Panoptic

Panoptic - Chapter 06

 He hurried along lightening streets, trying to ignore the crawling fear in his belly, and the chills that ran up and down his spine.

Gell Shield. Gell Shield wanted him. Worse, they knew him, knew his home. He shook his head. It didn't make sense. If they had his picture, if they'd recovered his prints from the charred shell of the smoke bomb, they could have had him arrested weeks ago. If an investigation had only just turned up some such damning evidence, they must have had the police contacts to get him locked up without the rigmarole of staging an ambush at his front door.

Ambush.

He didn't want to go home. The Gell Shield mob had to be watching it. If they were Gell Shield. He didn't know if he could trust the fat-fingered man that far. He didn't know why he would lie, and if he was working for someone else, he couldn't see how that someone else would know he'd tangled with the apes from Gell. No, he had to have told the truth, no matter how strange it was.

But Soro had an eerie certainty that it wasn't the entire truth. He half-wished he'd stuck around and carried on the questioning, but no matter how angry he was, he couldn't have kept any man locked in a reeking dumpster all that long, and he could never have left him to suffocate. His hand had trembled when he'd flipped open the catch, and then he'd run before his prisoner had time to emerge.

Prisoner. They had planned to take him prisoner. But why? He'd crawled under their fence, taken a few pictures, and bruised his knuckles against some dude's jaw. What the hell?

He still didn't want to go home. Gell Shield had a record of brutality, even if their excesses rarely came to court. They did not, as far as he knew, have a record of tracking citizens to their homes and abducting them, or of taking them to some Rancho Muerte to be slaughtered with chainsaws, but who knew what didn't hit the papers and blogs?

He circled around to his home, avoiding the direct approach. He climbed up the fire escape of the building adjacent to his apartment block, and eyed the front of his building from the roof. The black van had moved.

A few minutes more careful observation revealed that it hadn't vanished; it had been driven into a small side street, close by his building, and a man in dark overalls and a peaked cap stood on the corner, ostensibly cleaning graffiti off the wall, but Soro noted that his head tilted more to the nearby apartments than to the job under his nose.

He began the most risky part of his return. In fact, he would not have gone back at all if he'd had a choice, and he intended no more than a flying visit. But he did have to go back, for two compelling reasons.

As soon as he'd seen that flight was necessary, they'd come to his mind, so close together that he couldn't say himself which one had come first, which second.

His camera.

Squizzle.

He could pick up new clothes anywhere, he could access his accounts from any computer, organise train or plane tickets, hotels, whatever he needed. As long as Gell Shield didn't have a hacker to track him, though he could never be sure of that.

There were other personal items at his home, most especially the cards from Sam, and his copy of Leaves of Grass. Besides those few things, he didn't own much he couldn't replace. But two things could not be replaced: Squiz, who was a live and unique person, and his camera, which was a part of his body. Detachable, hungry for batteries, and mortally afraid of water, it was nevertheless as much a part of him as his tongue.

He had to leave town. So he had to swing by home.

He went to the rooftop corner nearest his building, found a convenient drain pipe, and slid down. The thing was damp and slick, and it shook with his weight. He bumped his knees on the wall, and scraped some skin from his knuckles. He was light, small, and he made it. He found a guy in black overalls and a peaked cap watching the back of his building, but he'd been expecting that.