“Sorry, buddy. You’re not on any list I got.”
“I know Nathan Lammockson. He helped me-I was a hostage in Barcelona-he sprung us out, vowed to support us…”
But this coca-chewing guard, his face hidden by his immense sunglasses, looked too young to have heard of Gary, or even Barcelona.
And the fence he and his companions defended was a good three meters tall, concrete panels topped by barbed wire and studded by machine gun towers. It stretched from horizon to glass-clear Andean horizon. This was the boundary of Project City, of Lammockson’s empire. And it was sealed shut against Gary Boyle.
They were alone in a vast empty landscape, Walker City’s advance party led by Gary and Grace and Domingo, the AxysCorp guards who had come out from behind their fence to deal with them, and a handful of locals, young Andean men, standing idly by in colorful wool ponchos, watching. Gary, dizzy with the altitude, felt desperate. His phone had been dead for months. If the guards wouldn’t let him pass, he had no way to contact Lily.
“I’m Gary Boyle! I know Lily Brooke! And this is Grace, Grace Gray! We walked down two continents to get here. The walk consumed my life. I’m forty-three years old. My whole damn life. But now we’re here, now we need help.” He felt absurdly like crying.
“Look, guy, you can see how we’re fixed.” Gary wondered how he had managed to pick up a Brooklyn accent, since he couldn’t have been more than five years old when New York drowned. “We ain’t got room for no more. We ain’t got room for you. Just because you can throw a few names around makes no difference to that. Mr. Lammockson is famous all over the world, anybody can say they know him, right?” He leaned closer to Gary. “And let me tell you something else. Even supposing you and your lady friend here are buddies of Mr. Lammockson, even supposing you could prove it, there’s still no way you would be allowed in with your army of bums.”
“If you’d just take a message to Lily Brooke-”
“No.” The guard started shouting now, exerting his authority. “I’m not some runner for you. You take a message. You take a message back to your “mayor.” You tell her that if you don’t shift your thousand asses, they’ll be shifted for you.” He looked Gary up and down, contemptuously staring through his sunglasses. “You been warned. You got forty-eight hours. You got that straight?” And he turned and walked back to the gate in the wall, held open for him by more AxysCorp goons.
Suddenly Gary was exhausted. The world yellowed. He bent, felt the blood pound in his ears, retched.
Grace rubbed his back. Domingo squatted down beside him.
“Well, you tried,” Grace said.
“This damn altitude,” Gary said.“I can’t think straight.” He sat on the grassy ground, and gazed up at the wall that excluded him.
“Nobody’s going to blame you, my friend,” Domingo said.
“Nathan’s breaking his promise to me,” Gary said. “And that means I’m breaking my promise to you all, the mayor, the thousand people who walked all this way with me.”
Grace looked at the blank wall, her expression empty. “It makes no difference,” she said. “If we keep walking. Not to me. I spent my life walking. I don’t believe I ever thought it would end.”
“But listen,” Domingo said more urgently, leaning close to Gary. “Never mind broken promises. You heard what the fool with the gun said. Suppose there were a way to get in, to make contact with this Lily, or Lammockson. If we persist we might find a way. Suppose they allowed you in-you, and Grace, a handful of others. Suppose it was as the guard said. If they let you in, but you had to leave the others behind-”
It was just the kind of deal Nathan Lammockson might ask him to make, Gary thought. But he had made his choice long ago, when, even as times became so hard, he found he was unable to abandon Walker City. “No. It’s all of us, or none.”
Grace shrugged. “Then I guess it’s none of us. We’re a thousand strong, but we’re no army.”
“But armies do exist in this world.”
Gary turned, still sitting. He saw woolen trousers, boots, a figure standing over him. One of the locals, a Quechua, had spoken to him. Gary tried to stand, but staggered, and Grace had to help him.
The Quechua must have been in his thirties. Not tall, but a strong face-no, arrogant more than strong. He wore a woolen tunic, brightly dyed. Huge golden studs stretched his earlobes. Behind him were more young men, similarly dressed, watching cautiously. They wore ponchos though the day was warm, and Gary wondered if they carried concealed weapons.
