by Stuart Hale
(10/12/05)

The car windows are starting to fog as we sit, waiting, the white noise of the radio sounding like a bad Merzbow impersonation. John uses his balaclava to wipe the constantly encroaching fog off the windshield, streaking and smearing it like ectoplasmic tendrils from a spiritualist's fingertips.

He glances down at his watch, looks up at me, considers the damp balaclava in his hand, and with a shrug pulls it over his head. He's nervous. I can tell by the way his body moves, the way his eyes never settle in one spot. If he hadn't just covered his face, I know I'd see him sucking on his cheeks. The three people in the back seat probably wouldn't notice these signs, but I know John's body so well that his small tics reach me like semaphore signals from a fog-shrouded ship.

John picks up the canvas bag at his feet, checks the contents for probably the tenth time in five minutes. I look over at the bank again, the streetlight bright over its front entrance, to study the ATM to the left of the door, thinking about the camera housed in its burnished steel body. As long as you're not standing directly in front of that camera, it won't catch you, and anything more than ten feet away is too pixilated to be useful to investigators.

I ponder this as the radio behind us squelches, squeals, and then the oddly modulated voice cuts through the interior of the car: "Two minutes."

I pull the stocking over my head, sepia-tinting my world. There's a hole for my mouth -- I hate the way my own stale breath is trapped by fabric. I look over at John, wishing I had a balaclava like his. It looks damn sexy. Terrorist chic.

The fog is creeping back across the windshield. Next time we'll have to spray it with that crap skiers use to keep their goggles from fogging over. I make a mental note to remember, wondering if there will be a next time, and if there is, will I remember it after the adrenaline-charged jumble of tonight?

The other camera, half-hidden on the roof of the bank, cants down to cover the sidewalk. That's the one I'm really interested in. I can barely see it in the pale glow cast by the streetlight. I hate that camera. I've studied photographs of it so many times that my mind fills in the details I can't actually see in this gloom: a steel encasement, shatter-resistant glass, the upper body industrial blue, the lower half metallic, approximately eighteen inches long by nine inches wide, six inches deep. The camera's squat body revolves on a ball socket, allowing its remote operator to pan and tilt at will, covering the length of Fifth Avenue. It can probably look up at police helicopters or study a lunar eclipse if its operator felt bored.

Tonight, whoever is operating that camera will feel anything but bored.

"One minute," the radio squelches.

"Ready?" I ask.

"Yeah," John says, the front of his black facemask moving; I can tell he's licking his lips nervously under its dark camouflage.

"Definitely," comes one voice from the back, the other two chiming in agreement.

I don't know any of their names. It's safer that way: each of us only knows two other people who we've recruited ourselves. If we're caught, we can only give up the ones we know. The only other people I know by name, Mark and Sarah, are with another team, across the bridge in West Seattle, sitting in a car just like this one. I wonder idly whether Mark's lucked out and gotten a balaclava or if he's stuck with a cut-rate stocking like mine.

"Go." The voice comes in over the radio. Adrenaline pounds through my veins; my hands shake, fumbling the door handle. The rear doors are swinging open. The woman who's been sitting behind me is already breaking into a run, getting into position fifteen feet down the sidewalk, scanning anything south of her. The man from the other side heads in the opposite direction, scanning north, both of them lookouts for John and me. The last man remains in the car, listening to police scanners, trunking shortwave radios, making sure we're clear while he videotapes everything out the window with a handheld Sony.

John reaches his mark slightly before I do, right in front of the bank's locked doors, directly under that hateful camera, standing with spread legs like a black-clad commando out of a GI Joe comic book.

It makes me giggle in nervousness as I wheel in front of him and fall to my knees -- thanking God for those SWAT team kneepads -- as he unzips his black fatigues and pulls his half-erect cock out with fumbling fingers.

My mouth closes around it.

Like all great schemes, this one started in a bar on a very drunken night.

"I just can't believe this shit," Mark declared. "I mean, where the fuck are we living? Russia?"

"Russia can't afford surveillance cameras," Sarah observed wryly.

"It's pretty goddamn unbelievable," I agreed, looking over his shoulder at the paper spread before him. Our weekly alternative rag had broken the story first, which surprised no one. The two dailies in this town weren't even worthy of being fish wrap, unless you dug articles about one-eyed glass artists.

"It's just fucked up. I mean, hello, Orwell," Mark raged, gathering up a full head of righteous indignation.

We'd laughed when Chicago had put three thousand surveillance cameras on its streets, consoling ourselves that it could never happen here; Seattle was too liberal to put up with such horseshit.

