by Addison Gunn
Morland smothered Lester against the back seat with du Trieux’s help, while Miller leaned back and handed Trix her bagged syringe and phial.
“I don’t like this! Who are you? Why aren’t I going home? I want to go home!”
“We’re Schaeffer-Yeager’s bodyguards. We’re taking you home!” du Trieux snapped.
“I don’t work for Schaeffer-Yeager, I work for BioGen—”
“Schaeffer-Yeager International owns Biogen. We’re your friends, everything’s alright!”
Miller settled himself into the driver’s seat, glanced once at the rear-view mirror, disengaged the automatic and steered the limousine around one of the mob members in the street. He tapped his earpiece. “Doyle. You good to get out on your own?”
“Should do. Although you should know: there are more running your way.”
“More?”
“I think the Infected called in for help.”
In the back seat, Lester stopped fighting for a moment, panting. “W-what’s that for?” he asked, pale and tense under Morland’s grip, staring at the syringe with dinner-plate eyes.
“We’re giving you Firbenzol,” du Trieux snapped.
Lester’s eyes widened. He knew the anti-parasitic drug by name, and he didn’t seem to want it, struggling to lash out at her from the midst of Morland’s bear-hug.
Du Trieux quickly, and very professionally, drew a measure of the drug from the phial, gazing at the syringe contemplatively as she held it up and squeezed the air bubbles back into the phial. She gestured, and Morland pinned Lester tighter, prompting a strangled yelp from the man. Du Trieux jabbed the needle into the meat of his shoulder. Lester struggled, twisted—God knew how she did it, but du Trieux got the full dose into him and pulled the needle free without him snapping it off in his flesh.
One of the mob, loping alongside the limousine, yelled as if they’d seen the syringe and didn’t like it any more than Lester did.
He clawed at his shoulder as if du Trieux had injected him with acid, his eyes growing ever more droopy.
Morland kept Lester down, pinning his arms to his chest. “Miller!”
“I see them,” Miller replied, swinging the steering wheel round, guiding the limousine up onto the sidewalk, speeding up past a clump of the crowd emerging from a side street.
Doyle was right. More and more of the Infected were coming out of alleyways and buildings—a brewing riot.
Behind them, the mob was following in fits and starts, jogging, sprinting after them. Someone banged on the limo’s back end when Miller was forced to slow down and swerve around an idiot trying to catch all two tons of the limousine with his hands.
“Dammit, Miller! They’re trying the doors!” Morland shouted.
Miller angled for the last gap ahead he could see, and stomped on the pedal.
Scarlet lights ignited, the car bawled, “Emergency Stop! Alert. Emergenc—”
“Get the override,” du Trieux screamed. “Miller, override the safeties!”
Miller already had. But even if the limo’s automatic braking system was disengaged, he wasn’t about to run over children. Miller wrenched the wheel to the side, teeth gritted, and slowed to avoid running headlong into a wall. The second he was clear, he started pumping on the pedal as if the electric vehicle still had gas to be metered out, staring at the filthy people climbing over the limousine’s hood. A little boy clambered up the car, stamping on the limousine’s armoured roof with hollow thuds, while a teenager started pounding on the windshield with a brick.
He nudged a woman out of the way with the limousine’s fender, rolling the wheel side to side, but the mass of humanity was too thick. Eventually the pounding fists ceased sliding past, and they all but held the limo in place. Each time he punched the accelerator, the car nudged forward, and then the crowd physically pushed it back.
Their screams were strangely hollow, distant through the armour.
“They can’t get in, can they?” Morland asked, nervous.
“I don’t think so.”
Du Trieux finished trussing up Lester’s limp arms behind him with a set of zip-tie cuffs, started on his legs.
The crowd parted briefly, and Miller tried to push the mob aside, only for the windshield to be covered in beating hands, hammering fists of all colours... an elderly gentleman helped hoist up a stop sign torn physically out of the ground, two younger people taking the post and stabbing the jagged end into the windshield like workers with shovels.
The windshield glass’s upper laminate layer spiderwebbed, and began to chip away.
