After America ww-2

by John Birmingham

  "Why do you think they will stay in Crockett?" he asked.

  Sofia spoke before Miguel could. "To rape the women and enjoy the spoils," she said. "That is what they did to Mama."

  Miguel felt sick. He'd hoped to have protected Sofia from that knowledge.

  "Come," he said. "We have much to do."

  18

  New York Some people were just lucky, but Ryan Dubois wasn't one of them. The mortar round that exploded and blew him into three large, messy pieces of burned meat merely tossed Julianne through a store window that had already been shattered. She tumbled through the air, eerily detached, recalling a childhood misadventure involving a trampoline and a dislocated shoulder. Her sense of time passing stretched like a rubber band, and then-snap! The world sped up again in a violent, jaggy swirl of color and pain and the loudest noise she had ever heard in her life.

  Jules screamed in agony as she hit something hard and immovable and the same shoulder was wrenched out of place with a grinding pop. She rolled across a wooden floor, every turn a flaring supernova of pain in her back and side, dark purple blossoms opening in front of her eyes as she fought to hold on to consciousness. Impact knocked the wind out of her, and she had trouble taking a breath, as though she'd just been gut punched by Lennox Lewis. Attempting to push herself up off the floor, she collapsed, screaming again as white-hot flames seemed to shoot down one side of her body. The rolling thunder of rocket fall and mortar fire lashed at the street outside, and she was oddly certain the Rhino was dead, disassembled at high speed just like poor Ryan, but then he unexpectedly landed feet first on the floor next to her. His filthy bloodstained boots crushed a small glass figurine a few inches from her face as he knelt down to help her up.

  She tried to cry out, to warn him that she was injured, but he had his arms around her and was dragging her away from the open window before she could protest. The pain was grotesque, unbearable, nauseating, and she did pass out for a few minutes. Another white dwarf of agony exploding somewhere inside her woke her up again to a world filled with death and horror and the screaming of a small child.

  After a few seconds she realized the small child was herself and the Rhino had done something to her shoulder. She felt a sting in her neck and then the most delicious warmth as a soothing bath of soft analgesic pleasure flowed out from that point to gently wash away all of her many hurts and outrages. Her eyelids felt heavy and her chin dropped down onto her chest as the Rhino heaved her up off the floor and away into a long, dark tunnel. Jules came to consciousness slowly, in fits and starts. She was dreaming. A nightmare, actually. Some penny dreadful horror, probably from eating too much Brie and watching that awful 28 Days Later with Fifi. They'd put the bloody thing in the DVD player only because Mr. Lee had brought a copy back from a trip ashore in Kupang and they simply couldn't sit through another fucking session of The English Patient. Now she was fighting to drag herself out of the dreadful nightmare of a world emptied of people-no, haunted by them. The world was haunted by millions of souls who had disappeared, and now they were back, returned from some hell dimension with every trace of humanity sucked from their souls. They had eyes like the milky orbs of dead fish and lips rotted away from yellow teeth, and they were coming for her. Of course, she couldn't run from them. She tried, but she never moved, not an inch, no matter how fast she pumped her legs.

  Jules forced herself out of the half-waking state with great effort, pushing back against the vision of hell as if bench-pressing a huge weight away from herself. She finally woke up in her hotel room in New York on fresh white Egyptian cotton sheets, with the prospect of a day's shopping in front of her and a night at the theater with Paul, and dinner at Gabriel's. She would wear her new Kate Spade slingbacks and perhaps the Karen Millen Black Silk Bird Dress, but definitely the Kate Spades, because they were gorgeous and she'd just bought them and the shop was wonderful; it was as if she were floating through it again, turning over and over in the air, with a thousand jagged shards of glass and the disembodied head and upper torso of Ryan Dubois, and she was falling, slamming into the floor, and hurting the same shoulder she had dislocated on a trampoline, and again playing hockey at school, and screaming…

  Screaming.

  She came fully awake at last with a gasp. Still groggy and disoriented and feeling as though she were at the end of a tumbling free-fall through her personal history.

