The siege, she meant. He said, “The wall is bound to come down sooner or later. There’ll be federal troops in both towers before long.”
“It’ll be bad for Kemp. Back home, I mean. He’ll try to blame all this on Theo, of course. But if it gets out that City employees fired on American soldiers, even in self-defense, Kemp will be out of business for good.”
She had told him on the train—days ago, though it seemed more like months—that Kemp’s first City of Futurity had ended badly: Three people had been killed when a former Confederate soldier entered the City’s pavilion at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia and opened fire on the crowd. It wasn’t much compared to what was happening here, but it had emboldened activists like Theo Stromberg and raised questions about the ethics of time travel. “If any of this gets into the press back home—I mean the bank fraud, the riots, the attempt on Grant’s life, this siege—it’ll be all over.”
“Will Kemp be put on trial?”
“Maybe not a criminal trial, more likely a Congressional investigation, but yeah—that’s what Theo Stromberg’s hoping for.”
“And will you be called to testify?”
She seemed startled by the idea. “I guess it’s not impossible.”
“Would you testify against Kemp, even if it cost you your job?”
“I wouldn’t lie to save him. And he’s already pissed at me, so losing the job is probably a done deal. Sure, I guess I’d testify. Theo’s a fanatic, but he’s right—Kemp’s reckless, he hurts people, and he ought to be stopped.”
The tunnel was busy with City operatives rushing back and forth, some riding on electrical carts, some laden with boxes or luggage. Large-scale goods too valuable to be abandoned would have been taken to the Mirror by way of the enormous freight elevators at ground level, while City personnel and any remaining civilians lined up for the less gargantuan staff elevators here. It looked as if the City’s twenty-first-century employees had all been moved to Tower One to wait their turn to leave, while local hires were segregated in Tower Two to wait for something else—the inevitable entry of federal forces, to whom they could surrender, presumably, and plead innocence.
Kemp’s people arrived at a doorway that marked the border between Tower One and Tower Two, where a pair of security men had been stationed to scrutinize everyone who passed through. The men doing the scrutinizing, Jesse realized with dismay, were his old enemies from Tower One, Dekker and Castro, two men who done as much as anyone to convince him that the future had not abolished vindictiveness or petty jealousy.
August Kemp stood next to Dekker as his party began to pass through. Phoebe on her gurney, pushed by the medics, then Elizabeth, Mercy Kemp, Theo Stromberg, then Dr. Talbot—but Kemp stepped forward and put a hand on Talbot’s chest and said, “Your phone, please, Doctor.”
“My phone?”
“For security reasons. You’ll get it back once we’re home.”
He would get it back with all the dangerous images purged from it, Jesse thought. Talbot looked like he might object, then sighed. “If you insist,” he said, handing the phone to Kemp, who passed it into the meaty hand of Dekker, who pocketed it, grinning. Talbot was allowed to pass. Then it was Jesse’s turn.
Except that it was not. “Hold on, chief,” Dekker said.
Kemp took Jesse’s arm and steered him aside. “I’m afraid we can’t allow locals beyond this point.”
“My sister’s a local,” Jesse said, “and she’s already beyond this point.”
“Phoebe’s your sister? Mercy didn’t mention that. It looks like Phoebe got caught in the crossfire when you were doing whatever it was you were doing in that Nob Hill house. That was personal business, wasn’t it? No connection to the job you were hired to do.”
Jesse didn’t venture an answer. Beyond the doorway, Elizabeth turned to look back but was hustled away by the press of people.
“I promised Mercy we’d take care of the girl, and we will. And as soon as she’s patched up, we’ll deliver her to you at Tower One. I’m a man of my word. And I promised you something else, didn’t I? This.” Kemp reached into his jacket and extracted a bag of jingling coins. Gold eagles, Jesse assumed, maybe the same bag Kemp had shown him back in Oakland. “Severance pay. I’m not sure you’ve earned it. You put my daughter in danger, and I’d be justified in cutting you off without a penny more than you’ve already been paid. But I’m not vindictive and I don’t hold a grudge. Take it. Go on. Take it, Jesse.”
