by Addison Gunn
An Abaddon Books™ Publication
www.abaddonbooks.com
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First published in 2016 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.
By Anne Tibbets and Malcolm Cross (writing as Addison Gunn)
Editor-in-Chief: Jonathan Oliver
Commissioning Editor: David Moore
Cover Art: Edouard Groult
Design: Sam Gretton & Oz Osborne
Marketing and PR: Rob Power
Head of Books and Comics Publishing: Ben Smith
Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley
Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley
ISBN: 978-1-78618-007-0
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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
1
“YOU UNDERSTAND THAT every second we stay here, you’re a target?”
L. Gray Matheson, CEO of Schaeffer-Yeager International and master of all he surveyed, shrugged off Miller’s concerns with a gentle raise of the palm. “In a minute, Alex. I’m on the phone with the President.”
At least, Miller thought, Gray wasn’t calling the President ‘Huck’ again.
“Now then, Huck. Like I said, I’m having trouble with one of your boys...”
Miller slapped his palm over his face.
Gray ignored Miller, and turned to face the queues of unhappy civilians waiting for their turn at the aid truck. He put on a patrician smile, and waved. “Uh-huh. Well, I know Major General Stockman isn’t following orders, Huck, but I need you to make that clear to what’s left of the media.” Somehow, and Miller didn’t know how he did it, Gray could smile without any hint of it reaching his voice.
Downtown Brooklyn, just south of Trinity Park and east of Cadman Plaza, had a liberal sprinkling of what could almost have been normality.
There was a media team following Gray around with cameras, and Miller was back in his suit playing at being the Armani while the cameras were streaming footage over anaemic satellite links back to what was left of the rest of the country.
There were un-Infected civilians, looking like a considerably expanded population of the city’s homeless, queuing for soup and aid packages provided by the generous corporation Schaeffer-Yeager, who’d even managed to restore electric power to the region.
Of course, the power was off the local solar grid, and with air conditioning growling away wherever anyone had it, there wouldn’t be enough juice in the grid’s fuel cells to last more than a few hours into the evening—but the press didn’t need to know that.
In fact, there was a lot they hoped the media detail wouldn’t notice. For one thing, du Trieux and Morland stood to one side with Miller’s combat gear, ready for him to shrug off his suit the moment the cameras were out of sight. For another, before the cameras had started filming, Miller and the others had cleared the dead off the surrounding streets.
Emaciated corpses, literally skin and bones, where the starved had fallen in search for a morsel to eat, had lain scattered and rotting across the entire city block.
Some only looked dead, and were simply too weak to move. Volunteers had pulled them to a make-shift triage tent and were treating them with little packets of gloopy processed food that had been developed by WellBeechBeck for saving Ethiopian orphans, but the volunteers were hungry enough that some were shamelessly sucking a mouthful from the packets before serving the starving.
Further down the street, titan-birds had gorged themselves on bodies too mutilated for the troops to even try to move without a shovel. Doyle was blasting the bastard creatures every time one landed in search of a meal, in hopes of keeping them out of sight of the cameras. But the stench of the dead remained in the air.
The titan-birds, New York’s newest residents, were hanging in the thermals between Brooklyn’s towers, stretched out, their leathery wings ready to catch any slight breeze allowing the colossal birds to glide and swoop down in search of prey.
At this distance they looked a little like pale eagles. Close in, they were more like half-feathered pterosaurs—some kind of failed and archaic evolutionary off-shoot locked into the hibernation cycles of the Archaeobiome. They’d followed the dust storms into the city, and couldn’t have arrived at a better time. Better for them, that is.
The flying monstrosities were intellectually on par with sauerkraut, Miller’d noticed, and didn’t seem to understand that flapping into low-flying helicopters was a quick way to get slashed to pieces by the rotors. Unfortunately, the beasts ranged from a twenty- to a sixty-foot wingspan and helicopters didn’t survive the encounters any better than the titan-birds did.
Helicopters just like the one a block away waiting to whisk Gray out of this hell-hole the second they were done.
“Uh-huh. Yeah.” Gray turned away from the food trucks doling out aid parcels, two per person able to carry them, and idly traced the toe of his shoe over stringy weeds struggling up through a crack in the sidewalk. “I don’t suppose you’ve got the manpower to stop Major General Stockman and his division, do you, Huck?” A pause. “No. I’m not suggesting—no, no you can’t possibly deploy a nuclear weapon on home soil, Huck, I know that.”
That morning, Major General Stockman had reiterated his demand for Schaeffer-Yeager International to stand down and surrender all its staff and assets to the custody of the U.S. Army.
Gray had... declined.
His actual words may have invoked something along the lines of ‘you motherfucking Infected traitors aren’t getting a fucking dime out of me,’ but so far as Miller knew the contents of that conversation hadn’t been made public, and like a good bodyguard who’d eavesdropped on more than he’d intended to, Miller did his best to forget about it.
