A Separate War and Other Stories (18 page)

One-half of one percent of a million people meant five thousand carriers—survivors, they called themselves—living off the ruins of the city.

I didn't think Jain could have survived, she'd been so near death when we last talked. Then I found out they all had to go through that stage, and I had some hope that she'd lived. Then I saw what happened to the survivors, and I more than half hoped she hadn't.

Her name hadn't been on the casualty list, but about a third of the bodies hadn't been identified. She always was walking out without her purse.

Petroski came up with a short squad of riflemen, all armored like me. Only one, a sniper, actually had a rifle. The three others had Remington shoot-'em-ups, fully automatic shotguns. And I would be between them and their target, a comforting thought.

“What's the call, Lieutenant?”

I thought about the geometry of it. “Put the sniper and one other under that truck there.” I pointed. “The other two on the wall, maybe twenty yards left and right of the elevator. Hold fire until I give the order.”

“Or you get creamed. You trust that armor?”

“So nuke 'em if I get creamed.”

“If it's a flamer, Lieutenant,” the sniper said, “get down fast. I'll be shooting straight in. Your armor wouldn't do squat against this.” He patted his rifle with affection. It was a 60-mm. recoilless.

“Thanks. Try to aim a little high till I can get out of the way.” I nodded at their sergeant and he said “Go.”

They scurried off, darting from cover to cover as if it were a training exercise. They'd be safer tiptoeing. If the enemy had IR they would have fired at us already. They could hear them moving, though, and might fire at the sound.

Nothing happened. I started walking straight toward the elevator. I had an IR flashlight; transferred it to my left hand and drew the tangler.

By the time I was twenty feet away I could see that what sounded like a “tunnel” was a freight elevator with both front and rear doors open. Corridor beyond.

I chinned the command freek. “Lillian, get me a floor plan of this parking lot, and whatever's north on the same level. Am I walking into another big lot?”

She must have had it up already; it flashed onto my data side almost instantly, my own position a blue circle. “It's a service corridor,” she said. “Keep walking straight and you'll wind up in the Big Dig. About a thousand places to hide along the way.

“They're not gonna have much fog in there. You want another round to the north? We can probably get the corridor.”

“Not yet. Let me see what's what.”

“Okay. Your funeral.” Actually, there was a note of relief in her voice. She could shell an old target like the underground lot until Judgement Day, but every time they put a round in a new place, they had to follow up with an assessment team and file a damage report. This was still Boston that they were blowing up, and someday we'd have it back. What was left of it.

Moving as quietly as possible, I inched over to one side of the door and flashed the IR around it. Chinned the scramble freek: “It's an open elevator shaft, like eight feet to the door on the other side. No way I'm gonna try to jump it.”

“Want a couple grenades?” the sergeant said.

“Not yet. I—” There was a loud crash, and I flattened myself against the wall.

“What the fuck's goin' on?” the sergeant said. “We're gonna lay down some—” There was a loud
crack
and a 60-mm. round screamed down the corridor.

“No! Wait for my command!”

Then a scraping sound. Someone had dropped a metal plate across the shaft, and was pushing it.

The voice that had laughed whispered, “That you, Ardis?”

She knew my name and there was no mistaking the Jamaican lilt. “Jain! Get away from the door!”

“I am. I'm on the floor over on the side. You comin' over?”

“Yeah. Of course.” On the freek: “Everybody
hold fire
until I say otherwise!”

“Or if we lose your carrier wave,” the sergeant said.

I popped once for affirmative and stepped toward the metal plate. Then I stopped. “How did you know it was me?”

She laughed, from the little H, then forced herself to stop. “We…we're not dumb cavemen, Ardis. Someone monitoring the military web recognized your name and told me. I found out you were in charge of Track Seven and what your duty schedule was. It was pretty easy to set up this meeting.”

“Easy! What about the kid?”

“He volunteered. We were afraid you might kill an adult. Your partner, Mark, might. He has twenty-three kills, none of them children.”

“How did you know it wouldn't be Mark coming after you here?”

“I know you, Ardis. You wouldn't send him. Come across.”

The plate was about a foot wide. I had to look at it to place my feet, and tried not to think about how far down the shaft went. She took my hand for the last couple of steps.

“You be lookin' like Papa Legba,” she said. The armor was shiny black and formidable.

The fog was thin in the corridor; I could see her well. She was wearing a shabby jumpsuit that covered most of her body. Her face had some of the hard striations that were the aftermath of the disease, but to me they were like a contour map of her familiar beauty.

I stepped toward her, stepping into a dream; gathered her into my hard breast. Everything blurred. “Alive,” I said. “Jain.”

“God, my darling,” she sobbed and laughed. Then she held me at arm's length and stared into my faceplate. “Look, can anybody else hear what I'm saying?”

“Not unless I click them in.”

“Fast, then.” She took a deep breath. “Look, I'm not infectious. Nobody is.”

“What? What about Newton?”

“Just a prison.” She stifled a laugh. “Silly damned stuff. Look, we've had normal people live with us, they don't get no plague.”

“Then why not just show them?”

“Once when we tried, they just took everyone to Newton. Second time, they killed everyone. Not sure why; what's goin' on.

“We need you; we need someone in the power loop. Come live with us—come live with me!—for a few months, and then get back in touch with your people.”

I had a hundred questions. Then I got one myself: “Lieutenant! What the hell's goin' on in there?”

