Fiction: The Bee in Van Pelt Park

by Marshall Edwards  (mfe101@gmail.com)

Here on the edge of the Hollow, where Van Pelt Park grows out to swallow Iron City's abandoned neighborhoods, no one owns the streets for long.  Tonight, I'm hoping for a big score.

My drone entourage checks in from my flanks - all clear.  I keep to the rooftops, each leap enhanced by the suit and absorbed by titanium joint implants.  I remember PDFaust saying "You'll never get on an airplane again, with those."

He was wrong.

I push off into weightlessness.  One foot, then another grabs the lip of the next roof.  No skid - the gripping textures I designed work well.  A bit too well, maybe, as the landing jars me like a Ferrari at a red light.

Note to self: dial back the grip on the soles by two percent.  Increase durability.  The engineer in me wants to get started right away, but Iron City needs me tonight.

My head's in Vienna.

PDFaust met me at a little cafe he chose.  I was the obvious tourist - *No, no German*.  Faust fit in a little better: white enough (not a given in Austria, as I'd seen, but it helped), and with six years of language, culture, and breaking in stylish tweed sports coats.  The cafe, modernist and over a century old.  The coffee, fantastic.  The Wi-Fi, unsecure.

No real names, we'd agreed.  I was TheeXeriousBee, he was PDFaust.  "Xeri!"  He smiled, standing to greet me.  "Nice to finally meet you in the flesh."

"I'd think you'd be quite familiar with my flesh, from the surgery footage.  Certain parts of my retinas, anyway."

He squirmed delightfully.  "I can't imagine getting a digital uplink and projector installed in my retina."

I smiled.  "Well, my momma gave birth to me, and so did hers, all the way back to Eve.  You've gotta accept a little pain for something good."

"Well, I guess someone's gotta do it."  PeeDee chuckled.  Quietly, he asked, "What do you see?"

I consulted the retinal display.  "About twenty unencrypted devices, a couple unsecured Wi-Fi networks... and someone's using Tor on an outdated iPhone?"

"That's me."  He placed the silver chunk on the homey wood table.  "It's my dummy phone.  I'm seeing how far I can push it before it dies on me."

"Well, the implants agree.  It's a hot mess."

I didn't savor my Americano long.  We got to talking about my project, and soon PeeDee was showing me around the Old City.

"Here," he ran up to the sun-bleach brickwork in a quiet alley.  "Take a look."

"A painted grate."  It was the sort of thing you don't see in Iron City, where nothing's maintained past twenty years anymore.  Where new gangster luxury pads and shopping districts go up, and the mills and neighborhoods that made my city great turn to rot.

"Look at the design."  He traced the crossed arrows pointing upward, a bold marquis made of negative space.  "Each district's grates are a little different.  Similar themes with altered designs, depending on the manufacturer and the era.  I feel I could look at any grate in the city and know where I was."

I nodded.  Behind PeeDee's eyes, the engineer's wheels were turning.  "I suppose there's a message here for me, then?"

He awoke from his reverie and sized me up, as if calculating wind-speed for a distant target.  "What about your city?  If you woke up in some random area of the city with no street signs, no GPS, nothing familiar - how would you know where you are?"

That one's easy.  I'd look for the tags.

The maze of warehouses came to a halt, and I looked down on one of the greatest tag walls in Old Rusty.  This towering brick wall belonged to Top Ace's flagship steel mill, back before the bust.  The faded black ace of spades with yellow and red piping was just visible about three floors up.  Above that, smashed-out narrow windows that let in the draft.

I fire up the visor spectrometer.  Databases come alive as dozens of symbols try to make themselves known.

First come the vagrant glyphs.  Clear, unadorned, close to the ground.  The black marks, older, are freshly painted over with white geometric glyphs.  "Keep moving."  "Get out fast."

And no wonder.  Newly scrawled over forty years of tags, from hasty burners to towering murals, is the sign of Saint's Sinners: a towering red dagger pointing down to mirror a cross, its blade cut by a crimson S.

"Christ."  I call my drones to me and give them orders.  Speedy whirrs off, scanning the surrounding blocks for Sinner tags.

The suit's enhanced senses tell half the story: the hum of generators, the electricity coursing through the building when the rest of the neighborhood was dark.  I sent in Silent to tell me more.

When the shipment of police-bound military gear went missing this afternoon, I saw two options.  Either someone in the City Council was pocketing the shipment, or an outsider was making a move.  The first was unlikely, since all the City Council players shared their cuts with the to-be-militarized police.  Saint made a lot more sense.

Saint had been cutting into rackets all around the city.  In four months, he'd moved into pot, designer drugs, copper stripping, basement gambling - anything the big players wouldn't touch or wouldn't miss.  If a few of their lesser lieutenants went dark and signed themselves over to Saint, no one complained: no one wanted to lose face with the other syndicates, after all.

