Season 1, Episode 6 - The Tree Plot XII - "The BLT"

Piper finished the last of her sandwich. “There's this popular saying I've been hearing about. It goes something along the lines of ‘who you are in the dark’. I’m not saying that just because it’s the dead of night right now. I’m saying it as in, you really find out about a person’s character when they’re all alone. But that’s the thing - if they’re all alone, how are you going to find out?”

She crossed her arms and nodded confidently. “That’s my job. Politicians, generals, schoolteachers, milkmen - you name it. They got two personas - the public persona in the light, and the private persona in the dark. I’m going to bring that private persona into the light so everybody can see it. How might I do it, you may ask?”

Coyote Joe opened his mouth - to stop her, since he had absolutely zero intention of asking by this point - but Piper kept talking.

“Gritted teeth,” Piper explained theatrically. “Rugged determination. Rugged good looks. A right fist named Free. A left fist named Speech. The desire to never give in until justice is served.

She adjusted her gray scalley cap she wore over her hazel hair. “God, I’m a genius. Let me write that down.”

She pulled her notebook out of her bomber jacket pocket and jotted some notes down. Before Coyote Joe could speak, Piper broke out into her thirty-second monologue of the night. Sitting in that dark corner of the small, out of the way diner deep in the bowels of Waban, Piper eyed her sandwich.

“BLT, not the worst sandwich in the world. But I’ve had better. I guess it makes sense we’re having low quality BLTs, since we’re in a secluded restaurant perfect for secret work. But I’ve had better. Like reubens.”

She grinned at a memory. “I love reubens. Beef and rye bread alone is good enough, but you throw in some melted cheese, some dressing, and a little bit of love...reubens make the world seem half-full. Like this one song, this one song is real half-full. This cop works as a bartender at night, and he trades his old Chevy for a Cadillac. And then he breaks his back! Poor bastard. But, even with a broken back, he can still polish the fenders. Isn’t that inspiring? Just goes to show you that you find silver linings in everything. So, even if it wasn’t a reuben, that BLT was still pretty good. Not the best, but still pretty damn good. Very much like life.”

Coyote Joe stared at her silently for a moment, feeling very much ready to take a shower after receiving twenty-two minutes straight of Piper monologues. He hadn’t even gotten a word in yet.

Pete, I hope your hunch was right about her.

Coyote Pete, the pirate radio host, sent one of his subordinates, Coyote Joe – real name classified – to scope out a Rddhi girl wanting to help out their cause. Their correspondence was informal, but effective, since this girl, this self-proclaimed journalist, had some hidden connections and knew her stuff about sneaking around. The Rddhi girl claimed to be from West Narragansett Technical Academy, a wild card in New England domestic politics. And after the State Police raid, it certainly wasn’t allied to the State Police or Presidential Administration. Cambridge and the Institute were members of the ruling oligarchy; the Academy wasn’t.

The Coyotes had her suspicions about her, of course. Compared to the other schools, the Academy and the students who attended it had less to lose with the informal share of information. It’s just that the Coyotes, in their quest to expose the truths of the tyrannical Presidential Administration, didn’t want to be used by an institution that could very well be seeking to replace the tyranny of the current government with its own.

This Piper girl didn’t seem like a plant. But dear God, she talked your ear off, licked her fingers after eating, asked him if he would cover the bill right when they got there, and when he said he would, she proceeded to order five BLTs!

Rddhi users could be eccentric, Joe knew that. This girl in front of him – this Piper – seemed to be no different. Dressed in her scarlet bomber jacket, she seemed to have no awareness of her oddities. The self-confidence radiating off of her was enough to make Joe shield his eyes.

But she seemed earnest and honest with her intentions, and a source of information from the Academy could always be helpful. The Coyotes knew Gregory Spallacio had a younger brother of his own at the Academy, but things between them seemed rather odd. And Gregory always did his own thing, anyway.

So, Piper it was. She finished the last of her BLTs and wiped her fingers on the table. “I don’t mind going first,” she said in a low whisper, reaching inside her bomber jacket. She pulled out a manila file and slid it across the table with such force that the corner stabbed Joe in the stomach.

Piper paid it no mind as she pulled it out of his body. As Joe rubbed the (admittedly, tiny) cut, she opened it up and explained what she found.

“I like the Academy, but something seems nefarious about them,” she began, still whispering, leaning close over the table. “They subsidize the purchase of a radio, if not a television too, for every household in the Pond. There’s far more radio towers than necessary in the district as well.”

“Bread and circuses,” Joe supposed, rubbing his chin.

