“You okay?” he asked.
“My back,” I grunted.
“Take a few,” he said. “It’s all good.”
He went down for another cup of water and brought me back one. The pain was subsiding, but the rest of the day was going to be rough. I could work through it, but the next day was going to be worse. He passed me the cup, and I gave him my thanks.
The soldier’s radio crackled, and he clicked a button, said some words, got another crackle, and said something else. He blew his whistle, and we reformed for another headcount. Hafiz helped me to my feet. His grip was strong, but I shrugged him off when he tried to help me down the steps to Hope Street, where we all stood at attention. Never making eye contact with us, the guard did his count, making little ticks on a piece of paper on his clipboard. He said something, followed by a grunt of approval, and put us back to work.
The afternoon sun bore down on us. I wiped sweat from my scalp; the gloves were gritty against the stubble. We worked hard, and the knots in my back began to bunch up. Every square inch of me hurt.
The radio squawked, interrupting the quiet labor, and a rushed string of gibberish came through the speaker. The PRC responded, his face screwed up in confusion. I couldn’t make out any of the words, but something in his eyes and the way he held himself meant trouble. A new knot twisted, this time in my stomach, its claws working into my chest. A worker from another crew shouted something at him. Hafiz turned to see what the commotion was about. The guard did, too.
The crew had found another woman buried under a light pile of debris. Things were happening quickly. A buzz in the air made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, causing my skin to crawl.
One of the workers, a young guy, probably still in his teens and new to the labor, bent to pick her up. He hooked his hands under her armpits and lifted with his knees. The explosion tore out from under her. Shrapnel buzzed by, a hot sting slicing through the bridge of my nose and cheek. I fell to my knees, burying my head under my arms, watching between a slit of skin.
My eyes struggled to piece together the horror. Screams. Limbs disconnected from bodies. The boy who had found the corpse had taken most of the blast, but it hadn’t saved the rest of his crew. A face, split down the middle by a long, jagged strip of metal. Half a leg, tipped over, the sole of his work boot smoking, a gory stump where a knee had once been. A coil of intestine had slopped against the piles of plaster, wood, and concrete in a wheelbarrow. One man sat, dazed, watching blood pour from his elbows, where his arms used to be, while he bled from the nose and ears. His shock-glazed eyes moved back and forth between each gushing wound, struggling to figure out what had happened and where his arms had gone.
The PRC guard hadn’t been close enough to the blast to take any damage. He looked back at me then came toward me. His mouth opened, and then his jaw exploded off his face while he was mid-step. It pushed him back on his heels, but he kept walking, painfully oblivious because it had happened so quickly. Not even a second later, a small crater punched into his forehead, blowing his brains out the back of his skull. I heard the dim dual bangs a moment later, realizing my eardrums were probably gone.
I scrabbled for cover, hooking my fingers into Hafiz’s collar and dragging him down. He followed me, moving quickly in a half-crouch, searching desperately for shelter. His nose and ears were bleeding. Pieces of concrete were pebbled into his face and neck like tiny pieces of buckshot.
“Snipers,” I said over the buzzing whine that filled my ears. His mouth was moving, but his words were leagues away.
We crawled behind a thick concrete pillar that had fallen across the steps outside the Bank of America. It offered thicker shelter than the Four Arches. I risked a quick glance, hoping to catch a peek of a sniper, but the bank was too squat to offer any really good vantage points. Over my shoulder, the buildings were taller, but not incredibly so. All the high-rises and skyscrapers had been reduced to stubs. Could be a few good spots, though. I hoped for a glint of sunlight catching off a scope but saw nothing.
My face ached, felt wrong. I brushed at my cheek, found something hard, and fought to get a grip on it. I pulled and was rewarded with a sharp, searing pain. Pinched between my fingers was a long, rough sliver of bone that wasn’t mine.
Hafiz was scared, near panic and in total shock. I smacked his arm, pointed toward the bank. We could maybe find shelter in there. He shook his head, obviously afraid to move. I understood, but being stationary was not an option.
