Novels2Search
Death and Taxes
Book 1 - Chapter 1 - It's all triage all the time.

Book 1 - Chapter 1 - It's all triage all the time.

"Why, why, why—it's all we hear from backseat analysts like you. You know why I didn't save the people in Four-C? I didn't know they were there. I have drones that do sweeps and whole teams of logistical people that feed Aldus information. Maybe their gear wasn't pinging, or they were in a safe room that killed RF. I don't know what happened, and frankly, I can't think about it too much. I can't save everyone, and I'll go mad if I beat myself up over that fact. I spent: Aldus, how much time did I spend going over my first incursion? Roughly sixty days, and remember, I'm modded, so I don't need to sleep. That's half a year of eight-hour days doing nothing but looking at mistakes and how to get better. You know why no Samurai gives you the time of day? Because there is no mistake you can find that we don't already know about. Every single one of us that cares is trying to do better, and those of us that don't care don't care. And yeah, this is going out live. Any advertisers still pumping credits into this shitshow of a podcast moving forward are going to have my AI looking through their financials for any, shall we say, discrepancies. You're so proud of the invisible hand of the market; let's see if you can stay afloat if the money only comes from legit businesses and not disinformation funds, companies selling scam products, or outright terrorist organizations. This is Red Claw signing off." On air transmission from Samurai Red Claw on the last profitable day for Roe Jorgan's popular pod cast.

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There was exactly one working elevator left in the building for everyday use. Greg the building's top handyman, said there could be two, but he was scabbing parts off the others to make sure to keep one working, and one for emergencies.

The building looked like it was leaning, but only because several of the Antithesis ships had hit the top and smashed in the outer section of the building on that side in an incursion six years ago. Several explosions near the ground had crushed in the floors on the opposite side, so it looked, at least from a great distance, like it was somewhat leaning. It was now the tallest building in the southern part of the city. A mere seven years ago the city pushed right up the reservation to the south. People paid a lot of money for the view of undeveloped land. Even now that the southwestern portion of the former United States is cooking every day, Trees had to be grown under shade, or they burned up. Life in the American south-west was unsustainable, and yet, buildings still climbed toward the sky and people who couldn't afford to leave still had to eek out a life.

A few people stepped up beside me as I waited for the elevator, but they put some distance between us moments later.

I didn’t look directly at them, but watched their poor reflections in the once mirrored doors. The images now warped and blurry in the grime.

When the door opened I entered, moved to the back, and turned around to face back out.

Six of the roughly twenty people waiting got on with me. While there was more room, the others remained.

The doors closed and there was the stutter of the elevator as it began. It didn’t matter if you pressed any buttons. The elevator stopped at floors 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 51, 62, 68, 73, and 84. You walked where you needed after that.

My office was on the seventieth floor, which I could never spell on the first try. Even my business cards had ‘70th’ which was less professional but it was what it was.

Getting off at 68 was only two floors of stairs, but they were up. Getting off on 73 meant three flights of stairs, but down. Most days, just to stay healthy, I walked up the stairs both ways. Getting off on 68 on the way to work, and later when I left in the evenings, walking up to 73 to ride the elevator back down.

Today I was the only person on the elevator at sixty-eight. I let the doors open, hold, and then close.

I got off on seventy-three and began the walk down.

The stairwell door had been removed and the elevator banks were empty. Beyond, a wall made of piecemeal metal plates welding together acted as a security area.

“You alright?” Dave shouted from behind the wall.

I nodded as I approached.

The door set into the security wall was thick metal, but short enough even I had to duck through it, and I was far from tall. It originally came from a security van or something like that.

“You alright?” Dave asked once I was through the door and he had it closed again.

“I’m not injured,” I said as I started to walk past him.

He grabbed my arm and then grimaced as he wiped his hand off with a rag he pulled from his pocket.

“I asked if you was ‘al’ight, not if you was injured,” Dave said letting a bit of his concern creep into his speech.

“Nope,” I said staring at him.

“Ah,” he said with a nod. “Anything I can do?”

I shook my head.

“Okay then boss man,” he said slowly.

I turned away from him and walked through the intersection that would open into the rest of the building's floor. I owned the whole of it, but I only used the office space directly ahead. There were offices that ringed an open area with nine desks. To my left were the kitchens which took the space of two offices. Next to them was an office with windows that were painted black. It contained the only working bathroom. It had a toilet affixed to the wall shared with the kitchen. But the room didn’t have any mirrors.

