Running for my life
Running for my life
The life of a blackmarket runner
Brandon Gutowski (C22 System)
There is one universal rule that all runners follow. Don’t look in the package. Rally always liked to question rules and push boundaries. He was the one studying to be an Engineer after all, me, I figured I’d be running for life. At least until I finally made a bad turn.
He would talk on and on about it. How could they know if I did not take anything? What if I fool the sensors and leave no marks? I insisted they would still know, but I could never give him a why. I wasn’t the smart one. It was a year after we joined that we got one of the rare doubles jobs, double the pay, double the runners, double the danger. Obviously we took it, I couldn’t pass up that kind of money.
The job was going smoothly, the silver cases we had drew a bit more looks than we would have liked but taking the back streets kept us out of sight. The one distraction that night was the smug grin Rally wore for the entire run. It was not until we stopped and waited for twilight, that he finally let me in on his good mood.
“I did it. You see this thing on my wrist”
“What did you do? You made wrist goggles?”
“I can finally look inside without them knowing!” he exclaimed, his excitement, threatening to break through our hushed voices.
“No no no. It's not worth it, if they find out we are so getting reddakted” I pleaded before lunging forward to stop him. But the click of the suitcase told me I was too late.
Still facing away from me as he lifted the case open, he whispered. “The worst that could happen is we find something super valuable and retire from it.”
Like Indiana Jones from that centuries old Hollywood movie, I shielded my eyes, naively hoping that if I did not see it, I would not face consequences. I was aware Rally was saying something, but I could not hear him over the sounds of my thumping heart or the millions of thoughts racing through my head. The click of the case closing was what finally shook me out of my stupor.
“That was disappointing” was the last thing he said for the rest of the run. I was a mess the rest of the run, missing key movement moments, almost walking into a camera’s line of sight, tripping the facial recognition into blowing the whole job. Rally was strangely calm as he got us through the rest of the run. I swear they knew by my nervousness when we handed over the cases. I swore the boss was going to call us in to say he knew.
It was a whole month before I finally calmed down and accepted that Rally was right. Maybe they did not know, they had been giving us jobs the last month and even yesterday they gave Rally one of the high paying three day jobs, so I thought we were in the clear.
I was wrong. That night’s run was the worst run of my life. My paranoia flared up again and I took a turn. The wrong turn, down the wrong street. There were interceptors there, looking to take whatever I was transporting. They did not know, they did not care. I was just walking money to them. The two stepped out from around some adposts and while I could usually outrun situations like this, when I turned around, the third one appeared and dropped me flat on the ground. He must have had some kind of camouflage for me to miss him.
They underestimated me. The first guy sneered at me as he got close to my face, basking in his victory or whatever, he did not see the knife. The other two I only just barely survived, but I did not feel like I survived. I felt like my life was over. They nicked the package. The boss will think I opened the case. I didn’t have a fancy device like Rally. I had no way to cover this. They would never believe me. But I could not lose this job, this was my life, I chose this. I had nowhere else to go.
It was in my panic, crumpled in that alley, staring at the miniscule mark that was my death sentence that I remembered what Rally said, “The worst that could happen is you find something super valuable and retire from it.”
I knew the only thing left I could do. I had to open the package and disappear. I crawled to the box, hands working at the locks. Maybe I could afford a ship of my own. I managed to get it open, my hands resting on the lid. Or at least a ticket to a frontier town, I could start fresh there.
I pulled the lid open, the cold feeling hit me first and I saw a glint of metal. Maybe some breakthrough tech to sell. The lid was over halfway off when I realized what the metal was. The familiar metal wrist goggles, still attached to a familiar hand, along with a note that read, “Both of the rats you were looking for.” They always knew.
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