Amped (29 page)

“Back,” I say to Big. “Stay the fuck back and I let him breathe.”

Little’s nightstick clatters to the ground.

Big considers, looking curiously at the twisted snarl on the face of his colleague. I’m breathing hard, but Little isn’t making a sound. He’s just turning a bright shade of red, eyes squeezed closed. The seconds seem like minutes to me. And they probably
seem like hours to Mister “I’m quickly suffocating to death” here, his sweaty head wedged under my arm.

“All right,” says Big, flashing me his black-gloved palms. “Take it easy, fella.”

“I am willing to crush his windpipe,” I say, staring at Big with what I hope is a stern face. I relax the chain across Little’s neck. Just enough so he can take a ragged breath.

“Uncuff me,” I say to Little.

Little’s breathing sounds like gravel being sucked through a straw. He responds sluggishly, fumbles for his keys. I never lift the cold chain from his Adam’s apple, and I never take my eyes off Big.

Click.

My handcuffs are undone. The chain drops from Little’s neck and slithers away, coiling on the desk. For a split second, nothing happens. Then Little yanks his head up and Big dives forward.

And faster than my brain can process light, those blue lines blink back into existence. Luminous guardrails guiding me toward survival. Just stay on the road, Gray, and you’ll live through this.

Two arrowed vector lines shoot away from Little’s rib cage. As he drags himself up, back facing me, I reach down and smoothly unfasten his body armor. I yank it up from behind and dump the rear portion over his head. As he staggers forward under the weight of those heavy ceramic plates, I snatch his cuffs out of his belt.

Big charges forward and shoves the flailing Little out of the way, onto the desk. He’s too massive to stop. A rhino. Big brings down that nightstick toward my head with both hands like it was a battle-ax, but I’ve got the cuffs up and waiting. The stick lands between the cuffs and I pull them down toward me and twist the nightstick out of his hands. It hits the ground, clanging like a tire iron. Big lunges at me with his hands, and I pivot away and snap
one of the cuffs onto his wrist. The other end I snap onto an ammo loop on Little’s body armor.

I dart out of the room. As the solid door swings closed behind me, it cuts off the bellowing of the two guards. I stand in the hallway for a few tense seconds, listening to myself breathe and feeling the storm coursing through the jail walls. I’ve done the thing I said I would never do.

I’ve woken up the beast inside my head.

Now it whispers to me in fans of blue light. In glowing mountain ridges of probability erupting from the walls and floor. Schematics of similar detention facilities. Blind spots. Routes and patterns.

I was wrong before. The beast is not silent. It speaks through my actions.

Turns out, the beast says, you
can
hurt somebody with your brain. In fact, you can fuck a person up pretty severely and steal supplies and sneak out of a perfectly secure detention facility—if you’ve got an okay grasp on the physics of it.

And I most certainly do.

“Think you’re superior to me?” jeers the dirty-faced homeless guy. “What do you carry, sir? Why are you so
clean
?”

My stomach clenches in on itself. This squirrelly little man came out of nowhere. Outside the federal detention center, I climbed down to the highway next to the river. Under seething skies, I crept along the riverbank until I was out of downtown. Stole clothes from a backyard. Crawled under a bush and wrapped my knees in my arms. It took thirty minutes of teeth-gritting concentration to come up from level five. Eventually, I fell asleep with the trash and leaves.
Somewhere along the line, I ended up in the neighborhood of Polish Hill.

Tattered relocation posters are plastered everywhere. A whole lot has happened in the weeks I spent locked up. Lives have changed forever. It’s hard to grasp the fact that we have always been one executive order away from this.

Most of the row houses here are boarded up in plywood and squeezed together suffocatingly close. Each house split from its neighbor by a narrow three-story-tall slat of darkness. The bum must have been crouched in the gap-toothed void between abandoned homes. Hiding. Or waiting.

The amps who lived here have now been sequestered away like a virus, cut out of the heart of the city and dropped in a petri dish so they can’t infect the rest of the population. Traumatic surgery, leaving this hemorrhaging hole in the center of the neighborhood.
Buildings, whole blocks, collapsing in on themselves without enough occupants inside to give them a purpose.

The hobo jabs a stubby finger at my temple and throws words like rocks. “I said what’re you
endowed
with, buddy? What foul gadgetry yet lingers in your nog? What’s your
frequency
?”

He creeps closer, hisses, “Are you with me or against me?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I sputter. My hands rise up defensively, awkwardly filling the space between us. But the blue-eyed squirrel man bobs just out of reach.

The little guy is an amp, I realize. A nodule perches on his temple like a cancerous mole. He is standing too close to me, his lips moving too fast. His eyes are too pale—a clear, disturbing blueness that somehow floats apart from his dirt-smeared face.

“With me? Or
against
me
?” he shouts at my face.
“With me or against me!”

He’s loud and shrill and he moves too fast, but he’s an amp. My own kind. So I take two steps back and I put out my hand. “I’m Owen,” I say.

A sudden smile breaks out on the man’s face. He dives forward and grabs my hand in both of his. Shakes it up and down with gusto. It’s like nobody has shaken this man’s hand for years.

“Peregrine,” he says. “Name’s Peregrine, friend. But I’ve adopted the simple moniker of Perry on account of the laziness of idiots and impertinence of the fools who infest this burgh like a swarm of lice-ridden plague rats.”

