A few of the fans fluttered with increased vigor. A few more fell still. Jonas watched Doc Cornwell at the end of the conference table, frowning at some of the more animated older folks in the audience. She clutched at her medical bag, which she’d brought to every Emergency Committee since old Brian Pumfrey had keeled over of a heart attack in the second meeting while yelling at Leo Vaulk to stop acting like a damn Nazi.

  “We might have a day to prepare,” Muller went on. “Maybe more, possibly less. But prepare we must. The last good information we had from Fort Lewis on conditions in Seattle was not encouraging. The army had secured a number of food wholesalers, but gridlock on the city’s road networks badly disrupted all the evacuation plans. Most folks just could not get their cars out. As you know, plenty tried walking. A lot did not make it up the hill.”

  Jonas scoffed at the euphemism. He’d ridden up more than a thousand feet of incline to reach Silverton by the end of that first day. He was young, fit and strong and even he’d had a tough time of it. Your average couch potato woulda gassed out after a couple of miles. Lots of them probably died of heat stroke and heart attacks on the road behind him and he hadn’t even known.

  “We need to understand the scale of what’s coming,” Muller went on. “The population of the greater metropolitan area was just under four million, as of two weeks ago. Fort Lewis, FEMA, and the city council agreed on a casualty count of a hundred to a hundred and fifty thousand in the first week of the crisis.”

  A murmur went around the room.

  “Initially that was all about road trauma, power failure, that sort of thing. The immediate death toll was large but not significant. Not what the Army calls significant, at least. A couple of thousand people died in motor vehicle accidents. Hundreds were trapped in high rise elevators. Still are, but they’re gone now too. No water, you see. Kills folk a lot quicker than starvation. Three or four days at most.”

  The room had gone completely silent. Muller’s voice was low, but steady.

  “We’ve had some rain the last few days, of course. But not enough to make do when the power failed to the Public Utilities. We got access to the springs up in the hills. The city didn’t. The taps going dry was when we got that first real big surge of refugees. The ones we tried to reroute via the Skagit hydropower access road.”

  More murmurs greeted that, and a darker elemental growl of people recalling the moment they realised everything was not just going to sort itself out.

  “Yeah, and how’d that work out, Muller,” O’Shannassy said, but in a low voice, so only a few people heard the comment. The Sheriff ignored him.

  “Casualties down the hill piled up pretty quickly then,” he said to the room. “Mostly from dehydration and exposure as folks tried to hike out of the city. Fort Lewis said they started taking their first casualties from urban pacification at the same time. Gunfights, basically. With the army if you can believe it. Over food and water. And we seen some of that up here, too, with folks trying to break in through the cordon.”

  “Anyway, bottom line, ten days in and we got somewhere up over a hundred thousand dead in the greater metro area, and now there’s more’n three and half million people not so far southwest of us, who just found out they are on their own. Mister O’Shannassy is right. At least some of them will be headed this way. But I don’t believe we can meet them in the passes. There’s not enough of us for an expeditionary group. Too many will get past any pickets we post and too few of us would remain here to secure the cordon. We need to throw everything we got into hardening our defences at home.”

  Muller paused and looked directly at O’Shannassy.

  “The Gates. The Wall,” he said deliberately. “We will either hold them at our strongest point, or not at all.”

  Darren O’Shannassy had had enough of listening politely. He jumped to his feet.

  “Dave Muller is doing what he thinks best,” he said, confusing a few of his own supporters. “But he almost lost the town in the first week…”

  The room erupted again, this time it was Muller’s people shouting down his old foe. Jonas pounded away with his little wooden hammer as the meeting fell into chaos.

  Not his finest hour, he had to admit.

  He was tempted to knock a few heads together, starting with Muller and O’Shannassy, but in the end he didn’t have to.

  Howard Wetsman brought the meeting back to order.

  Howard fucking Wetsman.

  Can you even believe it?

  The County Comptroller was talking with Deputy Milfull, who had come spooking in through the connecting door to the Sheriff’s office. The two men leaned in close together and conferred in low voices, as though the chaos around them wasn’t happening.

