Faces in the Fire

A story by Keith Croes

"Two-bucka-two," John heard.

Do you have any idea what it will be like out here?

Then a whomping explosion that carried the smell of dust. Bright particles -- fabric? skin? hair? dirt? -- froze in a body-throbbing flash. Given sufficient time, John thought he could paint them, one by one, the shards and fragments strobed against the night sky. Instead he dropped and rolled.

"Hey!"

He rolled under the planking that supported a variety of leafy vegetables, lettuce and kin, and into the stall and the legs of a man who kicked him vigorously, as if thankful for the distraction.

"Thing's clear!" Hoarse-voiced, the man kicked him again. "Thing's clear!"

John looked out prone beneath the counter, saw the spangled boots of a woman shuffle on the hard-baked street, the wheels of a stroller in front of her making nervous quarter turns, left and right. Beyond was a thicket of legs and a few gash-eyed windows. The man tried to kick him again, but John caught him around the ankle.

"Thing's clear," the man said quietly, almost conspiratorially. "Distiller two booths up. Must've lost his cooker."

"Shut up!"

John listened. Near and far, a few people took up the shreds of the relieving chant: "Thing's clear! Thing's clear!" Welling talk, a spume of laughter, and a thousand footsteps, squeaking bikes and zipping mopeds regained their clattering life.

Standing, John slipped the laserod into a covert hollow of the hem along his right thigh. The merchant grinned up at him from a splotched, pudgy face.

"Fab deal on liongreen," he said, spearing an index finger around. "Two-bucka-two. Plastic bags for soldiers."

"Fruit?"

The man scowled as if fruit had never entered his chumpy body.

Two booths up a dead man sprawled backward over a splayed bushel of apples, phosphorous snapping and glowing along the margin of his serrated ribs. Mute and stiff as shocked puppets, several people attended him. The apple came rolling out into the street from between their feet and a drawn, skull-faced woman turned toward him. John flipped her a coin as he walked away, salivary glands detonating as he bit into it.

Two-bucka-two. Two Cleveland dollars for two ounces of dandelion greens. He chewed the apple and swallowed. The crowd parted for him despite the unfaded crescent on his left shoulder where his unit patch had been removed. He may not have been active duty, but he was clearly a soldier.

Six weeks out of the Detroit developments and only now did his own city come into focus. The surgeons had made him a scalpel, an instrument of simple purpose. But Cleveland posed complex rhythms. Suddenly, in a surge of electronically amplified awareness, he recognized the subtle masks of the mass of city dwellers around him. In the tall, sweeping view from the vantage point of his head, he saw emotions rushing by him like leaves in a stream. Faces. Faces in the misshapen doorways, faces in the fires along the street, faces fast and hard around him.

He knew why it had taken so long. He had been looking for something lower. Yet here it was, way above battlefield pitch. The explosion had probably triggered it, brought him up in automatic response. He tasted blood with the apple and realized he had bitten his tongue. His sides hurt as if he had run a great distance.

This was something worse than war.

This was peace.

Farther down, where the booths and battered buildings gave way to lighted shops, he was stopped by a cop installed in an armored watchpoint on the corner. Spotlights came on and he saw his image appear on the giant screens mounted on all four corners of the intersection over the heads of the crowd. Him. Him looking strangely reversed. Him down to the old face he hardly recognized. The crowd pulled back as if he had grown fatter by several meters, as if he were a monument sprouting out of the concrete. The watchpoint, he knew, was the exposed tip of an underground tube that connected to police headquarters.

"You." From a speaker mounted atop the watchpoint, the amplified word wambled around where the buildings were whole. He watched himself stop and marshal his intimidating frame to some semblance of attention.

"Approach and insert ID."

The reflection of his trunk as he walked toward the watchpoint was a compressed column in the shiny curved metal, and his limbs were skinny pipes. A praying mantis. Two large red arrows -- one pointing up and one pointing down -- held between them at waist level the tiny slit of a card aperture, which tugged the plastic out of his fingers. Several seconds later a mirrored panel turned transparent, but John had already filtered through it and was working on the inscrutable translucent face protector of the police officer inside.

He heard the electronic birthnoise of the intercom. "We can't get any readings through the uniform," the masked officer said.

"That's the idea."

"You'll have to turn it in."

