Without warning

by John Birmingham

  Thinking about her family made him feel even worse. She had cried all through that first night of the Disappearance, after wasting hours ringing every number she knew back on the East Coast. Her parents, her brothers and sisters, her uncles, aunts, old friends were all gone. Kip almost turned on his heels and went back inside, but momentum carried him forward. He had to get to work.

  The street was sorry-looking and deserted. Nothing moved in a grey landscape of dying trees, brown lawn and wilted flowerbeds. Rain had washed away the worst of the fallout, but blackened, soggy clumps of mud and ash had collected at natural choke points in the gutter, behind the wheels of parked cars, and in small ponds of sludge where the ground dipped and run-off normally collected. Normally lush green and manicured to within an inch of its life, Deerford Drive was now sadly unkempt. Kipper shivered in the bleak chill of the morning. It had been unnaturally dark for most of the past week, with the sun completely blotted out, but prevailing weather patterns had finally pushed away the worst of the airborne waste, and although the day was by no means sunny, it was at least a good dealer brighter. That wouldn’t necessarily last, however.

  Hundreds of cities and towns were ablaze across North America. The entire continent was pouring out vast noxious plumes as the infernos spread, with nobody and nothing to stop them, save for the occasional (and completely futile) automated firefighting system. He’d seen satellite photos of it on the web, and once on a local news show, before FEMA took over the airwaves. If he hadn’t known better he’d have bet good money that an angry rash of super-sized volcanoes had suddenly erupted all over the US and up into Canada. Vast, slow-moving geysers of smoke, thousands of miles long, trailed away east from city after city. The Atlantic and most of Europe were now blanketed, with the wave front due to pass over the Urals in a day or two. It wouldn’t be long before it had circled the northern hemisphere and reappeared back over Deerford Drive.

  ‘Mr Kipper, Mr Kipper! Hello!’

  Jolted by the unexpected cry, Kipper got his mask in place. He knew the voice only too well. Mrs Heinemann from number 43.

  ‘Is it safe now? Is it safe to go out, Mr Kipper?’

  ‘Well, you’d better hope so, Mrs Heinemann. Because you’ll be in trouble otherwise, won’t you?’

  The woman was a wire-framed ninety-eight pounds of faded Jewish-American princess. Never married. Never got over it. At fifty-something, perhaps even sixty-odd, give or take some plastic surgery and a high degree of elasticity in her actual birth date, she’d poured all of her considerable energies into her self-appointed role as block kapo of the neighbourhood. Without a husband or children to harass and make miserable, she busied herself with other people’s ‘problems’ – situations that, generally speaking, nobody had recognised as a problem until Mrs Heinemann became involved.

  And yes, she was Mrs Heinemann. Unless you wanted an earbashing out of your thoughtlessness and lack of consideration for the cruel vicissitudes that had left her single when so many other, undeserving women had chanced upon partners and offspring. Dressed in a bright green and salmon-pink shell suit, gathered at the ankles and wrists with elastic bands, and sporting a plastic shower cap and handkerchief face mask, she hurried up the slight incline in the street towards him, firing from the lip as she advanced.

  ‘I’m so glad I caught you, Mr Kipper. I haven’t seen anyone out and about all week. This terrible situation, you know. And the curfew. So is it safe now? Can we move about? It’s just that I have very little food in the house. And so does everyone else. Mrs Deever at number 36, with her two little ones – she needs formula, Mr Kipper. And sweet Jane at 29, the retarded girl, she needs her medication. The Songnamichans – that very large Hindu family, he’s a Microsoft manager – well, they must nearly be eating the wallpaper by now, with all of those children. What is to be done, Mr Kipper? What is to be done?’

  She’d arrived right in front of him by now, yapping the whole time, a classic demonstration of fire and movement. He hadn’t had a chance to speak or retreat. But her questions gave him the opportunity he needed.

