Free The Courier (San Angeles) by Gerald Brandt

instead of walking, it had taken me over five hours to get here—I’d been moving around the whole damn night. And I never did get my shower. No chance of that for a while.
    If I remembered correctly, my old hiding spot was down to the left. If no one had found it yet, I could slip in and maybe grab a couple of hours of sleep before heading up to the depot. That would be a hell of a walk as well. At least during the day I wouldn’t have to hide in the shadows.
    I moved off to the left as the Ambients continued their slow climb to daylight strength. I walked past the decrepit buildings, their empty windows staring at me, the lost child returned home. Time, vandals, or old earthquakes had destroyed them. Sometimes all three. I ducked low, below any open windows, and dashed past doorways and streetsto the relative safety of the walls again. The opposite of what I’d done on Level 3. Down here, doors could lead to places I didn’t even want to imagine. The Taser’s smooth surface felt slick in my grip. I wiped my hand on my pants, trying to stay calm and alert.
    The ramp had exited on South Central Avenue, right by the Santa Monica Freeway. They seemed to put the Level ramps between the old freeway on-ramps. I followed South Central, staying close to the buildings converted from warehouses to apartments, before most of them became abandoned. I stopped a few blocks from the ramp and crouched behind a rusted hunk of old car that sat in front of a building shaped like an old ship. I couldn’t tell if the bottom of the wall had once been painted black, or if it was just the Level 1 filth that made it look that way. I waited a few minutes, watching for any signs of someone following me, before continuing on.
    When Central took a slight jog to the left, I turned down 6th, entering the area I only knew as Skid Row. In the distance I could see what was left of old Downtown, what my history classes had told me were once majestic towers of glass and steel, truncated at the fifth floor, squashed between the earth and the man-made ceiling. I kept on walking, counting the blocks until I reached seven. Last time I’d been here, a beat-up sign had told me the street name. The sign was gone, and my memory served the name up for me. San Julian Street. I turned left again.
    My Auntie’s apartment was only about fifteen blocks away from here, fifteen blocks and a lifetime. I had never been back, and never wanted to go back. That life was gone. Hell, I didn’t want to go back to my hole, either, but I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go right now. I would never be desperate enough to go back to Auntie’s though.
    Exhaustion pushed at the edges of my brain, threatening to shut it down completely. I needed to sleep before I ended up just keelingover wherever I happened to be. Dredging up past history wasn’t getting me someplace safe.
    The block had obviously become more used than when I lived here, or survived here. Paths wandered amongst the broken brick and twisted metal, which looked like it had been sorted into salvageable and non-salvageable piles. The rumors said the whole block had been destroyed by the earthquakes in 2118, but that couldn’t have been true. There had been enough issues by then that SoCal had come down and rebuilt the infrastructure to handle the occasional quake and the extra load of Levels 6 and 7. These days, when one hit, the retrofitted mass dampers took care of everything. The most damage you’d get would be the broken glass I’d seen earlier, or maybe a displaced brick or two. Then again, maybe this stuff had collapsed before then.
    People always wondered why the corporations had bothered to fix the old buildings. Why not just let them collapse? But I figured I knew. Every society needed the downtrodden, the poor, the homeless. It made the richer people feel good about themselves when they gave money or time, made them feel like they were giving back somehow. None of it really seemed to work. Instead,