They called Eugene Prosky the Jeep because he always had all the answers, like the magic little critter from the old Popeye cartoons. After he retired, the Water Department had kept his home number on speed dial. When the City fell apart, the Jeep and six other people, including his grandkids, had holed up in a Civil Defense shelter under the old U.S. Mint. Six months later, the Jeep and the kids were still there. The others tried to escape through the BART tunnels and never came back. Should’ve listened to the Jeep—
“No, I’ll just stand back and let you do the honors. But unless they’re dumping trash down the toilets—”
“All kinds of trash ends up down here.”
At the end of the tunnel, the Jeep unlocked a gate with his massive ring of skeleton keys and entered the pump house. The toilets and sinks for the entire mall converged on the big pipe that filled the small room. In the past, it had fed into the main sewer line and gone to the southeast waste-treatment center. But in the last few months, Tom had drafted a plan to redirect the sewage lines to the old storm-runoff-control center near the ferry terminal. The plan was to close the loop and recycle the City’s waste for the gardens.
It was an elegant solution. Bypassing all the old infrastructure cut through a gordian knot of two centuries of stopgap solutions. It would be simplicity itself, if the fucking thing would just work.
“Stand back,” said the Jeep as he gripped the first bolt on the pipe’s filter housing with his wrench. “A little more. It’s gonna come right at you.”
Tom backed up into the doorway. “It’s not under pressure. Why don’t you just drain it first?”
“I did.” The Jeep worked around the housing’s hex bolts with the wrench like he was tying his shoes. “Not worried about shit on your shoes…”
The Jeep had to stop to cough up a dollop of black snot. Worried, Tom went over and reached for the wrench.
“It’s all right, dammit,” the Jeep grumbled. “I can do it.”
The filter housing tore off the pipe junction all by itself. Tom jumped back, slipped in the gusher of black sludge coating the floor.
“We turned off the intakes at Two and Four, but the pipe kept making noise. Tapping.”
The tarry black stew of human waste bubbled and parted. And a hand shot out of it to fumble at the lip of the pipe.
A head rose out of the ooze, bobbing with an infant’s wobbly motor control. Bloated and burst and shriveled to the color and texture of a prune, the dead thing looked like a fat old man. But when it lurched halfway out of the pipe and stretched out fractured arms for the Jeep, Tom threw up in his mask.
It was a little kid, maybe seven or eight.
It looked, for just a moment, like Geoff.
Its flesh sagged off the bone like a full wineskin. It had been trapped in the filter screen with hundreds of gallons of sewage blasting over it for God only knew how long. Pinned against the screen, it had swelled up like a water balloon, and now its ruptured innards and stretched-out skin draped from its ribs like a repulsive tutu.
“Jesus, he’s a ripe one,” said the Jeep. The claw hammer slid out of his belt and neatly crunched up to the hilt in the crown of the mud puppy’s skull. It wriggled and tried to twist around on the hammer for far too long, but the Jeep held it with a snake wrangler’s ease. “Doesn’t look like one of our workers, does he, Tommy?”
Tom had to peel his mask off to wipe his eyes and shake out his lunch. The smell steamrolled his nose plugs and flatlined his sense of smell, leaving it in shock.
“I thought there were no more free-range dead in the Green Zone, Jeep. You said that, and you’re always right.”
The Jeep shrugged, taking it in stride. “I could think of a lot of things I’ve been wrong about.” He lifted the dead boy’s corpse out of the filter by the hammer and dragged it onto a plastic tarp.
“It’s a brave new world, all right. And I wouldn’t want to meet the fella who’s got all the answers now.…”
VI.
THERE WAS A KNOCK on the door, but Tom was more surprised by how long and how far he’d gone away. He jerked, and half an inch of Lucky ash collapsed on the sheet beside him, no longer hot.
“Molly?” he called. If it was her, she’d use the key.
The knock sounded again, both reluctant and insistent. Not Molly. Some neighborly thing. But halfway to the door, he noticed the smell.
Despite the AC, it was thick enough to taste.
Dead things.