"Come get it."

The intercom switched off for a moment, but John could translate the vibrations with his palm against the side of the structure: "What are we supposed to do with these fuckers!" Someone out of sight grunted. The intercom came back on at the same moment that John made it through the face protector. The officer was middle-aged, clean-shaven, headed for dual chins, a calm, good-natured face despite his outburst.

"Are you armed?"

John looked shocked and shook his head.

The man glanced down and his shoulder made several quick movements. John knew he was scrolling through his records.

"Not inside, eh?"

"Don't want inside."

Then, unaccountably: "Jesus." Shoulder movements.

John leaned against the watchpoint. The crowd was now flowing behind him, oblivious. The intercom went dead and his arm tingled against the metal: "Jesus. This guy is a retrofit warrior-grade bionic and not an insider. Detroit, Youngstown, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati -- ten years of campaigns all over the Cleveland territory with Expeditionary and now back on our lovely streets."

John knocked with one knuckle against the blastproof panel. "Righto, hey, I've got a date."

The man looked up and the intercom came on. "You know anything about the explosion up 150th way?"

John shrugged. "Phoscharge. No one fled the scene, so it probably had a timer. Fruit vendor didn't pay his booth tax, my guess. Can I go?"'

The panel went silver and John let it go silver, regarding his narrow reflected head.

"My card?" he said.

"Righto. Move along."

John filled his lungs and walked. The sky was deep and featureless save for an elusive sliver of moon. This was where the city started and the outskirts ended, but still the lights -- electric street lamps instead of fires -- clustered along the main drag. From the air John knew that this edge of the city at night could be seen stretching east across the landscape like the attenuating tentacle of a sparkly octopus along Lake Erie.

Here were the noisy, high-tech shops with audioplast windows that pulsated with music and color, and for a moment he shut down his filters. It was briefly entertaining, then distracting, so he called for a static wavelength, negating the swirling spectrum, allowing him to see the salesgirls inside, sheer-fabric skirts seeming to be the fashion, tight and low around the hips and flowing like a high-viscosity liquid below the knees, and brassieres of various bright colors. They pranced around the aisles as if they were protected, as if they were in the privacy of their parents' apartments. John watched, his filters adjusting instantly to the changing opacities in the storefronts.

"Big man, big man!"

There was a small boy wrapped around his leg. John recognized the limits of strength and held back.

"Go away," he said.

Then he glanced down and saw the young face, felt a sense of plummeting injustice. This child would grow up here.

"Dollar, big man, dollar!"

"What's your name?"

"Dollardollardollardollar..."

He kicked free. Walked.

He turned right on 58th. Left on Euclid past the brothels, yellow and pink neon on the warping sidewalk slabs. The women out front had never approached him and suddenly he knew why. They watched him pass with heavy eyelids like sea clams opening and closing.

He stopped in front of one.

"I wouldn't hurt you," he said.

"Righto." She had a centimeter-wide hole punched in one cheek so she could breathe without opening her mouth, or with something in her mouth. Her nose was usually nonfunctional, the membranes swollen from an exotic pharmacopoeia. "Your bones too hard, bad boy."

"No, I could be..."

She looked away. He saw her molars through the hole.

"Hey, march on, soldier."

An ugly midget stepped from the shadows and waved a black tube at him. John recognized the pulse weapon, the armored fabric of the suit the little man wore, and turned away. Where does the money come from? he wondered.

Inside. Where it comes from and where it goes.

Sensa worked at a bar about a block away. He crossed the street and turned right on 56th.

He sat for an hour at the back of the bar and watched the customers and Sensa, who looked in his direction now and then, and he admired her stamina and agility anew, wondering if he could do what she did, so expertly, and with smiles for most of the drunks and zonks and hearty-partiers. She gave him sad looks, though, and he wondered if it was her way of sharing with him her honest feelings, or whether he was simply a depressing figure making this comeback in her life, tolerated for what he had meant to her when he was human.

Finally she was across from him, pitiable in her fatigue. She had brought him a drink, his only one of the night. He counted fifteen other people in the bar, including three waitresses. He always counted people.

"You look different," she said.

"I am."

"You are what?" She plucked a synthetic cherry out of her drink and sucked it off the stem. Her arms were hairy. He thought the uniform had been chafing at her legs and now she spread them under the table. Up close she stunk.

