“
Okay. Send me what you can. It’s critical—
”
“Can’t.” Miller thumbed the phone’s power button again. The screen flashed a drained battery symbol. “Dead, no charge.”
Harris was silent for a moment. “
Stay in the vehicle. Don’t open the windows, nothing. You hear me?
”
Armoured limos didn’t
have
windows that opened; they were built in place. But Harris had never done any field work. Miller didn’t bother explaining. “I hear you.”
“
Sit tight,
” Harris said, and cut the connection.
A glance back over the interior of the limousine, the light entering the vehicle strobing as hammering hands rose and fell, and Miller realized it was the last place he ever wanted to be.
“Doyle, you seeing this?” Miller asked, cupping his ear.
“
Afraid not,
” Doyle replied. “
Thought it best to get the hell out while I could. I’m in my car and en route back home.
”
“Mob’s got us.”
The mob’s pounding seemed to be growing steadier.
“
I’ll be back in a tick.
”
“No, don’t turn around. Then we’ll have to haul you out of this, too.”
“
Bloody hell! Look at that!
”
“What?” Miller glanced back at Morland and du Trieux, who were staring bloodlessly out at one of the Infected standing on the trunk. He’d set down his crowbar, and was gazing up into the sky. Miller realised all of the Infected had stopped to look, but somehow the steady thumping was only growing louder.
It wasn’t the mob’s pounding.
Help arrived. It screamed with turbofan engines and battered the ear with the bassy chop of rotor blades. An attack helicopter. Ugly, armoured, fresh off the assembly line in unpainted grey primer and serial numbers, gunpods and missiles glistening and fresh as it banked across the rooftops above. It slowed, then fired.
Tracer rounds cut into the ground, streaking flares in alternating red and orange, 20mm anti-armour explosive shells chewing the street surface to splinters, punching straight through the mass of humanity and tearing into the rock beneath without regard for their lives. Rippling blasts raced back and forth across the mob like a kid pissing on the snow, beating them down and tearing limbs from bodies, crippling blasts leaving nothing but blood and bone where there had been
people
an instant before.
The screaming of humanity was overpowering. Blood and tissue fogged the nearside window, and fragments of concrete and metal rang off the windows, leaving dark pits in the scratched, spiderwebbed laminate.
The helicopter hovered in place, as if surveying what it had done. The aftermath’s silence exposed screaming, crying terror. The street was a shifting mass of running bodies, dying bodies. Bodies, everywhere.
The second attack was shorter than the first, a roaring as God and Zeus ganged up on mortal men with exploding metal and thunder, tearing them down where they stood, precisely cutting them apart and tearing them away from the limousine as if they were nothing.
The echoes washed through the streets almost as swiftly as the blood filled the gutters. The limousine was painted with ragged splashes of gore and a sandblasting of metal splinters, broken limbs and gobbets of flesh, but what the crowd of Infected humanity had been unable to endure, the vehicle’s armour had shrugged off without complaint.
Those who weren’t dead, fled. Running ribbons of tracer fire punched through their backs, the only living things in sight left ruined and twitching, crawling messes of bloody limbs.
Near silently, Miller managed to get the limo rolling forward, rocking as its wheels rolled over lumpen mash and torn asphalt, levelling out as it fled, trailing bloody tracks behind it.
When they were clear, Miller opened the door a crack, leaned out, and threw up.
2
“
A
ND WHERE ARE
the government in this? Where are the
police?”
The image on the screen bobbed unevenly, bad camera-work or shaking hands. Hsiung, unusually silent, picked up the remote control. No matter which channel she tried, it either displayed the same live scene from another angle, a flat blue screen, or a broken connection icon. The last surviving television station in New York, and it showed nothing but James Swift’s perspiring face. His nose, his cheek, his eye, painful close-ups as his rage simmered over.
“
No one knows how many
citizens
of this city are dead, no one knows because it is impossible to
count,” Swift growled, throwing back his head. “
Those who seek our
eradication,
those who have murdered
us,
have been left untouched by the sacred justice the freedoms our glorious country was
founded upon,
oh, yes.