I walked into the kitchen and dumped out the coffee I’d been carrying the whole time. Why did I continue to carry it if I knew I wasn't going to drink any more?

I tossed the paper cup into the trash can.

Then stared at it.

Then I reached down and rotated the cup so that the brown of the dried blood showing a blood-free hand shape was facing down and the clean side of the cup was facing up. I looked at the back of my hand. My eyes began to travel up the suit's jacket, also brown with dried blood and gore.

Then I dropped my briefcase and almost lunged at the sink, scrubbing away at my hand and then the side of my face. The washcloth was red in no time at all.

“You sleep here?”

I didn’t answer, instead glancing away from my desk and up at the clock. It was an Alumni gift from the college, it kept shit time, so much so that I had to correct the time every morning. Still, it was free and a wind-up gear driven thing instead of needing power. When we first moved in getting solar panels or batteries into the building required getting on the same elevator every other gang, community, and office used. Over time we moved in and then suddenly, when everyone had the bare minimum, commerce and trade took over.

Now we had power wires that linked through the building in various ways where people bought and paid for power with some sort of exchange system I didn’t understand. Greg was in charge of the building and for a small fee and set up the system on my floor. When we could afford it we bought another solar panel or a battery to add to the system. We didn’t have any high-speed access to the net this high up, but the people on the ground floors did. They had lots of shade from the other buildings, so those of us higher up produced the power, and sold it to those below, who sold us access to the net, various media feeds, and supplied water.

Trash and sewage were on a more complex payment scheme but Greg and the gang that maintained the building kept everyone appraised of it.

“Hey!” Paula snapped.

I blinked at her. I’d been looking through her instead of at her.

She stepped into my office and closed the door. I imagined I could feel the temperature rising.

Offices with a view might have been the best places back in the day, or in a modern building, but in this dying one, the upper floors were the ones that received the most sun. The more sun you got the more heat, and no one had enough power to run the big AC units you needed to keep things cool.

“Guy sitting next to me on the tube took himself out,” I said. I glanced at the coat rack and she turned to take in the blood and brain covered suit.

It said something about the smell in the building that she hadn’t smelled the mess.

The Antithesis were plant based, for all their ability to run faster than humans could. But they rotted when they died just like everything else.

Some Samurai had cleared this building after the incursion killing all the xenos floor by floor. Another had swept through with some sort of bread loaf-sized machine-maggot hybrid things that spit their digestive organs out of their own bodies over biological waste and then sort of sucked it back in.

They were disgusting, but they got into all the nooks and air vents and everywhere else. They made sure there wasn’t enough xeno biomass left to start another hive. What they didn’t do was report to a centralized spot to die. Instead they died and rotted where ever. Since they were programed or trained or whatever to eat Antithesis bodies, they skipped over their brethren.

Before people moved back into the building in force, the rats and insects had. They feasted on the maggot things that had eaten the xenos and breed like rabbits. And of course the first people in the ruined and stinking building weren't too concerned about cleanliness. At that time it didn't have power, or water, or working elevators. Most of the people that arrived, came to gut the building, taking everything and anything of value. From desks and chairs to copper electrical wiring.

It's been years since the incursion and the building is slowly being reclaimed even as much of the surrounding land is still being cleared by bots and work crews. The rubble sifted and recycled and turned into new buildings in other places. In three more years, when only standing buildings show the scars of a previous incursion, this place will explode again with population. And why not, the underground power lines, sewage system, and public transport were all designed for much larger loads.

This building had been occupied when reclamation started. As they cleared, emptied, and condemned other buildings, people without any other place to go, came here. The opportunity to properly clean the place had come and gone. There was no way to get the smell out now. The whole of the building had that sickly-sweet smell of rotting meat.

“You okay?” Paula asked.

“Nope,” I said seriously.

“Was it close?” she asked dropping her bulk onto the sofa across from my desk. The sofa had been in a shipping box when I was given a tour of the floor before I bought it. Everything had still been here then. In some places it looked like people and just got up and walked out. In other places the carpet and walls had dissolved because people had died there and other things ate the waste. The sofa had likely arrived the day of the incursion, or the week of, and the guy was on vacation or something.

It was a gaudy fucking thing. Real gold around the edges, silk, and Samurai material making up the apparel. All liquid beaded up and ran off and you couldn’t stain it if you tried. It was also sinfully comfortable.

“It wasn’t close,” I lied. I’d had a hat on and it had been shot off, the angle of his weapon and my shortness combining to save my life.