"You tell me."

She giggled, her arm stretched across the table. She was near sleep. Two blocks away in her apartment and she would be falling into bed, snoring. "You looked like you wanted to fuck. Got a cigarette?"

"No."

"That's okay. I don't smoke."

"Thanks for the drink."

She nodded.

"I want to fuck."

The brown eyes rolled up at him from the head resting on her forearm on the table.

"You are different."

As a joke he turned his throat upward and barked like a dog. The sound was so real that it elicited frightened stares from everyone in the place, so she led him quickly to her apartment.

"I'm not some kind of robot zombie."

"Oh, shut up, John."

He had steered her through the shower and her hair was wet. Her bed was a mess.

"I know you see me that way. Pasty-face in the back of the room. Lost. Bolts in my neck, zipper in my head."

"Oh, shut up, John."

She was breathing hard, gasping for the words.

"My bones are too hard."

She cried out in glee. "This one is just fine."

"Am I hurting you?"

"Yeah, but in such a good way."

"I think I'm going inside."

She cried out again, then seemed to settle. Her breasts spread like foothills, brown-dotted nipples rolling, rolling.

"You should be inside," she said. "I've told you that. My father was just a..."

"Your father was the best man I ever met."

They lay awhile. She had a candle, no windows.

"You re kidding, right?" she said.

"Righto."

"No one can get inside if they don't want you inside."

"But that's what I do. Or did."

He came up on his elbow. His shadow was a flickering behemoth on the wall.

"What did you do, John?"

"The managers took to the developments, and we went after them. Take the developments and you take the city. I know how to get in."

"But you were just kidding."

"Righto."

"You were just kidding about getting inside here?"

"Righto."

"You can't get inside, John."

"I don't want inside."

She deflated ultimately, like dying. "Well, you belong inside." And she was asleep. He puffed out the candle.

"I need a slitter and a jump."

Wormy sprawled in a pile of smudgy CDs, ready to say something about the old music. The new greed rose easily to his eyes, though, and John saw another man, as strange as himself. One stumpy palm on Jimi Hendrix. "What tolerance?"

"Four-point-five."

Wormy let out a truncated cackle. "Take a fucking break, home. Detroit surrendered."

An old reggae tune was rattling around the room with the madding crispy buzz of saturated speakers. John screened out the offending frequencies.

"Detroit only took fours," he said. "You need four-point-fives for Cleveland."

Gray metal shelves full of half-inch and three-quarter-inch video -- reels and random stacks of VHS and Beta carts -- lined one wall of Wormy's reconstituted garage. The narrow far wall held the buckled grate of a small ground-level window and the same gray metal shelves stacked with audio recordings and the ancient equipment to play them on. The rest of the room was devoted to low-priority weaponry in boxes and crates. Wormy himself wore an odd combination of black-market military and nonfunctional military chic. Cheap boutique stuff.

Wormy came up so that he was sitting cross-legged, his strange adult face giving way to childish hurt. All the possibilities of his personality were present in him from the first moment we met, John thought. What I'm seeing now is the result of all the experiences of his life pressed against the raw clay he was when he was ten. Weird shit.

"Would it do any good to be curious?"

John shrugged. "I'm going inside."

Wormy grunted, then said, "What's it like in there?"

"The way you'd expect. Polished wood. Good china. Cloth napkins. You'd hate it."

Wormy whinnied, then grew silent. "The way I hear it, you could be inside. I mean, shit, you..."

"The first Youngstown attack, remember? Joined Expeditionary instead. Never thought it would last -- the developments, I mean. Anyway, the law was clear -- if you weren't in the development when the repfields went up that first day, you were out. No exceptions. Not even me."

"And now you want in?"

"Righto," John said, grinning broadly, like the kid he thought Wormy would remember. "Now I want in."

Wormy laughed and shook his head. "You're a zonk."

"Righto," John said. "Been through too many repfields behind too many slitters."

John expected Wormy's interest to wane, but it actually intensified a notch. He brought his sensors down a third, quieting the room.

"They travel underground?"

"Mostly, through the tubes. All the main facilities are above ground, behind the repfields. Housing, laboratories, factories, hospitals, police watchpoints -- they're all hooked into the system, part of the original design. They had it figured out long, long before the repulsor fields went up, Wormy my boy."

