Extinction (34 page)

After another minute they saw police cars up ahead. Four black-and-white cruisers rolled into the next intersection, about a quarter mile in front of them, and stopped in the middle of the road. The cops spaced the cars evenly, one in front of the other, so that they blocked all the traffic lanes, both inbound and outbound. There was nothing to do except turn around, but when Jim looked over his shoulder he saw four more patrol cars behind them. “Shit!” he yelled. “We’re trapped!”

Kirsten lifted her foot off the accelerator. “Should we stop? Get out of the truck and make a run for it?”

In frustration Jim smacked his prosthesis against the passenger-side door, and the truck’s narrow chassis rattled. But as he stared at the police cruisers blocking the road, he noticed something. The front bumper of the patrol car that blocked the right lane was about four feet behind the rear bumper of the car in the left lane. The gap between them was way too small for an ordinary car or truck to slip through, but the three-wheeler’s cab was only four feet wide. “Don’t stop!” he yelled, pointing at the gap. “Go right between them!”

“Jesus! Are you nuts?”

“Just do it!”

Frowning mightily, Kirsten adjusted the steering wheel, carefully aiming the truck’s nose. Jim leaned out the window and fired his Glock, putting the shot above the roofs of the cruisers. As he’d hoped, the police officers leaped out of their cars and scattered. Then Jim ducked back inside the cab and braced himself.

It was like driving full speed through a car wash. The bumpers of the police cruisers passed within inches of the truck’s doors. The cab sped through the gap without a scratch, but the truck bed smashed into a headlight. The rear end of the truck lurched to the left, and for a heart-stopping second the three-wheeler became a two-wheeler. But then the right rear wheel fell back to the asphalt, and after a hard bounce the truck straightened out.

“Holy fuck!” Kristen yelled. “Look behind!”

Jim turned around and noticed that the bale of hay wasn’t in the truck bed anymore. After being jolted into the air by the sideswipe, it came crashing down on the hood of one of the cruisers. The bale disintegrated on impact, showering the whole intersection with dried grass.

“Bull’s-eye!” he shouted. He was so ecstatic he kissed Kirsten on the cheek. “Nice driving, Kir. Keep it up and I’ll buy you a new blouse.”

She smiled but didn’t say anything. Another intersection was up ahead, and six more cruisers were speeding toward it from the left. Kirsten hit the gas again, pressing the pedal to the floor. Soon they were going at least ninety miles per hour, faster than any three-wheeled truck had ever gone, and they blasted through the intersection just ahead of the patrol cars.

Then the road leveled out and began to slope upward. About half a mile ahead, a high tree-covered ridge rose abruptly from the urban landscape. Jim peered at the hill through the truck’s windshield, trying to see if the road went over or around it. Then he noticed a concrete rectangle at the base of the ridge.

“It’s a tunnel,” he said. “We have to go through that tunnel to get to the downtown.”

Kirsten shook her head. “Damn it! They’ll stop us there for sure!”

“Well, we can’t turn around.” He pointed over his shoulder at the half-dozen cruisers that were about two hundred yards behind them.

“Shit, shit, shit! This is one hell of a vacation you booked, Pierce!”

She was still cursing as they sped into the tunnel’s entrance. Jim noticed that the traffic in the outbound lanes was much heavier than the inbound traffic. At any moment he expected to see the flashing lights of a police blockade inside the tunnel, but there was nothing but headlights and taillights ahead of them. And after a few seconds, he noticed that there were no flashing lights behind them either.

“That’s strange,” he said. “It looks like the cops didn’t follow us into the tunnel.”

“They don’t need to,” Kirsten replied. “The whole goddamn police force is probably waiting for us at the other end.”

After another few seconds, Jim saw the tunnel’s exit. At the same time, he heard a low rumbling. He wondered for a moment if there was also a train tunnel that went under this ridge. Then they burst out of the tunnel and emerged at a bustling intersection and, miracle of miracles, there wasn’t a single police car in sight. Just ahead was Xiling Road, Yichang’s main boulevard, full of luxury stores and neon signs and sidewalks crowded with pedestrians. The street was bordered on both sides by skyscrapers, an impressive double row of glass-and-steel towers. The tallest was more than fifty stories high.

