by Shawn Keys
Dazz slipped forward in her seat, inspecting the metal a little. “Hmm. This is more than just thick metal. That wouldn’t be enough. There’s some kind of mesh in between. It’s like someone built a Faraday cage out of those barns way back when.”
“A what?”
“A Faraday cage can block EM signals. Holding it like you’re doing won’t work very well, but guess you’re getting lucky.” She shrugged. “You know my lack of fondness for the whole ‘Big Brother is Watching’ thing, but I don’t think I’m going to embrace this new-barn fashion trend you’ve got going just to fuck up that signal.”
Ignoring her jokes, he explained, “Two FDPC agents showed up while I was at the carnival. They tracked me down, but then lost me when I wandered into one of the old buildings there.”
“Why would you go in one of those sheds? Death wish? Like the taste of tetanus? Haven’t had a good antibiotic injection lately and you wanted an excuse?”
Not seeing any real way around telling her, Kyle said, “I wasn’t alone.”
“Oh?” Another pause. Then, she smirked. “Ooohhhhhhh! Wow, you’re having a busy day.”
Considering he hadn’t told her about Lily or Ms. Clarke, she didn’t know the half of it. Leaving the details vague, he went on, “The agents interrupted at the worst point. So, Laura –”
“– Laura Greene…?”
Pushing through, Kyle said, “… said they would distract the agents for me.”
“They?”
Kyle sighed, not doing well with hiding details after all. “Her and Danielle.”
Dazz was actually impressed. “Glad to hear you’re mending fences. Apparently, you found the right brand of glue.”
“Dazz!”
She smirked back at him, then waved for him to continue.
He did, “I took a chance this would mess around with the signal and got the hell out of there. I was going to drop it after I was clear of the fair. They probably would have found me once I got home. But then Laura texted me and said they pulled a gun and went all gestapo on her. She’s pretty freaked out, and said they were dead-set on getting a hold of me. I called my parents, and they said the agents had been by the house. They had no idea why they’re in such a snit.” He shook his head. “I’ve had bad feelings about this since it started.”
Nodding in understanding, always quick to believe the worst of the government at large, Dazz said, “What can I do about it?”
“I want a few days to think this over. Maybe do a little research. Call a few police helplines without them crawling down my throat. If I can figure out what crime I’ve committed or anything about what’s going on, that might help.”
“These government drones don’t need any excuses, Kyle.”
Well aware of her rebellious attitudes, Kyle didn’t argue. Right that moment, he needed it. “I want you to burn out my implant. Once I get this cleared up, I’ll let them put a new one in. But I’d love to know they can’t track me every minute.”
She whistled. “Even I haven’t gone that far. Not sure what crime they want you for, but you’ll have committed one for sure, if you do this. Five years in jail for that, Kyle.”
“If these agents are fake or breaking the rules, maybe they’ll pardon me. Like… self-defense in murder, right?”
She barked a laugh. “Keep telling yourself that.”
Kyle collapsed into the bag chair. “You won’t do it?”
“I never said that.”
“So, you can’t do it?”
Dazz looked mildly offended. “Sure, I can! Isn’t even that hard. The damned things are meant to be disposable and replaceable. They’re meant to dissolve so you’re forced to check in and get an upgrade. They keep making better leashes to slip around our necks. I just need you to be sure you know what you’re getting us into. It’s your crime, but I’ll be the accessory.”
“You willing to go that far?”
She barely hesitated. Her grin flared wider. “Hell, yeah. I’m going to do my own while I’m at it!”
“They’ll see you drop off the map.”
“One more drone that the queen can’t track. Doubt they’ll even notice.”
Kyle sat forward, suddenly eager. “What’s it going to take?”
Dazz roused herself. “Give me a second to set up. I’d ask you to help, but I don’t want you to let that metal slip. Last thing I need is a couple of G-men smashing down my door. I need some alcohol –”
“– let’s do this sober, huh?”
“For sterilization, you nimrod. I have to poke this stupidly long needle into your arm. Fun, huh?” She showed off the tool she was going to use. “Saw this done once by this guy downtown.”
