Ecotones: Ecological Stories from the Border Between Fantasy and Science Fiction Page 10

  “Still running late.” Maggie tapped the phone in her ear. I noticed she had a bit of a bruise under her right eye, covered with makeup. I wondered what from. Asshole boyfriend? Did she like her men wild and dangerous? It was certainly none of my business.

  She cocked her head. “Want me to call him again?”

  “Forget it.” I’d have to sleep in the storage room until morning. The last bus would be leaving downtown Detroit any second. “I’ll hit the cot tonight.” Besides, it’d save me some money.

  Whoever the pipsqueak drunk was, he was lucky. He was a downtowner, could get home on a cab, without spending a good portion of his day’s wages. He could afford to get drunk.

  “That’s three times this week. Go take a nap. When Lawrence gets here, I’ll drop you off.”

  “Maggie…”

  “Reg, I insist.”

  No one called me Reg. Except her. I’m Reginald. Reginald Stratton. But she could get away with Reg.

  It was the cheerfulness, I guessed.

  Maggie let her car drive us there with abandon, setting the vehicle’s profile to aggressive and letting it weave in and out of traffic as it whined its way on. From the somewhat revised downtown, then on past the decaying warehouses and skyscrapers of the heydays, and from there into the sudden change of the nice suburbs. The ones within a short, very short, driving distance.

  I didn’t live there, though: I lived in the decay of the Wilds.

  The further into the Wilds you got, the longer it took to drive, the more gas it cost. Out where battery cars like Maggie’s and bikes couldn’t easily get to, the rougher it got. And that’s where I lived.

  It began with the abandoned tract houses. Many just slumped over, windows shattered, roofs failed or riddled with pigeons and shit. I grew up somewhere like this, a dead end an hour and a half away from any major urban center.

  A safe place, a protected space, to raise your little ones. Or so we thought back then. All the while burning your way via car to and from work. Back then. Now those artificial greens and wooden houses were abandoned, for the most part, given away for the land to reclaim as its own.

  At the very edge of the Wilds I had Maggie pull over into the driveway. I pulled out a hundred, but she shook her head. “Let’s take a look.”

  She followed me in. I wasn’t sure what this was about, but then, Maggie was the one who got to call me Reg.

  “Welcome to Casa Stratton.” I waved my hand at the three acres of vegetable gardens and the large greenhouse I’d built out of windows reclaimed from houses further into the Wilds.

  “It’s a fucking mansion,” Maggie declared.

  “House belonged to some formerly rich family, once upon a time. All the stone and brickwork stopped it from getting burned up for steam engines or winter heating.”

  “And you own it?”

  I shook my head. “Course not.” No one owned them. That would have meant paying taxes. These were abandoned, but couldn’t be purchased because no one would claim them, as that would result in having to owe backtaxes, with interest, for decades. All these buildings floated in limbo, just like the outer skyscrapers: the Slumps. Perfectly good real estate not truly owned by anyone, and thus unable to be renovated.

  I knew a lot of people who’d give their right nut to live in the close-by skyscrapers. Instead they were guarded by private security, or even on contract by Edgewater. The owners kept them from being reclaimed, but you couldn’t trace who they were. They were waiting for the good times to come back.

  Who wouldn’t kill to live closer to the urban hub? Let the megacorp farms deliver food into where you all were easily gathered? No more gardening for myself, no more hour-long commutes and most of my month’s take going into transportation costs.

  “Looks nice, though,” Maggie said. “You got an extra room, I’ll move in. But don’t get excited, this is simple business.”

  “Leaving him?”

  Maggie looked confused, then touched the bruise under her eye and laughed. “You think it’s a guy? No, it was a lot of guys. Eddies.”

  “What’d you do to piss the Eddies off?”

  “Hiding out up in a penthouse in the Slumps. They found me.”

  “Ah. So you want to couch surf me?”

  “In exchange for half the cost your bus pass, my car’s cheap to run.” She charged up the car at work, some sort of agreement with the owners. “Plus, buses are getting less and less regular. Could all quit soon enough.”

