We paid cash everywhere. I had emptied the girlfriend’s meager bank accounts, and had a small sum in five-hundred dollar bills in a satchel, but we needed money. Just taking what we want from the twinkies is a walk in the park - hell, just rob them when they’re sleeping - but I didn’t want to attract any more attention, so we reluctantly decided to give up the bikes. By now, there was surely a police report about the theft, and it was plausible that the dicks at DigiRam had made the link between the girlfriend and us.
So we decided to get some cash for the bikes, which were quite valuable. After hours of riding through withered Iowa cornfields, we hooked a left at Des Moines, to check out Kansas City. We thought it would have the critical mass to support the kinds of criminal activity we were looking for.
When we got to Kansas City, the weather was oppressive. Heat drove sweat from my armpits, and the humidity made a mockery of any evaporative cooling the sweat might have provided. The global climate had changed quickly in the previous years. The plagues in 2020, the regional wars and declining birth rates effectively eliminated most sources of pollution. Emissions from the few internal combustion engines still on the roads were no longer a worry.
The one percenters and their enablers still denied any linkage between the murderous weather and human activities. I studied these things, in BitBoy’s garage. The distribution of economic output was skewed to a few million people, world-wide. When unions were outlawed, and corporations were given full civil rights, including the right to vote in 2017 after the election landslide, your so-called democratic institutions crumbled. Corporations thrived and proliferated. DigiRam had a child corporation that provided janitorial services, another that provided security - the pricks who were hunting us down - and another that lobbied in Washington and at the UN headquarters in New York. The unemployment rate was 45 percent. There was a sickness that was spreading across the world, a deadness in the soul of humanity.
We cruised all over the city, just to get our bearings. We stopped at a mall that once had been grand, but had shrunk over the years, as store after store shut down. There was valet parking for the remaining shops that catered to the one percent: Cartier, Bloomingdale’s, Prada, Gucci and Starbucks - the seven-year war in South America had crashed the coffee market, and espresso was a luxury.
In the mall, Melpomene and I wandered around for a few minutes. We felt the stares of the fashionable blondes and brunettes with shopping bags in their hands, as we rode down the escalator. At the bottom, we were met by two private security officers, both women. “Can we talk with you ladies for a minute, over in our offices?”
I was not in the mood.
Where I come from, anger is different. It spreads out from the base of your spine and radiates. It burns with blue heat, and is never ignored. A firestorm was growing, and I saw with pitiless indifference the two guards’ self-serving motivations, the silly hats with the black plastic brim, the vapidity of their occupation. It could have gotten ugly, but the guard who hadn’t spoken pulled the other away by the arm.
“We have to go. Now!” The urgency in her voice sprang from primal fear - ice in the spine, that most twinkies cannot feel. The girl had skills!
Drama averted, we slowly strolled to the exit. The minimum-wage clerks, bored by the paucity of customers, watched us from the doorways. They were dressed in a garish hodgepodge of clashing colors. You could sense the insecure foundation of loathing in their piercings, tattoos and gaudy make-up, even the pricks.
In the parking lot, we got back on our bikes and rode away. Right outside the glitzy mall we found a different world. Plywood nailed over windows, graffiti everywhere. Groups of teenage boys loitered on the sidewalks, their eyes following every passing car with predatory interest. The only food available was served up by chains of fast-food grease mongers, run by corporations. The fare was corn syrup and flesh from sick, insane livestock warehoused on corporate farms, pushed out to the killing floor by robots.
When live steam is not vented, the pressure builds, and it searches for any crack in composure to escape, to provide relief, at great peril to nearby people and objects.
I knew that Melpomene was treating me with caution, but I was raging, and couldn’t stop.
We had to turn on the charm and ask quite a few of the street kids for directions, but eventually we were led to the chop shop. It was in a mostly deserted industrial area, with crumbling century-old brick buildings, jagged glass shards in the windows. We rode up to the loading dock, which was littered with debris.
The metal accordion door was chained and padlocked.