"Righto, well, that's sort of what I thought." Wormy stood, holding his two popping knees. "But I don't have no four-point-five slitter." He gestured broadly toward the armaments stacked against the walls. "This is it, home. Nothing newer than five years. But I could get you a jump."

"Yeah?"

"I know a guy delivers cargo to the other side of the developments, could take a slight detour from his flight plan and drop you on the roof."

John shook his head. "Can't go in that way without a slitter," he said. "Look, you hear anything, let me know."

"Hey, wait! You don't want to hear no Rolling Stones?"

"Sure. Right after you sell me that 1090K pulse tube. Oh, 'bout thirty cushgrenades -- " Wormy donned his greedy grin. " -- couple of timers, ten ounces of the T70 plastic -- " John listed his list. A reggae singer sang through the scratchy speakers:

treat me like an animal a manimal
boy's gonna be free
and you gonna get bit
because you messin with an animal a manimal
and you gonna get bit
boy's gonna be free
boy's gonna be free.

Over Wormy's protestations, John left halfway through the second playing of Goat's Head Soup. The sun had set. Despite who he was and what he carried, he felt oddly vulnerable in the obstacle course of Wormy's neighborhood. The sensation was enough to jack up his sensors and set him running through the infrared tangle.

There's a place where we'll be safe. We've had it all planned.

He knew well the mortality of warriors and the value of fear. There were monsters here, towering shadows around the oil-drum fires. He could see their faces, hollow eyes only momentarily surprised by the figure that sprinted like a jungle cat through their junkyard wilderness. Soon he found a rhythm -- leap, step, step, leap, step, step -- by splattered concrete chunks, auto shells a decade old, appliance casings, twisted traffic signs, utility poles long given up any hope of the vertical. But ahead, around the fires, they saw him coming.

They lined up across the street, a row of about ten of them in grimy trousers and insulated vests of dull red and gray and green. He pressed his sensors to their limit -- until he could hear their breaths like waterfalls gushing from their nostrils, the drumming of their heartbeats, wind scraping the ragged rooftops high to the left and right -- then slowed to a trot and stopped. He heard ten more of them behind him, closing in. It must be September, he thought. It feels like September.

He stood with weapons slung over both shoulders and two rucksacks filled with electronics and explosives. Slowly, as he walked into the light of the fires, they drew back, dispersed, disappeared. From fight to flight without a word. And they had survived another night.

In a few minutes he was home. For the moment he camped in a corner apartment above an abandoned saloon on the corner of Holly and 167th. He could not bring himself to move in with Sensa, and her apartment was strategically impaired. From his windows he had a view down both intersecting streets. He woke the next morning to the sound of a diesel engine on 167th. In the new, low sun, he watched Wormy scramble out of a 990 Nissan tank, heft something out after him from the interior, and carry it into the building.

Splashing water on his face from an old stainless steel salad bowl, he listened to the footsteps on the stairs. They stopped in front of his door.

"John?"

"Come in, Wormy."

"John."

Wormy was looking equally at the towel John wore around his waist in the cold apartment and the silver laserod he twirled in his fingers. A piece of equipment of Wormy's fondest dreams.

"I got something for you, home."

"I see that. A slitter."

"Three-point-seven. All I could get, but I figured you might be able to use it."

"I doubt it."

"It'll do on an ag repfield. Keep you in beef, if robots eat."

"How much?"

"On the house. For old times. So the police don't shoot you through the heart..."

"...in a case of mistaken identity."

"Angie," Wormy sang his Mick Jagger impression. "A-a-n-n-n-gie -- " The voice faded behind the closed door. Footsteps padded down the stairs.

John squatted next to the slitter leaning up against the door frame. It was powered to capacity. Three-point-seven. Beef, he thought as the tank chuffed up and crunched away outside.

We've got it all planned.

One watchpoint was as good as another. He came in on 62nd, a dark street off the sparkly tentacle where the fires were the only light. But this night he had to kill. Fortunately, the killing was quiet. At first he went behind, pushing and thwacking, and then he found that the going was easier if he pulled on the jury-rigged harness, and the firing lane was better.

Do you have any idea what it will be like out here?

