There was nothing sure in this world. Drego could search for his soul all he wanted, but he couldn’t erase the shadows of those bodies lying in this heat. Nothing could.
Silence. From time to time a cry for help. Was someone calling for his mother?
22
The gunfire had stopped. The overcast day had become suddenly brilliant. The barbed wire that was shot across the road was dark and jagged against the lighter sky. There were still two bodies caught up in it. One of them was obviously young. He was thin, from a distance as black as the barbed wire, his body arched across the strands that cut into his flesh. There was a feeble effort by some of the people on his side of the wire to free him. From where we watched, we could hear his screams as the razors embedded in the wire cut more deeply into his flesh.
This was nothing like I had imagined. The neat dots on my computer screen were being translated into flesh and blood and the stink of gunfire.
Through the wire, I could see the other attackers begin to drift away. Some of them were crouching low as they hurried from the scene; others stood as they walked in a futile display of bravado. They knew they were defeated. They hoped that they wouldn’t be shot.
I saw Drego and went to him to ask if they would regroup and come back.
“No,” he said. There was a catch in his voice. He was a hard shell of a man barely holding back the tears. “They’re defeated. They’ll slink away and look for something to get high on. That’s what they’re used to doing.”
Minutes before—was it an hour?—Drego had been ready to do battle, and now he was saddened by what he had seen, pained. No matter what, they were his people. And he was right: slinking away was what they were used to, what we were all doing more and more.
A team of medics had arrived. No one on our side of the wire had been injured, and so they made their way to the deadly barrier and around it to the other side. Two of Tristan’s crew went with them. They carefully lifted one of the kids off the wire and eased him down to the ground. I saw that one of the medics was a girl, thick-legged, plain. She was putting something on the black boy’s legs. I guessed it was a topical anesthetic.
They checked the other body on the wire but quickly walked away. I looked at Drego and saw that Mei-Mei had her arm around his waist and was collapsed against his chest.
Michael came up to me, took my arm, and gently kissed my shoulder. “You were on the money about how they would attack,” he said. “Javier and Anja are trying to get the word out about what happened here, but we’re being jammed.”
“You think it’s over?” I asked.
“The sooner they hear about how these guys were turned back, the sooner the rest of them will find something better to do than continue this attack,” Michael said.
“That makes sense,” I said. “But only from our point of view. We’re still dealing with Sayeed and the guys he’s brought with him from North Africa. They’re not kids like the ones we just faced.”
“But they’ll see the wounded and think,” Michael said. He was nodding as he spoke. “I’d see the wounded, and I know I would be asking myself if it was worth it.”
“You can’t will this to be over, Michael,” I said. “There’s got to be a logic to it. Sayeed has to come away with something, as Drego said. If he sacrifices a few more lives, he won’t mind. You should know that.”
“If we could get people flashing the word …” Michael looked around as if he was looking for an answer to pop up from behind a barrier, or from a sewer.
“It would help,” I said.
“Are you sure that Sayeed’s not through?” Michael asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think he’s not through. He uses the same equations as I do.”
“I’ll go tell Tristan and Javier.”
It was weird watching Michael go off toward the command vehicle. I knew he had already had his fill of the fighting. It wasn’t like being onstage, urging your band on and feeding off the frenzy of ten thousand screaming fans. It was looking out over a small field and seeing a dead body still in the wire and knowing you had something to do with its being there. It was reaching a point at which you couldn’t just walk away anymore.
I wondered how many of the kids Sayeed had sent had actually been wounded. Tristan’s guys had shot into the cars, and the return fire had ended quickly. The crashing into the wire barriers had been a foolish act of desperation, and had failed.
I felt so damned sad, so sorry for myself as I realized what I was doing. If I had seen the shit that was happening in Florida, if I had seen it on television or the Internet, I would have been disgusted. This was porn with the bodies still lying on the ground after the scene was over. And the truth was I couldn’t just turn it off, because I was part of it. I felt so sorry for myself, and at the same time I was mad, because I knew I should feel sorry for the kids Sayeed sent to fight his battle for him. The bastard!
