by Rob Hart
Too long. The words felt like marbles in his mouth. Open with a strong statement. Keep it direct.
“Mr. Wells, you say you’re for the American worker, but you destroyed my business.”
Paxton nodded to himself. That ought to make Wells take notice. He wiped the sweat from his brow. Stepped out of the sun and into the shade. It was getting toward noon so the supply was running low. He considered stepping into the bookstore again, but that place gave him a bad feeling. There was a scuttling sound in there, somewhere. Rats maybe.
He went back to the car, circled around it, and continued down the alley, wondering where it would lead. Another block, maybe. Instead he found a loading bay and parking lot and the bare backs of the buildings. Weeds everywhere, huge stalks shooting out of the pavement like fireworks.
There was a sound behind him, footsteps crunching gravel. He turned to find three people standing in the blazing sunlight, their eyes hidden behind sunglasses, mouths by bandanas, their clothes rugged and worn. Two men and a woman.
The men were white, tall, and skinny, like they’d been stretched out. They might have been twins, but it was hard to tell with their faces obscured. The woman was strong and stout, dark skin and gray dreadlocks piled on her head. She was holding an ancient rifle, the barrel of it pointed at his chest. It was a .22, barely a BB gun, and so rusted it might not even fire, but Paxton didn’t want to gamble on that.
He stopped and put his hands in the air. The three people stood, staring at him. Waiting. Not in a rush. Paxton had never heard of something like this happening. This was America, not a shitty late-night movie. Bands of thugs didn’t roam the outlands waiting for distracted travelers.
The woman pulled down her bandana to free her mouth. “Who are you with?”
He almost mentioned Zinnia and then realized if they didn’t know about her, she might be safe, so he said, “Nobody. By myself.”
The woman gave a little smirk. “We know about your friend in the store. We’ve got her covered. Who are you with?”
“Where’s my friend?” Paxton asked.
“Answer us first.”
Paxton puffed out his chest a little.
“We have a gun,” she said.
“That has been established, yes.”
The woman stepped forward, punctuating her words with jabs of the rifle. “Who sent you all the way out here?”
Paxton took a step back. “No one sent us. We’re out for a ride. Day trip. Urban spelunking.”
“Urban spelunking?”
Paxton shrugged. “It’s a thing.”
The woman waved the gun in the direction of the store. “C’mon. Inside.”
“How about you put the gun down?”
“Not yet.”
“We’re not here to hurt anyone.”
“Do you have water?”
Paxton pointed. “In the trunk.”
“Keys.”
Paxton took the keys out of his pocket and threw them in the dirt at her feet. She reached down to get them. He could have charged. Should have. He waited a second too long, and then she was back up. She handed the keys to one of the skinny men, who went to the back and opened the trunk, pulled out the jugs of water.
“Great,” she said. “Now let’s go.”
The three of them backed up, giving Paxton plenty of space to walk along the brick wall toward the front of the store. They were smart. Not getting too close. Another few feet, Paxton could have grabbed the barrel of the gun, pointed it at the sky, reached underneath, pulled it away. It was an easy disarm he had practiced once every three months during the mandatory weapons defense training at the prison.
At least it was supposed to be easy. A rubber rifle was pretty different from a real one.
He didn’t feel like they wanted to hurt him. They put up a strong front, but for the woman at least, there was a slight quiver to her voice. Her shoulders were too tense. The harder Paxton looked, the more they seemed like scared little animals whose hidey-hole had been found, who were now baring their teeth in hope the predator might back away and pick another fight.
He stepped inside the store and called out, “Zin. You okay?”
She answered from somewhere in the back of the store. “I’m fine.”
Paxton heard the others enter behind him. He kept his hands up, moved slow. No sudden movements. If he was smart, if he and Zinnia could play this cool, they could be out of here within a couple of minutes. Back to the comfort of Cloud.
