by Mike Chen
“It’s really simple. This isn’t about me. It’s about finding Sunny before things get worse. I’m sorry, Frank. I really am. But I need to do this.” She slammed the door shut and cranked the engine to life.
“We should stop by my place first,” Krista said.
Rob and Moira gave inquisitive looks her way, though she didn’t meet either of them. “I have a large sum of cash. It might come in handy.”
Moira nodded, then released the parking brake.
* * *
Moira had run to Narc before, years ago. Like now, she went to him for help, for a way through the chaos.
Back then, she just hadn’t met him yet.
As she left Madison Square Garden’s loading area, people burst in all directions around her, trying to find their way home or to loved ones or whatever they considered safe.
Moira—Johanna as she was known then, or the even more repulsive MoJo—did the opposite of that. She didn’t run to the hotel where her family and hired help stayed, she didn’t run to closed quarters; she flew into the chaos, past breaking windows and crashing cars and open flames, as long as it meant going away from the life she knew.
She’d kept going, sprinting to walking to jogging in every possible combination, reaching into destroyed storefronts to grab layers of clothing or bags of chips or the miracle find of unopened vodka. The hours counted past, an aimless direction moving her farther and farther from the massive arena until dusk broke. The purple hues of the morning turned into daylight, the ugliness of the previous night failing to subside when the sun cast a spotlight on it all. Twelve hours became sixteen became twenty became a blur when her phone gave out.
She’d been awake for well over a day at that point, exhausted, drunk for at least a quarter of that time, and nourished only on a diet of salt-and-vinegar chips, a Snickers bar, and an orange. Sometime in the afternoon, she’d found a quiet spot in an alley next to a barred-up Chinese restaurant, the soundtrack of blaring car alarms, police sirens, and distant yelling singing her body to sleep. She knelt down, back against the hard, cold wall, then slid to sitting, eyes unable to stay open anymore. Everything went into shutdown mode.
She didn’t even hear the two men approach, or when one of them flicked open a knife.
They didn’t say a word, other than a whispered “You think the cops will help you right now?” The knife’s blade pressed up against her neck, and a forearm braced across her shoulders. “Why do I get the feeling you’re one of those rich kids?” the man said, pulling rings off her fingers. He was probably unaware that her ensemble consisted only of costume jewelry she hadn’t bothered to remove. “How rich are you?”
Inside, everything wanted to fight back. Her will pulled to scream and scratch and claw, punching and kicking, a lifetime of pent-up rage ready to explode. But her body wasn’t willing. It’d been awake too long, pushed too far, drank too much, and all she could muster was a meager push against the pressure.
Shutting down mentally and emotionally wasn’t anything new. She closed her eyes, awaiting the worst. Except it didn’t arrive.
Instead, she sat dumbfounded as something flew over her, vaulting across an adjacent Dumpster and landing with enough force to swiftly knock the two assailants down. A few blinks later and she registered a new person, a man about ten or fifteen years older than her, Latino complexion, black hair as filthy as her own, T-shirt stained dark.
And pointing a gun. Not at her, but at the two men he’d just taken out.
“You two don’t need to do this,” he said. The pair looked at each other, then at him; they both put their hands up and backed away. “There’s a big city fighting out there. How about you boys go join it?”
Within seconds, the men disappeared.
“You all right?”
“I don’t need rescuing,” she said, though her exhausted body told her otherwise.
“I’m not rescuing anyone. This is a shortcut. The other alleys are blocked.” He gestured around them. “Just doing a good deed while passing through. Here, have some water.”
“I’m fine. I’m fine.” Her shoes scuffed the pavement as she shuffled to her feet. Fatigue tried to drape her eyes shut, but she told herself to focus. “What was that? The...” She lacked the words to describe what she’d just seen, instead mock flailing her arms and legs.
“Ah. Jiujitsu. Well, the second part, anyway.” He mimicked her arm gestures. “And parkour.”
The terms meant nothing to her, other than saving if not her life, then her physical self and what little sanity remained. “Thanks. Guess I owe you one, yeah?”
“British. You on vacation here with your folks? Or studying?”
“Little bit of both. Kind of.” She exhaled, and it felt like it had been building up for years. Despite being sweaty and grimy, the man’s eyes flickered with something so rare in her life that it took several seconds for her to recognize it.
Honesty. Almost enough to disarm her. Almost.
“Look, um, I don’t know where you’re heading—” he started.
“Nowhere. Leave me alone.”
“I thought you said you were with your folks.”
“Doesn’t mean I’m going back to them.”
“Ah.” The man’s lips pursed, as he turned to examine the string of police sirens that whizzed by the alley. “They fell to the flu?”
“I don’t know.”
They stared at each other for a good twenty seconds. She felt certain he wasn’t going to harm her, though given the group of people usually paid to accompany her, perhaps she wasn’t the best judge of character. Still, nothing compelled her to run—and even if she did, her body may not have had the remaining strength to obey such a command.
