The radio fuzzed a bit, before two cops started chatting on the radio.
"Looks like we've got two going into the parking garage on Fifth street."
"Yep. Saw that. I'll check it out."
She kicked the radio hanging off of the rear view mirror, causing it to stumble down on to the car floor.
"Jesus Christ, they're still at it?", she mumbled, with her eyes half open. She squinted at the time on the dashboard, raised the car seat up, and pulled her legs down off of the top of the dashboard.
"Shit", she exclaimed, picking up the radio off the floor, and changing to a different radio channel. "Sarah, hurry up. Let's go!", she said, with her mouth against the radio. She threw a bag of dried mango slices, batteries, and a bottle full of coconut water into a duffel bag.
"Anna, over here", Sarah waved, stepping on to, and denting the hood of a car with her boots. She looked around for surveillance cameras, which were common in the city, but many of them were smashed or covered in spray paint to block them from seeing anything. She wanted to make sure the feds hadn't put any knew ones ups, but it looked like they didn't get to this part of the city yet during their monthly city-wide repair bullshit.
Anna reached Sarah, throwing Sarah the extra bottle of coconut water that she had packed into her duffel bag earlier. "Here, I've only got 5 jugs left. We'll probably need to go across town to get more. I heard there were some untouched palms up north."
Sarah caught the bottle and stuffed it into her backpack. "These two over here." he pointed, showing Anna two SUVs abandoned in the middle of the street, stuck between about 30 other cars that had been abandoned.
"Fuck yeah, thank god. The nights are getting way too cold", Anna commented in relief, as she looked up at the stars in the dark, early morning sky.
They each popped open the hood of the two SUVs and salvaged two car batteries from them.
"The one at home is definitely in its last days.", Anna commented, taking two older car batteries out of her duffel bag, and putting them on the driver seats of the two SUVs. Scavengers did this to tell other scavengers that the vehicle's batteries have been scavenged.
She pulled out a small single-board computer that was wired up to two nine-volt
batteries, and turned it on. A small yellow LED blinked 3 times, which meant the
device successfully connected to the wireless mesh network that the scavengers
had set up around the city. The small LCD screen read 2123-10-02. She glazed
at the screen a bit before turning it back off, and putting it back into her
bag. She spray painted "NC 2123 10 02" on the hood of each car to let scavengers
know there were "no cams" in this block of the city around on that day, in case
others passed by there who were also trying to avoid the feds.
Most scavengers were anyone who couldn't accept the new law that was introduced when the CEO of CorpIO, a monolith tech company, started running the country. The new law required that all electronic devices need to be manufactured in the country, and that all devices must have government-accessible backdoors in them, so they could be monitored for "criminal activity".
If this wasn't bad enough, the new law also required that all city street corners must have cameras that can record both video and audio, "for the public's safety".