Diridon Station, San Jose, Platform Access Tunnel

Joey hobbled slightly, the left ankle that had rolled fleeing the Witnesses across the tracks above, now clicking ominously with every step. The open ramp was behind him, stones clattering down from above where his pursuers cast them after his fleeing shadow, that shadow that grew more feint as he limped deeper into the bowels of the transit center.

Sadness grabbed at his heart. But tears, those watery refuges of fools, did not wet his eyes. He had brought his Bible to the revival at the Whole Foods Loaves and Fishes Miracle Seminar—but it had been the wrong Bible, the black one that the nice old man who claimed to be a repentant Government agent had given him for study in these Final Days.

“The wrong Bible?” his voice echoed dead and indignant in the concrete hive. “I just wanted to join, to become a Christian. How do you do that with no churches and no internet? With a book right? The Book? But it was the wrong edition?”

'Silence Says,' came his wary inner voice.

His natural fear of being found while running, extending upward these past 20 years of his life from the foundation of his flight phobia after spitting out his high protein granola and then being caught running from the table by Daddy Mark and Daddy Ryan, only to be cuffed back into his crib at age 5, making the long runaway misery of his life 5 years younger then the total misery of his 25 years of forsaken hate in the guts of this horrible country... had triggered his one soothing state, the silent voice of his surviving angel within. Life had informed him that there was always something listening.

His inner auto narrator returned to strangle his bleating meat-speak in its own cradle:

'How much does it matter who printed it—its the same book, right?'

'Maybe the old man that gave it still worked for the government? Maybe he marked it. Maybe it was printed as a decoy trap to keep us runners out of God?'

The stones no longer clattered. No steps followed. They would not come in here, still in fear of the platform drones—the stupid idiots. People were such creatures of conditioning. Yes, the transit hubs HAD been off limits, patrolled by the terrible government machines when the net was still up, when the phones still worked, when the Fright was high and everyone was fleeing for the mountains and caves...

Running from them, up past the abandoned condos and across the tracks, he had been compelled by the strangest fantasy, a sound probably implanted by his deep anxiety about being left alone and behind, that he had heard a train pulling in, one of the big cross country Amtrak trains. How he had dreamed of boarding a Train to Everywhere ever since his boyhood, when Mother had stood at the airport gate in Kiev and waved him off with tears in her eyes. Two new fathers were to replace the father that War had taken with his cruel hand, Daddy Mark and Daddy Ryan...

'Ah!' screamed Silent Joe Survivor in his pain wracked mind's eye.

He had stopped moving, unconsciously, as if his body had known that those idiots Witnesses, so spooked by all technology that they did not realize that the net was down and the drones would be frozen in their great insect like attitudes of oppression.

A sound, a deep sound as if of a plane taking off on the other side of Hope Way, beyond the big building, rushing up into the air like the evil American, child-swallowing bird of prey that it was, came to his ears from ahead and above, echoing down those ramps ahead. Joey was moved to go see the wondrous thunderous machine, perhaps the last of its kind to take the Rich Fatties to New Zealand, Easter Island, Pitcairn and Typee—he had wondered at the brochures, thinking them a scam when they came out a year ago... now Joey wished to go; not Silent Joe Survivor, but I Can Still Swim Joey, the brat that had got away from his sick butt sniffing parents.

He looked down at his mighty Keene boots, old blue jean pants bottoms wrapped over the laces against the cold. These fine, fair-weather friends moved smoothly with ingrained caution under the cuffed bottoms of his pillaged carpenter's pants, eight sizes too big, under his great fatty cargo shorts and felt the cool air through his long underwear beneath. He then whispered to Silent Joe Survivor, like a conspiratorial snake might hiss, “Coldest summer of them all. This joint has to be ripe for pickings, with all the rich fatties gone and the Witnesses ruled by their tech fear—let's eat bro!”

Silent Joe, hungry though he was, hissed back in his mind, 'There could be Africans up there stoking a fire to roast you! You know the drones always...'

Real, overbearing sound, whining, external hunt your homeless ass down sound, whirred up ahead and down the ramp; no, the ramps beside him, behind him and ahead of him, on both sides:

“Fuck me, bro!” hissed Joey, unable, from long practice, to even speak to himself above a hoarse whisper. “The net is down—what the shek?” [1]

Before Joey, on either side loomed in miniature, two, two-foot tall mechanical dogs, drones of the most feared kind, as they had great big, steely jaws for their size that could easily take off a foot at the ankle, but were used to hold a Trespass Pedestrian. [2]

“Awe, fuck, bro!”

Next to Joey, having whisked down at the speed of a bad dream from the platform above, were two disc drones, searchlight bubbles upon a big dinner plate from hell at rest upon their single wheel, that spoke, in soft feminine voices, almost seductively, to everyone who was not there and to the one caught one who might care beyond the mere certainty of action, “Trespass Incident.”

Joey halted, knowing what happened if he did not.

Afraid to turn, yet trembling from the sound of the swift humming behind him, indicating hover drones, at about the level of his frostbitten ears on either side, Joey listened for the next command. The command came from the bubble disc drones, in sultry womanly tones, reminding Joey that he had always wondered and wanted to know the touch of a woman but had never come closer than a sniff of perfume outside the cafes where he begged bread, “Terminate Trespass!”

His eyes was not even wet with the tears they were shedding when the release of the restraints with a whir sounded behind him and two twisting plastic cords weighted with magnetic steel balls whipped about his neck and throat from behind and squeezed.

'Silent Joe,' thought he within, 'I'm sorry for getting, us killed.'

His knee caps sounded like broken bricks as he collapsed to his knees and the terrible stainless steel hounds ahead of him seemed to whine in disappointment as the fliers hovered behind him and the 'Delilah Discs' as the old government bible man had called them, spoke to the metal dogs like some pair of goddess twins, “Remove the organic matter from the techway.”

The dogs' eyes glowed red with a mechanistic lust for task completion, their mouths dropped open, and they snarled hungrily as they bounded quicker than any man could run on their rubbery paw claws, grabbed him gently enough by the wrists not to draw blood, and dragged him up the left hand tunnel quick as spit.

As the smell of his oil-soaked canvas pants burning at 30 MPH up the concrete ramp and the stench of his Keene rubbers dissolving as well, threatened to distract him from his wonder, he smiled as the chute blurred in light-spotted failure of sight, 'Joe, awes fuck, the government still got net. My bad... but we might see the sunshine yet!'

By the time the whine of the machine dogs sounded in a mimicry of canine triumph, his sight had failed to black as his head swam on a swelling, pain-encompassed neck. But, but! And to crow at the moon his maiden! He felt, upon his grinning face, the soft, warm kiss of the just risen sun.

Notes

-1. Short for shekel and meant to describe all so called money and fiat currency, a house of imaginary cards of plenty that had crashed in Joey's youth and sent Daddy Mark into fentanyl prostitution and Daddy Ryan into voluntary hospice, freeing him from their petting grasp. The term “shek” had come to mean a mind shattering alteration in the foundation of reality that caught people by shock and surprise in the lurch while the connected rich fatties whisked off in their gas autos, jet planes and exclusive charter trains.

-2. A person illegally upon government, corporate or NGO property, or out and about in violation of curfew restrictions.