FOURTEEN
I went to the wall and turned left. According to Keane’s intel, there was a gap in the razor wire about fifty yards north of 136th. It took me awhile to spot it; a good thirty-foot section of the wall’s top was hidden by an overgrown clump of eucalyptus, but it was more or less where Keane’s source had indicated.
After looking around to make sure I wasn’t being observed, I slipped behind the eucalyptus and worked my way toward where I’d seen the gap. Hopefully I hadn’t misjudged the location; it would suck to get to the top of the wall and get a face-full of razor wire. I pulled the grappling hook from the backpack and made a couple of loops of slack in the cord. It took me three tries to get the damn thing over the far edge of the wall; thanks to the proximity of the vegetation, I had to throw it almost straight up. The first time it failed to grab and the second time it nearly brained me.
The wall was only about ten feet high, so if I could have gotten a running jump I could conceivably have pulled myself up by my fingertips, but the eucalyptus made that difficult. Besides, I wanted to get a feel for the grappling hook in case the wall on the other side of the highway was higher. I’d designed the hook specifically for these highway barriers; as far as I knew they were the only walls I needed to get over. Once I’d made sure the hook was secure, I put on the gloves and the backpack, got a firm handle on the rope, then planted my feet against the wall. To be perfectly honest, I felt like a complete idiot, scaling a wall in broad daylight like Adam West in that cheesy Batman series from the 1960s. Fortunately the eucalyptus gave me a fair amount of cover from any potential spectators in the area.
I pulled myself so my eyes were level with the top of the wall; thankfully I was dead center inside the razor wire gap. Someone had cut the wire and cleverly coiled the loose ends into the eucalyptus stalks, so that it was virtually impossible to see the gap unless you knew where to look. Thank God for Keane’s network of anonymous hooligans. I let go of the rope with my right hand and grabbed the top of the wall. I got my left hand on the wall as well and pulled my upper body onto the wall.
For a moment, I remained as still as possible, listening for the telltale buzz of a drone. I heard nothing but the low rumble of traffic and the occasional staccato gunfire from somewhere in the DZ. Below me was a paralyzed river of pre-Collapse vehicles, all peeled paint and cracked tires, receding into the afternoon haze to my left and to my right.
I pulled myself bodily onto the wall, coiled up the rope, and tossed it and the grappling hook down to the cracked asphalt shoulder below. Then I spun around and lowered myself down as far as I could before letting go. I landed in a crouch next to the grappling hook. I grabbed it and the rope, stuffed both in the backpack, and stood up.
To get into the DZ, I now had to cross ten lanes of highway and scale another wall like the one I’d just come over. The tricky part of this was that I didn’t know exactly where the razor wire gap was on the far wall; Keane’s intel said that it was a “short walk” to the north. Whether that meant ten feet or a quarter mile, I had no idea. I could only cross the highway and turn north, hoping that I’d see the gap when I got close.
I made my way through the abandoned vehicles toward the far wall, staying low and zigzagging north when the cars were too close together for me to squeeze through. When I got to the last row of cars before the median, I crouched in the space between a Buick sedan and a UPS truck, listening for drones. Still I heard nothing but traffic, the occasional shout, and, farther away, gunfire. I darted across the median then skidded to a stop again in a small gap between two cars in the first northbound lane.
The intuitive thing to do when you’re in the no-go zone is to get out as fast as you possibly can. This is a sucker move. The problem is that if you’re moving, a drone will spot you sooner than you can spot it. Given the ambient urban noise, you can only hear a drone coming from about two hundred yards away, and that’s if you’re quiet and listening for it. The effective range of a drone’s guns is about fifty yards on full automatic or a hundred and fifty yards firing singly. The bullets will go a hell of a lot farther than that, but drones are so lightweight that the recoil tends to throw off their aim. The drones are also programmed to take ambient noise into account; basically they’ll get as close as they think they can before shooting. What this means is that if you have good hearing and you can make yourself be very still and very quiet, you can usually hear the drone coming before it starts shooting.
