Shoeless Dan’s shrunken head had fairly tipped back and near fell off as he roared at his own wit, at least until Fifi had kicked his chair over and sent him tumbling to the floor of the tavern amid the appreciative uproar of a hundred plus drinkers.
Still, who was the stupid one now, eh? Dan was safely abed in Townsville, protected by the massed pikes and swords of the Colonel’s First Regiment, while she was inching her way into a city of the dead and undead. Pete steered them carefully through the sunken and half-sunken vessels that still lay about Farm Cove. The largest was a paddle steamer, a floating restaurant she supposed, that had gone down in front of the old governor’s residence. Tiny waves lapped at the paddles halfway up the giant wooden wheel and slowly poured through the broken windows on the second deck. Only the third was completely free of inundation and she watched it closely for signs of movement. As they wove around the abandoned hulls of smaller power craft, their course took them close enough to the flat bottomed steamer to make of them a perfect target, even for rock throwers. The old hulks clinked and creaked in the nor’easter. Magpies and crows cawed and cackled at one another, and somewhere nearby a kookaburra began to laugh. She startled at an enormous black bat that flapped close overhead, its leathery wings sounding just like the whuffling snap of sails in a moderate breeze.
“Bugger me,” she breathed. “This is less fun than the brochure promised.”
“Too late for a refund,” came Pete’s voice softly. “See to the sails, Julesy.”
She reduced the canvas bellying in the breeze and they bled off speed as Pete brought them up on their mooring point, an old floating dock at the Man o’ War Steps. Moving quickly now, wanting to be done with her work so she could get back to keeping an eye out for Biters or scavengers or any of the myriad types of ne’er-do-well you tended to meet in a necropolis, Jules shimmied up the mainmast carrying a length of torn and wretched looking sail. The sun was just peeking over the hills of the eastern suburbs then, revealing the Diamantina to be a wreck every bit as dilapidated and woebegone as any she had passed on her passage up the harbor.
Or at least that’s how it would appear to an observer. The rust streaks were lovingly painted on, as were the gaping holes on both port and starboard flanks, just above the waterline. The torn rags she fixed to the mast were held in place with industrial strength Velcro, but ready to be ripped down with one strong tug. The decks did not gleam, hiding under a fresh coat of coal dust, applied thinly to create a patina of age and neglect.
Pete maneuvered them around to point the bow back out toward their escape route, at which moment Fifi at last gave up her vigil on the whale gun and relaxed the firing bands with a mechanical crank. The skipper dropped anchor and tied them up while Jules went below and hurried back with their equipment. Each of them carried a mix of essentials: rope, ChemLights, copies of the maps they would use, a little food and water, some very basic emergency medical supplies. These went into small backpacks, which in turn were stowed in slightly larger ones. Each crew member carried their own weapons load out, and one piece of unique equipment: lightweight binoculars for Julianne, a small grappling hook for Pete, a couple of smoke bombs in Fifi’s kit.
They were dressed lightly, for fast movement. No chain mail, no steel plate, nothing that would weigh them down, sap their energy, or drag them to the bottom of the harbor if they ended up in the drink. Knee and elbow pads, sunglasses, and bandannas seemed to be their only common items. Pete clipped on his boiled leather breast-and-back plate, the heaviest armor any of them would wear. Jules snapped the fasteners of her old SWAT team tac-vest. Fifi wore Ray-Bans and attitude.
“We cool?” she asked.
“We’re cool,” Pete said.
“ERPs?” asked Jules, giving Fifi reason to roll her eyes before she recited the list of emergency rendezvous points like a bored schoolchild.
“Gatehouse of the governor’s mansion. The old library. The Mint. That restaurant you used to like.”
“Which is where?” said Jules.
More eye rolling.
“Corner of Martin and Phillip,” Pete said, to wrap it up. “But we won’t need it, will we, ladies? Because this payday will run smooth as poo through a duck with runny poo problems.”
“Touch wood?”
Jules passed him his secondary weapon. A wooden tonfa, which looked like a riot baton, but with both ends of the long striking-and-blocking arm filed down to wickedly sharp points.
