by Charles Joseph Albert
CHAPTER
1: GANGSTER
One February morning, an eleven-year-old boy stood in his chem
shower, posing with a gun in the full-length mirror. The autovoice in the stall
had warned him that he was still wearing his unters. Unters were disposable
biopaper underwear, and would make the chem cleanse less effective, but the boy
ignored the warning and pressed start. As the nearly invisible mist scoured his
body, he struck a variety of poses intended to inspire fear, though his bony,
under-developed body would not have intimidated many. His skin was blotted with
a rash, and his buzz-cut black hair made his large brown eyes seem especially
wide. Beads of perspiration dotted his body—the morning was hot and moist,
typical for California’s monsoon season.
"Alright, Javier, just do it!" he said quietly,
loosening his shoulders the way he'd seen done on the iWall. "You da mon!
You da mon!" He tried a bored smile, eyes half-closed. "Here you go,
Ja-DED. Dis for you, just like you said." He pointed his small pistol at
his reflection. "Way to go, Javier. You baaaad!"
A noise from outside the stall caught his attention. He peered
out, looking around for his brother, who hadn’t been in bed when Javier had
woken. He was used to Marcel wandering off to sleep elsewhere; usually at the
foot of their mother’s bed. Anyway, neither Marcel nor their mother would wake
for hours. The noise must have come from another apartment.
He went to a pile of clothes next to the pad where he slept, and
put on his baggy steel mesh shorts, then snapped a pair of green Foamies over
his feet. As he clipped on his black smartshirt, he had it play a holo-clip of
a gangbanger shooting a gun, and he paused to imitate the stance in the image.
Then he used the shirt to map his route to a certain Foamie store in the nearby
commercial district, zooming in on the service door in the back alley. Once
satisfied he knew the route, he slipped his Smith & Glock Stubpistol into
one cargo pocket, six Snackers bars into the other, and trotted out the front
door of the apartment building into the morning downpour.
Thanks to the Foamies, he was able to run along the wet sidewalk
in front of his building without slipping. His smartshirt’s hood kept his head
protected from the rain, and the ultrasonics warned him when other people were
approaching. Each time it burst into its urgent silent vibrations, Javier
ducked into hiding wherever he could, letting the people pass. Otherwise, the
rule of the ghetto prevailed: if you can’t hide, then move quickly and don’t
look anyone in the eye.
One good thing about the storm, he thought, was that it meant
fewer people who might interfere with his assignment. Only a single manned
vehicle was on the road, a large black Ford Extreme, which overtook him slowly,
its rollers making an animal-like hiss on the wet pavement as it passed. He
relaxed a little and ate a few food bars, tossing the wrappers in
garbage-strewn puddled street as he went.
In ten minutes he was on the drier streets that threaded through
Satan Row, the large commercial district with the only expensive shops in the
area. Delivery trucks were crawling back and forth here, their raw and
unmuffled exhaust rattling and stinking the air. He had to be careful now;
police drones scoured this part of the city. He flattened as well as he could
along the walls as he made his way toward his mark.
He reached a garbage-strewn utility alley, and, squatting behind
a parked car, he squinted against the rain at one of the buildings. His eyes
focused on the steel back doors.
Suddenly the alarm went off again on his iShirt, and he ducked
down immediately, rolling under the parked car. A patrol drone the size of a
large dog skimmed past the mouth of the alley, its motion and infrared scanners
sweeping for bio-signs: heat, CO2, motion. Steam was still emanating from the
exhaust line of the large black Ford he was hiding under, and he hoped that it
would hide his own body heat from the patrol drone.
At last, it moved on. Javier crawled back out and turned back to
watch the steel door, and wait. Several minutes later, the ancient locks of the
door rattled from the inside. Still crouched low behind the truck, Javier
lifted the barrel of his gun up to his cheek, imitating his Air heroes.
"Alright, mon," he repeated softly, "just do
it."
Looking around the car, he could see Mahmoud’s feet in the
doorway. According to Ja-DED, the store owner, Mahmoud, always took out the
garbage as soon as he opened the store. That’s when he would be unarmed and
defenseless.
Javier had practiced what would happen next: he'd leap out,
point the gun directly at the gut of Samad Mahmoud, and shoot him as many times
as it took to make him fall over. Then he would climb over the body, run into
the store, grab the pair of green BadMan Xtreme-Top E-Lim Nator Foamies, size
nine, and run out again before anyone could react. He'd run back downtown, slip
through the broken window in the abandoned Facebook building, and run past all
the crystal cookers to get to the floor where Ja-DED would be. Ja-DED would
accept the shoes, and the Javier would at last be a ganger, a full member of
the DED, after years of running lowly errands for them.
Suddenly, Javier heard a loud whack—not a gunshot, but something
hard getting hit. He peered from behind the car, his gun drawn.
The shop’s open doorway was empty. Javier looked around in
confusion. The dumpster had not been unlocked, either. He stared for a long
moment before he noticed a camouflaged man standing near the open door, naked
but for a loincloth and tattoos, his rain-pelted body smeared in some kind of
trick concrete-colored paint that made him hard to see. The man, large and
muscular, held a long stick that he had apparently used on the prone form of
Mahmoud, whose large-bore semiautomatic lay in a puddle next to him.
The alarm began vibrating on Javier’s iTool. Before he could
react, something swung down and knocked the gun out of his hand. He turned in
time to see a second man right next to him, also smeared in camouflage paint.
Before Javier could cry out or even react, the man hit him with his stick
again, this time on the head.
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