At first it didn’t look like anybody got hit. The civilians changed course and scattered like a school of minnows, disappearing down alleys and into doorways. Some crouched behind the fountain walls, their backs to Danny. Now she could see two people were lying in the street, one waving an arm, the other motionless. The Hawkstone men advanced, pointing their weapons around, until they were able to drag the two wounded people back down the street to the Humvee. Yanked them up inside it. Three grumbling Bradleys rolled up now, parking in the plaza. More men jumped down out of them and started to round up whoever they could find. They had machine gunners covering the plaza with the snouts of their heavy weapons.
There was a commotion downstairs in the building, shouting and pleading. Something heavy fell over, maybe a filing cabinet. After a couple of minutes, during which time Danny reasoned with herself that she should get involved, but didn’t move, there was the sound of doors banging open below, and then three struggling people, a woman and two men, were led out of the building, dragged along by a dozen others. They must have been part of the riot, and they’d been found hiding inside. Everybody knew who belonged or didn’t belong.
Ten minutes later, it was as if nothing had happened. The street was empty again, except for the occasional officially sanctioned vehicle crammed with supplies and gunmen.
Danny had a vague plan in mind. It required she stay put for another couple of days, watching for opportunities. Sitting tight was always the hardest part of action. With a great show of calm, Danny went downstairs in search of coffee. Little things had become incalculable luxuries again, the way it was in a theater of war; private toilet stalls, hot coffee, the occasional shower. Water that didn’t taste like a swimming pool. She should enjoy these things while they were available.
Danny came down the grand staircase toward a group of people in the lobby, all of them speaking in low, urgent voices about the excitement outside. The consensus was that it had been a riot. Somebody said it wasn’t a riot,
but that people were only fleeing the fires. The wind had changed, and the flames were reaching inhabited areas. Danny drifted over to listen to the conversation. She might need the information.
“People are flipping out,” said a white kid with dreadlocks and large metal grommets in his earlobes.
“Dude, they can’t take the heat from the Man, man,” an older woman retorted, imitating the kid.
“Knock it off, Carol,” said a tall, thin man with enormous spectacles. “People got shot out there. We could be next. They’re animals.”
“Those man-eating
things
out there are the animals,” Carol replied, turning on Spectacles. “I’d rather have to put up with a little extra security than get eaten by monsters.”
“A little extra
security
?” the dreadlocked kid said. “You saw that. They just
shot
people. That’s not security, it’s Nazi bullshit.”
It occurred to Danny that this very conversation had probably been had regarding her own squad of Marines—but in Mesopotamian Arabic or Farsi.
A shorter man in a torn mustard-yellow cardigan chimed in. Danny recognized him from one of the minivan teams that had been on patrol the previous night. “You have to be out there to see what’s happening,” he said. “The safe zone is getting tighter every day. We went into an apartment building last night that literally had people sleeping upright on the stairs. There wasn’t a level square foot of floor space left. It stank.”
“At least they have somewhere to stay,” Carol snapped. “We should be grateful those brave men are keeping us safe—not only from those things, but from the mob—people that don’t know when they’ve got it good.”
“Carol,” Spectacles said, cleaning his glasses on the tail of his shirt. “We’ve worked together for years, right? We go way back. So don’t take it the wrong way when I say you’re one of the least sympathetic human beings I’ve ever known.”
“Okay, then what happens to everybody,” the dreadlocked kid said, “when there’s no more room? They end up in the streets. But it’s martial law. You can’t be in the streets. It’s a pressure cooker, man. That resistance out there, that was only the beginning. The situation is going to de
volve
.”
“Freedom,” Carol said with staunch finality, “isn’t free.”
The man in the cardigan saw Danny and nudged Spectacles. Heads turned in her direction. The chatter died out. Her appearance lately tended to have a conversation-stopping effect; maybe once her hair grew out and
the injuries faded she’d blend in a little better. It wouldn’t hurt if she had eyelashes or eyebrows. Wait till they saw her in a bikini. She passed among them, not making eye contact, and was glad there were not more of them. She hated the staring.
