After America (25 page)

His grin grew wider as he saw she was going to be okay.

“Can you move? Or carry your weapon? Because believe me, I can handle two of these puppies on the leash, don’t you worry,” he said as he hoisted up both P90s. Julianne sucked in a deep breath, rocked back, and then rolled up onto one knee before standing, exhaling, and taking another deep breath to control her dizziness. The Rhino was quickly at her side with a strong arm for support.

“The fighting’s moved downtown and west a ways,” he told her. “Lucky thing for us, too. Thought we were gonna get ourselves squashed between both sides for a few hours there.”

Jules allowed him to lead her though the wreckage of the store, which was so badly trashed that she couldn’t tell what damage was new and what had been done by neglect and the elements over the years since the Disappearance. Here and there she was able to pick out a pile of clothes and accessories that were rigid and black with the congealed leftovers of whoever had been wearing them when the Wave struck. But mostly the store was just a shambles of collapsed shelving, broken glass, ruined stock, and …

“Oh …”

She closed her eyes and swallowed when she saw a disembodied arm poking out from under a blackened display cabinet.

“Damn, sorry, Jules. I thought I’d policed up all the remains.”

He moved to pick it up, but Jules squeezed his elbow and shook her head.

“Doesn’t matter. Come on. We should get moving. I want to get to Union Square before sunup.”

The Rhino helped her out onto the street, which looked like a scene from wartime France, illuminated by the shells of burning buildings. Explosions had picked up car bodies and tossed them willy-nilly, smashing them into shop fronts, tearing the chassis into jagged knots of metal. Tires burned. Shop fittings burned. The long, ruined canyon of Mercer Street, once one of her favorite parts of this city, was illuminated by the oily orange glow of a hundred separate fires. Light rain, more of a sooty drizzle, drifted down, coating the rubble in a thick patina of ash and toxic chemicals.

They picked their way along the cobblestoned street, threading through entanglements of fallen scaffolding and brickwork. A huge steel garbage can blocked the path down near a boutique she vaguely recalled visiting during the three weeks she’d spent here in 2000, shortly after the millennium celebration. The can had been blown high into the air and come crashing down to lie with one end propped up against the first floor of the boutique. It had buckled in the center and now effectively closed off access to upper Mercer.

“Let’s cut through,” said the Rhino, gesturing at the boutique with one of the P90s. “We should get out of the main thoroughfares, anyway. There’ll be a lane or something out the back of these buildings. We can get up the block using that.”

Jules muttered her agreement, preferring to concentrate on not tripping and further injuring her arm. They climbed over the windowsill of the nearest shop front, a gutted homewares store, and navigated their way to the rear of the building, first by the light of the fires and then by means of a torch the Rhino clipped onto one of the machine guns. A jet screamed overhead while they searched for a rear exit, chased by the thump-thump-thump of a big antiaircraft cannon. She’d heard of the pirates mounting such things onto pickups but had wondered at the truth of such rumors. Surely the city’s road network was too locked up with the rusted remains of all the vehicles that had crashed after losing their drivers.

“Here we go,” said her companion as the thin beam of torchlight picked out a heavy metal security door. “Stand back, Miss Jules.”

She did as she was told while he pressed down the locking bar and tentatively pushed open the door. No gunfire greeted the movement, and the Rhino slid through.

“Clear,” he announced a few seconds later, and she followed him through, emerging into the cold, gritty rain that pattered down into the space between those buildings fronting Mercer and the ass-end of their counterparts on the next block over. She tried to remember which street ran parallel on that side but came up blank. The back alley, as always, was much less disordered than the main streets. There were a few vehicles parked here and there, but they had been parked back in ‘03 while their drivers ran deliveries to the businesses on either side. The smugglers had learned very quickly, right back at Duane Street, in fact, that such hidden, disused passages were safest when one was trying to traverse the contested island.

She recalled this as they sloshed through three inches of rancid, stagnant groundwater collected in the artificial valley between the two terraced rows of buildings on Mercer and whatever streets. Rats the size of small dogs swam away from the thin shaft of torchlight, trailing V-shaped wakes.