“It's was what he said that's fucking me up.”

“Yeah?”

We sat in silence for a while. She didn’t ask or prod.

“He was sub-vocal at first, then got worked up so I only heard the last of it.”

She nodded.

“He said, ‘It’s all triage all the time.’”

I focused on her round face and then her small beady eyes.

Paula was the farthest thing from sexy, but she dressed like she was some sort of pin up girl. This dress showed a massive amount of cleavage and was skin tight enough it showed the rolls of flesh around her middle.

She wore real makeup, the kind you applied with brushes and spays and what not. Most women had an applicator they pressed their face into and were done in a moment.

She sometimes spent twenty minutes in the old bathroom, the one with the mirrors, applying colors and what not. Over time the collection of paints and dyes and other things had expanded into the hundreds.

“Does it feel like that? Like Triage?” her words stopped my mind from wandering. She worked with a lot of women who'd been dolls, sex workers, or raped. She was one of the best listeners I'd ever met.

I shrugged, then immediately nodded and looked away.

She wasn’t sexy, but she was smart and driven and cared about other people. I could count on two hands the number of people who actually cared about strangers.

“And that bothers you?” she prodded.

“I just didn’t realize- I didn’t have words for it until he said it. But life is just- No one can get ahead with bills because they had to buy meds or food or get to work. It’s all triage. Everyone ignores everyone else because no one can spare anything. We don’t have time to give, or credits, or, or-”

I lifted my hands and then dropped them back on my empty desk. I hadn’t even opened my briefcase.

She inhaled and then pressed herself up off the sofa. She lumbered her way around the desk and put her hand on my shoulder.

“A young man who doesn’t deserve what happened to him is going to be worse off if you miss court. It might be triage, and the people we try to help might die on our table, but we didn’t kill them, we just failed to save them. There is a difference. I sleep fine at night Freddy, you know why?”

She’d said this before.

“Because you did everything you could.”

“Cause I did everything I could,” she said. "And you do too."

She squeezed my shoulder and then waddled out past me.

She stopped in the open doorway.

“Sara’s on with an incursion in Mongolia or someplace, so we might go over bandwidth. It’s what I came to tell you. You want me to get that to the cleaners?”

“Can’t afford it,” I said seriously.

There were cleaners a dozen floors down or so but they charged more for bio-matter. I’d have to take a toothbrush to it and some hydrogen-peroxide then soak it and try to wash it by hand.

I opened the laptop that rested on the desk and began to pull the pages and pages of hard copy from my briefcase.

I’d have to switch chairs and sit on the uncomfortable one. The comfortable chair moved just slightly which fucked with the video compression and bandwidth.

Video compression had advanced like everything else but not moving helped a lot.

Who knew how many real lives would be saved or lost if Sara dropped her connection to whatever volunteer network she was helping with today.

With thirty minutes to go I pulled up the Samurai list. It was a rotating list we used for this sort of thing.

Normally Sara did this as she had an intimate knowledge of-

I switched over to email wondering if she had prepared something.

There was one from Sara, three recommended Samurai, with a suggested letter written for each one, and a suggestion to only contact an additional three from the list.

I sent the individualized letters off, and then a generic letter detailing the case and what they could do to help, to the next three Samurai on the list. I updated the list, that they were contacted and why, and it cycled them to the bottom of the list.

We’d never had a single samurai step in for a court case, but some had sent donations. One had sent a water treater to "help us continue to do good work." The thing weighed eight hundred pounds but it cleaned and processed the water for the whole building. It was one of the reasons I didn’t pay for water, sewage, or trash removal.

Mostly we received responses from the Protector AIs informing us that they had checked us out, ascertained we were legit charity organizations, and that was the only reason they weren’t nuking all our equipment, or turning off our eyes or what not.

Some Samurai responded personally but were not so polite, others took the time to patch our software and augs over the net.

Mostly the Samurai list was a Hail-Mary in a godless word.

I turned the fan on and sat the cooling pad over the back and seat of the chair. This was the only time I used it.

I slipped on my court suit and adjusted my tie while dabbing the sweat from my head.

Paula gave me a thumbs up from her desk when I got up to close the door.

Pete was leaning over his desk, a mismatched set of headphones on his head as he stared at his laptop. Pete spent all day everyday applying for grants. He was about as far on the spectrum as you could get and still functionally take public transportation.