“Okay.” The man broke the silence, sliding the gun into his boot. “Okay, look. If you want to stay here, that’s fine. If you want to try and get into quarantine, that’s fine too. But you’re welcome to come with me. My friends and I have decided. We’re standing our ground. No governments. No quarantines. We’ll live off the land. Either here or somewhere else.”
Live off the land. Up until that moment, the only options seemed to be quarantine with her dad or quarantine without. Or death. An alternative seemed so distant, so unlikely, that it had never materialized before.
“Did you hear about the shite going down at Madison Square Garden?” she asked.
“Shite,” he said, a playful lilt in his mock accent, “is going down everywhere.”
“Right. Well, there was a concert when things went bad. I was onstage.”
“You? Are you like a pop idol or something?”
“In some ways.” Her eyes fell to the uneven cement of New York City pavement beneath her. “They call me MoJo.”
“Hmm. Sorry,” he said, checking his watch. “Never heard of you.”
That moment burned in her memory with a frightening clarity: the grime on her hands, the sweat-stuck clothes, the pain in her feet, the aching sense of dehydration tinted with hunger, the burning in the air mixed with manhole stench. All of those details stitched permanently in her mind as the background to one single event.
She pulled the hood off her head and, on the ground, caught a distorted view of herself in a hubcap lying against the concrete wall. Slanted, pulled, out of proportion, the image blurred everything except for the eyes: they were tired eyes, but something seemed so unfamiliar, unique about them, despite having seen them in the mirror every day of her life—usually when prepping for a show or rehearsal.
Freedom sat beneath them.
She finally smiled.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to come. I’m just offering. But you have no reason to trust me.” The man looked down, then behind them, then down again before reaching and pulling out the gun. He grabbed it by the barrel, then held it out to her. “I should get going. Take this.”
“I d
on’t like guns.”
“Me neither. But with this?” He gestured around them. “It’s not a bad idea.” His logic made sense, but other fears ran through her mind. Bodyguards and limos and security had protected her all this time. A gun? She wouldn’t even know how to use it.
“I’m not sure.”
“About the gun or about coming along?”
She kept silent, eyes bouncing between the weapon and the man.
“What do you want? Maybe you should ask yourself that,” the man said, popping the clip out from the handle. He held it sideways, and though her gun experience amounted to zero, even her tired eyes recognized an empty clip. “You want to head to quarantine? Because the busing stations are that way.” He pointed in a direction that meant nothing to her.
“I want to be no one. For once.”
The man studied her for what felt like minutes, though that might have simply been the exhaustion and dehydration taking over. He finally nodded, putting the clip back into the gun’s handle and offering it to her. She clasped her fingers around it, the weight of the weapon surprising her. “You’re a teenage girl in a world going to shit. A gun looks better on you than it does me. Even if it’s empty.”
“Will you teach me to use it?”
The man let out a quick huff followed by a smile, nodding to no one in particular. “I’m not the best shot. But I’ll try. Like I said, I hate guns. Come on.” He propped her up. “We’ll meet up with my friend. He’s organizing a group to get out of New York. Everyone calls him Narc. I’m Santiago, by the way. What’s your name?”
“Jo—” she started before catching herself. She cleared her throat and stood up straight despite the overwhelming weariness. “Moira.”
“Moira.” Santiago reached into his backpack and pulled out a plastic bottle, cap still sealed, and handed it to her. Water had never tasted better. “I like it. Much better than MoJo.”
For years after that moment, she’d hidden behind the name Moira, using it to deflect from her past. But now, with Frank and his family shrinking in the rearview mirror, her dad’s shouts still audible, the chaos of the city swirling around them, and a family to reunite, the name Moira was no longer a shield.
It simply was who she was.
Excerpt from President Tanya Hersh’s speech on the
accelerated lockdown window and spreading MGS:
Barricades have been put up in most of the major cities by now with controlled entrance and exit checkpoints established by the end of the day. Certified citizen patrol officers will be monitoring secured highways to minimize looter gang activity. We urge all citizens to avoid gang conflict zones if they are traveling home. Travelers are reminded that a valid photo ID is required for entrance into a state using supported highways, and only people returning to their home address will be admitted. International air travel is permitted only for those who are returning to their native countries. This window will close in two days.
I understand that there will be questions about a quarantine state. Please know that we hear you and that there are no active plans for quarantine. Our focus is on resolving the situation at hand, not uprooting everyone’s lives again.
As our resources are limited, Reclaimed Territory groups will be left to plan their own response to this emergency.
Part 4:
FRIENDS
Chapter Forty
Moira
For the first hour, the drive out of San Francisco was calm and quiet.
But not now.
Krista was yelling. So was Rob.
Moira knew this, though she couldn’t understand what they were saying. The throttle roared, and her boot slammed the brake, enough to break up their pace as she turned the wheel and slid across the four empty lanes of the highway.
The last time someone had fired a gun at her, adrenaline pumped through her body and each step seemed like another inch toward victory—victory over what, she didn’t know, but some sort of self-affirmation, a point where her physical abilities to climb and leap matched her attitude. Maybe she only wanted to impress Narc, Santiago, and the crew through the beaten remains of Reno’s main strip on Sierra Street. She didn’t consider it much back then—in fact, at that point, she didn’t think about anything except getting to California right before civilization trickled out of quarantines. Something—a bullet, shrapnel, whatever—grazed her bare shoulder during that sprint between a valley of casinos, slicing into the flesh enough that Santiago tore a strip off the bottom of his shirt while in midstride and ran beside her to tie it.