The whine was lessening, and I could clearly hear volleys of gunshots. Snipers were killing the other crews, cleaning up, making a nice little massacre of all this.
“The gun,” Hafiz said, his voice breathless. He pointed to the guard.
I shook my head.
“It’s only a few yards,” he argued.
“We have to go,” I said, but Hafiz screwed up his face into an angry expression.
Apparently, he didn’t understand that heading down meant certain death and that I was trying to save his life. I urged him to his feet, taking his hands in mine. “C’mon, goddamn it,” I yelled.
I hauled him to his feet, and he worked his legs to help me out by getting his boots under him. Blood splattered across my face and chest, and I was blinded by gore. I stumbled back in shock and fell on my ass. My gloves were rough, too hard to clean the muck from my face. I pulled them off, palmed away thick puddles filled with hard pieces of bone, and forced my eyes open. Part of his skull was missing; an eye had been blasted away. Some of his brain had splashed onto my chest, mottling my carpenter’s coat with gore.
Half crawling, half trying to stand, ignoring the sharp, painful protests riding up alongside my spine, I bolted toward the half-wall and, staying low, jumped over it, into what used to be the building’s lobby. A bullet broke the floor tiles ahead of me. The second sniper, unused to chasing prey, had led too far ahead. I zigzagged, making each step unpredictable, a crazy sort of dance. Bullets came faster, and their strikes became as erratic as I was trying to be. My foot lifted, but I stumbled in pain. There was a hole in the back of my thigh and another coming out the front. I thought the bullet had missed the bone, but it hurt like a motherfucker. I rolled, but even that was a struggle. I dodged the next bullet, preventing it from going into my head. I had become easy prey, ready to be taken down, but I didn’t want to make it that easy. I slid behind a squat, thick leg of a plastic office directory.
My heart was racing, and I was trying very hard to ignore the throbbing pain in my leg.
The countertop above me exploded. Flying plastic stung the back of my head. The sniper had resorted to taking potshots, trying to rattle me out of hiding or maybe get lucky and tag me again.
I didn’t have many places to hide. A bank of elevators went nowhere. If I tried to make a break for the offices, I would end up dead before I got anywhere else. I was trapped, and a cold sweat broke out across my face and back, either from the pain or the fear. I had to do something, but I had no idea what.
I could stand up and take the bullet, let it pluck out my heart or tear through my head. End it all. Fuck it.
They came in cautiously, but swiftly. Guns pointed forward, tucked close to their bodies, they rushed in on each other’s heels, spreading out to cover the angles of the room and protect one another from attack. Their entry was well-practiced, from years of tactical training. They came around the directory, clearing the room, making sure I was alone. A quick once-over deemed me a non-threat. Weaponless, bleeding, and crippled, I certainly didn’t feel very threatening. I was more woozy than anything else. I smirked.
“What’s so funny?” one asked, his gun pointed at me, ready to use it.
I almost couldn’t help but laugh. He stepped forward, onto my injured leg, and ground the tread of his boot into my skin.
“Just that mop top of yours, tough guy.”
He smashed the butt of his Beretta into the side of my face. It hurt, and it loosened a few teeth. But he stepped off my leg, and
the pain instantly lessened. While I was bent over, waiting for the ringing in my head to dissolve, he slapped something against the side of my head, and my skull buzzed with the familiar tingle of electronics mating. The buzzing pushed deeper into my head, even as the pain of the pistol whipping dissolved, and the neural net wrapped around my brain went dark.
All of the men wore urban camo, and each carried the distinct weight of military bearing. They even had American flag patches stitched on their shoulders. Could be some unit that had gone AWOL after the fall and stayed behind enemy lines to carry on the good fight. Could be a militia who fancied themselves freedom fighters and had raided an army surplus store or ripped off a defunct supply caravan or military depot. Could be a bunch of assholes role-playing.