We hadn't counted on The Shrub being re-elected. We'd also failed to predict Patriot III.

Now every major metropolitan area in the country was receiving surveillance cameras, all tied into 'behavioral recognition software,' whatever the hell that meant. It wasn't surprising to see why Mark was losing his shit.

"We should smash the fucking things," I offered, half-joking.

"They'd just replace them," Sarah replied, and I had to admit she was right. The friggin things were probably cheap as hell.

"They say the citizens support it," Mark read, "citing the decrease in violent crimes in other cities that have put the system in place. Yeah, right."

"Can you imagine having that for a job?" Sarah asked, pulling a cherry out of her drink, studying it briefly before biting it in half with her small white teeth. I realized that the cherry was the exact same shade as her dreadlocks; I was going to point this out to her, but realized it wasn't pertinent. She swallowed, twirling the stem between her fingers as she spoke. "I mean, sitting there for eight hours at a time? How boring must that be?"

"They'll still find people," Mark said, pushing the paper away with both hands, "With the economy in the shitter, they'll probably have people lined up around the block even at minimum wage."

"I read about a group in New York that goes around performing skits in front of cameras," John said, his grey eyes calm, serene. Nothing ever seemed to faze John. He'd just sit there, silent, as the rest of us worked ourselves up over the latest indignity our government had dreamed up. That's why I liked him so much: it was nice having him around to ground us when we started flying into the stratosphere.

Mark snorted, derisive. "Yeah, that's what I want to do, entertain cubicle-dwelling fuckwads."

"What if you could make them uncomfortable?"

"What do you mean?" Sarah asked.

John smiled, "What if we could figure out something that would make them squirm, make it so they didn't want to sit in front of those monitors?"

"Like what? Stage fake murders?" I asked.

"I was thinking more along the lines of fucking in front of the cameras." John's grin grew bigger.

"They'd just sit there and jerk off," Sarah said. "It wouldn't make them uncomfortable."

"It would if it was two men fucking," I said. I could feel a grin breaking across my face as I realized what John was working towards, "That'd freak the fuckers right out."

"Precisely," John smiled. "A man and a woman going at it wouldn't faze them. Neither would two women. But two guys? Remember, that last election, the economy, terrorism, all that crap getting brushed aside over the image of two men kissing. Can you imagine if it was two men fucking? They'd lose their shit."

That was how it all began: four idiots sitting in a bar, getting drunk and bitching to each other about how fucked up our government was. It was time to do something, anything, no matter how silly or inconsequential. We'd learned our lessons after that last election. No more sitting around feeling superior, no more snide jokes about the other side's cheap rhetoric. We'd rather be effective than pure.

It took a few months to get everything in place. We had a lot of reading to do, a lot of planning, because unlike our boomer predecessors, none of us wanted to go to prison. You can't be effective when you're trying to keep from being ass-raped for Marlboros.

Mark set up our lines of communication, drafting instructions for anonymous relays via email, FAQs on how to use PGP to encrypt messages, how to place those messages on alt.anon.message.relay so others could read them. John set up the cells, and was the one that instituted each of us recruiting just two other people. Sarah dug into police communications and learned about shortwave, trunking, and bridge circuits. She also scoped out how to get our message out through videotape and alternative media. We knew we'd have to communicate directly and anonymously with the public. The only thing you could trust the news for was selling Cocoa Puffs.

Three months of feverish preparation led up to now, to this moment -- to me, on my knees, John's cock thrust through the hole in my stocking mask under the watchful eye of that hateful camera.

I suck greedily. There's no time for delicacy, for clever tricks or artful flicks of the tongue at that cluster of nerves under the firemen's helmet of his cock, no time for teasing or caressing. This has to be fast -- and it has one purpose, to get him as painfully hard as possible in the shortest amount of time.

I pull my mouth off his cock, spit into my palm, and working my fingers into a fist, spread the slickness onto his cock, ropes of glistening saliva trailing out of my hand. I pump hard and fast. I bring my mouth back to him, sucking as hard as I can, until the insides of my cheeks ache with the pressure. I moan, feeling his cock thicken within my mouth, groan and feel my own cock lurch, engorging, as it presses painfully against the cotton of my fatigues.

I look up to see John looking down, face obscured by the balaclava. The effect is even hotter than I imagined, his grey eyes highlighted in that expanse of black, so hot that I groan again, the vibrations of it trembling the length of his cock.

