by Carl Damen
Amanda was just reaching down to refresh her mobile, to find more commentary on the morning's events, when someone in front of her said, "Hey."
She looked up to see a group of three men and five women, ranging in age from early thirties to mid sixties, looking down at her. The nearest man, who looked to be in his early forties with long, straggly hair, waved to her. "Hi, I'm Mike." He introduced the rest of his group. "Look, I wasn't on your flight, but I saw your speech, and I gotta say... It made me feel pretty stupid. So anyway, we got together, some of us in the terminal, and started asking around, seeing what people wanted to say to the airline reps, and well... We figured you'd probably be the best person to talk to them. You've already proved yourself to be one of the best of us, and you were able to be pretty succinct. What do ya' say?"
Amanda finished her bite of taco, then nodded. "Sure. What are you planning on saying?"
4
Chapter 20
Chapter 20
General Loblen Mistaren stood in front of a barricade of concrete lane dividers and sandbags. "This is of course merely a stop-gap measure," he was saying. "At this point, we're not fighting; we're merely trying to keep the fighting contained. So far, this is still a police action, bolstered by deputized troops. I, along with other ranking officers deployed with the national guard, will be shifting our attention to the California crisis as soon as we can get the airways clear enough for us to fly."
He smiled, then receded back into a small box floating behind the anchor's shoulder. The anchor continued the story, but Jack didn't listen. He waved the television into silence, then sat upright on the sofa and looked around the living area of his apartment. His tower stood in the corner, the central support of a reality that had ended less than a week before. He wanted to be at work, to continue to fine-tune his designs, to work on something, but the city was still on virtual lock-down; he and Grant had barely made it back from the airport before the second round of rioting had commenced.
He stood and walked to the tower, felt its cold, smooth surface, than walked to the other end of the room, then back. He felt trapped in here.
Where had Amanda gone? Last he had heard, she was getting on her plane. Where had Grant gone? Last he had heard, he was going to the hospital; that was twelve hours ago. Likely, he was sleeping there, getting ready for his next shift. Likely, everyone was okay. It still didn't help Jack. As much as he didn't want to admit it, he was scared.
He returned to the couch, gestured at the television until he came to a browser, searched through until he found something interesting.
Compressed footage, date-stamped from sometime early that morning. A group of rioters, harried and half-mad from a day and two nights of guerilla combat, had ganged up on a patrol of national guards.
The footage started down low, close to the ground, moving closer to an empty intersection. The unseen camera operator dipped behind a newspaper dispenser, then poked the camera over the top to get a view of the side of an old brick building.
For a few seconds there was nothing, then a group of four soldiers—three men and a woman—rounded the corner, weapons drawn but relaxed. Most of the fighting in this neighborhood had burned out late Monday evening, so they were just patrolling, expecting no serious threat.
As soon as the soldiers passed by the traffic signal, the camera rotated to a line of cars that had been destroyed in the riot. Their doors were flung open and at least twenty young men and women, all dressed in 'Defend the Defenders' shirts tumbled out, brandishing clubs of all varieties. The rushed at the soldiers in a ragged line, swinging their weapons and yelling. The soldiers held their ground, tried to speak, to reason with their attackers, but the shouts, combined with the poor quality mic, served to make the soldier's words unintelligible.
In the end, it didn't matter what the soldiers did; this group of rioters was out for blood. They closed in and the image broke down into a swirl of arms and legs. Moments later the combatants separated, the soldiers standing in a circle, rifles raised, one rioter on the ground, his shirt slowly soaking with blood. The rioters rushed again, and this time there were more shots, more people down—
Jack waved the video off. It was becoming too real. He didn't want this to become real...
A harsh ringing from the television jerked him from his darkness, and he waved. A click, a series of short gasps, and then a woman's voice, quiet, scared: "Jack?"
Jack leaned forward, painfully alert. "Alice?"
A sharp sob of relief grated through the speakers. "Oh, God, I never thought I'd get through. Oh, my God, I thought I'd die in here..."
"Alice what's going on? Where are you?"
"I, uh, I—" She was breathing heavily, sounding frantic. "I've been trapped here since... since Sunday. There was no power—the phone lines were all jammed..."
"Where are you?" Jack repeated.
"Cohen & Associates. I was stuck in the riot, and—and lost my phone, and—" She swallowed. "I came here, and they cut the power, and the hard-lines were too busy to get through until just a while ago and—"
"Slow down, yeah?" Jack rushed to his bedroom, slipped into a pair of jeans, scrabbled around for as much cash as he could find. "Are you okay? Hurt, need food, anything?"
"My ankle's pretty 'fucked up... I've had food, though."
"I'm going to come and get you okay?"
