Chapter 1
When you have something to hide, it feels like everyone is looking at you. When your face is proof positive that you’ve been up to no good, your chances of getting dragged into a dark room and beaten until you spill your guts go through the roof.
Logan Cahill kept his head down and his eyes low as he walked through downtown San Francisco. The air was brisk, smelly, like the sweet and sour scents of Chinatown mixed with death. Pollute the air with a few ribbons of smoke from more than a few nearby fires and you get the picture.
As much as he loathed the cold, the pressure of it felt good against the swelling all over his face. He wasn’t one to lament the pain, certainly not when pain was all anyone really had left these days, but he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t pissed off for feeling like this.
It was the old feeling of helplessness mixed with disdain.
In the old days, before the occupation, the bruising on his face and knuckles would have stood out. Not now. When you live in a city overrun by hostile forces looking to secure their foothold in America, no one would ever give a guy like Logan a second glance. He looked too much like everyone else: scared, forlorn, compliant. If he couldn’t hide his face, at least he had his hat, which he’d pulled low over his eyes.
As he walked to work, he marched over the uneven sidewalks with the hordes of foot traffic all around him. He tried to shake off the abuse that sat like dull pain in his body. A frown formed. The wake of violence sat fresh in his mind reminding him to stay vigilant, to hide in plain sight, to be the ghost who walks between raindrops. He made the frown disappear. He had enough dead friends, enough dead family. No sense in joining them because he could not keep his feelings in check.
With the Communist Chinese regime running not only San Francisco, but much of the west coast of the former United States of America, someone like Logan Cahill knew that a smile, or a frown, would show up on the face-scanning and emotion-reading cameras that dotted each and every street.
Emotion meant freedom. Freedom was not the Communist way. Nor was happiness. Get caught showing too much emotion and the new Chinese government would club the truth out of you in the streets, or just kill you for what they would call “keeping secrets.”
The morning fog was lifting, elevating his mood, and the familiar scents both soothed and assaulted him. What you smelled depended much on the block you were walking. The one he was walking on now smelled like garlic and saffron, which—in the morning—did not bode well for the stomach.
Walking block by block with his fellow pedestrians, the gobs of foot traffic moved in unison, each to the cadence of the other, all of them robotic, all of them seemingly lost in the misery of their lives. All he cared about was blending in. He just wanted to get to work and make it through the day.
With the difficulties of his life often lost in the day to day activities—boring as they may be—he could not expel the number nine from his mind. It continued to roll around unbidden. Soon he found he was obsessive about it. Nine stood for the number of lives he’d taken. Nine represented the brutal deaths he now kept hidden.
A loud crash across the street startled him, breaking his trance and causing him to glance up. Sensing no immediate danger from the disturbance, he lowered his head again, pulled his hat even lower over his face. For good measure, and maybe because everyone had become paranoid over the years, he snuck a quick look around.
With all the surveillance cameras mounted not just on lamp posts but on traffic signals, the sides of buildings and in and around businesses, there was no such thing as privacy. That was a thing that mattered back when America was America. Back when there was such a thing as freedom. Drawing a deep breath, feeling a tightness in his chest, he thought, My how the times have changed!
Everything you did now, if you didn’t do it right, you were dead. You live with that fear long enough, your world starts to shrink. You think of emotion as enemy, of a misstep as betrayal, of honesty as treason.
Even now, Logan feared the mistakes made by the facial recognition technology, especially the latest models. There was emotional assessment software on board, a sort of threat detection feature, that wasn’t functioning quite right. The Chicoms (what everyone called the Communist Chinese party, not only in mainland China, but in California, too) sold this new technology to the public like it would stop crime. No one believed anything the Chicoms said, and all the new tech ever did was scare people.
It started to make you wonder, Can you even trust your face not to betray your brain?
The point was, you never knew when you were having a bad day and Chicom police would pick you up thinking you might be on your way to shoot up a school, a church, a restaurant. Or worse, inflict retaliation on the Chicoms themselves. That was the true threat. Americans.
Someone at work told Logan they never really got the emotional assessment software calibrated properly. On some level, he knew this. The second he’d confirmed this, however, Logan made it a habit to hide his features, giving his oppressors nothing, even though—up until a few days ago—he truly had nothing to hide.
With this new secret burning deep in his heart and tangling his mind, the secret of these nine deaths, he was grateful to have established these cautionary habits long before now.
Someone bumped him from behind, causing him to stumble forward a bit. Logan turned and cast the offending woman a glance, unaware that he’d slowed his pace. She almost said, “Excuse me,” but was then bumped by someone else behind her.
Foot traffic could sometimes be a contact sport.
With a skyrocketing population, massive unemployment and a steady influx of violence, San Francisco was no longer the City by the Bay as much as it was a fallen city marked more by its expanding slave labor and its slums than its once historic beauty.
He could say the same about himself. He was once a decent human being, just trying to be a good person and get along with others. The truth was, even then, you couldn’t survive this city or those times thinking like that. It was worse now. Everything had changed. He wasn’t that guy anymore—one of the subservient bootlickers—even though he pretended to be.