Think, girl. I think, therefore I am!
I was thinking. We were being jammed, so there was no Internet coming in or phone messages going out. It was standard for C-8—control the flow of information and you control the battlefield. But it had been done before!
I stumbled as I ran over to where Drego and Mei-Mei were standing. Next to him, in the street, she seemed tiny.
“Drego, Javier is trying to get the news out that the attack was beaten off,” I said. “He thinks if we get it to the neighborhood, it’ll keep other kids from joining Sayeed. The trouble is somebody is jamming our signals. We can’t spread the word. Are there any high-tech people in this area who can do countermeasures?”
“Countermeasures?”
“Override their jamming,” I said.
“Let’s find out.” Drego.
We went to one of Tristan’s people and asked to borrow his vehicle. The guy waved, and two more of his kind, blond and buff, came over. They talked to each other, all the time looking at me, Drego, and Mei-Mei as if we were freaks. Finally they said yes.
“I’ll stay here,” Mei-Mei said.
I looked at her and saw her eyes as wide as I had ever seen them. She was scared shitless! Okay, not a problem. It was one thing to deal with this life as an academic exercise, or as a chess problem. That wasn’t street life.
I got into the jeep with Drego, and we started driving into the downtown area.
“What happens if we get stopped?” I said. “A bunch of kids who just saw some of their friends get killed?”
“Then it’s our turn to get killed,” Drego said. He was looking down the street through the dusty windshield. He turned on the wiper control, and it spewed water onto the window and made it even harder to see through.
Drego drove quickly along the empty blocks. Everyone had heard the shooting, and nobody needed to be killed in a fight they didn’t belong in. Count had been right: Sayeed hadn’t picked up any local help.
There was a big twenty-four-hour clock on the dashboard. I watched the second hand sweep around a couple of times and was surprised when Drego slammed on the brakes in front of a corner building with a partially open steel folding gate.
“Play it hard,” Drego said as he got out. “These people ain’t got time for punks who ain’t sure of themselves.”
He pushed the gate all the way open and stepped inside the store. I felt a chill as I waited for the bullets to hit my body.
“Yo!” Drego shouted.
“What you want?!” I turned and saw a heavy black woman sitting on a stool in the corner. On the wall next to her was a picture of Papa Legba, the gatekeeper.
“I need to make a phone call and all the lines are jammed!” Drego said.
“Then you can’t make no phone call.” The woman’s voice was flat, dry.
“I got fifty dollars.” Drego.
“The phone is jammed.” The woman was looking me up and down. “You can’t make no phone call.”
“Yeah, okay.” Drego turned, brushed by me, and went toward the door. I followed.
“Let me see your fifty dollars.
”
We were back in the store, and the woman was counting the money. She asked Drego if he had one hundred dollars. Drego spit, then ground the tip of his shoe into it.
The woman looked pissed but went to the shelf and pulled out what looked like the kind of remote controls that you find in cheap hotels. She handed it to Drego.
“Who we calling?” Drego asked.
I hadn’t thought of that. “Can we reach the Brits?”
“You got a number?”
I took my phone out and found the number of the piss ant who wouldn’t share his computer data. Drego dialed it as I recorded a text message into my own phone. I could hear the tones from the thing that Drego held going through relay switches. It took three minutes, which was good because I was able to record nearly a page of text.
“Carleton here.”
“Carleton, this is Michael’s group from the States,” Drego said. “We’ve got a text message for you. Ready to receive it?”
“Of course.”
I put my phone against the one that Drego held and pressed send. The message only took a second or two to transmit. Then I got on.
“We’re cut off from regular communications,” I said. “Michael needs somebody to get out the news that we’ve beaten back an attack. We don’t know how many were killed or wounded, but the first attack by Sayeed and his people was beaten back.”