So I forced myself to breathe slowly and did my best to block out the noise of the cars, voices, and occasional distant gunfire, listening for that telltale hum. Still I heard nothing. I crept forward through the gaps in the cars, zigzagging what I hoped was a “short walk” to the north. The cars were lined up on the shoulder here, so when I got to the last row, I was only about eight feet from the wall. Looking to the top of the wall, I scanned left and right but saw only an unbroken stretch of razor wire. Fuck.
Once again I forced myself to be still and listen. Once again I heard nothing but ambient noise. I pulled back and crept between the two rows of vehicles for another fifty feet or so. Then I peeked out again and looked for the gap. I saw what looked like a break in the razor wire about eighty feet farther north. My instinct was to run toward it, but I forced myself to stop and listen. This time I heard, amid the shouts and rumble of traffic, a constant, high-pitched whine. After a few seconds, I was able to determine the direction of the sound. It was somewhere to the south, coming my way.
I made a run for it.
The problem was this: the optics on these drones are pretty damn good; I figured it was about fifty-fifty that it had already spotted me. If that was the case, I was as good as dead if I remained on the road. I had a clear escape route planned, and I was fairly certain I could get over the wall before I was in optimal firing range. The drone would take pictures of me and forward them to the LAPD, but it wouldn’t pursue me into the DZ. Even if the LAPD’s facial recognition software tagged me as a wanted fugitive, there wasn’t much they could do about it but wait for me to leave. The LAPD had no official authority inside the DZ. They could put a bounty on my head and hope the local warlords would turn me over, but that would take time. All I needed to do was get to Gwen’s apartment, grab the iota coin, and get out. So I ran.
Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that I had misjudged the gap. That is, what I thought was a gap was just a slack point in the wire where a support was missing. If I tried to climb over that part of the wall, I’d bleed out before I’d got twenty steps into the DZ.
Okay, Fowler, I thought. Don’t panic. There’s got to be a gap here somewhere. Stop, take a step back and look for it. There was no point in trying to be subtle now; the drone had certainly seen me. If it was closing at top speed, I’d be in range in about three seconds. But I saw no sign of a gap in the razor wire. It was time for evasive action.
I turned and ran back into the sea of dead cars. Hiding from a drone is difficult; if it loses track of you, it switches to infrared. Drones can see right through cars. Fortunately, shooting through cars is a little bit more difficult, so I was reasonably safe as long as I could keep a vehicle between me and the drone. That would buy me a little time, but it wasn’t a long-term strategy. The only way out of this was for me to disable the drone. It would already have called its fellows for backup, but I might at least buy enough time to find the gap—assuming it actually existed—and get out.
Drones aren’t particularly hardy; the trouble with trying to shoot one down is that they are small and fast-moving, making them hard to hit. Well, that’s part of the trouble. The other part is that by the time you get a shot off, it’s probably already killed you six times over. I needed a way to lure it in close without letting it shoot me—and as I knelt on the hot asphalt, I had an idea for how to do that. It was a lousy idea, as most ideas borne of desperate circumstances are, but it was the only one that had managed to float to the surface of my not-quite-panicking brain at that moment.
I peered through the windows of the nearest car but, not finding what I was looking for, moved on to the next. This one too had nothing to offer me. Keeping my head down, I crept to a third car. The buzz of the drone was loud now; I didn’t dare look, but I guessed it was only a few car lengths away. It had slowed down, knowing that I was nearby. It was probably having a little trouble pinpointing my exact location because the cars were radiating enough heat to scramble my heat signature. It couldn’t see me unless I moved or it caught a glimpse of me through a window. I got on the ground and rolled under a school bus, the asphalt hot where it contacted my bare skin. Emerging on the other side, I scampered behind the bus’s left front tire and scanned the area in front of me. I could hear the drone buzzing back and forth right on the other side of the bus.