A tall black man with close-cropped hair and thick stacks of muscle stepped forward, put a hand on my guard’s shoulder, and eased him back, making him step away. He waved over another man, who knelt beside me. I realized he was a medic with a small black box of field dressings and long needles.
The medic took a pair of sharp, short scissors and cut away my pant leg above the wound, then jabbed a needle in above the gunshot. Morphine plunged into my system with an icy rush that made my eyelids heavy. His movements were rapid, but precise. He wrapped my leg in gauze to staunch the bleeding then moved away.
“You the last of them?” the black guy asked, his eyes and chin indicating the dead men outside.
“Guess so,” I said. The fact of the matter was, I really didn’t care. If he was going to kill me, he would have done it already. Probably wouldn’t have had my leg wrapped, either. “Let’s get this over with.”
A smile flickered across his face, and I guessed that was a hard thing for him to come by. He had a gruff voice and stony hands that cinched around my wrists with the strength of a vice when he helped me to my feet.
“There you go,” he said.
I stood on one foot, gamely, not daring to put any weight on my other leg. One of the soldiers shoved thickly gloved fingers into my pockets and extracted the small collection of memory chips I carried with me.
“I’m with you,” I said, my tongue thick and heavy, slurring my words into an incoherent jam.
Something that wasn’t exactly confusion crossed his eyes. Even under the morphine spell, I could tell something was not right. His urban camo was new, crisp, and clean. I tried to commit this fact to memory.
My brain was mush, and the world was fading quickly. I was groggy, whipped beyond exhaustion. I welcomed the collapse.
Then he said, “Bag him up.” And the world went dark.
Chapter 5
MemSeq0500015789
Anger stewed across the table between us, its thickness fouling the air. The darkness was almost a relief when the lights went out. Power outages in Los Angeles weren’t exactly new, and neither of us thought much of it. We had bigger problems—mostly each other.
The energy crisis had been going on for five years, and rolling blackouts left a couple million households without power at any given time. Oil shortages had sent prices through the roof. Because of that, our ever-growing debt, and annual theatrical displays of government shutdowns, the US dollar was worthless. In four or five hours, the lights and air conditioning would click back on, after some pressure on the grid was relieved.
Or so we thought, anyway.
The tension between Selene and me was interrupted by a piercing rumble that was too close overhead. The noise pulled me away from the table, to the window, and then outside, as if that could change what I was seeing. The noise grew louder as a jumbo jetliner passed above us, flying far too low, but missing our neighborhood. It disappeared behind a rise of land, but the cataclysmic results were thunderous. The acrid stink of burning rubber and scorched metal clung to the air. Thick black plumes of smoke rose in the distance.
The lights never came back on.
A few of our neighbors had PetHuman droids that they used for yard work and household maintenance. The droning sounds of lawnmowers and weed whackers had dropped off into nothingness, and the robots stood or crouched where they had died, silent, synthetic sentinels of a now-dead age.
“Where’s Mesa?” I asked, my voice still tinged with bitterness.
I stood on our country porch, leaning against the rails, watching the smoke. Neighbors were starting to gather, their curiosity not yet turning to the fear that this was the end of their world. But the change was quickly catching up to us all. Many pointed skyward, following the white contrails in the dying light as it led to the pillar of smoke rising from the ground.
“I’m not getting any signals at all,” someone said, prompting others to nervously fidget with the data entry ports behind their ears and on their forearms. Some were disconnected for the first time since birth and were starting to panic from the sudden, strange sensation of isolation.
Selene’s fingers moved between mine, her hand tightening. I could feel her fear, which mimicked mine. The air felt haunted, and I sensed that something was deeply, strangely wrong—a horrifying otherness that went beyond a mere power outage. In between heartbeats, the world had changed.
“Where’s Mesa?” I asked again, my annoyance with both of them curdling in my gut.
