Firebreak

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  I start recording.

  Where there’s a gap in the onrushing of people, I slip into it and let it carry me. I blend in pretty well with my mask and backpack, but nobody’s paying attention to me anyway. They’re running down the street dragging their children and pets and go bags with them. A number of them are visibly freshly injured. Confusingly, others have older damage. Makeshift bandages caked in days of city grime. Like they’ve been out here, walking wounded, for a while. Why haven’t they reported to nearest authority, whose further instruction might have involved, like, a hospital? A woman carrying two babies and a backpack twice the size of mine is hobbling next to me on a leg that looks like it’s been in its splint for a while. I gesture at her to pass me something to carry—it’s hard to breathe and run and talk through the mask at the same time—but she just gives me a dirty look like I’m trying to steal her backpack or maybe her babies and keeps powering forward.

  A second helicopter chops the air overhead. THIS AREA IS OFF LIMITS TO CIVILIAN ACTIVITY, shouts a voice distorted by loudspeaker. A second, smaller version of the announcement plays directly into my head via my implant, a smaller, harmonic echo chasing the huge noise of the speaker. It also displays in a rolling banner of text across my visual field like a newsfeed chyron. DISPERSE. DISPERSE. REPEAT: THIS AREA IS OFF-LIMITS. RETURN TO YOUR HOMES AND REMAIN INDOORS UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

  Well, my home is miles away. Not much chance of that.

  The loudspeaker starts to say something else, but it dies in a crackle of blue fire that rips the helicopter from the sky and hurls it away over the buildings. There comes a blaring sound from somewhere behind me, deep and loud enough to rattle my molars together.

  Above that, screams rise.

  Despite myself, I look back.

  There’s a crowd of people huddled around the side of this massive fake-old building that might be some kind of museum. Dozens of them, hiding in the shadow of a gigantic pillar. They’re still screaming even after the blue fireball of the helicopter has passed over them and gone. A number of them are messing with their faces, but from here I have no idea why. Something’s clearly got them frozen there, together in a group. Something above and beyond the fear.

  I glance from them up the street. The mech, having wrapped up its helicopter target practice, now has its hands full with a swooping murmuration of drones that arrives to lay down a peppering of suppressive fire at the level of the citykiller’s pilot module.

  The people by the museum thing aren’t all that far away.

  I need to get out of this. I need to get home. The smell in the air is something I can’t place, but it slingshots me straight back through time until I’m a little kid in a bathtub being told jokes while I wait to die.

  My hands are sweating. I wipe them on my pants. I want the sidewalk to open up and swallow me. I want to wake up and be back in my bunk. I want my vision to stop going dark around the edges like I’m about to pass out.

  But at the same time, my mind has gone kind of shockingly clear. Later I’ll decide I used up all my panic when I saw Comforts of Home where B’s sister’s coffee shop should have been. For now I turn fully back toward the museum and square my backpack on my shoulders. Deep breath.

  Just like the game, I tell myself. Just like the game.

  Pushing backward against that fleeing crowd is like walking through water up to my neck. I tuck my chin and bull forward. Within seven more iterations of the alert chyron, I’m standing in the shadow of those ridiculous pillars.

  Up close, these are obviously people who are having a worse day than me, and that’s saying something.

  There are easily fifty of them, all crammed together. I don’t know whether the injured people I saw before were all traveling together or there’s just a higher concentration of them in this group, but everywhere I look are bandages and crutches and splints. Everyone’s filthy and hungry looking, and I can hear at least three separate babies screaming.

  Then I realize what they’re reminding me of. Me. Me and the eight other survivors of my building, just after the recovery drones tasted our living-human chemical signature buried in the rubble and disinterred us. Except nobody’s giving these people blankets and hot cocoa and company-logo toiletry bags. They’re on their own.

  At first I assume the injuries are what’s slowing them down, what’s making them hide by this awful building rather than getting out of the line of fire like they’re supposed to.

