After America (31 page)

“Do you think you could go find Mr. Atchison for me? I have need of inquiring with him about how much we can load in these saddlebags. I believe he is tending to the horses. Here, Adam can help you go find him.”

The youngest of the Mormon men, a pink-faced boy of maybe sixteen or seventeen, pulled up short as he tried to wrestle a big cardboard box into the room. His companion—Orin was his name if Miguel recalled correctly—bumped into him from behind, almost knocking him over. It was enough to break the tension. Sofia did give her father a cool glare as she left the diner, but Miguel was man enough not to be troubled by the poor opinion of a teenage girl. He even smiled slightly as she swept out of the room with as much dignity as she could muster, pulling Adam along in her wake. His grin lingered for a moment when he saw that the other boy, Orin, was genuinely put out not to have been chosen for escort duties. And then the black fog of sorrow descended upon him again.

“We should travel fast and light,” he said, almost sighing. “Perhaps we should leave everything here that we will not need in the fight. Your herd can be secured here.”

Cooper Aronson looked as if he was about to say something, but Miguel cut him off. “There
will
be a fight, Mister Aronson.”

The Mormon leader nodded reluctantly.

Miguel continued, “You are all carrying the same weapons, yes?”

Ben Randall answered, “Yep. Government-issue M16s. They hand them out when you get off the boat in Corpus Christi. I’m surprised you and your daughter don’t have them,” he said before suddenly blushing bright red and stumbling over an apology. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean …”

Miguel waved it away with one hand. “We were issued three army rifles when we arrived, but I do not like them as guns. We are not soldiers, and they are unreliable in any case. I took some time when we arrived at the homestead to seek out more appropriate firearms. Some for killing snakes,” he said, patting the cut-down shotgun in the oversized holster at his hip, “and some for farmwork, like my Winchester. I prefer a weapon with which I am familiar. And I have used a Winchester all my life.”

“And your daughter’s rifle?”

“She hunts,” Miguel said. “It is no matter. She will not be involved in this. She can protect herself and the women with that Remington.”

“Is she a good shot?” Aronson asked.

Miguel nodded. “She brought down a ten-point whitetail buck at three hundred yards.” He paused for a second. “I do not believe she will hesitate before pulling the trigger on a man.”

Aronson took a moment to digest all that before looking to his wife. “How are the supplies?”

“We will have what we need to see us through the next week,” she answered.

“That will be more than enough,” said Miguel. “We will resolve this one way or another in two days.”

New York

“Maybe Union Square’s not such a good idea,” said Jules.

The rooftop garden, which had gone wild in the last three years, afforded them with an excellent view of the soldiers pouring into Union Square, where Jules had been hoping to lay up for the night. She and the Rhino leaned over the guardrail in the constant drizzle and passed a pair of binoculars between them, scanning east on 14th Street to where the army apparently was gathering … well … a small army of some sort as far as Jules could tell. Jules’s injured shoulder forced her to use the binoculars one-handed when she took them, and the image was correspondingly shaky. Her shivering from hunger, cold, and fatigue did not help matters. Only a day had passed since her shower before bed back on Duane Street, yet she was already sweaty, itchy, and greasy from the rain.

“Looks like they’re getting together some sort of armored task force to punch a few blocks north,” said the Rhino, shaking a shower of raindrops from his army surplus Gore-Tex jacket.

All manner of armored vehicles and even a few tanks were rumbling into the streets around the little park. They couldn’t see much to the northeast, but from the martial thunder and lightning in that direction there was something untoward going on.

“Well, that’s just marvelous,” Jules replied sunnily, relatively dry in her own Gore-Tex jacket. “We’re going north; perhaps we could thumb a ride … That’s sarcasm, by the way,” she added. “Just in case you got all excited at the idea of a ride on a big bloody tank.”

He continued to peer through his binoculars, not bothering to answer.

“Perhaps if we headed down to the river,” she suggested more seriously, stepping back from the sheer drop to West 14th and pushing through the wet, overgrown foliage to a small open vantage point a little farther down. The rooftop garden thinned out there, possibly because it would be in the shade of a looming elevator shaft for more than half the day. The road far below them was badly congested with crashed cars and, for some inexplicable reason, dozens of Dumpsters. It looked as though a small river was running along the street, and at the corner of Seventh Avenue she could see an extraordinary sight: a veritable geyser gushing up from underground through the entrance to the subway there. It made her wonder whether the entire city might collapse in on itself and sink into the rivers that surrounded it.

