by Addison Gunn
An Abaddon Books™ Publication
www.abaddonbooks.com
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First published in 2016 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.
By Anne Tibbets and Malcolm Cross (writing as Addison Gunn)
Editor-in-Chief: Jonathan Oliver
Commissioning Editor: David Moore
Cover Art: Edouard Groult
Design: Sam Gretton & Oz Osborne
Marketing and PR: Rob Power
Head of Books and Comics Publishing: Ben Smith
Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley
Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley
ISBN: 978-1-78618-008-7
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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
1
THE EAST RIVER flowed backwards shortly after dawn. Miller had heard about it—the river, technically a strait, changed direction with the tides—but he’d never seen it before. He’d never been up at the ass-crack of dawn, waiting in line for ration packs, with nothing better to do than stare at the river.
Seagulls, part of the planet’s old ecology, were clustered on a big, gelatinous-looking corpse in the river. It could have been one of the new animals—a small thug or bloated terror-jaw—or it could have been a pig, maybe an obese human being. The gulls’ wings burned with an almost angelic light as they fought, flapping and graceless, over whatever it was.
First they were drifting left, but they gradually slowed and began to serenely drift back towards the right.
It was unlikely to be a human being, Miller reflected. The latest wave of famines had lasted months—the truly obese were a memory. Humanity, at least in New York, had been bled dry and left emaciated. Say one thing for the apocalypse, everyone had their beach bodies ready.
Well, not exactly. Thinned limbs, sagging flesh, the unhealthiness of borderline malnutrition, temperature records still being shattered in the midst of a heatwave and its furious sunlight, respiratory ailments from fungal spores and dust... No one around Miller looked like fashion models. They looked broken.
The line shuffled forward a step.
Something in the river’s depths surfaced. The birds tore away in terror, before the unseen creature dragged the carrion to the depths.
Miller was in the fast line; employees only. The refugee line, separated by a length of dirty chain-link fencing, hadn’t moved at all. Some of the refugees sat slumped on the ground, snoring, back-to-back. Hopefully their line would move before mid-morning. The daytime temperatures at noon could kill the weak, and Miller sure as hell didn’t see anyone strong on the other side of the fence.
He gazed at the ration cards in his hands. Mostly handwritten, to prevent forgery each one had been given a bar code label. Nobody had access to printers anymore. Bar codes qualified as key anti-forgery technology, now.
The wind brought an animal’s howl from Manhattan across the water, a long keening sound. Too high pitched to be one of the thug behemoths, too long for anything not tough enough to take on all challengers for its territory. Miller didn’t know what it could be, but whatever it was, it had one hell of a pair of lungs.
The line crept forward, and Miller trudged along with the others. There wasn’t too far to go, now. The fenced-off lines all led to the main distribution warehouse, a converted building with its walls cut open on Fourth Avenue. The only people in the entire Astoria compound who looked halfway well-fed, and who weren’t also members of the corporate board or major stockholders, worked behind its barred windows.
Another wait, and Miller lost himself in watching buildings’ shadows sweep across Manhattan. Eventually, ahead of him, a welding technician handed over a handful of ration cards. She waited, looking back at Miller neutrally. Miller stared back, shrugged, and the technician turned back to take back her ration cards. Eventually she walked away with an open cardboard box, moving towards the docks, bulging with unsealed ration packages. Maybe... two and a half, three thousand calories for each person’s ration card? A wealth, a goddamn fortune in food, but the welders were cutting apart the old oil tankers that had come in. Heavy work. Without food to fuel them, work would slow, and they were needed, expanding the Astoria compound onto barges in the river.
Miller’s turn came, and he pushed the cards for his team—himself, du Trieux, Doyle, Morland, Hsuing—through the slot. The worker eyed his security uniform, the Gallican holstered at his hip, then the cards. He scanned the cards on a supermarket checkout with scratched glass, slid them back, and moved back into the warehouse’s cool darkness.
Miller couldn’t help comparing the warehouse worker’s ass with the welding tech’s, but his libido felt like the rest of him: tired, dried out, crumbling. In any case, he decided, receiving his cardboard box, his brief flutter of interest had only been over so much food. The warehouse worker glanced again at Miller’s uniform, his sidearm, and said, sharply, “All sealed and correct.”
Miller made a show of inspecting the box’s contents. Sealed shrink-wrapped packages covered with handwritten labels. A thousand calories of canned goods, a thousand calories of candy bars, a thousand calories of dry pasta, a thousand calories... All sealed, unlike the welding technician’s packages. Miller looked up, glaring.
“We ain’t cheating you,” the warehouse worker said, smiling, holding up his hands.
The barest hint of a double chin wobbled at his throat. Just a hint.
Miller took it all back. He understood how an obese human body could have gotten into the river, and right at that moment, he knew he was just about capable of having thrown another in.
“You tubby fuck.”
“Hey, man. We don’t mess with the security teams. We good?”
“You moronic fuck! When you start a food riot I’ll fucking open the gate and help them tear you to pieces!” Miller snarled, jerking his head at the fenced off and unmoving refugee line. “Just give people their fucking food. Asshole.”
