Not Worth A Cent by R. Neube
R. Neube tells us that this story originated, "as more than a few of my stories do, while I was waiting for a city bus. This burly teen started spouting hundred-decibel abuse at a nigh-fossilized codger. The punk made the mistake of shoving the old man, giving the elder the space he needed to swing his cane. Babe Ruth would have been proud. As I watched the crying punk crawl away, it started me thinking..." 
* * * *
The bent old man watched the two young thugs enter the ruins of the warehouse. The thugs moved slowly. Between them, they strutted fifty kilos of surgically-implanted muscles.
The old man withdrew a cigarette and torched it. The thugs took a step back.
"That poison will kill you," said the thug with electric-orange hair braided into a pillar atop his head.
"On my hundredth birthday, I realized death means nothing. I started smoking, eating bacon, even guzzling vodka." William Stewart laughed. The sound echoed like the song of a ghost.
"Got the money?" asked the plaid-haired thug. He dropped a small bag on the wooden bench.
William shuffled to the bench, taking an oblique path to keep both thugs in front of him. "Let me see the drugs." Wrinkled hands dived into the pockets of his faded windbreaker. One hand emerged with five one thousand dollar bills. Dropping the banknotes on the bench, William opened the sack. He examined a vial, then another.
Plaid snatched the bag away with two fingers. "There's a slight complication, cent."
William cringed at the pejorative, remembering a day when living over a century earned a person some respect.
"Someone else will pay us eight thou. So, we're taking your money." Plaid's knife snapped open.
William stepped back, shrinking inside his jacket. "You know, this same rip-off thing happened to me back in ‘68, I--"
"What do you mean ‘68? It's only 2055, you old fool."
"Don't think of it as a rip-off. Think of it as education."
William drew a small handgun. Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. The old man grimaced. "How the hell did you miss twice at spitting distance?" William groused as he leaned over to fire another bullet into Orange.
His back crackled as he searched the thugs. A few bucks, the knife, and a roll of antacids went into the sack with the drugs and gun. The sack went into a mesh shopping bag, that badge of the elderly.
"Didn't you hear? Everybody loses these days."
William ambled from the warehouse, cutting across abandoned railroad tracks dappled in twilight. Nobody gave him a second glance. Not the homeless in their shanty town blocking the tracks. Not the young people living in the Graduation Projects beyond the tracks.
Jackson Commune stood in the center of Franklin Street. In the nineteenth century, the three-story palace had been built for a beer king. In the twentieth, it became an apartment building amidst an expanding ghetto. At the dawn of the current century, it had been renovated by the Jacksons, professors at OSU. Health freaks, they spent a million apiece for rejuvenation treatments then coming on the market. Whereupon the jet bringing them home crashed.
Chester, the black-sheep cousin, inherited the house. He threw a party that lasted four years, until he dropped dead of pleasure. By then, a dozen cents lived there. Chester's lover, Jennifer, formalized the communal arrangement. With Chester buried in the basement, Jennifer kept Chester's identity alive for twenty years with bank accounts that scrupulous paid their taxes and utilities.
William Stewart wheezed up the long flight of foot-polished limestone steps to the front porch. It was May, and the honeysuckle already carpeted the outside of the house. He leaned against a pillar. Long, deep breaths helped still his pounding heart, his laboring lungs.
"You murder two punks without breaking a sweat, yet you are too vain to allow your housemates see you winded. Pathetic, Billy boy."
He entered after the householdputer identified his handprint and unlocked the front door. A pile of suitcases announced a new member of the commune. They were top of the line, real leather. A sticker on the side of one chilled his marrow. TOLEDO FEDERAL PENITENTIARY, it read.
William tooled into the kitchen. A herd of dwarf rabbits--Jennifer's pride and joy--stampeded into the pantry. A snoring Kent slumped over the kitchen table. Taking the last cup, William loaded the coffeemaker, starting another pot.
Fortified, he climbed two flights of steep steps, the servants' stairs. On the third floor it opened into the death room. Doc Meyer had painted it a cheerful yellow.
Alicia occupied the bed, a tiny lump lost under fresh percale sheets. In the corner, Doc Meyer pressed her pug nose against a computer monitor. Long fingers manipulated a slide under the vidscope.
"How's our patient?" William whispered. He always whispered in the death room.