“So who are you?”
“My name is Ollantay.” He smiled. “The name means nothing to you. That’s fine. But your name means something to me, Gary Boyle.” He turned to Grace. “And you are Helen Gray’s girl, yes?”
Reflexively, Domingo stood between Ollantay and Grace. “You know about us? How? Are you from Project City, from Lammockson’s people?”
“Quite the opposite. I’ve never met Nathan Lammockson. But I have met your fellow hostages, Piers Michaelmas, Lily Brooke.”
“Oh? How so?”
“Kristie Caistor is my wife.”
Gary gaped at him.“Kristie-” Lily’s niece, whom he had last seen as a kid in London-who must now, he reminded himself, be in her thirties herself.
Domingo said, “And what was it you said about armies?”
Ollantay’s eyes narrowed. “You have been excluded by Lammockson. So have we, we Quechua. And we have been exploited by him for a generation now, as he huddles in his palaces, and builds his absurd mountain-stranded boat. Here, on a land that used to be ours, we suffer the final spasm of western colonialism. But times are changing. A final battle approaches, a final reckoning, before the sea closes over us all.”
Gary was bewildered by this exotic young man, and his head spun with his mentions of Lily and Kristie. “What the hell are you talking about? What boat?”
Ollantay gestured at the fence. “There is no room for barriers like this, not any more. Now is the time to right wrongs. It will not be vengeance. Simply justice.”
Domingo looked him up and down. “And how are you going to fight this battle, mountain boy? Will you ride llamas and throw spears?”
Ollantay faced him, and Gary sensed the silent conflict between them, a contest for dominance. “Not spears,” Ollantay said at last. “I will tell you one thing, one fact to take back to your footsore mayor. We have Kalashnikov rifles. AK47s. They were extracted from a saved cache in Lima, our drowned capital. We used Lammockson’s own salvage submarines to achieve this, right under his nose. We have the guns, and the ammunition. That is how we will fight our battle. Perhaps we could win without you, though we are not numerically strong. But you, who have come walking out of nowhere, are an opportunity for us. With you we will overwhelm Lammockson and his AxysCorp guards and his Project City, his technological Utopia.”
“We didn’t come here for this,” Gary said.
Domingo, determined now, said, “No, but this is what we’ve found, Gary. Before, we always walked away when we came to a crisis. But this is the end of the journey. You always knew it would come to this, some day, when the land ran out, and people crowded together tighter and tighter, like goats on a mountain summit. You heard what that guard said. If we’re driven away from here there’s nowhere else to go. It is the crunch for us. Fight or die.”
“I won’t take this back to the mayor.”
“But I will,” Domingo said.“In fact it’s not your choice.” He glanced at Ollantay. “Are you ready to come with us now?”
Ollantay smiled. “I have been waiting for this all my life.”
Gary looked at Grace. Her expression was closed up, unreadable.
And suddenly he was retching, his head pounding, the altitude beating him again. He leaned over, resting his hands on his knees, while Grace rubbed his back.
68
From Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:
All along the flooded fringes of the Andes the rafts drifted. Nobody knew how many the
re were, how many people were struggling to survive out there on the breast of the sea.
Nathan Lammockson posted troops along the shifting coastline to stop them landing. There was never any shortage of volunteers for that duty.
And he sent out boats among the rafts. The boats carried doctors, but not to administer to the sick.
Nathan had long been digging up old population-reduction philosophies and techniques. Even before the flood began there had been voluntary human extinction movements, developed by those who believed mankind was essentially a scourge and that its sole remaining duty was to restore Earth to its pre-human condition as best as possible, before submitting gracefully to the dark. Lammockson argued that here you had a rationalization for not fleeing from the encroaching flood, for submitting to it. So the doctors in the boats were “suicide missionaries,” trained to counsel refugees to accept their fate. They were equipped with appropriate medications.
