by Addison Gunn
“Me too. We’ll see about sending someone out to check on them, when things settle a little around here.”
Miller nodded his thanks.
“For now, I need you to take charge of one of Bob’s projects, but you’ll need to lose the suit, Alex. Switch over to something a little more practical and outdoorsy.”
“What’s the project?”
“Same as what you’ve been doing, really, picking them up from the airport.” Gray nodded towards his kids. “Just a little more urgent. After that storm, we’re worried about our own. Bob Harris has put together a list of critical personnel we want brought to the compound who are stuck in the city. Some are trapped in place, don’t have transport, or just aren’t answering their phones. You’re going to go out and get them.”
“Just bringing people in? I can wear my suit for that, Gray.”
“Alex. Stop kidding yourself. It’s going to hit a hundred and ten degrees at noon, and the streets are full of Infected, and those things with all the teeth.” Calmly, Gray sipped his tea. “Ditch the designer suit. Dress like a soldier.”
5
A TACTICAL VEST and urban camos weren’t Miller’s first choice for comfort—his clearest memory of pulling on BDUs and load-bearing equipment for the first time involved a lot of chafing—but despite the weight and heat, it was like stepping into an old set of well-loved shoes. Maybe his first few weeks in boot camp wearing this kind of thing had been uncomfortable, but he must have settled into it over the rest of his enlistment.
Sweat continued to pour down his face, and his hand rose in an old reflex before he knew what he was doing. Miller stopped, spooked, then simply let it happen, like scratching an itch. He tugged up the drinking tube on his water pouch, just like he had thousands of times before in his former life as a soldier. The water was tepid, but as it hit his mouth he discovered how thirsty he was, waiting in the shade of a dying tree for the next target of Robert Harris’s Operation Honshū Wolf to answer their door.
So far everything had gone textbook, like the airport pickup. Miller had split his team in two, and across the morning they’d recovered around sixty civilians—all employees and their families—and whisked them past the queues of starving refugees seeking entry into the Astoria Compound.
Now it was getting toward noon, and the shade under the fungally-blighted tree was shrinking away as the heat rose. Pinkish globs of fuzz covered the tree’s leaves, dragging them down. A midsummer’s autumn in the affluent part of the Bronx.
Miller pushed the doorbell for a fifth time and stepped back, glancing at the neighbouring houses. The mailbox in the brownstone to the left was choked, discoloured envelopes sticking out every which way.
It had been... three months, maybe, since the postal service shut down? Five? It was difficult to keep track of precisely when any given piece of civil life had dried out and crumbled away.
It was all deserted. Miller swore under his breath.
Du Trieux held the Gilboa low against her side. “What now? We go after the next target?”
“No. We find out what happened. I’ll go get the pry-bar for the door.”
But before Miller reached the Bravo, du Trieux tried the door handle and she called out, “Miller? It’s unlocked.”
Impossible. Maybe the rural neighbours at his parents’ ranch would do it, but nobody left their doors unlocked in the city, no matter how affluent the neighbourhood.
Miller skipped the pry-bar, and unslung his M27 instead. The weapon was only slightly unfamiliar—a ruggedized, upgraded assault rifle that the Marines used to use with drum magazines as a lighter alternative to machine guns. Miller had grabbed it out of the armoury as the first thing he saw that he trusted to actually kill a terror-jaw, though he suspected he’d have to go through most of his ammunition if he wanted to be sure.
He edged up beside du Trieux, and shared a nod with her. She was familiar with entry procedures, and although it had been a long time since he’d practised this with anything bigger than a handgun, snugging the long M27 against his shoulder and preparing to palm the door open had a familiar feel.
“Mr. Baxter?” Miller called out. “Mrs. Baxter? We’re coming inside...”
No one answered them as they cleared the house, room by room. Du Trieux took point with the shorter Gilboa—easier to swing around door frames—and Miller trailed after, the M27 short-stocked with its butt tucked over his shoulder at an angle. Not very accurate, but at this range and with a hundred and fifty rounds in the drum magazine, he didn’t need to be.