Doc Meyer jerked around. Her blue eyes widened. She was the kid in the commune, barely seventy-five--not even retirement age. Not that she would qualify for Social Security benefits once she reached retirement age next year. Convicted felons lost their rights to collect any government payment.
William stood taller in her presence, every creaking vertebra straight. Who knows, he thought, someday she might even tell me her given name. Solving that mystery would almost be as good as sex. Almost.
She sighed. "Alicia's infection stems from one of the Boston Bacteria, but I can't isolate which one. Did you get the drugs?"
William smiled broadly, grateful the last thing he got from the government--before his hundredth birthday disqualified him from Social Security--was a new set of teeth. "Would I disappoint you?" He handed her four vials, his fingers caressing her cool skin.
"Were you able to get them to lower the price?"
"Net cost, zilch. Don't ask how. The commune's med fund remains intact." He set the cash on her desk. "Is that enough to impress you out of your jeans?"
She studied the vials. "This," she waved a brownish vial, "was developed from mustard gas. Modern medicine is reduced to poisoning our patients to kill the cures we invented. I hope she's strong enough to survive the treatment."
It was the rare cent who had not been treated with Boston Bacteria to consume their cancers. The Nobel Prizes had already been awarded before the anti-cancer array of bacteria mutated, invading the general population to cause an epidemic du jour.
Had Alicia been ten years younger, she would have been diagnosed during her mandatory biannual Medicare checkup. A short stay in the hospital would have sufficed to kill the bacteria consuming her. But Alicia wasn't young enough to qualify for Medicare. A hospital would have required a twenty grand deposit before a doctor would see her, so Alicia had ended up in the commune's death room.
"Need me to donate more blood?" he asked as his imagination began to undress the doctor.
"No, you gave last week. The new guy is O-pos, too. I'll tap him."
"Know anything about him?"
"Stash the paranoia, Stewart, he's not a real criminal."
"Call me William."
"The poor guy was busted under the Crimes Against the Economy Act."
"I'd rather have a serial killer stay here than a leveraged buy-out bastard who unemployed millions of--"
"He's Hiram Bigg," she said, her eyebrows dancing.
"That hillbilly magnate who bought Kentucky? What's he doing in Ohio? You can't get a decent bowl of grits for a hundred miles."
"Be nice, he's on the lam. After he got out of prison, Bigg's creditors got a court order to send him to a labor camp until he pays back his debts."
William chuckled. "You just can't win. Let's see, at minimum wage times eighty hours a week on the assembly line, how long will it take to pay back $350,000,000,000? Wait, don't tell me. I was good with word problems in school. The answer is: the train reaches Chicago first."
"You're not funny, Stewart."
"Call me Bill."
"Be nice to him, Stewart. Alicia needs his blood." She made shooing motions.
William stopped by Alicia on his way out. It was hard to reconcile the husk with the vivacious blonde who stormed into the commune a decade ago.
William suspected that her rejuvenation treatment had something to do with her illness. Of course, it could be nothing more than his native paranoia. Lots of cents ended up in "conspiracy camps," looney bins devoted to the hopelessly paranoid.
"Part and parcel of the plot against us," he muttered.
He laughed. It was the only right left to him.
* * * *
William limped down the stairs after his nap. In the kitchen, a half-filled coffeepot awaited. Kent sat upright in a chair, eyes wide open, mouth agape. Only a rattling snore showed he was alive.
"What's the sense of living so long, if you're going to sleep it all away?"
"Long as it makes him happy," drawled a lanky man walking into the kitchen. He poured himself a cup.
William eyed the stranger while he reloaded the coffeemaker. "One of the house rules is that we keep a pot of java going around the clock." He fished a pack of smokes from his pocket. "Scared of secondhand smoke, Grit Boy?"
The newcomer took a cigarette, flaming it with a Flying Tigers Zippo. "You must be Stewart. What were you before becoming the commune's enforcer?"
"Must have worked a hundred jobs, but my fave was garbageman." He studied the ex-billionaire to judge his reaction. One wrong word and William would hate him; hate was such a simple, effortless emotion.
"I've had my hundred jobs, too. Golden Glove boxer, semi-pro quarterback. When I dropped out of college," said Hiram, voice dreamy, "I formed a trash hauling company in southeastern Kentucky. It was a good two years."
"Spent nineteen years on the back of a truck," interjected William.
"Nineteen years? Did they lay you off ere you qualified for a pension?"
"Naw, I was forced to retire after some aluminum cans went missing. They couldn't prove anything, but the bosses took their recyclables seriously."
