Everybody Pays (8 page)
“But your debs carry, right?”
He meant, they bring the weapons to the bop. And they take them away when it’s done. Sometimes, even in school, they bring the stuff, when everyone thinks it’s gonna jump off. I told Durango that was true.
He nods his head like this all makes good sense to him. Nobody else says nothing. It is very quiet in their clubhouse, not even no music playing on the radio.
Finally, he looks at me. “We got a rep,” he says. “Citywide. Clubs in the Bronx, in Brooklyn, even, they know us. If we was to take in an outsider, he would have to
earn
in. Earn big, you understand?”
I nodded like I understood, but I didn’t. Not really. I mean, sure, you want to be with the Dragons, you couldn’t just walk in and sign up. Like with the Army. I heard some of the colored clubs was citywide. Not just with rep, for real. I mean, they had men all over. But we don’t got no coloreds where I live, so I never seen it for myself. They all colored, and we all PRs, and the white boys, they had their clubs too. But it wasn’t about
your
color, it was the colors you fly. Those be your true colors. Everybody knows that.
“Give me the piece,” Durango says.
One of his boys hands him a pistol. A real little pistol. He looks at it for a minute, then he gives it to me. It had two barrels, one over the other.
“That there’s a derringer,” Durango says to me. “Only a twenty-two. Just like a zip, but this is a real one, understand? I mean, it ain’t gonna blow up in your hand. But it’s like a zip ’cause you got to be very, very close for it to work. You can’t blast nobody across the way with this. Even if you hit him, you don’t take him down. You ever been hit with a zip?”
“No,” I tell him. “Sometimes, when we’re into it, I can hear them . . . pop, like. But I don’t know nobody ever got hit with one.”
“I was,” he told me. He opened his shirt and he showed me. Just a tiny little dot on his chest. “It didn’t go in deep,” he said. “I didn’t even know I was hit until later. Didn’t have to go to no hospital or nothing. We just dug it out.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay? Nah, that ain’t where it is, Sonny. There ain’t but one way you be with us. You got to bring us something, understand? You bring us Mystic. Like you planned.”
“But I—”
“We ain’t looking to take over your club,” Durango said. “We don’t care nothing about no . . . What you got, anyway? A dozen men?”
“Fifteen for sure,” I told him. “For the meet, maybe twenty or more.”
“And the Enchanters, they got a couple more, but it’s about even?”
“About even,” I agreed with him.
“This is how it is,” he told me. “You can’t even
show
the piece until you get right on top of him, understand? You got to fight your way there. What you use?”
I knew what he meant. Some guys use knives, but most of them use baseball bats or pipes. Something long. Maybe they carry a knife just in case, but knives, they more for one-on-ones. “A chain,” I told him.
“Good. Walk
right
for him. Let him see you coming. You got to cut off your own Warlord, ’cause he’s gonna want him. So you go right to him, got it?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Don’t be cocking the piece,” he said, taking it out of my hand and showing me what he meant, “until you ready to use it. And make sure you get him in the head. You got two shots. Don’t be wasting one.”
“All right.”
“You get Mystic and you a Dragon,” he said, looking around the room like he was waiting on a challenge. But nobody said nothing.
“I . . .” I didn’t know what to say. I mean, this wouldn’t fix nothing.
“You be with us then,” he said. “For maybe two, three weeks. That’s all it’s gonna take.”
“Take for what?”
“For you to go in the Army,” he said. “They gonna be looking for whoever dusted Mystic anyway. And you be gone.”
“But Lucy Ann—”
“Lucy Ann gonna be flying colors, Sonny. Next day, walking to school, Lucy Ann gonna be wearing Hector’s jacket.”
That was fair, what he said. If I was a man, if I loved Lucy Ann, I had to take care of her. That was my plan. Now they was telling me she was safe. No matter what.
2
So it’s tonight.
I can see them coming. Just like a black blot, moving toward the open ground. The debs are over to the side, watching. I got my chain. Got my hands wrapped in tape. Got the pistol in my jacket pocket.
I see Mystic.
It’s my time now.
Time to show my true colors.
for Wendy
FROM THE UNDERGROUND SERIES
CURTAINS
I
am very patient. I know I have to wait. It’s not enough to be patient. . . . I have to
be
patience. The way they taught me in the temple.
