The Debt Collectors War

by Tess Mackenzie

  He nodded.

  “Stay away from your militia friends, and stay away from their building.”

  Another nod.

  Ellie thought one last time, and decided she was sure. She would let him go.

  “And don’t get up too quickly,” she said. “You might faint after all this. Just lie there for a while, and then sit up slowly. Don’t start walking until you’re sure you can.”

  He looked at her, but she wasn’t sure he understood. It didn’t matter. She stood upright, and glanced at Sameh, and then walked back to the SUV.

  Sameh followed. Reluctantly, Ellie thought.

  Ellie opened the SUV’s door, and then stopped and looked at Sameh. “Sorry I made you stop,” she said.

  “It’s fine,” Sameh said.

  “It just seemed better to leave him. To make him lie low on his own, and not draw any attention to him and why he might have disappeared.”

  “I understood. Sorry I got carried away.”

  Ellie stopped, thinking, and looked at Sameh. “We didn’t not kill him just because this is here, and not back home,” she said.

  Sameh looked over at her, surprised. “What?”

  “We didn’t leave him alive just because this is here.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “We haven’t left him alive only because…” Ellie stopped. “Because he isn’t a hajji.”

  “Oh. Good.”

  “Just in case you wondered.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Well, in case you did, it isn’t just that.”

  Sameh looked at her, and seemed confused. “I know.”

  Ellie sighed, and gave up. Talking about things like this was just far too complicated sometimes. Her and Sameh and everything they both were and what it meant. She gave up, like she always gave up. Instead, she took a bottle of water out of their supplies in the back, and rolled it along the ground towards Mark. Then another, just in case he needed it, and then she threw over a food bar as well.

  Then she walked around to the front passenger door, and got in.

  Joe was looking at her.

  “What?” she said to him. “Do you want to argue too?”

  He shrugged.

  “So don’t,” Ellie said. “Or I’ll go back and shoot him. If everyone has such a problem with this.”

  “No problem,” Joe said.

  “So stop looking at me like that.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Just don’t,” she said. “Head back to town.”

  He nodded, and started driving.

  As they drove away, as Joe turned the SUV in a lazy circle to head back towards the doors they had driven in by, Ellie looked over at Mark. He was still lying where she’d left him. He was probably exhausted and a bit shocked, and mostly just glad to be alive.

  “He saw the kid at the militia building,” Ellie said to Joe. “We should have just gone there first.”

  “It’s best to know for sure.”

  “I suppose so. Not that it makes much difference now. Do you know where the militia will be?”

  He shook his head. “Not these ones. Your intel people will, though.”

  Ellie nodded, and tapped her comm, and asked the voice that answered to send her coordinates for the nearest militia compound. They did, almost right away, and with driving directions too. An anti-debt militia was probably on some kind of active intel watchlist with the corporate debt-recovery intelligence people, she supposed.

  She held out the tablet, and showed Joe, who looked, and then nodded.

  Sameh leaned forward, behind Ellie, and asked, “Better now?” She said it as if she hoped Ellie would say yes.

  Ellie nodded slowly. “Yeah,” she said. “Actually.”

  She reached back, behind herself, twisting her arm behind her seat to reach for Sameh’s hand. Sameh took hers, and held it, and then leaned forward and kissed Ellie’s neck quickly around the seat.

  “You always get moody after something like this,” Sameh said.

  “I know.”

  “Well, it’s done. So cheer up.”

  “I will,” Ellie said, but kept staring out the window for a while anyway.

  Joe drove back towards town, quietly, and Sameh was quiet too. Everyone was in an odd mood, Ellie thought, but at least they were getting somewhere about the missing kid.

  Sometimes Ellie wondered what she’d become. She wondered whether too much time out in the world, in the endless wars with this problem or that problem, hadn’t tainted something inside her. Sometimes she wondered, and then she realized it didn’t matter. Not any more. She was what she was, and the world was the world, and she hadn’t made it become what it had.

  And it wasn’t as though anyone cared very much about the people Ellie happened to kill, anyway. Or not kill. Not people like Mark. The world didn’t care about him or Ellie or Sameh or Joe.

  Only about people like their corporate heir.

  Chapter 10

  They drove to the militia’s compound. It was a fenced, gated set of buildings in the middle of nowhere, along a dirt road that went off into the distance forever.

  They drove past, but didn’t stop. There had to be at least cameras and sensors at the gate, Ellie assumed, somewhere like this, and possibly drones and e-scanners too. She didn’t want to be too careless. She’d already checked on a map that the dirt road actually went somewhere else. If it had been a dead-end that led only to the militia compound, they would have been too obvious if they’d just driven up and then had to pretend to be lost and turn around right at the front gate.

  The road went somewhere else, though, so Ellie had decided to drive past. They might learn something useful, and she wanted to see the compound anyway.

  As they passed the compound, Ellie and Sameh held their tablets up to the SUV’s side windows and recorded video. Their tablets were linked and using an app which tried to build a moving three-dimensional model from the slightly different perspective the two cameras offered. It was a useful app. The picture wasn’t as good as a drone, but it also wasn’t as obvious as a drone drifting around in the sky, if anyone happened to be watching.

