Without warning

by John Birmingham

  For now, at least, there was no such problem with his English credit card. Even so, aware that some might think his use of credit an imposition on the goodwill and touching naпvetй of Mr Rajiv Singh, the owner of the swish gentlemen’s outfitter on Beretania Street where he bought all four suits, Culver had explained exactly how quickly Singh needed to lodge his accounts this month. Which was to say, immediately.

  ‘And don’t take no guff from those sons a bitches neither,’ he’d advised. ‘Get your money fast, and if you’re in the market for some further and better advice – get the hell out of the suit business, too. Ain’t gonna be much call for all these fancy duds soon.’

  Mr Singh had not needed telling twice. Eighty per cent of his business came from mainland tourists dropping disgraceful amounts of money on exclusive leisurewear. Business attire was a sideline. The next time Jed Culver drove past the shop it was closed. He never saw Singh again.

  ‘Best damn investment I ever made,’ he said to himself while climbing into the jacket of his new favourite, the Armani.

  ‘What’s that, Jedi Master?’ his wife called out, distracted, from the lounge room where she was glued to the television.

  Culver tugged at his shirt cuffs as he walked through into the main living area of the Embassy Suites serviced apartment. Marilyn, his third wife, and definitely his favourite, sat curled up at the end of the lounge nearest the TV, ignoring the glorious vista of Waikiki Beach and Mamala Bay in the floor-to-ceiling picture windows. The pollution storm had not yet reached this far around the world, and the advice they had was that the worst of it probably wouldn’t drift so far south anyway. Intensifying low-pressure systems were likely to draw the poisoned banks of cloud back up to the northern latitudes. Even so, Marilyn, a forty-year-old who looked thirty and sometimes acted twenty, remained at the end of the sofa, a black three-seater covered in a strikingly dense pineapple motif.

  She was, he thought fondly, a bear of little brain, but such a beautiful bear, and so cuddly and loving that he couldn’t help but love her all the more. She was just so much easier to live with than the harsh, angular carnivorous bitches he’d married by mistake the first two times. (And if there was one upside to the otherwise unmitigated horror of the last week, it was realising that those two life-sucking trolls had winked out of existence.)

  In comparison to Vanda and Louise, Marilyn’s needs were simple, if expensive, and she gave him so much in return that he could only worry at the change that had come over her since the Disappearance. What she lacked in book smarts, his wife more than made up for in a vast store of emotional, physical and spiritual resources. She was a woman who rushed at the edge of life, gleefully, like a child chasing soap bubbles on the breeze.

  Jed had never known her to vague out in front of the tube for such a long stretch of time – unless it was in front of Fashion TV in the weeks before they decamped to London and Paris each year. This last week, however, she’d camped in front of the box, channel surfing between BBC World, CNN Hong Kong, Sky News and whatever crisis-of-the-moment bulletins the local network affiliates were putting to air. Right now, she was seemingly mesmerised by an interview with some retired British admiral who wanted to blow up the Channel Tunnel and deploy the Royal Navy ‘to secure the approaches’. Distracted by his murmuring in the bedroom for only a moment, she had now sunk back into video torpor. Jed shook his head and let her be.

  Of his children, there was no sign, for which he was happy. Melanie, aged sixteen and the only positive reminder of his first marriage, had taken the loss of her world like a physical blow. She hadn’t wanted to come to Hawaii, and as soon as she realised that all of her friends back home were gone, she’d spiralled into a black whirlpool of survivor guilt, crying in her bedroom for two days. Roger, three years younger, from one marriage down the line, dealt with the shock by putting on a brittle and entirely counterfeit stoicism as his game face. Jed was worried about it cracking open at some point.

  ‘Have you seen Rog around?’ he asked Marilyn, interrupting the Chunnel bomber.

  ‘He’s with Debbie,’ she said, only half paying attention.

  ‘Debbie?’

  ‘A pretty little thing. Down on one of the lower floors. You know-with the girls’ choir from Iowa.’ As Marilyn spoke she seemed to emerge from a daze, sitting up and actually dragging her eyes off the screen. ‘You met her mom, the air force lady,’ she reminded him. ‘Remember? At breakfast the other day? When they ran out of muffins and toast.’

  He remembered now. All of the choirgirls had at least one parent with them as a chaperone, and a few had come with all of their immediate family, dampening the shock a little. But Debbie’s mother, an air force reservist, had been called back to active duty two days ago, and had been forced to leave her daughter in the care of the tour leaders.

  ‘Oh yes, I remember her. And Debbie. She’s a pretty thing, isn’t she?’

  He was glad that Roger and Debbie had met. Because, like kids everywhere, they were totally self-obsessed, and given the current circumstances, that was a form of strength.

  Marilyn stood up, brightening. ‘Yes, she’s lovely. And Jedi, the girls are doing a concert tonight, down in the restaurant. Do you think you could get back for that? It would be lovely, don’t you think, to do something nice? Everyone will be there, and the hotel manager will be hosting drinks afterwards. To keep up our morality. I could wear a new dress. If I went out to buy one.’

