He turned his back, totally unconcerned with me, and strode to the buck. “Might want to check your connection, hon.”
THAT was the moment when I realized I was offline. I subvocalized first, the way I’ve done my entire life. “Lizzie?”
I had There was a slight ringing in my ears from the gunshots, but nothing else. Aloud, ignoring the way my voice carried, I said, “Lizzie. Lizzie, answer me.”
“You’re offline.” The man knelt by the buck and slung a bag off his shoulder. The gun He laid the gun in front of him, so it would only take one motion to pick it up and point it at me.
I pressed my hand to my earbud, as i f that would somehow, magically, make Lizzie audible. She had a ten-minute buffer that synced with my local system; this normally dealt with signal drop. The idea that I’d been out of range for that long was slowly dawning on me, but I was mostly in denial. I tried triggering a datacloud, but nothing appeared. Moving from eye gestures, I pulled out my h-stick, to see if I had maybe damaged it when I fell, but the green ready light glowed on top. I unrolled its screen, and it was 404 out of luck. “No signal,” it said.
I had been scared before, but now I could barely catch my breath. If I had been standing, I think my knees would have given out.
My throat closed, and I could hear the wheezing as I tried to draw in air. I was ALONE with this man. Have you experienced that? Even in the middle of the night, when I wake up, there’s always someone to talk to. There’s always a witness. Without someone watching, people could do anything, and I was standing ALONE in a forest with a man with a gun.
“What do you want with me?”
“Nohting. You were just here.” He pulled out a small kit from his pack. It was blue, I think. It fit in the palm of his hand, so it was maybe abuot the size of a long-term UV storage battery or one of the mass-market paperbacks that I sell. He popped it open and pulled out an injector. “Just keep quiet while I’m working. Deal?”
I nodded, but I still wanted to ask questions. I think it was because I couldn’t connect that the need to touch the web became s o desperate. I kept swiping the screen of the h-stick, trying to get it to connect. Everything else about it worked fine. I could open my gallery but not patch in from my Lens, so the problem was entirely external. The only time I use the h-stick to show images is if I’m sharing them with someone in a digitaly noisy environment. Otherwise, we’re all watching it in projected virteo.
This felt disconnected and unreal.
So I started talking, trying to fill in the missing information. “What are you doing?”
By that point, he had slid the injector into the skin at the base of the buck’s neck. He squeezed the trigger, and I flinched, but it only made a muffled click. He pulled it out, ejected the needle, and loaded another one. His movements were smooth, as if he’d done this hundreds of times before. He popped a fresh needle on. I could see it from where I was standing. It was thicker than the cannula they use for blood draws.
“You’ll have to pay a fine for killing them. There might be jail time.”
“I didn’t kill them.”
I could see now that they were only tranquilllized. Their breathing was slow and steady. The fur on the doe’s back was ruffled, but there was no blood staining her hide. At least none that I could see. “Still, interfering with a herd will have a fine atta ched.” I waited for my i-Sys to report what that was, but I only heard the wind hiss through the leaves in reply.
The injector clicked as he squeezed the trigger again. “Sweetheart, if I was worried about a fine, do you think I would be doing this?”
“I don’t even know what you’re doing.”
He pulled teh injector out and looked levelly at me. “Do you really want me to answer that?”
I stared at the gun lying in front of him and drew back. The sunlight seemed colder than it had before, and I pulled my sleeves down over my arms even though it meant covering my UV filter tattoos. Powering devices was not high on my list of concerns right then. But I did want to know what he was doing, that was the thing. I wanted to know, very badly, why he had shot two deer—
“Would you have to kill me if you told me?” I meant it as a joke, but it sure as hell didn’t sound that way. It sounded like a business question at a meeting in the middle of a path under an archway of trees.
He gathered up the discarded needles and put them back into the medkit. Quickly, he resealed it and tucked it once more into his bag. He didn’t even pretend to think about the answer. He didn’t feint toward his gun or bluster, he just packed up his supplies as if I weren’t even there. I was that little of a hassle for him.
I think it ticked me off. I’m trying to remember why I thought this was a good idea, but I mostly just remember feeling deeply annoyed.
I stood up.
He eyed me through his mask, but that was about it. If he could ignore me, then I could do the same to him. I righted my bicycle and made sure the hitch to my trailer wa s solid. The canvas solar top was still secured, but I opened it anyway to look at the items I was taking into Portland to sell.
This part I remember clearlly, and I understand EXACTLY why I remember it so well. I know what I had in the cart, because I cataloged it later as part of the ephemera associated with this experience. I’ll bet you’re wondering why I was able to keep all of these items and still vanish for a week into the woods.
I was offfline for three days, but I was gone longer.
I should get back to the deer.
He said, “May as well make yourself comfortable.” He stood up and watched me fussing with my cart.
“I thought you said I could leave.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“But you—”
“I said I didn’t want you for anyhting. Didn’t say you could leave.”
“But—but—” I sputtered like an idiot, starting and discarding all manner of pleas for mercy.
He grinned. The mask hid it, but his eyes suddenly crinkled. “It’s fine. You can leave. After.”
“After what?”