Jim’s heart leaped. The riverfront was less than a mile ahead. It would be easy for them to ditch the truck there and disappear into one of the alleys, especially if the police weren’t right behind them. But instead of proceeding down the boulevard, Kirsten slowed the truck to a halt. “Jim, what the hell is that noise?”

The rumbling was louder now, a deep thunderous crashing that seemed to come from the west. Jim noticed that the pedestrians on the boulevard weren’t strolling down the sidewalks. They were running in terror away from the riverfront. Then Jim looked past the running people and saw the skyscrapers shudder. The tallest one swayed violently, then pitched forward and broke apart, disintegrating into hundreds of tons of steel and glass. And beneath the falling debris, a great black wave came raging down the street.

FIFTY-NINE

Supreme Harmony observed the inundation of Yichang. Module 104, who’d formerly been the chief of the city’s Public Security Bureau, stood on a high cliff overlooking the Yangtze River, at the eastern end of the Xiling Gorge. From its perusal of the Internet, Supreme Harmony had learned that this promontory had been the site of many battles during China’s long history. It was here, for example, that the Chinese Nationalists had stopped the Imperial Japanese Army from progressing up the Yangtze during World War II. And now the network was using these heights as an observation post for its first battle with
Homo sapiens
, a battle in which no guns or artillery pieces would be fired. In this engagement, Supreme Harmony’s weapon was water.

The Xiling Gorge was filled to the brim. The Yangtze River, which under normal circumstances flowed calmly eastward at the bottom of the deep trench, now sluiced through the gorge, its frothy surface sloshing against the cliffs on either side. The floodwaters rose so close to Module 104 that he could feel the spray from the roaring current. The color of the river had also changed. This stretch of the Yangtze was usually greenish brown, but the water had been blackened by the billions of tons of silt that had accumulated in the reservoir behind the Three Gorges Dam. According to Supreme Harmony’s calculations, the massive buildup of silt would’ve eventually caused the dam to collapse on its own, without any need for explosive charges. The network had simply hastened the inevitable.

Downstream from Module 104, the Yangtze widened. The floodwaters spilled from the gorge and overran a low island lined with shipyards. There were hills on the southern bank of the Yangtze that kept the floodwaters in check, but downtown Yichang occupied the broad, flat northern bank, only fifteen meters above the river’s normal level. The wall of water coming down the Yangtze was more than three times that height. Surging over the riverfront, it smashed into the city.

Because Supreme Harmony had access to the surveillance cameras that the Public Security Bureau had installed on every block of the downtown area, the network could view the destruction of Yichang as it happened, in real time. The video feed from Camera 168 showed an elderly man rising from a bench in the city’s riverfront park, staring in disbelief at the tall black wave rolling in from the west. The man turned to run, but in the next second the wave slammed down on both him and the surveillance camera, cutting off the video. The feed from Camera 232 showed a crowd racing down Minzhu Road just ahead of the floodwaters, which splintered the tenements on both sides of the street. Camera 307, located in the lobby of the Junyao International Plaza, captured the moment when the wave shattered the skyscraper’s windows, while Camera 308 showed the deluge punching through the building’s elevator banks and buckling the steel columns. The cameras in the lobby ceased operating half a second later, but Camera 451, located two blocks away, showed the damaged skyscraper lean to the side and crash into the adjacent building.

The video feeds raced across Supreme Harmony’s network, passing from the server hubs to all the Modules. The images streamed to the radio receivers in the Modules’ scalps, then to their retinal implants and the visual cortices of their brains, which performed their usual tasks of analysis and threat-detection. The workload was divided among the Modules, each analyzing a certain amount of footage and sending its results through its pulvinar implants to the rest of the network. And in less than fifteen seconds, Supreme Harmony detected a threat. It was in the surveillance video from Camera 514, located at the intersection of Xiling Road and Dongshan Avenue. The camera zoomed in on a three-wheeled truck in the middle of the intersection and captured an image of the man in the truck’s passenger seat. The network identified him as James T. Pierce, the former NSA agent whom Supreme Harmony had observed at the Great Wall near Beijing. And as the truck turned left in an attempt to escape the oncoming floodwaters, Camera 517 captured an image of Kirsten W. Chan, who sat in the driver’s seat. The truck accelerated down Dongshan Avenue, but the wall of water moved faster. The leading edge of the flood was just a few meters behind the vehicle when the surveillance cameras in the area stopped functioning.

