The Nirvana Plague (48 page)

It was a cool, bright morning. The water in the channel seemed to toy with the sun’s light. Helicopters hovered like vigilant hummingbirds over it.

He had his tablet on his lap, replaying the street scene of the great outbreak as he listened over and over again to different parts of the Purple Pony recordings. He’d been listening to it obsessively for two days. There was nothing else to do. He was on ice.

A door banged open behind him and Benford emerged at a trot, followed by several other officers. They jogged to the fence, pointing and talking. That was when Marley saw it: a thin column of black smoke rising out of the city.

“House fire,” Benford said. “Didn’t you see it?”

“Did you?”

At this distance, it was a tiny thing, a flimsy sliver of smoke.

“Choppers reported it,” she said.

“Are we responding?”

“Yes. We’re sending you back in.”

“To fight a fire?”

“No! They’re responding to the fire themselves! That’s why you’re going back in. Looks like they’re finally coming out. I need you to see what’s going on.”

In Skagway the morning broke cold and clammy. A heavy paste of sea-fog squeezed up through the fjord and out over the empty streets of the town.

It was well past sunrise and still foggy before their case came at last to the attention of the commandant. They were shown into an inflatable hut peopled with hungover Guardsmen and Guardswomen tottering on flimsy folding furniture and very bitter coffee.

The young commandant behind a battered worktable looked like any of the Monday-morning heroes Ally saw in her shop every week, caffeinating themselves back to sobriety before marching off to battle with the likes of Professor Hanover.

“What’s your names?” he said, hardly looking up.

They gave them.

Massaging his temples, he bent his eyes down to his tablet. Tapped it a few times. Located their records. Mumbled.

“Federal warrant. Canada. You—” He stopped for a breather, rubbed his eyes, clamped them back onto the tablet. “So. Jumping quarantine. That it?”

They didn’t answer. The question seemed meant for the tablet.

He raised his eyes to his prisoners. Looked them each up and down.

“That’s it then?” he said, unimpressed. “That’s all you’re wanted for? Jumping Q?”

Karen frowned. “Also,” she said, “a very bad attitude.”

The little commandant grimaced and closed his eyes. Rubbed his forehead wearily. His fingers left red marks on his skin. “Get the fuck out of here.”

“Excuse me?”

Rubbing miserably. “Get. The fuck. Out.” He reached for his coffee. “Jumping Q,” he mumbled, barely audible under the weight of the world. “For fuck sake. We’d have half the state in lock up.” He took a sip of the coffee and hissed air through his teeth. “We’re gonna need a place for the rest of us to go before it’s over.”

They wired Marley up in the backseat of a Humvee en route to the bridge. Police Sergeant Adams was already online.

The barricade had been improved since the last time he was here. Now there was a regular guard house, some portable toilets, and the lane through the barriers had been equipped with a black-and-yellow steel gate arm. And there were a lot more troops on hand — and a lot more Navy and Coast Guard vessels in the water both sides of the bridge.

Marley nodded toward the biggest ship, not far off, on the north side.

“Is that the
Auster?
”

“Yes,” Benford said.

“Big.”

“Yes. Eight hundred crew. — Come on.”

She transferred him to another Humvee (the one with the camera on the cab) and sent him out through the barricade.

Benford, on comm:
“We’re following you on camera.”

Adams:
“Proceed up Egan till you get to—”

“I can see the smoke myself,” Marley said.

“Good for you.”

Benford:
“All right, Carl. Just let us know if you need any help.”

The fire was in a residential neighborhood on the east side of the city, up in the hills. Even weaving through the abandoned vehicles scattered through the streets, it didn’t take long to get there — still, the fire was already out.

Two fire trucks sat crossways on the lawn in front of a small house, pouring water into a gaping hole in the roof. Plumes of thick white smoke hissed out of it. A dozen firemen were working the site. Half of them looked fully geared up; the rest wore various mixtures of gear and civilian dress. One man on hose was wearing nothing but boxer shorts and boots. Nobody else was there. No family, no spectators, no police, no reporters.

The firemen paid no attention to Marley.

He went up to one of them, who was monitoring gauges on one of the trucks.

“Excuse me. Who’s in charge here?”

No response. He didn’t even look up.

Marley selected a second target — a tall blonde fellow, naked above the waist, standing alone, watching the house. He stepped in front of him, but not too close. The fireman glanced at him. He had the eyes all right. Bright and glassy.

“Who’s in charge here?” Marley said.