Mark was semi-reclined in a matrix chair and jacked in. He rented the space and ran our public facing web page on both the net and in the matrix. He didn’t charge for the service and instead traded us for meat space in a secured location.

Sara was hidden behind the six different sized monitors on her desk. I knew she would have her headphones on and be sub-vocalizing in one of several different languages. Or possibly multiple languages depending on who she was talking to.

I closed the door. For the next thirty-three minutes, all the time the court had given me to argue my case, the only thing that mattered was getting Garbo-movers to pay for Cedric Wilkin’s prosthetic arm.

I’d start by trying to get medical paid and ambulance and lost wages, but if they offered to settle for a functional arm, I’d take it.

Exactly thirty-three minutes later the main portion of the screen went dark and the small picture-in-picture grew.

“So what’s that mean?” Mrs. Wilkin asked.

I took a deep breath and exhaled.

I sub-vocalized knowing my audio software would superimpose my voice. It was a conscious choice to strip out any emotion.

“They are asking the court to-”

“They said counter-sue!” she interrupted.

“And I asked if you were on any drugs at the time.”

“I weren’t-” he said seriously, “Hadn’t done a thing since the night before.” Cedric said. I did not rub at my eyes or temples.

“Well it showed up in the blood work and-”

“They are suing us?” she asked. “After they cut his fucking arm up?”

“They are claiming that-”

“I knew this was stupid!” Cedric shouted.

She slapped the back of his head and almost shot him out of the chair he was sitting in.

“You listen here!” she said pointing at the camera, “they come after us and I’m sending my boys to where ever your fancy office is and-”

“You won’t need to do that. As I was saying-”

“You was saying you’d get him a fucking arm!” she snapped.

Ten minutes later they had hung up.

I wrote up my notes from the court case, and then wrote an email to my client informing them where we stood with the case.

Then I closed the laptop and leaned back.

I gave myself a two hundred count of sitting in the fan’s air stream and on the cooling pad before I got up.

I took off the court suit and hung it up and then dressed in my sweats.

I put the cooling pad and fan away and switched chairs.

Then I got out the next case.

Malnutrition in a care facility. Six dead residents as of yesterday with two more in critical care.

I opened the office door and then paused.

Paula was talking calmly but her fingers were flying over a keyboard that wasn’t there, her wrists resting on a pad.

I got a brief look at Sara in profile as I circled the room. She was our youngest resident. Her hair was pulled back into a high pony tail and today she had chrome cheekbones and a chrome chin cap.

In truth she been raised in a Samurai worshiping cult. Most of those embraced the machine-god as the kids called it. Hers ‘respected the flesh’ or whatever. The chrome bits were cosmetic. Mark had a full set of augs that let him deep dive, but those were all at the base of his brain. Dave was the only one of us who looked like he lived in the building at all. His single piece of chrome was an industrial sized, and strength, arm.

As scary as the arm was it was the shotgun that people respected. Some sort of Samurai kit he'd earned the legit way. Knee-deep in an incursion he'd been holed up with a bunch of other factory workers. Some Samurai had showed up, wasted everything, told them where to run, and left. The Samurai had upgraded through three different weapons during the fight and left the others laying there when he took of. Dave picked up the shotgun and that was that.

Sara, for having grown up in a Samurai cult, was somehow the least chromed of any of us. She had only single ocular implant and that was only so she could interact with society, the feeds. and every other piece of modern technology.

The screens in front of her were filled with information I couldn’t follow. Three held maps of various areas with overlays of red and green and blue.

There were profiles pulled up on others and notes she would be adding to, or sharing with others.

The profiles flicked as needed to better show her information. Which private military contractors, PMCs, she was dealing with, as well as the Samurais on site.

As knowledgeable as she was, she had never spoken to a Samurai in the field.

“It would be selfish,” she said once, “to take their time. Better to inform their AI and allow them to choose what to do with the information, if anything."

Paula explained that it was the older more experienced Operators that actually spoke with the Samurai that requested someone to speak to.

Sometimes she was on monitoring duty, where she watched what the Samurai where doing and tried to keep the PMC and civilian networks informed. Samurai weren’t always the best at informing others of what they were planning.

They might spray a section of city down with acid and give zero thought that there were storm water drains there and people using the tunnels to escape.

One time, during an incursion on a beach somewhere she’d been singled out and thanked. The Samurai had thanked all the volunteers, especially the one who spotted the antitheses that had hitched a ride on a train that had been moving through the area at the very beginning of the incursion.

