Last Year

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “We might have to get out of here,” Theo said; this, too, not for the first time. “If things get completely crazy.”

  “But not yet.”

  “But if we do have to get out, even without this fucking wrist cuff—”

  “You can tie my jacket around your waist, so you won’t get arrested for public indecency, if that’s what you’re wondering about.”

  But what then? Where would they go? Theo’s accomplices in this world, mostly runners, had set up bank accounts he could draw on in an emergency. But the evacuation of City people from both coasts had thrown that network into disarray. All but the most fanatical runners had already decamped for the plains of Illinois.

  We’re a long way out on a thin limb, Mercy thought; and it was making Theo crazy.

  She looked outside again. Events at the house had attracted the attention of the crowd that had gathered to watch the fires consuming the Chinese quarter. But the house was surrounded by walls, and although the gates were open, the onlookers stayed outside them, out of some instinctive deference to the property and prerogatives of the rich. Nothing new, she was about to tell Theo, but then a figure lurched out of the darkness, heading straight for the coach.

  A meaty hand landed on the door handle and yanked it open. Jesse Cullum leaned inside.

  Mercy almost failed to recognize him. His expression was a mask of grief or outrage, and worse, his face was speckled with blood: There was a dime-sized spot of it above his right eye and smaller dots clustered around his cheek, as if he had been flecked with a blood-brush. He looked at Mercy but didn’t seem especially interested in her. “Sit tight,” he said in a flat voice. “I’ll drive the rig up to the house. Once we’re inside, you can talk to your father by radio.”

  His right hand was bloody, too. The blood, oily black by moonlight, seemed to be leaking from the cuff of his shirt, also sodden with blood. “Are you hurt?”

  “A little. There are people inside who are hurt worse.”

  “I can help,” she said.

  He looked at her dubiously.

  “Seriously,” she said. “I volunteered at a hospital when I was doing pre-med. I’m not squeamish, and I can do basic first aid.”

  “All right,” Jesse said. He closed the door, climbed onto the driver’s bench, and set the carriage in motion.

  * * *

  Elizabeth improvised a compression bandage for Phoebe’s wound while Jesse was out retrieving the carriage.

  He came back into the house with Mercy and Theo trailing behind him, rubbing their wrists where Jesse had cut away the flex cuffs. Mercy rushed to the sofa where Phoebe was lying, muttering something about her med-school training. Elizabeth was skeptical—she had pegged Kemp’s daughter as the kind of dilettante who wears Prada to a sit-in—but she stood back while Mercy examined the unconscious girl. “Good job stanching the wound,” Mercy said, “but you must know she needs more than a bandage.”

  “Her name is Phoebe. And yeah, I do know that.”

  “She’s bleeding internally, her pulse is weak—she needs serious medical attention as soon as possible.”

  “Obviously. I was about to radio your father.”

  “Call him now,” Mercy said, which was fairly presumptuous for someone who had recently been cuffed to a guy without pants. But there was nothing wrong with the advice.

  Elizabeth nodded. “I will. In the meantime you should look after Jesse’s arm.”

  “If he’ll let me. Are there any other injuries?”

  “Nothing serious. There’s a stack of bodies upstairs, but the survivors are all down here.”

  “What about you?” Mercy was eyeing Elizabeth’s shirt where she had bled into it.

  “When you have time,” Elizabeth said.

  * * *

  Elizabeth took the radio to an adjoining room. The radio reminded her of an antique mobile phone: It had a collapsible antenna, which she extended to its fullest length, and she stood by the window to use it, as if it might work better if it had a clear view toward Oakland.

  This wasn’t the easiest call Elizabeth had ever made, but it was probably the most urgent. The voice that came crackling back at her was August Kemp’s, and he was pissed. “Where the fuck are you? You missed the rendezvous—what’s your status?”

  “We’re halfway up Nob Hill, and we have injured requiring evac.”