” He nodded, and the camera bobbed in reflexive mimicry. No doubt, Miller thought, it was an effort of willpower for the cameramen to avoid joining in with Swift’s screed.
“
Their subsidiaries, WellBeechBeck and BioGen, toil to develop
poisons
for the terrible right hand of the corporate beast, seeking to
destroy
us, seeking to
destroy
the Archaean Gift, even while their left hand, the very military industrial complex itself, slaughters us
outright.” He leered at the camera, all teeth and tongue. “
All in the name of
corporate interests.
Is this right? Is this
American?!” Swift demanded, gnashing at the lens, spittle at the corners of his mouth. “
Who does Schaeffer-Yeager’s
genocide
profit? No one!
”
“Turn it off,” Miller said, pinching at the bridge of his nose. This was the last fucking thing he needed in Cobalt’s break room.
Hsiung glanced up, brief rebellion in her eyes, just on principle. If Miller didn’t want to see it, she did. She clasped the remote tighter.
Doyle groaned, hands over his face. “At least turn it down.”
Begrudgingly Hsiung complied.
“Thank you.” Miller looked at the coffee machine for the dozenth time, but it was still heating up.
Hsiung stared at the screen, struggling to make sense of the unnatural camera angles and close-ups of Swift’s sweating skin. “When did the Infected get Swift, anyway?”
“Oh, back when they were selling the parasite in bottled water. He fell in with the celebrity crowd,” Mannon said, from the other end of the couch.
“That long ago?”
“He went quiet after falling in with the communes.”
That would’ve been two, maybe three years ago? Miller’s ex-girlfriend, Samantha, had wanted him to try ‘Archaean Water’ with her, back then. She’d bought into the celebrity fad endorsing it as a wonder-cure for troubled relationships.
It sounded great, didn’t it? Water pulled out of a subglacial Antarctic lake, ultra-pure and natural, hidden beneath the ice for tens of thousands of years before global warming brought it near the surface. The early rumours about microscopic parasites in the stuff had dissuaded Miller from trying it just to patch things back up with Samantha, thank God. Maybe she’d ended up joining a commune?
It had seemed like a political thing, at first—living cooperatively, outside of the general economy. There were slums in the Bronx that had become the human equivalent of hives, the Infected living heel-to-toe, dozens of people to a room. The Infected hadn’t wanted a cure, and by the time anyone had attempted to pass laws enforcing anti-parasitic drug treatments—years late, long after Schaeffer-Yeager had started providing the drugs free of charge wherever possible—too much of the population had been ‘gifted’ with the Archaean Parasite to do anything to stop it.
Communes had seemed like a good idea when the famines
really
started to get bad. Jimmy ‘Eat The Poor’ Swift had once been another Wall Street shark, one of L. Gray Matheson’s—Schaeffer-Yeager’s CEO’s—peers. He’d owned half of Queens. Then he’d sold out, joined the dirty hippies who’d been protesting capitalism’s rise, and spent his considerable fortune feeding the city’s Infected.
Good for some, but Miller remembered watching overfilled grocery carts trundling down the streets towards the communes while everyone else starved, courtesy Swift’s fortune. Then, when Schaeffer-Yeager began its humanitarian campaign distributing anti-parasitic drugs and food, the communes had sent mobs to break up soup kitchens, burning trucks with the wrong logo no matter what they were carrying. It had been ugly then, but now...
While Swift spat fire on the screen, his words autocaptioned below, baying for the company’s blood, the mobs were out on the streets rioting. Was it purely a social phenomenon, or was the parasite somehow defending itself, making the Infected attack those trying to cure them?
Then again, Miller mused, if they
were
treated, cured, they’d lose their communes, wouldn’t they? It made sense if they were fighting to protect what they thought of as their families, didn’t it?
On the screen, Swift called on the Army and the government and the police, what was left of them all, to strike Schaeffer-Yeager down in furious justice.
He was right. Why the hell weren’t Miller and the rest in chains, with a summary execution for Robert Harris on the cards for calling down the helicopter strike?
When enough had finally dripped into the coffee pot, Miller got up and filled two mugs, then put the pot back to catch the rest.
