Emergency Transmission

by Sean McLachlan

  “Well, isn’t that interesting. You looking to trade it?”

  The man shuddered, stood straight with a visible effort, and shook his head.

  “No, I just want you to play it. Can you put the pictures on that flat thing where the movies went?”

  “Sure.”

  Roy paused. Something about this guy’s demeanor struck him wrong. It was too intense. Roy had plenty of people come in with Old Times DVDs and memory cards. They were always eager, even playful. Everyone wanted to see new image of those great days.

  Not this guy. He looked like he was going to murder somebody.

  But Roy couldn’t think of a way to say no. So he took the memory card and went over to his switchboard, a mazework of spliced cables and battered, cobbled together equipment. He flicked a switch to turn on one of the televisions.

  “We getting an extra movie night, Roy?” a farmer named Jack asked. With the toxic rains he was sitting out the workday, hoping the cancer wouldn’t catch him before he saw forty.

  “Not sure. Some pictures at least,” Roy said, his voice coming out quiet.

  He put the memory card into the slot and the computer screen next to it indicated it was readable. Roy turned to the scavenger.

  “We’re all set,” he said. But the stranger was already gone.

  Roy paused, then clicked on the image.

  The screen came to life, illuminating the dim interior of the bar.

  An image appeared of David, the preacher. He was drenched in blood, and still had hair, but it was unmistakably him. In one hand he gripped a machete. In the other, held aloft, was a severed head.

  Several of the patrons gasped.

  “What the fuck is this you’re putting on?” someone cried.

  Roy’s heart clenched hard in his chest when he recognized the victim.

  He had seen the guy from the wall, just a few months before.

  The Pure One. The leader of the Righteous Horde.

  David had killed him.

  He had set it on slideshow mode, and another image came up.

  One of David preaching to the Righteous Horde.

  Roy’s gaze flicked to the keyboard. One click and he could turn off the image. Why had he thought of doing that? Did he want to protect the brother? Why?

  Because David had saved his bar, had saved the whole damn settlement maybe.

  But it was all a lie. This was a mad cultist who had stormed the walls, tried to destroy everything he and Doc and Clyde and Marcus and Rosie and all the others had built over the past four decades. He was the enemy.

  Except he had stopped a riot. He had protected the Chinese. He had turned the Reverend Wallace from a frothing-at-the-mouth racist back into the kind, good man he had always been.

  Who was this guy?

  “Hey!” Jack said. “Ain’t that the preacher in the marketplace?”

  Roy’s legs buckled beneath him as his heart convulsed. He fell hard on the floor.

  “You all right?”

  Tammy hovered over him, a blurry wavering shadow.

  “Aw, shit, get Doc,” he whispered.

  “It is! It’s the fucking preacher!” someone shouted. “But who’s that he’s killed?”

  Tammy disappeared.

  “Looks kinda familiar. Does he look familiar to you?”

  “Yeah. Where have I seen that face before?”

  “Did he kill someone from the Burbs?”

  Roy clutched his chest, blinking, trying to clear his vision.

  “Not sure. Doesn’t look familiar to me.”

  Two shadows wavered over Roy.

  “What happened, Roy?”

  “Shit, I think he’s having a heart attack.”

  “Pick me up,” Roy gasped.

  “You sure?”

  “Pick me up!”

  The shadows grabbed him from either side, shoulders under armpits, and got him to his feet. Roy groaned. The world started to clarify.

  “Get me to the keyboard,” he croaked.

  “We need to get you to The Doctor.”

  “Get me to the keyboard first.”

  “Why?”

  “Do it.”

  They moved him forward. He blinked, trying to make the black fuzz of the keyboard congeal into letters and numbers, trying to get the diffuse light of the screen to resolve into lines and words.

  After a moment it did, or at least enough. He moved his hand to click on the “off” option. Paused.

  Why? Why was his first instinct to hide this man’s past?

  “It’s that cult leader!” Jack shouted. “I know it! I was on the wall and saw him. Looked like all the Old Times pictures of Jesus himself, the bloodthirsty piece of shit!”

  “Holy crap, you’re right. It is him!” someone else said.

  The scraping of chairs. Everyone started talking at once. Roy’s mind whirled. He couldn’t make sense of what anyone was saying. With a force of will he stood on his own two feet.

  “He’s changed,” he called out.

  “What was that, Roy?” one of the men holding him asked. Had anyone else even heard him?

  “He’s changed. He’s not … that, anymore.”

  No one paid him any attention. There was a scramble at the bar and a babble of many voices. The two people helping him led him around the bar and set him in a chair.

  His vision cleared, and he saw all the patrons standing now. A group of them had formed an angry circle, while others stared at the screen in shock. It still cycled through the damning images.

  “We got to get him!”

  “No, let’s get Clyde first.”

  “Fuck Clyde. I want to hang the piece of shit myself.”

  “Not yet. David is unarmed, he’s easy to catch. We might get a reward for bagging him.”

  “My reward will be seeing that son of a bitch swing.”

  “He’s not in the Righteous Horde!” Roy gasped. He tried to stand. Failed.