Miller floored the manual-drive pedal again, again, but the vehicle wouldn’t move, grimacing Infected pushing at the back when he tried reversing it. The mob literally pulled the limousine deeper inside itself, the wheels scraping sideways with a hellish rubber-on-concrete growl.
They couldn’t escape.
The steady schunk of the stop sign into the windshield was joined by the shriek of metal as someone took a pry-bar to one of the limo’s door seams, and over it all, Lester mewling for help in a drugged haze.
Miller flipped open his phone’s casing, told it to dial work, and pulled his Gallican back out, setting the handgun on his lap.
“Miller?”
“Cobalt-1, this is Cobalt-2.” Miller flattened the drive pedal again, and the crowd lunged, pushing the car sideways until the wheels thudded against the curb. “An Infected riot’s brewing. The limo can’t move and they’re trying to get in.”
“Fuck.” Brandon Lewis, head of Cobalt-1, had been resolving to quit swearing for years. Today clearly wasn’t the day, though. “Motherfucking son of a bitch, Miller. This is not what I need to hear. How many are there?”
It was as easy as putting on the camera and holding the phone against the side-window. Miller got it up just in time for someone to smash a divot out of the armoured glass. Faintly, Miller heard a rising chant of “Kill the poisoners!”
“Lots.” Miller cleared his throat, bringing the phone back to his ear. “We need help. Immediate help. Tear gas, riot squad, whatever’s left of the NYPD, I don’t care, Lewis. Get us out of here.”
“I don’t think there’s anything of the NYPD left.” Lewis hesitated. “I’ll get Bob Harris on the horn. We’ll bring in Bayonet if we need to.”
“Roger that,” Miller murmured, wiping his face.
Miller silently watched one of the mob bring up a shotgun and unload it at him, point blank. The buckshot rebounded back at the shooter off the glass, where the pellets hadn’t embedded in the chipped upper laminate, causing screams and howls and blood to cover the windshield.
Miller’s phone rang. Robert Harris, head of site, personnel, and executive security for Schaeffer-Yeager International, was on the other end of the line. “You have Allen?”
“Yeah. He’s been infected like we thought.” Miller risked a glance back, wincing at the distant crunch of glass behind him. They were almost halfway through the rear window’s two-inch laminate.
“You have his research? His phone?”
Miller checked inside his jacket, pulling it free. Last year’s Apple phablet, but Miller didn’t think it’d be worth telling Harris that Lester’s phone was from the competition. “Yeah. Secured as requested.”
“Okay. Send me what you can. It’s critical—”
“Can’t.” Miller thumbed the phone’s power button again. The screen flashed a drained battery symbol. “Dead, no charge.”
Harris was silent for a moment. “Stay in the vehicle. Don’t open the windows, nothing. You hear me?”
Armoured limos didn’t have windows that opened; they were built in place. But Harris had never done any field work. Miller didn’t bother explaining. “I hear you.”
“Sit tight,” Harris said, and cut the connection.
A glance back over the interior of the limousine, the light entering the vehicle strobing as hammering hands rose and fell, and Miller realized it was the last place he ever wanted to be.
; “Doyle, you seeing this?” Miller asked, cupping his ear.
“Afraid not,” Doyle replied. “Thought it best to get the hell out while I could. I’m in my car and en route back home.”
“Mob’s got us.”
The mob’s pounding seemed to be growing steadier.
“I’ll be back in a tick.”
“No, don’t turn around. Then we’ll have to haul you out of this, too.”
“Bloody hell! Look at that!”
“What?” Miller glanced back at Morland and du Trieux, who were staring bloodlessly out at one of the Infected standing on the trunk. He’d set down his crowbar, and was gazing up into the sky. Miller realised all of the Infected had stopped to look, but somehow the steady thumping was only growing louder.
It wasn’t the mob’s pounding.
Help arrived. It screamed with turbofan engines and battered the ear with the bassy chop of rotor blades. An attack helicopter. Ugly, armoured, fresh off the assembly line in unpainted grey primer and serial numbers, gunpods and missiles glistening and fresh as it banked across the rooftops above. It slowed, then fired.
