Static In The Snow

A numb arm, a failed jump, and a lost flashlight leave him dangling over the abyss, only to find help is another kind of violence.

The soup came back up with the violence of an exorcism. It wasn't a choice. His body simply rejected it, a sudden, convulsive lurch that bent him double over a jagged tear in the skyway’s floor. A thick, gray slurry erupted from his throat, shockingly cold, tasting of rust and stomach acid. It arced out into the blackness, a miserable offering to the void, and vanished into the wind that howled up from the street hundreds of feet below. He didn't hear it land.

The heave was so powerful it lifted him onto his toes. His good hand, his right, slammed against a rusted girder to keep him from pitching forward into the gap. His left arm, a dead thing of pins and needles from the cryo-foam, swung uselessly at his side, throwing off his balance. Another wave hit him. This one was just bile, thin and burning. It spattered against the corroded metal, freezing instantly into a pale, crystalline stain. He stayed there, braced against the girder, head hanging, spitting the last of the acrid taste from his mouth. Each breath was a ragged tear in his lungs, the sub-zero air scraping him raw from the inside out.

He pushed himself upright, his whole body trembling with the aftershocks. The brief, desperate satisfaction of a full stomach was gone, replaced by a hollow, aching emptiness. He had eaten the evidence. He had poisoned himself. And for what? Five minutes of warmth before his own biology betrayed him. Self-loathing, cold and familiar, coiled in his gut. It was almost funny. He was a walking catalogue of failures. A monument to bad decisions. The numbness in his left arm felt like a judgment, a physical manifestation of his own uselessness.

The wind was a physical force up here, a relentless predator that found every tear in his coat, every gap in his clothing. It shoved and pulled, its voice a constant, high-pitched shriek as it tore through the shattered superstructure of the bridge. This section of the skyway, known as the Broken Span, was a deathtrap. Decades-old infrastructure, neglected long before the barricades went up, now swiss-cheesed by drone fire and weakened by seasons of ice. Loose panels rattled. Wires, stripped of their casing, whipped and sparked against exposed rebar. Below his feet, through the missing floor plates, Theo could see the distant, snow-dusted shapes of military checkpoints and the skeletal remains of burned-out vehicles. It was a long way down.

He needed to get to Owen's Node. Owen, the ghost in the city's machine, the architect of the pirate network. If anyone could get his footage out—the little he had salvaged before his camera was destroyed—it was Owen. But Owen’s price was always information. A new scoop. Theo had nothing. He had a story about poisoned soup he could no longer prove. He was coming empty-handed, a beggar.

He started moving, his right hand trailing along the icy interior wall for balance. The floor was a treacherous mosaic of intact tiles, buckled metal, and gaping holes. He had to watch every step. His eyes, adjusted to the gloom, made out the faint, ambient glow of the city lights reflecting off the low-hanging clouds. It wasn't much, but it was enough to see the next hazard, the next potential misstep.

He came to a gap. A chasm, really. A maintenance drone had sliced clean through the floor, leaving a twelve-foot drop to the level below and a ten-foot jump to the other side. Normally, it wouldn't have been a problem. A running start, a committed leap. He’d done it a hundred times. But 'normally' he had two functioning arms for balance. 'Normally' his body wasn't a shivering, exhausted wreck.

He backed up, trying to get a small run-up. The floor was slick with frost. He stomped his feet, trying to get some purchase, the sound echoing in the metallic coffin of the skyway. He took a few deep breaths, the air burning his throat. He could feel his heart hammering against his ribs, a frantic, unsteady rhythm. This was stupid. There had to be another way. He glanced back. Miles of broken walkway. No. This was the only way forward.

He ran. It was a clumsy, shuffling sprint, his body screaming in protest. His left arm flopped, uncooperative. He pushed off with his right leg, launching himself across the gap. For a split second, he was airborne, suspended in the shrieking wind, the abyss below him. He knew, instantly, that he wasn't going to make it. His trajectory was off, his momentum pathetic. His dead arm had pulled him sideways. His boots hit the far edge, not flat, but at an angle. The worn rubber sole found no purchase on the ice-rimmed steel. He slipped.

