After America

by John Birmingham

  From the sound of the gunfire he judged his pursuers to be toting light automatic weapons, some sort of machine pistol. A stuttering burst threw up small puffs of dirt about twenty yards to his right. The sorts of light arms they were using weren’t very accurate. If he was unlucky, there was a very good chance they’d hit him or Monique by accident.

  Monique.

  He cursed himself for strapping her onto his back, where she was exposed to the gunfire. He could have slung her on his chest but had chosen not to because it made riding the mountain bike a little more difficult. He reached and vaulted the next boundary fence in one fluid sweep as a burst of fire chipped sharp pieces of stone from the wall. His lungs were already burning, and he fought to control his breathing, drawing in long, deep breaths rather than giving in to the urge to start panting and gulping for air. This field looked to be about three hundred yards across, and beyond it lay the relative safety and cover of the barley crop. A flight of birds took to the sky from a copse of yew trees at the far side of the meadow. Behind him a machine gun coughed and stuttered, and one of the birds exploded in midflight, dropping to the ground ahead of them.

  Bret’s vision began to blur, and he could feel a stitch gripping his gut just above his old appendix scar, but still he pressed on. If I can just get to the next field.

  A single shot caught him in the right leg, just above the knee, and he screamed as he went over, throwing his arms out to accept the full weight of the fall so that he would not roll over and crush the baby. He felt a bone snap behind his left wrist, and his jaw smashed into a jagged rock thrown up by the blades of the last plow that had passed through there. He coughed and choked on a mouthful of dirt and attempted to haul himself up again, but the injured leg wouldn’t take his weight and it collapsed underneath him. He began to crawl, anyway, ignoring the raucous, braying laughter he heard from behind. They were close now.

  A gun roared, much louder, and chewed up the thick brown earth a few feet away.

  “That’ll be far enough, brother.”

  The voice was accented slightly. London with an underlay of Jamaica, perhaps.

  Bret used his good arm to lever himself up. He’d made it to within ten yards of the wall and lay within the dappled shade of the largest yew tree.

  Monique was screaming and trying to crawl out of the backpack.

  “Fuck, would somebody shut that little shit up.”

  That voice was pure East End, and Bret glared at the speaker, a redheaded tough in his early twenties. He wore a short-sleeved T-shirt, and his arms were covered in the fuzzy, amateurish tattoos of a convict.

  “Quite a chase you led us, mon,” said the darkest of his hunters, the one with the slight Caribbean lilt.

  Bret was too short of breath to reply. He merely moved his body to put himself between the baby and their captors. Not that it would do any good. They had him at their mercy, and their mercy looked thin indeed.

  “What do you want?” he asked at last as they stood over him. His leg was in agony, and the broken wrist felt as though it were on fire.

  “It’s not what we want, mon. It’s who. Where is your wife at, eh? The lovely Caitlin? She wasn’t where we were told she would be. She is supposed to run along here, mon. But here you are, and where is she?”

  He felt nauseous with the pain and with something deeper and uglier, a creeping sense of his failure.

  “If you’d found her,” he said, nearly gagging on the effort, “you’d be dead by now.”

  The redhead with the tatts laughed, and Bret recognized his donkey bray from a few moments earlier.

  “You reckon, do you, pal?” He grinned just before his teeth disappeared in an explosion of gore.

  A thunderclap from a powerful handgun, a Beretta, rolled into a series of short, flat explosions, almost impossibly close together. Another three of the men went down as huge gouts of blood and tissue erupted from the center mass of their bodies. The West Indian, his eyes suddenly as wide and white as Ping-Pong balls, loosed off a wild unaimed burst from his sidearm, an old Heckler & Koch MP5. It clicked empty after a brief stutter of fire, and he turned to run just as Bret caught a flash of color in his peripheral vision, a blurred figure leaping the drystone wall.

  Caitlin.

  She seemed to materialize instantly at his side in a combat shooter’s crouch and snapped off two more rounds. The fleeing man cried out as the bullets’ impact and his own momentum lifted him off his feet and slammed his body hard into the ground.

  Caitlin’s voice was harsh and clipped, almost alien in its tone. “You all right? The baby’s all right?”