At first, I tried to edge a little closer every day—inches only, but then I realized the Questioner was just playing with me. So now I’m unpredictable: one day I move a foot or so toward her, the next an inch or two back. Sometimes sideways. And, for days, I don’t move at all.
I don’t respond to anything except her voice. The softer she speaks, the closer I come to her. The Rulers call this a Siren Call. I don’t know why they call it that. Nobody knows why the Rulers call things what they do. It’s not important now. What’s important is that she thinks she’s controlling. And what I found was, as long as she thinks she’s in control, she’s not afraid.
I need her not to be afraid. I send my calm out to her—in gentle waves, lapping against her spirit.
The men and the women of the Rulers are different. To calm the men, you have to let them feel your fear. For the women, you have to let them feel your gentleness—they have to know that you won’t hurt them.
I wonder how the men and women of the Rulers ever have sex, then. But maybe they don’t. The whisper-stream says they don’t—it says they clone. But that’s only because you never see any of the Rulers in the Sex Tunnels. Except the Police, of course. And they never take any, that’s what people say. But the Book Boys don’t write that on the walls, because we never write rumors.
If the Book Boys ever wrote a rumor on the walls, it would become the truth. So we could never do that.
The gentle waves I send are like the tide, in and out. Now they’re all coming in from behind her, washing over her back.
But because I send the tide, the undertow is within me, too. And it’s very deep. I can call it in. When it locks on, everything will go under. And stay there.
I keep a journal. In my head only—they read everything in here. But I write stuff, too. For them to read. That helps to keep them calm.
They asked me if I wanted to write on the walls, but I told them I didn’t have any paint. That’s when this started, really.
The Questioner is one of them. Another drone who thinks she’s a leader because she has a title, an office. The Rulers don’t call her what she is.
I’m in here because I called things what they are.
That’s the part of my training they know about. In the temple, truth is God. That was a religion once. Before the Terror. Outside. They called the religion “Journalism.”
And some say—the legends say, anyway—that when Journalism stopped worshipping Truth, that was the start of the Terror.
The Rulers know about the temple. They know it’s somewhere in the Uncharted Zone. But they didn’t know where it is. Their scouts could never find it. Because it’s not in one place anymore.
A lot of years after the Terror, a new crew started up in the tunnels. None of the others know exactly when that happened, because the new crew was just
there
one day . . . like it had always been. And that’s what the Sages say: that we had been here all along.
The other crews called us the Book Boys because we wrote on the walls of the tunnels. We wrote what happened. We always wrote the Truth. After a while, nobody really paid any attention to the InfoBoards anymore.
Lots of crews write on the walls in the tunnels. They do it to mark their territory, or to send messages, or just to scream. But we’re the only ones who write in blue.
“If it’s written in blue, it must be true,”
that’s the word in the whisper-stream.
It’s a special shade of blue. They only make it in the temple. The Rulers know this, but they can’t change it. First they tried to imitate it, but they could never get the color exactly right. The whisper-stream says there’s a secret ingredient in the blue that comes from the temple. Nobody knows what the secret ingredient is, but everybody agrees . . . it must come from Outside.
The temple has a link to Outside, that’s what everyone believes. So, when the Book Boys write, it’s not only true, it’s a link to Outside, too.
The Rulers did what the Rulers always do. They made a Rule. If you break a Rule, you go to the HydroFarm. If you break a Major Rule, you go for a year.
And for a Violation, you get put Outside.
The whisper-stream says that the first Book Boys who got put Outside . . . after a long time, they found a way to come back. And that’s when the temple started. So there were Book Boys before there was a temple, if that legend is true.
It doesn’t matter.
It is a Violation to be a Book Boy. Even if you’re a girl. There are girls in the Book Boys too, but they still call all of us Book Boys. I don’t know why. In the temple, they said that, at first, we always called ourselves Book Boys so the Rulers would think that there were only boys in the crew. That way, the girls would be safe. But the Rulers know now, and I guess they could change our name if they wanted.
It doesn’t matter what the Rulers call something. In the whisper-stream, we would always be the Book Boys. In the temple, they talk about tradition. How truth always lives.
“Whatever the name, the truth is the same.”
That was one of the first lessons in the temple. One of the things we had to practice writing. All the Book Boys have the same handwriting. The exact same. We never sign our writings, the way other crews do. The Rulers can’t tell which of us wrote any particular thing.
There’s another crew. The Guardians. They don’t come from the temple, but they protect us. They’re a war crew, mixed skin/ shades and everything. If anyone tries to sign what we write, the Guardians hurt them. And if anyone tries to erase what we write, the Guardians kill them.
Just being a Guardian is enough to get you sent Outside. That’s a Violation all by itself, same as being a Book Boy.
We never meet them, but we know them. We are all One, that’s another thing they taught us in the temple.
But lessons aren’t important—
learning
the lessons, that’s what’s important. Once you learn a lesson, it’s in you.
Then you go and do your work.
I have my work now.
If I get too close to her, the curtain will come down. A Jexan curtain, floor to ceiling. Come down right between us—like the laser-proof barriers they have in the Sex Tunnels.
I don’t know which tunnel I’m in now, but I know I’m still Underground. Outside, there are no Rulers.
They want me to tell them things. A lot of things. But, mostly, they want to know where the temple is. Nobody can tell them that. The temple moves. All the time. When you need to go back, you just step into the Uncharted Zone and start your walk. You move until one of us finds you. If anyone follows you, all you have to do is wait—the trackers stop, sooner or later. The Uncharted Zone is full of things that can stop them.
So there’s really nothing for me to tell the Rulers. Except the truth.
But they don’t know that. They think Book Boys can’t lie. But we can. We’re not allowed to
write
a lie, but we can
speak
one. If we have to do it to survive.
The Rulers have serum. They have electrodes. They have girls who offer you sex. Or boys, if that’s what you want. They have promises. They have threats. They have everything, and it’s all to make you tell the truth.
But when you tell them the truth, they think you’re lying.
That’s what they taught us in the temple. That’s what they said would happen if we were caught. The best way to lie to the Rulers is to tell them the truth.
They were right.
The Rulers have a lot of information, but they have no knowledge. They teach other things in the temple besides Journalism. That’s how come we can go into the Uncharted Zone and stay there for as long as it takes. The Rulers never ask about anything else that we’re taught . . . just where the temple is. That’s all they care about.
I have to get close to the Questioner. When I do, I’ll show her some of those other things I learned. I have to go back to the temple. I have to go back to my work.
That’s the truth.
for Kamau
THE WRITING ON THE WALL
T
he first time I saw her, I was with my horde, so I couldn’t do anything but watch. That’s because everybody watches
you
when you’re in a horde, and you have to be careful.
A horde’s not like a crew. Not like the Game Boys or the Dancing Girls. Crews get formed by people who are . . . like each other, I guess. Or maybe people who like each other even if they’re different. I don’t know. I do know they’re hard to get into. Everybody has to be in a crew, or you get swept up. Then you’re in a horde.
My horde works the outside of the Sex Tunnels. We have to keep them clean and quiet. Especially clean. The Rulers don’t allow any bad things near the entrance to the Sex Tunnels, because they want to be sure everyone who wants to can come.
I knew she wasn’t one of the Sex Workers the second time I saw her. Not because she’s a little fat. I know better than that. In the Sex Tunnels, there’s places to buy all kinds. Whatever people like. And for every kind of person Underground, there’s another person who wants to be with them for sex. That’s the way it was Outside too, before the Terror. At least that’s what people say.
The reason I knew she wasn’t is that she didn’t live in the Sex Tunnels. It doesn’t matter what the work is, the workers always live in the tunnels. They always need workers, because the tunnels never close.
When you live out your contract, you can leave the tunnel you were assigned to. But most people don’t leave, they just sign up again.
There’s a lot of jobs in the Sex Tunnels that don’t have anything to do with sex. Just like the job my horde has—cleaning up. I mean, we don’t have anything to do with sex either, but we help them run.
Our hardest job is the tunnel walls. We have to keep them
very
clean. The Rulers don’t want
anything
on them, ever. The walls are pure, glistening white—so bright it hurts your eyes to look at it.
Most of the stuff people write on the walls is just silly. Sex stuff. Drawings of people doing . . . whatever. That always comes off easy. One shot of Chloroscope from a hydropistol usually takes care of it. When it doesn’t, we have to use AC7. That eats the cover off the wall, but it removes anything on it too. Then we have to cover the wall again with the plastic spray-sheets. In a few hours, it always looks like new.