Elizabeth and Dr. Talbot had already disappeared. So had Phoebe. Jesse considered his options. He continued to meet Kemp’s cynical stare.
But he took the money.
“Some advice,” Kemp said. “That arm looks pretty ugly. Have someone take care of it before it gets infected. And if you’re afraid of how the army might treat you, as a City employee? Don’t be. You’re the man who saved the life of U. S. Grant. A fucking hero! Tell them that. Tell everyone! Talk to the press, play it up. A book, a lecture series—you could make yourself a rich man.”
* * *
Kemp pushed through the doorway and was gone. Jesse hung back, watching the passage. Dekker and Castro stood on each side of the door, eyeing him in return.
Jesse waited.
After a few minutes the crowd began to thin. These were the last of the City people, Jesse thought, abandoning Tower Two to the local employees. Soon the crowd was scant enough that the mechanical doors slid shut from time to time, so that stragglers had to use a pass card to open them. Jesse chose one of these empty moments to approach the door again.
Dekker’s grin expanded. He clearly relished the prospect of a fight … perhaps particularly because of the wound to Jesse’s right arm, blood from which had stained the sleeve of his shirt and was leaking through the bandage even now. “Need some help, chief? You’re headed in the wrong direction.”
“I ought to be with my sister.”
“Well, but that’s not possible.”
Castro kept quiet and looked uneasy. Jesse narrowed his attention to Dekker and only Dekker. “I mean to pass through, so you might as well get out of my way.”
“Not happening, bro. As an alternative, I suggest you go fuck yourself.”
Jesse charged him. These twenty-first-century security men were unnaturally tall and densely muscled, but Jesse was a big man for his time and his skills were brutally practical. It gave him a grim pleasure to step inside the radius of Dekker’s beefy arms and deliver a blow that rocked Dekker’s head back and sent a spurt of blood from his nose.
But Dekker wasn’t on his heels for long. He recovered quickly enough to close Jesse in a grip that trapped his injured right arm. And as Jesse struggled, flailing with his free left hand, Dekker began to squeeze. The man’s strength was astonishing. The pressure ignited a furious pain, as if the flesh itself were screaming. Jesse endured it until a new freshet of blood flowed down his forearm to the wrist and began to spatter the tiled floor. Dekker put his mouth to Jesse’s ear and said, “Had enough, chief?”
Jesse refused to speak.
“I can do this forever, asshole. Had enough?”
Jesse managed to nod his head, once.
“Say it. Seriously. Say it.”
“Enough,” Jesse gasped.
Dekker relaxed his grip, but followed with an open-palm blow that rocked Jesse’s head and sent him reeling. “Just head on back to Tower Two,” Dekker said. “They’ll send you your sister when they’re done with her. Chief.”
Jesse gave himself credit for staying upright. The damage to his arm was significant. An ominous numbness, almost worse than the pain, propagated through his right hand. Some of the fingers were reluctant to obey him. He turned and walked away. The sound of Dekker’s laughter followed him as he stumbled down the tunnel.
Dekker was savoring his victory. He would probably continue to savor it, Jesse thought, right up until the moment he realized that in the course of the struggle Jesse had taken from him both his pass card and Talbot’s ph
one.
* * *
Local employees of the City of Futurity had been herded into the commissary in the basement level of Tower Two, where they could surrender en masse to federal forces once the evacuation was complete and the Mirror shut down. None of these people was responsible for August Kemp’s crimes, and in principle none of them had anything to fear from the troops. But guns had been fired in earnest, and City employees were understandably nervous about the consequences of that. The crowd consisted of a hundred people or so, and some of them must have recognized Jesse, but apart from a few startled exclamations they left him alone. Limping slightly, bleeding from his arm, his clothes ragged and bloodstained, he guessed he looked as if he might be followed by an undertaker or a flock of carrion crows.