Stockman was coming, though. Even if he’d decried the president, Huckabee Fredericks, as a corporate stooge with no more authority over the American people than the Queen of England, there was no military to stop him.
What remained of the legitimate U.S. military was in tatters. Army divisions were running off into the wilderness with the food aid packages they were supposed to distribute to civilians. Starving soldiers were deserting in droves, large chunks of the Midwest were depopulating as food ran out.
Depopulating, Miller mused. What a sanitized term for starving to death and fleeing for their lives with everything they could carry.
After finishing with the President, in the few seconds he had before getting back onto camera, Gray stood scowling hard enough the wrinkles showed through the cosmetic treatments.
“Gray?”
“You think anybody around here needs the furniture in those?” He jerked his chin toward the ramshackle aid tents.
“Possibly. Why?”
“I said those bastards weren’t getting anything of mine, and I damn well meant it.” Gray wiped his sweating forehead with a handkerchief, and looked down at the pink smears of foundation he’d scraped off in dismay. “Damnit.”
Sometimes, being the Armani had more in common with being a gun-toting butler than anyone’s mental image of a bodyguard. Miller unfolded a compact he’d gotten off one of
the camera people while they were fixing Gray up for his time in front of the lens, and stepped in to repair the damage.
“Thanks.” Gray lifted his chin, shutting his eyes.
Miller gently moved his boss’s chin to the side with a fingertip, and concentrated on getting an even blend with the compact’s brush—something he’d learned from life with Samantha. “Someone could probably use it. But they need food, if there’s any to spare.”
“I’m keeping you people fed, right?” Gray asked, grimacing again, hard enough Miller had to tell him to relax before carrying on.
Miller thought before answering. “Luxuries are a little thin on the ground,” he said, diplomatically. “But we’re eating enough to get through the day.”
“Good. Getting supply trucks through the city for the aid program is difficult, but the civilians don’t come before my employees. I’m not going to fail the company the way Huck failed this damned country.”
Was it the President’s fault that exotic crop pests had crawled out of the ground after hibernating for tens of thousands of years? Miller didn’t think that ‘waking up an all-consuming ancient ecology’ had appeared anywhere on the government’s climate change risk assessments when it came to famines, but he could have been wrong.
Of course the amount of canned food that Gray had pulled out of distribution warehouses and moved into the Astoria compound’s stockpiles could put any survivalist—or town full of survivalist preppers—to shame. The compound’s refugee population needed a forty-foot shipping container brought in every day for bottled water alone, let alone food. Keeping them fed was a labour of Hercules. Providing aid to the remaining population of New York? Impossible.
“Tell Holly to find someone to take the furnishings away. Hell, give these people the trucks if possible—I don’t want anything left for Stockman’s goons.”
“I’ll tell her. Now can we please get your PR campaign moving again before Stockman arrives and takes you into custody?”
It took Gray two takes to make his grim pronouncement on the state of the world. His acid suggestion that Stockman’s forces would do more good by assisting in reclaiming parkland for World-War-II-style victory gardens turned into a perfect soundbite. Once upon a time, a PR coup like that would have mattered. But the public was too busy surviving to listen, these days.
Thankfully, PR wasn’t the only way Gray was fighting Stockman’s 11th Infantry Division. “We need to slow that division down,” Gray said afterwards, leaning in against the window while the helicopter whisked him away from the mucky reality of the world. “Literally slow them down, catch their feet in molasses.”
Miller, back in his combat gear, M27 across his knees, the touch of cologne he’d applied under his jaw little more than a fond memory. “We can do that,” he said. “Not with molasses, but we can do that.”
“Good. I’ll tell Harris to make it happen.”
2
“WE LOST ANOTHER drone. Re-pathing what’s left to provide coverage...”
“Third one in an hour. The 11th finally attacking, Northwind?”
“Negative, Cobalt-2. Engine failure.”
Miller edged in closer to the window of the building, squinting up at the sky to search for the failed drone.
There was a yellowish tinge to the light—maybe the after-effects of the dust storm—but no sign of any drones plummeting down from the heavens. They’d lost one to bird-strike earlier, or titan-bird strike, but the drones typically flew too high to be seen, let alone be interfered with by the new wildlife. It had to be those fungal particles that the storm had kicked up. Helicopter pilots were spending more time picking strands of pinkish-red gunk out of their air intakes than flying.
Well, in the event that Cyclops-Northwind lost all their drones, Miller and his team had a decent overwatch position. They were two-thirds of the way up a mostly abandoned apartment block. Fungal masses in the basement necessitated the use of gas masks while they’d been securing the building.
The local residents, thin and emaciated, ran for it the second they’d seen the well-armed Cobalt-2 team in the hallways. Miller had yelled that they were there to help, but the fearful survivors hadn’t believed him.
He didn’t blame them, not with the city’s only remaining television channels broadcasting Swift’s ranting tirades and carefully cut footage of corporate atrocities. There simply wasn’t enough functioning bandwidth in the city to spread the now official story—that while the government strongly condemned the actions of a few out-of-control subcontractors, it supported Schaeffer-Yeager’s larger humanitarian mission. And that the attempt to take control of the city under martial law by Major General Stockman were the actions of a mutineer.