Tracer rounds cut into the ground, streaking flares in alternating red and orange, 20mm anti-armour explosive shells chewing the street surface to splinters, punching straight through the mass of humanity and tearing into the rock beneath without regard for their lives. Rippling blasts raced back and forth across the mob like a kid pissing on the snow, beating them down and tearing limbs from bodies, crippling blasts leaving nothing but blood and bone where there had been people an instant before.
The screaming of humanity was overpowering. Blood and tissue fogged the nearside window, and fragments of concrete and metal rang off the windows, leaving dark pits in the scratched, spiderwebbed laminate.
The helicopter hovered in place, as if surveying what it had done. The aftermath’s silence exposed screaming, crying terror. The street was a shifting mass of running bodies, dying bodies. Bodies, everywhere.
The second attack was shorter than the first, a roaring as God and Zeus ganged up on mortal men with exploding metal and thunder, tearing them down where they stood, precisely cutting them apart and tearing them away from the limousine as if they were nothing.
The echoes washed through the streets almost as swiftly as the blood filled the gutters. The limousine was painted with ragged splashes of gore and a sandblasting of metal splinters, broken limbs and gobbets of flesh, but what the crowd of Infected humanity had been unable to endure, the vehicle’s armour had shrugged off without complaint.
Those who weren’t dead, fled. Running ribbons of tracer fire punched through their backs, the only living things in sight left ruined and twitching, crawling messes of bloody limbs.
Near silently, Miller managed to get the limo rolling forward, rocking as its wheels rolled over lumpen mash and torn asphalt, levelling out as it fled, trailing bloody tracks behind it.
When they were clear, Miller opened the door a crack, leaned out, and threw up.
2
“AND WHERE ARE the government in this? Where are the police?”
The image on the screen bobbed unevenly, bad camera-work or shaking hands. Hsiung, unusually silent, picked up the remote control. No matter which channel she tried, it either displayed the same live scene from another angle, a flat blue screen, or a broken connection icon. The last surviving television station in New York, and it showed nothing but James Swift’s perspiring face. His nose, his cheek, his eye, painful close-ups as his rage simmered over.
“No one knows how many citizens of this city are dead, no one knows because it is impossible to count,” Swift growled, throwing back his head. “Those who seek our eradication, those who have murdered us, have been left untouched by the sacred justice the freedoms our glorious country was founded upon, oh, yes.” He nodded, and the camera bobbed in reflexive mimicry. No doubt, Miller thought, it was an effort of willpower for the cameramen to avoid joining in with Swift’s screed.
“Their subsidiaries, WellBeechBeck and BioGen, toil to develop poisons for the terrible right hand of the corporate beast, seeking to destroy us, seeking to destroy the Archaean Gift, even while their left hand, the very military industrial complex itself, slaughters us outright.” He leered at the camera, all teeth and tongue. “All in the name of corporate interests. Is this right? Is this American?!” Swift demanded, gnashing at the lens, spittle at the corners of his mouth. “Who does Schaeffer-Yeager’s genocide profit? No one!”
“Turn it off,” Miller said, pinching at the bridge of his nose. This was the last fucking thing he needed in Cobalt’s break room.
Hsiung glanced up, brief rebellion in her eyes, just on principle. If Miller didn’t want to see it, she did. She clasped the remote tighter.
Doyle groaned, hands over his face. “At least turn it down.”
Begrudgingly Hsiung complied.
“Thank you.” Miller looked at the coffee machine for the dozenth time, but it was still heating up.
Hsiung stared at the screen, struggling to make sense of the unnatural camera angles and close-ups of Swift’s sweating skin. “When did the Infected get Swift, anyway?”
“Oh, back when they were selling the parasite in bottled water. He fell in with the celebrity crowd,” Mannon said, from the other end of the couch.
“That long ago?”
“He went quiet after falling in with the communes.”
That would’ve been two, maybe three years ago? Miller’s ex-girlfriend, Samantha, had wanted him to try ‘Archaean Water’ with her, back then. She’d bought into the celebrity fad endorsing it as a wonder-cure for troubled relationships.
