After a short while, Lock angled her eyes out the small porthole window. “Hold on. Comin’ in.”
She selected a landing spot on top of an abandoned warehouse and set down between two large HVAC units. The drone itself looked something like an industrial condenser. Only the halo of ducted fans ringing the top differentiated it from the surrounding equipment. They stepped out onto the roof of the building. Lock walked to the back side of the drone with the butt of the rifle atop one of her combat boots.
“Help me get on top of this thing,” she said, leaning the MK against the drone.
“On top of the drone?”
“I’m most accurate from prone position,” she said.
“I don’t think I could lift you.”
“No need. I’ll just step on you.”
“How about I make a hand basket instead?”
“Well it’d be easier for me to step on you, but whatever suits.”
“Easier for you,” mumbled Willa, weaving her fingers together and offering the foothold.
Lock hoisted herself while Willa helped push her to where she was able to wrench the rest of the way up. She crawled onto the drone’s roof just as a squadron of red lights came into view over a distant line of trees. “Gun me,” said Lock.
Willa took the rifle by the handguard and brought it gingerly into Lock’s waiting fingers. Rolling onto her back, Lock pulled it over her chest and flipped down the bipod from under the barrel. She set the rifle straight, reached into her pocket and drew a single, very large, round. It clicked into the chamber and she brought the bolt down with an experienced hand. “Straight ahead shots against oncoming bogies are notoriously tough to range in. I might have to fire twice to get my drop.” She messed with the elevation knob on top of the scope as Willa observed with a mixture of shock and amusement. Lock set her eye to the optics. “OK, well, fire in the hole and all that.”
Droplets of water exploded from the taxi’s body panels with the rifle’s report. Willa turned her eyes to the drones. The leader of the formation slumped to one side and began losing altitude.
Lock peeked over the edge at Willa, gave a wink and a thumbs-up. “First try.”
“Where did you learn to shoot like that?”
“Semper fidelis, my dear. Long gun specialist, dishonorable discharge, Year of our Lord 2038, pleased to meet you.”
“You were a Marine?”
“I were,” answered Lock, her eyes following the wounded drone until it dropped into the woods just shy of the intended clearing. “Well that was a miscalculation wasn’t it? Let’s get over there before the cavalry. Here, take the MK.”
Willa accepted the rifle, regarding the weapon with an even mixture of respect and unease. “Why were you dishonorably discharged?”
Lock slid down from the roof. “Trumped up some charges for refusal to follow orders, can you believe it?”
“What orders?”
“Illegal ones. My CO wanted me to smoke a POI – uh, Person of Interest – off the books.”
“You wouldn’t do it?”
“And now my whole life is off the books.” She shook her head. “Ironic isn’t it?”
They climbed into the drone.
“Didn’t they shoot the person anyway?”
“Heh. Not likely. I was the only one of ’em could have made the shot. Bastard lived. Whoever he was.”
Leaving the drone’s door open, Lock lifted them off from the warehouse roof and over an expanse of empty lots to the wreckage. “I see it, let’s get lower.”
But Willa could already see what she knew to be true – there was no red slick, no debris field of donor bags, just vaults strewn about like tin cans. One lay sheared in half. She pointed it out to Lock, who nodded good enough for me. She slammed the door down and they rocketed from the trees before any sign of security showed on the horizon.
Lock patted down on the big pockets of her dress and leather jacket. “Heh,” she laughed, “that was lucky.”
“What was?”
“Forgot my second bullet anyways.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MARASMUS
A state of severe malnutrition.
Willa secured herself to the bench while Lock twirled side to side in the pilot’s seat. Willa felt struck by this woman; an excommunicated Marine who ran blood hacks from a hoarder’s attic full of bygone-age ephemera. She wondered how such a person could possibly exist. Lock caught her staring.
“You alright, Willa?” she asked.
“Yes. Yes, I’m sorry. I glazed over for a minute there.” She gathered her thoughts. “Your hideout–”
“Which hideout?”