Other missionaries, not sanctioned by Lammockson, sailed among the desolate raft communities. One motorboat carried a preacher, gunning up and down the shore, haranguing with a loudhailer. This is how it feels to live in a world with an intervening god, he said. How mankind was back in the days of the Old Testament. Nathan considered shutting him up, but decided he was doing as effective a job as his suicide doctors.
The population of the rafts wasn’t fixed. Rafts broke up, or were cannibalized by others. Or they drifted away, over the horizon, to a fate nobody on the land cared to imagine. But there were always more, rising up from the flooded towns.
Kristie watched this. Isolated from Cusco for years, she wondered if there was anybody in there who fretted as she did about how long this could go on.
69
August 2035
Ollantay’s ragtag army broke through Project City’s outer perimeters near the airport.
The invasion force had no armor or heavy weapons. But it did have a lot of people, the Quechua and the other dispossessed from the highlands, and a good number of the resentful poor from P-ville, as well as hundreds of able-bodied adults from Walker City. And it did have an awful lot of AK47s and ammunition to spare.
Few died in the desultory exchanges of fire around the airport. Nathan’s forces were too well dug in to be vulnerable to Ollantay’s crude tactics, but on the other hand they seemed reluctant to deploy the heavy weapons they must have possessed. When the skirmish was over, the rebels left a significant detachment of Lammockson’s forces pinned down, holed up in the terminal building. Ollantay presented the stalemate as a victory, because it left this quadrant of Cusco largely undefended.
Then he led his army into the city from the southeast.
The invaders worked their way up a broad, deserted street called the Avenida El Sol, which, according to the elderly maps downloaded into Gary’s sleeve patch, ran straight into the old center of Cusco.
The rebels broke into two files which proceeded down either side of the road, in the cover of the buildings, keeping away from the center line where they would be vulnerable to sniper fire. Such rudimentary military tactics had been grafted into Ollantay’s thinking by a handful of military veterans among the Okies of Walker City. But inexperience showed in the cowering, nervous way the invaders huddled in doorways, clinging to scraps of cover, peering fearfully at shadows and at the sky. Most of them had Kalashnikovs, weapons they waved around with a casualness that scared Gary.
Walker City’s current mayor, Janet Thorson, was a tough fifty-something who originally hailed from Minnesota, graying blond, short, strong-looking, wary. Now she walked with Gary in the van of Ollantay’s army. They both wore their antique AxysCorp-durable coveralls, still their most flexible and enduring garments and, dirtied down as rough camouflage, the nearest they had to battle dress-garments whose purchase had once made Nathan Lammockson that little bit richer, now worn by an army come to bring him down. Neither of them carried weapons save the handguns tucked inside their coveralls. They had no armor, no flak jackets or helmets, and Gary, who was no soldier, felt very vulnerable.
“Shit, these kids got a right to be wary,” Janet Thorson said.“Let’s face it, we’re none of us used to cities anymore. Some of the Walker kids have never been in an environment like this, never in their young lives. And I guess most of these Andean hill-folk types are first-timers too.”
Gary imagined that was true. And it was true that Cusco was a better functioning town than any he personally had seen for years. The buildings were reasonably intact, the road surface maintained. There were even shops lining this long avenue, shut up and boarded now but obviously still working. But there was nobody around, no adults or children, not even a dog; even the birds were quiet. “I guess the town itself is a reflection of Nathan Lammockson’s will,” he said.“Willpower and discipline and leadership, applied across decades.”
Thorson grunted. “Yeah, that and the money he managed to vacuum up while the world was going to hell. But discipline, foresight, yes. Which is why this lull makes me uneasy.” She pointed to a CCTV camera on a stand; it panned silently, viewing the advancing army.“They know we’re here. I think Nathan Lammockson knows exactly what he’s doing. He must have seen that a day like this would come, when the workers in the shantytowns and the mountains who’ve been spending their lives for his precious city would rise up-even if we walkers are a joker in the pack. No, he’ll have foreseen this; he’ll have prepared. We’re walking into some kind of trap, is what I think,” she said grimly. “It just hasn’t snapped shut yet.”
