His fingers fall open as the gun kisses his ribs. I yank my shirt away and step back. But the gun doesn’t budge. The kid’s hand is open between us, frozen in place, and I’m transfixed by a prominent Adam’s apple that bobs all the way down and back up.
“What just happened?” he says, staring into space.
“Your dad had a debt, and Valor Savings called it in. This is totally legal.”
“Valor Savings? The . . . the bank? But why? You can’t just go around shooting people.” Rage and sorrow war on his face, and he’s panting like a dying animal.
“Go read the card, Max,” I say.
“What card?”
I exhale, a soundless sigh.
“The one I left on his chest. Just read it, okay?”
I climb into the truck backward, my eyes locked with his and the gun still pointing at his chest. He doesn’t move. He doesn’t turn to his father’s body. He definitely doesn’t go read the card, which would explain how Valor Savings Bank, now just Valor Savings, paid off every debt the US government owed to every other country on earth and now owns everything from sea to shining sea, plus Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico.
If he would just read it, the dumb asshole, he would know that Valor Savings is now calling in debts and that, thanks to a tricky and vague little clause in a credit card application that no one bothered to read before signing, they can legally kill their debtors. Even if Max did read the card, he still wouldn’t know that he’ll be making his own choice in exactly four days, if not earlier.
Kill or be killed, and God bless Valor.
I could shoot him right now. Could just pull the trigger while he stands there, stunned. Easy pickings. I could have done it a moment ago, while he was holding me by my shirt and the adrenaline and defiance were shooting through my veins, making my trigger finger as itchy as my Valor-issued shirt. I should have done it then, before I looked into his eyes. It would have made my life a hell of a lot easier.
But I couldn’t do it. And I still can’t. Not while he’s wearing that T-shirt. It would be like shooting my favorite band, like killing my old self. And Valor may force me to do things I don’t want to do, but they can’t take away the things I am. Or the things I love.
That’s what I tell myself as I get in the purring mail truck and drive away, my Postal Service shirt crumpled up on the passenger seat by the dented foam gift basket. Max stands there, watching me, until I turn off his street, the big game hunter leaving the Preserve behind until I come to claim the next dumb but magnificent animal in four more days. I swerve to the side, quick, and barf up my salad into the bushes by the neighborhood’s elegant, brick-framed sign.
As I climb back into the truck, the clock on the dashboard stops blinking and calmly begins counting down from 12:00:00.
When the GPS tells me to turn right, I do.
Goddammit, I do.
2.
Eloise Framingham
The next name on my list is an old woman’s name—Eloise. And I kind of hope she is an old woman, so old that she won’t even be able to see my face through milky-white eyes. Maybe I can just smile and hand her the glued-together basket of plastic fruit for a few minutes, make her feel like she won something, like maybe somebody cares. And then I’ll whisper the words on her card, right into the top button so she won’t actually hear them with her cheap-ass hearing aid. And then I’ll shoot her in the back when she goes to get me a glass of milk.
That would make it so easy.
But it’s just another dream.
I pull into her neighborhood, just a few streets over from Bob Beard’s. The Preserve is practically abandoned these days, but this cookie-cutter subdivision of much smaller homes is thriving and tidy. Bob’s house probably has ten rooms in it, not counting bathrooms. These houses might have three, if they’re lucky. I already know what they’re like inside: just like the house where I grew up, where I lived until yesterday morning, where my mom is waiting for me, exhaustively praying to Mother Mary while high on prescription narcotics.
Point is, this could be my house. Probably has scuffed parquet by the front door, a coat closet full of junk, torn linoleum in the kitchen, sparkling-clean toilet bowls next to faded wallpaper. The people who live here are what my mom used to call “the proud poor” before the economy went sour and then downright bitter. Before she took a lesser-paying job and finally realized that she was one of them.
Eloise’s house is sloped and unbalanced, basically a big lean-to striped with weathered gray wood boards. It reminds me of when Pa built log cabins in Little House on the Prairie, like one day soon they’ll build the other side of the house and make it symmetrical. Which, of course, they never will. The yard is trim, and there’s a birdbath and a reflecting ball relaxing amid strategically partying garden gnomes. There’s a For Sale sign, too, pretty faded. And wind chimes made of sea shells.
Please, please, let Eloise be an old woman.
I stop the mail truck in front of her house and unwad my Postal Service shirt. It’s been riding shotgun beside me as I follow the directions on my Valor-issued GPS unit. They want to make sure I know exactly where each of my marks lives, and they want me to get to them all within the time frame, before word gets out and people start hiding from anything that looks governmental. Or anything with a Valor logo. My instructions say that if a debtor runs or I can’t find them within their twelve-hour period, I set fire to the house. Which makes me think of my mom and that stupid, fraying heating pad she sleeps with for her back and how easy it would be for my own house to go up in flames that no one would ever question or investigate. Now that I’m carrying a gun and I know what Valor can do, nothing familiar feels safe.
