The Collector (17 page)

Neil pushes himself to his feet as chaos ensues inside the ballroom. He rushes through the frenzied crowd over to Mazer, whose frazzled movements replace all words.
“How did they do this?”

“Take the Board and get outta here,” Neil commands. His eyes pierce through the hysteria and lock onto Brock in the shadows of the rear corridor. With their plot thwarted, Brock flees towards the stairwell. Neil brushes past Inna as he bolts after him.

“Neil, be careful!” she shouts.

Brock descends the stairs two at a time, three at a time, then glances back as the door bursts open to see Neil hot on his tail. He slips out to the second floor.

Neil keeps pace as he chases Brock past the janitor’s closet when suddenly,
SWOOSH
, a sharp flailing knife nearly decapitates him. It’s Jace, who swings again, a curved ten-inch knife in each hand, large enough to skin an unauthorized stray let alone inflict lethal damage to Neil, who is without his usual protective black combat uniform. Neil ducks the attack, but before he can fully draw his gun, Brock ambushes him from behind, knocking Neil’s weapon away and nailing him with a flurry of punches straight to the kidneys.

It’s two-on-one as Neil is weaponless against a knife expert and a physical brute. He blocks, evades, and counters Jace’s knife attacks while absorbing Brock’s meaty fists with his body and firing back.
THWACK. THUMP. WHISH. WHOOSH.
He relies on years of combat training at the Academy and out in the field, holding his own, even drawing from all his fights at reform school, each former brawl helping him survive another second. In a desperate counter maneuver, Neil pins Jace to the wall with Jace’s own blade to level the battlefield. Brock immediately wrenches Neil’s neck from behind to snap it in two, but Neil plows them both backwards straight through a floor-to-ceiling glass entryway, shattering the window into tiny pieces of ice and sacrificing his own body just to get Brock to release his grip.

The footsteps from multiple oncoming SEOs echo from the stairwell just as Jace unpins himself from the wall. He glances to Brock, interlocked with Neil inside a set of offices, then towards the shadows of the advancing SEOs. He purposely gains their attention and draws them away in the opposite direction to allow Brock a fighting chance to escape.

Neil brushes shards of glass from his face, then sprints after Brock through what appears to be the Agency’s Marketing Department. A full-sized cardboard display of a family of three with the text, BE A HERO TO YOUR FAMILY, VOLUNTEER TODAY collapses on impact as Neil tackles Brock straight into it. A transparent glass board scribbled with marketing ideas doesn’t survive Brock’s thick skull, nor does a poster-sized commercial printer once Brock counters and body slams Neil onto it. Stacks of flyers, stickers, buttons, pens, and window decals – items usually given away at promotional events with the slogan SPARE LIVES BY SELLING YOURS – are also obliterated as the brawl demolishes everything in its path. It’s as if another one of the Brigade’s IEDs detonated inside given the pure environmental destruction to the marketing offices.

Brock continues to scramble for a way out, the detour with Neil not in the Brigade’s exit strategy. He makes it to a window and leaps from the second floor without hesitation, but snaps his ankle upon impact as he tumbles to a stop in the alley at the rear of Agency Headquarters. Neil considers making the jump, but thinks better of it and instead sprints to an emergency stairwell.

A white van screeches to a stop on a side street near the end of the alley. Leon drives, gun in hand, while the van’s side door slides open to reveal Chelsea and Jace. Jace prepares a
rocket-propelled grenade launcher
.

Brock limps on his broken ankle towards the getaway vehicle when Neil suddenly leaps out from the building’s rear emergency door and plows him over, his ruthless dedication unmatched.

Leon fires a burst of rounds from the driver’s seat to try to give Brock one last window of opportunity. One of the bullets grazes Neil in the shoulder, but luckily tears through more of his 3-stripe arm badge than flesh. Neil shields Brock from the potential friendly fire as he drags him towards a nearby dumpster, following Agency protocol that requires top priority enemies to be taken alive.

As another burst of gunfire flashes from the van, a squad of SEOs funnels out from Agency Headquarters, weapons aimed and vastly outnumbering the Brigade in sheer firepower. Leon shifts the van into drive and readies to burn off.

