Without Warning (43 page)

Night had fallen, and half of the hangar’s floating population had been spirited away before he finally stopped. Both hands ached, but his missing finger tormented him with a particular ferocity, and his wounded shoulder throbbed with a deep, agonizing bass line from having sat hunched over his notes for so long. But Melton thought he had enough material for a whole book, including a wrenching series of personal stories about what people had already lost. Families, home, friends, everything.

He made an effort to gather testimonials from the handful of Europeans present, such as Milosz and his men, and some British tankers whose Challenger had been crippled by a buried mine. Fact was, they would sell the piece in whatever form it took. The hometown market for American stories had literally disappeared. When the Poles finally got their ride out, he was reading over the tale of a Scottish infantryman who’d been separated from his platoon in al-Basra for two days, but whose main concern remained the fate of his family’s trout farm after a week of acid rain had killed all the stock. They all shook hands and wished each other well.

“Make them understand that there is a new Poland,” said Milosz, taking his hand gently as they parted.

Melton looked around at those who remained. Not quite so many tears now. A few of them were snoring, sound asleep, jerking in the fit of a nightmare somewhere in their past. He heard a couple of guys laughing about a canoe trip they had been on, how drunk they’d been and the silly idiot with
the yellow swimming trunks who wouldn’t fall into the raft full of college coeds.

It was mid-evening, a cool, almost chilly night, alive with the rumble of distant air operations. He was tired and very hungry, and growing almost claustrophobic having been trapped inside for so long, even in such a large building. The last thing he’d eaten had been a protein bar, four hours earlier, and he just knew the table service in this place was going to suck. Until his transport batch number was called there was nothing for it but to wait. Having lost the pile of Polish duffel bags on which he’d been resting contentedly, he’d moved to one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs dotted about the facility. He remembered the poncho liner, which he still had from the specialist on KP back in Kuwait. Melton wrapped himself in the woodland-green camo snivel gear as the desert daylight heat turned to nighttime frigid. It was there, half asleep, haunted by visions of the mortar attack that had put him in the hospital, that Sayad al-Mirsaad found him.

“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me!”

Kipper was incredulous, outraged even. In fact, half a dozen emotions blasted through him like a hot desert zephyr on finding out that the military had arrested the elected city councillors, but mostly his feelings arranged themselves around incredulous and outraged.

“You can’t do that. It’s … it’s …”

“Wrong?” offered General Blackstone.

“Yeah. That’s right. It’s wrong. It’s fucking wrong in so many ways I can’t even begin to count them. What? You guys couldn’t get your own way so you just threw the switch on a military coup? For Christ’s sake, you’re dealing with a bunch of frightened, fucked-up nimrods who take three hours to decide which sorta cookies they’re gonna serve up at council meetings.”

“We knew you’d understand,” said McCutcheon without a hint of irony. “That’s exactly why we put ‘em in the bag. They really do argue about the cookies, don’t they? It’s a big deal. I watched them do it last week. Amazing, man. Truly fucking amazing. Anyway, while they’re banging heads over the catering arrangements
PEOPLE ARE DYING.
“

The last part of his routine he delivered in a parade-ground roar emphasized
by pounding a fist on a stack of folders, which burst out from under the blow in an explosion of paper. Kipper jumped and looked over to Blackstone, but the general remained impassive. It was a bad-cop bad-cop routine.

“Look,” McCutcheon said, instantly switching back to his usual calm and spookily cheery self. “They haven’t been arrested as such. Just detained preventively.”

“What the hell do you mean, ‘preventively’?”

Blackstone answered for him.

“To prevent them being arrested before they fucked up so badly they really did get a lot of people killed.”

“What? Like this morning?”

“Oh, grow up, Kipper,” snarled Blackstone. “This is serious. We don’t want to take over here. We don’t want to take over anywhere. Hell, we’re desperate for someone to tell us what to do, but nobody’s putting a hand up. Everyone’s arguing about fucking cookies.”

“Bullshit, General, that’s an exaggeration.”

