by wade coleman
“Men are visual, they stare. But after a half hour or so their eyes get tired. Once they figure out I’m not getting naked their eyes move on.”
I nod. “I like your attitude. It healthy, natural, and male friendly.”
Hermes, are you home?” My mom's voice says from down the hall. Before I can react, she walks through my open door to let out the steam from Kim’s shower.
“Hermes, help me with the-”
Kim turns around and faces my mom.
“Oh, your door was open so-”
“It’s alright,” Kim says, “Hermes is just finishing up preaching to the choir.”
Mom beams me a smile. In her right hand is a bag of groceries with a loaf of French bread sticking out the top. Beverley walks over and pats my head. “That is such a nice name. I’m celebrating, so why don’t you come to the kitchen and feed me while I get drunk.” Mom turns around and leaves my room.
Kim puts on one of my shirts and we head to the kitchen. Mom is sitting at the counter with a bottle of vodka in front of her.
I open the bag of groceries. Bread from Maggie’s bakery, goat cheese from the neighbor across the street and real cow butter.
I get out a cutting board and slice the bread. Next to the sink is two tomatoes from the garden and I slice them up.
“You’re fast,” Kim says. She picks up a slice of tomato, tilts her head back and drops it in.
“Thank God,” Mom says and raises her glass. “I thought eyes were getting blurry from the vodka.” She takes a swig and puts down her glass. “My numbers came up.”
“Wow mom, that’s great, how much you did win?” “I know the answer to the question. Dad laundered the Super Store robbery earnings through a rigged lottery. Daniel gave him the cash and the next week the numbers Mom has played for the last twenty years came up.
“Enough to pay off our mortgage and then some.”
Kim smears the end piece in butter and bites into it. Her massive jaws crunching the crust drowns out any efforts at conservation. Kim savors the bread with her eyes closed. “That’s the best fucking thing I ever ate.”
We pass the time listen to mom’s emergency room stories. Around seven Daniel comes home and I heat up the left-over casserole and I get more tomatoes and cucumbers from the garden.
During dinner, the cold creeps into my skin telling me the sun has set.
Mom keeps up a steady chatter at the table. She gets this way when she’s tipsy.
Kim and I finish dinner and then head to the garage to prepare for our night out. We put on our vests of synthetic spider silk, a thief’s best friend.
I fill the pockets: penlight, burglary tools, pocket knife, and a med kit with the proper meds to make people talk. Kim fills her pockets with spare clips for her pistol.
I give Kim a disposable phone. “All communications are monitored, so never use real names. My phone name is Michael. Rachel is a common name, so let’s use that for you.”
“Okay, how are you getting in?”
“I checked out the place a few years back and found a weak spot.”
We take 80 to North Frisco and get in the express lane for the bay bridge. There used to be two bridges across the bay. Both bridges were destroyed in the floods. With the thirteen meter rise in sea level, only one bridge was rebuilt.
The Army Corp of Engineers built a new bridge on the base of the old 80 bridge. They also built a small harbor near the old city of Concord. The Army Corp scrapped the old town and hauled it out to sea. Then they built a twenty-foot wall around the thirty square mile valley and built homes for the naval officers stationed on the other side of the bay. They commute to work in boats.
We cross over onto South Frisco and stay on the highway. After a few miles, South Frisco ends, and the highway turns into a dirt road. The old cities of Richland, Berkley, and Oakland are barely above sea level. No one lives there but a few fishermen.
In another mile, the road narrows to one lane, and I spot the tree that marks the trail. Highway 4 used to be four lanes of concrete. It still is, but it’s buried under a meter of silt.
I head east, and Kim follows me.
We climb the Coastal Mountain pass. They were replanted with genetically engineered redwoods and declared a national park.
“Where are we going?” Kim's voice asks in my helmet speakers.
“The Broadmoor is surrounded on three sides by mountains. A road connects South Frisco to the Broadmoor. It used to be an empty stretch of land between the two, but in the last few years, mutants are settling the area. Security is very high along the coastal road.”
