The dead-smelling lady came over to review the surviving Raiders offensive line. Her skin was a dull gray-green behind her mask, shot through with black capillaries. He could ignore the itching hunger aroused by her assistants, but her rank aroma screamed at #24 to shoot, burn and behead her, sweep and clear.
But the order never came.
As she inspected them, she snapped over her shoulder, “Who runs these fucking rodeo clowns?”
A flunky checked his PDA. “A civilian contractor, Sherman Laliotitis. He was a professional gamer prewar, the best in the world at squad-based combat simulations.”
“Reliable?”
“He’s a sociopathic little prick, ma’am, but he’d do the work for free. Loves his toys.”
“Get him on the phone. If he still can’t deliver viable candidates, then he’s either incompetent or he’s a saboteur.”
She stopped and looked into the eyes of #24. Her eyes were the color of bile. She never blinked. “Check the headset on this one.”
“We did, ma’am. It sustained no cranial damage during the engagement.”
“Check it again, and double its downers. They’re supposed to be in a coma, and this one’s looking at me.”
A flunky unscrewed the bolts on #24’s helmet with a drill, while the other tugged it off. Several shots had cracked the high-impact plastic helmet, but the Kevlar liner had stopped them from damaging the electrical wiring and neurotransmitter pumps screwed into the dome of his skull.
He wanted to stop them and gut her, but he had orders not to move.
#24 followed orders.
VI.
On the dead side of Market, the Berkeley social science geniuses were building museum dioramas in the old storefronts, re-creating the bustling life of the old City. Celebrating its heroes—both the surviving and the fallen—in frozen pantomimes of earnestly rosy history.
You couldn’t see it at night, but they’d actually sculpted a plaster statue of Eagle and put him on a bike—next to Lester the Professor in his wheelchair and crazy-eyed Emperor Norton II, his courageous freak comrades in that first desperate year of rescues and food runs, before Big Brother came back to take over the job. A plaque at their feet said: They Kept the Embarcadero Lights Burning, And Kept The City Alive.
They’d posed for it together, three unlikely loners who had just tried to stay alive and protect their neighbors, when nobody else could. It was hella fucking surreal, hilarious, and also an incredible honor.
But under the self-deprecation and pride was a creeping sense of having already died. Their purpose fulfilled. Their glory days noted, memorialized, and gone.
Like the boy in the hundred-year-old statue behind him, on the domed-in corner of Montgomery and Market at which Eagle paused, finishing his joint before rolling out into the toxins.
It was a monument erected in 1850, or at least that was the date of the quote on the base. It showed a handsome young fellow in miner’s togs with a pickaxe in one hand, a flag in the other, standing tall against all comers.
The inscription read:
“The unity of our empire hangs on the decision of this day.” W. H. Seward, on the admission of California vs. Senate.
And now, San Francisco was a sovereign nation.
“Pffffft…Thanks, America!” Eagle said. “It’s been fun!” And then coughed up a plume of Master Kush and Kilimanjaro.
The Market Street South airlock was four lanes wide and a city block long, which included the sealed-off BART station just past Montgomery.
He snuffed the roach and swallowed it on his way through the door. No waste in this city. No littering, either.
Eagle’s locker was near the back and the showers, with the rest of the regulars. He suited up, put on his goggles and gas mask, checked the hazmat seals on the pizza cozy one more time.
Then he rode out through the gate and into the Red Zone.
The New City reclaimed the corpse of the old a block at a time. Clearing the wreckage off the streets, purging the buildings of any lingering human wreckage—dead or alive—was only the first step.
They were also repairing infrastructure, and cleaning up the chemical residue from the bombs that had leveled the playing field—or at least cleared it.
Eagle had watched from his bolthole in the Hyatt when the Navy choppers flew over the City that day. He watched the chemical bombs descend, on what they all unofficially called Black Flag Day.
He couldn’t tell what kind of bug spray they dropped this time, but the thousands of loitering dead that filled the streets didn’t respond to the powdery gray clouds like all the other times: getting all tweaked and fidgety, or eating themselves, but still standing.
