I’m pretty sure this place used to be a Laundromat; though there are no longer washers or dryers here, I’ve noticed some heavily spray-painted vending machines that still smell more of detergent than they do of urine, and in this part of town, that’s a blessing.

I half-carried/half-walked Beth through the city streets, resorting to occasional slaps to keep her as awake as possible. The longer we were on the streets, the more likely we’d be tagged by some happy-dappy Bio-Repo guy out scanning for his jollies. I’d packed all my weapons—and, of course, my trusty Underwood typewriter here—into a duffel, and between the weight of the metal and Bonnie’s slumped form, it was slow going.

This joint seems safe enough, though—a small, protected room in the back of the main space, easy access to the alley behind for a quick getaway. Only one main entrance through smoked plate-glass doors out front, easy to see out but not so much in.

Bonnie’s still asleep. When she wakes, we’ll go to work on that knee. Until then, I’ll type. I can feel the noose getting a little tighter with every passing day. Eventually, someone’s going to kick the chair out from under me, but until then, I’ll keep putting it all down on paper. It’s outdated, I know, but it’s all I’ve got. At this point, I’d rather be obsolete than forgotten.

After Beth’s divorce papers showed up in mail call, I applied for a forty-eight-hour leave and threw myself into the deepest, blackest bender I could work up. Most of my time was spent badgering the proprietor of the local liquor mart near base to sell me more alcohol, and after a protracted series of arguments, he could tell I wasn’t going to leave him alone, so he up and gave me two pints of tequila, a fifth of scotch, and a case of this odd African beer, just to get me away from the store. Sometime during my stupor I must have run into Antonio, the old Italian who liked my clothes, because when I returned to base, ranting and raving about the whore bitch who’d left me, I wasn’t wearing a stitch. It was nighttime, and the African desert was two degrees Celsius.

Lucky for me, Tig caught me before the higher brass did and sent me into barracks to sleep it off inside a control chair. When I was finally sober enough to manipulate my limbs, Tig placed me on bathroom detail as punishment, which was actually the ideal place for a hangover of Roman proportions, mainly due to the proximity of magical porcelain receptacles. As soon as I’d vomit and clean out one of the toilets, I’d stand and be ready to desecrate the next one over.

All this blubbering over a girl—a prostitute, no less, a whore if we’re calling a spade a spade—may seem like petty nonsense from a man who would, ten years later, feel no remorse at taking a child’s lung implant because his father frittered away the monthly artiforg payment at the dog track, but at the time I was still not much more than a boy who had lost the only woman he thought he could love forever.

It got much worse before it got much better.

The day Harold Hennenson died was a warm one. Most days in the desert were warm, of course, but I remember it as being particularly hot that afternoon, sweat dripping down my cheeks even before I climbed into the stifling atmosphere of the tank. We’d eaten a hearty breakfast of MREs in foil, made our guesses as to the actual content of the meal, and been given stock orders from the commanding officers to resume the maneuvers we’d been at all week.

The enemy, we were told, was retreating faster than we could advance, and it was up to our division to claim as much territory as possible in the most rapid fashion we could muster. The military didn’t want any dead space; they looked upon a neutral zone as nothing but a vacuum for other foreign interests to fill, and the last thing America needed, we were told, was to engage yet another enemy out here on the sand.

We were running after them, more or less, charging with our guns held high, sighting only their rumps as they ran away wholesale, only a few lone snipers and gung-ho religious nuts staying behind to fight us off. I remember one fellow who came charging out from behind what must have been the only palm tree—the only tree—the only living thing—for miles, finger hard on the trigger of his Uzi, spraying the advancing line of American tanks with rapid-fire ammunition, screaming something in his own language that could have been anything from a religious battle cry to a nursery rhyme; I’ve never understood what the hell those people were saying.

Don’t know who targeted him first, but three of our tanks released million-dollar heat-guided rockets at the exact same time, each one exploding in a bright wash of fire that hardened the desert into a thick, twisted mass of burnt glass and obliterated any mortal sign of the lone gunman.

Three missiles, one man: The modern Marines in action.

But the day Harold died, there were no fireworks or heroics; just a row of tanks rolling through the desert, side by side, a giant kick-line of metal strutting its stuff across the dark continent. There were eight of us per rank, stretched out across a three-mile-wide expanse of land, gunners in back manning the turrets, keeping the watch out for an enemy we knew would never show.

My concentration was focused on the terrain ahead and the topographical map laid out before me, the three-dimensional image floating in front of my control chair ray-traced in bright green lines. Each of our machines was represented by a dot—blue for mine, red for Harold’s, and so on—and the hills and valleys of the desert peaked before my eyes long before the tank ever made the climb or descent, enabling me and the other drivers to chart our course in advance.

