Chapter Nine
New Lost World
“Hey, Chief. I gotta use your silly old antique and check in at work.”
“Huh?” Hrka’s eyes couldn’t focus on the numbers on his alarm clock.
“Go back to sleep,” Ashleigh said. “I don’t think many folks are buying vacation cruises on a day like this. And I’ll feed the fish.”
“Uhn.”
* * *
“...President was found unconscious at his Telepresence chamber in the Oval Office at 8:05 Eastern Standard Time. Vice-President Howell assumed the powers of the Presidency and immediately declared a state of emergency. At Walter Reed Medical- ”
The spirits of the faithful will rise...
Hrka sat straight up on his air mattress. His alarm radio was playing the news, its face reading “9:59" in a pale blue color that was the only light in the room, beaming a ghostly trail to the Amana. He could see little shadow footprints following that trail like Dorothy to Oz.
Smoke. He smelled it, faint like a distant bombed-out village.
He lunged and tripped and fell onto the chamber, flailing his stump as his remaining hand banged on the hatch release. The hatch opened across Ashleigh’s console-lit face, her wide eyes locked heavenward.
He shook her, he pulled on her arm, he couldn’t dislodge her. It sank in, her breath was just a whisper, he couldn’t feel her pulse. He crawled halfway into the chamber, embraced her with his one arm like they were jumping off a cliff, then fell back with all his weight, taking her with him trailing yards of implant cable. They fell together, missing the shag, the smack of his body with the weight of another on concrete.
Some part of his mind that dealt out life and death roused from a two-year slumber. It sent out orders to his legs to crawl to one of his cell phones. 9-1-1 brought him nothing but a synthesized voice; “Due to an unprecedented volume of calls, the Miami-Dade County government has initiated Emergency Protocol Abundant Optimism. National Guard personnel will set up local phone banks at their staging areas.”
Abundant Optimism. That was the one for hurricanes of the century and ongoing terrorist attacks. Only now could Hrka hear the radio, the tone of voice of announcers at the bottom of the media food chain.
“No, I meant West Flagler Street. Please, a remote truck has crashed there, remain clear of the area. We will update you on the crashes of remote air freighters coming in to the airport. Bill, is there any word about the Governor?”
“We can’t get anyone - regional servers have crashed due to massive uploads of data. It appears the further south you go, the worse it is.”
“Yes, Bill, but we have reports of smaller numbers of cyberspace knowledge workers fallen at their consoles in Mexico, Guatemala, and Puerto Rico... apparently the wave has spread west from Israel as the sun rose.”
By now, Hrka had two hands digging through Ashleigh’s purse. He dumped everything out on the floor, and right on top of the pile sat a gold smart card. Ashleigh’s family had a private medical service, with a very exclusive membership. In one motion, he swept the card off the floor and swiped it across the reader on his cell phone, causing a frantic speed-dial noise.
“This is Methodist Southern Care Network.” The voice was a real person, yet she was very calm.
“I’m calling in an emergency for a member.”
“We have received all of Ms. Breckenridge’s card information. Please describe her condition for us, if you can.”
“Fuck... I mean...” He slid his fingers along the cable leading to Ashleigh’s neck. The attachment plate was still hot, scorched and melted, and the skin around it was burned. He didn’t see how it was possible for those microscopic wires to carry that much amperage. “I think my computer did something to her brain.”
“Thank you. We will send a transport to your current location.”
“Wait - what about... why...” He heard a click, then nothing. He had expected more questions. They had a right to be suspicious when someone said his computer put someone in a coma.
About ten minutes later, Hrka’s doorbell rang. He was still next to the chamber, on the floor with Ashleigh draped over his lap. “It’s open!”
Not remotes, but men came through the door, with a carbon fiber gurney whose underside blinked and glimmered with readouts. They didn’t say anything while they slid Ashleigh onto the gurney and hooked her to its many devices. Then they ran her out the door, Hrka stumbling behind.
“Where are you taking her?”
The medics rolled her to the elevator, where a third medic was holding the door open. Hrka could see the gurney wouldn’t fit, but it automatically tilted up like a magicians’ table, holding Ashleigh upright, as if she were standing there with her eyes closed, and the sight made Hrka stop.
But he had that other part of him going, and as the doors began to close, he whipped off his bathrobe and shot it straight into the threshold, so that the black rubber door edges banged against it and opened again.
The medics picked up the robe for him when he entered. They quietly draped it over his shoulders as he stared at Ashleigh, inches away in the crowded elevator.
