“How do I know you are not part of the Sodality?” I replied, still gasping for air.
“I’d have killed you in your sleep and taken the guns, and the girl.”
“Fair enough. If they’re the Sodality, what do you guys call yourselves?”
“We don’t call ourselves anything. We used to be part of the Underground Republic. Since the leadership split apart, it has been chaos.”
I stood and recovered my revolver. Keeping Ezra in sight, I turned and looked in on Taylor who was sleeping like a stone. I looked quickly back at Ezra who was suddenly standing uncomfortably close to me.
“Silverstein, we should move the guns,” he remarked quietly, his paranoia almost contagious.
“Your enemies might be counting on us to do that. I thought you guys didn’t operate above ground.”
Ezra One hesitated, looking self-conscious for a moment. I marveled at how every emotion Ezra seemed to feel was clearly rendered on his face. Even in my short interactions with Drones, they all seemed emotionally distant. Distant seemed an inadequate description however. Impervious, perhaps?
“Often, it is not a matter of willingness, but ability,” Ezra hissed. “The way many of us were engineered it grants an almost paralyzing fear of wide open spaces. That won’t stop our rivals from sending their above ground allies to intercept these weapons.” He pressed his ear to the front door.
“You’re operating above ground,” I replied coolly.
“We need to move the weapons, and the sooner the better,” he replied narrowing his eyes to my question.
“Why can’t we just descend through the access beneath this building and make the delivery?” I asked, not fully understanding his presence.
“That way has been compromised and is no longer safe.”
Drones from the rival tribe were waiting for us down there. How could they have learned of what we intended to do so quickly? The sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach grew two sizes.
Taylor stepped out of her room and shuffled past me toward the bathroom. She’d almost made it before letting out a shrill scream as she caught sight of Ezra. She grabbed a pair of shears from her sewing basket and brandished them in his direction menacingly. It took me several moments to calm her, almost forgetting she’s never seen a Drone before.
“Taylor, this is Ezra One. Ezra, Taylor,” I stammered, wrapping my arms around Taylor.
“He’s gross! Are these the things that we’re getting the guns and decorations for?!” she blurted angrily, swinging the shears about in random, dangerous arcs.
Ezra put on an uneasy smile allowing his claws to retract back into his slender hands. “Your hair is very pretty, and we will be indeed fortunate if the decorations you provide us are half as colorful,” Ezra said quickly, backing away submissively.
Taylor’s demeanor instantly changed to one of the friendly host. Without missing a beat she began showing Ezra a fan of color samples. The small Drone warmed to her quickly and looked on with genuine interest at what she had to offer. I let the two of them get acquainted while I put the coffee on. It wasn’t going to be easy to move the guns discretely.
As seemed to be the case with everyone, once Taylor turned on the charm, there wasn’t anyone she couldn’t win over. She even gave Ezra a knitted skullcap she’d made for herself when she was younger. It fit him perfectly, the rainbow pattern standing in stark contrast to the rest of his sinister appearance. It took every iota of willpower I possessed not to laugh at the peculiar sight. However, Ezra was completely moved by the gift. It was clear as day on his eerily smooth face. It was as though no one had ever given him anything before. He took the small hat off and gazed at it lovingly before tucking it safely away.
It did strike me as very strange how we all became such fast friends, or at least acquaintances. Ezra only got calmer the more interaction he had with us, and Taylor talked to him with an ease that she seemed to only have with me. Ezra was like us in a way I surmised, not like the others of his kind, outcast, and unique by choice or circumstance.
“Ezra, besides this building, do you know of any way down to the part of the tunnels your people control?” I asked as I handed Taylor a cup of coffee.
“The nearest way down, isn’t very close. The Alderman Company concrete factory,” Ezra replied.
“We could stash the guns, and Ezra, in the laundry cart and hoof it?” Taylor smirked.
I couldn’t tell if Ezra was more concerned with the coffee I’d offered him, or the prospect of pretending to be dirty laundry for several hours. Regardless, we all eventually agreed that it would be best to make for the concrete factory. Ezra had to be bribed with a handful of colorful rubber bracelets plucked from Taylor’s arm to be coaxed into the laundry cart.
It was an arduous journey pushing the cart from one district of downtown to another. The cart served well enough, but adding Ezra to the cart only made it more difficult to navigate the broken streets and haphazard alleys. Taylor picked a good route, or at least one that was fairly direct and lacking a lot of other foot traffic. I observed how much of downtown was dark all the time, devoid of light or people, and wondered how such had come to pass.
It was as though there had been great plans for the city, a means to rejuvenate every row, home, and shop. Then, something terrible happened and rather than take the time to continue with the original plan, the city built over the top of the blemish. Port Montaigne was not without dignity, but it had an equal measure of shame to go with it.
Our destination, nestled within the industrial district, was utterly dark sitting on a rise just below the bowels of uptown. Even when compared to the rest of downtown, this place was dark lacking any ambient light from the surrounding areas. The sky was blotted out by overpasses and the underbellies of huge buildings. Waste water and soot rained down upon us there as we pushed toward the loading area beside a massive concrete factory.