“Thank you, m’lady,” he said, slipping his arms through the straps of his pack and taking up the tonfa and his primary weapon, a cruel-looking club with four steel blades embedded in the knobbly head.
Fifi settled into her pack and took up the short-bladed ninjaken sword and Okinawan sai trident she routinely favored for close-in work. Julianne was already wearing her sword belt, from which hung a pair of khukuri blades. She passed out pistol grip slingshots and forty rounds of steel shot in two pouches of twenty, half-inch rounds each. Fifi and Pete stowed theirs in the leather holsters at their hips, while Jules, who was by far the best shot, carried her larger and more powerful model with three balls loaded and the wrist brace extended.
Jules obsessed about the kit as she had once obsessed about properly accessorizing her wardrobe. She’d been on a flying boat to Cairns when the Blackout hit. The pilot got them down alive, mostly, but she’d crawled out of the surf in the rags of a once beautiful silken shift by Akira Isogawa with nothing but a plastic bottle of spring water in her handbag for a three-hundred-mile trek to Townsville where the army kept things together at bayonet point.
“You ever wonder what we’d be doing if it weren’t for the Blackout?” Fifi asked as they geared up.
“Shopping,” said Jules.
“Let’s be about it then,” said Pete. “The shops await.”
And he swept his hand toward the city.
“Yeah, let’s fuck this cat,” Fifi agreed.
The sun had climbed high enough to dapple the harbor with a net of golden sparkles. Each of the three took a moment to look around. It was always hard to leave the relative safety of the boat. A line from an old movie surfaced from Julianne’s memory:
Never get out of the boat. Never get out of the boat.
But they did.
* * *
Fifi took point, preferring it to the role of tail gunner she’d made her own on the Diamantina. They cut a path through the vines and tanglebush spilling down the headland and onto the forecourt of the Opera House. Funny. That place always reminded her of big ass turtles humping each other. Woulda been a helluva lot easier to just walk up Macquarie Street, even with all the piled-up traffic wreckage, but it woulda been kind of an epic dumb-ass move too. The first couple of hundred yards of Macquarie were sunk between the towering sandstone retaining wall that marked the western edge of the Gardens, and on the far side of the road a long terrace of once luxurious apartments that dominated the waterfront facing Circular Quay. A shooting gallery, in other words, where even the most retarded Biter could rain down fire, or pointy rocks, on her pretty head, without having to think much about it.
So Fifi took them along the high road, a walking path, still easily navigable for most of its length. It skirted the edge of the Gardens, and afforded them a decent lookout over lower Macquarie Street and into the abandoned catacombs of the apartments on the far side. She mostly kept her attention forward, stopping at random intervals to listen for sign of pursuit or ambush. When the way forward proved impossible because the jungle had sent so much thorny creeper, or lantana or wait-a-while vines out to climb the old iron fencing, she would call Jules up to chop a way through with those wicked fucking Gurkha knives of hers.
“Reckon we might bring some garden shears next time,” Pete offered after the second delay.
“And a weed whacker,” Fifi grinned as Jules cursed up a storm at an especially thick knot of creeper.
“I thought Jules was our weed whacker.”
The obstruction was thick enough that when she’d hacked her way through, Julianne took a sharpening stone out of her tac-vest and spent a minute or so putting the edge back on her babies. While she did, Pete doubled back a ways and checked their six. Fifi used the break to scope out the roadway below, using Julesy’s binoculars to trace their intended path uptown.
The Blackout hit Sydney smack in the middle of lunchtime, at least according to Pete. Reckoned he’d been halfway to Tasmania at the time, running a charter for a bunch of merchant bankers as some sort of “team building” exercise. As best he knew, the team was building outdoor latrines in a potato field somewhere north of Hobart now. Still, better than starving to death, or being eaten alive in a place like this.
You could see where the traffic had been flowing freely the day it happened. As drivers lost control of their vehicles, long lines of cars and trucks and buses and taxis had been crunched together like God was a big old accordion player who’d decided at that moment to just mash everything up for no good reason. Some of those pileups had burned, of course, and they burned all the way down to the ground because no fire trucks had come to put out the flames.
