Calm Act Box Set (Books 1-3)

by Ginger Booth

  Paddy Bollai shook his head unhappily. “You don’t know what you’re doing here. This new meshnet will help everyone coordinate attacks. Disarming my militia. It’ll be a bloodbath tonight. We worked out truces. You’ll unbalance everything.”

  “Maybe,” Emmett said, narrowing his eyes. “But I think you’ve got ammo to last the night.” Paddy dropped his eyes, conceding the point. Emmett continued, “Lohan and Bremen. Who are they? Where are they?”

  Paddy gave in with a sigh. “Never heard of Lohan. Reverend Bremen runs the Baptist forces around Carnegie-Mellon and Schenley Park. East of downtown. Father Uccello might know how to contact him. Or Dane’s phone.” He provided Father Uccello’s contact information.

  Emmett looked unhappier by the minute. “You said Bremen ‘runs the Baptist forces.’ Does Uccello ‘run’ the Catholic forces? They lead the militia?”

  “Well, sort of,” Paddy said. “Uccello leads the Catholic community on Mount Washington, see. Bremen does the same around Schenley Park, with the Baptists.”

  “How could the city get divided up by religion?” Emmett asked, in increasing frustration. Kalnietis was staring at him, as though wondering why Emmett was so hung up on the religious landscape. Or at least, that was why I was staring at him.

  “Well, it isn’t exactly,” Paddy allowed. “It’s just, after the tornados, the local churches lead the cleanup. Help the survivors. Hand out food and clothes, provide shelter. Then people need to find somewhere else to live. It just keeps getting more sorted. You know? People double up. Or if the homeless don’t want to join one of the religious communities, they leave for the countryside. This hill, Mount Washington, is controlled by Catholics and Apocalyptics. The militia, anyway.”

  “So what’s your command chain?” Emmett asked. “From you, up to Dane?”

  “Well, I worked for Dane directly, too,” Bollai said. “But in the militia, I report to Captain Baumgartner. He answers to Father Uccello. Um…”

  “Father Uccello reports to a bishop somewhere,” Emmett suggested.

  “Yeah, Pittsburgh has our own bishop,” Paddy said, nodding. “Ah, I’m sure he’d help if Dane asked. Usually.”

  “Uh-huh,” Emmett breathed. No, Emmett definitely did not like what he was hearing. “Dwight Davison, Dane’s second. What can you tell me about him?”

  “He’s north of the Allegheny,” Paddy replied. He gave Emmett Davison’s phone number on their voice-over-Internet system. He didn’t know where Davison lived, and hadn’t been able to contact him for days. “I think he’s Mainline. Uh, you know, the normal Protestant churches. The liberal ones. What are you?”

  “I,” Emmett replied, “am a Colonel in the Penn Army at the moment. No, I know what you meant. But my religious beliefs are strictly off-duty.”

  “That makes a lot of sense,” Paddy agreed. “Look, the family’s expecting me back. Can I go now? Feel free to call and all, but…”

  “I can’t let you go until the armory is safely back at the hotel,” Emmett replied regretfully. Paddy looked annoyed, but seemed to understand the necessity. On second thought Emmett added, “Are my troops in danger out there?”

  “Probably not,” Paddy said. “This block’s my turf. I’ll get a call if anything’s going down.”

  Kalnietis asked softly, “What religion was Dane Beaufort, Paddy?”

  “Evangelist,” Paddy replied. “Didn’t hold it against him. Dane was alright.”

  I didn’t realize Emmett was holding his breath for the answer, until he blew it out in relief. I gathered Emmett was afraid that Dane had converted to one of the new doomsday faiths.

  Kalnietis took over the conversation, walking Paddy back through the details of the day Dane died. I wandered out to the living room after Emmett, and took a seat while he labored away with his phone. “Can I help?” I asked.

  “Just asking around after Marilou and the kids,” said Emmett. “Resco boards. Fort Campbell.” Fort Campbell was the home of the 101st Airborne Division, the outfit Emmett and Dane both served before their common schooling in Leavenworth.

  “Matthew,” I suggested. “Maybe we could ask around this ‘Apocalyptic’ community for Matt1034? The guy who posted the video.”

