“Tom doesn’t think the Emergency was triggered by a virus, doc,” Laurance said and batted his lashes at the woman boyishly. “You might be able to give us a medical opinion?”
Swarovsky inexplicably settled her uneven gaze on Tom for a few thoughtful seconds, perhaps aware and at the same time self-conscious of her grace as she turned to give Laurance – and beside him, Shirts, Lilianna and Dkembe – her reply.
“Mr Vanicek’s correct,” she said. “We don’t think it adhered to anything like the behavior of a virus. But if you rule out the biomedical, that only raises more questions than it answers.”
“Like?” Tom asked.
“Like Hell freezing over and there being no room left for the Dead?”
“That’s one explanation,” Shirts guffawed and then nervously laughed.
“I’m happy to consider other suggestions,” the doctor replied.
Laurance smiled at this point and stood. It was getting late, though not Curfew yet, shutting down the streets outside except for those with the correct authorization.
“I’m formally declaring my intention to go to sleep first so Shirts doesn’t get the bed.”
Swarovsky gave a slight chuckle, perhaps equally charmed. Dkembe stood like someone who’d only just realized they’d lost the game of musical chairs, Shirts cackling and looking quietly messy with booze as he eased back on one elbow.
The doctor took that as her cue to rise as well, everything she’d brought with her now consumed. Not sure about his role in this, Tom stood as well, playing host as the doctor made her goodbyes and he walked her to the door.
“Very clever, Tom,” Swarovsky said to him quietly. “Introduce me to your stragglers and hope my better nature prevails?”
Tom shrugged. She stopped as he opened the door and both performed an habitual safety check.
“You’d better hope I don’t prefer to attend your future dinner parties and leave you with your lodgers,” she said.
“You’re welcome any time,” he said and dropped his gaze.
“As long as I bring vegetables,” she said, turning up her own soft grin.
“Goodnight, Tom,” she said and then surprised him, adding: “I’m looking for a capable man to watch my back and share my bed. You’re shaping up as a good candidate.”
With a dry laugh of unclear intent, the doctor nodded to him and left.
Shirts was the only one still in the living room after Tom locked the front door and walked back through. Tom swallowed his own distaste, not quite nudging the barely conscious Scotsman with his bare foot where he lay sprawled out on the carpet.
“Shirts, go to bed,” he said.
The drunk didn’t move. Lila appeared in the bedroom doorway and Tom joined her.
*
Officials hail record safety month for City
by Melina Martelle
The Council of Five has praised new figures saying death-by-Fury incidents are at their lowest since Foundation began.
The Department of Public Safety’s log for June recorded 12 deaths where victims were confirmed killed by Furies within the sanctuary zone.
The figures were down from 15 in May, which followed April’s horror 27 deaths after the Transport Depot electrocution tragedy.
Councilor Ernest Eric Wilhelm III attributed the “low fatalities” to the Administration’s weapons control policy.
“The June log shows safety is improving for everyone,” he told the Herald.
“It is understandable to be afraid, but trusting the policies keeps everyone safer than firearms ever could.”
Controls around weapon permits and the “City First” acquisition policy for ammunition were widely criticized at last month’s general Council meeting.
Families of the six Citizens killed after the Transport tragedy said the lack of a fast Public Safety response caused more deaths.
Ms Annabel Star Reborn said a gap in patrols allowed the Furies to clear fences and kill more people.
Nine workers reanimated after they were killed by an electrical fault while testing the City’s streetcars on May 16.
Four co-workers and two passers-by, including Ms Star Reborn’s husband Graham Obrador, 49, were killed by Furies before troopers arrived.
At the time, Council delegate Aileen Leng inflamed tensions saying it was “unrealistic” to expect all Furies to be contained.
Her comments were taken up by Council critics, but Ms Leng told the Herald deaths by Fury were “a fact of life now”.
The new Public Safety figures did not include deaths where Furies were believed to come from outside the City.