Stockman’s mutineers, advancing up the avenue towards Biogen’s Upper West Side Laboratory, weren’t wearing eye-patches and hobbling around on peg-legs, the mental image of a mutineer in Miller’s addled-by-Hollywood imagination. They were rolling in sand-coloured Bravo convoys and wearing forest-green camos—using vehicles built for Middle-Eastern wars but never deployed, and wearing uniforms only ever intended for peacetime.
When was the last time America sent her troops anywhere that wasn’t a desert?
Cobalt-1—Lewis, Hsiung, Mannon, and Crewe—stood ready to meet them in black combat gear and with weapons slung over their shoulders. Behind them, taking cover behind sandbagged roadblocks and inside Biogen’s UWS Laboratory, were all sixty men and women of security team Switchblade.
Not much to meet the leading edge of the five or six hundred soldiers making up the 11th Infantry Division’s Third Battalion. Schaeffer-Yeager’s forces made up—what—two or three platoons?
Lewis stepped out in front of them all, holding up his hands at Stockman’s advancing convoy. Thankfully, the lead Bravo slowed to a halt instead of cruising straight over him.
Behind it, two more Bravos turned in, blocking the head of the avenue with their slab-like armoured frames. The lead vehicle halted out front, while the rest of the convoy took the intersection’s right turn.
From the fourth floor window of the building they’d commandeered, Miller picked up his binoculars, and murmured, gently, “The 11th are throwing a cordon up between us and Central Park.”
“I hear you,” Lewis rumbled. He was still audible over the open com-link as he yelled at the convoy, “We’re here to talk!”
Two of the soldiers who’d gotten out of the lead convoy vehicle, a captain and lieutenant, judging by the stitched in insignia at their collars, moved forward in near-lockstep. Two more, and the driver—all enlisted men, by the looks of them—were barely two steps behind. “I’m here for your surrender and the peaceful handover of that building behind you,” said the captain.
Lewis’s face didn’t waver. “That’s something we’re going to have to discuss.”
“Awful well armed for a discussion,” the captain said.
“Right to bear arms is in the constitution,” Lewis shot back.
One of Stockman’s enlisted men piped up with, “Constitution weren’t writ for niggers.”
Lewis’s already dark skin darkened further with a flush of red. “The hell did you say to me?”
It had been awhile since Miller had been in the Army, but he didn’t think any private he’d ever met would butt into his commanding officer’s conversation like that, no matter how heartfelt the racism.
The captain and his lieutenant didn’t seem particularly shocked, however. In fact the lieutenant, himself an African-American, was nodding in vague agreement, as if Private First Class Klansman over there was the division’s official historian. “Constitution was written long before the abolition of slavery...” the lieutenant said.
“Long before slavery,” PFC Klansman agreed.
Another private chipped in with, “We own them now. Ain’t that what the Major General said?”
The captain followed it up with, “It’s what the Major General said.”
“Did you not hear what your man just said
?” Lewis demanded of their lieutenant, gaping at them.
The lieutenant shrugged. “He didn’t mean me.”
“That’s right. You’re a nigger, and Lieutenant Phelps is white. On the inside.” PFC Klansman smiled crookedly. “I can see under his skin? And he’s a person inside. You? You black as a tar-pit.”
“So’s she,” the captain of Stockman’s convoy said, pointing at Hsuing, a purebred Han Chinese. “Fuck. Are all the ungifted like this?” he asked, boggling at Mannon. “Are they all so empty?”
Mannon clutched her belt just beside her sidearm holster ’til her knuckles were white.
From up in the building, Miller muttered, “They really are Infected. All of them. The entire division.”
Doyle, sitting at the empty apartment’s dining room table with his new rifle set up on top, eye to the scope, grunted. “Not exactly full of esprit de corps, are they?”
“Chain of command’s gone,” Miller muttered, using the corner window to get a look at one of the side streets. “There are civilians mixed in with the Army types.”
“Volunteer brigades?” du Trieux asked, looking up from the ruggedized tablet she was getting a feed from Northwind with.
“Don’t think so.” Miller handed her the binoculars as she got up.
Bands of roving Infected, some wearing filthy bloodstained clothes almost ready to rot from their bodies, with inky, bruise-like blotches eating into their skin, were gathering to meet the troops at the far end of the cordon. And where they did, there were embraces, as if they were civilian girlfriends welcoming their boyfriends home with a kiss.
A soldier handed his rifle to one of the local Infected, and they all crowded back into the Bravo together.
“Great.” Morland grunted from beside Miller’s shoulder. He hugged his weapon to his chest—a custom 3D-print-milled monstrosity of blocky metal and polymer wrapped around an assault rifle and integral shotgun. “Why couldn’t we be in a horror movie instead of this shit, eh? Zombies don’t run around sharing guns.”