by Ben Tripp
Amy herself might not be in much danger. She wasn’t unattractive, but she had asexuality about perfected. Her head was swarming with scenarios for how this situation could devolve into mayhem. A couple of women who were older than her, MILPs or MILFs or whatever the term was—especially the one with the big, unlikely boobs—would definitely end up on the roster. The boob one was flirty, the kind of person who got attacked and then told she was “asking for it.” Heck, they were all going to end up in trouble if these guys turned out to be into the gender power trip. As long as a woman cried, she could be eighty years old and they’d get the jollies they were after.
Adrenaline had been steaming through Amy’s bloodstream since she walked back behind the hangar, and now she felt ill and wired and crazy. But there was no plan. She couldn’t think what to do. They had the guns. It was their show. Murdo said: “We need some volunteers. Scouting party. You go out there, find an alternate safe location, and stay put. We’ll find you later on. Here’s who’s on the list.”
Murdo pointed at the men he wanted, and Ace and Parker separated them from the herd at gunpoint. Everybody was worried, now. They’d all seen the movies about World War II and they knew where this was going—the only thing missing was the boxcar. Topper started to protest, and Amy didn’t think. She shouted, sudden and loud: “Topper, no! Just do what he says.”
The anger and fear in her voice sliced through Topper’s bravado and left him silent. He stood with the others. Patrick was crying, though silently.
Fifteen minutes later, the chosen ones were walking down the road through the desert, each carrying a couple days’ worth of food on his back and a change of clothes if he had one. There was a touch of the epic about it, with the others who stayed behind clinging to the fence, some weeping, some daring to complain, but not loudly. Pfeiffer cried out Martin’s name, once, and he looked back. One of the Humvees was turned to the fence, with Molino manning the rooftop machine gun. They were unarmed, these men going out on foot into the deadly landscape. Troy was carrying two gallons of water in a polyethylene container.
That was it. They had nothing else.
The sun went down, the tips of the mountains cooled from fiery red to pitch black against the glowing azure horizon, and then it was too dark to see as the little band of figures receded into the distance. The remaining survivors were herded into the rec room after the cull, where they sat quietly. A couple of the women were cooking spaghetti in the kitchen; Boudreau was detailed to keep an eye on them. Amy kept to herself, sitting on the floor in a corner with her hands twisting between her knees. She didn’t respond to questions from any of her people. She only scowled at Murdo, who stood in the foyer, studying the group.
For Murdo’s part, he didn’t have much to say to the doctor. She’d been useful to him, patching up the incompetent Jones and keeping her men under control until the gates were locked behind them. Now she could go fuck herself. Murdo sure as hell wouldn’t.
Murdo’s primary focus was on watching the other civilians. See who showed signs of defiance. Anybody decided to act out, they were going to get made an example of. It was Management 101: Somebody has to get fucked up good, real early on, and then everybody else toes the line. He thought beating up that fat hairy biker asshole would take care of it, but these people expected men like him to get into fights and lose. Somebody else was going to have to get a hurt on. He thought he knew who.
His eyes kept returning to the little blond they called Patrick.
Amy fell asleep sitting in a chair in front of the women’s dormitory at the top of the stairs. She was going to postpone the inevitable as long as she could: Maybe it wouldn’t be inevitable, if help came, or Murdo’s headquarters radioed him to go to Potter, or who knew what else. Zombies or zeros might come down out of the hills and eat everybody. Amy didn’t know what she was hoping for. Anything would do. Even bad news was better than the worst-case scenario in front of her.
She woke up every few minutes, never sleeping more than half an hour at a stretch. Occasionally she would yield to the alarm that was going off inside her, get up, and tour the beds, looking for knife-wielding steroidal rapists. She wasn’t the only one awake. The dishwatery woman, Linda Maas, was crying on a lower bunk, shiny trails of tears running from eye to ear as she lay there on her back in the dark.
