Fail State, page 2
part #2 of End of Days Series
Michelle found her legs did not work as they should, and she stumbled as Mel pulled her away. Turning her back on all those guns and blank faces, she tripped over Nomi and blundered into Mel. Nomi scurried out of the way, and Mel absorbed the awkward collision without fuss to carry her a few steps back up the road, towards where James and Rick waited in the car. It seemed a long way off in the distance.
2
An old woman speaks in dog farts
The end of the world had arrived. It just wasn’t evenly distributed. Darkness fell hardest where the light of civilisation had burned with the brightest splendour. The crew of the International Space Station were ideally placed to observe the dying cities of the North American continent, but immediately after the Chinese cyber-attack on the US, there was surprisingly little to note. Unlike the morning of the 9/11 atrocities, no vast grey plumes soared into the atmosphere like dark volcanic ejecta.
Indeed, as the edge of darkness crept across the continent at the end of that first day, the Canadian crew member, Dan Frith, noted that the dense filigree of electric brilliance that traced the veins and arteries of urban life far below, seemed noticeably brighter – a consequence of tens of millions of automobiles trapped in gargantuan traffic jams. Second order effects of the cyber strike, such as panic buying, creeping hunger, and eventual mass starvation were not readily obvious from four hundred kilometres above the Earth’s surface, unlike the accelerating collapse of the power grid over the following week and a half.
It would be six months before the continental United States was completely dark, save for a few hundred pin points of light scattered far from the ruins of the great cities. But by then the four men and two women who had observed the trifling struggles of mankind as the Gods once had looked down from Olympus, had themselves perished. No NASA missions came to their rescue. The European Space Agency, like Europe itself, was taken into the maw a new Dark Age. Roscosmos, ESA’s Russian equivalent was quickly militarised with the outbreak of hostilities on the Eurasian landmass, and just as quickly destroyed in the short, brutal war that followed.
Roscosmos was always an unlikely hope for salvation, Frith noted in one of the last mission logs. A quirk of the crew rotation schedule meant that he had replaced the previous Russian crew member, Cosmonaut Colonel Danya Spasojevic, when the final Soyuz docked with the space station, two weeks before the catastrophe that came to be known, however briefly, as Zero Day.
Nobody read Frith’s mission log.
The ISS burned up on re-entry fifteen months and two days after General Chu Jianguo of the 2nd Bureau, Third Department of the People's Liberation Army General Staff pressed a single bright red key, labeled ENTER, to launch Operation Golden Path.
Unit 61398, the spearhead of the PLA’s digital war-fighting regiments, was designated by foes in the US military and intelligence complex as an ‘advanced persistent threat’. It did not long remain so.
With two fleets of the People’s Liberation Army Navy heavily engaged in combat with at least four US allies in South East Asia, the President authorised independent operations by those US forces which survived the precision attacks on the 7th Fleet. One such asset was SSN 777, also known as the North Carolina, a Virginia-class fast attack submarine which had been lurking sixty fathoms beneath the Taiwan Strait when China’s East Sea Fleet put out from Ningbo and Shanghai.
Appraised of the location and track of the enemy’s passage by encrypted satellite burst, Captain Michael Sharp ordered Helmswoman Nicola Webster to bring the North Carolina around. The boat’s ninth generation nuclear reactor fed full military power into the pump-jet propulsors, accelerating her to 35 knots as she raced into engagement range with Admiral Wen Bo Xi’s carrier battle group.
Seven minutes before Sharp would have ordered the release of an anti-surface ship strike package, orders arrived from the national command authority re-tasking the 777 onto a priority land attack mission. Sharp was the very model of professional restraint, keeping wholly to himself his opinion of such a strategically ruinous directive. He ordered his crew to reformat the weapons package. The sailors in the boat’s payload module were every bit as professional as their commander, but they were not subject to the strictures and constraints of command rank.
As they swapped out the anti-ship weapons for a smaller flight of long range cruise missiles, they volubly cursed the treasonous stupidity of their civilian masters. All to no avail, naturally. Captain Sharp ordered the launch as soon as the track was plotted. Six long range cruise missiles shot from the vertical launch tubes along the North Carolina’s spine, breaking surface a few seconds later and burning away towards the Chinese mainland. They speared into the headquarters of Unit 61398 after thirteen minutes of supersonic flight time, obliterating the entire complex in a small supernova.
General Chu was not there. Most of Unit 61398 was not there, having been dispersed to alpha sites before launching their strike on the American foe. Eventually, more missiles would end them, but not for a little while. And General Chu was not among their number when the second, more successful strike came in.
