Revolt of the Rats - Reed Blitzerman (early readers txt) 📗

Boomer picked up on the fourth or fifth ring. “Alright, Hoss, where you want to meet?”

“Usual.”

Inside The Pressroom, a crushed velvet darkness enveloped him.  Overhead vents drove fingers of heat down his collar, loosening his coat and lightening his mood. The book was in his backpack. Aggie was waiting for him. And a sliver of hope survived that he could win Bee and keep his job.

He was on a mission, until he noticed a dark haired beauty seated at the bar. The side of her face was visible in relief, cheekbone and chin standing out, eyes and mouth lost to the darkness. Bee. He felt a pressure in his chest, slowed his pace to a stop, and experienced a temporarily break from reality.

She rose from her chair and crossed the room, eyes swollen, breath perfumed in tart bourbon. Smiling now, coming close. She took his hand, guiding him out the front of the bar, out the rear of the factory, to the picnic tables just beyond the heat treat doors, where baking forgings bathed them in pungent sulfur. Blooming wildflowers surrounded them. He picked one and placed it in her hair.

She said, “I will always love you, Kahle.”

And she was hugging him, her heartbeat like a butterfly in a bell jar, her aura enveloping them in licking white fire, lifting them off the ground, turning the wildflowers around them into a field of flames.

He came to with a shock as cold beer slopped on his shirt. The serving tray clattered to the floor. The waitress (Her nametag said “Candy”) kneeled and her mouth twisted in a snarl; the broken bottles laid out like dead soldiers, their pristine brown bodies reduced to shrapnel.

He looked again at the girl at the bar. Long, manicured hands reached for her drink. She shifted her narrow hips in her seat. She was someone else, and he was just another damn fool. He crouched, trying to help Candy retrieve assorted shards but she waved him away, muttering under her breath, “...the fuck’s wrong with you?”

He pressed through the crowd toward the back, where Boomer was in a booth facing the door, illuminated in a greasy yellow halo. An amber bottle of beer sweated in his hand. Kahle collapsed into the booth and slid the booklet across. He said, “This is the bomb! I mean, I think this guy knows what he's talking about.”

“I can't read it through your hand." Boomer swiped foam from his lips and then turned the pages.

“Well, look at that picture, and that one.”

“Do you know what we're looking at?” Boomer asked.

Kahle wasn’t sure what he thought, but he knew what he felt. The paper was rough, but the images were lines of precise black ink, filled with blushes of color. Whomever created the sketches had put a lot of effort into getting them right. “Well, yeah. Maybe. You’re the production guy. You tell me.”

Boomer ignored him, turning the pages at a unhurried pace. Figures ran machines, added numbers, and followed arrows. A female figure stood in the center of her fellow sketches, her open hand above her head, palm facing the others in a pantomime “watch me.”

Sometimes Boomer’s confidence reminded him of Noyce. Everything seemed so certain to them. He envied that. This was the part where Noyce would have laughed. But Noyce was a world away. He focused on the puzzle sitting in front of him. “Well maybe,” Kahle said, “...well maybe it's a textbook.”

“If it’s a textbook, it's a textbook with almost no words.” Boomer turned the yellowed pages with a tentative hand, staring silently at the diagrams,  rocking side to side. “If you had a workforce that was illiterate or spoke multiple languages you'd use something like this, just pictures and numbers.”

Kahle knew Sanskrit and this wasn’t that. But it made him think of something else. Ancient Egyptians wrote in pictures. The description evaded his tongue. The words were blue and wide. Hieroglyphs. This was like that. Of course, they had no Rosetta Stone to translate it.

Kahle was reading the pages upside down, when he was jolted by recognition. Amongst the few words, one surfaced from his past: “kata”.

He was eighteen on the first day of cadet combatives; shivering with his peers in a room that smelled like blood, old sweat and faded bleach. They circled around Swiss Miss, his Judo coach, in the middle of the wrestling mats. She motioned the largest cadet in the class forward from his spot in the front row.

“Today we start with kata. Watch me,” she said. “Later you will do what I do.”

Before she started, it seemed impossible. She grabbed Neanderthal Man’s left arm and the lapel of his judo gi, pulling his body in a ragged circle. Once she was in motion, it seemed unstoppable. Her leg whipped out to catch his foot and he slapped on his back like a table with a missing leg, confusion registering on his face. Wherever had the floor come from? Why was all his air gone?

Swiss Miss pulled him to his feet and resumed her former station: hands on her hips, the twin buns in her hair undisturbed. “This is how is done,” she said. “Combat is not about the muscles, it is about the will. Who do you think is the strongest?” No one spoke.

“I think smallest is strongest. As soldiers, they must fight like rodents to survive, like rats. We’ll see.” She pointed at Kahle. “You’re next.”

“Kahle...Kahle? Where do you go when you do that?”

Kahle said, “That book looks pretty old.”

“Yeah, and there's no author listed. There’s something here that looks like a warehouse. Maybe this could help us improve shipments,” Boomer said. “We're at sixty percent on time right now, and dropping.”

“That's not what it says in the company newsletter.” Kahle rotated the images in his mind, searching for a pattern.

Boomer placed a hand over the book. “Bodge is just shipping stuff into storage. We don’t actually have orders for those. Take that out and the numbers are worse.”

Kahle’s mouth went dry. “How much worse?”

“Terminal.”

Kahle gave up on the book, replacing the pictures with images of occupying his parents couch, searching the papers for a new job. “Didn't know you watched that.”

“Well, yeah, Kahle. You have to make plans.”

Boomer’s knowing attitude reminded him of his lieutenant days; when he exchanged information with the colonel’s driver over a couple of packs of smokes. “Who’s your informant?”

Boomer smirked, making circles on the table with the sweat from his beer. “Margaret in planning.”

Kahle blushed.

Boomer said, “I'm going to get this to her before we meet tomorrow. She might even still be in the shop.”

Kahle nearly blacked out reliving her hammer-throwing arms carrying him up the stairs. Had she told anyone? Was she laughing about it right now with the other people in purchasing? He was tempted to call off sick tomorrow.

“Kahle, you okay?”

“Yeah, beer's just really strong and I missed lunch.”

Boomer tilted the book in the light and then started to pack it away. “Well, I think she could help us implement this.”

The book was important, he knew it: like a message in a bottle or a treasure map, a talisman, a lodestone guiding him to Bee. It pulled at Kahle as it sank into Boomer's satchel. He just couldn’t decode it. Not right this minute, anyways.

Boomer sensed Kahle’s frustration and rolled his eyes. “Stop pouting. We can't do this alone. Margaret can help us. We need to read her in.”

Margaret was a one woman Russian revolution. Kahle wondered what else she would talk him into. But he couldn’t figure out the diagrams; and the way she crunched numbers, maybe she could.

Aggie was right. Kahle slouched, resigned to his humiliation. If anyone could help it was her. Unless they went higher. Anything to save face. “Maybe we should run this by Bodge?”

“How about we try it out first? You just got this thing in the mail from who knows who, written who knows when, based on who knows what. He could be some sort of crackpot or fraud. If we go straight to Bodge, we’d need something to show him. He can be hard to convince.”

Kahle drew a long gulp from his beer. “You mean to say, he can't find his ass in the dark with both hands.”

“That’s what I just said.”