Tom got his handgun out of its holster on the hat rack by the door. His head went cold and his heart leaped into his throat, but he clenched his hand into a fist until it stopped shaking before he cracked the door to the length of its security latch.
“She’s crying again,” said Lucius from 4043. Lucius had been a mailman before, but now he supervised a border-patrol squad in the Red Zone. He looked as tired as Tom felt.
“I’m sorry,” Tom said. “Is she keeping Terry up?”
“I don’t think so. I just heard it from the hall. And, you know…” Lucius threw his hands up.
“I appreciate it. Thanks.”
“It’s cool,” Lucius said, pinching his temples. “My boy cries, too.”
“If she’s still going in another ten minutes,” Tom said, “I’ll step in.”
“Sometimes you got to just let ’em go.”
“I know.” He looked away from the other man’s concerned expression. “You know anything about the smell?”
“New family moving in, down the hall. Think one of the workers sprung a leak. You know, some people actually sabotage them, so they bust open in public.…”
They came down the hall toward him on padded sneaker feet. Each carried a stack of cardboard cartons or a bulky piece of Danish modern furniture from the local Ikea warehouse. Tom flipped the safety on the gun and stepped back into his doorway to let them pass.
Their dark green neoprene uniforms were supposed to keep in the stench, but under all the surgical and cybernetic modifications, under all the Z-chips and antibacterial shrink-wrap, they were still dead people.
Eighteen months ago, they ate the world alive, Tom thought. Now they’re helping move the furniture. Tell me that’s not progress.
Tom noted a few pieces of pink kids’ gear in the queue and said, “Look out, man. Another family with girls. Your son’s gonna be outnumbered.”
“Don’t worry about him. It’s the girls’ dads who gotta worry. No new names on the duty rosters, but I heard they came in from outside. Probably pretty shaken up. It must be hell out there.”
“Yeah, it must be.” The family wouldn’t be moved in until after the workers were gone. It would take some getting used to, being waited on by the dead. And it would probably take almost as long to get used to their neighbors. Well-fed, healthy, happy people would be a far stranger sight than walking dead folks.
At the end of the long line of slave units, an operator came shuffling up, whispering and typing commands to his crew on a souped-up BlackBerry. He looked little better than a zombie himself, with dark circles under his beady eyes and a straggly beard. “Sorry about the smell,” the operator mumbled. “You got an extra smoke, man?”
Tom almost told him there was no such thing, but then shook one out. Only a shitheel begrudged a working man a smoke. “Take them back down on the service elevator, would you? Our kids don’t need to smell that shit in their sleep.”
“You got it, dude,” the operator said with a flick of his lighter, and skipped off to catch up with his mule train.
Lucius looked after them and then turned back to Tom. “You know what bugs me, man? Our kids are growing up with this. To them, it’s going to seem normal.”
Tom nodded and sighed. “G’night, Lucius.”
Click. And the door was shut, Tom leaning against it, while the dead weight fell inside him.
Listening for Lucius’s retreating carpet footfalls.
Listening for Molly, through the wall.
VII.
WHEN SAN
FRANCISCO FELL APART, Tom already had a plan. He kept Molly home from school and picked Geoff up from kindergarten. The SUV was loaded with supplies. They were going to the cabin up at Clear Lake.
Between the announcement that there was no reason to panic and the order to evacuate, the freeways out of the Bay Area were hopelessly gridlocked. The army was trying to run checkpoints on the 80, the 580, and the 880, and tempers were wearing thin.
Images of soldiers shooting at cars as they bulldozed through the sawhorse barricades were scary enough, and nobody even knew yet what they were really running from. The blow-dried idiot on the local Fox affiliate called it an outbreak of political street violence and even speculated that immigration protesters were to blame.
Tom’s digital scanners were not much help. The police called it a rabies outbreak, then a terrorist attack.
SFO was shut down that morning after an American flight from China disgorged a hundred rabid passengers into the international terminal. Oakland and San Jose kept pushing out flights until the military shut them down.
Watching the chaos on the freeway from his backyard in Richmond, Tom started making calls. The lines were overloaded, but he had a satellite phone, and was able to get through to his friend Russ Blevins, who ran daily operations on Treasure Island.