This time, they just melted. Like the Wicked Witch of the West, an army reduced to runny, rancid meat that pooled in their shoes and overflowed the gutters around their fizzing, blackened bones. Then all was still, and death was dead.
Nearly a million zombies, dispatched in an hour and a half.
Along with every plant, animal, insect or human being that wasn’t safely under glass.
Black stains like Hiroshima victims, silhouettes etched deep into the pavement wherever they dropped. Static shadows of what once was, ghosts of an explosion still lethal two years later…
Eagle rolled over them, coasting the cleared stretch of Market, where the work crews were now opening up the frontier.
A few other cyclists passed Eagle as he hopped the curb and crossed the plaza with its defunct fountain and dead ginkgo groves. They wore elaborate Hopi sacred clown gas masks, and shouted his name as they passed.
The big red City truck was parked at the edge of Civic Center Plaza, with a string of worker trailers behind it. The crews worked in a long line, scrubbing the buckled marble flagstones and shoveling concrete debris into a sinkhole that had gobbled up half of Grove Street.
The workers wore orange convict jumpsuits and skid-lid motorcycle helmets. They played sandblasters over the marble to scour away the black scabs where the dead had melted. A cancerous seagull from somewhere far away wheeled down and perched on the head of one of the workers, pecked at its runny gray eyes.
Eagle saw a few other encouraging signs––sickly yellow weeds pushed through the cracks in the sidewalk, cockroaches ran in the gutter––but the domed palace of the Civic Center still looked like an ancient ruin. He remembered the day he’d delivered twelve pizzas to a wedding feast on the steps, the last weekend gay marriages were legal in the City. All of them now, as dead as the Romans.
The airlock on the back of the truck hissed and irised open as Eagle parked his bike and hefted the thermal pouch with their order in it.
Eagle stepped in and closed his eyes to the spray and blowoff. He kept his mask on until the inner airlock popped. The lucky pizza pies were way better protected than Eagle. A piping-hot message of love in a hermetic polystyrene metaphorical bottle, they would stay warm, yet crispy for at least twenty-four hours. Or until someone opened their boxes.
(Some Navy jerk on Treasure Island had bitched about the soggy cardboard when Eagle shipped a batch of deep dish pies out there; but the next day, he shipped a batch of these space age containers the submariners designed for keeping food hot without noisy microwaves. Another breakthrough for the evolving world.)
“Hey, Eagle,” Ernie cheered. “You remember that pizza place, Escape From New York, over on Van Ness? Ada says they gave you free pie if you could order in Italian. Is she full of shit or what?”
Eagle peeled off his mask, but he was in no hurry to jump into the argument, or breathe the air in there. Ernie Nardello and Ada Glaublich worked Red Zone cleanup 24/7, so they practically lived in the truck. Somebody must’ve pissed in their air recirculator. Hazmat suits, masks, dirty longjohns, and more than a few of Eagle’s special pizza boxes lay ankle-deep on the floor.
“I dunno, Ernie. I never delivered for them.” Popping the seal on the pouch made the truck warmer by five degrees. Garlic and oregano overpowered the truck’s man
ifold stinks. Even Ada made a noise, and Eagle had never heard her say a word. At least not to the living.
Born Adam Glaublich, the shy civil engineer was on top of the list for sex change surgery when the dead fucked up everything. Ada was a stone bummer, but Ernie loved her, and talked more than enough for both of them.
Ernie cracked the top box and nearly fainted. “Aw shit, I thought you said there was no more pineapple!”
“We got a couple more cans out of the Holiday Inn, so I saved ’em for you.”
“Dude, I could blow you right now.”
Eagle held out his wrist. “I love you, too. But how’s about you just pay me instead?”
Laughing, Ernie scanned him with a light pen. “They don’t pay you enough to come out here, man.”
“No, that’s your job.” He looked at the screens, the fly’s compound eye view of the Civic Center, the sinkhole, his bicycle. “Working hard?”
Ada munched a slice while she monitored their crews. “17, you’re cold,” she purred. “Warm up and work. Shovel faster.” She jogged Ernie’s elbow and pointed at a blinking indicator, but Ernie ignored her.