The fireman didn’t answer. Just looked away, back at the house.

“Was anyone hurt?”

The fireman looked at him again, curiously, as if he hadn’t noticed him before. “No,” he said.

“Was anyone home?”

“Yes.”

“Where are they now?”

He looked away again, without answering.

Adams broke in:
“We can’t see you from the vehicle camera.”

One of the fire trucks blocked their view.

“But we have you on long-range camera. What’s the house number? Is it three-sixteen?”

The house number, if there was one, was obscured by smoke and water plumes, but there was a broken mailbox lying on the ground, knocked down by one of the trucks.

“Three-sixteen,” he said.

“Looking it up… Family’s name is Sipes. John and Penelope Sipes.”

Marley turned back to the fireman.

“This is John and Penelope Sipes’ house.”

No response.

“My name is Marley.”

No response.

“What’s your name?”

No response.

“Typical early onset symptoms,” Marley said. “Unresponsive to personal queries.”

Benford:
“We don’t care about that now. How did he know about the fire? Power and communications are cut.”

Adams:
“What’s his badge number?”

“I don’t know.”

“On his hat.”

“He’s not wearing a hat!”

Marley turned back to the fireman: “How did you know there was a fire?”

It didn’t look like he was going to respond to this question either, but then he said, absently, without looking at Marley: “Where there’s smoke.”

Marley wasn’t sure he’d heard him right.

“Did you hear that, colonel? I think he made a joke.”

Benford:
“I think he ducked the question.”

Back to the fireman again: “But who
saw
the smoke?”

“Don’t you?”

“I mean, who saw it first?”

“I don’t know that.”

“Did someone come tell you there was a fire in the city?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“Alice.”

“Who is Alice?”

“Neighbor.”

“Your neighbor or the Sipeses’ neighbor?”

“Yes.”

“Were you at the fire station when Alice told you about the fire?”

“No.”

“Were you at home?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

No response.

“How did the fire start?” Marley said.

“Propane grill.”

The National Guard encampment lay at the far end of town from the water. Karen and Ally’s first look at the town was shrouded in fog. They walked out of the camp, pillowcases in hand, to find themselves on the shoulder of an empty road. They heard the sound of electric traffic — the dull hum of rubber tires rolling over cracked pavement — and walked toward it.

They soon came to an intersection, a traffic light, and a sidewalk. Continuing, they stopped the first person they encountered and asked her where they might find transportation to Juneau.

She directed them to the marina.

“Should be some floatplanes can take you,” she said. “But they won’t fly today.”

“Where’s the marina?”

“Just keep going. You can’t miss it.”

The street ran straight through the town and ended abruptly — nose to nose with an enormous white cruise ship. (Along the way they’d passed scores of stranded tourists, drifting unhappily through the souvenir shops and ice cream parlors lining the street.)

The marina was close by, faced by the offices of various sightseeing services. They went into each one. Nobody was going out in the fog. Nobody was going to Juneau anyway. And all the regular ferries and flights had been shut down by government order.

So they went into one of the dockside pubs to get some breakfast. It was called “The Real Deal.” They sat at the bar. A sign behind the bar read “
Tlingit owned. Tlingit operated.
”

“We want to hire a boat,” Karen said to the bartender and proprietor.

“What for?”

“To take us to Juneau.”

He snorted, and glanced up at the television over the bar, playing the news. He shook his head and changed the subject. “What can I get you?”

“Coffee,” Ally said.

“Anybody around here might be willing to take us to Juneau?” Karen said.

“Nobody in their right mind.”

“Anybody else?”

“You want some coffee too, ma’am?”

“Yes,” Ally said.

He went off down the bar, shaking his head, to get the coffee.

The place was busy. He spoke to some of the men at the far end of the bar. They looked at the two women and laughed.

Karen noticed they were the only women in the place.

The bartender returned with coffee. He had a hitch in his step that made the coffee slosh in the pot. He clunked two brown mugs on the bar, saying, as he poured:

“One of the guys says Banger was fueling up this morning.”

“What?” Karen said.

“Says Banger said something about taking some reporters down to Juneau on the quiet.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Reckon he’s already pulled out by now. What did you want to eat?”

Karen nearly shouted with frustration:
“Banger is a boat?”

“Banger is a damn fool,” the bartender said. “The name of his boat is the
Sea Word
.”

Karen sprang off her barstool and bolted out the door.

Ally grabbed both their pillowcases and ran after her.