A strangled cry was ripped from his throat. His body twisted, his good arm lashing out by pure instinct. His gloved fingers scraped, then caught, on the jagged edge of the torn floor plate. The impact was a brutal, dislocating jolt that shot from his wrist to his shoulder. He was dangling. The wind snatched at his legs, trying to tear him loose. Below him, nothing but darkness and the distant, uncaring street.

Panic, white-hot and absolute, flooded his system. His fingers were screaming, the muscles in his arm straining to the point of tearing. He tried to swing his legs, to find a foothold on the vertical face of the bridge, but there was nothing. Just smooth, frozen steel. The edge of the metal plate was cutting into his palm, even through the thick glove. He could feel his grip weakening. He was going to fall.

No. The word was a silent snarl in his mind. *Not like this.* He gritted his teeth, the muscles in his jaw aching. He put every ounce of his remaining strength into his right arm, into his core. He pulled. It was a graceless, shuddering motion. Metal screeched. His chin scraped against the rough edge of the floor, a sharp, grinding pain. His coat snagged on a shard of metal, and he heard the sickening sound of tough fabric ripping. He heaved again, his vision swimming with black spots. His elbow cleared the edge. Then his chest. He flopped onto the floor like a landed fish, gasping, every muscle screaming.

He lay there for a long time, the side of his face pressed against the freezing floor. He could taste blood from his chin. His right arm was a trembling, useless bundle of agony. The only thing he could hear over the wind was the frantic, desperate thump of his own heart. He had survived. By sheer, stupid luck. He rolled onto his back, wincing, and stared up at the skeletal remains of the skyway's ceiling. The feeling wasn't relief. It was humiliation. He was a clumsy animal, reduced to scrabbling for his life because his own body had failed him.

Something was missing. The thought surfaced slowly through the haze of pain and adrenaline. A weight. A familiar shape. He fumbled at his belt with his trembling right hand. The loop was empty. His flashlight. It must have been torn loose in the fall. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, peering back over the edge into the chasm. There was nothing. Just the black. He listened, straining to hear the faint clatter of it hitting the level below, but the wind swallowed all sound. Gone. His only source of light, gone.

He slumped back down, a fresh wave of despair washing over him. Now he was blind. He was in the middle of the Skyway Catacombs, a maze of booby-trapped corridors and structural collapses, with no light. He closed his eyes. It made no difference. The darkness was absolute.

He forced himself to his feet. Standing was an ordeal. His legs were shaky, his good arm felt like it was on fire, and his numb arm was a lead weight. Progress became glacial. He moved with one hand outstretched, shuffling his feet, feeling for the next solid piece of ground. The wall was his guide, a lifeline of cold, gritty metal and concrete. His fingers brushed over peeling paint, over the spiderweb cracks of stress fractures, over the raised, braille-like patterns of old graffiti. Every few feet, he'd stop and listen, trying to map the space with his ears. The wind was his enemy, masking the subtle groans and creaks that might warn of an unstable floor plate.

Time lost all meaning. It could have been minutes or an hour. The darkness was a sensory deprivation chamber. His own thoughts became unnervingly loud. The memory of the fall played on a loop, the slip, the jolt, the scrape of his chin. Each time, the self-recrimination got sharper. *You're a hack, Garrick. A clumsy, washed-up hack.* He thought of Mina, of the way she moved with such purpose, her hands steady, her voice calm even in the middle of chaos. What would she think of him now? A man who couldn't even jump over a hole in the floor without nearly killing himself.

Finally, his outstretched hand hit not a wall, but a door. A heavy, steel fire door. He recognized its shape, the recessed handle. This was it. The entrance to the sublevel network where Owen had his Node. He fumbled for the handle, his fingers stiff and clumsy with cold. He found the lever and pushed down. It didn't budge. Rusted shut. Of course. He put his shoulder into it, grunting with the effort. Nothing. He kicked it, just above the handle, the impact jarring his entire leg. The sound was a flat, unsatisfying thud. He kicked it again, harder, channeling all his frustration into the blow. A loud crack echoed in the corridor, and the door groaned inward a few inches.

