Without Warning (25 page)

And yes, she was
Mrs.
Heinemann. Unless you wanted an ear bashing out of your thoughtlessness and lack of consideration for the cruel vicissitudes that had left her single when so many other, undeserving women had chanced upon partners and offspring. Dressed in a bright green and salmon-pink sweat suit, gathered at the ankles and wrists with elastic bands, and sporting a plastic shower cap and handkerchief face mask, she hurried up the slight incline in the street toward him, firing from the lip as she advanced.

“I’m so glad I caught you, Mr. Kipper. I haven’t seen anyone out and about all week. This terrible situation, you know. And the curfew. So is it safe now? Can we move about? It’s just that I have very little food in the house. And neither does anyone else. Mrs. Deever at thirty-six, with her two little ones. She needs formula, Mr. Kipper. And sweet Jane at twenty-nine, the retarded girl, she needs her medication. The Songnamichans, that very large Hindu family, he’s a Microsoft manager, well, they must nearly be eating the wallpaper by now with all those children. What
is
to be done, Mr. Kipper?
What is to be done?”

She’d arrived right in front of him by then, yapping the whole time, a classic demonstration of fire and movement. He hadn’t had a chance to speak or retreat. But her questions gave him the opportunity he needed.

“Mrs. Heinemann,” he said forcefully. “You need to get back inside right now. It is not safe out here yet. We haven’t had a chance to take any measurements of air or water quality. I’m only out here because it’s my job. You need to get back inside where it’s safe this very minute. Go on. Right now. Don’t delay. And don’t drag any mud into the house with you. You’ll need to strip off, bag up that outfit, and scrub yourself thoroughly. You still got water stored in the house? Good. Then get going. Right now!”

He made sure his delivery was every bit as rapid and incontestable as her own. He waved her back toward her own house, shaking his head and brooking no backchat. In his peripheral vision he could see curtains twitching
aside in a couple of houses, and he made sure that everyone watching could see that he didn’t want anybody wandering around until it was safe.

“But Mr. Kipper …”

“No! Move along now. Go on, Mrs. Heinemann. You’ve no business endangering yourself out here. Now git. Go and decontaminate yourself.”

He took her upper arm in a deliberate grip and gave her a hurry-on toward home.

“Oh, my. Oh, dear,” she murmured as she toddled off at high speed.

Shaking his head, he returned to the pickup and climbed in, carefully knocking any mud from his boots before doing so, mostly for the benefit of his audience. The cabin was cold and still smelled of the McDonald’s family meal he’d brought home late on the first day of the Disappearance. He’d also picked up a whole heap of canned fruit and eighty gallons of spring water in big ten-gallon plastic bottles, but that was the extent of any hoarding he felt necessary, because of all those freeze-dried, vacuum-sealed meals he’d bought in bulk near the end of last year from some camping store that had closed down. Man, hadn’t Barb changed her tune on that little purchase? He’d got himself a new one torn at the time.

The engine needed turning over a couple of times before the truck grumbled into life, sounding louder than usual in the unnatural stillness of the morning. He checked the fuel gauge as soon as he had power, making sure he hadn’t been siphoned. The city council’s Emergency Management Committee had banned the sale of gasoline for “nonessential” purposes on the second day, but hadn’t had the manpower—or the will, in his opinion—to enforce the measure when thousands of people ignored it and started queuing at gas stations. They bid up the price to near fifty dollars a gallon at one point. That was when the army had rolled out of Fort Lewis to lock down the city and get everyone off the streets as the sky had blackened and the rain turned to acid.

Kipper’s truck had three-quarters of a tank, and he could still get more from a council depot without any trouble. But that’d change. No commercial shipping or air traffic had come into Seattle for five days, and he didn’t expect any in the foreseeable future. The only supplies they could draw on were aid shipments: food from Australia and New Zealand, one supertanker of petroleum so far from Taiwan, and more food and medical supplies from Japan. It was enough to keep things ticking over, if it kept coming, and if people didn’t panic. Two big fucking “if s.

The island was quiet, and people were sticking to the curfew. Mostly. Kipper searched the radio dial for anything besides the recorded EBS messages, which told him nothing new, and said nothing about the raid on the food
bank. He picked up a scratchy, inconsistent transmission from somewhere in Canada, but it was all electronic dance music, which in his book was worse than nothing. Sighing, he punched the button to cut off the radio and pulled away from the curb, wondering what the hell he was going to do about
Piglet’s Big Movie.

His route took him along West Mercer Way. Normally a quiet, tree-lined drive through some of the more exclusive real estate the island had to offer, it felt eerily deserted, with sodden rubbish and leaf litter strewn along its length. He took the Homer Hadley floating bridge across Lake Washington into the city, and again found it hard to get his head around the empty lanes. At this time of the morning traffic should have been crawling over the span, bumper to bumper. There was some vehicular movement, however. Mobile army patrols stopped him three times. Then there were the roadblocks and checkpoints he hit on another four occasions. His pass, countersigned by three city councillors and the ubiquitous General Blackstone, carried him through each obstacle, but he understood why there were so few people about. After the food riot down at Ivar’s Salmon House under the I-5 bridge on day three, and a shootout at the 7-Eleven on Denny Way that left four people dead following an argument over who was going to get the last of the frozen pizza subs, the army had put away its smiley face. Three young men, who’d have been thought of as burglars a week earlier, got shot down as “looters” while trying to make off with a carton of frozen hamburgers from the Wendy’s on Rainier Avenue that evening. A vagrant, emerging from a Dumpster behind a KFC the following day, was cut in half by automatic-weapon fire from an armored fighting vehicle. Far from attempting to cover up the incidents, the same General Blackstone who’d scrawled the signature on Kipper’s “transit documents” appeared on television and the radio to detail exactly what had happened and to assure the citizens of Seattle that it would happen again to anyone who broke curfew and attempted to steal from their fellow citizens by “subverting” the rationing system.

