The Starving Years (9 page)

He turned the little drive over, and struggled with the two urges that warred in him: the urge to hide it, keep it safe…and the urge to look. He wavered, undecided for maybe a second.

And then he shoved the drive into his USB port.

Chapter 9

Though the fire escape hadn’t been prettied up with potted plants like some, not even a cheap plastic lawn chair and an ash tray, like others, the air outside still smelled fresh and good. Despite the fact that it was tinged with the scent of oxidizing metal.
 

Javier helped Marianne out onto the metal slats, then took a good, deep breath, and noted a group of dangerous-looking men lurking at the nearest street corner. Despite the fact that news of the riot was getting older and older with each moment they delayed, maybe it wasn’t safe enough to send the others off to the dentist just yet.
 

“Hey!” Randy called to the next building over. “We speak Spanish now.”

Javier peered around him, expecting that Randy called all Latinos “Puerto Ricans” and whoever was on the fire escape would be Mexican or Guatemalan or Ecuadorian—but, no, Randy had been right. They really were Puerto Rican. A massive Puerto Rican flag, weather-worn, hung from the railing.

From the fire escape, a tough-looking tattooed man, twenty-five or thirty, gave Javier a suspicious look. His curiosity must have outweighed his natural caution, though, because he dispensed with the mandatory posturing, and called out in Spanish, “What’s going on, man?”

“A riot.” In all the excitement, Javier almost defaulted to the accent he’d been reared with, the pronunciations and inflections spoken at home. Fine for his mother Felicidad’s exactingly-set table—but not the best idea on the lower east side. He adjusted accordingly. “Phones are down, man. That’s all we know.”

The tattooed guy’s stance eased a bit. “What’s wrong with your eye?”

Pretty direct, though the poorer people got, Javier noticed, the more direct they tended to be. Maybe they had less to lose. No problem; Javier had an answer ready. He had several answers ready. It was just a matter of picking the right answer, and saying it in the right accent. “I was on the wrong side of a grenade.”

“Grenade? Here?”

The grenade angle was always good for street cred. “Overseas.”

Brief as it was, it seemed like a good enough answer for the Puerto Rican guy. He probably assumed Javier was in the military. They usually did. And unless whoever Javier was speaking with were ex-military, they didn’t tend to ask for specifics. With his curiosity about Javier’s eye patch settled, the guy said, “There’s nothing on the TV,” as if there damn well should have been.

“No. The Internet, either.”

Someone inside the neighboring building started talking to the tattooed guy. Emotions were running high. A woman’s voice carried outside, only fragments of words. She was crying.

“How much longer, you think?” the man called.

Javier took a sip of his coffee. “I don’t know.”

The woman’s voice grew more hysterical, and the man turned toward his window and tried to calm her. Her helplessness seemed to make him angry, and their conversation escalated into screaming.

“You didn’t get the maná!” she yelled in Spanish. “It was the one thing I told you to do. The one thing!”

“Oh, and my three jobs—that’s nothing, right?”

“We need maná! The baby is hungry!”

“Well, I’m hungry too. The stores are all closed. We’ll just have to be hungry until I can get some food.”

Marianne grabbed Javier by the arm and pulled so hard he almost fell into her. Coffee sloshed over the side of his cup. “Did she say ‘
nene
’? That means ‘baby,’ right? They have a baby?”

“Here we go,” Randy said.

Javier called over, “You have a baby?”

“Sí. A son.” With his lady still pitching a fit on the other side of the window, the neighbor paused to consider Javier. “Hey, man, you think you can help a guy out? A little maná? Even the cheap stuff?”

“Do they have a baby?” Marianne demanded. She’d forgotten all about her coffee.

“Yes. They have a son.”

“Oh my God.”

Javier judged the distance to the opposite fire escape. He supposed they could throw the manna that far. He was a terrible judge of distance nowadays, but one of the others could toss it. “I’ll see what I can do,” Javier called over.

He drained his mug so he didn’t spill it climbing in through the window, and he slipped back into the apartment. It seemed like a different place entirely, with only Tim inside. Tim sat hunched forward at his computer, eyes fixed on the screen, fingers flying over the keyboard. While Javier had done his best not to formulate a mental picture of the man behind the Voice of Reason, it seemed to him that if he had, that man would have looked very much like Tim at that particular moment.

