Wet Work: The Definitive Edition (27 page)

“
Impressive, isn’t it?”

Dick sat beside her. She saw he had grease in his crew cut. He looked comical.

“
No more gambling. No more Sinatra,” she said.

He smiled.

“
No more anything. But we fixed the engine.”

“
Good.”

“
Briggs sure knows his mechanics,” he said. “If he was as good a lawyer as he is an engineer, I wish I’d had him on my case when I got busted for pot in Ohio.”

John Briggs was the owner of the boat. They’d met him when Dick had taken Sandy and Jared down to the East River in search of a suitable craft to get them to Maryland. He and his family—wife Sally and daughter Jane—had been watching Manhattan burn from the dock near the Peter Luger Steakhouse in Williamsburg. Briggs had planned on leaving the city, heading all the way south to Florida, where he owned land. But Dick had soon persuaded them to head for Maryland and Elliot’s farm. Any destination away from the cities sounded good to Briggs. And safety lay in numbers.

And now, after several hours’ delay due to engine trouble, they were about to continue.

“
Breakfast,” called Sally Briggs, a redhead in her late forties.

“
I’m going to eat,” Dick said. “Coming?”

“
I’m not hungry. Is Jared awake?”

“
Yeah,” Dick said as he stood. “He’s down with John in the engine room.”

She nodded. Her nephew had regained some of his trying enthusiasm for knowledge since they’d been on the boat.

“
You should eat.”

“
Maybe later,” Sandy replied.

She turned her attention back to the funnel of smoke, wondering if Nick was still alive, and if so, where he was.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

8:39 A.M.

The sky bled smoke.

As Tranksen steered the Subaru 4 X 4 through the rubble and debris that was left of downtown D.C., the sky, to Nick, gaped like one big wound. Electrical burn stretched black to the South, charred flesh orange drained to the North; a broad lesion of dark life blood leaking between two polar opposites.

This is it,
he thought as the pickup maneuvered between the burned-out husks of cars, piled haphazardly into make-shift barricades, crunching over the bodies of fallen National Guardsmen at the corner of Dupoint,
it’s the end, the end of civilization as we know it.
He stifled a hysterical laugh.
This is what it all comes down to: real estate on fire, trashed cars and bodies…

“
It’s the end of the world as we know it,” he muttered.
“And I feel fine.”

“
I’m going to be sick,” Ellen gasped from the front seat, cupping her hand over her mouth.

“
The window, use the window,” Brion said, as he switchbacked the vehicle between piles of rubble.

Too late. Ellen ejected her breakfast of cold black beans and bacon—all they could scavenge that morning—between her legs, onto the truck cab’s floor.

Brion ignored the expulsion, continuing to skillfully navigate the 4 X 4 down what had once been Benning Road.

Nick ignored the smell of vomit, transfixed by the view out the rear side window—the azure sky shot through the spectrum of the Apocalypse. Gifford, however, cupped a hand over his own mouth now and cracked the window. Not that it made much difference. The smell rising off the streets reeked a thick aroma of ripe rotting garbage, smoke and dust.

“
What’s the matter, flyboy, a little puke too much for you?” Brion laughed, glancing in the rearview mirror at the short police pilot sitting next to Nick. Gifford ignored the pointless remark.

Nick found it hard to believe just how much the world—
his world
—had changed in under a week. All the signposts of reality were gone as they sped along New York Avenue towards the Potomac: the McDonalds at the junction of Isherwood was gutted, the Golden Arches broken in two, the verdant lawn of Walt Whitman Park scorched earth. And behind them to the East, the Capitol Building loomed, a broken egg shell, its budding-breast silhouette blackened and cracked by a fire that still smoldered inside the crumbling dome. Washington, D.C., had finally succumbed to the country-wide chaos he and the rest of the police force had fought hard to contain. What remained of the army, the National Guard, the PD, had scattered in all directions. Those men still living had steadily deserted over the last three days, Santos among them. Only a skeleton cleanup crew of several hundred men had remained until yesterday’s massacre along Independence Avenue. Then the final battalion of the cleanup crew had been slaughtered by the legions of living dead, picked off by snipers on the rooftops, blown apart by LAWS missiles as they advanced towards the Capitol, and torn apart by knife and hand as they stood bloodied and dazed at the corner of 11th, faced by a blockade of torched cars. Who the enemy had been, he still didn’t understand. The enemy hadn’t been the walking dead they had warred against over the last few days since Ground Zero (as the crews referred to the first day the shit had come down big time), but an organized group.

