Ish stopped by Chen, who still faithfully had his eyes on the door and his finger on the trigger, he leaned in and whispered.
“We are going. You can lock up tonight. If there are more storms and no power to the block tomorrow we will return in the morning. If not, we will have to wait.”
Chen didn’t say anything, but he stood and gave his friend a hug before he went down the stairs. Walter’s items were still in the corner and this time he saw the goggles were there too. Ish walked over, annoyed. He picked up the goggles and inspected them, the left lens had a big chip out of it that made his vision go in and out. He held them up to his eyes. It took his eyes a little extra work to focus on what they needed to, and not the tiny imperfection a centimeter away. Ish looked up at Chen, who was watching him. Chen shrugged his shoulders, tilting his head and scrunching his lips.
Ish returned the shrug and put the goggles on. He felt a little ridiculous, they made him look like a theatrical representation of a WW1 fighter pilot, but he was open to trying them. He had tried many strategies for seeing in the storms, mostly resorting to using a thin serat, which clouded his vision more than the dust. Roger wouldn’t need them this evening anyway. He walked up to the door and the wind was howling outside. For a moment he wanted to just go back and sit with Emma longer. Maybe they would hug again. If Ish didn’t show up in a few hours, Levy would come back home before the power was restored and the cameras would never know either of them left.
These thoughts made Ish feel small and weak; he covered his face with a cloth and reached around his back, touching the saftey of his pistol to ensure it was on and firmly tucking into his waist belt before opening the door to leave. The door slammed and whacked against the deadspace between the deadbolt and the latchhole as the wind howled at the door trying to bust it down. When he unlatched the deadbolt and tried to creep out into the darkness the gales of wind swung the door into him and nearly knocked him on his back, he looked at at Chen who shrugged his shoulders again. Ish put hand up to block his face and again he thought about going back. But he stepped outside into a place he didn’t want to be to do something he was scared to do, then he closed the door. He saw Chen just getting to the bottom of the stairs through the last sliver as it shut. The door rustled a little, clicked a few times and then finally clanked. He slipped along the streets, walking nearly blind. Barely able to see his own feet, he treaded slowly. The dust snuck it’s way into all of his clothes, even his shoes which were firmly laced. Ish had put a sturdy pair of boots that fit his foot snuggly, though even that couldn’t keep the dust from his toes. His fingers stung and after a few minutes he felt like he was crawling with fire ants all up his arms. He sheltered himself in an alleyway to adjust his facial gear so that he could hide his hands in his pockets instead of shielding his face. Amidst tying his serat, he heard shuffling under the roar of the wind.
“Yooooooooouuuuuuuuuuu there” a raspy voice calls to him. The dust wasn’t blowing so hard in the alley and Ish could clearly see a decrepit man raising a pointed boney jagged finger, he struggled to straighten it all the way. “Youuuuuuuuuu……………..” he rasps again.
“Ya.” Ish said to the vagabond.
His presence makes Ish uneasy. All the vagabonds did. He thought them to be unpredictable, liable to bash his head in when his back was turned. But Ish had rarely seen an act of violence from them, whether that is because they chose not to be violent or the violence has been beaten out of them by ancillaries remained unclear. The uneasiness extended beyond physical presence however, Ish was made uncomfortable by their very existence. An entire class of undesirables representing a significant minority o the population, the people who fell apart to the point where they can’t take care of themselves anymore. Most of them had gone psychotic or had their IQ points sucked out of them by the harsh environment. The rates of developmental disabilities has increased 100 fold since Ish was born, pipeline bursts, microplastics, nutrient deficiencies, new Epstein Barr strains, acid rain, depleted ozone, high CO2 concentrations have all resulted in staggering rates of retardation and schizophrenia. Social protections of these classes broke down long before the protection of others, as well as services for them. Most of them die of thirst or are smothered in their cribs by mothers so dehydrated that they choke tearlessly.