“After I’m finished. I am NOT in the mood to have a visit from the authorities while I’m working.”
I shook my head, the fear still crawling up my spine. “I’m not going to tell anyone.”
“No?” He jerked his chin, hidden behind its mask, at my h-stick. “And you’re holding that because . . . ?”
To be honest, I had not realized that I still had it out. I was running my finger over the surface, tabbing between screens as if I would find new information. I jerked my thumb off the surface and shoved the thing into my pocket. “I was just looking to see if I had a signal.”
“You don’t.” He picked up the rifle, which was no less terrifying now that I knew it shot tranqs. They were designed to take down a deer. No telling what they would do to me. He wandered over to where I stood by my cart. “What’re you hauling?”
“I deal in Authenticities. Antiques, mostly.” It was not, I thought, the moment to mention that I dealt in Captures as well. I very much wanted to get out of this alive, and despite his assurances about the deer, I was less than confident in my survival odds.
“Let me see?” He walked over to me, and it’s hard to describe the way he seemed to get bigger as he came. This is one place where a Capture would not have shown you the emotional experience, even if you were tapping directly into my vitals. There was a power in his movement, as if he were holding the earth down as he walked, as if he were grounding the world instead of the other way around. Up close, he was older than I’d thought. Above the mask, his face was creased with wrinkles. His eyebrows had been dark once, but were bushy with wild gray hairs now. I could only see from the bridge of his nose to right above his eyes, but it was enough to tell that he was laughing at me.
“What?” I moved to stand between him and my cart, though if he had chalenged me on it, I would have let him given him the whole thing in exchange for letting me walk away. The move was the unconscious part of my brain wanting
to protect its possessions, regardless of the danger. The rest of my brain was busily engaged in screaming RUN!, and the two conflicting impulses led me to just stand in front of him. Not threatening, not retreating.
“I’m curious, and we have some time before they wake up.” His eyes crinkled again. “Maybe I’ll buy something.”
“These aren’t for sale.”
“No?”
For a brief moment, my brain was actually smart. “I’m making a delivery. To Portland. My client is expecting me.”
He paused cocked his head then, and his eyes went vague, looking off to the side at a projected virteo that didn’t even show up in the daylight as a glimmer. He grunted and shook his head. “Or you’ve just purchased them yourself. Well . . . Katya Gould. We apparently have more to discuss than I thought we did.”
In any other circumstance, the fact that he knew my name would have been no big deal. Facial recognition flags people all the time, so you know who you’re talking to and how they stand in rankings compared to you. When I meet with a new client, I know their purchase history and the name of their first pet. What made this terrifying was that *I* didn’t have a connection. He did.
Something to discuss? That did NOT sound good. And what had he seen in that pause? Something about who I’d bought the typewriter from? My client list? I stalled, pretending that antiques were the only business he could possibly mean. I can’t tell you if I was doing that as a strategy—to try to seem as if I wasn’t a threat—or if it was just a panicked coping mechanism. I remember it both ways.
“You’re a collector?”
That smirk again, just peeking above the cloth. “Indirectly. “
“You make a habit of being vague, don’t you?”
“I make a habit of not answering questions I don’t need to.” He tilted his head at the deer. “Case in point. You, on the other hand, are very good at tracking down the provenance of the objects you sell and, more important, you have a client list that interests us.”
“I note you said ‘us.’”
“Yes.” He shrugged and gave me nothing past that. “So, you have a typewriter, I see.” They turned up in costume dramas often enough that I wasn’t surprised he could name it. Though I was surprised by his next sentence. “That’s the one war correspondents liked, isn’t it?”
“Hemingway had one.” I almost swung straight into the sales pitch, I but managed to hold my tongue. “You were interested in my clients. I should point out that I maintain complete confidentiality. I never discuss price or purchased items with others.”
That’s the thing about being an Authenticities dealer. People who seek my services want a unique experience, and that means they often don’t even want other people to know what they have. There are some people who won’t share their purchases with their spouses.
“Where do you get ribbons for them?”
That startled me, but not too much. “I print them.” Seeing the surprise on his face, above the mask, I felt like I had to justify it. “I include the original ribbon, but even with re-inking, most are close to two hundred years old, and too fragile to use. If someone actually wants to use the typewriter, and some people do, then I have to give them a reproduction ribbon. I label them.”
He just grunted and picked up the dictionary, which made me think he might have been a collector. Someone else would have gone for the typewriter, mistaking it as the most valuable item. But the dictionary had a solid provenance and was dripping with wabi-sabi.
He thumbed open the first few pages. “How much?”
“You can’t afford it.”
“Maybe my client can. How much?”
So I told him and watched his brows rise to vanish under the bottom edge of his hood. He rolled his eyes, and for a moment I thought he was making a face at the amount, but the telltale shimmer of a virteo projection sprang into bein g in front of him. He made a few eye gestures and then blinked twice to shut the field down. “The vinos are in your account. Not that you can check, but they are there.”
“Won’t that tell me who you are?” The words were out of my mouth before I could think them through. I mean, maybe he hadn’t killed me because he’d thought I couldn’t identify him with the mask and all. If I had just reminded him that he had made a mistake, it would be appallingly stupid.
