Velocity

The Rollers

Devon walked through the unlit streets, stumbling on debris and muttering to himself. He shoved his grime-coated hands deeper into the pockets of his ancient trench coat and hunched his shoulders against the biting cold of the wind. He found his grandfather’s gold-plated pocket watch in his left pocket and fingered it gingerly.

“Five friggin’ more bottles of zinc tablets!” he complained out loud to the cold skies. Remembering where he was, he shushed himself, touching a knobby finger to his blistered and brown lips.

“Shhh!” he admonished, waving the finger from side to side in front of his face. “Rollers gonna get me!”

His muttered complaints continued, but they were quieter. It was going to cost him, it was going to come dear. Five bottles would run him at least three hundred new-bucks, and he wasn’t even sure if there was that much in his account. A hundred new-bucks could buy a man a large bottle of wine-strong wine-with maybe enough left over for a can of malt liquor and a loaf of bread. Devon’s tongue slicked up with saliva just thinking about it.

It was all those damned pods it kept having. If it would just settle down and quit laying pods, maybe it would have time to do its own friggin’ shopping. Sometimes he regretted having helped the alien out of its capsule and hiding it in the abandoned buildings he called home. Now it had him and all his friends running errands for it, and the demands had been getting worse lately.

“Might as well have a friggin’ job!” he said aloud, then shushed himself again.

The lights from the supermarket were just ahead now. The red and yellow special-offer holos were faded and curling, the dingy cinderblock walls were in need of a paint job. The place was an antique, one of the last of its kind in the area. No one with a computer needed to leave their homes to shop, not these days.

“Like Old Red always say,” Devon told the fireplugs and the shot-out dayglow streetlamps, “‘We can’t all live like the friggin’ Jetsons! ’” His joke sent him off into a wheezing gale of laughter that ended with a coughing fit and then more shushing.

Somewhere under his low-brimmed, tattered hat his blue eyes twinkled in the filth, and his cheeks crinkled up in a way that had reminded children of that outlaw Santa Claus, twenty-five years earlier.

As he stumbled up onto the curb over the clogged storm drain, he felt relief. He had almost made it to the antiquated electric-eye doors. Then he halted, stiffening like a hare that smells a redneck with a hot-barreled rifle.

A figure slouched against the wall next to the doors, almost invisible due to the blinding effect of the glaring sulfur tube lights inside the store. The only thing that had tipped Devon off was the orange glow of a stimstik that hung from invisible lips.

Reflexively, Devon shoved his hand back into his left coat pocket and clutched at his grandfather’s watch, holding it tight in his greasy fingers. The cool metal disk felt good against his palm, like a big old-fashioned coin. He knew that protection was in his hand, but he didn’t want to call on it without real need. After a moment’s further hesitation, he continued to approach the store, knowing that the Roller would be even more likely to move if he turned back into the darker streets, showing weakness.

The figure slipped away from the wall and swaggered toward him. Devon, mumbling a bit, kept his eyes down and shuffled on, his old papery-thin heart pounding. Again he considered calling on his friends right away, but restrained himself. It had been made very clear that help should only be summoned in the most dire need. Otherwise, there would be dire consequences.

But then the circumstances became considerably worse as the first Roller stood directly in his path, hands on hips, grinning around his smoky stimstik. Devon sensed another Roller coming up behind him. The blood rushed in his ears and then his chest and stomach hardened up together, hurting.

“What’s an old drunk like you doin’ at the market, ay?” asked the Roller behind the stimstik.

“You boys go home to your mamas now, before you get hurt,” Devon said, his voice rattling. “I was in the Shale Wars, you know.”

This broke up the Rollers into rough laughter. Suddenly, heavy hands fell on Devon’s shoulders. His vision was filled with a hot flaring stimstik tip as the first Roller knocked Devon’s hat from his head and shoved his face up close.

“You been coding in some money, haven’t you? Maybe your old bag sister from New Miami or someplace coded you some money ‘cause she felt sorry for your sorry old skin, am I right? And now you’re steering in for a drink, aren’t you?”

“Let’s steer him right into our office,” rumbled the Roller behind Devon, holding him. Devon kicked for their knees and tried to break their bone-crushing grips, but he was too old, too weak.

He got a glimpse of the second Roller during the struggle. The haggard, sunken eyes and slack cheeks made him suspect that the man was a user, and the raised sores like a dozen wasp stings that rubbed against his neck made him sure. That worried him as addict Rollers were generally the worst.

