd managed to find his way onto the stairs, where he was now running ahead of the expanding cloud of gas.

  Bee watched him on the stairwell camera and clicked the icon marked "STAIRSLIGHT 1," switching off the light both by the stairs and in the upstairs hall. The internal cameras automatically switched over to night-vision mode. They watched as he fumbled around, tripping on a stair and falling forward onto his hands.

  He crawled the rest of the way up on all fours and started feeling his way along the hallway. They could hear him coughing from the tear gas.

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  As he approached the door to Sandee's bedroom, Chloe watched Bee click three icons in rapid succession, each marked: "2ND FLOOR DOOR CHARGE." Bee had hollowed out a space inside each door that contained the mechanism from a 100,000-volt stun gun. As soon as something touched the metal doorknobs the device went off, giving a nasty shock. That's exactly what happened to the Big Guy as he reached for Sandee's door. The current coursed through him and he screamed, pulling his hand away and falling to the floor in a twitching heap.

  Chloe realized another flaw in their system. Ideally she would have loved to rush out into the hall, shock the guy again and subdue him. But odds were he'd be recovered by the time she undid all the locks and seals that Bee's door had on it. Instead, she had to watch as he shrugged off the pain and shook his head from side to side trying to clear his vision. But his eyes were no doubt still tearing up from the gas, which was now spreading through the upstairs hall as well.

  "Look there," Paul said, pointing to one of the screens showing the outside of the house. Eddie was there with Marco, who'd run forward from the car to help his partner recover from the tear-gas attack. The two of them were pointing at the house and yelling at one another. As Chloe watched, two more guys she didn't recognize came running around the side of the house, straight past the shed where Sandee and the killer were holed up.

  She didn't recognize them, but they were definitely with Eddie. They must've been hiding out back. Good thing they hadn't tried to escape that way.

  The four men seemed to be debating what to do about the gas filled house. Marco was trying to pull Eddie toward the car, but he would have none of it. The two new guys just sort of stood there, staring down at the ground or back at the house. They reminded Chloe of a couple of kids trying to ignore the fact that their parents were fighting in front of them.

  Meanwhile, their big house guest had recovered enough to continue feeling his way blindly around the hallway outside their door. He'd learned his lesson about doorknobs at least, and had made his way to the end of the hall and the bathroom door (which wasn't electrified). The guy felt along the edges of the door as he stood up. Unlike Bee's door, the bathroom wasn't reinforced at all, and it gave a little as he leaned against it.

  The man didn't even have to try hard - one shoulder slam and it popped open. He flipped on the light switch and disappeared inside, shutting the door behind him.

  "Where's the bathroom camera?" Chloe asked.

  "There is no bathroom camera," Bee said. "I thought that would be weird."

  "Unlike having cameras all over the fucking city, including bathrooms at the party?"

  "But not in our bathrooms! That's icky."

  Chloe looked around Bee's room. "Fine. Where's a gas mask?"

  "In the chest by the bed," Bee replied.

  "What're you doing?" Paul asked.

  "I'm going to get that guy when he comes out," she said, opening the chest. It contained a jumble of gadgets and devices, most of them in pieces. But there were two gas masks. She took one for herself and tossed the other to Paul. "You want to help?"

  He looked down at the mask in his hands and sighed. His forehead still had a nasty bruise from his fight with the killer. "Yeah, of course."

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  Chloe rooted through the chest some more and came up with a pair of handcuffs and some pepper spray, ignoring the fact that Bee also kept a vibrator with her other gear. She glanced at the screen to see that Marco and Eddie were still arguing in the front yard. The other two had retreated to the street wh
ere they were talking to one of the neighbors who'd come outside to see what all the fuss was about. They were probably trying to convince the old man that the white smoke pouring out the busted down front door was no big deal.

  Paul finished unlocking and unsealing the door, and already they could smell the gas seeping in through the cracks. "Do you have any other gas masks for us?" Winston asked, speaking up for the first time since the siege began.

  "Under the bed," said Bee. "Could you get me mine?"

  Winston knelt by the bed and pulled out a long, clear plastic storage bin that was full of more gadgets and gear. "Which one's yours?" he asked as he opened the box, but it was immediately clear to everyone. There were three gasmasks in there, one of which Bee had modified heavily to look just like a Hello Kitty face.

  "Never mind, I found it."

  Bee and Winston donned their masks, and Chloe and Paul waited by the door. "Ok, we're going to get rid of this guy and then we need to bug out," Chloe said. "Bee and Win, load one of those containers with backup drives and whatever else Bee wants to take. And Bee, turn off the security on the back door, ok? Once we're done with the big guy, lock this place up - but non-lethal, ok? We're gonna have cops and probably firemen here pretty soon, and the last thing we need is one of them getting zapped."

  "Bug out?" said Bee, her voice barely audible through the mask. "Not like..."

  "No, of course not," said Chloe, knowing how much Bee had hated having to abandon the crew's house in San Jose on short notice. "We'll just clear out until Eddie and any cops are gone." She turned to Paul.

  "You ready?" she asked.

  "Someone's going to have to stay and spin the police a story to make them go away," he pointed out.

  "I know," she said. "Let's get rid of fattie first though, ok?"

  He nodded. She held up three fingers and counted down to one before throwing the door open. Bee hit the lights from her control panel, allowing them to see the bathroom door clearly. Chloe rushed down to the end of the hall and slammed her shoulder into the door, knocking it wide open. There was a very surprised man sitting on the toilet, a washcloth over his nose and mouth. Chloe emptied the can of pepper spray right into the guy's eyes. He yelled in protest, although she wasn't sure how much good it did since his eyes were already screwed shut as a result of the tear gas.