  Halving my transportation costs. Sounded harmless enough.

  I agreed and showed her a spare room. There were seven. No real trouble, other than having a pretty roommate who was entirely uninterested in me.

  Welcome to poverty homesteading, I thought. But it beat getting flushed out of the city by Edgewater. I’d made the same mistake Maggie had when I first arrived downtown, seeing an empty skyscraper as an opportunity. Fortunately I’d had enough on me to pay the Edgewater holding fee and get loose.

  Every once in a while, I wondered what happened to the homeless the Eddies rounded up who couldn’t pay.

  Later in the night, once Maggie was fast asleep, I padded out into the backyard and off into the Wilds. Survival training-wise, flitting my way through forest and suburban ruins.

  My bolthole was about two miles from my house, next to an old oak tree. Buried near a massive root, I had my whole stake in a lockbox.

  Sure, currency could devalue, but that hit everyone equally. With cash in hand and hidden, no hacker, frauder, lawyer, Edgewater flunky—or government—could get at my savings.

  Good luck finding this out in the Wilds.

  Maggie, on the way in the next morning, talked about the various cities she’d bartended her way through. Living out of the back of her car, charging up and moving on. She’d seen the East Coast, she told me. Now she was moving on through the Midwest, although she wasn’t sure how the car would do in open spaces. She was thinking about saving up for an ox. Or maybe a donkey. To pull it when power ran out, or when she couldn’t get gas to fill the generator in the back of the car.

  “Driving by day, sleeping under the stars, seeing something new every day. I don’t want to ever give it up,” she said.

  I lay slumped against the passenger window in my usual morning stupor, watching the dirty sidewalks slip past. Lotta trash was building up. Every-other-week pickups.

  But there was something new. Something I should have noticed on the bus rides in, but was too busy balancing in the aisle to see out the window and notice: people milled around the sidewalks.

  I would have said they were homeless, but they didn’t look garden variety. They were all clean-shaven, well clothed. A variety of hairstyles: punk to stiff to end-overs. A lot of them wore gray suits, others loose ponchos.

  They all sat along the street, watching traffic and life pass by. Some waved as we passed. One crouched next to a large plastic cube that was folding itself up, deflating from where it was hooked to the side of the street. Some sort of mobile tent.

  Most of them bunched up near the disused skyscrapers of the outer ring. As we hit downtown they thinned out. But we passed one last pair, sitting on folding chairs, fruit drinks in hand with little umbrellas perched off to the side.

  “Listen,” Maggie said. “You still hurting for cash?”

  “Yeah.” Two men in blue pinstripes leaned against a corner, talking into earpieces. I’d done a tour. These guys were doing recon. I’d have bet the day’s tips on it.

  What the hell was going on out in the Slumps? I needed to pay more attention to the news, because whatever it was, the Eddies would be on to it soon. If there was going to be any trouble anywhere downtown I wanted to know about it before it reached me.

  “I wasn’t just trying to sleep in that sky scraper the other night for no reason. There’s a guy, paid me a week’s worth to try and shelter in the Slumps for a night,” Maggie said. “I’d run out, couldn’t afford the hotel I was in anymore.”

  “Creepy?”
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  “Turk work. Anonymous. Some piece of software’s my second boss. I found the job on a list. Looking for people in Detroit to do stuff around the city. Random shit. Day one, I delivered a package lying out on a counter in a hotel to a bike courier ten blocks away. Then a couple days later I had to walk up to the top of some old carpark and toss some paperballs over the side. Weird stuff. Random. Paid well. Last night it was good pay to see how long I could stay in a Slump building. Some other guy, a lawyer, turking out himself probably, came and bailed me out from the Eddies. As promised, if I got caught.”

  “Job listing still up?” I asked.

  “Nah. But whoever’s running this is offering me a bonus to refer people verbally.” Maggie handed me a piece of paper with an email address of random numbers on it. One time encryption, no doubt.