“No,” said McCutcheon, tag-teaming him again. “It’s a metaphor. For pointless, infuriating contention about complete fucking inanities. Like cookies, which I can assure you they did argue about, because somebody said they needed to start conserving food and so they spent three-quarters of an hour debating whether they were entitled to a packet of fucking Oreos at their meetings. This was just last Thursday, by phone hookup, during the worst of the pollutant storm. By phone hookup, Kipper. They were all
at home.
They could have eaten
their own fucking cookies.”

Kipper rubbed his tired, burning eyes, but it only made them sting all the worse.

“So what are you gonna do? Keep arresting people until you get someone you can work with? You gonna go all the way down to the dogcatcher?”

“If we have to,” said McCutcheon. “But really, I’ve met that guy. He’s a freak. Got that gimpy eye. Half of one ear chewed off. Wouldn’t be a good look for the next president.”

“President?”

“Yeah. That’s what I’m talking about. We need a president. Pronto. If we don’t get a handle on this situation, we’re all going to hell in a handbasket.”

Kipper bumped up against a filing cabinet, jarring his elbow on the corner.

“Shit! Who the fuck talks like that? Hell in a handbasket?”

McCutcheon’s eyes twinkled.

“Granny Mae McCutcheon. Eighty-six this year and still skinning her own beaver … Oh, man, that didn’t come out right. She’s a trapper’s wife. Or
she was. Granddaddy McCutcheon passed back in ‘92. It was Clinton that eventually killed him. Seeing that gladhanding cocksucker take the oath, it was too much …”

“Back on message, Major,” said Blackstone. “Mr. Kipper. We have some command-and-control issues here, and elsewhere. Here it’s bad enough, elsewhere it gets worse by an order of magnitude. That mess at your food bank this morning. That was a C-three issue. That’s what happens when command, control, and communication breaks down. Blood. Gets. Spilled.”

Kipper’s head was reeling. He wondered if the heating had been turned up too high or if any contamination had made it into the building through the filters.

“Do you know anything about the line of succession, Kipper?” asked Blackstone.

“The line of what?”

“Succession,” explained McCutcheon. “You know, the president gets whacked in a motorcade, the veep steps up to the plate and
bam!—
any hopes the enemies of freedom had of exploiting our temporary constitutional be-fuddlement are right down the crapper.”

“Are you sure you’re an air force guy?”

“Sure. Born and bred. Anyway, the line of succession. Focus, dude. Right? You with me? It’s toast. We got nada. Nobody. Everyone we could have tapped for the top job is gone. Everyone we’ve approached since is like
‘Oh, no, don’t ask me, I’m too fucking busy. I got this fucking cookie crisis exploding in my face here.

Kipper exhaled a deep breath he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding in. That probably explained his dizziness.

“So, what do you want me to do about it?”

“About that? Nothing,” said Blackstone. “That’s our problem for now. But this city is yours. Kipper, you’re now on the executive committee. You and your department heads. I need you to do a better job running this place than we’ve seen so far.”

“Whoa! Wait a second. That’s a political position. Only elected officials can sit on the committee.”

McCutcheon shrugged.

“Only elected officials on the civilian side. And they’re all unavailable now. So General Blackstone is the senior member, and he’s appointing you and the other department heads.”

“What are we? Your good Germans?”

“No, you’re the only people we can rely on to keep this place from falling apart,” said McCutcheon.

“You don’t get a choice, Kipper,” growled Blackstone. “The days of easy choices are over. You’ve been drafted. You can either get with the program or you can fuck off and we’ll find someone who will.”

“Jesus Christ, you people …”

“Yeah, wrestle with your conscience in bed, if you have to. But you need to decide whether you’re going to help pull your city through, or walk away.”

It was too much.

Kipper turned and stormed out the door.

Was it his imagination or did the Municipal Tower seem to be even more overrun with military uniforms than he’d thought when he first came in? Kipper shook off the thought. No sense getting paranoid. A lot of the support staff were scurrying about on fast-forward. A few saw him and looked relieved, others seemed even more frightened and just put their heads down, hurrying past.