“Get over here, Tom,” Blevins told him. “Get your kids and get out of the house. Don’t take the bridge. I don’t know who they’re trying to fool on the TV, but it’s way worse than anybody’s saying.”
Tom’s questions about the attack went unanswered. Russ was shouting at ten other people while Tom bugged him. It wasn’t until he insulted the navy that he got any answer at all. “Russ, is the fucking navy retreating?”
“Retreat, shit. We’re in free-fall. I have—”
The line went dead.
Tom went out on their balcony and looked at the Bay. A few pillars of smoke rose out of San Francisco—in the Castro, the waterfront, and Japantown, the smoke looked like new instant skyscrapers. Oakland was a funeral pyre.
“Molly? Get your brother and get in the SUV!”
Geoff was on the couch, eating Oreos and drinking milk out of the carton while watching a Batman cartoon, enjoying the holiday to its fullest, even if he had to share it with his sister. But he dropped everything at the commanding tone in his dad’s voice, let his sister lead him by the hand into the garage.
They took side streets down to a swaybacked boat dock with a couple of old houseboats tied off on it. Molly helped Tom drag the Zodiac raft off the roof and down to the landing. He strapped the kids into their life jackets. Geoff tried to carry his big sister to the raft, so her feet wouldn’t get wet. He’d forgotten his backpack of drawing stuff in the RAV 4, and Tom had shouted at him when he went to get it.
There was a woman standing by the open doors of the SUV. She wore a frilly pink negligee with marabou stork feathers at the cuffs and collar. Her lower jaw hung from the ruin of her face by a few thongs of gristle. Her eyes reflected the reddening sunset, but nothing else.
Molly screamed and hid her face. Tom grabbed Geoff by his windbreaker and threw him into the raft.
The woman came running down the boat landing after them. Her shambling, drunken gait spilled her down the concrete slope. The wind tore open her flimsy wrap. Everything underneath had been bitten off.
Tom had a gun in his breast pocket, but he had no time to draw it. He shoved the raft off and dived into it, yanked the starter, and gunned the throttle.
The poor, ravaged woman wallowed in the shallows, waving her arms like she expected to be rescued.
The water was all choppy whitecaps, and a jolly impromptu regatta was strewn across the Bay, headed against the tide for the Golden Gate. Tom cut among them in the little raft, wondering that more of them weren’t seeking shelter at the naval station.
Molly hugged him for dear life. Geoff rode the nose until he was soaked, happy as a dog. The wind coming off the City reeked of charred buildings. His mind raced with all the methodical things he was trained to think in a crisis, but he couldn’t imagine how anything could turn so bad so quickly.
He almost got shot landing at Treasure Island. He was warned off by screaming buoy-beacons, and a cruiser anchored off the northern end of the tiny island tracked him with its guns. He wondered if they were shooting civilians yet.
The island was overrun with vets and families and a few hundred lucky refugees. Russ couldn’t see him, but passed down orders. He was needed to reinforce the barricades for the offramps on the Bay Bridge on adjoining Yerba Buena Island, and by the way, could he see about helping to arm charges that were set in the spans east and west of the island?
Tens of thousands of angry commuters had faced down the army and were flowing out of the City on both decks of the Bay Bridge and all seven lanes of the Golden Gate. But now the orders had come down from a different authority to “hold and contain” the cities. The infected had breached the Civil Defense perimeter, and the National Guard was swept away by what one short-lived TV reporter described as “really sick people.” Oakland and Berkeley were on fire, and mobs of the infected roaming en masse onto Interstate 580 caused traffic to grind to a halt.
Traffic was stopped dead on both bridges, and some idiot had set tanks and bulldozers to work pushing the stalled traffic across the bridges. Trapped in their cars with roving, drooling dead people climbing on the hoods, they were shoved out of the City, into darkness and fire.
Tom saw all this on the news while he and his kids ate hamburgers and chocolate pudding in the officers’ mess. He started to ask his kids to leave the room, but they tuned the TV out anyway. Kristin craved Indian food throughout her pregnancy with Molly, and their daughter called anything without hot sauce on it “boring.” Geoff played his PSP.
