Infinity Wars

by Jonathan Strahan

No doubt she was being over-cautious, but it was worth the check.

  THE WIND WAS kicking up. Somewhere around here was a noodle café he remembered from his first tour. A few streets later he found it, and ducked inside for shelter and something to eat. He ordered a spicy broth and when it arrived leaned over the bowl appreciatively. The door banged open with the wind. The proprietor went outside and returned, frowning. She said a few words to the clientele at large, who nodded and sucked at their noodles.

  Storm, murmured the translator through his earbud. A storm on the way.

  By the time he finished lunch the wind was consistently strong. He debated heading back to the hotel but no weather warnings had been issued, and he wanted to visit the harbour. He took the tram north and from there walked down to the front.

  His heart rejoiced to see water again. The harbour was still magnificent, even if it had lost the glamour of decades past. He could see the rows of towers on the waterfront that had once borne the names of economic giants, before survivalist technologies surpassed those of the consumer in the market place. Nicolas had invested his clients’ money in weather-proofing: engineering solutions designed to keep out the water, the wind, and the dust. His clients had done well. Weather-proofing was an expensive business, and few of the places he had visited on his first tour could afford such measures. Skirting the harbour was the shanty town that must have sprung up when the money went. Hundreds of makeshift abodes, perched on stilts, on floating platforms, and in the damp lee of the sea walls.

  He watched the ferries making their way across to the mainland. The harbour waters were being stirred up by the winds and the wave crests were very white; the ferries ploughed onwards. He raised his camera. The smallness of the boats against the magnitude of water, that was what he wanted. Just a fringe of the mainland in the top ribbon of the image. He could feel the force of the wind against his forearm, the camera strap flapping beneath. Perhaps it was time to head back.

  HENDRICKS HAD A location match. Lia glanced at her watch. She read what was there, read it again. A second passed where she seemed to have no thoughts at all, was lost and everything lost to her. Her world reduced to that tiny piece of text. It must be wrong. It couldn’t be right. She blinked. The text remained, clear as day. She took a step towards her office.

  “What’s your percentage on that, Hendricks?”

  “Ninety-eight per cent certain.”

  She shut the door with more force than necessary. On the other side she leaned heavily against it, her mind cycling frantically.

  Her team had one crucial rule, and that was that once a cloak had been laid down it was laid down for everyone. Nothing went beyond the incident room. It was Lia’s rule, enshrined in military protocol.

  Shakily, she raised her watch.

  You idiot, Nicolas. You fucking—

  A knock at the door.

  “Sir?”

  “Give me a minute—”

  “Sir, we’ve got a potential problem, I need an authorisation code from you—”

  “I’ll be right there,” she said sharply.

  He retreated. She stood, feeling the onset of something close to panic. A deluge of data across her brain. Only the pertinent facts, Lia. The facts.

  “Hendricks, I need you to contact Nicolas.”

  She instructed her assistant to wrap the message in every possible encryption. This was against all protocol.

  THE HOTEL DINING room was busier than on the previous evening. A steady stream of rain had begun an hour or so earlier, and other guests had also returned to escape the inclement weather. Nicolas listened to the chatter of his fellow diners through his earbud. The translators had improved immensely over the past five years, although in a busy space with multiple conversations, it was a challenge to piece together the disparate shards of dialogue.

  Back in his 10th floor room he turned on the news to see if there was any information about the weather. No alerts. He stretched out on the bed to review the day’s photography, and sent the one of the harbour to Lia. It was a tease of a picture, hinting at the mainland shoreline without revealing it. He planned to read for a while but the softness of the bed made him sleepy. Just before he drifted off he heard his watch vibrate, and leaned over to switch it off without looking at the message.

  He woke in the dark to a howl, convinced that he was back in the old apartment, that a dream had caused Lia to cry out. It’s okay, he murmured. I’m here. The howl did not stop. He remembered that he was alone and in a hotel room on the other side of the world and then he realized that the sound was not anything human but the wind.

  “Lights,” he muttered.

  The room warmed slowly from black to brown to amber, but stopped short of its maximum brightness. The rain-streaked window reflected his prone figure on the bed, the sky black beyond the glass. A dim muddle of light through the rain. He checked the time on the wall display and was taken aback to discover that it was nine in the morning. He got up and dressed—after an initial trickle there was no water from the taps, even if he’d wanted to wait around for a shower—and was lacing his shoes when something slammed into the glass with shocking force.

  He felt his heart accelerate to a sprint. He stared at the window. A crack ran from sill to ceiling, hairline threads sprouting on either side as he watched. Some part of his brain said it’s going to go you have to move and he grabbed his bag and seized the door handle. It wouldn’t turn. Panic rising, he could hear the groan of the glass you need the card an awful creaking it’s going to go the pass where was the pass—he saw it on the table by the kettle, slapped it against the door and watched the light turn green. He threw himself into the corridor. He was five steps along the carpeted hallway when he heard the crash and knew the window had blown.