Didn’t there used to be alligators in the New York sewers?

“Rhino,” she said lightly. “Do you recall whether the Wave disappeared crocodiles and suchlike?”

He halted in front of her and turned around, keeping the torch pointed down to avoid dazzling her.

“Crocodiles? You mean gators?”

“Yes,” she said, trying to sound casual.

“No idea, Miss Julianne. What is it they reckon now? It took humans and most of the higher primates. Chimps and apes and so on. And killed about half of anything that had a spinal cord. But not so as you could predict what was gonna get zapped beyond people and apes.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, feeling rather foolish.

The Rhino sketched a devilish grin.

“Do gators have spinal cords? Or do they just like to eat them? Hmm. Do you know, Miss Jules?”

“Shut the fuck up and keep moving,” she scolded, waving him forward.

The Rhino sniggered and turned back to resume sloshing through the filthy watercourse. The grumble of bomb bursts and far-off cannon fire rolled around the empty chasms of the city, but hidden away in their own deep concrete valley and with a cold rain pressing down, the fighting sounded muted and far away. Jules kicked away a rat that ran across her boots, sending it into a rack of old dresses still waiting to be delivered. They were covered in plastic bags; she wondered idly if any might still be wearable but scoffed at the thought. They’d be moldy and chewed to rags by moths and grubs after so long. After squeezing through a narrow space where the corners of two buildings almost met, they followed the passageway up to the rear of a two-story shop dwarfed by a much larger buildings on either side. The door was jammed open by a large cardboard box that was halfway to total disintegration. The Rhino tried to pull it out of the way, but it came apart in his hands and spilled its contents with a harsh clatter of metal and crashing glass.

“Shit,” the Rhino said. He kicked a path through the refuse. As Jules stepped forward, she realized she’d stood on the remains of whoever had been carrying the box and felt an absurd reflex need to apologize. Hurrying to keep up with the bobbing torchlight, she tried to make out what sort of store it might have been, but the best she could come up with was “eclectic.” Clothes. Knickknacks. Hideously expensive objets d’art. There were examples of all those in the small, neat space.

Spring Street, onto which the shop fronted, apparently had reverted to its original form as a stream. At least a foot of brown swiftly running water gushed past outside, lapping at the bottom of the shop’s front door, pouring in underneath. The Rhino was less concerned by that than by the chance they might be spotted as they left the cover they had so far enjoyed.

“Why don’t we just kick our way into the place over the road?” Jules suggested. “See if we can cut through the block like we just did?”

“That’s my plan, too,” he replied. “But I’d just like to check the water before I go dipping my toes.”

He turned around and smiled wickedly.

“Gators, you know.”

Salisbury Plain, England

Richardson broke just after four in the afternoon. He lasted much longer than Caitlin had expected, but she had watched better men than that try to resist torture before. She had even broken some of them herself with nothing more than a sanitary napkin smeared with pig’s blood. Everyone had a weakness, some deep fear that could be exploited if one was given time. If time was an issue, there was always the proper amount of pressure, applied in controlled doses. Everyone broke sooner or later. The wonder with Richardson was that he held on for so long, but as Dalby pointed out, it wasn’t for the sake of honor or duty.

“I believe he was quite terrified,” said the man from the Home Office. “And not of us.”

“Not at first,” Caitlin corrected.

Dalby seemed to give her comment more consideration than it was really due, sipping contemplatively at his cup of tea before dunking a cookie—or, rather, a biscuit—into it. He stood aside to let the guards drag Richardson’s unconscious body past him. The criminal’s dark skin was spotted with burn marks and torn by small, bleeding lacerations, hundreds of them, some crusted with salt. He reeked of sour sweat and the stink of his own urine and feces. As Caitlin kept her nose close to the coffee mug, attempting to block out the worst of the smell, she was reminded of a figure from history who used to carry a hollowed-out orange filled with perfume. He would sniff the orange to keep the miasma of the unwanted masses away.

What was that guy’s name? She had heard it in some history class eons ago. She couldn’t even remember the last time she had seen an edible orange.

