Allie's War Season Three (122 page)

He slammed her at least once more in the face before he tore the gas hose out of her dead, twitching fingers and started trying to use it to fill up a gas can he'd fashioned out of what looked like a used oil barrel.

He’d loaded the back of his pick-up truck with at least five more of those barrels already, so apparently this guy fancied himself some kind of survivalist.

Fires had burned in the field behind the gas station itself.

I saw five or six shadowy forms in the station's office, pulling things off racks and fighting over the cash register like a pack of wild dogs. Even then, a part of me couldn't help thinking how ludicrous it was, fighting over currency that had already been on its way out, even before this whole mess.

The main carnage happened over the gas itself, of course, even apart from polo-shirt guy. The attendant lay facedown in a long splatter of what had to be his own blood. I didn’t see the puddle growing any bigger, so mercifully, his heart had probably stopped already. Two pumps over from the soccer dad, three other men fought with their bare hands over another pump.

I also saw a petite, Asian woman in a business suit holding a semi-automatic handgun on three more people, two men and a woman, while she filled her Mustang's tank up using the third pump.

All I could think was, it had only been 72 hours.

Not even four days had passed since Shadow unleashed his deadly virus on the world. I was watching the only civilization I'd ever known crumble to dust around me.

We hadn’t even started running out of things yet, not for real.

We found out later, from Maygar, I think, that our arrival at Shadow's house had been the trigger for his ‘Final Solution.’ When we crossed the gates, entering the main construct of the house, a Barrier impulse had been sent to agents carrying samples of the disease in over twenty different urban centers around the globe. It didn’t include New York, but it did include just about every other major metropolitan area in the world. In the United States, that meant Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and Seattle. In the rest of the world, it was as if they took the top fifteen or so cities by population and systematically wiped them out, starting with Shanghai, Istanbul, Karachi, Mumbai and Moscow, and working down from there.

The list kept growing, too, and faster than it likely would have spread organically, which told us that a second wave of attacks had likely followed the first.

This time, instead of isolating the agent to a single building, like they had in San Francisco, they dumped the contaminant directly into the water supply.

After that, everything moved really fast.

Oh, and according to the media,
I’d
done this.

Supposedly, I’d claimed responsibility for the attacks before we'd even managed to find air transport back to North America. Clearly, Shadow had no trouble extending our enemies list to include pretty much anyone in the human race left alive. Images of us in San Francisco hit the feeds. One of the news crews must have employed flyers with cameras that we somehow missed. Either that, or the Lao Hu had gone out of their way to get images of me and Revik specifically for release to the feed networks.

The images did what the headlines and fake claims of responsibility hadn't accomplished on their own. Namely, a massive backlash against seers began almost at once, even with C2-77 tearing through communities and infecting everyone in sight. Pretty much anyone in a position to care anymore thought Revik and I were behind the spread of the disease.

Of course, not everyone thought we'd acted alone.

In fact, from what Balidor said, the main points of contention now seemed to be around who we'd been working with among the humans, and where we’d gotten our funding. The United States blamed China, at least behind closed doors. They seemed to think Revik and I had been hired or manipulated into working for the Chinese military. United States intel somehow obtained evidence of the Lao Hu involvement in San Francisco, which, to them anyway, strongly indicated we'd been backed by the Chinese.

As a result of all this back and forth of accusations and intel, as well as conflicting reports around what was actually occurring in the different cities, just about every military in the civilized world now stood at the brink of nuclear war. We had a number of our top infiltrators, led by Yumi, working to directly hack the White House construct and the minds of key decision-makers, including the President, in an attempt to dial back the hostilities.

So yeah, the United States government blamed China.

Supposedly England was moving towards that opinion, too. Japan hadn't needed much of a nudge to join the group looking closer at Beijing. Neither had India, for that matter, or France, or the Russians.

Most people blamed us, though. Meaning me and Revik.

I wasn't sure how much luck Yumi's team was having, trying to pacify world leaders in the midst of this nightmare. Balidor also informed me that we weren't the only players involved. The Lao Hu were in the mix, although they seemed to be trying to prevent things from going nuclear, too. Balidor saw evidence of another group of seers sharing that Barrier space, as well––seers with a decidedly different agenda than the Adhipan or the Lao Hu. Whoever they were, they seemed to be deliberately riling up the bigwigs on the subject of seers and Asia.

Clearly, someone wanted Beijing in D.C.'s sights.

Meanwhile, I still had my dreams, the same ones I'd been having since Revik first took me out of San Francisco. A good percentage of those centered around overreacting superpowers and big, blinding flashes of light.

Some of those featured Beijing.

Some featured other places, like D.C. itself...and New York.

Since running into that first gas station on that airport access road, the view out our windows had gotten progressively worse. The highway itself had been relatively clear at first, apart from a number of cars that appeared to have been run off the road. Well, and a shooting we witnessed on the shoulder. Given that electricity remained out in most places, mostly all we saw were fires in that penetrating dark, at least until we'd gotten to where actual towns abutted the highway. After we passed through the first major road blocks, mostly by flashing miraged military IDs at confused and frightened human soldiers, we found ourselves in bumper-to-bumper traffic filled with increasingly desperate humans, most of whom seemed to be trying to make their way to the same place we were, namely, the quarantine zone of New York City.