“No doubt,” Piper said. “Perhaps they want to distract us from something going on. And there’s a lot going on. The economic depression, the threat of war - or maybe the Academy is doing something itself, behind closed doors, that they want to distract us from. Perhaps it’s both. Perhaps it’s neither.”

You don’t have any idea, do you? Joe wanted to ask, but kept his mouth shut, since it’s not like he knew either. He would have to reconvene with Pete about the situation.

“But this is the most alarming,” Piper continued. She ran a hand through the files in the folder until she pulled out a picture of a smiling Stockham and smiling Morris Dunn, CEO of the Dunn Corporation that could be found on many of the district's billboards. “The Elizabeth Pond border crossing. It’s supposed to keep people in and out, but it really does seem like a turnstile. I’ve gone through it in several disguises - that I made myself, thank you very much - and each time, I passed through easily with my homemade ID cards. That’s all you need - an ID card - to get in or out. They take your name and length of stay and that’s it.”

She narrowed his eyebrows. “Hmm…maybe my arts and crafts skills are too good. I should’ve made shoddy ID cards to see if they really would’ve noticed then.”

“So,” Joe cut in in order to keep the conversation on track, “You’re saying the border crossing doesn’t seem very effective?”

Piper nodded. “It’s good at keeping us Rddhi users in - the Academy requires us to have special passes to leave the district, like the one I have right now for Thanksgiving break - but anyone else can essentially waltz right in and out. It’s almost like it’s just for show.”

Joe eyed the photo of the Chairman and the CEO. “There’s a theory among us that it’s for advertising. That, by keeping track of the visitors to Elizabeth Pond, they can keep track of how many people could see the advertisements within it.”

“Mayhaps,” Piper supposed with a suspicious look. “But when I snooped around the Academy and interrogated-” she made several kung fu swipes in the air when she said that word - “a source from within Dunn, I found out that neither the Academy nor Dunn have the bureaucracy necessary to shift through all that information.”

“Perhaps they have a third party then,” Joe said. “This whole city’s infrastructure is strange. Elevated rails and skyscrapers in a city that could be easily bombed by the enemy. We’ll have to look into that.”

Piper slurped noisily through her straw, sucking up the remnants of the last bits of soda in her glass. Joe sat quietly as she hammered away for far too long.

“Alright,” Piper concluded. “Now, your turn.”

Joe nodded; the info about the Academy and Dunn did seem to be useful. Piper had held up her end of the deal; Joe needed to now as well.

He slid a manila envelope across the table, and Piper took a peek inside. The first thing she saw was a grainy, black and white photo of a girl in an indigo coat with short hair standing atop a lamppost. The camera picked up a bright white light flaring from one of her hands.

“Her hand,” Piper realized. “It looks like there’s electricity sparking in it or something. Is this girl a Rddhi user?”

Joe nodded. “She’s the one who worked for the State Police in the attack on Elizabeth Pond last month. Her name’s Deborah Freeman. Graduated from Institute Feeder High School as a Class 4. Former student of the Institute itself.”

“Ah, I see. I didn’t know what she looked like. But you said former, so what happened?”

“She died two years ago in a freak lab accident,” Joe explained. “So what’s a dead girl from the Institute doing with the State Police?”

Piper grinned, apparently liking this twist to the story. “Maybe she got better?” she proposed. She flipped through the folder and found an old newspaper article from the Narragansett Shield. “Institute Student Killed After Lab Explosion,” she read aloud. “Maybe the explosion looked bad enough to kill, or it would’ve killed anyone normal...but if she’s a Rddhi user, maybe she shook it off.”

“Then why fake her death?”

Piper crossed her arms and grinned, having reached a conclusion. “So she could conduct the nefarious work of the State Police undetected. There are estimates of how many users there are at each school and institution - better to keep some off the books, just to be safe.”

“Speaking of nefarious, check out the next set of notes,” Joe said. As Piper looked them over, Joe explained the situation. “They say there are copycat murderers following the Mystic Killer. People are disappearing out of Androscoggin and Neponset.”

Piper looked at headlines detailing the alleged work of serial killers in those areas. The Narragansett Organ Harvester stuck out to her - Audrey kept going on about it in class as Halloween neared last month. Still though, for there to be so many serial killers active all at once seemed odd.

“The midnight knock at the door, more likely,” Piper concluded. “But everybody knows about that. Why cover it up with stories about serial killers?”

