Junior shot the little one in the face and followed, dodging the looters, and heading toward the warehouse in back.
They got out through the loading dock, blending in with the mass of humanity carrying off whatever they could hold. A woman juggled a half dozen cartons of milk, dropping one, two, three of them before she got to the edge of the parking lot. Another tripped, sending a dozen cans of beans scattering across the pavement. For some reason, an elderly man was making off with the mop and a bucket the food center used to clean up spills.
They made their way out of the lot before the PSF surrounded the place. Even as they kept going they could hear shouts and gunfire from behind them. They kept to alleys and passed through abandoned buildings and yards as best they could, avoiding the main streets. They saw cruisers pass, but managed to take cover; no one bothered them and no one caught Turnbull’s eye. Exploiting his counter-surveillance training, he doubled-back, periodically rushed ahead, and generally zig-zagged his way west. The half-hour walk instead took them four hours to get to “TRISTAR FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC AUTO CARE” located on a side street off La Brea. There was one car out front, a Fiat from the 1970s, and it was on blocks.
They did not go right up to it. Turnbull positioned Junior to observe the front as he walked around a one block perimeter. Finding a good location on a porch of an abandoned townhouse, he sat and watched the rear of the building for about an hour. There was a fair amount of foot traffic into the convenience mart next door, but nothing into the repair shop. Yet it was obviously occupied; he could see vague movements through the filthy windows.
After surveying the surrounding area, Turnbull was fairly satisfied that the repair shop was not under surveillance. He could still be wrong, in which case he would be dead meat, but he was reasonably certain and that was the best he would get. He went back to where Junior waited and gave him his pack to watch. Then he headed over to the repair shop, knocked on the front door, and disappeared inside.
Junior waited for ten minutes, becoming more and more restless. His arm hurt where the punk cut him. He was almost ready to investigate when Turnbull appeared at the doorway and waved him over. He came as quickly as he could carrying the two packs.
The repair shop was dark, and a generator whirred somewhere out where the lifts were. The front door opened into a kind of waiting area with ancient vinyl bench seats. An office was to the left, piled with papers. To the right was a surprisingly compact work area; a yellow Volkswagen Jetta from the early 2000s was hoisted up, its transmission on the cement floor below. A black Lexus from the 2010s was on the floor at the far end. Its windows were slightly tinted, not so much to be noticeable, but enough to obscure the view of the curious.
Turnbull stood with a black-bearded man in a silvery-blue jumpsuit. The name tag said “Jackson” – evidently this was their host.
“You need better clothes,” Jackson said. “I can do that too. I’ve got a nice selection.”
“Where?” asked Junior, puzzled.
“Downstairs.”
The stairway down was hidden by a large, wheeled Snap-On Tools cabinet. Jackson pushed it aside and they descended. The basement area was about as large as the work space upstairs, but was divided with wood walls. There were racks of clothing in one space, a work table with lights and a computer set up in another – the forgery area. A third held sheet metal presses, lathes and drills.
“You make your own auto parts?” asked Junior.
“Sometimes,” said Jackson. “Mostly, we make guns. We can do a couple of STEN submachine guns a day. Real simple. That’s how the British designed them, so they could sub-contract the work out to local metal shops during World War Two.”
“How about bullets?” asked Turnbull.
“Harder, now that Mexico built the wall to secure the border. We also get some from the reds. But mostly, we make our own.” He pointed to a reloader. “Getting the propellant and primers is pretty easy. If you have connections you can get most anything. We get the brass from PSF training ranges. They make their people collect the shells at the training ranges, turn it in, account for it, and then we buy it through the back door.”
“So,” said Turnbull. “Will we be good to go by tomorrow?”
“Yeah, if you have the money.”
“I have the money.”
“Well, I got a guy coming in tonight. He’ll do your papers up, get them entered in the PSF system. You should be able to cross into the Secured Zone no problem.”
“You got us wheels?”
“See that Lexus upstairs? Sweet. And no trackers. I reprogrammed the GPS myself so it can’t send.”
“Gas?”
“Full tank.”
“Sounds like we’re good to go,” said Turnbull. “Any loose ends?”
“My arm,” Junior said.
“Yeah, we need a place we can fix him up and where we can crash.”
“Got those too. I got anything you need, as long as you got the money.”
“Shit,” cried Junior, pulling back his arm. Turnbull locked it down to the table and pushed the needle through his skin again, then through the outer side of the wound and pulled the suture tight.
“Next time, don’t get cut.”
“Oh, okay. Sounds like a plan,” Junior replied, annoyed. Turnbull handed him the rubbing alcohol.
“Since you’re such a baby, you can pour it on yourself.” Turnbull got up and lay down in his cot. A stylish grey suit hung on the wall next to him, selected from Jackson’s inventory.
Junior continued cleaning up the knife wound. It was one of the power hours, so the TV was on. On the news, they were announcing the widespread public joy at the new and improved ration allocations – apparently the populace was thrilled to be getting less. Turnbull changed the channel to People’s Court. But this was not the old People’s Court where quarter wits argued over who committed what petty tort against whom. Here, some poor, pale, middle-aged schlub was dragged before a jeering audience of mouth-frothing community college students and accused by a shrieking, teary-eyed creature of “microaggressing me as a trans person of color by invoking his male gaze.” Seated in a chair center stage and flanked by two PSF thugs, the terrified protagonist stared in horror as his accuser fell to her knees wailing “You are eye-raping me!”
After ten minutes of this, the crowd declared him guilty by acclamation – he never said a word – and the announcer appeared on camera to announce that “Justice was done and always will be done to hate criminals, deniers, racists and economic criminals! Long live the battle against rape culture!”
“I don’t get it,” Junior said, dabbing his wound with an alcohol-infused cotton ball. “Why it’s still a rape culture if they’ve been in charge of their own country for a decade? Doesn’t that say something about the People’s Republic?”
“You’re applying facts and evidence and logic to it,” Turnbull said, turning off the tube. “None of that matters. Nothing matters. It’s all a lie. It’s all about power. That whole kangaroo court thing, that wasn’t about who was guilty or innocent of what, but about who gets to use the power. Now, those college students are going to leave there and go back to their shitty, cold dorms and be back to having no power again. But for a little while, there in that studio, the people who really have power lent them some power for a little while. And they took it out on that poor guy. He’s probably off in some rehabilitation camp learning how everything bad that ever happened to anyone was his fault.”
“This place is crazy.”
“No,” Turnbull said. “It’s not crazy. It’s the opposite. There may not seem to be any rhyme or reason for what’s happening, but there is. Like I said, it’s all about power. Pay off this group, let that group have some latitude, then balance it against another group. It’s a balancing act. The problem is sometimes, in a balancing act, you can lose your balance and it all comes crashing down.”