Guardian of Night (8 page)

Yet I lost everybody I loved, too, but that didn’t turn me into a political idiot.

What the cordon of buses encircled was not physically the U.S. presidential residence and Capitol complex. The buses were at street level, after all, and merely cordoned off the old First National Bank building, now empty. The actual Capitol was many feet underground, ensconced in the intricate system of century-old tunnels that lay beneath downtown Dallas. The bus-fortress was there to screen off exterior access to the First National block, including the main Capitol entrance at Field and Pacific, which was where Coalbridge was headed.

Puffs of smoke suddenly wafted toward him, and Coalbridge’s eyes began to water. What was that
smell
? Something was cooking. The air was thick with a meaty odor. Coalbridge had skipped breakfast for the first time in weeks and was hungry. Although it was plainly too early for anyone to be cooking lunch, in the back of his mind he idly assumed he might be smelling barbecue.

Coalbridge’s main hobby was cooking—and anybody who suggested that this made him somehow less of a warrior wasn’t worth the time to beat the shit out of. Despite the traumatized economy, there were still an amazing number of ingredients and spices still available in Dallas. The human instinct for trade had found a way. He’d spent whatever free time he’d been able to snag while on shore duty cooking up a storm, with usually only himself or a friend or two from work to feed. One thing he hadn’t had time for while planetside was an old-fashioned night-long grilling session. Barbecue was one of his main indulgences when eating out, however, and he’d been planning on at least hitting his favorite joint, Rudy’s, up in Denton—which he’d heard still existed and which was as close to Oklahoma-style barbecue as you could get in these parts. But so far there had been no time, and it didn’t look like he was going to make it now. Most of the past month he’d spent groundside had been underground in the New Pentagon’s Extry command.

Coalbridge turned the corner of Elm and Field and all thoughts of eating barbecue disappeared from his mind—perhaps for eternity.

A dozen Peepsies were burning to death in the middle of Elm Street.

“Aaaaaaaaiaaaaaaaaaah!”

The smell?
Human barbecue,
thought Coalbridge.
Oh, God, that’s what it was.

The Peepsies were sitting in meditative fashion—or, as his sister, Gretchen, a kindergarten teacher dead in the first wave of the invasion, had called it: sitting
crisscross-applesauce.

Something familiar . . .
 

Then it came to him: they were mimicking the Tovil Exorcism, the group of Buddhist monks and nuns who had set themselves alight in protest of the United States’s occupation of Sri Lanka back in the 2040s. Sri Lanka didn’t exist as a recognizable
landmass
anymore, much less a country.

Shit. Coalbridge tamped down the adrenaline surge he’d just endured and took a mental moment to stifle his immediate urge—which had been to go and
rescue somebody.

He took a longer look at the self-immolators. Looked like three men and three women, from what he could tell. Young. Dressed in Peepsie counterculture garb, now aflame. He took a closer look. Very young. They were teenagers. Aha.

Nobody was dying here.

These kids were protected by dermal churn—called “salt,” after the military version of the same nanotech. Salt itself was not extremely expensive—Coalbridge had a coating—but the charger subscription necessary to make it effective day in and day out was not cheap. Coalbridge didn’t know how much such subscriptions cost these days, but he’d bet his captain’s bar that these were rich kids, the children of doctors, lawyers, NGO brass, and government bureaucrats, probably, whose families could afford the kind of electrostatic subscription and advanced coating that would permit such a display of political theater.

Salt could be set to deliver or to stifle nerve stimuli, pain in particular, through the coating. Yet salt wasn’t magic. Even if the kids had turned off their nerves, salt could hardly prevent the heat damage from a gas flame.

Hence the charming barbecue smell,
Coalbridge thought.

But the nanobugs were repairing the damage as fast as it occurred, and probably insulating the inner body parts below the skin from further damage. The kids would suffer from the fire they were applying to their bodies, but in the end they weren’t going to be disfigured. Or burn to death. Or even be terribly inconvenienced.

Which was good, Coalbridge reflected. You did dumb shit when you were a teenager. Unfortunately, the teenagers
weren’t
doing a very good job at copying the Tovil monks’ calm indifference to pain.

