Consider Us Even (New Eden Series:Rexall Cycle, #0) Read online

  Berger pointed the gun toward the back of the restaurant and held it sideways like some kind of gangster from the movies. I reached over and twisted his hand so he was aiming it upright. “Not so fancy cowboy. That’s not how they teach you in basic.”

  “Is it hard?” Berger asked. “This job?”

  “Nah, just go along with the clients. Make sure they get where they need to go. Pretty simple stuff.”

  Berger sat the gun back on the table and asked “You ever had to shoot anyone?”

  I shook my head no, but told him I was ready to if needed. “But that’s just the cop in me. You agree to help out I’ll be the first shot. You’re just there for back up.”

  * * * * *

  Lift and pull. That was the trick to getting the lock at Raul’s to release. You lifted the door by the handle and pulled it toward you. Then you slipped the key in the lock and turned it to the right. It’d release with a loud snap. I’d learned the trick late at night when I’d come back with the key he’d left with me and get food to eat for the next day.

  I was there again after Berger and I ate dinner. The sandwich did nothing to fill the hole in my gut and the beer had left me wanting to taste the real stuff.

  Lift. Pull. Turn. Snap.

  I carried a package of bologna under one arm and a loaf of bread in one hand. In the other I had a case of beer. All of it was RomaCorp brand. Best stuff money could buy, even if I had no intention of paying full price. I left a wadded five dollar bill on Raul’s cracked countertop near his cash register, locked the door as I left, and headed for home.

  My apartment was on the fifth floor of a building a few blocks away from the docks. “New Eden Suites” was written in bright green neon letters over the double doors that led into the lobby. It wasn’t always called that, not when I first moved in more than ten years earlier. But once the government fell and the group of rebels took over everything and declared that we all now lived in New Eden, the owners of my building got caught up in the excitement and renamed the place. I didn’t care, though. My stuff was here and the rent didn’t change.

  There is an older gentleman who can’t sleep. At least he told me that’s why I always saw him when I came in at night. A nice guy. Never said more than a few words to me.

  “Good morning, Mr. Rexall,” he said when I’d come in late.

  “Please,” I’d say to him, “call me Weber.”

  “Sure thing, Mr. Rexall.”

  That was it. Our entire exchange every night. It always made me smile. He was there when I got home carrying my haul from Raul’s. I smiled as I climbed the stairs to my place.

  In the past I would have plugged in as soon as I was inside my apartment. There was a wire straight from the wall, added as a convenience years before I moved in. Easy data access for anyone with a terminal. I’d had it converted to my own personal hot jack. Plug in. Heat up. Pass out.

  It started as tingle near the port where the wire connected to the arm. Like something crawling under your skin. It quickly turned to a burn that rushed across the entire body, and for a few minutes it was uncomfortable. You wanted to pull off your skin. But if you could wait—if you could push through the hurt—your body would settle into the rush of data that was assaulting every last nerve, and your body calmed. You couldn’t hear anything. You couldn’t think anything. You just were. And for your time on the wire you didn’t have to deal with life now, or remember life in the past. All of those things you’d seen or done were gone. They weren’t affecting you anymore. That was the appeal. That’s why so many soldiers were the first to abuse the technology.

  The wire that everyone referred to is the one from your port to your brain, not the one from the source to your port, although that’s what most people thought. It’s an understandable confusion.

  It was a procedure developed by a team of Dutch doctors and scientists. Exactly how it worked I couldn’t tell you, but it’s made up of three parts.

  There’s the port. It’s typically inserted into the arm, but really it could go anywhere. The older a person was the more discrete their port. The younger, the more visible. Many kids were opting for a port in the neck. The theory was that the shorter the distance from the port to the brain, the more intense the sensation. How much more intense the sensation needed to be, I wasn’t sure.

  The second element was the wire itself. It’s a fine piece of microfilament that ran from the port to the third element, the net.

