Empire's End (8 page)

“The city can’t pour all its resources into a
war on petty crime, Voorhees! Meyer may be a bastard but the fact
is that the thugs under his umbrella are kept in line. So they take
credits from local businesses and use them to buy booze. So they
pimp—don’t you think a streetwalker is safer with a pimp watching
her back? I know it sounds wrong, Voorhees, I know we’re supposed
to cling to this ideal that says no crime can go unpunished, but
for God’s sake that’s not the reality we live in!”

“We’re supposed to try and make it that way!”
Voorhees yelled, pounding the table. Neighboring patrons tried not
to stare. “So we can’t bring crime down to zero. Does that mean we
sit on our hands or, worse yet,
help
them?
This is
fucking depraved.”

“But like he said, it works.”

A middle-aged woman with light brown hair and
a sash around her overcoat slid into the booth beside Blake,
flashing her P.O. badge. “Emily Halstead. Hey there, partner.”

So now it was going to be two against one.
Voorhees threw his hands in the air. “Forget it. I’ve gotta put in
my resignation. This funny farm can find another fake cop.”

“Blake, would you mind letting us get
acquainted? That is, unless you two are already joined at the hip.”
Halstead winked at Blake, who sighed and got up.

“Like I said, I’ll get the check. Think
before you walk, Voorhees.”

Halstead took Voorhees’ plate and looked the
sandwich over. “You gonna eat this?”

“I don’t have an appetite.”

She nodded and took a bite. “Mustard.
Pricey.”

“So you want to preach to me, too?” he
muttered.

She shook her head, chewing. “The system’s
been broken from the beginning. Nothing makes sense inside these
walls.”

So she wasn’t nuts. Voorhees leaned forward,
taking up his coffee. “Don’t drink that,” Halstead advised.

“Why do you do the job, then?” he asked.

“In hopes that things will start to change.
This is still America, right? You read the history books, you know
change is possible. If not here, not anywhere.”

“What’re we gonna do? Go on strike? Let Finn
Meyer put his own cops on the beat? Or do we lobby the Senate to
shake up their precious sandbox?”

“How long have you been inside the Wall,
Voorhees?”

“About five months.”

“You catch on pretty quick, you know that?
I’m guessing you tend to resist this whole notion that the world
out there no longer exists.”

“Of course.” He picked a wet French fry off
the plate. “I’m thinking about enlisting. I’d rather deal with
rotters than this.”

“You’d still have to live here,” she said.
“Why not fight the system from the inside? You may feel helpless
right now, but believe me, you’re in a position to make a
difference.”

“You really think so?”

“I do. It just means pissing Casey off now
and then. Maybe he’ll dock your pay, maybe Meyer’s boys won’t want
to be your buddies anymore. I’ve been threatened more than once and
I’m still here.

“Like Blake said, think before you walk.”

* * *

Voorhees made the mistake of visiting Casey’s
office and trying to be rational.

“If you’d rather live in the badlands, get
your shit and go,” the S.P.O. snapped. He wheeled himself out from
behind his desk and asked, “Did they tell you how I lost my legs
yet?”

Voorhees shook his head. Another mistake.

“I came north early on to help with
construction. On my way up here—didn’t have a military convoy
flanking me like the later ones—my friends and I were held up by
badlanders. Highwaymen. They shot me. You can’t see it, it’s above
me hairline, but yeah, they shot me and left me for dead.

“Then they came back.”

He kneaded the stumps of his knees, sweat
running down his brow. “They came back that night and took my body
to their camp. They were sure I was dead, you see. And they were
hungry.”

He narrowed his eyes to fiery slits. “They’re
just like the rotters, those people—lawless, godless animals. Take
society away and that’s what you’re left with. The human
animal.

“It was my screams that alerted a nearby Army
patrol. They’d begun sawing off my legs.”

He took a deep breath and massaged his
temples. “Oh, Voorhees. Don’t you see, that’s the alternative? If
we didn’t have Meyer and his honor code, there would be animals
running loose in the streets. And we wouldn’t have the strength to
stop them. Everything would fall apart—the Great Cities are in
their infancy and we have to safeguard their development.”