  ‘Mrs Heinemann,’ he said forcefully. ‘You need to get back inside right now. It is not safe out here, yet. We haven’t had a chance to take any measurements of air or water quality. I’m only out here because it’s my job. You need to get back inside where it’s safe, this very minute. Go on. Right now. Don’t delay. And don’t drag any mud into the house with you. You’ll need to strip off, bag up that outfit, and scrub yourself thoroughly. You still got water stored in the house? Good. Then, get going. Right now!’

  He made sure his delivery was every bit as rapid and incontestable as her own. He waved her back towards her own house, shaking his head and brooking no backchat. In his peripheral vision he could see curtains twitching aside in a couple of houses and he made sure that everyone watching could see he didn’t want anybody wandering around until it was safe.

  ‘But Mr Kipper -’

  ‘No! Move along now. Go on, Mrs Heinemann. You’ve no business endangering yourself out here. Now git. Go and decontaminate yourself.’ He took her upper arm in a deliberate grip and gave her a hurry-on towards home.

  ‘Oh my. Oh dear,’ she mumbled as she toddled off at high speed.

  Shaking his head, he returned to the pick-up and climbed in, carefully knocking any mud from his boots before doing so, mostly for the benefit of his audience. The cabin was cold and still smelled of the McDonald’s Family Meal he’d brought home late on day one. He’d also picked up a whole heap of canned fruit and eighty gallons of spring water in big ten-gallon plastic bottles, but that was the extent of any hoarding he felt necessary – because of all those freeze-dried, vacuum-sealed meals he’d bought in bulk near the end of last year, from some camping store that was closing down. Man, hadn’t Barb changed her tune on that little purchase. He’d got himself a new one torn at the time.

  The engine needed turning over a couple of times before the truck grumbled into life, sounding louder than usual in the unnatural stillness of the morning. He checked the fuel gauge as soon as he had power, making sure he hadn’t been siphoned. The city council’s Emergency Management Committee had banned the sale of gasoline for ‘non-essential’ purposes on the second day, but hadn’t had the manpower-or the will, in his opinion-to enforce the measure when thousands of people ignored it and started queuing at gas stations. They bid up the price to almost fifty dollars a gallon at one point. That was when the army had rolled out of Fort Lewis to lock down the city and get everyone off the streets as the sky had blackened and the rain turned to acid.

  Kipper’s truck had three-quarters of a tank, and he could get more from a council depot without any trouble, yet. But that’d change. No commercial shipping or air traffic had come into Seattle for five days, and he didn’t expect any in the foreseeable future. The only supplies they could draw on were aid shipments: food from Australia and New Zealand, one supertanker of petroleum so far from Taiwan, and more food and medical supplies from Japan. It was enough to keep things ticking over, if it kept coming, and if people didn’t panic. Two big fucking ‘if’s.

  The island was quiet, and people were sticking to the curfew. Mostly. Kipper searched the radio dial for anything besides the recorded EBS messages, which told him nothing new, and said nothing about the raid on the food bank. He picked up a scratchy, inconsistent transmission from somewhere in Canada, but it was all electronic dance music, which in his book was worse than nothing. Sighing, he punched the button to cut off the radio and pulled away from the curb, wondering what the hell he was going to do about Piglet’s Big Movie.

  * * * *

  His route took him along West Mercer Way. Normally a quiet, tree-lined drive through some of the more exclusive real estate the island had to offer, it felt eerily deserted, with sodden rubbish and leaf litter strewn along its length. He took the Homer Hadley floating bridge across Lake Washington into the city, and again found it hard to get his head around the empty lanes. At this time on a Friday m
orning, traffic should have been crawling over the span, bumper to bumper.