Alphonse Baxter and his wife, Linda, both employees of Schaeffer-Yeager subsidiary DDLN Software, had left touches of their life throughout their home. Family pictures were everywhere. A mixed race couple, their children looked a little like they might have been du Trieux’s kids to Miller’s eye. The kid’s toys littered their bedrooms, shockingly clean behind the closed doors after the dust-caked misery of the hall and living room. Two windows had been broken, either during the dust storm or before, and something that smelled of acid and decaying meat had been nesting in the shredded remnants of the living room sofa.
No sign of the Baxters. Their clothes were still in their dressers, luggage on top of wardrobes. The kids’ things all seemed to be in place. Toothbrushes in the bathrooms. A pile of school things had been hastily dumped out in one of the children’s bedrooms, though, and there were gaps in the ranks of stuffed animals arranged on a bed.
Maybe one of the kids had dumped out their school bag and left their access cards, binders and school tablet on the floor to save a few treasured toys before the family fled? But if they’d run, they’d run quickly. Mrs. Baxter either didn’t seem to own jewellery, or she’d taken it with her. The car was missing from the garage, and a gun safe in the master bedroom was empty.
Empty, and unlocked. The gun safe wouldn’t lock when Miller tried shutting it.
It didn’t make sense. The house definitely had solar panels on the roof—useless under dust right now, sure, but they’d also have hydrogen fuel cells in the attic. And those were clearly still charged; the lights worked when Miller tried them.
But the gun safe was open. And so was the front door. The locks hadn’t disengaged because of a fire, or a power outage—that was precisely why the building had fuel cells and solar power, one of the standard recommendations the company gave its staff. With always-on power, the security systems were always on. But the remote alarm link had failed, and the system logs were scrambled. Maybe some kind of error after internet connectivity had started cutting out?
“Looks like the Baxters were forced to evacuate their home about a week and a half ago,” Miller said, fingertips pressed to his earpiece’s transmit button.
“How do you figure?” the Northwind operator asked, on the other end of a satellite link.
“Mostly guessing. The security system’s log is scrambled, but that’s about how stinky the milk in the fridge is—and that’s when the Infected started rioting after the massacre.”
A moment’s silence. “Okay. You want the next pick-up target?”
“Not yet. Can you tell me what the Baxters’ emergency plan was?”
“Uh. Give me a minute. Need to see if DDLN’s servers are still online...”
“If it’s filed, there’ll be a copy with S-Y internal security,” Miller explained. “Somewhere under the employee protection plan files. You can use Cobalt’s account to access it.”
“A moment while I try and pull that up...”
Du Trieux was shuffling around the nesting site in the living room. It looked like some kind of colossal dog had shredded the couch upholstery and taken a shit in it.
“Anything?” Miller asked her.
She shook her head, poking at the mess with one booted toe. “Just... eggshells, I think.”
“Eggshells?” Miller frowned, and came over for a closer look.
They weren’t... shells, exactly. Not the hard fragments he’d expect from a chicken egg, at any rate; more l
ike dry scar tissue. Thick, crusted, slightly flexible. A cluster of empty pods, flopping over each other and clustered like oversized fly eggs. The carpet underneath them was soaked, and stank.
“I think they’re eggs, anyway,” du Trieux said, a little hesitantly.
Near the broken windows there were tracks in the fallen dust, what Miller had taken to be rats or birds or something. But since the heatwave had killed off most of the city’s birds, and the ancient creatures were eating the rats... that left something as the only viable answer.
Outside in the back yard what Miller might have assumed were mice or squirrels were nervously watching the house from the shrubbery. At a second look, even at a distance, even that small, the knobbled head and white glints of snake-like teeth were obvious. Terror-jaws, a couple of inches long.
“We should leave,” Miller murmured.
“Yeah,” du Trieux agreed. “Let’s not be here when Mama gets home.”