At other places she could see where the drivers had been lucky enough to be stopped at red lights, or caught up in the grind of the slow-moving traffic jams that were once endemic to big cities everywhere. At those intersections, and along those stretches of road you could still see daylight between the front fender of one vehicle and the ass end of the next one. Many of the doors stood open, and here and there she could see where windows and windshields had been smashed, perhaps to let the occupants escape, perhaps to break into the cabins days later as order broke down and the looting and riots began.
Jules grunted and swore, and hacked away as the morning sun climbed higher in the sky. They were all sweating by now, but their English rose was drenched with it. The heat didn’t bother Fifi much. She liked to tan. On the day of the Blackout she’d been the sous chef for a yachting party cruising around San Francisco Bay. Woulda been a total death sentence except that the geekboy millionaire who owned the big ass yacht was also a sci-fi super nerd who had about a dozen different plans worked out for all his favorite flavors of the Apocalypse. Mostly they involved sailing away to Tasmania. They’d all been very hungry by the time they made the South Pacific and she was sick of cooking fish and seabirds. But she had a great tan.
Summer was two or three weeks gone here, but the heat lingered and in the last couple of days it had been warm enough to brew up a decent storm by midafternoon. Fifi didn’t envy Julianne the job of cutting path, but Jules wouldn’t let anyone else use her choppers, and nobody wanted to carry the extra weight of a machete they wouldn’t need for more than a couple of minutes at most. She heard footsteps coming back up the path behind them, and saw Pete returning from his backtrack. He signed “All Clear” and she took a moment with the binoculars to sweep the buildings across the street. The mirrored sun blazed off panes of glass where windows and sliding doors were still intact, but she concentrated on those darkened caves that threw off no reflection.
No movement. No sign. Nothing.
Awesome.
The scrape of steel on whetstone told her Jules was done with the gardening. They paused to allow her to tend to her blades, which went back into their twin scabbards when she was done. The small, wiry noblewoman took a drink from her water flask and retrieved her slingshot from its holster.
“Next time, we’ll just take a taxi, I think,” she said.
They covered the rest of the way up past the charred ruins of Government House in good time, slowing only to negotiate a snarl of traffic that reached neutron star densities at the eastern end of the Cahill Expressway. A bus had tipped over on the ramp that swept down from the elevated roadway, blocking dozens of vehicles behind it. Fire had raced through the pileup that was now an impassable hazard of rusted, jagged metal.
“High road or low?” asked Jules.
They could use the grappling hook to climb up the off ramp, or detour deep into the wilderness of the Gardens gone wild.
“Why don’t we just fast rope down to Macquarie?” asked Fifi.
“Because Captain Sensible doesn’t like taking shortcuts,” Jules answered, waving the blade of her short inward-curved sword at Pete.
“Shortcuts are the road to Hell,” he confirmed, but he didn’t look like he loved the idea of a walk in the park either.
“Anyone hear that big cat earlier?” he asked.
Both women raised their hands, although Fifi was sure the nor’easter had carried the noise to them all the way from the north shore. As dangerous as it was navigating the streets, the only things likely to bite you down there were crazy people. The scrub, on the other hand, was crawling with snakes. Blacks and browns and king browns with venom enough to kill a man, painfully, with one lightning quick bite.
She hated snakes. They were the reason she missed shotguns so much.
“I’m cool to play Spider-Man,” she said. “Worst of the bad ground’s back yonder anyway,” she added, gesturing over her shoulder with the three-pronged sai.
“Pete, how far up is this place we’re headed?” asked Jules.
He didn’t need to consult his map. He well knew the city from before the Blackout and had been studying the maps all the way down the coast. Nor was it their first salvage run on old Sydney town.
“Three blocks.”
“Biters don’t like to wait for their breakfast,” Jules pointed out. “If they were going to have at us they’d already have put on a cauldron of tea and buttered up a couple of muffins.”
“Man, I’d love a breakfast McMuffin,” said Fifi.
“OK,” said Pete. “The low road it is.”
