After America

by John Birmingham

Covering her prisoner, she moved a few feet to the left, where she could keep the young woman in sight. “No,” she said. “I’m not going to help the other girls. I won’t be here that long. And if you want to live, you’ll get going, too.”

  “Are you going to kill him or something?” the young woman asked as she climbed into a pair of jeans she took from a dresser drawer.

  “That depends on how helpful he is,” Caitlin lied.

  Her captive bristled at that. “You will get nothing from me, you whore.”

  “Dude, as the guy who was raping this young lady not five minutes ago, I think it’s a little fucking disingenuous of you to be casting aspersions on my moral standing.”

  He frowned, apparently having trouble following her.

  “Disingenuous. It means do as I fucking say or I’ll shoot you in the face.”

  He opened his mouth to retort, and Caitlin did indeed shoot him, but in the hip, striding over quickly to launch one booted foot into his solar plexus as he spun to the floor. The snap kick drove all the air from his body, cutting off the scream that had begun to form in his throat. The woman cut off her own shriek of horror by jamming a couple of knuckles into her mouth. Caitlin quickly glanced at the door through which the bodyguard she’d killed just before had come, but she heard nothing in the hallway outside.

  “Do you mind if I ask your name?” she asked in as soothing a voice as possible.

  “Donna,” replied the woman. “Donna Gambaro.”

  “Okay, Donna. Do you know if there are other guards on this floor? I haven’t had a chance to check it out. Lucky you, yours was the first room I tried. That’s why you need to close your windows. Even in a nice hotel like this one.”

  The Gambaro woman visibly attempted to compose herself. A train of emotions ran over her face. Fear. Shock. Rage. All them morphing together. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, pointing at the man who’d been using her for his pleasure.

  “If you’re worried about him hollerin’, don’t,” she said. “You hear screaming like that all the time around here.”

  Caitlin took a second to examine the woman properly. She was half dressed now, buckling up her jeans and adding a gray T-shirt. This chick was not going to wait around for a second chance.

  “So this was your room, Donna? This is where you stayed the whole time? Did they let you out at all? I’m trying to get a sense of what’s waiting beyond that door, is all.”

  Donna pulled on an old jacket. It didn’t fit and looked as though it might have belonged to a man.

  “They caught me a month ago,” she said, her voice faltering. “I was working salvage with my brother in Toronto. We were … freelancers.”

  Caitlin shrugged. What did she care about somebody looting a dead Canadian city?

  “Your brother?” she asked.

  “He’s gone. They killed him when they took me.”

  Donna Gambaro looked like she was thinking about giving her captor a couple of kicks in the head to settle some of that debt.

  “I’m sorry about your loss,” said Caitlin, “but I have to ask for your help. I need you to focus, Donna. Have you been out of your room at all? Can you tell me about the setup here? How many men? What sort of security?”

  Caitlin could see tears welling in the woman’s eyes and knew she had very little time before she fell apart. She decided to try a different line of approach.

  “I don’t suppose you know the name of our friend here, do you?”

  “I’ve heard his bodyguard call him Mister ‘You Chick’ or something,” she said. “Something kinda foreign like that.”

  Keeping her gun trained on the man, who was moaning and snaking about in great pain, Caitlin powered up the PDA Velcroed to her gun arm.

  “Sounds like ‘You Chick,’ you say? All right, let’s see, then. That is ringing a bell for me.”

  She tried a few spelling combinations until the database threw up a possible match.

  “Jukic? Does that sound right? Danton Jukic?”

  He groaned as though she had struck him again, and Donna nodded enthusiastically as she wiped away a few tears.

  “That’s him. Rat bastard ass fucker. Not so fucking tough now, are you? Huh?”

  Caitlin shifted position slightly to put herself between the two of them. Jukic was sweating profusely, and deep body tremors had taken hold of him. He was having trouble keeping his moans quiet.

  “Are you like a cop or something?” Donna asked. She pointed at the PDA. “That looks like one of those computers they used to have in cop cars.”