Once, sometime after three in the morning, Amy went to where the mercenaries were sleeping: only four at a time, the rest on guard duty, except Murdo, who had privilege of rank, and claimed one of the private bedrooms. He slept with the door ajar. Amy slipped past, trying not to look at Murdo, obscene even in sleep, his mouth hanging open as if to shout. The rest were in the men’s dormitory, although most of the mercenaries had dragged mattresses onto the floor and slept there. Beds weren’t macho enough, apparently, or they didn’t feel comfortable in beds they’d emptied by force.
She explained to Parker, who stood watch at the dormitory door, that she wanted to check on Jones.
Jones was awake, too.
“It hurts,” he whispered, as if confessing his sins. “I mean it really hurts. And it’s itchy.”
“Don’t scratch it,” Amy said. “Or chew on it. Otherwise we have to put a cone around your neck.”
Jones didn’t understand the joke, and Amy thought better of explaining it. The poor man had enough worries. “Pain is good. Means the leg is still alive. That tourniquet could have killed it. And the itching is good, too. It means you’re healing.”
Jones was young and scared. He had little more in common with these others than the uniform. But he was still a good German, Amy thought. It wasn’t enough to be better than the bad guys. You had to resist.
Amy undressed the wound and examined it.
“Looks pretty good,” she said. “Did you really shoot yourself?”
“No way,” Jones said. “I’m not that stupid. Ace did it. He was shooting a zero that came up on me. Missed it.”
“Murdo said you did it to yourself.”
“He’s got his reasons.”
“I guess he must. So, Jones, has he said what the next step is?”
“Next step? To what?” Jones was a little groggy—and none too sharp on a good day, Amy suspected.
“You know. I mean you’re not going to stay here very long, right?”
“I’d like to.”
“Sure, but we’ll run out of water and stuff, right? And food. I guess he told you when you’d be going up to Potter probably.”
“He doesn’t tell me anything. Did he say something about going to Potter?”
“That’s where you were going, I thought,” Amy said.
“Yeah, but we didn’t hear from Control so we went to plan B or C or whatever plan it is by now. Find a secure location and stay there until further orders.”
Amy nodded as if only half-listening, examining the wound closely although there wasn’t anything to see—or smell. She had brought fresh dressings for it, and took her time wrapping the leg up again. She didn’t want to appear interested in anything other than medical matters. She thought Danny would find this clever. Danny would have slapped him until he talked.
“Right, that’s normal procedure, sure,” she muttered distractedly.
“Yeah.” Jones winced. There was a lot of damaged muscle knitting itself back together inside his leg. Amy had known the shot came from a distance the moment she saw it: no contact burns, the slug didn’t make it all the way through the leg, and the wound path went at a very strange angle for a self-inflicted injury. It made a lot more sense to imagine a man standing a hundred feet away fired that shot.
“So,” Amy continued, just making idle conversation, “what happens if you never get further orders?”
“I guess Murdo would…shit, I don’t know.”
It had obviously never occurred to Jones that there might someday not be somebody up higher to answer to. He was struggling with the idea.
Amy pressed on, sensing she had an advantage: “What I don’t get is wh
y he sent most of our men away.”
“When was this?” Jones looked bewildered.
“Two nights ago. Murdo’s pretty ruthless. I’m surprised he let you live.”
“We had to shoot one of our dudes that got bit on the arm,” Jones said. “We called him the Sledge, right? Sledge was all like sick and infected and Murdo told Ace…Damn, you know? And Ace was like—pam.” Jones made a gun out of his hand and mimicked the recoil of a pistol shot.
Amy wasn’t ready for that. They’d shot one of their own. It explained their lack of remorse: Shoot your buddies, it gets a hell of a lot easier to shoot a stranger.
5
Danny understood the martial law thing. She’d been an enforcer of lockdowns, not long before.
