The Junkie Quatrain (13 page)

It had been six months since the world ended.

For Quilt, things didn’t seem all that different.

Oh, a few dozen cities had fallen and more than a billion people had died, if numbers were to be believed. Millions were starving because of the shutdown of so many public services. Millions more were running around killing and eating anything they got their hands on.

In the end, though, nothing had really changed, as he saw it. People were still selfish animals, infected or not. Despite what science said about chimpanzees, Quilt believed mankind was a more evolved form of cockroach. This epidemic was a minor setback. Within fifty years there’d be no sign it had happened.

He loped along the roof of the building, slid down to the shop next door, and paused to wipe some dust from his glasses. They had a non-reflective coating which could be damaged easily if he let too much grit build up on the lenses. While he wiped them on his undershirt, he glanced over the edge of the roof at the baker’s dozen of infected people wandering and moaning through the streets.

It had begun in Asia. An epidemic that spread like wildfire. Not surprising, he thought, given the population density. It had been called the China Syndrome for the first few weeks, but the technical name was H1B6. Most people called it the Baugh Contagion now, after the scientist who first isolated it.

The contagion affected the brain. It caused poor judgment, uncontrollable hunger, a breakdown of communication skills, and eventually death. People spread the disease in its early stages through lack of inhibitions and bad personal choices. In the final weeks, they spread it in a much more active fashion. While most diseases made their victims weaker as they progressed, H1B6 made them burn up their lives in a frenzy. Two or three weeks of running, shaking, and howling. And biting. The biting had helped make it an epidemic. The tremors, babbling, and erratic behavior had helped give the infected the nickname
junkies
.

As Quilt looked at the gibbering infected below him, it occurred to him that he’d gone seven weeks without saying a single word. He’d gone for long periods before without speaking, depending on the location or requirements of a given job, but this was impressive even for him. There’d been no one to speak with, granted, and for a brief moment he toyed with the idea of saying a few words just to hear a voice, even if it was his own. He dismissed the thought just as swiftly. Talking to yourself was a bad habit, and bad habits were the bane of his profession.

In another life, Quilt might’ve had any number of jobs. He had very good organizational skills. He was great with faces. His hand-eye coordination was phenomenal. He had a flawless internal clock. It crossed his mind now and then that he would’ve made an excellent executive assistant, or perhaps a high-level manager of some kind.

Of course, he had one other skill. No matter where or when he’d lived, it would’ve ended up being his defining trait. It stood out on a resume.

Quilt killed people.

He did it very well, and had been doing it for most of his adult life. He’d never be so arrogant as to say he was the best at what he did or any other such statements. Privately, though, he knew there were very few people in his line of work who were considered better.

A quick check assured him this new rooftop, three stories up, was completely secure. He’d been on the move for six hours. Time to stop for his meal. He set his rifle down carefully and slid the streamlined pack off his shoulders. There were two Marine-issue MREs left in it.

He lifted the particle mask that covered his nose and mouth. It was number sixty-eight out of one hundred. They were all charcoal-gray, a specialty color he paid double for from an exploitative website that took advantage of rich germaphobes. Their products were top quality, though, and they had never questioned the false identities Quilt used to buy them.

Quilt hated diseases. One might even say he feared them. He disliked anything he couldn’t fight on equal terms. He knew his phenomenal health and careful, precise method of doing things made the risk of infection extremely minimal, but the thought nagged at the back of his mind.

He cracked open the MRE and began to eat. He made a point of setting his spoon down between each bite, giving the food longer to suppress his appetite. Quilt only ate one meal a day. It made it easer to carry enough food for two or three weeks.

Supplies were a bit low at the moment, but that was the whole reason he’d come back to Los Angeles. Quilt had offices and safe houses in a dozen cities across the globe. Never in key areas. Only amateurs stood
in
the target. He’d based himself just off-center, close enough to major transport but far enough to be out of sight. There was a loft apartment in Cardiff, and another one in Bonn. He had a small beach house in southern Maine, an hour north of Boston, and another one just south of Buenos Aires.

And, of course, an office in North Hollywood. Shielded by the Hollywood Hills in case of an attack on Los Angeles or LAX. Moving at an easy pace, he’d be there tomorrow afternoon.

He heard a distant yelp. It sounded faintly like a dog. Dogs were one of the few things Quilt had any fondness for. Probably, he admitted, because a well-trained dog was one of the most loyal weapons you could have. He’d seen the junkies go after dogs, and he made a point of stopping them when he could. And when he could spare the rounds.

He stood up and used his rifle scope to scan the streets below until movement caught his eyes. There was a junkie standing in the middle of the street, two blocks to the north. A young man with dark hair and skin. The junkie was Egyptian, probably. Maybe Lebanese. His features had a few of those subtle markers a person can only pick up on after so much time in a region.

He wasn’t after a dog. He had two women pinned by a few cars. Quilt could see the back of their heads. One was wiry and tough. The other one looked too soft to last long. He let the crosshairs settle on the base of her skull and contemplated tightening his trigger finger. His heart beat twice and he switched targets. Quilt made a point of not killing randomly. He was, after all, a professional.

The tough woman was trying to scare off the junkie. He heard her stomp on the pavement and saw her wave at him with some kind of club or bat. She was brave. Stupid, trying to frighten the infected man when Quilt could see a holster on her belt, but brave.

Quilt applied precise pressure to the trigger on the rifle, a Heckler & Koch G36 outfitted with a Beta C-Mag drum magazine, and the junkie’s head vanished from his scope. And from the junkie’s shoulders. Then he settled down to finish eating.