“This is bullshit busy work, man,” Ernie said. “The Navy says the shit got washed out and neutralized eighteen months ago. That’s why the fuckin’ Bay is dead, right? There’s never gonna be enough live people in this city for them to open the Green Zone this far.”
“I beg to differ, dude,” Eagle said, wiping the steam out of his goggles. “There’re still people out there. It’s our town. You’re cleaning it up, so the people will come back.”
“We’re just polishing rocks for a life-sized museum, but thanks. They’ll have meat puppets good enough to do our jobs by then. Hey, if anybody shows up at the gates who can turn my partner’s hot dog into a taco, let me know, okay? Then I’ll be at peace with the world.”
Ada punched his shoulder. “17’s acting up. Seagull ate his eyes.”
“So shut him down,” Ernie growled. “I’m not suiting up now. I’m eating lunch. You going back to the Bubble?”
“Not right away.” Eagle picked the old boxes out of the mess on the floor. “Got another delivery.”
“Out here? Where?”
“Haight and Stanyan.” Eagle strapped on his mask in the airlock.
Ernie’s eyeballs bounced off his HUD goggles as he dropped the first seal. “Say what?”
“It’s a long story. I gotta go, guys. Take care.”
Eagle popped the outer airlock and jumped down.
The zombie was waiting for him.
#17 stenciled on its helmet. Seagull shit and a sparking wire in its empty eyesockets. It dropped its shovel and lurched at Eagle, who threw the empty pizza boxes in its face and instinctively backed into the gate of the truck, groping in vain for a weapon worth having.
He hated guns, but he always carried one. A cop-issue Glock 9mm with soft hollowpoint rounds hung in its holster on his bike, next to his canteen, about ten unreachable feet away.
“Ernie! Call off your fucking dog!”
Ernie’s voice popped his headset. “What? Oh, holy shit… Ada!”
“MAKE IT STOP!” Eagle shrieked as #17 pawed his gas mask with one work-gloved hand.
Up close, the employed dead—the slave dead—glistened. Hi-tech Glad Wrap vacuum-sealed their skin, locked the sickness in and the freshness out. It was the only way to slow their inevitable decay, and make them humanly tolerable.
Under the industrial worklights, #17 glowed like a leftover angel. But underneath the shrink-wrap was the same old hunger. Its humanity was just a mask.
Up close, Eagle recognized that mask.
#17 had a Kirk Douglas chin. A Bruce Campbell chin. A chin among chins, with a nose to match.
That red-headed guy who used to barback at the Albion… Short-tempered, the regulars called him Fireplug…
I used to deliver pizzas to this guy, he thought.
Ernie and Ada were both hollering in his headset, but Eagle couldn’t hear it. He was lost in the moment. Pushing at #17, both hands on its chest, boxed in tight with no exit room. Watching it stagger back, lurch in, moaning.
“Ada, pop 17! Just do it! We got you, Eagle! Duck and cover, brother!”
Eagle dropped to his knees. The charges in the rogue worker’s head went off like firecrackers in a watermelon, wetware jumping out the top of its skull and spraying all over the fucking place.
“Eagle, you okay? Jesus, man, I’m so sorry!”
#17 wobbled and dropped. Eagle checked himself, wiped a few black specks off his parka. Willed his heart to slow down.
“Yeah, I’m good. Fucking freaked, but good.”
“Okay. We’re okay?”
“We’re okay.”
“Just…”
“Yeah. Just… yeah. Don’t worry about it.”
“You sure…?”
“Not gonna say a fucking thing, all right? We’re good.”
“Thank you, man.” Ernie exhaled, and chugged antacid. “Stay safe, buddy. We got your back.”
Eagle scooped up and stowed the pizza boxes, pocketed his gun and hopped on his bike as two more remote-controlled workers swept in to scrape up the mess.
Working together, making the world a better place.
VII.
The Dungeon Master had just burnt his tongue on the microwaved ricotta in his calzone––at least a three-hit-point wound––when the Love Line rang.