“And then what?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to
it.”

And Meyer will set it ablaze when you’re
halfway across,
Voorhees thought.

Ian Gregory sat in on his first Senate
morning meeting, positioned behind and to the left of Gillies as
the Senate President spoke to his fellow statesmen.

“I spoke with Britain by radio last night.
They’re still being difficult, but I think they’re beginning to
come around, at least as far as the airfield is concerned. I
assured them that it would be finished by November.”

“Isn’t that cutting it a little close?” asked
Senator Georgia Manning.

“If you need more manpower, Georgia, then get
it. You’ve got a whole damn city at your disposal.”

“Enough people already know about the
airfield,” she retorted.

“Then
lie
,” came the exasperated
reply. “Go outside of that construction company for volunteers—I
don’t trust those people anymore. Tell the volunteers that they’re
working on the site for a new hospital. They don’t have to know
anything!”

Gregory had tuned out the conversation and
was studying each Senator’s face. He tried to separate the loyal
ones from the opportunists. It was always visible in the face. As a
man of God—and Hand of God’s leader—he had honed his ability to
sniff out sin.

Maybe that was why Gillies made him just a
little uncomfortable.

But everyone had their flaws, their secrets;
and, though he fought it, his mind drifted again to Barry.

The final days of the Wall’s construction...
the burn pits, trenches twenty feet deep and piled with crippled,
decapitated and paralyzed rotters. The foul stench of death, so
thick and pervasive that all the soldiers standing guard had to
wear gas masks. And the moaning. The moaning and gurgling as the
undead flailed about in a slurry of leaking fluids and decaying
meat. The burn team hadn’t come by in days and trucks were bringing
in all of the ferals that had been picked off along the Wall’s
perimeter. They said it would be more efficient this way. It was
madness. Weird, otherworldly groans filled the sky day and
night.

Finally the burn team arrived. The dead in
the pits were liquefying beneath the summer sun, and a fog of
putrefaction had settled over the place; seeping into clothing and
skin, staining every man and woman on-site.

When the burn team pointed their
flamethrowers into the pits, the things erupted like volcanoes.
Instead of ash and lava it was gore and thrashing, living limbs
that rained down on everyone. Suddenly all was chaos, and the
insanity that had been building for a week finally screamed to
life. Everyone was in a panic, including Sergeant Ian Gregory. He
was frantically searching through the smoke and slaughter for
Kendra Barry. He pulled off his mask and screamed her name, then
the stench of roasting flesh filled his nose and eyes and throat
and he fell to his knees vomiting.

Somewhere in there, in the madness, she had
fallen. Perhaps shoved, perhaps tripped, or maybe she’d just run
blindly into the flaming pit and been caught in the blackened claws
of the undead.

They did manage to recover her body a few
days later during the cleanup; official cause of death was smoke
inhalation. But Gregory, identifying her body, had seen the marks
around her throat where they had choked the life from her.

* * *

“Has Finn Meyer been extorting credits from
you?”

Voorhees leaned on the counter and looked
Becks hard in the eye. She gave him a what’re-you-gonna-do shrug
and said, “It keeps people from stealing. He polices the market
more often than the cops.”

“But he
is
stealing from you, don’t
you see that?” Voorhees sighed.

“It could be worse,” was her reply.

“How, exactly?”

“I have a business here, Officer, and a home.
I have a normal life. I was the only one from my hometown to reach
the Great Cities. We were being followed by rotters. We had to try
to swim across this lake—then suddenly there were rotters all over
the shore, on all sides, surrounding u. Fourteen went in. By the
time an Army convoy happened by, I was the only one still treading
water.”

“I’m sorry,” Voorhees said. “I’m sorry that
happened to you. But how does that make this all right?”

“It makes this tolerable,” she said. “I spent
two days in that water. I watched as people sank, one by one,
around me. I ran out of tears. I couldn’t scream anymore. I could
only fight to stay afloat. And their eyes—the rotters, every pair
of eyes was on me. Those soldiers could have just passed me by but
they fought those bastards for hours just to get to me. They
brought me here. I’m grateful.”