*
LUCAS WOKE SHRIEKING in abyssal terror, the rifle-crack retort of going from asleep to awake setting Tom’s heart hammering, on his knees before even fully conscious. The room was pitch dark except for a distended rectangle of milky light through the empty bedroom window.
Lilianna started hushing her brother from his dream on autopilot. Tom swallowed hard, fighting back memories of other times his son’s night terrors had brought much worse calamities.
But that was banished at once as something or someone slammed heavily into their bedroom door.
“Dad?”
The frantic scrabbling outside only drove Lucas more wild. With his eyes cracked open from sleep, he homed in on the door as someone outside tried a third and then a fourth time to force their way in. Lilianna clutched Lucas, now actively with her hands over her brother’s mouth as Tom scanned the room again disbelieving that even with MacLaren’s insight he still had no weapon to hand – and bullets, but with nothing to use them.
“Quiet,” he hissed.
A man’s voice sounded outside, as confused as they were, and instantaneously there came a pitched scream, Dkembe’s voice breaking in alarm.
Tom leapt up and double-checked the bolt as a crashing and then many more thumping noises sounded out in the apartment. Laurance yelled something and Dkembe replied and Tom had half an idea of what had happened. And then Dkembe started shouting for help.
“Dad!” Lila cried.
“Stay quiet,” Tom said and then repeated himself. “Let me listen.”
“You can’t just listen,” she snapped. “We have to do something.”
Lucas was hyperventilating. Maybe it was too dark for Lila to read the instructions in Tom’s unhelpful expression. He motioned to her brother as if to be more clear.
“Dad,” Lila said.
“Dad, what’s outside?” Lucas yelled.
Tom forced a few deep breaths into his lungs out of habit, steeling himself as he undid the catch with his shoulder ready to defend the door. Instead, there were only shadows wrestling without the glimmer of candles long-since extinguished in the living room. Dkembe’s face congealed out of the darkness courtesy of the errant moonlight. He danced around the figures of Shirts and Laurance turning over each other on the carpet. A chisel was clutched uselessly in Dkembe’s hand, unready to save him as Shirts, now clearly dead yet alive, sprang up from his friend’s groaning body and rushed at the other young man.
Dkembe turned and ran for the locked front door, Shirts right on him, and Tom padded out from the bedroom hissing for Lila to bolt the door again, trusting to commonsense the girl would comply.
An ungodly amount of blood gurgled from Laurance’s throat, the ex-Sannyasin twitching feverishly as he died bleeding on the floor. His carpenter’s toolkit lay emptied nearby and Tom scooped up the hatchet and loped as silently as he could after Shirts as the dead Scotsman fell on Dkembe trapped in the front doorway.
Dkembe screamed, stabbing the chisel uselessly into Shirts’ ribs.
Tom fell on him from behind, sinking the small axe into the top of the Scotsman’s head. Shirts collapsed instantly, deflated as his brain functions ceased.
“He fucking bit me!” Dkembe yelled and clutched his forearm.
“Calm down,” Tom said.
“I don’t want to turn.”
“And you won’t,” Tom said.
“They’ve got medics here. Open the front door.”
The shaken young man blearily complied. Several other residents outside kept well back down the stairs and Dr Swarovsky pushed her way through them carrying a medical bag despite wearing an incongruous black silk nightgown.
Tom had already retreated into the main living space, eyes locked on Laurance now completely still. There was a long-necked screwdriver still in the young man’s leather work belt, and with an eye on the shut back bedroom door, Tom knelt and grimly drove the spike through Laurance’s eye, deep into his skull, using the orbit of the socket to give the fresh grey matter a fatal twist. Just as quickly, he hauled the body clear of the passage through to the bedroom, but the torrent of arterial blood only made the mess worse. He dropped Laurance by the ankles, driven by self-preservation alone to claim the belt and quickly lash it into place around his waist.