The talkies were on the fritz again, static hissing through any communication we attempted with each other, our frequencies limited to local range. This was a common occurrence out in Africa; some thought it was the sand, the dust storms. I had a hunch it was crap engineering due to a little bit of nepotism in the military bid process, but kept my feelings on the matter to myself. As a result of the headset malfunctions, I could converse with Jake holed up at the gun in the back, but was unable to relay information to any of the tanks around me.

I could hear some of the other tank conversation, though, in the odd moments when the crackling died down, and was relieved to hear that while imagining themselves safe in their confines, the other soldiers talked about the same stupid stuff we did in ours: money, girls, and the things we’d done to get them.

“How’s the back?” I radioed to Jake, who’d been passing the time by sighting and summarily destroying any insects unfortunate enough to pass by his scope.

“Clear. Like always. Second line of tanks are in some goddamn awful shape, lookin’ like a buncha runners at the end of a race. Tig would kick their asses good and proper, he saw that.”

“Not our problem,” I said. “Long as our line’s in order, we’re doing our jobs.”

I remember pulling up a second view of the topographical map, a small display winking into existence next to the first; as the original map scrolled forward, this one scrolled backward, marking the progress we’d made. A second line of colored blips steadily made its way across the desert, only this one was as convoluted as Jake had said, the tanks all out of alignment.

Static on the talkies, and I heard a nearby missile gunner, a kid from Omaha named Percy who would wind up spending the bulk of his post-military life in a military jail, saying, “I’m getting feedback from the second row. They’re slowing down on the right side.”

“Why?”

“Can’t make it out. Something about…there’s a…a drop…?”

A third map popped into place, hovering above the first two—more desert, the altitude graph climbing sharply, oddly, and I turned my legs in such a way as to pan the entire map to the right. The soothing blue digits on the map’s altimeter quickly darkened into a flashing red, and as I swung the map around a full 90 degrees, I saw in bright green lines, boldly drawn through the air in the small tank compartment, the rise and fall of what we would later find out was the largest sand dune ever seen in Africa. Harold’s tank was heading directly up its sloping face.

“They’re not turning,” said Percy. “They don’t see it.”

“They can’t see it, they’re on it,” another gunner piped up, and now it was getting hard to hear, the static was so strong. “Its huge…can’t see the…but it….”

But Harold’s tank kept on rolling, climbing up the dune, unaware that they were 300 meters from the edge—unaware that there even was an edge. Our topographical information came from a network of all the tanks’ radar put together, which allowed the drivers a full 360-degree view of the terrain. If that network was out—which is what the Marines later surmised happened to Harold’s tank—then the immediate area in front of the machine, especially if it was on an incline, was off-limits to the driver. Radar doesn’t turn corners, and it doesn’t bounce off clouds.

The talkies cleared up for a moment, and I used the time to frantically dial into Harold’s frequency, hoping to get a message across to his tank’s driver. But the crackles started up as soon as I locked in, and though I could hear their words, I know now they could never have heard mine.

“…sweet babies falling for these muscles…” I heard Harold saying, bragging to the other kid in his tank, the static cutting into his words. “Gonna get me a…when I get on back…gal for me. Hey, you think…with the same…am I right? And you know…he’s the driver three tanks over? He’s a buddy of mine, got a great gal down…maybe she’s got a friend…”

I punched buttons. I spun dials. I screamed and I yelled and I shouted into that talkie headset, and I know neither Harold nor his driver ever heard a word of it. In a last desperation attempt, I violated Marine policy in every possible way by unbuckling myself, squirming out of the control chair—Jake yelling at me, screaming at me to sit and drive, for chrissakes, drive—and blowing the top of our tank, climbing out and up, imagining that somehow I could leap onto the sand and outrace Harold’s machine, banging on the side, scrambling up top, pulling open the hatch, and applying the brakes myself just inches before the tank made its fateful dive.

As it was, I opened our hatch and reached air just in time to watch Harold, his mates, and 54 million dollars’ worth of Marine equipment plummet over the edge of the sand dune and fall 200 feet before exploding on the sand.

The sandstorm was what did it, they said. Mucked up the talkies, mucked up the topographical displays. Billions of particles no bigger than flea snot, bringing down the mighty force of the marching military. Maybe the enemy should have tried to harness the power of the desert rather than resort to modern-grade weapons in order to fight us off. It doesn’t come much lower-tech than sand. Perhaps next time they’ll wise up and try stoning us to death.