  “A week’s worth?” Pay like this, and with the money Maggie was saving me, I might be able to think about a place in the city. I could ditch the house in the Wilds after Maggie inevitably moved on.

  “Week,” she confirmed.

  “That’s worth a bruised eye,” I said.

  “Damn straight.”

  Plus, it sounded harmless enough.

  I don’t know why it’s called turking. Taking a complicated task and putting it up online, divvying up the parts of a task between multiple people and paying for the results, that had been going on a long time.

  Say you needed someone to find a certain face in a crowd, if you were an Edgewater investigator. You could upload the photo of the perp you were hunting, and then upload pictures of crowds you suspected the person was in.

  Then you put the task up online and paid whoever turned in a result. Saved you time, someone else did the idiot work, and you got to focus on higher level stuff.

  But it went further than that. Suppose you had a package in Los Angeles that needed to get to New York. When I was a kid you’d go to a centralized post office, pay for stamps, and it would be taken on a special van at a certain time of day along a series of routes to an airplane, across the country with a bunch of other packages to a distribution center, and then onto more vans, to finally end up at in New York. And most of all that was run by that one company.

  Today you turked the package out. Left it at a street corner with a price embedded on the package’s tag. Someone going in the right direction would snag it and get the credit or partial credit for taking it as close to the goal as they could get it.

  But other things were also turked out. Insidious things. And you’d never know. All you were being asked to do was walk a package a couple miles from one place to another. What was in the package? None of your business. And if you opened it the tag could snag a picture of you or pass on the information you used to agree to grab the package to the owner.

  No sense doing that.

  So there was also no sense in wondering what I was complicit in when I pinged the email on the piece of paper Maggie’d given me, and got back a set of simple instructions. I was to stand on the corner not too far from an Edgewater depot, and when they left their compound, text a certain number.

  Simple enough. And with good pay. I’d make what I made in three or four night’s bartending to do this.

  Someone really wanted to know what Edgewater’s comings and going were. Not really harmless anymore. But still potentially lucrative.

  I left work early for my street turk assignment, walking my way over to the location. I stood in the hot night, wind kicking faded pieces of litter past me. Dirt flicked up, grit stinging my eyes, and the nighttime rush of the city flowed by. I had staked out a spot on the street near an alley where part of a brick wall collapsed in. No one could walk up behind me, and I had the shadows to lurk in.

  Trails of brake lights burned on the back of my retinas as cars whined past. Some even thundered past. Uncollected trash out on the sidewalk smelled rich, making the thermos of coffee I had clipped to my belt seem unappetizing.

  The Edgewater compound broke into a flurry of activity as a large armored van full of men in riot gear rolled on out, a siren burping out a staccato series of wails and screeches.

  I texted.

  Over the next eight hours I texted three more times as the streets fell into their late night rhythm of random cars, distant sirens, and the occasional cat fight that broke out near any given garbage can.

  Simple enough.

  When dawn broke over the skyline I had an hour left. I was that much closer to leaving the Wilds. And it was then I heard the click of a safety catch being released in the alley behind me.

  Impossible, but there it was.

  I had the lid cup of the thermos filled with coffee. I slowly raised both hands, the thermos cup lid hanging off my pinkie.

  The Eddies must have spotted me.

  “On the ground,” spat the voice behind me. I followed the order.

  Once I kissed the pavement, he zip-tied my hands behind me. I heard an engine gun up loudly as a vehicle whipped around the street corner. I was wrenched up to standing and tossed into the back of the armored personnel carrier that I had watched roar out of their compound all night.

  After Sudan, I’d been offered a job as an Eddie in Cleveland. By then, I’d put in enough time kicking down doors and trying to figure out if the grey-green blob inside your night vision goggles was going to shoot you or run screaming.

  In the dim light inside they shoved me up against a metal bench. Five men in full urban combat garb stared at me. With gray fatigues and night vision goggles, they were also fully kitted out to climb buildings, blow out doors, and rush in with a shoot-first-ask-questions-later sort of look to them.