“Tom, are you injured?” Swarovsky asked.
“No, just please look after Dkembe,” he said. “The threat’s . . . contained.”
The doctor gave an approving look and it was hard not to be mindful of her comment of just hours before – followed by the reasonable suspicion this latest test only served Iwa Swarovsky’s agenda well.
A pair of sentries hammered up the stairs more than five minutes later. Tom’s bedroom door was unlocked by then, Lila peeking out on the maudlin scene and Tom sheltering Lucas from the worst of it, all the boy’s nightmares confirmed.
“I can’t believe Laurance is gone just like that,” Lila said.
Tom hated himself for aggravation at her tears. The tragedy was unescapable, even if an explanation was not.
“You’d want to check whatever rotgut he was drinking,” Tom said to the two troopers like he was overcoming a grave reluctance. “Alcohol poisoning, probably died in his sleep. Jesus Christ!”
He thumped the side of his fist into the wall and regretted it, but his son only curled into him more, sheltered by his father never more than when like a force of nature himself.
*
THE MORNING TOOK forever to come, though Tom and the children managed to doze towards the end of it. Tom cracked open one eye to find the sun fully risen, just starting to cut down the street running along the Boundary wall.
“Wake up,” he said. “We have to eat.”
“Eggs?” Lucas said as if queasy.
“And you’ve got some pedals to pump,” Tom said. “I’m sorry. How are you feeling?”
“It was just a bad dream.”
Tom watched him a moment and let it go. Brevity suited the moment, though Tom wasn’t convinced by his son’s tough guy act. Responsibilities he still couldn’t believe quickly mounted their strident campaign for his attention and Tom growled at the anachronistic feelings now resurrected by the newfound pressures of City life.
“We can talk about it later, if you like,” Tom said.
“Does that mean I have . . . School?”
“They called it ‘classes’,” Tom said as if it made a difference. “Maybe they’ll teach you something useful. Paying for breakfast though, first.”
“What about you, dad?” Lilianna asked. “Foragers?”
“I have to report in,” he said, not liking the taste of the phrase. “So do you.”
“Childcare? Ugh.”
She gave a shiver, glancing to the bedroom door as if staring still at Laurance’s corpse stretched out on the blood-soaked rug.
“We still have to work out about the rations,” Tom said. “Something for you to investigate with that ear of yours to the ground, OK?”
“Sure,” Lila said and shrugged, caustic and sarcastic. “Maybe in my ‘lunch break’.”
Tom checked in again with his rattled children, satisfied the traumatic night hadn’t left them unable to face the day. That in itself seemed miraculous, but he reminded himself this wasn’t their first rodeo. He strapped on Laurance’s work belt again – noted by a long, forlorn look from Lilianna – and once out in the apartment, saw the front bedroom door remained shut tight.
“You’re not going to force him out of here, are you, dad?”
Tom gestured for Lila to keep her voice down as they went out the front door and down into the awakening street.
*
HE WAS LATE for the morning’s muster, an officious-looking woman lacking even the charm of the bookish-looking ex-writer he’d spoken with the day before. Foragers gathered for the day at their factory headquarters out the back of the big brick apartment blocks behind Front Street. The carpark was one giant undercover network of marquees set behind a loosely-patrolled fence, part of an effort to shelter incoming scroungings from the elements. Work crews mustered at daybreak, the terse woman explained amid a half-dozen interruptions as Tom borrowed her time, only to realize his lateness meant he had another day to spare and now no income in sight.
“Great,” he muttered.
The medusa at the counter motioned to his tool belt.
“What’s with the rig?”
“Everyone’s allowed to have tools, right?”
The official only laughed humorlessly and dismissed him and any responsibility that might entail.