  And then I get a little closer, and I understand.

  Pretty much every pair of eyes I look at is horribly bloodshot, the whites gone almost totally red like their eyeballs are hemorrhaging. Right in front of me a man cries out and scrabbles at his face with his fingers until another man stops him, and when his friend pulls his hands away, I can see where his retinas have swelled up around the edges of his lenses, which didn’t pop out with the increased pressure but seem to have instead partially melted into the surface of his eyes somehow.

  Now that I know to look for it, I see it everywhere in these people. Red, swollen eyes pushing up around lenses that won’t come out. I don’t know how they’ve been able to see enough to get here. Maybe somebody helped them this far and then ran off when the mech-helicopter-drone battle royale started bringing buildings down around their heads. Maybe whatever’s in their eyes is something they picked up here. Some localized burst of something, probably not targeted at them. Collateral damage. Wrong place, wrong time. It happens.

  Regardless, these people’s lenses aren’t interfacing with shit anymore, not in that condition. I wonder which of the bioweapons on the FAQ I’m looking at. It’s like an interface scrambler admixed with some kind of hyperirritant, pepper spray or something nastier. I wonder if these people even got the PHASE ORANGE alert before the MODERATE THREAT was right on top of them.

  I have a hell of a lot of questions. But no time for any of them.

  Turn around, I tell myself. Get your own ass out of here. They’ve made it this far. They’ll be fine.

  But that’s flagrant bullshit, and I know it. Maybe people who do nothing in situations like this live longer than people who stick their necks out, but I will hate my bystander ass for every day of my bystander life if I leave these people here to become collateral damage like the families of literally every single person I know.

  “Follow me!” I hear myself shout. “I can get you out of here.”

  “Who is that?” someone calls. “That’s not Emily.”

  “Fuck Emily,” someone else replies. “Emily ditched us, and this one’ll ditch us too. We stay here where it’s safe.”

  No time to explain how where they are standing is the precise opposite of safe. All I have to do is hold my shit together long enough to get them out of citykiller stomping range. If I can’t do that much, I’m fucked either way. “I’m not Emily and I’m not going to ditch you, but if you want to come with me, you have to fucking move. Now.”

  They start grabbing onto each other’s backpacks and coat sleeves and hands, lacing together into some kind of refugee agglomeration, like a colony of army ants or an archipelago of plastic digesters. It’s pretty much how I expected them to travel, but the practiced ease of it gives me pause. How long have they been out here like this?

  Three separate hands latch onto my backpack, and I have to suppress a shudder. Being touched by strangers is its own special circle of hell, and I will not be convinced otherwise. But nobody tries to take my backpack off, and nobody touches any part of my person.

  I guess we’re doing this.

  “Everybody ready?” I call back. A drone crashes to the pavement not six feet away, drowning out my words. But when I move forward, they follow.

  I travel with them for blocks and blocks. It’s slow, it’s painfully slow, and I haven’t the faintest goddamn clue where I’m leading them, and I begin to regret my ill-advised high-mindedness almost immediately, but we make it work, staying low and tight against the buildings. Drones are still falling out of the sky
, but that’s mostly happening behind us now. Here the bigger problem is getting stampeded by other runners. It’s like everybody in this goddamn city is fleeing on foot, and nobody knows where to go. I can hear cries behind me, but I can’t stop and take account of new injuries. All I can do is keep moving.

  I dare one glance backward. We’re at the top of a rise in the street, and I can see way, way back over the crowd to the distant vanishing point where the mech’s standing astride all eight lanes, taking potshots at something out of sight down a side avenue.

  I don’t look back again.

  After a few more blocks, long past when my knees are wrecked from the hobbling, crouching run, and my shoulders are bruised from the backward pull on my backpack straps, and my nerves are shot to hell and back, I hear the mech take off down that side avenue, far faster than something that size should conceivably move.

