Without warning

by John Birmingham

  ‘Oui, docteur. Quand j’essaie de tourner la tкte, j’ai mal au cou, et зa me fait – ‘ She stopped short. To judge by the wide-eyed surprise on Monique’s face, the young woman had not known she could speak French.

  Shit.

  ‘Oui? Vous sentez quoi exactement?’ Colbert encouraged her to continue.

  ‘My neck… is very stiff and sore,’ she said slowly, in English. ‘It hurts so much to turn it, I get sick. And I have a terrible ache in my head all the time.’

  Monique’s hand fell away from hers. The young woman stared at her as if she had grown a new limb. The others were still fixated on the BBC. More commercial satellite imagery, from all over the North American continent, was becoming available every minute. Forty-five minutes after the short burst of white noise that shut down all communication with the richest, most powerful nation in the world – and big chunks of the countries bordering her to the north and south – the truth was unavoidable. They were gone.

  Caitlin had woken into some sort of Kafkaesque nightmare and for a moment she clutched at the hope that it might just be an actual nightmare, or even a psychotic breakdown, perhaps the result of an acquired brain injury.

  ‘But you told us you could not speak French,’ Monique said.

  ‘Fookin’ ‘ell, look’t that.’

  ‘Mademoiselle Mercure, malheureusement j’ai une mauvaise nouvelle a vous annoncer…’ Dr Colbert, still mechanically checking his watch, had just told her he had more bad news.

  No shit, Sherlock, thought Caitlin.

  Monique, like the doctor, was also phase-locked in her own little world. ‘But you told us. You told us you could not speak French.’

  Caitlin stared back at her, as the world broke up into jagged mirror shards of meaning and insanity. She improvised as best she could. ‘I don’t speak it very well. It’s embarrassing to even try. You guys are like so hard-core about it, with all the eye rolling and the shrugging. I mean, you know, lighten up.’

  The doctor saved her by cutting in at that point, ‘Excuse me. But my patient is very ill. Now is not twenty questions time. Now is -’

  ‘Fook me!’

  Aunty Celia’s extra loud cry finally brought everyone’s attention back to the TV, where a top-down image of Manhattan was displayed. Caitlin momentarily thought it might have been archival footage of the 9/11 attacks. Great plumes of black smoke curled away from collapsed high-rise buildings that burned at their cores like active volcanoes. But quickly she saw there were too many of them, too widely spread over the island, at least eight or nine that she could count immediately.

  ‘… if repeated across the country, the death toll might run into millions,’ read the anchorwoman.

  ‘Everyone’s gone,’ said Maggie in a flat voice. ‘This is fucked. Where have they gone?’

  ‘… At any one time many thousands of aircraft are aloft over the US, many of them above densely populated cities.’

  The coverage switched to grainy video taken from a weather cam, somewhere high above Manhattan. As Caitlin watched, numb and disbelieving, a Singapore Airlines jumbo jet ploughed into the side of the Chrysler Building, one wing spinning off screen.

  Something snagged in Caitlin’s conscious mind. Something that she had almost missed. ‘I’m ill?’ she said, suddenly picking up on the qualification the doctor had made. ‘I’m sick – not just injured?’ Irrationally, she reached for the thought, hoping it might explain the psychotic bullshit on the television.

  Dr Colbert nodded distractedly. Now that he was watching the TV he seemed unable to wrench his attention away from it.

  The screen switched to a series of shots detailing the moments just before and after a giant tanker had slammed into a wharf in a city she didn’t recognise. Two frames showed it heading straight into the dockside. The next two captured the impact, with the front quarter of the supertanker crumpling back in on itself while the water around the vessel churned white and dockside cranes began to topple. A single frame caught the moment of detonation amidships, a blossom of white light spilling from the ruptured hull. And then the entire length of the supertanker was consumed by the birth of a dwarf star.