Zinnia was sitting against the wall, back pressed to it, hands on the floor. A small woman with her hair in braids, skin like milk, was twenty feet away, pointing a tiny black revolver in Zinnia’s direction.
Zinnia looked at Paxton, confused, and then the three other folks moved into the open space between the shelves and the desks.
“They got you too, huh?” she asked. Paxton took some comfort in the fact that she didn’t seem panicked.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
“No.”
Paxton threw a sharp-eyed glance at the girl with the revolver. “Good.”
“Shut up,” said the woman with the rifle. She moved around, flanking Paxton, holding Zinnia at gunpoint. Zinnia kept her hands on the floor.
Paxton could feel it. The temperature in the room rising. He knew this feeling. Best to knock it down before the thermometer popped. Loud and clear he said, “Hey.”
Everyone looked at him.
“This is all a misunderstanding,” Paxton said. “No one is here to hurt anyone. No one wants to get hurt. We all just want to go home.” He reached his hand toward the girl with the rifle, to get her attention. “You can keep the water. So how about we all just put down the guns and turn around and walk away? The best part is, no one gets shot.”
The woman tightened her grip on the rifle, but she was looking at the girl with the revolver. Which meant revolver girl was in charge.
“What’s your name?” Paxton asked, turning to her. “Let’s start with that.” He touched his hand to his chest. “I’m Paxton. My friend on the floor is Zinnia. What’s your name?”
“Ember.”
“Amber?”
“Ember. With an E.”
“Okay, Ember. Now we’re pals. So how about you both put the guns down, and we walk out, and everyone goes home.”
“Your car has a Cloud logo on it,” she said.
“We work there.”
Ember nodded. She held his stare. Something about her face was familiar. He couldn’t place it. He had seen it. Maybe at Cloud? There were so many faces.
“You’re the girl from processing,” Zinnia said. Everyone turned to her. Zinnia was staring at Ember and nodded. “You’re the girl they took away. In the theater.”
The hard-ass look on Ember’s face softened. “You were there? You remember that?”
Zinnia shrugged. “I’ve got a thing for faces.”
Now that she said it, Paxton remembered, too. The girl in the secondhand lavender pantsuit, with the orange tag. As they were all being led to the bus, there’d been some kind of commotion.
“What is this?” Paxton asked.
Ember smiled. “This is the resistance.”
“To what?” Zinnia asked.
“To Cloud. And I think you can help us.”
ZINNIA
What a stupid bunch of bullshit this was.
They couldn’t be her employers. Their bones were pressing out of their skin at odd angles, their teeth tinted yellow and covered in grime. They could barely afford to care for themselves, let alone drop eight figures on her tab.
She hadn’t been able to check her phone, so she didn’t know if her contact was here, or waiting, or gone. The best she could do was play dumb and wait for an opportunity. She w
orked the angles of the room. No way she could disarm two people over such a wide space without someone getting shot. She didn’t want to get shot, and it was her preference that Paxton didn’t get shot either.
Not that she cared. She didn’t. But she also didn’t think he deserved to go out like that.
Paxton joined her against the wall, slid down into a sitting position.
“If we could just—” Paxton started.
“Stop,” Ember said. “Stop talking. Right now, you listen. Do you understand? You listen and then you can talk. We better like what you say, or this ends poorly for everyone.”
The woman with the rifle spoke, quietly, turned away from Paxton and Zinnia, like maybe that meant they wouldn’t hear. “Do you think this is who we were following?”
“Couldn’t be,” Ember said. “That signal stopped before they arrived. And their car is a beater anyway.”
Fuck. They’d been tailing her contact.
But why? She didn’t want to ask. Didn’t want to appear interested. She was relieved when Paxton did it for her.
“Wait, you were following someone? I thought you lived here.”
Ember looked down at him. She spun the handgun in her hand, so that it was hanging from the trigger guard by her finger, barrel pointed at the floor. One of the beanpole men took it. “We picked up the signal of a luxury car traveling through the area. Rare they come so far out. We were planning to rob it.”
