“Get stuff!” David yelled, from the floor. “Get everything you can carry!”
“Umm… right. Guys!” Vivianne yelled, searching the hall for other faces.
“We’re here!” Annabelle shouted from opposite doorway.
“Get everything you can! Food, clothes, pots and pans… anything! I’ll get Etienne’s things. There are plastic bags in the right hand cupboard.”
“We only have five minutes!” David reiterated.
“Come with me,” Annabelle said urgently to Kassandra. She turned to Antonio. “Get our stuff from in here. Make sure you get all our clothes. We don’t know how long they’ll have to last us. C’mon, Kassie.” The two girls pushed their way gingerly around the trooper, who still had his gun to David’s head, and into the kitchen. “Food!” Annabelle said. “Doesn’t matter what it is. Get it all, including the boxes of NBH.”
“What’s that?”
“Over there.” Annabelle pointed to a stack of gray containers, each about the size of two shoe boxes, in the corner of the kitchen. She then began to raid the cupboards for anything useful.
“Can I please get up?” David implored to the seemingly giant man standing over him. “I won’t try anything. We just need to get our stuff.” Thirty tense seconds passed, during which the trooper fixed David with a steely, unblinking stare. Then, the gun barrel and boot were removed. David sprang up. “I’ll get our stuff, Viv. Or as much as I can anyway,” he shouted. He darted into their bedroom, and pulled the contents of clothing drawers feverishly into travel bags. After a trip to the kitchen to grab plastic bags, he went back and rifled through the closet to try and grab personal effects. He paused at one item: a Hasselblad camera. After examining it for a few seconds, it too was tossed into a bag.
“The cat!” Vivianne shouted from the next room.
“Oh crap! Where’s the cat carrier?”
“I don’t know!”
“Time’s up,” came the trooper’s emotionless voice. David took one last around the room, and dashed out, laden with bags. He set them down on the street, then spun around and dashed back in, almost knocking over Annabelle, who was exiting with full bags.
“Please… just a couple more things…” David said. The soldier made no move to stop him. “Vlad...? Dammit!” A meow was heard from the far corner of the kitchen. David squeezed around the trooper into the kitchen, scooped up the cat, whose fur was standing on end, then headed into the bedroom and grabbed blankets. Fully laden, David pulled up abruptly behind Antonio, who was making his way out the door with armfuls of clothes. The others were already outside. The two men made their way out into a sea of sobbing, wailing, stunned people. Troops with shields, guns, and batons were directing them to move on. Vivianne was a mess of tears. Annabelle cried onto Kassandra’s shoulder. Etienne clung to Vivianne’s leg, whimpering. “One second,” Kassandra said to Annabelle. Parting contact with her, she picked up Etienne. “Shhh.” Antonio just stared catatonically at the ground. David gaped, his eyes unfocused, his mouth opening and closing slowly. He ran his fingers through his thinning hair. Then his focus returned. He reached into a plastic bag at his feet and pulled out the Hasselblad camera. He quickly zoomed in, composed, and snapped many subjects: the crying girls, an armored personnel carrier, clothes, blankets and toys strewn across the street, a trooper’s blank face with a mass of people reflected in his visor, a barefoot little girl in a nightshirt, a white sheet covering a body, a group of people praying, and a soldier with his baton raised at an old man who refused to stand up.
“Move on! Move on!” the trooper shouted. “This way!” He pointed down the street to Rue Borchal. “Come on! Move!” Etienne, still in Kassandra’s arms, reached for her mother. Kassandra handed her over to Vivianne.
“Get as much as you can carry,” David said, pocketing the camera. “Here, let’s use the blankets as bags.” Food, clothing and other items were put into the makeshift sacks. “I’ll be right back.” David darted through the harried crowd, and returned a minute later with an empty shopping cart. “Throw stuff in here too.” Vivianne sighed, and put the teary-eyed Etienne into the cart’s child seat, just in front of the handle, facing backwards. Kassandra caught the terrified Vlad as he cowered from all the noise and put him on top of the stuff in the cart.
CHAPTER NINE
Exile
“Let’s go, then, I guess,” Vivianne said, with a last look into the hallway of their apartment. The group shuffled off slowly, joining the stream of refugees heading down to the intersection with Rue Borchal. Once at that road, a group of soldiers directed them to turn left. The wide thoroughfare, with its harsh overhead lights, was already packed. Two armored personnel carriers blocked any vehicular traffic from coming through.
