The Municipalists

by Seth Fried

  OWEN shook his head.

  “You won’t be able to ask anyone anything if Kirklin’s agents slit your throat and leave you in a dumpster.”

  “What?”

  OWEN shushed me and peeked out one of the plane’s windows to watch the airport’s line crew as they marshaled us into position.

  “I don’t like it,” he said. “Too many eyes.”

  I tried to protest, but he shushed me again.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve got an idea.”

  Suddenly I was sitting across from a white French bulldog.

  “Kirklin could be watching the airports,” the dog said. “We’ll have to disguise ourselves.”

  He waved his snout toward one of the airplane’s windows, inviting me to take a look. When I saw my dim reflection in the reinforced plexiglass I noticed that I was a large muscle-bound man with a red perm.

  “OWEN, this isn’t necessary.”

  “I wish I agreed with you.”

  “Get this off me,” I said.

  “You don’t like it?”

  “Off.”

  “You could offer some constructive criticism,” he said. “If you don’t like the disguise, we can tweak it.”

  He squinted up at me as my pecs began to grow larger.

  “Stop it!”

  “We have to go bigger,” he said. “The masking works better if the projection is larger than your actual body. And try to be more deliberate in your movements—it will help with consistency.”

  In response, I stood up from my seat and shook myself violently. The projection began to bend and warp but managed to stay attached. OWEN nodded thoughtfully as the projection caught up with my movements.

  “I think we’ve got it,” he said.

  I finally pulled the tie clip off and threw it. When it hit the front of the cabin, OWEN’s projections flickered for a moment but didn’t disappear. He stared up at me with his dog mouth hanging open in shock.

  “This is ridiculous,” I said.

  He looked down at his paws for a moment, then raised his head and squared his small shoulders.

  “Henry, you’re hurting my feelings.”

  He saw that I wasn’t going to be moved on the subject and the image of my disguise disappeared. He wagged his tail hopefully when he asked if he could stay a dog, but I shook my head no. Once he restored himself to his previous shape, he looked at me as if he expected me to apologize or thank him for changing back. But I just stepped through him, cursing under my breath and reluctantly picking up the tie clip on my way off the plane.

  * * *

  As we walked through the terminal, OWEN sulked, regarding with suspicion the crowds of fellow travelers passing all around us. Outside arrivals, a man selling tickets for a shuttle service shielded his eyes in the bright afternoon sun and asked us where we were headed. OWEN squinted at the name of the shuttle service on the man’s T-shirt as if it were a fake detective’s badge.

  “Yeah, right,” he said.

  Then he stopped, thought for a moment, and told the man pointedly that we were going to Hershey, Pennsylvania. The man frowned and repeated this information aloud to himself as OWEN led me over to a line of self-driving cabs. Once we were inside, he refused to give the car’s computer our destination, instead telling it which way to go a few streets at a time.

  Beyond that he didn’t say much. Garrett had told me not to worry about arranging my own accommodations in Metropolis, but it wasn’t until OWEN told the cab to take the Matlin Expressway all the way down to Alpine and Block that I realized he had meant OWEN would be making the arrangements for me, meaning my hotel had been selected by a computer that was currently giving me the silent treatment.

  We drove along the Lawrence River on Center City’s eastern edge, eventually leaving behind the high, glinting office towers and luxury apartments of Center North for the lively, lower-density neighborhoods that spread out to the south. According to the dossier Garrett gave me back on the tarmac, Biggs lived not too far from Bixley, and I would have preferred to stay someplace close so I could interview his neighbors. I might have mentioned this to OWEN if he hadn’t been sitting with his arms folded, turning in his seat every so often to look out the back window, a passive-aggressive gesture demonstrating his belief that we were being followed.