It sounded great, didn’t it? Water pulled out of a subglacial Antarctic lake, ultra-pure and natural, hidden beneath the ice for tens of thousands of years before global warming brought it near the surface. The early rumours about microscopic parasites in the stuff had dissuaded Miller from trying it just to patch things back up with Samantha, thank God. Maybe she’d ended up joining a commune?
It had seemed like a political thing, at first—living cooperatively, outside of the general economy. There were slums in the Bronx that had become the human equivalent of hives, the Infected living heel-to-toe, dozens of people to a room. The Infected hadn’t wanted a cure, and by the time anyone had attempted to pass laws enforcing anti-parasitic drug treatments—years late, long after Schaeffer-Yeager had started providing the drugs free of charge wherever possible—too much of the population had been ‘gifted’ with the Archaean Parasite to do anything to stop it.
Communes had seemed like a good idea when the famines really started to get bad. Jimmy ‘Eat The Poor’ Swift had once been another Wall Street shark, one of L. Gray Matheson’s—Schaeffer-Yeager’s CEO’s—peers. He’d owned half of Queens. Then he’d sold out, joined the dirty hippies who’d been protesting capitalism’s rise, and spent his considerable fortune feeding the city’s Infected.
Good for some, but Miller remembered watching overfilled grocery carts trundling down the streets towards the communes while everyone else starved, courtesy Swift’s fortune. Then, when Schaeffer-Yeager began its humanitarian campaign distributing anti-parasitic drugs and food, the communes had sent mobs to break up soup kitchens, burning trucks with the wrong logo no matter what they were carrying. It had been ugly then, but now...
While Swift spat fire on the screen, his words autocaptioned below, baying for the company’s blood, the mobs were out on the streets rioting. Was it purely a social phenomenon, or was the parasite somehow defending itself, making the Infected attack those trying to cure them?
Then again, Miller mused, if they were treated, cured, they’d lose their communes, wouldn’t they? It made sense if they were fighting to protect what they thought of as their families, didn’t it?
On the screen, Swift called on the Army and the government and the police, what was left of them all, to strike Schaeffer-Yeager down in furious justice.
He was right. Why the hell
weren’t Miller and the rest in chains, with a summary execution for Robert Harris on the cards for calling down the helicopter strike?
When enough had finally dripped into the coffee pot, Miller got up and filled two mugs, then put the pot back to catch the rest.
“Shouldn’t do that. The first stuff’s the best, you’re stealing it,” du Trieux muttered from the narrow card table behind the break room couch.
Miller shrugged. “At least you’re not complaining about how Americans make their coffee anymore.”
She grunted something guttural and French.
Coffee was hard to come by. They were scraping out old filters and adding a meagre amount from their dwindling supply of fresh coffee, mockingly calling it ‘half-and-half.’
At one point, the Archaeobiome’s ‘novel’ South American crop pests were considered someone else’s problem—fairy-armadillo type creatures, though the pink-shelled little beasts weren’t armadillos at all—but coffee drinkers, serious coffee drinkers, knew they were trouble long before the threat of the famines loomed.
The locust armadillos, Pseudodasypus, were little cynodonts—early precursors to mammals—which showed every sign of being straight out of the Triassic period, other than showing up out of nowhere in Colombian plantations around two years before. They’d arrived on his parents’ ranch a year later, shortly before gnawing a swathe through the Midwest’s cornfields. The biggest were three inches long, and to Miller they looked a lot like lizards with an armadillo shell. They even laid eggs, leathery little packets that shrank up like prunes in the sun.
The first hatching anyone witnessed had been out in Mexico, locust armadillo young crawling up out of the ground like tiny maggots, maybe two or three millimetres long—much smaller than later hatchlings from fresh eggs, something to do with how the Archaeobiome worked. Apparently the locust armadillos, along with most of the new wildlife, had been hiding out deep underground for close to thirty thousand years. Then they’d hatched tiny, grown up, and started reproducing. Fast.