Tom broke back out of the Human Resources building in record time, gaze playing over the armed sentries, wondering whether the City had overstaffed its security department or maybe if it wasn’t enough after all. Lucas was alone at the wheel back at Einstein’s stall, Lila reporting herself in to work at a place conveniently close by – like so much in the cramped settlement – with an admirable lack of voicing the misgivings that at least her father felt about how quickly life in the wild had become a life of tamed routine.
Not that he’d made his routine run on anyone’s time yet but his own.
Foregoing the luxury of a midday meal, Tom and Lucas later ambled past Lilianna’s work, the building converted to reflect the worst parts of a daycare center and a prison combined. The building’s front was mostly crammed with women and children, very few men in sight as Tom led Lucas into the entryway against the outgoing tide. The interior foyer was just also bedlam, Lila jumping out from a doorway to one side carrying an armload of what looked to be filthy laundry.
“Oh my God dad, this is the worst,” she said. “We have to find Miss Stacey. The children who don’t have parents don’t even get sent to classes. They send them here. We’re meant to find things to do with them. At least some of the girls help, but . . . it’s insane. The Orphanage, they call it.”
“Sounds like a bad deal for everyone,” Tom said.
“And some of the kids are in a really bad way, dad,” Lila said. “They could really use someone with your skills.”
“Doing what?” Tom said. “Child therapy? Yikes.”
“It’s not like you don’t have enough experience working with people like that,” Lila said. “Or are you . . . disavowing that, too?”
“‘Disavowing’,” Tom said. “Good word. There’s a thousand things this City needs, Lilianna. And we need rations. Did you find out much about that?”
“Luke earns a stamp each day in your booklet if he attends whatever they call School around here,” Lila said. “Collecting the rations doesn’t sound too hard. If you give me the book, I’ll take any excuse to slip out of here. You can get it back from me when you pick up baby brother from School.”
Lucas grunted at the dreaded word again.
“I’m right here, you know.”
“Yeah, I know,” she replied. “We can smell you.”
“How can you get away?” Tom asked. “You get breaks? A supervisor?”
Lilianna laughed, world-weary and jaded by the experience already.
“This place is just a bunch of people, you know, trying for the most part to do good,” she said. “There’s not a lot of management. Mostly I do what the older women yell at me.”
“Sounds intense.”
Tom left her on that note, precious ration booklet exchanged, but thoughts about the chaotic arrangements Lilianna described stayed
with him, sending him back to his discussion with MacLaren the day before. Another day working at the Giant Falcon would’ve paid better than picking around the City with his son in tow. Mindful against wasting the daylight hours, Tom reoriented on the instructions he’d been given for his son.
“I still don’t have a watch, but it must be almost noon,” he said to Lucas. “Not a bad time to arrive on the first day of School, huh?”
*
THE HORRORS OF the night before burned off a little on exposure to daylight. The threatened rain hadn’t come, though there was a humidity reinforced by the close-packed City streets.
The Comfort Inn was a misnomer now if it hadn’t always been, squashed in behind the rows of shanty dwellings made by those trying their luck along The Mile on a permanent footing. The carpark was filled with end-to-end caravans, the swimming pool not yet turned to a better use than as a collection for exotic molds and algae, with the brutal four-story brick structure looking on like the most severe headmistress of all.
The School was fenced – though maybe that’s why they’d chosen the site. Four armed peacekeepers loitered at the entry, checking everyone who came in and out, including their bags. Again Tom was struck by the manpower in the relief effort, in trying to impose order on this City of damaged souls, and yet all those men and women on guard from Public Safety did nothing directly contributing to the food supply. Starvation beckoned for everyone at the whim of the gods, or at least that’s how it struck him.
Whether Foraging would be any better, only time would tell.
“This is wrong, dad,” Lucas said. “This feels weird.”
“You’re right.”
A few neglected-looking kids stood on the path to the main doors and a man with a catcher’s vest tightly lashed to his thin body watched over the comings and goings with a stout piece of wood pipe hanging off a strap around his wrist.
“We’re just going to look,” Tom said.
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