Without answering, I toed the steel plate and pushed it into the elevator shaft.

“Let's go,” Jain said.

“Just a second.” I took off the helmet, popped the cuirass, and stepped out of the armor. “They can home in on the armor.” I kicked off the boots and piled it all up in the corner. “Get out of here fast,” I whispered.

We slipped along the wall about fifty yards, and Jain lifted a piece of plasterboard that hid a hole big enough to wiggle through. “You first.” I crawled into a dark room full of boxes, feeling a little merry and playful from the whiff of little H. She followed me and as she pulled the cover back, I heard a gas grenade rattling down the corridor; heard it pop and hiss. “This way.” She took my hand.

We went through a silent door into another corridor, dark except for a cluster of three dim flashlights.

“Mission accomplished,” Jain said quietly. “Anybody have something for her to wear?”

“Jacket,” someone said, and handed it over, rustling. It was damp and smelled of rancid sweat, but at least it was warm. Sized for a large man, it came down to about six inches above my knees. It would look very fetching, if we ever got to somewhere with light.

We moved swiftly through the dark, too swiftly for barefoot me, afraid of tripping or stepping on something. But it gave me some time to think.

Jain wouldn't lie to me about this, but that doesn't mean that what she told me was true. She might unknowingly be passing on a lie, or she might know the truth and be in denial of it. In which case I was already walking dead.

I put that possibility out of my mind, not because it was unlikely but because there was nothing I could do about it. And I'd rather be uncertain and with Jain than safe in my track.

We stopped at a tall metal door. While everybody else played their lights on the bottom right corner of it, a big bare-chested man—my benefactor?—took a long crowbar to it. After several minutes of grunting and prising, the door popped open.

“This is a good defense,” Jain said. “It opens and closes easily from the other side, but nobody's going to just walk through it from here. This'll be a long ladder.” I followed the others to step backwards onto a metal ladder in the darkness.

It wasn't totally dark, though, looking down. There was a square, the floor, slightly less inky. I had an irrational twinge of modesty, my bare butt right above the stranger below me.

“Almost there,” Jain said from over her shoulder above me. “Headquarters.”

My foot hit carpeted concrete and I waited for Jain while the others went ahead. “So what's at headquarters?”

“Mostly supplies. Some low-tech communications gear. Everything's nine-volt solar power.”

It was a large warehouse room with dim lights here and there. Crates of food and water. A child's crib was a grab bag of miscellaneous cans and boxes; Jain rummaged through it and got a Snickers bar. “Hungry?”

“No, more like naked. You got clothes down here?” She walked me down a few yards, and there were clothes of all kinds roughly folded and sorted by size. I stepped into some black pants and found a black jersey, a fit combination for my new job as revolutionary turncoat, except for the Bergdorf labels. A fancy outfit to be buried in.

A tall skinny man walked up and offered his hand. “You're Lieutenant Drexel?”

“I don't think I'm Lieutenant anyone anymore. Ardis.” He was hard to look at. Besides the skin striations from the virus, a face wound had torn a hole in his cheek, exposing his back teeth.

He nodded. “I'm Wally, more or less in charge of this area. Has Jain filled you in?”

“Not much. You aren't actually carriers?”

“No. We may have been, right after we recovered. People who came in to help us died. We think it was leftover virus from the attack. But what we think doesn't make any difference.

“It left us weak. Old people who survived the attack all died in the first year; now people in their fifties and sixties are going the same way. Infections, pneumonia, bronchitis.”

“Our immune systems are shot,” Jain said. “If we don't get medical help, we'll all be dead in a few years.”

“We don't really understand what's going on,” Wally said. “They've got hundreds of us out at the Newton Center; we've seen them. You'd think by now they'd know that none of us are carrying the disease.”

“Maybe they wouldn't know, if they're really strict about quarantine,” I said.

“Not all of them are,” Jain said. “The guards wear surgical masks, but we've seen some take them off to smoke, even when there were ‘carriers' around.”

“Could just be carelessness,” Wally said. “We're trying to avoid a conspiracy mind-set here.”

I nodded. “Hard to see how it's to anybody's advantage to maintain the status quo. All of Boston shut down needlessly? Who profits?”

“Who set off the bomb?” Jain asked.

“Well, we assume—”

“But we don't
know,
right? Has anybody claimed responsibility?”

“No. Presumably they don't want to be nuked to glowing rubble.”

“What if it wasn't ‘them'? What if it was us?”

“Jain,” Wally said.

“Well, the bomb didn't go off in the business district or Back Bay. It went off in Roxbury, and if it hadn't been for the wind reversing, you wouldn't have had one percent white casualties. You don't like what that implies, Wally, and neither do I, but a fact is a fact.”

“I didn't know that,” I said.

“Well, they did find what might have been the bomb casing,” Wally said, “in the back of a blown-up truck down in Roxbury. Texas license plates. But there was a lot of that kind of damage in the riots, before everybody was too weak to riot.”

“I can take you down to see it. Pretty safe. Army doesn't do much down there.”

“Nightlights?”

“Go during the day. We only go out at night to attract attention.”

 

We did go out to see it the next day, and I could have made a case for or against Jain's suspicions. The Texas truck did have a tank in the back that had exploded, but the part that remained attached was identified as LP gas, which it seemed to have been using for fuel. Of course that might have been camouflage for a tank full of the mystery virus; the engine was set up to switch between LP and gasoline.