The Exodus Towers: The Dire Earth Cycle: Two

by Jason M. Hough

  Not even a hello, she thought.

  “Lee,” she said.

  “G’day,” he muttered, and flipped a page. A greeting used for random strangers passed on the street.

  Sam jerked her head toward Lee’s sleeping friend. “Looks like you need a new drinking partner. I could grab us a bottle.”

  He glanced sidelong at her then, and some silent deliberation passed through his mind. “Thanks, but I’m okay.”

  The lingering effects of Woon’s cider jumbled her thoughts. Six months ago he would have invited her to stay and drink, and within an hour they’d probably be in the cargo bay of his plane, making the beast with two backs.

  But not now. No hint at all of that camaraderie.

  “C’mon,” she said, leaning forward in hopes of earning more than a glance. “Shots, you and me. We can go to my roof. Dawn is still—”

  “I fly at dawn,” Lee said. He dog-eared a page in his book and set it down carefully on the table. “Your orders, remember?”

  She did, vaguely. Grillo wanted more output from the crews, and two missions a day was the only solution Sam could find. She doled out Grillo’s requests not based on profit or eagerness, but on things like range, readiness, cargo room, and capacitor charge time.

  None of the crews liked it, but they didn’t have much choice. No one had seen hide nor hair of Prumble in months, and anyway the days of picking and choosing missions were long gone. Grillo says jump, the crews jump.

  “Maybe we should inspect your bird then,” she said with what she hoped was a coy smile. “A thorough examination, just you and me—”

  “Sam,” Lee said with an annoyed sigh, “it wouldn’t be good for others to see us cavorting. Sorry, just the way it is.”

  “Cavorting? Jesus. I’m not proposing fucking marriage, I just want a quick tumble. What’s the big deal?”

  “Not a good idea, Sam. Sorry.” He picked up his book again and pointedly began to read.

  She stood so fast her chair tumbled over backward. Lee winced but kept reading, and with that Sam turned and strode away, the warmth of alcohol in her head transforming instantly to a cold desire for more. She told herself they would come around. Grillo’s plan required time before the rewards would be clear. Until then, she doubted any of the crews would smile and wave at her when she passed, much less jump between the sheets.

  “Maybe I’ll go visit Vaughn,” she muttered to herself as she stalked down the center of the runway. She’d used him to escape, only to end up not escaping at all, not really. Grillo had agreed not to punish the guard for allowing her to get away, but she’d not seen Vaughn since then. Perhaps, she thought, he’d be up for some makeup sex.

  Samantha stopped walking and hung her head. “Why,” she said to herself, “am I so damn horny all the time now?”

  The constant fantasies that ripped through her mind like runaway trains had become an annoyance. She walked on, pondering the reasons behind her distracting thirst all the way to the hangar, the same hangar she’d called home when Skyler ran the show.

  Maybe, she thought, it’s because I’ve not seen any combat in two months. Perhaps some part of her had grown addicted to the tension and violence beyond the aura and sought to fill the void in other ways. Or maybe it was because she was no longer living with four men. Skyler, Jake, Angus, and Takai were all gone now. The bond they’d shared had been something different. Primal, sure, but born of a shared reliance on one another to survive. None of them had ever shown her attention of a physical kind, and she’d never sought it from them.

  She laughed aloud at another thought. Maybe I’m just suffering from twitching ovaries. She was twenty-three, too young for such concerns in a pre-disease world. And now, all bets were off. The idea of birthing a child into the hell that humanity now lived in seemed foolish at best.

  Besides, Samantha had no desire for motherhood. Three times in the past five years she’d been asked, sometimes subtly and sometimes directly, if she thought an immune woman would give birth to children with the same attribute. She doubted it, but the question was pointless. She had no intention of being the guinea pig in that experiment. Though she knew of no other immune women, she did not want to be a lab rat.

  The hangar depressed the hell out of her. With no aircraft dominating the vast floor, it felt like an empty cavern. Add to that the lack of her crew mates, and it served only to remind her of everything that had been lost.

