by Ric Beard
“Let’s not go there again.”
“Yeah, fuck you,” Fleming said. “I don’t know those people.”
Sinclair sighed, staring at Fleming over the frame of his glasses. Then he slapped his knees, turned, and pulled the tray around the table. He gently set the bag on the floor behind him and reached for a short, stainless steel instrument with a tiny spiral head. He pushed the button on the handle, and the drill began to spin.
The pads inflated. The straps tightened.
When the drill pierced his skin, the pressure on Fleming’s legs sent a stream of blood flying into the air. It was too much. “Lexi Shaw! CorpKill62 is Lexi Shaw!”
Chapter Sixty-Two
Never Stopped Him Before
Sinclair took the elevator up two levels from the prison basement to the main floor, where he passed through a body scanner before stepping into the lobby. The hard, plastic chair upon which he sat got him thinking…the guests of prisoners must be uncomfortable in a multitude of ways. But the lobby was not under audio surveillance, and that suited his purpose. He tapped his Tab twice and then touched his earpiece.
“This is Morgan,” the mayor’s right hand said on the other end. “This line is not secure.”
Sinclair answered in his usual monotone. “Understood. He gave me a name.”
“Of course he did.”
“One tap of the drill and—”
“This is not a secure line,” Morgan reminded him.
“Yes, yes.”
“I think perhaps you enjoy your work too much. You really should tone it down, or someone might get the idea that you belong in a place like that.” His laugh made Sinclair shudder. But he returned a laugh of his own, absent any humor. “What name did he give?”
“Lexi Shaw.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“It’s the name he gave.”
“Lexi Shaw is Underground like I am a badlander general. Get me something actionable.”
“Who is Lexi Shaw?”
Morgan’s sigh was apparent on Sinclair’s end. “I’m guessing you don’t read the news. She’s the head of security for JenCorp. She also wrote an op-ed against the mayor’s policies not too long ago. She’s Blake Jensen’s stooge. Our people spied her investigating the attack on the elder Jensen yesterday—or haven’t you heard about that either?”
Asshole.
“She was seen walking into his downtown apartment an hour ago. Our best guess is that she’s going to take over his security.”
“I wonder what it’s like to work for Mikael Jensen.” Sinclair muttered. “Must be lucrative. I’m sure he’s quite selective with his staffing.”
“You sound like an admirer. Also a trait that wouldn’t serve you so well.”
“I was just musing.”
“Good.”
“I suppose acting against the staff of Vaughn’s opponent wouldn’t play well.”
“You suppose correctly,” Morgan replied. “The mayor has enough problems. It will look like a blatant abuse of power.”
“It has never stopped him before,” Sinclair muttered.
“I will pretend I didn’t hear that.”
“As if you can stand the man, yourself.”
“Whether I like him or not, I have a job to do, though I think my term might be getting shorter and shorter.”
A moment of silent tension passed.
“May I ask a question, Morgan?”
“You just did.”
Dick.
“How did he get her name?”
“Pardon me?” Morgan asked, impatience in his voice.
“If Lexi Shaw is so clean and an elite security specialist, then how does this Fleming person know her name? I assure you he doesn’t read op-eds in here. So, how did he know Lexi Shaw existed?”
“Sh—,” Morgan hissed through the Tab as he disconnected.
Idiot.
Part Fourteen
The Badlands
Chapter Sixty-Three
Looking at the Suit
Day 7
Monday, Mar 25, 2137
The Badlands
Sean shivered violently in the corner of the pod. He’d tried to eat one of the ration packs left for him, but his throat felt like a closed water pipe, and he couldn’t swallow. He looked down at his hands, swollen from beating on the pod walls. His head was pounding from where the rifle butt had landed.
The top of the pod slid open. The black man who’d hit him, Moss, stood there with his rifle, looking in.
“Hey man. No hard feelings.”
“Fuck you,” Sean said.
“Understandable response. I just wanted to say that I was sorry I hit you, and I could’ve handled it better.”
“Apology accepted. Now let me out of this fucking pod. I’ll sleep in my truck.”
“Right. No. Sorry. They’re going to be here to take you back to OK City and get all that sorted out in two days. In the meantime, you’re on lockdown.”
Lockdown. A memory of his prison cell came roaring into his mind, and he started to get to his feet, but his head spun and he fell backward. Moss raised his weapon.
“A stun bolt is only gonna make it worse, Stone. Here.” He tossed him a bottle that rattled as it landed. “For the headache.”
He slapped the side of the pod, and the door slid shut.
Sean screamed, but no one outside could hear him.
The lid slid open again hours later. Sean struggled to focus under his heavy eyelids. The blonde woman was standing there, under a starry night sky. She was beautiful, like a fairy, her round bosom stretching a tight black suit. The giant appeared next to her, and then a woman with cropped black hair and a tan complexion.
“Can you walk?” The blonde woman asked. There was something familiar about her. He couldn’t put his finger on it. Maybe it was the pills that Moss cat had given him.
