Like I'd never be right again.
After all, I'd lost a fair few number of people I loved already.
"Allie?" he murmured.
The one voice that could have pulled me out of my near-trance, did.
It was only then that I realized I'd closed my eyes, maybe to do the same thing I'd done as a kid. Ignore a reality that wanted to bludgeon me right in the face.
Instead of looking out the window, I looked at him. His fingers wound into mine. His light came through my skin as he touched me, strongly enough that I felt his worry along with that pulse of warmth, as if through his pores.
"Allie," he murmured again. He tugged me closer. Wrapping an arm around my back, he caressed my face. "Baby...are you all right?"
I wasn't sure what to say to that, either.
I let my mind toy with semantics, instead. Did he mean physically all right? Because really, I should be asking him that question, given what he'd been through in San Francisco and then Argentina. Did he mean my aleimi, or living light? Because ditto on that, since we hadn't come close to repairing all of the damage that had been done to his aleimi in that stronghold of Shadow, even with Balidor and Tarsi spending every free minute working on him.
Also, when did he mean? In the past few minutes? Before I closed my eyes? Before we got off the plane we jacked from that military base in Chile? Or did he mean right now, as I looked at him? Deciding to creatively interpret his question, given the latitude he'd given me, I nodded. Then, more out of habit than for any thought-out reason, I looked out the window again.
Immediately, I wished I hadn't.
Revik squeezed my fingers tighter, as if feeling my reaction as I took in the scenes of devastation unfolding on the other side of the plated organic glass of the armored vehicle.
Unlike me, Revik had seen war before. He’d seen it first-hand, and even more close-up and personal than I was seeing it now. Through his eyes, I’d seen piles of burnt and rotting corpses, reaching all the way back to the beginning of World War I. Revik was there when the Nazis first started feeding the ovens.
He’d also been there after, when the allies disposed of the emaciated remains of seers and Jews and Poles and gypsies in mass graves that stank and emitted toxic gases for decades.
He’d even been the cause of some of that death.
The period when he’d killed the most, however, he’d primarily been the pawn of others. During World War I, as Syrimne, he’d been pawn to his so-called ‘uncle,’ a seriously psychopathic seer named Menlim. Later, he’d worked for Galaith and even Vash, as he pretended to be a Nazi during World War II so that the Rooks might recruit him.
Either way, over the years, Revik had been forced to look out over more than one battlefield...some covered in thousands of dead...and know they'd died at his hands. Unlike me, war had dogged Revik for more than a century.
World Wars I and II. China. Korea. Cuba. Vietnam.
The revolutions in Argentina. Afghanistan. Peru. Turkey...
I knew he hadn't gotten over some of those experiences totally. He was a lot better at compartmentalizing his feelings, though, especially at a time like now.
I should be used to this.
We’d seen the aftermath of something very much like this in San Francisco, even outside the quarantine zone. That should have been harder, really, since I grew up there and knew a lot more people who were probably dead.
Maybe it had been easier back then to convince myself the whole thing could be contained. I could still tell myself that, even if it was my city, it was only the one city. I could pretend Shadow singled them out only because of me...that only that one, unlucky group of people ever had to die in such an unthinkable way.
Back then, I must have still believed we would stop it.
Otherwise, why would this be such a shock now?
"Allie," Revik said. He caressed my lower back, kissing my cheek. "None of us is all right. None of us. Stop trying to be."
I nodded to that, too. At the same time, I'm not entirely sure I really heard him, at least not in a way that was relevant. Turning back to the impact-proof, organic windows of the Humvee, I forced my eyes back to what slid past the greenish-tinted glass.
We were back in New York, the state at least.
I might not have believed it, if someone sent me the images via the non-network feeds. We'd left a private airstrip outside of Albany a few hours earlier, and were driving south towards New York City. A lot of other people were, too.
I wondered if even half of them had any prayer of getting where they were going.
I didn’t really like our chances, either. I knew ours were significantly better than most of theirs, however, and not only because seers were immune to the deadly disease.
Instead of a quarantine locking all of the infected humans inside the city, like what happened in San Francisco, New York opted to lock everyone out.
Both international airports and three private airstrips located in the surrounding boroughs closed as soon as the epidemic began moving east from Los Angeles and Chicago like a brush fire across the plains, then north from Miami and Mexico, where it had jumped from Cuba and South America.
Now all air traffic over New York had been suspended indefinitely.
Anyone who dared breach the 'safe zone' radius would be shot down by the giant anti-aircraft guns now jutting out over the waters of both the East River and the Hudson, as well as those aimed roughly in the direction of Staten Island itself. Loaded private security boats patrolled the waters, too, guarding a perimeter held by massive organic binary electric, or ‘OBE’ fields jacked up to their highest setting, which could cut an airplane cleanly in half, much less a human being.
The mayor of New York City, an ex-special forces commander and two-tour veteran of the wars against Greece and Pakistan, put the city under martial law as soon as news of the disease’s spread hit the feeds. He moved so quickly, in fact, that Balidor and the rest of the senior infiltration team strongly suspected he'd been tipped off.
