Night and Day (Book 3): Bandit's Moon (37 page)

“What do you see, Charlie?” Schleu
asked, her eyes on the photo.

“Uptown District,” I said. “Photo
was taken before the war.”

“Why do you say that?”

I leaned forward and tapped.
“Pershing Place police station. You can see police cars parked on the
street around it, meaning it was open for business when the picture was
taken. But the skeeters shut it down after the war, when they consolidated
the district stations.” I moved my hand. “Tremont Avenue station. Skeeters
made some additions when they turned it into Uptown District station. Most
obvious one from above would be the new wing they added to the east right
about here.”

“Tell me about Zone Four,” she
said, still looking at the picture.

I looked over the photograph and
saw the shape with a four scrawled inside it, in the northeast corner of
the district. “Older townhouses,” I said. “Most three stories, a couple
four stories. When I was working the district, a good number of them had
been subdivided. Apartment on the first floor, three apartments on the
second, two on the third. That kind of thing. A few were still
single-family, but they were so big, you’d need a large family to want to
live in one.”

“How many skeeters live in the
zone?”

“No idea,” I said.

She looked up.

“I can tell you roughly how many
people
lived there before the war,” I said with a thin smile. “But
I’m not up on skeeter living conditions. Maybe they cram them in, and
there’s five to an apartment. Or maybe they like their space.”

Schleu stared at me for a moment,
then nodded. “Fair enough. How many people lived in the zone
pre-war?”

I looked down at the photo, counted
buildings per block and did some rough calculations. “Say a minimum of
three thousand, maybe as many as four or five thousand. That’s based on the
townhouses I was actually inside before the war, and those I know were
split into apartments.”

“You’ve been inside these
buildings?” she asked, looking back down at the photo.

“Some,” I said. “Over the years I
responded to calls in one or another.” I tapped the roof of one of the
buildings. “Double homicide in this one. Man and a woman. They arrested the
ex-husband a couple of weeks later.”

“Describe the interior.”

“They were all about the same. Come
through the front door, staircase to the right, hall going ahead to a
living room. Dining room off the living room to the right, kitchen off the
dining room. Bathroom with a sink and a toilet off the hall. Upstairs, a
hall on each floor, with bedrooms or apartments on either side. Usually a
bathroom off the hall as well. Some of the apartments had private
bathrooms, others had to use the communal bathroom.”

I smiled. “Not the most deluxe
accommodations uptown, but if you weren’t picky and wouldn’t live anyplace
but uptown, the address was good to have on your driver’s license or
resume. That was enough for some people.”

“Zone Six,” she said.

I scanned the photo and grinned.
“My old neighborhood,” I said. “Apartment buildings. Condos. Four to six
stories tall. None taller. City had an ordinance.” I tapped the roof of a
building. “2375 Norwood. My building. Four floors. I was on three.” I put
my finger on the southeast corner. “Apartment 316. A choice corner
apartment that I paid dearly for.”

“Layout?”

“Doorman. Double glass doors into a
small lobby. Elevators on both sides. Laundry room, exercise room,
manager’s apartment on the first floor. Upstairs, halls and
apartments.”

“How many people.”

I stared at the photo for a moment.
“If they’re all occupied, at least five thousand. Maybe more. Including the
son-of-a-bitch living in my apartment.”

She looked up at Lee. He
nodded.

“Very good, Charlie,” she
said.

“I guess Becca’s report came back
positive.” I paused. “I also guess that this was some kind of a test, just
to make sure I was telling the truth.”

“Can’t be too careful,” she said.
“But yes, to answer your questions, Becca gives you a clean bill of health.
And I did want to see how much you knew about uptown. Part test, part...”
She smiled. “Part finding out how useful you might be to us.”

“How useful I am will probably
depend on how much I know about what you’re planning,” I said. “You want to
keep a lid that, I’ll try to do my best to answer your questions and make
intelligent observations, but without context, I don’t know how useful any
of it will be.”

