by John Barnes
“Our kind of outfit.” Bolton slowed as they approached the Harbor; more and more wrecks and junk lay in the road. “Ms. Roth, get down and stay down; we’re going slow enough to be a good target, and it’s always possible that someone had a working CB or something and we might be ambushed.”
Once, as they passed an apartment block, people ran out toward the Hummer from the driver’s side, but the GAFE on that side lowered his window and showed them his weapon, and they stepped back. “Just need food for the baby,” one of the men yelled. “Just need some help.”
They kept rolling, and Bambi tried to think of anything else they could have done. She couldn’t seem to come up with anything.
Harrison Castro had been careful about not letting anything important about Castle Castro leak into the media, despite a whirlwind of attention while it was being built. The outer surfaces were thin brick-and-concrete facades that looked fake-medieval, with far too much glass to be defensible; inside that relatively fragile box there were what amounted to concrete bunkers, with recessed steel shutters to cover the windows as needed. If anyone tries to shoot the place up, he had often explained to her, all that Hollywood-movie-castle crap will be blown into a heap of rubble, but behind it there’s bunkers you’d need tanks to take. And that’s the point where the asshole taxers, regulators, interferers, and Democrats find out that I’m an arrogant, practical, effective, energetic bastard disguising himself as an arrogant, pretentious, effete bastard.
Brush had been planted to conceal the turnoff, but Bambi had no trouble guiding Bolton into it. They bumped and rumbled up the apparent temporary dirt road to the first checkpoint. The guard was all business until Bolton lowered the window to talk to him, and Bambi said, “Hi, Mr. Duck!”
The guard was beaming. “Glad to see you home, and hope you’re staying. Are these friends of yours?”
“Terry Bolton here is, and I’d appreciate if you gave him an all-areas pass, and let him come and go as he needs. The rest are a case of bringing my work home with me.”
“You remember the way to the Secure Garage?”
“Yep.”
“I’ll let the house know you’re comin’. Mr. Castro will want to come down and say hi.”
“You still have a working radio or something?”
He grinned and shook his head, then pulled two flags from the holster at his side. “Mr. Castro always thought the world could end, and he made us all learn semaphore. Got a mirror for flashing Morse, too, but we’re being careful not to be conspicuous.”
On the way up the road, Bolton said, “Uh, his name is really Mr. Duck?”
“He was the only guy named Donald around when I was little, and I couldn’t pronounce Przeworski-Abdulkashian, but my father was not about to have me calling an adult by his first name, so I couldn’t call him Donald either. Hence…”
“Mr. Duck. He seemed to like it.”
“I was an awful kid but he thought I was cute.”
Bambi directed the biohazard Hummer through a complex, circuitous approach to the house along more than three miles of winding dirt roads. “What are all those branch roads, anyway?” Bolton asked. “Guest houses?”
“Some of them. Some are strongpoints, and some are both. And a lot are dead ends that are easy to cover from the house.”
“This place is a castle, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Did I mention my father is a bit eccentric?”
When they came around the last curve into the parking area in front of the Secure Garage, Harrison Castro was already there waiting for them, his shock of white hair billowing over his high forehead, bandito mustache curled up by his immense toothy grin, and in his around-the-Castle clothes—loose blue tunic and pantaloons, black boots, and an open, cowled red robe that made him look like he had escaped from the set of Star Wars for the Color-blind.
“ ’Scuse my having a warm family-values moment while you stop giggling,” Bambi told Bolton, popping her door and running to her father.
After a long hug, the older Castro said, “Well, I know why you didn’t call ahead. You’d better introduce me to everyone else.”
Bambi explained quickly, and Castro shook everyone’s hand, even Ysabel Roth’s. “Bambi says you’ve come over to our side, and you’re trying to help with information?”
