Rogue clone (37 page)

I did not make it all the way to Safe Harbor before nightfall. Crossing the gullies and blown out sections of road slowed me down. By late afternoon, I was only two or three miles from the outskirts of the city. I was close enough to see it clearly, but I did not want to travel into that urban tangle in the darkness. As the sun set and the sky took on streaks of amber, orange, and gold, I set up camp just inside the forest and ate an MRE that I had scrounged from the Starliner.

Once night fell, I hiked out of the woods to have a look at the distant city. No lights shined in the tall buildings. Some glow rose from the street. There might have been fires in dumpsters and trashcans. Maybe a few small stores had gone up in flames. The glow suggested controlled fires, but you never knew.

When morning came, I would make my way into the city. I would travel to Fort Washington, the stricken Marine base. I wanted combat armor. The sensors and lenses in a combat visor would help as I searched for Freeman and Callahan.

Resting in the woods, sleeping in the dark because I did not want to give away my position by building a fire, I thought about Safe Harbor, and Honolulu, and the Mars Spaceport, and the city they called Hinode on Ezer Kri. These had all been busy, thriving cities. I tried to imagine what it would be like to walk through these cities today, but the only image I could conjure was a spaceport terminal packed with millions of people fleeing their homes. I remembered frightened children and crying women and general silence.

In the morning, I ate another MRE and finished the hike into town.

The last time I came into Safe Harbor, the city was empty but perfectly preserved, like a museum exhibit. Now it more truly fit the profile of a ghost town. Looters had gutted the small stores on the outskirts of town. Some buildings were burned down.

There had been few cars along the street on the night of the attack. Now I found cars parked in the middle of the streets. These cars must have been found, driven dry, and abandoned. Not that I was in any position to condemn car thievery.

Safe Harbor had become a patchwork of prime city and war zones. A few blocks into town, I walked into a neighborhood that had probably survived the Hinode attack only to be sacked and destroyed by gangs. This had been an up-scale residential area with two-and three-story apartment buildings, parks with playgrounds, and hedges along the sidewalks.

Hinode lasers had not done this damage. The streets were intact but there were bullet holes everywhere. The windows and doors of the apartment buildings were broken in. Some buildings had been gutted by fire. The windows of these buildings were blackened from smoke. Beds, toys, and clothing littered the streets. The people who sacked this neighborhood had taken everything they wanted, then, in an anarchic feeding frenzy, destroyed everything they did not want. I looked at the stuffed animals, the toy cars, the books, and the furniture and thought about the families I passed in Safe Harbor spaceport. The thieves were like wild dogs, like a goddamned pack of dogs. Soon I would run into them, and my newfound respect for human life would not help me. I began to wonder if I would have the ability to pull the trigger when the moment came.

Without people, cities become uncomfortably quiet. Walking through Safe Harbor, I heard my own breathing and the soft clap of my footsteps. I turned one corner and heard the pop of automatic fire. This happened on the outskirts of the financial district, an area filled with monolithic skyscrapers that seemed to slide out of the sky.

One of the buildings across the street from where I stood had a circular drive lined by four flagpoles. From those poles hung flags representing the Unified Authority, the Orion Arm, New Columbia, and Safe Harbor. A strong wind pushed those flags. They snapped and waved. Holding my M27 before me, my right forefinger over the trigger and my left hand supporting the stock, I paused to look at the flags. The financial district stretched on for blocks, three square miles of city real estate covered by fifty-and sixty-floor buildings with marble façades and glistening windows. The looters would certainly have come into the financial district; but they could not break these inch-thick windows with simple bricks and they would not waste bullets trying to decorate this part of town. Some of the buildings had protective louvers across their entries. The looters would need to find better tools before they could enter these buildings. They would need lasers or explosives. I wondered just how well armed the looters might be. I saw snatches of sky between the buildings. It was blue and cloudless, and it glowed. The day would turn hot and humid by midafternoon; but for now, the temperature remained in the high sixties and a cooling breeze rolled through the city.

