“I thought you got killed,” he finally said to Ed. “Something involving a Toad.” He frowned and cocked his head.
“If this is heaven I’m sorely disappointed,” Ed said drily, not surprised at how well-informed the man was.
“You look tired,” Curly said cheerfully. “And old.”
“I am old and tired,” Ed agreed. “Been a long week. Been a long couple of weeks.”
Curly grunted. “It’s the busy season. You keeping up on your news?”
Ed shook his head. “I barely know what I’m doing half the time. And I’ve been a little too short of bandwidth to surf the web, if you know what I mean. Why, something happen?”
Curly checked the time on his big watch, light glinting off the brown dome of his skull. “Six hours ago, word came down the ARF liberated one of the big detention centers. Not sure which one, that’s a little fuzzy, I heard ‘Kankakee’, whatever or wherever the fuck that is, but I’m hearing hundreds, maybe thousands of POWs were released.”
“Holy shit,” Weasel said, stunned.
“Rioters,” Ed corrected him, mind racing. “Terrorists. Collaborators. Climate change deniers. Gun criminals. We’re not officially at war, remember? So they can’t be POWs.”
“Whatever, who the fuck cares? They weren’t calling it a gulag or re-education camp, either, but that’s what it was.” He shrugged. “Thought you’d be interested. So,” he said, taking his feet off the scarred wooden desk and standing up, “I’m guessing you need some shit, that’s why we’re all here. What do you need, and what do you have to trade?”
“We need fresh batteries that haven’t been charged a thousand times. New filters for water purifiers. Food. Water. Vitamins. Antibiotics. Clean socks. Underwear. NVGs. A good pair of binoculars, as we’re down to one. Freedom, cold beer, hot dogs, apple pie, and peace on Earth. Pretty much what we always need, except for ammo. That we’re good on. That’s what we’ve got to trade. Five-five-six. Pre-loaded in magazines.”
Curly’s thick eyebrows crawled up his head. He could do the math. This had to be the squad who’d ambushed that patrol. One of the things he traded in was information, and he liked to think he was the most well-informed man in the city. According to his sources the Army had lost a Growler and an IMP and over a dozen troops in a single ambush. Including the Kestrel they’d lost in the Ditch, and the three other soldiers who’d been killed in firefights, the Army was having a surprisingly bad week. Then again, he’d heard of two ARF squads being wiped out, so maybe the Army was in the lead, or at least tied. The amount of activity in the city was unusual. He wondered if it meant something big was going on. “How much?”
“Enough,” Ed said flatly. “Not on us, but close. Some cash, too, if you’re interested. Not sure how much it’s worth this week, I haven’t been paying attention to the stock market. You could use it as wallpaper in here, I guess. What about you?” Curly was the closest thing to organized crime in the city, at least that Ed was familiar with. The man was only interested in profit, which meant he was predictable. Ed liked predictable.
Curly grunted. “Step into my office.” He looked past them. “Kobe, Kanye, stay.”
There was a second door at the back of his office, and Curly went through that and led them into the vacant office space. Most of the rooms were being used for storage of rare and/or valuable items he didn’t want out on the floor, and if the Tabs ever wanted to search them, it would take them hours if not days and they’d never find any contraband. Not that that was any guarantee he wouldn’t get arrested if they felt like it….
The room in the very back corner was dark and cluttered with objects vaguely glimpsed. At the rear was a narrow closet, and Curly stooped to remove a soggy cardboard box filled with CDs and a milk crate stuffed to overflow with dirty toys. Then he grabbed a hidden handle and lifted up the trap door. The hole beneath it was obsidian.
Curly turned on a small flashlight and went down the ladder first. A hole had been pickaxed and sledgehammered through the concrete flooring, but below that the dirt and clay had been dug by hand with shovels. Ed had no idea how long the work had taken, but guessed weeks.
They went down ten feet, then followed a low narrow tunnel directly west. The roof and walls had been reinforced with lumber, but still Ed felt claustrophobic and worried the soil would fall in and crush him. The tunnel ran for seventy feet or so but felt longer because it was so cramped.
At the far end Curly climbed another homemade wooden ladder and banged on a second trap door. Ed noted that he pounded his fist against it five times—every day Curly had a different knock. Still, just to be sure, when the trapdoor was unbolted and raised the men found themselves staring into two flashlights clamped onto the ends of rifles.
Curly just grunted, and the guards moved out of the way and let them climb up the ladder. They came out in the basement of the two-story brown building they’d walked past just to the west of the market, the one with its narrow basement and ground floor windows all boarded up. Behind the plywood sheets were metal reinforcements, and the metal doors were in fact welded shut. Even driving a vehicle into the building to gain access was no sure thing—the first floor was three feet above ground level, and any vehicle would hit the side of the I-beam reinforced concrete floor.
Curly actually had electricity. Ed wasn’t sure how the man had managed that, considering how power seemed to be shut off to the entire city outside of the Blue Zone, but the lights in the basement were on, and he didn’t hear the sound of a generator. One of Curly’s men was in the corner loading 5.56 rifle ammunition on a Dillon press. The rifle brass was mostly scrounged by local kids from sites of firefights, and the Army practice range downtown. Curly paid by the piece. Where the man obtained the bullets, powder, or primers was anyone’s guess. Still, he never had enough to meet demand, and factory-loaded ammunition was always held in higher regard than his handloaded stuff—unless it was his pistol ammo. He sold nine millimeter ammo loaded with lathe-turned, pointed, copper solid bullets which would go through soft body armor.
On the bench behind the man an ancient tube TV was tuned to the local state-controlled channel. The broadcast facility was located in a high-rise in the Blue Zone, one TV and one radio station offering all the news the government approved for public consumption. The broadcast signal was picked up by old-fashioned rabbit ears atop the unit, but the image was still filled with static. Onscreen a talking head was moving his mouth, but the sound on the set was turned down to a murmur.
“Why do you even bother?” Weasel said with a frown, staring at the TV. “You know it’s all lies and bullshit and fake news.”
“If you pay attention to not just what they say but what they don’t,” Curly told him, “especially when you know what’s really going on, you can learn a few things about what they’re really thinking and really worried about.”
On the ground floor, above their heads, Ed knew there were numerous floor- and gun safes filled with various items including guns. Ed had only been up on the second floor once. There were private quarters up there, maybe Curly’s, as well as two belt-fed machineguns set up to cover every approach to the building. Those guns were invisible behind the tinted window glass and reportedly always manned, and they’d walked right under them, through their kill zone, to enter the market. Ed knew Curly wasn’t dumb enough to think those guns would hold off a serious assault by Army troops. More likely they’d be used to buy time to escape.
Moving to a large steel door behind him, Curly produced a big key ring and opened the hefty padlock. It was just one of several storerooms in the building, but the only one Ed had been inside.