“Yes, sir, I don’t know what—I mean, I sort of—uh, I have been trying to—”
The girl looked as if she’d been punched in the gut, her face pale and sick, and abruptly she fell down in the parking lot. Bambi and Bolton rolled her over. Her pupils were dilated but the same size; her breathing was harsh, deep, and irregular; there were flecks of foam around her mouth, and little twitches in the muscles of her face, but her arms and legs lay still and limp.
“Well, that’s twice,” Bambi said.
“And both times when a stranger said something to her about defecting,” Bolton pointed out. “Maybe Daybreak really does have a mind-control virus or something.”
Harrison Castro turned back from where he’d been giving orders to a servant. “We’ve got four doctors sheltering with us, and I think one of them is a neurologist. And we have a clinic inside. We’ll patch her up.”
“Is there anything you don’t already have here, Dad?”
“No lawyers. Figured I won’t need them. A baron makes his own law.” He had his same old sly smile. It made Bambi edgy; Dad spoke too much truth in jest.
THE NEXT DAY. CHEVY CHASE , MARYLAND. 4:30 A.M. EST. THURSDAY. OCTOBER 31.
“About two hours to dawn,” Lenny said, waking Heather. “Time to get moving.”
They made last use of the generator-driven pumps and auxiliary propane system, taking hot showers and fixing a big, hot breakfast. Sherry ate with them, saying nothing, but when they had finished, she said, “I’ll go with you, if one of you will go with me to get my hiking boots from Stan’s closet.”
Heather went with her, and because it seemed to make sense, she kept her hand on Sherry’s shoulder the whole time, as the young woman stepped around both the bodies and found boots, socks, and a big warm sweater. “Christmas last year,” she whispered, as she pulled it on.
With a half-sob, half-cry, Sherry turned back for a moment and grabbed two pictures from Stan’s desk, slipping them into the big pockets of the sweater. Heather held her for a moment till her sobs subsided, and they went out, not looking at the bodies.
Lenny had packed bags for Heather and himself, and after a last visit to “what’s probably the last working toilet in Chevy Chase, you can say you were here before they put up the plaque,” as Lenny explained it, they folded Lenny’s mountain racing wheelchair.
Down the stairs, Heather carried Lenny—he weighed less than a hundred pounds—and Sherry managed the folded wheelchair. They trotted back upstairs for the packs as Lenny sat in the dark lobby behind the front desk, with a path of retreat through three doorways, and the machine pistol in his hand.
“How’d you find him?” Sherry asked.
“Through work. We’re not in the same office but now and then we had to talk to each other.”
“He’s very cool. You’re so lucky.”
Oh, Christ, I’m no good at this social stuff. Do I ask her about Stan? “Thank you,” she said.
“You both work for the government, for like, the army and stuff, or you’re spies or something?” Sherry grabbed up her own pack and Lenny’s, leaving Heather the single large one she was planning to take.
Heather pulled it on. “Yeah, I guess it shows.”
“Kind of. Not too many people have all those pictures of Republicans on their walls, or quite so many guns, or a big poster of a tank in the front room.”
“Actually it’s an armored fighting vehicle.”
“And very few women—even if they’re Lenny’s girlfriend—would know that difference,” Sherry added, smiling. “I’m glad to have you guys to walk out with, really. Didn’t mean to sound critical. I was just leading up to a question. If you know, and if it’s okay to tel
l me, you know? Did somebody do this to us, or did it just, like, happen?”
Heather checked one more time; Lenny had accidentally acquired a perfect weapon, a rebuilt M4 with the plastic parts replaced with good wood and metal, and all surfaces plated or anodized, about as Daybreak-resistant a gun as anyone could have made. Of course, there would be trouble later on as so much ammunition was reported to be deteriorating, but at least yesterday Lenny’s H&K had been working just fine.
She just hoped she would turn out, if necessary, to be as good a gun-fighter as this was a fighting gun.
“We should get going,” she said. “The answer to your question is we don’t know if it was an enemy action yet, or something that just sort of happened to happen, but whatever it was, the thing to do is get the country back to functioning.”
“Good enough.”