“Shouldn’t do that. The first stuff’s the best, you’re stealing it,” du Trieux muttered from the narrow card table behind the break room couch.
Miller shrugged. “At least you’re not complaining about how Americans make their coffee anymore.”
She grunted something guttural and French.
Coffee was hard to come by. They were scraping out old filters and adding a meagre amount from their dwindling supply of fresh coffee, mockingly calling it ‘half-and-half.’
At one point, the Archaeobiome’s ‘novel’ South American crop pests were considered someone else’s problem—fairy-armadillo type creatures, though the pink-shelled little beasts weren’t armadillos at all—but coffee drinkers,
serious
coffee drinkers, knew they were trouble long before the threat of the famines loomed.
The locust armadillos,
Pseudodasypus
, were little cynodonts—early precursors to mammals—which showed every sign of being straight out of the Triassic period, other than showing up out of nowhere in Colombian plantations around two years before. They’d arrived on his parents’ ranch a year later, shortly before gnawing a swathe through the Midwest’s cornfields. The biggest were three inches long, and to Miller they looked a lot like lizards with an armadillo shell. They even laid eggs, leathery little packets that shrank up like prunes in the sun.
The first hatching anyone witnessed had been out in Mexico, locust armadillo young crawling up out of the ground like tiny maggots, maybe two or three millimetres long—much smaller than later hatchlings from fresh eggs, something to do with how the Archaeobiome worked. Apparently the locust armadillos, along with most of the new wildlife, had been hiding out deep underground for close to thirty thousand years. Then they’d hatched tiny, grown up, and started reproducing.
Fast
.
That was if you believed the scientists who’d carbon dated the ancient eggs that hadn’t hatched, anyway. A lot of people didn’t, but a lot of people thought man-made global warming was a load of horse-shit because it still got cold in the winter.
The locust armadillo swarms had eaten every stalk of wheat within a hundred miles of his parents’ ranch, but his dad hadn’t been the one who told Miller about them. He hadn’t learned about coffee and the locust armadillos from Brandon Lewis, either—the old man accepting the second cup of coffee when Miller joined him in the meeting room, at the far end of the table from the decision makers.
Over there, talking to Gray and Harris? There was the woman he’d heard about locust armadillos from, back when they were only ruining a couple of plantations. The woman that had, over a stretch of years, fed Miller every detail imaginable from the species of civet that shat the best coffee in Indonesia straight through to the exact difference between
espresso
,
restritto
, and
lungo
.
Jennifer Barrett.
Barrett wasn’t just the company’s top coffee maven. She was Schaeffer-Yeager’s head of internal IT, and a delight to work close protection for. She understood that the weakest link in any chain of security were the people in it, and the sharkish, middle-aged woman didn’t complain too hard when one of her bodyguards got her the wrong drink instead of letting her traipse through unsecured coffee shops. But even though she was understanding about security, anything else that rubbed her the wrong way was at risk of getting its throat ripped out.
Right now, her teeth were bared at Robert Harris, head of security and all around nice guy. You had to be a nice guy, didn’t you, to call down a helicopter gunship on an unarmed crowd?
“It was necessary to preserve the life of one of our assets,” Harris growled. “We had nothing else in the area and those
freaks
would have torn open the limousine if we’d waited any longer.”
“Tear gas, stun grenades, painbeams, water cannons; there is riot control gear
on the books
,” Barrett screeched, stabbing her finger onto the files displayed on a tablet in front of her. “There is
such a thing as proportionality, Bob!
”
“Proportionality? By the time the chopper arrived the howling mob was three blocks wide. Tens of goddamn
thousands!
” He thrust out his stubbled chin. Generally, he looked lean. Right now, despite having more than enough to eat, he looked starved and desperate. “I don’t have a riot squad that can contain that, nobody does anymore! The non-lethal option wasn’t an option.”
In theory, Miller took orders from Harris. In practice, despite Miller heading Cobalt-2, his direct superior was head of Cobalt-1, Brandon Lewis. Harris may have dished out the orders, but he didn’t know much about Cobalt’s special-case personnel security role.