The Bar Code Rebellion (4 page)

“Do you believe that Gene Drake really found something terrible in the bar code data file?” Kayla questioned Dusa as they drove together through DC in Dusa’s tractor trailer.

“Francis and Nate believe it,” Dusa answered. “He told them that he was working with a journalist on an exposé and he didn’t want to reveal what he knew before the story came out.”

“But the story never came out,” Kayla reminded her.

“I don’t know why. Maybe it was too hot to handle. Global-1 might have gotten to the journalist. The journalist might have been a Global-1 spy. Who knows? Francis and Nate say he knew about the genetic code stuff before this other thing. The other thing, though, was what really made him desperate.”

“What could it be?” Kayla wondered aloud.

“I’m not sure I even
want
to know,” Dusa said with a shiver. She pulled onto the Superlink and they drove toward Virginia.

“Where are we going?” Kayla asked after a short while. “I really need to find Mfumbe and August.”

“We will. Write down their full names and a
description of them for me. I have contacts who can keep an eye out for them. We’ll go look ourselves, but first we have a delivery to intercept.” She handed Kayla a molded plastic cheetah mask. It reminded Kayla of an elephant mask her father had bought her once at the Bronx Zoo.

“Put it on when I tell you,” Dusa instructed.

“What’s going on?” Kayla asked, suddenly worried. Why were they going to need masks?

“You’ll see.” Dusa pulled off at the next exit. “You don’t mind a little bloodshed, do you?”

The frantic questions racing through Kayla’s head went unanswered. Dusa was too busy talking with Francis on the chip-size phone clipped to the collar of her T-shirt. Apparently, Francis and the others were riding right behind in the truck’s trailer.

After phoning a contact with Kayla’s descriptions of Mfumbe and August, Dusa turned onto a side street and pulled the tractor trailer in front of a narrow outdoor parking lot wedged between two buildings, letting the motor idle. “We’ve trailed this G-1 delivery guy for a week,” she said to Kayla. “He goes for coffee here every morning at this time. See, there’s his truck.” She pointed to an unmarked compact silver truck parked in the lot.

Nate appeared from behind the truck. He wore a tiger mask and a gray sweatshirt with the hood up. Francis had already scurried into the lot and met up with Nate at the back of the silver truck.
“We wait here,” Dusa advised as she slipped on a lion mask. “Put your mask on just in case someone sees us. If they report anything, let them report that a pack of wild animals did this.”

“Is anyone going to be hurt?” Kayla asked.

“Hopefully not,” Dusa replied tensely as she stared out the window, her attention riveted on Nate and Francis.

Kayla placed the mask over her face and watched anxiously. Dusa had said they didn’t believe in violence. But this looked like trouble to her.

A light flashed near the truck. Smoke spiraled into the air as the back door of the Global-1 truck flew open and the men disappeared inside. In less than a minute, Nate and Francis raced out of the back of the truck, each of them carrying heavy black cases piled on top of one another. “Go! Go!” Dusa urged them, speaking into the phone on her collar.

From somewhere, a police siren came to life — alerted, no doubt, by the smoke.

Dusa gunned the motor. Two Global-1 cruisers swept into the street ahead of her and two came in from behind. “Put your head down, Kayla!” she shouted as she continued to drive straight for the cruisers.

Doors sprang open as the Globalofficers ran from their vehicles. With her arms over her masked face, Kayla heard the crunching and banging as Dusa knocked the cruisers aside.

A bullet smashed the mirror on the passenger side, spraying the window with clattering pebbles of safety glass. Kayla screamed, surprised and terrified.

Dusa drove for the highway at top speed. A Global-1 cruiser parked at the highway ramp tailed her onto the Superlink. “Our friends look ready,” she spoke into her collar phone.

They came alongside another tractor trailer. Kayla spotted a third tractor trailer, and just ahead of them was a fourth.

“I see our target,” Dusa told the guys in back. “Get ready at the doors.” She was referring to three black SUVs with dark-tinted windows that were driving in front of one another in the center lane of the five-lane Superlink highway. The four big rigs came together, boxing the black SUVs in their center. Dusa and Kayla were in the lead truck.

The screaming siren of the Global-1 cruiser was still somewhere behind the truck. The SUVs trapped in the center of this enclosure had no choice but to drive at the ever-faster speed of the four trucks that had boxed them in.

