Chapter #4Small-time thieves hoping to go large by: Yote   It is two weeks before Christmas. All through the town a heavy snow is falling through the 2am darkness, filling the streets of the city with deep drifts and summoning the plows and salt spreading trucks out into the night. With a spray of grit bouncing off your windshield, you hitch a lift in the wake of one of them, the three bald tyres of your dad's Reliant Regal Van slipping back and forth across both lanes.
The weather is a nuisance. On the positive, the streets are clear, the drunkards have had the good sense to stagger home hours ago and even the homeless have found somewhere else to sleep for the night. Good. No witnesses.
You take a left into the town square. With a hard thud the front tyre hits a buried curb, bouncing the car on to the plaza that sits in front of the city hall. Concrete bollards guard the perimeter. You hit the brakes and skid to a halt a few meters from the ten-feet tall glass doors of the front entrance, rocking gently on the front axle. The engine is purposefully left running. There's no guarantee that it will start again, particularly in cold like this, and you like your getaway vehicle to be able to actually get away.
The city hall looks grand in the snow and the spotlights, festooned in red and gold decorations and twinkling with fairy lights. The entrance hall is particularly fine. It had been decorated by the children of the local primary school earlier that day. Crayoned pictures of Santa Claus and reindeer hang beside the old oil paintings of dead mayors.
A 8-foot tall Christmas tree stands in the center of the hall. Its thick foliage sags under the weight of gingerbread and candy canes and multicolored shiny baubles upon its branches, and it has been practically lashed to the wall with tinsel. Under its bows sit four red velvet sacks bulging with gaudily wrapped presents, toys donated by charitable souls to be distributed on Christmas eve to the needy orphans of the city. So they think anyway.
You flash the headlights once...
Within the entrance hall, nothing moves. Please tell me the old man hasn't fallen asleep during a heist again.
Nervously you wait, one ear pricked out as always for the wail of sirens. After a few minutes, a security guards sidles into view and you shrink down behind the dashboard. He strolls across the entrance hall with a slow, bow-legged plod, mouth pursed in a whistle, twirling a torch by its strap around his fingers. He steps up to the tree, admires its festive grandeur and leans forward to smell the rich pine scent on its needles. His brow furrow as he notices the surprisingly large number of Alpine Fresh Car Fresheners hidden among the baubles, just barely concealing an underlying air of stale cigarette smoke.
Swallowing hard, you give one blast on the car horn. The security guards stands sharply to attention, spinning around to inspect the vehicular intruder upon the plaza outside. The tree shifts, a wooden branch very much like an arm raising itself out of the foliage behind him.
"Fairy-lights out, buddy," a gravely voice whispers in his ear as the branch thuds down on his head. The guard crumples to the floor.
You fling open the car door and jump out. The freezing night air cuts right through your thin clothes as you race to the door. The Christmas tree rocks back and forth in its tub. Its thick trunk split vertically as it lifts a pair of leg-shaped roots from the soil into which it has been planted. Mud pours off its gnarled feet. It takes a few awkward steps, tearing itself free from the tinsel and lights that bind it. With baubles falling from it and shattering against the floor, it stoops to pilfer a bunch of keys from the guard's belt before grabbing a sack in each hand.
I hope they have CCTV, you laugh as the tree lumbers to the door. We're going to be in all the newspapers. This is going to be the heist of the century. We'll be famous. Well... infamous.
The tree crows through the door. "You should have heard me, son! I said 'fairy-lights out' and then I hit him over the head! Like 'lights out' but with a Christmas spin to it!"
"Now's not the time for dumb jokes, dad, get the door open!"
The tree fumbles with the keys. "Alright, alright, one moment, here we are." Next moment it is flinging the doors open and racing towards the van, throwing the haul into the back and itself into the passenger seat. You lug the third sack back to the van and dive into the passenger seat, skidding away from the crime scene in a flurry of snow.
It's cramped in the cabin, squashed as you are between a Santa's sack of stolen goods and an 8-foot tall tree guffawing to itself. "The perfect crime, boy, the perfect crime! Now those stupid kids will get exactly what I always got for Christmas - nothing!" The tree pats itself down before withdrawing from some unknown crevice a crumples packet of cigarettes. It maneuvers one of them into a gap in its needles that must be its mouth. "That machine is everything I dreamed it could be. It all went off without a hitch - well, other than the fact that they wouldn't stop watering me, my feet are soaked through. Get that heating on before my toes freeze off."
Your eyes are focused on the road ahead but you look over as he lights up. "I don't think you should be smoking in that costume, dad"
"Ehh? Cause I'm a tree?"
"No, cause its made out of rubber or something. It's probably flammable!"
He ignores you to take a deep drag on the cigarette, glowing embers tumbling down the suit. After enough self-satisfied puffs to fill the cabin with smoke, it said, "Yep, things are going to really turn around for us now, Nick. You and I, we're gonna be rich. With this baby, we'll be able to go anywhere, steal anything, and there's nothing the police can do to stop us. I mean what are they gonna do, check every tree in the city? I don't think so!" He takes one of the presents and tears through the wrapping paper. It is a knitted dolly. With a tree-shrug, he tosses it, ripping through more until he finds one filled with candy, which he shoves into his cigarette-hole. "Haven't eaten in two days," he grumbles around mouthfuls. "It's your turn in the suit next time."
The car has reached the docks. The car thuds over broken concrete, skirts crumbling factories. You pull into the empty shell of an auto-motor garage that has served as your hideout for the past month and switch the engine off.
No sirens. Not even the distant jingle of bells. Just the soft silence of falling snow over the dockyard. The van's tracks lead back into the darkness. "We should cover them."
"Later," your father replies. "Get me out of this suit first."
The machine is exactly where you left it, thank god. It resembles a large corrugated aluminium suitcase with the words 'This side up', 'Deliver to the Institute of Technology' and 'Prototype Macro-Scale Additive Printer' stenciled on it. The two of you had found it while raiding shipping containers.
When you flick a catch, the suitcase lid springs open and it smoothly unfolds itself into a platform large enough for a man to stand on, surrounded with four articulated arms. Beneath the platform are four canisters of viscous cyan, magenta, yellow and black goop. A touch screen slides out and lights up, waiting for a command.   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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