The soldiers didn’t seem to be intimidating anyone. Indeed, some of them looked pretty well spooked, too. But their very presence, in full combat gear, including their weapons, was enough to put the zap on anyone’s head. And what the fuck were they carrying arms for anyway, what did …

Kipper pulled up in confusion. He’d been so angry, so unbalanced by the meeting with Blackstone and McCutcheon, that he’d stomped right around the corner into the planning department. Cursing quietly, he retraced his steps to the office of the city engineer, his office, a small suite of rooms behind a plain dark wooden door inset with marbled glass. It felt like a holy sanctuary right now. He pushed through, praying that he’d find no military people inside, with their feet up on his desk, guns lying on top of the filing cabinets.

He didn’t.

Instead he found Rhonda, his secretary, a large and formidable African-American presence in a room full of frightened white folk.

“Kipper! Thank the Lord at last!” she cried out when she saw him. “We were beginning to worry that they’d arrested you as well.”

“Not yet, Ronnie. Not just yet. So you’ve heard then?”

He smiled wearily at his team, or what was left of it. Barney Tench, his deputy and old college bud, who looked about as glum as Kipper had ever seen him; Marv Basco, the sanitation chief, a dead ringer for Larry from the Three Stooges; Dave Chugg, water, who looked a lot like Curly to Marv’s Larry, at least when you stood them next to each other. And Heather. Sweet, fragile, freaked-out little Heather.

“Whoa. What are you doing here, darlin’? You should be at home.”

“I wanted to come in,” she said, sounding preternaturally calm. He wondered if she’d been medicated. Barney shrugged and shook his head.

“I dropped her at her apartment, Kip. But she talked some dumb grunt into giving her a lift back in.”

Kipper sighed.

“Okay. Heather, I’m not sending you home again. But you shouldn’t be here. You’re in shock. Go and sit yourself down on that couch over there and do not get up again. Ronnie?”

His secretary nodded and bustled the girl as gently as she could over to the old brown couch in the corner. Heather didn’t really protest or resist. When he thought about it, Kip understood. She had no friends or family in Seattle. Her work colleagues had been caught behind the Wave in Spokane. The only people she had left in the world were here, in this office. It would have been cruel to send her out again.

“So. You’ve heard about the council?” he asked.

They all nodded and mumbled that yes, they knew about the arrests now.

“Did you know you’ve been drafted?” he asked Basco and Chugg. “You’re on the emergency committee now.”

“No. Nobody’s told us anything,” said Chugg.

Kipper rubbed his neck, which felt stiff and very sore. He noticed that he still had a smear of dried blood on the back of his hand.

“Well, I met the guy behind the coup d’état a few minutes ago. General Blackstone.”

“He’s here?” asked Barney.

“Yeah. Hiding down in the deputy mayor’s office.”

“Did he have any explanation for this morning?”

“Said it was a fuckup, said we should get over it.”

“Good Lord!” said Ronnie, who considered
heck
and
gosh darn it
to be pushing the boundaries of decent language. “He said that?”

“Close enough,” said Kipper, as he leaned back on his desk. “He pretty much threw everything back on us. Said if we didn’t want the city to die, we’d have to step up to the plate.”

“And what about the councillors?” asked Barney.

“I have no idea. He’s got them detained for protection or some crap somewhere. I dunno what that means, short or long term.”

“Well, it sounds like this asshole feels perfectly free to lock people he doesn’t get along with,” said Barney. “What’d you tell him, Kip?”

“I didn’t give him an answer either way,” he said, chewing his lip. “And I’m not happy. I’m a thousand fucking miles from happy. But he’s right about one thing. No matter what we think of him, we have a responsibility to the
city. We still need to get a handle on food distribution. As of right now there is no market solution to the problem of empty shelves because most of the market disappeared behind the energy wave last week. Priority number one is food. We have enough in aid shipments coming through if it’s distributed rationally. If not, this city will die. It’ll tear itself apart before we can work out how to feed ourselves.”