Ducky Zero

I told Clark first. At least I knew he'd be able to check up on things if I was gone for a while.

Pulling into his Supercharger station, I thought about the times I'd stopped in here when I was younger, and not believing they'd ever replace the old roll-dial gas pumps that still said 'unleaded'. Now only one stood off to the side, acting as a diesel and gasoline pump for the few combustion engines that rolled in every so often. It was never truly busy, really, but well located for us in the area, and was a good source of employment for a few of us when we were kids.

Clark and I would smoke cigarettes and drinking the occasional snuck beer out back working long days of kinda-full-service-kinda-not shifts in the 30° days. Now, the cigarettes that were once stashed behind the cash in shutter-cases were mostly replaced by tins of smokeless, and often artificial tobacco. "Sucking a Zyn" doesn't have the same romance. Nor does "chewing a gummy". The beers were still there, though.

Nowadays it was, like a lot of things, bought out by American interests and converted into a Supercharger branded station, though the last pump to serve diesel and regular gas was permitted under their otherwise strict franchise deal, Clark had told him.

Once I got the van plugged in, I headed inside to the combination grocer/LCBO, grabbed a bottle of CC, the one thing I'd forgotten, and walked up to the counter where Clark's kid was ringing up Kyle, who lived down near the beach. A couple winters Kyle had us all over in his garage for darts, but mostly we drank and got angry about how things were changing.

Kyle gave me a nod from behind his sunglasses as he turned and headed for the door. Clark's kid is tall one, and always has a look on his face like hesmelled something rank. He kept his hair short, and didn't bother trying to grow a boy-beard, which was a nice change from some of the sad excuses for facial hair I saw on the boys running checkpoints or whatever, who were about Cub's age.

"Hey Mister Warren."

I put the bottle of rye on the counter between us and started reaching for my wallet.

"Hey Cubby. Busy day?"

"Actually yeah, ton of greens guys came by this morning and almost drained out all our diesel. Dad's in the back filing the claim now."

"Yeah? How many?"

"Couldn't say for sure. Couple of big trailer looking things with the cloth top, a few jeeps, and a flatbed with something big on it."

"Sounds like another checkpoint's going up."

"Maybe," Cub scanned the bar code on the bottle of Canadian Club and set it aside. "How much charge today?"

"The full 180. I'm heading out of town. I actually wanted to talk to your dad before I left."

"So let me get this straight," Clark says.

His office. while large on the floor plan, felt claustrophobic among the flats and boxes of automotive basics and confectioneries. Clark leaned on a stack of assorted Faygo as he repeated what I had just told him.

"You screwed up paperwork on someone you detained which– I might add– you planned to sell to the Americans--"

"--trade to the Americans."

"My mistake," he said, holding his palms up at me, "trade to the Americans, which you were doing regularly, okay. You got paid up front, you have that nice truck now, and the guy got picked up. I don't see what the problem is this time, but you feel bad and you want to what, take a vacation to go find them?"

"It's not that, it's just that..."

"I'm listening."

"It's not just that I screwed up the paperwork. It's two things, I guess," Clark looked at me, "It's that they think he's an amalgamist. He's not going to get traded back."

"Oh shit."

"Yeah."

"Well, I hope he didn't enjoy having fingernails."

"Yeah."

"At least he was already bald."

"You're sick."

"And shaving a beard does make you look younger."

"You're absolutely sick."

We stood in silence. I made it clear from my posture that I was serious. Nobody deserved that.

"Listen," he said, "I've seen a lot of what these people can actually do, and what they will do."

"I'm sure I can talk my way out of most situations."

"Some of these guys... they don't talk much. Listen," Clark walked over to his desk and pulled open the top drawer, and a set of keys. "Things have changed since the earlier days of this. We got as good as we could give, but now... I'm not so sure."

I made a noise with my mouth still closed, acknowledging what he said.

As he walked over to the cabinet, he said, "But this should give you a hand."

Unlocking and opening the cabinet, he pulled out a small pouch, which I recognized as a faraday bag. shielding whatever's inside.

"Open it."

From inside, I pull out a small one-inch by three-inch gray electronic device. It has a large orange button to the left of the small OLED screen that was lit up and displayed an egg. On the top of the device were four buttons that were unlabeled. The back had a switching device that was flush with the case.

"Hit the top buttons, left to right, 1-1-3-3-1-4."

As I did so, the egg display changed to display a broken eggshell.

"What is this, some kind of pet to keep me company?"

"Push the big button," Clark says, with a grin on his face.

I pushed the button and my right arm threw up a warning before fully powering off and dropping off of the maglocks on my shoulder, and catching in my shirt sleeve. Its hand, my hand, returned to its default open palm position, causing the grey handheld device to clatter to the floor.

"That, my friend, is a Ducky Zero. I managed to pull one in from Denmark a couple years ago, but they're not exactly... something, here let me help you with that," he said. "They're not really legal, so don't get caught with it. It sends and receives signals, and you can, well..."

Reattaching my arm and hitting the power button again, I gave a small flex and started calibration. "It's not exactly CRTC certified is what you're saying."

"Nor is it FCC certified, as that's the direction you're going. But dogs, bots, doors, targeting, you name it. One sec," he reached into the same cabinet where the bag came from.

"Here's the booklet," he said, handing over a fold-out brochure. It goes over most of the functions and how to use 'em.

I tucked the booklet into the pouch.

"So this is it then for a while?"

"For a while, I guess," I said, unsure.