I stop talking to go around a fallen log. It takes us an hour to make it the five miles across the pass where we begin our descent. After a mile, I spot the old sign, “Alhambra Ave.”
The redwoods stop at the sign. Ahead is a baseball field, behind it a twenty-foot high fence with white LED lights blazing from the top. There are cameras mounted about every fifty feet.
I think back to being a kid and throwing rocks into a pond to make waves. When waves meet, they set up an interference pattern causing the ripple to grow large in some places and shallower in others. Light cast from two sources does the same thing. Where the waves cancel out, they leave a thin band of darkness. The web of shadows cast by overhead lights is my playground. With the right conditions, like downtown, I can cover a long distance in a very short amount of time. I walk closer to the web of shadows, and they pull me in. Teleporting several hundred feet, I reform next to the concrete wall, hiding in the camera’s blind spot.
Natasha screams: “Stop! Stop!” her voice is so loud it hurts.
I cup my hands over my ears to block out the shriek. It does not work since the scream is coming from inside my head. Natasha calms down, and the pain in my head eventually subsides. That’s when I realize I’m breathing heavily.
I lean heavily against the concrete wall, my heart hammering. “Natasha, what’s wrong?”
“Cold and dark,” her voice strangely out of character. “There was nothing. Now…the time is wrong…I lost a tenth of a second, Hermes; it felt like an eternity...”
I can almost hear the panic in her voice. “Natasha, it’s okay. It’s not going to hurt you.” Leaning against concrete, I feel vulnerable, looking out at the ball field behind it. “Time doesn’t flow the same in shadows as it does here on earth. It’s no big deal, just reset your clock with universal time when we are done.”
“It is a big deal,” she sounds like she is catching her breath.
I’ve never heard her this upset before.
“Don’t do it again,” Natasha firmly declares.
“I’ve haft to get inside. If the police catch me here, I go to prison.”
“You should go home.”
“Go home and become a mechanic…is that what you want?”
“I want to fly.”
“Then I need to go inside the Broadmoor to steal money.”
“When are you going to flight school?”
“Many things have to be arranged before that.”
“What things?”
“Natasha, this is not a good time. We’re in danger. I need to move quickly. Will you let me in?
“We will talk about flight school tomorrow?
“Yes. I promise.”
This conversation with Natasha feels like a domestic quarrel with a younger sister who can do nothing but screams. There’s no winning against that kind of decibel.
I let a shadow cross my palm. “Natasha, do you feel that?”
“Yes, it feels like a cold knife.”
I take hold, collapse into the cold void and follow it along the edge of the wall. In seconds, I travel a few miles to the main gate of the Broadmoor Manor.
The subdivision is a thirty-square mile estate which is home to five thousand Purebloods. The Broadmoor is along the mountains, with schools and shopping centers taking up most of the central area. Homes surround it all. The outer rim is open spaces and golf courses.
Two men guard the main gate. One sits in a metal booth while the other paces out front.
As the pacing man turns, I step inside and find the shadow of a tree in which to hide. A jogging path lined with redwoods runs along the wall. The gravel glows a subdued red.
Flicking from one shadow to the next, I find the golf course. Mature pine trees line the path, and I take a moment to enjoy the scent. Dr. Jefferson’s home is a two-story brick building behind the water trap at the golf course, lavish by Pureblood standards.
I leave the path and walk around a pond of croaking frogs. The back door is open, the screen closed. Sliding the door open, I step onto a tiled floor. The stairs to the second floor are near the front door, and I start up. I come to a door and open it.
The master bedroom has a skylight, a sunken bathroom, and a sauna. I go up three steps to a bed where two people lie asleep. I open my vest pocket and pull out two syringes. I lift up the sheet and inject the woman with a fast-acting sedative to keep her out for several hours.
For the good doctor, I have a combination of two drugs: a hypnotic to make him suggestible and another one which prevents memories from forming. I wouldn’t want the good doctor to recall our little rendezvous.
