LINKS
Author Website: http://www.davidafsharirad.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/dmafshar
Dead Run
Aaron Michael Ritchey
Jake Koum showed his unconscious sister the turquoise eMuse phone with the case cracked open.
“This should have enough memory to handle the download, Talitha,” he said.
The disease chewed pink holes into his sister’s gray skin. She didn’t cough; she rattled with every breath. Sweat trickled down her face to drip on the bare mattress resting on the scraped wood floor of what had been the master bedroom in better times. Now, the place stank of the mold in the carpet and the mildew in the drywall. And his sister’s failing body.
“It’ll be all right,” Jake said. “I was at the door of the storage unit trying to download the security hacks. I heard babies yesterday.” His old phone had maxed out only a few gigs away from finishing the download. That forced him to steal the eMuse from Harper, though it didn’t feel like stealing. Not when the buttsucker had five of them lying around his West Colfax apartment.
“Tonight is my last chance to get one of the babies,” Jake whispered. “They grow so fast.”
On the other side of the unpainted drywall, the Jaya family murmured and creaked around. A century ago, only one family had lived in the Denver suburban house. After the dollar fell to zero and the corporations guzzled the last pints of oil, the Littleton neighborhood had been converted into low-income housing.
MBiti, their landlord, had used sheetrock to convert the whole place into little ratholes where Jake and his family lived, where the Jaya family lived, the Ling family, the Winters, and old MBiti himself, downstairs because he was too fat to climb steps. The rich man’s AC chugged and whirred.
On the other side of the wall, a toddler whined, and Grandpa Jaya coughed—a real cough, harsh, yet so much better than Talitha’s rattle. First you got the big capital-letter disease. Then you got the pneumonia. Then you died.
“But you won’t die, Talitha” Jake said. He dipped a Hello Kitty t-shirt into a clean bowl of water, brought directly from the hydrant, and wiped the sweat off his sister’s gray skin. His own hand seemed so dark in comparison.
Before the disease, she had been beautiful, his beautiful older sister, seventeen-years-old and white teeth and shining hair and skin so dark it looked like her shadow. She had been full-faced despite the thin oatmeal they ate. But that was before. Before his father gave her the disease. A four-letter word that spelled death.
“I’ll sell the baby, and we can get those retro-drugs I’ve read about online at school. It’s not a cure, but you’ll feel better. As long as you take a pill every day, you’ll be able to live longer than me.” Jake stood up abruptly. Below, old MBiti’s TV blared. He probably had it split-screened so he could watch a hundred shows at once, stuffing his face, sitting on his sofa, in the comfort of his air conditioning.
Jake rubbed sweat off his forehead with his arm. Once he sold the baby on the black market, if there was enough money left, he’d get an AC for their room. In his fantasies, the scientists gave him enough cash to buy out MBiti completely. He’d find homes for the other families, and then he and his sister would live in the huge house like people had done before. But those were just dreams.
Heavy footsteps shook the outside staircase.
The patio door to the balcony slid open, and Jake moved away from Talitha.
Jake did not want to face his father, not on the most important night of his life.
But it was too late. His dad stood in the patio door, blocking his way. His dad’s yellowed eyes squinted from an acne-chopped face, thinned from the disease. He swayed.
“Where’re you going?” his father slurred.
Jake grabbed his torn backpack off a folding chair. He shuffled through the contents: computer parts, tablet, and cables. He placed the eMuse on top of the pile. He was ready. But his father blocked the door.
“You can’t go. I’m in no shape to take care of your sister.”
“I’m going,” Jake said, glaring.
“She’s…she’s…dying.” His father’s mouth stumbled. His feet stayed planted on the chipped wood.
“Because of you…” Jake knew what the words would do. Like the dominos he and his sister would arrange on the floor of their room. You set them up, and then you tapped just the first one, and the rest rattled down. Rattled, like his sister’s lungs.