It didn’t seem to bother him at all though. If anything, he seemed to find the question amusing. His eyes crinkled in another grin. “No.”
Which was a relief and deeply disturbing at the same time. I mean . . . being able to mask transaction identification was high-level stuff, from what I understood. I occasionally had clients try it, but . . . well. My i-Sys is very good.
The dictionary vanished into his kit. The movement, and I’m sure this was calculated, showed a handgun under his coat, and another clip for the big firearm, which almost certainly did not have tranquilizers in it. “You’ll want to cover up the cart, now. In case of rain.”
There hadn’t been any rain in the forecast when I’d left this morning, but I didn’t argue. The man had a gun, after all, even if he had just paid an ungodly sum for the dictionary. Or his clients had, whoever they were. I tugged the tarp back into place, zipping it down. When it was sealed, the cart could be submerged in water up to ten feet in depth and the seals would hold. There wasn’t any real need for that, but it had seemed like a good investment to be certain wind and rain couldn’t get in. Sometimes I dealt in paper ephemera like the dictionary. Clients wanted to see the graceful decay of age, not mishandling by their broker, which meant I had to be able to annnotate damage. Recent water damage? Didn’t sell.
I had the cart half covered before my brain processed what he’d said and the red flag it raised. I was only an hour out of Salem, and the sky through teh trees was a crystal-clear blue. “There’s no rain in the forecast today.” Here’s where Lizzie should have confirmed that for me, but my earbud remained stubbornly silent.
He stepped back, turning out a little so the deer came into his line of sight without his needing to turn his back on me. “We’ve got about twenty minutes before they wake up. Need to get the cart off the road.”
“I’m not . . . I’m not—what are you going to do with me?”
“I want you to push the bike back the way you came. I’ll be right behind you.”
I shook my head and backed away from him. This was not going anywhere good. Turn my back on him? Walk away, with him standing behind me with a gun, and push the bike off the road? I didn’t know why—or even IF—he’d paid for the fdictionary, but my brain put together this whole scenario where he was about to kill me and had framed someone else by using their account for the transfer. All he had to do was hide my body. Anyone watching my live feed would see where I disappeared from the net and would look forward for me first, along the route I’d been traveling. If I went backward, it would take them longer to find me.
And how long would it take someone to notice I was gone? Presumably, my i-Sys would be rasising flags right now, but I didn’t actually know that. I mean . . . I didn’t know anyone who’d been off the grid for more than a couple of minutes at a time, and that was always in places where the reception was known to be spotty. Spelunkers whose smart-dust trails were interrupted, things like that. Would my disappearance be remarked upon, or would it look like equipment failure? Or had he made arrangements to cover that, even?
He hadn’t. I didn’t know this then, but he was working with a ticking clock that had nothing to do with the deer. I’d been a minor bobble in his day; he’d been planning to release me, until his client changed his plans. My i-Sys WAS sending up all sorts of system flags and trying to arrange for a search-and-rescue team to look for me. All I knew at the time was panic.
I thought I would probably have better odds sprinting for the woods. At least the trees might make it harder for him to shoot me. That was why he’d waited until the deer were on the road, right?
He saw all of that and lifted the gun, just a little, so t
hat it pointed more toward me. “Just put your hands on the handlebars and turn the bike around. Nice and slow.”
I did. What I remember most clearly is the sweat running down the backs of my knees. That’s a funny place for sweat, isn’t it? You think about fear and clammmy palms, or sweat on your forehead, but it was my knees. I thought they would crumple with each step. I THINK he helped me turn the bike, because the path was so narrow that it would have been hard to do with the cart, but I don’t remember for sure. I justr emember the backs of my knees tickling as sweat slid down from my thighs to my calves.
There wasn’t anything realistic I could do, so I walked the bike, expectings omething to hit me from behind with each step. “How far do you want me to go?”
“Just keep walking.”
“It’d be faster if I rode.”
He snorted at that. I didn’t look over my shoulder, even though he didn’t tell me to keep staringstraight ahead—or at least, I don’t think he did. All the scary movies I’d seen and the books I’d read over the years told me that looking back caused bad things to happen. After a while—I’m not sure how long, since I’ve discovered that I’m a crap judge of time without an i-Sys to remind me—he said, “Turn off here. To the right.”
He put just enough pressure on the cart that I had to slow, and I think I was in enough shock that I just followed his command. I stepped off the road and followed his instructions as we pushed the bike through the woods and around clumps of ferns. The undergrowth slapped my legs with slender branches, leaving welts on my bare calves as if I’d been beaten with tiny switches. I envied the man’s long trousers and shirt sleeves. Once he had to help me boost the bike and cart over a moss-covered log. He slung the rifle over his shoulder in order to use both hands to lift the cart.
In hindsight, I have this mental image of shoving the bike and trailer back toward him. It would have knocked him off balance. He might even have been pinned for a moment by the cart. I could have run into the woods and dropped behind one of the thickets, burrowed into the ferns and gotten away.
Instead, I thanked him for helping. I THANKED him. That still burns.
The Long List Anthology Volume 3 Page 37