The Dead Slam: A Tale of Benevolent Assasination (36 page)

G
amers are nocturnal
. Homeless veterans are not. Gamers are gadget freaks. Homeless veterans are not. Gamers are slaves to their comforts. Homeless veterans are not. So it took a gargantuan effort for thousands of gamers to leave their basements and fan out over the Mid-Atlantic states, rousting weary veterans from their well-earned sleep. But in a few hours the vets, who’d long ago accepted their abandonment, were on the move with a horde of brand-new friends.

A
global bandwidth spike
, caused by one line of code cleverly seeded years ago, forced the corporate community’s long-dormant back-up servers to come back online. An extremely curious event for the unwitting corporate IT guys and blue-blazer consultants, who’d shut down and isolated those servers years ago. Or so the IT guys thought! For some unknown reason, all those dormant servers were suddenly springing back to life.

Christopher Eddy, Senior Segmentation Engineer, Bickers & Bickers, LLC, was the most highly regarded Fireman in the IT universe. It didn’t seem possible to Mr. Eddy that anyone could breach his firewall and reconnect all the pieces he’d scattered so brilliantly into places only he knew. No, he thought, nothing could bring these servers back up. He’d personally cut them off from one another with the most elegant code any segmentoré had ever written. So how did they know to come up now, together? Like a network?

He’d done the job himself, and it made him a little famous. And very proud. How did they penetrate his security apparatus? He watched with gloomy eyes as the open internet came back online. And worst of all . . . was once again a public utility.

W
ar veterans
who hadn’t had a purposeful day in years rallied to chin-bearded gamers and neon-haired code-harpies in garishly painted overalls and white ball caps with the upside down martini glass logo. These young people, whose futures had been squandered before they were born, were determined to get these veterans to NYC, but giving orders made them uneasy. That didn’t matter to the vets, who fell in good-naturedly. Their futures had been stolen while living amongst the thieves. This would be a cakewalk for them. And it really felt good to be a force again. Against what, they didn’t know or care, but they all had the same sneaking suspicion and couldn’t stop smiling.

The gamers folded their laptops under their arms, looked woefully over the ranks of veterans in their charge, and marched into the East.

A
t the Polish Falcons Dance Hall
, Turnstyle and Priyanka’s gaping faces were tinted acid green and their heads were bobbing to the beat. “Oh shit, not the KNim,” they yelled.

A low hiss wiped out the music and up came this text:

Turnstyle and Priyanka did a double double-take, screaming, “Central Park! They’re with us!”

Midtown Manhattan quickly saw a flood of corporate IT guys and other egg-heads in every shape and denomination, laptops folded neatly under their arms, heading toward Central Park.

The women at the dance hall planned to leave in a more deliberate manner, and make a far more dramatic entrance onto the Great Lawn. Tuke appeared on the Dance Hall’s main monitor. “The KNim want to know how much bandwidth you’ll need.”

Turnstyle and Priyanka were utterly speechless. An alliance of the actual best and brightest was developing, and they were part of it. Priyanka elbowed Turnstyle, who said, “We’ll take all we can get.”

I
n every village
, town and city within a one-hundred-mile perimeter of New York, veterans formed into regiments and headed to the nearest football field, no matter its size or condition. Local residents joined Tuke’s colorful procession with chainsaws, generators, lights, and whatever food and water they could bring. The volunteers worked tirelessly, but few believed they’d make it to New York in less than two days. It didn’t seem possible. But the gamers kept the beat.
Keep moving east. Keep smiling. Play on.

The volunteers nearer to New York were asking a different question: how are we going to keep these vets from crossing the Hudson too soon? Their numbers were swelling faster than anyone had anticipated, and for every vet, two or three sympathetic civilians joined the march.

This was very unexpected.

C
hildren were awakened
from their cozy beds to deliver tickets their parents were printing to each veteran who arrived at their local football field. These tickets had, according to ReplayAJ, been paid for in widows’ tears.

Every street near any stadium overflowed with determined veterans and locals proud to be part of a great horde on the march toward justice. Inside the stadiums, former officers wearing whatever was left of their uniforms—for most, the hat was the only part that still fit—took charge and formed the men into orderly ranks, dress-right-dress! No talking! The vets snapped-to. The volunteers handed each vet their reward for making it to the first goal, the Initial Destination, a brand-new laptop and two tickets for the Dance-Off Final, at the Meadowlands in New Jersey. When everybody had their tickets, they peeled off rank after rank into single file and marched out of the stadium’s east exit, as new ranks entered from the west. They folded their tickets into their pockets, tucked their newly won laptops under their arms, and fell in behind the growing legions, moving east.