  Paul?

  Dear Paul. God, how long had it been since they had dated?

  And Fifi was dead.

  And she had not shopped in New York for many years.

  And those shoes were lost somewhere back in England.

  And then she knew where she was. She'd been blown through the front window of a Kate Spade store on the corner of Broome and Mercer streets. She had never shopped there. For an infuriating, irrational moment she could not recall where she'd bought the gorgeous slingbacks her sister had stolen so many years ago. And then she remembered. It was in San Francisco, way back in 2000, at the opening of the store. She levered herself up against a display case, groaning a little at the sudden throbbing ache in her shoulder. This was the third time she'd popped the thing, and every time recovery took longer and was less complete.

  "Rhino," she said, coughing as she choked on the dust in her mouth and throat. "Rhino? Are you there?"

  "Quiet," he said softly. "Pirates."

  That one word brought her rushing back to full consciousness, or close enough that it made no difference. It was dark in the store and outside on the street. She calculated quickly that she must have been out of action for most of the day. She remembered the sudden fall of the rockets, the way a tsunami of explosive fire had rushed toward them up the narrow street, and the weirdly familiar sensation of being blown clear through the air. It was like standing on a ship's deck in a fierce storm and being catapulted through space by the impact of a rogue wave. She remembered with shuddering horror how Ryan, who had been standing a good ten yards away from her, closer to the blast, had simply come apart and spewed his inner life all over the whitewashed facade of the store on the corner.

  She understood then that they had not been attacked by pirates or caught in one of their mortar barrages. They'd been mistaken for pirates and targeted by the army. Or maybe not. Perhaps they were just firing blindly into this part of Manhattan because it was crawling with freebooters. She pawed at her chest, seeking the reassurance of the weapon she'd set out with a dozen or so blocks back on Duane Street.

  "I've got it," the Rhino said in a low voice. "You're in no state to fight anyone. I put your shoulder back in and doped you up. Now just lie still and try not to get us both kilt."

  Kilts, she thought, somewhat baffled. Why would she be looking for kilts?

  Her eyelids drooped again, and she dozed off.

  It was very dark when she next awoke, but her head was much clearer. The morphine must have leached out of her bloodstream. She blinked her eyes open and shut a few times and carefully rolled her injured shoulder. It was stiff and sore, but she could move the arm even though the Rhino had fashioned a basic sling out of what had once been a very expensive silk scarf.

  "You awake?" he asked. "For good now?"

  "Water," she croaked, and the former coast guard man passed her a canteen. It was smeared with blood, and she could taste the coppery scum of it as she put her lips to the plastic bottle. The water was warm and tasted brackish, but she gulped it down gratefully.

  "S'okay," said the Rhino. "The pirates have moved on. They didn't come in here. Guess this season's fashions are just so 2003, eh?"

  He held up a pair of gold leather sandals and grinned.

  Jules stared at him.

  "I've been unconscious for most of the day, and that's the best line you could come up with?" she asked.

  His grin grew wider as he saw she was going to be okay.

  "Can you move? Or carry your weapon? Because believe me, I can handle two of these puppies on the leash, don't you worry," he said as he hoiste
d up both P90s. Julianne sucked in a deep breath, rocked back, and then rolled up onto one knee before standing, exhaling, and taking another deep breath to control her dizziness. The Rhino was quickly at her side with a strong arm for support.

  "The fighting's moved downtown and west a ways," he told her. "Lucky thing for us, too. Thought we were gonna get ourselves squashed between both sides for a few hours there."

  Jules allowed him to lead her though the wreckage of the store, which was so badly trashed that she couldn't tell what damage was new and what had been done by neglect and the elements over the years since the Disappearance. Here and there she was able to pick out a pile of clothes and accessories that were rigid and black with the congealed leftovers of whoever had been wearing them when the Wave struck. But mostly the store was just a shambles of collapsed shelving, broken glass, ruined stock, and…

  "Oh…"

  She closed her eyes and swallowed when she saw a disembodied arm poking out from under a blackened display cabinet.