  OWEN got us off the highway as soon as he could and kept us to small streets, where I noticed in store windows the various printed and handwritten signs that read FIND SARAH. Men and women on the sidewalks wore white ribbons pinned to their chests, a symbol of solidarity with the Laury family. The news program on the cab’s video monitor was showing old footage of Sarah giving the commencement address at Metropolis University when she was only twelve years old. She looked self-possessed and dignified, even though the sight of a child in a mortarboard giving advice to her elders was almost comical. In the video she spoke of the importance of public service, her voice wavering with such obvious passion that it wasn’t difficult to understand the city’s sadness at her strange disappearance.

  OWEN told the car to let us out just as we hit Chinatown. From there we proceeded on foot, navigating through crowds of tourists who were too busy snapping pictures of the fast-food signs written in hanzi and the red and gold paper lanterns hanging in shop windows to notice that OWEN was occasionally forced to drift right through them. He moved quickly, away from all the novelty shops displaying cheap Metropolis hoodies and knockoff handbags. It was several blocks before we reached what I thought of as Chinatown proper, where the locals browsed the fresh markets and old men sat in small parks, betting cigarettes on games of chess.

  But after we turned down a few more side streets, the stillness of the neighborhood took on a more unsettling quality. OWEN came to a stop in front of a run-down brick building, the first floor of which was occupied by an abandoned take-out place with a half-torn awning that read FRIENDS FOREVER DUMPLING HOUSE. It was surrounded by desolate-looking apartment buildings and across the street was a warehouse with the words GAO FAMILY INDUSTRIAL RUBBER FLOORS painted above its loading bay. OWEN looked down the empty street in both directions to make sure we weren’t being watched, and then waved me over to a windowless door adjacent to the main entrance of the late dumpling house.

  “Buzz 2G,” he said, sounding less than pleased to break the silence between us. “Bao-yu will let us up.”

  I hit the button and asked OWEN how he had found the place.

  “The internet,” he said, smiling up at the building with what looked like pride in a job well done.

  I gave the place an uncertain look and asked him what travel website he had used. He rolled his eyes and said he “wasn’t talking about that internet.”

  The entrance opened halfway and a woman in a blue tracksuit stood there holding the door as if she were getting ready to slam it shut again. OWEN quickly addressed her in Mandarin and her expression brightened. He then gestured toward me with his thumb and said something that caused her to laugh and open the door the rest of the way.

  OWEN and Bao-yu continued to chat as we followed her upstairs. OWEN turned to me briefly on the second landing to explain that this building was an underground safe house for illegal immigrants. When I asked him if we were breaking the law by staying here, he frowned as if I had just reminded him of exactly what it was he didn’t like about me.

  On the third floor, Bao-yu took us down a narrow hallway, where the only light came from a window looking out on an alley. The hallway was crowded with shelves covered with dusty stacks of take-out menus and boxes of unused plastic bags with smiley faces on them. I had to help her move a broken cash register and half of a restaurant booth out of the way before she could open the door to my room. OWEN described it as a studio, but the space we were shown was clearly once a utility closet. Its plaster walls had been painted black and the room itself was empty except for a twin-sized bed i
n one corner, a small dark wood bureau, and a shadeless lamp resting on a folding chair near the door.

  OWEN was standing at the window in the hallway, taking in the view of an opposing brick wall.

  “This place is perfect,” he said.

  I placed my hat on the bureau and opened the top drawer. Inside was a small pile of men’s white briefs.

  Bao-yu said something in Mandarin and OWEN relayed the message.

  “It’s $1,500 for three nights and the bathroom is on the first floor.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “She’s doing us a favor,” he said. “We’re not her typical clientele and you look like a snitch. Also, she usually only accepts cash, but has graciously agreed to accept a wire transfer from the agency. I’ve already taken care of it.”

  “It’s $500 a night and there’s not even a bathroom up here?”

  OWEN looked confused.

  “Do people pay more to be closer to the toilet?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Sorry, but you have to admit that’s a little counterintuitive.” He paused. “I could ask her to bring you a bucket?”

  “OWEN, why am I staying here?”