He spared a quick glance for Javier, then went back to his typing. “You got it.”

Javier said, “I got…what?”

“The right folder. Cookies and history. And any minute we’ll be remoting into Canaan’s computers like we work there ourselves.”

We. Ourselves. Maybe Tim hadn’t seen the kiss after all.

Maybe there was still a chance things would work out more like Javier had hoped…and the things they’d only typed about could happen in the flesh.

The key, it seemed, was getting back on track with the original plan—at least as much as it was possible to do with three extra people who couldn’t be trusted blundering around.

Javier stepped up behind Tim, paused to consider whether he could handle the possibility of him flinching away, and then decided the fallout could be dealt with. He placed a hand on Tim’s shoulder.

Tim didn’t flinch.

“Once you get in,” Javier asked, “then what?”

“I don’t know. We’ll see what kinds of access this guy has, and how their system is set up. If he’s in HR, I should be able to use his credentials to create a new user. Figure out how to get our ‘new guy’ anywhere he wants to go.”

Javier knew just the place to start. According to his source, fleets of Canaan Products trucks were rolling out day and night, and rolling back in just as full as they’d been when they left. A recall, the source figured, though no one had actually confirmed an official recall was happening. When the shipping manager asked about it, he was told it was a simple stock rotation. But he’d been working there long enough to know that stock never came back from vendors while it still had three months remaining on its sell-by date. “Shipping and receiving.” Javier said.
 

The scrolling paused as Tim stopped typing and looked over his shoulder. “Really?”

The employee had leaked whatever he’d found to a Leftist group, just like he’d claimed.
I took things into my own hands. Told some people who might do something about it.
Then the Leftists had shown up at the job fair, right on cue. So Javier had no doubt the recall was significant. “Really.”
 

“That doesn’t seem like the department a scandal would—”

“Javier?”

Both Javier and Tim did flinch then, as Marianne stuck her head into the apartment.

“What’s taking so long? They have a
baby
.”

Javier raised his hand, palm forward, and said, “It’s not a problem. I’ll be right out.”

Marianne went back to the fire escape, and Javier said, “Can you spare some manna for your neighbor?”

“Who?”

“In the next building….”

Tim had already glanced in the general direction of the neighboring apartments, then focused his attention again on his monitor as if he was still trying to figure out how Shipping and Receiving might be involved. “I thought I had plenty…but I don’t know how long we’ll need to make it last for five people.”

“Even a small package. They have a baby.”

Tim stared at the monitor for a moment, then blinked. “Right, yeah. Okay. How long do you think I’ll need to…aw, never mind. A pound of manna won’t make a difference one way or the other between five people. Grab some of the perishable stuff out of the fridge.”

Javier picked up the partially thawed veg-o-mix from the arm of the recliner to put it back in the freezer. He’d expected to find ice cube trays, frozen meals, maybe some ice-dream. But Tim’s freezer was stacked with boxes, plain boxes labeled
protein + mineral
in English, Spanish, French, and Korean. The ice cube caddy was stocked with first aid kits.

The single pocket of recognizable food was mostly plain, flash-frozen vegetables. Javier tucked the veg-o-mix into a gap among the other plastic bags and quietly closed the freezer door. He looked at Tim. Tim had leaned in so close to the monitor he could practically lick it. His eyes tracked back and forth as he watched code scroll past.

Javier took the opportunity to peek into one of the cupboards.

Completely filled, top to bottom. More plain brown boxes, these stamped in some Arabic-looking languages, and French. 5-year complete protein. No wonder Tim only had two mugs. There wasn’t room for any more. Javier eased open another cupboard, this one bursting with a bank of canned manna with once-colorful labels, now faded, the text possibly in Chinese. He couldn’t tell what the contents were supposed to be, even by the pictures—cubes of jiggling off-white manna, awash in a bath of syrup, with birds and lotus flowers dancing around the dripping spoonfuls.

“In the fridge,” Tim prompted. “Something that looks, y’know…normal.”

