Let me know what you think of this. The city has a soul, no matter how hard it tries to fight the fact. The streets full of pits and cracks, storefronts with glass so caked in dust that the holes in them are like cavities in rust-stained teeth, sleep in the shimmering heat of the day like lazy scorpions. But that isn’t the soul of the city, not all of it. Those storefronts were alive once. Once, they’d shone in the sun, but the sun didn’t reach them anymore. Street level in the city, people don’t live here now. Oh, not that it’s uninhabited – the law just doesn’t call the inhabitants people unless it has no other choice. There are high-rises blocking the sun from those storefronts, and that’s where the bona fide people are. Wide, walled-in and air conditioned catwalks connect those high-rises, and an elevated rail connects the high-rises in this part of the city with their cousins in the other districts. Executives, managers, technicians, those with skills, those are the people. The rest, well they’re down here with me. That’s the soul of the city. I don’t know if Fritz Lang would be happy or horrified, and on any given day I’m too busy dodging death and taxes to really care. The city had started over up there. They called it The Great Regression, and maybe for them it was great. Everybody knows the history, but nobody paid any attention. Back in 2012, they finally tried the whole American Union business – not just North, the whole ball of wax. Well, the conspiracy nuts had been right. The economy here collapsed like a drunk at the end of a long weekend. President Oakley ate a bullet – some say an assassin’s, some say her own. The Liquidation took care of the rest of the politicians. Oh, they got to keep working, but they did it with all their assets frozen. Most people don’t know it, but they were supposed to get those assets back at the end of their terms of office. Well, they never did, and nobody except them much cared. The fences went up in the south and in the north, too, I guess just to be fair about it. The boys who had been piddling around in the middle east got called home and put on those fences – sure, north and south both – and told to piddle around here instead. Central and South America didn’t really mind, they’d hauled away half of what was worth taking by then anyway. Oasis Valley, back when maps still called it Phoenix and a cluster of suburbs – Tempe, Scottsdale, Mesa, Glendale, Gilbert and the rest – hadn’t had the hardest time making the change and it hadn’t taken the longest. People joked that it had never really left the mid 20th century in the first place. Oh, it’s a decent enough place if you don’t mind the occasional shooting or stabbing taking place in a giant barbecue pit. You take the work you can get, especially when your total assets amount to a boat that never goes anywhere on a man made lake, moored to a slip of dock you hold onto with squatter’s rights and a gun that gets fed more ammunition than you get food. That’s the history lesson. There are markets here and there reclaimed from disarray and stocked with goods stolen off trucks out on the freeway, or if you like your shopping adventurous you can try to cross the border and get more exotic stuff from Mexico. Families in apartments and houses try to imitate civilized life. But we don’t get the internet down here, no land line telephone or cable service. They send technicians and engineers down to go over power and sewer systems just to keep from having to smell us wafting up at them, and I guess that’s something. There are workarounds for the rest, some more shady than others. The roof of my office is shingled with solar arrays, the payout from a favor I did for a wealthy widow in the Camelback District a few months back. She had a sweet tooth and I guess I looked like sugar to her. Well, she got what she wanted and I got a way to keep the office cool by day and lit by night. I keyed the office lights on with the remote in my hand, then opened the door and shouldered an armload of groceries whose labels were all in Spanish only inside and over to the cramped kitchenette. I didn’t see the woman on my futon until she spoke up and I turned around to see who was about to get shot. “Hello.” she was seven feet of legs and righteously proportionate curves wrapped in bronze skin and topped off with a green eyed smile that would’ve made the Cheshire Cat nervous in a face so gorgeous the Pope would go out and buy condoms just to negotiate a long stare. The smile flashed at me under long, curly hair the color of melted chocolate. The way she was draped over the couch must’ve made the couch happier than it had been in years. The little black one-piece dress looked like it was trying to hold on for dear life, and a pair of completely unnecessary six inch lexan heels complete with wide black leather straps crisscrossing up her overdeveloped calves told me she wouldn’t settle for all of it when twice her share would do. “I need to have a talk with my locksmith.” I turned back and finished putting the groceries away. “What do I call you when the cops ask?” I could feel her blink at me, and then the temperature went up a little. The smile must have grown. “You can call me Lady.” I took another look over my shoulder just in time to see her cross one leg over the other. “Not dressed like that, I can’t.” “And there’s no need for the militia. Don’t be unfriendly.” “It’s the best you get for free. What do you want?” “You’re Rocky Dylan.” She said it like it was a fact. A long time ago it had been. “Not since I was eight years old.” She gave the couch a break and slithered toward me like a seven and a half foot housecat in heat, and that made me nervous enough to open my jacket and let her see the butt of Miss Cleo. She veered off by a few degrees and turned the smile down a notch. “I have a job for you, Mr. Dylan.” “All right, you’re gaining traction.” I leaned back against the refrigerator and took out a cigarette. She