“I think so.” He felt a wave of relief wash over him as he slowly struggled to his feet and his head passed above the threshold of the cube so he could see the trees in front and the interstate behind him. The giant, Scrub—or whatever his name was—grabbed his arm to steady him.
“Good. I don’t think Scruff wants to carry you. Come on.”
Scruff. Yeah. That.
Scruff helped Sean out of the pod, and they walked across the grassy field. The bottoms of his feet felt numb inside his boots, and Scruff had to right him a couple of times as they trudged up the slippery hill. Sean saw small burned patches of grass in the moonlight.
“Where are we going?” he whispered.
“You don’t have to whisper,” Jenna said.
“Where are we going?” Sean asked in a normal voice.
“I was hoping you would give my friend a ride to Triangle City,” Jenna said, shoving a thumb in Reagan’s direction. “That’s where you were headed, right?”
“Um, yeah.”
Groggy.
“Reagan was kidnapped from Triangle City’s Expeditionary Forces a couple years ago, and she wants to go home. Scruff and I pulled two generators and charged your truck. You’ve got about 80% power, but I assume with the size of the thing, you’re going to have to stop sometime tomorrow.”
“About an hour a day,” was all Sean could manage through the fog.
“He drugged you pretty good.” She was smiling at him and she kept shaking her head.
“Do I know you, umm…”
“Jenna. And actually, I think we’ve crossed paths before. But I don’t remember where.”
“Then why do you keep looking at me and smiling like you know me?”
“Let me put it this way.” She stopped walking and turned toward him. “In the near future, you’re going to learn a lot of things that will blow your mind. But right now, I need you to get in that truck, fire her up, take Reagan, and get the hell out of dodge before Moss wakes up. We’re short on time.” She turned and started walking again, Scruff and Reagan falling in behind her. Sean looked down at her backside across the skintight sui
t she was wearing. Her curves never seemed to stop.
“Respect,” Scruff grunted.
Sean snapped his head around to see the giant eyeing him.
“I was just checking out the suit.”
“Mm hm,” Scruff said with a stink eye.
“Don’t be so protective, Scruff,” Jenna said without so much as a turn of her head. “He can look at my ass if he wants to.”
“I was looking at the suit.”
“Mm hm,” Jenna said.
Reagan laughed. Sean looked at her. She smiled.
“You’re cute,” Sean said.
What was with all the hot-ass women in the middle of nowhere? And damn these drugs were good.
“How many pills did you take?” Jenna asked.
There were two hover bikes parked next to The Beast, distracting Sean from the conversation.
“What’re those for?”
“We’re going to escort you,” Jenna said.
“You’re coming?”
“Long story, but I promise, I’ll tell it soon. Let’s go.”
Chapter Sixty-Four
A Click
Wolfe awoke with sore shoulders, sore arms, and sore ribs. He could almost feel the ghosts of the bindings around his wrists. He might have been sore, but the pain wasn’t too bad. The Morpho still seemed to be working. It was pitch black. He must be in a cave. He knew he was lying on the ground because he could feel the unmistakable chill of the mud beneath him. The bitch had left him in the mud.
But hey! I’m alive!
Had some of his men come back for him? He tried to move his legs, but he could feel rope cinched around his ankles, restraining them. He felt around on the ground, and his hands touched muck. He patted his body from chest to waist, where a rope had been tied. He pulled on it and felt the muddy slickness the more he dragged it across his body, trying to find the knot. At the end of the rope, he felt something cold, smooth, a knife!
He unfolded it and cut the bindings off his ankles. Feeling around his temples, there was no sign of a blindfold or his eyepatch’s strap.
Weird. Where the fuck am I?
Scrambling to his feet, reaching blindly for a tree, a rock—anything to get his bearing and get out of this darkness—he slipped in the mud and fell. He cursed and slowly rose again, his feet slipping, but he righted himself.
Mud. I have to be outside. But why’s it so dark?
Man, his eye was sore.
He slowly got to his feet, took a few, tentative steps hoping his eye would adjust to the lack of lighting, and then realized he couldn’t even feel his eye moving around in their sockets.
Morpho. Wow!
He tried to blink. Nothing happened. He reached up and gently patted his face. A chill went up his spine as a finger disappeared into the socket where his one remaining eye used to be.
Wolfe’s stomach lurched, he doubled over, and he vomited. Due to the blindness, he didn’t even know if the splatter of his stomach contents was splashing in the mud or on his boots.
He howled.
When his relentless screaming yielded, the sobs began.
Blind! I’m fucking blind! Fucking bitch! The bitch let me live because she cut out my good eye!
Then he heard an unmistakable, metallic click.
Laurie had escaped the little silver box, but she hadn’t gone far. The big bear man shot her, but the rest seemed nice. She only ran away from the camp ‘cause she wanted to go home, find mama, and run away. But then she figured, she didn’t know how to get home. So, she watched the people in the camp to see if they were really good or bad.
But then the mean man, Wolfe, showed up and caused lots of trouble. It was so scary. Lights flashed everywhere and the booms were so loud. So, she’d stayed hidden in the back of the little tiny forest. Laurie was watching when Lucy got kilt. Laurie hid in the trees and didn’t move.