His father reached for him but was too slow, too drunk. Jake slipped past him and onto the balcony and then ran down the stairs. The old nails holding the staircase to the siding squeaked and strained. Some pulled loose.
His father shouted down the landing. “It wasn’t me, Jake. I never touched her like that.”
“First you get sick, then she gets sick. I’m not stupid. Why aren’t you dying instead of her?” Jake called up from the garbage in the yard. He saw the windows fill with people. He didn’t blame them. When they fought, he listened. It was better than TV.
“Jake, please. It wasn’t me. There was another woman. After your mother got burned during her shift—”
“You’re a liar!” Jake roared. He tore off through the trash-thick weeds in the backyard and ran through the shanties built on, around, between the old suburban houses. Cardboard flapped in the light breeze, mothers with the disease held babies with the disease, all eyes on Jake.
The sweat slid off him like rainwater, dripping onto his white t-shirt and green canvas shorts. He dashed through the plywood maze and found the chipped asphalt of Ammons Avenue, glittering with broken glass, littered with papers and wrappers, cans, sofa stuffing, electronic parts, a few dead monitors beyond repair. The hulking wrecks of cars lay surrounded by a penumbra of tubes, gears, wires, hoses, and tires. Families were always working on their cars, and stealing parts was as popular as swapping them.
Jake had just started to breathe normally when he saw the group of boys coming down the street, four of them. Including Harper. All had pink hair, bright red lips, and black-and-white metallic shirts. And the tight jeans poor tueet boys wore when they wanted men with money to notice.
Harper didn’t need to point. His eyes ripped through Jake.
Harper and his gang took off in a sprint, fanning out, as if they owned the street.
Jake whirled and ran
The chemicals in the air left orange and purple claw marks across the sky. It never got dark. At night, the orange left and only the purple remained, cooked darker by the heat.
Jake sped away. The loose plastic on his shoes flapped with every step. He ran towards Rudyard, where the third-shift workers would be bicycling home.
Bicycles packed the four lanes of Rudyard, holding back a big truck and an ancient Toyota Prius. He had to get across the wide street, down into the culvert, up the other side, across the carrier tracks, and then to the storage units. Where the babies were.
Harper screamed, “I’m coming for my eMuse, Jake. You thief. You dirty thief.”
“We’re gonna hurt you bad, thief.” One of Harper’s friends added, a big kid marked by scabs and scars.
Jake rushed into the swarm of bicycles. They swerved, not to save Jake’s skin, but to save their wheels.
A truck, belching smog into the heat, jerked forward. Jack put up a hand to shove himself away, and that one second was all it took to scorch his palm. Jake hissed in pain.
More yells from Harper and his gang. The commuters had closed ranks, stopping them from busting through, which gave Jake time to get to the other side of Rudyard. He dropped down into the culvert swimming in more garbage, splashing through slimy puddles. He slipped and fell. The mossy scum soothed the burn on his hand—probably infected it as well.
Infection. Not the big capital-letter disease, but some other bug had crawled into his mother through her burn and killed her.
Harper and his friends might not have seen him drop into the culvert. They might think he was heading over to the school. But then again
, maybe not.
The storage units were just across the carrier tracks, not steel train tracks, nothing so ancient, but frictionless magnetic tracks glowing blue. Jake’s dad said the destruction equipment had bulldozed through houses to lay the tracks. The people had leapt from their shanties, shacks and mouse holes like ticks off a drowning dog. Nuclear-powered carriers, massive, hulking buckets, carried chunks of re-processed material to Optimum’s recycling plant. Optimum took hundreds of years of trash and turned it into shit that fifteen minutes later the rich people would throw away. Trash into shit and right back into trash.
Jake clambered up the cement bank, and he was slim enough to slip under the bottom of the razor wire. He turned and saw Harper and his gang in the culvert. He ducked behind a big cement post. He hid for a moment in the shadows of the purple night. Then he risked a glance.