"Can you?" She sounded disbelieving, as if the thought were too much to hope for. "I mean, can you even get through? I have no idea what's been going on..."
Jack stopped short. He didn't even know what was going on, not really. He hadn't left his home since yesterday's second round of riots, and he had no idea if C & A's part of the was one of the interdicted zones.
"I'm going to try, alright? Have you called the police?"
A wild laugh. "Yeah, that's not happening any time soon. I got through once, after hours of calling, and all I got was a recording telling the lines were fucking busy..."
"Okay, I'll come and get you. You have any way to tell time? You don't hear from me in an hour, you call again, okay?"
"Yeah, okay..."
Jack waited for the click of disconnect, but instead all he heard was Alice's labored breathing. "Alice?"
"Yeah?"
"I need you to hang up, Alice."
The breathing became more intense.
"Alice..."
"Please," she hissed. "Please don't go. You don't know what's been happening, what happened here..."
Jack swallowed. If he was having trouble coping with reality while in the safety of his still-functioning home, what must she be going through, out there beyond any hope of reality?
"Alice, I'm coming for you. Please, please trust me."
The breathing continued for another minute, then ended with a click. Jack breathed a sigh of relief, then left the seeming safety of the shadow of his tower.
The barricade cut across the street, a line of dusty green that had killed all forward movement and left Jack trapped for nearly two hours. A small chain-link gate wrapped in razor wire swung open, a truck rolled slowly through, and Jack pulled up to the edge of his world. A soldier stepped forward, tapped on the window with his tablet. When the window was down, he leaned forward, took a quick glance around the beige interior of the car.
"License and registration, please?"
Jack passed his ID out of the window. "This is my brother's vehicle."
The soldier nodded noncommittally as he tapped at the tablet. "He know you're borrowing it?"
"We have an agreement, yes."
"Hmm..." The officer returned Jack's license, then glanced over the car. "Where you going?"
Jack tightened his grip on the steering wheel; the sudden interrogation was unnerving. "Private matter."
"Sorry, sir, but the city's under lock-down; you better have a damn good reason to be out and about."
Jack felt reluctant to tell the soldier anything. He had grown rather more suspicious of the military in the last few months,
of their gifts, of their implied oaths of silence. "I'm picking up a friend; she's been trapped downtown for a couple days."
The soldier nodded, rubbing his chin. "We'll need to search the car. You come up clean, you're free to go. Just make sure you get back before curfew." The soldier gestured at two others who stood by the gate.
"When's that?" Jack bounced slightly as the car rocked, heard the sounds of people groping beneath the car.
"Eight o'clock. Be on time."
"Got it."
The inspection ended, the soldiers stepped back, and Jack was waved through the opening gate.
Beyond the barricade, all was still. Cars lined the road, looking pristine and untouched. Buildings loomed overhead, the fresh corpse of a dead city. As Jack drove the death became more pronounced, the rot set in. Now, the cars were twisted at odd angles, their windows were smashed, some showed signs of having been on fire. Shops stood gutted, ragged glass standing as the only hinderance to the goods that were once inside.
Occasionally a shop would show the signs of both looting and rioting, of a thin trickle of loot trailing away, only to end in huge piles of crushed merchandise and sprays of blood.
This wasn't real, couldn't be real, couldn't be the world he lived in.
And then there was Coen & Associates. Jack parked in the middle of the street and slowly stood out of the car, his resolve draining away as he saw what had happened to the once beautiful facade.
The first tow floors were gone entirely, nothing but steel girders and twists of wire leading in to a lobby piled high with iridescent drifts of shattered glass. Above that the glass stood erratically, jutting from a pole here, a girder there, up and up, slowly becoming more whole as the top approached, the empty spaces compressing down into cracks that wrapped vine-like up the side of the building. The sparkling, cetacean forms that had leapt from the ledges at each floor now stood stunted, irregularly sheared off, what remained stained with smoke.
Jack approached the building, carefully stepped over the glass floes that blocked his way, stepped over crushed tile and office equipment and human filth until he found a door leading to an emergency stairwell. He pushed on it, found it gave slightly, but wouldn't open completely. He dialed Alice's office number, waited, waited...
"Hello?"
"I'm at the stairs; I can't get the door open."
"I barricaded it. I'll be down soon."
Minutes dragged by, then Jack heard something, many somethings, shifting and falling, Alice's voice cursing and crying. More minutes dragged by, and then the door slowly swung open.
Alice stood in the darkness, her clothes rumpled and dirty, her right ankle visibly swollen even in the darkness. "Office chairs," she said, her voice hoarse and barely audible. "I threw them down the stairwell after the first group got up."