“Aaaaaaaaiaaaaaaaaaah!” Their heads tilted back, agony in their throats, the teen screams continued—loud and annoyingly piercing.

It’s like a goddamn coyote yowl,
Coalbridge thought.
Haven’t heard one of those in ages.

As Coalbridge looked on, he saw one of the girls break from her position, try to crawl from the street toward the gutter, but another flaming boy reached for her.

For a moment the two tussled on the pavement, both engulfed in flames.

Coalbridge’s impulse to help kicked back in. He took a step toward the two. This was insane. If the girl wanted out, hadn’t realized the pain she was getting herself into, it was his duty to aid her.

But before he could move any farther, the boy succeeded in throwing himself atop the flaming girl and holding her in place.

Coalbridge quickly made his way toward the two—only to pull up short. Now he was close enough to see what was up.

He’d misinterpreted. The two weren’t actually fighting or struggling at all. They were locked in a kiss.

And were they . . .
 

Yep.

Coalbridge turned away, amused and disgusted. He chuckled. If this really was the end of the world, what a third-rate apocalypse it had turned out to be.

Another glance toward the sky.

No drop-rod attack seemed imminent. But the longer he lingered outside, the more exposed he felt.

Coalbridge made his way back to the side of the Elm Street cleared corridor. As he walked on, any contempt he’d felt dissipated. He felt suddenly tender toward the burned kids. He’d been an adrenaline junkie when he was that age. He’d strongly considered taking an aviation route when he graduated from Annapolis.

And he’d jumped at the Extry, and spacecraft duty, the minute his transfer had been approved.

Of course, aircraft were now obsolete militarily—at least so far as the war with the sceeve was concerned.

Fate had led him out to sea on surface vessels and then driven him in another direction entirely—one in which there was plenty of adrenaline to be had. That was good, because he still jonesed for it. All the time. Kept his mind off things.

Like his mom and dad turned to curd by sceeve churn. His brothers. His sister. Cousins. Friends. Grandparents, greats, great-greats—beaten into the Oklahoma red earth by metal rain.

A fucking lot of things.

Nearby a Peepsie crowd lining the north side of Elm was shouting encouragement and cries of sympathy for the teens. Somewhere an incomprehensible bullhorn blared agitation. Coalbridge rose on tiptoes to his full height—a good six foot two—and surveyed the crowd. A sea of dazzed T-shirts scrolling through preassigned messages. A few homemade signs. And a score of placards, most of them on display-changing dazz paper, the signs featuring similar messages to their T-shirts.

“The Real Parasites Are in Dallas!”

“Make Our Solar System a Salt-free Zone!”

“The Sceeve Were Right: We ARE an Unjust Species!” And the even more direct: “Humans: We Got What We Deserved!”

There were even a few vintage signs strewn about. A yellowed “Condi = War-Criminal-in-Chief!” And was that . . . yes, it was: “Stop Global Warming!” Well,
that
problem was taken care of, thank you very much. Humanity’s carbon footprint was about the size of a three-week old fetus’s these days.

A few clumps of Peepsies had signs he agreed with: “Reformat Act = Jim Crow!” “Repeal all Expiration Codes!” “Free the servants!” Generally the civil-rights folks stood a bit away from the others and were clustered around their own tables of literature and bumper stickers, the material weighed down with rocks and bits of brick against the Texas wind. Servant rights were controversial. The enormous shortage of workers to keep up the basics of civilization had been solved by the introduction of artificial agents, but at a price. Servants had performed
too
well. They had all but eliminated manufacturing jobs for regular people and had taken over many of the service jobs, as well.

Suddenly:
BAM!
A stinging blow against his chest and an explosion on the dark black wool of his coat. He looked down.

Red, red, red!

I’m hit. Something somehow got through my shirt.

Coalbridge’s reflexes took over, and he was instantly on his hands and knees scrambling for cover.

He reached into his inner coat pocket for the Extry officer’s weapon, his service truncheon—a nasty device that looked like a police baton but was oh-so-much-more. Coalbridge was an expert with it. In fact, he’d personally taken out fifteen sceeve and counting with this very trunch.

He glanced down to survey the damage to himself.

Should be okay,
he thought.