EMERGENCY PLANS WERE issued by Schaeffer-Yeager’s internal security department to most executives and high-level staff, as well as those with access to material useful for industrial sabotage or at risk of extortion. The plans tended to be simple and short. Easy to remember, for when they came home to find the front door hanging open, or when someone broke in through a window at night. If there was a more substantial threat—terrorist attack, fire, natural disaster—a plan to keep the company’s personnel safe until a security team could pick them up was helpful, sometimes lifesaving.
The plan Northwind found for the Baxters had been updated just two weeks before, and was simple as could be. Relocate immediately to a shelter in the WellBeechBeck Washington Heights office, and await retrieval by security team Sabre.
“That’s bullshit,” Miller said. “There is no Sabre.”
“Sabre is what’s listed.”
“We’ve got Stiletto, Switchblade, Bayonet and Dagger. The security teams are named after knives, not swords—who authored the last plan update?” Miller growled, twisting the Bravo’s wheel. There was a little traffic at the bridges, cars nervously edging across in clumps. Not many drivers; half the city’s mainline electricity was down, and liquid fuels and cars were even scarcer than electrics right now.
“It’s a numeric account with the internal security office. Forty-six, seventy-two.” The voice from Northwind paused. “Doesn’t seem to have a user linked to it.”
“Harris, maybe?” du Trieux asked. “Bob Harris’s office is on the forty-sixth floor of Sexy Towers.”
“Don’t call it that in front of anybody important,” Miller said, as if he’d never spent time coming up with ways to fill in the blank on the ‘S-Y’ logo plastered all over the Schaeffer-Yeager skyscraper.
The Northwind operator snorted back laughter. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“Not unless you can raise anyone at the Washington Heights office.”
“There’s a landline, but it’s disconnected.”
“We’re good, then.”
“Thanks for calling.”
Northwind hung up on him, and Miller squinted at the GPS navigator. At least GPS still worked.
Du Trieux petted the Gilboa on her lap like it was an animal, staring out of the windows. “We should leave this to someone else and bring in the next target on the list.”
“The Baxters are on the list. We go look. If we don’t find them at the WBB office, we’ll list them as missing and move on.”
She nodded, scratching at the weapon’s bulky receiver. “What do you think the Sabre thing’s about?”
“Don’t know,” Miller said. “Maybe it’s a placeholder name for drafting up emergency plans, just a typo that slipped through. ‘Dear Mr. John Doe, upon triggering your personal alarm you will be met by team Sabre at the corner of Left and Right street...’”
“You don’t really think that, do you?”
Miller kept his mouth shut, concentrating on the road and the GPS’s audio navigation cues.
“Why the hell were the Baxters’ locks all open? You don’t think this is more of Harris’s bullshit, do you?”
“I think my job’s picking up the Baxters and taking them to safety.” Miller checked the mirrors as he turned, glancing every which way and checking the Bravo’s external cameras for signs of Infected or wildlife. “I’ll leave the mysteries to Sherlock Holmes.”
“But—”
“But nothing. We’re armed, these Bravos can roll over landmines and IEDs without blinking, and if we run into trouble we can’t get out of we can call in Doyle and Morland from their pick-ups. If the four of us can’t handle it, I’m sure there are more of those fucking helicopters on standby somewhere.” He glanced at her. “So one problem at a time. Our problem right now is figuring out where the hell the Baxters are.”
Du Trieux nodded, lightly. “Don’t like this, though.”
“Me either,” Miller replied. “I’d like it better if we had more guns and combat exoharnesses, but I’ll settle for an open barber who does a decent hot towel shave.”
She laughed, and stopped gripping the Gilboa quite so hard. “Is that all you miss? Hot shaves?”
“With just that much sandalwood oil,” Miller said, gesturing. “Better than going to the spa. What do you miss?”
“Palm wine,” she said, without hesitation. “My Nigerian cousins used to bring over crates of the stuff.”