  Monique was still screaming, but she sounded distressed rather than in pain.

  “We’re fine for now, I think.” Bret coughed, spitting more dirt from his mouth and ignoring his agonizing injuries.

  Caitlin walked quickly over to where the four men she’d first targeted had fallen. Without preamble she executed two of them with a double tap to the head. Another she kicked, but Bret could tell he was already dead, shot through the heart.

  The redhead was attempting to crawl away. The lower half of his face hung in tatters and a terrible, animalistic keening sound came from his throat. Caitlin approached him with the muzzle of her pistol trained on the back of his head. She quickly glanced up to where the last of the five, the Jamaican, was also trying to escape, dragging himself back toward the cars. His legs trailed behind him uselessly.

  Bret watched as his wife made some grim calculation before firing two rounds into the head of the man closest to her. His skull came apart, spattering her with blowback.

  Monique screamed louder with every shot. Bret did his best with what felt like a broken wrist to unhitch the papoose and drag her around as Caitlin stalked over to the sole remaining survivor. Bret was pulsing blood from a bad wound to one of his fingers. White fire burned through shards of glass rubbing against each other in his leg and wrist, but he managed to cradle Monique in his good arm. He kissed the top of her head, humming softly, and rocking her back and forth. He waited for the last shots, but they never came.

  Caitlin approached the Jamaican from behind, waiting until he had levered himself up on his arms as he crawled desperately for the imagined safety of his car. She launched a short, vicious kick into one elbow, snapping the joint with a sickening crack. The man screamed and rolled over onto his side, which allowed her to piston another kick into his solar plexus. The howls cut off abruptly as the blow drove all the air from his body. As Bret watched, horrified, his wife placed her running shoe on the man’s throat and pressed down, all the while training the pistol on his face. After thrashing around for a short period, his body went limp. She delivered a kick to his groin just to check, but he was lights out.

  Holding the muzzle of the M9 against the back of his neck, she searched his pockets, pulling out a cell phone.

  Bret’s last memory before he passed out was the beeping of the keypad as she called for help.

  The hospital, a modern facility, sat next to Junction 15 of the M4 motorway, a relatively short ambulance ride from the scene of the killings. The paramedics assured Caitlin that Bret and Monique would be fine and that she had nothing to worry about, but sitting in an interview room of the Gablecross police station in Swindon, she couldn’t help but worry and fret on their behalf. Bret had lost a lot of blood before she was able to tie off his wounds, and Monique was still screaming when they took her away. The police had refused to allow Caitlin to keep Monique with her, and she supposed she could understand their point. She had just shot and killed four men and critically wounded another. Her running outfit was tacky with their blood, and she kept finding small bone chips and worse in her hair.

  “We really can’t help you if you won’t help us,” Detective Sergeant Congreve said for the third or fourth time.

  The female constable sitting beside him across the table gave Caitlin a sympathetic look, which had no more effect on her than a small bird flying into a brick wall.

&nbs
p; “You need to call the number I gave you and tell them what’s happened,” she said. “I can’t help you. There is nothing else I can say.”

  Congreve, a chubby, dark-haired man with a large drooping mustache, frowned unhappily.

  “Somebody will be doing just that, Ms. Monroe, but until then, why don’t you tell us what happened. You appear to have been defending your partner and child from armed men. There can be no harm in explaining what happened, can there? Was it just happenstance that you came across the villains while you were running?”

  It was total happen-fucking-stance, all right, but she remained silent.

  Congreve exhaled slowly.

  “Look, Ms. Monroe. You and your ’usband have a good reputation down in Mildenhall. We never hear anything but good things about how you run your farm, and I know from talking to the Resources Ministry that you’re in tight with the government somehow. I just don’t understand why you can’t help me help you. This isn’t going to go away, you know. Self-defense or not, ’appenstance or whatever, you can’t go gunning down ’alf a dozen people without explanation. Now, if you want to see your family anytime soon, and I’m sure you do, you’ll be needing to give me somethin’ to go on with. Who were those men? What were they doing in Wiltshire? Do you know them? Do you know why they’d be lookin’ to do you or yours any harm?”