  “No, I’m not a cop. They don’t get to shoot people on general principles. Or torture them. You hear that, Jukic? We’ll be moving along with the torture in a minute. Just so you know.”

  His groan was noticeably louder, and he kicked out with one leg as though trying to push himself toward the door. Donna Gambaro fetched a pair of running shoes from the same dresser drawer in which she had stored her jeans. She sat on the end of the bed to pull them on. Caitlin could see that her hands were shaking, but she was doing her best. She kept the gun on Jukic as she spoke to Gambaro.

  “Do they have guards in the hallways, Donna, do you know?”

  Donna paused in the job of trying to untangle a knotted shoelace.

  “Not always, no,” she said. “Only the big guys get bodyguards. Sometimes some of the guys who came through here were just fighters or soldiers, you know. They got sent here as a reward. I talked with some of them. They weren’t all bad. Some were pigs, of course. You never knew what you were getting. But that’s men all over, isn’t it? Anyway, no. There’s not always guards in the halls.”

  Caitlin fetched a couple of photographs of Bilal Baumer from one of her pockets.

  “You ever see this guy come in?” she asked.

  “No,” Donna said, after a brief look. She began searching the drawers, as if looking for something lost in the clothing. Jukic levered himself up on one elbow and gave the impression of a man who was about to start protesting again, leading Caitlin to drive another kick into his guts to quiet him down.

  “That’s good to know,” she said. “Now, Donna Gambaro, you look to me like someone who can handle herself. That’s good, too. The thing is I have to ask old Jukic a few questions, and … well, things are probably going to get ugly. Very ugly. I’m afraid I can’t let you go until I have the answers I need. When I get them, we can both leave together, out the same window I came in. I’ll be on my way then. But if I were you, I’d probably get my ass hunkered down somewhere nearby as quickly as possible. Do you understand?”

  “Miss,” Donna Gambaro said as she located a locket that obviously meant something to her, “I don’t know who you are, but I used to wait tables at Hooters. I know when things are about to get ugly and when it’s time to go. You won’t need to tell me twice. Are you going to torture him?” she asked, pointing at Jukic.

  Caitlin took the fighting knife from the scabbard in her boot. “A little bit,” she said.

  In fact, she hardly needed to hurt him at all. Jukic, an Albanian, who was listed in her files as running a medium-size pirate crew of mostly Balkan origins, gave up the information she needed a few seconds after she cut off the tip of his little finger. She had thought she was going to have to harvest at least half of his digits, but perhaps kneeling on his hip wound as she made the cut helped.

  She got an address no more than a few blocks away that the Albanian gang leader insisted was the last command post he knew of for the jihadi fighters who had brought so much grief to New York. It didn’t show up on her PDA, so chances were that it hadn’t been known to the military. There was no guarantee Baumer would be there, but if it was manned by his own people rather than pirates, she might have a shot at getting to someone with better information than Jukic.

  He was now balled into a fetal position on the floor, shaking and sweating and keening in a high-pitched, almost childlike fashion as he bled all over the carpet. “Fucking Germans. Fucking Turks,” he
repeated over and over again until Caitlin put two bullets in his brain and shut him up forever.

  She killed him without warning or obvious provocation, causing Donna to jump with fright again.

  “Sorry,” Caitlin said. “You don’t mind, do you?” The former Hooters waitress looked at her the same way one might regard a dangerous dog one had stumbled across in a dark alley.

  “No,” Gambaro said, but none too certainly. “No, fuck him, I guess. Can we go now?”

  The window in the bathroom was still open, giving them access to the roof of the apartment house across which Caitlin had come. She hadn’t intended to enter the hotel through that particular window until she noticed the flickering light of a candle inside as she approached. The sash was already raised a few inches, and Caitlin was able to lift it without too much effort, although she did have to take her time with it lest the sound of the wooden window frame rumbling upward alerted the occupants. Luckily, Donna had had Jukic well and truly distracted as Caitlin came calling. It was her scream, however, upon seeing the assassin silhouetted in the doorway to the bathroom that had brought Jukic’s bodyguard into the room. Caitlin had shot him twice in the head before pistol-whipping his boss into submission.