As he made his way down a long sloping street, he ignored the crush of automobiles all around him, the tall buildings that rose into the sky like huge, faceless monoliths, all the neglect around him. Fighting off the depression, he knew there was a block ahead where the cameras were down for repair. Up there he would smile. He might cry. He would certainly frown. After he made that block, though, he told himself not to look at the dull, compressed sky, and he told himself not to go crazy.
The person behind him slightly bumped into him again, forcing him to knock into the person in front of him.
“What the hell?” he grumbled.
“Sorry,” came the voice behind him.
The sidewalks were packed, but not that packed.
Glancing to the left, there was a width of two more people between him and the street. Not much room, but enough. Nowadays, he walked shoulder to shoulder with people no matter where he went in the city. If you were claustrophobic, honestly, either you were screwed or you got over it. He got over it.
Now, with this secret burning holes in his brain—with the number nine shining bright like a huge neon sign—he remained more protective of his emotions than normal.
In the crowded streets, cars were inching through the city, a bit of honking here and there, the exhaust fumes not terrible, but not great first thing in the morning either. Behind him, a commotion began. Head still tucked low, he snuck a look over his shoulder. Through the throng of people, deeper back in traffic, Logan spotted a huge green military transport truck.
The enormous vehicle was partially blocked and began intermittently blasting its horn. Other pedestrians were now looking back. All around him he could feel the elevation of heart rates, the pumping of fresh blood, the sizzle of fear, almost like an animal senses danger in the very air itself.
People began to squish into him, pressing him into the sides of buildings, forcing him to step over planters, trip on concrete porch stoops, stumble around faux metal gates and forgotten planters.
“Hey!” he finally barked, nudging the offending woman walking next to him.
“I’m being pushed same as you!” she snapped, holding her daughter’s hand, who was being bounced around like the rest of them.
This harried game of human bumper cars was not an abnormal occurrence, for their panic was powered by paranoia and the fear of retribution.
“Stop pushing me!” the little girl shouted to the man beside her.
She was no more than twelve, a gangly little thing with big teeth that should have braces if modern dentistry was still a thing. It wasn’t.
The hulking, honking vehicle got closer to them. It was one of those driverless troop transports and it was relentless in its bullying of other vehicles. Drivers steered clear of it as best as they could, but the road was bumper to bumper in most parts. Now the sidewalks were shrinking against the presence of cars, people making room for cars to drive up onto the sidewalks to let the transport through.
A cold tremor raced down his spine, touched his heart with an icepick point. He tried to stay calm, but that ominous feeling he carried with him often was now a bright red warning beacon. And the agitation he could see in the cars trying to clear a lane? It had become a palpable thing. Group fear racing through the crowd with predictable effect.
The smashing sound of the Army green transport with the small red star in the middle pushing a compact car out of the way startled him and everyone around him. It was not uncharacteristic for these driverless transports to run over people in their attempt to get where they were going. Of course, that didn’t make it any easier to accept. The senselessness of it, the callousness of it, made the loss of human life so much worse.
Was it shaping up to be one of those days?
He figured it was.
As busy as San Francisco was ten years ago, now in 2030 the population had all but doubled. The city was not fit for so much growth so quickly. Now, with troop and supply transports smashing up cars, scaring people and generally causing all measure of chaos, everyone around him was on edge, the bumping, stumbling and grumbling among the pedestrians getting worse.
With the giant truck looming, Logan saw something new. This truck was no longer just flat-faced with a push-guard on the front. This one was outfitted with a cattle catcher, the kind of pointed external grill that started its life on old trains eons ago as a way of clearing obstinate cows off the tracks. The triangular metal grate scraped and pushed cars aside, cars that were now slamming into people who were just trying to get to work in one piece.
The revulsion boiling up in him was acid in the back of his throat. God, he hated these people. He absolutely loathed the idea that the citizens of this once civilized American city were now being killed in the streets and left to rot. It had gotten so bad that dead people on the streets of San Francisco ranked right up there with human excrement and used needles.
The honking persisted.
Cars were pushing each other out of the way the same way people were pushing against each other and him to make room on the sidewalk. Still moving, shoulder to shoulder with the procession of people, he passed several store fronts.
One in particular stood out.
He was being hustled past a young man with wild eyes. The Asian man had ducked into an eave and was holding a big bottle of alcohol with a rag hanging out of it. His attention was fixed firmly on the driverless troop transport blasting its way through traffic. That bad feeling Logan had just got a whole lot worse. The rag was dripping wet.
Assessing his surroundings, the people crushed against him were an older man, a testy woman and her mouthy young daughter. Everyone was moving quicker now, not stopping, not slowing, one giant herd of frightened cattle scampering block by block in a blind frenzy. He sucked down a breath, told himself to concentrate, to stay calm, to keep up.
But this guy with the bottle…
With his zinging energy and his sizzling hot stare, something was about to happen, he knew it. Trepidation shot through his veins. He started to sweat.
When the transport truck finally bulldozed past them, Logan realized the noisy, open aired truck was carrying at least twenty soldiers, all of them standing with rifles in hand.
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