  There was some vehicular movement, however. Mobile army patrols stopped him three times. Then there were the roadblocks and checkpoints he hit on another four occasions. His pass, countersigned by three city councillors and the ubiquitous General Blackstone, carried him through each obstacle, but he understood why there were so few people about. After the food riot on day three down at Ivar’s Salmon House, under the I-5 bridge, and a shoot-out at the 7-Eleven on Denny Way that left four people dead following an argument over who was going to get the last of the frozen pizza subs, the army had put away its smiley face. Three young men, who’d have been thought of as burglars a week earlier, got shot down as ‘looters’ while trying to make off with a carton of hot dogs from the Wendy’s on Rainier Avenue that evening. A vagrant, emerging from a dumpster behind a KFC the following day, was cut in half by automatic weapons fire from an armoured fighting vehicle. Far from attempting to cover up the incidents, the same General Blackstone who’d scrawled the signature on Kipper’s ‘transit documents’ appeared on television and the radio to detail exactly what had happened and to assure the citizens of Seattle it would happen again, to anyone who broke curfew and attempted to steal from their fellow citizens by ‘subverting’ the rationing system. Things went quiet around the city after that.

  Talk-back radio and a couple of current affairs shows on the local TV networks had raged against the ‘injustice’, but that defiance was short-lived, lasting only as long as it took four Humvees full of troops to roll into their parking lots. Some lawyers who arrived at City Hall to serve papers on the administration for First Amendment violations were still in custody somewhere. There’d been no more open dissent and, incidentally, no more food riots or looting either. But the self-proclaimed Resistance appeared shortly afterwards in the form of an email spammed throughout the city warning of a fascist takeover and promising to ‘take back the streets’.

  Kipper wasn’t happy about any of it – how the hell could you be? But on the other hand he knew how desperate the situation was, and just how easily it could spin totally out of control. He really hoped this Blackstone asshole would see sense and ease off the thumbscrews a little. People were hurting and scared; you couldn’t keep the whole city under house arrest indefinitely. And he could only pray that this dumbass Resistance thing turned out to be a bunch of dope-addled bullshit artists. God knows, Seattle was full of them. A few more stunts like last night’s stupidity at the food bank and they could totally fuck things up.

  Speaking of which… He hauled the wheel around, crossing over the median strip and pointing the truck towards 4th Avenue South, where the main food distribution centre for the CBD was located, at a Costco wholesale warehouse near the train yards. He wanted to see for himself how the food aid system was working.

  The signal-strength meter on his cell phone read near full and he called Barney Tench on hands free as the pick-up swung around Rizal Park. It seemed a small wonder the call went through – until he remembered that ‘unauthorised civilians’ were barred from using the cell network for anything other than emergencies.

  Kipper shook his head and scowled at a measure he thought of as totally unnecessary and counterproductive. It wasn’t like the Wave had just appeared and people were going to be melting the phone-company servers with millions of calls. It was just more repression for no good reason. Exactly the sort of nonsense that fuelled the paranoid dementia of idiots and conspiracy loons.

  His temper was building again as he chewed over the many poor decisions that had been made in the previous week, and it was only Barney’s answering the call that short-circuited a bout of foul-mouthed, solitary cussing. His friend’s voice filled the cabin, sounding flat and tinny as everyone did on speaker-phone.

  ‘S’up, buddy?’

  ‘Hey, Barn. I’m heading over to Costco right now to check things out. You on your way?’

  ‘About four or five minutes away. I’m just coming over 1st Avenue Bridge. Heather should already be there. She overnighted in town to get there early.’

  ‘Oh, okay. I didn’t know that. Good for her.’

  Kipper was taken aback for a second. Heather Cosgrove was a young civil engineering graduate on a six-month internship with his road maintenance guys, all of whom had been at a conference in Spokane when the Wave hit. If he was giving out a prize for Most Freaked Out, Heather was an unbackable favourite. She was from Minneapolis, and apart from her job, she had nothing left.

  ‘It’s spooky, isn’t it,’ said Tench, completely oblivious, ‘without any traffic. Like a doomsday movie or something.’

  ‘Yeah,’ replied Kip, getting his head back in the game. ‘Listen, did you hear about the raid last night?’

  Barney snorted down the line. ‘Dunno that I’d call it a raid, man. What I heard was two dreadlocked jerks got stoned and tried to steal a pallet of Cheetos from the food bank on South Graham.’

  ‘Well, d’you hear they got shot?’

  The speaker-phone hissed quietly for a second, as Kipper swung down the off ramp at South Forest Street.