Nostalgia, of the good kind:

Peter, my son, did a report for his third-grade class on the disciplinary procedures of cultures before the common age. I wasn’t usually around to help out with homework, especially during that part of Peter’s life, but he was in my custody that weekend, as determined by the courts, and I was obligated to take care of the little pisser for at least those two days every other week. He hadn’t learned to hate me yet, and I like to think it was for a good reason: At that point in his life, I hadn’t yet done anything to incur his wrath.

I was sitting in my workroom, going over a few last bits of paperwork from the last artiforg I’d brought in, and Peter ambled over. It was late, and he was already dressed in his pajamas, feet and all.

“My teeth are brushed,” he announced, “and I washed my face.”

These were bedtime procedures Melinda insisted upon; I always forgot about them, but Peter was a good-enough kid to remember on his own.

“Great, champ,” I told him. “Run off and I’ll see you in the morning.”

But he stood there, a sheet of paper in his right hand, and waddled to where I was sitting. “Dad,” he said, “why did the Romans stone people to death?”

“Because they didn’t have any guns,” I answered.

I think he got a B.

When Peter was younger, just a tyke who didn’t want to go to sleep, who wanted to stay up with Mommy and Daddy and dance and play, Melinda and I used to sing nonsense songs to him in place of lullabies. He was never interested in the conventional “Rock-a-Bye Baby,” but he did close his eyes and drift off to our own improvised tunes.

Melinda was much better at it than I was; her songs, at least, made sense. But Peter’s favorite, the song he’d ask for over and over again once he got old enough to put in requests, was a silly little number I’d constructed one restless evening when he had a cough and a fever and nothing else was working.

It was like a Dixieland riff on a Hawaiian melody, jangly and fun and soft, and I still remember the words today:

Melinda and I sang it to each other well after the first movement of our marriage had come to a close, the love of our son the only thing that still bound us as a couple. I wonder if Peter still remembers it. I wonder if it still helps him go to sleep. I wonder if he remembers that his pop made it up.

Tig asked if I could write a little something to be sent back to Harold’s parents along with his ashes. There wasn’t much to say, I told him. At least, not much I could say to his parents. We’d hung out together, sure, gone to bars and clubs and whorehouses. Fought side by side, talked about what we wanted out of life and how we thought we’d get it. Where we thought the world was going to and whether or not it was going to leave us behind. But that wasn’t anything to write home to parents, was it?

I eventually wrote:

And then, just so there could be some element of truth in this little elegy, I scribbled:

Noise outside. Screaming?

Bonnie and I are leaving the Laundromat. We just got here, but we have no choice. Our first night will be our last.

She was awake and waiting for me in the darkened alley, tourniquet around her knee. I burst through, scalpel in one hand, Mauser in the other.

“Did you hear it?” she asked. I noticed that she, too, was armed, her .38 clutched in that delicate hand, nail wrapped around the trigger guard.

“Yeah. You’re walking?”

“Well enough.”

Another wail shot out from nearby, clearly female, clearly in distress, clearly none of my business. “We should stay put,” I tell Bonnie. “We should hole up and stay put.”

“And if she needs our help?”

“No one needs our help in particular,” I pointed out. “If she needs help, someone else who’s not on the run can do it.”

Bonnie wasn’t having any of it. She fixed me with a look intended to make me feel like pigeon droppings, and it more or less worked. “It’s not a Bio-Repo man,” she said, “or she wouldn’t be screaming. She’d be passed out—you know the drill.”

On that, she was right. But I didn’t cotton running into any officers of the state, either. They might like to know what we’d been up to cruising the streets of skid row at night, a couple of nice folks like us, and then questioning would lead to detainment, which would lead to a ride downtown, which would lead to my credit file, which would lead to…

“And the cops won’t be coming by to check it out,” promised Bonnie, following my thoughts. “They gave up on this area a long time ago.”

Another scream jumped through the night to punctuate Bonnie’s sentence, and within moments we were headed across the street, against my better judgment.

Altruism, to whatever extent it actually exists in modern society, is not a required trait for the Bio-Repo man. The personality tests they make you take when you apply for a Union job are designed to detect a certain degree of deviant pathologies, a smidgen of mania, and a healthy dose of clinical apathy, which is the scientific way of saying you just don’t give a shit. The petitioner who passes all these ink blots and name games will be allowed into the training program, but will be watched to make sure his levels don’t get wildly out of control, spewing brain chemistry this way and that; the Union has no urge to license sociopaths with scalpels.