"I thought I was screwed." Hiram Bigg held onto his pronouns until they drawled into entire paragraphs of their own. "A career destroyed over tin cans."
"Aluminum. I would have made a lot more money embezzling 6,400 tons of tin cans." William smiled.
"Tons?"
"Ain't no petty crimes, just petty criminals," William counter-drawled. "Are you trying to disguise yourself as Abe Lincoln? Is your hair dyed?" He tugged the man's beard.
"If I was going for a dye job, I'd get one of those plaid jobs the kids are wearing." Bigg snorted smoke as he laughed.
Kent opened his eyes, shouted, "What is Cheyenne, Alex?" He blinked twice before returning to his snooze.
Jennifer drifted into the room. Such was her grace that it seemed she sailed on winds that caressed her alone. The light played with her silver-dyed hair, eyes, and skin.
"Howdy do, I'm Hiram Bigg."
Jennifer ignored him, drifting into the pantry. Pots rattled. Cans banged.
William refilled his coffee cup, then Bigg's. "C'mon, Jennifer doesn't like people in her kitchen while she's cooking. Don't take it personally." William noticed the magnate eyeing Kent. "He's not people. He's a toadstool."
They went onto the front porch, sitting on a swing. Dots and slashes of Franklin Street were visible through the thick mass of honeysuckle twining the mesh fence surrounding the porch. Noses sought their perfume, but only the road exhaust from the nearby interstate could be discerned.
"What are the odds of the cops tracking you here?"
"Nil. My spoor goes south from Louisville to Alabama. Spent half my life telling folks Ohio was hell. Nobody'll look for me in Columbus."
"Sentenced to hell. How poetic. Rule One, you bring pain to this house, and I promise you a world of hurt."
"Beth warned me yer a hard case."
"Beth?"
"Doctor Meyer. Her sister was my Attorney General after I purchased Kentucky. Good woman. All the Meyer women are good."
"Her name is Beth?" He pulled a bottle of generic vodka from his pocket. After a long swig, he offered it to Bigg.
"Naw, I blew out my liver years ago."
"Had to give up every vice when I was fifty after a cardiac event. My doc told me I'd be dead by sixty, so during the second fifty years of my life, I lived like a monk. I don't intend to live a third fifty. Isn't worth the hassle."
"You look good for a cent. When did you have your rejuv?" Bigg fingercombed his lush, black hair.
"Never have. Guess I have good genes," replied William, fingercombing his thin, grey hair. "The only time I saved enough money for rejuv, I had to have new lungs installed instead."
"That was the only stroke of luck I had owning Kentucky. I knew it was going to be the toughest job of my life, so I went into a rejuv clinic when I was fifty-five." His deep-set eyes grew misty. "If I had another two or three years, I could have turned my Commonwealth into paradise."
William nodded politely. "Just out of curiosity, how did you pay for a frigging state?"
"Put it on my Platinum Card. It was a publicity stunt I worked out with the corporation. They gave me zero interest for a year, and I made commercials for ‘em."
"Is looking like Lincoln part of the stunt?"
"Part of my genetic pool."
"Lucky you, Grit Boy."
* * * *
William stretched across the threadbare couch, watching generic news about a generic world, starting with the latest bankruptcy of Social Security.
Doc Meyer ghosted into the room. Before she sat on the arm of the couch, she hit the mute button on the remote. Her sigh was eloquent luggage for the dark bands under her eyes. Her pouting mouth opened and closed.
William patiently waited for her to speak. One eye strayed to the shapely ankle exposed by her long linen dress.
"Stewart, we have a situation."
"Alicia?"
"No, she'll be fine, sort of. The situation--"
"Oh, mannn, every time you use that s-word, I end up committing another felony." William's laugh cracked as the doctor's blue eyes flamed.
"This is serious, Stewart."
"Call me Bill, or even William."
"I found one of Jennifer's rabbits dead."
"Colonel Mustard did it with a wrench in the basement."
"I did an autopsy."
"Jennifer will have a fit about you cutting up one of her bunnies."
"The furball died of TB-3."
"Can rabbits give people TB?" William blurted, snapping upright, dreading the chore of killing the pets.
"We gave it to them. It's not a lung disease for rabbits. The bacteria attacks their brains. It cannot be communicated to humans unless we eat them." The doctor wiped her sweating brow.
"W-we gave it to them?"