He squeezed through the gap into a space that was somehow even darker and colder than the skyway. The air was still, heavy with the smell of dust and old insulation. He was in a service corridor. According to the scavenged schematics he’d memorized, Owen's hideout was at the end of this hall, behind a reinforced utility closet. He started shuffling forward again, his hand back on the wall, when his foot caught on something. A wire, thin and taut, strung about six inches off the floor.

He pitched forward, arms flailing. The sound was instantaneous and deafening. A hellish, metallic clatter erupted from both sides of the hall. It wasn't an electronic alarm; it was a cascade of tin cans, dozens of them, filled with ball bearings and bolts, all tied together and sent crashing against the concrete walls and floor. The racket was obscene in the dead silence, a physical assault of noise that echoed and amplified in the narrow space.

Before he could even process the noise, a light exploded in his face. Not a steady light, but a high-frequency strobe, pulsing with a blinding, disorienting rhythm. White. Black. White. Black. It seared his retinas, wiping out what little night vision he had. He threw his good arm up to shield his eyes, stumbling backward, his ears ringing from the alarm. Every pulse of the strobe revealed the corridor in stark, fractured detail: pipes, conduit, his own frantic shadow dancing on the walls.

“Canis Rufus! Canis Rufus!” he tried to shout. It was the code phrase Owen had given him months ago. But his throat, ravaged by the cold, the vomiting, and the screaming exertion, failed him. The words came out as a strangled, wet rasp. A pathetic wheeze that was completely swallowed by the dying rattle of the tin cans.

“Quiet, you little bastard,” a voice hissed from the darkness in front of him. The strobe was positioned behind the speaker, turning them into a twitching, headless silhouette.

A shape lunged out of the pulsing darkness. Theo didn't have time to react. He saw a leg swing, and then a boot connected squarely with his ribs. The impact drove the air from his lungs in a sharp, painful gasp. He doubled over, clutching his side, and fell to one knee. The pain was a bright, hot flare. He thought he heard a rib crack. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't see.

The silhouette took a step closer, its form jerky and unnatural in the strobe's frantic pulse. “Thought I sealed that grate. Squeaking all night.” The voice was fast, muttered, distracted. It wasn't talking to him. It was talking to itself.

This was Owen. Of course. Theo realized with a sickening lurch what was happening. Owen was wearing some kind of VR rig. A blackout visor covered his eyes, and thick, haptic gloves were on his hands. He was jacked in. He wasn't seeing Theo. He was seeing an overlay, a digital world. The tin can alarm was just a peripheral alert, an annoyance. To him, the noise was a rat.

“Owen!” Theo gasped, the name a pained croak. “Owen, it’s me!”

The figure paused, head cocked. But it wasn't listening to Theo. Its head twitched left and right, tracking some unseen digital target. “Packet loss… unacceptable latency… come on, you piece of…”

He was going to get kicked again. Or worse. Theo knew he had seconds to make Owen understand. Reasoning was out. He had to break through the digital haze. He lunged from his kneeling position, a desperate, clumsy tackle aimed at Owen's legs. He wrapped his good arm around Owen's knees, driving his shoulder into his thighs. The impact was solid. They both went down in a tangled heap of limbs and a shower of curses.

Owen reacted instantly. Not like a man who'd been tackled, but like a system under attack. His movements were brutally efficient. A gloved hand, wiry and strong, grabbed a handful of Theo’s hair and slammed his head against the concrete floor. The world exploded in a flash of white, then swam back into a blurry, strobing nightmare. Before Theo could even register the pain, something hard was jammed against his leg.

He heard a high-pitched electronic whine, a sound like a capacitor charging. He knew that sound. A taser. “No, wait—!” he gargled.