It took a moment for the words to sink in. "How many?"
"Three... I... I don't know what they thought they would find here, but... No one else got up."
Jack swallowed, stepped forward, led Alice outside and into the car. She hobbled slowly along, gasping with every step.
"Oh, God, I can't wait to get out of here. I assume there's somewhere better to go?"
"Yeah." Jack opened the passenger door and lowered Alice inside. "Still have power in Sky Crest."
She chuckled. "You always did love Sky Crest, huh? It's gotten you through a lot..."
Something she said clicked inside Jack, and he aborted his circling to the driver's side. He opened Alice's door, leaned inside. "I'm really sorry, but there's something I have to do."
"What?" Her eyes dilated in fright, and she began to shake a little. "Jack, what are you doing? Where are you going?"
"I've got to do some looting of my own."
"Jack? Jack—" She continued yelling his name, her voice muffled as he closed the door and walked back to the shattered building. It bothered him to leave her here, but there was something he needed, something that had gotten him through so much, the tower holding up what little was left of his reality.
In through the door, up over the shifting mass of broken office furniture that littered the bottom of the stairwell. Up seven flights of stairs, through a fire door—
The smell of human refuse and rotten meat rolled over Jack as soon as the door was opened. He gagged, coughed, and looked out over the loft that had been his home away from home. This high, the windows were still intact, but streaked with smoke. In the light that filtered through, Jack saw collapsed cubicles, small barricades of desks and computers and, in a small pile under the half-floor that hung overhead, three bodies, each crushed under a small piece of furniture.
Alice was right; he didn't know what had happened here.
He sidestepped the bodies, made his way to the thin hallway at the far end of the loft, and pushed open a door that led into darkness. A moment later his mobile illuminated a small room filled with wires and short, rounded plastic towers. Each was labeled, Work Group A through D, with a series of names below the initial designation. He found his name, Work Group C, and carefully disconnected the wires that held the tower in place.
As he left the loft, left the remains of Alice's brush with madness, he smiled, secure in the knowledge that the tower, his tower was now firmly in his hands. All of his plans, every detail of construction and material, was his for the taking. Now all he needed was an underwriter.
Downstairs, Alice sat hunched in the car, glaring ruder at Jack. He deposited his bundle in the back seat, then slid into the driver's seat and started the car.
"That's what was so fucking important?"
Her tone cut at him, made him regret what he had done. She had been through so much in the past two days, and all she wanted was to be home...
But what about me, what about Jack? He had been through worse, had lost ten years of his life, had been dead. All he had to show for his life, for his second chance, was stored in the foot-and-a-half of plastic in the back seat. The ten minutes it took to retrieve his legacy hadn't hurt Alice.
"Did they do anything to you?"
Alice looked down at her lap. "No. They came up and were just going to wait it out, like me, just set up camp in the middle while I was up above. Then I heard them talking, heard what they were planning to do on Monday, when things had died down a bit and... and I..." she fell silent, chewed at her nails. "After that I barricaded the stairs. Did you know the water fountain doesn't work with no power?"
Jack shook his head and turned the car around, carefully avoiding the piles of glass. "Power's out in most of the town. Kensington's pretty much the hub of civilization here in the south. We've got power in Sky Crest; you can stay there a few days if you want."
Alice nodded, then sniffled. She was already relaxing, slumping down in the seat, putting her ordeal behind her. Jack idly wondered if letting her stay with him was a good idea. She seemed fine now, but she would probably need therapy. He'd ask Grant.
A car turned onto the road from a cross street, and Jack followed it for a mile before two other cars joined them. Another two miles, and seven cars were lined up at the barricade.
Jack put the car in park and adjusted the heater.
Alice was tensing, grinding her teeth.
"National Guard barricade; they set it up yesterday. There's one here, and another couple around Penn Square. They're trying to keep most of the rioters contained southeast."
Alice nodded, but she didn't seem very happy about this development.
The driver at the head of the line was offering up his ID to the soldier who stepped through the gate as a small truck pulled out into no man's land.
The car suddenly rocked violently, and Alice screamed, struck out at the window. Jack looked around wildly, then saw a shape hunched on the hood in front of him. The shape extended an arm, rapped on the windshield, and shifted to reveal the gaunt face of a small, dirty woman. Spilling out of the layers of coats she wore was a spray of bright-red hair.
"Hiya, Jack!" she called through the wi
ndshield. "Piece of fuckin' luck finding you here!"
Jack swallowed back a curse; he had hoped all of this was behind him.
"Is that Cyd?" Alice asked.
"You know her?"
"I watch all her videos. I just... never brought it up with you."
Cyd knocked again. "You're a celebrity, Johnny!"