He spotted Dorothy, the war widow who used to sell him muffins from the Starbucks booth, seated on an upturned trash bin. Her eyes widened at the sight of him, but she was brave enough not to flinch. “Jesse Cullum, is that you?”
“Yes, ma’am. I was away, but I got back this morning.”
“How is that possible—did you fly over the wall?”
She meant it facetiously, but he nodded. “In fact I did.”
“I’m tempted to believe you. You’re hurt!”
“Not fatally. Tell me, have you seen Doris Vanderkamp today?”
“Do you see how few of us are still here? Most of the local hires left as soon as the evacuation was announced. The rest of us took cash bonuses to stay behind and help, for better or worse. If Doris had been prudent she’d be long gone. But when was Doris ever prudent? I saw her heading for the dormitory section a few minutes ago, probably packing up what’s left of her possessions. Jesse, do you know what’s going on? We haven’t heard from management for hours. Has the wall been breached?”
“Kemp’s people mean to hold off the soldiers until the Mirror is shut down. But I’m guessing you’ll see soldiers inside by nightfall.”
She smiled wanly. “I liked it here, Jesse. Oh, I know it was all pretend. The amity, the smiles. Past and future clasping hands in friendship. But it was a pretty dream, wasn’t it?”
Jesse felt a surge of affection for this solemn woman who had served him coffee on countless winter mornings. “For some of us it was. Best of luck to you, Dorothy.”
“And to you, Jesse Cullum, wherever you’re hurrying off to. Have someone see to that arm!”
* * *
He found Doris Vanderkamp in her cubicle in the dormitory wing, just as Dorothy had said. The door to her room was half ajar, but he knocked so as not to alarm her. It didn’t work. She saw his face and emitted a small shriek. “Jesse!”
“Yes,” he said, “it’s me.”
She came to him and took his arm—his uninjured left arm, luckily—and steered him inside. He sat on her bed and let a wave of dizziness wash over him. “Lord,” she said, “you’re bleeding like a butchered hog!”
A coin-sized drop of blood stained the bedsheet. He gazed at it dully. “I’m sorry…”
“You need a bandage.”
“I already have one.”
“Then you need a fresh one, or a tourniquet.”
“It’s a kind thought. But what I really need, Doris, is a uniform.”
“What? I thought you said ‘uniform.’”
“I did. A City security uniform.”
“Are you drunk? That’s the last thing you need. All of us here already traded our uniforms for civilian clothes. The army will be inside sooner or later, and you don’t want to get caught wearing City colors. It would only make a target of you. Lie down and let me look at that wound.”
“Did you take medical training in my absence?”
“No, but I can tie a cloth.”
He was tempted to take her advice, at least the part about lying down. But if he closed his eyes he might not open them again for hours. “My case is different. I’m serious—I need a uniform that fits me.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What business are you caught up in now?”
“It’s a long story, Doris, I’m sorry. A City uniform—can you get me one?”
“The lockers are full of them.” She sighed. “If you’re willing to wait here, I’ll bring you one. I guess anything would serve you better than that bloody rag of a shirt.”
“One more thing. Do you have paper and a pen?”
She waved at her desk, the kind with which every dormitory cubicle was equipped. “Top drawer.”
“I thank you,” he said. But she had already left the room. Time was slipping away from him. He located a pad of paper embossed with the City logo and a City pen with a rolling point. Paper in his lap, pen in his left hand, he gathered his unruly thoughts and began to write.
* * *
He had filled two pages by the time Doris returned with a uniform that looked as if it might fit him. He set aside the pages and let her help him trade his civilian pants for City trousers. That was easy enough. The shirt was more difficult. He took Dekker’s pass card and Talbot’s phone from his pocket and put them on Doris’s desk.
“That’s an iPhone,” she said.
“How do you know about such things?”
“I was courted by a Tower One man last winter, when you were off chasing runners or whatever you were doing. He had a pass card like that. He used it to sneak me into his quarters. And he had an iPhone, too. He liked to take pictures with it. Moving pictures,” she said, waggling her eyebrows suggestively.
