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Story Excerpt

Enough
by William Ledbetter

Illustrated by Eli Bischof

Under normal circumstances, the blank canvas of a freshly painted wall—like the one I faced on Third Street next to the interstate—would invoke both anticipation and a little dread. But tonight, I hadn’t come to share my art, only a small but important message. Tiny drips of water can eventually create an ocean.

I sized up the wall from shadows across the street. Selected not only for its visibility, the wall had symbolic value. Five protestors had been stood against that wall and shot during the first week after the government takeover. The bullet holes and chipped concrete were muted, but still visible under the fresh white paint.

A perfect venue, but my message would have to be large and clear enough for people to read from a car on the highway, even going at speed, not just stuck in traffic. And it had to have enough flare to catch the eye.

Without a crew to keep watch, I had to work fast. I checked my scrambler mask in the electric bike’s mirror and saw random pixelation patterns shifting across my face. When no headlights were visible, I darted across the street and switched on the bike’s passive scanner. The closest security drone wireless signals were more than a mile away, so I pulled two cans from my bag and started to paint.

Nothing appeared on the blank wall.

Even in the relative darkness I could see paint leaving the can, but it was being absorbed by the newly coated surface. As a test, I sprayed a small circle on the sidewalk below—and that worked—but each time I tried to apply paint to the wall, it disappeared.

My skin prickled as I looked around. The whole situation was just wrong, like a trap. With chills climbing my back, I glanced down at the bike’s screen and saw five drones converging on my spot.

In a panicked effort to stuff them in my bag, both paint cans fumbled to the ground and rolled away. Damn! Yanking the gloves off, I shoved them in the bag, then threw the whole mess into some bushes beside the building. I took off, but the electric motor was way too slow, so I stood up and pedaled hard while trying to watch drone progress on the screen.

I had almost passed beyond the perimeter of the closing dragnet when a cat darted in front of me. With a jerk sideways to avoid hitting it, I lost control and tumbled off the road.

“Mfghm,” I muttered, spitting dirt and grass.

My only chance was to make myself as small a target as possible and hope the drones IR sensors didn’t see me. I switched the bike off and folded it to reduce the heat signature, then looked around and had my first lucky break. Where the road’s asphalt met a concrete culvert, a section of the underlying soil had been washed away. The hole wasn’t large, but maybe it would hide me from aerial scans. Already skinned and dirty, I squirmed into the hole and pulled the folded bike in with me. Hopefully its composite frame would muddy my heat outline from the open side.

Then, with heart hammering and on the verge of hyperventilation, I waited.

The cat responsible for the crash came up to my hideout and meowed. I don’t know if I was in its hole, or it was attracted by my labored breathing, or just wanted company, but the gray and white tabby sat down and started bathing no more than two feet away.

I heard the buzz of drones flying over several times, but none dropped below the road level to examine my hiding place. Then I heard the most dreaded sound of all. Men talking.

When the Patriotic Independence Party or PIP, took over two years earlier, they immediately instituted neighborhood militia patrols. The first time I faced one of their checkpoints I ended up with two broken ribs and a new scar above my eye, simply because I refused to call one of the punks “sir.” I had no illusions about how the swaggering men—made brave by being heavily armed—would react to someone who had actually broken the law.

The cat heard them coming too and stopped bathing, perked its ears, then sauntered down the embankment and waited next to the worn dirt path.

Five men—their black clothes making them nearly invisible in the dark—were strung out in a line as they came up the path. They spoke in whispers while sweeping flashlights along the surrounding bushes. I held my breath when their beams passed over me as they examined the culvert, and only breathed again when they moved on. One of the men stopped, slung his rifle, and knelt to talk to the cat. He pulled something from a pouch on his belt and laid it on the ground. The cat eagerly gobbled up the morsel as the guy scratched its head.

“For Christ’s sake, Kyle,” one of the men said. “Come on! We didn’t come out here for you to feel up pussies.”

The others laughed as the shadowy man gave the cat one last scratch, unslung his rifle, and continued down the path. The cat followed them for a while, then returned to its spot beside my hole to continue its bath, probably hoping for a treat from me too. I heard muted laughter a few more times, but despite the awkward fetal position, I gradually relaxed.

