Punks, p.1
Punks, page 1
PUNKS
EVERYMART
BOOK 1
BLAZE WARD
KNOTTED ROAD PRESS
CONTENTS
Author Notes: Trevor
Punks
Soundtrack
Madison Avenue
About the Author
Also by Blaze Ward
About Knotted Road Press
AUTHOR NOTES: TREVOR
Depending on which decade of Science Fiction you are reading or watching movies from, the future might be exciting and shiny, a post-apocalyptic hellscape, or painted dystopian gray. Authors are a reflection of their times, and SF writers are probably worse, because we’re forever looking at some idea or situation and asking ourselves “What if…?”
What if this one little tweak is extended out to infinity? What if that one person never came along? Or turned out to be someone else?
All future multiverse possibilities are exposed, and we like to dabble.
Trevor was no different.
I looked at a future where the banality of decay and dystopia was what we inherited. More and more, as the world warms up and societies start to come apart, I expect my grandkids to live in a worse situation than I had, which was worse than my grandparents had. (Hunter S. Thompson talks about a high-water mark in his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and I find, fifty years later, that he might have been a prophet.)
Thus was born Everymart.
I wanted to explore small stories. Small stakes, while still telling action-packed, thrill-a-minute capers. But not for all the marbles. Nothing world-shaping or earth shattering.
At least not as most people would see it.
The little things.
I had an utterly crappy day yesterday and wasn’t even sort of looking forward to dealing with the world today. Except that a friend sent me a random little high-five online to tell me how much she appreciated me and what I did to help other writers. And for being a great friend.
I’ve had a smile on my face all day. Her fault.
The little things.
Trevor didn’t have any good options after high school. Lots of kids face that. In the US, it is very much a class thing, though not everyone recognizes it as such. He had to go get a job and move out. Become an adult and live the meaningless structures in life that capitalism has inflicted upon us all. (At least until the Revolution comes. And I still figure it might.)
At the same time, he knows some folks to refuse to participate. Who make their own rules. Live in a way that the mundanes and squares are simply ill-equipped to understand at all.
Because those of us who are artists understand that thing. Some of us can hide it reasonably well. Others cannot.
We all make due.
Trevor. And friends. A caper team. (Technically, a shadowrun team, but most people won’t understand that reference, so I won’t generally use it. If you do, congrats on being as weird as me.)
Everymart is a bodega chain. As far as I know, none with that name actually exists, but I’m pretty sure you can recognize who I based it on pretty easily anyway.
The (dim, grungy, messed up) future of the American Dream.
Except that Night Butterfly has a plan. She’s going to change the world. Every time travel story you’ve ever read talks about how some tiny change in the past might change everything in the present.
For you, dear reader, that means that some little tweak today can absolutely change the future. Are you making tomorrow a better place?
Night Butterfly is. And needs some help. An entire team of experts, all contributing.
Epic tension. Tiny stakes. Intentional on my part.
Thus, the Everymart Tales. Punks, when a few artists decide that they are going to change the future by changing the present, one life at a time.
PUNKS
PUNKS
EVERYMART 01
It wasn’t entirely accidental that Trevor was studying the Everymart Operations Manual™ for everything you needed to know to run the bodega when Mr. Bankov walked in from the back of the store. He’d watched the owner approach the back door on security cameras pointed at the alley.
Ambient music filled the store. Not quite mellow jazz. Somewhere softer than corporate rock. Just background stuff you’d never remember five minutes after walking out.
Trevor really had needed to look something up in the book. That holiest of holies from corporate that covered every single damned thing possible in running a corporate corner market in a big city. Or any other podunk in North America.
Seriously, why was it so damned critical to have exact measurements of the space between the heater rolling afternoon hotdogs and the drink dispenser machine? With helpful images?
Stupid, but nobody had asked Trevor. It was enough that four hotdogs, two eggrolls, and six taquitos were warming on the little heating thing right now, and wouldn’t go bad before someone came in with a need. The smell got to everyone that walked through the door.
Except Trevor. After two years, he’d even gotten past that surge of wanting to vomit when that hot grease smell hit his nose. He would never actually eat one again, after a thorough, passive study of what they went through before they went into your mouth. And that was before he read the ingredients label on the big box they arrived in.
He smiled at Mr. Bankov as the man came up behind the counter, manual still open. Might as well get bonus points for being a good, little corporate drone, after all.
“Ah, good,” Mr. Bankov said in a heavily-accented Russian voice when he came to rest behind the counter. “Always good to see a young man intent on bettering himself.”
Bettering himself. Mr. Bankov’s favorite phrase.
The dude had been born in Russia, back before it fell apart and got invaded by the Chinese. Somehow, he had ended up in the United States, itself not at risk of physical invasion, but already dominated by most of those folks anyway.