“I miss McDonald’s.”
“OK. We’ll get you a Happy Meal later,” said Pete.
“And curly fries.”
“Of course.”
“Man, I loved curly fries,” Fifi recalled wistfully.
“Didn’t you used to be a proper chef?” said Jules.
“A deputy,” said Fifi. “Sous chef. And I just cooked that snooty shit. I didn’t eat it, Judgy McJudgerson.”
The fence line had collapsed a little farther on, allowing them to rope down to Macquarie where the drop wasn’t too far. Fifi went first, doubling the rope around an anchor point at the base of the iron railing where it still held strong. She rappelled down the sheer sandstone retaining wall, kicking off with her boots, zipping downline, and landing with a soft thump on the roof of an old Volvo that had mounted the curb when the driver lost power and steering. Jules followed and they formed a basic perimeter as Pete descended. He pulled the rope through and stowed it in his pack.
As soon as they were all down in the canyon between the Gardens and the apartment blocks, Fifi regretted it. Her skin crawled with the sensation of being watched and her heart beat faster than the meager exertion of a fast rope descent really warranted. She took point again, leading them forward, sword and sai in guard position, bent low to drop beneath the roofline of the cars. Behind her, Julianne’s boots crunched on the accumulated grit of nearly ten years that lay on the road surface. She would be sweeping their flanks and the high ground with her slingshot, the ammo pouch loaded with four or five balls for area suppression. Fifi didn’t need to look back over her shoulder to confirm the detail. This wasn’t their first rodeo. Pete, she knew, would hang back just a little, occasionally stopping and dropping out of sight to cover their back trail.
In this way they moved quickly up the gentle gradient toward the intersection where the Cahill Expressway looped back into the city grid. It was a junkyard of rusting cars, all snarled together, but easily skirted on foot. They cleared the canyon and jogged the length of the next block, which was almost free of traffic. Weeds and razor grass had sprung up in the cracks of the tar
mac and curb, but not so thickly that she had to worry about snakebite. Not that she really had to worry at all. Her boots laced halfway up her calves and the camouflage pants she wore were reinforced below the knees with a thin titanium mesh, carefully removed from a “shark-proof” old wet suit. She knew there was no such thing as shark-proof, unless it was staying out of the goddamned water in the first place. But it made her feel better. She’d been snake-bit once.
Never again.
They halted and spread out at the next intersection, taking a minute to scan their surrounds. They were on open ground now, or as open as it got in a city, a wide apron of tarmac and granite in front of an old colonial building. Real big sucker too, like a Roman ruin, or would be in a hundred years or so.
“Library,” Pete informed her when he saw her looking.
“A real one, with Danielle Steele?” she asked, almost hopefully.
“Probably not,” said Jules. “Looks a bit grown up for that.”
“Hey, I’m a grown-up and I like Danielle Steele,” Fifi protested.
“No time for browsing, sweetheart,” Pete warned. “Not this trip. We can get you some new stories in Hobart.”
“Yeah, for about a million bucks,” she scoffed.
“We make this score, that won’t be a problem,” he promised. “Come on. Not far now.”
And it wasn’t. The building marked on all of their maps, committed to all of their memories, was only another half block past the big mall that dropped downhill into the city. It took them less than a minute to hurry along on past the stupid library without any Danielle Steele stories. They crouched behind a taxi, sunken down to its wheel rims right in front of the target building. It looked old, but not like the library. The Art Deco features, the green tiles and faded silver banding, advertised its origins in the 1920s or thirties.
Pete had told them on the boat that it was mostly doctor’s consulting rooms. All of Macquarie Street, or at least this end of it, was full of doctors, probably because the first hospital in the colony had been built right behind them, on a high ridge overlooking the original sweep of Gardens. Then, being Pete, he’d spent the next hour pulling a cork and telling them a lot of boring stories about how some assholes had paid for the hospital with rum running, or some shit, and there’d been a rebellion, again because of rum, or something and . . . well, Fifi tuned out and tried to remember what listening to the Spice Girls sounded like.
Tales of Downfall and Rebirth Page 32
