by Peter Clines
Supplies were a bit low at the moment, but that was the whole reason he’d come back to Los Angeles. Quilt had offices and safe houses in a dozen cities across the globe. Never in key areas. Only amateurs stood in the target. He’d based himself just off-center, close enough to major transport but far enough to be out of sight. There was a loft apartment in Cardiff, and another one in Bonn. He had a small beach house in southern Maine, an hour north of Boston, and another one just south of Buenos Aires.
And, of course, an office in North Hollywood. Shielded by the Hollywood Hills in case of an attack on Los Angeles or LAX. Moving at an easy pace, he’d be there tomorrow afternoon.
He heard a distant yelp. It sounded faintly like a dog. Dogs were one of the few things Quilt had any fondness for. Probably, he admitted, because a well-trained dog was one of the most loyal weapons you could have. He’d seen the junkies go after dogs, and he made a point of stopping them when he could. And when he could spare the rounds.
He stood up and used his rifle scope to scan the streets below until movement caught his eyes. There was a junkie standing in the middle of the street, two blocks to the north. A young man with dark hair and skin. The junkie was Egyptian, probably. Maybe Lebanese. His features had a few of those subtle markers a person can only pick up on after so much time in a region.
He wasn’t after a dog. He had two women pinned by a few cars. Quilt could see the back of their heads. One was wiry and tough. The other one looked too soft to last long. He let the crosshairs settle on the base of her skull and contemplated tightening his trigger finger. His heart beat twice and he switched targets. Quilt made a point of not killing randomly. He was, after all, a professional.
The tough woman was trying to scare off the junkie. He heard her stomp on the pavement and saw her wave at him with some kind of club or bat. She was brave. Stupid, trying to frighten the infected man when Quilt could see a holster on her belt, but brave.
Quilt applied precise pressure to the trigger on the rifle, a Heckler & Koch G36 outfitted with a Beta C-Mag drum magazine, and the junkie’s head vanished from his scope. And from the junkie’s shoulders. Then he settled down to finish eating.
Some people would have seen a political motive in shooting the Arab junkie over the blonde woman. They would be wrong. Quilt made a point of having no political views whatsoever. It made his work simpler not to think about the motivations behind different jobs. However, there was no denying that he missed the worldwide chaos of the Bush years. A glorious time for a freelance soldier, when assignments could be picked up easier than milk at a grocery store. The mercenary assassin trade had been getting thin under Barack Obama.
His last assignment before the collapse of western society had been to kill a doctor. Fifteen weeks ago. As far as Quilt’s target assessment could discern, the man had no aspirations and posed no threats, even within academic or departmental bureaucracy. He was a dedicated researcher who isolated viruses and their origins, nothing more.
Quilt had driven a delivery truck into the loading dock. He’d disabled the security cameras the night before with a paintball gun, along with eight other randomly selected ones in nearby buildings. The campus police had discovered them that morning and already written it off as a student prank. It would take another day to schedule maintenance and have them cleaned.
He’d wheeled his three large crates into the doctor’s lab. The man suspected nothing until Quilt had glanced at the room’s corners to confirm there were no cameras. Then he’d known instantly.
Over the years, Quilt had come to realize that targets fit into a few simple groups once confronted with their impending deaths. There were the ones who fight, the ones who bargain, and the ones who accept it. The doctor had sighed and shook his head.
‘No matter what you do to me,’ the target had said, ‘people are going to find out. You can’t hide something like this.’
Quilt had broken his neck with a quick blow to the fourth vertebrae, a technique he’d learned in Laos and mastered in Somalia. It was quick and painless. The man had died instantly. Every now and then, perhaps one out of every five targets, the person would survive the shock of internal decapitation and their brain would live in terror of what was happening for another fifty or sixty seconds before the oxygen in their blood was depleted. Quilt often felt a twinge of guilt at those instances. Not for the killing. Just for the messiness of it.