By 3:00 a.m. there were ten volunteers for every vet, and there were far more vets than anyone would have ever guessed. Civilians lined the roads, cheering and waving flags or pieces of uniforms once worn by someone they’d lost. The cheering grew louder and louder as the population grew denser. But the somber gamers knew that there was no way the men at the back of this march were going to make New York by Sunday morning.

They were going to miss that awful Church show.

T
he Village
of Lily was well beyond the one-hundred-mile range, but every Lilian could hear the peal of church bells, and the smell of smoke was a sure sign Pastor Scott and Fred were up to something. The whole town came to The Church in the middle of the night, brand-new laptops tucked neatly under their arms, expecting answers. “What’s that smell?”

Pastor Scott stood at the pulpit, and announced, “We’ve just received an urgent message from Max. He wants us to meet him at the Portage roundhouse. That smell is Fred stoking up The Booby Duck’s steam engine.” The crowd sat awestruck. “I know, it’s been sitting out in the parking lot for decades, but the tracks are still intact and we have plenty of coal.”

The townsfolk looked amongst themselves; none seemed to fully understand.

Pastor Scott lifted his hands to them, and said, “There are forty-two seats. And Max said, veterans first. Who’s coming?”

I
t was
quiet at the Portage roundhouse as a crew of locals worked the late shift with a Chinese supervisor and two armed guards. The roundhouse’s gigantic doors and expansive yard were perfectly suited to airship work.

Ross Wilson, a stout and ever-cheerful man, found the Chinese just as insufferable as his former supervisors, but had long ago swallowed the resentment their foreign presence caused him and his fellow workers. What could they do? The Chinese were the new job creators.

Ross maintained his cool with one cathartic gesture per shift. Every night, in the middle of the shift, he would excuse himself and duck out into the darkness to piss on something of importance to the Chinese: their bicycle seats, the doorknobs to their quarters, their chicken coop and so on. Tonight he was determined to water their vegetable patch, with a special concentration on the bok choi. It would freeze, but . . . What!? He thought he heard something and froze with his pecker shrinking into the night air.

“Hey,” came a whisper.

Ross jumped. “Who’s there?”

“Is this the place?”

“What place?” yelped Ross. He could see movement in the shadows outside the barbed wire fence.

“The place where we’re supposed to meet up.”

“Who? Meet where?” Ross bolted for the roundhouse.

The Managing Supervisor, Leun Yoon, was crossing the roundhouse floor, cell phone to his ear, giving landing instructions to Airship Two, which was on course to land within an hour. He went out the back door to see if Airship One had left room for the impending landing. He did not like having both ships in the yard at once. The bare light bulb over the back door blinded him for a second, but he stumbled on toward the landing area, then stopped. Something wasn’t right. He thought he saw bushes moving beyond the fence. He looked hard, but his eyes were still bleached from that bare bulb. In the yard the gargantuan Airship One sat tethered to huge concrete pylons, plenty of space next to it. He was glad, until . . .

“Hey, buddy.”

Leun spun and crouched defensively. “Who there?”

“Is this the L.Z.?” came from somewhere in the darkness.

Before he could respond, the great doors slid open and Ross Wilson, with the entire night crew, came running across the landing yard. Leun’s eyes darted back and forth from his crew to what he could now see in the light spilling through the doors was a large assemblage gathered outside the fence. Three Chinese guards rushed forward, guns drawn. “Stop,” yelled Leun. “You can’t stop them.”

Suddenly, a cluster of tiny lights in the sky shot toward him, flew over the fence and came to a hover directly above. Peregrines?
What have I done?
thought Leun. A red laser painted a dot on the tarmac. He jumped back just as a Peregrine came to rest on that dot. He looked up and quickly estimated there were another twenty dropping into the landing yard.

Max and Lily jumped out and ran toward Leun. The guards raised their weapons, but Leun waved them off with an angry look, shouting in Chinese, “Put those down. On the ground! You idiots.”

Max met Leun Yoon with a chilly stare. “We’re going to borrow your airships. If you don’t mind,” he said. “And . . . even if you do.”

