Runner Boy | Book 2 | Rider Kid Read online

  He looks up from the device at me. He still hasn’t said a word. He nods, looks back at the recorder, and says, “Captain Miles Wilkerson.” He looks at his watch, states the time and date, and then looks back at me. “Please state your name, age, address, affiliation and rank, if any.”

  I say, “I want a lawyer.”

  He looks pissed and reaches over and turns the recorder off. “What, are you nuts? Where do you think you are? Or better, when do you think you are? There are no lawyers.” The way he says “lawyers,” it’s a dirty word. “Now just answer the damn questions.”

  He backs the tape up and starts over, giving his name, time and date again. He asks me the same questions. This time I answer, giving my name and my old Cincinnati address. I figure there’s no reason to give up the address where my family lives. I’m actually feeling a little calmer now that he’s yelled at me.

  “No affiliation,” I say. “So no rank.”

  He asks me some inane stuff, like whether I’m married and what I do for a living, and I answer. Then he asks me what I’m doing in the Great States of America, since I live in the Republic of North America.

  I tell him I was sightseeing. He doesn’t react.

  He asks what I was doing in the Marriott building.

  I say I was looking for somewhere to get something to eat.

  “Okay, Mr. Gruen,” he says calmly. “Let’s go back and start over. First, give me your address in Juniper, Indiana, where you live. Then tell me how you managed to smuggle a sniper rifle into the GSA and to the top of the Marriott.”

  14

  83 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Even though I know Williams just fed me a load of bull, I’m still feeling pretty good when I leave his office. At a minimum, I won’t have to spy on people and report to him anymore. It’s not too late, maybe 12:30 or so, I guess, so I head over to Purdue to see if I can find Jake. I haven’t seen him since this whole thing happened—me going on stage, meeting with Wayne and Williams, the spy thing, the new laws. We’d been meeting every other Tuesday when we could, but I’d missed last Tuesday. I figure I’ll just wander around the cafeteria to see if I can find him. Sure enough, he’s at his usual seat, with a group of college student–aged people around him.

  I grab a big bowl of vegetable soup and sit at his table. He greets me, introduces me to the other kids—he says I’m a war buddy—and says they’re working on ways to make mechanical controls to replace electronic ones in simple machines, like pumps. I forget sometimes that he’s still working and teaching here at Purdue. Maybe not in formal classes, but doing what he can.

  They finish their lunch and their discussion about stuff that I don’t understand even a little while I slurp up my soup. After the last of his students has left, he asks me what brings me to campus on an off week.

  “Just wanted to catch up. A lot has happened, and I missed last week.” I don’t tell him that I didn’t come to town last Tuesday because I was avoiding meeting with Williams.

  I ask him if he knew about me being on stage with Governor General Wayne. He says he does, that he was in the crowd and tried to catch up with me after the event, but I disappeared with the “bigwigs.”

  I fill him in on my doings with Wayne and Williams. He listens intently, calling me “bigshot” at one point. I tell him about my conversation this morning with Williams. He’d heard most of the news about the outside world before, just not in as much detail and not from as good a source as Williams. He didn’t know about the timing of Russia’s attack on Ukraine, nor of how the Middle East was doing.

  “It’s easy to blame the rest of the world for not helping us more,” he says, “but the fact is they have their own crises, people out of work, soup lines, the whole thing. They’ve had their hands full taking care of their own people, so we should be thankful for anything they can spare for us.”

  We get around to talking about the new laws, or, as Jake puts it, “the new constraints on our freedoms.” He’s concerned, he says, that this is just the beginning of a society that will be very different from the old USA.

  “You know,” he says, “your relationship with the governor general and his top guy, who’s now heading up the militia, puts you in a unique position.” He seems to be thinking about something.

  “How so?”

  “I’m not sure, but there are a couple people I’d like you to meet who may have some ideas.”

  He won’t tell me any more than that. We agree to meet again on Friday, which is the next time I plan to be in town.

