The Courier (San Angeles) (8 page)

Quincy’s comm unit rang just as he was reaching for it. The van in front of him was riddled with holes. A couple of the kids had made it out, and their bodies lay a short distance from the van, facedown in pools of blood, multiple bullet holes in their backs.

One big fucking mess. No girl, no package, and one big fucking mess.

Quincy knew without looking who was on the other end of the connection. He sighed and raised the unit to his ear.

“Hello.”

“You keep making mistakes.” Jeremy’s voice was calm and conversational, never a good sign when something had gone wrong.

“Yes, sir.”

“We’ve tracked her, and think we know where she’s going.”

Quincy’s grip tightened on the phone. “Just let me know where.”

“Not this time. Three mistakes in one night is more than enough, don’t you think? I’ve sent Abby.”

“I want this one.” Quincy could feel the blood rising up his face. He hid the anger he felt from his voice.

“Clean up your last mess, we’ll talk tomorrow.”

The connection dropped and Quincy squeezed the comm unit tighter until he felt the plastic start to flex. He turned to the guy that had taken the first shot and started the slaughter on the street.

“Clean this up, before you end up just like them.”

Quincy turned, his heel leaving a clean circle in the dust and sand on the road, and stalked back to his vehicle.

As soon as I hit the rubble-strewn street, I veered off to the side and crouched behind a massive concrete barrier protecting the ramp’s walls. The air clung to my skin, oily and thick. I scanned the surrounding area, lingering on the darker shadows and places where someone could be hiding, using my helmet to try and pierce the deep gloom. There weren’t any flashy billboards or ads here. No one on Level 1 could afford what they were trying to sell.

This late at night, or early in the morning, I guess, only the desperate and the insane entered Level 1. Which had its good and bad points. The good point was that no one really expected it to happen. Even if the local gangs had posted someone to watch the ramps, chances were they would be half asleep and not paying attention. The bad point was that, well, you had to be desperate or insane. I was a lot of both.

I let out a long slow breath, one I didn’t even realize I was holding. It looked like luck was finally on my side. My lid’s enhanced
vision picked glints of light off of broken glass and the rough edges on the busted brick walls, but no movement, no sign of anyone watching the ramp’s exit.

Revulsion crawled up my back as I scanned the area. Christ, to think I had lived in this hellhole for almost a year and a half. Just the smell of it made me want to throw up. A putrid mixture of stale air, garbage, and god knows what else. Why anyone would willingly stay down here was beyond me. If I could get out, anyone could.

At least it would be a good place to hide out for tonight.

It had been a long time since I’d been down to Level 1. Once I made it out, I vowed I would never come back. Now I was being forced here, back into my hole to hide. I could almost feel the hands on my shoulders, pushing me back, pushing me into this man-made hell. The low ceiling, only fifteen meters above my head, didn’t help the feeling of oppression.

The Ambients started to rise, reducing the shadows lying close to the ground. I checked the time again. Five in the fucking morning. I’d spent so much time hiding instead of walking, it had taken me over five hours to get here—I’d been moving around the whole damn night. And I never did get my shower. No chance of that for a while.

If I remembered correctly, my old hiding spot was down to the left. If no one had found it yet, I could slip in and maybe grab a couple of hours of sleep before heading up to the depot. That would be a hell of a walk as well. At least during the day I wouldn’t have to hide in the shadows.

I moved off to the left as the Ambients continued their slow climb to daylight strength. I walked past the decrepit buildings, their empty windows staring at me, the lost child returned home. Time, vandals, or old earthquakes had destroyed them. Sometimes all three. I ducked low, below any open windows, and dashed past doorways and streets
to the relative safety of the walls again. The opposite of what I’d done on Level 3. Down here, doors could lead to places I didn’t even want to imagine. The Taser’s smooth surface felt slick in my grip. I wiped my hand on my pants, trying to stay calm and alert.

The ramp had exited on South Central Avenue, right by the Santa Monica Freeway. They seemed to put the Level ramps between the old freeway on-ramps. I followed South Central, staying close to the buildings converted from warehouses to apartments, before most of them became abandoned. I stopped a few blocks from the ramp and crouched behind a rusted hunk of old car that sat in front of a building shaped like an old ship. I couldn’t tell if the bottom of the wall had once been painted black, or if it was just the Level 1 filth that made it look that way. I waited a few minutes, watching for any signs of someone following me, before continuing on.

When Central took a slight jog to the left, I turned down 6th, entering the area I only knew as Skid Row. In the distance I could see what was left of old Downtown, what my history classes had told me were once majestic towers of glass and steel, truncated at the fifth floor, squashed between the earth and the man-made ceiling. I kept on walking, counting the blocks until I reached seven. Last time I’d been here, a beat-up sign had told me the street name. The sign was gone, and my memory served the name up for me. San Julian Street. I turned left again.

My Auntie’s apartment was only about fifteen blocks away from here, fifteen blocks and a lifetime. I had never been back, and never wanted to go back. That life was gone. Hell, I didn’t want to go back to my hole, either, but I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go right now. I would never be desperate enough to go back to Auntie’s though.

Exhaustion pushed at the edges of my brain, threatening to shut it down completely. I needed to sleep before I ended up just keeling
over wherever I happened to be. Dredging up past history wasn’t getting me someplace safe.

