Treat

“Just a few more minutes.”

“I’ll wait in the back.”

Jat knew her friend would go sit on the storage boxes of plastic cups and to-go containers, sharing his real cigarette with the line cooks, blowing tangy smoke at all the food as they chatted. They didn’t care if he swiped a pack of fresh udon noodles and shoved it in a secret pocket of his long grey coat, they weren’t paid enough to care. As long as the shift manager didn’t catch on, Rot was free to smoke and steal to his heart’s content. The place wasn’t winning any awards for best ramen in the Alleys anytime soon.

Wiping old grease from her forearms and between her fingers, Jat slid out from the walk-in freezer and assured the manager it would run until the belt needed replacing again, and yes, it would always be that loud. Cheap gears. He grumbled as he sent the money to her bank account with a few quick swipes of his crumbling phone, made his frown worse by tucking it down into the triple chin protruding out of a shirt that once may have been white, and shooed her away. Transaction over. Jat retrieved her friend on the way out, along with their backpacks and motorcycle keys left at the rickety security booth run by a bird-faced man with red eyes who never spoke.

Immediately as they stepped out into the Alleys, a rush of electric hoverbikes snapped hot blue bolts out at anything and everything in their wake, careening off into the night, screams just as shocking as the electricity. Jat’s whole body seized, the jolt passing through her like a ghost, and then it was over. Neighboring shop owners jeered and waggled heavy mallets and meat cleavers from beneath the grimy awnings of their pawn shops and food stands, watching the sleek black machines catch the light of pink and blue neon signs as they zoomed recklessly away from whatever chaos they caused.

“You okay?” Rot gasped, a hand on Jat’s shoulder. She nodded, heart pounding, and zipped up her stiff black jacket up to the chin, eyes down. “They knew where you were? Or just happened to pass by?”

Jat chewed her lips. “Not good either way.”

The electricity was a new mod, something superfluous but highly desired for gangs with a penchant for pain. The zaps that shot out from under the bike’s hovering magnetic body didn’t propel it forward any faster than a standard rubber tire, but the lack of wheels made them lighter, and they often shot out tendrils of lightning when the drivers didn’t contain the power properly, much to the delight of those sadists on a joy ride. Jat had recently refused to fix up a fleet of bikes, even when the violent Mace Crew dangled a severe amount of money in her face. When they ignored her refusal by quickly usurping all of the mechanical shops she frequented to earn money, she lashed out in anger the only way she knew how– she crippled their fleet by sneaking into their garage and disabling the charging bay. Her trusty old standard motorcycle sped her safely away, heavy wheels and all. They didn’t find it funny.

Rot shoved her to shake up the worry beginning to take hold. “Screw ‘em. I have a surprise for you. A treat.”

Jat slid on her helmet, Rot his goggles and mouth mask—more freedom to smoke through a slit in the fabric—and Jat heard his raspy voice come through her helmet’s internal speaker. “We’re going downtown, in case you were wondering.”

“Are you fucking kidding?”

“Side roads! Quietly!”

“We can’t go anywhere quietly.”

“It’ll be fine; I’ve been there twice this week.”

He turned his engine over in a burst of sparks. Jat clenched her jaw and did the same.

Rot liked to believe he was the fastest thing on two wheels in the bowels of the city, but Jat kept pace and teased him to move faster as she sped around autocars hovering quietly down the main roads towards a brighter destination. She imagined those lounging passengers spilling their cocktails all over the leather interior when the sharp noise of two speeders ripped by, but she’d never know for sure, as they moved too fast for her to ever risk looking back.

When the enormous block buildings in North City transformed into the sleek skyscrapers of the Center, she slowed and let him lead her to the surprise. Day collapsed into night, finally cool enough for people to move around without immediately succumbing to dehydration. They passed pedestrians trudging in steady streams on the sidewalk, spellbound by the endless scrawl of media broadcasted in their brains via nano chip. They passed the self-proclaimed Luddites who dressed in loose woven cloth and wore blindfolds when out in the world and worshipped silent gods. They passed Urchins who splashed in acidic puddles and pick pocketed with ease and chattered in their own made-up language sounding like enthusiastic fax machines. The hum of lights switching on harmonized all around. The city woke up with a hungover groan.

Nearer to the South West edge away from the Center, streets widened to make room for squat warehouses that lay mostly abandoned or repurposed by the displaced. Shouts in the dark urged Rot and Jat forward, until they puttered up a makeshift ramp of sheet metal into a grey building’s shattered upper windows, through empty offices slashed with graffiti, furniture picked clean as a carcass. Moss once covered the carpeted areas, defiant weeds sprang up in the corners, but they dried up and crumbled long ago leaving a dense musty cloud as each step disturbed the ground. The duo stopped at a door with a rusted red sign: EMERGENCY STAIRS. The light on Rot’s goggles flared the stairwell to life, four stories down dusty cement steps behind his whisp of tobacco smoke.

Jat hadn’t experienced a quiet darkness like that in a very long time. It was gift enough if they wanted to stop and turn back, but down they went.

Her skin crawled with cold anticipation when they reached the bottom. A door opened out onto a cavernous basement, two stories split by the balcony from which they emerged, and a wide granite staircase down to the flooded lower level. Most basements were flooded, no surprise there, but when Rot’s light lit up the water, Jat gasped at its clarity. Someone filled the room on purpose, and just as she opened her mouth to ask, a fin dissected the beam in the water.

Rot pulled a plastic bag from his hard shell backpack, and lifted a cluster of headless fish sloshing in frozen blood. He grinned and handed it to Jat, who cackled in delight as she tossed one quickly in the dark water. They watched the shark thrash up out of nowhere to collect the offering. She fed it the rest of the fish, one by one.

“You could, you know…” Rot snickered, dumping the rest of the bag’s dripping contents into the water, “...use this to solve your little problem.”

“The herpes thing?”

That made him belly laugh. “No, for real, I mean the Mace Crew.”

Jat turned her entire body to face her impulsively stupid friend. “You want me. To bring members of the Mace here. And feed them… to an illegal warehouse shark.”

“Don’t make me sound crazy!”

Jat flailed her arms around, You ARE crazy. “This is obviously someone’s pet, someone with money to burn!”

“So?”

“So! Don’t you think they’d notice a few pairs of boots bobbing in the water that weren’t there before? We’d get caught!”

He sighed and tossed the plastic bag over the edge. The shark idled up to it, passed by uninterested. “I wasn’t thinking you’d push anyone in, that would be crazy.” He winked, lit another cigarette from the cherry of the previous. “Now, some calculated intimidation, however…”

Intriguing. Her eyebrows raised, lips pursed before a smirk overtook her face.

“‘We’d get caught,’” he muttered, mocking. “What is this ‘we’? You think I’m helping?” They grinned at each other, all teeth and starry eyes. “Just kidding, I already know where they live and how to disarm the building. Let’s eat, udon noodles on me!”

Jat stared down at the water, calm and still again.

“Just a few more minutes.”