The Warehouse

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The Warehouse Page 25

by Rob Hart


  Paxton closed the door behind him and smiled. Completely involuntary. But the feeling had built up in him so much he had to let it out somewhere, and he couldn’t hoot and holler, so he just wore it on his face like that fourth star he maybe hadn’t earned yet but might have been closer to achieving.

  It was more than that, too. The human brain did not have the capacity to count the number of times he had wished he could give Gibson Wells a piece of his mind. Tell him about how Cloud had shut him down.

  And now it looked like he might have that chance.

  Which of course would piss away all his stars.

  But it wasn’t like he wanted to make a career of this place anyway.

  ZINNIA

  The dash of the electric car breathed a steady stream of cool air. Outside, the parched earth glowed with radiated heat. Zinnia glanced in her mirrors, watched the drones filling up the sky, like a swarm of insects. The boxy protuberances of the MotherCloud disappeared under the horizon. Ahead of them, a blank stretch of road, flat land on either side, nothing but straight as far as she could see.

  It felt good to be out of her polo shirt. It made the day even more special, getting a break from the uniform. She’d found an airy romper at the bottom of her drawer that she’d forgotten she’d packed. Paxton was in blue shorts and a white T-shirt that went a little high on his arms, showing off the curve of his triceps.

  “So where we headed?” Paxton asked, fiddling with the incline of the passenger seat, searching for a comfortable position.

  “Not sure,” Zinnia said. “I just need some sky.”

  They were clear enough of the facility that she felt comfortable keying in a response, tapping at the phone with her left hand, her right on the wheel. Soon, I hope.

  Zinnia put down her phone and realized it had been more than two months since they’d arrived and this was the first she was stepping foot outside. Or as outside as you can get in the relatively safe environs of a climate-controlled vehicle.

  “Do we have water?” he asked.

  “Plenty in the trunk.”

  “Should have brought my sunglasses.”

  Zinnia touched a button next to the rearview mirror. A small compartment yawned open, with a row of sunglasses. “Rental guy said we might need them. While you were in the bathroom. You certainly got us the VIP treatment.”

  “It seems like I’m back in with the brass.”

  “Because you got me to agree to not press charges?”

  Paxton took a couple of seconds before answering, “Yes.” After another few: “Is that…okay?”

  Zinnia shrugged. “It would have been too much trouble.” She didn’t want to tell him it was her preference, but also, she saw nothing wrong with letting Paxton stew a little bit. Because in most other situations, no, that would not have been okay. It did sour his heroism a tad.

  Zinnia reached into the compartment and pulled out a pair of sunglasses. Thick, plastic, bright blue frames. Paxton followed. The other pair was white, feminine, pointed in the corners like cat eyes, but he shrugged and put them on. Turned to her and gave a big grin, showing off all his teeth.

  “They look good,” Zinnia said, letting out a deep laugh after she tried to hold it in, found she couldn’t, and then realized she didn’t care.

  “They fit my style.”

  “They go with the shirt, at least.”

  The sky cleared, the drones thinning out. The sun shone in the car, raising the temperature. Paxton nodded up at them. “Kind of incredible, isn’t it?”

  “What? The drones?”

  “Yeah, I mean, look at them all up there. Back and forth all day, they don’t crash into each other. At least I don’t think they do. Carrying all that stuff…”

  “You sound very wistful. Did you have a pet drone as a kid?”

  “No, just…” He trailed off, then shrugged. “They’re cool. That was the thing that put Cloud over the top, right? Once they were able to pull off drone delivery, that was the end of online retail. No one could compete. I wonder what that must be like. To come up with something world-changing like that.”

  “Eggs are cool, too.”

  Paxton’s voice dropped. “C’mon. That’s not nice.”

  Zinnia’s scalp burned. She looked at Paxton, who was looking out the window, his head turned as far from her as he could get it.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Bad joke.”

  When he didn’t answer, she thumbed the dial on the air conditioner, trying to find a balance between tepid and frigid. She clicked on the radio, not so loud as to discourage conversation, though she wasn’t really looking for it either.

  She checked her phone. No response.

  “So how are you doing, with everything?” Paxton asked.

  Zinnia thought about apologizing again but figured this meant he wanted to drop it. “Car handles nice. Seat is pretty comfortable. I don’t like the gas pedal. It’s sticky.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Zinnia did. Would have preferred it if he had gotten the hint and left it. She watched as the odometer increased a tenth of a mile at a time. “It happened and it’s over.”

  “If you want to talk…”

  Zinnia waited for more. Nothing came. “I’m fine.” She turned to Paxton and gave him a brief It’s cool smile.

  “So now that we’re out of that damn building…what do you think about all this?” Zinnia asked.

  “All what?”

  “Cloud. Living at your job. Being rated on a damn star system. It’s not really what I expected.”

  “What did you expect?”

