by Sue Burke
Irene endured endless speculation from Roger and the other quarantine-table members about what was going on outside. People might be dropping by droves from the cold, whatever a drove was.
“I think there’ll be armed resistance,” Roger said, his breath short and fast. He slumped in his chair, a man in need of serious rest and care. “I mean, the Prez has supporters. He keeps things in order, crime down—I know, not really, ’specially if it’s a crime to lock us up—and stuff like that. If you have money, things are great. But today, everyone else, they just say no, and there’s going to be pushback.”
In a game of truth and lies, Irene thought, one out of those three things—illness, mutiny, and resistance—wouldn’t be true. Which one? The question seemed too hard to answer.
Gunfire sounded outside. Everyone stopped and listened. They heard another round, then silence.
Koobmeej stood on a table. “That was a warning to us that this place is guarded. But we knew that. Everyone knows that. It was meant to scare us. Don’t be scared.”
“It’s a shooting war now,” Roger said. “Told ya.”
He looked bad, but so did Koobmeej, and as the minutes ticked by, Irene was feeling sick, too. Her head pounded so fiercely she could hardly think—since when did she get migraines?—and she felt too dizzy to want to try to think. She couldn’t breathe well.
“We could really use some fresh air in here,” she said.
“Ain’t that a fact.” Roger looked up at the skylights. “I wonder if those things open.”
“We could break them,” she said. “All we need is someone with a good throwing arm.”
“We talked about that. It might bring in the centaurs. Or something. The same with the door.”
She looked around. Koobmeej was looking at his phone. Why? It didn’t work to make calls. Maybe he was playing a game, but he definitely wasn’t enjoying it.
He climbed onto a table again. “Hey, everyone, listen up. We have a big problem. I work in a greenhouse, so I need to monitor the atmosphere in it. I’ve checked our air. The CO2 level in here is wrong. They’ve cut off ventilation. Maybe they’re messing with the air. We have to do something. But in the meantime, sit still. Try not to talk too much. We’re about to try to break out of here while we still can.”
“Suffocation,” Roger said. “It’s a tough way to die. They use CO2 to stun animals before they slaughter them sometimes. I’ve seen it. Takes a while. Hurts just to watch.”
At Koobmeej’s direction, a dozen brawny prisoners stacked up three tables, and while some of them held the tables steady, a tall man climbed up and swung a metal folding chair against a skylight. The chair broke. The skylight didn’t.
“Well built, dammit,” Roger said. “Look at the sides of the building. Sheet-metal siding, sure, but iron bars inside. This was never a barn. Always a prison.” He didn’t seem inclined to consider talking less, and Irene didn’t have the ambition to ask him to shut up.
They tried another chair against the nearly flat metal roof, but the roof didn’t budge, even at seams alongside the skylights.
Irene choked back nausea. A few people were holding their chests in pain. A tough way to die.
The team trying to get fresh air moved the tables again, this time under the peak in the roof and at a different seam in the construction. One chair broke, and the man swinging it fell and was caught by others. Another man climbed up and continued to hammer rhythmically.
Irene thought of a song with that rhythm and drifted off into sort of a dream, waking with a start at a wrong note. A weird dream.
The man on the table seemed to have made a big dent.
“Cease activity immediately,” a voice said over a loudspeaker, a guard, probably a robot by the way it repeated the warning in the exact same tones. Then gunfire boomed outside, and the man on the table fell. He was caught by the work team, and although his shoulder streamed with blood, he gave a high-five sign.
The guard had shot through the wall. A sparkle of light shone in the wall where the bullet had entered, and another in the roof where the bullet exited.
“Not enough for fresh air,” Roger said.
“Where’s the surveillance?” Koobmeej called. “Look for something small that’s a camera, maybe hidden.”
Irene could do that. She stood up and suddenly swayed, dizzy. She held on tight to the back of her chair and waited until she felt steady, then examined the corner of the barn used for the quarantine area. She spotted a tiny box tucked up against a strut and recognized it as an off-the-shelf camera.