lit it. I didn’t miss the symbolism, but I didn’t say anything. “You gonna tell me about it, or is my couch gonna be the happiest thing in this room?” “There’s a man in the Juacheca District, street level. That shouldn’t bother you.” She gave me a knowing look and put her lighter back into the side pocket of her dress, then smoothed a long-nailed fingertip down the magnetic closure to make the pocket disappear again. “I guess it bothers you.” I looked up at her. Lit from below by the hooded light over my stove, her face was a lot more worried and a lot less impressive. Oh, she was hot enough to stop pulses, all right, but the narrow-spectrum lighting showed me faint lines under her chin and I wondered how much of the organic woman was left in the cluster of implants and maybe cybernetics. Then the height made sense: acromegaly. Gigantism, with the usual attendant deformities corrected by highly skilled surgeons. “What are you doing down here?” I asked her. “You’re one of the real people.” “That’s my business.” she said in a voice that wasn’t all velvet smoke anymore. It was all cold talk now, and I told her that suited me a lot better. “Your business is to take a message to the man I told you about.” Her hand slipped into the other side pocket and brought out a sealed carbon fiber envelope with a silver magnetic stripe on the back that sported a GPS tag at one end. “All right.” I looked it over. No sign of a name, no address, just a flat black flank on both sides, except for that silver stripe. “You’ll know when he gets it.” “And when he does,” she leaned against the wall and fixed me with an expression I couldn’t read exactly through the haze her curves were putting up. “You’ll get five hundred.” “Suppose I have expenses on the way?” Five hundred didn’t used to be a lot of money, but after the economy got dialed back a hundred years, a man who earned fifty a day was well off. Even executive salaries were capped at a hundred thousand a year. This dame was offering me serious loot for any job short of killing. Either she was joking or I was in for a bad time. “Check your PayTab.” Her hands hadn’t moved. I took my reader from my pocket and fired it up. Sure enough, two hundred was sitting on my available balance that hadn’t been there the last time I’d looked. In the Memo field was a name, Taz Estrada. “Estrada. That’s who the message is for?” She nodded. I put the reader away. “You’re wired.” I wouldn’t have seen the silver dollar sized flattened dome antenna at the base of her skull, not under that mane of brown hair. I didn’t have to; there was no other way she could have done the transaction without a handheld reader. It worried me that she knew my account ID, though. “I hoped you’d figure that out.” “So why don’t you deliver the message?” “The man’s a ‘phobe. He won’t touch a core. Not in his head, not even in his hand. He’s a lot harder to find than you were.” She looked disgusted, like she’d just bit into a doughnut and got a mouthful of rat. “Smart man.” I said, just to see if her scowl could get deeper without breaking something. “I don’t think I like you much.” “That should keep things honest.” I pocketed the envelope. It was thick and heavy, and felt like a quarter pound of papers nobody wanted to read. She headed back toward the front door, plucking a black coat that looked like silk and probably wasn’t from the chair beside the door. “You’d better go now, Mr. Dylan. The sooner that message gets to him, the sooner you get your five hundred dollars.” At least the sun was down, but it was still hot enough to make the thermometer sweat all the way around the clock. I would have liked to take the count of beers in the refrigerator down by one, but the bakshish that kept the militia off me about the dock space was behind and I was anxious to get it out of the way. So instead of a beer, I grabbed my hat, plugged in my coat for about five minutes to recharge the cooling panels in it and spent that five minutes staring at the envelope. It didn’t have any more to say then than it did when my amazon client handed it to me, so I took out my reader and checked the rail schedule. That’s when I heard my front door open. “Don’t get up.” All the things my client was, this guy wasn’t. He was bald on top with a face like a coat of cookie dough on a head like a baked potato, and he was about as short as a man gets without a nickname like Junior getting attached in a suit too big on length and too small around his middle. But the cannon in his pudgy fist made it all come out even. “And drop the .45 in the the shoulder rig on the floor and kick it this way.” I moved the reader back toward my hip pocket, but he didn’t like that idea, I guess, because he thumbed the hammer back on his piece. So I put the reader on my desk like that’s what I’d had in mind the whole time. “I’m tired. You have something in mind for that gun or are we just having a really exciting sleepover?” I unstrapped Miss Cleo and nudged her at him with my toe. “That’s a good boy. That’s just what I got in mind.” his voice matched his face. He sounded like a guy trying to talk around a mouthful of oatmeal. “You’re gonna give me the envelope the girl passed you. Then we’re gonna sit right here until morning.” “Suppose I’ve got cabin fever?” “I got the cure, cowboy.” He hefted the gun a little. “Where’d you put the envelope?” “It’s in the desk,” I lied and reached for the drawer. There’s unpaid bills from five years ago in there. He didn’t know that. “Back up!” He flicked the barrel toward the right and I got up out of the chair nice and slow, then took a few steps back while he went to the drawer and pulled it open. He was just like I figured him – a sucker. I reached back and snagged the lamp off the dresser behind me, covered the distance between us just as he turned to see what the noise was and brought it down on his shiny scalp with a shoulder and hip’s worth of momentum behind it. He folded up like the want ads.