  Zinnia thought about it. After a moment she went chasing after an analogy she thought might fit. “You know how when you go to a fast-food restaurant? And you’ve got this idea in your head of what it’s going to be like? From the commercials. Like, the burger looks perfect on television, but when you open the wrapper, it’s just a mess? Everything is smashed and smeared and gray. It looks like someone sat on it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Kinda like that. I thought it would be nicer. But it just feels like a fast-food burger. I can eat it but I sort of wish I didn’t have to.”

  “Interesting way to put it.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t think CloudBurgers deserve to be the subject of your derision.”

  “Oh, so you got jokes now?”

  A bus passed on the other side, headed toward Cloud. Fresh grist. Zinnia tried to see inside, see how many people were aboard, what they looked like, but the sun glared off the side of the bus so bright it hurt her eyes, even with the sunglasses on.

  Paxton leaned back in his seat. Stretched his arms over his head, arched his lower back. “I miss my company. I miss being in charge and running something. But this is better than the alternative. It’s better than nothing.”

  “You going to have words with the big man?”

  “Wells?”

  “He’s going to visit, isn’t he?”

  Paxton laughed. “I’ve been thinking about it. Dobbs even wants me involved with the protection detail. It would still have to be approved by Dakota, because she’s in charge of that, but I’ve been thinking about it.”

  “So, you tell him off, and how long is it before they send you packing?”

  “Seconds, probably. Maybe less.”

  Zinnia laughed. “I’d love to see that.”

  “You want to see me lose my job?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  The phone buzzed.

  Great! Let’s try to sort something out soon. Here’s a picture of me and Dad to hold you over until we get to see you again.

  Attached was a stock photo of a black couple who were clearly not her parents, their skin tone being
so much darker than hers, but whatever. She clicked the photo and saved it, eyes darting between the phone and the wheel, and dropped it into an encrypted app.

  “Who’s that?” Paxton asked.

  “Mom. Checking in.”

  “Tell her I said hi.”

  Zinnia laughed. “Sure.”

  As she suspected, there was a string of code embedded in the photo, which the app revealed to be a map, displaying a pulsing blue dot about twenty miles east. It looked like there was a highway system coming up, and as if on cue, something jutted on the horizon. A blip on the flat landscape. Zinnia pressed the pedal a little, sped up toward it.

  Highways were dicey, a lot of them so poorly maintained they were crumbling, but it didn’t look too bad, so she turned onto the entrance ramp.

  “So how’s your plan going?” Paxton asked.

  Zinnia stopped breathing for a moment. But then she remembered her cover story, and she let the feeling of panic settle. “So far so good. Saving my money.”

  “Right, right,” Paxton said, trailing off like there was something else he wanted to ask. Zinnia wondered if she should push it, but then she didn’t need to. “Can I ask you something?”

  “You just did.”

  “Ha, ha. Yesterday. That guy, Rick. He said you were messing with one of the computer terminals.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “But after I got there…I thought I saw…”

  “Saw what?”

  “It looked like you were back at it. At the computers. After I got him off you.”

  Zinnia breathed in deep, breathed out deeper. Tried to make this sound painful so maybe he would drop it. But he didn’t. He held on to that silence like it was a weapon. She lowered her voice when she answered, hoped it would make her sound vulnerable. Hoped if she sounded that way, he would take a few steps back. “I was panicked. I was looking for a pair of scissors or something. Anything I could use to defend myself. He tried to kill me.” She threw him a little glance, dropped her voice. “I was worried he might kill you.”

  “Okay,” Paxton said, processing. Then again, “Okay.”

  “What would I be doing at the computers?”

  “I have no idea,” Paxton said. “Truly, I don’t. But he said it, and then what I saw…I’m sorry. And there was this other thing…it’s been bugging me.”

  She tightened her grip on the wheel. “What other thing?”

  “I mean, it’s probably nothing….”

  “No, it’s not nothing, or else you wouldn’t have mentioned it.”

  Another stretch of silence, during which Zinnia’s heart tried to climb up her throat and out her mouth. Paxton said, “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “But you did.”

  “That first night we went out,” he said. “In the arcade. I was surveilling someone. For work. And when we were reviewing the location tracking data later…” He looked out the window again. “You followed me.”

  Again, Zinnia didn’t know what to say. It was as if her brain were a record and it had suddenly come off the track, just spinning. Fuck. How long had he been sitting on that?

  “Your ass,” she said.

  “What?”

  She dropped her hand into his lap. Rubbed his thigh, her fingertips coming within an inch of the bulge at the front of his shorts. The fabric stretched. “I was checking out that fine ass. There. You’ve embarrassed me. Are you happy?”

  Paxton put his hand on Zinnia’s, and she thought he might pull it onto his dick, but he just held it. “I’m sorry. And you shouldn’t be embarrassed. I was checking out your ass all night.”

  Zinnia laughed as he leaned over and kissed her shoulder, wet lips pressing to her bare skin, and it felt cool when he pulled away. The way she laughed probably sounded to him like a playful, sexy reaction, but the truth was, she couldn’t believe how easy that was.

  “I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying to spy on you,” she said. “It was just there. Are you mad?”

  “It’s a little weird, but it’s fine.”

