Allie's War Season Three (92 page)

"They'll try to neutralize Revik, first," I cautioned. "Any sign of guns and fire a shot in that direction. Don't bother with a ping, they'll count on the lag..."

Revik glanced at me again, and nodded, sending me a pulse of warmth.

"Keep feeling for them, Allie...you're our only chance of advance warning. But try not to be seen, too..."

I nodded, showing him where I was at with the shields.

So far, they seemed to be holding. I'd been practicing again, even since the bank op, so I knew I'd improved since we broke into the Registry building in São Paulo. Considering that I'd managed to make the shields work even inside a high-security building owned by Black Arrow, I had to hope they'd be good enough for walking around the city, especially given that a lot of the security we'd been expecting to run into appeared to be down. Even so, I could tell Revik was on edge. I switched to private for him again.

"You all right?"

"No," he sent back, brief. "I'm actually wishing you hadn't come with us, Allie..."

Perceiving the dense array of feeling behind his words, I nodded to myself, but didn't answer. I knew how he felt. I felt pretty much the same way about him going to South America, with or without me. When another dense pulse of fear left his light, all I could do was try to send reassurance back through the connection between us, while doing my best to stay away from edges of the shield, where either of us might be felt on the outside.

As if regretting he'd spoken, he said, "What's the cross street again?"

I knew he had a photographic memory, but I didn't hesitate before answering.

"33rd. Fulton and 33rd. Right across from Spreckels Lake..."

He pinged an acknowledgement, but his light didn't feel any calmer.

We crossed over to the west side of Stanyon Street, looking up and down Fulton as we neared the intersection. Instead of making a right to follow the street down to Jaden's house, we followed Revik as he crossed over Fulton at an angle and entered the edge of the park through the stone gate.

In all that time, I hadn't heard a single car engine, car horn, feed station, video player, snippet of music, headset conversation or any other sign of human existence. I'd heard seagulls and even some finches in the planter trees along the sidewalk. I'd also seen and heard a number of crows, but all that did was make me feel like I was in a remake of Hitchcock's
The Birds.

I hadn't heard a dog bark, either...or seen a single one of the previously ubiquitous cats that haunted the streets and alleys and window boxes just about everywhere in the San Francisco I remembered. I'd been staring up at and across to windows, too, but all of them appeared to be dark. I saw no movement, no reflections, no one staring at us from any height. Most of the windows on the lower levels appeared to be boarded up, as did the few houses I glimpsed down Fulton itself. The gas station on the corner was entirely deserted, and the one shop I saw, what had been a coffee shop I used to like to go to, had all of its windows smashed, and the espresso maker lay in pieces on the street, along with a few chairs and part of one table. It looked like someone had been chopping up the furniture for kindling.

"Where does a whole city go?" I murmured to Jon via the headset.

He glanced at me, his mouth grim.

My eyes tracked up the length of Stanyon I could see, following the course of a sloping hill as I crossed onto the park's path. I hadn't seen a single car since we'd gotten out of the truck, other than those parked along the side of the road. Most of those had all of their windows bashed in, as well as their headlights, windshields, fenders, trunks, mirrors. The majority had spray paint tags on them as well, and had been stripped of their seats, wheels, and in some cases even the steering columns and parts of the electronic panelling inside the dashboards. I couldn't help wondering how many had engines left at that point.

"Jesus..." Jon muttered aloud.

Revik immediately hushed him, signaling with his hand, but by then all of us had come to a dead halt, looking in the same direction where Jon had been staring.

When I first saw them, I could only stare, too.

The images my eyes sent to my brain had to be wrong. Either that, or my brain had to be interpreting the information incorrectly.

Yumi covered her mouth then, wincing as she turned her face away.

From her expression, she looked like she might be trying not to get sick.

We'd stopped on one of the paths inside the park by then, just past the stone gates on the corner of Stanyon and Fulton. I knew the horseshoe pits stood off to our left somewhere, where mostly old men used to hang out on Sundays, smoking cigars and throwing shoes as they gossiped and called out to people they knew strolling through the park. I also knew that if we kept walking along that same path, we'd reach the conservatory and the flower gardens, which had always been one of my favorite parts of the park. But Revik had already started to move us off that path and into the lawn and trees more parallel to Fulton Street, which ran pretty much due west towards Ocean Beach and not far from the Camera Obscura and the old Sutro Baths.

I forced my eyes to take in the forms littering the ground on either side of the path.

The way they sprawled there, it looked like someone had shoveled them aside to keep the walkway clear. They lay tangled into one another in inelegant heaps, arms and legs bent into patterns that would never happen in a natural fall. I took a step closer and then the smell hit me, enough that I had to cover my mouth with a hand as well, closing my eyes as if that might help to shut it out.

Somewhere in all of that, my mind had clicked back on.

Then, I knew exactly what I was seeing.

