Bishop stopped.
The sun sank a little further, and Bishop was about to turn the truck back on when he saw a figure start to jog down Elm Street. At first, they were a white speck coated in blue, then as they got closer, they became a white man in a translucent blue bodysuit with a headband holding back sweaty, flowing tree-bark-colored hair. The city comptroller had augmented lungs, Bishop was sure of it, so running like this was pure vanity. Just to be seen. But Bishop had been counting on that.
He got out of the car and crept around the corner, clinging to shadows, even though it woulda taken nothing for the white man to see him. And he made his way up the block. Then, just as the comptroller was about to round the corner, Bishop swung out, slipped his pistol from his pocket and smacked the man in the head, toppling him sideways.
Before the man hit the ground, Bishop wrapped him up in his arms and frog-marched him to the truck. With one hand, he pulled open the back door and tossed the man in, then jumped in behind him and sat on his legs.
“Where’s our food rations?” Bishop hissed at the comptroller.
“Wha…” A voice that had been calibrated to automatically add bass came out scratchy and like static.
Bishop pulled a device that looked like ancient headphones out of his back pocket and forced them onto the man’s ears, even as he writhed and struggled under Bishop. “Don’t bother calling for help. The drones can’t see you. And you shoulda fuckin’ shelled out for security, but you ain’t skim enough off us fucking people, ain’t you?”
Bugs had turned in his seat but there was only a moment of surprise on his face, a brief raising of the eyebrows, before he turned back around and even seemed to relax against the seat.
“Credit station at the Fairfield border been closed, so when were you gonna tell us?”
“I … I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Bishop smashed the gun butt against the man’s temple. No blood came out of the wound, but a dent did mar the manufactured curvature of the comptroller’s temple. “You was just gonna let us starve.”
“We … we are in the process of preparing a transfer of—”
Bishop hit him two more times, this time trying to actually break the wound open.
Something changed in the comptroller’s posture. “I’ve seen your face.”
“No, you ain’t. Because I scrambled your shit too. If you think you can threaten your way out of this, you fuckin’ with the wrong nigga. I will blind you forever, homeboy, now where’s our fucking rations?”
Now the comptroller started to tremble.
“If you don’t answer me, your daughters in Westport been in trouble. Fuck with me.”
“Okay, okay, wait, wait, wait.”
“Next city council budget meeting, if we don’t see the right numbers allocated for our fuckin’ community, this’ll be a love tap compared to what’s next. Now, tell me how you’re going to fix our food problem.”
“I don’t know … what…”
Bishop pressed the barrel to the back of the man’s knee. “You wanna run again, my nigga? Answer the goddamn question.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll take it out of my own salary. Ration distribution will begin next week. The distributors will be reprogrammed tonight and the new routes will be put in and it’ll all be set, please, just, not my legs.”
A small part of Bishop felt vindicated that the man was more visibly distressed over the ability to flaunt his partially mechanized body than the prospect of harm coming to his daughters in their domed community. But that was what men his type were like. Mid-level bureaucrats who didn’t know the right people to make cushy careers for themselves in the Space Colony. Grifters who were stuck here, none of them by choice, forced into their fiefdoms and molded by their greed and small-mindedness into ant-sized tyrants. Bishop felt more respect for the robots they programmed. At least those were governed by a code.
“Now, you’re gonna make good on your promise right now. Stick your hand out.” When the comptroller hesitated, Bishop hit him again. Again and again until the man stuck his hand out between the driver’s seat and the passenger’s. “Aye,” Bishop said to Bugs, “take his index finger and put it to the scanner.”
“Wh—what are you doing?”
“Shut the fuck up!”
Bugs took the man’s finger, as commanded, and pressed it to the credit exchanger’s scanner. Immediately, digital green numbers appeared on its screen, the total rising higher and higher until Bishop said, “That’s good.”
The credit exchanger disappeared.
“What I said about the next budget meeting stands.” Bishop kicked his back door open, then shoved the comptroller out of his vehicle.
When Bishop came out after him, he made sure to step over the man and linger, gun barrel pointed at the man’s face the whole time, before getting back into the driver’s seat and spouting red dust over the fallen man’s face as he turned the corner and sped off.
BUGS’S legs dangled over the bridge in Canal Lock 12 of the Farmington Canal. Bishop’s truck was parked a little ways down by the gate and the old lock keeper’s house. The leaves around them had started to turn so that the two of them on that crumbling stone bridge over that dried aqueduct sat beneath an umbrella that was just beginning to gild and redden.
Bugs munched on his taco while Bishop spooned bits of already-brown salad into his mouth. His stomach couldn’t take whatever that beef shit they put in tacos and burritos now did to it.
“It was the niggas with money that was doin’ the thuggin’,” Bugs said around a mouthful of taco. “Mama was around when all them rappers were runnin’ around talmbout gang-bangin, and she ain’t see none of them niggas around.”
“You listened to rap?” Bishop almost added “as a kid” like the kid still wasn’t just that.
“Nah, my mama loved me!”
Bishop’s chest heaved with laughter.
“On the real, though. A gun’s expensive as shit. You broke, you can’t be broke with a gun. It was always the middle-class niggas was the turn-up niggas.”
“That so?”
Munch. “Yeah. Some of those rap groups was gettin’ niggas’ whole ’hoods crashed. Mama used to gang-bang and she could tell who was really out there and who was just tellin’ they homie’s stories. But that shit ages you, bro.”
“Bro?”