  As she did most nights, Samantha pulled the blanket and pillow from her bunk, tucked them under one arm, and made her way to the roof. She left her tent behind, this time, the sky being devoid of rainclouds now that wet season had made its usual swift departure.

  The stars were bright and clear tonight, and a half-moon provided plenty of light by which to move. She laid out her blanket and pillow, stripped to her underwear, and fell asleep under the stars only after a quick and lackluster session of pleasuring herself. Up until a few weeks ago she’d engaged in that activity only a few times, those needs fulfilled by the regular brush with danger, the proximity to and the dealing of death. Lately, though, it seemed she could not find rest unless she coaxed her body into some release, however limited it might be.

  She awoke shortly after dawn to the sound of her name being shouted.

  When she opened her eyes, the morning sun lanced into her eyes like lightning bolts. Samantha winced, and rolled onto her side, pulling the blanket over her. The motion made her head hurt, despite a tame night at Woon’s. “Fuck off!” she shouted back.

  “Come down here. I have something to discuss!”

  Grillo’s voice. Bloody hell.

  Frowning, Sam threw the blanket off and pulled her clothes back on. A stained white tank top, black cargo pants, and steel-toed boots with bright yellow stitching. She rubbed the back of her neck as she stalked across the roof, weaving her way between planters flush with ripe fruits and vegetables. Her stomach grumbled despite the hangover, and so she plucked a ripe plantain from a heavy branch, peeled it, and devoured the bland fruit in three bites. At the cistern she filled a bucket with cool rainwater and dunked her head in it, twisting left and right violently until she couldn’t hold her breath anymore. Water flew in an arch when she yanked her head from the bucket, and she kept her eyes closed as the runoff flowed down the sides of her face, letting some of it flow into her mouth. This she swished from cheek to cheek while she wrung her blond hair out and knotted it into a quick braid.

  “Good enough,” she growled, and trudged down to the hangar’s catwalk. From her room she grabbed her favorite black vest. It was laden with pockets and made of a stiff woven nylon. A patch on the left breast bore the Australian “Special Operations Command” logo. There’d been another patch below it when she found the garment, bearing some soldier’s last name, but she’d torn that off.

  Zipped up, the vest constricted around her torso and made her feel even taller than she already was. Something about the stiff, tight material served to give her confidence, and a certain swagger that made people listen.

  At the front of the hangar she punched the red button that hung from a chain by the doors, causing the big barriers to roll back with a loud gnashing of gears and pulleys.

  Grillo stood just outside, in front of a black armored truck. He wore a business suit, as usual, and gripped a ledger of some sort in his left hand. “Good morning,” he said.

  Two similar trucks were parked behind his. She noted that each had both driver and passenger seats occupied.

  “What’s with the caravan?”

  “Safety in numbers,” he replied.

  Samantha grimaced. Grillo’s relentless drive to subjugate the roofers around Nightcliff, and their gardens, was often discussed by the scavenger crews. A few seemed to fall every day. The leaders of those enclaves were once a steady source of business.

  The slumlord gestured, his eyes darting to the interior of the hangar.

  “Come in,” Sam said. “Take a load off.”

  He nodded an
d stepped inside. She led him to the circle of couches and chairs that the crew used to sit in when planning missions. Grillo deliberated for a few seconds before selecting a wooden chair. Sam flopped onto the black leather couch opposite him and tucked her feet up beneath her legs. “You could have just sent a list.”

  “It’s not that kind of mission,” he said flatly.

  Samantha waited.

  “Do you recall,” he said, “the explosion just south of the aura, in Old Downtown, a few months ago?”

  “Sure. I heard the, um, ‘traitors’ tried to blow up Nightcliff. Good thing they missed, too, since I was locked up in there. Look, we’ve talked about this. I’ll keep the crews in line and all that shit, but I draw the line at doing anything that might hurt my friends.”

  Grillo held a hand out, waving her off. “Our arrangement is well understood. Hear me out.”

