The Gun Runners

A huge holo of an overflowing beer mug rotated and flickered in the harsh afternoon sunlight. The old holo was older than Pedro. He was only seventeen, but the holo, and the small cantina it was attached to had opened two decades before the Western War. No money had been spent to fix the glitchy holo, it was barely bright enough to be seen in daylight, but what could be seen was a slowly rotating volume of blocky holographic flickering pixels that were more or less beer mug shaped.

 

The inside of the cantina, simply named Sombrero Gris, was no better than the holo ad outside, though the structure outdated the holo by several decades at least. The Sombrero Gris was not a nice place, but then, it wasn’t supposed to be. Everything about the place was designed to keep the EGO Peace and Defense Force folks out. It had the stench of various rodent and insect poisons. The windows were covered with a thick layer of dust and spider webs. The floors were covered in dirt and dead palm tree debris. It was hot and the fans that were meant to keep it cool spun lazily, providing no airflow whatsoever. Nobody in long camouflage pants, dress shirts and heavy boots would set foot in there unless they were looking to melt off every last bit of body fat they had five minutes before dying of heat stroke. 

 

The small cantina was filled with cheep poly tables and chairs. The furniture was once brightly colored. Pedro remembered the old colors, the pinks, the oranges, the yellows, reds and greens. *Festive.* They were all painted black, and painted poorly. Pedro could see the old colors through the scrapes and dings in the cheep old house paint that was used to cover up the old revolutionary colors. Forbidden colors. Not illegal, just not practical for survival. 

 

Pedro was only seven when the pueblito of Los Barilles was finally sacked by the Earth Governance Organization’s Peace and Defense Force. Really, it was sacked by politicians who wanted to partake in the largess of the EGO’s various grants, loans, subsidies and other such international financial shenanigans, but the politicians were too cowardly to kill his mother and older brother themselves, so they sent the so called Peace and Defense Forces to do it for them. The Peace and Defense Forces were neither peaceful nor defensive. 

 

Pedro took a seat at a small table near the window facing the entry so he could see who was coming and going. An old dune buggy zipped by ripping up rooster tails of sand along the sandy road. The old dune buggy’s drive motors whirred as if they were straining against a century or so of entropy. They probably were. It sounded like a buzzsaw cutting up the dirt road. *Pendejo.* 

 

On the far wall, there was an old magazine rack. The magazines had not been updated since the beginning of the Western War. Nobody bought magazines, they were older than everyone and probably everything in the entire town. The magazines were for sale, or at least marked as such, but nobody ever bought them. They were not really intended to be purchased. The old rack full of smut magazines served only two purposes, to keep the golden boys out and to convey important information about the war. 

 

“Cervesa?” Jiro the bartender asked. 

 

“Yeah.” Pedro said sullenly. 

 

Jiro knew Pedro wasn’t necessarily visiting for a cold beer, he only even came in from the mountains for two reasons, guns and information. Jiro Martinez, half Japanese, half Mexican bartender, was born in Los Barilles about three years before Pedro was born. His Japanese mother had immigrated to Mexico when Japan was sacked by the EGO. She was wanted back then. She was a rebel. The Japanese rebellion lasted about six months, but she had caused enough grief for the P and D forces that they sent out most-wanted bulletins across the globe. Baja Mexico and several of the old southwestern states of the former United States were the last holdouts, so she left Japan on a shuttle bound for Mars and somehow ended up in Mexico. She married a local, they had a son they named Jiro, after a good friend who died in the Japanese rebellion. Jiro didn’t know how his namesake died, his mother never said. 

 

“Here for the local news?” Jiro asked as he handed Pedro a beer.

 

“Hardware.”

 

“Too fucking hot outside for hardware.” Jiro commented. 

 

“Well, we need it nonetheless.”

 

“Check the news first. I think your guy was here.” Jiro said.

