Further Into The Future!

Chapter 19

The next day Jack and I stood on the roof of a tower near the Corrupt Cops' headquarters, which they and everyone who knew of them (which was virtually everyone) called "the Station." Jack surveyed the property with a pair of binoculars, but even without binoculars I could see that it was impenetrable.

There was a thick cement wall around the building at least twenty feet tall, with barbed wire on the top. Giant searchlights looked down from every corner of the wall, flooding a corner of the sidewalk with bright light even during the daytime.

Two rookie band members guarded the only entrance through the wall. They were young – they didn't even have the customary Corrupt Cop mustache – but they looked serious, wearing sunglasses, crossing their arms, with various weapons hanging visibly from their belt.

Inside the wall was a fantastically ugly two-story building from which the Corrupt Cops orchestrated their crime. Like the wall around it, it was cement. It looked like an oversized bomb shelter. The only difference was thin glass slits every six feet or so for windows. As I stood there watching it, it seemed like using nuclear weapons would be the only way to get in.

In between the wall and the Station was an equally ugly mud field. A few younger band members were walking across it. One was escorting a handcuffed prisoner. He was holding the man's elbow and he gave it a jolt whenever he felt the man wasn't walking fast enough. The prisoner was an old man, too old to be treated this way, I thought. His head drooped to the ground sadly.

Another officer was walking a German Shepard fog that terrified me even from this distance. It was yelling ferociously - I couldn't distinguish any words, but I imagined it was cursing. It seems like that would be what an angry fog would say. It was larger than any German Shepard I've seen in our time. It had probably been genetically modified to be larger.

What really terrified me was that I could hear more fogs yelling that I couldn't see.

"How are we going to get around those fogs?" I asked.

Jack shrugged as he continued to peer through the binoculars. "I don't know. Maybe we'll just have to go around them somehow."

That didn't sound like a good plan to me. I would rather have lived to my old age in that crazy dictatorship than be torn apart by a German Shepard fog.

A minute or two later Jack took off the binoculars and let them hang around his neck. He shook is head.

"This could be difficult," he said.

"I think that's an understatement."

He laughed. "It was supposed to be an understatement, Professor."

I paused; now that we were alone I debated whether to ask him about something that had been on my mind since the Corrupt Cops broke into the apartment. I decided to ask him, but I wanted to do it gently, so I spent more time phrasing the question in my head as he pulled the binoculars back up to his eyes.

"You used to be a Corrupt Cop?" I finally asked.

He sighed. "Yeah, I used to be a Corrupt Cop," he said. "Until five or six years ago. I knew you would ask about it eventually."

"What was it like? How did it happen?"

"Well, I was in the band well before they were the Corrupt Cops. I just got out of high school and I was looking for work. I got an offer to join a band called the Cops. They were a somewhat well known band at the time, a rising star. I listened to some of their stuff and I thought it was great. I was delighted to get the offer.

"When I joined, they were a perfectly legitimate band. They wrote their own songs, didn't steal them like they do now, and they actually sang. We actually sang. They didn't lip sync, like now.