  “Okay …”

  The slight man leaned forward in his chair. “The site of the explosion is seeing some”—he searched for words—“activity.”

  “Huh? Subhumans?” She thought that unlikely. Old Downtown sat beyond the aura, yes, but it was only connected to land inside the aura, effectively making it an island. The small subhuman presence that existed there in the first weeks and months of the disease had long died out, leaving the place a ghost town.

  He shook his head. “A cloud blankets the whole area. Darwin gets fog on occasion, but this is localized to just that area, and it’s been there for two days now.”

  Samantha studied him. “So their bomb hit some subterranean infrastructure. Ruptured a pipe or a mini-thor’s cooling system.”

  “Maybe so,” he said.

  “So what’s the problem? It’s walking distance from the aura. Send a team in environment suits to scout it out.”

  “We did,” he said. “Yesterday.”

  His tone implied the result.

  Grillo went on. “Five suited men hiked down there, but the moisture obscured their helmets. Zero visibility. They said they were going to turn back, but got lost. And then we lost all contact.”

  “Subs,” Samantha said, “probably. They can track by sounds, so the fog wouldn’t slow them down much.”

  Grillo spread his hands. “That’s what we’d like you to find out. You don’t need a suit, and you’re the only—”

  “The only immune. Hooray for me,” she muttered.

  “I’d just like you to poke around. Find out what happened, and that’s it. I’ll send a few good soldiers with you, yours to command. Men who fought in the Purge and know how to handle an environment suit.”

  She’d prefer to go alone, but Grillo had a certain tone he used when something was not debatable, and he’d invoked that now. Maybe he feared she would run off.

  “Clear the place out,” he added, “if you can, and then we’ll get some engineers in there to make sure whatever is generating that steam is not a danger to the city.”

  She folded her arms and leaned back into the plush couch. “Our agreement was that I would get the crews flying again, which I’ve done. You never said anything about playing sub bait, or babysitting your goon squad.”

  His face remained a mask, but she caught his grip tightening on the leather-bound book in his left hand. “Do this,” he said, “and I’ll bring you to my compound afterward to visit your friend.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  Grillo shook his head. “This is not an ultimatum, Samantha. I’m asking for your help because you’re the best person for the task. Whatever is going on out there, it may pose a threat to us all.”

  Samantha shrugged. “Okay then. Sounds easy enough. When will your people be ready?”

  “They’re waiting outside.”

  The drive, despite being only eight klicks or so by road, took more than an hour.

  Samantha sat in the back of the armored vehicle, rocking back and forth as it trundled over Darwin’s battered streets.

  The two thugs Grillo brought along remained silent after the briefest of introductions, as if they’d been ordered not to chat with her. The taller one, David, had a ragged beard worn in contradiction to his neatly cropped black hair. His teeth were yellow and crooked, and there were wrinkles at the corners of his hard eyes.

  The other was a Middle Easterner of average build and height. He’d said his name, Faisal, with a strong accent, and had not even made eye contact with her. Perhaps, she thought, he still believes women should cover themselves.

  Darwin’s filthy streets blurred by. The morning sun would soon become intolerable for most, giving urgency to the foot traffic and makeshift street markets. Children chased after the caravan, laughing and waving until they could no longer keep up. Then they would bend down and pick up the nearest rock, hurling it at the trucks with total abandon, as punishment for not stopping.

  Eventually the vehicles turned down Cavenagh Street and surged in speed. This close to Aura’s Edge, the people out and about were the lowest of the low. The single-story buildings here were all crumbling, looted shells. Hardly any had gardens on the roof, Samantha noted. Too easy to raid, too hard to defend.

  Groups of citizens huddled in whatever shade they could find, all dressed in dirty rags, their faces skeletal and arms stick-thin. They watched the trucks roll by with hollow stares, having lost hope years ago of anyone coming out here to help them. Samantha glanced at Grillo. He sat in the front passenger seat, his back to her, and she expected him to be ignoring the heartbreaking view. But he wasn’t. Grillo was turned toward the window, his face scanning back and forth as he studied the sights. His lips were pressed into a thin line, and though she couldn’t see his eyes behind a pair of small, round sunglasses, she suspected there was no disgust to be found there.