  “Is Mercy—”

  “Mercy’s all right. She’s here, she’s okay, but there’s no way we can get her to the docks tonight.”

  “Okay … so who’s injured? You?”

  “Jesse and I sustained minor injuries, but we’re basically okay. But we have a young woman who took a bullet and needs attention ASAP.”

  “A local?”

  “She was hurt while we were on City business.” Not strictly true, but it was a useful lie.

  Kemp said, “We’re not in the business of patching up locals.”

  Mercy Kemp came into the room. Elizabeth turned to face the window. A reef of cloud had rolled in from the sea, reflecting the glare of the Chinatown fires, as if the clouds themselves were about to burst into flame. “She’ll die without help.”

  “I’m truly sorry to hear that, but there’s nothing I can do.”

  “We have a moral obligation—”

  “You picked the wrong time to lecture me about morality. Give me your location and I’ll arrange to evacuate you and my daughter. And here’s a clue: The next words out of your mouth should be ‘yes sir’ and ‘thank you.’”

  Elizabeth stared at the radio. This was going south even faster than she had feared.

  Mercy put a hand on Elizabeth’s shoulder. “Let me talk to him.”

  “What?”

  “Just let me talk.”

  Elizabeth was annoyed, but anything that might change Kemp’s mind was worth a try. She showed Mercy the send/receive button and handed over the device. After that, all she could hear was Mercy’s end of the conversation:

  “It’s me.”

  Pause.

  “Yes!”

  Pause.

  “No, I want to go back. But—”

  Pause.

  “I understand that, but we have a medical emergency.”

  Pause.

  “No!”

  Pause.

  “Bottom line, I’m not leaving this house unless she does.”

  Pause.

  “Of course I know what it means! This isn’t negotiable.”

  Pause.

  “I’m standing by a door, and there’s nothing stopping me from walking out of it.”

  Pause.

  “All right. Yes, all right.”

  Mercy handed the radio back to Elizabeth.

  August Kemp said, “You heard that?”

  “This end of it.”

  “My daughter is acting irrationally. I need you and Jesse to take her into custody. I trust you can do that without hurting her. Handcuff her if you have to.”

  “Sir—”

  “What?”

  “I’m not in a position to do that.”

  “Say again?”

  “It’s not currently possible to comply with that order.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “It’s the situation on the ground.”

  Elizabeth closed her eyes. After everything she had been through today, the prospect of losing her job seemed trivial. But she had probably just guaranteed that outcome. She heard Kemp talking to someone else, barking out unintelligible orders with his thumb still on the transmit button. Then he said, “Get your runners ready for transport. We’ll discuss this face to face.”

  * * *

  Jesse stood by his sister, watching her. Her bleeding had been stanched and her wound bandaged, but she was still unconscious and grievously hurt.

  One of Candy’s bullets had passed through the door of the closet and pierced Phoebe’s gut. He had found her slumped and gushing blood, and he had carried her to the parlor sofa, cradled in his arms as if it were not too late to prot
ect her, as if the idea of protecting her had not become a foolish joke. He stood over her now, calculating all the ways he could have prevented this. He replayed the memory of his struggle with Candy as if it were one of the songs in the iPod Elizabeth had given him, until he felt a gentle touch at his shoulder.

  “Come away,” Aunt Abbie said. “Elizabeth and Miss Kemp need to prepare her so she can be moved.”

  It was a common belief that women were useless in an emergency, but Jesse had known it for a lie long before he went to work for the City of Futurity. Abbie was just one more item of evidence. Women were soft, it was said; they tended to faint or succumb to hysteria; but Jesse had often seen in the women he knew something precisely the opposite: a polished, refractory hardness. He forced himself to turn away and allowed Aunt Abbie to steer him to the room she used as a library.

  He had much to apologize for. In a single night he had made a charnel house of her mansion and changed the course of her life irrevocably. But she refused his mumbled contrition. “The people responsible for the carnage are dead, Jesse, and if not for you I might be dead in their place. Don’t take on the weight of Mr. Candy’s sins.” She said this confidently, though her hands, Jesse saw, were shaking. He wondered if she was coming down with PTSD. It would be a miracle if she were not.