“Don’t be grateful to Meyer,” Voorhees told
her. “His days are numbered.”

“What are you trying to do?” she asked
softly, sadness in her eyes, pleading eyes. “Life is okay now.
Please.”

Someone nudged Voorhees’ back. Remembering
that he was blocking the checkout, he stepped back. A hard-faced
woman in a long coat offered her hand. “Pat Morgan.”

“P.O. Voorhees.” He gave her a firm shake.
“Are you another officer?”

“No, air,” she said, with the slightest
twinkle in her eye. “I work for Mister Meyer. He’d like to buy you
lunch.”

Meyer had a handful of colorful rock candy,
probably homemade, that he munched obnoxiously as he and Pat Morgan
walked Voorhees down to the shore of Lake Michigan.

“I thought this was an invitation to lunch,”
said Voorhees. Meyer shrugged. “Not hungry.”

“Crooked
and
cheap. But I’ll bet your
whores are top dollar.”

“Interested in a lay, Officer?” Meyer
grinned. “I can get you a special deal. You ever fucked an Asian
girl? I do mean
girl
, by the way.”

A quiet chill settled in Voorhees’ gut. “What
do you want? If this is about either bribes or threats you’d best
just save your breath. I don’t care.”

“I have a lot of little girls,” Meyer
continued, as if Voorhees hadn’t spoken. “In basements all over
Gaylen. They’re quite willing, too—”

Voorhees seized Meyer by the collar of his
coat. Morgan whipped out a .45 and stuck it against his temple.

“I didn’t think guns were allowed in Gaylen,”
Voorhees said through gritted teeth. He didn’t let Meyer go.

“Oh, they’re not,” Meyer replied, his breath
sickly sweet. “Neither are booze or hash or meth, but there seems
to be a steady demand and, well, why send people away empty-handed?
I don’t believe in that. The government doesn’t believe in
that.”

“You’re trash. If this were my city I’d—”

“Yes, I’ve heard how you did things back in
Louisiana. So trusted, so admired that nearly every citizen and all
your cops bailed on you when the military withdrew? Leaving you
with what, a handful of bums? What else happened down there,
Voorhees? I’ve heard lots of strange talk about weird things in the
southern badlands.

“You know what they say?” Meyer asked,
delicately extracting Voorhees’ hands from the folds of his coat.
“People say that there are ghosts and gods roaming about out there.
They call these days the Last Days. But I don’t subscribe to that,
and I’m sure you don’t either, being a rational man. Just the
same—”

He slugged Voorhees in the stomach, doubling
the old man over, and shouted in his ear “In here,
I am
God!
”

Morgan clipped Voorhees in the back of the
head with the butt of her gun. He fell to his knees, vision
swimming, the voice of Finn Meyer fading in and out and then gone
altogether.

He looked up to find himself alone. It was
starting to snow.

* * *

Upon arriving back at his office—a warehouse
basement downtown—Meyer was informed that he had a couple of
sellers sitting upstairs. He liked to handle this end of the
business personally. He removed his coat, smoothed his suit and
headed up.

The couple was sitting in a small windowless
room, isolated from the goings-on in the rest of the building.
Entering with the lieutenant who had summoned him, Meyer shook
their hands warmly and said, “First things first. How much are you
asking for?”

The woman looked at the man, who cleared his
throat and said, “Ten thousand.”

Meyer clapped his hands on his knees and
laughed. “Well, this must be quite a filly! Ten thousand? Let’s see
her. Where is she?”

The lieutenant opened a narrow door into a
smaller room, where a few toys—dolls, blocks, crayons—were
scattered about on faded carpet.

Lily looked up from her place against the
wall, arms and legs crossed, and said “When do I get to go
home?”

Meyer licked his lips. He looked back at the
couple. “How old is she?”

“Twelve,” Jack Calvert said.

“Come on now,” Meyer said in scolding tone.
“I’ll need to see papers on that.”

“She might be thirteen or fourteen. We’ve
only had her a few months.”

Meyer said to Lily, “Just another minute,
sweetheart,” and closed the door to the smaller room. To the
Calverts he asked, “Why ten grand? You must know how steep that
is.”