Faster on My Own: Chapter 34
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The humvee couldn’t turn the ride down the highway into a smooth one. Steven glanced out of the window to see if he could identify where they were going. North, it seemed. Not to D.C., like he thought. The leader hadn’t called for him again since their one meeting, which Steven had mixed feelings about. On the one hand, his hand. They hadn’t given him any kind of splint for his left pinky and ring fingers. Swollen and purple, he would welcome amputation rather than continue to feel pain cry out in his hand every time they hit a bump in the road. And bumps were numerous, the highway must have been a battleground of some kind in the last few years. Maybe they were headed south, and were driving where that Constitutionalist rebellion met its end.
Steven wondered if Johnathan had been busted trying to smuggle orders to the loyalist army, since he hadn’t been assigned to guard duty. While he didn’t blame his regular guard contingent for treating him with anything other than powerful disdain, he yearned for some conversation. Too bad, he thought, these guards had a lot more in common with him. They could bond over some Bookchin, or whatever theoretical model this revolution was working with. If Charlotte had been in charge at all, it had to be something decentralized like that. Maybe their current one-leader model was just because the rest had died. Steven chuckled to himself. That’s how theory always works out. You plan and Plan and when the time comes to actually act, reality crumples up your plan and forces you to crawl through the tightest cracks to make it out. Still, he had to admit the revolution looked impressive.
Once they reached the city limits, Steven recognized Detroit. Struggling even before his presidency, it had degenerated completely once his "reforms" went through. Every single corporation pulled out of the city, and it became a lawless wasteland, according to reports. Collateral damage. As the humvee navigated the city streets, Steven expected the rebel soldiers to become more tense, preparing for an attack on the car. Instead, they smiled. One opened the window and let the air rush over his hand. People outside waved at them as they passed. How had the whole city of Detroit become a rebel enclave without them knowing? Unless Sam knew and kept it from him.
The car came to a stop. A welcoming party massed outside of the door, and when the soldiers hopped down from the humvee, the people hugged them. They were less kind to Steven, spitting on him as his guards walked him through the streets. There could have been an assassination attempt, unstoppable and untimely, but no one rushed him. They glared and cursed and threw trash at him, but no one tried to kill him. Either they had been instructed not to by someone—whoever was in charge—or they simply had no interest in watching him die. Whatever kept him alive, Steven thought it might be easier to be dead in that moment. Even when Charlotte tried to kill him, the people's hatred had existed at a distance. Now, seeing a thousand people hating Steven for what he'd done placed a heavy burden on his heart. He couldn't shout out that he'd done it for them. Steven's fingers throbbed, reminding him of his last attempt to come clean. So he took the abuse until they led him into a house.
The house looked just like ten other abandoned houses on the block. Torn screens, broken windows, even a hole kicked out of the bottom of the door. So Steven was surprised that this house was theirs. Where had all the money he sent Charlotte gone? The inside was much better. Stripped down to bare essentials, a clean carpet covered the floor. Unpainted drywall, with the screws still visible, lined the walls. Hopefully the money had gone to enough weapons to win the revolution quickly. Steven expected to hear drones firing missiles at any moment, though he hadn't seen any in the sky. Once that started, it would be much too difficult to organize anything new. He wished he could give the rebel leader that advice, but his guards showed little interest in passing it along.
They showed him his room, which appeared to be an old walk-in closet with a pair of shackles bolted to the wall. Chained yet again, they left him alone, no longer concerned that he could somehow escape his bonds. For the first half hour, he shouted at the door with the hopes of getting a reaction. But "Your revolution seems a bit too centralist to me. Aren't you worried about swapping one dictator for another?" didn't rile them up, and "You're going to die if you don't listen to me!" didn't work either. So Steven sat on the ground and played a game he'd invented while at the camp: kicking one foot with the other. It had no rules and Steven couldn't win or lose, but it killed an hour and a half until the guards opened the door and pulled Steven out again. They took him to a balcony from which he could see a few blocks of the city.
The rebel leader appeared next to him. Steven knew his name had been on one of the documents Sam had shown him. Earlier, it hadn't concerned him, but now he wished he had paid attention. "Do you know how many times you've tried to destroy this city?"
"Once? It was more of a byproduct, I didn't think much about it."
"Ten times, soldiers swept through this city to 'pacify' it. Ten times, they left dead parents, dead children. No one here ever wanted a war. But you couldn't stand it, could you?"
"Stand what?" Steven looked around, but didn't find anything in particular that would rile him up.
"This! The perfect refusal of your fascist nightmare. Everything owned in common, everyone living with each other, for each other. What's happening here is the future."
Steven looked past the leader's gestures, down at the people milling about. Utopia didn't have the glow to it, not literally of course, that Steven expected. It appeared surprisingly ordinary. Just people walking from place to place. "Huh. I did this?"
The leader scowled. "No, you idiot. They did this. You tried to destroy it."
"Well, if you want to be technical, I created the situation that allowed this to happen. That seems like partial responsibility to me."
"How you convinced so many people to let you rule the world, when five minutes with you is hell, I'll never know." Gripping the railing on the balcony, the leader bent over and took a deep breath. "But that doesn't matter now. You're already dead. "
"You better hope not." Steven laughed as he looked up. Two drones, specks against the red sunset-sky, hovered above them. "It looks like I'm the only thing keeping you alive."The leader stared at the dots. "I doubt they can tell exactly who you are." He muttered some orders about warning others to one of the guards, who ran off.