The hungry denizens of Cleveland charged from the blank doorways, leapt from the out-of-plumb balconies, and he downed them in quick, silent slices of the laserod. No one cried out. Bodies fell, that was all. Slumped down. Died. Only a few people even comprehended the spectacle: a man leading a cow down a city street. And those few remained as speechless as the dead.

Soon he reached the street lamps and the intersection and watched again as the crowd retreated, granting him wide berth. Just he and the cow on the four screens, strangely reversed. He wore a cloak over his uniform, the hood pulled up over his head. Halted in the glare of spotlights, the pair resembled some kind of rural monument to Death.

The police immediately came out of the watchpoint, as he knew they would. There would be no bellowing commands from the dark bell of the public address speaker tonight. Possession of an ag animal was a high crime. Meat production was a managerial responsibility, undertaken solely within the repfields.

Inside.

"Step away from the animal."

Heading straight toward the cops, John tugged on the nylon rope and the animal followed, hooves clunking. The face protectors were ominous reflecting caricatures under the lights, set now within the white globes of riot helmets. Both men aimed pulse tubes from the hip.

"That's close enough. Now step away from the animal."

The cow bleated a complaint as John reached over its neck and grabbed its jaw, twisting its head and bringing it down to the street on its side. Wordlessly, he sank to one knee beside it and drew the blade through the sagging flesh of its throat. Blood flew with a sucking spatter over the white riot helmets, the face protectors like Kabuki masks. Another slash and the viscera spilled around the shiny black jackboots planted to the concrete. The sound was a squishy burbling and the hiss of released gas. Neither man moved as John stood and walked into the gaping watchpoint, drawing the sliding hatch closed behind him.

They were still standing there, frozen on the four screens, when John found the controls for the electromagnetic shuttle and launched himself into the underground.

He would rather have jumped in, slitting through the repfield and down to a roof, or even gone in at ground level, challenging the dogs and automated gunposts. His knowledge of the underground was based solely on his knowledge of the above-ground landmarks. The residential portion of the Cleveland developments was southeast of the city, and police headquarters was east-southeast. But as he doffed the cloak and stuffed it in the space next to the swivel seat, he relinquished all thought of alternate routes. This was his way in. Tonight, the one and only way.

He figured that the police tube paralleled the main commuter tubes for at least several kilometers before branching off. His first stop, only seconds into acceleration, confirmed that assumption, and two stops later he reached the point where the smaller police tubes -- there were several now -- curved away from the larger mass transit tunnels. The T70 charge was in place on the control panel, and he activated the timer and sent the shuttle on its way. It would blow in twenty seconds, when the craft had traveled at least eight kilometers, and it would likely take out every police tube to the city and even to the developments.

He felt the explosion more than he heard it. By then he was already through the maintenance hatch and trotting along the catwalk that clung to the side of the nearest commuter tube. He estimated that he would be running for twenty minutes.

Running, like the day of the Youngstown attack. Sensa's family had lived in a rowhouse within ten blocks of where she lived now.

There's a place where we'll be safe.

An occasional commuter car passed with a zinging hum.

boy's gonna be free
boy's gonna be free

He ran when there was nothing left -- five kilometers, ten, fifteen -- throat raw, phlegm seeming to pull in a chain up his chest and out his mouth. He reached her street at the same time as a squad of Youngstown soldiers and snatched a rifle from the deathgrip of a corpse -- an old man he had seen the week before trimming hedges in front of this house. An old man wearing a gray John Carroll University sweatshirt, head half buried in a tire rut of dirty slush. He walked down the sidewalk toward her house as calmly as if he were returning from the corner deli.

It felt good, boots slamming against the grated floor of the catwalk, arteries to his muscles maximally dilated, wide-open rushing like a celebration, and he threw his arms upward and shouted, screamed an echoing victory cry for every one of the million red blood cells that brought him life through tubes of his own, bloated on the oxygen that he wolfed down in well-paced portions. A cry that drowned out even the passing swoosh of a commuter shuttle. He shook a pulse tube in one hand and a cushgrenade launcher in the other. A twenty-minute run and he was in. Tonight, the one and only way in.

