Capital City Chronicles: The Island (3 page)

Two stops before NerveTown. My pack on my lap, I leaned back and watched the city rush past. I had ridden this line hundreds of times, and as the bohemian opulence of my neighborhood fell away, and the rundown, crumbling tenements took over, my eyes slipped closed.

The sudden cheering and string of spanish curses jerked me awake. Over the noise of insults that traveled up the car toward the doors, the conductor’s voice spoke again.

“Gabrielle Square,”

One gang followed the other to the doors, berating and slapping at them as they ducked through and out onto the platform. The small group of winners then cheered again and ran back the length of the car to yell insults through the windows, triumphant that their superior knowledge of TV commercials had carved them a new turf. I exchanged a look with the woman across from me. She shrugged and rolled her eyes, as if to say, “until next week.” I smiled and shook my head.

I leaned back again, the train now mostly quiet. Staring out the window, thinking of nothing in particular, I noticed a small piece of graffiti among the usual obscenities, gang tags and crude drawings of genitalia. It was new, and of higher quality and effort than the rest that smudged the window. About the size of a large coin, it was stamped on top of the rest. A red dog’s head, the mouth open wide, bearing long, curved spiked teeth. The dog was framed by the outline of a hand. It was an unnerving symbol, and somehow I realised I had seen it before, in alleys, on curbs and the sides of post boxes all over Capital City. Below the symbol was printed in red:

BITE THE HAND

I had indeed seen it before. Like most graffiti I must have ignored it, only picking up on the repetition subconsciously. The slogan, “bite the hand,” was familiar, like a song lyric I couldn’t place. As I realised I was staring at the dog, I felt the pressure of someone’s gaze. I looked at the slave woman, and found her watching me. Her expression was blank, but I knew she was interested in my noticing the stamp. Before she looked away, her tattooed hand crept up to her face. My heart began to race, certain she was trying to tell me something. I felt silly and paranoid when she merely extended two fingers and relieved an itch below her eye. She looked away as she did it, and I knew I was, as I sometimes did, connecting dots that weren’t there.

I turned again to gaze out the window but that paranoid feeling wouldn’t let me go. The blood red dog’s head on the window was now impossible to unsee. I looked again at the vicious teeth, and as they became outlined in familiar blinking, colored lights, I knew we were approaching the next stop.

“Market District, Doll’s Row.”

The train lurched to a stop, the doors hissed open. Her briefcase in hand, the slave stood. I stared down at my pack, unable to look at her. She wasn’t handling million dollar negotiations as I had fantasized. She was purchasing slaves. Dolls to be exact. I looked again out the window, to the ever bustling Doll’s Row below. There was no vehicle traffic here, only throngs of pedestrians and rickshaws. Dolls stood and sauntered outside their respective shops, waving and slithering, yelling and singing, a constant dissonance of desperation as they worked to be sold. The glowing, popping neon that silhouetted their bodies shouted each shop’s merchandise:

YOUNG DOLLS

GIRLS FOR SALE

THRALLDOLLS DISCOUNT BULK

FRE HIST DO LS IN CC

I couldn’t help wondering the fate of the girls to be bought tonight. The typical buyer on Doll’s Row was the sweaty, middle aged man wearing bermuda shorts and an aloha shirt, here to buy and discard a girl or four for his weekend business trip to Capital City. He was the rich frat boy punk who wanted something to clean up after him. He was the deranged woman slasher in a spotless suit. Tonight, there would be hundreds of sales, especially of the disposable thralldolls, for use at countless parties. They would be taken off to all corners of the city, and no doubt the police would have to assign entire units to clean up the ones found in abandoned hotel rooms, alleyways and dumpsters.

The woman across from me, however, was a different kind of buyer. In her suit and briefcase, she was buying for permanent use. This was rare for Doll’s Row; most harems bought through private, high end dealers and breeders, not from shady street-side merchants. Though it did happen, often enough at least, that most merchants would have a private panel truck ready in the alley behind their store for the buyer to ship the purchases. She would buy probably a dozen or more of the youngest, load them into a truck and after a year or two of training, some GCI executive would have a fresh batch of professionals at his disposal.

A sense of disappointment and despair weighted me to the bench as the woman shuffled past me toward the aisle. As she passed, something fell into my lap, tumbling down between my pack and my stomach. I looked up at her, and she ignored me as she hurried to the doors and out onto the platform. Moving my pack I felt around my lap to find what she had dropped. Under my left leg I found it. A business card. On one side was printed only the name of an Underground message board:

Capital City Jazz Review

I flipped the card over to see the same dog and hand logo, again in red. The message, however, was different:

EAT YOUR MASTERS

As the doors of the train jerked closed, I leaned toward the window, cupping my hands on either side of my face to block the glare. I wanted desperately to see her again, to get some signal, some clue as to what it meant. But I saw nothing, she had gone about whatever mysterious business she was on, and disappeared. The platform swept away as the train sped ahead, and I was left to wonder.

Looking at the card one last time, I tucked it into a zippered pocket on my hip and tried to focus on the job at hand. NerveTown was approaching.

* * *

If purgatory were a neighborhood in Capital City, it would be NerveTown. A three mile long stretch of warehouses, storage buildings and repurposed motels, all dark but for the multicolored, soft flickering glow that spilled from windows, neon tubing that ran the edges of buildings and fiber optic angel hair that hung from long burned out street lamps. The streets were narrow trenches dug through waist high piles of broken and burned computer monitors, circuit boards and components, all bound in tangles of thousands of miles of frayed cable. While the rest of the city raged with a relentless noise of a level unmatched by any world metropolis, NerveTown, in a way, sat silent. The only noise was from the web of overpasses that swooped over and under and between each other without any logical direction. It was indeed noise, and loud, but unlike the rest of the city, it was a kind of constant and steady white noise that was as close to real silence as one could find out of doors.