Things went quiet around the city after that.

Talk radio and a couple of current-affairs shows on the local TV networks had raged against the “injustice,” but that defiance was short-lived, lasting only as long as it took four Humvees full of troops to roll into their parking lots. Some lawyers who arrived at City Hall to serve papers on the administration for First Amendment violations were still in custody somewhere. There’d been no more open dissent and, incidentally, no more food riots or “looting” either. But the self-proclaimed Resistance appeared shortly afterward
in the form of an e-mail spammed throughout the city warning of a fascist takeover and promising to “take back the streets.”

Kipper wasn’t happy about any of it—how the hell could you be?—but on the other hand he knew how desperate the situation was, and just how easily it could spin totally out of control. He really hoped this Blackstone asshole would see sense and ease off the thumbscrews a little. People were hurting and scared. You couldn’t keep the whole city under house arrest indefinitely. And he could only pray that this dumbass Resistance thing turned out to be a bunch of dope-addled bullshit artists. God knows Seattle was full
of them.
A few more stunts like last night’s stupidity at the food bank and they could totally fuck things up.

Speaking of which …

He hauled the wheel around, crossing over the median strip and pointing the truck toward Fourth Avenue South, where the main food-distribution center for the CBD was located, at a Costco wholesale warehouse near the train yards.

He wanted to see for himself how the food-aid system was working.

The signal strength meter on his cell phone was near full and he called Barney on hands-free as the pickup swung around Rizal Park.

It seemed a small wonder that the call went through, until he remembered that “unauthorized civilians” were barred from using the cell network for anything other than emergencies.

Kipper shook his head and scowled at a measure he thought of as totally unnecessary and counterproductive. It wasn’t like the Wave had just appeared and people were going to be melting the phone company servers with millions of calls. It was just more repression for no good reason. Exactly the sort of nonsense that fueled the paranoid dementia of idiots and conspiracy loons.

His temper was building again as he chewed over the many poor decisions that had been made in the previous week, and it was only Barney’s answering the call that short-circuited a bout of foulmouthed, solitary cussing. His friend’s voice filled the cabin, sounding flat and tinny, as everyone’s did on speakerphone.

“ ‘Sup, buddy.”

“Hey, Barn. I’m heading over to Costco right now to check things out. You on your way?”

“About four or five minutes away. I’m just coming over the First Avenue Bridge. Heather should already be there. She overnighted in town to be there early.”

“Oh, okay. I didn’t know that. Good for her.”

Kipper was taken aback for a second. Heather Cosgrove was a young civil-engineering graduate on a six-month internship with his road-maintenance guys, all of whom except for her had been at a conference in Spokane when the Wave hit. If he was giving out a prize for Most Freaked Out, Heather was an unbackable favorite. She was from Minneapolis, and apart from her job, she had nothing left.

“It’s spooky, isn’t it?” said Barney, completely oblivious. “Without any traffic. Like a doomsday movie or something.”

“Yeah,” said Kip, getting his head back in the game. “Listen, did you hear about the raid last night?”

Barney snorted down the line.

“Dunno that I’d call it a raid, man. What I heard was, two dreadlocked jerks got stoned and tried to steal a pallet full of Cheetos from the food bank on South Graham.”

“Well, d’you hear they got shot?”

The speakerphone hissed quietly for a second, as Kipper swung down the off ramp at South Forest Street.

“No. Sorry. I didn’t hear that,” said Barney. “Who told you?”

“Cops rang at about two this morning.”

“Why’d they call you? Why not one of the councillors?”

“Said they couldn’t raise them.”

Barney laughed. “That’d be right.”

“Fedayeenl”

The warning cry came from the man at point, a fraction of a second before the hammering of automatic-weapon fire started up. The Cav troopers, veterans now of urban warfare as meat grinder, moved for cover as though every man had been jabbed with a stun gun. The dismounted cavalry scouts were fast and flowed like quicksilver, pouring themselves into doorways, around stone walls, and down behind piles of rubble that made vehicle movement all but impossible through the narrow streets of An Nasiriyah. The M3A2 Bradley cavalry fighting vehicles followed them when and where they could. A couple of squads of infantry, with their M2A2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, joined them when they moved into the town.

Melton moved with them, the instincts and experience of his own time in the rangers, and a decade of combat reportage since, rubbing up hard against fatigue and aging muscles. He landed next to Specialist Alcibiades, burrowing in under the protection of a massive, broken beam of concrete and rebar as small-arms fire chewed up the mud-brick walls of the street, zipping less than a foot overhead.

Melton had picked up an M4 for his own protection moments before they entered Iraq. Nobody said word one to him. After the carbine, he picked up some MOLLE web gear and some ammo pouches. He already had a matching dark blue set of Level III body armor and a Kevlar helmet. The army issued him a protective mask and MOPP gear in case someone dropped some germs or chemicals on them, but he had always been one of the skeptics on the WMD front.

In any case, the fighting was simply too chaotic and disordered for him to rely on anyone else to look after him. In the labyrinthine warren of souks, alleys, cut-throughs, and ragged streets of the towns and villages in which they’d been fighting, you never knew when you were going to have some asshole suddenly appear right in front of you with murder in his eyes. He hadn’t needed the carbine yet, for which he was grateful. Still, he flicked the selector from safe to semi and waited. Alcibiades let rip with two short bursts, holding his own M4 up over the cover and firing blind. The Bradleys added the hum and mechanical metal-punching beat to the chaotic audio mix, sending twenty-five mike-mike into buildings without a care for possible civilian casualties.