People would go crazy. Holed up in some stranger’s house with twenty other people, unwelcome, not wanting to be there in the first place, stuck until the curfew was lifted for a few hours. Which sometimes would be days on end. Surviving on canned goods and whatever you could make with flour and water, assuming there was any gas to cook with. Or any water. No power, so these squeezed populations were sweltering in temperatures that would eventually prove deadly.
There would be inconsolable infants, some little kids suffering loudly, crazy just to be allowed to run around, to be alive. They hadn’t mastered suffering and stillness the way the adults had. So they were wild, screaming. The mind doesn’t stop thinking in these circumstances. Rage breeds, fed upon the stench of urine and shit and unwashed skin, the fetid, motionless air, the rumble of armored vehicles down the pavement outside.
Hunger makes it stronger. Thirst gives it urgency. Something happens, a house-to-house search or a death in the street, and the rage explodes into action.
Danny went back to the office building after her shift on patrol was over, to rest on the floor beside Yanaba. The woman slept on her side with her fists up by her face, beads of sweat on her skin, a posture Danny thought looked very much like a sleeping infant.
Danny slept on her back, the reptilian scars compressed by her weight in such a way that the itching was lessened. She had her hands laced behind her head, elbows out, staring at the underside of the desk atop which some anonymous information workers had done their day’s work. Wad of old gum up there. A sheet of particle board above her, a thin carpet beneath; nonetheless it beat the hell out of sleeping in the driver’s seat of the Mustang with the seat back tilted down as far as it would go. She wondered how she was going to find Kelley, and she wondered how long it would be before she could get out of the city. This place wasn’t going to survive. Danny dozed off without being aware of it, and knew nothing until she awoke to the sound of shouting.
It was midmorning. They let the night shift sleep in, of course. Yanaba was gone. Danny felt a moment of irritation that she’d slept through people moving around in her space, but then, she hadn’t had a proper sleep in living memory. She was secure enough here, she was a part of the machine, invisible and functioning according to plan.
She rose, pulled on her cold, sweat-damp boots, and went to the window-wall. Outside there was a plaza bounded on two sides by streets and the other two sides by office buildings, with rows of buildings opposite. Danny overlooked it from the second floor. The plaza was paved with brick, and there was some kind of modern fountain in the center of it, rising up out of a series of low, curving brick walls. Fair cover in a gunfight, Danny noted, although you’d be stranded when the ammunition ran out. Everything was covered in a shroud of cinerary dust that whirled and billowed when the air shifted.
The far side of the plaza was almost obscured by smoke from the fires. It was raining fluffy ash. A small shift in the wind and now the fires were threatening to choke those it could not burn.
Something was happening. People were running down the street. Some of them cut diagonally across the plaza. One of the Hawkstone Humvees came racing through the crowd and came to a halt across the street at a guillotine angle, bisecting the crowd. Probably two hundred people, Danny estimated, were running around out there. Men jumped out of the Humvee and started knocking civilians down. There was a gunshot, and the Hawkstone mercenaries took cover. Their weapons came up and they started shooting. Danny hit the floor, scooting back away from the window, but continued to watch the action.
At first it didn’t look like anybody got hit. The civilians changed course and scattered like a school of minnows, disappearing down alleys and into doorways. Some crouched behind the fountain walls, their backs to Danny. Now she could see two people were lying in the street, one waving an arm, the other motionless. The Hawkstone men advanced, pointing their weapons around, until they were able to drag the two wounded people back down the street to the Humvee. Yanked them up inside it. Three grumbling Bradleys rolled up now, parking in the plaza. More men jumped down out of them and started to round up whoever they could find. They had machine gunners covering the plaza with the snouts of their heavy weapons.
There was a commotion downstairs in the building, shouting and pleading. Something heavy fell over, maybe a filing cabinet. After a couple of minutes, during which time Danny reasoned with herself that she should get involved, but didn’t move, there was the sound of doors banging open below, and then three struggling people, a woman and two men, were led out of the building, dragged along by a dozen others. They must have been part of the riot, and they’d been found hiding inside. Everybody knew who belonged or didn’t belong.