The doctor had fallen to the floor and Quilt had moved on to stage two of the assassination. The client had suggested it to cover his tracks. Quilt never left tracks of any sort, but he rarely argued with a client.
Each of the three crates contained a heavily-sedated person in the final stages of infection. He had pulled on a set of rubber gloves, checked their pulses, and dumped them on the floor near the doctor’s body. Quilt had locked the doors behind him as he left, then kicked them open to break the lock from the outside. He had paused to wipe a partial print of his shoe from the door and heard one of the junkies groan as the noise roused it. Junkies always woke up hungry, as he had confirmed several times since then.
It had been, in Quilt’s assessment, a perfect assignment, even when the client sent a second man to silence him. Just as there were certain types of targets, there were certain types of clients as well. Some believed in a Machiavellian need to eliminate an operative after a successful mission—usually the ones who’d never seen any sort of combat themselves. Quilt had broken both the man’s arms and knees, slit his throat, and left him outside their public office building. Payment had been transferred to his Gstaad account the next day.
A perfectly-executed assignment.
* * *
He reached the office building at quarter of five in the afternoon the next day. The building was one of dozens in Los Angeles with a regular tenant rotation. Suites and whole floors were rented out to small movie crews and production companies. The landlord was thrilled to have a few tenants with permanent offices. Quilt made a point of contacting the man every seventeen months to argue about rent. Perfect tenants attract as much attention as bad ones, in their own way. He strived to be a mediocre tenant at all his properties.
The bottom of one of the front doors was smashed in. From the lack of dust, he guessed it had happened within the past twenty-four hours. There were tracks in the broken safety glass that had almost been hidden by a body sliding through it. A few small cubes of material trailed off towards the stairwell and nowhere else. Whoever had come in had gone straight upstairs.
Quilt frowned.
He moved to the opposite side of the lobby, where the building’s security office was located. The door was unlocked, which bothered him. While this was far from the most high-end office building in the city, an unlocked security office spoke of a certain lack of professionalism. He did a quick sweep of the room and sat down at the desk.
Like most of the city, the building still had power. The computer was security protected, but a twenty-three second search of the desk found the password on an index card beneath a box of staples in the left hand drawer. It was, to Quilt, yet another sign of the lack of professionalism.
According to the security log, the doors had been locked seven weeks ago, but the main alarm system had not been turned on. Which explained why the power was on yet the broken door had not set off half a dozen blaring sirens. There were a few glitches in the logs, most likely from random brownouts, but the past two days were clear and machine-meticulous.
The break-in had been five hours, forty-two minutes ago. Ten minutes after the glass in the door had been broken, the stairwell card reader had been compromised on the fifth floor. Seven minutes after that, the lock on suite 551 had failed.
They had broken in and gone straight for Quilt’s office.
Was it a raiding party? Or an attempt to deny him his supplies? How could anyone have known the bolt hole existed? It was rented through three dummy corporate shells, registered to a stolen identity, a fake name, and a dead man, respectively. The close
st he’d been to it in the past two years was a job six months ago in Hawaii. According to the computer log, thirty-seven minutes after his door had been breached the east stairwell card reader on the third floor had failed. Five minutes later suite 331 was compromised.
The two break-ins confused him. The suite directly below or above would be an attempt to breach his office without setting off an alarm on the door. But why would someone go to another office altogether? And after already achieving the objective?
Confusion bothered Quilt.
He slipped into the computer’s operating system and erased the record of him accessing the security log and the operating system. Once finished he carefully readjusted the papers on the desk and the position of the chair. He closed the door behind him and made a point not to lock it, as much as it nagged at him.
As he walked across the lobby he noted the different tracks in the dust and broken glass. At least ten people. Mostly men, from the size of the footprints and strides, but he couldn’t be sure of that. He pulled open the stairwell door and a junkie lunged at him.