  “Of course he is,” Jack snapped. “Can’t you see, Roy? He killed The Pure One and took over. He came here to subvert us. They couldn’t take us by storm, so now they’re trying to weaken us from within.”

  “Say, do you think David is in league with the freighter? He’s been preaching how they’re friends and all.”

  “Hey, I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “No,” Roy moaned.

  Someone ran out of the bar. From outside, Roy could hear him calling,

  “Hey everyone, come look at this!”

  More people came. The angry conversation rose in volume as more and more people crowded in. Roy’s head spun from all the noise. His chest fluttered like a trapped bird.

  And then, like a giant beast, the crowd heaved for the exit with a roar.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Yu-jin trailed behind Aaron like she was stalking a rabbit in the wildlands. By the time she got to the gate, he was already across the dead zone between the walls and the Burbs, striding on long legs as fast as they would carry him. He glanced back. Yu-jin ducked behind the gate just in time not to get noticed.

  Aaron disappeared into the tangle of shacks and tents. Yu-jin jogged across the open space and caught sight of him taking a left down one of the Burbs’ haphazard lanes. They weren’t so much streets like in Old Times ruins as spaces between clusters of dwellings.

  She hurried to the corner and spotted him again. Hanging back, trying to screen herself with the crowd of merchants and shoppers, she followed.

  Once Aaron looked back, and she got behind a tall woman looking at a table of homespun clothing. Yu-jin pretended to do the same. When Aaron faced forward again, she continued to follow.

  He led her right to Roy’s bar. He walked in.

  She paused, unsure of herself. There was no place to hide once she entered, and he was sure to recognize her.

  Was he meeting someone? Getting a drink to cheer himself up? It seemed an odd place to go after the bombshell he’d just dropped. She figured he’d make a run for the wildlands.


  Yu-jin got partway around the corner of a building opposite and watched the door. A moment later she had the odd realization that this was where one of the gunmen who had attacked the bar had positioned himself. It may have even been the very same gunman who shot the Reverend and nearly shot her.

  Aaron reappeared a minute later. Yu-jin ducked back around the corner, then peeked out. He was walking away from her, obviously in a hurry.

  She started to follow.

  After a few steps Aaron staggered, put his face in his hands. Someone moved towards him, saying something, perhaps asking what was the matter. Aaron shoved him away and stumbled forward.

  The passerby gave Aaron the finger and walked off.

  Aaron moved more slowly now, seeming to have lost all his energy. Once he stopped and moaned, striking his forehead with his fist.

  He walked to the edge of the Burbs and onto the beach, heading south. His head hung low and he shuffled along, utterly despondent.

  Yu-jin considered the wisdom of following him. She wanted to find out where he was going. That might be essential. On the beach she wouldn’t be able to hide, but he didn’t look dangerous. He didn’t even look like he was paying attention to the terrain around him, a fatal mistake for any scavenger.

  But then something else got her attention, a noise from back in the Burbs.

  A low, sustained roar in the distance.

  She’d heard that noise before. She’d heard it all too often in the past few weeks.

  It was the inhuman growl of a riot.

  She hesitated, looked one last time at the slumped, receding figure on the beach, and ran back towards the Burbs.

  As she crested the last dune and the edge of the Burbs came into view, she could see this was the worst yet. People ran out of shacks and tents, heading for the center of the settlement. Others secured their shelters as well as they could and hunkered inside.

  She scanned the sky but saw no smoke. No one was burning any Chinese homes, at least not yet. She angled to the left to get to New City as quickly as possible, and avoid as much of the Burbs as she could.

  As she ran, she kept a sharp eye out. To her left and right stood shelters, hidden spots where attackers could lurk. She only had a knife at her hip. Too damn little if more than one came at her.

  How could she have been so stupid to go out practically unarmed? It was that picture, that terrible image of David holding up the severed head. She’d been so stunned that she couldn’t think straight.

  David’s face had been the worst. Exultant, almost transcendent, as if he had just felt the touch of God.

  How could he have been like that and become the person she had met? That’s why she had followed Aaron, the find an answer to that impossible question.

  Focus.

  She forced herself to slow, to look around every corner, to study the few people she came across, looking for any sign of danger.

  The noise of the riot seemed to be receding, as if the crowd was moving to the eastern side of the Burbs. Good, maybe she could skirt the worst of it and get to the gate.

  Then a familiar face made her stop short.

  It was a market trader. A squat, middle-aged woman Yu-jin didn’t really know. She’d only met her at New Year when the woman had asked Xinxin for a recipe for nian gao. Yu-jin had been standing by her friend and the three of them had chatted.

  Yu-jin rushed up to her.

  “What’s going on?”

  “That new preacher is from the Righteous Horde,” the woman said, all wide-eyed. “I heard someone was showing pictures of him at $87,953 cutting off people’s heads and bathing himself in blood.”

  Yu-jin gasped. Someone had shown those pictures at the bar?

  Aaron.

  He had wanted to make sure David would be unmasked. He hadn’t trusted the New City government to do it.

  “What’s going on now?” Yu-jin asked.

  “I think they’re hunting for him. I’m getting home as fast as I can. Once the crowd gets its blood up, there’s not telling what it will do. You need a place to hide?”

