Authors: David Luna
Neil kicks a water purifier
with frayed tubes and a cracked container reservoir. “What about this?” he asks, still not agreeing with her point of view.
“This is a device that simply needs new tubing, which…” She takes off again down another pathway, a childlike dance, knowing exactly where to look in the mountains of trash.
“Hey, get back here!” Neil shouts. Her giggles echo throughout the maze. Neil finds her near an appliance with dangling tubes.
“I’ll take these, and…” Spinning around, she backtracks, skipping and gone again. Neil attempts to follow, but she somehow manages to appear behind him with a large plastic jug, startling him as she continues. “I’ll swap out that container with this, and voilà, a perfectly good machine to help sustain life.”
Neil shakes his head in disbelief.
“People are so wasteful!” she defends herself. “No wonder we’re in the situation we’re in.”
“You sure get excited about this stuff.”
“I was practically born here in the landfill. The shop was my grandma’s.”
Just then Neil spots a fragment of panpipes buried in a mound. From his smile, Inna can tell this has meaning to him. “Still think it’s all garbage?” she asks.
“I haven’t played one of these since I was a kid.” Neil blows in it, clogged with dirt.
“Here, let me.” Inna cleans it out, then blows to play various broken notes.
Neil’s interrupted by his buzzing PDA. It’s Slayter calling again. Neil knows he can’t miss Slayter’s call a second time, but as he steps away to take it, Inna’s broken notes begin to resemble her melody. She improves the second time through, and only continues to get better. Neil ignores the PDA as his eyes lock on Inna. Her lips. The panpipes. He can almost feel the melody with the wind. Just then the PDA stops, as does Inna when she notices Neil staring.
“Sorry, it’s just some silly kid’s song,” she shamefully admits.
“Not when you do it.”
Inna smiles, unsure if Neil could really mean that. “She shared that with me. My grandma.” Inna points around the open clearing of the landfill. “This is what we did together.”
As she resumes playing, Neil takes in the surroundings, but this time everything is different. Picture frames. Vases. Art. The landfill is not full of trash – it’s pieces of humanity.
“Do you want to go for a ride?” Neil asks as the melody concludes.
“Last time I went near your truck we almost died.”
“And I got a new one out of it. Maybe this time I’ll get my next stripe,” Neil jokes.
Inna smiles. “You’re turning into quite the comedian, Neil Vaughn.” Neil extends his hand, but she shakes her head. “I can’t. I mean, I really shouldn’t. Damian expects me back before dinner.”
“Well at least let me give you a ride,” he offers. “Think of my truck as a giant wagon.”
Inna considers for a brief moment before she concedes. She nods her head in agreement.
Within the hour, Neil has Inna’s newly gathered items from the landfill unloaded on the porch of her antique shop. Little is said between them as neither of the two know how to conclude their outing together.
“Well okay…,” Neil musters.
It’s awkward, like a first date many years ago when dating was still allowed. Inna smiles and waves before heading inside, while Neil gives her a two-fingered salute, then immediately kicks himself as he turns back to his truck. He wonders why in the world he would salute her. He does that to other Collectors and Security Enforcement Officers, never an everyday citizen. But Inna isn’t just an everyday citizen. She’s different, though Neil can’t pinpoint how exactly.
As Neil hops in his truck, he glances to his PDA: three more missed calls from Slayter. He knows Slayter is going to be furious. He immediately begins to think of excuses to mitigate the situation. Perhaps he can say questioning the people in the slums took longer than expected, or that he received an emergency assignment from Adrianne he had to deal with. No matter, he’ll figure it out on the way. He fires up the engine and speeds off.
Little did both Neil and Inna know is that Damian has been watching from the upstairs window of the antique shop the entire time. The awkward interaction. The strange sight of a Collector going out of his way to transport a citizen home rather than to the transfer tunnels. Witnessing it all, Damian scowls from suspicion – and his overall bitterness at life.