A few blocks into the financial district, I located the remains of an Army checkpoint. I smelled the destruction long before I saw it. The scents of decay, dust, and fire became stronger. Then I turned a corner and confronted it. The men who erected the barricade had prepared to face looters, not battleships. A few laser blasts had reduced their tanks and armored transports to slag. There was one spot in which a laser had dug a six-foot pit in the middle of the street. The laser carved a perfectly round pit. The laser melted the road around the pit, heating the tar until it boiled. The tar had cooled days ago, but the acrid smell of melted tar lingered in the air. The men guarding this checkpoint would have died at their post before deserting. They were government-issue clones, heavily programmed and damned near incapable of abandoning an assignment. A direct hit from those laser cannons could turn an entire platoon to ash, and the heat from a near hit would kill a man, but they would have stayed. If there had been bodies left after the attack, the looters carted them away.

Taking one last look around the destruction, I sighed and continued on. From here on out, I would travel through smaller streets and alleyways. As long as I continued heading north and east, I would end up somewhere near Fort Washington. When Ray Freeman arrived in Safe Harbor, the Marine base was the first place he would have visited.

After another hour, I found my way into a retail district. Going from the deserted financial district into a retail section was like stepping out of a forest and finding yourself in a pasture. As I moved through alleys, working my way around pallets and the layer of trash that carpeted this portion of town, I heard an engine growl.

Moving through the empty streets of Safe Harbor, the hum of an engine sounded as foreign to me as the roar of a dinosaur. This was not a car, I could tell that easily enough. If it was a truck, it was a large truck. If I had to guess, I would have said it was an armored transport from the Marine or Army base. No self-respecting corporation would own such a noisy truck.

I switched from my M27 to my particle beam pistol as I peeked around a corner. Ahead of me I saw a four-way intersection over which hung a blacked-out stoplight. From here on out, I would need to move more cautiously. I was entering enemy territory. This was gangland. Anybody and everybody was the enemy.

Traveling from lot to lot, hiding behind walls and fences whenever I could, I worked my way forward. I tracked down the sound of that truck engine. Soon I heard voices.

“Hey, guys, look at me! I’m a specking Marine.” The man who said this had a low voice that sounded utterly without intelligence.

The buildings in this area, mostly two-and three-story commercial structures with block-length display windows and awning-covered entrances, had been looted and gutted. The glass in the display windows was shattered. In one window, dozens of naked mannequins lay piled on top of each other like logs in a fireplace.

The building directly behind me was a looted diner. The people who broke into the restaurant seemed to have had a certain reverence for it. They did not break the windows or steal the tables and chairs. Except for a missing door, the restaurant looked clean enough to open for business. Whoever was talking was right around the corner from me when he said, “Careful with that, it’s worth something.”

“This thing? I wouldn’t want to wear it. It’s got clone meat inside it. Clone probably rotted all over it.”

“I’m telling you, that helmet is worth something. That Marine combat armor, that’s good shit.”

“If you don’t want it, I’ll take it,” a third voice said. “I’ll give you five hundred bucks for it.”

I did not recognize the voices. I knelt in a shadow to listen for clues about who these men were.

“Money doesn’t buy jack,” the first man complained.

“Might sometime.”

“Only if the government comes back. If that happens, we’re all screwed.” That was the second speaker, the only one who sounded like he could read.

“I’ll trade you a canned ham for it,” the third man offered.

“A canned ham? No shit?” the man sounded impressed.

Staying low to the ground, I slipped over towards a broken display window. The floor inside the display was covered with sparkling shards of glass. Whatever had been on display inside this window must have been valuable since the looters had picked it clean.

I climbed into the window and found an open door that led into the store itself. This particular shop had sold gourmet foods, not that there was anything left on the shelves. Posters showing kosher this and imported that covered the walls. Banners for cheeses and special brands of coffee hung from the ceiling. Toppled refrigerator display cases, demolished shelves, and cast-away shopping carts littered the floor. The store was huge and dark except for the bright sunlight that shined in through small windows in distinct rays.

I sorted my way through the wreckage. Checkout stands were pushed over and computerized registers lay on the floor, their drawers hanging open and empty. Stepping over a register, I approached the front door of the store and peered around the edge.

The plaza did not look busy by any stretch of the imagination, but it was well-trafficked. It looked like a downtown shopping district might look on a Saturday afternoon, in a city that closed on weekends. Groups of men and women sat on walls or around a fountain. The fountain was full of sloshing blue water, but its jets were turned off.

