Coffee Shop

The pink shade of the eastern horizon was quite possibly the most welcome sight in Ethan's entire life. It had rained during the evening, removing the possibility of sleeping outside, so he had gone to a Denny's, stretching a bottomless coffee and an order of fries out until they asked him to leave at four in the morning. He felt guilty about not tipping, but there was no helping it, he needed the money. With the caffeine cut off, he lapsed into a zombie-like state, not quite sleeping or awake, but just shuffling around aimlessly.

As the night had passed he had felt himself growing steadily more paranoid, but was at the same time growing more powerless to fight it. He tried to focus on how Linden would have left him a message, but all he could think of was that he was being watched. If not by the policeman on the corner, then by the cameras in the stores. Sooner or later, one of those observers would recognize him, and the gig would be up.

Ethan found himself standing outside of Cup-a-Joe, squinting through the glass at the clock above the register. It said that it was 5:57. It was tragic, the cafe didn't open until six. Then the barista came around the corner and waved him in.

"I don't know if you need a shot of whiskey or espresso, but you look like shit," she said as she pulled the last of the chairs down from on top of the tables. "Which one is it?" It took Ethan a moment to puzzle through what she was asking and another to realize that she wasn't joking.

"Neither," he said. "I'm going to crash pretty soon here, caffeine will just keep me up, not really awake." He found himself thinking that she was kind of cute, with a soft face and tattoos extending from under her rolled-up sleeves to her wrists and the backs of her hands. She saw him looking at her, and her blush made him hate himself.

She smiled, working her way around the counter towards the register and the espresso machine. From a distance, it looked like something was wrong with her left eye, like she had pinkeye, but as she got closer, he could see that her left iris had been doped red. Usually people had both of them done, and why not, it was non-reversible after all, so the mismatch threw him off.

"You look like you need about a week's rest, man. How 'bout I get you something strong, five or six shots and some food?" she asked. "Trust me, a power nap will do you a world of good."

"Does that really work?"

"Like a charm," she said. "By the time the caffeine hits your system, you should be able to catch about twenty minutes. Muffin or scone?"

Ethan looked at the pastry case. The muffins were all chocolate chip, which were like the El Camino of pastries, sweet, but not sweet enough to justify all the parts of the muffin without any chips. That left the lemon-poppyseed scones. "I'll take a scone." He dug into his pocket, bringing out his remaining cash. "How much?"

"Don't worry about it, the pastries are yesterday's and coffee's cheap," she said. "You look like you need it."

Another time, another place, he would have insisted on paying, but given the circumstances he was just thankful. She put the scone on a plate and handed it to him before turning around to start on the espresso. He put a dollar and the coins into the tip jar before eating the scone. By the time he was finished, the espresso was ready.

"Thanks," he said.

"You might want to wait until you've tasted the mud before you say that," she said.

He took a sip, and mud was the correct name for it. It had been a long time since he had ordered anything without milk in it, and it tasted like coffee that had been boiling down for a week, washing away any satisfaction he had gotten from the scone and making his throat start to close up. The good news was that it tasted like it should have a potency on a level with cocaine.

"Nope, still thanks," he said. "If this doesn't kill me, I'm sure that it'll do the trick."

"Go lay down, I'll wake you up in twenty or so," she said.

Meetings

Going into the meeting, Ethan had been hopeful. Maybe it would be different now, now that the stakes were so high. It wasn't. He found himself sitting in a folding chair, holding a stack of flyers as people argued about how they should respond to the massacre. It had been two weeks, and still they hadn't done anything for fear of doing the wrong thing. He told the guy next to him that he had to use the bathroom, then he slipped away and started to head back to Linden's apartment.

A block away from her building, he realized what a shitty guest he was being and stopped at the liquor store on the corner. It was owned by a Mexican family, if the flag hanging behind the register was any indicator. He grabbed a six-pack of Negro Modelo out of one of the coolers, and then went to wait in line behind a couple of suits. He was watching the football on the TV in the corner, trying to remember his Spanish, when the suits started to talk.

"Do you think he'll show?" the one on the left asked.

The other one shrugged. "Who knows, she probably warned him."

"Well, whether he shows up or the techs track down his phone, I hope it happens soon, I'm fucking tired."

"Stop whining, at least you have a girlfriend."

Ethan shifted the beer from hand to hand as he rifled through his pockets, looking for his phone, but it wasn't there. In his haste, he had left it at the meeting. Were the suits waiting for him? He wanted to dismiss the idea as mere paranoia, but his cautious side won out. He returned the beer to the cooler and left the store.

Once back outside, it was clear that there were indeed people watching Linden's apartment building. He headed the other way, trying to keep a measured pace. He knew it was unreasonable, but he felt that he should have prepared for something like this, had some secure way for people to contact him.

Ethan also had more pressing concerns. He only had about twenty dollars on his person, and his cards were definitely under surveillance, if not frozen outright. Without access to resources, it was only a matter of time before he ended up dead or in custody. Linden was probably fairing better. She had always been the paranoid survivalist type, a planner, and he knew that if he could find her, his chances would improve dramatically. Of course, she could be anywhere.

Preparation

The soldiers didn't show up to Linden's apartment until an hour after Ethan had left for the meeting. There wasn't much warning, just a feed from the camera she had set up in the hallway popping up on her Screen as it's motion sensor was activated. The feed was only up for a couple of seconds before it was cut off, but it was enough to see the soldiers outside her door, one of them aiming his shotgun at the dead-bolt.

She was glad that Ethan hadn't been caught, but she also knew that there was enough questionable material in her small apartment for them to black-bag her. She grabbed her go-bag from next to the couch and ran to the bathroom, glad that she hadn't gotten around to putting it in a closet after she had assembled it. She managed to shut the door quietly before she heard the gunshot followed by the sound of the door rebounding from the cabinets as they came in through the main entrance in the kitchen.

Linden started to climb out of the window that led to the vertical shaft running from the basement to the roof. For the first time since she had moved in, the extra cost of having a ground floor apartment seemed worth it, she wasn't sure if she would have been able climb down five stories of pipe and window sill. Even the fifteen feet or so down to the basement was bad, but she made it.

She moved out from under the shaft, and allowed herself a moment to think. Getting to the basement was as far ahead as she had thought. The basement exited to a narrow walkway that ran between her building and it's neighbor, which in turn had two exits, one to the street and one to the alley. She was about to make a break for it when she noticed that the basement door of the adjacent building hadn't been shut all the way.

She pushed it open to find an empty basement much like the one in her own building. She turned on the light, and headed up the winding staircase. As she was heading toward the front door someone opened the door to one of the apartments ahead of her. Linden froze automatically before starting to walk again. A guy in a Mariners cap stepped out. He looked up at her, but didn't recognize her and kept on walking. She followed him out, staying close to him for half a block before veering off.

After a few minutes of walking it started to rain and she crouched down to get her rain jacket out of her bag. It was a good sign, people wearing jackets would make it difficult for anyone to spot her. She also checked her homeDrive, to make sure that it was inside one of the bag's rubberized pockets. The homeDrives were supposed to be waterproof, but she didn't want to test it.

A couple more blocks and she was at the coffee shop. Once she had her chai, she opened her Go bag to check it's contents. It was just a small messenger bag, so it didn't hold much, but she would be able to survive for a couple of days. The spare phone was crappy, but it wasn't on the cell networks, instead using meshNet. She used it to send a message to her parents that she was going camping and would be out of touch for a couple of days. She knew that they would eventually track it back to the phone, but she didn't want her parents to worry, either. Things had been hard enough on them already. After that it was just a matter of figuring out a way of contacting Ethan.