B
y 3
:45 a.m., in Landover, Maryland, the colossal FedEx Field was under siege by two thousand volunteers tearing down boarded-up windows and razor-wired passages. Walkways overgrown with vines were slashed. Crews hacked down everything on the field for the dozens of mowers that followed. Technicians broke into electrical service panels and opened toilets with sledgehammers and pipe wrenches. The light towers swarmed with volunteers changing bulbs. The same scene played out at Gillette Stadium, in Foxborough, Massachusetts, and Lincoln Financial Stadium, in Philadelphia. But the big push was on at Met Life Stadium, AKA the Meadowlands, in Rutherford, New Jersey, only 4.7 miles from Manhattan.

Tuke had dispatched his organization man, Todd Williams, who always wore a suit and boring striped tie, no matter how inappropriate, to oversee the Meadowlands. Todd set up shop in the ticket office, which was crammed with techies wiring gizmos and projectors and routers and lights. A Peregrine with a hydrogen generator dangling from a drop-line placed it on the roof of the electrical shed. In ten minutes, they had the field lights on and a satellite link to Tuke up and running.

Tuke was flipping through a checklist. “FedEx, Gillette, Lincoln Financial, Met Life? This is how corporate culture became
the
culture. They attached it to a game and snuck in through the front door, after the taxpayers paid for it.”

“The parking lot is almost clear, Levi,” said Todd; he was all business.

“Many hands, huh?”

“Yeah,” said Todd, adjusting his top-ranking gray hat with the martini glass logo. “We need wire. Can you get me the wiring diagram for this stadium? We’re ripping out what’s not needed to fix the essentials. It’s going to get crazy here if this flow continues.”

“We need that flow. We’re building the biggest human shield ever made. And we have six million housing units in New York City to pay for it. That represents centuries of accumulated productivity. Retrieving that has become a priority.”

“How long can we keep all these vets in one place? We never planned for this many.”

“Yeah, I blew it. Too conservative. Things are going to get a bit dodgy, but we cannot move until dawn, Sunday,” said Tuke. “About thirty hours. We won’t be ready up here until then.”

“What are we going to do in the meantime?”

“Don’t worry, Todd. The Manhatmazon will take care of that.”

* * *

“
L
adies
, ladies, ladies,” said Priyanka, to fifteen million Manhatmazon players, most of whom had joined overnight. “Please look at this map and find the nearest football stadium you can reach by 6:00 a.m. Go there and you just might find — true love. If not, you’ll still have — the Pick of the Litter.

“Wear something nice!”

* * *

R
oss Wilson threw
open the roundhouse gates and hundreds of veterans streamed in. Max and Lily ushered Leun Yoon to his office, wondering which one would do the talking. A profusion of subtle looks, discreet brush-up, fondling sniffs and carnal glances clouded the decision.

Leun Yoon slumped into his office chair, folded his hands into his lap, and sat motionless, coal black eyes staring into dead space — nothing but ashes.

“Mr. Leun?” said Lily.

His tortured eyes answered. She put a laptop on his desk and reached to open it.

Max caught her arm, and sneered, “Mr. Leun. We never liked it that you came here and robbed us because of some kind of trade deal crap we never had anything to do with. None of us.”

Leun Yoon lowered his head. “I sorry. Understand, please. I Chinese manager. Is all I can be. I Chinese manager. Do not hate me because I am.”

Max rolled his shoulders around inside his posh new jacket. “Doesn’t matter. I’m taking these airships and everything else in this roundhouse. That’s what I’m supposed to do. That’s what I’m gonna do.”

Lily gave Max a chastising look, and took over. She snapped open the laptop.

“Mr. Leun!” said Levi Tuke.

“You know me?” Leun’s eyes were the size of golf balls.

“Yes. Of course. Do you know who I am?”

“Tuke Massive highly regarded in China.”

“I know you’re worried about your family. You have my personal guarantee, they are at this very minute on their way to Tokyo.”

Leun Yoon’s inscrutability failed, and he may have grinned.

* * *

T
urnstyle raced between workstations
, checking and tweaking every detail of her slapdash creation — Pick of the Litter. She caught Priyanka’s eye and nodded to the corner with the pinball machines, where their words were lost in the din of bells and gongs and women cheering each other on. Turnstyle whispered, “Petey said something about a tunnel that’s still open.”