But altruism can’t be found in any of the Union training manuals, and for good reason. There’s no time to be nice when your ass is on the line; more often than not, it will get you killed. Gas, grab, go—the Bio-Repo man’s mantra.

I have violated this rule in the past. Without fail, it has been because of a woman. There is a trend here.

The building across the road from the Laundromat used to be an office plaza, and the very same series of city fires that ravaged Tyler Street must have wreaked havoc with the office plaza as well. Wide, open courtyards with canopies of trees and natural vines, sparkling fountains—it must have been a lovely place for the suits to come and relax during their fifteen minutes of lunch break every day.

But now the courtyard is blackened and dirty, weeds poking up through the cracks, prickly things that stabbed at my legs as I rushed by them. Bonnie and I moved through the main enclosure—Bonnie limping, grimacing with every pained step—toward the back of the plaza, toward the screaming, picking up the pace with every new howl. But the faster we went, the faster the shrieks came, and the faster the shrieks came, the more I wanted to turn around and hole up in the Laundromat. This was not cowardice; this was intuition.

Three floors to the plaza, though half of the building had crumbled to a single story, rubble filling the rooms beneath. We stood by the entrance, waiting for another burst of noise to indicate our next direction. I was double-fisting it: Taser in my right, Mauser in my left. I’d moved the scalpel into my waistband for easy access, the tip of the blade digging lightly into my groin. Bonnie was still holding her .38, but loosely, as if she didn’t expect that she’d have to use it. Dumb move. Always expect to use your weapon. When you don’t, that’s when you’ll need to.

A scream, directly in front of us.

“In there,” Bonnie said, and moved confidently into the building, ducking her head beneath the partially collapsed door frame and disappearing into the darkness. I flicked off the safety, held the Mauser down by my knee, and followed.

His neck was mostly missing, which explained why the girl was screaming so much.

“Calm down,” I said to her, trying to pull her away from the blood and the gore and the messiness. “Calm down, stop yelling. Get a hold of yourself.”

But my bear hug only intensified the fit, her head slamming up and down, chin pounding her own chest, long blonde hair flapping through the air, making me sputter as it flew into my mouth. “Can you do something?” I asked Bonnie, but she just stood there, stroking the girl’s hand, whispering into her ear.

The guy on the floor was dead, no doubt about it, and from what I could tell, his thyroid was gone, too. It’s not a big organ, the thyroid, but when you’ve got as good a knowledge of anatomy as I do—and in specific, a knowledge of where organs should be when organs are not—a heap of blood and tissue doesn’t matter. There’s a hole where there shouldn’t be, and in that hole went a thyroid gland. More likely, in that hole went an artiforg.

“Tell me what happened,” said Bonnie.

The gal had calmed down considerably since we first arrived, but she still took great gasps of air as she spoke, trying to get it all out. “He—he—I was bringing him—bringing him lunch—and I came in and—and I found him—I found him like—like this…” The crying began again, and Bonnie hugged her close.

I was superfluous. Stood there watching these two women hugging each other, not in the least aroused. In one corner of the room, next to an overturned wooden box with food stains on it, I spied a familiar yellow sheet of paper, bloody fingerprints marring the corners. Using the blade of my knife, I drew the paper up from the floor, running it along the wall to eye level so I could get a good look at it.

Official Credit Union Repossession, it read, and then, below it: One thyroid gland. Payment 120 days overdue. The details came next: client name, age, last known address, the works.

Before I could absorb the rest of the sheet, the girl snatched the paper off the wall and knocked away the knife, nicking her thumb in the process; the blood dripped off her hand and joined the pool on the floor. “This is what they gave me,” she sobbed, waving the paper through the air. Bonnie came up behind her, eyes moist.

“It’s a receipt,” I explained. “You get to keep that. For your records.”

Still, she kept sobbing. “They gave me this and they took my boyfriend…”

“They took your boyfriend’s thyroid,” I said, the sentences flowing from my mouth in a rapid patter, a torrent of words I had repeated hundreds and hundreds of times over during my career. “They didn’t take your boyfriend. They took their merchandise, and the Credit Union has a right to their merchandise, just like you have a right to yours. If they didn’t reclaim their unpaid belongings, they’d never be able to continue as a corporation, and then all the people who need medical help would be unable to get it. Furthermore, under the Federal Artiforg Code, section twelve, number eighteen, they and/or their agents are under no legal right to resuscitate the bearer of said merchandise if payment had not been met by the—”

That’s when she started crying again. I have this way with women.