  But the screaming crowd is still barreling past, deafening. If I try to ask my group where they were headed or where they came from or where I should be taking them now, all it’ll earn me is a squeezing tightness in my lungs from trying to yell through the filtration mask and two decades of mediocre physical fitness.

  I decide to follow the main crowd. Eventually that scatters into groups, leaving me standing in open ground in the middle of a deserted street with fifty-plus people and not a solid game plan among us.

  By this point I’m pretty much falling over with exhaustion and panic and relief at not being vaporized by those gun-arms or pancaked by a downed strike drone, but I can’t exactly leave them here.

  For lack of a better idea, I lead them into a back alley between high buildings and help them pack in. “We’re safe here,” I tell them, hoping this is true. “The mech is blocks away now and heading in the opposite direction.” It’s actually headed away at a ninety-degree angle, but I don’t want to scare them more than they are already.

  “Where are we?” someone asks.

  Good question. I pull up a map and read off an address. As far as I’m concerned, it might as well be on the moon.

  In the first piece of good news I’ve had all day, now that we’ve settled into the alley, three people immediately take charge. A woman and two men. They park themselves in the mouth of the alley, holding handguns that are going to do them a hilarious lot of good if that mech decides to double back and pay us all a visit.

  Our little space backs onto a chain-link fence with a couple of dumpsters, then goes past the buildings behind and opens onto the street. If it comes to it, I wonder how many of these people are healthy enough to get over that fence. Hell, I wonder if I am. Now that we’ve stopped moving, the adrenaline rush of the last hour or so has run dry, dumping me entirely on my ass. We’re as safe here as we’re going to get, and sooner or later someone will have to help us.

  I wait a few minutes. Nobody comes.

  I work my way out of the packed alley and come level with the group leaders just a bit back from the street. “Do you all live in the same building? Give me the address and I can try to get you there if it’s not too far.”

  “Address,” the woman echoes, with this bitter noise that doesn’t quite pass as a laugh. She’s clutching that pistol like a security blanket. Would she try to fire blind against a sixty-foot-tall mech if it came to that? If she has people here to protect, her people, I know where I’d lay my money. “What address.”

  This strikes me as overly cryptic, and I still have a bus to catch. “Whatever address. I’m saying, I can take you there. At least partway. If it’s soon. I have to—”

  “We’re going to the hospital,” someone else says. “We’ve been trying to get there for a couple days. It’s been… complicated.”

  I can well imagine.

  “I don’t know where that is,” I tell them. “But I can find out. Tell me the address, or the name of the hospital, and I’ll pull it up. We can start making our way over to—”

  Something maybe a block distant plummets and shatters, shaking the ground.

  “No,” the leader woman says. “We wait here until it calms down. Too risky.”

  I glance around. Nobody else seems in any kind of major hurry to move from this quiet space, and whatever choices they’ve been making have been keeping them alive so far, and I’m not about to pretend I know any better. I find myself a clearish spot against a wall and lean on it. I’m having a hard time picturing getting up and walking out there, through that, alone, in search of a bus station. Besides, I don’t know who Emily is or what she did that ended with dumping fifty-plus helpless people at the feet of an honest-to-shit citykiller mech, but I’m guessing that in the grand scheme of things I probably don’t want to be an Emily. Worst case, I can find somewhere to sleep tonight and grab a bus in the morning. At least I don’t have any dog walking scheduled until the day after tomorrow.

  Look at me, reassuring myself about job security when these might be my last minutes to live. That’s pretty sad even for me.

  “What happened to you,” I say. “The gas attack or whatever? With your lenses? Is it water soluble?”

  “How would I know?” the man says. “Do we look like we have any water to try with?”

  “Well, what I’m saying is I do.” I pull the bottle out of my backpack and hand it over. “It’s not a lot, but it might clean up a few of you. Your lenses are probably toast, but if you can calm down the reaction enough to get them out, you might at least be able to see where you’re going.”