Some people would have seen a political motive in shooting the Arab junkie over the blonde woman. They would be wrong. Quilt made a point of having no political views whatsoever. It made his work simpler not to think about the motivations behind different jobs. However, there was no denying that he missed the worldwide chaos of the Bush years. A glorious time for a freelance soldier, when assignments could be picked up easier than milk at a grocery store. The mercenary assassin trade had been getting thin under Barack Obama.

His last assignment before the collapse of western society had been to kill a doctor. Fifteen weeks ago. As far as Quilt’s target assessment could discern, the man had no aspirations and posed no threats, even within academic or departmental bureaucracy. He was a dedicated researcher who isolated viruses and their origins, nothing more.

Quilt had driven a delivery truck into the loading dock. He’d disabled the security cameras the night before with a paintball gun, along with eight other randomly selected ones in nearby buildings. The campus police had discovered them that morning and already written it off as a student prank. It would take another day to schedule maintenance and have them cleaned.

He’d wheeled his three large crates into the doctor’s lab. The man suspected nothing until Quilt had glanced at the room’s corners to confirm there were no cameras. Then he’d known instantly.

Over the years, Quilt had come to realize that targets fit into a few simple groups once confronted with their impending deaths. There were the ones who fight, the ones who bargain, and the ones who accept it. The doctor had sighed and shook his head.

‘No matter what you do to me,’ the target had said, ‘people are going to find out. You can’t hide something like this.’

Quilt had broken his neck with a quick blow to the fourth vertebrae, a technique he’d learned in Laos and mastered in Somalia. It was quick and painless. The man had died instantly. Every now and then, perhaps one out of every five targets, the person would survive the shock of internal decapitation and their brain would live in terror of what was happening for another fifty or sixty seconds before the oxygen in their blood was depleted. Quilt often felt a twinge of guilt at those instances. Not for the killing. Just for the messiness of it.

The doctor had fallen to the floor and Quilt had moved on to stage two of the assassination. The client had suggested it to cover his tracks. Quilt never left tracks of any sort, but he rarely argued with a client.

Each of the three crates contained a heavily-sedated person in the final stages of infection. He had pulled on a set of rubber gloves, checked their pulses, and dumped them on the floor near the doctor’s body. Quilt had locked the doors behind him as he left, then kicked them open to break the lock from the outside. He had paused to wipe a partial print of his shoe from the door and heard one of the junkies groan as the noise roused it. Junkies always woke up hungry, as he had confirmed several times since then.

It had been, in Quilt’s assessment, a perfect assignment, even when the client sent a second man to silence him. Just as there were certain types of targets, there were certain types of clients as well. Some believed in a Machiavellian need to eliminate an operative after a successful mission—usually the ones who’d never seen any sort of combat themselves. Quilt had broken both the man’s arms and knees, slit his throat, and left him outside their public office building. Payment had been transferred to his Gstaad account the next day.

A perfectly-executed assignment.

* * *

He reached the office building at quarter of five in the afternoon the next day. The building was one of dozens in Los Angeles with a regular tenant rotation. Suites and whole floors were rented out to small movie crews and production companies. The landlord was thrilled to have a few tenants with permanent offices. Quilt made a point of contacting the man every seventeen months to argue about rent. Perfect tenants attract as much attention as bad ones, in their own way. He strived to be a mediocre tenant at all his properties.

The bottom of one of the front doors was smashed in. From the lack of dust, he guessed it had happened within the past twenty-four hours. There were tracks in the broken safety glass that had almost been hidden by a body sliding through it. A few small cubes of material trailed off towards the stairwell and nowhere else. Whoever had come in had gone straight upstairs.

Quilt frowned.

He moved to the opposite side of the lobby, where the building’s security office was located. The door was unlocked, which bothered him. While this was far from the most high-end office building in the city, an unlocked security office spoke of a certain lack of professionalism. He did a quick sweep of the room and sat down at the desk.

Like most of the city, the building still had power. The computer was security protected, but a twenty-three second search of the desk found the password on an index card beneath a box of staples in the left hand drawer. It was, to Quilt, yet another sign of the lack of professionalism.

According to the security log, the doors had been locked seven weeks ago, but the main alarm system had not been turned on. Which explained why the power was on yet the broken door had not set off half a dozen blaring sirens. There were a few glitches in the logs, most likely from random brownouts, but the past two days were clear and machine-meticulous.

The break-in had been five hours, forty-two minutes ago. Ten minutes after the glass in the door had been broken, the stairwell card reader had been compromised on the fifth floor. Seven minutes after that, the lock on suite 551 had failed.

They had broken in and gone straight for Quilt’s office.

Was it a raiding party? Or an attempt to deny him his supplies? How could anyone have known the bolt hole existed? It was rented through three dummy corporate shells, registered to a stolen identity, a fake name, and a dead man, respectively. The closest he’d been to it in the past two years was a job six months ago in Hawaii. According to the computer log, thirty-seven minutes after his door had been breached the east stairwell card reader on the third floor had failed. Five minutes later suite 331 was compromised.

The two break-ins confused him. The suite directly below or above would be an attempt to breach his office without setting off an alarm on the door. But why would someone go to another office altogether? And after already achieving the objective?

Confusion bothered Quilt.

He slipped into the computer’s operating system and erased the record of him accessing the security log and the operating system. Once finished he carefully readjusted the papers on the desk and the position of the chair. He closed the door behind him and made a point not to lock it, as much as it nagged at him.

As he walked across the lobby he noted the different tracks in the dust and broken glass. At least ten people. Mostly men, from the size of the footprints and strides, but he couldn’t be sure of that. He pulled open the stairwell door and a junkie lunged at him.