After she saw Lucy’s mom take Wolfe to the mud near the lake and talk to him, Laurie stuck around. She waited for him to wake up. Maybe she could use the gun to make him take her home. Then he started screaming. She knew what he was like when he started yelling. That meant someone was going to get hurt. Well, Laurie didn’t want to get hurt. She was tired of Wolfe hurting her.
She walked up behind him, pulled back the hammer on her gun, and blew a hole in his back.
Chapter Sixty-Five
I'm Just Steering
Sean was dead. He couldn’t feel his chest rising or falling. There was no air to inflate it, no muscles, and no autonomic function. The coffin’s walls squeezed at the outside of his arms, the pillow raising his head so his forehead was inches from the lid. Then he felt one trickle of sweat roll down onto his nose…and he couldn’t scream. The lid opened and light flooded his death box. There stood that guy, Moss, a wide grin on his face revealing hundreds of white fangs.
“Sorry about all this,” Moss said. But it wasn’t Moss’s voice. It was more guttural, throaty. The voice of death. Moss cackled and slammed the lid closed.
“Sean?”
A woman’s voice.
He jerked away from what he’d thought were worms slithering on his arm and struggled to move, visions of Moss offending his nerves. His eyes blinked open and fluttered several times as the world renewed and consciousness returned.
The woman’s face was lovely, though somehow nondescript. Her olive skin was muted by the light of the high, noon sun pouring into the cabin through the adaptable tinted glass above, giving it a gray tint. She’d pulled him from the depths of his nightmare. Her fingers had been the worms. As reality returned and he gathered his senses, Sean realized she was the woman from the road crew’s camp.
Reagan.
Why was she here? Sean blinked his eyes as foggy remnants of memory became clearer.
Reagan was from Triangle City. She’d been kidnapped. She had told him her story as The Beast rolled along I-40. She’d theorized, explained her suspicions about stakeholders in the city who might be arming the outsiders of the east—The Chain.
After he’d slept a few hours and the drug cleared his system, he’d wanted to know what Triangle City was like.
The city she described was impossible. A post-modern society conjuring images of what a cooperative world could’ve been without the fall.
The city that refused to die and moved on as if nothing had happened.
She’d explained that expansion was almost universally supported at the time she was kidnapped. So, she wondered what had changed. If someone was arming the outsiders, or badlanders, what was their motivation? In the pit of Sean’s stomach, he felt the truth in her words, and though he didn’t say it out loud, the answer was simple. Greed.
Sean had been captivated, though still slightly drugged. When he’d asked how Triangle City had survived while the rest of the world was flushed down the universe’s toilet, Reagan recited history like it was her own.
It was the time of the fall.
2027.
Private James G. Johnson of the National Guard was a twenty-six-year-old from a town named Cary. Johnson lost his job as a biotech researcher and joined up so he could support his wife and two daughters. In the throes of the fall, when the commissioned officers abandoned their posts and tried to find their way to their homes scattered throughout the country, Johnson held firm, fashioning a private military unit from area guardsmen. Reagan figured having a wife and two daughters motivated him. His unit drew a line in the sand in what was now Northern Triangle City, in what the old-worlders called Research Triangle Park.
Sean knew the place too well.
Johnson’s new unit dug in and swore that the new stain upon humanity sweeping the country and murdering people for resources would find no succor in their place.
They took one city block, moved their families inside, and held it. Those in pain, those with nowhere to go, were waved inside. Word traveled. Those who came to take were repelled with violent prejudice. Those who came to give were brought in to the fold.
Then ther
e were two blocks. Then there were four. Then, eight.
Civilians flooded the area, bringing provisions and sharing them with others in support of the new community.
Ten blocks.
Johnson knew the value of the research facilities in the area and had plans to find and protect the researchers, keep technology alive, and preserve a decent way of life. Guns were left at the entry points, stockpiled, and distributed to the men and women who were willing to stand watch, participate in resource missions, and fight to survive. Those who were healthy and could fire a weapon were recruited. Armed men and women were trained and sent into the surrounding area, offering aid to those in need, and bringing them back. It grew from there, this new bastion of civility, this island of hope floating in a sea of shit.
Fifty blocks.
Doctors and nurses came from the University of North Carolina and Duke. More military personnel came. Jim Johnson’s team reclaimed apartment subdivisions previously home to professionals in RTP as the population grew. They were compact, easy to guard.
A hundred blocks.
Johnson redirected the strike teams. Fuel was the next resource he wanted to stockpile. They took any source they could find. In a world with dwindling oil supplies, they still managed to siphon thousands of gallons of fuel for their vehicles from a variety of abandoned sources. They filled the trucks and sent out crews. They located farms outside the city, finding farmers happy to contribute in exchange for the security of their crops. Badlanders were run off farmers’ lands. They used any grassy field to plant food, and in the meantime, the national guard unit gave new meaning to the phrase, ‘canned food drive.’ They stockpiled everything upon which they could lay their hands.