  Emmett looked up at me thoughtfully. “If that’s his name. Or…” He plied the phone again. He got much better WiFi in here than I did, courtesy of a military-grade phone, no doubt. “Could be Matthew 10:34,” he concluded, and read, “‘Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.’”

  6

  Interesting fact: Pittsburgh began manufacturing steel in 1875, and by 1911, produced half the steel in the U.S. After 1970, foreign competition led to the collapse of the Pennsylvania steel industry.

  I suppose it makes sense that in a murder investigation, job one is to nail down the facts. For instance, we still weren’t entirely sure that ‘murder’ was the right word. Emmett desperately wanted to lay hands on one Dwight Davison, Dane’s second in command, who should have been acting Resco for Pittsburgh, and figure out why he wasn’t on the job. But there wasn’t much more we could do about that, after adding another leads-wanted item to the meshnet announcement. And dearly as Emmett wished to dive into Dane’s computer and phone records, the data needed reconstruction first. Hanging over Tibbs’ shoulder wouldn’t speed that up.

  So we dropped off Tibbs and the armory at the hotel, grabbed a late lunch, and set off with the IBIS agents again, plus a fresh quartet of armed guards. At a guess, the IBIS agents and Emmett were significantly more deadly than our soldiers. But Pittsburgh wasn’t feeling too friendly so far.

  First stop was Station Square, a few blocks down the Monongahela River from our hotel, at the base of Mount Washington. The famous incline was just across the street. One of the adorable twin rail cars, wedge-shaped and multi-leveled for people to sit upright despite the steep slope, was latched to the station at the top of the rail. The other car, presumably, was mixed into the pile of kindling and wreckage at the base of the hill. The rails themselves were pulled apart and tangled with splintered trees for the lower quarter of their track. The road running perpendicular to the incline base had a couple lanes cleared for two-way traffic. The building across the road was broken open by the tornado as well.

  I studied this mournful wreckage from several directions, several times, as Gianetti drove us in circles hunting for where the video was taken. Finally my reluctance to be a back-seat driver broke down. I claimed Emmett’s phone with its superior Internet connection, and surfed Google maps and streetview until I found a likely spot. I directed Gianetti in.

  “But it says bridge out!” she objected. So that’s why we hadn’t driven this way yet.

  “We’re not crossing the bridge,” I assured her. “Just turn left, now left into there…and left again.” Yes, that was far from obvious. “See the Hard Rock Cafe? Stop just before there.”

  Hidden in a sea of low brick buildings, a pair of walkways opened up to the right, leading into an open-air plaza. Since no one else was moving, I handed Emmett back his phone, and climbed out of the car. The guards in the trailing car hastily exited as well.

  Not that there were any threats in evidence. The place was empty of the pedestrians and window-shoppers it once held, a grown-up playground where no one came to play anymore. Someone had spray-painted ‘Dec 10!’ and ‘Remember 12-10!’ in red across several abandoned storefronts. At a guess, that was the day Pennsylvania closed its borders, and left the world behind. I can’t say that I noticed at the time, that the state had gone missing. No one in Connecticut looked beyond their own problems and the Ebola outbreak in New York City around then.

  What a strange thing, to have the entire world disappear. In New England, our borders closed. But we still had Internet, censored as it was. We had television news, of steadily decreasing credibility. On rare occasions, we could even punch through the borders with a personal phone call. Amenac was up and running and bypassing the c
ensorship within a month or so of the border lockdown. The view was a blurry one, sure. Our worlds got much smaller. But we’d never been cut off completely. Not like Pennsylvania. Their own martial law governor, General Tolliver, had severed Internet and phone connections at the Penn borders. For 15 months, Penn stood alone, an island adrift. The war with New York, that blasted open Penn’s communications again, began 10 months ago, at Thanksgiving. Yet contact with the outside world strangely still hadn’t reached here, for normal people.

  Those events seemed so very far from Pittsburgh. I walked into the plaza, idly wondering what that isolation did to a people’s psyche. I pointed out the low rectangular fountain across the far side of the space, turned off, but full of rainwater. In the video, Dane had stood a couple heads taller than the crowd. The fountain’s edge looked like his likely pulpit.