He swept up his team’s rations off the counter and stormed away, leaving the worker, pale and frightened, to his next customer.
Entering the fenced-in warrens of the compound’s streets, covered to keep titan-birds out, Miller raged at himself. He shouldn’t have gotten that angry with some jackoff stealing candy bars. It was uncivilized bullshit. A person didn’t threaten to kill someone over candy. Not in the old, pre-famine world, anyway.
This new world, though. There were new rules, ones Miller wasn’t adjusting to quickly enough. Maybe killing that corrupt ass for skimming calories off rations was exactly the right thing to do. But Miller had taken the rations and walked. He hadn’t dragged that bastard out from behind the counter. And every step he took put him farther away from doing anything about it.
What the hell did it matter, anyway?
Miller brought the food back to Cobalt’s break room. They had power today. The lights were on and an old television was hooked up to an even older Blu-ray player. Morland kneeled with a bottle of window cleaner and some rags, trying to clean up the discs and find at least one that worked.
Barely mana
ging to avoid taking his own head off with one of the cables snaking around the television, Morland unfolded himself, his puppyish expression at odds with his imposing size. “Say we’ve got popcorn. I’ve got the sugar for it saved.”
Miller’s stomach rebelled. “Sugar? On popcorn?”
“Yeah. Oh, God. You don’t like it salty, do you?”
“You put butter and you put salt on popcorn. What is wrong with British people?” Miller demanded.
Hsiung, draped over the couch, looked up from her perusal of the movie boxes they’d looted from the city. Slowly, glacially, her eyebrow lifted. “And Chinese people.”
Desperately, Miller looked to the other half of the room for backup.
“You should try it,” Doyle said, immersed in the guts of his rifle’s firing mechanisms, oil and steel on the table in front of him. “It’s good.”
As one, everyone looked at du Trieux, minding her own business with Cobalt’s weapons requisitions papers.
“Well?” Miller begged. “Salt or sugar?”
Her lips thinned. Bad news on the way. “Sugar.”
“Just in France, right? That’s just a European thing? What about Nigeria?”
“Both. Salt’s bad for your blood pressure anyway.”
“I’m going to get Lewis,” Miller said, “and we’re going to enact written orders that any popcorn this team gets hold of is doused in melted butter and salt.”
“Americans.” Du Trieux shook her head grimly.
“Salted isn’t the end of the world. Not very good, but...”
“Shut it, Doyle.” Miller pointed a finger at him. “Quit while you’re ahead.”
“Honestly. Just try it sweet some time.” Doyle snapped a slender pin back into his rifle’s firing mechanisms. “You’ll like it. Like candy corn.”
“Candy corn is a whole other thing. It’s candy.” Miller checked the requisition papers over du Trieux’s shoulder, and stopped, leaning in. “How much ammunition did we use last week?”
“It’s not quite that bad,” she said. “We just don’t have any here. A lot of it’s in the caches.”
They’d been going through a lot of ammunition all the same. Hunting down the city’s Charismatics wasn’t easy, even now that the main push of military organization seemed to have crumbled.
The Charismatics knew how to manipulate their fellow Infected into playing the role of bodyguard. A quick assassination or a single rifle shot could create a howling mob charging through the streets for their blood in an instant. Sometimes to get that shot, to kill an Infected Charismatic coordinating the others, they had to kill dozens, even hundreds. More than once Miller had barricaded Cobalt-2 into position, with a cache of ammunition and spare weapons, and fought like demons against the horde until none of the screaming Infected were left pounding at the doors and windows.
It went through a lot of ammunition. That was the comfortable way to look at what had happened. Maybe Miller could have viewed it in terms of circling the wagons, or drawn parallels with Rorke’s Drift, a battle between savagery and civilization, in the kind of rhetoric beloved by white supremacists, neatly transforming himself into a conquering hero. But it didn’t feel like that at all.
Afterward, Cobalt had used shovels to clear enough bodies from the window to get away before the big predators arrived to scavenge. Very heroic.
There wasn’t enough soap in the entire compound to wash away the memories of how heroic it felt to crawl out over piled bodies, or how heroic it had smelled, or what kind of heroism a human being’s face could be transformed into by a 5.56mm bullet.
The system worked, but it burned through ammunition, and if they didn’t have the bullets, they’d be killed. Miller sat down beside du Trieux, pulling the ready forms over for him to sign. He had to ask stores for more bullets and equipment so he could walk his team out into the city and go through it all over again. So he could stumble on warm limbs, slippery with blood. Leave as the thug-behemoths started in on the bodies, shearing through limbs with gristly cracks of their beaked jaws.
Miller palmed at his face. “Pass me the pen.”
She finished totalling how many quarts of fuel they’d need for the flamethrower they wanted for the cache in Queens, then slid the last form and the pen over to him.
