Monkey Wrench Read online

  Silo couldn’t wait to watch the plan come to fruition. The sooner the cleansing started, the better. Then he would be able to get himself elected president, pick up the broken pieces of their country, and put together a new, better United States.

  One united under the God of Hannibal Silo this time.

  Amen, brother.

  Chapter Seven

  Omega and Echo assisted Lima and Quack on their recon run the next morning. Under Papa’s orders, Lima led the operation and they headed out to scout the church’s facility. At first, Lima thought maybe their suspicions about the church’s activities were unfounded and the result of a massively fragile leap in logic.

  But the more information Bubba pulled together about the facility, and their failure to hack into that particular facility’s computer system, the more Lima thought they might really be onto something.

  Something potentially horrendous, if their suspicions proved correct. It was suspiciously unconnected to the church in any way, yet it bore its name and a logo very close to the church’s logo. As if it was meant to be mistaken as an official affiliate of the church.

  Yet somebody had gone to great lengths to make sure it could not be traced back as an official church facility.

  Omega stood in the deep shade of the abandoned building’s doorway with Lima and Quack. They all wore civvie clothes. The large black man studied the church’s building kitty-corner across the intersection from where they were huddled.

  “I’m not real familiar with this neighborhood,” Omega said. “We need him to finish circling the building before we waste time talking about any plans. I don’t see any obvious video cameras out front, which is strange. But if they’re small cameras, we might not be able to see them from here.”

  Lima pulled a feed detector from his pocket and scanned with it, looking for the most common camera feed bandwidths. “If there are any on the outside in front, they must be hard-wired. No nearby wireless signals showing up in that direction.”

  “Or scrambled,” Quack said.

  “Why would a church scramble video from security camera feeds?” Lima asked.

  “Why would they have a computer network system that apparently has zero exploitable flaws?” Omega replied. “Why would they go to such lengths to make themselves look like they’re part of the church when, in fact, they apparently aren’t? The answer being because they are up to something they don’t want anyone knowing about. You don’t pay to have that kind of network security unless you have something worth hiding.”

  Omega’s partner, Echo, slowly appeared from around the back side of the church building across the way. Dressed like a homeless person, he wore oversized dark sunglasses and a bandana across his lower face instead of a surgical mask as he slowly shuffled along. He carried a plastic bag of aluminum cans in one hand and his gaze darted all over, as if paranoid someone might be watching him. Occasionally he looked up, threw his free hand protectively over his head as he ducked, and barked some gibberish into the air.

  “He’s too good at that,” Lima said. “Sometimes, I wonder about him.”

  Omega chuckled. “Tease him all you want about the foreign movies and shit he watches, but the man is a freaking chameleon. ’Bout the only thing he can’t do is turn his pale, blue-eyed ass into a brother. You tell him you want him to do or be someone or something, damned if he doesn’t pull it right off. I’d bet he would have made a great actor if he hadn’t gone into the military.” The two men had gone through basic together, served together for several years, and were fast friends even before they joined the Drunk Monkeys.

  It took him another five minutes, but Echo slowly made his way across the street and to their doorway. He dropped his voice and pantomimed begging for money from them.

  “Three cameras in the back,” he whispered, “and two in front. That I saw. I’m guessing high-end industrial grade. Looks like maybe 08-Fegoes.”

  “Sonofabitch,” Lima muttered. “Scrambled feeds.”

  “Undetectable feeds,” Omega said. “And likely equipped with facial recognition software on the inside.”

  “That complicates things,” Quack said.

  “Only a little,” Lima said. “The surgical masks work to our benefit. And I still have some magno-lotion in my kit. We smear a little of that on our cheekbones and foreheads, it farks the reader software.”

  “Can’t it detect if you’re wearing that?” Omega asked.

  “No. It goes on clear. All it does is fool the software, distorts the sensed facial structure, and makes it read the faces differently when the software runs its search algorithms.”

  “Okay,” Omega said, “so answer me this. How you gonna get inside there long enough to get to a computer terminal? Without someone seeing you do it?”

  “That’s where you two are going to come in handy,” he said. “You’re going to keep an eye on this place today and give me a bead on when people are coming and going. I’d bet at lunchtime we see some people head out to eat. Echo goes in and does his polite and crazy panhandler act and leaves. That gives me an idea of the layout when I pull the recorded video feed from the glasses he’s wearing. If there’s an office close to the entrance, or a receptionist’s desk or something, we come back tomorrow and have him fake a seizure in the parking lot. One of us runs in for help. People will run out to see what’s going on and, in the confusion, I’ll do whatever it is I’m going to do.”

  Omega chuckled. “You have no clue what you’re going to do yet, do you?”

  “Not a single damn one. I’m waiting on Bubba for that part.”

  “Anything else I can do to help besides surveillance?” Omega asked.

  Lima nodded. “Yeah, actually, there is. I need you to get me a suit. And shoes.”

  “A suit?”

  He slowly nodded. “Yep. I need to look like money.”