  “Good morning,” said the nearest Eddie. “What have we here?”

  “He was staking us out,” said the one who’d snuck up on me.

  “You staking us out, you little concrete bunny?” The nearest Eddie, a pale-looking thin dude with a sour smell leaned in. “You related to those fuckers that’ve been setting off little bombs and running for it, just to get us to run around all night? You getting off on wasting our time?”

  Nothing I said would be helpful, but if I remained quiet, that was a problem too. They had me here in the armored carrier because they could rough me up some before getting back to the compound. They were having a long night, and now they had a target.

  Straight truth was the easiest course. No running around. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” I said. “But maybe. I got paid a good bit. Street turking. Just to stand there and text a number if you guys ran out in a hurry. I bartend at ZaZa’s, usually, but I’m out in the Wilds. They offered me good money to stand here. Bus fare’s are tight: you know the drill.”

  The nearby Eddie still looked keyed up to cause me some pain, but the Eddie standing in silhouette at the entrance to the carrier nodded. “Makes sense. Turk out the stake out, just like the guy last night. We’ll bust you, they’ll have a turked out lawyer ready and waiting. They have other turks watching this scene, if last night was any indication.”

  “Fuckers,” the sour-smelling Eddie said.

  “Take this joker to a cell and wait for bail, charge the max for loitering,” the Eddie outside said. He sounded in-charge and on-top. “Might as well see some good green for our trouble.”

  “Shit.” Sour-smelling Eddie spat something nasty and brown at my feet. “Sure about that?”

  “Dee and me will take patrol, see if we can flush out the other turks.” This Eddie looked young, and tired. He rubbed his face. Maybe he’d commanded a squad overseas, enough savvy to get noticed and promoted to running things when he got back.

  Now he probably sensed something was in the air, something that didn’t bode well for the Eddies.

  Outside Eddie shut the doors and slapped them, and the carrier lurched into gear. Sour-smelling Eddie smiled at me.

  I didn’t like him. Some people enjoyed their jobs way too much.

  This punk was probably some kid from the Midwest, one of those who seemed to think that everyone
non-white was to blame for everything that was wrong with the country since any of the various crises had hit. He took some relish in policing the city, putting certain people in their place.

  Probably had a no-immigration bumper sticker on an electric pickup cart that he drove to the compound. Even though it was mostly Canada and the Europeans trying to keep us contained in our own borders these days.

  He volunteered to steer me to my cell, and followed me in. I turned to face him. “Can I help—”

  He hit me hard in the stomach, but I’d already tensed and let my torso move with the blow. Still hurt. All this bus riding and gardening didn’t exactly keep me in peak shape. I needed to remember to work a bit harder on that. I was a bouncer, after all.

  Back a few steps, and I was ready for the next, but someone smacked the windows with the palm of their hand. “Hey! Gary. Knock that shit out.”

  The Community Management Officer of the station stood outside. CMO S. Whatten, the patch on his chest indicated. Unlike all the other head-shaved urban commandos I’d run into tonight, Whatten had a business cut going. Middle-management kind of look. A suit.

  But you could see in his posture he was command through and through. Probably served in the same fields as me. Been given a pat on the back, a gas bonus, and taken private work on his return.

  Whatten shook his head. “Gary, you lose your cut.”

  “What?” Gary looked genuinely shocked. “I helped pull this one in.”

  “He’s got a lawyer outside. If you kept going they wouldn’t be paying us permanent bail, idiot, they’d be getting a force-and-violence payout from us.” Whatten shoved Gary back. “Keep it up, Gary, keep it up and I’ll happily toss your ass out of the dorm and let you walk to work every day. See how long you last on your own two feet.” A known Edgewater walking out and around. He’d get knifed in the back before long unless he was very quick on his toes. Gary didn’t strike me as quick on his toes.

  Gary swallowed, and with a glance back at me left the room.