  After a few blocks the trucks reached the barricade and fanned out to park side by side. Samantha squinted when Faisal opened the back door of their APC and hopped out. Sunlight flooded the compartment, reflected off a dusty concrete sidewalk they’d parked on.

  “After you,” David said, the only words he’d spoken the entire drive other than his name.

  Outside, Samantha waited while the two mercenaries pulled on bright yellow environment suits that were produced from the back of one of the other trucks. The final truck held a selection of weapons and a comm terminal. A black woman in civilian garb sat at the screen, pulling a headset on. She smiled halfheartedly when their eyes met, then focused on the equipment in front of her.

  Sam glanced over the weaponry arrayed along the floor of the truck, but there was nothing tempting. She made sure her own machine gun was loaded and ready. She’d yet to find a replacement for her beloved Israeli shotgun, lost when the Melville crashed. Someday, soon perhaps, she resolved to take a crew out into the Clear just to find another. For now, one of Skyler’s extra rifles would have to do. She’d found it in a private, hidden stash shortly after returning to the hangar. The place had been ransacked by Nightcliff’s finest, but in their haste they’d missed a few spots.

  Skyler, despite his many faults, knew how to keep a weapon clean, and so she had no qualms about carrying one of his guns on a mission. In some weird way it felt like a small tribute to his memory.

  “Up here, Samantha,” Grillo said. He’d scaled the barricade and now stood atop it. The mound of trash and debris roughly marked Aura’s Edge along the entire circle, except where it went out into the ocean. Beyond, a no-man’s-land extended for a hundred meters. Here the aura’s protection rippled, shifted, and weakened. Only fools ventured beyond the barricade without some form of protection against SUBS.

  Sam bounded up the five-meter-high “wall,” hopping from one broken chunk of concrete to another, avoiding a rusty bit of chain-link fence that protruded from one spot.

  Up top, Grillo waited with a pair of binoculars already extended to her. She took them, but didn’t raise them to her eyes just yet.

  The street beyond the barricade was markedly different from the portion inside. Because so few dared to venture there, ver
y little had been looted or picked over. Cars dotted the road. They weren’t packed in like sardines here, because Darwin’s Old Downtown was effectively an island, cut off by the aura. Farther west, Larrakeyah Army Base found itself in a similar state of isolation, but it had been one of the scavengers’ first hunting grounds for useful items.

  Sam’s gaze settled on the area just beyond no-man’s-land. A group of tall buildings marked the local government offices, half a kilometer away. She could only see the very top floors. Everything else lay blanketed under a thick cloud that hugged the ground despite an ocean breeze. The gray-white haze swirled and billowed gently.

  Grillo tapped her shoulder and handed her a headset. She slipped it over her head and adjusted the boom mic to rest near her cheek.

  “Sound check,” a woman’s voice said in her ear.

  Sam glanced back at the truck below her, and said, “Testing one two.”

  “You’re clear,” the woman replied.

  The two mercenaries, David and Faisal, were suited now and climbing the barricade. They both carried matching assault rifles, standard army issue stuff. David, she saw, had a couple of grenades on his utility belt. Oddly, both men had towels wrapped around their left forearm, as if they expected to get bitten by a police dog.

  Next to Sam, Grillo cleared his throat. “I’m most interested in what is causing that cloud. If you can find yesterday’s party, please ascertain their fate, and salvage what you can.”

  “And the headset is so I can call in reinforcements?”

  “Do you want the truth?”

  “No,” she said. “Glad-hand me.”

  Grillo’s eyebrow twitched slightly but he did not smile. Sarcasm seemed to be the only thing that rattled his calm veneer. “The headset is so you can report back what you are seeing,” he said. “Up until the end, if need be.”

  No offense, mate, but I’m not risking my life just to give you a little intel. She kept this to herself and nodded. “Let’s go, boys.”