Game Slaves (21 page)

Out there, in the streets, there was poverty. In here, as my team walked, we saw where all the wealth truly was.

It was nauseating. To think how common people had to scrape to get by, but in here, XMart
could feed them all. Of course, there'd be no profit in that. Better to sell food to them in tiny increments at a criminal markup, one day at a time.

Food was stacked in the market section. Meat would have cost our entire pay from the day before. Fruit, trucked all the way from whatever city had cornered that niche, was even pricier.

A simple razor made of sharpened bone was ten chits. One with a stainless blade? Over a hundred. Cheap clothing was rummaged through by the average shopper, while to one side, sweet leather gear was carefully picked over by off-duty security personnel.

It had everything a city could need. It had to. Citizens banked, for a fee. They reupped their game subscription fees. They stocked up on food packets. They splurged for a toothbrush or bought a rare birthday present or, if need be, sat in line to have a tooth pulled. The cost for that was actually quite low, unless the patient wanted some kind of anesthesia or painkiller.

One glassed-off wing had the town hospital, where patients were stored on racks of beds that moved up and down, left and right, as if they were slung in an elaborate vending machine. The doctors, one minute whipping up a cast and the next giving some kind of injection, did not have to move out of their chairs as one casualty was spun along after another.

I kept our money in my pocket. But we did do some shopping.

“They won't let me near the gun counter,” Mi whined. “I can't even buy a knife or a battle-ax or one of those cool laser–chain saws.”

“Why not?” Reno asked her. “We all have the company tat.”

“They wanted to
scan
it. No dice. You need a security pass too. Only goons carry guns out here. And just the elite BlackStar troops with special clearance can get near the big stuff.”

“That is just so unfair to the common criminal,” I agreed.

“Makes it tough to start a revolution,” Dakota said. “But I bet Jimmy's family would have no trouble buying anything they want.”

“They've probably got servants doing their shopping for them,” Mi pointed out. She was right. There were, here and there, neatly dressed older women in housekeeping frocks making large purchases. They'd scan their master's shopping list, point to this and that and ten more of those, and one of the store employees would gather it all on a wooden pallet for later delivery.

But it didn't stop there.

It was an enormous place. Cement floor. Cold steel shelves that would survive a heavy blast. Fluorescent lighting.

But the world outside, in some way, must have been rebounding. You could get just about anything in here,
if
you could pay. There were a few small cars for sale. So some city out there was still manufacturing automobiles and was welcomed into the XMart supply chain.

The cost, of course, was over a million chits. Gas would be a crippling necessity. But for the wealthy, it could be done.

You could buy other large-ticket items as well. Big-screen TVs, even though the poor seemed to get all their news and entertainment from their cheap game controllers. Some bizarre things: Yard fountains. Push mowers. Elaborate barbecue grills. I saw a hang glider down one aisle, and York came across a power boat in another.

It was getting harder and harder to wrap my brain around this world. Did the top 1 percent really live
so
well? While the poor were just used as labor?

“Look at
that
line.” Mi pointed. BlackStar's logo was bright. Visuals for new titles, new adventures, and new experiences gleamed on overhead screens. People were buying.

“Imagine,” she said, “that same line in every remaining city or town on the planet.”

“For game subscriptions?”

She nodded. “BlackStar has found one of those things that all people feel like they just can't do without.”

“It's pretty cheap to play,” I told her.

“Sure, but if
everyone
has one, I mean, rich and poor and old and young and boy and girl . . . ?”

Now it began to make sense to me. How important BlackStar was. And how much money they really could make.

The company that made those cars? They'd sell in the good neighborhoods, but not to
everyone
. Same with the boat, the plane, a gun. But
gaming:
gaming had no age or status or gender boundaries. From Max Kode himself to Jimmy and Charlotte and Hal and Screw and even my team, no one could really live without that escape. So a few chits here and a few there, across the globe, from every remaining citizen.

Yeah, BlackStar had found a hit.