The infected man threw his full weight on Quilt, driving them both to the ground. Quilt already had his hand up, bending the junkie’s head back so neither his teeth or the streamers of drool came near exposed skin. The man flailed at Quilt, raining down a flurry of savage blows that would’ve been lethal if they’d been aimed with any degree of skill.
On his back, Quilt yanked his knee up, hitting the junkie in the groin. The man was an animal at this point, but he still yelped and froze up for a moment. It was all the time Quilt needed to collapse the man’s trachea and draw his knife. He flipped the junkie over and drove the blade up into the man’s skull where it joined the spine. A quick twist of the knife turned the junkie’s brain into a purposeless mass of waterlogged flesh. Blood spread across the floor. Quilt cleaned his knife on the man’s shirt, stepped carefully around the puddle, and headed up the stairs.
He stopped at the third floor landing. This model of card reader could be defeated by half a dozen magnetic master keys. It had been cracked open and hotwired. The work of someone not used to covering their tracks.
Quilt swung his rifle down and slipped into the third floor hallway. He could smell blood, not fresh but only a few hours old at the most. He listened for a moment and determined if anyone was still on this level of the building they were at least as skilled as he. Which was not a pleasant thought.
The door for suite 331 had been kicked open. Again, a crude method with no attempt to hide the invader’s presence. It had taken two or three blows. Quilt was about to enter the office when he noticed the lock. It was a Medeco3 dead bolt set. Not the building’s standard, but very common with the U.S. government.
He examined the frame and found three additional sensors past the building’s standard security lines. There was a micro-thin pressure pad on the threshold. Someone had wanted to know every time this door opened.
Quilt let his rifle hang and drew his MK23 SOCOM pistol.
Suite 331 had the same layout as his own office. A small reception area with two small rooms on either side and a larger room behind it. Perfect for a small business or production company.
Or, in this case, a covert field hospital.
When valuable agents or assets were wounded and a public facility wasn’t an option, most agencies kept a well-stocked, low-profile infirmary in every city. Quilt had seen rooms like this before. His left kidney had been removed in one. Bandages, sutures, surgical tools, braces, crutches, a fully-stocked pharmacy, and equipment to monitor everything from heartbeats to brain waves.
Judging by the style of the furniture in the reception area and the design of the lone examination table, he estimated this room had been here for just over twelve years. It was well-established when he set up his bolt hole two stories above. If he was the smiling type, Quilt’s lips might have twitched at the thought of the embarrassing situations which could’ve resulted from this unfortunate coincidence.
The field hospital was missing several things. More to the point, he noted, many things had been left behind. Most of the equipment. Almost two-thirds of the chemicals and drugs, including narcotics. Whoever had done this was not looting. They had been searching for very specific items and materials. He could see outlines in the dust where bottles and cases had been pulled from the shelves.
Quilt knew the names and purposes of most of the drugs and compounds that were still there. So the things that had been taken were specialty items. Things only a professional in this field would know about or have use for.
The card reader on the fifth floor landing had been broken and hotwired the same way. He slipped into the hall and listened. Again, there were no sounds.
His office door had been pried away from the lock and kicked open. The fact that the desks and cabinets were searched told Quilt whoever had done this had no idea what they were looking for. His suite had not been examined, it had been ransacked.
They had found both gun racks, hidden behind the false wall panels he’d installed seven years ago. The ammunition drawers had been pried open. Both supply closets were broken open, and the concealed closet in the other office.
A third of his rations were gone. Almost a full month’s worth of food. An AA-12 shotgun, three M4 carbine rifles, and two P90s were also missing, along with a dozen assorted pistols and tactical gear.
They had taken his machete. One of his very few sentimental items. That machete had gotten him through North Korea. He’d crossed close to two hundred miles of jungle with nothing but the heavy blade and an AK-47 with a single round in it. Because of the machete, he’d never needed to use the bullet.