  A net, also made of microfilament, was woven into the different parts of the head. The digital came into the port, ran along the wire, and was dumped into the brain.

  The original applications were military. Soldiers were given their mission details with the port. They’d plug in at night and wake the next morning with their orders and all pertinent background information.

  The original ports came with a governor that limited the flow of data to the brain. Those were cracked soon after ports were approved for commercial use.

  Mine was a military unit, first generation. Got it cracked in a small computer shop two blocks from base as soon as I was discharged. Done by a hack in a back room. Me laying on a table and him plugging a beaten up laptop into my port.

  He punched some keys and I laid there and felt the flush of digital for the first time. It started with a tingle that ran up my arm and into my shoulder. It crossed over to my neck and then into my head. It became an intense heat that left me dizzy and light headed.

  From my head, it ran down my chest, past my waist, and into my toes. For the first time I felt my head tip back and my mouth drop open. I could no longer think. Nothing was in my head. All the things I had seen and done had been replaced by the heat of the data.

  After thirty minutes and twenty bucks I was on the wire.

  * * * * *

  Instead of plugging in as soon as the door shut, my nightly routine now started with a sandwich of bologna on white bread with a thin spread of mayonnaise. It was served on a paper plate and eaten in my recliner. A little TV while I ate and a moment to check messages using the keyboard I kept on the side table.

  After that is when I plugged in, but only for ten minutes. Just enough time to get warm and feel the flush of digital come over me. At least I intended it to only last ten minutes. There were nights, most nights honestly, I’d let it go on too long. Regularly I woke up with the feed still in my arm and a pool of drool on my chest. But I could do that. I was careful. My feed was virtually an antique.

  Getting technical it was a hot jack, but nothing like what the kids used. My feed came in low and slow, not like what you’d find in a hothouse. Using one of those was like sticking a fire hose into your port. My feed was a drinking straw by comparison.

  I plugged in and let the TV run. Soon everything started to blur and the words coming from the news anchor’s mouth ran together. My head tipped back and my mouth fell open. Something like a calm came over me. I was on the wire.

  * * * * *

  I introduced Berger to Carroll on a Thursday. We were at Carroll’s house in the Bayside Estates overlooking the water. Property on the water was expensive. It came with gates and guards and during the uprising it was a sanctuary.

  Cars never passed through the neighborhoods that Berger and I called home. You would see an occasional truck, usually some RomaCorp vehicle delivering something or other to one of their big, shiny shops, the ones that were driving all the other stores out of business. But anyone who’d had a car before the government fell had long since sold it. They either needed the money or got tired of not being able to find fuel. And if they didn’t sell it outright they stripped it themselves for parts. But in Bayside Estates there was a vehicle in every driveway, sometimes two.

  Carroll’s place was on a hill, overlooking the private marina where Bayside residents kept their toys. We were on a porch that came off the living room. A pair of reclined lawn chairs sat next to a table covered by an umbrella. A wrought iron railing circled the patio, and Berger seemed distracted by th
e boats that were racing the sun back into the marina. Several sails were fully extended and puffed out by the wind. Carroll had the help, Magda, bring three tall glasses of iced tea. She sat them in front of us and Carroll slid a list of names and addresses across the table to me. I did a quick count. Five items on the sheet.

  “We start tomorrow night at 9 p.m. Those first two names go then. The other three go on Saturday. Early morning so don’t go staying out all night. I need you fresh. Him too.” Carroll pointed at Berger and Berger turned and looked at us.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “I’ll be fresh.”

  As we walked back to Raul’s to get ready for that night’s action we stayed on the streets that were well lit. The sun was setting and casting long shadows down the asphalt. The buildings were getting taller as we headed into downtown and I explained what it was that Carroll did.

  “It’s called data running,” I said, waiting at a corner for a man pulling a small cart on the back of his bicycle to pass, the orange flag attached to the seat popping in the breeze. A horn blew down the block and a moment later a large box truck with a RomaCorp “R” painted on the side rumbled through the intersection.