It was too late. A switch clicked. A blinding blue-white arc of electricity jumped from the prongs into his thigh. His world ceased to exist. There was only the electricity. It was not pain in the conventional sense; it was a violation. A thousand volts hijacking his entire nervous system, turning his muscles into a single, massive, clenched knot of agony. His leg convulsed, kicking out of his control. A scream was locked in his throat, unable to escape the paralyzed muscles of his diaphragm. His vision dissolved into pure static. He could smell his own hair burning.

Then it was over. The current stopped. The tension vanished. His body went limp, a dead weight on the floor. The only thing he could feel was the ghost of the electricity, a phantom buzzing under his skin, and the dull, throbbing ache where his head had hit the concrete. The strobe light continued its relentless, maddening pulse.

He heard a grunt, and the weight on top of him shifted. Owen was pulling off the blackout visor. “What the hell…?” The voice was different now. Confused. Present. The strobe clicked off, plunging the corridor back into near-total darkness, relieved only by a faint, blue glow from the open doorway behind Owen.

“Garrick?” Owen’s voice was a shocked whisper. “Theo? Is that you?”

Theo tried to answer. He opened his mouth, but only a low moan came out. He was lying on his side, his body refusing to obey him. His entire left leg was twitching uncontrollably, the muscle spasming from the taser shock.

“Shit. Oh, shit.” Owen scrambled off him. “I thought… the alarm… I thought you were a rat. A big one.” There was no apology in his voice. Just a detached, clinical surprise, as if he’d discovered a fascinating new species of insect by stepping on it.

Owen grabbed him under the armpits and began to drag him. Theo’s boots scraped uselessly against the concrete. Every movement sent a fresh wave of agony through his ribs and a fiery protest from his tased leg. “My leg,” Theo managed to gasp out, the words thick on his tongue.

“Yeah, I see it. It’ll stop twitching in a minute. Probably.” Owen dragged him through the doorway and unceremoniously dropped him on the floor inside the Node. The door hissed shut behind them, sealing them in.

The transition was jarring. From the absolute cold and dark of the corridor to a stifling, oppressive heat. The room was a small utility closet, no bigger than a walk-in freezer, but every inch of wall space was covered with salvaged monitors and the humming, blinking chassis of server racks. The air was dry and smelled of ozone, hot plastic, and the faint, sweet-sour tang of stale energy drinks. Cables, thick as pythons, snaked across the floor, over the equipment, and hung in dense loops from the ceiling. It wasn't a room; it was the inside of a dying computer, a chaotic nest of wires and heat.

Owen Valen stood over him, a wiry man lost inside a stained, oversized parka. He was younger than Theo, maybe twenty-two, with a pale, sallow face that rarely saw the sun. His eyes, wide and bloodshot, darted around, never settling on one place for long. He ran a hand through his greasy, matted hair. “You look like hell, man. What happened to you?”

Theo pushed himself up, leaning against a humming server rack. The metal was almost too hot to touch. “Got… complicated,” he rasped, his throat still on fire. He tried to get to his feet, but his left leg gave out immediately, sending him sprawling back into a chaotic tangle of ethernet cables. He landed hard, his bad arm banging against a power supply unit.

Owen watched him, making no move to help. He just shook his head, a small, pitying smile on his lips. “You trip my alarm, you don’t give the code, and you tackle me while I’m debugging a kernel panic in the mesh network. You’re lucky I didn't use something with a bit more stopping power.” He nudged Theo's twitching leg with the toe of his boot. “That’s a 50,000-volt rig. You’re gonna feel that tomorrow. And the day after.”

“I need your help, Owen.” Theo’s voice was strained, each word an effort. “I have footage. BHI. The loading dock incident. It’s… it's not everything, but it's something.”

Owen let out a short, sharp laugh that was more of a bark. “Footage? From what, that piece of junk you carry around?” He gestured vaguely toward Theo’s empty hip. “Where is it? You lose your camera too?”

“It was destroyed. But I have the data card. Salvaged it.” Theo fumbled inside his ripped coat with his good hand, his fingers numb and clumsy. He finally located the tiny, wafer-thin memory card in a sealed pocket and held it up. “I need you to get this out. Uplink it to the wire services. Outside the zone.”