They spoke a language that resembled Ish’s, they have human hands, feet and eyes, but behind those eyes is the instrument of the soul and it plays a tune Ish just didn’t quite recognize.
The vagabond continued to ramble, hunched over and focused on his internal delusion. After Ish was satisfied with his face cloths he stood up to leave, the urchin rose too. He had been hunched over so much that Ish thought him to be very short and stunted, but when he straightened his back he was taller than Ish. His hair was white and dreaded, he had few teeth and wore a long brown overcoat which even with all the holes in it was probably still far too warm and let all the dust in. And then for a moment their eyes met and Ish saw them to be sober and clear as the wind stopped in it’s entirety and the dust that was flying and assaulting them both all fell to the ground then the man pointed to his mouth in an offering gesture as his gaped before starting to talk and they looked into each other's eyes while a trance cast from beyond took a hold of them both.
“I see in your eyes, other eyes. The eye’s of, of, of… Blue eyes, brown eyes, sm--small eyes. Ey-- Eyes you, you shut.”
The wind returned with fury and the dust resumed it’s assault and then the urchin shrunk back into a hunch and resumed rambling. Ish backed out of the alley and rubbed his head like he had been knocked unconscious and in a dream before moving on. The streets were hard going and he didn’t see anyone else after the vagabond, the dust still troubled his face, but he hid his hands in his pockets. He would need them nimble for the task ahead. He walked past the checkpoint that leads to the Lanoi district, it was closed, but still had power as the watch lights were bursting through the dust clouds.. A few blocks past, he ducked into a little building whose doorway had collapsed. He could barely squeeze his chest through the twist of the broken door and went down the cellar. The basement had a checkered floor and had been converted into a studio apartment that someone had obviously recently been sleeping in. There was a makeshift cot and empty water jugs in 1 corner, on the kitchenette was a scented candle. Ish put it in his bag. On the opposite end of the studio was a dresser with a few drawers missing, Ish pulled it to the side revealing a tunnel. Before he entered it he took out a pistol silencer made from an old oil filter and attached it to his gun. When Ish first came to the LAFPZ when he was 16 he learned how to make pistol silencer by etching the groove on the filter to take the camber of the muzzle, it used to take Ish many hours. but this one only took 30 minutes. He clicked the safety and went into the tunnel.
--
The sky was empty, even without the dust the moon was only going to be a slim crescent this evening and wouldn’t rise until late into the night. Ish has never been into the officer’s district during the day, though the path he was on was familiar. Like game on a trail, he crept through dilapidated buildings taking the path of least resistance that smugglers and terrorists frequented. Ish not identifying as either smuggler, terrorist or game. He didn’t figure himself much like a game, he was too proud for that, more like the player of a game or a wolf. The problem with wolves is they are too pack oriented. Ish remembers reading about hunters killing an entire pack by poisoning 1 carcass, or wounding just 1 animal and waiting for it to call for backup. He thought about being a Buffalo, but then settled on Jaguar. He was content to be a solitary and large dangerous cat with sharp teeth and a vast home range. He imagined himself creeping like a cat, taking silent steps through the brush and then pausing to listen, peering occasionally towards shining lights in the distance through the dust as the wind would rise and fall like breath.
Soon he found Levy exactly where he was supposed to be. He surprised Ish, he was walking up a failing set of stairs that creaked with each step and he saw the human figure as still as a statue juxtaposed against the plain background, it made his heart drop. He was sitting far back in the room perched on a table looking through a spyglass.
“The power is on here. I can see flood lights.” Levy said
“It doesn’t matter”. Ish said
“It’s going to be really hard to squeeze back through all those holes with our packs full.” Levy said
“This job is worth destroying 2 packs. We can just take them off and stuff them through.” Ish finally replied after a long moment.
They continued to conference in a faint whisper. A steel shutter on a building was slamming with each gust of wind and every time it cracked, Ish’s belly sank a little. He took a deep breath and let it out slow and quiet.
sh and Levy didn’t have much of a plan, which was the plan. The storm was heavy again and the cameras were out, there was no power to the yard so the pair had decided even if there were proximity sensors, they would just be ornaments on the fence.