  We waited for the truck to pass before we crossed and I continued explaining. Berger nodded like he knew what I was talking about but I know he didn’t.

  I lifted my left sleeve to expose the port in my arm, just below my elbow.

  “You’re on the wire?” Berger asked.

  I nodded and told him that I could be. “I’ve got the equipment, but I don’t use it. Not often anyway.”

  Obviously, a lie.

  “So, what does your port have to do with Carroll and this job?”

  “It’s how they run data.” We turned the corner and passed the restaurant we ate at a few nights before. Generators rumbled to life. Shop keepers were preparing for the night and little pools of light began to litter the sidewalk. “They sit a guy in a chair; hook him up to a feed. They dump whatever info that needs to travel securely into a part of the brain that’s not being used and send him off with an address on a page and the name of someone to ask for. Once they get to wherever it is they’re supposed to go they get hooked back up and the data is pulled out of their heads. All we have to do is make sure they get there.”

  “Ever done it? Run data?”

  “No. Dealing with a data feed that intense you can get hooked. Plus, it’s risky. I’ve seen too many runners not get up from the chair.”

  Berger shook his head. “I don’t think I could. I don’t care what the pay is like.”

  We took the steps down to Raul’s basement two at a time. A crowd had gathered and it looked like it would be a good night. Get too many men in the basement and it felt like you were in a coffin. You were sure the low ceilings were about to close in on you and the crowd made the fighting area small. You were grappling more than fighting. Not that it mattered much since outcomes were predetermined, at least for the most part.

  Early fights, like the ones that we’d walked in on, were legitimate. Raul was scouting talent. It was during one of these fights a few months ago that we each first saw Berger. He was paired with another man who was a head shorter and at least fifty pounds lighter. Berger made short work of him, leaving the other guy little more than a bump on the floor.

  Raul nudged me in the middle of the fight and smiled. I only nodded.

  * * * * *

  I caught a surprise right at Raul’s and my left eye had started to go black.

  “Looks like you got on the wrong end of something,” Carroll said when he opened the back door to his shop. In the front he sold some of this and some of that. Whatever he could find that someone would pay money for found a place on his shelves.

  I stepped through the door, Berger behind me. The room was unfinished but well-organized. Three reclined chairs sat in front of sets of monitors. The chairs were raised a foot or so from the concrete floor and there was a stool next to each of them so the technicians running the machines had some place to sit.

  When we arrived there was a young man in the seat on the right. He had his head laid back. Dark circles under his eyes and his hair was a mess of weeds. His jeans were soiled and stained. I looked at Berger.

  “This one should be easy. Carroll wouldn’t give an important job to this kid.” We walked to the table Carroll was sitting behind. He slipped me another sheet of paper with an address written on it.

  “This one’s just a warm up,” he said. “So the new guy can get his feet wet.” Carroll pulled two flashlights from behind the desk and passed them to us. He stood and said “Let me see them.” Berger and I pulled our shirts up above the waistband on our pants and showed Carroll that we had guns. He nodded and we walked to meet the guy we were escorting.

  We all shook hands and our runner’s grip was soft. He could barely keep his eyes open and Carroll slapped him across the face.

  “Stay awake,” he shouted then turned to us. “Be back soon. Got a bigger one after this one gets there and back again.”

  “A Hobbit’s tale,” Berger whispered. I looked up at him but he had his eyes on the kid we were escorting.

  We let him through the door first then followed a few steps behind. “We walk next to him we draw attention so we’ll stay back here. He knows where he’s supposed to go.”

  We’d gone three blocks before a man in a torn denim jacket approached with his hand in his pocket. He whispered something into our boy’s ear and the boy pushed the man away. He stumbled then put his arm around the boy’s shoulder.