“You’ve never done it before?”
“I’ll be really careful. Promise. But you need to pay attention. When it’s my turn, I won’t be able to stick it in myself. It’ll be your turn.”
Kyle snorted. “Sweet, sweet revenge.”
The two moved around the room, assembling what they needed. Kyle focused on getting the hardware cleansed and ready, which he was able to do in his seat without compromising his signal blocker. For her part, Dazz brought her laptop down, hooked up some cables, and set about doing mystically strange things on her computer that Kyle wasn’t really equipped to understand.
Finally, she grinned. “Excellent! A friend of mine in Estonia has a cracker program that’ll fry the thing. He also has the diagram for the new model. All I have to do it tap this port on the side of the implant with the needle, and I’ll be able to drop in the kill code.”
“Don’t these things have passwords and stuff?”
She smiled at him in a way that forgave him for being out of his depth. “If I wanted to break in wirelessly, sure. But not even Big Brother decided to encrypt it against a direct hard link. Not when it involves jabbing big needles into people.”
“You are really selling this, you know?”
“Quiet, you. I need to concentrate. And like I said, pay attention. You’re doing this to me next.”
“Is it a good idea to be telling anyone in… where was it, Estonia?... about what we’re doing?”
“Do you think I can whip up a program like that while you wait? This isn’t the movies, dude. Relax. Viperman is an old friend. We share stuff all the time.”
“Viperman?”
“I’m Dazzle. Cool, huh? And no, you can’t have a code name. Only for the L33T.”
“The Leet?” For some reason, Kyle had a feeling he had said it wrong. She had pronounced it weird.
“The… Elite…” She rolled her eyes.
“You’re a cheerleader?”
As if realizing the connection for the first time that the nickname was the same as the social group at school, Dazz gave a small scream and threw a stuffed giraffe at him. “If you ever say that again, I swear, I’ll… I’ll…” She scrambled for some properly hideous fate.
Kyle held up a solemn hand. “I promise. Can we focus? You know, committing a crime here? Don’t have all night.”
Faced with the delicate problem, Dazz got back on task. Finishing her assembly, she knelt by Kyle’s side. Her fingers roamed around his shoulder, searching beneath the surface for the implant.
Kyle had to admit, the sensation of her touch skimming over his skin wasn’t unpleasant. Talking with Dazz was easy, and despite her bold fashion choices, he had always found Dazz attractive. Sure, getting into bed with her would have a lot in common with tapping a cobra on the nose for fun, but… well, some people found that sort of thing exciting.
Before he could dwell on how warm her breath felt as it brushed over his skin, Dazz proclaimed. “Got it. I’d say… yup, the thing is pointed down, right in line with your arm. If I go in from above, I should be able to tap the port.”
“Try not to hit any nerves or anything.”
“No promises.” Setting herself in concentration, Dazz inserted the probe and pressed it in under his skin.
The jab didn’t hurt much more than
a typical needle at first. But then she moved it, changing her angle of attack and searching for the right spot. Every time she jiggled it a little, a small lash of pain lanced up Kyle’s arm. He was used to getting his ass handed to him in the sparring ring, but trying to sit perfectly still while he was operated on was making his guts squirm.
All of the sudden, Dazz made a sound of triumph. “Aha! I’m getting a connection. Communicating… communicating… ha! There it is. Now for the download… and, voila! Eat my code, you little bitch.” She hit the execute button. A blizzard of pre-programmed text flashed on the screen and then vanished. “Boo-yah!”
There was a moment’s pause. Then, Kyle asked, “Is that it?”
“What, did you want it to explode?”
“No!”
“Well, then stop complaining.” Dazz extricated the needle, then bathed it in the bowl of rubbing alcohol. “Alright, let’s set up to do mine. Now that I know what we need to do, this should go even easier.”
For the most part, it did. Kyle wasn’t a computer guru, but jiu jutsu had its fair share of nerve-strikes and a rigorous understanding of what parts of the body hurt the most when you punched it or twisted it. He wasn’t a surgeon by a long stretch, but he knew enough to avoid the most likely spots to cause Dazz any pain. He slipped the needle in with even less trouble, and soon her own implant was a dead weight inside her arm.