Very recently, it seems, the Sinners set up here.  Far past the utility shut-off, much too far for anyone to care.

Silent finds its way to an open window up high.  The on-board cam picks up nothing but black.  Nothing strange on the diagnostics, and yet...

On a hunch, I take control of Silent's task arm.  I choose the mini-saw: similar in appearance to the saw you'd see on a pocket multitool, but motorized and printed with a durable ceramic of my design.  I prod forward, and the black field bends, then breaks with jagged light.

Tar-papered windows, to block hide their activities.  They're well prepared.

***

:You prepared for this?:

Eight months ago, I get that text.

PeeDee, you ass.

:Of course  I am.  This is me.  I'm not ready until I am.:

:You're replacing your joints with titanium enhancements, by yourself, and no one knows where you are:

I grit my teeth and type back,

:We debugged the cerebral controls together, PD.  It works.  The feed will be up, in case something goes wrong.:

:If you do this, there's no going back.:

God damn, could you be more trite?  Why you why me why now??

:I know that.  See you in post-op.:

Dropping him was right, but it hurt.  I thought about that when the sedatives started to wear off and for the next two months whenever the painkillers started to fade.  The K-rations and saline kept me nourished and immobile.  PDFaust's texts were few and formal.  As the bone fused to titanium and muscle networks rewired themselves, we began to joke again.

On the forty-fifth day, I leaped from my roof and landed atop the adjacent apartment complex on the other side of a two lane street.  PeeDee gave me a :thumbs up:.  My body was fine.  Something else was broken.

***

I retract the saw and deploy a snaking camera.  Three big covered trucks, still loaded and ready to roll out.  Two men work to unload the first, and a third directed what will stay and go.  On their head, bulky black night vision goggles.

The tip was good - they were meeting the buyer tonight.  Not the whole shipment, just a taste.

"That's it," the leader instructs as the others close the trailer.  "Let's roll out.  Saint is waiting."

Damn.  Okay, two approaches: stay here and blow the rest of their load, or follow them and learn who's buying.  I opt for the second.

The bangers put the goggles down over their eyes and hop in the truck.  No lights.  I follow them to the edge of the neighborhood where oaks and sumacs take over.  They roll slow over cracked pavement then turn onto a beaten path through the brush.  I take Speedy over the grass and let them take the lead.

I'd mastered roof-to-roof travel.  The run, the leap, the impact against the brick or concrete.  I even created a super-grip graphite texture modeled after a honeybee's feelers that allow me to recover from too-short jumps.  Sheer surface at full impact?  No problem.

You envisioning that?  Good.

Now imagine how well I'll land in a heaping tangle of brush.

I smash down in a thicket of tall grass and woody invaders.  Leg's in a hole.  Bruises are instant.  Weeds and burs strain all the joints of the suit.

With a blip, Speedy checks in.  The truck's pulling away from me.

"Fuck it," I say.  "It's camouflage now."

***

Using Speedy to calculate the jumps works, but with a learning curve.  I apologize to a bundle of birch saplings.  I take a minute to clear the suit of brush - I've acquired so much camouflage my suit smells hot - and plan my next leap carefully.  Groves of trees rise up against the moonlit clouds.  I feel their leaves brush the toes of my boots, and come down amongst the rocks.

Speedy beeps me again.  They've stopped in a clearing, and someone's with them.  I pick my way through the woods and urge Speedy a little closer.

Two semi-circles of vehicles face each other.  The covered truck had joined a couple of armored BearCats, one with a rounded rectangle mounted on top, like a metal-rimmed pool skimmer.

Microwave suppression ray.  Jesus shit.

I lay low.  Speedy keeps its slow, high orbit, grabbing plate numbers, serial numbers, makes and models.  Together we triangulate shots of faces for PeeDee's database to analyze.

The buyers get out of their vehicles - an original commercial Hummer and an old Chevelle, built like a boat on the inside.  I adjust my internal camera to get a better look.

They don't wear the Thug-Gone-Pro look the Council's goons prefer, or the slick-cut suits of the elder Families.  Instead, carpenter's pants, T-shirts, leather and denim jackets crossed with leather straps, holsters, and bandoliers.

On each jacket, a large white stencil of a massive gavel.

The Court of Last Resort.  Psychotic vigilantes out of Saxon Hills who kill or maim their prey.  First they pushed out the gangs - now, they snuff out vagrants, "loiterers," sex-workers, and addicts.  And they're about to buy a city's worth of war gear.

Heaven help us.

Head Skinhead in Charge talks price with Saint's lieutenant.  I can't hear them over my pounding heart, but the suit's recording.  I open a notification from PDFaust:

:D0x.:

Vehicle records.  Criminal records.  Places of residence.  Typically, I'd be done, ready to pass this on to anyone that'll listen - ICPD, the Feds, media outlets, whoever.  They'd put on the pressure, and I'd take them down bit by bit.