The real problem is the damn Book Boys. They’re a crew too, like the others. But nobody knows who they are. They don’t walk around in fans, and they don’t wear crew clothes. You only know them by what they do. And what they do is write on the walls. In a special blue. The Book Boys are the only ones that can use it.
There’s a one-hundred-thousand-credit bounty on any Book Boy. If you capture one, you collect. But you have to catch one actually doing the writing, and you have to get the special blue paint too—that’s the only proof there can be.
When my horde arrived for its cycle, there it was, right on the wall near the entrance. Written in blue:
We all knew what it was right away, but there wasn’t anyone in sight who could be a Book Boy. I did see a couple of the Guardians, but I wasn’t dumb enough to ask them. That crew guards the Book Boys. Guards their work, I mean. If anyone tries to write in the same blue, and they’re not a Book Boy, the Guardians take them away. Or kill them right there.
The Guardians are a warrior crew. Nobody bothers them. Sometimes the Rulers capture one of them. But never one of the Book Boys. Either the Guardians are too strong for the torture to make them tell, or they don’t know where the Book Boys hide.
Every time the Book Boys write something on the wall of the Sex Tunnels, traffic slows down. That’s why the Rulers make more Rules.
That’s why the bounty is so high.
That was another message. It takes a long time to remove a Book Boy’s message. Even when we take the whole section off and replace it, sometimes it seems like there’s a little blue glow behind the new plastic. I know that can’t be true, but other people have seen it, too.
It just got worse. The Rulers posted their own guards all around the entrance to keep away the Book Boys. But those guards, they scared some of the customers, so that wasn’t any good.
I saw her again. She smiled at me. Quick. I don’t think anyone noticed.
I wonder what she does in there. I know, whatever it is, she’s always just finishing when my horde comes on duty.
She was just leaving when we started to clean that one up. This time, she moved her head a little bit. Like telling me to come over to where she was.
The horde was all working. I moved toward the back. It was easy—everybody wants to be up front, so they could have a chance to capture a Book Boy.
She told me her name was Cassandra. I told her my name was Jamal. I asked her, was she with a crew, and she told me no. She didn’t have a horde either, but she had to pay tolls to one to get to and from work every time.
I saw her a lot after that. Once she told me where she celled, I would go over to see her sometimes.
She’s very nice. Very good to talk to. She would ask me about my work, but I never asked about hers. So, one time, she said that to me. I mean, she said, why didn’t I ask her what she did. I was . . . embarrassed, I guess. She told me what she did. She was a cashier. People told her what they wanted, and she would direct them to the right arrows. They follow the arrows to what they want. After they pay her. The color of the arrow tells how many credits they have to pay.
She said most of the customers already know where to go and how much it costs, so she doesn’t have to do much.
I thought that would be a good job. She said some of it was good. But some of it was evil.
I asked her what that meant, “evil.” I never heard it before. She said, when people have sex with children, that is evil. I asked her why. She said because the children didn’t want to do it, and the Rulers made them. I said the Rulers make everybody do things they don’t want to do. That’s what the Rules are.
She said that was wrong.
How could that be wrong? I asked her. The Rulers make the Rules.
She looked real sad when I said that. She asked me, did I ever actually
read
the stuff the Book Boys write on the walls. I told her my job is to take it off, not read it.
We talked a lot. It was almost four cycles later when I asked her if she would be with me. My cell isn’t even as good as hers, but if we each sold ours, we could get one big enough for the two of us.
“I love you, Jamal,” she told me. “But you’re not ready to be with me.”
“I can get more credits,” I told her. “All I have to do is—”
Cassandra slapped me. Real hard. Then she started crying. I tried to talk to her, but she wouldn’t listen. I knew I did something wrong. And I knew I couldn’t come back until I figured out what it was.
I thought about it every time I was at the wall. With my horde. By myself. All the time.
This morning, I got to the tunnels during the shift change, a few minutes early. Nobody was there. I saw . . . I saw a Book Boy. Writing on the wall. In that special blue. All alone.
And then I saw how I could fix what I did wrong. How I could prove to Cassandra that I was ready to be with her.
I never knew Book Boys could be girls.
for Dawn Bailey