“Nope, can’t go west,” the Rhino said, as he moved a piece of chewing tobacco from one cheek to the other. Julianne prepared herself for the inevitable stream of spit, and …

There it was.

She felt like shuddering every time he did that, but if he wasn’t smoking cigars—and he wasn’t right now because of the chance they’d be spotted in the dark—the Rhino insisted on getting his tobacco hit via plugs of the foul “chaw,” as he called it.

“Can’t do that, Miss Jules,” he continued. “I endured a good long time picking Lewis’s tiny brains about who controlled which parts of the city, and he said everything north of Eighteenth and west of Eighth was being fought over by Serbs, Russians, Chechens, and Rastas. You don’t want to be tangling with any of them.”

An enormous blast a mile or two to the north sent a bright white ball of fire and sparks high into the sky.

“Do I have to make the obvious point that I don’t want to be tangling with any of these fucking munters?” she asked.

“Sarcasm again, Miss Julianne?”

“Yes. Sarcasm. I’m afraid that at the moment I have only the lowest form of wit to offer. And to think I took a first in rhetoric at Cambridge.”

“Didn’t you cheat your way through college?”

“Cheated and bonked, but I did have a base level of competence, you know. It’s in my nature. Daddy virtually lived off his wits until he blew his brains out.”

The Rhino lowered his binoculars and joined her in the small clearing. Jules could recognize a few of the plants that had gone wild up there—some Japanese maples that had burst out of their pots and colonized a large square of native grasses, a thicket of tomato vines, and what looked like zucchini—but most of it was just anonymous shrubbery and scrappy urban jungle. The Rhino spit out the rest of his chaw, plucked a small tomato off the vine, and bit into it, but then he screwed up his face and spit out the pulp.

“Nasty.”

The tom-tom beat of a heavy weapon started up, and within seconds Julianne flinched as a jet fighter slipped down out of the clouds and released a couple of bombs that detonated with enough force to shake the city. Pulling out of the dive, the jet fighter climbed back into the clouds, its engines howling at the skyscrapers. The drumbeat did not resume.

“Bloody hell,” she said as the rumble subsided. It never ceased to amaze her. The sounds on the battlefield were not like the movies at all. You never heard the jet until it was too late to do anything about it, especially if you were the target. She hoped that did not happen to her.

“Yeah.” Rhino showed his tobacco-stained teeth. “Fuck, yeah. They’re not dicking around anymore, are they?”

“Perhaps they’re avenging all our deaths,” Jules suggested with no real sincerity.

“I sorely doubt it,” the Rhino said. “But it looks like the president has decided he’s had enough of caring and sharing.”

The way he said “the president” gave Jules to understand that the Rhino most definitely approved.

“So what are we going to do?” she asked. “We need to get to that apartment and get out of the city with Rubin’s papers if we’re to be paid.”

The huge, slab-shouldered sea dog appeared to think about plucking a zucchini and trying his luck but decided against it. The rain came down heavier for a moment, then eased off, as though the downpour had given its all before petering out.

“I’m gonna suggest we keep pressing on, Miss Jules. If we thread ourselves up between the ragheads who started this fight—” He jerked one thumb over his shoulder back toward Union Square. “—and the crazy fucking Ivans down by the river—” He nodded toward the Hudson. “—we might just show ‘em all a clean pair of heels.”

Jules frowned, unconvinced, but there didn’t seem to be many alternatives. If the Rhino was right and this was the first day of a battle to retake the city, the army would roll up the island block by block, probably destroying everything in its path. They had to get to Rubin’s apartment and retrieve his documents before that happened, even if it meant dialing up the risk for a day or two. This gig was a big score. If it paid off, she could probably retire from assing about in the smuggling game and set up a legitimate business out on the West Coast, running salvage charters down to LA or something. Or, rather, not running them in person, just raking off the cream while some other poor bastards did the hard work as her contractors and remitted all the profits back to her.

