Skullcrack City by Jeremy Robert Johnson

Author:Jeremy Robert Johnson [Johnson, Jeremy Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lazy Fascist Press
Published: 2015-02-06T23:00:00+00:00

The phone was set to vibrate, and I hadn’t felt it buzzing against my leg when we were playing our demented parlor game in Shinori’s office.

One new message.

Please let her be okay.

My heart decided I was running a sprint, though I was sitting still in the passenger seat of the blue sedan. Dara activated the door locks and decided we should keep moving.

I played the message. A strange series of clicks, then her voice.

“Hi, honey. It’s mom. I can’t tell you how good it is to get a message from you. I’m so grateful to know you’re alive. This last week…it’s been really hard, and I don’t want to believe anything they’re telling me. I told them that you liked your job and that you’d just had a big promotion and you wouldn’t even need to steal, but they showed me some footage, and…I know you. You wouldn’t hurt a fly. Whatever has happened, you know I still love you, okay, and we’ll meet up and figure things out and I think I can do one of those reverse mortgage things if we need to get you a lawyer. Your timing is great, anyway. I had to get out of the house. The cameras were driving me crazy, and I swear I heard someone on the roof. I’ve been having these weird pressure sensations in my head, and…well, you don’t need to hear my problems right now. I’m in the car, headed your way. I’ll probably stop for some tacos, so I’ll be in town in about two hours. Call me when you get this, okay? We’ll figure things out. Love you so much.”

I dialed her three times. Nothing. Maybe her battery was dead. She always forgot her charger. Maybe she was eating tacos. She didn’t like to talk when she was driving, especially in the evening.

Maybe she’s tied to a chair. Maybe someone working for Delta is speeding up her Pelton-Reyes with a riot-busting radiation rifle. Maybe someone is injecting a super-dose of Hex into her neck right now and waiting for her eyes to turn black.

Dara looked over at me. “Nothing?”

“Nope.” I kept it short. Saying any more would let the panic go full bloom.

“Best case scenario says they’re tracking her to you. They’ll want you to communicate. Between these two calls and your attempts to reach her, they’ve probably pinged your phone. If we get back to the compound we’ve got a short burst communicator that can reach her without trace once she’s in a twenty mile radius. Maybe Ms. A. can think of a safe meeting spot, or at least some place we’d have the advantage.”

Dara sounded confident, but I remembered what she’d said earlier: They ruin everything.

I cracked my phone in half, pulled the components, and flung them from the car window.

Dara’s grip on the steering wheel was white knuckle, but she drove slowly and came to a full stop at every signal. Even a cursory traffic violation at this point would billboard our faces across the tracking networks.

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