  Amazing what can happen in a New York minute, she thought as the two women dropped a couple of feet onto the roof of the neighboring building. Despite being loaded down with all her equipment and wearing heavy jump boots, Caitlin landed almost without a sound, whereas Donna struggled and grunted and heaved herself through the aperture before touching down with a loud bang.

  “Ma’am, do you think I could come …”

  “No,” Caitlin said before she could finish. “I’m sorry, Donna, but you can’t come with me. It’s gonna get a lot worse before I’m done. You’d be way better off just hiding out in one of these buildings. It won’t be more than a few days before things shake themselves out here. Whatever you do, though, Donna, do not go back to the hotel. Even if you have friends there, leave them. Do not try to rescue them. You’ll fail and you’ll die.”

  The rumble of distant explosions grew louder as if to emphasize her point. They had reached the tiny cabin at the top of the stairwell providing access to the roof of the apartment house. The sun had not yet fully arisen, but there was more than enough light to make them out. Caitlin hurried the woman along out of sight.

  “You don’t need to go much farther,” she said. “But you do need to get out of this building. They’ll look for you here. But if you take yourself along the street a ways, get yourself bedded down, and then keep your fucking head down, you will get through this, I promise.”

  Donna Gambaro looked anything but certain as Caitlin entered the stairwell, but throwing a glance back over her shoulder at the Plaza seemed to strengthen her resolve.

  “All right, then,” she said. “Whatever you say.”

  “Remember,” Caitlin said. “Do not go back to the hotel. Move quickly and get out of sight. You’ve got maybe half an hour till Jukic is missed.”

  She gave Gambaro a reassuring pat on the shoulder before turning and hurrying down the darkened stairs.

  If she was following the playbook, Donna Gambaro would have been dead, too, or at least trussed up and stashed away somewhere so that she couldn’t interfere with the run of events. But as somebody who’d once been held captive and abused in a very similar fashion to the former waitress, Caitlin was well past giving a shit about the playbook.

  Good luck, kid, she thought.

  47

  New York

  The shopping was a terrible disappointment. Jules had been hoping there might be one or two choice items somewhere along Fifth Avenue that she could take home as a souvenir of their visit to New York, but everyplace she looked had been comprehensively looted. Takashimaya was a burned-out shell in front of which a headless body swung by its heels. And Lord knew she’d never had any luck at Saks, anyway, so why bother trying now, especially when that particular block appeared to be swarming with jihadi whack jobs and pirate asswits—she really did like that cheeky Polish character—all heading into Rockefeller Center.

  Jules used her binoculars to scope out that stretch of the avenue from their hiding place within the rubble of St. Patrick’s. There was a lot of movement down there, which meant it couldn’t be long before there was a response from the U.S. Air Force. Every time the pirates massed in any numbers, they got pounded flat.

  “Looks like they’re gonna make a stand there,” the Rhino said around the stub of an unlit stogie. He was growing impatient, grunting and shaking his enormous and ugly head, which still was magnificently ornamented with the stupid Viking helmet.

  “Do you think we might be done with the retail therapy soon, Miss Jules,” he asked. “We really shoulda stayed over on Madison. Fifth seems to be lousy with tourists.”

  Jules ignored him. He was grouchy from having to drag his oversized ass through the tumbledown ruins of the cathedral to reach a safe vantage point where they could observe the activity on Fifth. There appeared to be a real concentration of ragheaded crazies in the shell of Saks. Every window in the department store was broken, and half the stock seemed to have been piled into a sodden heap out on the road. As she watched, dozens of fighters emerged from the building, but rather than scattering and heading into Rockefeller Center like their comrades, they took off at a sprint downtown.

  “What do you think that means?” she mused out loud.