“We’ll just split the fence with wirecutters, fill our packs and go.” Levy said to Ish in his apartment the day after Peg spilled that pharmacy grade medicines would be in a low security facility.
“They are too fat to patrol in their little Utopia, especially during a storm like this. They have clean, cool air inside.” If our entrance is still alive, that's the entire battle. We can wing the rest.” Levy added.
Ish stood with his back against the wall and contemplated in stillness. Sometimes his eyes would move and his head would bob while he thought, but right now he was still, still like a stone that had fallen off a mountain and rested in its new place for a long time.
Levy wasn't going to say anymore while his friend was thinking. He sat on Ish’s stool and pulled some tobacco out of his pocket and started to roll it in a thin piece of paper.
“Where did you get that?” Ish said, the stone started to roll again.
“Bought it from Seline. 1 script for all this. How much did you sell your cigarettes for?”
“Okawa said someone is growing Tobacco out in the Sierra, they are paying ancillaries with it. So not a lot.”
“Hm. I heard the Lanoi is passable now. Did you see all the old world graffiti on the seawalls from before the waters rose.”
Ish had seen it and didn’t pay much attention to it. It looked like it had been mostly washed away, the light colors were entirely faded but darker ones still showed the outline of art and tags. Ish was busy watching where he stepped, the passage in the Lanoi was flush with debris, old planks, drywall, rotten wood and rusty nails, all of which had to be waded through in knee high water. Ish had stepped on a nail before and would never do it again if he could prevent it, there was no time to look at art. There were holes too, some so deep they could swallow a grown man if you stepped in it.
“You’re gonna step on a nail if you don’t keep your eyes down.” Ish said.
“That’s the thing about you Ish, you are paranoid. Mostly about listening devices, but CHIEFLY about nails. You stepped on 1 nail 10 years ago and you talk about it once a week.” Levy replied.
Ish heard and said nothing, the stone stopped rolling.
Then he said, “I don’t think there is much more planning to do other than to take our usual route and see what we see.”
Now they were sitting and seeing, at the perimeter of the fence, seeing not much other than dust. The 2 were entirely clad in rags on their faces with only little slits for their eyes and noses, Ish was wearing Walter’s goggles and Levy was wearing tight fitting clear glasses a carpenter might wear. The visibility had worsened and the wind was whipping so loud that the 2 gave up on trying to communicate with words after they left the overlooking building they met in, but the pair didn’t need to exchange many words as they had been running jobs like this together for 20 years. Ish has said more words to Levy than any person alive, only his brother might have eclipsed him and that was because Ish was more talkatative in his youth. Levy clipped the fence while Ish pulled it apart. Ish thought about how far to clip the fence and watched if Levy would make the hole large enough. It was satisfactory in size to Ish when Levy started to squeeze through. The fraud field office was a scrawny building compared to the ANSOC and Security Bureau headquarters in the center of the district. Ish has seen it in the distance before, it used to be a municipal administration building pre ecoside, it was nothing more than a plane, brutalist rectangle made from precast concrete and prefabbed windows.
Ish and Levy were on the inside of the enclosed yard standing behind a row of balliards, there were trucks in working order parked in a row along with many shipping crates. The building was dark except for 1 room, which had rays of light streamed out of and pierced into the dust.
Ish looked at Levy, who shrugged his shoulders and tilted his head. Then they crept towards the crates, all of which were latched shut and locked. Breaking into shipping containers was an art that Ish had never mastered, which was fine because Levy was a savant at it. He employed many strategies, sometimes using hand drills, crowbars, or pair of cutters were etched with, “big fucking dykes.”