“Killed or wounded?” Carleton. “Did you say ‘killed or wounded’?”
“Yes.”
“Cripes.”
“We’re expecting another attack,” I said. “If I can, I’ll let you know what happens. I think they’re probably trying to regroup.”
“Are you the girl?” Carleton.
The girl? “Yes, I’m the woman,” I said.
“Do you think Michael should speak directly to Victor?”
Drego snatched the phone from my hand and let loose a string of curse words that included everyone in Carleton’s family and the monkeys they came from. Then he told Carleton to have a blessed day and hung up.
“What was that phone device?” We were headed back to the area of the fight. “How come they can get through and we can’t? What kind of tech shit is that?”
“It’s called a land line,” Drego said. “When they cut them down back in the day, people realized that the police could listen in on cell phones that went through the air, so they strung the telephone lines back up again. They go to a point outside the area, and then get picked up by cell from there.”
“I didn’t think they were that sophisticated,” I said. “I mean technically.”
“You kidding?” Drego.
I wasn’t in the mood to spar with Drego. He knew a lot of stuff, but his ghetto act was wearing thin. Maybe it got him over with Mei-Mei, but I wasn’t buying it.
Back at the command post. There are blogs coming through, hacked-in pop-ups on C-8’s propaganda line. They’re already talking about how the first attack was turned away and added a bit about the “miracle” find in the United States.
HUSH-HUSH—MUSH-MUSH. MORE GLAD NEWS BEING FLUSHED DOWN THE TOILET IN THE YOU ESS OF HEY! BREAKTHROUGH SCIENCE—SOMETHING ABOUT CELL REGULATION—BEING HIJACKED AND STUFFED INTO THE PROFITS COLUMNS OF THE DEEP SIXERS. THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF A LOW-RANKING LAB WORKER, CONNECTED WITH CTI MEDICAL, POINTS TO A BEDTIME STORY—OTHERWISE KNOWN AS A COVER-UP. POLICE IN ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA, HAVE THEIR LIPS SEALED. THANK GOD THEY STILL HAVE THEIR POCKETS OPEN.
Michael was at my side and took my hand in his. His skin was softer than mine. “I’m thinking that if we retreat now, we can claim a victory,” he said. “If Sayeed doesn’t have an enemy, he can’t have a victory.”
“Enemies are just excuses,” I said. “You want to do some evil shit, you look for somebody to make an enemy and then you do your shit. Sayeed came over here as a kickass African legend. He has to get back to neutral or he’s going to lose everything he’s spent his life building up.”
“You’re sure?”
“So are you,” I said, “but some things we don’t like to be sure about, right?”
“One day, if we’re lucky, we’ll look back on this and think it was all worth it,” Michael said.
“Not if we’re lucky,” I said. “People are dying.”
He dipped his head ever so slightly to one side. Then he walked away toward Javier’s van.
23
Tristan. He had a slight stubble from not shaving for a few days. It was darker than the hair on his head, and it made him look rough. There was a translucent quality to his eyes. A gray-blue sky in autumn, but shallow.
“I know you think Sayeed’s going to attack again,” he announced. “But how will he attack?”
“He’s unsure of himself,” I said. “Usually he hangs back until there’s a clear victory in sight. This time, he’ll hang back even more. He might even try to make something of a defeat. I don’t know for sure.”
“That’s not good enough,” Tristan said. “Will he be in the attack or not?”
“No,” I guessed, knowing how wrong I could be. “He only comes to the fight when he sees it’s over. He’ll hang around to see how it goes, and if it doesn’t go right for his grand appearance, he’ll look for an out. What I suspect, what I think, is that if things went against him in Morocco, he simply retreated into the mountains. He’s not going to risk his neck here, either.”
“You’d make a great combat chick,” Tristan said. “Somebody to plan battles with.”
“Tristan, remember back in England, when we were the good guys? We were sitting in Dulwich College being all righteous and whatever?”
