City Wars

by Dennis Palumbo

“I was very lucky …” She leaned on Bowman’s shoulder, took a few steps closer to Wilkins’ body. “He was good.”

  “How …?” Bowman looked at her.

  “A blow to his throat,” she said simply. “You needn’t know where … or how. He strangled on his own blood.”

  Cassandra shivered.

  Bowman picked up his rifle.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  17

  They made it back to Bowman’s quarters without interference. Cassandra had fainted once during the journey. He held her tightly now, at the same time forcing the door open with his shoulder. He pointed the rifle into the room, swung it in a high arc. The room was empty.

  Quickly, he brought Cassandra into his bedroom and helped her off with the tunic. The fabric clung to her wounds. He dropped it to the floor, guided her back on the bed. She lay against the sheets with a low moan. Bowman went into another room, returned moments later with bandages.

  Cassandra was up on her elbows, eyes alert.

  “Lie back,” he said, touching her shoulder gingerly.

  She shook her head. “I’m all right, Jake. Really. I—”

  He unrolled the bandages. “We don’t have much time, Cass.”

  Cassandra leaned back against the pillow and closed her eyes. Bowman opened a bottle of antiseptic.

  “I guess you were right about Hadrian all along,” she said quietly. “He must be power-mad, Napoleonic … I don’t know what the psychologists would call it. He wanted control of Government.”

  Jake said, “Well, it’s damned clear he got it. And you can bet it’s something Hadrian’s wanted for a long time. So when he met up with Wilkins—”

  “Not his real name, I’m sure,” she said bitterly. “I should have known when his bio tape was incomplete. Prior to joining Tactics, there was no record of Wilkins’ activities. No one knew he’d been a mercenary during the War …” She opened her eyes, stared at the ceiling. “And we thought they’d all been caught … or killed.”

  Bowman bathed an area of her shoulder with the antiseptic. Cassandra seemed unaware of the pain.

  “Wilkins was smart,” she said. “He changed his appearance, adopted an entirely different manner … I’m almost ashamed to admit that I couldn’t spot him for a Guardian.”

  He saw the darkness shading her eyes. He bent and kissed her lightly on the forehead.

  “Hadrian and Wilkins,” he said. “That’s one hell of a combination. Over the last couple years, they could have worked to build support in Government … planned the take-over … It was just a matter of waiting for the right moment …”

  “Which finally came when New York attacked us,” she said. “Then the only thing Hadrian feared was cool heads. That’s why he had us followed outside of Corrigan’s Bar—why he ordered the attempt on your life.” Her voice fell. “By then, he’d already set in motion his plan to eliminate the final obstacle …”

  Bowman put down the swab. “What do you mean, Cass?”

  Cassandra sat up, hands gripping the edge of the bed. Her breasts were coldly pale in the harsh light.

  “Minister Gilcrest is dead, Jake. They caused it … I’m sure …”

  He could only stare.

  She took his arm, drew him close. “There’s no way you could have known. Gilcrest was lured to an abandoned sector of the city. By the time I arrived, he’d been murdered. Hadrian’s managed to blame the lunks for it, but I think—”

  Bowman’s face darkened. Then, quietly:

  “Maybe it’s better this way,” he said. “Old Gilcrest loved this city too much.”

  He moved away from her, leaned against a corner. The hard bright lines of the chamber matched the angular depths of his face. He stood with arms folded, very hard and sure in the dark Service uniform.

  “I’m glad for him, Cass,” he said. “I’m glad he’ll miss it.”

  “Miss what, Jake?”

  He took a robe from the chair next to him and came back to the bed. He drew the robe around Cassandra’s shoulders; he sat next to her on the bed.

  She eyed him carefully. For one sharp moment, she felt as though he were a stranger.

  “Jake, what happened when you went out … what did you find?”

  He sat back, expressionless.

  “I found nothing, Cass. Nothing but death.” His voice was thin, as though out of a delayed sense of wonderment. “New York is a dead city. I flew the cruiser right into the heart of it … and then I saw them …”

  “The—the people …?”

  “Dead, Cass. They were all dead. In the streets, in the buildings, on stairways … everywhere I looked, everywhere I had the stomach to look … until I didn’t have it anymore …”

  Silence.

  “Maybe it was radiation,” he went on. “Maybe the result of those gamma experiments they were doing … I don’t know …”

  He took a long breath. “I started running down the streets. I guess I went crazy for a while. Then this voice came out of nowhere. There must have been speakers hidden all over. I managed to trace it, stumbled onto this hidden chamber a couple thousand feet under the streets.”

  “Their Government …?”

  “I don’t think so. It was some kind of tactical brain center. But it was also part of an elaborate trap … intended to keep unexpected visitors from discovering the gamma projectors positioned throughout the city …”

  “Jake, I’m not following you.”

  He looked at his fists, clenched on his lap.

  “You see, they didn’t want someone finding out, screwing up the sequence. They didn’t want anything set off before they were ready.”

