Fail State, page 10
part #2 of End of Days Series
"Steady on there, Jodes. Keep it sweet. Show them your pretty smile. In fact, why don't you walk out there where they can get a good look at you?"
She started to move towards the stern, but he stopped her with a gentle hand on her elbow.
"Better leave the gun here, Darlin’. Just put it it at your feet. No sudden moves."
She was shaking, but she did as he told her.
"When it starts, you drop to the deck as quickly as you can, okay?" Damo said quietly.
"When what…"
The two vessels thumped into each other, and all four men standing at the bow of the other boat started to crab walk forward, meaning to jump across.
“NOW!" Damo roared.
Ellie and Karl stood, each racking a round into the chamber of their shotguns as they did so. The boarding party seemed genuinely surprised. One of them even threw up his hands. Another, one of the men with an assault rifle, tried to raise it. Karl got off three shots in the time Ellie squeezed out two.
The one man they didn't cut down with gunfire was the pilot of the vessel. He dived over the side of the boat and started swimming for shore.
Karl covered the bodies of the other men while Ellie threw off the grappling hooks.
One of the bodies rolled into the water. None of the others moved.
"Jesus, Damo. What did we just do?" Jodi said, her voice shaking.
"Better them than us, mate," he said, before calling back to Karl, “Are we clear back there?"
Karl gave him a thumbs up, and Damo fed a little power back into the engines moving them clear of the drifting vessel.
"You better go look after Max," Damo said. "Poor little bugger is probably pissing his pants down there."
13
(Interlude)
Lucy Harkins scanned the darkened seas with a powerful pair of binoculars; every now and then she would lower her PVS-14 monocular for a look around as well. The Commander had ordered a double deck watch; the fire-shot night was alive with malign intent. Her ship, the USS John Paul Jones, was slowly cruising between Long Beach and Catalina Island. Their mission was fucked-up; they were to intercept any threats from the People’s Liberation Army Navy. The Arleigh Burke class destroyer was the best that could be managed in a very compressed time frame, but they would throw themselves between Los Angeles and whatever appeared over the horizon.
She shook her head as she looked around once more. The shore was alight with fires and occasional tracer fire, it looked more like Yemen or some other dump than anywhere in the US should. At this rate, she thought, there wouldn’t be much left to defend. The city seemed to be tearing itself apart; she was too far out to hear much but her mind filled in the explosions and the rattle and pop of gunfire.
Lucy’s job was complicated by hordes of yachts, sailboats, and anything that would float. The piloting skill of the various watercraft reflected the eclectic mix on the water; some ships stayed carefully out of the destroyer’s way. Others seemed not to notice her at all. For those that got too close there was a spotlight, followed by warning flares, and finally warning shots. The Rules of Engagement were clear; a ship that was perceived to be a threat would be fired upon. No second chances.
Everyone remembered the USS Cole. As she played her binoculars over the far shore she shuddered. It must be pure hell in LA, she thought. A speedboat sped vaguely in the Jones’s direction to starboard; she keyed her radio.
“Oscar, this is Watch Five.”
The officer answered. “Send it, Five.”
“Be advised, speedboat to starboard, eight hundred meters.”
“Roger, we are tracking.”
“Five out.”
She could hear the M242 25mm Bushmaster behind her whining as it tracked the boat. Before anyone so much as hit the speedboat with the spotlight, however, she veered off. Lucy let out a breath. This was hairy as shit, she thought. People were gonna get themselves killed out here. Lucy wondered how the wider war was going, she wondered about friends who were stationed out at Pearl. They had to be going nuts out there, just like 1941.
Lord knew there was plenty of panic on board, she thought. The Jones had been dispatched with haste from San Diego, the mission brief had been terse, rushed. The crew had been preparing for yet another deployment cycle, so at least they were at full strength, unlike some ships sent forth with haste from the USN’s main west coast base.
And now they were here, defending a riot-torn Los Angeles from a real-world Chinese attack. Supposedly.