Joe flipped past the article on the Harvester and produced a grainy photo of State Police officers raiding a family duplex in Waban. “Usually, the State Police abducts political prisoners or suspected dissidents, but we noticed a pattern this time - that there is no pattern. It’s random people being abducted.”

Piper munched on the separate pickle that came with the BLTs. “Nefarious indeed.”

“And usually, abductees are brought to the logging camps up in Piscataquis,” Joe continued. “But, when we tracked the vans transporting the prisoners, we found them going to labs within the city. And these labs, it looks like they go through bodies quick. Far too quick for the usual midnight knock at the door. They needed something extra, hence the serial killer stories.”

Piper didn’t like the sound of that. “What do you mean by ‘far too quick’?”

Joe grimaced. “We got a guy manning the incinerator at one of the labs. The number of bodies they go through...you don’t want to know. And the oddest thing is, it’s not always whole bodies. He’s burned just arms and legs, heads, torsos...hearts and brains and internal organs. And sometimes...”

He lowered his voice. “The bodies smell human, but don’t look human. Like they’re imitations of some sort.”

Piper set down her pickle. “Creepy. Maybe this Organ Harvester rumor is based on these State Police activities.”

“Creepy indeed. And here, check out that map,” Joe said next. Piper found a beige-colored map that depicted Narragansett in all its glory, with the Academy marked in the west, Cambridge in the north, and the Institute in the east. There were also a few black X’s scattered around the capital.

“I’ve marked where we’ve discovered State Police-Institute laboratories,” Joe explained. “Originally, there was a mix of labs belonging to each Rddhi school, the government, and private researchers. But it looks like the State Police and the Institute are consolidating their control over them. Huge amounts of money have changed hands in the past few years involving the ownership and contracts for the city’s labs. They say the Squanto Bank branch manager shot earlier this month in Fore River was finalizing the sale of property to the Institute and State Police so they could build a joint laboratory.”

Joe leaned over and pointed at the map. “See anything unusual about the labs’ locations?”

Piper thought it over, her eyes trying to make sense of the array of black X’s. “It looks like...they’re all kind of arranged in a circle. Sort of, maybe?”

Joe leaned back in his seat. “I can’t tell for sure yet, but I think there’s a pattern in the arrangement of the labs. That’s why we’re looking for the locations of more of them. We’re still stumbling around in the dark right now, but there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Off-record Rddhi users, missing people, burnt bodies, and the labs. What does it all mean?”

Piper replayed his words in her head so she wouldn’t forget. “I’m gonna use that line in my memoir. It feels like a good ending to a chapter.”

Joe rubbed his temple. “...I can’t tell if you’re serious or not.”

Piper grinned, but then they heard the bell at the front door ring. They gritted their teeth; three men in black fedoras and suits stepped inside. Each man held a Tommy Gun.

“Staties,” Piper whispered. "Maybe a confrontation would be a better end to the chapter."

“Keep your head down,” Joe said. “Keep calm.”

The lead officer, flanked by two of his men, approached their table. They were tall, broad-shouldered, mustached, and looked like they were in the mood to shoot first and ask questions later.

Piper tensed herself as the officers arrived next to them. Joe tried to take a calm sip of coffee, but he set it down rather uneasily.

“You two better come with us,” the lead officer said gruffly. The others behind him already had their fingers primed on their triggers. When Joe and Piper glanced around the restaurant, they found the other late-night patrons in the restaurant - all four of them - seemed to be incredibly interested in their meals at the moment. Even the bartender seemed heavily intent on wiping out a stain on his counter.

They looked back at the officers; Joe raised his hands defensively. “Hey, hey...I was just trying to pick her up. Leave her be. If you need to take anyone, take only me.”

The officer’s expression didn’t change. “We’ll settle that downtown.”

Piper stood up and grinned, ignoring how the barrels of the Tommy Guns followed her. Joe started sweating at the sight of that grin, since it seemed like Piper had something up her sleeve, and he had no desire of seeing it. “Have you guys seen Of Limes and Lemons yet?” she asked, the whole line seemingly rehearsed. “You know, that German Neo-Expressionist movie with Suga? Shame that he died in the end, but I liked it.”

The lead officer looked at her sternly. “I haven’t seen it yet.” He narrowed his eyes. “So he dies at the end...”

Piper shrugged. “It’s been out for a month already.”

“With everything going on, you think I have any time off?” the officer yelled. “You’ve put me in a bad mood. Both of you, downtown now.”

Joe stood up with his hands raised.