Only a vase of artificial
Eternity Flowers
separates Wade’s apartment from being an exact replica of Neil’s. The Agency is strict in its standard issue housing, modern barracks for Collectors masked as apartments. Each detail is carefully selected for psychological reasons. The white sterile décor is intended to keep morale high, while the virtual fish tanks are aimed to provide the minimal amount of companionship required to properly function since Collectors are deterred from human relationships outside of their direct colleagues. Each apartment is stationed at least ten stories high, most of the time double that – such as Neil’s on the twenty-second floor – and the towering bird’s-eye view of the streets down below serve to reinforce the importance of the Collectors and their status in society. However, unlike all of the others, Wade’s apartment is in complete disarray. Couches shredded, drawers ripped open, trash dumped on the tables and counter. Neil looks to the crushed fake flowers scattered on the coffee table when Slayter appears from the bedroom.
“Unless you were stuck on the shitter, I don’t wanna hear it,” Slayter frowns, just as expected. He motions Neil over. “C’mon, I already covered out here.”
Slayter slices open the mattress in Wade’s bedroom, then shreds the pillows. “Anything from the slums?” he asks.
“No one saw anything,” Neil responds. He grabs a black combat uniform from a dirty pile in the closet, his eyes lingering on Wade’s 1-stripe arm badge.
“I don’t want to have to double check your work, Neil. Tell me you did more than talk to them.”
Neil sifts through the shirts one by one until something in one of the front pockets catches his attention. It’s a torn sliver of paper with the name Paiton written on it. Next to the name is a drawing of a heart.
“That looks promising,” Slayter notes, eyeing the clue while looming over Neil’s shoulder. “You know what it is?”
Neil doesn’t recognize it as he runs a search for “Paiton” through the identity database on his PDA. Within moments a list of eight results populates the screen. “He could be hiding at any one of these.”
Slayter grabs the PDA and reviews the first entry. “Lesson two,” he instructs, talking down as if it is Neil’s first day. “Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty.”
BLAM!
Slayter kicks down the door to a shack in the slums. An older woman cowers in fear, but there is no sign of Wade.
Neil scrolls to the next entry.
Two teens make out in an old bungalow when the door caves in. The Teen Boy nearly pisses himself at the sight of the Collectors.
Wrong Paiton.
Slayter and Neil storm into a Downtown apartment to find a cute woman at the stove. This could be the Paiton they are after. Neil eyes the bedroom door, but the cute woman blocks their path. Slayter shoves her out of the way and continues in to find two sleeping children – again wrong place and wrong Paiton. Slayter storms out furious.
Neil looks to the next entry on his PDA: Paiton Haas, age twenty-one. He does a double take as
Dani’s Diner
is listed as her employer. He pulls out the torn sliver of paper with the drawing of the heart and this time recognizes it as the top half of a receipt from the same diner.
Nearly simultaneously a conversation with Wade replays in his mind, Wade’s near confession from before.
“Can I tell you something? Just between me and you?” Wade asks.
“It’d be best if you didn’t,” Neil recalls his cold response.
Suddenly Neil’s eyes grow wide, taken aback by a realization. How could he have missed this? He can spot a citizen breaking a penal code from a mile away, a mere stranger, yet he never saw this coming from his own rookie. “Slayter,” he calls out in disbelief. “We found him.”
Slayter pauses as his seething lingers beneath his breath, waiting for Neil to clarify.
The Agency takes precaution after precaution to prevent a Collector from ever succumbing to this sickness, but somehow Wade fell through the cracks.
Neil announces the revelation, “He’s in love.”
******
Haunted Reactor
There’s an old science scenario about a cat in a box and whether or not it still existed when you weren’t looking (I think it went something like that. I’m not sure, those pages were missing from the book!). Anyway, that’s how I feel about the Old Reactor. I can’t see that far outside the Bay with all the haze, so does the reactor even still exist? It would be cool if something still survives out there!
-Quado
8
F
orty-eight hours prior to Neil and Slayter narrowing down Wade’s motivations and Paiton’s whereabouts, Wade just completed returning Jimmy to his home in secret. He remembers Loraine answering the door in tears, heart-broken that her eldest son, only ten, followed in her husband’s footsteps and sacrificed himself for their family. He remembers the look of both relief and confusion on her face as she saw her son standing there, still breathing and alive. Wade couldn’t think of anything meaningful to say to add to the moment except what came from the heart. “Love Jimmy. Love him and never let go,” just as Loraine described to Neil.