Jesse understood that Doris liked to think she possessed the power to make him jealous. “What kind of moving pictures?”
“The intimate kind.”
“The cad,” he said, to please her.
Doris grinned triumphantly. “I didn’t mind! He said there are women who do it for a living, where he comes from, and they’re perfectly respectable, and I’m as good at it as any of them.”
“Seems like you were born too soon.”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“Far from it.” He clenched his teeth and pulled off his shirt. The shirt and the bandage beneath it and the flesh of his arm had been glued together with blood. Peeling it all apart caused black spots to cloud his vision. Doris sucked in her breath when she saw the exposed wound. “Jesse … I think I can see bone.”
He wished she hadn’t spoken. “Bind it,” he said. “Any old cloth. Tear a strip from my shirttail if you have to. Bind it for me, Doris—I can’t do it myself.”
She looked queasy but followed his instructions. The bleeding wasn’t stanched, but it slowed. He used his old shirt to wipe some of the spilled blood from his arm, and he covered up the rest with the fresh City shirt and the blue City blazer with the City of Futurity insignia on it.
“And I got these for you,” Doris said.
A pair of Oakley sunglasses. The kind he had once considered supremely desirable. Tinted plastic and a thimble’s-worth of aluminum. He put them on and regarded himself in Doris’s mirror.
“You look as City as they come,” she said.
He pocketed the pass card and was pocketing Talbot’s iPhone when an idea occurred to him. “Doris, have you really used one of these devices?”
“I said so, didn’t I?”
“To make moving pictures?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going up to the observation deck to find out what’s happening. Will you come with me?”
“Those elevators don’t open to us anymore.”
“They’ll open for me. It’ll only take a few minutes. Will you come?”
She seemed flattered and curious in equal parts. “Yeah, all right,” she said.
* * *
The observation deck of Tower Two, like the rest of Tower Two, had been designed to impress guests who had never seen a building taller than three stories. Jesse had been up here occasionally during his tenure at the City, and for him, as for most guests, the effect was an amalgam of fascination and dread. The floor was not divided by interior walls, and the outer walls were made of thick transp
arent glass. It was like standing on an open platform suspended from a cloud.
Not everyone enjoyed the experience. Every week a few visitors, by no means exclusively women, fainted at the sight. Others begged to be taken back to solid ground. And even Doris’s pleasure was not unalloyed, it seemed to Jesse. Or maybe it was the risk of a stray artillery round that made her uneasy.
He went to the north side of the deck, where he could see the wall and the army arrayed beyond it. From this angle it was clear what the City’s strategy had been. The army was separated from the wall by a broad swath of empty prairie, a sort of no-man’s-land, marking out the effective range of a twenty-first-century rifle. The City’s soldiers were posted atop the wall itself, which was more than broad enough to accommodate them, and they were all armed with automatic weapons. Any infantryman who ventured into the no-go zone would be rewarded with a bullet. And City rifles were accurate at distances that made even the finest Winchester seem like a farmer’s musket.
The gate itself was a smaller steel barrier set into the wall, and the soldiers had trained their artillery on that target, perhaps hoping to eventually blow it open and enable a massed charge. Or maybe they were simply restraining themselves in hope of a negotiated surrender: They could have shelled the towers at any time, as a few stray shots had demonstrated.
The steel gate was sturdy, but it wasn’t as massive as the wall itself, and there was enough accumulated rubble at the base of it to suggest a breach was possible. As Jesse watched, another artillery round burst against it. The City’s defenders responded with rounds of automatic-rifle fire.
“Kemp wants to buy time to finish the evacuation,” Jesse said. “The Mirror is a bottleneck. It’s hard to say how long this will last. You can record moving pictures with this phone?”
“For the last time, yes! But I don’t mean to stand close enough to the window to do so. I’ll go back down, if you don’t mind. I feel like a flea on a flagpole.”
Last Year Page 29