Three other boxes were spotted in other parts of the barn, and people started throwing things at them. Irene looked around for something.
“Hey, take my boot,” Roger called. He’d pulled it off and held it out. “Steel toes. Work boots.”
It was heavy and bulky, and she tested it in her hands. It would be hard to aim, but with its weight, it could be destructive. She threw it and almost hit the camera. Suddenly bullets flew in through the side of the building. She dropped to the ground like everyone else, and she lay still for a minute. They should have expected the robots to shoot.
“Those bullets flew way too high,” Roger said from where he lay under a table. “If those damn robots wanted to kill people, they’d’ve aimed low. They’re obeying orders, and I bet the orders say to keep us inside, not to kill us. So we die nice and slow of bad air.” He grunted, a sound as ugly as an expletive.
Irene got up slowly, rage rising as she did. They were being tortured to death. She retrieved the boot and, with the strength of red-hot anger, threw it again. Its heel hit the camera with a satisfying thump, and the camera dangled from a wire. She dropped to the ground and waited for bullets. None came. She stood up and threw the boot again. The camera fell this time, and she dropped to the ground again. Another burst of gunfire pierced the walls.
Did she hear a mammoth trumpet? No, that was just her oxygen-starved imagination. Nimkii to the rescue! He could follow the trail of her scent and trash and crumbs up the county trunk road to Berry Farm. A nice idea. But the centaurs would shoot him.
One by one, the cameras were destroyed, and after a wait, the team resumed banging on the roof. Irene watched, lying on the ground. Bits of metal fell as the chair broke apart. A man pushed a leg into the roof like a pry bar and pulled down, and a line of light shone through. The roof was open! A little, at least. She took a breath and couldn’t notice a difference.
The team worked even faster. The man swung from the chair-leg pry bar like an acrobat, and another man hung on to his ankles for extra weight. The crack widened and sunshine poured through—and air. She caught a whiff of it now, cool and fresh.
The hole grew. How big would be big enough? A breeze passed over her, and she breathed in as much as she could—and she heard a trumpet. Definitely. Nimkii was out there!
She climbed to her feet and staggered through a dizzy spell to the stack of tables. She had to warn Nimkii to get away.
“Let me climb up there. Hear that? It’s the mammoth. My mammoth. He’s out there.” She got a blank look. She explained again. “That mammoth at that farm, you know it? I work there.”
“Okay then,” a woman said. “Let me help you climb up. Hey, Aaron. Let her out. She’s the mammoth girl.”
“Easy does it,” the man told her as he knelt to let her sit on his shoulders. She poked her head through the narrow opening, avoiding the sharp metal edges. The air smelled sweet, sweet, sweet.
Nimkii stood on the road, trunk raised and jerking. She couldn’t see any centaurs or people, but she was at a bad angle for looking around.
“Nimkii!”
He spotted her and started rushing toward her.
“Nimkii, go away!” She grabbed an edge of the metal, scraping her palm, and put her foot on the man’s shoulder. He pushed the backs of her thighs to help her climb out.
One of the centaurs stood near the front entrance to the barn.
Nimkii kept walking forward. “N
imkii, no!” How could she make him understand the idea? Noise might work.
“Return to the building,” the robot called. Nimkii continued walking toward it, unafraid. He didn’t know what a robot was, but he knew a humanlike voice. He might think it was a living being, someone who could help him.
The centaur emitted a blast of noise. Irene covered her ears and hunched down, eyes on Nimkii. For a moment, he froze. Then he lowered his head, curled his trunk, and spread out his ears in an attack pose. He roared and charged. The centaur didn’t seem to notice him. He butted the robot with enough strength to knock it over easily, a puny thing next to him, and reared up to land on it with both feet. The noise stopped. A robot leg had fallen off. He kicked it again, sending it a few feet across the gravel yard. Satisfied, he backed off.