I want him fucking my mouth. I lean inward, my arms coming around to grab his ass, feeling his tensed butt muscles as I pull him in, forcing more of his cock into my mouth, forcing him to thrust with greater abandon. His cock is heavy, wrenching my mouth open, pressing against the back of my throat as I drive down onto him, hungry for all he can give me. The two of us are locked together, driving each other.

With a groan John pulls out of my mouth, his hands on my shoulders, pushing me down.

I fumble at my fatigues, pulling them down. He pulls out a bottle of lube, one hand stroking his cock, as his other hand upends the bottle. A stream of clear lube hits my lower back and then the crack of my ass. I hear the cap snap shut, and then the head of John's cock centers on the puckered entrance to my ass.

My cock is throbbing in the cold air. I want him now, all of him. I push back hard, feel him sliding into me, that hard pressure behind my balls, that indefinable sensation of penetration, of being taken, as I drive back. He takes me, head low, moaning. Before my eyes are the random patterns of the concrete. I'm being fucked, here, in public, on a sidewalk, the cold air caressing my throbbing cock as John fucks me.

"Just...fuck...me," I growl, and his body responds. My whole world collapses to the feel of his hands around my ribcage, pulling me back as his hips thrust forward, driving his cock into me until I feel his hips colliding with my ass cheeks, the two of us bouncing, hard, fast, desperate.

John leans forward, one arm locking my chest, the other snaking down to grab my cock. His fingers are rough as he jerks me, his hand finding the same cycle as his cock, his head beside mine, his voice thick in my ear, "You like that? Huh? Do you fucking like that?"

It's the feel of his breath against my ear that drives me, hot, heavy, and thick, invading me as thoroughly as his cock. I'm grunting in reply, a wordless litany of greed and lust offered up like a prayer to the god of want. His head angles down, his teeth clamp on my shoulder through the thick fabric of my fatigues, biting the muscle between neck and shoulder, biting hard, extremely hard, and it pushes me over the edge, no chance to yell out that I'm coming. My cock lurches in his hand, my balls contract. Three times my cock lurches, and I hear the splatter as my cum hits the pavement. A wordless wail tears from my mouth. My hips contract in sharp jerks as if they can make the cum fly harder, make it shatter the concrete.

John rises up suddenly. His cock slides from my ass and I hear him yell, feel his cum streaking my back, imagine its thick whiteness across the black fabric, pearlescent under the wan yellow streetlight.

"Go! Go! Go!" John's yelling. There's a mad scramble across the sidewalk, a clumsy run, one hand holding my pants up as I scurry for the car, footsteps pounding around me as our lookouts break and fall back.

I fall into the backseat, yelling and laughing in a chaotic swirl of post-orgasm fervor and exuberance. We drive off, loud with whoops and laughter.

Our exuberance only gains momentum in the following days.

We release the footage onto the net alongside our surrealistic, Burroughs-inspired manifesto, vague enough for people to build their own mythology, pointed enough to cut. Two hundred newspapers and radio and TV stations receive our media package.

The response is immediate and incendiary. Even in the underground media controversy rages. Leftists denounce us as thrill-seeking hooligans, a danger to the cause. The mainstream media hates us too, but the videocam watchers hate us even more. Three of them quit in protest. Middle-aged faces fill the local news, talking about their trauma after being assaulted by our images.

The police promise the public that it will be a one-time occurrence, that it won't happen again, that the perpetrators are just disordered individuals, their kinky sex hiding under pseudo-revolutionary psycho-babble.

A one-time occurrence? Easy to prove them wrong.

We hit on random nights, in random locations, always listening to their radios, always with lookouts, and each time we release more footage to prove our success, each time middle-aged faces on the evening news complain of the filth they're forced to endure.

Our idea catches on and spreads to other cities. Our files knock Paris Hilton off her throne and become the top-traded videos on P2P. 'Balaclava porn' replaces 'bukake' in the Google standings.

None of us expected what came next.

A fifty-four-year-old man brings a multi-million dollar suit against the Federal Government, claiming that being exposed to men fucking during the course of his employment violates his civil rights and his religious beliefs. Within hours of the suit being announced, others spring up around the country as lawyers spot a way to make a quick buck and a name for themselves.

The Feds try to block the lawsuits, but courts around the country turn them down.

Half the country watches the proceedings with glee. The other half proclaims this as proof of the country's moral decline. One right-wing talk show host says that the people bringing suit are closeted homosexuals, sleeper agents in our nefarious plans. We take note of this for future use.

As I write, Seattle is taking down its cameras. They say they can't afford to keep them in place. Other cities grumble about following suit.

Never underestimate the power of drunken bitching in bars.

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