I stayed hidden for a long time, kept company by the pain in my cramped extremities, the cat, and my own dark thoughts. I was a freakin paint bomber. A street artist. So why were they chasing me like I was a cop-killer? Why had they used some kind of super coating to paint a wall in the poorest part of the city? It made no sense, but I had to find out and knew who could help me.

*   *   *

I hesitated at Ossiana’s door. I hadn’t seen her since our breakup so it would be awkward, but I was afraid to go home and my need for solid intel about the night’s events outweighed my pride. After taking a deep breath to steel myself, I knocked and hoped she’d let me in.

Of course, Shae opened the door. My replacement—the reason Ossiana dumped me—stared out with mussed hair and squinting, confused eyes. “Jake? Why are you here?”

“Obviously, I need to talk with Ossiana.”

They rubbed their face and glared. “You realize it’s after two in the morning, right? Couldn’t you have just called?”

“I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important.”

They looked over my mud-smeared clothes, shrugged, and opened the door wider. “Why not, she’s awake anyway.”

I hadn’t been inside Ossiana’s apartment since I left with my stuff two years before, but aside from extra clothes on the floor, and Shae, not much had changed. A workbench scattered with electronic devices in various stages of repair or cannibalization and a tabletop 3D printer spanned one wall. The queen-sized bed she now shared with Shae filled another third of the room, leaving only the small kitchenette and Ossiana’s cluttered computer desk to claim the remaining space.

I folded my bike and plugged it into the wall outlet near the door, then dropped my backpack beside it, like I’d done hundreds of times while living there. It all felt familiar but no longer comfortable.

Barricaded behind four large monitors, Ossiana looked the same, yet different. Her hair was shorter and bleached white, but that intense expression—eerily lit by shifting patterns of light from the screens—never changed. The old pain resurfaced, and I almost turned around to leave. That’s when she pulled the headphones off and looked at me.

“Jake? Wow, you look like shit.”

“Yeah. It’s been a night.”

She nodded and glanced back to her screens. “I’m . . . I’m glad you’re okay considering everything that’s happening tonight.”

“What do you mean?”

She looked up again, but this time to examine me with a new intensity.

“You don’t know?”

I was starting to get worried but raised my hands and shook my head.

She cleared a stack of books from the only other chair and patted it for me to sit.

“Reports are still coming in,” she said while clacking away at the keyboard, “but this is really bad. So far eighty-one street writers across the country have been arrested and the number is still creeping upward. It looks like Goss and Wanda were among the locals caught. I was expecting to see your name pop up too.”

“So . . . That kind of explains what happened to me,” I said.

She gestured at my clothes. “I assume you had a close call?”

I nodded still trying to work it out in my head. “I don’t get it. Why us? We’re freakin artpunks!”

She pointed to a list of slogans we’d used in our ENOUGH campaign that was tacked to the wall beside her:

*   *   *

Enough Stuff

Enough Fascism

Enough Lies

Enough can be Enough

*   *   *

“Really?” I said and stood up to pace. “You think our little paint bombs were starting to hurt them?”

“It’s all over the net,” she said. “The slogans and artwork have even been popping up on T-shirts and memes. Some reports show up to a 4 percent decline in domestic consumer spending since you started. On top of the international sanctions, that’s really hurting the only thing they care about. Why else spend so much effort to shut the campaign down?”

Shae, who’d been standing in the shadows beside the workbench crawled back into bed with a snort and covered their head with a pillow.

“They have the power of guns, with the police and military, but average people have power too,” I said. “We can’t ignore their laws, but we can refuse to play their game. I mean soldiers won’t come and shoot us if we decide not to buy a sofa or TV. Right?”

“Not yet at least,” Ossiana said. “But regardless, you can’t keep doing stupid shit like these paint missions. Not now. We don’t live in the same country anymore. They can do whatever they want to you, and nobody will stop them.”

The very idea that our little ENOUGH campaign had generated that much fear among the Pips filled me with a righteous fire. I knew I couldn’t stop now.