Yup, Zinnia thought. Definitely her contact.
“Like Robin Hood?” Paxton asked. “Does that make you the princess of thieves?”
“I’m sure they’re long gone at this point.” She clapped her hands. “We just found ourselves a bigger prize.”
The beanpoles and the gray-haired woman moved off toward the shelves and sat like children, cross-legged, looking up at Ember with excitement on their dusty faces. Ember reached into her back pocket and took something out, held tight in her fist. Lowered herself to the floor without taking her eyes off Zinnia and Paxton. There was a slight scuff, and she stood back up. At her feet was a plastic thumb drive.
“This is the match that is going to burn down all of Cloud,” she said.
She said it like she was on a stage, addressing a theater full of people.
The match on the CloudBand. Was it them? She wanted to ask how they’d broken into the system, because that was actually really impressive, but it wasn’t the time for questions.
“What are your jobs?” Ember asked. “What do you do there?”
“We’re both pickers,” Zinnia said, just as Paxton said, “Security.”
Zinnia turned to Paxton and gave him an Are you fucking kidding me? eyebrow.
Ember nodded and turned to Paxton. “Perfect. Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to take this to Cloud. You’re going to plug this into a software port and follow the prompts until you execute the program. We’ll hold her until you get back and it’s done.”
Zinnia laughed. She made it sound so easy, like she hadn’t just wasted months of her life on this thing. But then a burst of cold air expanded in her chest. Their gig sounded similar to hers. Were they competition? Was that the message from her employers? Was she being frozen out?
“No,” Paxton said.
“What do you mean, no?” Ember asked.
“I mean exactly what I said. I’m not going to leave her here. And I’m not going to do anything until you explain to us what the hell is happening.”
Ember turned to her compatriots. Gave a little side-eye to Paxton and Zinnia. Said, “If you need it explained to you why Cloud needs to be destroyed, then I’m not sure where to even start.”
“What is your problem with them, exactly?” Paxton asked, his voice taking on a condescending, sarcastic tone, and it was in that moment Zinnia was most attracted to him. “Please. Enlighten me.”
Ember laughed. “Do you know what the average American workweek used to be? Forty hours. You got Saturday and Sunday off. And you got paid for overtime. Health care was included in your salary. Did you know that? You got paid in money, not a bizarre credit system. You owned a home. You maintained a life separate from work. Now?” She huffed. “You’re a disposable good packaging disposable goods.”
“And?” Paxton asked.
Ember froze, like her words should have had some greater effect on them. “Doesn’t that infuriate you?”
Paxton looked around the room, dragging his eyes off her, and her cronies, seated on the floor behind them. “Things sure are going great for you, aren’t they? Robbing cars in the middle of nowhere. What other choice do we have?”
“There’s always a choice,” Ember said. “You have the choice to walk away.”
Paxton’s voice rose in the dim space. For Zinnia, it was taking a sharp turn away from self-assured and attractive, and into something else. Ember seemed to have hit a vein running deep below the surface of his skin, accessing emotions he maybe didn’t know were there. “Is there a choice? Really? Because I spent years working a job I hated so I could own a business. And you know what happened? The market made its choice. It chose Cloud. I can kick my feet and scream all I want. What good will it do? I can either buck up and do my work, or go live in squalor and starve to death. Thanks but no thanks. I choose a roof over my head and food in my stomach.”
“So that’s it?” she asked. “You’ll accept the status quo? Take things the way they are? Isn’t it worth fighting for something better?”
“What’s better?” Paxton asked.
“Anything other than this,” Ember said, her voice rising.
Paxton’s voice was rising, too. And the muscles in his neck were tightening, his face growing red. “This is the best of a bad situation. So you can play your games all you want, it’s not going to change anything.”
“Whoa,” Zinnia said, and the two of them turned to look at her. She nudged Paxton. “What happened to keeping calm?”