“Don’t let them take me alive,” Brock shouts.

Just then Jace finishes prepping the RPG launcher and looks to Leon. “Orders?” he asks.

“Do it for the cause!” Brock begs as he spots the massive weapon is ready. “Kill them! Kill us all!”

Faced with a lose-lose decision, Leon nods to proceed.

The SEOs unload a surge of rounds into the side of the white van while Neil wrestles Brock’s heavy body down behind the dumpster. It’s a symphony of metal piercing metal playing out in the alley, until one of the SEOs notices Jace squatting on one knee and lifting the RPG launcher to his shoulder. “Grenade!” the SEO shouts.

The entire squad dives for cover when,
BOOM!
The blast incinerates the alley, and Chelsea follows it up with a handmade Molotov Cocktail to set the littered debris ablaze. Leon pounds the gas to send the white van screeching away, leaving their fallen man behind.

Neil dusts himself off as falling ash sprinkles down, surviving his second explosion of the day. He and the squad of SEOs check in on one another. Scratches, bruises, and torn uniforms, but no major injuries.

Neil yanks Brock upright, who sulks from the Brigade’s failed martyr attempt. The SEOs naturally part and form a line while Neil escorts his prisoner through. Most of them glare at Brock, while others nod their head and acknowledge Neil’s good work.

After so many of their fellow SEOs and Collectors have been killed, and with the weight of Wade’s Breach of Contract still lingering in the Agency’s shadow, the Agency needed this victory. The SEOs needed this victory. Neil needed this victory. For the first time ever since the Brigade’s inception, they finally have a member of the opposition in custody.

******

Under The Sea

I propose a new Sector to be built underneath the Bay. Think about it, within the confines of the Wall we’re limited for space, but there is no Wall out in the Bay! While expanding the city won’t help with the water shortage, at least it’ll give us more room. It sounds ambitious, but this city is full of ambitious people, right?

I admit this wasn’t my idea. I stopped off at the library again today. They just got more book donations!

-Quado

14

N
eil stands on the cliff overlooking the city by the bay. After his hard fought victory, he soaks in the view to remind himself all that he is fighting for. Though his mind should be preoccupied replaying the events that unfolded just hours ago – delivering Brock to the Agency and celebrating with his colleagues – Neil can’t help but wonder what Inna would say at the sight of his arm wrapped in gauze again. Leon’s grazing bullet shredded his 3-stripe arm badge, something she’s already repaired once yet he can’t seem to keep intact. Would she quip how at least her wagon wasn’t destroyed in this particular run-in with the Brigade? Would she make a joke about her hard work fixing his uniform gone to waste? Or even worse, would she even care? He recalls their interaction at the gala, awkward and unexpected, and they didn’t exactly clarify whether they were on good terms or not.

Neil’s gaze naturally shifts to the landfill as he holds the Dream Catcher in hand, the same pendant he tried to give Inna back at the Bayou Sector before their unexpected first kiss, intended to filter out the bad and leave only the good. The webbing shows its first sign of age, matching its musty smell, as a few stray strands begin to come undone.

“Compassion makes us weak.”
Slayter’s words replay in his mind, followed by a wide range of disturbing thoughts. Is he weak? Is he losing the ability to stomach the job, the same thing that happened to his rookie Wade? He’s been doing this job for years, why is he suddenly having these types of doubts? As Mazer so elegantly reminded him while they conversed on the balcony back at Headquarters, he knew what he was signing up for just like each and every volunteer who signs up to sell their life.

