Occupied Pt. 2

This is the second chapter of the world's first NoBlogVel. Check 0ut the introduction here, and the first chapter here.

Wherever borders or barriers have been erected with the proud confidence possible only in the ruling class, there have been smugglers. Pedro was a part of a tradition that was as old as human civilization. When Solon was throwing up walls around new-fangled cities across Mesopotamia there were smugglers finding their way in—bringing in and taking out whatever it was Solon wasn't down for. Pedro had been taught by a Westy companero who ended up with his throat cut a couple of years before all this. It is a science older than written language—any barrier has a weak point. In terms of crossing borders there are structural/geographical weak points, administrative/bureaucratic weak points and personnel weak points. You have two options when exploiting weak points: one can push on it without them seeing you or you can let them see something they want to see, secreting the payload. You can dodge the man or you can fool him. You make a plan, have an escape and let go of your fear of death. You are ready to smuggle.

Getting from the burbs into the Greez involved a complex gambit. A ring of rubble and mighty piles of collapsed concrete formed an eighty-mile ring well off from the Greez, the first layer of resistance. Over it a labor crew had been compelled to unfurl several haphazard loops of stainless steel razor wire. Retired industrial equipment from the thousands of factories in the area was towed to the ring and given a casual distribution along the barrier.

“Ha!” Molly hadn't been to KC since before even the Bolie Wars, more than half a century before that day. She grabbed her waist and looked over the Trash Ring like a trader appraising a questionable mule. “That's old I-435. It was a freeway.” Pedro just stared. “Freeways were big roads that cars drove on. Back then everyone drove cars.”

He stared a bit longer before talking. “I know. I'm still just wondering how someone who talks as much as you is still alive.” The woman had regaled him all night with slow-paced tales of her days in Hollywood (he had no idea where it was until he asked her, found out nobody had been within 200 miles of the place in 20 years and wondered why she thought he cared). Her tales droned all along the bike ride through Olathe and then the always asshole-puckering experience of making it through enemy turf in OvParque. A good smuggler knew the secret path, and only rolling through all but forgotten alleys walled by overgrown grasses hiding the broken frames of cardboard-fire heated squats and avoiding the gutted strip developments that housed hundreds at a time—the concrete floors slick with the sleep breath of exhausted producers—he got them across the city with only a couple of bottles thrown his way by kids wearing the orange Kevmesh of OvParque New Popular Front. The maquiladoras were butted up against each other as they got closer, ten miles deep all the way around for more than 80 miles. The roar of sewing machines and scream of grinding metal was broken only by the rattling thump of something incredibly heavy being dropped into place. The factories came up so quick as to be disorienting. Clutches of squats with their rowdy unemployed tenants maxing out front gave way without any warning to an endless wall of dumpy corrugated steel warehouses full of human toil. Pedro had not been welcome here as a producer in months, ever since he fell off quota two days in a row. But he knew how to make sure he was always on the backside of each of the randomly faced facilities, his ride a maze memorized over years of smuggling.

“We are going to talk, abuelita,” He said, resting for a moment in the corner where a hulking dumpster backed into the rear of a loud maquiladora. “Before we get where the drones can listen again, I want to know how—exactly—you manage to say whatever the hell you want and not end up skyfucked. I once saw a guy start to tell an Admin to shove it in his ass and he was a hard to remove stain on my uni before he got to the profanity. What's your trick, lady?”

Molly took a long squirt off the bottle passed her by Pedro and squatted in front of him to relax a moment. “They don't know to look for me, and they couldn't if they did.”

Pedro was disbelieving and would have punished her obliquity with violence had he not remembered Xiu, laid up for four days with a broken instep locked into FirstAidTech. Had to get to the clinic for some more cordblood before the commandant would let him work any more missions, which he might not let him do anyways after getting his ass kicked by a 120 year old woman. “What does that mean? Sounds like some kind of snoozhead bullshit to me.”

The woman smiled. “Okay then. Believe that.” He was clearly unsatisfied, he needed to know if he was being reckless beyond conscience or protected from on high. It made the only difference in the world that mattered in the WPTs—life and death. “It is pretty blah actually. I was purged from the party, the Democratc Workers Party about three months before the Crack Up and the subsequent invasion.”

“So they didn't know you were a Bolie. Erased you from the pictures and shit.”

“You got it.”

“But there must have been a bunch of purged Bolivarans who ended up skyfucked anyways.”

“Indeed, there were. There was a whole well developed underground that lasted all of about six months after the invasion. Two, three at a time they were ripped up when they tripped up. But not me.”

“And you run your mouth. You said they couldn't get you if they knew. Why?”

Molly shrugged her shoulders. “I don't know.” Pedro's face was lousy with incredulity. “I have a theory,” she said. Pedro stared at her, waiting for her to elucidate. She said nothing for a long time and then “It's why we're going downtown.”

“You seem pretty confident in your personal security round here, girl. Especially for a chica dealing in theories and shit. Now, you're a tough one. Saw that when you put the bolt through ol Xiu.”

“That wasn't that impressive. That sizzle kid's to killing what a seat sniffer is to fucking. He don't do it cause he don't got what it takes.”

“What does it take?”

She spit on the ground and cracked her rubbery knuckles one at a time. “Perspective. That's a good word for it.”

“Perspective?”