The Federal Artiforg Code was the Holy Book to those of us who lived under its protective umbrella. Some six hundred pages long, it detailed every possible scenario between manufacturer, supply house, direct marketer, client, and organ, and served as the ultimate tome in all cases arising from error or miscommunication. Many was the time that I’d had to sit in a stranger’s living room and recite article after article to some widow or soon-to-be widow, only to be hit or kicked or shot at even after all the trouble I went through memorizing the damned thing. They didn’t appreciate the hard work, not a one of them.

Granted, some had legitimate grievances, and I can only hope that those who took these matters up through the proper channels were properly remunerated. A telephone number was listed on the bottom of every repossession receipt—a toll-free number, mind you—and business hours were every Monday through Saturday from nine until six; if there was a problem, these people would listen, get to the bottom of the situation, and sort it all out within a few weeks’ time.

Ran out a small intestine once, back when Kenton was still making the IS–9, and due to a clerical oversight, I was out of ether. So I tagged the guy with a Taser, shot him up with a few hits of Thorazine, and he was out for the duration of the extraction. Problem was, his wife came home midway, and she didn’t stop screaming at me how they’d made the monthly payments on the intestine, how the paperwork had gotten all screwed up, how it was all a mistake. I was sympathetic, but she wasn’t letting me do my job, so I had to Taser her as well. It was legal—section 10, article three of the F.A.C., interference with a licensed repossessor—but I didn’t enjoy it.

So I repo’d the IS–9, brought it back to Kenton, got my commission. Two months later, I’m called in, and they tell me there really was a mistake, that the guy had not only paid up on the device, he’d actually been paying a little extra off in advance. Real swell customer, great credit history, just a screwup down in records. The wife had called the toll-free number after I left and the customer-service folks, ever vigilant, didn’t give up until they found the problem. Kenton sent me back.

I returned to the house bearing baskets of fruit, gifts for the client’s kids, free artiforg certificates for the widow. Refunded the full amount they’d already paid for the organ, plus a few extra thousand bucks on top to ease the pain of loss. Federal guidelines require only a refund in case of a foul-up; the additional money just goes to show what great management they’ve got at Kenton.

I felt like Santa Claus, handing out toys to the children, money to the widow.

And I still got to keep my commission.

But this girl wasn’t having any of it; her screams fell into sobs, which fell into weeps. I tried suggesting that she stand up, jog in place, try to walk it off, but she was inconsolable. Bonnie, who had been with her on the ground, lying next to the girl in an attempt to get her to talk out the pain, stood and brushed herself off. She had the yellow receipt in her hands.

“It looks in order,” she said. “Jessica told me they’ve been hiding out here for a few weeks. Her boyfriend is—was—an electrician, but with the recent layoffs, he lost his job, and after food and house payments, the thyroid…well…”

“I know the story,” I said. I’d heard it all before. Food, water, and shelter is what they teach kids in school. The three necessities; take care of those, and you’re good to go. Liars.

“So they were found out.”

Bonnie nodded. “This morning, when she went out to look for something to eat. She said they’d been hearing noises but thought the building was safe. She left, grabbed some bread and cheese down the street, and came back to…this. It was the first time she’d left his side in ten days.”

“Only takes ten minutes,” I explained. “Five for a gland.”

This set the girl off on a new sobbing jag. While Bonnie attended to her, I took back the yellow receipt and soaked in another good look. Never understood why people forked over money for artiforg thyroids; pills work just fine as a replacement. There’s no need to go to all the pain and trouble of an artificial organ when you can just suck down 30 mg of levothyroxine twice a day and be done with it.

At the bottom of the repo receipt is where they keep the official stuff, coded in such a way that only Credit Union employees can read and understand it. From the string of digits typed neatly along the edge, I learned that the client had a credit rating of 84.4 when he applied for the thyroid—respectable in today’s financial climate—and had been awarded the artiforg at an interest rate of 32.4 percent over a period of 120 months. Again, quite fair, all things considered. My Jarvik unit was offered at 26.3 percent, but that was a special rate afforded me by my former employers. I still won’t be sending them a card at Christmas.

But here’s the reason why we’re moving, the excuse for packing up our goodies and hoofing it out of the Laundromat and away from this part of the city as soon as dawn breaks and the sentinels go back home to sleep off the sunshine:

In the bottom right corner of that yellow receipt was a signature, right where a signature should have been. This is where the Bio-Repo man in charge of the case signs off that the artiforg is back in Union possession, that the client has paid his debt in full, and that the account is now considered closed.

I recognized that signature right away; I’d scrawled my own name next to it many a time.

It was the signature of the repo man I least want to run into. The one who has the best chance of locating me and successfully finishing off the job.

It was the signature of Jake Freivald.