  "Damn, sorry, Jules. I thought I'd policed up all the remains."

  He moved to pick it up, but Jules squeezed his elbow and shook her head.

  "Doesn't matter. Come on. We should get moving. I want to get to Union Square before sunup."

  The Rhino helped her out onto the street, which looked like a scene from wartime France, illuminated by the shells of burning buildings. Explosions had picked up car bodies and tossed them willy-nilly, smashing them into shop fronts, tearing the chassis into jagged knots of metal. Tires burned. Shop fittings burned. The long, ruined canyon of Mercer Street, once one of her favorite parts of this city, was illuminated by the oily orange glow of a hundred separate fires. Light rain, more of a sooty drizzle, drifted down, coating the rubble in a thick patina of ash and toxic chemicals.

  They picked their way along the cobblestoned street, threading through entanglements of fallen scaffolding and brickwork. A huge steel garbage can blocked the path down near a boutique she vaguely recalled visiting during the three weeks she'd spent here in 2000, shortly after the millennium celebration. The can had been blown high into the air and come crashing down to lie with one end propped up against the first floor of the boutique. It had buckled in the center and now effectively closed off access to upper Mercer.

  "Let's cut through," said the Rhino, gesturing at the boutique with one of the P90s. "We should get out of the main thoroughfares, anyway. There'll be a lane or something out the back of these buildings. We can get up the block using that."

  Jules muttered her agreement, preferring to concentrate on not tripping and further injuring her arm. They climbed over the windowsill of the nearest shop front, a gutted homewares store, and navigated their way to the rear of the building, first by the light of the fires and then by means of a torch the Rhino clipped onto one of the machine guns. A jet screamed overhead while they searched for a rear exit, chased by the thump-thump-thump of a big antiaircraft cannon. She'd heard of the pirates mounting such things onto pickups but had wondered at the truth of such rumors. Surely the city's road network was too locked up with the rusted remains of all the vehicles that had crashed after losing their drivers.

  "Here we go," said her companion as the thin beam of torchlight picked out a heavy metal security door. "Stand back, Miss Jules."

  She did as she was told while he pressed down the locking bar and tentatively pushed open the door. No gunfire greeted the movement, and the Rhino slid through.

  "Clear," he announced a few seconds later, and she followed him through, emerging into the cold, gritty rain that pattered down into the space between those buildings fronting Mercer and the ass-end of their counterparts on the next block over. She tried to remember which street ran parallel on that side but came up blank. The back alley, as always, was much less disordered than the main streets. There were a few vehicles parked here and there, but they had been parked back in '03 while their drivers ran deliveries to the businesses on either side. The smugglers had learned very quickly, right back at Duane Street, in fact, that such hidden, disused passages were safest when one was trying to traverse the contested island.

  She recalled this as they sloshed through three inches of rancid, stagnant groundwater collected in the artificial valley between the two terraced rows of buildings on Mercer and whatever streets. Rats the size of small dogs swam away from the thin shaft of torchlight, trailing V-shaped wakes.

  Didn't there used to be alligators in the New York sewers?

  "Rhino," she said lightly. "Do you recall whether the Wave disappeared crocodiles and suchlike?"

  He halted in front of her and turned around, keeping the torch pointed down to avoid dazzling her.

  "Crocodiles? You mean gators?"

  "Yes," she said, trying to sound casual.

  "No idea, Miss Julianne. What is it they reckon now? It took humans and most of the higher primates. Chimps and apes and so on. And killed about half of anything that had a spinal cord. But not so as you could predict what was gonna get zapped beyond people and apes."

  "Don't worry about it," she said, feeling rather foolish.

  The Rhino sketched a devilish grin.

  "Do gators have spinal cords? Or do they just like to eat them? Hmm. Do you know, Miss Jules?"

  "Shut the fuck up and keep moving," she scolded, waving him forward.