What Trevor had never figured out was how the guy had been able to quickly buy a whole string of Everymart franchises and start his own little commercial empire. No banks would just hand you dough like that.
Trevor just figured that the dude had been a gangster or something over there and had stolen a bag of money from someone. He gave off that kind of skeavy feel, even in an expensive, silk suit.
Tall guy. Hard eyes. Heavy shoulders starting to slide down to his waist now, trapped there by his belt. Iron gray hair buzzed short like the soldiers that occasionally came through. This store wasn’t close to any of Southern California’s military bases, but Trevor had volunteered a few times to do shifts at one of the other stores when asked.
He always got a bonus he thought of as hazard pay for doing it, mostly because he could still run the place just fine when Mr. Bankov had fired half the staff. Or they’d all quit because he was being a jackass. Again.
Mr. Bankov was like that. Why he liked Trevor was a thing neither Trevor nor his friends had ever been able to figure out. The two of them were nothing alike. Trevor was short for a guy. Barely five foot six if he stood up straight. Slim in spite of that one attempt to put on muscle and weight with those nutritional supplements everybody swore by. Brown hair not long enough to get him crossways with corporate standards, but longer than Mr. Bankov really approved of. Not that the man could argue with the manual, laying right there on the counter like a bible or something.
“What are you studying today, Trevor?” Mr. Bankov asked as he came to rest next to Trevor.
They were alone in the place. Early afternoon, in that stretch after lunch when folks had gone back to the office but before they snuck out early to buy a sixpack of cheap beer on the way home. Dead. Outside was hot, but not yet that high summer where it was hotter than hell to the point you could probably fry eggs on the hood of a car.
That was coming.
At least the slurpee machine was working today. Occasionally, you had to conduct quality control.
As long as you used your own cup.
Trevor pointed to the page on the right of the big, four-inch, three-ring binder with the laminated pages, where it dealt with maintenance on the ice machine that would become everybody’s favorite destination in the neighborhood in another week or so.
Absolutely not the page on the left where it talked about the ambient sound systems that corporate provided, piped into every single store in the entire world at the same time. No, sir. That just happens to be the page next to it.
Honest.
“Is the machine giving problems?” Mr. Bankov asked quickly, nervousness in his tones.
“No, sir,” Trevor reassured him. “But the weather will get hot soon, so I wanted to make sure I understood everything, in case it did. You know how much money we make in the summer from it.”
Mr. Bankov nodded somberly. The Money Printer, he’d called that machine more than once, when summer got hot and heavy and everybody needed to refill their cooler. Especially folks living in tiny coffin-sized apartments that were too small to hold a refrigerator. Like Trevor.
“Is good,” the man said, beaming. “You watch these things far better than most. Keep this up and one of these days you’ll be managing a store, on your way to owning several. Bettering yourself.”
Trevor faked a smile and even made it look enthusiastic. Even at its worst, this job beat the hell out of the army. Or the marines. After all, if anybody was going to shoot him, they’d mean it around here, as opposed to random folks in foreign countries who hated your American guts just for being there.
Not that too many people hated him in this neighborhood, but the
Or disappear them. Trevor wasn’t entirely sure, and didn’t ask what the laws were like when megacorps could make their own rules.
Extraterritoriality, and all that.
At least Everymart Corporate had never tried to expand it to their franchises.
Yet.
He could only imagine the concept of legally extraditing someone from the burger franchise down the block. Weird.
Trevor closed up the book and slid it back under the counter as a customer walked in. Mr. Bankov slipped away into the back and left him alone.
Plotting revolution.
Trevor quick-checked all the security cameras when he saw Brody walk in the front door, dressed like a perfectly normal human being and everything. Worse, the silly freak walked to the soft drink case, grabbed a chilled bottle, and paid with cash.
That was how Trevor knew he was up to no good.
California blond. Longer hair than corporate allowed. Almost any corporate, coming down past his shoulders and feathered like a surfer on top. Tan. Innocence personified today in blue jeans and a red t-shirt with some band on the front.
It was only as the guy got his receipt that he winked and nodded as he headed out the front door. The mask slipping, as it were.
Trevor checked his phone. Eight minutes until his shift was over. Hannah was already in back, doing a little paperwork. She’d be up in a minute or two to take over.
At thirty-eight, the woman was old enough to be his mom. In her case though, just coasting through life, as the first of her kids was gone and the other two weren’t far behind. Universal Basic Income (UBI) and cheap food meant that this job was enough, with her husband’s, for the family to have a real flat, rather than the coffinbox Trevor had lived in since he’d gotten thrown out of the house two days after graduating high school.
Some days, he didn’t even blame his parental units for that. Wasn’t like he could afford to go to college. And wasn’t dumb enough to join the military.
That left getting a job. He’d had some cash saved up. Enough. Barely. Got out of there and was his own man.
Nobody ever mentioned how dull a life like this was going to be, though.