  “What sequence? Jake, I—”

  “I recognized the schematics on the computer screens down there,” he said. “I knew what they were … knew I had to get topside, get a transmit back to Chicago …”

  He grew quiet. Cassandra struggled to find meaning in his toneless speech.

  “I don’t understand, Jake. I mean, the attacks on Chicago …”

  “It’s obvious,” Bowman said. “New York and Chicago were isolated, surrounded by impassable terrain. We’ve had no communication for almost a year, and little enough before that. Nothing but rumor, speculation, paranoia …”

  He stood suddenly and looked down at her.

  “It was a Doomsday game, Cass. A kind of chain reaction they set in motion.” He looked off. “The way I figure it, as the last of the New Yorkers died, a preprogrammed attack sequence was initiated. First, a series of randomly fired cobalt cones … then a massive gamma shower, the one that destroyed E Sector … something they could be sure would trigger a war …”

  “But why?”

  “So we’d do exactly as we did. Send an armada … launch a full-scale attack against New York … destroy a city whose inhabitants would by that time already be dead …”

  Bowman’s laugh was hollow.

  “New York even made it easier for us. They dropped all their defense shields … just like opening a door …” He spread his hands. “In that chamber underneath the streets, I’d recognized Chicago’s geographic coordinates on the computer screens. When I got back to my cruiser, I tried to transmit back, to warn Chicago. But my channel had been closed.”

  “Probably on Hadrian’s orders.”

  “Right. Not because he knew what I had to report … but because he’d wanted me to be caught in the bombardment of New York …

  “When I couldn’t get through, I suspected the worst. I flew back here at near-ground level to avoid scans from our own war cruisers … the war cruisers I knew would be coming.”

  “Because Hadrian had moved up the strike time …”

  “Exactly.” Bowman sighed. “But I had to come back … even though I knew it was too late …”

  She pulled the robe tighter around her shoulders. “Too late …?”

  “Too late for us. For the city.” He leaned down, held her arms. “Cass, it was a Doomsday game. They were dying. They had nothing but
their hatred, their frustration. But they were not going to die alone. New York had preprogrammed their entire military system. That’s why they made it so easy for our armada to get through. Don’t you see? When Chicago’s five cruisers dropped their payload on New York, it was just another step in the sequence. They might as well have flipped a switch. When the bombs hit, self-activating high-level cobalt charges destroyed both the city and our war cruisers.”

  “Both …”

  “That’s not the worst of it. I said it was a chain reaction, Cass. What else could the last link in that chain possibly be but another gamma shower … a hundred times more potent than the first …”

  “Oh … God …”

  She came into his arms.

  “That’s why I’m glad Gilcrest is gone,” he said, nuzzling her. His voice was a whisper in her ear. “He never had to see … the end of the city he’d always served …”

  Cassandra’s tears smeared the medication on her cheeks.

  “You said you had to come back,” she said. “But if Chicago is doomed … if it’s going to be destroyed … then why—”

  He still held her, and she couldn’t see his smile.

  “I came back for you,” he said.

  “We’re not going to die,” Bowman had told her.

  They were running along the mesh walkway separating the huge drainage pipes, their clothes now in tatters from the arduous climb down into the Safety Zone. Diffused haloes of light shone from evenly spaced niches in the rock face. Beyond the reach of their pale illumination, the cavern rose up into soundless darkness.

  Images formed in Bowman’s mind, even as he ran. He saw the scanners, a dozen levels above them, picking up the first indications of the awesome destructiveness that was coming. He felt rather than pictured the scenes playing out on the turgid streets of Chicago—the Urbans all headlong into the war fever, crowding the Government Access Centers, filing into Induction Depots, climbing aboard the massive land transports about to depart for New York in the wake of the aerial invasion.

  Dark forms leaped all about him as he ran. Bowman had long since lost track of time. Perhaps the Land forces were already making their way through the desolation that divided the cities. Perhaps, too, these would be among the few Urbans to ironically escape the coming holocaust.

  He listened to the hollow echo of his boots pounding the rusted steel mesh. Then he looked over at the woman running beside him, a woman whose wounds should have forbidden the long, graceful stride she maintained.

  She shouted to him. “How much farther?”

  Even with her Guardian conditioning, she wouldn’t be able to keep up this pace much longer.

  “One more level down,” he said between breaths. He watched her turn her eyes to the front once more.

  There was a sudden rush of cold as they neared the end of the walkway. Wordlessly, Bowman directed Cassandra down the spiral stairwell to another long ribbon of mesh, this running at another angle into the darkened cavern.

  She stumbled once, and he caught her, nearly losing his footing himself. This walkway was almost paper-thin, and swayed beneath their weight. She gasped, and squeezed his arm. Her smile was warm, and full of the best of her, and then she was trotting a few yards ahead of him on the fine steel mesh.