  When I get home on Wednesday morning, I find my sisters in an uproar. Add in Mia, whose family owns the farm we all live on, and it’s more like uproarious.

  Mia is a large, black woman. She’s Chrissie’s age—they’d be juniors in college in the fall, if there was college anymore. The fact that the two of them are sorority sisters is the reason we’re all here, after all.

  But Mia isn’t fat. It’s really hard to be fat anymore. We all basically starved all winter. Then a lot of us got sick, so that took off a few more pounds. Now we have vegetables and a few fruits growing in our gardens, but we eat so healthy and are so physically active that very few of us are fat. But she’s big—tall and broad. She’s also loud. Her laugh can rattle the windows in the whole house, and her voice carries forever.

  So when I say that it is obvious when I get home that the girls are upset about something, I mean that the neighbors probably have to shut their windows to seal off the noise from the yelling and screaming.

  And it’s not like my sisters aren’t contributing too. Chrissie, who’s the only one of us Gruen kids with blonde hair and blue eyes, taking after Mom, can hold her own in any yelling match. And Claire, Clarke’s twin sister, who, like him is tall, thin and dark, can screech with the best of them. I literally have to hold my hands over my ears when I walk in.

  The thing that they’re upset about, I learn gradually, started last night. The three of them had been visiting a friend’s house in Juniper. They were walking home that evening, between nine and ten. (“It wasn’t even completely dark yet,” says Claire.) Three guys from the militia stopped them for being out after curfew.

  “The curfew rule says ‘unaccompanied females,’ and there were three of us,” says Chrissie, as she’s describing the incident to me.

  “I though Mia was going to grab that skinny guy who was doing all the talking and twist his head off,” says Claire.

  “The little prick says, ‘Oh, but you need to be accompanied by a man. Where’s your man?’” says Mia. “Can you believe that?”

  “So then they say they have to take us in to the station, and they try to put handcuffs on Mia,” says Claire.

  “No way were they going to get any cuffs on me, I’ll tell you,” says Mia.

  “Well, finally this one guy . . .” says Chrissie.

  “The bigger guy, who’d been standing around in the back . . .” says Mia.

  “Right,” says Chrissie. “He says hold on. Let’s take their information and we can come back and get them tomorrow, because the station is probably full up already.”

  “Like they have a station,” says Claire. “Probably somebody’s house.”

  “I think I’ve seen that bigger guy before. He probably lives around here somewhere,” says Mia.

  I say, “So they let you go home?”

  “They walked us home,” says Claire.

  “And why are you so upset now?” I ask. “That all happened last night.”

  “Because,” says Chrissie. “The one, the bigger guy, just came by. He apologized at first, and we were all like, hey, it’s about time. But then he says that we really shouldn’t be out by ourselves. That it’s dangerous.”

  “And I say, ‘So you think a man is going to make a difference? Protect us weak little girls?’” says Mia. “And he gets all flustered and says, ‘It’s the law,’ or some such and shuffles off.”

  “So,” I say. “That’s our well-trained militia in action, kee
ping the Republic safe.”

  “I’m going to pack my dad’s shotgun next time we’re out,” says Mia. “Let somebody try to stop us, militia or not, and I’ll remove a few of their vital organs. See how helpless we really are.”

  15

  80 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  It’s Friday, and I’m a little nervous riding into Lafayette today. Jake said he wants me to meet some people, but he wouldn’t tell me anything about them. I trust Jake, but I can’t help but wonder who I’m meeting, and why. I’m so distracted thinking about the meeting that I almost forget to stop by Mrs. Hazelwood’s place to pick up the load of candles she wants me to take to Lafayette. She makes them out of soybeans somehow. She’s got a whole system going, with farmers supplying the beans, some other folks boiling them down to get soybean oil, and then she does whatever she does to make candles. I think she supplies the whole town.

  I also check with her to make sure she’s got a supply of insulin for her diabetes, and she says she’s good from the last lot I got for her.