The touch screen on Taylor’s mobile and a small flashlight Ezra had with him were our only light sources. As we stopped to rest, I gazed over at what little I could see of the front gate. There were fresh tracks in the ground left by wheeled vehicles, the newly broken hinges of the gate still shiny not having had time to properly corrode. Someone was already inside lying in wait, and we were probably out of options.
“Should we go back?” she whispered, looking under the curtains at Ezra.
“Risky either way,” Ezra replied, shaking his head.
“There’s a silt pit along the side that’s fallen in leaving a gap below that wall,” Taylor said pointing.
It took all of us to lift the cart in through the wall, and over the fallen rubble. We were as quiet as possible as we crept past the large heaps of abandoned gravel. The place was eerily quiet, not even the cooing of pigeons or squeaking of bats could be heard overhead.
Loose gravel crunched beneath our feet as the cart wheels squeaked faintly. In spite of our best attempts to be quiet, we weren’t very stealthy. I could only hope whoever else was in the cement plant was too busy or far away to hear us. Really, I just hoped we’d get lucky.
I was already nervous, which quickly began to turn into a bad feeling about the whole affair. My fears were realized as we stepped into the lower loading area, almost to the drainage access we sought. Suddenly, the lights of three vehicles blinked on, bright light spilling into the area. Several figures exited the vehicles and approached us, guns drawn.
I had never seen any of them before, and Taylor was the first to raise her hands. My mind raced as I glanced about for any means of escape. There was none.
“Kind of you to bring us the package, really saved us a lot of trouble” one of them remarked, pressing the barrel of his gun painfully against my cheek. “The girl is a nice bonus.”
He lifted me up by my shirt, relieving me of my weapon, then lifted the curtains on th
e cart. I took a sharp breath as he did, noticing that Ezra was conspicuously missing. The exertion and stress of the situation took its toll as my head began to ache once more.
Suddenly the lights on one of the vehicles went dark, then another, and another, blanketing the area in blessed darkness. I dropped to the ground and began crawling for Taylor, who stood frozen in place. Then there were screams, and muzzle flashes as the goons began firing at shadows. I grabbed Taylor and threw her to the ground, rolling over on top of her.
I glanced up, seeing only flashes of what was going on in time with the muzzle flare. Ezra was leaping between them lithely clawing out eyes, taking hands off at the wrists, and opening up throats with deadly precision. He landed on one man’s chest clawing him, and then leapt to another, his serrated hands raking something vital in each one. For a moment, the numbers vanished. I was afraid. I looked away, holding Taylor down under me as bullets flew about randomly.
Then, as quickly as the chaos begun, the screams and gunfire abated. The sound of someone’s labored breathing ceased with a sickening gurgle. The headlights on one of the vehicles flicked back on, revealing a charnel house around us, blood oozing across the ground toward where Taylor and I lay. Ezra withdrew his clawed hand from the interior of car, and walked over to where Taylor and I sat terrified.
“You guys alright?” Ezra asked quietly as he wiped his clawed hands on the shirt of a fallen goon.
“Where did you learn to fight like that?” she questioned after a long pause.
Ezra didn’t respond. Instead, he deftly fished a wallet out of the pocket of one of the fallen goons. He gazed inside, then dropped it, kicking it over to me. I took a gander inside the wallet then let it drop back to the ground. According to the ID, they were members of a Martian paramilitary group called Nomad Incorporated. I’d never heard of them, but it did mean something.
“Who hires this kind of muscle, from another planet, to intercept a few thousand worth of weapons?” Taylor asked. She shook her head after fishing through the wallet for spare change.
“I don’t think they were here after the guns. One of these guns is worth more than our entire haul, and all the ammunition they are using is custom,” Ezra said, gazing down at the goon’s expensive looking hardware.
I walked back over to the laundry cart and set about opening every crate. In one marked as ammunition for the revolvers there were several stainless steel vials. They were unmarked but stamped with the usual industrial warning labels identifying them as containing a hazardous substance. I looked over at Ezra who seemed as genuinely surprised as I was.
“We got set up,” I remarked closing the crate back up.
“Who knew we would be coming here?” Taylor asked nervously.
“Someone who knew where you live, knew we had the goods, and could listen in on our plans,” I replied quietly.
“Russ or Joe? They are the only ones that could have known,” she replied, her voice quivering with worry.
“In either case, the room would have had to be bugged.”
“There is another possibility,” Ezra interrupted our paranoia-fest.
Both Taylor and I looked over at Ezra who seemed more grim than usual.
“There are Drones with clairvoyant abilities. However, in every case, such a Drone has been an Elder, garnering their powers later in life,” he remarked coldly.
“I thought you said the leadership had disbanded, like not around anymore, right?”
Ezra turned toward me pushing his goggles up to the top of his head. I could see he was worried, his smooth face creased with anxiety. I did my best to throw salve on his fears.
“Hey, we don’t know anything for sure. Maybe Russ or Joe betrayed us, bugged Taylor’s apartment, and used us as unwitting mules to transport an unknown chemical agent?”