Just ahead and to my right, I saw what I was looking for. Well, not exactly what I was looking for, but it would do: a badly weathered and warped four-foot-by-eight-foot sheet of OSB siding, the stuff they use for the exterior walls of cheap apartment buildings. Probably slid off the back of a pickup on its way to a construction site. I crawled toward the sheet, doing my best to keep the bus’s tire between me and the drone. Then I lifted the sheet and crawled under it, the warp in the sheet making it possible to lie flat on the pavement with the sheet lightly resting on my shoulders. My head was oriented toward the bus and my gun lay flat on the pavement, with my right hand on top of it.
It was hot. Almost unbearably hot. Despite the OSB shielding the pavement from direct sunlight, I felt like I was lying on a griddle. After about three seconds, I could feel perspiration pouring down my sides, and the sweat in my eyes was making it near-impossible to see. I couldn’t keep my head off the asphalt without rocking the OSB, so I forced myself to press my right cheek against the pavement. I’m not a big crier, but that brought tears to my eyes. I half-expected to hear the sizzling of bacon.
The upside to all this was that I was—I hoped—now virtually invisible to the drone. I was hidden from its conventional camera under the OSB, and the asphalt was so hot that I couldn’t be much more than an indistinct blur on its infrared cam. The trick now was to stay conscious until the drone got close enough for me to shoot it down. I must have been losing a pint of water a minute.
Evidently my hiding spot was even better than I’d hoped: I waited there for a good three minutes and it never even came around the bus. I heard its buzzing growing more distant. This was no good; it wouldn’t stop looking until it found me, and any minute it was going to be joined in the search by every other drone in the area. It was time to seize the initiative.
I momentarily raised my head from the pavement and barked, “Hey!” Then I lay back down, trying to be as still as possible. After a few seconds, I caught a glimpse through my blurry vision of something coming around the back of the bus. It was extremely tempting to raise my gun and just start shooting, but my reflexes were no match for the drone’s. The nanosecond it identified something potentially human in the area, it would direct its fire at me. The best I could hope for was a draw—and taking the drone with me to the great beyond was going to be little consolation.
So I waited as the drone buzzed ever closer to my hiding place. At one point it stopped and hovered for several seconds about five feet from my face. A droplet of sweat had run down my cheek and was now hanging from the tip of my nose, causing it to itch something fierce. It was all I could do not to brush it away with my thumb.
Finally I heard the drone moving away. Doing my best to blink away the sweat and tears, I gripped my gun and pulled myself into a sniper position. As I did so, the sheet of OSB tipped on my back like a lever on a fulcrum, and a corner touched the pavement with a barely audible tap. The drone pivoted to face me and I fired.
Not waiting to see if I’d hit it, I rolled out from under the OSB. I heard the sound of automatic gunfire and felt gravel hitting me in the face. I scrambled to the other side of the bus. The gunshots had stopped, and I was miraculously unhit. I heard a strange noise like a June bug ramming into a screen door and realized the drone was whacking into the side of the bus. I’d winged it. I ran around the other side of the bus to approach it from behind. By this point, its gyros had compensated for the damage and it was once again hovering in place, but it was facing the wrong direction. I wiped my eyes with the back of my sleeve, took aim, and fired. The drone shattered into pieces. The main chassis hit the ground, gave a little whine, and died. I knew how it felt.
Dizzy from the heat, I collapsed against the bus and sank to the ground. Once the gushing of blood in my ears faded, I forced myself to listen for more drones. Thankfully I heard nothing. Hopefully I had a minute or two before the next wave hit. I took several deep breaths, trying to steady my hands and ease the nausea, then opened the backpack. I guzzled down an entire bottle of water, discarded it, and drank half of another. I put the half-empty bottle back in the backpack, threw it over my shoulders, and got to my feet. Taking another moment to listen for drones, I still heard nothing, so I walked back through the cars toward the far wall. I found the gap in the razor wire another sixty feet or so down from where I’d been looking. As I tossed the grappling hook up, I heard the sound of several more drones approaching.