She crowed, “Free at last, free at last, sweet merciful code, I’m free at last!” She slumped back into her bean-bag chair again. “I don’t even know what to do with myself now! Hah!”
“You know someone is going to notice. I think they mark us every time we go through the security check at school.”
Dazz shrugged, “Thanks for killing my buzz. Yeah yeah, I know. Honestly? I figure someone will call me on it, and I’ll go all ‘anime eyes’ on them and say I had no idea that it was malfunctioning. And of course, I’d be happy to go get another one injected! You know the drill. But until then, this feels great! I want to just walk around outside for a while knowing the giant space laser satellites can’t target me!”
Kyle cocked an eyebrow at her. “Umm, you… you know there… well, there aren’t any of those…”
She smirked. “How do you know? If there are, they can’t target us! Doesn’t that take a weight off your mind?”
Her quirky sense of humor made him laugh. It was nice to forget any tension for a while. Maybe he was overreacting after all. When the FDPC found him, they were going to see his implant wasn’t working. Which meant he might have made all this a lot worse. But right then, he didn’t care. He had the space he needed. “Guess you’re right.”
He rubbed at his shoulder, checking the bandage they had applied over the needle wound. The bleeding had already stopped. It had scabbed over, leaving only a pinpoint proof that anyone had reached in to tamper with the device. He tossed the metal shield he had been using over toward her garbage. “Guess I won’t be needing that anymore.”
The doorbell rang. In the secluded room, it wasn’t as easy to hear, but the two-tone warble was unmistakable.
Dazz’s eyebrows rose. “Mom and Dad are going to be pissed. It’s almost half-past eleven. As soon as their news program is over, they usually head for bed.”
Like with his own arrival, there was the sound of the two parents shuffling over to the door to admonish the new visitors about the hour and probably turn them away.
Kyle said, “Hope it isn’t Nathan looking for me. We may have to go save him.” They both craned an ear, listening for a familiar voice that they might have to rescue.
For Kyle, the voice he heard was all too familiar. “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. Simmons. Agent Lawson, FDPC. This is my partner, Agent Niles. We have reason to believe a certain Mr. Kyle Hutchings is here.”
Kyle whispered urgently, “That’s them! Those are the same agents! I recognize the male voice. He kept yelling my name!”
While Dazz’s face crept toward disbelieving horror, her father showed about equal hospitality as he had shown to Kyle. “This is quite irregular, Agent Lawson. The hour is quite late, and we were about to retire to bed.”
“I’m afraid it’s rather urgent, Sir. Is he in there?”
The scowl could be heard on Gordon Simmons’ face as he grouched, “Well, yes, but I was about to suggest –”
His intentions died along with him.
Two muffled-yet-still-loud crrwhump! crrwhump!s reverberated up the steps. Kyle had never heard a silencer shoot, but he had heard a gun fire before. The silencer didn’t turn it into nothing like the movies wanted you to believe. But it killed the worst of the blast, turning each pistol shot into a dull crash that didn’t carry quite so far.
Instantly, Kyle and Dazz’s mouths dropped open. Neither screamed, realizing instinctively they were targets. Probably the real targets, and her parents had just gotten in the way. They both scrambled off the bag-chairs.
Dazz hissed, “They just killed them! Sweet fuck, Kyle, they’re here to kill you!”
Kyle’s mind was howling around in his head in every direction except a useful one. Pulsing blood pounded in his ears, yet he felt like every sense was heightened. He swore he could hear the gentle creak of floorboards as the FDPC invaders moved into the house and searched inward, looking for their targets. He whispered back, “Grab what you can! We need to get the hell out of here!”
Neither of them was thinking quite straight, but they snatched up the small bit of belongs they could, knowing they would never return to the house again. It wasn’t Kyle’s home, so he grabbed mundane things he knew would be useful. A water bottle. A jackknife. Whatever else he thought of in that few moments. Dazz stuffed the laptop and a few other electronic gizmos she couldn’t live without into her bag.