Lucy spotted something odd through her binos, but the flickering shadows of the coastline were messing with her ability to see what exactly it was. She lowered the binoculars and hit the lever on the NVGs.
She saw a greenish gray, slightly grainy nightscape with some flaring light sources, appearing as fuzzy, glaring white dots in her field of view. One obscured what she wanted to look at, so her night vision was worthless as well. She knew there was something out there, though. Something small, moving slowly. She lifted her Harris radio again and pressed the ribbed call button.
“Oscar, this is Watch Five.”
“Go ahead, Five.” The words were clipped. Terse. Lucy wondered how many of these calls he was fielding.
“I’ve got something at maybe four hundred meters, starboard, about three o’clock. Can you see anything with thermals?”
“Give me a minute, Five.”
Lucy said nothing, she waited, peering into the flickering dark. Something was out there. She knew it for sure. The seconds ticked by.
“Looks like a rowboat of some sort, with four souls aboard.” A pause. “Good eye, Five.”
“Roger, Oscar.” Lucy flipped up her night vision, it wouldn’t do to look at the target with NVG’s when the spotlight came on. She was just in time, as the powerful light speared through the darkness like a laser. It searched the waves for a moment, then fixed its target. Lucy could see the little boat clearly. She could see its occupants, too. Looked like a man and two kids, they were waving frantically and pointing at something. Something in the boat that Lucy couldn’t see. What was it? These people didn’t look like a threat, but maybe the suicide bombers who attacked the Cole didn’t, either. The man started to row furiously toward the bobbing destroyer, and through her binos Lucy could see his determined grimace. They were damn good binoculars, a pair of Steiners with a reticule. Lucy imagined that she could hear the man pant as he heaved on the oars. What the hell, she wondered, would bring a man to risk the sea at night in a row boat? Hell, with the chop it was a miracle that he’d made it out this far. She shook her head. The row boat kept moving, inching, in the destroyer’s direction.
He was within three hundred meters when someone aboard fired a flare. Lucy scanned her sector and then returned to the row boat, it continued to come. Slowly, but steadily the man pulling on the oars was making headway.
Lucy knew the next step was a loud-hail and warning shots. Her radio crackled.
“Five, this is Oscar. You watching that boat?”
“Yes, Oscar.”
“Is it a threat?”
Lucy’s armpits tingled as they pumped out cold sweat. Her mouth went dry. She keyed the radio.
“Probably not, Oscar.”
“Yes or no, Five.”
She needed to pee. Lucy took a deep breath. What if that dinghy was packed with explosives? Did that man look Asian? So what if he did? And she thought of those kids. The Bushmaster would turn them into so much loose meat. There was no time. The boat was getting closer. She keyed the mic.
“No, Oscar.” She let out a breath. Whatever happened, it was her responsibility.
“Roger, Five.”
As the Jones searched the sky for ballistic missiles, the little boat approached. Lucy saw Marines covering the rowboat with a machine gun and rifles. Someone hailed them with a megaphone, but she was too far away to hear the response. The man at the oars looked weary unto death. Lucy could finally see down into the rowboat: there was a woman, her torso stained with blood, lying in the bottom.
What the fuck was happening ashore?
Lucy squared her shoulders and maintained her vigil. She had made the right decision.
She wiped her sweaty palms on her dungarees.
But the night was still young.
Jennifer hadn’t minded her transfer to the ICU. Floor nurses generally had a low opinion of the life: demanding doctors, families insane with fear, and the constant life-and-death demands at every moment. There was a high turnover rate from burn out, but that’s exactly why Jennifer didn’t mind. She burned out on the hypochondriacs in the outpatient clinic. A shift in the ICU was never dull. This is what she had gone to nursing school for.