“
Turn! Turn!” Nick shouted as the charred husk of a Dodge Ram suddenly appeared in front of them through the drifting smoke.

“
Got it!” Tranksen spun the wheel to the right.

Not far enough,
Nick thought as the left fender of the 4 X 4 scraped the Ram’s rear end, jolting them against their safety belts and sending the jeep over a pile of debris.

Ellen groaned and Brion let out a primal whoop as they switchbacked past a second torched car to their right. He spun the wheel hard left to make the turn onto 20th Street towards Constitution Avenue and the Arlington Memorial Bridge.

Arlington was one of the few bridges spanning the Potomac still intact. The Roosevelt, Mason and Rochambeau had been dynamited to limit passage between Arlington, scene of some of the heaviest skirmishes in the last week. The Williams Memorial had been blockaded, as had the Key Bridge to the north, cutting Georgetown off from Rosslyn. The Arlington was also blocked, but Tranksen believed they could take it almost to the other side. Then, unless they could find a working vehicle within immediate reach over the barricade, they were on foot until their ultimate destination—Washington National Airport.

The goal was to find a helicopter and get the hell out. It had been Brion’s idea to take to the air, and Nick still felt stupid having suggested driving to northern Maryland when he’d asked the others to join him.

“
Wake up, man,” Brion had said, his expression incredulous as Nick described his plan to rendezvous with Sandy at her brother’s farm in Keaton. “Get real. You think we can make it a hundred and fifty miles across open country in a car? We’d be lucky to get beyond Baltimore.” He shook his head, looking down at the scuffed hardwood floor of the makeshift barracks in the Buchanan Rec Center on D Street.

“
Okay, what do you suggest, smartass, we walk?”

“
You’re thinking like a dick,” he replied. “We fly.”

Tranksen looked across the room, and Nick turned his head towards Frankie Gifford who was sprawled out chain-smoking on a cot three beds away. He felt his face redden. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Man, he was burning out. He’d spent so much time plotting his escape for the past three days he hadn’t even considered asking Gifford, one of a handful of police department pilots to join him. Before he could mentally chew himself a new asshole, Brion slapped him on the back and moved towards the pilot, who was nervously fidgeting with his pack of smokes.

Gifford, a short, wiry guy in his early thirties, had been reluctant at first. Like most of the soldiers and policemen still functioning, he had a bunker mentality. There was no escape because there was nowhere to escape to. It was stand and fight until the inevitable happened—you stopped living. Preferably for good. Either by your own hand if you couldn’t take it anymore, or by a bullet from a fellow cleanup member. That had soon become an unstated law. Once they had faced up to the fact anyone who died could get up and start moving around again, every plague victim was given the last rites of a bullet to the brain, and the team members had started taking care of their own. They were just postponing the inevitable; they were all just meat one way or another.

It had taken nearly two hours of hushed conversation to persuade Gifford there was a point to getting out.

“
So we’re going to die,” Nick had snapped angrily after Tranksen had spoken softly, compassionately, for what had seemed forever. “You want to die here in an urban charnel house, or you want at least to see green fields again? Smell the countryside one last time?”

“
Everything smells of shit,” Gifford shot back. “What makes you think it’s going to be different elsewhere? That’s bullshit. I see it every time I go up. There’re fires as far as you can see. We’ve all heard the news—everywhere’s a fucking mess. What makes you think your wife even got out of New York City?”

Nick lost it then, rising to hit Gifford straight in the jaw and wipe that smug, know-it-all expression from his lips. Tranksen halted him with a firm hand on his arm.