  Ellie and Sameh held the tablets against the windows, but they all looked straight ahead as they passed, and Joe carefully didn’t slow down at all. Just in case they were being watched, so they didn’t seem to be paying any attention to the compound. The cameras were enough.

  Ellie had thought about dropping a sensor package out the window too, but she didn’t bother for now. It would be too obvious, if it was found or seen. It would give away that someone like her was interested.

  “It’s not very big,” Sameh said, looking at her tablet.

  Ellie looked too. The imaging app had done its best, but she couldn’t see very much that was useful. No more than the satellite showed anyway. A few buildings, perhaps houses, and maybe a farm shed or a barn.

  It didn’t matter, Ellie thought. They could try again later. This was just a first sweep, a recon, to see what the area looked like.

  Sameh had a second tablet on her lap, and it was scanning the radio frequencies used for wireless data and cell signals, just in case anything interesting showed up. Probably there was a security system, and probably it was wired or using narrowcast laser like it ought to, to be secure. Probably, but perhaps not. Sometimes people did installations themselves, and linked equipment poorly, and sometimes surveillance equipment spillover broadcasts had markers in the encrypted datastreams which could be used to identify specific models, and their capabilities.

  “Anything?” Ellie asked Sameh, without turning around.

  “Not really. There’s something broadcasting near their gate, but it might just be a remote opener or a doorbell.”

  Ellie nodded. “Keep driving,” she said to Joe. “Go at least a couple of k in case anyone is watching.”

  He nodded, and did.

  While he drove, Ellie thought. They could assault now, and take their chances. They could fight, sin
ce they had tactical gear with them, although the militia probably did too. Or she could call in backup, and have someone else storm the compound, but it might be a little too soon to do that since she didn’t know the kid was still inside. She needed to be careful not to do anything which warned the militia of their interest, in case the kid was being held hostage, somewhere else.

  She needed to decide what to do next.

  Joe drove two kilometers, and then two more. They came to a crossroads where one dirt road met another at an angle, and he slowed down and glanced over at Ellie.

  She was looking at a map on her tablet.

  “Turn right,” she said. That was towards the side of the road that the militia compound had been on. He turned, and they drove for another ten minutes, and then, at the next intersection, Ellie said, “Right again.”

  Now they were on the road behind the compound, and several kilometers back from it. Ellie wanted to recon here, too.

  This road seemed much the same as any other in the area. It was mostly empty fields and run-down old farmhouses and clumps of trees. The trees were useful, Ellie thought. There was more cover here, out in the open countryside, than there was in Afghanistan.

  Joe drove, and Ellie watched out the window, looking at the roadsides. She couldn’t see any sensors or surveillance equipment along this road, either, but she wouldn’t necessarily expect to. Not to actually see it. Not unless it was the most obvious, industrial kind of sensor, cameras on metal poles, that kind of thing, sensors which were intended to be seen and deter interference. There was nothing like that visible.

  “Is there any electronic noise here?” she asked Sameh.

  “Nope,” Sameh said. “Nothing. Not even home internet.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “This doesn’t really seem like somewhere with a lot of data warehousing going on.”

  “I suppose not,” Ellie said. She looked over at Joe. “Don’t slow down,” she said. “But keep an eye out for somewhere we could watch from.”

  He nodded, and kept driving.

  Ahead, the road bent, and went up a slight ridge, and there was a line of trees at the top. Perhaps a windbreak, Ellie thought. Perhaps just an old fence or hedge that had become so overgrown it had started turning into a forest.

  She turned in her seat and looked at the trees as they went past. The clump was dense, dense enough to conceal the SUV if they drove through the gate in the next-door field, and then once in the field, parked the SUV right in among the trees. She turned, and looked out across the fields into the distance, carefully, trying to see the militia compound. She couldn’t, but when she checked the map on her tablet again, the distance between marker at their current location and the marker showing the compound was only a kilometer and half apart across what looked like open fields.

  She looked out the window, thinking. They ought to be able to see the compound from those trees, at the top of the rise, if they were standing still and had binoculars and also a little more time to get themselves lined up just right. They could see, and they could launch sensor packs or mini-drones too, if they needed to.

  It would do, she thought. It wasn’t perfect, but it would do.

  And it would make her feel better to go and stand on actual dirt, somewhere close by to the target.

  There was no particular reason to, she knew, except that it made her feel better. She wanted to be nearby, watching, close enough to get a feel for the area. She wanted to be able to smell and hear, and not just look at imaging data on a tablet screen. She also wanted to look at the route across the fields to the back of the compound, just in case they ended up infiltrating that way, and to get some idea of how well fenced and guarded the back of the compound was.

  Those trees would be a good place to watch from. Soon.

  First, though, they needed to leave. They needed to go, and to stay away for a while in case anyone in the compound had been watching for passing vehicles, and counting them in and out, making sure everyone who went past actually left the area again. They would go away for a few hours, disappear and let anyone who’d been watching the road calm down and forget about them, and then they would come back, up this road, and see what there was to see at the back of the compound.