Even the set-up of the Mercy General unit had impressed her. A central station surrounded by six glass-enclosed bays so the two nurses on duty could see everyone at once. You could almost run things without moving from the station seeing that everything that happened with the patients was displayed in real time on the station’s screens. Even ventilators and IV drips were wired for remote control from the station. Bay Central was at the cutting edge of tech. Someone still had to go in and check on the patients, but really it was the tech that made the staffing ratio work. That’s why everything was going so wrong.
They told her that Sacramento was different. It was protected now, a stronghold city. There weren’t just Marines and Army guys everywhere. Doctor Volker, who was an Army Reserve Colonel, told Doctor Ludgrove on the Board that the Cyber Command had even moved units into the city. The shit that happened everywhere else would not be happening here.
Except it was, and to Jennifer’s patients.
Mrs Castile was 82 and vent dependent. She would only be able to breathe on her own again if the pulmonary swelling from her pneumonia lessened. Then they could wake her from the medically induced coma she needed to be in on the vent. In the old days it was unheard of to go to such lengths at Mrs Castile’s age, but she had still been playing tennis every week before she got a chest infection that went bad. Her immune system just couldn’t fight it off and she hadn’t sought help until she was quite ill. Her family was lovely, still visiting every day, even after they’d been assigned to work gangs. And always brought flowers and even cookies for the staff.
The cookies were appreciated, because of the rationing.
So the vent was keeping Mrs Castile alive. But the vent wasn’t working any more.
An hour after Jennifer’s shift started, the four ventilators currently serving six patients had started to glitch. The computer system was supposed to control the rate, gas mix and pressure. Once you set the vents, they ran by themselves, protecting the patients from too much pressure on their lungs. But now the computers were acting up. Alarms tried, warning that the pressure was spiking. Jennifer as the lead on shift had no choice but to turn them off and manually bag the patients. That, of course was why instead of two nurses and four aids staffing the unit, there were currently three people in each of the four vent-dependent bays.
She had pulled staff from the emergency department which was now calling them back. Administrators were on the phones trying to get more staff in but Jennifer needed those spare hands now.
They told everyone that Sacramento was different.
This place was supposed to be safe.
Mrs Castille’s heart rate monitor started to ping an alert.
“Cardiac arrest!” Nurse Tabbard cried out.
Jennifer moved.
There was no time to wonder whether the computer was just glitching, or if it might be something worse.
She had a patient to save.
Dante Phelps hated his shoes. They had seemed like a good choice when he started his trek, they were a stylish but comfortable seeming pair of basketball trainers with red accents. Now they chafed his heels with every step. The blisters on the bottoms of his feet squished and burned as well, but he couldn’t stop.
Not if he valued his life ; that much was clear. Those who stopped lay all around him. And they wouldn’t be getting up again. An old woman with an oxygen tank. A hugely fat man, his face gray and featureless in death. A young mother with a gaping, ugly gunshot wound, her children screaming beside her body.
There was a carpet of corpses strewn between, and sometimes under, all the tightly packed, stopped cars on the US 87 through Yonkers. They were stinking, bloating: the broad highway was a sunny charnel house.
Twenty-four hours ago, he’d never seen a gunshot wound. But during his escape from his stuffy and waterless apartment in Corona, Queens, Dante had seen a battle’s worth. In a city where gun ownership was supposed to be tightly controlled he’d seen way too many of them.
The route to the RFK bridge had been absolutely packed with people when he made the decision to leave. It was like New Year’s but murderously worse. The only police he saw were dead, and with all the fires burning out of control he thought the firemen must be gone, too. One smart decision he had made was to climb up on the rails and use the Hell Gate Bridge to cross over the East River. Thinking back that had probably saved his life. For now.
He heard another gunshot, then a flurry of them. He ducked behind a car and hurried forward, his eyes stung with the black, acrid smoke that hung like a funeral pall over the highway leading north. Dante wore nothing but a checkered short sleeved shirt and a pair of Tsubi jeans; he wished he had a flak jacket. He clutched his precious half-full bottle of Evian in his hand, his two chocolate-chip Clif bars squished in his pocket. Someone had stolen his daypack with its precious, if meagre, supply of organic quinoa protein balls hours before.
