Capital City Chronicles: The Island

by Goss, S. E.

  In the living room, I slung the pack over my shoulder and snatched up my PDA as I walked to the door. With my fingers hooked over the door handle, I turned and scanned my apartment. Before leaving, I always did this, perhaps in some attempt to soak in all the quiet stillness I could before stepping out into the chaos. With a deep breath, I swung the door open and stepped out.

  The wide, clean hallways were normally empty save the occasional sighting of the housekeeper. Tonight was different. It wasn’t full by any means, but people rushed up and down the hall with the same urgency as the ones on the sidewalk. Most of them here, however, wore tuxedos and suits, shimmering gowns and sparkling heels. Their personal drones followed close, dressed just as luxuriantly and seeming to be in the same hurried, gay mood as their masters and mistresses. It appeared that all of the supercilious employees who shouted their indignance over how the president ran the nation, weren’t hesitating tonight to celebrate his return. As apart as I felt, had always felt, from them, I supposed I was one of them. I had no real worries about money, I lived in their building, my lover was one of their heroes. Yet I owned no slaves, employed no servants, and could care less what the president did, unless it affected my work.

  I walked among them, unnoticed and unacknowledged even as I pressed into the stuffed elevator. In a few short moments it dropped eight floors and the doors slid open to the packed lobby. I hurried through, unable to stand another moment among the cloud of cologne and perfume and elitism. As I weaved through the crowd, I picked up bits of overlapping conversations:

  “-heard it was jihadists-”

  “-stencils of dogs-”

  “-Whitten will be opening for him, I do enjoy his oration-”

  “-rebels-”

  “-you just want his head between your thighs-”

  “-at Glass’ memorial-”

  All at once the voices cut to the deafening noise of traffic, and the energy of the street hit me, like coming out of a tunnel into a hurricane. I was almost knocked over twice in just my first steps into the crowd. I saw glimpses of the people from the elevator pushing their way to the line of limousines that waited, stretched the entire block. Exhaust hung hazy in the air above the street, car horns blared at each other for no discernable reason. The smell of fish and mustard snuck across from the mobile sushi bus that parked and opened onto the sidewalk. As I walked, I watched the ancient asian chef scream at his chained teenaged thrall to open faster. The boy rushed around the side of the bus to pull out a shelf of condiments from where the luggage compartment used to be, yanking and jerking at the not quite long enough chain that connected his collar to the counter on the inside of the bus.

  Just as I passed, I heard the old man scream again, this time somehow different, and I knew it was at someone else. I turned in time to see a rickshaw racing toward me and stepped back, bumping into at least three other pedestrians. The thrall was not as lucky. The runner plowed into him, both of them crumbling into the gutter, their chains tangling them both in a hopeless bundle as the cart itself flipped forward, slinging the rich, beautiful young couple into the shelf of the bus. I jumped back again, stumbling now into a fat man in a pink tux, to avoid the explosion of sauce bottles, mustards, spices and wasabi that spun and flipped and shattered all over the sidewalk. The old man now was gesticulating so wildly, I thought his arms would unscrew themselves and go flopping along the street. The pretty young couple struggled to stand, the man holding his screeching, bleeding and spice blinded girlfriend as his feet continued to slip and skate underneath him on the pools of soy sauce. One slave lay unconscious, and the other laughed maniacally at the woman, pointing from inside a ball of wound chain. The spice that now seemed to hang motionless in the air began to burn my eyes, and I turned away from the carnage. Tonight would be anything but routine.

  Once I turned off Heart Steet, down 2nd, the crowd thinned. This neighborhood all used private vehicles or limo services, and the CCTA platform was empty as usual. I climbed the four floors to the platform, slid my GCI employee ID through the box next to the turnstile and pushed through. The giant, rusted ornate clock above the rails told me I had three minutes until the next train. I leaned against the handrailing and again stared down at the madness of Heart Street, enjoying the cool breeze that wafted out from under the platform and hit my face. It wasn’t a particularly pretty area, it was dark and rusted and held an air of loneliness that only develops after years of neglect, but this platform was one of my favorite spots in the city. It wasn’t quiet, but it felt quiet, even peaceful. The proximity of Heart Street, just far enough away for the noise to blend into a drone, and still close enough to smell the traffic, created a contrast that couldn’t be felt even from my eighth floor window.