I can't wait.  If I don't do this tonight, someone's going to die.

I just don't know what I'm doing yet.

"Just a sample," Saint's man says.  "Whatever you want, there's more."

The man's assistants parade out an unending arsenal of goods.  Bean-bag guns.  Rubber bullets.  Tear gas.  Gas masks.  By the time they brought out the M16s, even the lookouts want a piece.

And that's my cue.

I send Speedy into the back of the truck.  The first two guards to investigate gets a high wattage spotlight in their eyes.  They fall, and two of the Court draw on the truck.  The third, a long-haired lookout with a shotgun, scans the weeds for me.

With a charge, I find him first.  I yank the gun away and put an armored fist in his face.  I rush low and sweep up a second gunman before he can turn on me.  Now the truck's between me and the last Courtman.

I zip-tie the blinded thugs before they can recover.  So clean.  Two more to go, now: the gunman on the far side of the truck -

"Hey, metal bitch!"

- and Saint's lieutenant.

I don't know what I'm looking at.  He's got a gun, a hyper-modern take on a WWII greaser.  Attached to the back is a large round drum.  There's a pop like a champagne cork and a rolling fizz, and my visor goes dark.

Shit.  I step back to round the corner of the truck, but my joints have seized up.  Suddenly, I know what I'm dealing with: high-strength entangling foam, all over my mask and gears.  Left side frozen, I hobble to the edge of the clearing.  Bullets ricochet off my armor, and I regain my balance.  When I hit the weeds I don't stop until I trip over a root.

I flip up my mask.  Rows of blue-grey brambles call back in the moonlight.  Shouts from the clearing behind me, and sweeping bright lights.  I get low amongst the weeds, and the light sweeps past me.

"Silent," I whisper.  "Do your thing."

Fun fact - the heat of a spark depends on the metal used to create it.  Silent's titanium saw sets off sparks at 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit.  More than enough to light the gasoline of three punctured gas tanks.

The explosion rocks the night, and bathes the reeds in fire-red for a moment.  Shouts, and the flashlights swing away.  Some bickering between gangs that simmers, but doesn't boil over.  Some engines start up, peel out, and fade away.

That's when I hear the sirens.  Distant, but only for now.  I call Speedy to me and head back to the clearing.

Just a little time.  I use Speedy for balance and hobble to the nearest Humvee.  I press near the elbow and deploy the Stinger, an armor-piercing blade I designed to take out the big baddies.

A lot of people would be happy to see these go back into the hands of the police.  I'm not one of them.  Half a dozen hits, and eager gasoline surges from the punctured metal.

The sound of choppers.  Still far off.  I hammer through the armor of one more Hummer, and that's all I can do.

Speedy leads me into the weeds.  I put my mask back in place.  Speedy zips ahead to choose a landing spot for me.  The trail through the weeds behind me will simply evaporate.

Helicopters louder now.  I can practically hear the searchlights.

I make my jump.

***

The sun threatens to rise.  I struggle to get the last of the gummed-up suit off of me.  Note to self: invest in giant crab-crackers.

Both my boys made it home safely.  Silent's left motor moans sadly, the fuselage around it badly burnt.  I leave the suit in a pile on the cement floor.  Can't risk burning off the foam now when the heat's still out in force.

I dry off from the shower and lay on the bed.  Around me, the world is waking up.

The sun was rising when I left Vienna for Iron City.  PeeDee begged me not to go.

"Stay," he said.  I was itching under the weight of his lingering hug.  "We'll perfect the tech.  Let someone else do the grunt-work."

"I can't sit back and watch.  That's what we always do.  Things just get worse.  Iron City needs Worker-Bee."

"Just take some time."  He rested his head on my shoulder.  "To make up your mind."

"I made my mind up ten years ago."  I duck out and put him at arm's length.  Passengers around me pulled in by the current.

The edifice is gone - only the boy remains.  "Don't go."

"Coward," I say, and grip my boarding pass.

***

And now we're back in our domains.  Me, back in the city where I ducked gangs, ducked cops, ducked gun-happy property owners my whole life.  Him, back in the placid center of culture, working behind the scenes.

When PeeDee first agreed to help me, he told me Vienna was the birthplace of the end of the world.  If that's true, it's sowing its wild oats in Iron City.

What did I accomplish tonight?  I blew up some ordinance, maybe ruined some Hummers.  I stopped a major arms sale, maybe even soured relations between two upstart gangs.  I also made an enemy of the ICPD - it's their equipment, after all.

I can't imagine what this city will look like in six months.  I don't even know if I'll be alive.  I need to get smarter.

I text PeeDee with an "X" - home safe - and pull the sleep mask down over my eyes.  For now, no more questions.

Marshall Edwards has been writing comic books and short stories for five years.  He lives with his partner in Kansas City, is part of the Autism Self-Advocacy Network, and has a degree in philosophy and religion.