The Junkie Quatrain (9 page)

Behind Charlie, they saw a handful of junkies racing forward.

‘Move,’ snapped Barney. ‘He’s here. Move!’ He didn’t wait to see if they listened. He just stood up on the pedals and started pumping.

Monica glanced at Chit and bent over her own handlebars.

It took them five more minutes to get to the Federal Building. It was at the bottom of the hill, just before Wilshire ducked under Interstate 405 and headed down to the beach. Barney had always thought of it as
the ghost building
because of the eerie lighting effects the recessed windows caused at night.

These days it was more of a fortress. Months ago it had been fortified with concrete dividers, chain link fences, and lots of barbed wire. There were scaffolding towers with spotlights and more towers with armed men. A huge gate had been built on the Wilshire side. Chit had mentioned several times that it looked like the gate to a concentration camp. The bonfires out front where they burned infected bodies added to that appearance.

In front of the gate was a large circle, almost fifty feet across. They rode their bikes into the circle and slammed on the brakes. Like a lot of the little sanctuary communities, one of the first stages of getting into the Federal Building was proving you could be patient and stand still. The three outsiders looked up the hill at the junkies they’d passed on the way down. The infected men and women built up momentum as they charged down the hill after the bicycles.

They waited just over a minute. They bit their lips and kept their hands at their sides as the junkies got closer and closer. There were almost forty of them pounding across the pavement when the guards waved them in though the gate.

Charlie had once commented on the fact that there weren’t any actual soldiers guarding the Federal Building. It was all private security in black uniforms with a notable lack of nametags and badges. Barney had told him to shut his mouth.

Monica glanced back up the street as they passed through the gate. She could just see the speck of Charlie’s body. The junkies were tearing it limb from limb.

They heard the soldiers fire into the approaching mob. All they had to do was wound six or seven of them and the rest would shift focus to feed on the wounded. It was an accepted strategy at this point.

The outsiders dropped their packs in the waiting area, surrendered their weapons, and headed into the trailers for the safety exam. They each stripped for a doctor while two guards held them at gunpoint. They stood naked while every inch of their skin was checked for bites and their blood was tested. Chit spent the time staring at the floor or ceiling. Monica focused all her attention on the guards and tried to make them feel more uncomfortable than she did. Normally Barney held out hopes that he’d get the cute female doctor he’d seen once or twice. Today he was glad he didn’t, because he still felt a bit cold and withdrawn.

He was getting dressed when they asked for his papers. He bit his lip as he remembered Charlie flailing in the street, his messenger bag sticking out from under his hips. ‘I lost our work order,’ he said, ‘but Director Bradbury can vouch for us. Tell him we got everything on his list.’

The guard made a noncommittal grunt and picked up a phone. After a few moments he gave a nod. ‘You’re good,’ he said. ‘Your gear’s in the reception area. Director Bradbury’s busy in a meeting, but Mathis can accept delivery. Or you can wait in the lounge on nine.’ His eyes didn’t rise from his computer screen as he held up a tan card. ‘Your weapons are in lock-up. Present your ticket when you exit the compound.’

Barney nodded. He stepped outside and found Chit buttoning her shirt. Monica joined them a beat later. She wore a pale hospital blouse over her jeans. ‘They burned half my clothes,’ she said. ‘Too much blood on them.’

Barney snorted out a laugh. They grabbed their packs from the clerk, clipped on their VISITOR badges, and headed toward the Federal Building itself.

‘At least they let you keep your new pigsticker,’ Barney said as they trotted up the steps. He nodded at the machete on Monica’s thigh.

She smiled. ‘Yeah. I guess they figure if they’ve got all the automatic weapons there’s not much I can do with an eighteen-inch blade. Or the bozo was too distracted by me not having a bra.’

‘I’d keep it to yourself,’ said Chit. ‘You know they’ll go crazy if they find you with a weapon in here. Especially if it was their mistake.’