  After I’ve made my deliveries I head into West Lafayette to the Purdue campus to find Jake. I’m a little bit early and get to the cafeteria before him. They have real bread today, a treat. I order a grilled cheese sandwich, something I don’t think I’ve had since before the pulse, at least not with real bread. It’s a little expensive—I have to forgo a bowl of berries because the bag of squash I brought from home only covers the one sandwich. They still go mostly by the trade method of payment here—bring some food to pay for your food—although they’ve recently starting taking chits too. But I’m happy to give them the squash; I’m not a big fan. To me, a bag of squash for a grilled cheese is like stealing.

  I’m just sitting down with my lunch when Jake appears. He sees me and walks over to my table without going for food. He’s alone, so I wonder about this big meeting when he reaches me and says, “Eat fast. We’re leaving.”

  I look at my sandwich. It’ll be a crime to stuff this down fast, but Jake looks nervous. He’s looking this way and that, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Impatient. So I take a big bite, stand, grab my backpack and say, “Let’s go. I’ll eat on the way.”

  He nods and leads the way outside. I decide to leave my rig here, my bike with the trailer. It’s not set up to carry passengers anymore like it was when I hauled Dad across half of Indiana with it.

  We hustle across campus, and then across Northwestern Avenue, which is sort of the campus boundary, then a couple more blocks before we turn right, go down a way to an apartment complex of brick and yellow-green siding. It was undoubtedly student housing at one time, but who knows who lives here now, if anybody. There are garages on the first level, and then it looks like two levels above that. We go to the door in the center of one of the buildings, open it and go up a flight of dark stairs. It looks like there’s two apartments here, one on the right, one on the left. Jake knocks on the door on the left, and we’re let into a very dark apartment, lit with one candle (I can’t help wondering if it’s one of Mrs. Hazelwood’s). The drapes are closed to keep out the sun in a seemingly futile effort to keep the place a little cooler.

  There are two guys inside. The one who opened the door sticks his hand out and says, “Rick.” He’s tall, a little taller than me, so over six feet, thin, reddish curly hair and a wispy beard. He looks sort of familiar. I think he might have been one of the students who was with Jake on Tuesday. He’s wearing a black Purdue T-shirt, jeans and Nikes.

  I shake his hand. “Brady.”

  The other guy is sitting on a well-worn couch of indistinguishable color. He waves and says, “Flip.” He looks vaguely Japanese, but he could be part Chinese or Korean for all I know. His hair is dark and straight, coming almost down to his shoulders. It looks like it could use a wash. It’s hard to tell how tall he is because he’s sitting, but he’s a little heavier. Not as old as Jake, but older than Rick. Maybe thirties. He’s wearing glasses with a wire frame, a gray T-shirt, black pants and black shoes, maybe hiking shoes.

  Jake says, “Open a window, Rick. It’s sweltering in here.”

  Rick goes to the window, pulls back the drapes and opens a window. It’s a little lighter now, but not any cooler. The room we’re in has the couch, with a cheap coffee table, two stuffed chairs that have seen better days, a couple kitchen chairs against the wall, and a small table at one end. It looks like there’s a kitchen through a door by the table. There are a couple boxes on the coffee table in front of Flip.

  He sees me looking at the boxes and says, “Thirty-aught-six, right?”

  I frown.

  “Your rifle.”

  “Oh, yeah. I’ve got a thirty-aught-six.”

  “Here.” He picks up the two boxes and holds them out to me. I take them and see that they’re boxes of ammunition for my rifle.

  “Um. Thanks. What are these for?” I say.

  “For your rifle. To practice.”

  Jake says, “Wait. Hold on a minute. Let’s take a step back. Brady doesn’t know a thing about who we are or what we’re about. So, sit down, Brady. Let me tell you a few things.” He points at one of the armchairs, so I sit down. He sits in the other one, and Rick sits next to Flip on the couch.