Emergency lights a hundred meters apart seemed to flash by. He stopped once to attach charges to the seven commuter tubes, leaping from one to the other in the dim light. When he stopped again in front of an ordinary-looking maintenance door, he felt the concussions behind him. Glancing to his right, he counted seven humps diminishing in the distance. That's all there were. Underground, at least, access to the developments was limited. The tubes were temporarily out of service.

He was unimpressed by the ordinariness of the door. It was painted beige. A pressure-label notice stuck neatly to its upper center read authorized personnel only in red letters. A stainless steel push plate bore numerous grimy fingerprints. He was accustomed to how death could be delivered in the midst of the familiar. Life expelled irretrievably over the dining room table. Arms vaporized as they reached into the dishwasher, legs detaching, disintegrating as they pounded across the comfortable braided rug. There was war behind the ordinary door.

And something worse than war.

He pushed it open. He was looking for an address: complex S, unit 26.

Sensa lived on 50th between Bainbridge and Fyfe. He had run down Bainbridge and turned, then walked calmly with fifteen rounds in an antique bolt-action 30-30. Unless something happened, something incredible, he and the ten men ahead of him would reach Sensa's porch about the same time.

We've built a place to go. And we're going. We're all going.

It was early March. He smiled and waved.

boy's gonna be free
and you gonna get bit

The soldiers smiled back. White glare from the patchy snow.

He was at the bottom of a stairwell with a murderous yen to go up. Though the commuter station was not busy at this hour of the evening, it was not abandoned either. On the opposite side of another plain-looking door in front of him was a large lobby decorated at present with six armed men. Security, he thought. Not military. Not even police. About four flights overhead a woman descended, her small feet clinking on the metal stairs. He cut the door in half with the laserod and discharged two cushgrenades through the opening. After a moment there was no one alive within a hundred meters of him except for the woman, who was clanging upward now, shrieking.

He climbed after her.

Fifteen rounds and ten men. They seemed magnified somehow in the open sights of the rifle, like underwater statues, with clothing a little too artistically crumpled. He saw their smiles disappear, his finger squeezing, his hand finding the bolt, ramming it back and forward again, again and again and again. Two or three men were coming toward him as he fell, returning fire, and Sensa's father was squatting on the porch, taking aim with a rifle of his own.

Later, John felt hands undressing him and a thought surfaced. It was like when he was a baby, getting his diapers changed.

"Complex S," he said.

The woman stared at him and pointed in some abstract direction, handbag swinging from her fist. He leaped up several steps, throwing his arm around her so that her neck was in his armpit and bending her backward over his knee. His breath was warm in her face. He heard her bag drop.

"Where is complex S?"

treat me like an animal a manimal
boy's gonna be free

The hospital was a prime recruiting ground, and everyone thought his wounds were perfect. Punctured lung? No problem. Ribs, muscles, bones -- we're going to replace them all anyway, boy. Brain's in one piece, that's all that matters. Right age. Good Cleveland kid. Sign here.

We'll be safe there. It's all arranged.

He disposed of the explosives at the commuter station and took off with the pulse tube under one arm and the launcher under the other, stopping at corners to shoot out the cameras.

The complexes formed a loose circle, with only T, U, and V farther away from the commuter station than complex S. A glass-enclosed moving beltway would have taken him directly across an open courtyard and cut the distance he had to travel considerably, but he wouldn't have lasted fifty meters. In the hallways, the security forces had to worry about harming the residents. Lasers mounted over the courtyard relied on the cameras for target confirmation, and he couldn't possibly get all the cameras.

This time of day, the hallways were almost empty.

Open ground-level walkways linked each complex. Here he knew he was most vulnerable. On the way to complex N, several security guards converged from both sides in front of him. He took them down with one blast from the pulse tube, but dogs spilled around the corners and the weapon would need at least six seconds to recharge. Unable to reach for the machine pistol at his hip quickly enough, he shouldered through the door of an apartment immediately on his right.

He staggered back across the terra cotta floor of the vestibule and steadied himself in the archway to the kitchen. A slight, handsome, compact man with curly black hair held a knife in the air, poised over a cutting board covered with a chopped red pepper. John regarded him. The dogs entered, howling, nails clattering on the tiles.

Holding the man's eye, John growled, barked, and bayed, and as a single entity the dogs around his legs lifted their muzzles and began a hair-raising clamor. Winking at the man, he backed out through the vestibule and into the hallway, closing the door behind him.