Owen didn't take the card. He just squinted at it from a distance, his expression one of profound disappointment. “A physical card. Analog trash. Theo, what year do you think this is? Everything is encrypted, peer-to-peer. You hand me that, and I have to physically plug it into a clean machine, sandbox it, scan it for BHI malware, decrypt whatever proprietary crap your camera uses, and then transcode it. It’s a liability. A physical liability.”

“It’s proof,” Theo insisted, his voice cracking with desperation. He felt a wave of dizziness. The heat in the room was making him nauseous again. “They’re poisoning the food drops.”

That got Owen’s attention. He stopped pacing and looked at Theo, his head tilted. “Poisoning? How? What kind of poison?”

“Not poison, exactly. A tracker. An isotope. I got a can of the soup. I saw them… distributing it. To the starving.” As Theo spoke, he started coughing, a deep, wracking cough that shook his entire frame and sent a fresh spike of pain through his ribs.

As he coughed, a small device on one of Owen’s shelves began to make a noise. It was a quiet, rhythmic clicking. *Click… click-click… click…*

Owen’s eyes darted to the device. It was a Geiger counter, an old analog model with a swinging needle. The needle, which had been resting at zero, was now twitching, jumping with each soft click. *Click… click… click-click-click…*

“What’s that?” Theo asked, his coughing fit subsiding.

Owen didn’t answer. His eyes were wide, staring at Theo with a new kind of intensity. It wasn’t pity or annoyance. It was fear. He slowly reached out and picked up the Geiger counter. He held it out, pointing it at Theo like a weapon. As he moved it closer, the clicking grew faster, more frantic, turning into a steady, chattering buzz. The needle swung hard to the right, into the yellow warning zone.

“The soup,” Owen whispered, his voice barely audible over the chatter of the counter. “You said you got a can of the soup.”

“Yeah. It was my proof. But it was punctured. Contaminated. So…” Theo trailed off, shame flushing his face hot. He didn’t want to say it.

Owen finished the thought for him, his voice flat with horror. “So you ate it. You idiot. You absolute idiot. You ate it.”

He wasn't asking. He was stating a fact. The Geiger counter in his hand was buzzing angrily now, the needle deep in the red. “Tracker-9. It has to be. Short half-life, high gamma emission. Easy to detect from a distance. You’re not just carrying a story, Theo. You’re a walking, talking BHI drone beacon.”

Owen scrambled backward, stumbling over his own cables, putting as much distance between them as the tiny room would allow. “Get out.”

“What? No, Owen, listen—”

“Get. Out. Now.” Owen’s hand went to his belt, and this time he pulled out a pistol. It was a blocky, polymer thing, and it looked ridiculous in his shaky hand, but it was aimed squarely at Theo's chest. “You’re hot. You’re radioactive. Do you have any idea what that much gamma radiation does to my equipment? It’s not shielded! You’re introducing noise into the entire system! I’m getting data corruption across three servers just from you *breathing* in here!”

“I have nowhere to go!” Theo yelled, his voice finally breaking free from the rasp. He tried to push himself up again, his desperation giving him a burst of strength. He got to one knee, his tased leg still trembling violently. “They left me for dead. My arm is useless. I lost my gear. You’re the only one who can help me.”

“Help you? I should shoot you!” Owen shrieked, his voice cracking with panic. He waved the gun wildly. “You led them right to me! They’ve probably got a drone circling overhead right now, homing in on your glowing ass! You’ve compromised my entire network. Years of work!”

Theo knew it was hopeless, but he couldn’t stop. He was cornered. “The footage, Owen. Just take the card. It’s all that matters.”

“The footage is worthless if we’re all dead!” He gestured at a bank of monitors. On one, a temperature reading was flashing red. “See that? Core temps are critical. My primary coolant pump is failing. I’ve been trying to route processing power to the auxiliary system for six hours, but there’s too much latency. And now you show up, spewing gamma rays and frying my diagnostic tools. You’re not a journalist, Garrick. You’re a plague.”