  “No, thank you. I’ll go to New City.”

  Yu-jin hurried on her way.

  Just as she did, she heard the watchtower siren wail, signaling that they were closing the gate.

  Yu-jin started to run. She stayed off the main lanes, zigzagging between structures and keeping low to make herself less visible. That market trader hadn’t mentioned the crowd going after Chinese, but she wasn’t taking any chances.

  She passed more people, frightened faces peeking out of doors and tent flaps, hurried figures that avoided getting close to her, and one tall man with a dirty face and a black bandanna standing atop a stone, rifle in hand, glaring all around him.

  She came upon that one suddenly, rounding the corner of a shack and seeing him about ten meters away over the tops of a row of low tents.

  He spotted her at the same moment.

  Crazy eyes locked on hers.

  She ducked and ran for the shelter of a shack a few meters ahead, tensing as she expected a bullet.

  None came. She kept going and did not look back.

  The gate came into view, and with a sob of anguish she saw the heavy doors close with a thud.

  “Wait!” she cried, running for it and waving her hands above her head.

  The top of the wall was lined with guards, their helmets and assault rifles dull under the cloudy sky.

  “Gate’s closed!” One shouted, waving his arm at her. “Go find shelter in the Burbs!”

  “I need to speak with The Doctor!”

  Clyde’s head popped into view.

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  “Let me in!” she called up.

  He disappeared.

  “Wait!”

  No reply.

  “Clyde, let me in!”

  Clyde reappeared. “Keep your panties on, I’m coming.”

  He started playing down a rope with a loop on one end.

  “Can you hang onto this long enough for us to pull you up?”

  The rumble of the crowd rose into a victorious, animalistic roar.

  “You’re damn right I can!”

  Yu-jin grabbed the rope, looped it under her shoulders, and they began to haul her up.

  This would be a perfect opportunity for Clyde to get rid of me, she thought. He could get me nearly to the top and then drop me. The guards would probably laugh their asses off.

  She knew that was uncharitable, but the thought kept her tense and anxious until she got to the top and clambered over the parapet.

  Yu-jin turned to look out over the Burbs, and a worse fear overtook her.

  A huge crowd swirled near the eastern end of the settlement. People ran to join it from all sides. She picked out Xinxin’s house, and the houses of other Chinese she knew. No one seemed to be attacking them.

  Yet.

  “Did we all get inside?” Yu-jin asked.

  “You mean the Chinese? Yeah, a bunch of them came in,” Clyde said. “I let them in even though they weren’t citizens.”

  It came out sounding like he wanted some credit for being a decent human being.

  “Did all of them get in?”

  “How should I know? We never took a census. You people have been hiding all this time.”

  “But—”

  “Relax. Your pregnant friend got in, and so did her family.”

  Clyde put a pair of binoculars to his eyes and studied the crowd.

  “They got him,” he said.

  “Sure did,” one of the guards chuckled, looking through a small telescope. “He’s a goner for sure.”

  “Give me that!” Yu-jin said, snatching the telescope away from him.

  She focused on the crowd, ignoring the man’s objections. All she could see was a heaving mass of humanity, screaming, snarling, fists in the air.

  Then she found him.

  He rode on a sea of upraised hands, tossed this way and that. His clothes were torn and his face
bloody. Several people directly around him were struggling with the crowd. They seemed to be stopping the worst of the blows. One man, a hatchet raised above his head, pushed through the mob, only to have it snatched from his hands.

  But the people stopping the killers did not seem to be doing much more to protect David. Did they want to torture him first?

  Yu-jin put a hand on Clyde’s arm. “We have to save him.”

  “No way. I’m not going to risk my men for that piece of shit.”

  “They’ll kill him!”

  “Good. Look, I know you’re worried about this getting out of hand. If they make a move on any Chinese houses or businesses, I’ll go out there myself. Otherwise I’m sitting back and letting justice get done.”

  “Where’s Reginald?”

  “Fixing a broken nose. One of the Chinese got slugged while he was coming here. There are a few other injuries. Minor stuff. They’re not after your people. They’re after David.”

  “We can’t just leave him out there, he’s been helping!”

  “He’s a spy,” one of the guards said.

  Yu-jin rounded on him. “A spy preaching tolerance?”

  The guard narrowed his eyes. “A spy trying to get us to trust the enemy.”

  “None of that!” Clyde snapped. He turned back to Yu-jin. “Your people are safe. Let this play out and we can get back to the important stuff, like figuring out how to cap that well. The wind’s turned again and we’ll probably get another toxic rain before the week is out. We can’t take much more of this.”

  “Clyde, they’re coming this way,” one of the guards said.

  The mob marched through the Burbs, carrying David above their heads. He moved a little, a hand passing across his face, perhaps to wipe off some blood.

  “He’s still alive,” Yu-jin said.

  Clyde nodded. “They’re probably going to kill him in the market where he preached.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because that’s what I’d do. Kill the lies at the source.”

  “They weren’t lies,” Yu-jin whispered. “They couldn’t be.”

  But her voice came out so small they couldn’t have heard even if they had been listening.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN