Anniversary Day (4 page)

All he knew was that Palmette was terrifyingly quiet.

And that wasn’t good.

Five

Nyquist found Palmette. She was half buried in debris, her eyes closed. He touched her shoulder and his hand came away wet with blood.

He cursed. He’d picked up his light after knocking Alvina unconscious, and he used it now to see if he could figure out what was going on with Palmette.

What was going on was that she was losing a lot of blood. More than he wanted to think about.

He felt in his pockets for some kind of emergency kit, something to help, but he couldn’t find anything at all. He would have to make do in this mess somehow. He needed to see the wounds, see which was bleeding the worst, and figure out how to stop it.

For good measure, he tried to send for help on his emergency links, but got no response. Maybe he could send, but he couldn’t get any message in return. He had no idea, after all, and no way of knowing, so he set the emergency link on automatic, having it ping the system every thirty seconds, requesting an ambulance, backup, and help for the crew outside.

Then he went cold.

How long had he been in here since the crisis started? Five minutes? Ten? Thirty?

The exact time didn’t really matter. What mattered was that none of the group outside had tried to come in.

The thought made his pulse race. Something was seriously wrong, something that was way beyond this house or even this set of row houses. His people should have broken in by now.

He made himself take a deep breath to calm down, then immediately regretted it because the air tasted of dust. He shone his light around, saw piles of junk and no cloth.

But there was a tablecloth in the other room and if he remembered correctly, it was relatively clean.

He picked his way back in there, as quickly and as carefully as he could, shining the light on Alvina first to make sure she hadn’t moved. Then he grabbed the cloth which was still on the table. Some of the cloth wouldn’t come—it was trapped under the fallen bit of ceiling. But he tugged as hard as he could and the cloth ripped free.

Then he carried it back into the kitchen.

He shone the light on Palmette. Her hands were on top of the debris and they were covered in defensive wounds. Blood oozed from those. A bad slash on the top of her arm, but it avoided the arteries on the underside, at least so far as he could tell.

The bulk of the wounds, though, were on her torso, and he wasn’t sure how to stop them from bleeding.

He could tie off her arms, but he couldn’t tie off her chest.

He wished for the damn links. Somewhere on there, someone or some stupid FAQ file could tell him what to do to tie off wounds, help him be creative with what he had.

But he was on his own here.

He put the light between his teeth and slung the cloth over his shoulder. Then he dug the debris away from her. Her stomach had been slashed, and another slash ran along her thigh.

The thigh wound was bleeding the most. Solution to that one was obvious. He had to tie it off. He ripped some of the cloth, and tied it around her leg (thank God she was thin) and pulled as tight as he could.

He wished he could research her to see if she had signed up for an emergency healing service, something that would close up small wounds with a simple command. She probably didn’t or she would have ordered it the moment the wound happened.

Still, she might not have been thinking clearly—most people didn’t when attacked—or she might have passed out too soon.

Although he doubted she had. She had been the one who was moaning.

He tied off her arms too, and then peered at that stomach wound. It was bad. She’d bleed out, just like that poor man in the living room had.

Nyquist needed supplies and he wasn’t going to get them in here.

He pressed the remaining cloth against her stomach, put something flat, heavy, and unidentifiable over it to hold it in place, hoping that would at least staunch some of this.

Then he wiped his hands on his pants. “I’m going to get help—”

He was going to say her first name to comfort her—people liked hearing their names in moments of crisis—but he couldn’t remember it. He didn’t think calling her Palmette was right.

“I’m going to get help,” he repeated softly. Then he shone his light on that opening into the front room. Part of the ceiling had come down there as well, and blocked the door. But nothing had fallen on the body, oddly enough, and that window seemed remarkably untouched.

So if whatever had blacked out the window wasn’t made of an unbreakable material, he might be able to smash his way out of here.

He had to try.

Six

It felt like climbing a damn mountain to get to the window. A trip that had taken Nyquist only seconds an hour ago now took him at least ten minutes. Ten minutes, he—or more properly, Palmette—didn’t have.

Along the way, he’d found two heavy cylindrical items he could use as cudgels. He had long ago given up trying to figure out what something was. In the dark and the dirt and the chaos, everything familiar seemed like something alien.

And the body, sprawled on the floor beside him, seemed vastly unimportant. Nyquist just had to be careful to stay out of the sticky and congealing puddle of blood.

The blackout material over the window was some kind of nanofiber. Unbreakable, untearable, without proper authorization, and he doubted, given Alvina’s level of paranoia, that she would have left the protective authorization for emergency services. He didn’t even try, because he was inside, and the theory was that someone inside was there by invitation.

He should be able to get the blackout material to lift on its own.

His effort was almost anti-climactic. He rolled up the bottom of the screen, and it continued to roll the rest of the way. He’d volunteer to do a commercial for the manufacturer when this crisis was over. The only part of the house still functioning was the nanofiber blackout curtain.

The window itself was so covered with filth—on the inside—that Nyquist couldn’t see out of it. He doubted anyone had opened the damn thing in a decade.

One benefit of not having a conventional smart house was this window actually had handles so that someone could open it. He set one of the cudgels down, tucked the other underneath his left arm, and grabbed the window handle, wincing at the slimy feel. Then he braced himself and lifted upwards.

For a moment, he thought the window was stuck. Then it slid up and open, sending in light and air and noise—sirens and shouts and moans—and a stench so sharp he thought of closing the window again.

It took him a moment to recognize the smell. Burning chemicals. His eyes watered and he had trouble catching his breath.

What the hell had happened?

He didn’t have time to think about it. He squeezed out of the window into the noise and smell, and eased himself to the ground.