  * * * *

  That night just before dinnertime, Lima had his clue. “I’ve got the answer,” he said when he walked into the common room where everyone was preparing to eat. He held up a small thumb drive.

  “What are you supposed to do with that?” Papa asked.

  He smiled. “Bubba send me a present. All we have to do is get me into that church building, get me to someone’s computer station, and boom, he can get in.”

  “It’s a virus?”

  “Trojan. It’ll allow Bubba an undetectable back door into their system, and we’ll finally be able to take a tiptoe through Silo’s tulips.”

  “Can he dump my parents’ retirement fund back into their account, then?” Clara snarked. She still held a lot of resentment at Reverend Silo and how her parents had chosen to ignore her warnings not to waste all their money by giving it to his church.

  Papa looked like he was mulling over their options. “Our first priority is still to figure out where Dr. Riley Perkins is, if she’s even in the area. I’m not yet totally convinced whatever Silo might be up to is relevant to our cause. But yeah, just in case he is trying to spread Kite around, we should do whatever we can to shut that shit down.”

  “Yeah,” Clara drawled, “because that might just possibly be a bad thing, if they’re doing that.”

  Papa shot her an irritated look, but she flashed him a sweet, innocent smile in return.

  Chapter Eight

  That evening, as Stacia sat at her bus stop near their apartment building and waited, the surgical mask over her nose and mouth made her sweat even more in the oppressive heat. As she sat there, she tried not to think about her brother.

  Marvin apparently hadn’t come home during the day, and her aunt hadn’t seen him, either.

  He didn’t have a cell phone. He’d dropped the last one and it wasn’t in the budget to buy him a new one, not even a burner.

  Stacia damn sure wasn’t giving him hers. She needed it in case Aunt Darla had problems and needed to contact her.

  Mainly because Stacia was the only one Aunt Darla could count on. Stacia also only had about five minutes of time left on the
cell’s account before she had to restock, so she never used it. She couldn’t really afford to load more minutes on it right now.

  Stacia hadn’t told her aunt exactly what she’d found out about Marvin’s sudden volunteerism spirit. Stacia knew it would likely upset her aunt, especially when she didn’t know all the details and wouldn’t be able to answer any of the older woman’s questions.

  And Stacia wasn’t even sure what the hell the deal was. There had to be a catch. It couldn’t be a legitimate offer. That was an obscene amount of money. It just didn’t make any sense.

  Then again, nothing her brother had ever done made any sense.

  At war within Stacia, her anger at her brother over his irresponsibility versus the indelible memory of her mother’s words before she died.

  How she’d made the two of them promise to always look after each other. How she’d made Stacia promise to take care of her brother.

  Come to think if it, she hadn’t made Marvin promise the same thing in return, to take care of Stacia.

  Maybe she knew he couldn’t.

  If Stacia looked back with a brutally honest eye, her brother’s problems were always there. Their mom having to ride him to do his homework or study. Riding him to clean up his stuff. Riding him to do anything.

  It wasn’t that he actively rebelled and fought her, it was like he just couldn’t remember it or stick with anything long enough to do it. His grade school counselor had ruled out ADHD.

  He just…didn’t care.

  Stacia had gone so far last year as to stop doing his laundry for him. She’d thought maybe if he had to wear stinky clothes, maybe he’d finally get off his ass and do something on his own. Take a little initiative.

  Nope. She thought she’d won the battle the next week only to find out her aunt had started doing his laundry because she felt sorry for him. He hadn’t even asked her to do them, he’d just re-worn dirty clothes for several days and their aunt had noticed.

  It was like some internal circuit never connected in his brain, leaving him adrift and unable to latch onto something.

  Stacia took over doing them again because she didn’t want her aunt dealing with the extra strain.

  The driver tonight must have been a new one to the route, because he wasn’t wearing a protective suit. Stacia scanned her pass and boarded, taking her usual seat toward the back of the bus and holding her tote bag carrying her lunch, work clothes, and hardhat in her lap.

  There usually weren’t many other people riding this time of night who were heading in the same direction, unless they were her coworkers at the plant. The bus would head to the garage after the last stop at the bottling plant, and usually the bus home that she caught first thing in the morning had just left the garage.

  In a way it was good, because it meant less people to run into, to risk Kite exposure from.

  So far, the news said that the only local cases they’d had were isolated at the airport and contained before they could expose anyone in the city at large.

  Stacia’s deeply rooted cynicism, combined with her innate wariness, doubted the story was that simple. She wondered what the public hadn’t been told. Weren’t being told.

  Or were outright being lied to about.

  Wondered if the continuing riots they’d been having on the other side of town really were people expressing dissatisfaction over the government and the economy, as had been reported, or if they were actually Kiters running rampant.

  She’d seen extremely graphic videos from overseas when she’d gone to the library and used the computers there. Those videos weren’t being shown on the local nightly news. She’d looked up international news websites and saw the user videos that had been posted. Mobs of raging people attacking and sometimes even killing people. If you were bitten, or injured or exposed to the blood of one of the Kiters, you probably would get the virus. Or if a victim didn’t get the rages and attack you toward the end of their disease, if you were their caregiver and exposed to their bodily fluids, you would likely contract the disease from them anyway.