  He thought of glass splinters exploding through the room, imagined himself still asleep in the bed. Nausea flooded him and he slumped against the wall, his breathing shallow. Up and down the floor doors were opening, perhaps awakened by the sound. Hands rubbing at eyes, confused voices, quick exchanges across the corridor. He continued towards the stairwell—don’t take the lift, even if it’s working—trying to banish the image of those lethal shards.

  Downstairs was chaos. A number of guests must have vacated their rooms first thing this morning, and were now gathered in the lobby with their luggage, unable to leave and barraging the night manager with questions. Others like Nicolas were emerging dazedly into the dining room, still in their nightwear. A man was bleeding, a member of staff bandaging his head wound inexpertly. Other staff were putting up storm shutters. Too late, he thought. The wind and rain were a relentless shrill outside.

  There was no hot food—even if the kitchen staff had been able to get in, he supposed there was no power—but a porter was laying out a cold buffet. A couple of families encouraged their children to get some breakfast, and gradually the rest of the diners filed up to the tables. Nicolas took some juice and wished there were coffee. Behind the buffet another member of staff started arguing with the porter, apparently over the food. People exchanged glances, and began to eat more quickly.

  Nicolas checked his watch. No signal, which meant his translator was out of action. He had one message though, which must have been delivered earlier. The message was short. Leave the island as soon as you get this and get as far inland as you can.

  It was from an unknown sender, but there was only one person it would have come from. Well, the city was under siege, he couldn’t go anywhere. He supposed Lia had seen reports on the news. Although the message had been delivered hours earlier. He chose not to pursue that line of thought, switched off his watch and walked through the ground floor of the hotel, wanting answers but not understanding a word of the panicked discussions, until he located another tourist. The woman was attempting to charge her watch, but evidently without success. He coughed.

  “Excuse me? Do you know anything about what’s going on? My translator’s down.”

  The woman straightened. “Yep,
mine too. A right mess isn’t it? From what I can gather the grid’s down so the hotel’s running off a back-up generator. Seems they’ve cut any extraneous power sources.”

  “I’m guessing we’ve lost the water supply too. My taps weren’t working.”

  “No one seems to have seen this one coming.”

  He looked towards the storm-shuttered windows. “There must be somewhere we can get to.”

  “Honey, have you seen outside? Windspeed’s already clocking three hundred kay and this is just the edge of it. There won’t be any transport off the island now.”

  There were more people in the city than there should have been, the woman explained. That was the first problem. An evacuation process that should have taken place over forty-eight hours had been crammed into two. She showed Nicolas some video on her watch taken before the signal went down. Waves twenty metres high imploding against the first line of buildings. Tidal surges torrenting through the streets, flooding the lower levels of the city.

  “We’re not much higher up here. It might flood,” said the woman matter-of-factly.

  Nicolas replayed the footage. He thought of the shanty towns he had seen around the harbour. How many people had remained in those stilt houses, those floating shacks, when the storm hit?

  “Hundreds of people are going to die,” he said.

  “It’ll be thousands,” said the woman. That same matter-of-fact tone. Nicolas stared at her. The woman sighed. “I’m an aid worker, I usually operate further south than here. After a while you stop hearing the numbers. It doesn’t mean I don’t care.”

  “No,” said Nicolas. “Of course not.”

  “They’re calling it Myanna,” said the woman.

  “What?”

  “The typhoon.”

  “Oh.”

  On the other side of the room a young woman was sobbing.

  “Her friend went out last night,” said the aid worker. “She hasn’t come back.”

  THE SATELLITE IMAGES refreshed, and refreshed again. Lia watched as the spiral revolved in its inexorable formations, moving steadily west. The second spiral on its tail, the two engaged in some ancient deadly dance. She watched as the typhoon smashed into the coastline. As the hackers lifted their blackout, news footage began to leak through, helicopters flying at the edges of the weather system, video clips that had been uploaded before the city went dark. There was a clip from a car caught on the bridge in the attempted evacuation, a wall of water bearing down upon its occupants, screams from those inside. Nothing more had been heard after the upload.

  She watched as the hackers tied off loose ends, erased their trails, sighed and stretched their aching bodies, no doubt thinking of their warm beds after a long shift. She watched as the meteorologists talked excitedly about reports of windspeeds surpassing the known record.

  Her message to Nicolas had been delivered, but he hadn’t replied. She instructed Hendricks to send another. The second one failed. She asked Hendricks to check for new messages every few minutes, although she knew her assistant would alert her the moment anything came through. Her messages became increasingly frantic: Did you get out? Tell me you got out.

  It would be two days before the eye passed over, and then the other side of the eyewall would let rip. In her head she ran through evacuation scenarios, each one more outlandish than the next. Even if it were possible to locate him, she knew better than anyone that none of them would work.

  WHEN THE LOBBY flooded everyone moved up a floor. Not all of the food and water supplies had been moved upstairs in time, and everything was rationed. By the second day his throat was continually parched, his stomach rumbling. Guests and staff slept where they could. The children were offered the beds but their parents preferred to keep them away from the windows, even with the storm shutters up. From the corridors you could hear the wind moving through the upper floors in a continual wail. He began to lose track of time. Dozed at intervals. Woke to find someone shaking his arm, and thought himself back on the bus, arriving in the city.