  Howard Wetsman surprised the hell out of Jonas by climbing onto his chair and then, with Deputy Milfull’s help, onto the conference table around which the Emergency Committee had been sitting.

  “Excuse me, excuse me,” he said, waving his bandaged arm high.

  “Oh Howard do be careful,” Doctor Cornwell cried out.

  Jonas could barely hear them over the crowd, but the sight of the staid civil servant standing astride the agenda papers, his tasseled loafers very close to kicking over a water jar, was bizarre enough to quickly capture the attention of the whole room.

  “Excuse me,” Wetsman said again, a little louder, and with more success this time.

  The tumult died away.

  “Deputy Milfull has just come from the Seattle Gate,” he said. “A large group is demanding entrance to the town. They have weapons. They look like some sort of motorcycle gang.”

  17

  Blowback

  “I can’t believe you’re telling us this.”

  Mel Baker’s voice wavered somewhere between distress and outrage. Another unseasonably cool night had fallen on the Canaan Valley and she shivered inside her thick padded jacket. She hadn’t expected to need it. Hadn’t expected to need many clothes at all when it was just Rick and her planning a weekend away. But then things had gone bad and he’d warned her that even in summer, the high country they’d travel could turn bitterly cold at night.

  “You can’t believe what I’m telling you? Or that I’m telling you at all?” Michelle Nguyen replied. Her voice was flat, and almost devoid of emotion. Her eyes were unfocussed, as though she was looking into another world; not necessarily one better than this. Just different.

  “Both, I guess,” Mel conceded. She folded her arms, hugging herself against the chill.

  James said nothing. He’d been quiet since Michelle had confessed her fears about the BBC’s report of pandemic in China.

  “And you… worked on this?” Mel said.

  Michelle gave her a look.

  “I didn’t brew up the virus, no. I didn’t even know it was a virus. I just did threat vector analyses for blowback in scenarios like this. We had a generic code for it. Plan Jericho.”

  James’s mouth twitched.

  “For when the walls come tumbling down.”

  “Something like that, yes,” Michelle said. “Probably some Pentagon asshole with an Old Testament hard on. You’d be surprised how often you get that.”

  “No. I wouldn’t,” Mel said.

  They all went quiet again. Rick was gone for the night, patrolling the forest approaches to the campsite. Nobody suggested going to look for him. It would be stupidly dangerous for a whole bunch of reasons. Instead, the three campers sat on logs around the old tree stump, each hunched over, examining their own thoughts.

  Michelle had identified herself as some sort of intelligence analyst when they’d met back in Darnestown. She didn’t look it, with the blue black hair dye and all of the high concept tattoo ink. But Mel was familiar with her type from working around DC. Michelle had surely behaved as though she was plugged into the government at some deep and fundamental level.

  No, Mel corrected herself. Not just the government — The State.

  Or what some people had taken to calling the Deep State the last couple of years.

  Governments built libraries and handed out food stamps and wrote you your parking ticket when you were a bit thoughtless of your fellow citizens. As a copper she’d been the strong arm of government back in London.

  She’d been a guarantor of civilisation.

  The State was different. To her mind the State was a vast, black machine for doing violence on the world.

  A cool breeze reached up from the valley floor, cleaning out the last smells of the cooking and campfire. Over near the edge of the plateau Nomi chewed on a bone. For a little while the sounds of her gnawing on the bone were the only noise in camp. Mel stared across the Canaan Valley, trying to lose herself in the grand sweep of the wilderness. The sun had fallen below the mountains in the west and although it was not full dark yet, the lowland reaches were disappearing into shadow. Night birds sang to each other, and here and there a few tendrils of smoke rose into the sky from isolated cooking fires. The punters sitting around those fires would soon have to put them out.

  “Are you in danger?” James asked, breaking the reverie.

  “What?” Mel asked, looking back, assuming he was talking to her.