“I guess we’re going west, then, away from downtown,” David said, as they joined the river of lost souls.
“Where to?” Vivianne cried.
“I don’t know. But, we can’t stop. We’ll be trampled.” A boy to their right tripped over a plastic tub and skinned his knee. His father promptly picked him up and slung him over his shoulder. David whipped his hand into his pocket and withdrew the camera. He had missed that moment, but began simultaneously video recording and snapping around him: tear-streaked faces, a small girl on her father’s shoulders, bobbing up and down with the man’s steps, some troopers standing against the opposite (right hand) side of the road, keeping the crowd moving. A brawl that broke out behind them. Vivianne and Etienne walked on David’s right, and the others to his left. They were near the left side of the road.
“You must go faster!” an old man to their half-right said to his wife, who walked with a cane.
“Oh, why did it come to this?” she sobbed.
“I don’t know, cherie, but we must make the best of it.”
David then turned the camera on himself, half-yelling to be heard above the din. “This is happening, right around me, right now, unbelievable though it is. We’re part of an exodus. If we don’t survive, let this be a record.” He then turned the lens toward Etienne, who was looking up at Vivianne’s face as she pushed the shopping cart. “And if you make it out of this and I don’t, just know, baby, that I love you so very, very much.”
----
After three kilometers, the group came upon two more armored personnel carriers, and two tanks, complete with a few dozen soldiers standing around. A sign was projected on a midair display: OCCUPIED ZONE ENDS HERE. NO READMITTANCE.
David raised his eyebrows. “Oh… I guess that means we can go where we want after here then?”
“Except back home,” Vivianne said bitterly. “Oh baby…” she let go of the cart, stopped, and grabbed a hold of David, crying on his shoulder. The group huddled in to keep from hindering those behind. A soldier took a few steps towards them, and gestured with his gun barrel to keep moving.
David sighed. “There’ll be time for this later. We’ve got to go.” Once they had passed the army encampment, the sidewalks were lined once again with homeless camps. The air was rank with the smell of human waste. “Move! Get out of the way!” some travelers shouted, as they stumbled around the camps. The crowd still spread right across the asphalt from one side to the other. There was no traffic. As they plodded on, some people began to leave Rue Borchal, heading onto side streets. Antonio stayed sulky and quiet.
“What should we do?” Annabelle asked David, who was walking to her right, now pushing the shopping cart.
David shrugged. “Um… I really don’t know. I haven’t a clue.”
“Maybe there are refugee camps somewhere?” Kassandra offered.
“I’ll be buggered if I know where…”
“What if we knocked on doors, to see if someone can accommodate us?” Kassandra said.
Annabelle looked around. “The place is already saturated with refugees that started coming down before this even happened, and then there are more displaced people like us. I guess we just keep going for now…”
“Rue Borchal
keeps going straight to the edge of the city,” David said. “I’d hazard a guess we’re in the Inner West Belt now. It’s a long way to the edge of underground Lyon.”
“We’ll have to stop and rest some time,” Vivianne said.
“Yeah.” David pulled out his camera and snapped pictures looking back at the army blockade, around at the wearying, desperate, refugees, Etienne asleep on his wife’s shoulder, and smashed, smoke-blackened storefronts. Their interiors were still being picked over. David pointed at one of them. “They’re getting bits of wood. I bet they’re going to use it for a fire,” he said to Antonio.
“Probably.”
“Uh oh!” Antonio said.
“What?”
“Tanks! Coming this way!”
“Crap! Everybody back against the wall! David yelled. He hit the curb with the shopping cart, got its wheels onto the sidewalk, and pushed it back to the wall. The group huddled between two tents, whose startled occupants looked on. Screaming and panic broke out among the crowd, as they scattered to make way. “One tank and two APCs,” David said, as he whipped out the camera and began to snap and film.
“Maybe it’s the real army, coming to take out the invaders,” Annabelle said, hopefully.
“They’re really moving,” Kassandra said. “Not slowing down for anybody or anything. There’s police behind them too.”
“If there’s going to be a battle, I’m glad we’re out of the way,” Vivianne said, as the huge machines whooshed past.