The other centaur came running. It ignored Nimkii and aimed a gun at Irene. She dropped down and heard a crash, then another one. She raised her head slowly, covering it instinctively and uselessly with her hands. Nimkii picked up the robot with his trunk, obviously not for the first time, and dashed it against the barn. Pieces flew off of it. The robot collapsed, leaving a dent in the metal siding.
Nimkii trumpeted. He spotted a small car. He rushed at it and pushed it over, all the way upside down. Then he smashed a foot onto its undercarriage, and the roof crunched against the ground. He began kicking it.
“Nimkii! You’ll hurt yourself!” She had to calm him down. “Nimkii,” she crooned. “Nimkii, I’m up here. I’ll come down and get you.” She slid toward the edge of the roof.
Where were the guards? Ruby’s truck was gone. Had everyone left? Apparently. Gunfire and noise hadn’t brought anyone out. No one had shot Nimkii.
“All clear?” a woman’s voice asked. Irene turned. A woman had poked her head through the opening in the roof. She climbed out and looked down at the centaurs, then at Nimkii. “Wow.”
“I think it’s clear,” Irene said. Nimkii approached the building. She slid to dangle her legs off the edge. He offered his shoulders. She climbed on, and he backed away. She took a deep breath of air scented with his buttery perfume.
Banging started up from inside on the main door. People needed to break out, the faster the better. Maybe she could speed things up.
She rocked forward toward the sliding door. “Can you open that?” The idea seemed unlikely, but she was riding on a mammoth, she’d broken out of jail, she had lungs full of clean air, and anything was possible.
He hesitated. He probably didn’t understand the concept of a door. She rocked again, hoping the noise of the hammering might tell him that this was another evil thing that needed to be destroyed. He stepped forward. The door had bent open a crack from the pounding. He slipped in the tip of his trunk and pulled. The door bent wider. He took a step back and tore it from its track, then ripped it from its hinges. The door fell outward, and he pulled it away as if he meant to smash it.
Foul air flowed out. He growled at the scent, dropped the door, and stepped away. She rocked backward. “Let’s get away, let the people out.” They wouldn’t want to face a huge, angry animal. She rocked again, and he backed away some more, grumbling. When they’d gone far enough, she leaned forward to hug him as tight as she could.
Koobmeej stuck his head out of the barn, grinning.
* * *
Berenike looked at the red dot on Neal’s phone. “That’s the next drop-off, a pharmacy,” he said.
“Armed looters, an organized assault. We’ll have to skip it.”
“They won’t get what they’re looting for.” She fiddled with her own phone. “We can double up on another pharmacy later.”
“I’ll make sure it’s okay.”
“Up next is the valley homeless camp.”
“Could be tricky,” he said.
“Maybe not. I know this place. They had to get a special account with AutoKar, and they kept the agreement to the letter. It’s run as strict as a tight-assed condo association.” The camp had long ago moved from scattered tents to take over a big abandoned factory building, and their presence had sparked a dozen legal battles.
“So I’ve heard.” He didn’t sound convinced.
He might be proven right about the delivery being tricky. The council didn’t always act democratically, and a few people in the camp had objected in the past over decisions—she’d met some residents and followed the debate. She kept her hopes up as the truck turned in to the Menomonee River Valley toward the abandoned site. A block away a group of people alongside the street waved them down.
“I know her,” she said, “the one in the yellow vest. She’s the mayor of the camp.” Neal lowered the window.
“We’ll take it here,” the woman called. “The camp’s in lockdown. Safer for everyone that way.”
She and Neal got out, unloaded the shipment onto the pavement, and got back in the truck. The mayor and her crew picked up the boxes and marched off, a model of efficiency. Tight-assed for sure.
At the next site, the other pharmacy, a couple of police squads were waiting to usher them in. Nervous customers waited in their cars in the parking lot.
They finished the final loop by sunset and reported back to City Hall, its doors and windows propped wide open to let in clean air. By then, traffic had picked up some, but even fewer businesses were open, and it was still an apocalypse.