Javier opened the refrigerator. It, too, was loaded. The soda racks had perishable manna stuffed in the slots, verde and cheese and chili flavored. A few of the sweet varieties, mostly chocolate, were mounded in the crisper. All the ready-made meals were
 
utilitarian: manna, vegetable, starch. The type of food you’d find in a public school or an eldercare institution.

“I think you can spare a few,” Javier said.

“Did you know Nelson Oliver had a PhD?”

What did Tim care about Nelson? It must have been the kiss. He
had
seen it after all. Damn it. “He’s not old enough,” Javier replied, finally. Tim could infer whatever level of intimacy—or non-intimacy—he wanted from that statement.

“A double-masters in chemistry and microbiology, and a PhD in molecular biology.”

“I thought you were working on remoting in.”

“I’ve got a script on it—I need to find the cookie first. But all the job applications are sitting right here, in the documents folder.”

Nelson Oliver, a doctor? The guy who’d been too busy cruising Javier to even spare a glance for the Canaan Products HR reps who everyone else was scrambling to impress? His shoes were cheap. And he did seem too young to have all that schooling under his belt—though maybe it accounted for the cockiness. Or he could have been lying. Everyone lied on job applications. Some more than others.

“He’s thirty-five,” Tim read.

Obviously, Javier hadn’t gotten a very good look at Nelson. Though he wasn’t sure seeing him with two eyes would have made any difference. “I suppose he could be.”

“Can you imagine what he knows about manna?”

Javier wished he could tell if he was supposed to play his knowledge of Nelson up or down. There wasn’t much to spin one way or the other. Confident (obnoxiously so). Determined (ditto). Older than Javier had thought by five years or so. And he had a nice mouth—though probably anyone who was a reasonable kisser would have seemed that way to Javier, who hadn’t been kissed since the end of his old life. And charming, in a way, for someone they needed to send packing as soon as possible. “So…I’ll give them a verde and a cheese. Okay?”

Tim tore his eyes from the screen. “The Canaan stuff. Right?”

“Right.”

“Yeah, fine.” Tim went back to stabbing at the keyboard.

Javier watched him for a moment, then told himself that Tim was probably perfectly aware of being watched, and turned toward the window.

“Javier?”

At the sound of his name coming from Tim’s mouth, Javier’s heartbeat quickened. “Yes?”

Tim didn’t look up from the screen. “Keep those other guys out of my cupboards.”

“Sure.” His heart sank as fast as it had surged—and honestly, Javier thought, what had he expected Tim to say?
I wish we were alone. Then I’d really show you how impressed I am with the way you handled the job fair.
Tim trusted Javier with his secrets, much more than Javier trusted his own secrets with, well…anybody. It seemed like that should have been enough.

Though it didn’t feel that way at all.

Chapter 10

Javier handed the manna to Randy through the window, then hauled himself back out onto the fire escape. The sun had set, and the temperature was dropping fast. A small tendril of steam rose from Marianne’s forgotten coffee. “How do you know they really have a baby?” Randy asked—not as if he was particularly concerned. More like he was accustomed to playing devil’s advocate.

“What do you want them to do?” Marianne whispered, though Javier suspected it was unlikely the neighbors would understand her anyway, especially across the span of the building over the background noise of the rising wind. “Bring the kid outside and show it to you?”

Randy tried to hand the manna back to Javier, but Javier made no move to take it. “You throw it,” he said. “I wrenched my arm in the crowd.” Randy might have suspected Javier’s arm had nothing to do with his unwillingness to throw something and make a fool of himself, but he didn’t call Javier on it. Which went completely against the slightly-grown-frat-boy image he projected. Curious. But not unwelcome.

Randy waved the two plastic sacs above his head like he’d just scored a touchdown. “Heads up, buddy!”

The neighbor’s face transformed from desperation to hope—over something as simple as manna. Not even high-grade manna. Canaan Products manna, so inexpensive to produce, it was on par with bottled water. The only real cost was the packaging, marketing and shipping. “Overhead,” as Randy had so eloquently put it.

Randy tossed the packages over with ease, first verde, then cheese. The neighbor caught them and handed them through the window. “Gracias,” he said, over and over, as if he wished he could think of a better word to express his thanks, but he’d have to settle for just repeating it.