“You gotta realize that it ain't that big a deal. Back in the day we had to worry about the pigs—police, an armed force of men that put people in prison for doing things society had deemed necessary of such things, you've heard of them?”

“Saw them in a zone once, a scene set in the old days. They were all fat and had mustaches and shit, right?”

She laughed. “More or less, I suppose. But we had to worry about prison, then the Bolies made us worry bout the wilderness, now you gotta worry about...”

“The skyfuck?”

“For simple murder? Hardly. All you gotta worry about is your conscience, retaliation and hell. Its a little equation. How bad will I feel about this guy not being around anymore, his friends missing him, his family suffering from his loss? How likely are his homies or his gang to come after me and grease me back? Do I believe in a transcendent justice, a post-mortem reckoning that sets right all wrongs of this mortal coil? You get two out of three and you can kill. If you don't give a shit about the guy, if you know you can handle the heat, if you know you're just gonna end up wormshit anyways, it's easy.”

“Where does Xiu fall off? You don't think he...”

“He probably does.”

Pedro bent his brows and shook his head as if trying to fling the very thought of the insinuation out of his head. “No way. We don't talk about such things, but I'd know. No way that guy's a sheep. He's lifelong Dub-PT, nobody here believes in hell outside the obvious.” He knocked on the wall of the screaming colonia behind him.

“The hub churches do good business.”

“He's zoning for cock and puss, baby. No sheepery in his glasses.”

“Were his parents clicks?” She read the confusion on his face and nearly wept—their history had been erased. “Clericals? Chrissies and Clares—Clicks. They were two parties that were sometimes... During the Federation.”

In a moment the fog of slang gave way to a bit of understanding, to Molly's relief. “Oh right, I heard about those. Yeah, best thing the Trees ever did was skyfuck every last one of them kids and pack a cruise missile into every one of their arcades. At least ninos don't gotta walk past hub churches.”

“But is our Sino-Mesoamerican friend drawn from their lots? Could be a closeter.”

“I'm telling you, I know the guy, he's fucking useless, but he's a killer. He ain't a sheep.”

“He ever held a gun down on you? He did me, you'll recall. He had a fear in his eye. I'm an old woman—shit, probably goddamn near the oldest in the whole WPT—no retaliation, no real loss if another toothless number like myself gets it. He's froze up on hell.”

It was Pedro's turn to spit now, and he followed it with a long pause. He didn't respond with words, just getting on his bicycle and pushing off. Molly got on hers and followed. The free trade pavilion went on for kilometers made even longer by the serpentine path demanded for security's sake. He was being watched right now by the surveillance drones, his movements analyzed by the metaprocessor regardless of which path he took, but the overseer drones at the various colonias were to be avoided. The noise of the factories had been identified early on by the Trio as a strategic cover for speaking without airborne eavesdroppers getting a piece of the action, and the industrial setting was fertile ground for revolutionary action already anyways. Might have led to a nasty strike—a sit down scene that made it impossible for the skyfucks to retaliate, lest they blow up the expensive machinery the Trees had brought over from Asia. But it would never happen—the overseer drones swooped in every day at exactly 0500, one to each factory, lowering themselves silently to a couple of feet above the ground where they hovered. Each projected a true and undeniable image of a professionally attired Chinese woman, attractive and smiling. Always smiling. She would read a list of names, and those not named were given four minutes—thats exactly 240 seconds—to hustle on out of the pavilion. If anyone tarried, the nearest overseer drone spun around and fired two custom carbon, laser-targeted darts directly into the pupils of the straggler's eyes. Better a dead producer to render than a potential troublemaker—they had no human empathy, they were based in outer space and they knew there was no hell for holograms.

There was but one path through the pavilion, and only Pedro and Xiu knew it nowadays. And now the abuelita. She was a lifelong revolutionary, a gangster with no boss, a hellraiser with white hair. No way she didn't remember every single turn and twist of the ride. He took a track through the colonias that ended up putting them on the other side of the free trade pavilion in an overgrown creek along which they walked their bikes. They walked a mile or more until they reached the place where a labor crew had strung a net of razor wire and signs in five languages warning that the creek beyond this point was heavily mined. Pedro's teacher had strung a pulley over one of the last trees, where one could tie one's bike and pull it up over the edge after scaling up and out of the creek. First Pedro and then Molly got out of the creek, finding themselves facing what Molly immediately informed him had once been I-435.

“Pretty sufficient test of the theory, eh?”

“I don't even know what this theory is. You seem to have some kind of Tree guardian angel, and that chica is more than happy to let you run your mouth about the good ol' days when we had instantaneous representation and the wilderness, long as you are wherever you've been.” He sucked on his nic inhaler, letting it set before he went to the bump. “But her eyes skip over your ass when the bolts fall in the greez.”

“His.” She had the ghost of a smile on her face.

“Come again?”

“You referred to my guardian angel as a 'chica,' my theory is that its a chico.”

Pedro snorted. “Some ol' Tree-hugger snitch cum Admin that you let stink up his fingers back in twenty fifty three?”

“Before that—had to be before forty nine.”

Pedro smiled mischievously. She was easily the coolest old woman he'd ever met, though he'd only met a few and none as old as this one. “Must have been some pretty primo shit to keep an hombre hanging on forty five, fifty years, no? I got no idea what that's like.”

There was a long time when nobody talked, and they just listened to the wind rattle the wall of junk and wire.

“Doubt I'll get to.”