Dusa honked her truck’s horn and immediately the SUVs were spattered with pails of blood that were tossed from the back of her truck and from the other two on either side of the SUVs. The red blood splashed onto the windows, drenching the vehicles in deep red liquid. The SUVs braked as the truck drivers separated, heading for different exits.
The last thing Kayla saw was the Global-1 cruiser jamming its brakes to avoid hitting the blood-covered SUVs.

“We just dumped a month’s worth of blood samples on the Global-1 bigwigs in those SUVs!” Dusa shouted triumphantly. “We stole them from G-1 couriers in four different locations and tossed them on the Global-1 bosses who were headed for DC. It doesn’t get any better than that!”

“Oh, my God!” Kayla cried, gasping at the audacity of what had just happened.

“It’s the Boston Tea Party of the twenty-first century!” Dusa shouted.

Kayla smiled broadly. It was hard not to be caught up in the victory, though they’d come scarily close to being caught and could still be caught. “Won’t they trace your license plate?”

“It’s a stolen plate.”

“Aren’t you afraid of going to jail?”

“We’re outlaws, kiddo,” Dusa said. “You might as well accept that. They could pull you in today for not having the code. If we’re going to be outlaws anyway, we might as well not worry about it. Speaking of which —” She rapped on the back of her cab, and Nate slid open the narrow door behind her. “We have another crime to commit.”

“Could you drop me off first?” Kayla requested as Dusa drove into the parking lot of a suburban mall. “I need to find Mfumbe and August.”

“Like I told you, it’s already being taken care
of,” Dusa assured her. “There are fake-tattoo–wearing Drakians all over this city. I’ve already sent out word that you’re looking for your friends, along with the descriptions you gave me. You’ll find them faster by sitting tight than you will by trekking around on your own. Besides, your back must still hurt like hell.”

“It does,” Kayla admitted.

Dusa stopped on the outskirts of the mall’s parking lot to allow Nate and Francis a moment to change the license plate on her truck, replacing it with another stolen one from a commercial vehicle.

Nate and Francis opened a box of fake bar code tattoos as Dusa drove, letting the fakes flutter out the back of the truck. “Blow, wind! Blow!” Dusa cheered as the fake tattoos floated on the breezes. “Take ’em like seeds and spread them all over the damn place! A free gift for free people, courtesy of the Drakians!”

Back at the garage, everyone was excited about the success of their mission. “Now there are hundreds of newly tattooed people who can’t be tagged to their genetic histories,” Dusa told Kayla. “Spilling their blood before it could be processed freed them!”

“But Global-1 can collect new samples,” Kayla pointed out.

“True,” Dusa admitted. “But it’s another clog in the cog.”

“What?” Kayla questioned.

Dusa laughed. “It’s like throwing a wooden shoe in the machinery. It stops the wheels from turning for a while; we’ve messed them up for a time. More than that, it sends the message that we’re not going to lie down and let them walk all over us. We won’t let them define who we are or dictate how we live. There’s resistance to their control, and they might as well know it.”

A woman approached them. “We found Mfumbe Taylor,” she reported. “He was spotted in a Waters Shed — that’s what the people are calling the temporary jails that are popping up all over DC. He’s in one outside the Smithsonian Institution.”

“Anything on August?” Kayla asked. Dusa said there wasn’t but suggested that they might find him in the jail along with Mfumbe. “Let’s go,” Kayla said, hurrying to the door of the garage.

“Do you feel strong enough to sit on the back of a motorcycle?” Dusa asked.

The pain in Kayla’s upper back made her wince every time she made even the smallest movement, but she couldn’t let it stop her.

“I love motorcycles,” she said.

With bar code fakes on their wrists, Dusa and Kayla entered the quickly erected building of corrugated metal and high-tech plastics set up outside the Smithsonian Institution. “Ironic, isn’t it?” Dusa said, taking off her helmet. “Hopefully, someday this jail will be
inside
the Smithsonian, just a freaky artifact of American history.”

Their bar codes were scanned at the front door by a uniformed guard. Kayla held her breath nervously until he passed them through. Dusa answered her unasked question as they headed down a row of small, empty jail cells, explaining, “He was seeing a dead person’s file.”

Ahead of them, at the spot where the last cell stood, was a large open room lined with cots. Hundreds of people milled around, some sitting or sleeping, others pacing like caged animals. Dusa broke into a jog. Kayla was about to follow when she heard her name.

