Каарон Уоррен - The Lowest Heaven

“Griff liked the IT a lot, because it’s so big and empty and we could just move and move, but sometimes we were living on nothing at all, and I was getting tired of it. Every time he talked about the AT, about all the casinos and stuff, I’d be like ‘I want to try it there.’ I never been off the IT before, and the planum’s about as boring as the Max mountains. I wanted to see a real city, and go someplace fun, but Griff was always like ‘it sucks just as much there as here, and they’re all big fakes, and it sucks even more if you don’t have any money, and here it’s easier not to have money’ so we never went.

“And then finally I got real tired of it, and all his crap about how we were ‘realer people’ than everyone else, like being poor was this noble thing, and I told him I was going to go no matter what, and he could come or not. He was like ‘I’ve been poor my whole life!’ but he’s full of crap. I’ve seen where he lived, and he went to college, too. We had a big old bust–up about it and then a couple days later he said he was sorry and I was right, it was time to leave the IT, and explained that when he was down at Garden City he met a guy who had been a worker out on the farms all over the IT. He said how people there don’t believe in banks so they keep their money in the house in cash, and it was a real cinch to just knock over a house and make off with all the money, and it was pretty untraceable and everything. So this guy in Garden City had worked out in this town in the middle of nowhere, but everyone was super well–off, and in particular there was this old guy who was super, super rich and kept all his money in a safe in his office at home.

“So Griff said we should go knock over this old guy. He◦– Griff, I mean◦– knew all about the old guy, because he’d made the Garden City guy tell him everything, like where exactly the house was and how to get there. And we went to the library and learned all about the town, Hartmann, and studied maps so that we knew how to get there and back again, all the different ways. And he got a job in a salon in Helios so that he could collect random hair DNA so we could confuse the crime scene. He collected it over a long time, because we planned carefully and took our time to make sure we got everything right. We stole dampers from all over, a few from Helios and one from somewhere else, even, and rigged them up to work together so the old guy couldn’t call anyone while we were robbing him

“And we set up an alibi, too. There are some homeless guys who sleep outside the [Helios] city hall and Griff started sleeping there at night, ‘cause there’s a camera that watches them and they all sleep huddled up, and he got good at joining them and then slipping away so you couldn’t see he wasn’t there anymore. I used to watch him to make sure he was doing it right. And I went into one of those all–night moviedromes, but it was one with a broken window, so I’d be recorded going in but I could sneak in and out without anyone seeing.

“So we decided on a night. It wasn’t supposed to be that night [Thursday the eighth], because Griff wanted to do it on a Friday thinking no one would notice anything if the old guy didn’t show up anywhere over a weekend, but the night we picked out to do it we got into an argument and so we didn’t go. Then when we made up Griff was like ‘we got to do it now, I’m tired of this place’ so we just left. That was that Thursday, I guess.

“We stole a car and then exchanged plates every two hundred kilometers. It took us four hours to drive to Hartmann, and it went perfect. We drove through the town, and Griff was like ‘there’s the school, turn right at the hardware store, three kilometers past.’ We came to the tree–lined drive, and it was dark as I ever saw. We killed the headlights once we were out of town and drove slow, but we didn’t see a single person. The town was totally empty, and there wasn’t anyone on the roads, not one person. So we drive slow down the tree–lined street, and as we pull up we can see the house in the sort of dim light. It was huge and white and looked real cozy. Griff keeps saying ‘look how big that fucker is; this old fart must be loaded.’

“We pulled off the driveway a little and got out really quiet, but couldn’t hear a thing. So we snuck around and put the dampers out and set them off, and it was the most beautiful thing I ever saw, to watch them do their thing. They buzzed a little then this green glow spreads up and out from them and meets up and then there’s this soft green light shaped like a bowl, covering the whole house. I could put my hand through it like it was the ocean. I told Griff I didn’t know it would make light but he said we were super far from anyone else and if anyone saw anything they’d think it was the ashen light. So we went inside.

“We had a shotgun Griff made from three different guns. He said it would mess up the ballistics. We had a knife, too. I think it was one I stole from somewhere. We go in and there’s a nightlight shining, so we kill it; just unplug it. I pull out my phone and sure enough, no signal, so we know the damper’s working. No phones, no computers, nothing will get signals out. We have little flashlights, but we don’t need them because of the green light coming through the windows.

“We had decided before to find the old guy first and make him tell us where the money was. So we walk around the ground floor really fast, to make sure there’s nothing obvious, and find the office, but can’t see a safe or anything. So we go down the hall and toward the stairs, and I’m first, and as we walk toward the stairs I look up and I see someone standing there at the top of the stairs. There’s a window there and the green light is coming through bright enough to make the outline of the person really clear. It doesn’t look like an old guy. I stop and look up, and the person freezes and looks down at me, and then sort of slips away, out of the light, so I grab Griff and we go upstairs.

“The first door has stuff all over it, but there’s no lock. We go in and there’s this girl standing there in the corner, by the window. I didn’t know why she didn’t break the window or anything, but I guess it was unbreakable glass. She had her phone in her hand but of course it wasn’t working. She sets it down asks what we want and Griff says, really nice, we’re just there for some money. She’s also being really nice and says ‘we don’t keep money in the house,’ but Griff tells her it’s okay and says he needs to tie her up so he can check. She’s like, ‘okay,’ really cheerful, and she’s really scared but trying to be nice. So Griff ties her up and puts her on the bed, and we leave her.

“So we know there’s more than an old guy in the house now. The next room there’s a boy sleeping, and he sort of wakes up when we come in and shoots right up out of bed, but Griff points the gun at him and tells him to sit, and we tie him up and gag him next to his bed.

“Then there’s the big bedroom, and two grownups sleeping in it. We wake them up really gentle and tell them we’re there for the money and we’re not going to hurt anyone. The woman says ‘there’s no money,’ just like the girl, and the man pissed his pants. We tell the man to show us where the safe is, because we know there is one, and the woman keeps talking, like saying that there’s no money and no safe but she can give us all the credit she has and won’t report us or anything and I can see Griff is getting real unhappy. He always gets jiggly when he thinks someone is lying and he was, like, bouncing now. So we tell the man again to show us where the money is, and the woman is still like ‘he doesn’t know anything, please talk to me and I can help,’ so we tie the man up to the bed and take the woman downstairs to the office. The entire time she’s talking to us real calm, saying she’ll give us whatever she can, and to take anything in the house, but obviously we’re not going to do that because it’ll all be chipped. We pass by the kids’ rooms and she says can she see them to make sure they’re all right and tell them to be good, but we say no.