made him sure. That worried him as addict Rollers were generally the worst.
They dragged him into the darkness, and slid up his right sleeve, revealing his tattooed barcode. Pulling out a cheap plastic scanner that looked like a portable car vacuum, they ran it down the skinny blue-veined arm. Devon felt the familiar touch of the plastic rollers in the scanner against his arm and the slightest warmth from the laser inside, the feeling of violation.
It was this very act-the stealing of a person’s barcoded account number-which gave the Rollers their name. Devon was old enough to remember the feel of good green money in his hand, but his attackers weren’t. In these days money was transferred with the use of scanners and a person’s personal account number, in the form of a barcode on the right arm. It was supposed to eliminate muggings forever, but instead it had only given birth to the Rollers.
Devon struggled, managing to scramble the first two readings. Then the smoker plunged a fist into his stomach four times and he held still for the third attempt, coughing bloody phlegm. In his left hand he gripped his grandfather’s watch in desperation. He tried to thumb open the latch, but one of the Rollers was holding that arm too, and he couldn’t get it open.
“There, we finally got the old bastard’s number,” grunted the smoker. He tapped gray ash into Devon’s hair and smiled with the genetically strong teeth that all the young had these days.
“Now, you give us the access code.”
Devon glared at him. There was no way he would just give these two his last twenty bucks. They could see this right away, and so they began methodically beating him without even speaking. In the grips of the two men, Devon could not remember having felt so alone.
Soon, spitting blood, he gave them the series of nine letters and digits that formed his secret code. Eagerly, the two stood up and tapped keys on the scanner, like lotto players hoping for the big jackpot. Devon took the opportunity to reach deeper into his pocket and pop open the latch on his grandpa’s watch and put his thumb into the broken interior. He found the button-pad there, which activated to his touch and recognized his dirty thumbprint. With one squeeze he could press the button and call the pod children, but he hesitated.
He watched the young men, still waiting for the slow scanner to relay the account transfer up to the main networks and retrieve the balance. Knowing what his friends would do to them, he felt pity. He had been beaten and robbed of all his new-bucks, but was that enough to alert the pods? While he thought about it, he muttered and raved aloud like a man with malaria.
“What’s he talkin’ ‘bout?” asked the user. “I don’t know, some sludge about zinc tablets and pods. Vid-dream stuff. He got a little too much gas in the shale tunnels, I’d gamble,” the first Roller snorted. His stimstik, almost out now, quivered and rolled in his mouth as he laughed. Then his laugh cut short as the account balance flashed up on the scanner’s tiny screen.
“Two hundred ninety-three friggin’ bucks?” he burst out, his stimstik falling to the cracked concrete to join the sea of debris. Devon watched as they turned toward him.
“You faked us out, old man,” the Roller hissed. “You conned us.”
Devon saw murder in their eyes. He had seen it before. Lips trembling in regret, he pressed the button in his coat pocket.
From a nearby alley came wet popping sounds. Three pods released children and they came, their tiny feet tapping against the asphalt with incredible rapidity. Behind them five more pods popped. Mantis-like creatures with bodies like yardsticks and wire-thin limbs sped to Devon’s rescue, moving with blinding speed.
Both the Rollers pulled out their vibro-blades and knelt. They planned to do it right: a single double-plunge with both blades, piercing his sternum and the old heart beneath it at the same moment.
“On the count of three,” said the first Roller. “One…”
The first three pod creatures arrived before he got to two.
Devon squeezed his eyes shut as the killing began, wishing he could block out the sounds as effectively as the sights, but fingers in the ears never did as complete a job as shut eyelids. He looked only once, when the initial screams had changed to gurgles and grunts, and watched for a moment as two of the pod children held the stim- smoker aloft and immobile. A third one kept the Roller’s jaws clamped shut while it wrapped its wire-like limbs around his the neck and squeezed, blood spurting.
The scanner dropped from the jerking hand, plastic clattering on concrete. Struggling to get up, Devon vomited and staggered away. Tears running down his face, he found his old hat and shoved it firmly down over his head.
“You made me do it,” he muttered, clicking shut his grandfather’s watch. “Didn’t want to…”
He wiped the blood from his face and shoved open the broken automatic doors. After releasing so many children, it would want the zinc tablets all the more, he knew.
And it was best to do what it wanted. Devon knew that too.