  My thoughts again drifted to Pan. It had already been almost an hour since she left, and by now she was surely on the heels of one of her targets. Tonight was the perfect night for her. It occurred to me, not suddenly, that she had chosen to stay in with me on a night when her celebrity would have demanded her to be on some long carpet somewhere, waving and smiling for the strobelights of reporters, fans and paparazzi. Her adoring public. Capital City held her up as a shining example of everything this city was, and the rest of the country considered her a hero, a patriotic servant of the people, laying her life on the line for God and Country. Mercenaries and movie stars, these people loved nothing more. Pandora Demour had turned murder into a brand.

  Yet she had chosen me over them. She knew how much I hated “the scene” and she had stayed away to keep our date night. Still, in the end, she had left me to work. The work I understood, though. If my PDA had chimed before the phone rang, I would have left her behind the second I saw the offer. And she would be getting at least as much for Cole alone. I found myself wishing I could have made out that voice in the receiver. The curiosity of how much she was making tonight was almost overwhelming. It had been that blissful, nearly orgasmic sigh of hers that meant it was more than even my imagination could conjure.

  That sigh. I replayed it on a loop in my mind as I leaned further against the railing, pretending it had been me that made her breath purr from her small mouth. My nipples grew hard and sensitive and I found my bottom lip between my teeth. My eyes slipped closed as I pictured her feet, her hips and her shoulders, the sharp pain of her teeth clamping down onto the web of skin between my thumb and forefinger when I-

  I gasped when the clanging roar of the train pushed hot wind against my back, shooting my still damp hair out into a wild, spiked halo around my shocked face. With both hands I pushed it back and down again. I felt my face grow hot, embarrassed and ashamed, as if the train itself had caught me looking at something I shouldn’t have been. Collecting myself, I stepped to the line. The loud buzz signaled the door and it opened with a hydraulic hiss.

  There were only a dozen or so passengers, spread throughout the car. Night train people were a surprisingly diverse lot. You saw every flavor here: A vagabond with a beard down to his belt, spoons and forks, old coffee cans and random keys all sewn into a vest with a thousand pockets. Hispanic gang members with fighter’s faces, two of them squaring off and reciting a rapid string of television commercial song lyrics into the face of the opponent as their amigos cheered them on. A terrified old woman refusing to watch the show and clutching onto her giant handbag. Privileged hipster students riding the train for the enriching experience of seeing the proletariat in their natural habitat.

  I sat across from a woman in a smart suit, holding a briefcase across her lap and blankly watching the cholos hoot and holler and trade jingles, as if she’d seen it for the millionth time. And it was quite possible she had. She smiled demurely at me as I sat, then went back to watching the show. I watched her for a bit, musing on how content she seemed despite the intricate, jeweled collar she wore. On her hand was a stylized, high quality tattoo of a pigeon, signalling to authorities that she was permitted to travel alone on her owner’s behalf. She was traveling now, probably handling million dol
lar negotiations while her owner was enjoying a cocktail party somewhere. Despite the celebrations tonight, some of us were still working.

  The conductor’s voice scratched over the ancient PA system.

  “Green line, leaving 2nd Ave. Next: Gabrielle Square… Market District… Interstate Junction, Nerve Town…”

  Two stops before NerveTown. My pack on my lap, I leaned back and watched the city rush past. I had ridden this line hundreds of times, and as the bohemian opulence of my neighborhood fell away, and the rundown, crumbling tenements took over, my eyes slipped closed.

  The sudden cheering and string of spanish curses jerked me awake. Over the noise of insults that traveled up the car toward the doors, the conductor’s voice spoke again.