She’s why I’m doing this, of course. My mom did a great job of raising me after my piece-of-crap dad left us when I was four, but when the recession hit, it hit us hard. First Bob Beard sent her packing and we were on unemployment. We were even on food stamps for a while. She took a job that was far away and paid less, but the stress really ate at her. Her last job wasn’t awesome, and the insurance was even worse. When she totaled the car on the highway six months ago and spent two weeks in the hospital, it was pretty much the last straw. Now she can barely walk, she’s depressed and addicted to pills, and I’m maxing out my hours at the pizza place just to keep the electricity on.
Or I was. I told Roy and Jeremy that I had to cancel all my shifts and go out of town for a funeral, but I didn’t mention it might be my own.
My mom always told me that if you worked hard and paid your dues, you would be happy. A good person. And then, a couple of months ago, she asked me if she could borrow something from my savings and use some of my work money. And to bring home an extra pizza when Jeremy dropped me off after work. She’d always said my work money was my college money, and when she asked for some of it, the wrinkles around her lips quivering, I knew things were worse than she was letting on. But I had no idea how bad they really were.
Up until two nights ago, I never could have guessed that she was more than $100,000 in debt. That she had taken out a second mortgage. That she had pawned the title to our new piece-of-shit car. That she’d been fired for missing too much work after the car accident—and kept it from me. That under the influence of generic Vicodin, she had done everything they tell you not to do to stay afloat in an economy this bad and had hidden it from me out of shame. My mom had raised me to be humble, determined, hardworking, and tenacious, just like her.
Turns out that was just a bunch of bullshit.
And here I am today, seventeen and driving around a repainted mail truck, killing strangers for the megacorporation that now runs my government. I can’t even begin to grasp what sort of threats, voodoo, and cold, hard cash are behind the fact that everyone in America—excuse me, Valor Nation—doesn’t seem to know to whom they are now pledging allegiance. But somehow, Valor has managed to give themselves at least five day
s of complete radio silence in which to set the new regime in motion by getting rid of the irresponsible scum dragging down the economy with unpaid bills.
It’s finally open season in America the Beautiful.
And lucky me. I get to be part of it.
The representative who came to our door in a black suit like the CIA guys wear in movies was as composed and careful and neutral as a plastic figurine. I was sitting cross-legged on the couch when the doorbell rang, working on a knitted cozy for the flagpole at school, knee-deep in bright yellow acrylic yarn. My mom opened the door, and he scanned the room before walking right past her without being invited inside. He had wires sticking out from his ears and a precision to his haircut and sideburns that made me think they had programmed his hair to grow along a dotted line.
“Patricia Klein?” he said, standing right in front of me, more a statement than a question.
I was so surprised and freaked out I could only mutter, “Patsy,” under my breath, like he cared about my nickname.
“I’m here to offer you a wonderful opportunity,” he said.
He perched on the edge of the sagging recliner, and my mom looked out the door. Whatever she saw in the front yard made her close the door, lock it, and sit by my side on the couch, pulling my hand away from my knitting needles and clutching it tightly like she already knew terrible news was coming. Good news arrives with TV cameras and big, brightly painted vans. Bad news arrives quietly, in dark sedans with black windows. Worry and guilt rolled off my mom like fumes, her shoulders slumping like she’d been caught doing something bad. When I was little, my ex–best friend, Amber, had a puppy who used to look like that when he peed on the rug while wagging his tail. But he ran away, and later on, I had to admit that he was smarter than he looked.
“An opportunity?” my mom said slowly, like it was a word she’d never heard before.
“I represent a very high level of the government, and we’d like to recruit your daughter,” the man said. He never gave a name or offered a business card. But he did hand me the same card I leave with my victims—with my mom’s name and six figures on it. And then he handed me another one with lots of legalese and double-talk. And he watched me read it, his face as impassive as a turned-off TV. I dropped it into the puddle of yarn in my lap, my yarn bombing forgotten.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Congress? Amendments? Banks? I don’t get it.”
His smile had the greased movement of a machine. There was no kindness there, no empathy.
“Patricia, has your mother not spoken to you about her debts?”
“Don’t drag her into this. Whatever needs doing, I’ll do it,” my mother said before I could even turn to her in utter disbelief. And yet, was it utter? Underneath it all, there was some tiny click as everything came together. As it made sense.
The man slowly reached into his matte black blazer and pulled out a matching matte black gun. Of course I knew what it was. Jeremy and Roy from work had taken me shooting a few times. Not at a range, since I’m underage. But out in the fields behind their trailer park, where they had some old bales of hay and one sad, three-legged plastic deer set up. It felt good and rebellious, blasting a few rounds of cheap bullets into a row of off-brand soda cans while my pizza-tossing geek friends from math class drank stolen beer and cheered me on. It was my one concession to my white-trash roots, shooting that gun in my hipster getup and sale-rack gladiator sandals. Learning how to handle a gun made me feel powerful, offered a different sort of high than the one I get from yarn bombing and selling rude embroidery patterns on Etsy, channeling my frustration into doing something beautiful and defiant with my hands. Most of the time, I prefer creation to destruction. Valor Savings feels differently on that topic.
As I sat there, cradling a half-made yellow flagpole cozy and a doomsday card in my lap, the man pointed his gun at my mom’s chest. And just like Bob Beard, that’s when I knew it was real.