Of the others, most probably hoped to reach one of the remaining open coastal ports.

Wreg had told me that boat captains of all kinds were advertising 'quarantine cruises' from points up and down both American coasts. Most charged somewhere in the neighborhood of a million bucks per seat, and promised to ferry their charges out onto the open ocean, presumably to wait out the worst of the outbreak. Half of those ships were probably tug boats and commercial or private fishing vessels, not luxury liners.

For those who had the money, (or could steal it, my mind supplied helpfully), I could see how that might seem like a viable option. Even small boats usually had some kind of freshwater conversion system on board. In theory, they could catch the majority of the food they needed. That, coupled with vitamin supplements and seaweed, would probably allow most of them to last a few months, minimum, providing the weather held.

So yeah, in a situation with few options, I could almost see how that one might appeal. Their biggest risk would be of the captain dumping them off at sea in the hopes of repeating the trick a few more times...or maybe a few dozen more.

Or that someone would bring the disease on board, knowingly or not.

In any case, I understood why Balidor opted for the fully-armored, organic-plated Humvees once we reached more trafficked areas. Bands of looters, many already looking sick themselves, traveled between cars and bashed windows with baseball bats. Revik, Wreg, Jorag and I did what we could to push some of them into a less violent state of mind, but there were simply too many of them. Being in their minds at all was a kind of hell all of its own.

I kept trying, anyway, at least until it became so many the whole thing felt futile.

Even then, I couldn't help but intervene when it happened near enough for me to see it.

I stopped a young guy from dragging a pregnant woman through a broken windshield that he and his pals smashed with pipes. I managed to keep him from killing her right there, but I doubt I prevented her and her family from catching the disease when they all got exposed to the open air outside the reinforced glass.

The fires got more numerous, too. They also got bigger.

Once we got off the freeway about eighty miles north of the city and began traveling back roads, we were thrust into the middle of that burning landscape. People smashed storefront windows as we drove by, pulling out everything from crates of alcohol to microwave ovens and even a washing machine and dryer set. We saw families loading up pick-up trucks with aluminum siding, multi-tiered bakery cakes, porn sims, computers, jewelry...socks. Wreg watched most of this with a look of blank incredulity on his face, pausing on the guy carrying a set of golf clubs long enough to let out a surprised laugh.

"Now what do you suppose he thinks he's going to do with those?" he said.

"Weapons?" Revik joked.

I knew they were whistling in the dark, but I couldn't make myself do it with them.

People's priorities were pretty much all over the place, though. We saw parents risking the lives of...so far, at least...healthy-looking children, all to get a new set of tires, a side of beef and all the beer they could drink. Those acquisitions were on the practical side, really, compared to the people raiding appliance stores, given that the power grid was already flashing on and off all over the state, and soon to be down altogether, possibly permanently. Even that made more sense than the ones breaking into cash registers, though, at least to me.

As if he'd heard some portion of my thoughts, Wreg gave me a wry smile.

"Humans," he said, as if that explained everything.

I raised an eyebrow at him, only to glance down and find him stroking Jon's hair. Under normal circumstances, I might have given him crap for his blatant hypocrisy, but when I saw the grief etched into his features, I only reached past Revik to clasp one of his tattooed arms. Wreg spared me a glance and a smile, even as he held Jon protectively in his lap.

"I don't like this," Wreg muttered, aiming his words at both me and Revik that time. "What do you think of Adhipan's plan,
laoban?"

Revik smiled, gripping my hand tighter. "I know why you don't like it."

"It's not only that," Wreg muttered.

"Submarines have been around for over 150 years, Wreg."

"And they've been sinking for that long too,
laoban
," the older seer grumbled back, running a hand through his shoulder-length black hair. "Might as well lock ourselves inside a iron casket with inner tubes strapped to our waists and hope we
float
to that fucking island..."

I laughed at that, I couldn't help it. "You don't like submarines, Wreg?"

"He hates them," Revik told me, kissing my face as he held me closer. "Don't you, brother?"

"With a passion," Wreg confirmed. "...A sinking dread. And that was an intended pun, by the way. A pun by way of a hint. A dire prognostication, if you will..."

"He got stuck in one that got torpedoed during WWI," Revik told me, still cradling me in his arms. I felt another flush of heat in his light, but he subdued it more quickly that time. "...Both of us did. He's been claustrophobic ever since."

"So have you," Wreg retorted.

"No." I shook my head. "He was claustrophobic before that."

"How is that
better?"
Wreg grumbled, now glaring at both of us.

Something about the way he said it made me laugh again.

The conversation lifted things a little, for that brief moment anyway. Until Revik glanced outside once more, pausing on something he saw. I didn't follow his eyes to know the specifics, but I felt that cold feeling return to the pit of my stomach. As if rousing himself, Revik shook his head before looking back at us, his voice more serious.

"I think Balidor's plan is sound," he said, matter-of-fact. "Despite what they tell the press, they must maintain at least one safe passage in and out of the city...for food, medical supplies, ammunition, potential evacuations and whatever else. They would not risk dropping the main grid for this. It would be too easy for the contaminant to get through."