  “Aunt Abbie … what will you do now?”

  “When you call me Aunt Abbie you make me think of the boy you were when your father first delivered you here. Do you remember that day? How wide your eyes were when you walked into this room! You said you’d never seen so many books in your life. And in the end, it was easier to let you read them at whim than to give you a proper education. Don’t worry about me, Jesse. My home was invaded by armed criminals, who will trouble us no longer. No one will mourn for them and the police will be grateful, on balance, to find them dead. Anything more difficult to explain, such as the use of unusual weapons, I intend to blame on you and your connection to the City of Futurity—assuming you’re safely far away. Is that all right?”

  “Blame me for bank failures and bad weather, too, if it serves you. I don’t mind. But what about the house? It’s damaged, and it’ll become notorious if the newspapers take up the story.”

  “I’m not bound to this house. Notorious or not, it can be sold. I wouldn’t be sorry to go back to Boston, if it comes to that. This was a good place for Phoebe, on the whole, but now—” Her words stopped as if they had hit a wall. “Do you think she can be saved?”

  “The City people know how to save her.” It was not as positive an answer as he would have liked to give.

  “Is that where you’ll take her, the City of Futurity?”

  “That’s where they have the tools and machines to save her life.”

  “According to the newspapers, the City is under siege.”

  “Don’t believe everything you read. I expect August Kemp knows how to find his way inside.”

  “I hope so. But, Jesse—” She became stern. “I don’t hold you responsible for what happened to your sister, or to Randal, or for anything else that went on here. But I’m entrusting you with Phoebe, and I do hold you responsible for what happens next. You must do your very best to help her, and if in the end you can’t help her, you must comfort her. Save her or soothe her dying. Will you do that?”

  They were terrible words to pronounce, terrible to hear. “I won’t abandon her.”

  It was a binding promise. Aunt Abbie nodded. Jesse said, “How is Soo Yee?”

  “She’s in the kitchen, keeping to herself. Randal was killed in front of her, and she hasn’t spoken since she learned of Sonny’s murder. Soo Yee has a place with me as long as she wants it, of course…” Before Jesse could speak again she looked over his shoulder at the window, startled. “My goodness, what’s that light?”

  * * *

  Jesse left his aunt in the library and hurried up to the widow’s walk. Elizabeth was already there. The radio was in her hand, and she was talking to it.

  Two of Candy’s men had died here, but Jesse had dragged the bodies into the turret room and out of the way. Sooner or later, an undertaker would be called to remove the numerous dead. The blood that had been tracked underfoot would be difficult to get rid of, but he guessed it could be done. Memories were harder to eradicate. He could hardly blame Aunt Abbie for wanting to close the house and sell it. It would be many years before the sum of its tenants exceeded the sum of its ghosts.

  The light that had startled Abbie was moving up California Street from the south, a circle of artificial daylight swinging like a bucket at the end of a rope. Its source was airborne. Jesse said, “A helicopter.”

  Elizabeth kept the radio to her ear, but no message was coming through at the moment. “Yep.”

  “Did it come all the way from the City?”

  “Hardly. The helicopter at the City isn’t the only one Kemp imported. It’s not even the only aircraft. There are at least two fixed-wing planes stashed at isolated hangars within range of both coasts. Multiple redundancy.”

  “First I’ve heard of it,” Jesse said. There had been rumors, of course, but there were always rumors, some more plausible than others.

  “All the aircraft and associated gear came through the Mirror before construction on the towers was finished—probably before you were hired. Kemp was never going to let himself get caught in Manhattan or San Francisco without a guaranteed escape route. And a Plan B, and a Plan C, in case of emergencies.”

  “Like this.”

  “I doubt he imagined an emergency quite like this. But yeah.”

  The radio crackled again as Mercy came up the stairs from below.