  That is, if your lenses aren’t completely melded to your eyeballs, I don’t say. I imagine they’re pretty well aware of the depth of the shit they’re in without me spelling it out for them.

  There’s a pause. Even at this distance I can hear the citykiller mech clearly: the holding-pattern hum of its gun-arms, punctuated by a periodic dark blare as one discharges, then the sound of something imploding into blue fire.

  I’d know that string of sounds anywhere. I just didn’t fully appreciate until now how accurately they rendered it in-game.

  Other sounds join it. Machine-gun fire pocking into concrete, the whirring chop of another helicopter. An unseen shriek of metal, followed by two seconds of perfect silence and then a concussion that blows out so many windows I can still hear glass tinkling to the street a full minute later. Another drone array dopplers past us with a whine that hurts my teeth.

  From the alley behind me comes a collective moan. Somewhere a child starts crying.

  “We lie low here,” the leader woman says in a tone of quiet command. “When it dies down out there, we move out.”

  “It’s going to be okay,” the second man adds, voice pitched to carry. “Plan hasn’t changed. We’re still going to the hospital. We just have to wait a little, that’s all. Just until it’s safe.”

  That seems to be a long time coming. Plenty of time for me to sit against the wall and watch them splash the last of my water into their eyes and have a good long think about what exact type of hell I’ve wandered into and what my odds are of wandering back out of it anytime soon.

  I can just hear the woman, speaking under her breath: “I told you, the hospital’s full.”

  “You got a better idea?” the man says back. Not even angry. Just tired. “Sixty-some chemical attack victims? Bunch of kids? They’ll have to let us in.”

  They start whispering to each other furiously, heading out to the mouth of the alley, just out of my hearing range.

  After a few minutes the other man works his way back along the wall, holding out the now-empty bottle.

  “Did it help?” I ask him, meeting him halfway to take it off his hands. Though I can guess the answer from how he’s squinting and flinching like he’s got all his eyelashes stuck in his eyes all at once.

  “It’s better than it was,” he says, though every inch of his body language says different. “Appreciate it.”

  I glance over toward the other man and woman. Whatever happened to their argument, they now have their pistols out and are making some kind of squinty attempt
at covering the street outside. They must have been given a turn at my water bottle, because at least now they’re aiming the right way.

  “Sure. Where’d you guys come from anyway? Somebody said you’d been out here for a while.”

  He snorts, then waves in the general direction of the mech, invisible but for the plumes of smoke thrown upward by its destruction. “One of those goddamn things took out our building in the middle of the night. You’re looking at the last survivors of Hawk Watch Gardens.”

  I nod my sympathies. “Sunset Vista.”

  “Who names these places anyway? You ever even seen a hawk?”

  “Sure. Few months ago. On a calendar.”

  He shakes his head. “Wait. Shit. Sunset Vista. I remember when your place came down. That was, what, ten, eleven years ago?”

  “Going on twelve.” I lift my chin at the packed alley. “At least they dragged me out of it.”

  “Yeah. Well. We were asleep, man. It was three in the morning. Do you see all those kids?”

  “I see them.”

  “No way to prepare. Nobody came for us. And absolutely the fuck nowhere to go.”

  “Thought you were headed for the hospital.”

  “Hospital’s closed,” he says. “It’s all over the news. They’ve been out of beds since last week. We’ve been figuring we’ll run into a field clinic somewhere, but it hasn’t happened yet. And now our lenses are all fucked, so they’ll probably finally decide to make an announcement about the hospital opening back up, now that we won’t—”

  He cuts off, whirling, as the two guarding the mouth of the alley start to shout. They’re losing their minds at something up the street I can’t see from back here. The man I was talking to staggers out of the alley to join them, gun ready.

  I swing my backpack around front and fumble for my taser. For all the good it’ll do against whatever’s coming down that road.

  Whatever it is, it’s not firing on us as it approaches. It’s talking.