  “I meant Michelle,” James said. “If she was at risk? From this virus?”

  The young woman shrugged.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what sort of package they sent…”

  “Package?” James asked.

  “Sorry,” Michelle replied, subdued. “It’s just… you get used to thinking about things in certain ways, and to talking about them that way too. If there was a package—she sketched a pair of air quotes with her fingers—“it would’ve been a tailored virus, something with a recent history in the region, like bird flu or something. But they would have tweaked it to target a host population defined by some genetic marker.”

  “What?” Mel shot back. Her temper was finally slipping the leash. “Like slanty eyes? Or the wrong skin colour.”

  “Don’t be offensive,” Michelle said, but without much heat. “No, nothing in the phenotype. It would have been something to define a significant cohort of Han Chinese into the catchment population, while defining out everyone else. Or as many people as they could exclude.”

  Mel stood up, unable to stay seated any longer.

  “You’re telling me they built a killer flu bug, but just for the Chinese? It fuckin’ sounds like a white man’s dream weapon,” she said. “Smallpox in the blankets, that sort of thing.”

  Michelle smiled sadly at her. “I’m not a white man.”

  “And Rick is,” James added. “But he’s not responsible for this and neither is Michelle. Please, Mel, just sit down and let’s deal with this. Let’s get all the information we can for a start.”

  Mel nearly turned way and started to stomp off into the dusk, but there was nowhere to go. Just the forest and the edge of the plateau.

  And anyway, Michelle Nguyen’s empty, hollowed out expression cut across her disgust and anger.

  “I don’t know anything about the specifics of this Plan Jericho outcome,” Michelle said in a small voice. Even so, Mel could hear the capital letters marking this Jericho thing as a big deal. In her mind’s eye she saw buff covered folders stamped with TOP SECRET in red and the words PLAN JERICHO in plain black letters, six inches high.

  “I don’t even know if they went ahead with a plan,” Michelle Nguyen continued. “We would have retaliated for the Chinese attacks, for sure. Not just for the cyber strike but for the military attacks on Vietnam, the Philippines and the rest. We have alliance responsibilities. You were there for that, James. You saw what was happening in those meetings.”

  The investment guy nodded, first to Michelle and then to Mel Baker, as if to confirm the story just for her.

  “Looked to me like they were getting ready to drop bombs,” he said.

  “Bombs and missiles for sure,” Michelle confirmed. “But the Chinese were still denying they had anything to do with Zero Day. They only fessed up to the stuff we could actually nail them for. Sailing their fleet south, attacking Vietnam and Thailand and Malaysia, shooting the shit out of anyone who even looked sideways at them. Last I heard they were still denying they had anything to do with the drones that crippled the Seventh Fleet. They were calling out rogue North Koreans or some shit. Like there’s any other sort.”

  She looked at them, as if for support. Nobody said anything.

  Michelle Nguyen went on. “So I’m guessing we played their game. Deniable counter-value strikes. They killed millions of us. We kill millions of them. Nobody admits anything. And we all go down together.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Mel said, finally sitting down again, or really just collapsing as her legs folded underneath her. “You’re sure? This is madness, girl.”

  “Of course I’m not sure,” Michelle snapped, before apologising. “I’m sorry. This is hard and really awful. But I had to tell you. Because… I don’t know… I just…”

  She ran out of words.

  James O’Donnell reached across and took her hand, squeezing it gently. Michelle laid her head on his shoulder.

  Mel wondered whether they were sleeping together. They had seemed so close when they stayed over at Rick’s, and she had found them under the same blanket on the couch the next morning. But there seemed a distance between them, even now.

  “Right then. I apologise for getting angry,” Mel said, shortly. “It’s just that there’s so much trouble right now and this just seems to have no purpose but to add to it.”

  “It had a purpose,” Michelle replied. She took her hand from James. “To make sure they didn’t win. There’ll be other plans too. For the Russians. The Iranians. All of them.”

  An awkward silence followed, and James eventually stepped into it, again.