  Jesse looked out at the crowd in the street. The Chinatown fires were burning brighter than ever, but the crowd had turned its attention to the airship’s fulgent glare and clattering roar. The helicopter’s searchlight flitted over the homes of the wealthy like the attention of a jealous god. A few people began to run haphazardly or to crouch behind walls, and Jesse hoped no one would be bold or stupid enough to pull a gun and fire at what frightened them.

  “There’s no protected place to land,” Elizabeth said, raising her voice above the noise, “so they want to do a rooftop evac, like they do with flood victims.”

  Mercy stepped up next to Jesse. “Do they have a litter?”

  “A Stokes basket, yeah,” Elizabeth said.

  “Tell them to send it down first. I don’t want my father dropping a security team on us.”

  Elizabeth relayed the request and listened to the answer. “They say they’ll lower the basket for casualties as soon as you’re safely on board.”

  “Not acceptable. There’s no way I’m going aboard before Phoebe. If I see anything but a basket coming out of that helicopter, I’ll be out the front door and running.”

  Jesse’s respect for the woman went up another notch. Mercy looked as skinny and insubstantial as the women whose pictures appeared in glossy twenty-first-century magazines, but she possessed considerable grit.

  The airship was almost directly overhead now. Its metallic underside glittered balefully, and it broadcast a false daylight that turned the lawn a phosphorescent green. “No, he’s right here,” Elizabeth said, and handed the radio to Jesse.

  Jesse accepted it reluctantly. The next voice he heard was August Kemp’s. “Elizabeth says you’re injured. Is that true?”

  “My right arm, but I can still use it.”

  “And my daughter is there with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Listen carefully. Don’t speak, just listen. I don’t want you to hurt her, but I want you to take her into custody. Right now. Handcuff her if necessary.”

  Jesse pretended to think about it. Neither Mercy nor Elizabeth had been able to hear the exchange, but both eyed him warily. He let a few more seconds slip by. Then he said, “I won’t do it.”

  He waited another long minute, but Kemp said nothing further. He gave the radio to Elizabeth. She pressed its buttons, without result. Then
a man wearing a helmet and orange-colored overalls appeared in the side door of the airship, swinging out a metal-frame bed—Elizabeth had called it a Stokes basket—on a system of ropes and pulleys. Jesse hurried into the house, calling out to Theo and Aunt Abbie to help him carry Phoebe up the stairs.

  18

  Aboard the airship there was a City physician, a solemn black man, who examined Phoebe without speaking. She had been sweating and moaning when Jesse carried her up the stairs, but the doctor administered a drug and plugged a bag of fluid into her arm, and soon enough her eyes closed and her face became peaceful.

  Jesse would have thanked the man, but the roar of the helicopter was as oppressive on the inside as it had seemed from the outside. Meaningful communication was almost impossible for anyone not wearing a headset, and Jesse had not been given one, so he sat wordlessly on a bench in the cramped interior as the doors were sealed and the airship hurtled higher into the air. Through the small window at his shoulder he was able to see the whole of San Francisco below him, brightest where it was burning, and all the moonlit land and the sea that enclosed it, until vertigo made him turn away and close his eyes.

  When he felt well enough to look again, there was nothing but a plain of cloud, as wide as the world and flowing like an ethereal river. Mercy had bandaged his wounded arm for him, and he cradled it against his body to minimize the pain. After a time the clouds opened to reveal misty hilltops, moon-shadowed valleys, moon-blue rivers, a perspective that belonged by right to God himself; and it made him feel lonesome and fragile to be suspended over this abyss of air by nothing more than burning vapors and whirling steel.

  It wasn’t a prolonged journey. A helicopter couldn’t fly all the way from San Francisco to Illinois without refueling, apparently. The airship gradually lost altitude until it was hovering over a patch of pavement somewhere in the western desert: a landing strip marked with yellow lights, a horizon of dry hills under a firmament of fierce, bright stars.