  In places like India there were reportedly no remaining doctors, nurses, or other medical professionals in the country. They’d all either contracted the disease, or had been killed by Kiters, if they hadn’t fled.

  What was scarier, Stacia couldn’t decide. The high mortality rate? The infection potential? Or how packs of them sometimes banded together in their rages. It reminded her of the old zombie movies she’d watched on TV as a kid, when she still had the luxury of free time after doing her schoolwork.

  At least Kiters could easily be killed. They didn’t reanimate and get back up again after they died, like Hollywood zombies.

  In real life, the dead stayed dead, no matter how many of the living they took with them in the process of dying, or after.

  And people seemed to die pretty dang easily.

  Health officials overseas were recommending bodies be burned as close to where they died as possible if there weren’t body bags available to safely transport them. The fear being that long transports of unenclosed bodies could risk spreading the disease in the process.

  Burial was an option only if cremation wasn’t possible. And that if buried, to try to do it away from a public water source, or private wells, and not in an area prone to flooding for fear of bodies popping to the surface later on.

  It scared her. Even in these crazy times, those were things you heard about in movies and books, not in real life. The flu pandemics had been bad, but there were still tidy processions of memorial services for the dead.

  Yes, the United States had worked itself right into a rich and poor class system, with very few people surviving in the middle class. Yes, people were rioting in protest.

  But unlike the flu pandemics, which were so deadly mostly due to vaccine shortages, at least if you got the flu, you had a pretty decent chance of surviving it.

  If you tested positive for Kite, you were better off saying good-bye to your loved ones and letting someone kill you before you suffered an agonizing death and infected anyone else.

  What a horrible way to die.

  She didn’t want to engage in the what-if game.

  What if Kite started spreading in Los Angeles?

  Or what if it already had?

  She didn’t want to devote the energy or brain cells to that. Her focus right now was on work, on doing her job the best she could so she could keep getting paid to do it. That was the issue directly in front of her at that moment. Hypothesizing about possible Kite infections in their city wasn’t part of her job description, nor was it part of her daily life. It would not only waste time and energy but possibly get her mind going in directions she didn’t need it to be going.

  Like how would I keep Aunt Darla safe?

  * * * *

  People who hadn’t witnessed but had heard about the can of whoop-ass being opened on Marco’s balls gave Stacia fist bumps, thumbs-ups, or simply smiled and nodded their heads in respect as they all waited in line to get stuck at the front gate.

  Especially the women.

  Marco had long been a bane at the company. But he’d always been careful to skirt the line just on the side of crossing it, unless he was absolutely sure he had no witnesses.

  Then all bets were off.

  And he didn’t hesitate to threaten to put in a bad word for anyone who didn’t tolerate his antics.

  Billy had been the lead shift supervisor for six weeks, only two weeks longer than Stacia had been there. He’d moved to there from a different part of the plant, as well as from a different shift. He’d only heard vague rumors of Marco’s bullshit.

  And apparently he’d decided to catch the man in the act.

  When Stacia finally got her stick test, received the clear notice, and headed inside toward the locker room, Billy called out to her from his office when she passed.

  She walked in and shifted the tote bag on her shoulder. “Yeah, boss?”

  He smiled. “You ready to kick ass tonight?�
��

  She laughed. “Why? Is Marco back?”

  “I just meant in general.”

  She shoved her previous thoughts about Marvin and her issues with him out of her head. “Yeah, I’m ready for my shift.”

  “I think what happened with him did more to boost morale around here than anything I ever could have tried.”

  She shrugged, not comfortable with the attention being focused on her. “I lost my temper. I shouldn’t have, but I could only take so much for so long.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry it went on for as long as it did. I’ve been begging corporate to fix the closed-circuit video system in this section ever since I started here. It hasn’t been their priority…until I reported firing Marco and why. Now, they’ve suddenly found the funds and personnel to take care of it. I’m not convinced Marco didn’t sabotage the cameras himself a long time ago.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me,” she said without thinking.

  “Well, anyway, thanks for what you did. I promise, I won’t forget it. HR is still processing the paperwork, but it looks like you might get a slight pay bump for stepping up one position with him gone. Might only be ten or fifteen dollars a week, but I hope that helps.”

  “Thanks. It does.”

  Her heart raced. That was the best news she’d received in a long time. An extra ten dollars per paycheck could be stretched into a few extra meals per month. Or, she might actually be able to pick up a new pair of work boots in her size, instead of the used ones she’d purchased from the brewery’s employee exchange that were men’s and about a size too big. She wore two pairs of socks to keep them from hurting her feet.

  Or it would buy more medication for Aunt Darla to get her through the last days of the month, when she always ran out.

  After changing and stowing her stuff in her locker, Stacia went to her station and inventoried her tools, as she did at the beginning of every shift. If there were any shortages, she had to report them immediately, or it could be docked from her pay.