  Another man might have wearied of such vacuous babble, but Culver smiled indulgently. The curfew had been lifted somewhat in the islands, allowing people to get out for strictly rationed supplies, but he had no idea whether Marilyn would be able to find a clothing boutique that was still open or accepting her credit cards. Doubtless, knowing her, she would have a wonderful adventure trying, however.

  ‘You knock yourself out, honey. And I will move heaven and earth to be at that concert.’

  He kissed Marilyn on the top of her head and loitered briefly by the window, squinting into the morning glare in the hope of picking his kids out of the small, scattered crowds down on the beach. A large but orderly swell pushed regular sets of clean barrelling waves up onto the sand and he knew that they would be somewhere down there: his children, Debbie, a handful of choir-girls and at least one or two parental chaperones, all playing in the surf, trying to keep their minds away from dark places. They were doing well at it too, all things considered, and he sent a quick, silent prayer of thanks up to the Lord for that small mercy. Especially for his daughter, who had found in her new friends a salve for the loss of so many old ones.

  On the television the blustering admiral was gone, replaced by a handsome but harried-looking middle-aged man in a white shirt and bright yellow tie. He stood on what looked like the trading floor of some bank or brokerage house and his thick East London accent was difficult to follow, but certain words tolled like funeral bells. ‘Meltdown… crisis.… credit shocks… market collapse…’ A ticker line of breaking news items scrolled across the bottom of the screen. Massed rocket attacks on Israel from southern Lebanon. ‘Pre-emptive’ Israeli air strikes on dozens of targets in Syria, Iran and even Egypt. Another American cruiser, the USS Hopper, swarmed by Hamas suicide bombers on jet skis. Food riots in Berlin. Street fighting between thousands of youths in Paris. More refugees pouring into Guantanamo Bay. A declaration of martial law in six Chinese provinces. A toxic supercell storm forming in the Bay of Biscay.

  There was no question in Jed’s mind what everyone was doing down on the beach below him. They were trying to ignore the end of the world.

  ‘Bye-bye, honey,’ he said to Marilyn as he picked up his briefcase and kissed her again, on the forehead this time.

  ‘Okay. I’ll see you later, darlin’,’ she replied, surprising him with a fierce hug that almost pulled the 205-pound lawyer off his feet. When they separated, her eyes were puffy and haunted. ‘Everything’s gonna be cool, ain’t it, Jedi Master?’

  It was one of those questions
he wasn’t meant to answer truthfully.

  ‘Sure, honey. Everything’s gonna be cool.’

  And he wasn’t lying exactly. Things would probably be better for his family than for most survivors, because Jed Culver had come flying out of the starter’s gate, throwing himself at an overwhelmed administration, impressing the hell out of them with his extensive background in disaster management and civil-military relations – two bits of fluff on his resume that might best be described as completely fictitious. Didn’t matter. Nobody was going to be checking his bona fides for a long time, if ever, and fact was, if you had to put a realistic description on Jed Culver’s colourful employment history you could do no better than saying: Jedediah Armstrong Culver got things done and made sure they stayed done.

  Indeed, he couldn’t think of anyone better qualified to stick his hands into the fire and haul everybody’s asses out with a minimum of singeing and whingeing. And if the price of that was his family getting looked after because he’d snuggled up tight to the surviving power structure, well, then that was just a win-win situation, wasn’t it? As he squared his shoulders, still powerful from years of college wrestling, and headed out of the apartment, he was already thinking about that power structure, which was becoming one of his more difficult projects. In his briefcase he had letters from four ambassadors each putting himself forward as interim President, until a new Congress or election could be organised. It wasn’t a bad idea, stiff-arming a senior diplomat into the job for a strictly limited amount of time. There were decisions that needed making at a national executive level that simply weren’t getting made. But the four bozos in his briefcase were all political appointments – one of whom he’d actually played a very sly hand in getting up – and Culver didn’t rate a single one of them much higher than a stale sack of shit. Frankly, anyone seeking power at the moment definitely couldn’t be trusted with it.

  No, they were going to need someone who actually didn’t want the job. Someone who was available but who was nothing like him or any of his peers in the shark tank. They were going to need someone honest. As honest as George Washington, or at least a good enough actor that he, or she, could pull it off. But who?

  He was going to have to start doing some digging, finding out what was happening beyond the Hawaiian Islands. The Alaskan state government was consumed with the job of making sure its people didn’t starve and freeze to death. Seattle and those parts of Washington outside of the Wave’s effect seemed to be muddling through after some unpleasantness with riots and looting, although it was hard to tell with news coming out of there in a drip feed. Perhaps that might be the place to start looking.