They inspected many crates for which one might be holding the pilfered medical supplies Peg said were being investigated, but in the dust they all looked the same. Oblong and red with rusted latching mechanism. Eventually they found one with a shiny latch that had dust clinging to grease someone had lubed up the lock with and there was a keypad and a large keyhole guarding the handle. Ish left Levy at an official looking crate with the keypad while he continued to search the rest of the yard.
In between the crates offered some shelter and he took his time examining each one, knocking on some to gauge how full they were. He was peering out from a crate when he heard voices coming from the balliards, the wind carried them away fast and for many minutes Ish listened, he couldn’t tell if he was hearing the wind babble like a brook or if the voices were still there. Walter told him once that native peoples would pass messages using the wind, words and dreams being carried like scent. Ish for a moment longed to live in their world, where visions dictated tribal policy and wolf medicine could stop bullets like Walter had described. Instead he was here, on a demented earth that has transcended secularism to something worse, in the midst of decay of a civilization too infatuated with its own greatness to imagine that wolf medicine could have been exactly what it needed.
Ish shook his head and continued to stay still, he looked where he thought the lit room should be in the featureless cloud of dust be and waited for the lulls in the wind, he stared at the spot for 10 minutes, but never saw the rays of light piercing into the dust and fading away into the midst; though Ish could barely tell what way was up so he wasn’t sure he was looking at the right spot. The wind had stopped babbling, so he decided to make his way back to Levy.
He was shocked to find that Levy had made friends, 3 of them. He recognized the backpack on one of the men as the one that was next to the shimmed chair Satumi was sitting on a few days earlier, he was the look out. So 2 men and 1 boy. Another was crouched idly and the third was involved with Levy at the door of the crate, he had taken apart the code luck and was attempting to pick the mechanism it was hiding. The crouched man saw Ish during a lul in the wind and tapped the lockpickers, who both glanced towards Ish, but they quickly returned to their work.
He could see that Ish wasn't ancillary, he was wearing tattered clothes and creeping along like a stalker. An ancillary would carry a bright light while walking upright, and the man that they had found taking apart the keypad had made some hand gestures indicating he had a friend in the direction Ish had come from. Ish didn’t know what to make of the situation, he didn’t unholster his pistol or his knife as Levy seemed to be cooperating with them. Many scenarios and situations began to play in Ish’s mind and he took his knife into his hand before approaching the group.
Upon seeing the knife, the crouched man vigorously shook the lockpickers and pointed towards Ish. He put his hands up, not all the way up to indicate surrender, just slightly up to show that his intentions were not so malign as his serrated dagger might suggest. Ish went straight to Levy, who gave him the same shrug he had given him before and then Ish put his knife away.
Here Ish was, in the home district of the ancillaries in the worst dust storm he’s ever been trying to steal medical supplies, and Satumi and his buddies are here trying to steal them too. The crouched man took out a piece of paper and it had 8 numbers written on it, then he pointed to the broken keypad. Levy shrugged again and went back to picking the lock. Satumi turned around and was startled to see a new character had joined them. He apparently was not a very good lookout because Ish had walked right by him without him even noticing. He came over and tried to say something, but he was forcefully shoved back to where he came by the crouched man.
Ish pointed towards the building and made a sun wide motion with his hands, the crouched man held up 2 fingers and then made a slicing motion across his throat in reply. He then held the paper closer to Ish and flipped it over, he saw that both sides of the paper had the number written in different strokes, the second side was also smeared with blood.
Ish didn’t like torture, he felt condemned by it. His enemies' tools sometimes had to be his own and he hated himself and the crouched man for it. The whole situation had become infinitely more complicated with these new unvetted goons who killed 2 ancillaries. Ish wanted to shove the crouched man, he wanted to shove him much harder than he shoved Satumi for butchering 2 men for no reason other than convenience. The Security Bureau might not ever know the supplies were stolen and if they did they had no way of knowing who it was. Now when the morning crew comes and finds the overnight MPs have been cut apart the entire bureau will be combing every inch of the yard. At least no one had seen anyone else's face. After a few minutes the lock clicked and Levy offered to high five his cooperant, but he obviously was not in the mood for celebration.