Harper and his gang jogged toward him, going south. Jake realized they knew where he was going.
His hand hurt. Bright red grill marks crisscrossed his palm. However bad the pain, it wasn’t going to hinder him from getting a baby, not when he had a chance to save his sister’s life. A burn. So what? Burns had almost become a family tradition.
A carrier rumbled from the west, fifty feet high, shaking the ground. Hissing and shaking, a metal dinosaur, it moved slowly but steadily down the eerie blue of the magnetic tracks. Jake had to get across the tracks before the carrier came.
Even if it meant Harper and his gang would see him.
Jake fled.
The yells erupted.
He darted in front of the carrier. The radiation and power of the thing made his skin crawl. He leapt over the glowing magnetic track, then climbed a dirt slope and slid under another razor-wire fence. He rose, facing the storage units—rows and rows of garages with their orange doors closed tight.
Harper knew where Jake was going. Harper had read the same books, and maybe had the same ideas.
After all, Jake and Harper had been brothers not too long ago. Before Harper went insane.
Jake raced down the alley on the north side of the storage units, thirteen aisles, running north to south. The north alley lay between the storage units and a big Optimum warehouse—new concrete, nice steel, bright flex-glass windows. The storage units next to it looked like they thousands of years old, something from ancient Egypt. The concrete was flecked, the sliding doors were made of cheap aluminum doors, and the shingles on the flat roofs were decaying.
Aisle thirteen had the big storage units. The smugglers would need the big ones to hold the mama and her babies.
Denver gleamed in the distance. The running lights of flying cars floated around the glowing skyscrapers. Real sci-fi stuff, his dad always said. Jake didn’t get it, but his dad would laugh. Every time his dad laughed, Jake hated him more.
Jake’s mom, her body blackened, had shrieked herself into silence. Jake joined her in the silence and hadn’t laughed since.
Not his dad. A few months later, he hooks up with some woman. Then he gets sick. Then he gives the capital-letter disease to his daughter. His own daughter.
Unit 13E was all the way at the end of the corridor next to the southern alley. Jake sped to the garage door and retrieved the legacy tablet from his backpack. He heard a growl come from inside unit 13E. He froze and listened for a long time but heard nothing more. Maybe he’d imagined it. He hoped he had. An adult would tear him apart and slurp up his bloody bones.
The mama and her babies should still be sleeping after coming through the portal. If the internet was right about them.
The full-grown ones were cheap. The scientists wanted the young ones, the babies.
Two days ago, while dawdling on his way home from school, Jake had seen the rough-necked traders lock them up in the storage unit. Probably got greedy. Didn’t go with the first buyers. Like Kino from The Pearl, which Jake was reading in school.
Jake wouldn’t make that mistake.
The tablet sparked on, the battery light steady. The link to the wireless connection was weak, but not weak enough to drop. Couldn’t drop. It was a dynamic download, which meant the security hacks code would need to run continuously while connected to the internet.
Jake plugged in the eMuse, then used the custom cable to link the tablet to the security lock on the door. The light on the pad glowed a defiant red.
Harper’s cursing drifted through the air from somewhere in the storage unit facility.
Jake would start the download and then keep them away from the door.
The thing shifted inside, a huge weight, its lungs inhaling and exhaling huge gusts of air. The adults were the size of elephants.
He found the hacking website and started downloading all possible combinations for all possible storage containers across the west into the eMuse’s memory. Couldn’t use the tablet’s memory, too small. Only a couple terabytes. Tiny. Worthless. The eMuse was newer, tons of space.
Jake sprinted down the southern alley, making noise as he went, until he got to aisle six. He climbed up onto the roof and hoped he was far enough away from the tablet so they wouldn’t find it or Harper’s eMuse. A cinderblock lay on the roof. He scooped it up and winced. His hand, the burn.
Chatter below made him freeze.
Harper and his boys were right under him.
“Do you think he found one?” the big scabby kid asked.