  And then Ellie would decide what to do.

  *

  They drove back through the town, to the far side of it, to be well away from the militia, or anyone who might be watching on their behalf.

  They drove right through town and out the other side, to the emptier countryside on the outskirts, and then found a place to stop. The empty driveway of what had once been a farmhouse, long ago. A gap in the trees which ran up to a charred ruin, a gap overgrown with grass, but with no larger bushes, so Joe was able to drive up it and park out of sight of the road.

  Ellie told him to sleep, because he’d been driving, and then she and Sameh took it turn and turn about to rest while the other sat on the front of the SUV and kept watch.

  They stayed there for a few hours, long enough for the day to become quite warm, and then Ellie woke Joe, handed him a food pack, and said, “Let’s go.”

  He ate as they drove back through the town towards the militia compound.

  As they drove, Ellie looked out the window at the people they passed. She had been looking at the faces for a while. Idly, not especially seeing anything. Just looking to build an awareness of her surroundings.

  Suddenly, she consciously realized what it was she’d already half-noticed.

  “Where are all the old people?” she asked Joe.

  “What old people?”

  “That’s what I mean. There aren’t any. So where are they?”

  He looked at her, and his expression was odd. His voice was odd too, when he spoke. “We don’t have old people,” he said. “Not any more.”

  “You must have old people,” Ellie said. She wasn’t completely paying attention to his reaction. She was just talking, being smart, assuming that her sense of normality was universal. She was thinking of suburban Sydney, and of hajji villages, and how there were always elderly people just around, there somewhere, even if you didn’t especially notice them. “They can’t just die.”

  “They die,” Joe said.

  Ellie looked at him. “What do you mean?” she said.

  “We don’t have old people any more,” he said. “Now, they die.”

  Joe definitely sounded odd, Ellie thought. She didn’t know him well enough to tell what kind of odd it was. Odd guilty or perhaps odd angry, she wasn’t sure which. She wasn’t entirely sure Joe would even know either.

  She felt awful for bringing this up. It obviously wasn’t something people talked about here. But she had, and now that she had, she wanted to be clear what Joe had meant. She sat there for a moment, looking at him.

  “Why do they die?” she said in the end.

  “We let them.”

  Ellie still didn’t understand. “Why?”

  “Because we started letting them die, the ones who caused all this, and we never stopped again.”

  “I really don’t understand,” Ellie said.

  “We used to just let old people die. Because we were angry with them. With their greed and selfishness and all the rest. The old people who caused all this. Who ran up the debts and made the laws which broke governments. We’d already stopped funding healthcare, so a lot of them were in a bad way. But then we just stopped everything else. We stopped caring for them at all. We let them die, those ones, the ones who probably deserved it. And then we never started caring again.”

  “I mean, you just… what, leave them outside?”

  Joe shrugged. “Not outside, usually. But there’s no medicine, and no heating, and no work for them once they’re old. Unless they have families who care, close families…”

  “They just die?”

  He nodded.

  “Fuck,” Ellie said. She hadn’t spoken to her parents in years, but strangely, she suddenly wanted to. Perhaps not speak to them, exa
ctly, but she wanted to send them money, and make sure they were okay.

  They would be okay, she knew, because they weren’t in an awful place like this. Měi-guó was horrible, and Ellie knew it was horrible, but even so, realizing just how horrible came as a shock. Even backwoods hajjis halfway up the mountains to nowhere didn’t treat people quite as badly as this.

  She looked at Joe for a moment, and had no idea what to say. She had no idea, so she didn’t say anything. She just sat there, silently, watching fields go past out the windows.

  After a while, she said, “I’m sorry.”

  Joe shrugged, and didn’t say anything else.

  *

  They drove up the road behind the militia compound, to the clump of trees they had found earlier. When they reached it, Joe slowed down, and they all looked around. There didn’t seem to be anybody else nearby, so Ellie got out of the SUV to open the gate.

  It was stiff, and rusted shut, and she had to go back to the SUV for anti-rust spray, and use that on the latch and hinges, then thump the latch to make it move, and kick the whole gate quite hard several times too. It was a good sign, she supposed. Nobody else had been through here in a while. It was a good sign, but it was also a little worrying because she was taking so long, and someone might come along and see her. She glanced up and down the road as she kicked, but nobody was nearby. Finally, the gate began to swing, and she pushed it open, and let Joe drove through. She closed it again behind them, and smeared dirt onto the latch and hinges so it wasn’t as obvious it had just been opened, and then she got back into the SUV.

  She glanced at Joe. He was still being quiet, and still seemed in an odd mood, so she left him alone.

  They drove across the field, and parked in among the trees. The trees were fairly dense, and quite scrubby, with lots of undergrowth that was tricky to walk through, but which also concealed them fairly well. Ellie left a sensor pack camera at the SUV, and had put another at the gate, so they could check with a glance at a tablet that no-one was creeping up behind them.