“Look,” she said. “I’m glad you’re okay, but why did you come here?”

Her voice carried undisputed accusation. Had I put her in danger by coming? I told her about the weird paint, and her face lit up.

“There are reports on the dark net saying some city police forces are using a nano-based coating that was provided by the feds,” she said.

“Call them Pips. They hate that name and calling them feds make them sound official.”

“Whatever, Jake. Like it or not, they are the same thing now.”

“It’s not the same thing to me,” I snapped. For me, living in a police state was a scab I couldn’t stop picking. But my comment had been too harsh, and I could see her starting to close up, so I changed the subject. “So did this magic paint somehow help them catch everyone so fast? I mean there were no drones anywhere near when I tried to paint that wall, then within minutes they were converging on me from everywhere.”

“Maybe. It sounds like everyone caught tonight had been trying to paint over the new coatings. One guy who was part of a crew that escaped suggested the paint itself might be acting as a camera and transmitting the images.”

I stopped pacing and stared at her. “Nano-scale cameras in the paint? Wouldn’t that have the same power to size ratio problem as nano-drone swarms?”

She shrugged. “That was just one suggested possibility. The only way to be sure is to wait until someone gets a sample.”

A sample?

An idea coalesced in my head, and I leaned on her desk to look Ossiana in the eye. “If I get a sample, can you analyze it?”

“Oh Christ, Jake. Even you’re not that stupid. You barely escaped tonight. Do you think they’ll let you just waltz up and take a sample of their super paint?”

“I have a plan! Can. You. Analyze. It?”

Ossiana glanced at the workbench, then the computers, and shrugged. “I have no idea. My ability to work with nano-scaled devices is limited, but we might at least be able to get a better understanding of the way the system works.”

“If you let me borrow your 3D printer, I can get a sample and make it look like an accident.”

She leaned back in her chair and sighed. “I’m not taking the fall for you again, Jake. I’m still on probation. If the black shirts come pounding on my door, I’ll feed you to them in a heartbeat.”

I didn’t believe her, but I would still have to be extra careful.

*   *   *

After tweaking the design repeatedly over five hours and reprinting new parts a dozen times, the mods to my bike eventually worked even better than I’d hoped. A button on the bottom of the handlebars released the spring-loaded post that extended from the handle grip about two inches, then locked in place. A scoop-like cup was mounted to the end of the hollow post, with an outer edge that was made from a scavenged stainless steel knife blade.

Ossiana stood next to the bike with crossed arms and a skeptical expression. “You think this will work?”

“Yeah,” I said with enthusiasm I didn’t feel. “I should at least be able to get a few chips. How much do you need for a sample?”

“No idea. Like I said, I won’t know until I see the stuff.”

“Right,” I said and wheeled my bike into the hallway.

“Don’t you get us busted again, Jake. Under this regime we won’t get another slap on the wrist.”

“I know.”

*   *   *

I waited until dark and saved my strength by letting the bike’s electric motor take me most of the way to the target. Twenty minutes later I stopped at the top of a hill and looked down at the broad, newly painted concrete bridge support that held up Commerce Avenue. It had always been a good surface for painters, because it was widely visible during the day but was in shadows at night. Hopefully that would make it harder for video surveillance to record details of my passage.

I started pedaling and had built up some good speed by the time I reached the wall. When I pressed the stud on the handlebars my little collector scoop popped out with a satisfying “snick.”

Upon reaching the shadowed section, I edged closer to the wall until my scoop made contact. Sparks trailed behind me, and I felt elated by my own ingenuity. Then the knife-edged scoop caught on an unanticipated seam in the concrete, yanking the grips from my hands and turning the front wheel into the wall.

My right wrist snapped as momentum carried me over the handlebars and into the concrete, then to the ground where I banged my head and skidded for several yards along the asphalt. My tumbling bike landed on top of me with a clattering screech.

I lay there for several seconds, cradling my arm, pretty sure the strange bump felt through my jacket meant it was broken. I was less sure about the knot on the side of my head, but since I was conscious and not dizzy or nauseous, I had hope it wasn’t a concussion.