“Yeah. Let’s pick up the pace,” David said. They moved back onto the roadway and resumed walking. Muffled shouts from loud hailers echoed eerily down the road, from behind. The words were inaudible. Then came the unmistakable cracks of small arms fire. The crowd scrambled once again, a thundering herd, running straight ahead this time, away from the fighting.
“Oh crap!” Annabelle said.
“Move!” Kassandra implored, as they fled. More rat-tat-tat gunfire.
“We’re a good few hundred meters away, so we’ll likely be safe,” David panted, a little later, “but someone needs to tell this lot.” He jerked his left thumb at the herd. “It’s a bloody stampede!” Many of the sweaty, displaced horde ceased running and resumed walking. A heavily tattooed and pierced man and woman stopped abruptly in front of Vivianne and looked back, over her head, and then at each other. “Shall we wait and see what happens?” the man said. “Maybe they’ll take the city back and we can go home.”
“Not likely,” David muttered darkly to the others, in answer to inquiring looks. “Not until I know for sure that it’s safe.”
----
“I’m exhausted,” Vivianne said to David. “We’ve been walking for hours. We have to stop, preferably for the night. Etienne needs to sleep, too.”
“We can’t,” David said. “Don’t you see all these army vehicles? I bet they’re getting ready to take over this area too. Never mind we’re probably at least fifteen kilometers from downtown. It’s going to be a shitstorm here too, pretty soon.”
“They might be here to protect people. You don’t know if they’re good forces or bad.”
“No, I don’t. But I also don’t want to get threatened or shot in the head. It’s only about another fifteen K to the edge of the city.”
“David, I’m not walking any more, dammit. It’s got to be at least seven o’clock. We need to eat.”
“At least the homeless camps are fewer here,” Annabelle said. “Probably because it’s been a while since the last subway station. Even though the system’s been shut down all day.”
“Okay. I guess we’ll stop here,” David said. Kassandra wrapped a blanket around herself and sat down. The temperature was a pleasant seventeen degrees Celsius.
“We only have four blankets,” Annabelle said. “Can you share with me, Kassie?”
“Of course.”
“Right. Food.” Vivianne said, once they were all seated. “We have some cans of Spam and celery sticks, thanks to Annabelle’s efforts to grab them from the kitchen.” Annabelle smiled. Kassandra scowled. “Then there’s some NBH. It’s barely edible when it’s raw.”
“We’ll have to ration our stuff,” David said. “The biggest problem is we only have one liter of water. That’s all we could grab. For all of us.” Concerned glances all around.
“Etienne needs it the most, since she’ll get dehydrated easily,” Vivianne said. “I’ll go without for now. There’s a little bit of juice in the cans, so we can share that.”
“We don’t have even one plate, knife or fork,” David said. “I have a feeling we’re going to have to get used to a lot worse hardships than that, mind, before things get better. Well, if they ever do...”
CHAPTER TEN
The Enigma
Kato, Zara, and Akio sat on the spacious white couch in Zara and Akio’s living room aboard the Revenant. Kato had his feet up. “Live coverage coming to you now from the Earth Transport Interchange, where the first immigrants from Mars are arriving,” the newscast said. “Scientists, engineers, doctors, artists, miners, and others from all walks of life are now entering through the ingress tunnel.” The people hanging onto the moving handrail as they floated into the ETI bore expressions of fear, anger, sadness and shame. “As we mentioned, the logistics of moving forty million people in under six months are staggering. Every available warp ship is being pressed into service. Let’s switch to an outside view now. Shuttles are queued up for hundreds of kilometers, waiting to dock, to the refugees onward to Earth.”
“So, the blockade on getting to Earth is now lifted, but we can’t get a damn docking slot at the ETI,” Kato said. “None of us can get to Earth.”
Zara’s eyes were red, and still somewhat teary. “We have to be able to pull some strings, Dad,” Zara said. “I have to go and find our baby. We don’t have to dock this huge ship there. We can use our short-range shuttles, so we only take up one ETI port for less than an hour. Half the Earth-to-orbit shuttles they’re using to take the Martians down are ours, so we’re good for getting down to the surface…”
“We’d better hope the communications nets in France come back up,” Akio said. “She could have moved on from Lyon by now.”
“I have to go,” Zara said. “My little girl’s in that mess somewhere, and I won’t rest until I find her.”