  “Hey, hey wake up!”

  It was the aid worker.

  “We’re going foraging,” she said. “Want to come? We could use the help.”

  “Has it stopped?”

  “No, but we’re in the eye. So the wind’s dropped.”

  It was eleven at night. The woman had organized a small party. They were going to make their way across the street to the row of hotels opposite. The water on the ground floor was waist deep and cold. They waded across the lobby and one by one pushed through the revolving doors.

  The water rose a few inches as he stepped into the street. The wind had dropped, the air was preternaturally still. Nicolas looked up and saw stars. It seemed inconceivable. A pretend sky. The aid worker ran a torch over the water, indicating the buildings opposite, and instructed them to form a chain.

  “And watch out for debris!”

  Nicolas quickly realized the water was occupied. Pieces of furniture, the expelled contents of shops and households, were all floating about. The lead person yelled and stopped. Nicolas saw a darker mass looming ahead, and a car floated past. He couldn’t see if there was anyone inside. They kept going. It wasn’t far but seemed endless. Nicolas was last in the chain. With his free hand he pushed away at anything moving towards him. Halfway across he touched the roughness of fabric and then cold wet skin and he couldn’t suppress a shout.

  The body drifted slowly away. A yell from the other end of the chain; they’d reached the opposite side of the street. The other hotel was not much better equipped than theirs, but the manager in charge allowed them to take some bottled water supplies which they could float back across the street. They moved on to the next building. Nicolas’s hands were numb from immersion. Once the torch flickered over the hump of limbs and then a face was illuminated, stark beneath the orange light. The torch moved away quickly. It was easier not to know. They could feel the wind starting to rise again and the aid worker declared it time to return. In the thin starlight Nicolas noticed the building adjacent to their hotel had also lost its windows, and appeared to be listing.

  Back in the hotel he removed his soaking trousers, shoes and socks and accepted the offer of a towel. Sat in the corridor in the towel and his damp boxers. He noticed people around him were starting to sniff and cough. The invading sea was chilling the city. He turned on his watch, hoping for a signal before the other side of the eyewall hit, but there was nothing. He read again the message: Leave the island as soon as you get this. He did the maths, slowly because he was hungry and dehydrated and exhausted from the wading through water. It had been sent ten hours before the official warning. Hours before the disaster of the attempted evacuation. The meaning was stark.

  He wondered if he had always known. If something in his subconscious had linked the days she worked overnight to certain cataclysmic events around the world. But if this was a revelation it didn’t feel as revelation ought. There was no enlightenment. Just a kind of shutting down.

  Of course, she might not have been involved directly. She might have had a tip off. He wanted desperately to believe that, to believe her the woman he’d been introduced to all those years ago, with the beautiful uncertain smile. But he knew in his heart that wasn’t true.

  It was too big to grasp at, he supposed. And he was weary, and couldn’t escape the idea that whatever he had been running towards, this was it. He thought of the aid worker’s statement that thousands would die, and wondered whether torture would have been easier to bear.

  He looked up and found one of the children staring at him.

  “You can be anything you want to be,” he murmured. The child looked at him like he was a lunatic. Who but a lunatic would say such a thing? Besides, they had no language in common. Only this place, this end.

  The wind had returned. He thought of Lia crying out in the night. The flutter of her breath warm against his face when he leaned over to check whether she had woken, to gently stroke her face. It’s okay. He curle
d into a ball and put his hands over his ears.

  AFTER, THERE WAS a list of the dead. The number of foreign nationals grew longer but he was not on it. She instructed Hendricks to run facial recognition software over footage of the devastation, checking bodies alive and not. There were no matches. She allowed herself to entertain the possibility that he had got out in time, asked a friend to run an identity check on transactions in the city for the twenty-four hours before the typhoon hit. The list was small but confirmed Nicolas’s location. There was a tram ticket. Lunch at a local café.

  She remembered her first successful hack. The jubilation in the room when they realized they’d done it, they’d successfully hidden a cyclone. She’d found it hard to suppress the feeling that the cyclone was working for them; had to remind herself they were not wielding a manmade weapon. But it was nonetheless a weapon of mass destruction and thousands of people would die for lack of warning. Still they were jubilant.

  Afterwards she had gone home and Nicolas had sensed her adrenaline, asked if there was something to celebrate. She shook her head. Bit of a breakthrough, that’s all. They ordered takeaway and started watching a film, paused it halfway through when she turned to kiss him. She fell asleep against him in the second half.

  Even now there was a chance he would be found. Hundreds of people had been washed out to sea and others trapped underground or under collapsed buildings. It was still possible he was alive. But as the weeks passed so did the possibility.

  Operation Myanna, as it would be known in the classified files, counted as a success. The damage would run into the trillions, and surveys reported public moral at an all time low. No one would be thinking of the materials war.

  SHE SAW SPIRALS every night now. Her dreams brought her visions of figures trapped inside them, stretched and melted into the cyclonic coils. All of them were Nicolas although none of them had his face, instead they were faceless, the faceless millions. She did not remember the dreams, but always she woke to find that her face was wet, and the spirals were waiting for her.