I glanced upward at the traffic as I exited the CCTA platform. It would have been impossible to pick out a single CCPD evidence van among the thousands of vehicles that flew in every direction, but it wouldn’t feel right not to take the chance. By placing the evidence garage in NerveTown, it could be accessed from anywhere in the city in less than two hours, thanks to the Interstate Junction above. Every road leading out, and every road coming into Capital City was above my head.

I strolled the dark street, content with the rare psuedosilence. As much as most people avoided NerveTown, it was one of the safest places to walk alone at night. Two thirds of the people (if they could even be called that) were uninterested in anyone or anything outside of the Underground. The Wired Nervous they were called. Strange, grotesque white shells, they stayed locked up in their buildings and rooms and storage units, subsisting off feeding tubes and a plumbing system I never understood, or wanted to.

The other third of the population were the Mobile Nervous. The same as the others, they were wired into the Underground at all times, yet they also lived and breathed out here in physical space, shuffling and skating along between buildings, filling feeding tubes, checking vital signs and otherwise maintaining the neighborhood. Their philosophy toward the human body was the same toward technology: constant upgrades, function before aesthetics and the discarding of anything non essential.

I saw none of them out tonight, however. They most likely were focusing their entire attention upon the happenings of the Underground. Even the invisible universe of ones and zeros wasn’t immune to the events of tonight. I was alone out here.

Taking my time, I walked the empty street, past the squat motel buildings, and into the block of storage complexes and garages. The BII garage was at the end of the block, surrounded by a high chain link fence. Coils of razor wire ran the upper edge of the fence, preventing anyone but the most dedicated from climbing it. But I wasn’t going over the fence, I was going through it.

Between glowing clusters of storage units was a narrow alley, the concrete sloping down into a shallow, dried out aqueduct that ran perpendicular to the street. I stepped down into the alley, and hurried along to the backs of the buildings, where it angled into the back of the BII lot. The fence at this spot extended down into the aqueduct. It was only about an extra foot and a half, but it was perfect. The guard never bothered with checking this spot, only running his flashlight over it once an hour, if he felt like it. He couldn’t see where I had cut the fence over a year earlier. Every time it rained, a carpet of leaves, sticks and trash built up against the chain link and camouflaged the two loops of chicken wire I used to create the hinges.

Crouched in front of the fence, I reached over my shoulder and pulled the mask over my head.

It was time to clock in.

A soft, crackling rip whispered from the flap of pre-cut fence as I lifted it. Holding it up, I shrugged off my bag and tossed it through. I side stepped in and gently lowered it back into place. Slinging the bag back over my shoulders, I watched as the one camera I needed to concern myself with arched away from my location.

I ran.

I had exactly six seconds before it reached the end of its field, which would give me just under four seconds to make it under the camera. I didn’t watch the camera as I ran; I had learned early on that watching the threat instead of the goal was how you trip. I also learned to slow down as I neared the sheet metal siding of the building. Slamming into it would have been the loudest noise in NerveTown, which, of course, was the opposite of what I wanted. All of these considerations were most likely moot here, considering the one nightwatchman that seemed to work every night of the year, only did just enough to not get canned. But one could never be too careful.

Skirting the wall, I approached the back door. From my bag I pulled a small, hard black case. Inside was a blank keycard, at the end of which was attached a long cord that plugged into my PDA. When I reached the door, I swiped the card through the lock. In a matter of seconds, the PDA found a list of employees with access to this particular lock, which I then narrowed down to non-CCPD personnel, and again to hourly employees. This brought up three. I tapped the now familiar name of the guard and the lock clicked.

I slinked through the door, letting it close against my back, silent as possible. I scanned the garage as I replaced the keycard. This building was a labyrinth of overflowing file cabinets, shelves of metal lock boxes and piles of plastic storage bins. In another room, toward the front of the building were even a couple dozen vehicles, left there to rot since probably before I was born. Making my way to the W section of files, I slipped in and out of aisles, ducking low and avoiding the few, random cameras. Finally, I saw the yellowed, curling sheet of printer paper taped to a stanchion:

WX

I hurried along the uneven row, twice stepping over tipped cabinets, glancing back and forth, waiting for the number to jump out at me.

330124 - 341624…

And the top drawer was open.

On the floor a few feet away was a manila file. Files, papers and trash had littered the floor here for years, but I knew the moment I saw it. The only file not covered in dust and dirt and bootprints. I had been beaten to it.

Picking up the file, I flipped it open. It was a pretty standard dossier on one of Capital City’s finest. I scanned the documents for anything useful.

James Travis Whitten.

Dept. of Para-Military Research - 3 years.

GCI Security consultant - 1 year.

Capital City Police Dept. - 12 years…

Arrest records, health records, eight on-duty shooting reports, height, weight, pedigree. Nothing useful and no flashdrive.

So much for three hours. Tossing the file aside, I went to the end of the aisle. Against the wall sat a desk, with an outdated computer sitting among rolling hills of the ancient rubble of middle aged, stress eating detectives. I had to push aside a layer of coffee cups, candy wrappers and cigarette butts to find the keyboard.

I plugged my PDA into the computer. A thousand number and letter combinations blurred upward along my PDA screen, and after a moment, the computer’s monitor popped on and a dim glow flickered and grew. Soon the screen became a galaxy of glowing specks of dust and cigarette ash,  smudges of chocolate and pepperoni grease. I squinted past the mess at the employee menu. After looking again at the now spotlit filth on the keyboard, I elected to use my PDA to navigate the system. Tapping and swiping, I pulled open the day’s logs. Two deliveries, three outgoing, and one shift change. No visitors. I checked the outgoing log.