“Okay,” I respond, gently pulling my arm back. Perry focuses intensely on my face and speaks in rapid-fire bursts. His sentences are studded with ten-dollar words.

“You’ll notice I’m loquacious and you’ll rightly surmise it’s on account of this medical implant lodged here in the old dusty cortex. I love the taste of words, sir. And each
logos
spawned from my lips, sui generis, mind you, carries the ambrosial tang of an exquisite candy. And I’m afraid that I’ve got
quite
the sweet tooth.”

He flashes bruised teeth at me.

“A gentleman such as yourself will understand that my intellectual curiosity is piqued by that telltale seal of otherness that stamps your temple and marks you as a fellow
amp, as they call us
. And at the risk of appearing obstinate and demanding, I’d like to return to the previous line of questioning in which I implored you to share the nature of the gadgetry cocooned within you.”

“You want to know about my implant?” I ask.

“Cocoon,” he purrs, eyes half lidded. “Oh, now that’s a good one. Ex-quisite.”

“Uh, Perry?”

His eyes flutter open, like headlights flickering on. “Sir?”

“It’s for epilepsy,” I say.

“Ah, the shakes. A woeful fate, indeed. But you’re not alone, friend. The United States government cured many a pal of mine. The schizos, the alkos, and the bipolars. Even cured my own indisposition toward the mental muddle of autism—with a heaping dollop of paranoia for flavor. But, praise God, the taxpayers fixed those of us under the bridge by the miracle of modern science.”

He flinches at the sound of his voice echoing. “How much did they cure you?” he whispers.

“How much?”

“Well, they can cure you a little or a
lot,
can’t they?”

I think of my father and Jim. The discussion they must have had when I was just a boy. I remember the flashing dance steps on the ground as I sidestepped that guard.

“They cured me a lot,” I say.

He considers me briefly, then digs out a worn plastic ruler from under his filthy coat. He dangles it over the cracked pavement.

“Put your fingers around this but don’t touch,” he says. “When I let go of it, pinch your fingers together.”

“Okay.”

“Sheep fucker,” he says, then drops the ruler. My fingers pinch by reflex, even as Perry’s strange words hit.

The little man grabs my wrist.

“Hold it. Right there. Don’t move a muscle.” Perry bends over and inspects the ruler. His lips twitch as he does the math in his head. “You caught it at zero point zero seven centimeters. With the speed of gravity, seven milliseconds. Visual reaction time …”

Perry looks at me, rubs his hands together greedily.

“Why, you
have
been cured a lot.”

Perry’s eyes go to my maintenance nub, then he glances up and down the empty street. “I don’t doubt your veracity a whit, young gentleman. Only the brainiest amongst us yet walk the streets unmolested. What with these confounded roundups.”

“Roundups?”

“Indeed, sir. How have you ever managed to fall truant to that information—”

“I’ve been in jail.”

Perry waits for me to continue. I don’t.

“Fair enough, then,” he says.

“Where are they taking the amps?”

“Why, to the under-bridge, sir.”

“Under what bridge?”

“The bridge is the fair shore where many of us once lived in peace—before tasting the apple, you see? The bridge dwellers dissipated, it’s true. Set sail for the shores of normalcy. Bewitched by that flirting specter of gainful employment.

“But lately, a great exodus from Mundania has begun. Under government mandate many a bridge dweller has returned and more. Countrywide they’ve come to the central repository. By train, by plane, and by hoof. The amps, sir, have come home to the under-bridge.”

Lucy and Nick.

“Do you mean the west Pittsburgh Federal Safety Zone? Can you take me there, Perry?”

“A wise notion, sir,” he says. Then the little man smiles up at me, a glint of anticipation in his eyes. “You’ll find that twisted folk linger out here. Some were amped before the technology was ripe, you see? These leftover amps are fierce and
rotten
. Under-bridge is the safest place to be, sir.”

As the sun sets, Perry leads me through the forgotten fissures of Polish Hill, down narrow alleys where our shoulders brush sweating concrete walls. Over weedy lots where the grass is ingrown with ancient trash. Down endless rusty railroad tracks.

We stop briefly in a back lot where trash bins squat in the shadow of a looming megastore out front. One arm hooked over a trash can, Perry roots for stale bread and continues his monologue. “Lucky, we are. Yes, sir. Lucky to live in this cutting-edge era of progress. When men can aspire not only to be well and healthy, but to be
better
than well. Better than healthy. If you ponder it, Owen, why, it’s clear that you and me are technological
marvels of the modern age!”

Finally, we reach the deteriorating Washington Crossing Bridge. A few hundred people mill about in what looks like half a campground and half a swap meet. The stained concrete is layered with blankets and sleeping bags and bulging plastic sacks. Windblown empties rattle over the concrete, barely audible under the muted hum of conversation and the sporadic roar of traffic overhead.

Perry throws an arm around my shoulder, gestures to the mesh-covered belly of the towering structure overhead. “Welcome to the under-bridge.”

Weeks of scraggly beard cover my face, but I keep my head down anyway. It has become a habit. I try to shush Perry and take in my surroundings.

National Guardsmen in camouflaged gear ring the shaded area under the bridge. Their eyes are veiled by shining new riot helmets, watching everybody and settling on nobody. Long black batons hang on their hips, rifles hanging from chest straps. Side by side, the men might as well be statues. They aren’t looking through us but past us.