(continued) I lifted the novice heavy’s gun and wallet, then cuffed his wrists to the armrest of the chair before I locked up and left. The cannon went in the lake, the wallet into my coat pocket. I had some questions for Dough Face, but they’d wait. The militia’s rent was first in line for my attention and the long drink of hot sauce that brought the answer to that was a close second. The Mill Avenue access elevator has a sultry female voice to it that draws lonely teenage boys out of their houses while their parents are sleeping. You don’t want to know what they spend the morning hours doing about it. Personally, I can’t stand that voice. No machine ought to sound like that. “Please press any key to transmit authentication.” it suggested. I didn’t need to take the reader out of my pocket for that, just reached in and pressed the Home key, the only physical key on the thing. The red light beside the door flipped over to green. “Good evening, Rock. How many occupants?” “Just me, Betty.” I had now authenticated my voiceprint and the core inside the elevator system was analyzing it for signs of duress as well as sampling the background noise and sweeping its electronic eyes over the surroundings, all the way up from infrared to ultraviolet, to verify that I was in fact the only one approaching the elevator car. “Thank you, Rock.” it cooed again. “Please enter the car and place your hand on the railing to begin transport.” I did. The lights flicked from soft white to harsh red and the voice changed. Now it sounded like an old-fashioned police dispatcher. “Rockford James Dylan, you are in possession of a Kimber-Colt Custom Law Enforcement Operator Model 1911A3 .45 caliber handgun. Scan indicates that the weapon is loaded.” “Tell me something I don’t know.” It paused for a fraction of a second. “Please rephrase your last statement.” “Never mind, Betty. Validate license number AZOV725295A.” Every time I have to go up for a job, I have to go through this. But at least I have the license, which was all that was holding the door open and the chloroform in the car’s vents. The lights flipped back to dove white and the voice went back to sounding like a stripper with rent coming up. “License verified.” the machine pouted. “Twenty four hour inspection pass granted.” The door hissed shut and I put my hand on the rail like a good soldier, and up we went. * * * I try to use the rail as seldom as possible. The cars are bright on the inside, all polished chrome and red leather and the smell of coffee. The thing you don’t get on the street is all up top: civilization. Not bad civilization, either, if you feel like walking around choking on a throat full of bruised ethics. The services girl came by and I gave her a buck and a quarter for a pack of Lucky Strikes, then shook one out and took a hit off the digital cigarette. The girl flashed an unnaturally bright smile and a naturally tanned leg and continued past me. I couldn’t help but admire the view, then turned my eyes to the one out the “window.” It showed a Phoenix skyline that hadn’t existed for eighty years. Every five minutes it would dissolve to a room of happy people who swore up and down that that view was on its way back thanks to the Oasis Valley Planning Commission in cooperation with ArchiTech and the West American Confederation government. I doubted they’d checked with the people who already lived down there to see what our feelings were on it. Then again, maybe they had and I’d missed the meeting. It was a new worry, but it could get in line. The car eased to a halt and the doors opened onto the Juacheca Terminal. And ‘terminal’ was a pretty apt description. The place was dead empty. Just as there are different qualities of life at street-level, there are up in civilization, too, and the correlation was pretty close. It wasn’t dirty, it just got about as much use as a condom machine in the Vatican, and after fifteen minutes in the subliminally perfumed air of the rail, you could pick up the scent of the dust and mold in the circulation systems real easy. Even up here, this was the bad part of town. I stepped into the elevator – no voice this time. No barriers to people getting out of the clean world upstairs, just to getting in. The doors opened onto a mess. Unlike in the University District, where the militia likes to keep things as clean and orderly as possible, you can only tell the militia from the outlaws in Juacheca by the ones who can actually aim a gun. Litter blew down a darkened street. Above, rail terminal’s floodlights had been shot out. A hot gust carried the metallic tang of oncoming rain, so I turned up my collar and swore at myself under my breath for not looking at the forecast at home and putting on a hat. My reader buzzed in my coat pocket, so I hung back in the brightness of the elevator and let the doors shut. Something buzzed at me from overhead and I looked up to see that there was a bullet-hole in Betty’s speaker, probably put there by an outlaw before she’d gassed him out and the militia’d got him. Or maybe it was one of the militamen themselves. “Your voice is out, Betty. I need sixty seconds sanctuary. Dim the lights