Ten minutes later, it was as if nothing had happened. The street was empty again, except for the occasional officially sanctioned vehicle crammed with supplies and gunmen.
Danny had a vague plan in mind. It required she stay put for another couple of days, watching for opportunities. Sitting tight was always the hardest part of action. With a great show of calm, Danny went downstairs in search of coffee. Little things had become incalculable luxuries again, the way it was in a theater of war; private toilet stalls, hot coffee, the occasional shower. Water that didn’t taste like a swimming pool. She should enjoy these things while they were available.
Danny came down the grand staircase toward a group of people in the lobby, all of them speaking in low, urgent voices about the excitement outside. The consensus was that it had been a riot. Somebody said it wasn’t a riot, but that people were only fleeing the fires. The wind had changed, and the flames were reaching inhabited areas. Danny drifted over to listen to the conversation. She might need the information.
“People are flipping out,” said a white kid with dreadlocks and large metal grommets in his earlobes.
“Dude, they can’t take the heat from the Man, man,” an older woman retorted, imitating the kid.
“Knock it off, Carol,” said a tall, thin man with enormous spectacles. “People got shot out there. We could be next. They’re animals.”
“Those man-eating things out there are the animals,” Carol replied, turning on Spectacles. “I’d rather have to put up with a little extra security than get eaten by monsters.”
“A little extra security?” the dreadlocked kid said. “You saw that. They just shot people. That’s not security, it’s Nazi bullshit.”
It occurred to Danny that this very conversation had probably been had regarding her own squad of Marines—but in Mesopotamian Arabic or Farsi.
A shorter man in a torn mustard-yellow cardigan chimed in. Danny recognized him from one of the minivan teams that had been on patrol the previous night. “You have to be out there to see what’s happening,” he said. “The safe zone is getting tighter every day. We went into an apartment building last night that literally had people sleeping upright on the stairs. There wasn’t a level square foot of floor space left. It stank.”
“At least they have somewhere to stay,” Carol snapped. “We should be grateful those brave men are keeping us safe—not only from those things, but from the mob—people that don’t know when they’ve got it good.”
“Carol,” Spectacles said, cleaning his glasses on the tail of his sh
irt. “We’ve worked together for years, right? We go way back. So don’t take it the wrong way when I say you’re one of the least sympathetic human beings I’ve ever known.”
“Okay, then what happens to everybody,” the dreadlocked kid said, “when there’s no more room? They end up in the streets. But it’s martial law. You can’t be in the streets. It’s a pressure cooker, man. That resistance out there, that was only the beginning. The situation is going to devolve.”
“Freedom,” Carol said with staunch finality, “isn’t free.”
The man in the cardigan saw Danny and nudged Spectacles. Heads turned in her direction. The chatter died out. Her appearance lately tended to have a conversation-stopping effect; maybe once her hair grew out and the injuries faded she’d blend in a little better. It wouldn’t hurt if she had eyelashes or eyebrows. Wait till they saw her in a bikini. She passed among them, not making eye contact, and was glad there were not more of them. She hated the staring.
Danny went down to the room where the laundry was kept for pick-up, then changed into the remains of her uniform, clean but ragged, in the nearest bathroom. Attired in a way that suggested she might have some pretense to authority, she inquired of some competent-looking people in the lobby if there were any convoys headed in the direction of the Pyramid Building. An hour later she was on her way, rifle in hand, riding guard duty on a load of canned soup and packets of dried ravioli.
When she got to the guards in front of the Pyramid, she was carrying a box of cans on her shoulder. The driver of the truck, also laden with boxes, asserted her legitimacy as a “critical member of personnel”; she hadn’t been given any papers to flash around, but it didn’t matter. Despite the lockdown, few people seemed to have any credentials.