  ‘No. Sorry, I didn’t hear that,’ said Barney. ‘Who told you?’

  ‘Cops rang at about two this morning.’

  ‘Why’d they call you? Why not one of the councillors?’

  ‘Said they couldn’t raise them.’

  Tench laughed. ‘That’d be right.’

  * * * *

  17

  AN NASIRIYAH, SOUTHERN IRAQ

  ‘Fedayeen!’

  The warning cry came from the man at point, a fraction of a second before the hammering of automatic weapons fire started up. The Cav troopers moved for cover as though every man had been jabbed with a stun gun. The dismounted cavalry scouts were fast and flowed like quicksilver, pouring themselves into doorways, around stone walls, and down behind piles of rubble that made vehicle movement all but impossible through the narrow streets of An Nasiriyah. The M3A2 Bradley Cavalry Fighting Vehicles followed them when and where they could. A couple of squads of infantry with their M2A2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles joined them when they moved into the town.

  Bret Melton moved with them, the instincts and experience of his own time in the Rangers, and a decade of combat reportage since, rubbing up hard against fatigue and ageing muscles. He landed next to Specialist Vincent Alcibiades, burrowing in under the protection of a massive broken beam of concrete and rebar as small-arms fire chewed up the mud-brick walls of the street, zipping less than a foot overhead.

  Melton had picked up an M4 for his own protection, moments before they entered Iraq. Nobody said one word to him. After the carbine, he picked up some MOLLE web gear and some ammo pouches. He already had a matching dark blue set of Level III body armour and a Kevlar helmet. The army issued him with a protective mask and MOPP gear in case someone dropped some germs or chemicals on them, but he’d always been one of the sceptics on the WMD front.

  In any case, the fighting was simply too chaotic and disordered for Melton to be able to rely on anyone else to look after him. In the labyrinthine warren of souks, alleys, cut-throughs and ragged streets of the towns and villages in which they’d been fighting, you never knew when you were going to have some asshole suddenly appear right in front of you with murder in his eyes. He hadn’t needed the carbine yet, for which he was grateful. Still, he flicked the selector from safe to semi and waited. Alcibiades let rip with two short bursts, holding his own M4 up over the cover and firing blind. The Bradleys added the hum and mechanical metal-punching beat to the chaotic audio mix, sending.25 mike-mike into buildings without a care for possible civilian casualties.

  When the specialist came back down, he spat a green stream in the sand, his cheeks bulging from a wad of chew. ‘Fuckin’ ragheads.’

  The volume of fire going down-range was impressive and deafening, nearly drowning out the shouts of Lieutenant Euler and his non-coms as they organised the counter-ambush with the infantry troops who had
linked up with them.

  Melton did his best to collect himself and commit to memory as many details as possible. He would write notes out later, when the immediate danger had passed, and his hands, hopefully, weren’t shaking too much. As always, the head rush of contact was giddy and horrifying – a glassy funnel of light and colour down which you fell as soon as you realised somebody was trying to take your life. Melton found it harder to deal with as a reporter than he had when a soldier, perhaps because he was older and wiser, perhaps because now he had nothing to distract him from the experience. Indeed, having the experience and recording it for others were his sole reasons for being there. He couldn’t shut down and get on with whatever task the sergeant or corporals assigned him. He played his part by opening up his senses to the madness of battle, letting it burn its terrors and banalities directly onto his cortex.

  He savoured the taste of the dust in his mouth, the gritty, choking, dog-shit and tangy metallic diesel flavour of it. He noted the struggle of a green bejewelled bug caught in a wad of gum, stuck to the side of Alcibiades’s boot; tried to freeze in his memory the smell of the man next to him, a cloying miasma of body odour, stale farts and wintergreen Skoal chewing tobacco. He studied the contours of the street, the way the ancient biscuit-coloured buildings snaked away, slightly uphill. The yellow-green, foul-smelling stream of raw sewage and trash that flowed down-slope towards him. The soldiers themselves – some cool and frosty, others sweating but focused, most of them scared out of their minds.