There was more supplies in the crate than any group could carry out on their backs so they had no reason to compete with each other. The routes they entered were different so their exits might be different too. It could work out. Levy didn’t seem worried, which was the deciding factor for Ish that it might all work out.
Ish came close to Levy and they started to whisper in the shelter.
“They are obviously underground, vicious enough to be Nadia’s crew. The guy helping me is covered in blood. Doesn’t matter much I think.” Levy said.
Ish nodded his head and the 2 crews went about pillaging the medical supplies. Ish and Levy took the highest value items first, antibiotics, focus drugs and narcotics while the other crew took items that had practically no exchange value, but were also impossible to buy on the black market, blood products, plasma and trauma kits.
Ish pointed his head toward the men whose selection was very telling about who they were. Levy nodded and kept pillaging. Both groups kept out of each other's way and watched the other with suspicion. Ish bumped into the lockpicker and he nearly jumped out of his shoes, he could hear his breath which was shallow and fast. Ish and Levy had brought smaller bags, they finished first and when they went to exit, the man that had been crouching grabbed Ish. It wasn’t a forceful grab, more like a tug and Ish didn’t react much to it, but Levy had his view blocked, he lunged forward to break the man’s grip and in an instant Levy had mounted the man and a knife on his throat. The lockpicker charged and a full brawl had started. Levy retracted his knife and slammed the man's head into the metal crate, which made a gonging sound that reverbated and echoed into the darkness. Satumi bursted in and mounted Levy’s back, pulling him off the man who had his consciousness excised from him while Ish squared against the third.
It wasn’t a beautiful fight, neither man ever found their footing, they swung each other from wall to wall as medical supplies crashed all over. The fight was a simple math equation, Ish was far larger than the man he was fighting and he slowly, and then quickly overpowered him. As he was about to strangle him to sleep he saw that Levy had escaped Satumi and was now pummeling the boy. At that moment, he felt no sympathy for him, a boy he had watched grow up and mentored. His mind was in a fit with primal intuition that resembled nothing like words or emotions, he was prepared to kill all of these people, he’d like to kill the crouched man for boastfully mentioning they had butchered the ancillaries when it in fact accomplished nothing for their cause. Ish had met a hundred men like this, men who thought killing made them hard. Ish had thought he was hard once. Now he knows that he was just drunk on war, an addiction he was born with, destined to inherit from a thousand paternal generations behind him, an adrenal cocktail of natural born sin. As much a part of him as his bones, built into a deep masculine intuition of who he was, existed a desperate need to soldier. It was what made once young and tender boys leave the teet of the bosom to answer a call of war, boys who would soon line graves by the thousands. A carnal incantation that drove men to defend the city of Rome from Hannibal and also to rape and sack the city of Cartage. A repressed proclivity for violence that the remaining polite society never would accept, a beast inside everyman that stirs when a sword is put in his hand. It was a part of himself he sometimes harnessed and sometimes lost control of. After years of desperate conflict sapped his soul Ish retreated from his potential for beastliness, he tried to retire it. Tried to live a normal life, as normal as one could after the world had ended. And yet here he was drawn back into the chaos -- Fighting a man who intended to kill him while deep in a hostile country with weather worse outside than hell could summon. He found nothing holding him back; with the lockpicker's neck sunk into the crease of his arm and the justification to cast life or death, Ish found himself feeling intensely alive, alive in a way no amount or quality of civilized living could ever muster. It was as if his eyes had retreated into the back of his head, but they had suddenly come forward and the world was made clear again.
“Fucking stop you fucks. I was going to say good luck you stupid fucking troglodytes and you try to bash my fucking head in.” The formerly crouched and formerly unconscious man said as he leaned forward and rubbed sore head.
Ish and Levy gave each other a dumfounded look as they held their respective bloodied and nearly asleep opponents in their hands. Then a klaxon started to blare.