 

“Guy? What the hell happened to Marisol?” Marisol was his usual contact for hardware. Hardware, in this case was hopefully at least a handful of functioning plasma kinetic pistols, or better yet a combat drone of some kind. 

 

“Haven’t seen her in a while. You should probably have something more to drink than beer Pedro.”

 

“Why?”

 

“I think they took her.”

 

“Marisol?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

Pedro put his face in his hands. He had youthful genes, but war had aged him and he could feel the still tender scars on his face as he hid his tearful eyes. He wasn’t in love with Marisol, she was impossible to love, but she was someone he admired. Beautiful too, if you stripped away the permanent fight or flight glare in her eyes and defensively cold personality. 

 

Marisol was a gun runner. She would pick up hardware somewhere north and take it south. She was a loner. She had to be a loner. There were bounties on gun runners, but even without the bounties, fear could easily turn reasonable men into disloyal bastards. 

 

A wind kicked up a small sand storm in the streets. Pedro dried his eyes so the sand wouldn’t stick to his face in long muddy streaks. The old holo kept spinning, nearly invisible in the afternoon sun and dense cloud of dust.

 

“Anyway,” Jiro continued. “They don’t tell me anything. They leave their little codes in the news and then you tell me. Want tequila?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“It’s not good tequila Pedro.” By that Jiro meant that it was war tequila. The type of shit you’re supposed to drink to remind you of how shitty war was, not that Pedro needed such reminders. 

 

As Jiro went behind the bar to find a suitably awful bottle of tequila, Pedro approached the news stand. He knew which magazines were to be used, and which pages too. He found the old “Beaver Lodge” magazine and opened to page thirty one. There she was, the old familiar nudie. A young woman with a thick beaver, her legs spread wide open on an orange sofa. Pedro pulled out his old data-lens from his leather backpack. He put the data-lens on slowly hoping not to find anything on the page other than coordinates for a meeting or perhaps a dead drop.

 

The nudie picture disappeared into a hash of pixels as soon as he looked at it through his data-lens. The readout was simple text: *Marisol is presumed dead. She was last seen just outside of La Paz headed north. She has not shown up for her usual appointments. Sympathies. -Victor.* 

 

Pedro wanted to throw the damn magazine across the cantina, but there were coordinates. *Cactus 7.* Cactus seven was not a cactus, but a code. It was a location only a handful of others knew about. Jiro knew about the locations, but never checked the magazine rack, especially whenever people came in to recode the nano-imprint on the images. He didn’t want to know. He didn’t need to know. 

 

Marisol reminded Pedro of his mother. She was much younger than her, but still somehow motherly. She was maybe thirty-five years old Pedro guessed. She had been his point of contact since he was ten. Seven years of Marisol telling him what to do and what not to do had imprinted some kind of motherly notion of her into his mind. She cared for him, but mostly so he wouldn’t get her caught. 

 

Pedro watched the sand dancing in the old beer holo outside. Jiro was watching, waiting for the right time to bring the tequila over to the formerly bright pink table. He gave up on waiting. A friend needed tequila. 

 

“Hey. Drink this.” Jiro said plunking the shot of Tequila brand tequila on the poly table. “Sorry about Marisol.”

 

“It was inevitable.” Pedro mumbled as he tossed the shot back. He closed his eyes and let the burn slip down his throat. *War. Fuck war.* 

 

“She was careful Pedro.”

 

“Still…”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“I’ll be sticking around for a while now I guess. Cactus seven.”

 

“Don’t want to know.”

 

“You should know.”

 

“I suppose.” Jiro replied. “More?”

 

“Yup.”

 

“Okay. I’ll get the good stuff this time.”

 

“Please.” 

 

As Jiro was returning to the bar, the bells on the old church across the street began to ring out. They are *not* supposed to ring out at all. Cultural assimilation requires that things like church bells ought to be muted, lest people remember what Mexico used to be like. No more pink and orange buildings. No more colorful papel strung between old street lamps and rooftops. If you so much as strum a guitar or blow into a trumpet in public, you’d be labeled a rebel. That’s why colorful furniture was painted black. If only the damn Mexicans would go along with the assimilation project, they would not have to care so much about such traditional things. 