It is true that Wade was in love. And love, he felt, shouldn’t be punished by the harsh rules of the Agency. Some volunteer by choice, which he has no issue with. And then there are those that volunteer from desperation; those feeling the pinch from the city’s dire circumstances. It is these people that Wade could no longer stomach to haul away to the processing facility. It is not as if anything he was assigned to do as a Collector surprised him. The Agency doesn’t sugarcoat anything back at the Academy in simulated training, and Neil didn’t sugarcoat anything in field training. If anything, Neil prepared him the best he possibly could. But the field was mentally tougher than Wade expected, especially once he met Paiton, and he was no longer cut out for that type of work. Love changes a man, and in his opinion, it changes one for the better.
Wade rides the SectorLink as these thoughts play out in his head. He doesn’t try to hide in the corner or act overly suspicious. In fact, if it weren’t for his black combat uniform he’d blend in with every other passenger on the tram. Tired. Thirsty. Clinging to a bit of foolish hope. No one would guess that in just a few hours he’d become an enemy to the most powerful entity in the city. But even though he just broke the oath in his contract, Wade doesn’t feel the pressure of getting caught just yet considering he knows Neil is still at the antique shop working with the oddly chipper girl to repair their utility truck. According to his estimate, it won’t be for another few hours when Wade fails to return by nightfall that Neil will realize his absence, become concerned, and then report these details to Adrianne in the dispatch department. It might actually take even longer considering Neil’s reluctance to report the attack on his truck by the misfit kids as he tries to avoid Slayter’s ridicule and mockery. When it is finally reported, it will then take another few hours for Adrianne to notice that Jimmy was never submitted to the transfer tunnels to close out the assignment. Only then when an assignment is reported missing, Wade knows, will Mazer be informed and demand a call for some sort of action. Until then Wade knows he can breathe and enjoy the calm before the storm, though he double checks this on his PDA nonetheless just to be sure. His device is still connected to the network, which means officially he is still a Collector.
What Wade doesn’t know is anything about the extra time the Brigade inadvertently just bought him by attacking Neil and the utility truck. If he only knew he had an extra twenty-four hours before Neil reports in to Headquarters after recovering at Inna’s antique shop, perhaps he would pause to plan more thoroughly, or try to use the attack somehow to his advantage. Instead, Wade continues under his original estimated timeline, his greatest mistake outside of going against the Agency.
Wade hops off the SectorLink line at the second of four exits in the Downtown Sector, just two blocks from his Agency-issued apartment. While he currently has a head start, he knows he will soon need to blend in so he stops to change out of his black combat uniform and into a simple shirt and ball cap before leaving his cold living quarters for the final time.
Night settles in as Wade moves through the downtown sidewalk on foot. After again checking that his access to the Agency network is still active on his PDA, he breathes a sigh of relief towards the night sky, and for the first time notices just how black it is. There are no stars as the pollution blocks any from shining through, and now that Wade thinks about it, he is not sure when the last time he ever saw a star outside of the simulated stars decorated on the ceiling of the Observatory located inside the Agency museum on Headquarters’ third floor.
Soon Wade reaches a corner and peers in the window to Dani’s Diner where Paiton Haas finishes the end of her shift – the final name on Neil and Slayter’s list once they start their pursuit the following night. With no knowledge how her life is about to change, Paiton clears the last of the dishes and wipes down the tables for the following morning just as Wade slips through the door.
“Sorry, we’re closed,” Paiton says as she hears the door closing, but as soon as she glances up Wade is already moving in, dipping her back and kissing her. Paiton is swept away in the moment, throwing discretion out the window, until she finally breaks away.
“Are you crazy?” She rushes to close the blinds. “What are you doing here?”
“I think they’re going to need this,” Wade says cryptically as he grabs a HELP WANTED sign from behind the counter and tilts it upright against the register, grinning from ear to ear.
Paiton furrows her brow, “You mean…?”