As they entered City Hall to report in, someone was being pushed out on a stretcher. Up in the Health Department offices, King told them that doctors were learning more, but given time and resources, the system was overwhelmed.
“If anyone asks you about garlic soup, by the way,” she said, “it’s no miracle cure, but it might alleviate a few symptoms, just like chicken soup, so it won’t hurt anything.”
Neal set down his helmet. “That’ll work only for as long as the nation’s strategic garlic stockpiles hold out.”
She sighed. “That’s the thing. Take a break. There’ll be more for you to do soon.”
A table in the atrium held a small selection of food and drinks, including a pot of garlic-scented broth, and instructions to eat alone, preferably outside. Berenike grabbed a meatball sandwich, room temperature and soggy and probably fake meat, and she ate it under the vaulted stone arches at the entryway on the clock tower end of the building. How long would food last? The average city had a three-day supply of food on hand. She’d been told in a training session to motivate her to value her AutoKar job. Enjoy the meatballs while they last.
Someone leaned out the door. “The mayor’s going to speak. Come back in.”
He stood at the rail of the second floor of the atrium. “Let me get you all up to speed.” The mayor usually shaved his head, but now it had grown out to a faint white fuzz around a shiny brown pate. The fuzz matched his beard. He still wore the purple Hawaiian shirt. The public address system carried his words.
“First, and most important, we’re getting medicine and help to every neighborhood. It’s not true that we’ve banned insurance companies from serving their customers. We’re just serving everyone, and on behalf of the city I want to thank the employees who are acting above and beyond to fulfill their missions in the most extreme of circumstances.”
His voice soared, as usual. “I want to thank the volunteers who are here and the many more out in their neighborhoods who are making sure that their fellow Milwaukeeans are safe and cared for. This is a city full of heroes and love. I could say much, much more about that, but you all have to get back to work.”
Berenike didn’t want to trust politicians of any sort, but she liked the thanks, whether or not it was genuine.
“I have important news. I can confirm that the president died this afternoon at 2:33 P.M., apparently of the same cold that’s killing so many people and that he and his administration wasted so much time denying.”
A few people cheered and applauded. Berenike was about to join in, rejoicing that she’d never see him smirk and wag his finger again, but the mayor waved his hands for quie
t and continued.
“Federal policies have not changed. This is still a nation divided in the same sad way it’s been divided for so long, and now it’s costing countless lives. In fact, things may be about to get worse. Until now, the women and men who manage our infrastructure have made sure at great personal sacrifice to keep it working. Our own water and waste treatment facilities have kept our water safe. This is vital. But even more vital is the electrical system. Everything, from cars to lights to the labs striving to find a cure, depends on power.” He took a deep breath.
“Now the government threatens to cut power to areas in mutiny. They can only do this with the support of the women and men who run the power plants and operation centers and distribution utilities. Most of them have said no. The Eastern Electrical Grid, which is our grid, has chosen to mutiny, as has the Western Grid.”
He looked around, arms outstretched.
“They will need continued help. We’ve already made sure they have priority medical care and supplies and food and transportation, and we’ll continue to do that. This is where the battle is now. We always expected a battle with foreign nations, not among our own beloved fellow citizens.
“Whatever the next battle is, we’ll be there for the people of Milwaukee and for the United States of America. We will not back down.”
Now he accepted applause. Berenike joined in. Was she ready to do battle? She always was, and now things had ratcheted up, finally.
“Berenike?” Neal was calling from the second floor. “You want to make another delivery? This time to a power grid station.”
“Let’s go.” Infrastructure saved lives. Cutting off electricity would kill people. She’d be on the front lines, where she really wanted to be.
* * *
Irene coaxed Nimkii into a cornfield across the highway from Berry Farm Prison, and he seemed content to stay there and ravage the harvest, a safe distance from the excitement, and keep an eye on her on the farm’s lawn in the twilight. His path across the pavement had left a bloody print. He’d hurt himself, although he wasn’t limping.