One of the steps near the top of the stairs creaked. Dazz glanced at the window: her normal escape route. But Kyle knew they were out of time. They’d be shot while dangling above the pavement.
What he did instead was pure instinct. Imagining everything he had ever seen in movies and video games and documentaries about how professionals cleared rooms, he pictured the agents coming up on the door. One person to open the door. The other on aim, ready to shoot.
But not yet. Right then, they were still coming up the stairs. Not quite ready.
Kyle launched himself at the door, hitting it with all his considerable expertise at utilizing momentum. It whipped open right into the face of a large male agent, hammering him in the face. He flew backward, sailing down a couple of steps before collapsing on the middle landing of the box-shaped staircase.
To the other side, a female agent had been establishing herself as the bracket to their entry. Her pistol was out, but not quite lined up with the door. Her eyes widened as her partner was blasted away. Anger lit her face, and she swerved the gun toward Kyle.
His training kicked in. Curling a hand over her wrist, he grabbed hold and twisted hard. The agent snarled in pain as the pistol was sent spinning from her hand to clatter on the carpet a few feet away. But she had her own training. Rather than be taken completely off-guard or let her elbow be broken by the arm-bar, she turned into the grapple. With some of Kyle’s leverage reduced, the agent let her trapped wrist be wrapped around her back while she snapped an elbow in toward Kyle’s head.
Letting go of her wrist, Kyle backed away. The elbow whistled by his chin without connecting. He snapped out a quick punch at the agent’s head, then followed it up with a stern front kick to her belly. She dodged the fist, but took the second blow in the middle of her torso. It blasted her up against the wall.
She absorbed it well, not shaken at all. Instead, she slipped a knife from her belt and slashed at him. Not expecting a weapon, Kyle couldn’t jerk his arm out of the way fast enough. She cut a three-inch gouge along his forearm, making him hiss in pain.
But he had trained for pain. He wasn’t any more phased by it that the agent had been. When she reversed her strike and thrust in again, he was ready. Using her own str
ike against her, he smacked the hilt of the knife, sending it wide, then directed her kinetic energy into a throw that flipped her back against the other wall with enough force to break ribs. Certainly hard enough to break drywall.
Despite the power of the blow, the agent growled and grappled her way free of the dent in the wall, shaking off dust.
Kyle cursed. What is she, a damn robot?
Before she could charge back into the fray, Dazz came out of her room with a snarl. Her finger depressed the button of her personal pepper spray container, unleashing the burning contents right into the agent’s eyes. This wasn’t proper mace, but it was enough to sting fiercely. The acrid cloud filled the air, so bad that even Kyle could feel it sizzling the edge of his eyeballs. The agent howled in pain and went down in a heap.
Kyle grabbed at Dazz, dragging her toward the stairs. As they reached the landing, the other agent was only then picking himself up off the ground. Drunk from the heavy landing, he struggled to shake off the impact.
Like the last agent, Kyle made disarming him the priority. He struck the man’s gun hand with a sharp, decisive blow on a nerve cluster meant to numb his whole arm, then smacked the pistol so it went spinning from his grasp and over the railing. It tumbled two stories to the basement below. Not about to give the large man any sort of advantage, Kyle thundered two blistering punches to his gut and left kidney, the sort of shots meant to be felt for hours.
The powerful agent wasn’t any sort of wilting flower. He accepted the punishment, clutching hold of Kyle and ramming him up against the wall. His meaty fist hammered a blow into Kyle’s side. It was hard enough to cripple some people, and only Kyle’s training kept him upright. Even he had the wind knocked out of him briefly.
But though his martial art had taught him how to punch, grappling was the core of the whole jiu jutsu style. Slipping free of the hold the agent tried to lock down on him, he ran his arms into a circle that trapped the agent’s own arm at an awkward angle, then leveraged the man over his hip and tossed him down the second flight of stairs leading to the main level. The agent roared in fury, twisting to take the fall as best he could. His roar became one of pain as he crunched down, rolled twice, and ended up splayed out on the hardwood below.