And something else made sense. Something we
all
now understood.

We
were BlackStar.
We
were the reason gaming was so good.

And we were missing now, weren't we?

There would be nothing that company would not do to get us back. There'd be more and more search patrols. On and on. We couldn't lie low forever, not with these telltale holes in the sides of our heads.

We heard beeping, everyone heard it, but something else made my ears prick up. Big doors were sliding up. Not the front ones, but over by the automotive section.

I grabbed Mi's hand and we ran. I didn't want to miss a second of this, but the sudden movement made her cough violently.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Let's go,” she urged, hitting her chest.

Up a ramp. Through a couple of furniture stacks. Then past, would you believe, fake aquariums stocked with rubber fish?

There was an aisle of Christmas decorations. Another of lawn ornaments. But we were headed to the back wall, where the loud chirping originated.

“Now, that's an RV!” Reno yelled. The rest of them had kept up.

As the giant double doors on the back of the store slid up to the roof, we all saw what had made those huge tire tracks in the street. It was, without a doubt, the king of mechanical beasts. Eight tires lined each side, each of them a couple stories tall. On the wedge-shaped nose, a driving cabin sat way overhead, and on top of that, no fewer than ten soot-covered exhaust stacks belched dead pterodactyls.

I figured the semi-truck had at least four decks. It was towing a line of trailers, each of them like a small container ship, stacked with goods for the store. A trailer piled high with scrap metal and bales of plastic packaging looked ready to head out, maybe back to XMart's distribution and manufacturing base, wherever that was.

The truck pulled inside the bay, almost like a spaceship would edge up to a station to dock. Brakes hissed. Turbine motors whined, then began a long, slow decline, until the whole store stopped echoing.

Instantly, a door on the truck cab opened and a woman stepped onto an elevator platform no larger than her feet. She whisked to the ground, manifest in hand, and tossed the papers at a clerk. Then she was off, through a door after her long, tough journey.

Crews surrounded the trailers, pulling them in alongside the semi-truck. Cranes snaked straps from the ceiling and began hoisting the various goods off to their internal destinations.

It was clockwork. It was well practiced. Wherever this thing had come from, it looked like the only real way in or out of our city. Of any city. And it was tightly controlled.

A mass of armed BlackStar commandos watched every move. Guns ready. Goggles scanning, magnifying.

Then, on the bottom deck of the semi, a door whooshed open. Two of the guards pointed their weapons inside the hatch, motioning “out.”

And a string of men and woman began to disembark. They were not, in any way, passengers. No, these humans were under heavy guard.

“Look at 'em.” Dakota pointed. She didn't need to say that. We couldn't look away.

The eight or ten were made to line up and sink to their knees, hands clasped on their heads. They were pale, small, almost breakable. Lack of food, lack of sleep, something had kept them weak.

“Those aren't line workers. They aren't street people.” Dakota was still talking. She was probably right. They didn't have that hardened look, like Hal and Screw and everyone in this store. Not laborers. But valuable enough that they would be transported—at huge cost, no doubt—between cities.

“They're
us
.” Dakota seemed sure of whatever she was saying.

“Us?” I asked.

“Not us now, but at some point, that was us.
That's
how we got here. That's where we came from and the reason you're no longer in Arizona and I got taken from South Dakota and
all
that.”

“Passengers?”

“No, prisoners. Selected because of our gaming skills or brain patterns or whatever, who really cares? But I'm sure of it, Phoenix. It's why we have memories of those places. Because we were
born
in those places. Then stolen, sold, and brought here against our will.”

I didn't know how much sense that made, but Dakota seemed to believe it. One of the guards kicked two of the prisoners, made them all stand up, and marched them into a room off to one side. The door slammed shut.

We'd seen the show. It was time for us to go.

Before leaving, I rushed over and bought every antibiotic I could find for Mi and her cough. Some ointment for my port. Dakota complained of a fever, so we stocked up on flu meds.