"Trust me. Those drones can tell exactly who all of us are. Unless you're not in the databases. "
A white line broke off from one of the specks, drawing its diagonal path past them as a missile hit a house two blocks away from them. The leader yanked Steven inside the house, and yelled into a walkie talkie to fire. Through the window, Steven saw the trails of two RPGs form useless smoke spirals, blocking the missile's original trail. The third, however, flew straight into the air, exploding with the drone and sending debris raining to the ground. Two more explosions rocked the neighborhoods until the rebels shot down the other drone.
After a tense five seconds, in which everyone expected the explosions to resume from some unknown source, the leader barked at two soldiers to find out who had been killed. After those soldiers left, the leader and Steven were alone. "You're going to need more than just gunfire when more of them come. Dozens, a hundred, are going to be coming next. And pretty soon, Sam's going to stop caring if she kills me."
"There's nothing else we can do. Maybe go underground." He didn't look at Steven, so clearly was he talking to himself.
But Steven, long past any pretense toward decorum, said, "Look, if you want something that can fuck up some drones, I know exactly where they keep it."
"And why would you volunteer that information?"
Steven cycled through a few explanations. First discarded, the truth. Then, a sob story about what he owed Charlotte emotionally. Neither of those seemed likely to win his trust. No, if the leader thought of Steven as the monster he pretended to be, Steven would have to play into it. "Because eventually those drones are going to kill me. If you win this fight, I've still got a chance for my men to come put your rebellion down and everything's good."
"So, what's stopping me from killing you as soon as you tell me what I need?"
"Nothing. But you might want to wait, in case I'm lying."
“Sure.” The leader followed Steven and his guards down the stairway. After the drone attack, Steven appreciated the purpose of this flop house headquarters. The cracked paint on the outside and the steps creaking as Steven walked down didn’t outweigh the perfect camouflage it offered. If it had been people flying over,
Faster on My Own: Chapter 35
there would have been no way for them to tell which decaying building housed the rebels. The face recognition algorithm used by the AI flying the drones didn’t care about what the house looked like, but soon those would be out of the picture. Sam’s forces still had a technological edge, but Steven had been sure to slow development of any weapons that the rebels couldn’t counter. At the time, he’d claimed he was watching the deficit.
When they approached his closet-turned-cell, Steven smelled iron in the air. He’d been present for enough murders to know it was blood. But where did it come from? He thought someone might be injured, until they turned a corner and Steven saw Johnathan slumped against the wall, head slumped, and a splash of blood against the wall. Against the white drywall, the blood looked like a pair of red wings that unfurled out of Johnathan’s ruined head. Steven gulped, but kept walking forward. “So, uh, I guess you use the room for other stuff too, huh?’
“No. But he’s yours, isn’t he?”
“My what?” There were no signs of torture on Johnathan’s body, which assuaged what little guilt Steven felt. Anyone loyal to him deserved to be shot in the head, after all.
“Your man. We always suspected you had someone on the inside here.” Arnold laughed. “How could you not? We believe it was Johnathan.” Lifting the head, directing the lifeless eyes at Steven, Arnold said, “So, recognize him?”
Steven pushed down his first instinct, to deny. As much as he would like to disavow the corpse attached to Arnold’s blood mural, he needed to consider what his opportunity was. Denial, if successful, would widen the information gap between the two. Of course, it was likely to fail. Whereas admitting Johnathan was his couldn’t fail. If Arnold believed him, it could help spark a greater degree of trust between the two. And Steven needed to improve his status among the rebels or he’d probably die in a supply closet within two weeks. As he pictured his own body in Johnathan’s position, a little thicker and probably posed in a more dramatic location, his fingers throbbed to remind him that his death probably wouldn’t be so quick. Steven sighed to appear reluctant. There was no reason he couldn’t still manipulate the information gap a little. “Yeah, he’s mine. Not one of my best men, but then you never send your best into an enemy army, you know?”
“If I find any more of your spies in this city, you will take the punishment for their crimes. Feel free to contemplate what punishment looks like. “The guards pushed Steven into the closet with Johnathan’s dead body and locked him in. The blood smell, without circulation to temper it, sunk into the air around him, weighing each molecule down with its significance. Steven banged against the door a few times to complain, but it was theater. He and the guards knew he’d be spending the night with the body. Luckily, the guards had been distracted enough by Johnathan to forget to chain Steven to the wall, who used that uncommon freedom to nudge Johnathan’s head to the right, so the hole where his eye should be wouldn’t stare at him. But no matter how he tried to poke it away, or push it, or even shove it, the head would loll around on a surprisingly flexible neck and point that gore-ringed hole right back at Steven.
Hours later, the smell of blood ducked back to allow the star of the show come out, the stench of rotting flesh. As Steven curled up against the wall— train sleeping style— the first hints filtered into his nose. Sleeping with the smell of death wafting by, slithering into his lungs, proved impossible. By morning, his nose pushed its way through the air crowded with odor. Yet another torture, despite all the help he’d offered Arnold. Hostility, especially toward such an authoritarian revolution, would have been justified. But Steven wasn’t about to start sabotaging his own odds when The Plan might rely on the outcome of the revolution. Steven knocked Johnathan off the chair and, over the course of a couple hours and a hundred foot-nudges, navigated his body into the far corner of the room.
Steven glanced at Johnathan’s face, still pointed directly at him after all that. The bullet hole stared accusatorily at him. Sighing, Steven said, “Look, that’s the risk you take. You wanted to help tighten fascism’s grip on the world, that’s on you.”