  Maggie started swearing at the TV again, a stream of disconnected curses. Aunty Celia softly repeated the same thing over and over again: ‘Fookin’ ‘ell… Fookin’ ‘ell…’ Every time she said it, she folded and unfolded her arms, like a malfunctioning animatronic figure. Monique, however, was refusing to even look at the screen anymore.

  ‘You said you could not speak French at all,’ she said, challenging Caitlin once more.

  Dr Colbert shook his head like a dog emerging from water and waved the young woman away with his clipboard, addressing himself only half to Caitlin. His eyes remained fixed on the catastrophe as it unfolded a few feet above the end of the bed.

  ‘We have done scans while you were unconscious,’ he told his patient, in English. ‘You have a lesion on your hippocampus, a part of the brain intimately involved in the organisation of memory. It may be a tumour. But we need to take a biopsy to ascertain its nature. It may be serious. Much more serious than the injuries that brought you here. They are uncomfortable, but they can be dealt with.’

  Caitlin Monroe had been an Echelon field agent for nearly five years. She had been intensively trained for three years before that. For her entire adult life, she had lived in a crazy maze where every step she took, every corner she turned, she faced the possibility of betrayal and death. She had adapted to a contingent existence where nothing was taken for granted. She had faced her own potential annihilation so many times that a doctor telling her she might be dying was completely passй. At least, on a normal day.

  But this was a thousand miles from being a normal day, and for once Caitlin found the idea of her life ending to be a completely novel and unsettling experience. It stuck in her mind, a barbed, immovable object that tugged painfully whenever she tried to pull at it. ‘I’m dying?’ she asked him finally.

  ‘No,’ said Colbert. ‘But -’

  The television went blank, the screen a dead, black void.

  ‘What the…?’

  Two words of white, plain type appeared.

  TRANSMISSION INTERRUPTED.

  ‘Holy shit, it’s happening here now!’ Maggie exclaimed.

  ‘No!’ said Caitlin, cutting off an outbreak of panic. They could all hear cries of alarm and distress from other rooms on the hospital floor. ‘Just wait.’

  STAND BY FOR AN ANNOUNCEMENT BY HM GOVERNMENT.

  ‘Check the French news channels,’ she said. ‘See if they’re still on. And the English sports channels.’

  Monique abandoned the task of glaring at her to flip through the channels with the remote. As Caitlin had expected, the continental stations were still broadcasting, as was Sky Racing and the English football channels. Even the end of the world wouldn’t be allowed to interfere with interminable replays of last year’s Champions League.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Caitlin assured them, rubbing at her throbbing temples with one hand, the one trailing slightly fewer leads and sensors. ‘The government has taken control of the news broadcasters. It’s standard procedure in a national emergency. Just watch… And doc… what’s your name again?’

  ‘Colbert.’

  ‘Dr Colbert. I’m not dying?’

  He gave the impression of a man greatly relieved to find himself back on familiar ground. ‘Not yet. But you could, without proper treatment. You are not yet incapacitated but the lesion might well require intensive therapy, and very soon. But we can treat you as an outpatient for the moment… We need your bed.’ He shrugged, smiling for the first time, almost apologetically.

  A single, high-pitched tone filled the room for one second before the TV screen came back to life. Tony Blair was sitting at a desk in a book-lined room, with a British flag prominently draped from a pole behind him. His eyes were haunted and, even beneath a very professional make-up job, his skin looked blotchy and sallow.

  ‘G
-good evening …’ he stammered.

  * * * *

  Colbert wasn’t kidding about needing the bed. An hour later, still swaddled in bandages, and trailing one rogue sensor lead that had become entangled with her unwashed hair, Caitlin Monroe was still in-character as Cathy Mercure, attempting to sign herself out of the Pitiй-Salpкtriиre while shaking off what she’d come to think of as her Secret Squirrel detail. The motley collection of professional anti-warmongers had closed around her like a fist as she’d dragged herself out of bed, dressed, and pushed her way through corridors now crowded with fearful idiots.

