Operation Honshu Wolf (5 page)

“Everything’s going to be fine,” he said, leaning around the driver’s seat. “We’ll just be a little late getting you to the Astoria Compound.”

Helen was holding her nose. “What’s that smell?”

“I’m sure it’s just the dust, baby,” Mrs. Williams said. “Could you turn on the air conditioning or something, Alex?”

The Bravo had something better than air conditioning—NBC grade HEPA/active carbon air filters. Miller toggled them on, just before he started to catch the scent too—something rotten, decaying. Mushrooms and, very faintly, the burning sting of ammonia. The filters cleared it quickly, thank God.

They didn’t have the roads to themselves, even if the city seemed deserted in the murk. Just two intersections after their route straightened out, they encountered a knot of stalled traffic. Most of the cars were abandoned. A long queue led to the intersection—a chain of automatically driven vehicles had halted behind one empty car—but ahead of them were vehicles physically blocking both sides of the road. A few of the stopped cars’ interiors were lit, passengers nervously looking ahead...

Miller craned his head and squinted through the fog, but couldn’t see anything other than a blur of light.

“Trix?”

“
Oui
?” Du Trieux rested her thumb against the Gilboa’s safety.

“Be ready to bail out after me.” Miller smiled back at the kids. “This’ll take just a moment.” With that, he got out of the Bravo, slamming the door shut before too much of the roiling dust got in.

The smell hit him like a hammer. Rotting asparagus trapped at the bottom of a garbage bag with something acid and vile done to it, every fleck of dust in his mouth making him want to retch. His eyes watered uncontrollably, and each new breath felt like a bad idea. But Miller had survived the tear gas hut during basic training. During his four-year stretch, waiting for a war that never came, he and his squadmates had bet money on who’d make it longest in the hut without a mask on. It was the kind of dumb thing young men do, but Miller was glad for it now, struggling around to the Bravo’s trunk and hammering on it until Morland or du Trieux popped it open from the control console.

Almost blind, Miller opened one of the panic-packs lined up next to the emergency medical kit, pulled out the gas-mask and mashed it against his face with one hand, taking clean breaths through the filters and coughing out whatever the shit in his lungs was while triggering the exhalation valves. After a few moments of spluttering and wheezing he was breathing clean again, and he took the time to finish securing the mask before grabbing one of the shotguns. The wind tugging unpredictably at his limbs, he made his way forward to take a better look at what had stopped them.

Shattered glass crunched under Miller’s dress shoes. A multiple car pile-up in the middle of the next intersection. Six, maybe seven or eight cars; they were hard to count, they were too tangled. They must have been driven on manual, blind in the storm. First just two cars, then the third must have hit the mess, then the fourth behind it, and so on.

Now that he was close enough he could see what the other trapped drivers had been staring at. It wasn’t the dead passengers, or the slinky, armour-faced rat-things clambering into the wrecks through shattered windows. It was the family that had gotten out of their car after its automatic driver stopped it.

The father, laying halfway across the opposite lane, was the only one Miller could bear looking at. He was still alive, barely. Twitching. Nose streaming with snot, vomit everywhere, convulsing like he’d been hit with some kind of nerve agent. What Miller first took for a light dusting of blood covering the dad’s chin, where the snot was drying out, turned out to look more like scarlet threads of silk or lint. The beginnings of the cobweb-like shroud fungus that had been devastating the Midwest, triggering the New Dust Bowl by killing everything—
everything
—in the topsoil.

When its spores spread, even prairie dogs died en masse, effectively gassed in their burrows so their corpses could serve as fertilizer to feed the fungal growth.

Miller tore his eyes away from the dying family. Their youngest was already gone, and Miller had no idea what to do. Dialling 911 was a thing of the past.

Red specks of dust swirled around in front of the goggles of his gas mask, and Miller found himself slowly looking up to the black sky of the dust storm above. How many tons of dust were hanging in the wind over his head right now? How much of it was laced with shroud fungus?

No wonder the air was so foul.

One of the drivers nearby, safe in their car, banged on their windshield, yelling something Miller couldn’t hear over the roar of the wind. Timidly, Miller stepped closer, holding the shotgun low, against his leg.

“What?” he yelled, not that they’d hear it through his mask.