The ground wasn’t ground, not really. It was debris, just like in the house. In fact, much of it might have fallen from the house. He surveyed the neighborhood—saw more collapsed or canted buildings. Parked vehicles had moved, and the air had a sludgy oily feel.

A brown haze covered everything, and there was something wrong with the Dome.

He squinted at it. The Dome looked closer, and he didn’t believe it was a trick of the light.

He tried his links before he even had a chance to think about it, trying to see if the Dome had some kind of addition here, but got nothing.

His links were still down.

He couldn’t think about. He had to get help for Palmette.

Two men—he thought maybe they were medical personnel from the ambulance—crouched over the male officer by the door. No other officers appeared in Nyquist’s line of sight. The crime scene lasers had fallen away from their moorings, sending their thin red lights into the air. That alone had added to the cacophony—warning sirens went off when light from crime scene lasers got broken.

No one had fixed that, not in the last hour.

His heart was pounding.

The medical workers looked like they were working on the male officer. Nyquist didn’t interrupt them. Instead, he headed to the ambulance. If nothing else, he would get a wound repair kit himself.

Inside, he found two other people on stretchers and one harried looking medico supervising them.

“Your links working?” Nyquist asked.

“I need your help here,” the woman said. “I need someone to monitor their vitals—”

“I have an injured woman in the house back there who needs immediate attention,” Nyquist said. “Are your links working?”

“No,” the woman snapped. “No one’s are.”

“What the hell happened here?” he asked.

“What the hell happened everywhere?” she asked. “I’m not in charge, nothing’s working and I have no damn idea. Now help me out.”

“If I do, Palmette will die.” For all he knew, she might already be dead. “She’s bleeding out.”

The woman looked at him with compassion. “If you stay here, I’ll get her.”

Nyquist shook his head. “You’ll never find her on your own. Just give me something and some instructions on how to use it. I’ll try to get her to you.”

The woman gave him a strange look, as if she didn’t believe he could do that, then she shrugged.

“Bleeding out from what?” she asked.

“Stab wounds,” he said.

The woman paled. “You stabbed her?”

“Hell, no. I’m a detective with the Armstrong PD.” Although he probably looked a lot more disreputable than that right now. “My partner and I were called here to investigate a death, and the killer attacked her.”

The woman cursed, then grabbed a kit. “Some AutoBandages here,” she said. “They should last long enough to get your partner out here. But I don’t have anything to replace the lost blood.”

He couldn’t worry about that now. He had to deal with one thing at a time. First thing, stop the bleeding. Second, get Palmette out of that house. Third, deal with the blood loss.

Maybe by the time he got her out here, links would work again and someone could help them.

But he doubted that would be the case.

This wasn’t a simple little disaster, covering one block. From what he could see—which was damn little—the entire neighborhood had been affected.

He was on his own with Palmette and Alvina—and he had no idea how long that situation would last.

Seven

Nyquist didn’t want to go back in that house. The whole thing looked unstable, not like a block of row houses at all. They had toppled inward against each other, roofs caved, walls leaning precariously against each other—or against nothing at all.

He recognized Alvina’s only by the emergency workers still working on the officer in front of the door.

Not that he could go in that way anyhow. Debris had fallen in front of that door, and it opened inward.

He was going to have to crawl through that window and over that body one more time.

He crossed the yard quickly, and stopped in front of the window, feeling a bit stunned. It was higher than he expected. He didn’t remember such a far drop to the ground, but he had to have made it.

He placed his hand on the sill and levered himself upward, balancing precariously. Then he hoisted himself over the edge, careful to step down as near to the wall as he could to avoid the drying blood.

The wall felt wobbly. He wondered if it truly was wobbly or if that was his imagination working extra hard now that he knew what condition this place was actually in.

He paused long enough to listen to see if he heard anything. A moan, a rustle, anything. He hoped to hear a moan from Palmette, and he didn’t want to hear anything else. He didn’t want Alvina to have gotten loose from her cuffs and come after him.

He heard voices from outside, over the sirens, but nothing from inside, at least that he could tell. He stepped back over the debris pile, then made his way to the kitchen.

He glanced at Palmette. She hadn’t moved, which was a bad thing. He wanted her squirming, maybe trying to get to the door. But she hadn’t done anything.

Still, he had to go past her to check on Alvina first.

Alvina was still splayed face down near the table. She didn’t look like she had moved either, and he wasn’t sure if the splotch of blackness he saw on the floor near her head was a growing puddle of blood, or something else entirely.

He didn’t go near her to check. The last thing he wanted was to get close enough to have her grab at him, pull him down, or use some hidden shard of glass as a weapon.

Instead, he went back into the kitchen and crouched near Palmette.

She was still breathing. Her skin was clammy and she was even paler than she had been before. Despite his efforts, she was losing blood.

She was dying.

He grabbed the kit, slid health gloves over the protective material he already wore on his hands, and then grabbed the AutoBandages. Only one was big enough for that stomach wound.

He pulled up her shirt and hesitated for just a moment: remove the cloth he had stuck in the wound or leave it there? He had no idea which would be better or worse. He wanted to download the information through his links, but he didn’t have it.

He was alone on this.

Finally, he gave it a bit of a tug, figuring if it was loose, he would pull it out, and if it wasn’t, he would leave it.

It was loose.

He pulled it out. It was barely recognizable as cloth, and it dripped as he cast it aside. The kitchen already smelled so bad he couldn’t tell if the stink around him came from the bandage, the wound, or the garbage in the room.

So he just ignored it all. He opened the AutoBandage, held it over the wound like he had done a dozen times before for other officers down in the line of duty, and then pressed.

AutoBandages attacked the skin and the wound, binding to it almost immediately, becoming part of the injured person’s body. He had no idea how doctors got the damn things off or if they just managed to reverse the process somehow, and he didn’t care.