  Caitlin was surprised at the hysterical undertow that was running so strongly in the Pitiй-Salpкtriиre. But then again, the place was full of people who were already stressed out and had nothing much to do beyond watching television while they waited for some sort of traumatic medical procedure. On the way down to check out she witnessed any number of pedal-to-the-metal, full-bore freak-outs. One woman even barrelled right into her; a large, bug-eyed Parisian Mack Truck, she knocked Maggie right off her feet, screaming about the end of days, before disappearing down the hallway with her enormous, deeply dimpled butt swinging free in the rear of a badly strung hospital gown.

  ‘I’ll be a lot better off out of here,’ Caitlin assured her companions.

  Apart from Monique, who remained suspicious after discovering Caitlin’s hidden gift for her native tongue, the secret squirrels weren’t doing much better than any of the ranting, unbalanced Frenchies around them. Maggie, after picking herself up off the floor, was blabbering on about needing to phone her sister in Connecticut. And Aunty Celia had settled on a never-ending string of curses and oaths as her favoured response. They’d all made perfunctory efforts to get her to stay in the hospital, to argue with Colbert that she was too ill to move, but Caitlin could tell that each was spinning off into her own little world of free-floating and violently unstable anxiety. The whole city was probably going to be like this. The whole fucking world.

  For her part, she didn’t know what to think about the news out of the States. It was bordering on psychotic. But she did know that even if this all turned out to be some post-millennial War of the Worlds shakedown, if she’d been cut off from Echelon, she was travelling blind and unarmed in a world of predators. She had to run to ground as soon as possible, re-establish contact with Wales, her controller, and get some updated instructions. Christ only knew what had gone down while she’d been out of it. Plus, of course, Monique was eyeing her off with increasing suspicion.

  A single television, suspended from the ceiling in the main waiting room, had drawn a huge pool of onlookers, all muttering and gasping at every new revelation from the French-language news service. Caitlin ignored it. She was having trouble negotiating her release with the large, distracted black woman on the front desk. Like everyone else, the woman seemed incapable of dragging her attention away from the TV for more than a few seconds. Monique tugged at her elbow, saying ‘Cathy, je veux te parler,’ while Maggie, having spied a bank of payphones, exclaimed, ‘All righty then!’

  The American took off past Caitlin and Monique – and her head suddenly burst open. Ropey strands of blood, bone chips and gobbets of brain tissue splattered everybody within two metres.

  As Maggie’s oversized, badly dressed and utterly lifeless frame began to drop to the floor, Caitlin was already in midair, having launched herself without thought towards the nearest cover. She sailed over the counter, crashing bodily into the nurse with whom she’d been making so little headway. A cheap pink radio exploded on top of a filing cabinet. The screams began as the hundred or more people crammed into the foyer finally realised that somebody was shooting into their midst, but Caitlin was already on the move, belly-crawling towards an open door that she hoped would give onto another exit point.

  ‘Wait!’

  She felt a hand on her ankle and lashed back with a heel strike, only checking the move as she recognised the voice. Monique. The blow still caught the French girl heavily on one cheek and she cried out in pain. Caitlin swore and reached back behind her, grabbing Monique by her collar and roughly dragging her up into a crouching run. She slipped once, losing her footing and painfully twisting one knee. ‘Move!’ Caitlin yelled. ‘If you want to live, move your ass!’

  Behind them a riot had seemingly erupted. She heard two muffled shots and the crash of breaking glass, barely masked by the uproar of the terrorised crowd. A frightened nurse stood in their way, her eyes wide and staring. Caitlin elbowed her aside and made for a doorway behind her.

  ‘What is happening?’ cried Monique before Caitlin cut her off.

  ‘Shut up and run!’

  Crashing out into the corridor, they ran headlong into a couple of security guards, one fat and wheezing, the other looking like he might have started his career as a public security professional back in the days of the Maginot Line. ‘That way,’ shouted Caitlin, throwing a glance back over her shoulder, where she caught the briefest glimpse of pandemonium in the hospital foyer.