I recognized the canned ham boys instantly. They were the ones standing around the corpse of a Marine. The biggest of the men had stripped the helmet off of the dead clone and held it in his hands. As I watched, he placed one boot on the dead man’s back. I decided the man was an idiot as I watched him hold the helmet to his face and stare into the visor. “What’s so good about this thing?”

I could have used that visor. In my personal opinion, Marine combat armor, with its audio sensors and lenses, was the most important innovation in soldiering since the invention of gunpowder. Also, I did not like seeing these grave robbers abusing the body of a fallen Marine. Looking around the plaza, I noted that all of the men were armed. Most had government-issue M27s. They must have taken these from dead soldiers and Marines. I wondered if looters had found their way to Fort Washington and how thoroughly they had picked over the base.

“Why do you want this so badly?” the goliath with the helmet asked the runt sitting beside him.

“No reason, I just like the look of it.”

“You wouldn’t have offered a ham for it for no reason.”

At the edge of the plaza, three men looked under the hood of an Army supply truck. The truck’s dark green paint stood out against the cement courtyard and slate fountain. Any number of warlords had probably carved up the city and claimed sections for themselves. I had located some warlord’s stronghold. There were a couple of heavy-caliber machine guns mounted on the front and back of the truck, but if that was the best this dime store daimyo could do, he and his tribe would not last long.

“Throw in some chocolate bars and you can have it,” the big man said.

“I ate all my chocolate bars,” the runt sounded embarrassed. “How about a half-box of Twinkies?”

I went back into the store and let myself out through a window on the other side.

The warlords with downtown territories mostly concerned themselves with survival. They held small areas, kept their gangs grouped in tight clusters, and gathered whatever small arms they could find. I passed more than one dozen similarly doomed fiefdoms on my way through Safe Harbor. What if every city in the galaxy had degenerated this way? Had Washington, D.C. been carved up by a handful of self-appointed warlords? Maybe not. Maybe cities like Safe Harbor, cities that had been evacuated, collapsed more readily into anarchy. Cities that still had soldiers and police to keep the peace might be okay. It occurred to me that this anarchy was probably not restricted to U.A. territory, either. The Confederate Arms probably had the same problem.

As I reached the outer suburbs around Fort Washington, however, I discovered signs of a different disorder. Someone had claimed these streets, and I had a pretty good idea of who had done it. Someone painted the letters JC on signs and walls. Like a dog urinating to mark its territory, JC, possibly Jimmy Callahan, had painted graffiti around this part of town. On one larger building I saw, “JC ‘Resurrection’.”

“Resurrected,” I thought, it had to be Callahan.

I thought about Silent Tommy and Limping Eddie, the two men who had been his bodyguards. Were they his seconds-in-command? The notion of Jimmy Callahan running this section of town should have made me laugh. Instead, it sent a chill through me.

The ruins of Fort Washington blended in with the stores, churches, and houses in this ugly suburb. I found my way into a neighborhood that could only have been officer housing. The houses were three-bedroom jobs that all looked alike from the outside, right down to the flower beds and white picket fences. These homes had no more floor space than a two-bedroom apartment. They had patios the size of postage stamps and shingled roofs. Looking up the drive-ways, I saw upended tricycles and plastic swimming pools. I could almost hear the children playing.

Not wanting to approach the fort in daylight, I broke into one of these homes and hid inside it until nightfall. The front door of the house had been marked with a red JC, but the contents inside had not yet been picked over. I entered a clean kitchen that was orderly except for the pile of dirty dishes in the sink. Inside the pantry I found a jar of peanut butter that I ate by the spoonful as I waited for sunset. The officer who had lived in this home was a family man with a pretty platinum-blond wife and two little boys. I saw pictures of the family on the walls. The boys shared a single room sleeping on bunk beds with steel tube frames. Searching the house, I found a flashlight and a cheap pair of binoculars, both of which I took. I also found a book of fairy tales and a Bible, both of which I left behind. The wife had jars of fruit preserves in the garage. She and the boys had undoubtedly left the planet during the mass evacuation. Even if he was alive, her husband would never find them again. Not without the Broadcast Network.