The pain felt almost good then, a challenge to be alive. There was no panic, there was nothing to lose, and they’d seen so much on their cross-country trek that that felt like one more test before getting through.
The distinct pop-pop-pop of gunfire, the echo of bullets bouncing off the pavement. It sounded the same today, right now, but speeding down the highway with Rob and Krista, it felt different. There was no bravado in her actions. In fact, only one thought remained.
We have to get to Sunny. The line repeated itself from the instant they left Frank and his family, from gathering supplies at Rob’s to a pit stop at Krista’s for a ridiculous pile of cash and to set up Krista’s cat with her neighbor, all the way to the brief call with Narc before leaving the San Francisco Metro phone coverage zone. It kept her focus when they escaped across the Bay Bridge—with shocking ease; by the time they set out, traffic had died down. Either people had given up or they’d got through—past the checkpoint of the government-supported zone at the Benicia Bridge, and into the wilderness of Highway 80, surrounded only by the Major Highway Safety Project’s protective structure and the occasional automated fill-up station.
When a pair of looter gang vehicles appeared on the opposite side of the highway, it was still at the forefront of her mind.
“Holy shit,” Krista yelled, ducking her head down as the ceiling pinged with a bullet. “Those assholes are trying to kill us.”
“Hang on.” Moira’s voice was steady. Calm. But not fearless. “Warning shots,” she said, though she didn’t necessarily believe it.
“Stop the car!” a megaphoned voice called from outside. “Give us your shit and you can walk home.”
“Don’t think so.” She glanced at the straight stretch of Highway 80 eastbound, a mostly empty expanse, dilapidated despite the barbed-wire fencing of the MHSP on either side. She could see the government barricades blocking the next off-ramp. In the sky, two highway patrol drones hovered, watching passively from above, similar to the pair they’d passed about twenty miles ago.
“You totally jinxed us,” Krista said to Rob. “You just had to say, ‘Oh, at least it’s an MHSP highway.’”
“The only two cars we’ve seen turn out to be looter gangs,” Rob yelled, holding their bags down in the back. “Who are these guys?”
“Die Urbans.” At least, that’s what Moira thought. Her memory of looter gang signs was a little shaky, and she’d only gotten a glance of the spray-painted X-U on a truck on the opposite side of the highway before it flipped a U and started running parallel to them down the wrong way. “They don’t usually hit MHSP highways. They’re alone. We can lose them.”
“That’s a really, really, really—” Krista’s comment got cut off as Moira jerked the car suddenly to go wide of an abandoned truck sitting in the middle lane. “That’s a really weird name for a gang. Are they German or something?”
“Dunno. Narc might know.”
“We have to get to Narc first,” Rob said.
Moira nodded. She glanced over her shoulder across the highway divider. Two Die Urban vehicles, one truck and one beat-up sports car, continued racing just steps behind them. If there was anyone driving westbound on Highway 80, it wouldn’t end well. She told herself to focus, and maybe if they kept this distance for a bit, the pirates would get bored and go off.
The J
eep jolted forward with Moira’s foot jamming the accelerator, the car’s cage rattling.
“I think—” she started until a static squawk interrupted her.
“Moira,” a voice said from the dash’s CB radio. “Moira Gorman, is that you causing trouble on the highway?”
Narc.
She snatched the microphone from the dash. “Narc, are you gonna just sit and watch?”
“Well, yeah. I’ve got the highway drone feed up here.”
“Thanks,” Moira said reflexively, unable to add much sarcasm in it.
“But I’m sending some help. We’ve had a few Die Urban scouts down here over the past few weeks. We know how to scare them off.”
“Narc, they are shooting at us. Like, right now.”
“I can see that. Help is on the way. Just don’t run into them.”
“I think we’d be happy to see them.”
“No, literally, don’t run into them. It took us forever to build those cars.”
“Come on...” Moira’s voice trailed off as a black speck popped out of the horizon, flying in an arc over the highway divide. She tracked it as it hovered over the westbound side, followed by two more drones. Smoke began to plume out of them, falling onto the pavement below, and the drones, barely visible through the dense vapors, zigged and zagged to blanket the opposing lanes while trying to keep up with them. Moira pressed the accelerator, the Jeep’s engine rattling as it pushed its limits.
The CB came to life again. “I think you’re good. But just for good measure...”
Right when Narc said that, the rearview mirror lit up with a geyser of flames reaching up some twenty feet in the air.
“Jesus,” Rob said. “Did we drive into a war zone?”
“Looks good,” Narc said, as if he could hear Rob’s question, “but it’s pretty harmless. The Die Urbans are turning around now. Too much trouble for just one car. They were probably on their way to raid the convoys coming out of the Benicia warehouses. You’ll be coming up on my friends soon.”