She slapped the windshield again, pointed past the family’s stopped car, her face frantic.

Miller turned around, he hadn’t wanted to look. But someone was hunched over a child’s body. A woman stood nearby, staring at Miller. Five people, in all. None of them were wearing gas masks. Some of them were coughing, spluttering, but none of them seemed to care about toxic fungal blooms. They were filthy, unwashed, slick with sweat. Swaying in unison.

The Infected.

“Why are you out of your car?” one called, her voice overrun by another asking, “Is it the Rapture?”

Just five of them weren’t enough to start the chorus of moans, words colliding into a tangle of noise. But five of them were enough. One of them hefted a baseball bat to her shoulder.

“Is it the Rapture?” the other demanded again, her eyes wide. “The ungifted are dying. God hates them now. Is it the Rapture?”

“Trix?” Miller leaned his head to the side, lifting a hand to cover his earpiece and hold the transmit key.

“
Miller?
”

“Y’all are going to want to get out of the Bravo,” he said, slowly, “without letting too much of this shit in, and grab a mask from the trunk. Then head up here with the Gilboa.”

“Why are you wearing a mask?” one of the men demanded, stepping closer, then halting until the others caught up, stepping forward again... shambling forward, stop, go, stop, go.

“He’s not gifted.” “Ungifted?” “Why hasn’t the Rapture taken him?”

Miller backed away a step, another, swinging the shotgun up to his shoulder as the Infected with the baseball bat came around to the front. The rapid click-slam of one of the Bravo’s doors was followed by the sound of retching, which drew the small mob’s attention for an instant. But only an instant.

Their eyes were raw, bloodshot. Probably from the dust more than the parasite infecting them.

Wheezing through her mask, du Trieux, ever dependable, loped out of the dust and blaze of the Bravo’s headlights, rifle up. More than anything else, the two side-by-side barrels of the Gilboa Viper II looked
nasty
. A lot nastier than just some little shotgun.

The one with the baseball bat let it swing down to his feet, the group starting to shuffle backward. “You’re supposed to be dead!” one of them howled. Another, all but spitting up tears, said, “You’re supposed to be extinct. Like animals. We’re the only ones meant to survive.”

Before they disappeared into the dust entirely, breaking into a run like a pack of defeated wolves, Miller’s steel slipped entirely. His hands shook, the shotgun’s barrel wobbling, and the sweat plastering his skin turned cold despite the heat.

“Miller?”

“Dial Northwind,” he said into his earpiece, touching the ‘phone’ button. He marched towards the accident at the intersection, tapping back onto the Cobalt team circuit. “Trix, guard those bodies.” He jerked his head in the direction of the family. A few were still twitching, but Miller doubted anything could be done.

“
How the fuck are the Infected breathing this shit?
” du Trieux asked, her voice lost to the dust and wind, audible only in his earpiece. “
A mouthful of it nearly made me throw up.
”

“I have no idea.” The phone continued to ring in Miller’s earpiece, then went to hold music. He got to the mangled wrecks, and had to stop to fiddle for a moment with the shotgun’s flashlight. He eventually got it switched on and swung it to illuminate the interior of one of the wrecks, to see four rat-things sitting in the driver’s lap gnawing their way into his guts. They looked up in shock, like dumb toads, blinded by the light and sitting stock still as blood dribbled off their leathery faces.

They weren’t having any trouble breathing either. Apparently the Archaeobiome wildlife, and the Archaean Parasite, both got along with the lethal fungal blooms just fine.

Miller shifted his point of aim fractionally, and blasted all four of them into the passenger seat with a single shot. A second shot ended their squealing. He did the same in the other wrecked cars, clearing them of the bastard little scavengers, and finished just as Northwind picked up his phone call.

U
NTIL RECENTLY,
C
YCLOPS-
N
ORTHWIND
had nothing to do with civilian operations, and nothing to do with Miller. But, piece by piece, Schaeffer-Yeager was absorbing useful parts of its subsidiaries. Originally, Cyclops was part of StratDevCo’s support and logistic services. Now Northwind, its communications satellite management department, had been sealed into the filtered, steel-shuttered concrete blockhouse of their private mission control centre somewhere in Arizona with an expanded set of responsibilities.