Priyanka strained to recollect. “I thought they’d all filled up with water. That’s why they don’t watch them anymore. Did he say which one?”

“No. I was total fuego. How many tunnels can there be?”

Priyanka’s face brightened. “I know who to ask.”

“Who?”

Priyanka gave her a you-should-already-know-that face. “The Bridge and Tunnel Girls.”

* * *

O
n the banks
of the mighty Hudson River, in Weehawken, New Jersey, sat a 1974 Airstream Trailer Super Deluxe as shiny as the day it rolled off the assembly line, high tide licking at its concrete block foundation. Inside, Emily Beamon, Queen of the Bridge and Tunnel Girls, pondered her acid green computer screen while stroking a wrinkled tattoo on her ample shoulder:
We mug the muggers
, it said, framed in skulls with snakes crawling through their eye sockets.

Madam Beamon usually went to bed about this time, before the sun was up but after all her girls had been accounted for. She was fiercely protective, and many a lecherous prick lay forever on the bottom of the Hudson who’d abused her tender mercies. She knew people. But this morning she had a funny feeling, reinforced by that acid green screen. She hobbled over to the coffee pot, blowing a kiss at a portrait of a young man in uniform enshrined on the wall above the sink. The Purple Heart was draped over one corner. It was all that remained of something splendid she’d lost along the way. She poured herself a watery cup of coffee as her screen blinked on with a smiling Priyanka wiggling all her pinkies in a deferential hello.

Madam Beamon laughed out loud. “Good morning, my big-pimpin’ little sister.”

“Good morning, my Queen.”

“Not a queen, my dear, toy keeper — mother of broken dolls.”

“Please forgive me, but there’s no time to explain. Do you know about a tunnel that’s still dry enough to get into Manhattan?”

“Of course I do. We’d just be the Bridge Girls without it. Ha! Ha!”

“Where is it?”

“My beautiful, up-market ingénue,” said Madam Beamon, rubbing her thumb against her forefinger. “I have just enough to last me until I die, unless I buy something.”

“How about a Park Avenue penthouse?”

Madam Beamon, hustler extraordinaire, fell uncharacteristically quiet. Her eyes slowly filled with trouble. “And give up my riverfront view?” she said in a smooth, double-suede voice.

* * *

T
uke was ushered
down a rocky corridor toward the General Auditorium by a blur of splatter-painted coveralls. They pushed through two massive doors and into a dizzyingly tall cavern, unmodified but for a half-acre amphitheater carved out of the far wall. From the amphitheater’s stage, six 3D projectors shot acid-green cubes onto the massive volume of space above the crowd.

Tuke checked the one from the Meadowlands, then the one that showed MacIan’s room and Camille pacing in a tight figure eight between the beds. The whole room sighed. Then he switched to a cube screen with a shaky image of Max helping a stream of men into Airship One. “Is that you, Lily?” asked Tuke.

Lily’s golden hair flopped over the top of the screen. “It’s me.” She repositioned her laptop to an arm’s-length selfie. She was seated on a Tsing Tao beer case in front of a mountain of shiny railroad tracks dumped from the airships and piled in the rail yard.

Tuke asked, “Do we have a count?”

“The first ship’s almost full. Gotta be a couple thousand guys in there, but,” she panned her mobile over the crowd, “there’s a couple thousand guys waiting for . . .” she panned to Airship Two, which was being ransacked to make room for passengers, standing room only.

“Lily, let us know . . . ah . . . umm.” Tuke fell silent as a heavily bearded man in a crumpled top hat, wearing a powder-blue tux and tails with the pant legs tucked into huge rubber galoshes, waltzed up and sat on a beer case next to Lily. Lily recoiled slightly, but relaxed as he opened a violin case, lifted from it a ukulele, and began to tune up.

Lily resumed, “We can be at the Meadowlands by three o’clock this afternoon. That’s what Mr. Leun says.”

The entire auditorium sat on the edge of their seats, fearing for Lily as the bearded man began to play. “Lily, are you OK?” asked Tuke.

Lily smiled and winked. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

The auditorium decompressed as everyone recognized the transcendent “I’ll See You in My Dreams”, which filled every rugged crag with plucky ukulele — a fitting accompaniment to Lily’s improvised hula-hands and swaying hair. Lily tried to be serious. “Max’s dad is on . . .”