They weren't street people, with dirt on their faces and matted hair or whatever. None of them wore ripped up, second-hand clothes or looked like they'd just come down off a speed bender or too many months of drinking Thunderbird wine. Not like any of that makes it worse or better, really, but the image hit me harder, I think, in that they looked more like people I used to see walking around the neighborhood, pushing strollers or jogging in the park, talking on their headsets on the bus on their way to some city office job downtown, or maybe going to classes at one of the half-dozen campuses in and around the city.

They wore jeans and T-shirts, business skirts and suit jackets, jogging suits and bathrobes. I don't know how they all got into the park. Maybe this was where they dumped the bodies...or maybe these ones never made it to one of the quarantine hospitals at all. They were all different ages, different ethnicities...some looked like they had a lot of money and others could have been one of my artist slacker friends who hung out at Lucky Cat in the middle of the day, or at one of the tattoo parlors where I did side jobs for extra cash.

In only one way were they the same.

Their faces, frozen in different expressions, with different skin tones and different rates of decomposition, all had the same crusted, dried, trails of blood in lines from their eyes and ears and noses. On some of them, the blood obscured their features almost totally, making trails through eye makeup and foundation and lipstick and beard stubble and sticking glasses to faces. Most of them lay there, open-mouthed, as if choking on their own blood, but their tongues were all uniformly black and swollen, making them look like they'd choked on some part of themselves. Making them look like they'd died in pain.

Forcing my eyes off a woman and a little boy who lay wrapped up together next to the path, I covered my mouth again, feeling another surge of bile. When I glanced to the side, I saw Jorag throwing up in some bushes a little ways further off the path. Revik just stood there, holding Jon back protectively with an arm as he stared down at the line of corpses.

It wasn't until then that I realized just how many of them there were.

"This area got hit," Yumi said aloud. "That's why it's so quiet...everyone around here is dead. Dead...or they left this part of the city."

Her words sounded eerily loud in the silence of the park.

That time, Revik didn't bother to tell her to be quiet. Instead, he began backing away from the path, and the line of bodies that lay on either side of it. I could see now that that line stretched literally for further than I could see.

"Come on," he sent through the headset. "There seem to be less over here..."

Forcing my eyes off the rows of dead, which now seemed to form a gruesome procession along the lawn as the path sloped off into the trees, I nodded.

Glancing at where he stood, I realized Revik was right. Whatever had pushed the bodies off the path, it didn't seem to have moved them very far. Where Revik and Jon stood, the path itself and the nearby lawn seemed to be clear. Swallowing back another mouthful of bile when a breeze blew the smell of decay and death and defecation back in my direction, I stumbled backwards, only to have Neela catch hold of my arm and lead me in the direction of Revik and Jon. She looked overly pale too, and her gold-rimmed eyes appeared close to dazed, but she didn't look sick the way Jorag and Yumi had.

Yumi joined me on my other side, even as I thought it, still looking slightly greenish, her eyes overly bright. I found myself gripping her hand in mine...maybe for her or maybe for me, I don't know, but it seemed to snap her out of wherever her mind had gone. She squeezed my fingers back, but didn't let go until she wanted that hand back to unholster her gun.

Together, we crept along the trees and grass just on the other side of Fulton Street, gauging our progress with the GPS.

At that point, I think all of us were wondering just what we would find when we finally made it to the rendezvous point at Jaden's.

22

RENDEZVOUS

I COULD TELL Revik was wound tight, maybe as tight as I'd ever seen him.

Even with only a toe in the Barrier, I could feel a kind of electrical current around him, and knew he probably had the telekinesis at hair-trigger setting as we got closer to the junction of 33rd and Fulton.

As for me, the longer we walked through the trees at the rim of the park, the more nervous I got, too. I knew anyone trying to approach Revik would likely try to do it at a distance, so in that case, our semi-camouflaged route through the park remained preferable to us walking down Fulton Street in broad daylight, where a sniper positioned in one of the taller building windows or houses could easily pick us off from a few hundred yards.

Even knowing this, I kept having minor panic attacks that someone was going to hit Revik with a dart through the trees...especially since the camouflage also limited our own visibility. But as far as I could tell, no one came near us.

We didn't hear anyone, either.

I didn't let my light get too close to any of the smatterings of resonance I felt in the Barrier, especially any that reminded me even remotely of the Lao Hu. I'd gotten close enough the one time to freak myself out. Not only had it frightened me that one of the Lao Hu infiltrators might have noticed, it had been enough to remind me of that feeling I'd had, being in China, especially for those weeks after I killed Gerwix. And really, that was the last thing I needed to be thinking about right then. Not only was it potentially dangerous for all of us, in that those memories would make me resonate more with the Lao Hu infiltrators...but it started to fill me with paranoia as I remembered key things Ditrini had said to me, along with the fucked up head games he liked to play more generally.

When I checked my headset's GPS, I was relieved to find us only a few blocks from our destination. I knew our biggest risk likely lived in our approach to the house itself, but at that point, I welcomed the distraction. The last thing I needed was to blow our cover because I had some kind of PTSD attack about Ditrini.