Still, better than the tweakers or the soldiers.
Except that Brody had come in the store. Bought a soda and everything, even though Trevor knew that Brody was way too health-conscious to consume all that corn syrup and natural flavors. When you owned the various governments, you didn’t have to label the shit you sold people, as long as it wasn’t actually going to kill anybody.
Hannah appeared from the back now. He would have described her to a stranger as middle-aged squishy with already graying hair. Not as dumb as a mud fence post, to quote his dad’s favorite insult, but not much better.
Reliable enough, though. Did the job. Collected her pay. Didn’t cause Mr. Bankov any trouble.
Trevor couldn’t imagine working here for ten years, but Hannah had said more than once that it had been a step up from that call center gig she’d had.
Ew.
They completed the signover and Trevor clocked out. He worked weekdays because it was the shift everybody else hated. Nobody to talk to. Nothing to do but stand there most of the time, watching cars whiz by and wondering if anyone was going to come in. Everymart was open twenty-four/seven/three-sixty-six, according to the little sign on the glass door.
Always there when you needed something.
If they carried it.
Trevor slipped out the back door after checking that the security cameras didn’t show any tweakers or homeless in the alley behind the store. Mr. Bankov wouldn’t call the badges for a homeless person, but he did have sprayers back there, and they weren’t cleaned all that often, so the water that came out was kinda brown.
Kept folks away.
Trevor turned left and started walking. His coffinbox was only a few blocks over, but he didn’t figure he’d actually get there for a while.
Sure enough, turn a corner and there was Brody, sitting in the door of an aircraft carrier sized minivan. Damned thing looked like it might hold ten people.
Trevor barely knew ten people.
The side door was slid open. Finn was driving.
“Get in, loser,” Brody called in a cheery voice.
Trevor looked both ways, but they were off an alley and the van had mysteriously parked in such a way that the smoked windows hid everything from the street.
Then again, Finn had been a hotshot driver before he’d gotten tired of rent-a-cops shooting at him when he crossed the borders from Mexico into SoCal. Man understood hardware.
Although why his Mexican parents had named the kid Finnegan was one Trevor didn’t know. Hadn’t ever asked. Finn was currently drinking the pop Brody had bought.
Trevor let the seatbelt hook him in and Finn triggered the hatch shut. Nobody spoke until the van was in motion.
“Mrs. Spuds been around lately?” Night Butterfly asked from the passenger seat up front, looking back over her shoulder with a big, teasing grin.
She was the ringleader of these folks. Trevor was just a dude. Maybe.
Ye Hu Die. Chinese. Technically Chinese-American these days, but she’d been born in Shanghai. Apparently spoke all languages, if you asked. At least every one Trevor had seen her need to. Spooky.
She never actually went by her real name in public though. Like the rest of these folks, she had a codename that she used when she connected to the cyberworld. Night Butterfly, which was actually what her parents had named her.
Yè Húdié.
The others were laughing at Butterfly’s joke. Brody went so far as to punch him lightly on the shoulder.
Trevor let it go.
Ilyana Bankova. Wife of Mr. Bankov. They called her Mrs. Spuds because her husband drove an old bio-diesel Cadillac that smelled like French fries. Mark of how old the guy was. And maybe how rich. Normal people couldn’t afford cars. If they could, they drove electric, like this minivan, which had probably been stolen at some point. Maybe several points.
Bio-diesel machines like Mr. Bankov owned cost a lot to own.
Butterfly and her people teased him about Mrs. Spuds because the woman seemed to be a nymphomaniac. Or at least not getting what she needed at home, so she sniffed around the various stores regularly.
Trevor had made it a point never to be alone with her in the back room after she’d nearly cornered him that first time. He didn’t even figure that telling her he was gay would put the woman off. Just make it a challenge.
“I have not seen Bankova lately,” Trevor said with a polite, frosty grin.
Butterfly nodded and dropped it. She knew his face. This was how far you could push a guy like Trevor before pissing him off.
And they needed him.
Or he needed them. Trevor was never sure. It was Butterfly’s gang. He just kind of ended up hooked up with them as an odd man from time to time.
Like when a pretty-boy SoCal surfer type like Brody happened to walk in every once in a while. Nobody even noticed the guy in public, where the rest might stand out.
Trevor looked around. It was just the four of them.
“Where is everybody else?” he asked, mostly curious.
“Back at the warehouse,” Butterfly answered and left it at that.
Trevor nodded and sat back.
Nobody would tell him anything until they got where they were going.
At least they needed him.
Trevor was always amazed, driving through the old neighborhoods down towards San Pedro. Even with as expensive as real estate could be, there were whole blocks of warehouses that nobody wanted. At the same time, that last big depression, ten years ago, had really messed up everybody everywhere. And he didn’t figure that Butterfly had paid anything close to real value for the place.