With a grunt at the growing pain, I struggled from beneath my bike and stood. Nobody else was near, but it was a popular road that passed beneath Commerce, so cars could come by at any minute. Trying not to look panicky in case I was being watched, I picked up my bike and examined it. The handlebars were bent, and the front tire wobbled, but the electric motor still worked.

The thing that worried me the most, was that the collector scoop I had so painstakingly designed and built was a twisted mess. I had no idea if it had done the job before crumpling. There was no way to find out until I got back to Ossiana’s place.

I mounted the bike and was getting ready to leave when I noticed a long, corkscrew of white material laying on the ground at the base of the wall, just below a matching strip of bare concrete. My scoop had worked almost too well. It had peeled the paint from the wall in one long strand. But had any been scooped into the tube?

In a totally stupid move I leaned down, snagged the strand with my good hand, and stuffed it into my pocket. I cursed at myself as I turned on the bike’s motor and wobbled away using one hand to steer. Even though my arm screamed in protest, and every bump made my vision swim with pain, I took a long, circuitous route back toward Ossiana’s apartment.

I expected at any second to be stopped by the police or a black shirt goon squad. Up until the point I’d picked up the string, I could have just played a stupid kid that crashed in the dark. But if they had video of me picking up the sample, they would have questions I couldn’t easily answer.

*   *   *

“You selfish prick!” Shae yelled and ran across the room to peer out the window, like the bad guy in some black and white noir detective movie. “You’re going to bring the whole fucking Patriot gestapo to our door!”

“Don’t give them the dignity of calling them that.”

“Oh, like they care what we call them?”

“I care!” I said a little louder than I should but was in agony struggling to open the bottle of painkillers with one hand. “Can you please help me open this?”

They glared at me with crossed arms and a mean smirk but didn’t move.

“Now you’re being the selfish prick, Shae,” Ossiana said without looking up from the microscope.

Shae shrugged, took the bottle, and opened it, then paused. “Should you be taking these? I mean the ER doc might ask where you got them.”

“I’m not going to the ER. At least not yet.”

Shae rolled their eyes. “Really? Do you think you’re macho enough to just shrug off a broken wrist?”

“No. This hurts like hell,” I said, “but if they have video of me picking up the sample, they could probably tell I was favoring my arm after the crash. They might not be able to ID me from my masked face but could be looking for someone with a broken arm.”

Shae glanced at Ossiana, who ignored us both as she examined the sample, then sighed and shook out two capsules and handed them to me. “As soon as those kick in, we’re going to have to put a temporary splint on your arm to immobilize it. I guess we’ll see how macho you are then.”

I swallowed the pills without a response.

Shae sat down with their phone and said, “This will be fun. I saw them make a splint on a reality show. I think it was one of those about Alaska, but I’d better search how to make one at home just to be sure.”

“No!” Ossiana and I shouted simultaneously.

“They might be watching for those kinds of searches coming from this area too,” I said.

Shae paused with their finger above the screen. “Right. How can I forget we’re accomplices to a wanted fugitive now?”

I was in no mood for their self-righteous bullshit or inclined to play nice. “I’m sure you’re safe. I doubt the Pips would ever assume someone who does makeup and fashion videos on the internet is an insurgent.”

“Really? At least being a content creator pays well. Not that having a job and earning money is something you’d be familiar with.”

“What I do isn’t about money, though income does influence some people.”

Ossiana’s head whipped up, and she saw that I was looking at her. “Stop it, Jake! I didn’t dump you for Shae. I dumped you because you’re an immature, selfish little prick. You got me arrested, and now you’re trying to do it again.”

“I just provided the message,” I said as my head started to feel mushy. “You’re a grown-assed adult and nobody made you hack the Patriot’s Independence Party website. You just couldn’t resist the challenge.”

“And did it make any difference? Do you think your little paint bombs will matter in the long run? Fucking grow up, Jake!”

“I don’t know if it’ll change anything, but I have to fight back, and paint is the only weapon I have.”

 

Read the exciting conclusion in this month’s issue on sale now!

Copyright © 2024. Enough by William Ledbetter

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