“
Chill out. You know what he’s saying is true. How do you know? How do we know that Elliot’s farm isn’t crawling with dead things?”

“
She’s alive, I know it, I can’t explain it, I can’t—”

“
We all want to think someone we loved is still alive,” Gifford replied quietly, pulling a torn photo from inside his jacket pocket. “Until we know for sure.”

Both Nick and Tranksen knew who was in the photo. Gifford’s girlfriend, wife—it didn’t matter which, and they weren’t going to ask. Every man in the room whose family hadn’t been moved into the barracks carried the last memory of someone special in their pocket. Tranksen was one of the lucky ones. At least Ellen was there with him, her nerves worn ragged every time he went out on either a cleanup operation or a supply hunt, almost beside herself by the time he returned unscathed. It was the same for the other women and children—seventy in all—who had moved in with their husbands and lovers on Friday, safer in the fortressed barracks than left at home to wait and wonder behind locked doors. There were tears and desperate hugs before each crew departed, pacing and tension while their men were out, building to almost fever pitch as a shift drew to a close. It was even harder on the single men awaiting their next foray out into urban hell. And crushing for those who had lost their loved ones. Men like Gifford, who held themselves apart from the small social groups which had formed inside the rec center over the past few days. Men who smoked incessantly, played solitaire or read to while away the time.

Gifford had turned his back on them, terminating the conversation. Tranksen and Nick retreated to their bunks disheartened, lost for a solution.

Until Captain Sienkiewicz blew his brains out in the basement during the early hours of the morning.

It was the third suicide in as many days, but the Captain’s death sent an almost palpable shock wave through the morale of the twenty-three policemen working with a platoon of National Guardsmen under the designation C.E.D.3—Cleanup East Division 3. An hour after Captain Stipe broke the news, Gifford approached Nick and Tranksen.

“
Let’s do it,” he said quietly, sitting down beside them as they played blackjack, trying to take their minds off Sienkiewicz’s suicide. “I know where there’s a chopper…”

Tranksen skillfully maneuvered the 4 X 4 between the crashed shell of a sanitation truck and an abandoned Caddy. As they came to the end of Constitution Avenue Nick saw the approach road to the bridge. Good, Nick thought, the path appeared to be relatively clear of obstructions, and the breeze coming off the river even was mildly refreshing after the persistent assault of smoke. Lines from an R.E.M. song echoed through his mind again…
Lenny Bruce and Lester Banks, birthday party, jelly bean, cheesecake - it’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.

I feel fine…

“
Nearly there,” Brion said, placing a hand on Ellen’s knee and giving it a reassuring squeeze.

She looked up, wiping a hand across her mouth.

“
I’m sorry.”

Brion shook his head. “Don’t be.”

Nick cracked his window wide, allowing the relatively fresh air to blow away the smell of puke.

“
Shit,” Gifford muttered as they sped up the approach ramp. “We’ll never get past that.”

The army had completely blocked the middle of the bridge with two school buses, several cars and a troop carrier.

Brion slowed the 4 X 4. A makeshift checkpoint constructed out of sandbags was situated alongside the bus blocking the right side of the bridge. What looked like an M-60 was pointed in their direction, its barrel poking out from the center of the bags.

Brion pulled the van to a stop. There was no sign of life at the checkpoint.

“
What do you think?”

“
Abandoned,” Nick replied.

They waited for a moment, the idling engine roaring loudly in their ears as they studied the sandbags.

Seconds slipped away.

Nothing.

“
Keep moving,” Gifford said. “Slowly.”

Tranksen put the van in first, easing it forward.

Nick felt like the Subaru was crawling in slow motion, his imagination projecting what was going to happen.

They were going to get within twenty yards of the sandbags and the M-60 would open up. It would end here in the middle of the Arlington Bridge as bullets ripped through the vehicle, and he’d never see Sandy again, and it wouldn’t matter because he’d be dead at the hands of a trigger-happy soldier steadily going mad on a barricaded bridge over the Potomac…

Closer.

Nothing.