She’d spotted what she thought was an oddity on a train car in a grainy video where it was on screen for less than a single second.

She’d possibly stopped a hive from forming somewhere along the route wherever it dropped off.

She’d smiled that smile of hers for a week afterward.

I dreaded the day her optimism wore out. I don’t know if it was her youth or the bliss that is the ignorance of religion, but she was always sure that something could be done and that something could be learned.

Work progressed. I had three more court appearances before noon.

The sun shifted around after that and the office really began to cook.

My one-fourteen appointment was in a Reservation court. The judge heard our pleas and did a summary judgment for my client as well as a fine for bringing it to trial.

The corpo lawyer told him to fuck off in lawyer speak as they were not based in the jurisdiction and his appearance was a courtesy.

I send the judge the list of suppliers that used rez roads and cargo-transfer stations on the automated rail lines.

The judge informed him of those supply lines and there was a short recess where the judge charged him forty thousand credits a minute for the delay.

Six minutes later he was back on line with a plea deal, which I rejected.

I rejected the second and made a counter offer on the third. The judge attached some fines to it and the case was closed, pending payment. I didn’t get a chance to see the fines attached to delayed payment because the credits were in our accounts a moment later. Case closed, and with a larger pay out that I had expected.

I didn’t have too much time to celebrate the win because my next case was four minutes later. The client threatened the judge’s children by name and the connection to the holding facility was cut.

My client was then tried in absentia and I did my best, but there was nothing I could do at that point.

The building alarm went off and the red light on the ceiling began to flash.

I glanced at the clock.

4:54 PM

The clock was off more than normal. It normally read 4:57 for the 5:00 monthly alarm test.

I turned on my aug’s interface and blinked at the stomach twisting augmented reality interface that appeared. I really did need to upgrade. My implant was a decade old. In tech terms it should have died the death of a thousand exploitable hacks by now. Normally a product was supported for three years, maybe four if you got something top of the line. Then it was a free for all and all the hackers, advertisements, and exploits forced you to upgrade.

There were multi-billion credit class action litigation because popular augs had been caught giving away exploitable loop holes when their hardware left the support window, forcing owners to upgrade. From the ancient times of iphones to the modern hover cars, if it was still profitable to tank hardware when the next version was released, companies would continue to do it.

We’d been lucky in that a Samurai’s AI had patched all our augs one afternoon on a whim as we begged for help with this or that case.

The time on my augs read 4:57 PM. What made my stomach drop though was that the date said it was the thirtieth, not the first. Did Greg run the drill one day too early? No. Thirty-one days this month. Two days to early? That didn't seem-

My office door slammed open. Paula’s face was just as painted as ever but her neck was pale with blood loss and panic.

“Greg confirmed it’s a city-wide alarm. Waiting to hear from-”

She paused, here eyes glossing in that way they did when reading something from her system.

“Roof top observation has confirmed rift sightings.”

“Not a drill.” I said. I don’t know if it came out as a question but Paula repeated, “Not a drill.”

“Right.” I said taking a moment I didn’t have.

“Lists!” I almost shouted.

Paula nodded and we split away. My list was in the top drawer under everything else. I clawed it up and then looked over it briefly. It was printed on plastic sleeve instead of paper with instructions on one side and two smaller maps on the other side.

1 Upload off site with CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+J+F7

2 Extract Mark from Matrix. There is a hard power off under the orange fan vent.

3 Close breakers 7 and 9 in the old bathroom. (provides unrestricted battery access to the building.)

4 Take Ready Packs from READY cabinet.

4A Thermite charges

4B MEDIPACK

4C Samurai Logistic Radios

4D Pistol + ammo

4E Maps

4F Tactical extraction beacon / F.I.N.D.M.E.

5 Extract to basement

5A Hold Door Closed Button to cause elevator to skip stopping at other floors and go straight to basement. (Only works with 800+ pounds and building incursion alarm active.)

6 Cross over to Douglas street station.

7 Walk service walkway to Alice Ave Station.

7A Cut locks with bolt cutter or melt with thermite.

7B Circuit breaker 14 in SUPERVISOR office will turn on lights over track and service walkway.

8 Take storm sewer drainage tunnels to Gila River Evacuation point.

I started the laptop upload. The screen went black displaying a single progress bar. I left it on and plugged in. Paula was helping a very disorientated Mark sit up.

I made my way to the old bathroom. The breakers were behind the new lockers!

Fuck.

I opened one of the lockers and then grabbed the sheet metal edge and pulled.