As Neil watches a SectorLink tram transport people out of the Downtown Sector, his eyes land on the processing facility where black smoke continues to infest the air. Yes, he knew what he was signing up for. He remembers what drove him to that decision in the first place. The teasing he experienced in reform school. All the other young boys branding his brother a coward for selling himself to the Agency and abandoning Neil as an orphan. He lost count the number of black eyes he endured from fighting to defend his brother’s honor. It was during one of these fights where he and Mazer first encountered one another. While visiting the reform school, it was Mazer who pulled Neil aside, still in that young development age – malleable, influenceable – and implanted the idea that there is no better way to uphold his brother’s honor than to join the Academy. It was the first of many times that Mazer told him he saw potential from him to become a Collector. As far as Neil knows, he is the only one Mazer has ever taken under his wing like that. Mazer became a father figure to him, having lost his own child at a young age, and the Agency became Neil’s home. He never once doubted the system, and even now he doesn’t doubt it. It’s necessary. And it’s quite simple really. There are too many people in the city for the resources available, so people need to go. What better and more humane method to solve this issue than to ask for volunteers? Things could have been much more barbaric if it was mandatory or if people were chosen from a lottery and forced to die against their will, but the Agency doesn’t operate like that. Yes, the volunteer aspect is the way to go, and he’s heard it is this opportunity of choice that separates their city from some of the others in the surrounding region. He acknowledges that it’s morbid, but without it the people could not survive. Even now with all that they’ve done, there is still so much pain and suffering in the valley below. The Agency is just trying to minimize that suffering.

So it is not a doubt in the system that currently plagues Neil. It is more of a burden, something he never felt before. The burden of transporting one to their death. The burden of punishing Breachers who try to cheat the system, yet at the end of the day are just trying to survive another day – exactly what he and the Agency are doing on a fundamental level. And then there is another burden he never realized before: the burden of giving up the right to an assigned partner and the right to the ability to feel. Up until now it is like he’s been living in a haze, and only recently – since he first crossed paths with Inna, since he’s first heard that angelic melody traveling in the air – has that haze started to lift. It isn’t just because Inna is beautiful that he feels this way. He’s a Collector after all. Pockets of gorgeous women throw themselves at him on a nightly basis. Groupies. Fan girls. Even the Agency sends him authorized call girls in order to satisfy his primal needs, though he never really gets to know them, or desires to, before they are rotated out. There is something more to Inna than just her looks. There is her innocence. Her ability to see beauty and humanity in things others wouldn’t give a second glance to. It’s her song…that sweet melody…

Neil shakes his head to snap out of these thoughts. He doesn’t like them. He doesn’t like the feelings they bring either. Believe it or not, life was easier when he didn’t feel anything at all. He knows it’s ironic, but it’s the truth.

To his relief, his PDA buzzes with an incoming text that interrupts his clouded mind. It’s from Mazer, “URGENT! Report to HQ.”

A new assignment couldn’t have come soon enough.

Neil crosses through the bullpen towards Mazer back at Agency Headquarters, with Raymond and Garrison waiting next to him outside the evaluation room. Garrison jokingly hoots and hollers at Neil’s recent rise in status, but Neil brushes him off.

Through the one-sided observation glass they watch on as Brock, secured to a chair with his hands bound, ignores Slayter looming over him and bombarding him with questions. Brock’s scabbed face makes him barely recognizable from his photo still pinned above the bulletin board.

“That nose has seen better days,” Garrison quips.

“Is he talking?” Neil wonders.

“He will,” Mazer states without hesitation.

The four men watch as Slayter backhands Brock, unfazed, continuing to stare forward seemingly right at them. Brock knows he’s caught. He knows there is no chance of being let go. So therefore he knows there is absolutely no benefit to divulging any information.

“And if he doesn’t?” Neil asks, recognizing this could turn into a long and brutal session.

Just then the screams of a protesting woman interrupt from across the bullpen. “Let me go. Let us go!” the voice shrieks.

Neil looks to see two more Collectors, Cecil and Dale, dragging in Brock’s wife and child against their will.

“Then that’d be unfortunate for them,” Mazer warns.

Inside the evaluation room, more of an interrogation room these days, Slayter backhands Brock again. “I can do this all day,” he taunts.

“You and me both, brother,” Brock fires back, spitting blood. He remains utterly defiant until the door opens and Cecil presents Brock’s wife and child.

“The real question is, can they?” Slayter asks ominously. Brock jolts forward in concern as Slayter yanks the new visitors inside and slams the door, no doubt willing to go the distance in order to get information.

Neil turns away, the only Collector not wanting to watch the torturous events unfold through the window. Instead he spots Mazer heading for his office. He follows and slips in to find Mazer sipping water from a reserve stash behind his desk to unwind.

“People should be proud to see us in these uniforms, not afraid,” Neil says.