  A sign appeared over the highway. Sun-bleached to sea-mist green, the words indecipherable. Another two miles and they saw evidence of civilization. A crumbling gas station on the side of the highway. A row of low-slung buildings, old businesses now empty, the signs faded or fallen, the parking lots full of weeds. She checked her phone. The dot was in this town.

  Zinnia clicked her blinker, then giggled to herself, wondering why she even needed to, as they hadn’t seen a car in the twenty minutes since they’d gotten on the highway. She drifted into the exit lane and then down the ramp. A couple of turns later, they were traveling down a wide street, the buildings on either side no more than two stories tall.

  Zinnia craned her neck, looking for the address. And she was thrilled when she found it.

  A bookshop. She always looked for bookshops in towns like these. The ghost town they’d trudged through on the day of the interview, it didn’t have one, and it had made her sad. This was a corner spot, big dusty bay windows, the sign over the door: FOREST AVENUE BOOKS.

  She saw something else, too.

  Something in the corner of her eye. A mote of dust, maybe, or a furtive bit of movement on the roof of the building. An animal? She stopped the car, looked at the edge of the building, where it fell off to blue sky. Waiting for something to break that straight line.

  “What?” Paxton asked.

  Her eyes playing tricks. Reflected sunlight. Her brain overloaded, being out in the wide-open world. She still had a headache. Low-level concussion for sure.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Can we check out the bookstore?”

  Paxton shrugged. “Sure.”

  Zinnia nosed the car into an alleyway a few storefronts down, between buildings where there was some shade, noon still a few hours off. She turned off the car and climbed into the choking heat. Her skin erupted in sweat immediately. Paxton groaned. “What a day to be outside.”

  “Are there good days to be outside?”

  “Fair.”

  They walked up the alley, back to the main strip, sticking to the shadows at the edges of the buildings, past an antique shop and a deli and a hardware store until finally, they got to the bookshop. The space was bigger than the outside indicated, narrow but headed so far back she couldn’t see the end of it in the gloom. She jiggled the knob.

  “Sure we should be doing this?” Paxton asked.

  “C’mon,” she said. “Live dangerously.”

  Zinnia dropped to her knee, pulled a set of hairpins out of her hair, and got to work on the lock.

  “Are you kidding?” Paxton asked.

  “What?” Zinnia asked, working the first pin into the mechanism, all the way to the back, then giving it a bend down, so she had some leverage to turn the tumbler.

  “This is illegal.”

  “Is it?” she asked, using the other hairpin to move the lock’s pins into place. “No one’s been in this place in years. Who’s going to bust me, you? I don’t think your jurisdiction extends this far.”

  Paxton leaned down to get a closer look. “Have you done this before?”

  “You never know what you might find,” Zinnia said, struggling with old, cranky metal. “Old books. Out-of-print stuff you can’t get anymore. Think of it as urban spelunking.”

  “What do you do?” he asked. “Sell them?”

  “No, dummy. I read them.”

  “Oh.”

  When the last pin clicked, Zinnia gave the bent hairpin a hard turn, and the lock screeched as it twisted. The door sprung open. She stood and put out her hand. “Ta-da.”

  “I’m impressed,” Paxton said. “Though I’m not sure what Dobbs would think, knowing I’m spending time around a criminal.”

  Ha ha, yeah
, thought Zinnia.

  She picked an aisle and wandered down it, found the shelves were half-full. She was trying to put some space between her and Paxton and figured on hanging around the store long enough that he would get bored and wander off. Her contact would be smart enough to wait for the right opportunity.

  A lot of the books toward the front held no interest for her: cookbooks, nonfiction, kid stuff. But as she got farther back, toward the fiction section, she found things that spoke to her. Covers that jumped through the layers of dust. She felt like an archaeologist. She made a small pile of books, anything that looked interesting, to bring back.

  As she approached the rear of the store, the air grew thick. That old bookstore smell—the must and old paper, amplified by endless heating cycles from the sun. Paxton called from the front of the store. “I’m going to poke around outside a bit. Get some air. See what else there is around town.”

  Perfect. “Okay,” Zinnia said. “I’ll be done in a few.”

  She listened to him walk to the front, open and close the door. She jogged to the rear of the store, where she found a desk and a dusty cash register, the cash tray pulled out and upended, empty save for a few pennies scattered across the floor. Her phone buzzed, another text message coming in, which pulled her attention away for a moment, so she didn’t react in time to the creak of the floorboards behind her.

  And then there was a hard click. Metal on metal.

  Not that she needed the verification, but something cold and hard pressed to the base of her skull. Pointing up, so whoever it was, they were shorter than she was.

  A female voice. “Are you with them?”

  PAXTON

  “Mr. Paxton, I’m Gibson Wells—”

  Wrong, damn it. Breathe.

  “Mr. Wells. My name is Paxton. And before I worked here at Cloud, I was the owner…no…I was the CEO of a company called the Perfect Egg. It was a small American business that I worked very hard to build, and Cloud’s constant demand for deeper and deeper discounts…”

 

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