While the meds take effect, I check out his home. There are two more rooms on this level, twins in bunk-beds, a teenage boy in the other, all Purebloods.
I return to the doctor. “Wake up.”
His eyes open. I use a penlight to check his pupils. The drugs have taken effect. Helping him out the bed, we walk downstairs and into his study, where I sit him in front of his computer terminal.
I tell him plainly: “Dr. Jefferson, why don’t you check your financial accounts?”
He logs in, the drugs working beautifully. He makes three hundred thousand credits a year as the Mercy Hospital Chief Administrator. He makes two million credits a year speaking at medical conventions and consulting for Baron Enterprises. A week after giving the order to ignore sick mutants, he received another million. The good doctor recently cashed out of the stock market and now has eight million in savings.
“Dr. Jefferson, who gave you that money?”
“The Baron.”
“Who is he?”
“Jason Baron of Baron Enterprises.”
“Log into your hospital records.”
He complies.
“Doctor lay down on the couch and go to sleep.”
He gets up, goes to the couch and does what I tell him. Soon he’s snoring quietly. I sit at his terminal.
My heart races, looking at the numbers: $8,445,117, the amount of his savings. “Natasha, transfer all of Dr. Jefferson’s cash into the Mercy Hospital general fund.”
Natasha takes over my hands and types two hundred words per minute. It’s a little unnerving sharing your hands with someone else, and I’m still not used to it.
“Now, transfer the money the holding company and cover your tracks. Add a back door so I can get access to the hospital’s accounts without the doctor knowing.”
I look at the credits in my account. After paying for laundering the money, I cleared a little less than one hundred thousand credits from the Super Store. This is eighty times that amount.
“Hermes, does this mean I can go shopping for an airplane?” Natasha sounds excited.
“Sure, but not right now.”
“Natasha, check on your previous owner’s jet. Is it still there?”
“Yes, the Learjet belongs to Blue Algae Inc. Mark is the CEO.”
“Has anyone reported him missing?”
Natasha calls up the police blog and the data streams past faster than I can read.
“There is no mention of Mark Lukas in any police records.”
I shut down the computer and help the Doctor to bed. Once that’s over, I walk out the back door, inhaling the scent of trees again. I stroll through the golf course, enjoying the fact that I am now a millionaire. Maybe I’ll buy my mom something nice. Finding the path, I take the shadows back to the gate and then to Kim.
She is sitting with her legs crossed, flicking the safety to her pistol on and off. Kim stands up when she sees me.
“How do you do it? Appear out of nowhere like that?”
I get on my bike. “That’s not important right now. Let’s get out of here.”
Kim gets on her bike. “What did you find out?”
“Jason Baron of Baron Enterprises made the virus.”
We make up the mountain pass and into the redwoods.
Kim talks to me via the helmet. “How do we get to the Baron?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll think of something.”
CHAPTER TEN
I’m standing on a street corner and watch a forties Ford coupe drive past. The man behind the wheel is wearing a fedora.
Looking around, I realize I’m in New York City, the Empire State Building in the distance. People bustle across the street.
A newsboy yells, “Extra, Extra! Read all about it! Hitler Begins War on Russia! Damascus Falls to the Nazis!”
I hand the boy a nickel, and he gives me a paper. Instead of the article, there’s a picture of the Maltese Falcon on the front page. Only it has red eyes, and it’s called the Maltese Dragon. Below is a picture of the thief: me in a Bowler hat.
* * *
When I wake up, and I feel anxious. There is music in the background. “Natasha, what’s that?”
“Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5”
“What time is it?
“One in the afternoon.”
“It’s too early to get up.”
“You slept eight hours, and you promised we’d talk about flight school today.”
I want to tell her she’s a nag, but resist. Instead, I sit up and rub my eyes. “Natasha, before I can get a license, I need an identity that has the financial means to fly. That requires a birth certificate, social security number, school records and things like that. Then the new identity can buy a plane.”