  Jake tells me they’re part of a larger group of people concerned with the direction that the country is going. “We’re not just talking our part of it, what they call the Republic of North America. We’re also worried about the South, the Great States of America, and the rest of it, too. The US has been broken into pieces . . .”

  “Yeah, broken is the right word,” says Flip.

  Jake continues, “What once was the greatest nation in the world is headed down a path that means it will never be what it once was. Even after, or if, we recover from the pulse.”

  Rick says, “We’re mostly worried about the fascist state we live in.”

  “True,” says Jake, “but we’re also concerned that the GSA is very cozy with the Russians, the West Coast is being helped by the Chinese and other Asian countries, and is headed toward becoming a Pacific nation, rather than states of our country. The northeast, well, who knows? And Texas is Texas.”

  “People are taking help from wherever they can get it,” says Flip. “You can’t blame them.”

  “Yes, but that doesn’t mean the country has to be divided up,” says Jake.

  Flip points to me and says, “You should talk to your buddy Colonel Williams. There’s lots of theories about why the GSA and the RNA split. I mean, Bowers and Pounds used to be best buddies. And now they’re sworn enemies. I bet Williams knows something about that.”

  I think I’m getting it now. And I’m not thrilled. “Is that why you invited me here? So I can ask Williams about things? Or to spy on him? Or what?”

  Jake says, “No. Well, yes, in part. Your relationship with the head of the militia could be valuable. But that’s not why I invited you here. It’s because I think you are like those of us who thinks things are going wrong, and maybe you’d agree that we should try to do something about it.”

  “We’re trying to gather together a corps that can, and will, change things,” says Flip. “We agree on the ultimate goal, and we’re determined to make a difference. Every one of us has different strengths to offer. Me, I’m an organizer, and I’m good at identifying the talents of others. Rick is an engineer. Jake is one of the smartest people I know. And you, Brady, have a couple really valuable strengths.” He smiles at me and holds up a finger. “One, you have valuable connections to those in power. And two . . .” He holds up a second finger and points to the boxes of ammunition sitting in front of me. “You’re a shooter.”

  16

  80 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  “So wait,” I say, “are you saying you want me to shoot Williams?” Shooting people isn’t something I want to do, no matter the cause. And I don’t know if I’m buying into their cause yet, either.

  “No, no, nothing like that,” says Flip, waving his hands. �
��It just that, who knows, if the other side comes after us with guns blazing, I’d rather have someone on my side who knows how to protect us than someone who doesn’t.”

  That makes me feel maybe a little better, a very little better. Like two percent better, maybe. “And who is the other side? Why would they be coming after us with guns blazing? What do you plan to do?”

  “Wait, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here,” says Jake. “We’re not planning to shoot anyone, and we’re not planning to get into a blazing gun battle with anybody. We’re just trying to gather like-minded people together to see if we can make a difference. And it doesn’t matter if it’s the RNA or the USA, or something else.”

  “True,” says Flip. “And actually, the old USA wasn’t exactly headed in the right direction either, before the pulse.”

  Jake turns to me and says, “All we’re asking you is, do you want to join us in trying to make a difference in the way our society is structured, in how it grows?”

  “I don’t know.” I say. “What does that mean? What are you trying to do, really? What’s the goal?”

  Jake doesn’t hesitate. “Free and open elections,” he says, looking around the room at all of us. I see Rick nodding, and Flip says, “Right on.”

  I don’t know. This doesn’t seem like the kind of deal where I can say, no, I don’t want free elections, so I say, “Sure. I can be on board for that.”

  Rick says, “Welcome to the resistance.”

  Jake leans over and shakes my hand.

  Flip points to the boxes of ammunition and says, “Humor me. Keep up with your shooting skills.”

  I look at the ammo, and then back at him, and say, “I don’t know what skills, really. It’s just that I have a rifle.”

  He replies, “That’s not what I hear.” He looks over at Jake, who nods in agreement.

  “Mack Delaney told me about that shot you took at the gunner on the Stryker,” says Jake. “And I saw—”