  The IBIS agents pounced on that, to find the exact spot where Dane was swallowed by the crowd. Given that the space was surrounded by recognizable objects, it didn’t take them long. I left them to it, and drifted past the fountain.

  The plaza’s far edge was a sort of non-railway platform. It had the styling of a railway platform, riveted steel supporting an open-air roof for shelter. There was even a railroad running past. But between the platform and the tracks was an iron picket fence. The train didn’t stop here. An easy stone’s throw across the rail bed were docks on the river, with a few boats. A pedestrian bridge rose to my left, and crossed the rails, providing safe access across the tracks. The non-platform was more of a covered walkway, a lovely riverside promenade stretching in both directions from where I stood, with a great view of the downtown high-rises. Off to the right, I could clearly see what was wrong with the bridge, too. Its last expanse, on the downtown side, had fallen into the river. At least one building over there was crushed, as well.

  Decorating the promenade space, the designers had placed a giant pig-iron blast furnace by the rail-side. Steel city, after all. I dutifully read the tourist sign providing an explanation, and walked around the immense furnace, about four times my height. As my eyes dropped to the ground, I thought it was a shame about the rust on this side. The rust that appeared only on the concrete under the pig furnace. The humongous egg-shaped machine itself was painted a quarter inch thick. It was completely rust-free.

  I looked over my shoulder. My back faced the IBIS agents and Emmett, right across the long rectangular fountain. If Beaufort was standing on the edge of the fountain, and the crowd rushed him, he might have been pulled forward into the crowd. But more likely, he would have stepped backward, into the fountain basin. And sloshed across, trying to escape. It rained hard last night, and maybe more than once in the past – three days? But the walkway roof and the bulk of the pig iron furnace would have kept the rain off underneath. The concrete was slightly higher there, preventing puddles.

  “Darlin’?” Emmett asked, seeing my sad look. “Find something?”

  I nodded and explained my theory. They traipsed around the fountain toward me, and Gianetti soon confirmed that the rust was indeed blood. She easily found more traces now that she had a path to follow.

  Emmett and I sat out of the way on the fountain’s edge while she and Kalnietis developed their model of events. Assuming that the blood was Beaufort’s. That would be easy to check, if we had a body and a coroner.

  Dane made it clean away to the furnace, where the bleeding began. He would have run slow, a big man in sodden heavy clothing from splashing through the fountain water. But after the furnace, he broke free again, and ran for the river. More blood under the black picket fence. A light trail across the gravel of the railroad bed. He’d almost made it to the docks, where boats held tantalizing promise of escape. Maybe he could have hid under the docks, or swum out into the current. But he didn’t make it. A whole lot of blood happened in the gravel just past the rails, and none beyond. Dane didn’t make it any farther.

  Fascinated by the proceedings to my left, it took me a while to notice that Emmett was far too quiet on my right. He sat hunched forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped, staring. That brought me back to earth. This wasn’t just a mystery for Emmett. Dane Beaufort was a friend. More than that, the friend held the same job as Emmett, serving a community as a resource coordinator, the personal representative of the martial law government. And that community had killed him, right here, run him down and murdered him, in a way that was becoming all too vivid. In a flash, I pictured not Dane, but Emmett running that gauntlet, and losing.

  I leaned forward to match Emmett’s posture, and placed a hand on his thigh. “I’m sorry about your friend, Emmett,” I murmured.

  He grasped my hand, squeezed his eyes. A tear squeezed out. I’ve always loved that about Emmett, that he wasn’t too tough to cry when it hurt. “Dane was perfect for this job,” he said, voice cracking a little. “Desk chair warrior. Detail-oriented paperwork prick. Self-righteous in theory. Not in practice.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  He sighed and shrugged. “He’d disapprove of women dressing like sluts. But Marilou didn’t just dress like a slut. She was one. Drugs, drinking, whoring around. Not even sure who Colin’s dad was. But she didn’t want to be that person anymore. He adored her for it. Dane was like that. Talked all prissy and judgmental. But he didn’t act it. He cared for people.”