  “It’s secure,” he said. “I’m in charge of keeping you safe while you’re here and this isn’t the type of place anyone would expect you to stay.”

  “Listen,” I said. “No one is looking for me.”

  Just then a buzzer sounded from downstairs and Bao-yu excused herself. OWEN waited for her to leave, then stepped into the room and put a weightless hand on my shoulder.

  “Henry, I didn’t want to scare you, but our cab was being observed.”

  OWEN brought up a satellite image of a city street. He pointed to the roof of a car making a turn through an intersection.

  “That’s us twenty minutes ago,” he said.

  He then pointed to the roof of a building in the upper-right-hand corner.

  “And what do you see there?”

  The image was pixelated, but I was just able to make out a circular shadow.

  “That could be anything.”

  “Are you joking?” he said. “This is the exact outline of an H-311 surveillance drone. We’re the only agency that uses them.”

  “All our drones in the city crashed.”

  “Except the ones in the Northeast Supply Hangar, which housed two reserve fleets and enough hardware to set up their own navigational relays.”

  “You think someone is watching the city with our drones?”

  “I don’t think they’re ours anymore.”

  “OWEN, this is—”

  “Serious, I know. But I think we lost them once we ditched the cab. It would have been easier if I had been allowed to use disguises.”

  There seemed to be no use trying to convince OWEN against the possibility of such complex forces at work, and so I decided it was time to carry on without him. The room had already been paid for and I figured he could continue to enjoy the hospitality of Friends Forever Dumpling House while I found a real room uptown. It was early still and there was enough time for me to swing by the transit museum to get my picture with the Steam Beetle before starting the hunt for Biggs.

  From downstairs came the sound of Bao-yu yelling and slamming the front door.

  “That could be trouble,” OWEN said. “I’ll see if I can get satellite visual on the street out front.”

  “Sure,” I said, giving that preposterous room one last look and trying to decide if I wanted to walk to the museum or get myself pumped up for it by taking the subway.

  OWEN looked up at the ceiling in concentration and I took the opportunity to reopen the top drawer of the bureau. I pulled off the tie clip and wrapped it tightly in one of the pairs of underwear before dropping it into the drawer. I shut the bureau and turned around just in time to see OWEN flicker out of sight. His voice was still able to move about the room, but was so muffled that his confused and urgent protests were barely discernible.

  Bao-yu’s shouting continued downstairs and was now accompanied by a loud banging. I grabbed my bag and hat as I made my way to the stairs. In the foyer, I found Bao-yu with her hands pressed flat against the front door, shouting at whoever was pounding on the other side. The door shook violently with each blow and Bao-yu leaned in as if to bolster it.

  I was just asking her if everything was all right when the tip of an axe blade poked through the door. She screamed at the sight of it and fled up the stairs back into 2G. The door received two more massive thwacks before it collapsed into the foyer in a heap.

  Standing outside were two men dressed in matching suits, which I was surprised to notice were the USMS cut. The men could have been mistaken for field agents except that their suits were black instead of the usual navy and they weren’t wearing fedoras. The bigger one must have been at least six foot, five inches and had a thick beard as well as blond hair that came to his shoulders. He stood holding his axe at the ready and looking down at the demolished door as if to intimidate it into further submission. The other one was leaning forward as he brushed splinters and dust from the broken door off his pant legs. When he stood up and adjusted his thin black tie, it occurred to me with surprise that I was looking at Stuart Biggs.

  As soon as he spotted me he tilted his head back and smiled, showing a mouth of large, perfectly white teeth.

  “Henry Thompson,” he said, “as I live and breathe.”

  “Stuart?”

  He spoke rapidly to his companion in an odd-sounding language.

  “Sorry, Henry,” he said. “Nothing personal.”

  The blond man grunted in response and stepped toward me, lifting his axe. I fell back into the stairs as he took a wide, heavy swing, the axe blade narrowly missing my head and sinking into the wall.