Willa paused, confused. “The one in the attic, the one we met you in.”
“A hideout,” Lock corrected with a smirk.
“You have more of them?”
“Who would have just one hideout? What if somebody found it? Then it’d no longer be a hideout and you’d be S-O-L.” She fluttered her fingers.
“S-O-L?”
“Jesus, were you ever a kid? Shit-outa-luck. S-O-L,” she chuckled. “Anyway, got hideouts all over, Willa.”
“OK, but, the one you let us see… it’s full of all those old computers and telephones and whatnot. Why?”
Lock sighed.
“What?”
“Short question that calls for a long answer.”
“Tell me.”
“Human Nature would be the subject heading,” said Lock, gazing back out the window. “Yep, no matter what the technology, any hack always comes down to human nature in one way or another. Some people think the technology is where the magic happens, but that’s short sighted. Most hacks are a matter of social engineering. Always have been. Most the time the tech never even enters the equation. But when it does, the tech is just… the medium… that’s all. Humans are still at the head and tail of it, even if the humans at the tail are long dead. Get me?”
Willa did not.
“Weaknesses in technology are predictable because human beings are predictable. Bottom line? People don’t care about old stuff.” She tapped some instructions into the console and spun in her chair so they were face to face. “For example: how much time did your parents or grandparents spend explaining old technologies to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“They never sat you down and said, ‘Willa, let’s learn about how rotary telephones worked’, or ‘the internal combustion engine was a real marvel, let’s spend an afternoon discussing it’, or ‘let’s talk turn of the century sewage infrastructure’, or ‘hey Willa–’”
“I get it.”
“The same rule applies to any trade. Software, hardware. No exception. Old is irrelevant. People have no desire to look backward in time and learn the workings of obsolete technology just for fun. Hobbyists, sure, but nobody listens to them. No, people focus on the present and hustle forward with the rest of the rats. These quantum computers now, they’ll be the big thing until the next big thing. But do you think their designers and programmers ever got the hankering to learn how one solid state CPU built in 2020 talked to another of the same vintage? Hell no, that’s boring shit, Willa. Why would they do that? That technology is stone aged.”
“OK,” said Willa, starting to follow. In a way, the same thing had occurred with phlebotomy. The new technology, blood bags and needle-probes and all of that was so advanced and easy, that the old techniques had quickly vacated the collective conscience, forgotten even by those who used to practice them. But it wasn’t just phlebotomy for Willa. It was everything, really. At some point the world and its shortcuts seemed to have passed her by, moving on like water as she stood stubborn in the stream.
“Point is,” Lock went on, “technology is like history: get far enough down the line and people forget, or worse, don’t care. Technology outstrips itself, again and again and again. All the high-powered functionality is way up here,” she said, holding her hand up toward the drone’s ceiling, “but they’ve forgotten to give a
ttention to the old boring stuff down here in the weeds with us,” moving her hand low. “Take Patriot’s operating system for example: that OS is top of the line quantum computing, the damned thing does calculations based off of the ability to observe the state of matter cross-dimensionally. But see, that central brain still has to talk to all the old systems throughout Patriot. Why don’t they modernize the whole infrastructure? Well, one, it’s cheaper and easier not to. And two, because nobody out in the districts can afford hardware that talks directly to any of the new systems. Don’t even think they could buy it if they wanted to. It’s almost like Patriot wants it this way. So what you get is layers of tech – vintages so to speak. There’s still decades-old software that surrounds and buttresses the new systems. It’s like… concentric rings in a tree. As you move out, the systems get older, and that makes them more permeable, susceptible to people like me. I bet when you were trained back in what, ’20, ’25, any hospital you visited still had those old dot matrix printers, right, even though it’d been invented seventy years before that. Well, only computers of a proximate vintage could talk to those iron-aged sumbitches, so they kept them around way beyond their obsolescence out of a combination of laziness and cost savings. That hardware at the periphery of the hospital’s system would be like the outer ring of their tech. That’s my entry point for Patriot: the outer ring.”