“What do you think we’re planning?”
she asked. “And explain your reasoning.”

“Great, another test,” I said.
“Okay.”

I looked down at the photograph.
“You’re recruiting people and training them to kill skeeters with a
machete. A lot of people. Somebody mentioned six hundred or so.”

“Who told you that?”

“Captain Konrad,” I said. It was
actually Zach, but he was already in enough trouble and he’d been friendly
enough to me and Johnny. Anyway, Konrad was buried in the basement and
wasn’t in a position to contradict me. “He said it during
training.”

Schleu stared at me, then nodded.
“Continue.”

“I understand why you chose
something like a machete. Killing a skeeter with a gun takes skill, while
anybody can swing a machete. But a machete is a close combat weapon. You
have to be no more than a foot or two away from the target.” I paused.
“You’d probably want to send them out in two-man teams. Skeeters are
strong. One human is going to be in real trouble if the first blow doesn’t
kill the skeeter, and the last thing you’d want is a live skeeter raising
the alarm. So two-man teams and you probably have a good chance to take out
any skeeter they run into, at least if the skeeter is alone.”

I looked back at the photo.
“Uptown,” I said. “Skeeter town. If you want to kill skeeters, that’s the
place to go.” I paused. “You’ve sectioned it off into six zones. Probably
somewhere around five thousand skeeters in each one, plus or minus a
thousand or two. Three hundred two-man teams, that’s what...” I did the
calculation in my head. “Say sixteen or seventeen skeeters per team. In
Zone Four, with the townhouses, say an average of two, maybe three
townhouses to clear for each team.”

“Not bad,” she said. “Assume for a
moment that you’re correct. What flaws do you see in the plan?”

I laughed. “Almost too many to
mention,” I said. “Unless you got all night?”

“Yes, I do,” she said.

“Okay, let’s start at the
beginning. You need to do it in the daytime, since the skeeters are at work
or partying or whatever they do at night. I don’t know if you’ve ever been
in uptown during daylight hours, but I have. Not a lot of vehicular
traffic.”

I tapped the map. “Some traffic on
Second, some on St. Joseph, but it’s mostly commercial, trucks, that kind
of thing. And there’s next to no foot traffic. Like I said, it’s skeeter
town. It’s different at night, lots of skeeters on the sidewalks, lots of
cars. But during the day, it’s real quiet. More cops than civilians on the
streets.” I looked up at her. “Like I told you earlier, there aren’t that
many patrol cars, but they do plenty of foot patrols. You start marching
three hundred two-man teams through uptown, you’re not going to get very
far.”

“What else?” she asked.

“Let’s assume that the teams don’t
get spotted as they move into position. Not likely, but we’ll make that
assumption. Now they need to get into the townhouses. Quietly. They can’t
kick down the doors. That would wake up the skeeters inside. So they need
to pick the lock, something like that. Something silent. That takes time.
All the while, they’re standing at the door of a building where they’re not
supposed to be. Cops see them, they’re finished.”

Schleu nodded. “What
else?”

“Okay,” I said. “If that’s not
enough, let’s say they’re able to get inside, quietly, without being seen
or heard. If it’s a single-family townhouse, that’s not too bad. Just go
from room to room and kill every sleeping skeeter they find.” I paused. “On
the other hand, if it’s one of the sub-divided townhouses, you’ve got the
same problem at each apartment door as you had at the front door. Get
through a probably-locked door without waking up the skeeters
inside.”

“Next?”

I laughed. “More? Really?” I
paused. “Okay, if they get inside without waking up the skeeters, it comes
down to training. Go to wherever the skeeter is sleeping, whack it’s head
off. Based on what I saw before my training was interrupted, I guess all
your recruits have done that at least once. That’s good. But I can tell you
from experience, it’s not the same. There’s a big difference between
beheading a skeeter strapped to a wooden pole and beheading one who will
come up and rip your face off if your blade catches him in the chest or
only slices the side of his neck.”