Danny went down to the room where the laundry was kept for pick-up, then changed into the remains of her uniform, clean but ragged, in the nearest bathroom. Attired in a way that suggested she might have some pretense to authority, she inquired of some competent-looking people in the lobby if there were any convoys headed in the direction of the Pyramid Building. An hour later she was on her way, rifle in hand, riding guard duty on a load of canned soup and packets of dried ravioli.
When she got to the guards in front of the Pyramid, she was carrying a box of cans on her shoulder. The driver of the truck, also laden with boxes, asserted her legitimacy as a “critical member of personnel”; she hadn’t been given any papers to flash around, but it didn’t matter. Despite the lockdown, few people seemed to have any credentials.
“That’s it? You’re with him, you’re cool?” Danny muttered to the driver as they entered the building.
“You’re as legitimate as the guy vouching for you,” he said. “I bring these guys smokes. They like me.” In the lobby they didn’t cross to the elevators but went around behind the elevator core to the stairs, which led down into the basement storage areas. Danny would have kept vital supplies on an upper floor, to make them easier to defend, but this wasn’t her fight. The entire basement of the building was stuffed with dry goods, medical equipment, and canned food, besides caches of ammunition and weapons in accessible locations. There were loading doors down there, some kind of access possible by truck, but she could see why they made everything come through the lobby. One less access point, one less hole in the defenses. Keep the loading doors shut so nobody in a nearby building decided to make a raid—and keep an eye on what came and went. The place smelled strongly of vegetable soup and diesel fuel. Danny imagined there must be a couple of ruptured cans in there somewhere. The diesel was for the generators, rumbling away in a sub-basement below the supplies. She could feel the vibration through her boots.
Once the groceries were all carried into the basement, Danny excused herself and asked at the front desk where the personnel files were being kept. The woman at the desk raised her eyebrows.
“I’m a cop,” Danny said. “I’m looking for some known criminals.” What
the hell, at this point anybody would take anything for an excuse, as long as it sounded urgent.
She’d thought her story out in advance. It was quite a melodrama. If anybody asked, Danny was going to say she’d come up from Los Angeles in pursuit of some fugitives from the prison system down there, the worst of the worst, who broke out when everything went nuts. She had a list of names. Kelley’s name was on the list, of course.
As it transpired, nobody asked her what her story was. She was directed to a windowless, beige room on the first floor. There was a tired man with a white mustache at the desk she approached; he and a dozen others were transcribing names from handwritten sheets into a computer database. Danny asked to see the list of refugee names.
“The list we got isn’t going to do you any good,” the tired man said.
“I’d like to have a look anyway,” Danny said.
“Come back in a week,” the man said, shaking his head.
“Sir—it’s important.”
The man’s eyes narrowed. He turned his screen squarely away from Danny’s field of view. “Who are you with?”
“I’m from a small town outside Los Angeles—” Danny said, preparing to tell her story, and got no further than that. The tired man waved his hand at her.
“You’re not with Hawkstone or the city, am I right?”
“No,” Danny said. “Please let me look at the list, it’s important.”
“They didn’t ask you to come down here?”
“I’m not supposed to be here,” Danny admitted. “This is a personal thing. I traveled three hundred miles for this.”
The man leaned back in his squeaky chair and chuckled. It was a dry, mirthless sound, the sort of noise that follows a cruel, not especially funny joke.
“The joke’s on you. Those goons upstairs told us we each had to input five hundred names an hour, or we’d be out on the street. So they hand us these piles of names they gather at the checkpoints”—here he gestured at a carton filled with grubby scraps of paper—“and we type any goddamn name in on the computer, and at the end of every shift we dump all this crap in the incinerator. In other words, there is no list.”
Danny’s eyes stung. The air outside was dense and gritty; the wind had shifted again, carrying with it a burden of filthy smoke and ash. If Danny
wept, she could tell herself it was only the smoke. There was no difference, in the end: Either way, all that was left was ashes. She looked back at the Pyramid Building and wondered how long it would be before the place was inhabited only by walking corpses. It was time to get out of San Francisco before the whole place went down, get back to Boscombe Field, and do what she did best: brood on her own failures.
Danny drove out to the perimeter with her patrol team, rifle propped up between her knees, a knife in the pocket of her uniform pants. Her mind was fixed on a single goal: to get out of the fortified city. She took her first patrol of the assigned block. Two buildings opposite had caught fire during the day, and they were excusing the former inhabitants for coming and going in the smoldering wreckage during curfew hours. The entire block was illuminated by the small fires that ate at whatever was left besides charcoal and masonry. As the night wore on, people found places to lie down and were not seen again.
Danny found herself alone, sometime in the hour between very late and very early. She stood below the smoke rising over the city, its sound like the sound of falling snow, a kind of pressure in the ear, almost a nonsound. Beyond, the fires rumbled and muttered. Turbulent, muscular smoke rolled up into the atmosphere, candescent at the skyline where the red flames leaped up inside it, dancing with bright izles that flared and winked out. The smoke bellied overhead, black and hot and dry, raining down ash and cinders. The stench was awful: Sulfur and poison and the destruction of ordinary things filled Danny’s nose.
She was desperate to be out of the city before dawn, on her way back to Boscombe Field, but haste at this point would be fatal. She decided to patrol in the usual fashion, looking for some opportunity to slip away and get through the barrier between the living and the dead. It would almost be safer among the zeros. At least they were predictable.
Halfway through Danny’s first shift standing watch, her shoulders heaped with ash, she heard an engine approaching. A Humvee rolled up the block and came to a halt directly in front of her position. A man in camouflage with a shaggy chin beard leaned out of the passenger side window.
“You Danny?” he asked.
Danny didn’t say anything. She had her T-shirt pulled up through her collar, over the lower half of her face, to keep the soot out. She thought
fast: What did he want? Why? Who sent him? He shone a flashlight in her eyes to verify she was the one he was looking for. Then he hooked his thumb at the back of the vehicle.
“I can’t leave my post,” Danny said. “This is the side the zeros will come from.”
The man in the Humvee said something into his radio.
“It’s covered,” he told Danny. Danny slung her rifle down from her shoulder and climbed in the back, that familiar wide, flat space with benches along the sides she’d spent so much time bouncing around in during her tours of duty. There were two Hawkstone men in there with her, both wearing hardware store respirator masks. She sat close to the open tail of the vehicle and kept her rifle at a careless attitude—one that would make it quick to aim, if they decided to try something.
In her rapid analysis of the situation she couldn’t come up with any good-news reason for the attention. She was in trouble. Probably her useless stint down in the records room of the Pyramid Building. The tired man with the mustache might have ratted her out.
They drove in silence for a few minutes, first westward, then what looked like due south. The west side of the road was bordered by a massive barricade, composed mostly of crushed vehicles and chunks of architecture, bulldozed into a rough wall and bound with accordion wire. It ran, as far as Danny could see, all the way along the street, crushed up against the façades of the buildings and piled across the intersections to form an unbroken boundary twice the height of a man. The smoky, fire-blown darkness outside was punctuated in this new area by battery-powered area lamps, so the world alternated between deep, bloody brown shadows and pools of sickening green light. It appeared to be snowing heavily, but the air was parching hot.
The windshield wipers scraped ash off the glass. The driver was hunched over, visibility poor. Choking grit swirled in through the back of the Humvee. One of the lights caught the blade of a street sign, and Danny saw they were traveling along Guerrero Street. This meant nothing to her in terms of navigation, but she knew what the word meant:
warrior
. Ramirez had taught it to her, in the desert on the other side of the world.
They came to a broad intersection where a Bradley fighting vehicle stood, a gunner in night vision goggles manning the .50 caliber weapon on the roof. The cross-street was barricaded with razor wire set up on pylons. Close behind the barricade were fresh, bright flames and the lumpen silhouettes
of massed undead, clawing at the barrier, eyes flashing yellow when they reflected the lights. There were thousands of them. The air boomed with fire and moaning from voiceless mouths.