As they pressed on the advance units came up against more defensive perimeters, at intersections of the El Sol with transverse roads called the Avenida Pachacutec, just north of the rail station, and the Avenida Garcilaso a few blocks further on. At each halt Gary, maybe a hundred meters back from the advance guard, was able to hear the popping of gunfire, screams, yells before the column was waved on. Evidently Nathan’s resistance was proving no tougher in the town than at the airport.
When he came through the intersections himself Gary saw the remains of barbed-wire fences, smashed-open roadblocks, pillboxes of sandbags and concrete slabs. And at the Garcilaso intersection he saw a dead man, some guy in a bright blue AxysCorp uniform that looked as if it had rolled out of the factory today. He wore a white helmet, and had a sergeant’s stripes on his arm. He was flung over the road surface, face down, limbs sprawled like a doll’s, a deep crimson stain spreading over his back. This was the first corpse Gary had seen today. He had seen plenty of death in his time with Walker City, and enough violent death, but he never got used to it.
Now the column halted again. The order came to hole up. People looked for shelter, from the sun as much as from sniper fire, in doorways and alleys. Doors splintered and windows shattered as the invaders began to help themselves to whatever they could loot from the shops and residences, offices and churches. But Gary started to hear complaints that there was no food or water to be found.
The mayor told Gary she was going forward to see what was happening, and left him.
Gary went back twenty meters to find Grace, who had been walking with Domingo. Grace looked more uncomfortable than nervous. Domingo looked like some kind of pirate, grinning hugely as he cradled his own AK47, which he had polished until it gleamed in the clear Andean light. He had a looted necklace, a string of chunky aquamarine blocks, wrapped around his head like a bandanna.
“You really are an asshole, Domingo,” Gary said with faint disgust.
Domingo laughed.“But this is a day for assholes. What next, O great non-asshole gringo?”
“The mayor’s going forward. I guess Ollantay’s planning the next step. Come on, we’ll go up with her.” He took Grace’s hand.
“We are mere foot soldiers,” Domingo said.
Gary shook his head. “We got friends in this city. Anything we can do to reduce the body count today, we’re going to do.”
Domingo bowed. “Then I follow your lead.”
Holding Grace’s hand and follo
wed by Domingo, Gary worked up the line until he caught up with the mayor’s party. They had stopped at another major intersection, beside a green space beneath the shoulders of a monumental-looking church.
Standing before this blocky pile, Ollantay held court. He was in his Inca finery, gaudy woolen tunic and trousers, those gold ear-studs bright in the sun, and he had a gold helmet on his head, looted from some private collection during the bee-sting raids he had mounted on Cusco before this main assault. He stood erect, his face dark and proud, here on this day of his apotheosis.
Mayor Thorson stood before Ollantay dubiously, listening to the conversation that passed between Ollantay and his senior generals, such as they were. They were a pack of thugs and troublemakers who had been attracted to Ollantay’s cause from the highland communities, farms and mines, here to settle old scores. There were even a few of the dispossessed from the raft communities offshore. This core group stood around a wooden box that looked like a coffin, hauled here on a cart.
Among them was a man Gary didn’t recognize, in a fresh-looking AxysCorp uniform. Aged maybe thirty, he was overweight, an unusual sight nowadays; he had a puffy, resentful face, and he stood by Ollantay nervously.
And Kristie was here. Her little boy wore feathers in his hair and had his own Inca-prince costume. He held his mother’s hand, one free finger probing a small nostril. It had been a shock this morning, the first shock of the day, for Gary to see Kristie Caistor at the side of a man like Ollantay. In fact, he saw, she wore a pink plastic backpack, incongruous amid the Inca stuff, and Gary had a faint memory of how she had carried the thing as that bright, pretty London kid, long ago.
Gary murmured to Thorson, “So what’s the plan?”
“Ollantay has spies in Project City,” she said. “Moles. Like that fat guy, evidently. Lammockson and his senior people have holed up in a sports stadium a few blocks thataway.” She pointed northeast along the transverse avenue.
And that was where Lily and Piers must be, Gary thought. What a strange reunion this was going to be. “So we’re going to lay siege?”
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