  “Gabrielle Square,”

  One gang followed the other to the doors, berating and slapping at them as they ducked through and out onto the platform. The small group of winners then cheered again and ran back the length of the car to yell insults through the windows, triumphant that their superior knowledge of TV commercials had carved them a new turf. I exchanged a look with the woman across from me. She shrugged and rolled her eyes, as if to say, “until next week.” I smiled and shook my head.

  I leaned back again, the train now mostly quiet. Staring out the window, thinking of nothing in particular, I noticed a small piece of graffiti among the usual obscenities, gang tags and crude drawings of genitalia. It was new, and of higher quality and effort than the rest that smudged the window. About the size of a large coin, it was stamped on top of the rest. A red dog’s head, the mouth open wide, bearing long, curved spiked teeth. The dog was framed by the outline of a hand. It was an unnerving symbol, and somehow I realised I had seen it before, in alleys, on curbs and the sides of post boxes all over Capital City. Below the symbol was printed in red:

  BITE THE HAND

  I had indeed seen it before. Like most graffiti I must have ignored it, only picking up on the repetition subconsciously. The slogan, “bite the hand,” was familiar, like a song lyric I couldn’t place. As I realised I was staring at the dog, I felt the pressure of someone’s gaze. I looked at the slave woman, and found her watching me. Her expression was blank, but I knew she was interested in my noticing the stamp. Before she looked away, her tattooed hand crept up to her face. My heart began to race, certain she was trying to tell me something. I felt silly and paranoid when she merely extended two fingers and relieved an itch below her eye. She looked away as she did it, and I knew I was, as I sometimes did, connecting dots that weren’t there.

  I turned again to gaze out the window but that paranoid feeling wouldn’t let me go. The blood red dog’s head on the window was now impossible to unsee. I looked again at the vicious teeth, and as they became outlined in familiar blinking, colored lights, I knew we were approaching the next stop.

  “Market District, Doll’s Row.”

  The train lurched to a stop, the doors hissed open. Her briefcase in hand, the slave stood. I stared down at my pack, unable to look at her. She wasn’t handling million dollar negotiations as I had fantasized. She was purchasing slaves. Dolls to be exact. I looked again out the window, to the ever bustling Doll’s Row below. There was no vehicle traffic here, only throngs of pedestrians and rickshaws. Dolls stood and sauntered outside their respective shops, waving and slithering, yelling and singing, a constant dissonance of desperation as they worked to be sold. The glowing, popping neon that silhouetted their bodies shouted each shop’s merchandise:

  YOUNG DOLLS

  GIRLS FOR SALE

  THRALLDOLLS DISCOUNT BULK

  FRE HIST DO LS IN CC

  I couldn’t help wondering the fate of the girls to be bought tonight. The typical buyer on Doll’s Row was the sweaty, middle aged man wearing bermuda shorts and an aloha shirt, here to buy and discard a girl or four for his weekend business trip to Capital City. He was the rich frat boy punk who wanted something to clean up after him. He was the deranged woman slasher in a spotless suit. Tonight, there would be hundreds of sales, especially of the disposable thralldolls, for use at countless parties. They would be taken off to all corners of the city, and no doubt the police would have to assign entire units to clean up the ones found in abandoned hotel rooms, alleyways and dumpsters.

  The woman across from me, however, was a different kind of buyer. In her suit and briefcase, she was buying for permanent use. This was rare for Doll’s Row; most harems bought through private, high end dealers and breeders, not from shady street-side merchants. Though it did happen, often enough at least, that most merchants would have a private panel truck ready in the alley behind their store for the buyer to ship the purchases. She would buy probably a dozen or more of the youngest, load them into a truck and after a year or two of training, some GCI executive would have a fresh batch of professionals at his disposal.