They went down the stairs quickly and quietly. “Nothing’s moved out on the street since you left,” Lenny said. “I vote for going as quick as we can, all the way south in one fast trip.”
“Makes sense to me,” Heather said.
“I’m just along for the trip,” Sherry said. “You know, you’re the first people I’ve ever seen who just have guns—not like showing them off the way the gangsta wannabes do, just like, it’s a tool is all. Right now, I wish I was that way.”
“There’re three spares in my pack,” Lenny said, “all loaded and ready. That’s why it was so heavy. Heather, when we’re going through open spots, in daylight, maybe you can give Sherry a fast course.”
“ ‘The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Shooting People,’” Sherry said. “Sounds good to me.”
For the hour before the sun came up, they hurried south along Connecticut Avenue, occasionally having to dodge around clusters of abandoned cars but mostly able to just proceed quickly.
“Aren’t you worried about snipers?” Sherry said, after a while.
“Very,” Lenny said. “But I’m more afraid of getting into something hand to hand. Tip me over and I’m fucked; at gunfire distances, it’s at least even, maybe better. And I can always shoot to make them keep their heads down while Heather closes in to rip their heads off with her bare hands.”
“Pbbbbt.”
“Hey, you and I know we’re a couple of scared desk jockeys. Sherry thinks you’re Daniel Boone and I’m Q. This way at least one of us has some confidence.”
The sun found them near a pocket park with good views in all directions; Heather gave Sherry a fast course in using the pistol, finishing by telling her, “Look, it’s really nothing more than this: You point it at people you intend to shoot. Don’t point it at anyone you don’t. Put your finger inside the trigger guard only if you plan to shoot someone. Once they’ve seen you point it at them, they’re going to be pissed, so shoot. If you decide to stick around after this, then we’ll go into exciting subjects like cleaning and maintenance. For one long day in the street like we’re doing here, it’s a magic stick for blowing holes in people, so only point it at people who need holes in them, but if they do, put a hole in them quick. ’Kay?”
“ ’Kay. And thanks.”
When they had all had a rest, a long drink of water, a sandwich, and a well-guarded trip behind the bushes, Lenny said, “Time to get rolling again, I guess,” and they were back at it.
It was about ten A.M., and they were looking for a good place for their next rest stop, when they saw another living human being—an old man in tattered clothes pushing a grocery cart. He waved at them in a friendly way, hollered “They ain’t got nothing at Rescue, I’m tryin’ Salvation Army,” and kept going.
“How much of all this do you suppose he’s noticed?” Heather asked.
“Everything or nothing,” Sherry said, “that’s what most of them are like. Some of them are at the public library all day and are better informed than most congressmen, even if their take on things veers into weird; and some of them, if ten-legged aliens landed at noon, they’d have forgotten it by the time they started looking for their afternoon bottle.”
“You sound like you know your way around.”
“I used to be in social services. Went down into bad places with just my cell phone. Plus, of course, all the police in DC to get my middle-class ass out of there if anything went south. So I spent some time around bums.”
“Aren’t you supposed to call them the homeless?”
“Different beat from mine. I was dealing with the crazy guys that bother pedestrians; mostly the homeless are people and families that are managing in shelters, or relatives’ basements, or cheap hotels. My guys were bums—harder to help but more entertaining, that’s how Stan used to put it.”
She wasn’t crying, and seemed to be all right. Lenny glanced at Heather, then tried, “I didn’t know Stan very well, but we used to visit now and then. He had me teach Dennis some gun safety, because he said there were always guns around and Stan didn’t want Denny to be afraid of them, the way he was.”
Sherry nodded. “That was Stan. Never sure when to be idealistic and when to be practical. I’m going to miss him. I’m glad you guys took me out of there. If there’s a life to come and all that shit, if I’d just stayed there and mourned until someone killed me, Stan’d’ve been so pissed at me.”
“Practical,” Lenny agreed. “We should get rolling.”
They saw children who didn’t seem to have anyone to be with, a young mother with a baby who wouldn’t come close enough to them to talk, and some small groups of armed people who kept their distance.