----
The refugees sat on their blankets, on the right sidewalk of the dismal gray Rue Borchal, after a meager evening meal. Etienne, Vivianne and David were closest to the wall. The others sat nearest to the roadway. A few stragglers still plowed along the road. “We have to post a watch through the night,” David said. “There are all kinds of people about, and I bet a lot of them are desperate for anything they can get their hands on. It’s about eight now, so I’ll take the first shift. Then you can take the second starting around 2 AM, pretty boy.” He nodded at Antonio. Antonio grunted. “Then we’ll see what tomorrow brings, I guess,” David said.
“Okay love,” Vivianne said. “I just hope Etienne sleeps straight through. I’m beyond exhausted.”
“I wish we had something to cover up with,” Kassandra said. “At least Vlad has his fur coat.” The cat was nestled in the shopping cart, while keeping his large eyes and ears focused on the goings-on around them.
“Just be thankful we even have something to lie on,” Annabelle said. She pointed to the next-but-one camp. “They don’t even have that. They just ran with the clothes on their backs.” A tear formed at the corner of her left eye, and glistened as it ran down her cheek. “I just can’t believe this situation. So many people displaced and suffering.” Kassandra leaned over and hugged her.
“Yeah,” Vivianne said. “I have to go to sleep now. See you guys in the morning.” She grabbed a sweater from the cart to use as a pillow, laid down on her right side next to Etienne, and put her arm over the little girl. She stirred, but didn’t wake up. Someone yelled a few curse words in the distance, which echoed down the street.
“I’ve noticed the
re aren’t any storefronts on the other side of the road,” David said, nodding his head in that direction. “It’s been a few hundred meters since we saw one.”
“Yeah,” Annabelle said, looking over her shoulder. “It’s just a blank gray wall, apart from a couple of openings that look like loading docks.” She pointed towards an opening they had passed before setting up camp, which looked the right size to accommodate a semi-trailer. There was another one forty meters further down. David shrugged.
The jabbering and footfalls of passersby gradually tailed off as the evening wore on. Soon, everyone but David was asleep. He sat cross-legged next to Vivianne. “What a bloody situation. Wish I had a gun of my own,” he muttered to himself, as he kept an eye on the neighboring camps and the few travelers still heading out of the city. “I guess the good guys didn’t win yet.” Midnight came and went. However, the lighting on the street never varied, and the air never stirred. There was no traffic. At the appointed time of 2 AM, David woke Antonio. “Your turn, fella.”
“Ugh. Okay.”
David was asleep within minutes. Antonio sat up and rubbed his eyes repeatedly as he looked around. There was an orange tent twenty meters to his left. He faced out towards the road. To his right was another group, three adults and three children, lying down on blankets. Other camps lined the sidewalk on the opposite side, by the featureless gray wall. After a while, Antonio laid down again, elbows on the ground, propping his chin up on his hands. Time wore on, and the oppressive dead of night began to take its toll. His eyelids drooped, and he was soon snoozing quietly. A fuzzy gray shape emerged from the loading dock thirty meters to Antonio’s right. It was neither human nor animal. It darted across the road to the third camp along from theirs. It paused there for maybe twenty seconds. It went out of sight, behind their tent. Then it moved on to the next camp, moving towards Antonio and the group. Soon it was at the one next to theirs. Items were picked up and stowed in a black backpack that it carried by the straps. Finally, it snuck slowly towards the friends’ shopping cart. It was now visibly human in outline. It stood upright, but its appearance was of constantly-shifting static, like the screen of an old TV set with no antenna connected. The shape extended an arm into the cart, and grabbed a can of green beans. As it did so, some other cans shifted and settled against a cooking pan, with a soft clunk. The sound was enough to wake Antonio. He looked over his left shoulder. His eyes immediately widened. “Oi! Get away!” The enigmatic shape darted across the road, towards the loading dock, dropping the can as it ran. “What else have you got?” Antonio raged. “Give it back!” He sprang to his feet, and pelted off in pursuit. Antonio’s long legs propelled him quickly across the road. He closed the gap between them, as they entered the loading dock. At the rear of the dock was a rolling shutter door, open a meter or so at the bottom. The being was already climbing through and into the darkness beyond. Antonio dove at the opening, a meter above the ground, and slid along the floor. It was too dark to see anything. He heard a squeak of rubber like that of a sneaker on a gym floor, and pelted in its direction. “What the hell is this thing?” he grunted, as he ran.
The Extinction Switch: Book three of the Kato's War series Page 7