“What if the Sodality has captured an Elder and are forcing them to use their second sight to quietly manipulate the surface world? We could have a big problem,” he remarked sadly.
“Should we take their guns and add them to what we already have?” Taylor asked. She tried to avoid looking down at the slaughter that lay all around us.
“No. We’d need special caseless ammunition,” Ezra remarked giving one of the guns a gentle, dismissive kick.
He handed me the crate with the chemical agent and pushed the rest down a drainage hole nearby. He waved us a quick goodbye and promised to meet up with us in a couple of days to get the decorations. On the way out I recovered my revolver and the ID cards carried by one of the mercenaries. I tucked the box of chemical agent under one arm and grasped Taylor’s hand with the other.
“Silverstein, do you think Russ or Joe sold us out?”
“Do you?”
“I don’t know. When the alternative is psychic mutants watching you from the underground? I almost hope one of them did. We’ll look for bugs when we get back to the apartment.”
“You think it is safe to go back there?”
“You think the elderly underground mutants can’t watch you showering somewhere else?”
“I’m serious!” Taylor yelled and slugged me playfully. “We could be in real trouble here!”
I paused to look down at her. Her lips trembled as she broke gaze with me. I’d just made her life endlessly more complex and I was beginning to feel more than a little guilty about it.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that all of this was somehow connected to the life I led before waking in the alley. Somehow, I was playing a game where I was only allowed the briefest glimpse at the pieces. I didn’t know how to fix this.
“I’m sorry, Taylor. I thought this would be a simple thing. Get the Drones what they want, keep the heat on in your building, and everyone wins.”
“We could run. You might never find out who you are, but at least we’d be safe.”
“I don’t know. After talking to that old guy before, I get the feeling I’m in this predicament because I ran from my problems in the first place.”
“You sound like the narrator in one of those after-school specials.”
“They still do those?”
“No, it’s just something people say I guess. Let’s go.”
We crept out of the cement factory and out into the open industrial park. We made our way across the open ground to the darkened buildings and warehouses at the fringe of the populated part of downtown. It was a long walk home, but blissfully uneventful.
“What do you think of Ezra?” Taylor said breaking the silence.
“I’m really not sure. He seems very genuine though, almost like he was incapable of lying.”
“Corporations created the Drones to work in the underground places humans were unwilling to go,” Taylor said gazing at some text on her mobile. “Is it possible that one of those corporations made Drones designed to be weapons?”
“Entirely possible, but why would they make them so small? Ezra can’t be more than seventy-five pounds.”
I stashed the crate containing the mystery chemical agent beneath a bit of concrete behind Taylor’s building. Once I was certain no one was watching, we crept inside through the back entrance, and set about searching her apartment. We had no idea what we were looking for but found nothing resembling a bug.
The thing that didn’t figure into all this was that they knew we were going to the concrete factory, but not that Ezra was with us. The goons had no idea he would be there, but seemed to be expecting Taylor and I. That would point to Joe or Russ, except that we couldn’t find any surveillance equipment in Taylor’s apartment. It was a puzzle.
“Taylor, where is it?”
“Maybe they came in and removed the bug while we were gone? I don’t know.”
“We aren’t exactly master spies or detectives. It could still be here in the apartment, and we’re too blind to s
ee it.”
“This sucks,” Taylor said plopping down on the couch.
“I agree. Let’s pack a bag and get out of here.”
Chapter 5
Downtown, Port Montaigne - Porter’s District
5:20 AM, May 15th, 2178 - 21 years previous to shutdown.
Perfidy looked down at the wreckage that remained of the transport spread across the street, then up at the hole in the uptown substructure above. It had plummeted from at least ten thousand feet and crashed down through a quarter mile worth of all that separated uptown from downtown. Natural gas burned as sewage and clean water alike trickled down from the damage above.
There were emergency crews and city engineers just arriving and they were already counting bodies. Perfidy could see none small enough to be what he was sent here to confirm. The Cabal had potentially lost an important asset as a result of the accident, if it could really be classified as such, and it was up to him to find it.
Those that dwelled in Downtown Port Montaigne had already spent the last thirty minutes following the crash, grabbing up anything they could recycle or sell. The scene was heavily compromised and if the asset had been lying about, it was long gone now. As impossible as it seemed, he was probably going to seek out anyone that trafficked in human beings for what he sought.
Perfidy looked about the area with his mechanical eyes until he spotted someone carrying more biological matter than was normal for a person his size. The man had a neoprene sack full of body parts he’d gathered from the wreck and was heading off quickly to avoid the impending arrival of law enforcement. Perfidy followed him for several blocks, the clamor of the crash scene fading slowly behind him.
The man’s heat signature was easy to spot in the crowd as the body parts he carried slowly cooled and began to release a myriad of gases easy to trace by someone with mechanically and chemically enhanced senses. The man stopped at an ice house, a place set aside to use the chemical exchange that fueled the air conditioners that kept uptown comfortable as a contrived means to generate and sell ice. Illegal, but far from the focus of law enforcement when they dared to venture downtown for any reason.
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