In between jobs, he’d tried to get a message out to Kristin, but the whole Pacific Fleet had gone dark. Nobody knew what they were dealing with, or if they were at war.
Three hours later, they got the order to blow the upper span, dropping it onto the eastbound lower deck to stop any more cars from leaving.
Tom wasn’t in the navy anymore. They couldn’t order him to do it. They didn’t want to do it themselves. If it was him on that bridge, with his kids, struggling to get out of a city gone mad, he’d damn the cowards who shut the door on them with his last breath. But his kids were right here, safe for now, because of his good planning and great luck. The people on the bridge weren’t so much like him. They were out there, with the infected. When they couldn’t get across the bridge, they would come in here, and there’d be no sorting them out.
He could go on for the rest of his life rationalizing the decision, but it was made for him with one look at his kids as they did look up at the TV screen, and Molly asked, “When is Mommy coming home?”
He left the kids in an impromptu day-care center and joined Russ on the roof of the command center with an older man whom Russ introduced as Rear Admiral Thatcher.
Tom shook the officer’s hand and asked, “Admiral, how are the people supposed to evacuate San Francisco if we blow the bridge?”
“We’re trying to steer them south down the 280. There’s no way out, to the east. Most of the people on that bridge are already dead. And there are several thousand infected crossing the bridge from Oakland. We’re not going to contain this situation any other way.”
The evening fog had wrapped the whole island in cotton, but it seemed to amplify, rather than muffle, the sounds from the bridge—wailing sirens, gunshots, and screams like a whole stadium in a meat grinder. The news told them to evacuate to the south. Couldn’t be more clear.
“Sir, I’ve got kids of my own. You can’t seriously ask—”
“I’m not asking,” Thatcher snapped back. “We already tried it, but some candy-ass civil engineers sabotaged the charges. Give me the goddamn thing.”
Russ handed him a cell phone. “This is Thatcher. Tango-72 authorized. Cut the cord, son.”
He pocketed the phone
and turned away, bowed his head. Something high above the fog roared. By the time he heard the sound, they were way out over the ocean. Fighter jets—F-18s out of Alameda—passing low overhead, just once.
The Bay Bridge was a spectral, impossible landscape unto itself, a miracle too big to have been made by men. But it took them only seconds to take it down.
The concussion was a flat, unpowerful sound, but the fog jumped with the incredible displacement of force. Bulbous fireballs erupted in midspan, halfway to Oakland and halfway to San Francisco.
The building shivered beneath Tom’s feet. The night screamed with steel teeth and concrete tongues and bloody human lungs, and then a huge wing of the bridge, so fundamental to the landscape that it seemed like a chunk of the sky itself, subsided and fell thirty feet onto the lower deck, crushing dozens of cars in a concrete sandwich that slowly sagged and tumbled into the Bay.
The steel suspension cables twanged like a gigantic harp, a horribly musical sound louder than the explosions themselves.
And it started to rain.
It rained cars and people. Horns honked and bleated as they fell two hundred feet to smash into the stone-hard face of the water. Headlights made firefly flickers in the mist, picking out awful glimpses of people twisting in the air, clawing at falling cars and at one another, eating and being eaten all the way to the bottom.
“God knows,” Russ kept hissing. “God knows why…”
If God knew anything, it was that they deserved his worst, and He had clearly sent it.
There was more work to do, and Tom pitched in until he was no good to anyone, and they sent him to his room. Refugees had continued landing on the island throughout the night, and a flotilla of yachts and dinghies filled the harbor. Angry civilians filled the halls. Tom had never been happier to be out of uniform.
A burly older guy grabbed him by the lapels anyway and demanded to know what the navy was doing. Tom hadn’t been in a fight since grade school, but he almost decked the guy. “You’re scaring people with your noise,” he said, as reasonably as he could.
“Scared? Hell, we’re furious! I pay taxes, asshole, and I deserve to know what you’re going to do!”
21st Century Dead Page 19