  He favored her with what her old man would have called a hangdog expression, shaking his head at the bother of it all and imploring her with big wet eyes to just do ’erself a favor.

  Caitlin smiled without warmth.

  “Call the number.”

  Congreve rubbed one meaty hand across his face and reached for the off switch on the video recorder.

  “Interview suspended at thirteen hundred and twenty-three hours. Go call the fuckin’ number, Constable.” He sighed. “See what happens.”

  The uniformed officer excused herself and closed the door behind her. Congreve shook his head.

  “What sort of fuckin’ teddy bears’ picnic have you dragged me into, young lady, eh?” he asked. “Those blaggers we took out of that field, they had the look of nasty men about them, they did. What you left of them, at any rate. And that one you choked off after you shot him, we’ll ’ave him identified soon enough, and I’ll wager he’s no fuckin’ altar boy, eh? Not a bad morning’s effort for a little lady, was it?”

  She shrugged, trying to keep her impatience and frustration under control. She needed to get to her family. Before somebody else did.

  “Would you like a cup of tea, perhaps?” The detective went on. “Something to wet the whistle. Might put you in a chattier mood. After all, you’ve had a bad scare. Might be a bit shocky. Does wonders for the shocky types, a cup of tea does.”

  “I’m not the shocky type, Detective Sergeant,” she said calmly. “A cup of coffee would be great, though.”

  The door opened behind him, revealing the female constable, who had returned with another cop, a middle-aged man in a dark blue suit.

  “Sorry, guv,” said Congreve. “Not making much headway with this one.”

  “No,” the suit said in a tired voice. “I can’t imagine that you are. And you’re not about to, either. We have to let her go.”

  For the first time, Caitlin saw Congreve struggle to control his temper. The avuncular bumpkin routine slipped for a second, and his face flushed with anger. She had to hand it to him, though; he didn’t lash out. A bunching of the muscles along his jawline and the clenching of one hand were the only signs of annoyance he allowed himself.

  “Do you mind if I ask why, guv?” he asked.

  The suit, whom Caitlin assumed to be the station commander, shook his head.

  “Orders, Detective Sergeant. From the Home Office. No questions. No charges. Just let her go. Somebody from London will be down to take over the investigation this afternoon.”

  Congreve’s mouth dropped open before he had a chance to compose himself. “You’re fucking kidding me.”

  “I don’t kid, Detective Sergeant. And neither does the Home Office. Ms. Monroe, you are free to go.”

  “Thank you,” she said as humbly as possible. “I’ll need my weapon.”

  “You can collect your personal effects at the front desk.”

  9

  New York

  “Did you hear? They tried to kill the president.”

  Jules swung the sledgehammer into the tangle of crumpled metal and fiberglass with a bone-jarring clang! She was trying to dislodge a Lexus from the rear end of a UPS truck.

  “Really, Manny? Who’s they?” she asked.

  “You know, the pirates, out there?” The small, wiry Puerto Rican waved in the direction of uptown Manhattan. “Fuckin’ pirates, man. Africans. Wetbacks. Crazy fuckers, all of them.”

  The clash and boom of heavy tools on twisted metal and the grumble and roar of the heavy equipment, the dozers and scrapers and skid steer loaders, made it all but impossible to hear him. The clearance crew had been working on the pileup in Water Street all day and had made some obvious progress. An assembly-line process started with knots of vehicles such as the one Julianne’s crew was working on, breaking apart the impacted vehicles. Salvaged NYPD tow trucks pulled the smaller vehicles over to the forklifts that would in turn load them onto army HEMTTs. The Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Trucks were eight-wheel vehicles with large flatbeds. Once their beds were full, the HEMTTs would bounce down the recently cleared streets to the river, where barges awaited the busted-up vehicles. Heavier vehicles were moved by army five-ton tow trucks or M88 armored recovery vehicles. All of them where headed to the same location, down by the river.

  Another team of free enterprise types, some of them veterans who had served their time and were not subject to the resettlement program, would work over the vehicles. Luxury vehicles such as the Lexus commanded their attention for the leather seats, sound system, and other parts. After being stripped, they were tossed into garbage barges along with the rest of the car wrecks of Manhattan.