He’d taken the hit in his chest, so the crunch, the embedded smart fiber woven into his uniform shirt, probably stopped the main impact of the bullet. But there was blood, and sometimes a lucky shot got through the nano activators, so—

Hold on. Don’t shit your pants quite yet, little Jimbo.

Paint. It was red paint.

Christ.

He stood up, dusted himself off.

“The sceeves should kill you for
real
!” someone screamed nearby.

He looked over. Dungarees and checkered Vans. A tight Chavez T-shirt topped by a flowing, hand-crocheted sweater vest left open. A red bandana holding back a bundle of curly brown hair. Distressed jeans that looked like they’d been water-boarded multiple times.

She was hot. Total retro-hippie vogue, like Joan Placid in that viral that was going around, the one that every red-blooded exper male had set to permanent repeat on his Palace.

A look which he had to admit he found kind of attractive.

And now he was going to pull off the seduction of the century? Turn his enemy into his lover on the mean streets of Dallas?

God, two months without a woman, Coalbridge thought. It was beginning to tell on him.

Forget all that. On this day of all days, he had to get to work! This situation was ridiculous. He had to find a way through these buses and get into the Capitol complex.

“Just let me by, dear, and I’ll come back and pass a pipe around the campfire later,” he said. “Hell, I’ll bring the THC. Got sources you wouldn’t believe. Just move aside for now—”

“Fuck
you
,” said a male voice, close to his ear. He turned to see a pencil-thin guy in his late twenties. He wore an old-fashioned punk getup, with sewed-on pegged jeans and a black leather motorcycle jacket over a T-shirt. “You think you can go around dressed like that”—he nodded toward Coalbridge’s dress uniform—“and
get away with it
? Children are dying in Africa because of you fucking Extry baby-killers.”

Coalbridge shook his head and was about to make his way around them in bemusement when the Peepsie punk reached out a quick hand and shoved him into the side of a bus.

His head whacked into the paper-covered sheet metal. Shot of pain through his skull. Yellow-tinged floaters momentarily in front of his eyes.

The Peepsie punk was stronger than he looked.

Reaction and training took over Coalbridge’s body. He had to end this quickly, and he wasn’t going to be able to use reason. Coalbridge reached between his coat buttons, felt the truncheon’s handle, activated it with a twist and spun around to face—

Some other dude.

This one was entirely People’s Front, a real Chavista down to the torn dungarees and paisley shirt. There was something much more authentic about him, too—if it
was
a him. A mane of curly, tangled hair, and underneath—yeah, it was a guy. Who smelled of patchouli and cheap incense. A chest draped in beads. Dirt—or something grimy—smeared into the wrinkles of his exposed skin.

Was this the Peepsie version of a medicine man or shaman? Did they even
have
those?

But the Peepsie-shaman was not confronting Coalbridge. Instead he was smiling benignly at the punk guy and Joan Placid, putting a firm hand on the punk’s shoulder.

“Come on, brother, you know better,” said the shaman in a low, calm voice. “Violence won’t solve anything.”

For a moment, the Peepsie punk glared hatred at Coalbridge. But the calming hand of the shaman and Coalbridge’s truncheon, glowing with a pale purple Q-generated fire, gave the punk pause.

“If you go after him, you just prove him right,” said the hippie-shaman. “War is the problem, not the solution.”

The shaman pointed to the bus behind Coalbridge. “This man’s victims see him, don’t worry,” he said.

Coalbridge turned and looked behind him. Nothing but the bus, the poster-like plasterings. Faces. Hundreds of faces, staring out at him. Some smiling, some mysterious, some even sexy. Then he realized what he was seeing.

The Peepsies, or someone, had turned the sides of the bus—all the buses—into remembrance walls. They were plastered with photographs of the dead. Some had a short paragraph, a birth and death date. Some had no lettering at all, but silently, wordlessly attested to the fact that this person had been here, had walked the Earth, and was no more.

The Peepsie punk started to say something else to Coalbridge, but the shaman gave the punk a sharp look. Finally the Peepsie punk shook his head like an angry, confused bull. “He fucking started it,” he said to the shaman. “His kind started the whole thing. All the fucking suffering. They violated the Limit and brought the retribution down on us.”