if you understand and agree.” Something clicked a few times in the broken grille. But the lights dimmed. My reader’s alert light flashed in the dimness as I took it out of my pocket. I keyed the screen on and a line of text faded up: 718 South Alma School #32 No signature. No header. No originating address. But it could only have been from my amazon client. I put the reader to sleep and slipped it back into my pocket next to the envelope. “Thank you, Betty. Please keep the lights dimmed and open the doors.” They slid open with a hiss and there was more crackling from the smashed speakers. Stupid machine. I did a left to right lookaround when I stepped onto the crowded concrete. The party was in full swing, but not all of the guests were having a good time. They had a girl in the middle of them, and by the look of her torn blouse and their blue-black short-sleeved shirts, they were lucky nobody had a camera. Or a real justice system. These were what passed for cops down here. They got a little nervous when they saw me, and then a little turned to a lot when they noticed the elevator doors sliding shut behind me. Two of them held the girl while a third detached himself from the party and sauntered over to me like a furniture salesman. “Got a problem, bro?” He was a big guy, six foot two to my five foot eight and the kind of wide most people don’t want to take a solid punch from. I wasn’t impressed. “I didn’t come with one, but if you’re handing them out I won’t be rude.” A confused look flashed across his face. It could have gone fifty-fifty about then. Half of them laugh and fade, half of them don’t like getting rocked on their mental heels because they can’t come back. He was the wrong half. “Is that supposed to scare me?” His expression dropped into a low-gear grin. I shrugged. “I don’t care whether you’re scared or not.” He’d already made up his mind he was going to take a poke at me. I could see it in the way his eyes started darting up and down. He was trying to read my body language, and he was doing an amateur job. He led with his left in a straight jab up at my chin, which was probably the smartest move he could have made. But it wasn’t one I didn’t see coming. I stepped into it with my right shoulder and my left foot planted. Sure, it hurt like hell, but all he got out of it was a shove backward that he put most of the work into. I would have warned him to stop then, but there was no point. When a big guy picks a fight with a smaller guy, he puts both fists and all his ego into it, and there’s no stopping him with words, only bullets. He came back with an enraged, looping right hook. I slid under it and inside, my left arm driving straight up into his right while my whole right side slammed into his middle. The lift merged with the body-check and sent him spinning to his hands and knees facing his friends. Now it was serious. His cronies cut loose of the girl and she tore off into the night like a car alarm on two feet until her brains caught up with her at the end of the block and she stopped letting the world know where to find her. They still had their guns holstered. They were only two-thirds his size but with all the dumb and twice the ugly. “You’re dead, little man!” he shrieked up at me over his shoulder. His voice was high-pitched and hysterical. “You’re fuckin’ dead!” He scrambled to get up, but Miss Cleo was in my hand before he made it. His two friends froze for a second before their hands started groping at the leather on their hips. Gunshots without hearing protection are deafening. In a semi-enclosed concrete structure, they’re damned painful. The two navy-shirted boys looked like they’d never been shot before. One of them actually managed to get his gun into his hand before I put a bullet into his biceps. I didn’t want to bruise my ear drums again, but I couldn’t take any chances. I aimed at the talker’s right ass cheek and let another punishing thunderclap echo off the walls, then kicked him onto his left side and took his gun. The one who had managed to get a grip on his piece locked eyes with me and dropped it. I looked the three weapons over in the elevator: a .38 revolver that must have been a family heirloom and hadn’t been fired in over forty years, a 10 millimeter and a .45. I emptied and stripped the semiautos, dropped them and the ammunition from the 10 on the elevator floor and sent it up. The bullets from the .45 and the revolver were mine now. “Betty, send the following text to Camelback Police Department, attention Captain Pryan Cambpell: Attempted 1075 at Alma School Rail Terminal, shots fired, three suspects down. Send medics. No signature. Flash the lights once if you got all that.” She flashed the lights.
My guess is that this either really sucks, or it's so awesome that y'all's fingers go numb and nerveless when it comes time to pipe up.
space your paragraphs... its easier to read and not slip into skimming the narrative. What I did read through though seems like the makings of a decent pulp story were not for the constant use of similes. Sometimes they just seem completely extraneous... like a school kid trying to stretch an essay out to 2000 words.