  “Do you have any idea how tightly targeted the virus would be? You know, assuming it was targeted at all.”

  Michelle shrugged.

  “Not my area of expertise, James. Maybe they focused on something like an enzyme deficiency, like an inability to digest dairy or something. Maybe some mad fucking scientist in a bunker in Nevada somewhere sequenced out a specific Y-marker that differentiated 99.94% of Han Chinese exclusively. I just don’t know.”

  “For somebody with no expertise in this shit you sound like you got a lotta fuckin’ expertise,” Mel said, but not in accusation as much as resignation. Of course things would get worse. Millions of people had probably died of hunger and thirst in America already. They were probably lucky nobody had decided to just fire off a bunch of nuclear weapons and be done with it.

  James stood up and stretched. He walked off a few paces, turned around and came back.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s look at worst case scenarios. This bug, or whatever it is, gets back here, somehow. What then? Is it gonna be like a Stephen King novel or something.”

  Michelle shook her head.

  “No. There’d be no point to that. Jericho was all about selective mass causalities. A discerning apocalypse, if you like.”

  “I don’t like, no,” Mel said.

  Michelle ignored the retort and went on.

  “If and when it gets here, anybody with the wrong gene marker is going to get sick and die. That’s it. That’s all. You guys will be fine.”

  “And you?” James said, sitting down next to her again. He reached for her hand and Michelle let him take it, but she did not return his grip.

  “I have no idea,” she said.

  Rick Boreham ghosted through the Eastern Hardwoods in the blue-black dark, all five senses so keenly attuned to the surrounding world that in concert they achieved a sort of transcendence, all five becoming one. It was not a new sensation. Not to Rick. But it had lain dormant within him for so long because he had not dared to wake it.

  He moved quietly though pooling shadow and pale moonlight, taking long pauses to drink in the night. He smelled the loam and dustiness of earth, the slow rot of dead leaves, and on the gentle breeze, a merest whiff of an extinguished campfire, not his own. These few wandering molecules of smoke and ash carried with them the scent of tinned beans and a sweet tincture of roasted marshmallow. He heard the scuttling of raccoons and above, the cry of a screech owl among the rustling leaves and creaking hardwood. A fallen twig bent, but did not break beneath his carefully placed step. The night was dark and pregnant with terror, but he was that terror which came upon the wary and the unwary alike, and thus he did not give himself over to fear, but instead to meditation.

  A killer’s meditation.

  Once upon a time, when he was done with killing, but found that killing was not done with him, the doctors at the VA had taught Rick Boreham to still his panicked thoughts and slow his racing heart by measured breathing and quiet focus. But this was not that. This was in some ways the opposite of that.

  Rick’s breathing was slow and deliberate, but instead of a telescoping his focus on some singular mental point, he unsealed his mind to a vast pouring flood of stimuli. So much rushed in through watchful eye and heedful ear, through the living parchment of his skin and the subtle filigree of fine hairs that covered it, through taste and smell and the tenebrous vibrations of earth and air, that collectively they became something weird and extrasensory. An otherness that Rick had come to think of as a third eye, the one that perceived everything, exactly as it was.

  This was how a killer meditated upon the world.

  And in his arms he cradled another killer; the captured M-4. Rick held his weapon at the low-ready, his thumb on the safety and his right index finger resting on the cold trigger housing. Standing silent in a thicket of fir trees he tasted instant coffee at the back of his throat, sweetened just sightly by the scent of sap, sticky and oozing from the rough bark a few inches from his face. He read the darkened Valley below, relaxed but alert, his nerves quietly humming with the old mortal song. This we will defend, they sang; his friends, his woman, his life.

  Three small fires, widely spaced, burned in the marshy lowlands, but many dozens more campsites held fast down there unseen. The points of light he could see were probably newcomers. Nobody who had been here when tracers lit up the night would be foolish enough to draw attention to themselves now. He did not wonder from where the newcomers had travelled. Such considerations were for the daylight hours and, to be frank, for others to ponder. He had simpler endeavours to be about.

 

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