<b>Roo'd</b>

# Roo'd

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# Chapter #52

The reporters had arranged themselves in a line between the elevator bay at the end of the hall and the door to apartment three. Behind him the five black-suited guards who were the private employees of the resident of apartment one stood in a solid line, shock wands held horizontally in front of them slowly buzzing with blue light. Little red lights on the cameras winked at Marcus as he bent to press the doorbell with one big finger. The door opened and a poster child for cute Chinese children everywhere slowly shuffled out, a big floppy cap perched on his head. A slightly haggard, but clearly loving father appeared behind him, bowing compulsively. Marcus slowly bowed to the them both and presented the boy with a big red box with a yellow bow. The boy’s hat slid off as he looked up, his bald head gleaming pinkly in the camera lights. A slow shy smile spread over his face and the reporters begin to drool as they saw their ratings start to spike.

The elevator bay dinged softly. A solid wall of media-mad teenage bodies erupted from them, pouring over the reporters and cameras alike. The cams had time to capture one long image of Marcus shuffling the boy and his father inside their apartment and turning, frowning slightly towards the oncoming wave. Then everything was chaos.

The reporters were more or less thrown past Marcus and into the guards, their carefully sculpted hair flying akimbo as they hit the shock wands. Cass kicked out one guard’s leg and jabbed him in the ribs as he fell into the bitchy reporter whose cameraman she had stolen. She pulled off one shoe and smashed the sculpted LED array hanging like a fruit from the imported Cuban chandelier overhead. The camera’s lights clicked on to cover the sudden dimming, dazzling everyone. She ran for door number one in the shadows at the end of the hall.

Meanwhile the guards were downing everybody, Marcus bellowing at the top of his lungs to stop hurting people. It was in English of course, so nobody understood it, but it played well on film. At least six Lolitas lay on the pile of reporters, mouths frothing, delicate limbs jiggling. Tiny beaded purses spilled jelly-colored cosmetics everywhere. Marcus waited until the crowd surged back enough for one of the cameramen to steady himself against the wall and aim. Then he reached to cover the girls with his arm.

Over three hundred pounds of grey muscle lunged towards the guards’ line of defense. They did what anybody in their situation would do and shocked the fuck out of him.

Marcus knew it was coming and had already clenched his teeth, but enough volts to power an average microwave sputtering through his nervous system still threw him. He staggered, crushing a very small and very expensive tape recorder with the reporter’s name in zirconium studded characters on one side, but he didn’t fall.

He defended himself. With prejudice.

Cass had already misted the knob with superglue and flicked on a tiny black light by the time Marcus got shocked. She smoothed a thin piece of scotch tape over the best print she could find and pulled a two-inch plug of gummy plastic from where it had been stuck inside her bra. Nicely warmed it took the print quickly, the oils from the print etching away a negative on its surface. She waved it in the air, the constant screaming building to a crescendo as Marcus threw one guard into the doorway next to him, his long arm taking another shock as he covered a Lolita scrambling across the floor for her phone. The elevator dinged again and more fans poured out. Cass huddled by the doorknob and twisted the thumb in half, licking the half without the print and pressing it firmly against the negative. It resisted her saliva where the oils had coated it and dissolved away where they weren’t, making a dummy print. A moment later she pressed the dummy against the scanner mounted in the wood paneling beside the door, and was in.

The door snicked shut behind her and she let her hair down. Her bangs slid in front of her face and she ran bent-backed as she ran through the foyer, shoes in hand, the pump’s little heels held outwards. She’s hammered nails through the heels the night before so they wouldn’t break, so she could use them as weapons if she needed to. But there was no one there.

The living room gave way to a tiny kitchen, immaculate and unused. Beyond lay a bedroom. It had one futon, blankets folded at its head, and a long, solid-looking table holding a three-foot tall, six-inch wide, two-foot deep beige metal box next to a monitor. Cass stared. It was by far the biggest single-user computer she had ever seen.

Cass had come prepared, and pulled the slim black box from where it had been taped to her lower back. Scanning the room again she opened her little purse and retrieved the multi-headed set of cables that fit into it. She knew the box might be wired for movement, thermal or pressure changes or extremely minor electrical alterations. Assuming she could get past that the software was likely bleeding edge security, black ops code written by some of China’s best. The little black box Xing had given her should connect directly with whatever the interface was and bypass those securities.

She shifted her weight between her feet, hands fluttering uselessly in the air. The keyboard was massive, a big metal and plastic affair, and there was a plastic paperweight on a stack of papers next to it. That was it. The little black box in her hand wasn’t registering any wireless access, and she couldn’t see any ports on the front of the box. There was nothing but a small slot a few inches wide. She unfolded a small mirror from her purse and held it over the back of the box.

There were wires running from it, big thick beige plastic wires like she hadn’t seen since she was a kid. The black box had jacks for nearly eighteen different kinds of ports with software to execute appropriate attacks on each. There wasn’t a single port on the thing that fit this box. Something stuck, buzzed around her mind. She looked at the front again. It had a floppy disk drive.

A disk drive. Her dad had had a computer when she was a kid, a 4GHz monstrosity with umpteen buzzing fans and cards the size of your hand you put inside to operate the graphics, or the sound, or whatever. It was ancient when he’d tried to pawn it off on her for schoolwork. This thing in front of her was just like that.

As she looked she saw actual plastic data disks, wide as her palm, in a neat pile next to the box. She stepped back, eyes wide, and as she did so jostled the desk. The paperweight on the papers slid and the screen made a loud oscillating hum, flickered dimly to life.

Two words: Name, and Password. The keyboard was the only interface. Cass held the very expensive, very useless thin black box in her right hand and stared.

Marcus’s right leg wasn’t moving any more. Things weren’t going as planned. The guards hadn’t all gone down yet. He’d managed to get one to stay down after he’d smashed his head through the fiberboard ceiling panels and looped him over a supporting rod, but that was it so far. A big group of boys in matching grey jackets had come out of the stairway on the far end of the hall, cutting off his fighting room even more. The elevator kept dinging, more voices screaming, trying to get in and out at once. The guards waved their rods in wide sweeps, the crowd roiling at bay.

His vision was misting over. Bile rose in his throat, fatigue riding him, gulping down hot dry breaths too fast. A guard rushed him and missed, Marcus’s hand slapping the back of his head hard as it went by. But the feint had worked. Marcus had fallen for it, and the guard’s rod followed as he fell, sliding up Marcus’s arm. He pitched forward, bright colors angry in his eyes.

Fighting in close quarters requires two things: a good grip, and solid footing. As Marcus swung through a tight roll his size 52’s planted themselves solidly on the ultra-fine hundred-weave ‘arctic sand’ colored carpeting. His surgically oversized torso carried through like a piano falling out a window, cannonballing him out of his roll. Three wide fingers on each hand clamped down on the tiny, delicate fingers of two of the remaining guards, closing over the rods along with them as he let his weight swing through them, their bodies slamming backwards into each other.

Marcus danced as the current dumped into the three of them. Cass came out of the apartment door just as the rods finished their discharge. The bright camera lights behind him turned Marcus into one huge silhouette, the guards flying like banners in front of him. They fell, twitching at his feet.

The remaining guard turned and ran, away from Marcus. He wasn’t looking at her, ignored her as another helpless female. The slim black box in her hand took out three of his teeth and tore away the cheek from his gums before burying itself in his throat. Then Cass was gone, down the stairway, past the last few Gray boys standing staring. Behind her Marcus slowly twisted, and fell.

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