Theo collapsed back onto the floor, defeated. The heat, the pain, the terror in Owen’s eyes—it was too much. He was going to die in this hot, stinking box. Owen would shoot him and dump his body in the corridor. He closed his eyes. “Then do it,” he whispered. “Just do it.”

Silence. The only sounds were the frantic hum of overheating fans and the insistent, angry chatter of the Geiger counter. Theo waited for the gunshot. It didn't come.

He opened his eyes. Owen had lowered the gun slightly. He was staring at the flashing red temperature warning on the monitor, then back at Theo, then at the Geiger counter. A frantic, ugly calculation was playing out on his face.

“No,” Owen said slowly, a new, chilling tone in his voice. “No, killing you is a waste of resources. A messy, biological waste.” He took a deep breath, trying to regain his composure. “Okay. Okay. New plan. I have two problems. You are one of them. The other is that I need a Kellers-7 industrial coolant pump to replace the dying one in my server array. There’s a derelict HVAC unit on the roof of the old Cresh-Mart distribution center. It has the pump I need.”

Theo stared at him, not understanding. “The Cresh-Mart? Owen, that’s in the Gray Zone. That intersection is a kill box. BHI has a sniper nest in the clock tower overlooking the whole block.”

“I am aware of the tactical situation,” Owen snapped, his voice cold and precise. “That’s why you’re going to get it for me. You are already a target. Your presence there changes nothing about the risk calculus. In fact, it might even help. You’re so loud, radiologically speaking, you might draw their attention while I perform some sensitive system maintenance.”

This was insane. It was a suicide mission. “Owen, I can’t even walk. You shot me with a taser.”

“Motivation,” Owen said, his eyes glittering with a feverish intensity. “Here’s the deal, Garrick. It’s non-negotiable. You go to the Gray Zone. You strip the Kellers-7 pump from that HVAC unit. You bring it back here. If you succeed, I will take your data card, and I will find a way to shield my equipment from your… condition… long enough to uplink your precious footage. I’ll even give you a lead pouch to carry the card in, so it doesn't get fried by your own emissions.”

He paused, letting the offer hang in the hot, stale air. “And if you fail?” Theo asked, his voice a dead monotone.

Owen’s lips twisted into a grim smile. “If the sniper gets you, I’ll wait a few hours for your body to cool, then use your corpse as a signal decoy to pull the BHI drones away from this sector while I relocate my entire operation. Your death will have tactical value. Either way, you solve one of my problems.”

Theo looked down at his useless left arm, at his twitching, burned leg, at the ripped fabric of his coat. He felt the raw scrape on his chin, the deep, throbbing ache in his ribs. Owen wasn't offering him a chance. He was sentencing him to death and giving him a choice of execution methods. But the alternative was to die here, on this floor, for nothing. If he went out there, if he took the insane risk, there was a sliver of a chance. A microscopic, statistically insignificant possibility that he could succeed. That his story could get out. That his life, and his death, might actually mean something.

He thought he was going to argue, to plead. But the words wouldn’t come. The taser shock had done more than just cripple his leg; it had burned away the last of his fight. He was too tired, too broken. All he could do was nod, a slow, jerky movement that felt like a surrender.

“Good.” Owen’s tone was brisk, all business. He tossed a small, heavy gray pouch onto Theo’s chest. It landed with a soft thud. “For your card. And here.” He rummaged through a crate and pulled out a schematic, a greasy, much-folded piece of paper. He threw it down next to Theo. “That’s the HVAC unit. The pump is behind the primary service panel. You’ll need tools.” He paused, looking at Theo’s empty belt. “Don’t lose them this time.”

Owen turned his back, already plugging himself back into his console, the conversation clearly over. He was issuing orders, and Theo was just a disposable asset, a tool to be used and discarded. Theo slowly, painfully, tucked the data card into the lead pouch and began to drag himself toward the door, the schematic clutched in his good hand. The buzzing of the Geiger counter faded slightly as he moved away, a mocking farewell from the machine that had signed his death warrant.