Module 104 smiled. Supreme Harmony was victorious. And it anticipated even greater success. The deluge caused by the collapse of the Three Gorges Dam would surge down the Yangtze River far beyond Yichang, devastating the cities of Wuhan, Nanjing, and Shanghai as well. According to the network’s calculations, the death toll could rise as high as ten million. What’s more, Supreme Harmony had learned enough about human behavior to predict how the Chinese people would react to this catastrophe. There would be acts of heroism and outpourings of grief, but there would also be a furious desire for revenge. And this desire, so central to the human psyche, would ensure Supreme Harmony’s ultimate triumph.

SIXTY

Kirsten floored the gas pedal. The giant black wave was right behind the truck, but she refused to look at it. She kept her eyes on Dongshan Avenue, which ran alongside the base of the tree-covered ridge they’d just traveled under in the tunnel a few seconds before. Up ahead, on the left, she saw something extraordinary—a wide stairway rising from street level and climbing at least a hundred feet up the ridge. At the top of the stairs was a large building with an arched roof. It was probably a railway station, but that didn’t matter. The important thing was that it stood above the floodwaters.

Jim saw it, too, and pointed at the stairway from the passenger seat. He opened his mouth and yelled something at her, but Kirsten couldn’t hear him. She couldn’t hear the truck’s engine either, even though its overworked pistons had to be shrieking from the acceleration. All she could hear was the roar of the floodwaters, a deep, deafening noise that shook the truck’s chassis and echoed against the ridge. The stairway was still a hundred feet ahead, but the roaring of the black wave was right in Kirsten’s ears, maddening and relentless, like the voice of Death itself. She’d heard that voice once before, fifteen years ago in Nairobi, where Death had spoken one percussive syllable that shattered all the windows in the American embassy. But now the voice was louder and roaring with laughter.

The voice enraged Kirsten. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel and her foot mashed the accelerator, and she screamed, “
Fuck you! Fuck you, motherfucker!
” Then the stairway loomed in front of her, and she jerked the steering wheel to the left and the single front tire of their three-wheeled truck scudded over the steps.

The truck jangled and clanked and clattered up the stairway. Kirsten held on to the steering wheel for dear life while Jim gripped the dashboard. They ascended at an insane velocity, bouncing and juddering inside the truck’s cab. In less than three seconds, they were fifty feet above the street, high enough that the leading edge of the flood missed them. Kirsten dared a look at the rearview mirror and saw the black wave surging down Dongshan Avenue, tossing cars and trucks and buses in the air. But before she could breathe a sigh of relief, a second, higher wave rushed up the stairway and lashed against the truck bed. Kirsten lost control of the vehicle and they careened to the right, but their forward momentum carried them over the last steps. With a final jolt, the cab broke off from the truck bed and slid across the plaza at the top of the stairway.

The cab came to rest on its driver-side door. Kirsten was scrunched between her seat and the door, with Jim lying on top of her. After a bit of maneuvering, he slammed his prosthesis against the passenger-side door, bursting it open. Then he reached for Kirsten and helped her out of the wreck.

Once they were out of the truck and standing on the plaza, Jim looked her over. “You okay?” he asked. “Anything broken?”

She took a moment to examine herself. She had a few cuts on her hands and forearms, but no serious injuries. “Yeah, I’m okay.”

Kirsten expected him to grab her arm and start running across the plaza, but, instead, he stepped forward and hugged her. She looked over his shoulder and saw the stairway going down to the flooded city. Yichang’s downtown looked like a vast marsh with a thousand square islands, each a city block full of demolished masonry. Hundreds of overturned vehicles floated in the black water. And countless bodies.

She started to cry. Her ruined eyes could still do that. They filled with tears, but because her vision came from the video cameras in her glasses, the ghastly image of Yichang remained unblurred. “My God,” she whispered. “There’s millions of them. Millions.”

Jim tightened his hold on her. “It’s Supreme Harmony. The network did this.”