“Now, I thought good Muslims don’t drink.”
Du Trieux settled back, smirking. “But if I didn’t drink I wouldn’t be a very good Frenchwoman. Oui?”
Miller’s turn to laugh. The lists of things they missed from before the famines and the heatwaves, from before all this bullshit started, were just about inexhaustible. In the right mood, going over it all brought back good memories, rather than the gloomy certainty that none of it would ever come by again. They reached cream cheese (du Trieux’s) and gay stand-up comics (Miller’s) when the sign for the ‘WellBeechBeck Washington Heights’ turn-off came into view ahead of them.
The medical company was one of Schaeffer-Yeager’s largest subsidiaries, along with S-Y Aerospace. Ordinarily its assets would never be involved with protecting high-level personnel from an entity as minor as DDLN, but it was routine for these office buildings to be used as initial shelters for employees.
The fifteen-storey tower looked dead, nothing to be seen through the mirrored facade, no lights, but the building’s internal systems were online when Miller tried connecting to them. He couldn’t access the closed circuit cameras or any door-locks. Without a live internet connection for the building to authenticate him on, the best it could do was show him the login page and hang up.
While Miller was messing with technology, du Trieux looked at the building like a woman hunting guerrillas. When he told her that he didn’t think anyone was home, she disagreed immediately, pointing out what she could see from her seat.
“See that pile of trash there? Fresh—some of it not yet covered by dust or fungus. That pit looks like a latrine, or somewhere to dump food scraps.” She tapped into the Bravo’s cameras, and zoomed in on something sticking out of one of the windows on a lower floor—a scorched-looking length of air conditioner duct.
“That’s a chimney,” she said. “They have a fire, maybe for cooking. This building is very much occupied.”
Miller touched his earpiece. “Dial Cobalt-2-2,” he told it.
Doyle, reliable as ever, picked up on the first ring. “Miller?”
“What’s your status?”
“Moving to drop off civilians at the compound.”
Miller consulted the GPS navigator, and tried to figure out if its guess of a twenty-five minute ride between Astoria and his location would be accurate. Probably, but they were burning daylight. Wasting both his teams’ time on this...
“Fuck it,” Miller muttered. Better safe than sorry. “Doyle, we’ve got a big scary building to search, and I want more than two of us doing it. Get over here, and bring guns.”
ONCE IN A while, channel-hopping as a child and wishing he had streaming video on demand instead of the cable TV provided by the Air Force base his dad had been stationed at, Miller used to stumble across these nature programs. They weren’t documentaries, not like the dramatic ones on Discovery Channel where they got alligators to eat people in protective suits and hunted for giant sharks that were never quite so giant when they found them, but the shows were nice for having in the background while dicking around on social networks.
In the nature programs there was a scientist, or a biologist, always speaking in soft, hushed tones, as if they were frightened of startling what was on camera. And it was just... footage of animals, doing animal things. Sleeping, walking around, hunting, whatever. The footage was either from a hand camera or a drone, and somehow those shows turned a lion getting up and walking toward a jeep into the most terrifying moment in the world, way better than Discovery Channel’s crazy sharks, because the sharks felt like something somebody made up for a monster movie, and lions on the savannah were real. And lions were so rare it was illegal to shoot them, so if they attacked, you just got eaten, and that was that.
Miller found himself talking to du Trieux in the same hushed tones, even though he had an M27 across his lap and the Bravo’s armour could hold off RPGs, let alone the claws and teeth of the predators crossing the road a few blocks away. Not terror-jaws, something much bigger and stockier. They might have been nicknamed thugs? Miller wasn’t sure if it really was a thug—a heavy-built scavenger that’d gnawed its way through Canada—he didn’t think they got as big as what he saw in his binoculars. Even so, he wasn’t too worried. Sure, maybe some of these Archaeobiome things had eaten T-rexes once upon a time, but so far as Miller knew, dinosaurs weren’t built to handle IEDs.