“All the old computers in the attic, then–”
“Not a collection for when I’m feeling nostalgic. Our tech is so ancient nobody looks for it anymore – they wouldn’t know how. We don’t need to fly under the radar because there is no radar. Patriot is over there doing all their big important work, all the while I’m out here having a heart to heart with the outer rings through dialup. Well, not really dialup, but you capiche.”
“So, the computer hacks you’ve done… you’ve done them with all that stuff in the attic?”
“Don’t get the wrong impression, Willa, even the outer rings are tough to penetrate. Getting just one ping on their system takes me fifteen attics’ worth of Cretaceous hardware, all chained together. We push a single line of code up the ladder from the local level, the donor stations read all the blood as O-neg for ten minutes, and then it’s over.”
“All of that for ten minutes?” Willa said, almost sad that such great effort garnered so little in return, and regretful that as a Patriot employee she’d rejoiced when the hacks were smothered.
“If we get the word out in time, we can run a thousand donors through that window,” Lock answered.
“Weren’t you concerned about mislabeled blood getting to the Gray Zones and hurting people?”
Lock looked at Willa in a way that was part bewilderment, part patronizing. She pointed to the homes flowing below them on the view screen. “That’s AB Plus, down there,” she said. “We’re trying to survive – literally trying to save kids. And you’re worried about some strangers in the Gray Zones – who are all probably gonna die anyway – getting a bad transfusion? You shittin’ me?”
“They’re innocent people, though.”
“So are we, Willa.”
Willa looked out the window as the homes, outdated and in disrepair, rushed by. What had seemed so important only days before, the things that had concerned her as an employee of Patriot, had been rendered irrevocably irrelevant. Her hard wiring had been ripped away. Obsolete, just like the outer rings.
The drone set down in the shed behind the boarding house. Lock stepped out first and halted. She held her fist up like a soldier taking point.
“Something doesn’t feel right. Everard usually waits at the back for me. Hand over the MK.”
“But it doesn’t have any bullets.”
“Sure it does. In the stock.”
“But you said you forgot to bring more–”
“You gotta stop listening to what I say, Willa!”
“I’m not just waiting here!” said Willa. “I need to check on Isaiah.”
“He’s fine, I’m sure. Stay put. I’ll be right back.”
“No, I’m coming.”
Lock slammed the rifle across the drone’s door, barring Willa from exiting. “You are staying right here,” she said, all pretense gone from her voice. “I got kids in there too. My rules.”
Willa nodded and the former Marine headed down the walk and into the home.
Willa stood inside the drone, nervous, praying that Isaiah was all right.
Lock burst back through the screen door, strutting with bravado. “Look what we got!”
Trailing behind was Everard, and stumbling before him, with his hands pinned behind his back–
“Claude!” Willa called, running to embrace him.
“Willa–”
“Shut up!” said Everard.
“Whoa, whoa, now,” said Lock, separating Willa from him. “You know him?”
“Oh, they know each other,” said Everard.
“He’s my friend, my, uh,” she hesitated, “coworker.”
“Down at Donor Eight,” added Everard, grinning like a trophy hunter.
“What’s he doing here, Willa?” asked Lock.
“Probably trying to find me,” she answered, looking back to him and taking note of his haggard state.
“Going door-to-door, matter of fact,” said Everard. “Can you believe that? Got some balls on him.”
Lock kept her gaze on Willa, reading her, looking for any sign of foul play or shenanigans. “Well,” she said, “he’s brought us a gift.”
Everard flung a bag from his shoulder onto the ground. “Go ahead, Willa. Check out what we got.”
“It’s OK,” said Lock. “Open it.”
Willa knew the contents already. The bag was a Patriot-issued portable cooling vault for emergency blood transport. She knelt and unzipped it. “Claude?” she said. “Is this all A-negative?”