Tracing the spider’s web of what the corporation owned and who it employed was a full time job in itself. Miller could, if he needed, ask Northwind to handle that for him, but not today. Miller knew
who
he needed, just not how to get in touch with them.

Forty minutes later, faster than some pizza deliveries he’d had, a pair of fire truck-sized emergency response vehicles shouldered through the traffic jam, pausing every so often to push abandoned vehicles off the road and onto the sidewalks. Boltman Oil and Chemical’s in-house fast emergency intervention and response team—the Blue Bolts. They were trained to deal with industrial accidents, oil well fires, chemical spills. This was biological, but Miller’s gamble that they were equipped to deal with that, too, paid off.

A team of four in firefighters’ exoskeletal harnesses finished clearing the road, and a new convoy set off, trapped civilian vehicles following them through the streets to the Astoria Peninsula. Their refugee convoy was met by the light of arc-welders working through the dust—more Boltman engineers building a wall across the peninsula, straight down the middle of 12th Street to sever all access from the land.

The forty-foot-high gate, still under construction, was an impressive sight. Concrete reinforced pillars on either side linked into the compound wall, this section built from stacked interlocking concrete slabs pinned together with rebar. Rolling through, James’s eyes bugged out. He pressed himself against the glass, staring at the flash of welders in the dust storm’s dark. “
Cool!
”

Even if what really mattered to Miller was getting into shelter and safety, for a moment, he let part of himself be sixteen again, and leaned against the windows with James to stare as engineers rolled the half-constructed gate shut behind them, an imposing edifice out of a monster movie.

“Cool,” Miller agreed. “Very cool.” It was something the fun uncle, the Armani, would have said to his young wards.

Miller didn’t think he’d get the chance to be the Armani, or the fun uncle, ever again.

4

F
OR SIX HOURS
the dust storm continued to reverse day into night. Nothing but roiling blackness outside, and the stink of fungal growth indoors. With the windows sealed it wasn’t too bad—foul smelling but survivable. Some of the refugees came down with a cough, and the medics treating it almost caused a riot talking about an airborne infection. The doctors had to explain they meant a
lung
infection, fungal spores trying to colonize the lungs, not a
parasitic
infection.

The wind died down and the dust fell out of the air, barely in time for the sunset’s light to reveal the East River’s waters stained black and scarlet. It was still dangerous in places, especially where dust had piled up into drifts—walking through could kick up fresh fungal spores—but the storm hadn’t been as apocalyptic as Miller had feared. Almost everyone seemed to be wheezing or coughing up dirty mucus through the night, but it appeared that almost everyone who’d been able to stay indoors had survived.

Outdoors, there were bodies in the streets. It wasn’t as bad as the famine’s first peak, just a few scattered bodies half-buried in the dust. Of course there was another explanation for the scarcity of corpses, one Miller did his best to ignore: the terror-jaws and the rat-things might have been scavenging during the storm.

Miller gently lifted his cup of tea, his reward for surviving the night through to the morning after, and sipped slowly.

“Why are you still in a suit, Alex?” Gray asked, lounging across the table from him.

The riverside plaza, white-tiled and beautiful, was all but abandoned. This side of the peninsula, Astoria Cove, stood in stark contrast to the housing projects on the south end. Both were packed with towering buildings, but on the Cove’s end of the peninsula an apartment sold for tens of millions of dollars. The projects just a couple of blocks away were where the city sent the poor and elderly who couldn’t afford to live anywhere else.

The barrier walls had swallowed both into one settlement, less than a fifth of a square mile, jutting out into the East River. The work hadn’t stopped for the dust storm, and it hadn’t stopped overnight. Stretches of wire fencing protected rolling concrete-printer trucks adding layer upon layer to growing segments of the wall, while Boltman Oil and Chemical engineers barricaded buildings and linked them into the wall’s structure with sheet metal cladding.

The Cove was quiet but for the muted roar of power tools and engineers yelling instructions to each other, still wearing their gas masks loose around their necks in case the wind picked up. Someone had cleared the plaza, its white tiles polished, almost gleaming. It felt peaceful. Gray’s kids were fiddling with their phones at another table, trying to connect to what was left of the internet.