 

Jiro grabbed a nice bottle, this time one of Mezcal. The bottle had two old six-shooters in black against a gold background on it. “Gun Runner? At two in the afternoon?” Pedro asked.

 

“Is it two already?”

 

“According to the bells.” Pedro replied. 

 

“Yeah, I guess the P and D contingent on duty in the outreach center let that one slip by.”

 

The church was open to the public, but it was not a church. You couldn’t go inside and pray, beg for the forgiveness of your sins or contemplate any sort of spiritual beauty whatsoever. If you were entering the church, you were doing so, because you wanted to talk to the outreach center. The outreach center is where you went to rat on your friends. If you go in, you better have good long-term travel plans, because life in Los Barriles is going to be an unviable option the moment you step out into the sunlight. 

 

Pedro and Jiro watched the church entrance as the bells rang out once again. Nobody came out, but there was one old woman approaching the crooked old steps. She knelt down in the sand before the church, clasped her hands together and began praying to herself.  Two more older women knelt down beside her. Then three. Then five. Then ten. The Peace and Defense officers inside had enough sense to ignore the first few, but the crowd was beginning to build. 

 

“Something is going to happen Jiro. We should do something.” Pedro said.

 

“Do what?”

 

“Not sure yet.” Pedro replied quietly.

 

The old ladies knelt before their church and prayed for as long as they deemed necessary until a P and D officer stepped out to disperse them. He was wearing his green and black camouflage uniform and had his hands on his side-arm. “Leave this place.” He announced.

 

“Leave this place or we’ll be forced to take you in.” He continued. 

 

The old women continued praying, this time out loud. Pedro listened to the dull hum of their prayers as they filled his head with old defiant thoughts. Thoughts Marisol had planted and fertilized. *Individuality.* 

 

Marisol didn’t need to plant any such notions into his head though her constant sowing of such notions helped keep him sharp about such things. In war, it is important to stick to first principals. Individuality was a highly useful first principal to have in a time of war. The branches and tributaries of thought that grew from the idea kept him grounded and focused on the purpose of the war and not on the suffering it caused. 

 

Here is what happened. The bells were not real bells, they were old speakers inside of a bell tower that were connected to a datasphere enabled amplifier. When Pedro scanned the picture of the nude woman on page thirty-one of the old *Beaver Lodge* magazine, he also triggered a code to run within the illegal black dataspheres his data-slate was connected to. 

 

The code was a hack that made a simple connection to the bells. The bells went off. The old ladies hadn’t heard the bells in decades and although they understood it was probably more of a prank than a miracle, they took it as a miracle anyway, because the EGO socially conditioned them into painting over anything remotely beautiful in their little community. They had forgotten the beauty and joy of those things. They had forgotten the joy they felt gathering together in contemplation of their deeply held spiritual beliefs. When they heard the bells, their minds said *fuck the EGO, I’m going to embrace a moment of joy in this colorless dystopia.*

 

Marisol’s death had been known for a while in town. The town was mostly filled with older women because the men and women of fighting age were up in the hills preparing for various acts of guerilla warfare. The town knew. Jiro knew even though he never once looked at the nudie picture. They finally had a moment to grieve her in public, in defiance of the EGO, just as she would have wanted. 

 

“To Marisol.” Jiro said as he handed Pedro a snifter of Gun Runner Mezcal.

 

“To Marisol. If anybody from the EGO made it into heaven, they’ll wish they’d gone to hell once she shows up.” Pedro replied holding the snifter in the air. 

 

“Salud!”

 

“Salud.”

 

The old women dispersed slowly, perhaps too slow for the P and D officer’s preferred pace. It was a slow drip of reminders that he not only didn’t control them, he couldn’t control them. They were free.