“Wonder how many of those are out looting and robbing, and how many are preventing it?” Heather said, after a group of three men with pistols and bats had traded waves with them.
“And how many start out to do one and end up doing the other?” Lenny said.
Just after eleven A.M., a biohazard Hummer turned a corner in front of them and came to a stop. A man in a black suit with well-shined shoes got out. “Cameron Nguyen-Peters sent me out to fetch you,” he said. “And to tell you you could at least have tried a pay phone, or flashing Morse code, or something.”
Those last few minutes were surreal; suddenly the trip that should have taken the rest of the day took less than ten minutes. The air was just the right temperature, there was cool clean water for all of them, and on their way along the parkway, shots were fired at them twice.
“That didn’t happen while we were walking,” Heather said.
The driver shrugged. “When you were walking, you looked like people; now you look like the Man.”
ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. PALE BLUFF. ILLINOIS. 10:30 A.M. CST. THURSDAY. OCTOBER 31.
Carol May Kloster wondered if anyone had even thought, yet, about what they’d do for record keeping when they ran out of pencils, since as far as anyone could tell, every single ballpoint pen in Pale Bluff, Illinois, had turned to goo in the last week.
She also wondered if there was really any point in taking down the report from the Food Committee tonight; surely their own records should suffice, without her taking dictation? Especially when George Auvergne had such a knack for going on.
So far the news was that there were enough apples stored, and they probably would not need to commandeer more basements. They were lucky that Pale Bluff had been an orchard town for a hundred years, and luckier still that forty boxcars of just-harvested apples had been waiting on the siding, not yet off to the national market.
According to Linda Beckham, the town’s one dietician, there were calories enough in all those apples, enough vitamin pills had been salvaged from plastic bottles thanks to a smart pharmacist, and the local hunters and fishermen could bring in enough deer, pheasants, and small game with rifles from the local black-powder club for enough protein; they’d make it through without starvation or significant malnutrition. If the winter was cold, ice fishermen could help out, and they were talking to a Hutterite community up the road about trading apples for cheese.
As the only person in town who still knew Gregg shorthand, and therefore
could take accurate minutes (take that, iScribe! she thought), Carol May had job security but she was probably doomed to be the only person who listened all the way through each meeting. She wondered whether what she had done in a previous life had been good or bad.
The Community Kitchen Committee was figuring they could keep everyone fed until June, when early beets and radishes would start coming in. The Planting Committee had located enough seed potatoes and corn. The Poultry Committee reported that there’d be eggs enough around July, and at least some chickens for the table by fall next year. They had a plan for seeing if they could capture and pen wild ducks as well.
The last committee to report was Amusements. Mrs. Martinez pointed out that the candy for the Pale Bluff Community Halloween Party was already on hand, and some children already had costumes; “I was thinking, it’s Halloween tonight, why don’t we just let the kids have a last rampage at the candy? There won’t be any more for a long time, and it wouldn’t be bad to put a little extra fat on the kids for the winter—”
Reverend Walters got up and started yelling about how Halloween and Satan were behind Daybreak. After a moment, Carol May decided to just note down “Reverend Walters objected.” It looked like she’d be eating lunch on the second shift again.
ABOUT 45 MINUTES LATER. ST. ELIZABETH’S FACILITY. WASHINGTON. DC. 2:15 P.M. EST. THURSDAY. OCTOBER 31.
“Mr. Nguyen-Peters,” Mason’s voice said, over the intercom, “the President’s limo is pulling into the driveway.”
Cam’s lips tightened, and he nodded slightly. Heather thought, If I were Cam, I’d be thinking, “There’s about two hundred phones left that work in the whole government, and we have two of them, and Shaunsen can’t call us first?” It seemed of a piece with using the limo; tires survived about a day without peroxide wipedowns, and maybe three days with, yet the Acting President drove everywhere in Washington. He said it was to improve his visibility; to mobs and snipers, I hope.