“Yeah?”
“And here we are fighting and killing street kids from Miami, the same kinds of people we’re supposed to be saving,” I said. “You see anything wrong with that?”
“My father used to say that the only way to talk to a snake is to first learn how to hiss,” he said. “Sometimes people can’t—or maybe won’t—listen to you until they know you can speak their language as well as your own.”
“And you’re cool with that?”
“I can live with it,” Tristan said. “I can live with it.”
I think I’m losing the battle to save myself is what I wanted to say.
Tristan seemed less mindless as he walked off. I thought I knew him better now. He knew what he did. He was a fighter—he found his enemies and waged war, and he waited for the chance to do that. He needed me to say something, to allow him not to think about anything else, just to do what he did best. Fight. I knew him better, but I didn’t know if I liked him as much.
We were waiting. Javier texted everybody that the jamming had stopped. He wanted to know what that meant. Mei-Mei texted him back that C-8 was probably trying to limit their involvement. She had a grasp of things that I had to admire.
“A group of Sturmers has been spotted,” Javier texted. “They are just to the left up ahead. Less than a mile away. They don’t appear to be doing anything at this point.”
Vultures, I thought.
We were waiting. I felt myself tensing up, felt the stiffness in my shoulders as I thought about what was to come. I imagined more old cars filled with high school dropouts moving toward the barriers, moving toward Tristan’s people with their high-tech gear and square shoulders.
As few as we were, maybe fifty or so against three hundred that Sayeed might be able to muster, we were in the best position On impulse I texted Mei-Mei.
D: What is the best endgame?
She texted me back.
M-M: Us being #alive#
Was that it? Was the best endgame only that we lived? What had I read about Martin Luther King, Jr.? That longevity had its place? I made a mental note to always hate Mei-Mei. Added that to the list.
What I knew was that I hated Mei-Mei because she was right. I wanted to live. I wanted to know what was going to happen in the next few seconds, the next few minutes, the next hours. That was what made me human. Not the intelligence or the opposable thu
mbs. It was about finding out what happened next.
The fighting started again like a sudden spring rain, with big hard drops banging against the shutters. There were bullets hitting the barriers in front of us. I felt my legs and arms moving, scrambling like crazy to get closer to the protective metal shields. I was holding my breath, palms flat against the steel that I hoped would not let me die.
There was return fire from our side. The answers to the staccato fire, the high-pitched whines of bullets coming toward us, were the low and rumbling sounds of Tristan’s men and their guns. The beasts had awakened.
I didn’t want to, but somehow I forced myself to look around the steel barrier I had found. It was slightly shorter than me, about five feet high, with vertical slits to fire through. I looked, but I couldn’t see anything. Who was shooting at us?
I could hear the sound of the shooting, could see the puffs of smoke and an occasional flash of light, but I couldn’t see anyone holding a rifle or actually shooting in our direction. How could killing be so impersonal? An Asian dude with powerful arms and legs was giving orders over a phone. I wondered how he was giving orders to other people if he couldn’t see shit.
“Armor!” The voice that called it out cracked as it rose.
I looked down the wide corridor again and saw four vehicles headed in our direction. They were tracked vehicles, lumbering and rumbling as they headed toward us.
The immediate response from our side, Tristan’s army, was a wicked hissing noise followed by a boom that seemed to fill me up before knocking me down.
“Oh, my God!” Anja’s voice. I looked up and saw she had her hands by the sides of her face as she looked down the street.
I looked. One of the vehicles had been hit. There were flames shooting high into the air. At the base of the flames there was still the outline of the vehicle, and a dark spot where it had been hit.
Another hissing noise, and I felt myself reaching for something to grab hold of. Too late. I had struggled to my feet, but now I was on the ground again. The blast from the gun had knocked me over. The sound seemed to be inside my body. I was shaking, and crying, and confused. I wanted to be away from where I struggled on the hard ground.
On a Clear Day Page 17