“What’s your choice, Patricia?” he said casually.
My heart jumped into my sinuses, and I picked the card back up, fingers shaking. The words all blurred together. It still didn’t make any sense. It was printed in green ink with a weird seal at the top and the Valor Savings Bank logo at the bottom. Except the word “bank” was gone.
Just Valor Savings now.
“I can’t even . . .” I trailed off.
I guess the robot guy understood what I wasn’t able to say. As I watched my mom clutch her chest and stare down the barrel of a gun, he explained it with the clear implication that he would indulge me only once.
“Due to overwhelming national debt, Valor Savings Bank combined with several private shareholders to relieve the government of their obligations to other countries.”
“You mean they bought us?”
A cold, reptilian smile.
“‘Bought’ is such an ugly word, Patricia. They saved us. From ourselves.”
My mother crossed herself and started praying under her breath.
“One of the first acts of the Valor Savings Congress was to draft Amendment 7B, which calls in a tricky bit of fine print from the Valor Savings Bank Platinum Credit Card Agreement issued in 2007 through 2013. Debtors owing significant amounts and in arrears for more than three months can, in effect, be considered indentured servants and can, therefore, be legally killed in recompense. And Valor Savings is now calling in several of those debts to relieve the country of deadweight. Our algorithms have pinpointed you, Patricia Klein, as an optimal debt collector.”
“She’s just a child!” My mom’s voice was painfully high, her swollen fingers tight around mine. “I’ll do it. Don’t . . . This is my business. It’s not her fault. It’s mine.”
The man swiveled to face her, his gun never wavering. “You’re old, slow, overly religious, damaged, and drugged. You have neither the emotional fortitude nor the stamina to accomplish this simple task. But Patricia is an ideal recruit. And, if she fails, she’s no great loss to the future economy. Consider this . . . an internship.”
“Like in a call center?” I said, voice shaking.
“More like a bounty hunter,” he said. “Did you ever watch that show on Bravo? Dog the Bounty Hunter?”
I gave him a blank stare. “The wrestler? Like with a mullet? Who never kills anyone?” I said. “Like Boba Fett?”
Something in his jaw twitched then, and I decided to speak as little as possible from there on out.
“Allow me to be frank, Miss Klein. Your mother owes $167,892.33 to Valor Savings. We already own the car and the house. And, per her signature, we own her.”
The gun pointed at her chest never so much as trembled the whole time. But I did.
“Mom, is that true?”
“I think it’s gone up a little since I quit paying it,” she said, her voice childish and wavering, like a recording of herself. Her fingers left mine to clutch her rosary against her wrist brace.
The man smiled again, showing even, white teeth.
“Now, I’m sure you don’t want me to shoot your mother,” he said. “Not only because no young girl should be orphaned, especially not one who hasn’t seen her father since she was four. But also because there will be no witnesses. Who knows what might happen? You could get shot too. The house could burn down.”
“You’re going to shoot us both?” I asked. My hands started to lift up of their own accord, like we were in an old Western movie and he had told me to reach for the sky. But he lowered the gun, shook his head as if it were a joke, and smiled like a car salesman.
“Valor Savings doesn’t want it to come to that. We don’t want to lose our bright young stars before they even get a chance to shine.”
I gave him as much of a deadpan look as possible, considering his gun was still mostly pointed at my mom, held loosely in his hand. If he’d done his homework, he’d learned about my homework. I’m not a genius, but I tr
y hard. I mostly get A’s and B’s because I really want to get into community college, maybe get a grant or a scholarship to a state school. No awards for me, no after-school activities. I stay out of trouble, although I was once caught selling parsley to some freshman idiot in the last stall of the girls’ room, having convinced her it was weed as a joke. While the other girls in my class went for jobs at the mall or the Cracker Barrel, I’m content to sling cheap-ass pizza because that means I can walk home if I have to. If I was a star, then the sky was getting pretty freaking bleak.
“We don’t care about your grades,” he said as if reading my mind. “We have your test scores. You have the exact qualities we’re looking for.”
I turned to my mom and gave her my usual, careful smirk.
“And you were worried about my career prospects,” I said. “I’m being recruited!”
I guess that was what broke her and, in effect, me. My mom sobbed and doubled over, dropping the rosary, her arms wrapped around her belly. She’d gained a lot of weight since the accident, and she couldn’t really hug herself anymore. As she rocked back and forth, crying, I realized that it was the saddest, most hopeless, most desperate I’d ever seen her. When Dad left, when she’d lost her good job and had to take a worse one, when I saw her in the hospital, covered in dried blood and bruises—all these experiences had been torture for me to watch, helpless.
But this was worse.
“Karen, this is no reason to cry,” the man said, and I sensed a cruel glee under his carefully manicured facade. “It’s not like she had any real future. It’s not like she was going to college. And you’ll be able to afford the treatments you need now. If she succeeds.”
My head shot up. “Treatments?”
Mom just sobbed harder and turned her face away like she was trying to bury it in her shoulder.
“She didn’t tell you about the lump they found in her breast?”