  So far, the clearance crew had only reached the Flatiron Building. Some streets were still jammed, made worse by the recent fighting that had torn through the financial district during the early days after the Wave lifted. That said, at least there was still a city to be salvaged and cleared. Many urban areas had been reduced to blackened scars of rubble and ruin that stretched for miles in every direction.

  Julianne couldn’t help feeling the hopelessness of the job when she thought about the whole city still waiting to be cleared and the country beyond that. Not that she would be around to help out. But it did rather get one down if one let one’s thoughts stray that way.

  “What’s that, Manny? What’d you say?”

  The Rhino’s bellowing voice was powerful enough to be heard no matter how loud or harsh the background noise. Manny leaned on his sledgehammer for a moment and wiped his face with a dirty red cloth, which he then stuffed back into his jeans.

  “Fuckin’ pirates, Rhino. They took a shot at President Kipper this morning. About an hour after we saw him,” Manny explained. “That was all that banging and booming we heard downtown. They fuckin’ shot rockets at him, dude.”

  “I heard it was mortars,” said Ryan, a big, raw-boned kid from Kentucky who’d been traveling through Germany when the Wave hit. “Heard they put mortars on top of some building, you know, for the extra range, and they tried to get him while he was doing something down at Battery Park.”

  “So much for the Green Zone,” Manny said.

  The Rhino frowned deeply as he swung a massive sledgehammer into the crumpled snarl of the Lexus. Jules took a moment to catch her breath as Manny and Ryan argued about who had the dopest of the inside dope. The Rhino kept swinging and swearing around the stub of a well-chewed stogie. Jules knew that he liked James Kipper, and he seemed more than a little pissed off at the news.

  “Who’d you hear this from?” he asked.

  “Bossman,” said the Puerto Rican.

  “Lewis, the security
guy,” Ryan said.

  “But he’s okay, right?” Rhino asked. “He didn’t get hurt or nothing.”

  Both men shrugged and shook their heads.

  “Don’t think so,” Ryan said.

  “Boss said it was cool,” Manny agreed.

  The Rhino muttered a few curses under his breath and swung the sledgehammer with an almighty effort. The impact broke apart the grille of the Lexus, freeing up the vehicle. Teenagers with chains and nimble fingers slipped under the UPS truck, hooking the chain to the axle. A waiting tow truck dragged the vehicle away, making room for the next tow truck to remove the Lexus.

  “Dial it down, Rhino,” Jules said as she moved up beside him. “Don’t wear yourself out. We have a long way to go yet.”

  He nodded and took a breather, moving out of the way of an army five-ton that was inching forward.

  “It’s just, you know, fuckin’ pirates. I hate those guys, Jules. Nothin’ but worthless fuckin’ bottom feeders the lot of them. Never heard of one worth a pinch of shit when I was in the Coast Guard, and these assholes we got running around now are no better. Just scavengers is all. Fuckin’ parasites and worms, the lot of them.”

  “Yes, Rhino, I’m sure, but let’s not get carried away, shall we.”

  She gave him a warning look, one eyebrow raised and her head dipped like a disapproving schoolmistress.

  “Okay, Miss Jules. Whatever you say.”

  Rumors of the attack swirled through the salvage and clearance crew all afternoon. Some said it was a car bomb; others insisted on a lone sniper. At one point Manny became convinced that ninjas were involved.

  “As if,” Ryan Dubois snorted. “Ninjas and pirates never work together.”

  The gang boss called time at four in the afternoon after a day that had started at four in the morning. The grubby rainbow coalition of people that made up the salvage crews dragged themselves onto a long line of salvaged double-decker New York City tour buses driven by Pakistani survivors of the Indo-Pakistani War of ’05. The buses would take them back to their quarters, a hotel in the center of the island’s pacified area. Julianne purposefully tuned out of the horrible Pashtun music and local conversation buzzing around her, knowing that nobody on the crew could really have any idea of what had happened earlier in the day. It wasn’t that she was not interested, far from it. But until she could access a news source back at the Duane Street Hotel, she saw no point in drinking from the bottomless well of ignorance on the bus.