Or, at the very least, that he'd designed contingency plans in advance, for a situation very much like the one currently unfolding in just about every major city in the world.
The mayor also ordered all water sources cut off from the outside and all delivery of food to be suspended.
He shut down the bridges, blocked the tunnels with explosives and armored tanks, and covered the banks of the island on every side with mines and razor wire. He cranked up the already-impressive organic grid around the island of Manhattan itself and added an even more deadly OBE field that stretched up into the skies.
That same boundary, initially erected to keep the rising Atlantic at bay and protect the city from increasingly intense tropical storms, would now fry anyone who got within a hundred meters of any one of the island’s shores.
I'd begun to wonder if the OBEs themselves had been created for this exact scenario. They seemed to appear out of nowhere about a year ago, and now they were everywhere.
Well, everywhere we'd been, in a military capacity, at any rate.
Heck, we were using a bastardized version of an OBE ourselves, on the roof of the hotel in Manhattan. Ours was designed and created by Arc Enterprises to compete with Black Arrow Industries’ version, however, which they’d done to ensure that not only human multinationals and seer terrorists were the recipients of that particular tech.
How long the city could remain locked down was anyone's guess.
New York City, even stripped of its six million commuters and everyone who lived in the surrounding boroughs, had a hell of a lot of people to feed, given that downtown Manhattan wasn't exactly a hotbed of agricultural development.
From what I'd seen on the networks, the previous mayor built some massive water tank and/or water de-salinization and purification plant under the city itself, in the event of an emergency situation like this, but no one seemed to know just how well the city was fixed for food. I couldn't help thinking that the more wealthy residents
would find some way to solve that problem, at least in the short term. The poor and middle classes might not be so lucky, unless dynamics in the city had changed a lot in the weeks we'd been gone.
Next to me, Revik gave a low grunt of agreement.
We'd already heard there had been purges since the quarantine walls went up. Most of these had been done under the auspices of ‘removing contamination risks,’ which seemed to mean that anyone with a head cold could be picked up as an ‘immunity risk’ and forcibly removed via a one-way boat trip. Again, I kind of doubted the rich were included in these purges.
Again, Revik grunted in agreement next to me.
We had to assume that a significant chunk of Shadow's 'chosen' must be hunkered down in New York City, too.
Shadow, the moniker of the mysterious being who engineered the human-killing virus in the first place––which they were now called C2-77––seemed to have his own ideas about who among the human race deserved to live. C2-77 seemed meant to do the job of culling pretty much everyone else...meaning every human who hadn't been granted some sort of free pass by Shadow himself.
There was also a certain percentage of humans who were immune altogether, but that percentage was abysmally small––less than one in four of all humans on the planet. That left another nearly seven billion people who probably wouldn't make it. It also made C2-77 the deadliest known disease of all time.
Other problems made headlines, too.
Water levels had been rising for the past two decades, of course, from the ice caps melting and whatever else. Now, however, they seemed to have hit some kind of critical mass. For the first time, force fields around some of the islands were failing.
For the first time in over ten years, previously 'rescued' cities and countries were finding themselves underwater, too, even in places as well-populated and technologically advanced as Japan. According to Balidor, seismic activity had also increased in several parts of the globe, and the whole freak storm, flood and drought thing that had been happening for years now seemed to have either gotten worse all of a sudden, or else we’d just entered peak season.
It was as if the release of the human-killing virus had given the quirky weather an excuse to have at it, too...which again, made me wonder if some of these weather patterns were being messed with by Shadow and some of his cronies, as well.
There had been monsoon-type weather and intense tropical storms reported as far north as New York itself, as well as Seattle and Vancouver BC. Texas and Mexico were so dry they would probably be completely unlivable if it wasn't for the massive greenhouses built outside of major cities like Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Mexico City and Cancun.
Fresh water was becoming a serious issue, too, even apart from threats of contamination, and Revik told me there had been rumors of invading forces by Nepalese, Indian, Pakistani, Mongolian and Bhutanese troops making land grabs to secure access to water from the Chinese. The whole line of the Himalayas, on both sides, had become a militarized zone over water rights, with pretty much everyone taking an every-person-for-themselves approach to securing enough water to grow food.
With large numbers of the population being forced out of cities to escape the spread of the disease, that would only get worse.
We figured that growing scarcity of resources must form part, if not the primary reason, Shadow and his people were killing off the excess human population in the first place.
As near as we could tell, Shadow had decided to solve the resource allocation problem by decreasing competition for those resources by more than half, and then dividing up the spoils among whoever lived. It was certainly starting to look as if the quarantine cities functioned mainly as safe zones for his favored few to wait out the plague.
As it happened, most of our people were inside those quarantine walls, too.
Well, the ones who hadn't been with us in Argentina or San Francisco, that is. Which, come to think of it, was significantly less than a third of our total numbers, especially if we counted all of the new additions from the work camps Wreg liberated in Brazil.