It's inconceivable that you wouldn't want to come with us. It's that girl, isn't it.

He slowed and stopped in front of a bank of elevators at complex S, then retreated quickly to the walkway and around the side of the building. The units were stacked in a rough pyramid, the roofs of one level serving as the yards and patios of the next level up. Out of habit he cracked the spent pulse tube in half over his knee and tossed it aside.

The grappling hook caught fast on the first toss, the rope winding tight through the small motor on his belt harness. A hundred meters through the sheltering woods behind him he heard the steady trotting of a dozen men.

Halfway up the wall he stopped and arced three cushgrenades into the darkness over his shoulder. The wall to his left exploded.

Do you have any idea what it will be like out here?

Sensa's father was a union welder, working up and down the decks and bulkheads of the cargo ships that sailed the Great Lakes. Neither he nor his wife nor his four children nor any of his relatives nor anybody he knew was on the list. He hadn't been chosen.

John stayed in his house for most of the six months of John's recuperation and watched him die, served as a pallbearer at his funeral. The man had also been wounded by the Youngstown soldiers. A few weeks later John was only too happy to be slitting down through the repfield of the Youngstown developments.

Up over the wall, squatting next to a mound of patio furniture covered by a tarp. A light came on inside and he saw the silhouette of a tricycle. Security wouldn't fire again, not now. John blew out the glass doors and ran through the living room into the bedroom.

An elderly couple joined in raising a lime-green bedspread up to their necks. The silver hair reminded him of target practice, and sagging butts crashing through frosted-glass shower doors. They might as well have had bull's-eyes painted on their foreheads.

"Where is 26?" he said.

The man nearly shouted. "Two levels up!"

"This side or the other?"

"This side."

"West -- " John pointed with a twitch of his thumb, " -- or east?"

"Ah -- " The man paused. "A few units west."

John backed toward the doorway, then halted.

"What month is it?"

"September."

"Why the tricycle?"

The man looked puzzled. "It's our granddaughter's."

John left the way he came, sending the grappling hook up to the next level.

Take the developments and you take the city. The city, with its million faces. Its million emotions --

because you messin with an animal a manimal

-- just take the old white heads in the developments, the business executives, doctors, scientists, engineers, politicians, artists, the gifted and the monied, and you take the city. And nothing gets their attention like blowing away the china hutch, the Picasso print mounted behind nonglare glass, the hollow ceramic duck, oak spice rack, bookcase full of leather-bound volumes, fish aquarium, brass bed, and grandfather clock. After Youngstown, they found plenty of reasons to hit Cincinnati and Pittsburgh and Detroit.

The old white heads of Cleveland decided it. This would be the Cleveland territory, strongest single alliance since the dissolution of the federal government.

But what happened to the granddaughters? John wondered. He never stuck around long enough to find out. Several times, as he and the other warriors rattled off in one of the raucous troop transports, he caught glimpses of crowds in the courtyards wandering about in pajamas and robes, like some kind of shell-shocked society slumber party. There were men, women, and children of all ages surrounded by the Expeditionary grunts. Where did they go? Where were they now?

We have two hours. The development will admit no more residents once the repfields go up. You go after that girl now and you'll relinquish your heritage, all that we've worked for. It's the law. And we made the law.

Another level up he began moving west, climbing over the walls between patios. Three units over he blew out the glass door. He heard choppers in the distance.

because you messin with an animal a manimal
and you gonna get bit

The man had gray hair, but age had granted little kindness to his face. He stood in a far corner of the living room in front of a woman, also gray-haired, who peeked out from around his arm. A book had been dropped on the floor next to a lounge chair. The reading light was on. Glass beads glittered across the brown-and-white motif of a Persian rug, spilling over to the hardwood floor.

As mayor of Cleveland, your father pushed through the entire plan -- the building of the development, the attack on Youngstown -- and now we're prepared for the counterattack. But we've got to move, John. It's happening right now. It's what we've been working for.

"I've seen what you've been working for."

"John?"

He fired the machine pistol once, killing both his parents with the single shot, and listened to the mad vectors of footsteps on the roof and down the hallway.

boy's gonna be free
boy's gonna be free

THE END

MORE STORIES BY KEITH CROES

keith@croes.com