Barney swung his pack into his other hand and Chit stumbled off the side. He shifted to look and Monica thought he’d hit the smaller woman with the backpack. Then the shift became a few big, awkward steps toward the big pillar and then he turned abruptly around to face her. The bag slipped from his fingers and he stood straight.

Chit slumped to the ground. She twitched twice and let out a small whine. It wasn’t much louder than a breath.

The knife at Barney’s throat kept him standing straight. It was black metal, but Monica could see the gleaming edge even through her boss’s beard. As if it knew where she was looking, the blade adjusted its angle. It bit into Barney’s throat, not quite enough to draw blood but close enough that any move would make it happen.

Monica let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d taken and raised her palms. ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘let’s take it easy.’

‘I would like my machete back,’ someone said behind Barney.

The woman the other day—the lean, ragged woman—she’d had a dry voice. She’d probably gone a whole week without talking before stumbling across her infected girlfriend.

This voice was hot air out of an Egyptian tomb. It wasn’t the voice of a gun-nut executive. It was the sound of dust, a voice that hadn’t needed people in a long, long time.

Monica could just see the man in the shadows. He was whip-thin with a bristle of dark hair across his scalp. A pair of round lenses—
John Lennon glasses
flitted across her mind— covered his eyes. The lower half of his face was hidden by a gray dust mask. It made him look like an evil surgeon.

‘Are you serious?’ She looked at the man, then down at the blade strapped to her thigh. ‘That’s what this was all about?’

The hand with the knife didn’t waver. The other hand reached out, palm up. ‘Please,’ said the man.

Monica cursed him again, shook her head, and unbuckled her gun belt. She wrestled with the canvas scabbard for a few moments, then held it out.

The evil doctor didn’t move. He flexed his open fingers once and turned the blade against Barney’s throat just enough to catch the light.

She leaned forward and set the machete in his hand. The thin man’s fingers closed over the scabbard and pulled it back into the midday shadows.

A beat passed and Barney let out a deep sigh. Monica realized the blade had vanished from his throat. She turned her head toward the lobby and took in a deep breath to yell.

‘No,’ he said.

She bit back the call for help. ‘That psycho killed most of our crew.’

Barney took another breath and looked over his shoulder. ‘I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that guy’s killed a lot of people,’ he said. ‘At the moment, I’m focusing on the fact that he didn’t kill us.’

Monica bit her lip but said nothing. Barney went to help Chit up, and the smaller woman winced. He unbuckled her pack and got her to her feet. ‘You okay?’

‘A lot of pain,’ she whispered, ‘but I think I’m okay past that.’ She tried to raise her arm and winced again.

One of the black-suited guards, a woman, walked by with a young man in a suit. The guard ignored them, the man gave them a glance. Monica felt the urge to say something rise up again but Barney gave her a look.

‘So now what?’ she said when they were alone again.

He slung his pack over his shoulder and picked up Chit’s. ‘We finish the job,’ he said. ‘We deliver the goods and get paid.’

‘And then?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m thinking maybe we should call it quits for a while.’

‘You think so?’

Barney looked out at the city. ‘There’s some dangerous stuff out there. A person could get killed.’

It had been six months since the world ended.

For Sam Clemens it had been six months of non-stop work.

On one level, it was exciting as hell. As a student of diagnostic medicine with a specialty in virology, the China outbreaks had been fascinating. He’d sat around with his friends and classmates examining the reports out of Asia and forming their own theories about the H1B6 virus, sometimes called the Baugh Contagion.

Then it reached North America. He’d been pulled out of his residency in Seattle and flown to Sacramento. There he’d been given an honorary doctorate and told he was now employed by the Centers for Disease Control.

And now, two months after that, he was being driven through Los Angeles in an armored Hummer. Humvee, actually. The driver, a solid man with a square jaw, had corrected Sam twice now on that point. Hummers were civilian, Humvees were military.