We hadn't gotten much news out of the city itself, not since the feed blackout spread across most of the Americas. We kept our Barrier communications to a minimum and cryptic, too, but as far as we knew, the remnants of the Adhipan and the Seven were still there, hunkered down in the House on the Hill, a five-star hotel on Central Park South.
We did receive a few scattered, rumor-like reports from a network that maintained emergency broadcasting, claiming that riots continued to break out inside the city as people fought over water rations, food, gasoline, electricity, batteries, feed bandwidth, housing and whatever else. Most of those disturbances were put down with brute force by the NYPD and private security firms hired to assist in resource allocation.
From what we’d heard, that force wasn't being applied lightly, nor with a lot of finesse. To call it martial law even struck me as euphemistic; we'd intercepted more than one message warning New Yorkers what would happen to anyone caught attempting to steal rations. The military representative used language like ‘sentences executed without delay,’ and ‘requirements to warn waived,’ and ‘single-point decision-making,’ so we figured most weren't even being questioned, but simply shot on the spot, or deported, if they were lucky.
Para-military groups working for those same private contractors guarded food and water reserves and doled out rations once a day, generally in the morning, starting around dawn. Those reserve dumps reportedly existed in six or seven locations across the island.
The official United States military had a lockdown over the power grid used by Manhattan itself. Mysteriously, similar resources didn't appear to be available for power stations in any other part of the state, or in most parts of the country.
We’d already heard stories about people hoarding food.
We’d also heard reports of ‘territories’ being carved out, some protected by yet more private security and OBEs, but a few probably being run by organized crime syndicates, as well. I imagined a few new faces were in the mix, too...individuals whose more psychopathic tendencies were aroused by the Lord of the Flies-type environment erupting in the city.
Somehow, that depressed me as much as the actual death and disease.
"How are we even going to get inside?" I asked him, as much to distract myself as anything.
Revik stared out the window, frowning without answering me.
I could tell from his expression he’d heard some if not all of my thoughts. I also could feel that he was worrying about the damage to his aleimi again.
More to the point, he was worrying about his ability to do much with it, if we found ourselves in a serious situation and needed to fight our way out. The one part of him that Balidor and Tarsi both agreed wouldn't be operational for some time yet was what he used to perform the telekinesis.
"...Does Balidor have that worked out?" I added, a little more sharply, trying to distract him that time. "Our entry plan?"
He looked at me. After a short pause, he shrugged. His eyes flickered down over my body then, and briefly, I saw a different look rise to his eyes.
I found myself staring back at the expression there, a little thrown.
"Seriously?" I said. "Now? How can you be thinking about that now?"
He smiled, wrapping a hand around my hip.
With his other hand, he caressed my throat with his fingers, and I felt a slow tugging there, faint but perceptible. His pain worsened, enough that I knew he might be using it to distract me, or maybe to keep my eyes off the view outside the Humvee’s window.
"You're unbelievable," I said, laughing a little in spite of myself. "Or else a full-blown sociopath, I'm not sure which."
From his other side, Wreg smacked Revik roughly on the shoulder with the palm of his hand. "Cut it out, Nenz,” he growled. “Seriously. I'm not up for it right now."
"Or maybe you're a little too up for it, Commander Wreg?" Revik said, grinning over his shoulder at him.
"You really are a fucking pervert, you know that? Where's your sense of decorum?"
"About where you left yours around 1891, I imagine,” Revik smirked.
"Fuck you very much, Illustrious Sword. I at least have the decency not to be thinking with my dick every damned minute..."
“Sure you do,” Revik laughed, and Wreg hit him again, harder.
"Shut up, goddamn it!" he said, his voice still low. He pointed down at the other man sprawled in his lap. "You're going to wake him up. And I finally got him to sleep...so keep your damned opinions about my light to yourself. You're the one with the self-control of a drunk adolescent..."
Revik laughed again, but quieter that time.
He still didn't let go of me, and I couldn't help agreeing with Wreg, at least in part.
Those same pulses of heat continued to slide through his fingers as he maneuvered his hand under the armored vest I wore, and then the shirt underneath that. If he was trying to distract me, it was working...but then, he'd been in a pretty weird space since we left Argentina.
Truthfully, I was starting to wonder about him a bit.
He was the first to admit that he'd been having 'issues' with his aleimi around me, pretty much since the wedding, although he wouldn't tell me why, or what he thought it meant. Whatever it was, it was making his light even more volatile than usual.
I'd asked him if the injuries from Shadow were affecting him in that area, too, but he never really answered me. At this point, all I really did know was that there was something he didn't want to tell me, at least in regard to his light.
I considered asking him again now, especially when I saw the ring of his irises glowing faintly in the low light from the armored vehicle's floor. Dismissing it when I saw him looking at my mouth, I glanced around him to the other seer, who pointed at his lap.
"Keep your man under control, Esteemed Bridge," Wreg advised me curtly.
"You say that like it was a remote possibility," I sighed.
Revik chuckled again, right before he leaned down to kiss my neck. When he started putting light into his tongue, I felt myself flush and glanced again at Wreg, who frowned at me openly.
Allie's War Season Three Page 79