“Why else would he come to the storage units?” Harper asked. “The BRSM smugglers use these storage units for xeno biological contraband. And I know, Jake. I know how he thinks. He loved those books and movies.”
“Xenobiology? Like from outer space?” one of the others asked.
“No, from an alternate reality,” Harper said. “I guess scientists can visit other dimensions or whatever. Even storybook worlds.”
Jake listened, a grim panic nipping at his guts. If he could drop the cinderblock on Harper, kill him, the other gangers would scurry away.
But could he do that to his own brother?
A brother’s life for a sister’s. Talitha had been brilliant in school, funny, so quick to laugh. Harper was just another tueet who left his family for a nice apartment and hamburgers. Never sent a single dollar home.
Jake never had the chance to use the cinderblock. Harper and his boys moved down aisle six, turned and headed down the southern alley toward aisle thirteen. Unit 13E. They would see his tablet and the eMuse.
Jake hefted the cinderblock onto his shoulder and threw it into aisle six. The cinderblock shattered.
“Hey, Harper!” Jake yelled. “Mom said she liked me the best. She said she didn’t even know if you came from Dad.”
That would hurt Harper. A bad thing to say about his mom, but she was already dead. His sister was alive.
“Why do you want us to chase you, baby brother? What have you got going here?”
Jake dropped to the ground and ran to the north alley to aisle nine. “You’re a coward, Harper. Leaving us like that. Just for the money. Just for better food. You broke mom’s heart. That’s why she died. You like being a tueet, Harper?”
Silence, for a minute. Then Harper’s voice carried over the units. “Mom died ‘cause she got burned working for Optimum. Just another way of being a tueet, if you ask me. That had nothing to do with me.”
Whispers in the purple night. Jake knew they were planning something, but what?
He had to keep them distracted, to give the download time to finish. “You didn’t answer my question, Harper. You like selling your butt on Colfax, huh?”
“Why’d you stay with the old man? You know he don’t care nothing about you now that Mom’s dead.” Harper was breathing hard.
“For Talitha.” Jake said.
“She’s as good as dead.”
“No, she’s not!”
Two boys appeared from down on aisle six. “We got him, Harper!”
Jake bolted down the alley, headed toward aisle thirteen.
Jake would have to be fast—faster than the thing in the
storage unit.
Faster than Harper, wherever he was.
Even halfway down aisle thirteen, Jake saw something was wrong. The light on the security pad was still red.
Jake made it to the tablet. The download was stuck at 99%, which was why the light wasn’t green.
Harper swung into aisle thirteen from the southern alley. Right in front of Jake.
Jake only had seconds. Key strokes, pad clicks, the eMuse’s memory was nearly full. But it still had enough space, easily enough space for another 1% of data.
He couldn’t start the download again.
Harper was close enough for Jake to smell his stink and expensive cologne.
Too late.
Jake flicked down through the files on the eMuse, found the unlock executable, and clicked it. He had to pray the 99% was enough, that the program didn’t need the full 100%.
Harper kicked the tablet away and it skittered down the concrete. The screen flew loose, plastic components spraying like intestines. Two boys charged from the north. From the south, behind Harper, stormed the scabby boy.
Jake threw a punch, but Harper grabbed his fist and threw him against the door of the storage unit. The adult inside let out a growl, a very awake, very angry growl.
“Jesus, there really is one of those things inside,” Harper said, awe in his voice.
The other three boys ran up, panting. They stood around him in a semicircle; their cologne was stifling.
Jake saw Harper’s eMuse on the ground. He bent and lifted it up weakly. The case was off, and the circuit board was cracked.
“Here’s your eMuse back,” Jake said. “Part of it anyway.”
Harper punched him the face.
Jake heard his nose snap. Blood gushed down his face, and he spit blood and mucous onto the asphalt. His face burned, part pain, part numb swell.
Parallel Worlds- the Heroes Within Page 15