  “It means the U.S. Air Force is going to be along very shortly to bomb the living bejeezus out of anyone foolish enough to be loitering in the vicinity of fucking Fifth Avenue,” the Rhino said. “Come on, we’ve ticked all the boxes, reconnoitered like champions. We can see the place is crawling with vermin. But it’s not our concern unless they make us. We should get going back over to Park Avenue. Quieter there. Wide-open spaces. It’s a more amenable environment for your average pachyderm. And it’s not like you’re going to find anything you like here. I think you’ve probably left your shopping till a bit late.”

  “You’re right,” she admitted as she adjusted her sling, which was slipping off her injured shoulder, and crawled backward down the mound of rubble on which she’d been lying. St. Pat’s was a gutted ruin, burned out and open to the sky where the roof had caved in. She wondered if it had been reduced to this state on purpose. Small jagged jewels of stained glass lay everywhere, and anything of value had been looted long ago. The vestibule in which they hid reeked of human excrement. “There’s nothing worth having here now,” she said. “Best we push on, I suppose.”

  “Yes, best we do,” he muttered.

  Just two blocks away, on Park Avenue, the city was surprisingly quiet again, indeed all but abandoned, allowing them to move with more freedom as long as they exercised some caution. The large number of enemy fighters in the blocks around the Rockefeller Center buildings had caused them a few hours’ delay as they picked their way around the obstacles, with Jules insisting that they move slowly and take note of where the gangs had gathered their forces. It never hurt to know where your competition was setting up shop, although from what Milosz and the others had told them, perhaps it was time to stop thinking of the pirates as competitors. They seemed to want to actually take over the joint now rather than just clean it out.

  The overnight downpour had abated, and the worst of the flooding was over, although great oily pools of water lay everywhere and small rivulets and streams ran out of some buildings with damaged roofs. The dull background roar of battle to the south probably explained the abandoned streets, Jules thought, as thousands of gang members rushed to join the battle. It couldn’t be long before somebody else pushed in to fill the vacuum created by their departure from this part of midtown, however.

  “It’s all just fucked,” she muttered to herself.

  “What’s that?” he asked as they paused at the corner of 52nd Street and Park, sheltering behind an overturned meat truck while they scoped the next block of real estate.

  “Oh,
it’s just so fucking disappointing, isn’t it,” she grumbled. “I used to love this town, Rhino. And especially this part of it. I was just sort of hoping that … you know.”

  He paused in his scan of the terrain ahead of them.

  “That it might not be completely fucked. That there might be some little trinket you could put in your pocket and carry home with you? A keepsake from the past, Miss Jules?”

  “God, you put it like that and it sounds so naive.”

  “That’s because it is naive. This is the reality now.” He gestured with his gun at a bloated corpse lying half in and half out of a Citibank across the street.

  “September 11 was the end of the fucking golden age here. The Wave just came in and washed the debris away. There wouldn’t have been anything more after that. Come on,” he said, dashing from the wreckage of the van to the cover of another pileup a hundred yards farther north. Half a dozen cars had collided with a big blue bus, forcing them to weave around the twisted wreckage. Gray water had gathered in a small depression, deep enough to reach the top of her boots, and Jules was slowed down considerably by nursing her shoulder injury. “Sorry,” she gasped, a little winded.

  He shrugged and took up his surveillance of the next hundred yards of ground.

  “I’m not even a local, you know, and I have more faith in the city than you,” Julianne said, continuing her thoughts from before.

  “Miss Jules, your ironic detachment is almost Buffy-like in its awesomeness. But how about we get our game faces on? According to that Polish guy, it’s gonna start getting dicey once we’re nearer the park. Milosz reckons it’s still crawling with bad guys, even with most of them heading downtown, and it’s six to five the gangs from the West Side are going to push through there anyway once they figure out there’s nobody to really push back.”

  Jules conceded the point with a nod and took a grip on the P90 with her good hand. She wore it slung around her neck and clipped to a combat harness, but taking hold of the weapon did help focus her mind again.