  I didn’t care for his example. “You want to argue about the harlot thing again? Now?”

  His answer was slow coming. “No,” he eventually replied. “Are you? A harlot? Slutty, whoring around? I don’t think so.”

  “You go analytical at the weirdest damned times, Emmett,” I complained.

  “Uh-huh,” he breathed. “Off-balance.” He stared at the pig-iron furnace, the gravel rail bed beyond, and swallowed.

  I squeezed his hand. “You know, it doesn’t matter, Emmett,” I said softly. “What Dane did to deserve this. Nobody deserved to die like this.”

  He let out an explosive breath. “Uh-huh,” he said. He took me in his arms, laid his chin on the crown of my head. “People do shitty things, in a mob.”

  “Can’t judge a whole city,” I suggested, “for what a mob did.”

  After a long pause, he said, “No. I don’t want to judge anybody at all.”

  “Do you have to?” I asked, gently extricating myself from his arms. He didn’t need a teddy bear. He needed to break out of his funk and move, was how I read it. I stood and twisted back and forth, to release my spine.

  “Probably,” he said, following my lead to rise and stretch his back. “Yeah. The guilty have to die. The city, that’s a different problem.”

  One he didn’t need to stew on right now. He didn’t have enough information to make stewing useful, so his thoughts would keep turning to the violent death of a friend, right here. Distraction, that was the ticket. “I think that’s a ThingSpace over there,” I said, pointing to a passage out of the plaza.

  “A what?”

  “The Internet of Things,” I elaborated, and started walking that way. “They had a great ThingSpace in Stamford. Very, um, glittery. Sort of a live demo to market all the things you could control by voice, movement, phone.”

  The corridor was mostly a pedestrian passage back to the street. They wouldn’t have left it running all the time, for the ThingSpace to prey on passersby. There would have been…yes. A giant green button, twice the width of my fist, like the one that activated a water park by a town beach back home. Just for grins, I mashed the button. I didn’t expect the ThingSpace to turn on. I didn’t expect there to be power anymore to this abandoned mall. But there was.

  A bank of LED fairy lights rippled down and back 10 feet up, to right and left, showing us the active portion of passageway before us to interact with. I stepped forward, to a ta-dump! from hidden speakers. I stepped back and forth, and waved my hands to verify where the ta-dump sensor fired – around shin level.

  “Darlin’, this is silly,” Emmett complained.

  If he was calling me
‘darlin’’ again, I definitely disagreed. I’d contributed a lot, and he’d been chilly to me all day. ‘Darlin’’ was a distinct improvement. “Play with me, Emmett,” I said in challenge, shooting him a grin over my shoulder. “You know you have to.”

  He scowled, but stepped in to sound ta-dump.

  “ThingSpace, play dance music!” I attempted. No response. “Alexa, play music!”

  “What music would you like?” replied the ThingSpace, in a woman’s sultry alto voice.

  “It wants to dance with us!” I said in delight.

  “Alexa?” Emmett demanded. “How’d you know that?”

  I shrugged. “It’s like Siri. Just a name.”

  “My partner is a machine whisperer,” Emmett groused.

  “I love cool tech,” I agreed. “I really do. Alexa, play music. Walk on By, by Dionne Warwick.” I don’t know why I picked that song. Pathos, perhaps. Sure enough, the song started to play.

  If you see me walking down the street

  And I start to cry each time we meet

  Walk on by, walk on by

  I took Emmett’s hand and sashayed him down the corridor, one step facing half-together, next step facing half-away. This was nearly guaranteed to make him dance – Emmett was far too dominant to let me lead. He was a good dancer, too, especially swing. His mother had tended bar at a country-western club in Branson Missouri when he was a kid. After a few reluctant steps, Emmett took over, and spun me around. Step together, step apart, turn in place with me stepping backward to him stepping forward, then tossed away in a spin again, and pulled back into his arms. Half of me enjoyed his touch, and the accelerations as he pulled me around, and the sway of my own hips, to the slow sultry beat.

  Foolish pride

  Is all that I have left

  So let me hide

  The tears and the sadness you gave me

  When you said goodbye