The doors opened at the roof. Hrka knew the sound as soon as it assaulted his ears, throat, lungs and skin. The medics tilted Ashleigh at a 45 degree angle and ran her up the short staircase to daylight. Before them was a Scoop, a bus-sized VTOL with long bowed legs that allowed it to carry large payloads underneath. It was set up as an ambulance, fifty clear polycarbonate coffins stacked between the legs. Exactly like the one that carried him away from Cairo in a morphine haze with most of his last I-team.
It was full. None of them were moving. They seemed of all ages, some children.
When the medics passed the cockpit, a leathery pilot face poked out and yelled, “We gotta get this load back to base, turn right around and start another run!”
The fans went to 110% power, and the Scoop rocked its way off the roof, which creaked and rose a couple of inches. Not being able to look straight at it, Hrka turned his head, and saw columns of smoke rising everywhere in Miami.
He frowned. He couldn’t think of what to do next. So he slowly descended the staircase, took the waiting elevator back to his apartment, and stood in its doorway.
He didn’t feel as though he lived in this place at all. It looked like a hideout his I-team had abandoned, leaving nothing behind but canned olives and booby-trapped computers. The goldfish was a discrepancy.
Hrka put on his jogging shorts, got his boots out of the closet, and put on a green t-shirt with a stencil of a cruise missile and the logo, “Some of my best friends are suicide bombers.” Then he put his red striped bathrobe back on. The machine gun boxes sat dully behind all the clothes. He took a step towards the guns, but then he turned his head and looked at the goldfish globe on the refrigerator.
Don’t forget to feed your fish.
He picked up the globe by its little plastic pedestal. He left the closet open, left the apartment, and didn’t lock the door. Passing Ashliegh’s BMW, he splashed out the garage, down the ruined little cypress-shaded road that ran along the back of the apartment blocks.
The trees were winning here, for a while, before the salt killed them. Hrka could hear crickets and seagulls and, below them, sirens. After he had walked north about a quarter mile, he found he had passed the last apartment building, and everything opened before him. To his right ran the black-barred fence of the yacht club, while across the road were gas stations, bars, and tackle shops.
He could see past the fence of the yacht club. Yachts and motor cruisers and cigarette boats were launching into the Atlantic, headed in all directions tax-havenly.
Hrka kept walking north, into the thing they were fleeing. A wave of sound from open windows of cars, headphones of kids, and radios in the hands of panicky soldiers who missed breakfast engulfed Hrka.
Martial... missing... millions... Tokyo... Jerusalem... Dallas... emergency session... suspension of trading... spontaneous evacuation...
He didn’t hear the word “explanation”, but he wasn’t listening for it.
Palm fronds sliced across the sun like broken rotor blades. Strip malls stretched for kilometers, sometimes jumping the street with a pedestrian bridge. There had hardly been any pedestrians for years, and this morning there were none. The smoke billowing from a McDonald’s smelled delicious, all sausage and hamburger, but people were running out of it. It was a small franchise, the kind that could be run by a single remote operator, but now the cooking remotes inside flailed their arms wildly, and the grease dispensers shot more and more brown fluid onto flaming burgers, which the arms sometimes thwacked across the dining room like meteors.
Ahead were great walls of whitewashed stucco, fronted by iron fence bars and electronic gates. As Hrka passed them he could see these shells protected fresh-minted Spanish colonial townhouses, topped by brilliant azure solar cell tiles and multiple satellite dishes. Some gates were open, and one of those had an ambulance in front, into which medics loaded a stretcher carrying a man in a coma. His wife and children were lined up on the patio, still being examined by a medical remote. At other homes, Hrka watched people not being able to cram much of their household into a minivan that seemed so roomy when taking kids to Little League. Some homes were already empty, and Hrka zigged and zagged through the lamps and digital recorders and pet carriers strewn across the sidewalk.
About once a minute, the sound of wrenching metal assaulted his ears, louder each time. Ahead, a yellow garbage truck crept down the neighborhood. It had two arching-over arms for picking up trash dumpsters, but the dumpsters weren’t out on the curb this morning. Instead, it picked up a parked Porsche Cayenne, lifted it screaming far overhead, then flipped it upside down and dropped it in its back compartment. It bounced off the pile of inverted cars already there, and fell sideways into the street, like many cars behind it. The truck moved ahead to the next identified target.
In time, Hrka came to a place where the townhouses weren’t even finished. Their construction sites crowded against bodegas and pawn shops, and kids stood there, in broad daylight, dropping lit matches on the exposed wood frames to ignite them. It was too soggy, like everything in Miami. The kids had also whacked open every fire hydrant they could see, but it didn’t matter because the fire trucks would never come. The streets were entirely gridlocked by people pulling out of their driveways, all going north. They had to roll up their windows, pass under the hydrant geysers at 2 feet per minute, and wallow through the spreading ponds at the intersections. Hrka walked past them all and got wet.