“At a friend’s,” she said. The worry in her eyes was growing. Her body curled against mine, her hands clinging around my waist. I put my arms around her and kissed the top of her head.
A few hours before, I had been bothered by her mere presence and started a fight. With the end of the world blooming around us, I couldn’t even remember why I’d been angry with her.
The growing confusion and worry worsened as night fell. Whatever disquiet had grown between Selene and me, whatever fractures I may have introduced to our marriage, were suddenly mundane and unimportant. I didn’t know what was happening, but I told her everything would be fine.
“Everything is going to be okay,” I said, hoping that it would be. Then I told her that I loved her and held her close, hoping Mesa would have the good sense to come home soon.
She was getting rebellious, going out late, staying out late, and walking out on us in the middle of talks with her because she’d decided she didn’t need to hear whatever we were saying. Telling us to fuck off. Trying to figure out how far she could push things. Trying to take it further and further each time. She spent most of her energy being angry, yelling, and telling us how she was an adult, so we couldn’t stop her. We’d caught her smoking and drinking. She’d left condoms lying around her bedroom, still sealed in their packages. They’d been given to her by her school administrators who wanted her to be safe. She got off on torturing us with it, putting it on our face, and rubbing our noses in it.
“I should try to find her.” I untangled myself from Selene. A part of her—the needy part—looked wounded. I went to the car, slid into the driver’s seat, and pressed my thumb to the small black plate on the dash. It did nothing. I sat back in the seat, realizing the car’s unresponsive biometrics were fried. I brought up my commNet. The retinal display filled with local server errors and host-unavailable messages. No car. No power. No connections. No communications.
“Who was she with?” I asked.
Selene was distracted and didn’t answer for a minute. “Macy,” she said uncertainly.
“We’ll have to walk. Car’s dead.”
“What’s happening?”
I didn’t have any answers. I took her hand and started walking. We crossed the street, heading two blocks north, over to Macy’s. We knocked on the door, but nobody answered. No answer at Linda’s or Jennifer’s. Her boyfriend, Tom, answered when we came to his door, but he hadn’t seen her. He told us they’d fought two nights before and hadn’t talked since. She wouldn’t take his calls and had refused his attempts at messaging.
“If you hear from her, call us,” Selene said. Then, looking at the darkened houses around us and apparently remembering her unresponsive commNet, she must have felt stupid, and her face flushed. “Y
eah, I guess you can’t do that, can you?” She gave him a small, half-hearted laugh, and he closed the door, sullen.
The absence of a working commNet was growing into a palpable void. We couldn’t raise Mesa and had no way of contacting her friends other than by foot, and that was getting us nowhere.
“Maybe you should go back home,” I said. “One of us should be there if she comes back. I can keep looking.”
We knew a couple other friends she hung out with, but they were all in the opposite direction. We would be passing our house anyway.
We were walking down Burbank, to get to White Oak and back home, when a clopping noise rushed up from behind us. A mounted police officer rode up beside us.
“There’s a curfew in effect now folks. We ask that you get inside immediately.” He’d used cop-speaking, saying “we” even though it was only him and his horse.
Selene and I were still a mile and a half away from our house on Kittridge, and I told him so.
“Get inside as soon as you can.”
“Please, we’re looking for our daughter,” Selene said. She stepped toward the horse, and it whinnied, taking a step back. She reached for the officer’s arm in a mother’s plea.
“Please step away, ma’am.”
She didn’t. She moved forward, crying and grasping. Her panic unraveled as she tried to make him understand the urgency of our plight. “Help us, please. You have to help us. Our daughter is missing!”
The horses of the mounted unit were used for crowd control and had been trained to deal with noise, like gunfire and shouting, as well as smoke and rowdy demonstrators, so they were used to people. But the Arabian was unsettled by whatever vibe Selene was giving off and was trying to get away from her, but she kept getting closer, aggravating it even more. Despite any kind of training, an animal always has a basic instinct that can never be overcome, and this horse sensed something in the air, something that had it spooked.
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