I was still a little shaky, so it took me longer to get to the top than last time. I spotted at least three drones, and they were almost in range. I left my grappling hook and rope on the wall and threw myself down the other side, landing hard on a patch of gravel. Ahead of me were several dilapidated apartment buildings covered with so much graffiti it was hard to tell what color they’d originally been painted. I took off running toward the opening of an alley between two of them. I was fairly certain the drones wouldn’t pursue me past the wall, but there was no point in testing their programming. Once I was safely ensconced in the alley, I leaned against a wall and drank some more water. The sound of gunfire was closer and more persistent now. I heard a child wailing somewhere, and several men yelling at each other in anger. The air smelled of burning garbage and urine.
I’d made it into the DZ.
FIFTEEN
I wended my way through the urban maze that was the Disincorporated Zone. I had only two goals in mind: (1) get to Gwen’s apartment as quickly as possible; and (2) don’t get killed. As I was largely unfamiliar with this part of the DZ and didn’t know where the lines were drawn in the current gang war, the best I could do in service of goal number two was to actively avoid the sound of gunfire. This rule of thumb served me well; by keeping to the alleys and side streets, I made it to the address Gwen had specified in less than forty minutes. Despite it being the middle of the afternoon, the streets were nearly deserted—a fact that was more disturbing than reassuring. Although I saw no active fighting, clearly the residents of this area were staying indoors as much as possible.
I made it to the gate without incident, and had no trouble getting through the padlock and the lock on the building’s outer door. I moved quietly up the stairs, finding the hallway deserted. Breathing a sigh of relief, I continued down the hall to Gwen’s apartment, picked the lock, and slipped inside.
I spent the next hour going through every cabinet, drawer, and cupboard in Gwen’s apartment looking for the coin. I had almost given up when I finally glimpsed a silver disk at the bottom of a shoebox full of random junk that had been stuffed in the back of her bedroom closet. So Keane’s suspicion was right: Gwen had gone back to the DZ for the coin, but had been intercepted by Mag-Lev’s thugs before she had a chance to get it.
Holding it in my hand, I had to laugh. It felt cheap. Titanium is a lightweight metal; that’s why they use it on things like airplane frames. It’s incredibly strong, but it feels like tin. The iota coin was like a prize you’d get out of a cereal box. I’d have put it in a shoebox in my closet, too.
I held it between my fingers and studied it for a moment. It was identical to the one in Mr. Kim’s book. On the front was the backward J symbol, which I took to be the Greek letter iota, under which appeared the
inscription “Not One Iota.” On the back was Leptophlebia nebulosa, the mayfly. The only difference between Gwen’s coin and the picture was that this one bore the serial number 7. I stuffed the coin in my pocket.
By this time I was starving, and the granola bars in my backpack didn’t sound very tempting. I took the backpack off and made myself two ham and cheese sandwiches, which I washed down with a Diet Coke. Once I had eaten, I became aware of how sticky and exhausted I was. I was tempted to take a nap at Gwen’s place and sneak out of the DZ later on in the night, but it probably wasn’t a good idea to stay in one place too long. Somebody might come looking for Gwen or the coin. So I splashed some water on my face, put the backpack on, and went to the door. I pulled it open with my left hand, holding my gun in my right. The hall was empty.
I closed and locked the door behind me and made my way down the hall. I was halfway to the stairs when a door opened just ahead of me. I raised my gun as a man emerged into the hall. It was the grungy guy I’d seen earlier, but now a pistol dangled from his hand.
“Haven’t seen Kathryn for a while,” said the man.
“Yeah, well,” I replied, continuing toward him. “We all have our crosses to bear.”
“Maybe you tell me where she is,” he said.
“Maybe I don’t.”
He pointed his gun at me and I stopped walking. I nearly shot him at that point. In retrospect, I should have.
“Mag-Lev said to keep an eye out for her.”
“Look, friend,” I said. “Kathryn isn’t here, as you can see. This really isn’t any of Mag-Lev’s business.”
“Maybe you tell him that.”
“You live in a world of maybes, don’t you?” I said. “Look, I get it. One of Mag-Lev’s guys comes by, tells you there’s something in it for you if you can find out where Kathryn is. Here’s the problem: Mag-Lev already has Kathryn. That’s why she isn’t here now. So you’re wasting your time.”
The Last Iota Page 14