“Shit!” I swore as the thin metal cut into my fingers.

I used one of the pieces of clothing hanging in the locker as a buffer and pulled twice more. Each time shifted the locker a bit farther out from the wall.

“You got the breakers?” Paula yelled behind me.

“Yes!” I shouted.

I felt something shift in my back and I swore again. Now was not the time to be injuring myself.

I stood up carefully from my crouched over position. Nothing twinged or pulled.

“Let me get that,” Dave said as he all but shouldered me aside.

His industrial prosthetic hand grabbed the side of the locker assembly and ripped through it like it was wet tissue paper. He still had to pull, but he was in his late twenties, not early forties. I stood there like an idiot until I realized I could be helping.

I tried getting behind him and helping but I just got in the way.

Again I stood there.

Just when I realized I could move on to other tasks instead of doing nothing, he asked, “What we moving this for?”

By the time I had located the breakers on the list with the intention of telling him which to flip, he had the lockers moved out of the way.

I slipped past, opened the breaker box and flipped the breakers.

“Ready packs,” I said after consulting the list again. I couldn’t seem to keep more than a single task in my mind at a time.

Pete wasn’t here when we made the list and it was clear Paula was having issues getting through to him that we had to go. She’d already closed his laptop, but he was sitting there calmly trying to explain to her that he didn’t leave until six-nineteen so that he could make the seven-oh-two train.

“Paula,” I said, and it was far more calm than I felt, “Take Dave, get the packs.”

“Right,” she said leaving Pete to me.

I stood there scrolling through my emails and trying the unreliable search function to find what I needed.

I thought I had it three different times.

I was aware of Paula, Dave, and Mark checking the gear in the cheap backpacks. I saw them slipping shirts over their heads and remembered that we’d added bullet proof vests to the packs. Something else we hadn’t updated on the list.

There it was.

I clicked the thing, then looked at Pete. No change. He was just staring at me.

I clicked again and he said, “They are changing my room again!”

The system bounced an email to his building which bounced one to him informing him he had to change rooms. It was about the only thing that could get him to break his routine.

He was standing.

“You have to follow us,” I said to Pete, “we will get you on the correct train because you don’t know the schedule.”

I grabbed his hand and he followed me over to the table.

I realized as we arrived that of course their weren't enough packs. We’d added people to the floor after Sara had started the READY plan.

Mark, Paula, and Dave had the backpacks on.

“Won’t fit me,” Paula said as she pushed the bullet proof chest sleeve over towards me.

I knew she was nervous as fuck if she wasn’t making a fat joke about it.

“They just have them in kiddie sizes I guess,” she added and I let out a nervous laugh.

“Pete arms up. Put this on.” I’d at least try. If he didn’t-

He did. I Velcro-ed it around his body.

Right.

Take this,” Dave said sliding the small pistol, holster and belt across the table.

“I got Betty,” he said indicating the large chromed out shotgun.

The belt wasn’t even a belt. It was a sort of long ribbon meant to be rolled up and stored. The gun was barely stamped sheet metal and the magazines held only nine rounds.

The belt thing was twisted I was sure, but I got it through the compression buckle and pulled it tight.

I checked the list.

“Alright. Stay together. Dave feel free to shout that we know a safe underground route to an extraction point once we get with others. Let’s move.”

“It was a nice speech,” Paula said a moment later as we all stood waiting at the elevator banks.

Mark let out a small hiccup of a laugh and I smiled.

Normally it would be-

“Where the fuck is Sara?” I snapped.

“She went down already?” Dave said.

“There should have been four packs. And her club thing wasn’t in the cabinet,” Paula said.

“It was open when we got to it,” Mark added.

“So she left first?” Dave asked.

He had the loop of the Samurai Logistic Radio looped over his wrist.

I grabbed it and held it up staring at it.

“She wouldn’t run-” Paula began when the doors opened.

“Get on!” I snapped. There was room. There wouldn’t be soonish. Even with so few floors above us once they finished panicking the elevators would be full for twenty minutes at least.

“Get skinny. We know a way through the underground to the Gila River extraction!” I shouted into the elevator as I pushed my people on.

I pulled at Dave’s wrist while trying to push them all into the elevator.

He understood and helped get the radio off just before the doors closed.

“Hold the Closed button and you will express all the way down!” I shouted into the elevator. I’m not sure how many people remembered that.

The door closed and the semi-reflective image of myself in the door’s weathered surface looked fucking terrified.

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