Around him the looters surged, looking for something, whatever the future held. Department stores, the Euro boutiques, software outlets. Several graying Hispanic men wearing faded Desert Storm camouflage quietly stood around the unhinged door of Garcia y Garcia, smoking foot-long cigars of incomprehensible cost while their friends rolled dollies into the humidors inside. Some more of their cigar-smoking society guarded the Catholic church across the street, so packed with worshippers that they spilled out onto the street.
Hrka could feel the approach of the boundary, the most important one in Miami. The next church he came across was a little Pentecostal shack, the only paint on it a hand-painted sign in English. LIBERTY TABERNACLE. Another sign under that in cardboard, “All-Day Prayer Today”. The street was crowded, people milled around and threw a few rocks at windows, but it was different here. Where the Cubans and the Dominicans had been confused and excited and were either running or chasing depending on economics, here was a sullen anger that layered the oily haze spreading down all the streets. Old black women wept on the street corners, and their sons simply glared at Hrka as he passed.
The very first approximation of an authority figure that Hrka saw this morning was a tall thin black man wearing an embroidered drum-shaped hat, standing on a bus stop bench yelling at a growing semicircle of people through his wireless microphone.
“Did their God leave you all behind? Did their Rapture only take your bosses? Seems the white man is abandoning the world that he ruined.”
Other mobs were at work. A hapless construction droid, left defenseless in autopilot mode, careened down the roof of an unfinished gas station, rolled by big burly men of the sort who hadn’t been able to find work since it got cheaper to control a robot over the Internet. It crashed directly into the fuel pumps, and Hrka heard the hiss of escaping methane as he left those men to cheer with cigarettes and lighters.
The sidewalks crumbled as he crossed into successively more useless and abandoned tax districts. The houses looked made of driftwood, leached of anything organic, their windows boarded over with stolen sections of billboards.
Yet among one long row of shacks rose a great green faceted sphere, thirty feet tall, crowning a berm planted densely with peanuts and marijuana. Around that, cars and pickups parked at all angles, some with their doors left open. Hrka headed straight for the sphere, angling off the sidewalk. As he grew closer, he could discern the stenciled Joint Services markings on the individual hexagonal facets, serial numbers, barcodes, assembly instructions.
The door of the dome was ceramic-armored with biological seals. Hrka thudded his fist against it, no stopping and waiting, just on and on like a road compactor. A webcam hidden in the incongruous Home Depot brass porch light betrayed its position with a noisy motor.
When the door opened, he couldn’t see into the darkness inside, until a machete thrust straight out at his chin. Attached to this was a black teenager, maybe twelve or thirteen, who just seemed to mold himself out of the shadows as Hrka’s pupils dilated.
“Who sent you?”
A muscled arm grabbed the boy by his hair and nearly pulled him off his feet. “Stop that shit, Marcus!” Stoudemire disarmed him by twisting his wrist a couple hundred degrees, with the machete hitting the ground with a ceramic ping.
“You came at a bad time, Walt, I got people meeting here all day on the situation and the local TV is out and we’re all out of nachos.” Then Stoudemire stopped and sort of looked over Hrka’s shoulder. “Where is Ashleigh?”
Hrka said nothing, but advanced into the dome. Stoudemire stumbled back half a step.
“Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh Jesus, I’m sorry.” He turned and put his arm around Hrka’s shoulder and pulled him through a garage that filled the ground level, then up steps around the edge of the dome into curving corridors. People crossed in front of them carrying printouts and waving cell phones.
They ran into a young woman balancing a stack of Bibles, hardcover, paperback, large, small and tattered. “Fenicia, you remember Walt. They done got his lady, the thing in the computers.”
“Oh!” She just dropped the Bibles right there. “You just come over here to the sofa and sit a while.”
The great round room elevated at the core of the dome looked like a starship bridge from the Lebanese Stereo Hustler galaxy. Its chromed railings held in check tall stacks of aftermarket car NavSat systems. Strewn across its floor were bulk spools of recordable Blu-rays, alternating with stacks of unmarked disc cases and uncut labels to put on those cases. The sofa was a beached whale made of black leather, overstuffed to shapelessness, one extremely expensive beanbag. All of this was now abandoned, glasses of whiskey paled by melted ice left on the Taiwanese battle scene table, the ashtrays still full, all the signs that a lot of goods were moving through here a few hours ago, then came to an abrupt halt.
So Hrka finally came to rest in the enveloping sofa, placed the fish globe on the table, and stared at the zebra skin that had been posted on the dome wall like a towed antiaircraft target.