  A sense of disappointment and despair weighted me to the bench as the woman shuffled past me toward the aisle. As she passed, something fell into my lap, tumbling down between my pack and my stomach. I looked up at her, and she ignored me as she hurried to the doors and out onto the platform. Moving my pack I felt around my lap to find what she had dropped. Under my left leg I found it. A business card. On one side was printed only the name of an Underground message board:

  Capital City Jazz Review

  I flipped the card over to see the same dog and hand logo, again in red. The message, however, was different:

  EAT YOUR MASTERS

  As the doors of the train jerked closed, I leaned toward the window, cupping my hands on either side of my face to block the glare. I wanted desperately to see her again, to get some signal, some clue as to what it meant. But I saw nothing, she had gone about whatever mysterious business she was on, and disappeared. The platform swept away as the train sped ahead, and I was left to wonder.

  Looking at the card one last time, I tucked it into a zippered pocket on my hip and tried to focus on the job at hand. NerveTown was approaching.

  * * *

  If purgatory were a neighborhood in Capital City, it would be NerveTown. A three mile long stretch of warehouses, storage buildings and repurposed motels, all dark but for the multicolored, soft flickering glow that spilled from windows, neon tubing that ran the edges of buildings and fiber optic angel hair that hung from long burned out street lamps. The streets were narrow trenches dug through waist high piles of broken and burned computer monitors, circuit boards and components, all bound in tangles of thousands of miles of frayed cable. While the rest of the city raged with a relentless noise of a level unmatched by any world metropolis, NerveTown, in a way, sat silent. The only noise was from the web of overpasses that swooped over and under and between each other without any logical direction. It was indeed noise, and loud, but unlike the rest of the city, it was a kind of constant and steady white noise that was as close to real silence as one could find out of doors.

  I glanced upward at the traffic as I exited the CCTA platform. It would have been impossible to pick out a single CCPD evidence van among the thousands of vehicles that flew in every direction, but it wouldn’t feel right not to take the chance. By placing the evidence garage in NerveTown, it could be accessed from anywhere in the city in less than two hours, thanks to the Interstate Junction above. Every road leading out, and every road coming into Capital City was above my head.

  I strolled the dark street, content with the rare psuedosilence. As much as most people avoided NerveTown, it was one of the safest places to walk alone at night. Two thirds of the people (if they could even be called that) were uninterested in anyone or anything outside of the Underground. The Wired Nervous they were called. Strange, grotesque white shells, they stayed locked up in their buildings and rooms and storage units, subsisting off feeding tubes and a plumbing system I never understood, or wanted to.

  The other third of the population were the Mobile Nervous. The same as the others, they were wired into the Underground at all times, yet they also lived and breathed out he
re in physical space, shuffling and skating along between buildings, filling feeding tubes, checking vital signs and otherwise maintaining the neighborhood. Their philosophy toward the human body was the same toward technology: constant upgrades, function before aesthetics and the discarding of anything non essential.

  I saw none of them out tonight, however. They most likely were focusing their entire attention upon the happenings of the Underground. Even the invisible universe of ones and zeros wasn’t immune to the events of tonight. I was alone out here.

  Taking my time, I walked the empty street, past the squat motel buildings, and into the block of storage complexes and garages. The BII garage was at the end of the block, surrounded by a high chain link fence. Coils of razor wire ran the upper edge of the fence, preventing anyone but the most dedicated from climbing it. But I wasn’t going over the fence, I was going through it.

  Between glowing clusters of storage units was a narrow alley, the concrete sloping down into a shallow, dried out aqueduct that ran perpendicular to the street. I stepped down into the alley, and hurried along to the backs of the buildings, where it angled into the back of the BII lot. The fence at this spot extended down into the aqueduct. It was only about an extra foot and a half, but it was perfect. The guard never bothered with checking this spot, only running his flashlight over it once an hour, if he felt like it. He couldn’t see where I had cut the fence over a year earlier. Every time it rained, a carpet of leaves, sticks and trash built up against the chain link and camouflaged the two loops of chicken wire I used to create the hinges.