They dragged him into the darkness, and slid up his right sleeve, revealing his tattooed barcode. Pulling out a cheap plastic scanner that looked like a portable car vacuum, they ran it down the skinny blue-veined arm. Devon felt the familiar touch of the plastic rollers in the scanner against his arm and the slightest warmth from the laser inside, the feeling of violation.

It was this very act-the stealing of a person’s barcoded account number-which gave the Rollers their name. Devon was old enough to remember the feel of good green money in his hand, but his attackers weren’t. In these days money was transferred with the use of scanners and a person’s personal account number, in the form of a barcode on the right arm. It was supposed to eliminate muggings forever, but instead it had only given birth to the Rollers.

Devon struggled, managing to scramble the first two readings. Then the smoker plunged a fist into his stomach four times and he held still for the third attempt, coughing bloody phlegm. In his left hand he gripped his grandfather’s watch in desperation. He tried to thumb open the latch, but one of the Rollers was holding that arm too, and he couldn’t get it open.

“There, we finally got the old bastard’s number,” grunted the smoker. He tapped gray ash into Devon’s hair and smiled with the genetically strong teeth that all the young had these days.

“Now, you give us the access code.”

Devon glared at him. There was no way he would just give these two his last twenty bucks. They could see this right away, and so they began methodically beating him without even speaking. In the grips of the two men, Devon could not remember having felt so alone.

Soon, spitting blood, he gave them the series of nine letters and digits that formed his secret code. Eagerly, the two stood up and tapped keys on the scanner, like lotto players hoping for the big jackpot. Devon took the opportunity to reach deeper into his pocket and pop open the latch on his grandpa’s watch and put his thumb into the broken interior. He found the button-pad there, which activated to his touch and recognized his dirty thumbprint. With one squeeze he could press the button and call the pod children, but he hesitated.

He watched the young men, still waiting for the slow scanner to relay the account transfer up to the main networks and retrieve the balance. Knowing what his friends would do to them, he felt pity. He had been beaten and robbed of all his new-bucks, but was that enough to alert the pods? While he thought about it, he muttered and raved aloud like a man with malaria.

“What’s he talkin’ ‘bout?” asked the user. “I don’t know, some sludge about zinc tablets and pods. Vid-dream stuff. He got a little too much gas in the shale tunnels, I’d gamble,” the first Roller snorted. His stimstik, almost out now, quivered and rolled in his mouth as he laughed. Then his laugh cut short as the account balance flashed up on the scanner’s tiny screen.

“Two hundred ninety-three friggin’ bucks?” he burst out, his stimstik falling to the cracked concrete to join the sea of debris. Devon watched as they turned toward him.

“You faked us out, old man,” the Roller hissed. “You conned us.”

Devon saw murder in their eyes. He had seen it before. Lips trembling in regret, he pressed the button in his coat pocket.

From a nearby alley came wet popping sounds. Three pods released children and they came, their tiny feet tapping against the asphalt with incredible rapidity. Behind them five more pods popped. Mantis-like creatures with bodies like yardsticks and wire-thin limbs sped to Devon’s rescue, moving with blinding speed.

Both the Rollers pulled out their vibro-blades and knelt. They planned to do it right: a single double-plunge with both blades, piercing his sternum and the old heart beneath it at the same moment.

“On the count of three,” said the first Roller. “One…”

The first three pod creatures arrived before he got to two.

Devon squeezed his eyes shut as the killing began, wishing he could block out the sounds as effectively as the sights, but fingers in the ears never did as complete a job as shut eyelids. He looked only once, when the initial screams had changed to gurgles and grunts, and watched for a moment as two of the pod children held the stim-smoker aloft and immobile. A third one kept the Roller’s jaws clamped shut while it wrapped its wire-like limbs around his the neck and squeezed, blood spurting.

The scanner dropped from the jerking hand, plastic clattering on concrete. Struggling to get up, Devon vomited and staggered away. Tears running down his face, he found his old hat and shoved it firmly down over his head.

“You made me do it,” he muttered, clicking shut his grandfather’s watch. “Didn’t want to…”

He wiped the blood from his face and shoved open the broken automatic doors. After releasing so many children, it would want the zinc tablets all the more, he knew.

And it was best to do what it wanted. Devon knew that too.