He washed the glutinous lava down with a splash of root beer, checked his hair, and let the phone ring.
For allegedly living humans, the science division sure seemed to enjoy chewing on human asses. When they couldn’t bitch about his kill ratio, they whined that his tactics were overkill; when his meat puppets weren’t lagging and bugging out like an NT server, they were dangerous rabid dogs.
The Love Line blinked faster. His pager trembled and jittered off the edge of the desk into an empty pizza box.
He wondered which of the Brain Trust would be dining on his haunches today. Of the three-headed nerd colossus that ran New San Francisco, he got the least friction from the Livermore geeks. Nasty little crypto-fascist elves, but they made the best toys, and bitched the least about his tactics.
His tongue throbbed and told him everything tasted like sandpaper. Perfect. He might as well throw the rest of the calzone back in the fridge.
Well, he thought, killing his root beer and reaching for another, somebody in the world probably has even worse problems.
He hit the Accept button.
Fuck my eyes, he thought.
Poison Lady.
Sherman sat up in his chair and brushed his oily hair back out of his eyes. “Dr. Childers, you’re looking lovely today.”
Meredith Childers’ gray-green face tightened on the monitor. She wasn’t just the chief researcher on the City’s medical research Brain Trust. She was also their star guinea pig. It was easy to see why the other scientists called her The Hippie. “Sherman… Laliotitis, is it?”
“Round these parts, they call me the Dun––”
“This is not a game, Sherman. You were briefed by your superior about today’s primary objective?”
“To secure the borders of Fortress Frisco against hostile invaders, ma’am. And phase one was a big win.”
“Don’t fuck around with me. You know what we’re doing here. What needs doing.”
Sherman looked around the control room. The Raiders’ POV monitors showed the cleanup crews carting off the last of the bodies. “I, uh… I am sorry if you’re unhappy with my performance, but… you know, capping enemies in the heat of battle isn’t like cutting the heads off guinea pigs in the lab––”
I’ll bet the cultists would’ve done it, he thought. You could’ve paid them in lentils and Bentleys.
The order had come down last night to target all the squatters on the peninsula in a one-day blitz, using all meat-puppet crews. Every squad operator was on duty today or tonight. The machinists pulled double-shifts refitting assa
ult teams and converting run-down workers into walking bombs.
All the targets were armed; most were subhuman freaks, but none of them was an imminent threat to the city. Most of the Green Zone was still half-empty, but they were expanding it again, and the whitecoats always needed more cold bodies to play with.
“I’m just,” he finally said, “trying to do my job, ma’am.”
“If you’re as good as advertised, you should be able to control your team. Do you verbally monitor all of them at once?”
“That’d be impossible. I’m all over them in real-time for the real precise wetwork, but they’re all running a bunch of apps, most of which I wrote myself.”
“You’ve changed their programming for today, though, correct?”
“Well, sure…”
“No more headshots. You will be docked for each non-viable body––”
“Docked?” Sherman sputtered. “How much?”
“How much is a human life worth on the current market? Harden the fuck up and do your job, Sherman.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You’ll have no excuses for me next time?”
“No, ma’am.”
“You’re not the only warm body in San Francisco who’s good at videogames, Mr. Laliotitis. But if you’re not the best in town from here on out—or if I hear of any more leaks in your operation—the machinists will help us discover a whole new world of uses for you. Am I clear?”
“Um, yes, ma’am.” Voice choked. His catheter popped out. Cold piss streamed down his leg.
The line went dead. Motherfucker!
Sherman got an aluminum baseball bat and strode out into the hall, away from the mainframe made from 900 chained PS3s and the banks of refrigerated processors running every zombie in the city.
His eyes alit on the vending machine in the hall, but it was the only one in the whole building that worked.
A janitor pushed a floor waxer in loopy circles in front of the elevators.
He didn’t flinch or look up as Sherman ran up on him and smashed his face in.
The janitor wore a cheap motorcycle helmet with an enormous smiley face sticker on the visor. It took four whacks to crack the helmet, but another twenty to kill the fucking thing.
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