  The Rhino sniggered and turned back to resume sloshing through the filthy watercourse. The grumble of bomb bursts and far-off cannon fire rolled around the empty chasms of the city, but hidden away in their own deep concrete valley and with a cold rain pressing down, the fighting sounded muted and far away. Jules kicked away a rat that ran across her boots, sending it into a rack of old dresses still waiting to be delivered. They were covered in plastic bags; she wondered idly if any might still be wearable but scoffed at the thought. They'd be moldy and chewed to rags by moths and grubs after so long. After squeezing through a narrow space where the corners of two buildings almost met, they followed the passageway up to the rear of a two-story shop dwarfed by a much larger buildings on either side. The door was jammed open by a large cardboard box that was halfway to total disintegration. The Rhino tried to pull it out of the way, but it came apart in his hands and spilled its contents with a harsh clatter of metal and crashing glass.

  "Shit," the Rhino said. He kicked a path through the refuse. As Jules stepped forward, she realized she'd stood on the remains of whoever had been carrying the box and felt an absurd reflex need to apologize. Hurrying to keep up with the bobbing torchlight, she tried to make out what sort of store it might have been, but the best she could come up with was "eclectic." Clothes. Knickknacks. Hideously expensive objets d'art. There were examples of all those in the small, neat space.

  Spring Street, onto which the shop fronted, apparently had reverted to its original form as a stream. At least a foot of brown swiftly running water gushed past outside, lapping at the bottom of the shop's front door, pouring in underneath. The Rhino was less concerned by that than by the chance they might be spotted as they left the cover they had so far enjoyed.

  "Why don't we just kick our way into the place over the road?" Jules suggested. "See if we can cut through the block like we just did?"

  "That's my plan, too," he replied. "But I'd just like to check the water before I go dipping my toes."

  He turned around and smiled wickedly.

  "Gators, you know."

  19

  Salisbury Plain, England Richardson broke just after four in the afternoon. He lasted much longer than Caitlin had expected, but she had watched better men than that try to resist torture before. She had even broken some of them herself with nothing more than a sanitary napkin smeared with pig's blood. Everyone had a weakness, some deep fear that could be exploited if one was given time. If time was an issue, there was always the proper amount of pressure, applied in controlled doses. Everyone broke sooner or later. The wonder with Richardson was that he held on for so long, but as Dalby pointed out, it wasn't
for the sake of honor or duty.

  "I believe he was quite terrified," said the man from the Home Office. "And not of us."

  "Not at first," Caitlin corrected.

  Dalby seemed to give her comment more consideration than it was really due, sipping contemplatively at his cup of tea before dunking a cookie-or, rather, a biscuit-into it. He stood aside to let the guards drag Richardson's unconscious body past him. The criminal's dark skin was spotted with burn marks and torn by small, bleeding lacerations, hundreds of them, some crusted with salt. He reeked of sour sweat and the stink of his own urine and feces. As Caitlin kept her nose close to the coffee mug, attempting to block out the worst of the smell, she was reminded of a figure from history who used to carry a hollowed-out orange filled with perfume. He would sniff the orange to keep the miasma of the unwanted masses away.

  What was that guy's name? She had heard it in some history class eons ago. She couldn't even remember the last time she had seen an edible orange.

  Stop it, she told herself. Jesus Christ but her mind was not as sharp at it had been before the tumor. It seemed to wander so much now.

  The smell didn't seem to bother Dalby in the least, but he was sensitive enough to her discomfort to move out of the room when the path was clear.

  "Lads, why don't we pack our guest off to London?" Dalby said. "For a spell in the Cage."

  "Yes, sir," one of the guards said. "Very good, Mister Dalby. We'll see to it."

  The funk inside the small cell must have been especially thick, because the air in the musty, enclosed space of the main keg room tasted as sweet as an alpine forest when she was able to breathe freely once more. Caitlin did not tell the Englishman that Richardson's interrogation had brought back some deeply traumatic memories of her own treatment at the hands of al Banna, but Dalby would have been familiar with her file, and he had offered a number of times to take on the responsibility for the hostile debriefing alone.