A weak nod.
She ran her hand through and eye-checked what had to be forty or fifty bags. All A-negative. “Why?”
“What kinda idiot steals anything but O-neg?” Everard hooted.
Claude’s eyes expressed a sadness that Willa had never seen in him, their aperture telling of his hope to find her, but at the risk of succumbing to some vulnerability.
“Mr Claude here has presented us with an offering of modest value,” said Lock. “A-neg’s well enough in demand. Alright, let’s bring this soiree inside-of-doors.” She zipped the cooling vault and shouldered it.
Claude followed the bag as it went by. Willa scanned him over. What was he up to?
Inside, Isaiah had barely noticed her missing, now surrounded by a crowd of tiny admirers, rapt as he retold the tale of his journey across town just the day before, complete with brellabots and hotdogs eaten in a restaurant. Seeing Claude, he rushed over and hugged him. “Claude!”
“Isaiah,” Claude said, with a gentle smile. “Hey, buddy.”
Willa gently pried Isaiah away. “Past your bedtime, baby,” she said. “You and Claude can hang out in the morning.” Then turning to Lock, “Can we stay here, tonight?”
“Oh, I insist,” she said with a colder, inhospitable tone. “Any vacant pallet will do.”
Willa went to getting Isaiah settled in an adjoining room filled with children, and did a visual check on Claude, who sat motionless at the small kitchen table looking evermore fatigued. After the children’s chirping died down, Willa sat with him, across from Lock and Lindon, who were in fervor about where to spend the blood.
“Donor Eight is obviously off the table,” said Lock. “Would be funny to sell it back to the place he stole it from, though.”
“Shouldn’t go to Six neither, half my folks been busted in there,” added Everard from the folding chair by the door.
“Safest bet is to send everybody segment-wide. A sudden clot of A-neg through one station would be suspect, especially since this one just stole a vault of the stuff,” Lock chuckled and pointed at Claude. “Claude: what’s the incentive on A-neg today?”
He inched
his head from the table. “It’s… it’s not for sale.”
“It’s good as sold, Claude,” she said. “What’s it up to? Seventeenish?”
He nodded, then looked at Willa like he needed to tell her something.
“You have his blood, is he allowed to go now?” asked Willa.
Lock gave Willa a cynical smirk. “This bag keeps blood for two days, is that right, Claude?”
“Hmm-mm.”
“Theoretically,” Lock said, “he can leave once we’ve laundered it. But I still want to know why he came here in the first place.”
“I promised Willa I would find her,” he answered. “That’s it.”
“You found her,” said Lock. “Now what?”
Claude turned to the window, his shoulders twisted and narrow.
“Claude, are you sick?” asked Willa.
“Just tired,” he answered.
“Eat something then,” said Everard, dropping a colander full of blackberries onto the table. Willa pushed it over but Claude waved it off.
“Ungrateful.” Everard swiped the bowl and brought it in to the children.
Lock took in the situation. “I’ll get the A-neg to my guy Jethrum tomorrow morning. He can offload it,” she said. “So, tomorrow plus a week or so to let any additional surveillance this one’s triggered blow over. Then he can leave.”
“That’s too long,” muttered Claude.
Lock sneered. “That’s the way it is, reaper.”
Willa sat with Claude late into the night. She sipped tea while he didn’t so much as look at the cup she’d made for him. He didn’t seem well, like he had the flu, slumped with his head down on the daisy-print tablecloth. He’d likely been up for two days straight, just like her, on the run from Patriot since he’d killed his boss.
The children were all asleep, as well as the various adults including Everard beside the front door, and Lindon in the folding chair at the back. Lock had gone off on some errand, to another one of her hideouts, perhaps, or to negotiate a deal for Claude’s blood. Willa straightened, felt her back pop, and went to the sink for some water. Bringing the glass back to the table, she scooted her chair right next to Claude, rubbed his shoulder until he straightened. “Hey,” she whispered.
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