Dante was breathing fast, almost panting. His mouth was dry. He looked along the highway for some sign of the shooter, or shooters, but he couldn’t see anything. Please God, he thought, let me get away from here. I don’t want anything but to get out to the country and get some food.
As he crouched and rushed forward, he had the vague mental image of a black and white cow, like the ones pictured on milk cartons. The cows always seemed to be smiling, eager to be used as food.
Dante sure wasn’t smiling. He swore if he lived through this he would never smile again. He kept moving forward. His body tensed for the bullet that would strike home with a whisper, a curious noise he had heard for the first time that morning. In the crowds, the bullets never missed. Someone always seemed to get hit. They would fall underfoot and be smashed to a pulp by the human tide.
He was crushing a child’s body at that exact moment, in fact. He felt a squishy feeling, like stepping on a crunchy water balloon. He made the mistake of looking down. Dante moaned. His shoe was planted firmly on the child’s ribcage, and filth leaked from her dead mouth.
Oh God, oh God, oh fucking God, he thought.
A bullet plinked into the car beside him.
Dante made his shoes move.
14
Instagram baller pirates
Damo was saying something, but Ellie Jabbarah wasn’t really listening.
She’d just killed a man. Maybe two.
She’d sure as shit pulled the trigger on at least one of them. But everything happened so fast. And Karl had been standing right next to her, blasting away, and the bodies had been coming apart, and dropping hard…
“We really gotta move now,” Damo said.
Ellie shook her head, trying to escape the fugue state that was stealing over her.
Am I in shock?
“Hey baby? You did good. I was so proud,” Jodi cooed, wrapping her arms around Ellie and squeezing, but not too hard.
“You okay, El? You need a moment, mate?” Damo asked.
Why was everyone talking to her like she was a child?
She looked for Maxi. He might know. But he was nowhere to be seen. The sun glinted fiercely off the waters of the Tract. Silver bursts of light exploded from the polished chrome trim of the pirate boat, which was connected to Damo’s by a bright orange rope.
Ellie frowned. She thought she had cut the lines to the speedboat.
“We should get in out of the sun," Karl said. "Miss Ellie, she looks a little pale to me. It's a helluva thing, killing a fella. Even if he was trying to kill you."
"I'm fine," Ellie said, struggling to find her voice. “I’ll be fine.”
She had done tougher days than this. She would do harder ones yet.
The other boat, still draped with dead bodies, all of them leaking blood into the water, bumped up against the stern of the Lassiter's Reef.
“We should put a little distance between us and these arse clowns," Damo said.
"You don't want to check their boat for salvage?” Karl asked him. “Maybe siphon their fuel?”
Damo seemed to consider the question seriously, but then he looked at Ellie. He wasn't certain what he saw in her eyes, but he shook his head. "We can always come back later, clean up then. Come on, let's get out of the sun. And out of here."
“No,” Ellie said, forcing her voice out through numb lips. “Check their boat. Strip it for anything useful. Weapons, ammo, food, fuel. Take it all. They’d have done the same to us.”
“You sure?” Damo asked, frowning.
She nodded and Jodi hugged her again.
Karl and Damo were twenty minutes ransacking the other vessel, and half of that was taken up with Karl siphoning as much of their fuel as he could. They left the bodies and took everything they could transfer. It wasn’t much compared to what they had on the Reef. But Ellie supposed that explained why these guys had come at them. They were jackals.
Jodi kept a lookout while they made the transfer. Ellie, who was possessed of a ropey, tenacious strength, helped Damo and Karl loot the other vessel. She noted with a sort of dull surprise that they had a lot of primo shit in crates and boxes. Jars of caviar. Tins of cassoulet. A fucking case of Veuve Clicquot. These guys were like Instagram baller pirates.