  Berger took a step toward them but I put a hand on his chest, telling him to hang back for a second. The pair exchanged a few words before our boy pulled a couple of wadded bills from his pocket and handed them to his friend. The man stepped away, down an alley, and was gone.

  “What was that?” Berger asked. “Why didn’t you want me to move in?”

  “He was just trying to scrounge a couple bucks.”

  “How did you know he wasn’t dangerous?”

  “I see him every time we come this way. Even helped him out a few times.”

  “You couldn’t warn me about guys like him?”

  “Ahh, he’s the only one. We see anyone else you can go up and knock a few heads.”

  Berger smiled.

  We kept walking, passing shops that were closed and a man sitting on a corner, a small generator rumbling behind him. The generator powered a weak light on a tall stand pointing at the ground. He was surrounded by small bottles of gasoline for sale; stuff likely siphoned from those few who were lucky enough to have a working automobile. Berger and I acknowledged the man as we passed and he gave us a wave.

  The young man we were following looked back at us and pointed at the door of a small office tower. He rang a buzzer and told the woman who answered who he was there to see. Berger and I waited on the street and ten minutes later the boy came back out, his eyes half open.

  The walk back to Carroll’s shop was easy. He got up from behind his desk when we returned. He paid the boy then sent him on his way.

  There was a man in the chair with a feed in his arm. He was dressed in pressed black pants and a crisp white shirt with a sleeve pulled above his elbow. A jacket was draped across the chair next to him. He was older than our previous escort but clean cut with his hair slicked straight back. It was held in place by some sort of grease that I could smell when we entered. He gave us a wave and I returned it.

  “It go well?” Carroll asked.

  “Uneventful,” I said.

  Carroll pulled a map from the drawer in his desk and laid it on the table. He smoothed it flat with both hands and started tracing a route.

  “This is a little dated but it’ll give you two an idea of where you’re headed. You following my finger?”

  We both nodded. Carroll drew a path along a street that ran next to the south bay and into the rail district. He stopped at an address I recognized but for bad reasons.

  I looked up at Carroll and he smiled
at the confused expression on my face.

  “That’s a hothouse,” I said.

  “Yep. Genius right? No one would think anyone other than addicts are in there.”

  I looked back at the map. “Genius wouldn’t be the word I’d use. I used to work that district. Cops hated it. Soldiers hated it. You think we can walk a guy in there with a starched shirt and nice suit and not stand out?”

  “You’ll be fine. You’ve got what’s in your waistband. You know how to use it. I figure he does too.” Carroll pointed at Berger.

  “You want us to walk your guy down there then you have to do something for me. Tell me what he’s got.”

  Carroll laughed and shook his head. “You’re funny. And no. Your job is to get him there and back again.”

  “A Hobbit’s tale,” Berger whispered.

  “You don’t get to know what the data is,” Carroll hadn’t stopped talking. “What you get is a payday.” He pulled two stacks of cash – at least a thousand dollars in each – and laid them on top of his desk. “That’s half. You get him back here safely and I get confirmation that everything went well with the data transfer, you get the other stack.” Carroll pulled out the other half of the money and laid it on the desk as well. Berger tapped my arm. He had a smile on his face. I was smiling too, inside.

  “I wish that was enough,” I said. “Want us to walk fancy pants over there into the rail district you’re going to tell me what it is you’re planting in his head.”

  Carroll thought for a moment. “If those are your terms then I’m sorry.” He pulled one of the stacks off the table. I slammed my hand on the top of two of the other stacks and Berger followed, grabbing the fourth.

  “Changing your mind once the incentive comes of the table?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “You’re going to use us. You’re going to pay us. This money and a little more now. But you’re also going to tell me what it is we’re transporting.”

  “The deal is you walk him, you deliver him, and you bring him back. That’s it.”

  I pulled the two stacks of cash close to my edge of the table and Carroll reached behind him. He pulled a pistol from his waistband and pointed it at me.