Stop it
, she told herself. Jesus Christ but her mind was not as sharp at it had been before the tumor. It seemed to wander so much now.

The smell didn’t seem to bother Dalby in the least, but he was sensitive enough to her discomfort to move out of the room when the path was clear.

“Lads, why don’t we pack our guest off to London?” Dalby said. “For a spell in the Cage.”

“Yes, sir,” one of the guards said. “Very good, Mister Dalby. We’ll see to it.”

The funk inside the small cell must have been especially thick, because the air in the musty, enclosed space of the main keg room tasted as sweet as an alpine forest when she was able to breathe freely once more. Caitlin did not tell the Englishman that Richardson’s interrogation had brought back some deeply traumatic memories of her own treatment at the hands of al Banna, but Dalby would have been familiar with her file, and he had offered a number of times to take on the responsibility for the hostile debriefing alone.

She’d refused. Richardson and his crew had come after her through Bret and Monique. She wouldn’t leave the room until he broke and told them why. Indeed, she believed her presence had probably contributed to undermining his will. He’d seen her execute his comrades, some of them in cold blood, and she gave him no reason to believe that she wouldn’t be just as ruthless with him.

“Still and all, he did give a good accounting of himself in there, didn’t he?” said Dalby as they reached the foot of the ladder leading up to the old barroom. “That was quite a job of work getting him to talk. Your Mister Baumer really knows how to put the frighteners on a chap.”

Caitlin shook her head in disgust.

Bilal Baumer. Al Banna.

She thought she’d seen off that worthless blood clot years ago. But here he was, back in her face, even if it was only through the agency of cutouts and dupes like Richardson. She finished the dregs of her coffee before pulling herself up the old wooden ladder hand over hand. She was amused and a little touched to see that Dalby made a conspicuous effort not to stare at her butt as it swayed past his eyes.

He was good guy, old Dalby, she had decided, even if he was a little too ready with the shaving razor and the Zippo during interrogation. He followed her up the ladder and directed her through the small pod of desks, where the typist she had met earlier was having a late-afternoon tea, nibbling a jam-covered scone and reading an old gossip magazine. Not that there were any new gossip mags being published. Not in paper form, anyway. After all, a big swag of the world’s celebrity supply had disappeared back in ‘03, but more important, the all-powerful Ministry of Resources had deemed august journals such as
Hello!
and
OK!
“surplus to the national emergency requirements,” making them prohibitively expensive to publish. Like most of the print media, they had downsized and gone online, where they scrabbled over some very meager pickings from advertising and subscriptions.

“This way,” Dalby said, using a key to open a door at the far end of the room. The day had grown even gloomier while they’d been downstairs, and outside it was so dark with the lowering clouds and rain that she could barely see beyond the windows. Springtime in England, she thought gloomily. A log fire burned in the center of the old barroom, providing welcome light and warmth, but fluorescent tubes hanging from the ceiling shone with a much harsher effect, laying a flat white light over everything. Caitlin tailed Dalby into the room, which looked like it might have been the pub manager’s office at one time. It was furnished in the same spare utilitarian style as the main area, but he had softened the space with a few amateurish oil paintings and a potted fern, which he sprayed with water from a plastic bottle before sitting down. There were three framed pictures sitting on his desk, which was otherwise free of clutter. She assumed they were of his family but could not see from her side of the room.

“Sit down, sit down. That’s the comfier perch,” he said, indicating a very tired-looking leather armchair in a corner behind her. It sat next to a gray metal bookcase that was mostly filled with government documents and a few nonfiction books:
The Legacy of Jihad, Bravo Two Zero, The Disappeared.
There were two novels there, however, lying face up on the top shelf: a well-thumbed copy of
The Cruel Sea
and what looked like an unread science fiction title,
Tearing Down Tuesday.
She assumed it was sci-fi because of the green robot on the cover. She was probably sitting in Dalby’s reading chair, she realized. It was, as he had said, a rather comfortable perch.

“I must apologize for the unpleasantness downstairs, Caitlin. It did get rather fraught once or twice.”