"The twins came from New York City the summer after that big epidemic up there. Kelly was treated. But when I asked her just now, she admitted she didn't complete the treatment. It would have gotten in the way of her Bermuda vacation. When will patients learn to complete their drug regimen?"
"So Kelly gave it to the rabbits?"
"We've all got it. Jennifer, Kent, Alicia, Ted, and Becky," her voice quivered as she added, "Me. You and Hiram are the only safe ones. Hiram because the infectious phase ended months ago. You because--" She waved at the old scar twaining his chest. "Because you've had the old variety of TB, you're immune to TB-3. Lucky bastard."
"Tell me about it. Fifty years later, and these new lungs still feel weird."
"Stop whining, Stewart."
"Could you call me Bill just once, Beth?"
An ephemeral smile crosses her long face. "It sounds so sweet coming from your mouth. I hate my middle name. Beth was my mother's name. She once put out a cigarette on the back of my hand because I refused to eat cauliflower."
"Sorry, uh, Meyer."
"This commune will be a cemetery before the end of the year unless you can get us some Luewat Toxin to treat the TB. We've got $9,900 in the med fund, another $1,280 in the general fund."
"How much toxin will that buy?" William asked, trying to recall whether the toxin came from Amazonian frogs or Afghan voles.
"Perkins' Pharmacy offered me the best deal--eight grand a dose. Times nine that--"
"Equals $82,000." William grinned. "Math was my best subject at school."
"Equals $72,000. We can't mortgage the house because that might reveal our little Chester secret. Jennifer and I have a few grand in the bank. But not enough. Everyone else is broke."
"I've only got chump change. Mannn, nobody wins these days."
"FEMA stores Luewat Toxin at the HMO Depository over on Fourth."
"You won't call me Bill. Won't even tell me your first name, let alone sleep with me. But now you want me to burgle a depository. Who the hell do you think I am?"
She stood. Her dress fell to the floor. Its wind caused a baseball-sized clump of rabbit fur to tumbleweed across the floor.
"Don't you know anything about romance? The least you could do is get me drunk first," said William.
The thunder of the rabbit herd echoed down the steps. They raced into the living room, diving beneath the couch.
"Mannn, you make me feel like a hooker," William whispered.
She grabbed her dress off the floor, hugging it. "Sorry, I didn't mean--"
"That's not a bad thing, Meyer."
"Reagan. My name is Reagan Beth Meyer. I was an election eve baby."
"Ugh, my hapless Dulcinea. I think I'll call you R.B."
"You're not going to make roast beef jokes, are you, Bill?"
"You'll always be my cheddar melt of love. Now, go away. I've got some thinking to do."
Throwing a puzzled glance over her slumping shoulder, she was so busy nonplussing that she walked into the door frame.
William couldn't restrain the laughter. His spine crunched like stepping on peanut shells as he came off the couch to join her. "Okay, R.B. You want to treat me like a hooker. Fine. I get five bucks an hour, plus a dollar an orgasm bonus."
* * * *
The Drug Depository was located two blocks beyond the downtown corporate core. That was lucky. The corporations fielded their own cops--earning three times what the harried local police made. HMO Ohio owned the monopoly of medical care in the state. Cutting corners was their art form, skimping on everything except political contributions. That explained why their drug warehouse was located outside the protection of the corporate zone.
William ambled around the converted furniture warehouse, just another senior getting exercise. There was a bus stop across the street from the loading docks where he watched delivery vans come and go. The docks were within the building; creaking metal doors and scanning cameras protected them. Every hour, a guard inspected them.
Lunch hour he spent in a deli a block down. It was simple to pump an employee--obvious in her stark HMO uniform--about the Depository. The high value drugs were stored inside a walk-in refrigerator in the basement.
William walked home deep in thought. Panting at the top of the steps, he leaned against his favorite pillar. The porch swing creaked. Dusk, combined with the wall of honeysuckle, made the figure in the swing a shadow within shadows. William blushed, despising that anyone witnessed him out of breath like an old man.
"We oughta build an escalator. Those steps are gonna kill somebody," drawled the man who once purchased Kentucky.
"Most folks use the basement door out back," replied William.
"But not you?"
"When you allow your body to dictate to you, that's when you are too old."
William dropped onto a frayed lawn chair to rub a throbbing knee.
"I want to help."
"With what, Grit Boy?"
"Beth won't tell me what's wrong, but I feel it. Beth said you wouldn't trust me." The ex-billionaire chuckled, a rusty sound. "Know why I bought Kentuck? My career was buying failing companies, turning them around, and selling ‘em for big profit. I fixed things for a living. So when my home state went bankrupt, and the feds arrested Governor Letcher and the legislature for corruption, I said to myself, you can fix it. My state was so rich in every way except money. Five million folks, my folks, were trapped in a nightmare. It wasn't hard to convince Washington to sell me the Commonwealth government. Privatization, after all, was the buzzword of the administration."
William studied the runes of the shadows. "Is there a point to this history lesson?"
Bigg grunted at William's glower. "Y'all gave me a refuge when I had nothing. I want to help you fix whatever is wrong."
"Even if we can't win?"
The ex-magnate tugged his beard. "I'd rather try and fail than sit on my ass."
William said, "Yeah, you got to try."
"Gotta. It's what separates us from the losers."
"Rule Two: I'm in charge. Shave your beard, Lincoln Boy. You are a fugitive, behave like one--stop drawing attention to yourself."
The ex-billionaire stood and saluted. "When do I report for active duty, sir?"
"We leave tonight at two. I'm going to take a nap."
William entered the commune. Climbing the stairs to his bedroom was too daunting a task. Instead, he stretched across the couch.
"You can bail, if you want. No grudge," William grumbled as they fast-stepped through a garbage-choked alley.
"I had to find 7,500 bureaucrats, honest and hardworking, overnight after I fired the entire state gov. That was hard. This is merely Bad Acting 101."
As they walked, the homeless appeared, looking like ghosts. Or were they ghosts looking homeless? A trio of thugs emerged from the shadows behind a mini-mart. William showed them his pistol. The thugs retreated.
They arrived at the fire station. Hiram Bigg started huffing and puffing until his pallid face colored. He raced around the corner into the fire station, gasping to a stop behind the fire trucks. A pair of firefighters popped out of the office to confront him.
"You can't come in here."
"I'm so glad to see you," said Bigg, his accent gone. "A bunch of punks are chasing me."
William slipped into the station. The door to the office stood wide open. The computer on the desk purred. He tapped in the address of the Depository, holding his breath as the printer hummed to life.
"I just need a chance to catch my breath. I thought I was a goner," gasped Bigg.
William peeked through the window into the bay. The lanky Bigg leaned against the wall, hand to his cheek like a southern belle suffering from the vapors.
The printer clicked off. William stuffed the pages into his pocket. He was walking out when a firefighter appeared.
"What are you doing here?"
William smiled broadly. "Thought I saw my buddy duck in here. We got separated. Told him we shouldn't walk anywhere near those Graduate Projects. Those kids are vicious."
The firefighter gave the office a quick once over. Seeing nothing disturbed, he threw a thumb over his shoulder. "He's back there. I was about to call the cops."
"The police have real crime to deal with. I'll get him home safely."
"You two should know better than to be out this late," replied the fireman as he pushed William out of the office.
As they scurried home, William couldn't stop chuckling.
"Have I earned the right to know what's going on?" asked Bigg.
"The Fire Department's database contains the blueprints for every structure in town. Knowing the layout of a burning building means life or death to them. To us, too."
"The floor plan to what?"
A thug stepped from the doorway of a burnt-out building. Bigg pretended to grab a pistol in his waistband. The thug threw up his hands before walking away.
William's finger snaked off the trigger of his pistol. "You're learning, Grit Boy. Of course, the next step could be our ticket to prison."
"They serve good grits in prison," Bigg drawled.
* * * *
Heat glowed from the walls, raising spectral scents of the scores of people, hundreds of pets, and countless meals of the house's past. The windows were open, but not a breeze stirred.
William and Doc Meyer sat at the puzzle table in the corner of the living room. A half-completed Monet scene in jigsaw pieces framed their touching fingertips. The rabbit herd thumped into the living room, then turned 180 degrees to charge up the stairs.
Bigg entered the sweating room. "I saw an air conditioner out back," Bigg said, wiping his brow. "Is it broke?"
"Nope, but it eats $140 a day in electricity. We only turn it on when it hits a hundred."
Bigg tapped the Coca Cola thermometer on the wall as if ninety-eight degrees wasn't bad enough. "And how is our good doctor?"
Meyer shook her head. Black hair plastered against her skull did not move. "I canvassed the ‘hood this morn. Eight probable cases of TB-3 in the nascent stage. I think the Cooper elderhaus must have it bad; they wouldn't allow me inside. Public Health will find out soon."
"Then what?" asked the ex-billionaire.
"You missed a lot while you were in prison," said William. "Pub Health will do door-to-door testing throughout the contaminated district. If you cannot prove you're being treated for the disease, they take you to Cough Camps. A one-way ticket."
"Benign neglect behind razor wire," added the doc through clenched teeth.
William flamed a joint, exhaling out the window beside his chair. "We're living in the age of camps--cough, conspiracy, every time you turn around the gov is creating a new waiting room for cents to die in. We can't win. And the sad truth is that I voted for most of this crap when I was younger."
"Who could have predicted rejuv, and the quantum leap in transplant tech? Who could have guessed 65 percent of the population could live beyond the century mark?" asked Meyer.
"You vote to screw the other guy, it'll boomerang right up yer ass every time," observed the ex-billionaire.
"It might've worked," said Meyer. "If the Wall Street sharks hadn't stolen so much from us--"
"I thought you doctors had investment counselors to protect your goodies," said William, propelling a cloud of smoke over Meyer.
"I should have retired rich," she admitted. "But I got busted. Teach me to marry a junkie. I had to supply him. It worried me sick while he was buying drugs on the street. And how was I rewarded? He was the primary witness for the prosecution. The DA made it sound like I was supplying the whole city. He walked. I went to prison."
"Ironic, don't you think?" William spoke as he inhaled. "I'm the only real criminal at this table, and I'm the only one who has never been busted."
"Irony is the primary industry of this century."
* * * *
"You sure you know how to pick a lock?"
"Cork it, Grit Boy," William grumbled as he raked the door lock. The cheapie continued to defy him.
It had gone too smoothly downstairs, William fretted. They'd simply loitered outside the apartment building until a drunk couple weaved their car into the basement garage, then they strolled inside with their bulging shopping bags before the security gate closed.
Frustrated, William reared back and kicked. The lock surrendered. They crossed the roof of the building. William secured a rope to the leg of an air purifier the size of a house, dropped it over the side onto the roof of the Depository. Before they went over, he handed Bigg a stick of gum.
"Minty and, in an emergency, it gives you something to spit in the face of a guard. That'll buy you an extra second to--" William allowed the preposition to linger.
Bigg clambered down the rope with the brio of a teen.
"Show-off." William went down the rope slowly. It wouldn't do, he thought, to break a leg.
The lock on the Depository's roof door was a hundred times more complex than the last; it took William less than a minute to pick it. Another twenty minutes vanished as he rewired the alarm system. Donning knapsacks, they abandoned the empty shopping bags.
At the first floor, William ordered Bigg to wait. Producing a short section of lead pipe, he went hunting. The guard sat at his desk, consuming a hoagie. William pulled the first blow, a mistake. Had to strike the guard three more times. He stole the guard's keys, wallet, and revolver before handcuffing the man to the desk, yanking the telephone wires as an afterthought. Finished the hoagie while returning to Bigg.
In the basement, William handed a crowbar and a flashlight to Bigg. "Lookit, when I yell, you snap open the cage door, walk directly to the walk-in fridge, snap its lock. One, two, three."
"What are you going to do?"
"Set off every alarm in the world, if I'm wrong."
William went down a dank corridor to a storage room. The circuit box stood on the wall, right where the floor plan said. He opened it, studied the chart on the door, and threw three switches. The lights died. William shouted. Turning on his flashlight, he returned. The hillbilly attacked the fridge, ripping the handle clean off the door.
William pushed Bigg away, reached inside the handle hole to twist the bar inside. The door opened as its interior light flickered on. The fridge had its own auxiliary power. Brownouts were all too common; nobody would risk ruining millions of dollars worth of perishable drugs.
The question was whether the alarm was wired into the auxiliary power. And, if so, how long would it take to reset.
From his knapsack came an insulated bag filled with bubble wrap. The racks were in alphabetical order.
He went to the "L" shelf, loading boxed vials of toxin, plenty for everyone on Franklin Street.
"Our job here is done, Grit Boy."
"We've won the big game."
"Nobody wins."
"We did."
As they raced up the steps, William was appalled he had to stop to catch his breath. "If anything happens to me, take the knapsack and run."
"Billy," drawled Bigg, "we're gonna make it."
They hit the front door. William wiped his brow as he inserted the key into the lock. "Just saunter. Nonchalant. And take those damned gloves off as soon as we hit the street."
Hot air slapped them as they strolled down Fourth Street. Only one in ten streetlights shone. Out of nowhere appeared a prowl car. It hit the duo with its spotlight.
The ex-billionaire tensed. "What's she doing here?" he hissed.
Their attention riveted on the ancient Volvo station wagon parked across the street. Smoke puffed from its tailpipe. Doc Meyer slumped behind the wheel, trying to look casual.
William paled. The prowl car thumped onto the sidewalk, coming to a stop abreast of them. A patrolman stepped from the car. William frisbeed the lead pipe across his forehead. The cop went down. The driver hopped out, drawing his weapon. William rolled across the hood of the car, screaming as he kicked the cop's handgun.
Bigg froze. His bloodshot eyes widened until it appeared they would explode from his face. Even when a bullet screamed past his ear, Hiram Bigg did not move.
The driver staggered as William rammed his skull into the cop's face. His weapon jerked downwards. Two bullets smashed the interior of the cruiser. The cop leveled his weapon, yelping when he saw a shell casing jamming his semi-auto.
William drew the security guard's revolver, thumbed back its hammer. The cop dropped his weapon and fled. The first cop regained his feet, firing two shots into William's chest. Bigg threw himself against the man, who ricocheted off the prowl car, bouncing right into Bigg's fists. His left lashed out with a six pack of blows, capped by a textbook right. The cop went down for the count.
"The knapsack!" The ex-billionaire raced around the cruiser, jerking the precious cargo off William's back, snapping one of the straps in his haste. Halfway across the street, he froze again. A forest of distant flashing blue lights approached down the broad boulevard. Without thinking, ancient first-down instincts threw the backpack. He turned, not bothering to watch the knapsack sail through the Volvo's open window and smack Doc Meyer in the face.
The Volvo sputtered and lurched, nearly stalling before the doctor zipped into a parking lot. Sparks flew as she jumped a curb and scraped into an alley.
Bigg tensed, thinking about fleeing in the opposite direction to draw the police away from Beth. Instead, he decided to see if his partner needed first aid.
The body wasn't on the street.
"Billy!" he yelled. Then froze again. The sirens, the blue lights were overwhelming.
The prowl car squealed from the curb. William rolled down the window, throwing out a fistful of wires. "Hey, Grit Boy, up for a ride?"
Bigg darted around the car and jumped through the open door. The acceleration nearly threw him out before he got it shut. "But you were shot. You--"
A phalanx of police cars loomed in front of them. William yelled as they lanced through their ranks. Metal screamed as he sideswiped cruisers; he yelled all the louder as he twisted the wheel. Bigg hit the roof, leaving a dint when they thumped onto the sidewalk, plowing down topiaries as they crossed a park. The windshield shattered when they tore through a mesh fence. The vehicle vibrated madly as William took them onto railroad tracks.
They came to an abrupt stop. "Out, out, out!" screamed William, kicking Bigg to speed him. Shifting into neutral, he wedged a baton against the accelerator, hopped out, and banged it into drive. The battered cruiser bounced down the tracks.
The duo rolled down the gravel slope of the elevated track. The roar of a helicopter and its probing spotlight spied them under a tree. A flood of yowling police cars thumped down the tracks in hot pursuit of the stolen cruiser.
"How badly shot are you?" Bigg asked after dragging the wheezing William most of the way.
"Cracked some ribs," William wheezed. "I wore my Kevlar vest. Geez, the sales brochure didn't tell me a hit would hurt this bad."
"I can't believe we escaped. We won. We won big!"
"You grit-brained hick, we're page one sociopaths, FBI fugitives with a bullet. Prowl cars have a full sensor array. It filmed everything we did from the second the spotlight hit us until I gutted the system. We'll be news at eleven."
"Oh," was all Bigg said.
"We can't go back to the commune."
"But they don't know I live there," said the ex-billionaire, shrinking into the shadows.
"John Law doesn't know where I live either. But the neighbors know. One of them will sell us out. Mannn, we can't win."
"The vaccine got to the doc."
"Okay, our street won." William laughed. The outburst bent him double with pain. "But we lost. Well, pard, we're going on a road trip. I'll leave it up to you to decide our destination."
The ex-billionaire stood. Shadows made him ten feet tall. "I hear Vegas is good for gambling men like us."
"Throw the dice, Grit Boy."