“You mean forgery?”
“Technically…yes. Will you do it?” I wonder if they program an ethical subroutine in the implants.
“Yes, but I will need our new full immersion helmet, a terminal with direct access to the county records and an administrator level password.”
“Where’s the helmet?”
“I was delivered yesterday, The instructions said to leave it in Mark’s locker at the Aviation Center.”
“We’ll pick up our new toy tonight,” I say and I walk into the kitchen. The smell of garlic is thick in the air.
Mom’s made a mess preparing sauce from the fresh tomatoes from the garden. She blocks the entrance, threatening me with a wooden spoon.
“Caffeine, my life depends on it,” I demand access to the coffee pot.
She sits me down and pours a cup of coffee. It’s been sitting for a few hours, but the bitterness helps perk me up.
Mom reads my mind, putting two apricots from our neighbor’s orchard in front of me.
“Why aren’t you at work?”
“Decided to cut my hours to thirty a week.”
I finish the fruit, dodge Mom’s mess and get the butter out of the fridge. “Where’s Kim?”
“Helping Bob gather eggs.”
I cut off a hunk of butter, put it on my tongue and add a sip of coffee.
“Would you like some bread?”
“Did a lot of shadow walking last night. I need the fat,”
Kim walks in with a basket of eggs, putting it on the table, and sits down. “Eggs come out of chicken’s butts!” she proclaims like a kid.
“Where did you think they came from?”
“The only thing I know about chickens was a video I watched in the fourth grade. It didn’t show a hen laying an egg.”
Mom turns down the burners under the sauce, gets out three glasses and pours some tea. She sits down. “What happened last night?”
“Baron Enterprises paid Dr. Jefferson millions to develop and test a virus.”
; “What are you going to do?”
“I’ll check the Baron out. Once I know more about him, I’ll think something.”
Mom shakes. “I just got a cold chill going down my back.” She goes back to work. “I’m proud of you, Son, doing the right thing. It’s so unlike you.” She looks down at her sauce with a slight smile. “You honor most of the Commandments. It’s just the ones about stealing, lying, and coveting that you have problems with. Seven out of ten isn’t bad.”
“Ma, that’s not fair, you know I don’t lie to you.”
Kim hiccups, then giggles. I give her a look. Then Kim and I head to my room.
“What’s up?”
“Last night, I hacked into Dr. Jefferson’s financial accounts and stole eight million credits.”
“Fucking A,” Kim sneers, and we fist bump. “Nice. Making a rich man poor. But the fucker deserves worse.”
“No argument there,” I smile. “I’m enjoying the irony, using the good doctor’s money to destroy the virus.”
Kim sits on the bed. “What’s my cut?”
“What do you want?”
“I’m getting used to eating good and sleeping on clean sheets.”
“Talk to Mom; she’ll show you around the neighborhood.”
Kim lays down on the bed again, her hands behind her neck. “It can’t be that easy.”
“It’s not. There’s a vote to become a member, so try to make friends. When Beverly introduces you, don’t answer every question with ‘fuck-you.’”
“I didn’t know you army brats were such thin-skinned bitches?”
Sitting in my chair, I change the subject. “I’m going to the Aviation Center.”
“Why are we going?” Kim stands in front of me.
“Natasha’s previous owner had names and passwords hardwired into the bio-implant. I used his money to buy an accessory for his jet, a full immersion helmet. It’s sitting at an office in the airport.”
Kim gets up from the bed, sits on my lap facing me. She plays with my hair. “What kind of jet?”
“Learjet 35D.”
“I want to fuck in a jet. You can wear your new toy. What time do we leave?”
“Eight PM,”
* * *
Dad shows up later afternoon with a big grin on his face. He grabs a beer from the fridge and heads to the front porch. With the sun behind the house in the west, the front porch is in the shade. I join him with a glass of tea, and we rock back and forth in our chairs.