Turning quickly, she saw a tall Cherokee woman in jeans and a T-shirt. Long black hair framed a strong, weathered face with piercing dark eyes. “Eutonah!” Kayla gasped as she hurried to the cell. She’d thought her former teacher, her guide, was
still in jail, but apparently Eutonah had come to the march only to be caught again.

“Kayla, listen to me,” Eutonah began in her usual direct manner. “There is something you don’t know. Global-1 wants you. You are more important to them than you realize — and it’s not only because you’re a known bar code resister.”

“Why?” Kayla asked.

“I don’t know that yet,” Eutonah told her. “But our group intercepted an e-mail and your name was in it. Global-1 is desperate to find you. Don’t let them. In fact, you shouldn’t be here. Go!”

“But, Mfumbe —” Kayla began to protest. At that moment Dusa called to her, waving for her to come. Kayla turned toward her and held out her finger to gain a last moment with Eutonah, but when she turned back, the woman was no longer in the cell.

Eutonah, a shaman, could project herself through time and space. When she’d been arrested during last August’s raid, she’d projected herself to Kayla in the mountains, and now she’d appeared to her again.

Global-1 was desperate to find her? Why?

Dusa was still waiting for her, and she had no time to ponder Eutonah’s message. She had to find Mfumbe and get out of there. She looked for Dusa but could no longer see her. A commotion had arisen in the room as a well-dressed man of about sixty-five strode into the holding pen. It was
Ambrose Young, surrounded by a coterie of his staff and followed by reporters. The crowd of prisoners gathered around him.

Using a handheld microphone, Ambrose Young told the prisoners that he’d come to get his son but that David Young refused to leave jail until everyone who had been taken into custody was out. “And he has told me about the outrage of forced bar code tattooing that went on last night,” he added. “We will get each and every one of you out of here, and you will have your day in court.”

As the people stood and cheered him, Kayla wove through the throng. It seemed hopeless, the crowd was so thick.
Mfumbe, where are you?
she tried.

Walk straight back,
his mental answer came.
I saw you for a second before everyone stood up.

She didn’t like the weakness she sensed in him. Something was wrong. After a few more minutes of squeezing between tightly packed bodies, she found him lying on a cot, badly battered. His right eye was purple and swollen, his lip was split. There was something about the angle of his shoulder that worried her, too. “I look good, huh?” he attempted to joke as she knelt beside his cot.

“You’ve looked better,” she confirmed, stroking his forehead instead of kissing his injured lips.

“Here’s the worst of it.” He held out his right arm. A bar code tattoo was emblazoned there.

“Bastards,” Kayla hissed, filled with hot rage.
Angry tears sprang to her eyes. How could they do this to him? She swept the wetness away roughly. This wasn’t a time for crying.

Inside the dense crowd, someone shouted angrily. Fighting had broken out. She scanned the crowd, searching for August but not seeing him.

Dusa came alongside the cot. “Let’s slip out of here in this confusion.”

“I can’t find August,” Kayla said. “We can’t leave without him.”

“He’s not here,” Dusa reported. “One of my contacts saw your friend walking toward the Superlink this morning. It sounded like he was okay.”

Mfumbe tried to pull himself up but winced in pain. He coughed harshly into his hand, and Kayla saw he’d spit up blood.

Offering her arm, Dusa helped him to hoist himself up. Kayla supported his left side, and together they pushed their way along the back wall. Dusa seemed to have an idea where she was headed, so Kayla followed her. When they reached a corner of the Waters Shed, Kayla was sure she smelled burning plastic.

Pounding her fist and kicking, Dusa forced open the spot where the walls met and the two sides came apart. Nate and Francis appeared on the other side, grinning, a blowtorch in Nate’s hand. “Help us,” Dusa ordered, taking the torch and shifting Mfumbe off to them. “Careful. He’s hurt bad.”

Kayla followed Mfumbe as Nate and Francis carried him toward Dusa’s tractor trailer, parked about three yards away.

Francis and Nate climbed into the trailer, carrying Mfumbe with them. Kayla scrambled in behind. As she closed the back doors, she saw other prisoners darting out the opening in the Waters Shed. She also witnessed a G-1 officer racing around to the back of it. The prisoners dispersed in various directions, and she didn’t have time to find out if any were recaptured.

The truck sped off, lurching forward so strongly that she could barely latch the door before sliding across the back of the trailer.

She had Mfumbe back … but what would they do now?