The block had obviously become more used than when I lived here, or survived here. Paths wandered amongst the broken brick and twisted metal, which looked like it had been sorted into salvageable and non-salvageable piles. The rumors said the whole block had been destroyed by the earthquakes in 2118, but that couldn’t have been true. There had been enough issues by then that SoCal had come down and rebuilt the infrastructure to handle the occasional quake and the extra load of Levels 6 and 7. These days, when one hit, the retrofitted mass dampers took care of everything. The most damage you’d get would be the broken glass I’d seen earlier, or maybe a displaced brick or two. Then again, maybe this stuff had collapsed before then.

People always wondered why the corporations had bothered to fix the old buildings. Why not just let them collapse? But I figured I knew. Every society needed the downtrodden, the poor, the homeless. It made the richer people feel good about themselves when they gave money or time, made them feel like they were giving back somehow. None of it really seemed to work. Instead, life went on for anyone living down here. A life filled with drugs and hate and disease. I wished I was anywhere but back here.

The northern corner of the lot still looked unused. At least I hoped it was. Lying under the layered garbage and crushed bricks was an entrance into the old basement of the building that had once stood here. An entrance that, at least a couple of years ago, only I had known about. The access itself was a tight squeeze, as though it was made for a small kid. I hoped I could still wriggle through the openings and tight tunnels created by the collapsed structure.

Sudden motion caught my eye, and I twisted to face it. Something slammed into my chest. I jerked backward, stumbling over the
rough ground. My heel caught on some loose rubble and I fell on my back, laying stunned, staring at the mottled gray ceiling and Ambients through a layer of fog and flashing points of light floating above me. I moved my arm across my chest and struggled to sit up. Two thin wires lay across the ground, embedded in the front of my jacket and leading to a pile of garbage about six meters away.

The pile moved.

Awareness struggled to rise through the thick fog in my head. As it began to clear, I realized what had happened. The wires were from a Taser. I flexed my hand, looking for the Taser I had held only moments ago. It was gone.

Unless things had changed over the last two years, Tasers were not the weapon of choice for the Level 1 gangs. Baseball bats and knives were more their style. Maybe the assholes in the white van knew where I was heading, but how?

My reaction to the Taser wasn’t what I’d expected either. I had felt some surge of power, and my chest felt bruised, but where was the pain? I’d seen firsthand what a Taser could do when I hit Quincy. I moved my arm again, searching in the dirt for my own Taser.

Footsteps approached from the pile of garbage, accompanied by the sounds of scraping bricks and the hollow clang of empty cans banging. Someone knelt down beside me, and I lashed out with my feet instinctively, using all the strength I could gather from my prone position. I felt contact. The figure grunted and fell, sprawling on his back. I stood and ripped the Taser hooks from my jacket before sprinting deeper into the piles of rubble.

I slid to a stop and threw myself behind a large mound. My heart
pounded in my chest, a sharp pulsating roar that filled my ears. The only other sound I could hear was the sharp intake of my breathing. Nothing from the lot surrounding me. The Ambients continued to raise the level of light, and I knew my chances of slipping away unnoticed in the dark were falling. I forced my arms to move, pushing myself up to my knees, ignoring the small rocks and glass grinding under them, and peeked over the pile. I scanned the area, looking for the man that had attacked me. The lot was empty. Where the hell did he go?

My Taser was back where I had first fallen. Even though I knew it was empty, its loss made me feel exposed, naked. I rubbed my palms on my thighs and looked down at them. A glint of light shone from my wrist. The indicator on my jacket’s cuff. The damn thing was fully charged! It must have absorbed the major hit from the Taser. I was lucky it didn’t blow out the jacket in the process.

I looked back out at my fallen Taser. Come on, where was the bastard?

“Are you looking for me?” The voice was clean and crisp with a slight lilting accent.

I spun around. The man in front of me was huge. From my crouched position, he looked at least two meters tall. His clothes were made out of the garbage he’d been hiding in. Thin shavings of bricks, rusted cans, gravel, and wire were attached to his pants and jacket. His bald head was painted in blotches of gray and brown to match. The glasses on his face looked weird, almost as though they held some sort of tech. Probably infrared night enhancers. Shit. He had probably seen me coming before I even entered the lot.

I dropped my shoulders in defeat, lowering my head and staring at his boots. In the same motion, I pushed off the pile behind me toward him, hoping to drive my head into his gut and make a run for it.

He sidestepped with the agility of a cat and grabbed onto the
collar of my jacket, jerking me off my feet and flat onto my back. My breath blew out in a giant rush, and I lay there, my mouth flapping helplessly, trying to suck in a fresh breath.

He grabbed the front of my jacket and picked me up with one arm, throwing me against the pile of rubble I had just been hiding behind. My lungs released, and the disgusting air of Level 1 filled them like a sweet nectar. I wrapped my hand around a broken brick and swung without thinking about what I was doing. The man jerked back, but the brick hit, pulling the glasses off his face. Blood poured from his nose, dripping down his chin and staining the metal on his chest.

“You fucking bitch!”

He jabbed me hard in the chest and followed up with a sharp slap, spinning me around. I felt my nose rupture, and blood spilled across my face. I collapsed onto my hands and knees, the ground spinning beneath me, threatening to give way at any moment. The helmet slid down my arm to my wrist. I felt him grab my shoulders as the spinning slowed. He twisted me around, slamming me against a partially standing brick wall.

I almost laughed. This was the same wall I had ripped moss off of, sucking the water out of the green spongy growth, when I had run away from home. It was going to end almost where it had all started. I raised my hands to protect my face, curling my arms around my head.

“They only said I had to deliver you, they didn’t say you still had to be pretty.”

Through my protective cover, I saw him pull his hand back and curl his fingers into a tight fist. His lips stretched into a grin underneath the blood.

A single thought pulsed through the fear: the
jacket.