  And then Bowman faced what he’d only begun to suspect. That he didn’t give a damn about the city, nor the Urbans who dwelled in it. Both had become spoiled, empty, lost … symbolic of a life he no longer acknowledged, even though that life had been his own. Those days, those people, those private wars—they were all behind him, gone forever. Gone … like Meyerson was gone, and Gilcrest, and all the soldiers and politicians, all the Urbans. He was no longer part of them, of their city, their world. Perhaps he never had been. Maybe that’s what he’d seen that afternoon in Cassandra’s apartment, after the attempt on his life, when he’d looked out her view window onto the broad cityscape below. It had only been a few days before, yet now seemed a hundred years in the past. But perhaps even then he’d recognized the change. The change he’d thought had come over Chicago, when in fact it had come over him.

  Then what had he left? Only Cassandra, the gift returned. Only she was— “Jake!”

  She was clutching his arm, pointing.

  He nodded, out of breath. They’d come finally to the entrance shaft. Beyond lay the banks of storage chambers, thick-walled and chemically insulated, hundreds of feet below even the deepest level of Government. The Safety Zone had been constructed just before the end of the Great War for the purpose of storing radioactive waste.

  “It’s our best chance,” Bowman said, freeing his mind of the thoughts that had crowded it. He searched the control panel atop the chamber entrance. “Probably our only one. I think a couple of these chambers are still empty. You’ll be safe in one of them.”

  “Me—?”

  Bowman ran his fingers over the row of switches.

  “Number Fourteen. Registers zero radioactivity. That’s what we’re looking for.”

  Pulling her brusquely behind him, Bowman raced down the passgeway until he came to a massive door marked “Fourteen.” He tripped the safety mechanism and the door parted with a sigh.

  He peered inside. It was dark and silent.

  “In you go,” he said, giving her a push.

  “No!”

  “There’s plenty of air … at least enough for an hour or so. That’s all you’ll need.”

  “But what about you? I won’t—”

  Bowman held her hands in his. “I’ll be back.”

  “Jake, no! Not without you—”

  “Please, Cass. Some unfinished business, that’s all …”

  “There isn’t time, I know it—!”

  “I’ll be back. Soon.” He kissed her, hard. “I have to do this, Cass.”

  Cassandra searched his face and found him.

  “All right,” she said at last.

  Amos Hadrian was tired. It had been a full day, the fullest of his life.

  He was alone. Which was what he wanted. The others—ministers, officers, soldiers, citizens—they all had their tasks, their duties. They all had their parts to play in the fulfillment of his vision.

  He would be much needed in the days ahead, of course. There was great work yet to be done. Campaigns to be mounted, wars to be waged.

  But for now, in the sanctity of his private rooms, Hadrian could be alone. To savor. To replay in his mind the day’s events.

  As for Wilkins—let him have his fun. Hadrian didn’t want to know where he was, nor what he was doing. Though he was sure he knew. The strange little man was probably venting his sadism on that female Guardian. Poor woman. For some reason, Wilkins had resented her from the start.

  Hadrian poured himself another glass of wine.

  Perhaps it was foolhardy to have a man such as Wilkins around. His formidable skills could prove dangerous.

  But there’d be time to think of that later. For now, right now, Minister Amos Hadrian wanted only to— Jake Bowman stood in Hadrian’s room.

  The wine glass shattered on the floor.

  Hadrian’s hand went to the alarm switch.

  “Don’t move,” Bowman said. A Service rifle was in his right hand.

  Hadrian said, “My sentry …”

  “You should keep more than one.”

  “Well …” Hadrian drew up the points of his brow. “I congratulate you, Colonel, on your most—”

  “I have something to say to you.” Bowman’s face was hard. “I wanted you to know. Chicago is dead. You killed it.”

  Hadrian laughed. “Hardly, Colonel …”

  “I’m not saying we wouldn’t have done this to ourselves,” Bowman went on, “without you. After the attack on E Sector, it’s pretty certain Government would have retaliated anyway. Even with Gilcrest at the helm. You just hastened the end, that’s all.”

  Hadrian took a long, slow breath.

  “Bowman, I’m afraid you’ve gone quite mad …”

 
; Bowman stepped closer.

  “The funny thing is,” he said evenly, “I don’t think I give a goddam about this city anymore. Or any city. So the whole thing goes up in smoke. How can that be any worse than the way it is now … the way we are now …”

  Hadrian began very slowly to move his fingers along the edge of his chair. There was a gun hidden in a niche about five inches below his hand.

  “Why, Colonel Bowman, I believe that beneath that apparently coarse exterior there exists the soul of a philosopher … or at the very least, a politician …”

  “I don’t care about any of it,” Bowman went on, oblivious. “But I do care about old Gilcrest. I care about the fact that you killed him. Or had him killed. So I’d just feel better if I did something about it.”

  Hadrian’s fingers closed on the gun butt.

  “I was given to understand that Minister Gilcrest was assassinated by rebel lunks,” he said. “And as far as I’m concerned—”

  Hadrian twisted out of his seat and raised his weapon.

  Bowman fired once. The burst took Hadrian in the chest. He was halved cleanly.

  Afterward, Bowman joined Cassandra down below the streets of the city.

  They waited, together, for the darkness.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Dennis Palumbo is a young writer who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. This is his first novel.