Piper raised her hands as well, though the smirk remained on her face. “You see, my favorite thing about German films are the colors. They only have a couple of cinemas here that play movies in color...I guess that’s why it didn’t do so well in the box office. But it was definitely worth seeing it. All the colors and lights. I love the whole disco-aspect they have going on in movies like that.”

She turned to face the officer. “I have something going on like that too. I call it...”

Red Rddhi currents sparked up her raised arms.

“PLATINUM DISCO!”

In the space between her arms, dozens of pulsing lights appeared, flashing repeatedly, bathing the whole restaurant in blinking white lights. The light show was overwhelming; the officers all felt dizzy, their heads throbbing in pain, from receiving the equivalent of industrial-strength strobe lights at point blank-range. They dropped their guns and fell to their knees.

Unfortunately, so did everyone else in the restaurant besides Piper and Joe. At least three people had seizures.

“Let’s go!” Joe told her. Piper grabbed the manila envelope and followed him out of their booth, past the bar area, into the kitchen in the back. They darted around two surprised line cooks, knocking over pots and pans as they looked for a back exit. They found it just as a Statie kicked in the kitchen door behind them and fired several rounds in their direction. The bullets struck the wall next to the exit just as Joe and Piper escaped into a back alleyway.

Piper instinctively threw up a Platinum Disco as they made it outside; her suspicions were confirmed when she heard several Tommy Guns fire aimlessly into the air, their owners temporarily blinded. Joe took the lead, running past the struggling officers with Piper in tow.

“Where are we going?” Piper asked as Joey navigated the dark maze of alleyways. They passed by back-alley bars and stalls, drunken businessmen stumbling around, all under the glow of aging gaslamps.

“My colleague was waiting for us in his car, just in case,” Joe told her. A State Police officer stepped around a corner, blocking their path, raising his gun to shoot, but Joe was already on him, two rounds to the chest courtesy of the gun he kept hidden under his longcoat.

The officer crumpled back into the shadows as the two continued onward.

“Wow, that’s heavy,” Piper supposed. “You just shot a guy.”

“I shot a lot of guys at Fort Edward,” Joe muttered. “You get used to it.”

“Fort Edward?” Piper repeated. “That thing five years ago? I thought only like five people died there.”

“I killed double that myself,” Joe said. “We made them dig their own mass grave. That’s why I’m here helping Coyote Pete and fighting the good fight.”

“I’ll quote that in my memoirs when this is all said and done, too.” A gaslamp illuminated Piper’s wide grin as they headed around another corner.

At the end of the next alleyway, they saw the light of a main avenue and a Model Litoral waiting for them. A man opened the driver side door and looked over the car.

“Behind you!” he yelled. Through the Rddhi, Piper realized a few State Police officers had caught up to them. Bullets whizzed overhead, and Joe saw Piper trying for another Platinum Disco, but her hands looked weak as she brought them up and she stumbled for a moment, looking dizzy; Joe suspected overuse. He also suspected they might meet their end there if they didn’t do something fast.

Hurry!” the man at the car yelled, his arm launching something down the alleyway. Joe saw light glint off the metal ball-shaped object as it passed overhead, and he realized it was a metal ball-shaped grenade.

Joe slid into the backseat and saw Piper struggling towards the car. He remembered the sight of wounded men and women and children reaching out towards him at Fort Edward; he gritted his teeth and took someone else’s hand for once, dragging Piper into the backseat alongside him.

The grenade then went off, the Litoral peeling away from the shock wave and fireball that decimated the alley.

“A little overkill, don’t you think, Pete?” Joe said gruffly as he settled into the passenger seat.

Piper rubbed her eyes, her strength returning to her. She leaned forward from the backseat. “Pete? As in the Coyote Pete?”

Pete eyed her as Piper, completely uninvited, messed around with the car radio until it arrived on a Asian pop station. “Yeah, that’s me. Coyote Pete, at your service.”

Joe watched Piper observe him under the glow of passing streetlights. Pete was a medium size guy with unkempt, shaggy brown hair and a scar on his cheek.

“You sure got the face for radio,” Piper observed.

“For your information, I was in Cambridge High’s drama club,” Pete told her as he took a left off the avenue, heading for an on-ramp to merge onto the highway. “...I operated the sound system, but still, I was there.”

“And then he became a fearless radio operator while in college,” Joe told Piper. “Kept in touch with his older classmates that joined the Army and saw what they had to say about Fort Edward. The truth about it all. And that was that.”

Pete kept his voice even as he floored the accelerator and the car shot onto the highway. “And that was that.”

Joe glanced over and saw Piper nodding intently, passing orange street lamps flashing across her face.