  I scrambled up the stairs as he started to tug the axe free, and it wasn’t long before I heard them both heading up after me, their pace slow and deliberate.

  On the third floor, I slipped into my room, shut the door, and began digging through my travel bag for my new cell phone. Once I found it I got down on the floor and did a quick army crawl under the bed. Luckily, OWEN had gone quiet in the drawer and I was hopeful that it would take the two men a while to find me hiding under the sagging twin bed.

  When I hit the phone’s power button, the screen lit up with a series of loud-but-welcoming chimes before asking me to register my Newtech mobile device.

  Below I could hear the footfalls of the two men making their way up the stairs as they talked to one another in their foreign tongue. Their tone was casual; they could have been discussing anything from baseball to their plans for that night once they had finished killing me.

  I pressed the button indicating that I did not want to register my phone. An hourglass appeared, rotated, and then disappeared before a message flashed onto the screen: “You must register in order to use your Newtech mobile device.”

  It sounded like the two men were walking down the third-floor hallway, smashing things indiscriminately as they went.

  The phone asked me for my preferred username. I pushed random keys on the screen’s keyboard until I had entered the required number of characters. When I hit submit the resulting text was autocorrected to “Salad daughter urine gut.”

  The hourglass reappeared and rotated. A new message: “The username Salad daughter urine gut is not available. Please select any one of the following usernames: Urine_Daughter912, GutSalad727, Daughter_Gut613!, _SaladUrine4, Daughter_Salad212, or Gut_Urine474.”

  I selected Gut_Urine474 and was immediately prompted to create a password. I mashed the keyboard again and hit enter, prompting another message: “This password is weak. Are you sure you would like to continue?” I selected yes.

  The men’s voices sounded close.

  The hourglass reappeared and was followed by a flashing screen that con
gratulated me on registering and asked me to reenter my password. In the same moment, the door to the room flew off its hinges. The blond man pulled me out from under the bed by my ankle and rolled me onto my back.

  Biggs stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets. My phone had fallen to the floor and the blond man crushed it under his heel before raising his axe as if to bring the handle down onto my face. I instinctively brought my leg up and kicked, planting my heel into the man’s crotch as hard as I could. He dropped the axe and fell to his knees.

  Biggs gasped at the sight of his partner on the floor. He ran to his side and began to rub his shoulders.

  “Spiru,” he said. “Spiru.”

  I grabbed the axe as I stood up and held it in front of me, more as a partition than a weapon.

  “Biggs, what’s going on?” I said.

  He turned to me as he continued rubbing his partner’s shoulders, his eyes wide with anger and righteous disbelief.

  “Can you give us a minute? Can you?! You kicked Teddy right in the testicles, which is a pretty cheap shot.”

  I was taken aback by the anger in his voice. There was also something strange about his enunciation that I didn’t recall from our interactions at headquarters, a slight sibilance that wasn’t quite a lisp.

  “He was going to hit me with an axe.”

  “Yeah, with the handle,” he said. “You would have been fine.”

  “He—on the stairs, he swung the blade at me.”

  “So he got carried away a few minutes ago. Does that mean he deserves to be kicked in the nuts for the rest of his life?”

  Teddy moaned at the mention of his testicles. When he winced, baring his teeth, I noticed that his too were incredibly white.

  “You mean you’re not trying to kill me?”

  “Not here,” he said, sounding irritated. “We’re supposed to throw you off the Lennox Street Bridge.”

  I was still unsure whether I was prepared to hit someone with an axe when Teddy rose to his feet with the pained expression of an athlete who knew he would be expected to tough it out. He took a deep breath and stepped in a slow circle, looking for his axe. As soon as he noticed I was holding it, he took a few steps forward and unceremoniously punched me in the face, taking it from me as easily as if I had handed it to him. I stumbled back toward the bed and Biggs resumed his position near the door, watching the proceedings with a look of grim satisfaction that suggested I probably wouldn’t make it to Lennox Street.