The emotional impact had nothing to do with having to deal with paperwork, or what the paperwork represented—more killing in the future. The pen was so heavy in his hand because it amounted to consent. To putting it on paper that living through that kind of hell wasn’t just something he’d suffered through, but accepted and repeated, willingly.
“Hey! There is popcorn in here!” Morland pulled a bag of microwave popcorn from one of the miscellaneous packs victoriously.
Miller pressed his fingertips over his eyes.
“Aw, bloody hell. It’s pre-salted.”
Well. That was a small mercy.
While his team struggled to figure out which discs worked and which didn’t, or catalogued the day’s rations into ‘snacks’ and ‘real food,’ Miller and du Trieux handled the rest of the paperwork. Miller couldn’t understand why there was so much of it, but without programmers and a robust IT infrastructure, all the little things that used to be handled by automatically scanning your corporate ID as you walked into a room now had to be handled with paper. Thankfully, stationery didn’t rot or go stale, so it was easy to scavenge and stockpile. The only trouble was the pens—they kept running out. It had never happened to Miller before, but in the past few weeks, he’d used up three.
Requisitions had eaten up one, the other two had perished writing reports—sanitized versions of what had happened in the field. He used to be able to type it all out on a word processor, but the internal security offices no longer had access to secure online cloud storage. It had to be on paper.
Filling out forms to a background of film-snippets, as Morland and Hsiung found working DVDs and Blu-rays, didn’t cost Miller and du Trieux any blood, but plenty of ink. Without printers, they had to copy the form’s grids and questions out by hand from a master copy they’d been given.
Who was going to read all this garbage, at the end of the day? The question kept distracting Miller. Some guy was going to glance over the paperwork, hand over a pallet of boxed ammo, and then the forms might as well go straight into the trash. It wasn’t as though lawyers would be going over Miller’s reports with a fine-toothed comb, subjecting him and his actions to legal scrutiny—there weren’t any courts left. It was unnecessary bureaucracy, the dying, twitching remnants of a social structure that no longer existed. It let tubby bastards skim food off people, let the real atrocities slip by, and made Miller’s fingers and wrists ache.
His penmanship was improving, at least. And there was salted popcorn. Something to look forward to.
He checked his wristwatch. It was just barely eight-thirty in the morning. “Don’t start movie night until I’m back.” Miller collected the loose sheets into something approaching a neat stack.
“We’ll need to find a microwave first, anyway,” Morland said.
Du Trieux turned her head, frowning. “Surely we can cook it in a pan?”
Miller drew in a deep breath. Improved penmanship, and burnt popcorn. Rolling his eyes, he gathered up the last of the documentation and left his team to their own devices, while he headed upstairs to see Lewis.
Lewis’s office was, for now, part of the small suite of rooms assigned to Cobalt. Increasingly, though, since Mannon’s death and the news that Crewe wouldn’t be leaving a hospital bed, Lewis had ceased to be security team Cobalt’s de facto leader. He was Gray’s eyes on the ground, feeding Schaeffer-Yeager’s CEO news from what qualified as the front line. He was Gray’s voice, too—not that the CEO’s new directive stopped security teams Shank and Bayonet from calling in with Robert Harris to confirm their every move. The old corporate hierarchy, with everything going through internal security first, held strong.
Miller knocked on the doorframe. Lewis’s do
or was always open, but not as a matter of managerial policy—it was the only way to get any air-flow through the room in the day’s oppressive heat.
“Give us a minute, son. Busy here.”
A man with extremely dark skin, darker than Lewis’s by a landslide, was sitting across the desk. Worn clothes, thin. Could have been a refugee, but refugees didn’t carry guns—a battered, antique-looking AK variant Miller had never seen before. He glared at Miller with yellowy eyes, seemingly jaundiced, and turned back to face Lewis over the desk. “Jolly promised shore leave to the men.” His accent was foreign, but reminded Miller of the wide, flat tones of du Trieux’s impressions of her Nigerian cousins.
“Not my problem,” Lewis replied, going into a weary explanation of how there wasn’t anywhere for shore leave. Areas were sectored out, refugees and personnel. The compound had no public spaces.
Miller wasted some time by following the breeze from Lewis’s office door to a window at the end of a corridor. He stood, eyes half shut, letting the air blow past him. Maybe if he cooled down enough now, he’d actually be able to get some sleep at noon instead of waking up to helpless, muggy heat.
When the Nigerian asking about shore leave left, Miller stepped into Lewis’s office, and set the stack of paperwork on the desk. “All good?” Miller asked.
Lewis finished jotting something down, and looked up at the stack without much enthusiasm. “Hell,” he muttered, and pulled the pages over for a closer look.
Paperwork didn’t really suit Lewis. He’d remained an NCO with the Marines as long as he could before taking retirement, and that was only because he was getting a little old to be jumping out of planes with a set of prosthetic feet. He’d taken work in the private sector as a bodyguard with the intent of staying active and on his feet well into his seventies. It didn’t seem fair to Miller that circumstances had put Lewis behind a desk.
“I don’t think I can get you this much ammunition,” Lewis said, blinking at the page. “How the hell’d you use this much?”