They pulled up to the Los Angeles Federal Building just after noon. The structure had been surrounded by concrete barriers and barbed wire. Through the gate he could see a small group of people on bicycles checking in with the guards. He couldn’t imagine being one of the outsiders who ventured out into the wild zones on a regular basis.

As they waited, Sam saw a large pack of Baugh-ridden to the east, maybe twenty or thirty of them. Their clothing was dirty and tattered from weeks of wear. Most of them were thin. They all shook and trembled enough that he could see it almost two blocks away. That and their garbled, slurred attempts at speech were what had earned the infected the casual nickname of
junkies
.

The pack was focused on something on the ground. He recognized the motions as a fight over food. Each of them was trying to get more than a few mouthfuls of whatever dog or cat they’d managed to corner. As he watched, one of them, a young woman, lifted her prize to the sky and gibbered like an ape. It was an arm, ripped off at the elbow.

Sam stopped looking out the side windows and stared at the hood of the Humvee.

They were waved through the gate by a pair of men in dark body armor. He craned his neck and saw towers with floodlights and even more men with rifles and armor. The Humvee halted in front of a trailer that Sam recognized as a mobile research lab. His door opened and he was gestured out. ‘Right this way, sir,’ said one soldier.

He was guided into the lab. Sam stripped naked in a brightly lit room and a slim brunette examined him for lacerations or severe abrasions. She also swabbed his mouth and took a blood sample. He dressed while they waited for the test results and made small talk about the facility.

His test came back negative and he stepped outside again. It was a major infection zone, but the air in Los Angeles was still wonderfully fresh. He hadn’t been outside much in the past few months.

‘Sir?’ Another soldier, this one a broad-shouldered woman, was in front of him. She didn’t have the dark body armor on, but there was a pistol on her thigh and a variety of lethal-looking things hooked to her belt. A few short strands of dark hair curled out from under her cap. She gave him a polite nod. ‘Sergeant Hogan, sir,’ she said. ‘I’m to escort you up to Director Bradbury.’ She held out a laminated badge with his name, picture, and the FMF logo on it.

Sam glanced over at the empty space where the Humvee had been while he clipped the badge to his coat. ‘I had some bags,’ he said. ‘Clothes and some copies of my research.’

‘Already on the way to your quarters, sir,’ she said. She gestured to the building’s main entrance. ‘If you could come this way, Director Bradbury’s waiting for you.’

They passed a series of huge pillars where a scruffy trio of outsiders was muttering about some deal that had gone bad, then entered the building’s lobby. There were armed soldiers everywhere, all in black armor. They each gave his escort a salute as they walked to the elevators. He stepped all the way in and put his back against the wall. The sergeant stood almost dead center. She pressed the button marked
6
and placed her fists together behind the small of her back.

Sam looked at her shoulders again. ‘Excuse me, ummm...’

‘Sergeant Hogan, sir.’

‘Thanks. What branch are you with, sergeant?’

‘Sir?’

‘Are you Army or National Guard or what? I don’t recognize any of your insignia.’

‘Whitestealth Security, sir. We provide all defense for this facility.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘The Federal Building doesn’t get military protection?’

‘We are military, sir,’ she said. ‘Just privately contracted by the Freedom Medical Foundation.’

Sam gave a slow nod and took a second look at her uniform. He studied the different items on her belt. She gave him a look and he realized studying her belt probably looked a lot like checking out her ass. He cleared his throat and made a show of pointing at one item. ‘Is that a... what do you call it, a taser?’

She shook her head. ‘Technically it’s a stun gun. Tasers shoot electrified darts. Same principal, different delivery system.’

‘Is that standard?’

She nodded. ‘They’re great against the junk—sorry, sir, the Baugh-ridden. They don’t even know enough to block it. You just hit them and they drop.’ She cleared her own throat. ‘Keep it up and I’ll be glad to demonstrate.’