Quilt frowned. For the first time in months, he felt annoyed. Not annoyed, angry. Angry at the amateurs that had found his bolt hole and looted it.
The thieves had not discovered the twin safes beneath the carpeting. One contained approximately one-point-five million dollars, divided into dollars, euros, and yen. The other was the hard drive and processor for his personal security system. He had ten cameras in the office, four in the hall, two in the downstairs lobby, and another five on the building’s roof.
They appeared on his desktop screen. Six men and four women, wearing sporting equipment as if it were body armor. He’d heard people like this called outsiders over the past few months. As the disease spread and junkies became more and more common, the services of those who dared to go outside—and could make it back unharmed—were becoming more and more valuable.
Quilt watched them enter the office and search. He saw them discover his cache and dole out weapons and supplies among themselves. He memorized their faces.
According to the outside cameras, they’d left the building seventy-one minutes after entering. Twelve-thirty-seven. And there’d been some kind of altercation with another pair of scavengers.
He squinted at the high-angle shot on the screen. The two other scavengers were both women. One, the soft one, became a hostage in less than a minute. The other one, the wiry one, had a baseball bat. Quilt was not a romantic, by any means, but he had a keen awareness that running into the same women twice in two days was noteworthy.
The soft one had panicked. Her screams had brought junkies. Eleven of them. The thieves had left on bicycles—good, quiet, dependable third-world transport. The two women had run back into the office building. Four of the junkies had followed them in. The other seven had chased the thieves.
Quilt remembered the smell of blood on the third floor, and he considered the matter with the mystery women solved.
The thieves had headed up the road, which meant they had either gone straight and headed into Hollywood proper or turned at Barham and crossed over the freeway into Universal City. Scared people tended to go in straight lines and follow the path of least resistance, and the thieves didn’t look professional enough not to be scared. With the hardware they’d stolen from his bolt hole, seven junkies shouldn’t’ve been a problem, but they’d chosen to run. That means t
hey’d avoided the sharp turn onto Barham and also the two or three residential streets that led uphill.
The thieves were in Hollywood.
* * *
It took him half an hour to confirm his suspicion. On the downhill side of the valley was a thin line of fresh, dark rubber, barely visible in the fading sunlight, and a slight drift of grit and dust. A dozen yards further he found another fresh tire mark where one of the thieves, now carrying extra supplies, had squeezed the brakes a little too hard.
It was sundown by the time he reached the base of the Cahuenga Pass and the Hollywood Bowl. It didn’t bother him. Enough of the streetlights were still working, and Quilt had probably spent more of his life awake at night than during the day. His scope had a night vision setting, but he rarely used it. He preferred to keep his natural senses sharp and not become dependent on tools.
He passed several junkies. They had passable night vision since the disease dilated their eyes. Most of them still didn’t see him. One pair did and he slit both their throats when they lunged at him. Another, a bony woman, managed to get the drop on him and grabbed him from behind. He broke the woman’s arm, knocked her head back with the heel of his palm, and drove his knife up into her brain through her jaw.
Quilt made his way down through the city. The streetlights were on, but no one was home. The tourist traps hadn’t seen any traffic in at least ten weeks. The roads were empty. His life had hardened him to the sights of war, and the various aftermaths of it. He still found the sight of an empty, abandoned city to be almost unnerving.
He followed the trail for another three miles as it cut back and forth through residential neighborhoods. He killed fourteen more junkies as he went, most of them with his bare hands or the knife. A small pack charged him and he put a round in each of their heads with the MK 23.
As he stepped out onto Wilshire Boulevard, a junkie child lunged at him, sputtering high-pitched nonsense. She was a girl of five at the most, dressed in filthy clothes that had been bright pink and yellow once. Quilt grabbed one shoulder and the top of the thrashing child’s head and twisted. Her five-year old spine made a noise like a bundle of celery being torn apart and she dropped to the ground. As her head hit the sidewalk, a scent drifted past his nose.