I paused and looked at her, hard.
“Not to mention that some of the skeeters are probably going to be awake. I
don’t know how much you know about them, but unlike fictional vampires,
skeeters don’t have to sleep during the day. Some do, some don’t. And if
they hear somebody breaking into their apartment, whether they’re awake or
it wakes them up, guess what? They’re going to call the cops. And your guys
with the machetes won’t stand a chance against the armed cops that show up
to investigate.”

Schleu looked at Lee.

“Hey,”he said. “I didn’t say a word
to him. He’s coming up with this all by himself.”

She looked down at the photo.
“Anything else, Charlie?”

“Yeah, one little thing,” I said.
“Let’s say it all goes smoothly. It’s unlikely, but let’s say nobody gets
spotted, all the skeeters die, cops know nothing about it. What then? Your
skeeter killers all scoot back to wherever they came from. The sun goes
down. What happens then?”

“You’re on a roll,” she said. “You
tell me.”

“If it’s during the week, Sammy
Skeeter doesn’t show up at work, because he’s in bed with his head on the
floor. A lot of Sammy Skeeters don’t show up for work. Sooner or later,
when their offices can’t contact them to find out why, they call Uptown
District station to make a welfare check. Which, by the way, the uptown
cops are more than happy to do. And when they find Sammy, it starts to rain
shit. And when they find a second Sammy, or a third, the shitstorm really
begins. And not just in uptown. All over the city. And all over the area,
when somebody tells area government that skeeters are being slaughtered in
their beds.”

“And if it’s on a
weekend?”

“Same song, different verse,” I
said. “It’s not work that calls the cops. It’s Sammy’s friend, who had a
date to spend the night licking blood off humans in a slurp club. The
friend either finds headless Sammy, or calls for that welfare check.” I
paused. “Either way, you have maybe one day, kill maybe five thousand
skeeters. It’s like a gun with one bullet. You can’t wait till morning and
do it all over again till all the skeeters in uptown are dead.”

“That was a good analysis,
Charlie,” she said. “I’m impressed.”

I looked at her. “No offense, but
if that’s your plan, commander, I’m definitely not impressed.”

“Why?”

“Too many moving parts,” I said.
“Too much exposure. Too many things that could go wrong, and frankly, will
go wrong.” I paused. “There’s no wiggle room. Everything has to go exactly
according to plan or it all comes tumbling down.”

 Schleu smiled. “I guess we’re
lucky that you’re not quite right about the specifics of the Lexington
Project.”

“Lexington Project?”

“Our code name for the operation,”
she said. “If you know your history, you know that the first battle of the
American Revolution was fought on the Common in Lexington,
Massachusetts.”

“Actually I do know my history,” I
said. “And as I recall, the militia got their asses kicked by British
regulars on Lexington Common.”

“True,” she said. “But when the
British moved on to Concord, they ran into more than a handful of
militiamen, and it was
their
asses that got kicked, not the
colonials. Kicked all the way back to Boston.” She was silent for a moment.
“And in the end, kicked all the way back to England.”

It was an interesting way of
looking at it. The Humans First Front as the plucky colonial militia,
firing that first shot, with all the other humans in the city, and
eventually the whole country, rising up as one to destroy the Vees. A
delusional way of looking at it, but I’m sure it made them all feel
good.

Schleu smiled. “There’s more to it,
Charlie. Lots more. And many of your concerns about the uptown part of the
operation have already been addressed. The Lexington Project has been in
the works for nearly three years. We’ve considered all of the issues you
mentioned, and either worked around them or neutered them.” She paused.
“Now I have another question for you.”

“Ask away.”

“Earlier I asked if I could trust
you. You told me that I could. Becca’s report told me that I might be able
to trust you.” She paused. “Your analysis of the uptown part of our plan
proved it.”