She shivered as the wind knifed in off the river. Her shoulder ached terribly, and she longed to be out of the cold. Across the water New Jersey was a dark continent with just a few mystery points of light to give some sense of the vastness of the graveyard it had become. She wondered idly who or what those lights might be. Freebooters? Scavengers? Some sort of special forces camp with a lot of unwashed Lord Jim types sitting around eating roasted rats off coat hangers?

Possibly not.

There were still mountains of canned and vacuum sealed food in the big cities to make a resort to hobo’s chicken—one of her father’s favorite jokes—a rarity. Another jet plane—no, two of them—came shrieking down out of the night sky, flying just under the low ceiling of cloud, which lit up with their exhausts and running lights. They appeared to drop a stick of bombs somewhere near Gramercy Park.

The Rhino grunted in approval but frowned.

“Miss Jules, I’m going to do something that a good Rhino never does,” he said. “I’m going to lower my horn and back the fuck up. This looks to me like a fight that is only just getting warmed up, and I wonder if we should be heading out into it just yet.”

“We could end up like poor Ryan,” she said.

“Yeah. I vote we hunker down here for a few hours, get some rest, review our plans, and see whether there’s a lull anytime before sunup when we could move a few more blocks.”

Julianne shivered inside her Gore-Tex. The thought of getting somewhere warm and dry appealed in a way that no trip to the Virgin Islands ever had.

“Sounds good to me. Let’s see if this building had a penthouse, shall we?”

“May God strike me down if the worst thing about the end of the world isn’t the impossibility of securing a decent cup of tea when I fucking need it. I could murder a pot of Twinings right now.”

Jules stood at the black granite island bench in the massive, luxuriously fitted out kitchen with hands on hips and frustration acid etched into her face.

The building did not boast a single penthouse, but the top-floor apartments were considerably larger than those below, there being only four of them in all. The Rhino had tried to kick in the door of the first apartment they came to, but it seemed to have been secured by something as extravagant as thick metal locking bolts driven deep into the walls. His size-twelve boots boomed off the hardwood surface without any appreciable return on the effort. The next apartment door, however, yielded to his second kick with a terrible splintering and cracking of the door frame. The noise was awfully loud inside the empty building but insignificant when one considered the uproar of the street fighting a mile or two away. The two smugglers swept the darkened entry hall and a large open-plan living room beyond, but it was obvious that no living soul had set foot in there for years. After securing the wreckage of the front door by pushing a heavy couch up against it, they went about settling in for a few hours: drawing curtains so they could turn on a battery-powered camp light, firing up a small gas stove, and searching the kitchen cupboards for any usable supplies, whereupon Jules was yet again confronted by the barbaric habits of Americans high and low.

“There simply is no fucking tea in this place,” she complained.

The Rhino snorted his amusement.

“Got plenty of stale coffee if you want. Or drinking chocolate. Does that stuff keep?”

“Let me see,” she said, taking the small white canister from him. A twelve-ounce tin of Dagoba organic. Jules rolled her eyes. “Well, it’s hardly Vosges La Parisienne Couture cocoa, but I suppose we’ll see. At least it’s never been opened.”

As the Rhino set to brewing a small pot of water poured from his canteen, Julianne retrieved their commission papers from her small backpack. In addition to the satelilite maps and out-of-date intel on the surrounding area, she carried a private
lettre de course
from Samuel Rubin’s attorney in Seattle, authorizing them to search Rubin’s New York apartment and seize any and all documentation relating to his disputed claim to part ownership of the new Sonoma “Sunset” gas and oil field, along with detailed floor plans of the apartment and instructions for accessing a hidden safe in the library. She also found their original letters of acceptance into the Manhattan clearance and salvage program. She was about to toss them away as being no longer necessary, when caution stayed her hand. The only safe and sure way into New York, a Declared Zone, had been via the salvage program, and given how everything had gone so spectacularly wrong in the last twenty-four hours, it might turn out that those crumpled form letters were their only way out of the city as well. They wouldn’t stop an F-16 from dropping smart bombs on them should they be mistaken for villains, but if they ran into any U.S. ground forces, it probably would pay to have a piece of paper explaining how they came to be in the city.