Then food. Nothing fancy. Nonperishables. Enough for a long time, though, in case we had to try to get out of the city fast.

York and Mi really wanted guns, but no way was that going to happen.

We got clothing we might need, better boots, and a few more hats and pairs of plastic glasses to keep hiding our ports.

“Game controllers and subscriptions?” Mi asked, her eyes wide.

“Not for me,” Dakota hissed.

I didn't want one either. There were a lot of bad men on our tail. We didn't have time to waste playing games and shooting our own kind.

“Really, Dakota?” I asked. I also did it a bit loudly, so that everyone could hear.

We were about a block from the building we'd chosen to squat in. Security and foot traffic on the streets was ebbing. It was time for sleep.

“Really what?” she groaned back, although I thought she knew what I meant.

Still, I wanted to say it. I wanted it on the table. “This is your choice? You'd take
this
kind of freedom over . . .”

“Over a life sentence in an aquatic prison?” She glared at me. “Yes.”

“It's almost unlivable,” York challenged.

“There's got to be a way to make it work,” Dakota replied. “To have something to work for. Or toward.”

“Otherwise,” Mi observed, “what's the point?”

But York had my back on this, wanting Dakota to have to spell it out. “So you'd rather live your life working to build the upper class while you barely have enough to even survive. What next, Dakota? A husband? Kids? Bringing them up in these torn-apart old buildings, only for them to be cheap manual labor themselves? And all of you addicted to or consumed by escape into an artificial game world?”

“Where killer aquarium fish—like we used to be—get to shoot you up every night?” Mi kind of joked. Kind of.

Dakota went a bit quiet then.

I wasn't sure if she was lost in thought or was reacting to what we saw when we turned the corner: the street was crawling with BlackStar troops.

They were everywhere, rushing in and out of the occupied buildings, and all around the deserted one we'd moved into. Searching every apartment.

“Go door to door!” a captain yelled into his radio mic. “Three men per flat! Tear them apart! Room to room, closets, bathrooms, every single crawl space.”

It was a heavy sweep. Four or five of their vans were lining the street, machine-gun turrets panning across all the lighted windows.

“ATTENTION!” a voice from one of the trucks barked through a loudspeaker. “WE'RE SEARCHING FOR FIVE MURDEROUS CONVICTS WHO ESCAPED FROM BLACKSTAR PENITENTIARY!”

“I didn't know they had a prison,” Reno whispered to me. We had a good hiding spot behind a series of pillars just down an alley, but our path to our own place was blocked.

The announcement continued. “YOUR COOPERATION IS MANDATORY. INFORMATION LEADING TO THE ARRESTS OF THE THREE MALE AND TWO FEMALE FUGITIVES WILL BE REWARDED WITH CITIZENSHIP. IF WE HAVE TO FIND THEM BEFORE YOU SURRENDER THEM, SENTENCING IS IMMEDIATE! FAMILY BANISHMENT TO THE WASTELAND!”

This was not good. Of course, none of those poor people knew anything about us, but through the open windows we could hear furniture being smashed, children screaming, riot batons cracking into joints and bone.

I kept waiting for some description or mention of the names we might be using, but apparently, they hadn't thought to take snapshots of us while we were slaved up in that tank for so long. Nice advantage for us. I hoped it would last.

York nudged me. “Couple of flamethrowers would take care of those trucks.”

“Fresh out,” I said. I'd been thinking more of rocket grenades, but at least we were getting our legs back under us.

“We can't do anything about this,” Mi rationalized. “Not like we are. We can't help anyone.”

“They'd turn us in, in a millisecond, if they could,” York answered. “But Mi's right. We need to get into our lair and lie low until we come up with a better plan.”

I agreed, but everything changed right after that.

The captain was getting impatient, and as his troops came out of the occupied buildings, he seemed to realize this search was not going to produce.

He turned suddenly, right toward the darkened structure where we'd hidden. Ten stories, all brick, no power, every room almost bare. It would take time to search it, but that was the direction he was pointing.