  Snaking around the guards, she sped up again, turning left and right, slamming through a series of swinging rubber doors without regard for who or what she might find on the other side. She’d let go of Monique and didn’t much care whether the Frenchwoman was keeping up or not, as she blew through yet another set of swinging doors, crashing into an orderly and the trolley he’d been pushing. It tipped over and fell to the tiles with a great metallic clattering of medical instruments and stainless-steel bowls. Never stopping, Caitlin swooped down on a foil package, slipping it into her sleeve as she hurried on.

  ‘Wait, Cathy, wait…’

  Monique was still with her.

  They’d found the treatment area of the hospital’s emergency ward, and even by the usually chaotic standards of an ER unit, their entrance drew attention. With no televisions in this ward and most everyone distracted by whatever injuries or raging illnesses had gained them access to the overstretched facility, the sudden noisy appearance of two women, covered in gore and moving at great speed with no apparent regard for their own safety or anybody else’s, caused heads to turn and all conversation to cease.

  Monique was obviously about to start demanding answers and looked like she might just put down roots on the spot where she’d slid to a halt. A formidable grey-haired woman in a matron’s uniform started moving towards them with her head down and eyes glaring murderously. She put Caitlin in mind of a big blue bulldozer.

  ‘What the hell are you doing, Cathy?’ asked Monique. ‘What is going on?’

  Before Caitlin could answer, or even just spin around and keep running, the same heavy rubber doors swung inwards and two men, both armed, muscled through. They were dressed in suits, one of them badly blood-stained, and their eyes swept the room, quickly settling on their quarry. Caitlin knew there was no chance of running.

  Two bullets took the formidable-looking matron in the chest, throwing her through the air and rendering her a whole lot less formidable as her body crashed into a bed and dropped to the floor, twitching and pulsing extravagant amounts of blood onto the yellowing tiles. Monique screamed and ducked, covering her ears with both hands. Her cries were lost in the bedlam of the emergency room as patients and medical staff flew into a panic. Having no cover and no safe exit, Caitlin took the only option left. She attacked.

  One of her assailants had been caught out with a nearly empty magazine, leaving his partner as the primary threat. She grabbed the only ranged weapon to hand – a couple of stainless-steel bowls – and launched them with great force like bright metal frisbees directly at his head. He had no choice but to duck and weave, firing anyway, the bullets heading down-range unaimed, uncontrolled. One splattered an IV bag. Another struck a patient in the arm. Taking the foil pack from inside the sleeve at her wrist as she charged, Caitlin stripped the silver wrapping away from a disposable scalpel and, focusing her kiai, her war shout, into the very centre of her target, she closed the short distance between them as quickly as
she could.

  To those normal, mortal beings around her, she moved as a fluid blur of violent action, suddenly airborne, one long leg pistoning out and into the sternum of the armed attacker. The gun fired again, bringing down a shower of plaster dust from the ceiling as he slammed backwards into a wall. His head struck a metal oxygen tap with a wet crunch and he began a slow drop to the ground, trailing a greasy organic smear down the wall.

  Without pause, Caitlin’s whole body swept around in a small, self-contained tornado, one foot lashing out to strike squarely at the gun hand of her second foe, who had just jacked in a fresh mag as she struck. The pistol, a Glock 23, discharged a single round, shattering an overhead fluorescent light. Turning tightly with the direction of the kick, getting right inside the circle of her man, Caitlin shot out her free hand, grabbing his wrist, extending it up and slamming her other arm in under the elbow to snap the vulnerable joint with a terrible crack. In a flash, her weapon hand whipped backwards and she opened up his throat with the razor-sharp scalpel. A geyser of hot blood spilled out in a rush as she continued to spin, dragging the bulk of her victim around between her and the first man. Only then did she strip the Glock from the weak, rubbery grip of the man who was already slumping out of her grasp. She felt fingers breaking as she wrenched it away.