  Culver stalked through the hotel corridors towards the lift at the end of the hall, brooding on a tangle of competing thoughts, among them how much emptier the Embassy Suites seemed compared to just a few days ago. Almost all of the foreign guests had checked out, but there seemed to be fewer Americans in residence, too. Operation Uplift hadn’t started yet and he wondered where they might have gone, since most would have hailed from the mainland. That was less of an issue, however, than the lack of maids. Every morning when he’d emerged from his rooms, at least three housekeeping trolleys were parked somewhere on his family’s floor, but this morning, nada. Of course, it might mean nothing, but he made a mental note to check with some of the staff whether there were problems with their pay, whether some people had just stopped turning up to work, or whether there might be any signs of order and organisation starting to fall apart. Of the three surviving US states, Hawaii was the least able to sustain itself. Without massive amounts of external assistance, the islands would probably be ungovernable, even with a huge armed-forces presence. Both the civilian and military authorities were alive to the very real possibility of starvation and a rapid fraying of the social fabric. Given the shit going down in Europe, nobody was sanguine about just muddling through anymore.

  He walked into the elevator, which was empty, and punched in the button for the lobby. The lift stopped only once during the descent, to pick up a German couple and their luggage.

  ‘Howdy.’ He smiled as they wrestled their bags in. ‘Heading home?’

  ‘No,’ the man responded in perfect, clipped English. ‘We have relatives in Australia we are to visit. Winemakers in the Barossa Valley. Do you know it?’

  ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘Not much of a wine drinker, though.’

  The Germans both nodded as though he’d said something profound.

  ‘So, you think you’ll be going home any time soon?’ Jed asked when the silence began to stretch out.

  ‘No,’ the man replied just as quickly, as they reached the ground floor. He bowed his head brusquely and said, ‘My sympathies for your loss,’ as they squeezed out with their suitcases.

  The foyer would normally have been crowded at this time, with guests checking out and conference-goers arriving for seminars and meetings, but apart from the Germans and half-a-dozen cabin crew from some Asian airline, the lobby was mostly deserted. A couple of wet tourists wandered in from the beach with towels thrown over their shoulders, and the glassy, frozen grins of people desperately trying to avoid looking at the yawning abyss that had lately opened up in front of them. It was a look that Jed Culver was becoming used to. His eyes scanned the floor and he spied his driver standing just outside, sneaking in a last-minute cigarette. He’d given the cancer sticks up himself twenty years ago, after successfully representing British and American Tobacco in a suit against one of their many former customers. Or victims, as even the executives called them in private.

  Bobby Kua, his driver, was a native Hawaiian, a surfer. Jed shook his head ruefully as he watched the boy suck extra hard on the Marlboro, to drag in every last precious carcinogenic lungful, as soon as he saw the lawyer approaching.

  ‘I’m telling you, Bobby, you’d be a much better surfer if you gave those things away.’

  ‘No way, boss,’ Kua said with a smile. ‘I’m already a weapon. Couldn’t get any better.’

  He drew one last, long puff before stubbing out the butt and flicking it into a nearby bin. Jed wondered how long it would be before the young man was pinching off his half-smoked butts to finish them later. He made a mental note to buy up a few cartons. Within a week or two, some people would sell their souls for nicotine, he was sure.

  ‘So where to, boss?’

  ‘Pearl today,’ replied Culver. ‘We’ll be there most of the day, then out to the Capitol at about three-thirty for a meeting. You could probably get away for an hour or so if you needed to. But I’m on a promise to get back here for drinks. Say, seven.’

  ‘Got it,’ said Bobby, leading him over to the nondescript white Chevy Aveo from the government fleet. Gas rationing meant that only the smallest, most fuel-efficient cars could be signed out of the pool for official business, while civilian motorists were restricted to just a few gallons a week, which could only be purchased on alternate days. Rationing had quickly become an unpleasant reality that everyone had to deal with. Armed troopers posted at supermarkets and gas stations made sure of that. Appeals to fairness and civic mindedness shortly after the start of the Disappearance had achieved nothing but the rapid emptying of grocery-store shelves and at least a dozen incidents of serious violence, including one macadamia-caramel-popcorn-related multiple homicide at a supermarket on Kalakaua Avenue.

  Culver was grateful that he had no responsibility for the rationing system. It had quickly come to challenge the Disappearance as the open wound on talk radio. The first time an American was told by a heavily armed man in combat gear that they couldn’t buy all of the Twinkies they wanted, it tended to come as a deep, existential shock every bit as unnerving as the still unexplained cataclysm back on the mainland. Jed himself had quickly emptied the small bar fridge of liquor back at the hotel and filled it up with emergency food supplies, as soon as he’d noticed the breakfast buffet in the restaurant was looking a bit spare. Frankly, he’d have been much happier if he could have relocated Ma
rilyn and the kids to Pearl Harbor, just in case things got totally out of hand. But they all insisted on staying at the Embassy Suites, and he was reasonably confident of making himself important enough to grab up a safe berth in the event of any European-style uprising.

  To that end, he strapped himself into the back seat of the car, with room to spread out his documents, and got to work while Bobby drove him through Honolulu. More shops were closed every day now. In fact, apart from bars and heavily guarded food outlets, there was very little open at all and very few people on the streets. Marilyn was probably going to be disappointed in her search for a new cocktail dress.