Ember sighed and took a few steps forward. “Let me tell you something about Cloud. They are the choice we made. We gave them control. When they decided to buy up the grocery stores, we let them. When they decided to take over farming operations, we let them. When they decided to take over media outlets, and the internet providers, and the cell phone companies, we let them. We were told it would mean better prices, because Cloud only cared about the customer. That the customer was family. But we’re not family. We are the food that big businesses eat to grow bigger. It seemed like the only thing that kept them in check was the last of the big-box retailers. And then Black Friday happened, and people were too afraid to leave their house to go shopping. You think that was an accident? A coincidence?”
“Okay,” Paxton said, nodding slowly, his voice back to normal. “Now you’re being ridiculous. Now you’re spouting conspiracy theory nonsense.”
“It’s not nonsense.”
“So you’re nuts, is what you are.”
She stamped her foot. Her friends jerked where they were sitting. “How can you not see this? How can you not be angry at the stranglehold they have on you and your life? How can you be content to be one of the people of Omelas?”
“Omelas? What?”
Ember pressed her hands against her face. “This is the problem. It’s not that we’ve lost the ability to care. We’ve lost the ability to think.” She removed her hands, looked back at Paxton. “We live in a state of entropy. We buy things because we are falling apart and the newness makes us feel whole. We are addicted to that feeling. That is how Cloud controls us. The worst part is, we should have seen it coming. For years we lived with stories about this. Brave New World and 1984 and Fight Club. We celebrated these stories while ignoring the message. And now, how come you can order anything in the world and it’ll show up at your door within a day, but if you try to order a copy of Fahrenheit 4
51 or The Handmaid’s Tale, it takes weeks, or it doesn’t show up at all? It’s because they don’t want us to read these stories anymore. They don’t want us to get ideas. Ideas are dangerous.”
Paxton didn’t answer. Zinnia wondered what he was thinking. She knew what she was thinking: Ember was a hell of a speaker. She had the kind of voice that snaked itself around you, caressed your cheek, convinced you to hand over your credit card number.
It also helped that she wasn’t wrong.
“This is the system we have,” Paxton said. “The world is falling apart. At least Cloud is trying to put it back together.”
“Oh, with their ‘green initiatives’?” Ember asked. “Like that excuses them?” She shook her head, took another few steps forward. She reached into her pocket again. Pulled out something small. It took a second for Zinnia to focus and see what it was, held aloft between two pinched fingers.
A black match with a white head.
“Do you see this?” she asked, looking at Paxton and Zinnia in turn, not relenting until they both nodded. “It is so small, and so fragile. In time it’ll get old and worn out. It won’t even work if it’s wet. It’s so easily lost, so easily misplaced. And yet, the spark contained within this could burn down a forest. It could light a stick of dynamite capable of destroying a building.”
Paxton laughed. “So that was your plan, with the CloudBands? You thought showing people a picture of a match would change things? No one even understood what it meant.”
“We were laying the groundwork,” she said, her voice sharp. She was not used to verbal parrying. She was used to people who hung on her words like rocks at the edge of a cliff. “We’re easing people in slow.” She pointed behind her, to the thumb drive, still on the floor, sitting like a sacred object. “But with that, we’re going to get there. That’s our answer. That’s our match.”
“And then what?” Paxton asked. “Take down Cloud, then what? Where will people work? What will they do? You’re talking about completely rewriting the American economy. And the housing market.”
“People will adapt,” she said. “We can’t allow one company to have complete control over everything. You know there used to be laws against that? Until governments found themselves with less and less, and companies found themselves with more and more. Soon the companies were the ones writing the laws. Do you think your salary pays for your food? For your housing? Because it doesn’t. The government pays for them. It subsidizes that, along with your health care. It pays money to keep you employed, because then you pay votes to keep them employed. This is too broke to fix. It is time to pull this system down and smash it to pieces.”