He was at home, in bed with a cold.
He had contracted the cold, which grew rapidly worse, from his driver and bodyguard, Lieutenant Bo Min. The good lieutenant had his dose from a girlfriend, a dancer at the Flower Drum Club in Shanghai, and she in turn had encountered the HPAI B1 subtype virus from a contractor, hired as a cut out by an agent of the CIA’s Special Activities Division.
The Agency had not chosen the contractor imagining that he would deliver America’s vengeance upon General Chu Jianguo. The contractor was infected because he was Han Chinese and so lacked an enzyme which worked as a trigger to kill the replicator switch in the tailored virus. He was also known to the Agency as a source of synthetic opioids, a massively lucrative business which had blighted millions of American lives over the previous decade. The Agency were not moral arbiters. They had chosen on occasion to use the contractor because he did good work. On this occasion they chose him because he was biologically suitable, but also well placed. It was not possible to run a business such as he did without at least the tacit approval, if not active connivance, of the state security apparatus in China.
Thus Contractor P7X-T9 was judged to be a viable transmission vector for delivering the virus directly into the social circles occupied by the highest levels of the PLA and Chinese Communist Party.
As indeed he was.
The bug leapt from the contractor, to the dancer, to the driver to the general, and from them to 99.94% of everyone they encountered during the three day incubation phase.
There were three hundred contractors.
The virus spread rapidly.
Within three days, Li Wei, a five-month-old boy in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, tossed about in his little bed, his tiny face scrunched up as he whined. He rubbed his ears and his nose ran with clear snot. He seemed overtired and unusually irritable to his mother, Chen. She changed his nappy and was alarmed to discover a quite striking rash on his upper thighs. It had not been there half an hour ago. It was not a common diaper rash and she wrung her hands as she debated calling her mother in law. Her own mother lived in distant Fuzhou; her husband Chao’s family was here in Hangzhou. Chen and Chao had met at University, and their marriage had been fairly happy, even when Chao travelled so much. She knew he did important work for the State, although she wasn’t entirely sure what. It paid the bills, however, and there were so many of them with a new baby. It seemed impossible to get ahead of them.
Li Wei squealed and writhed and Chen put aside thoughts of her absent husband. She put a slender hand on her son’s forehead. He felt very hot. Her sleek Vivo cell phone lay on the table; it was one of the rewards for a family with a sky-high Social Score.
Should she call?
She gave her son a worried glance. He rubbed his ears with his tiny fists and bawled raucously. The cry grated on Chen’s nerves. Was she a bad mother to feel it so?
Enough, she thought. Enough! She reached for the phone, swiped to unlock it and scrolled down to one of her least favoured contacts, her mother-in-law. Chunhua the dragon. She had set the phone up to display a terrible fire breathing lizard when Chao’s mother rang. As she did often to berate Chen for her poor parenting and lack of wifely virtue.
Just dialing this number felt like failure. But she pressed on. The phone rang, her son sneezed and choked.
“Hello?”
“Good morning, I have a question for you, if you have time?”
Chen felt like an idiot. This was a mistake.
“Of course you do. Speak then, child.”
Chen’s ears burned. Child. She had a diploma in organic chemistry, and she would surely return to work in a few months. Child! You speak in dog farts, old woman, she thought. But Chen held her tongue and spoke.
“Your grandson is sick, he has a strange rash.”
There was a pause on the phone, and when Chunhua spoke again she was all business. “Does he have a fever?”
“Not a bad one. His temperature is thirty-eight.”
“No, that is not so bad. What does the rash look like?”
“It’s on his thighs, it’s hard to describe.”
“Does it look mottled, like lap cheong sausage?”
“Kind of, I suppose.”
“Your supposing will not suffice! I need to look for myself. I will be there within the hour.”
The dragon cut the call.
Gah! What had she done?
Chen paced the room. Her baby cried.
She had done the right thing, she assured herself.
Chunhua was not a good person, but she was a retired army nurse, very senior, with many commendations from the state. Chen had to trust her opinion in this matter if nothing else.
The hour spent waiting stretched out like dry rubber. Li Wei remained restless and crabby. Chen wandering continually to the big window overlooking the city, far below. The view had once thrilled her. Now she felt like a prisoner in a high tower.
The door chimed at last and her diminutive mother-in-law pushed into the apartment, nodded brusquely at Chen and marched directly to the crib. She reached down, picked up her grandson and placed him on the changing table. Chunhua sucked through her teeth as the boy whimpered.
“Ai! I called a friend at the hospital and she said they are seeing this a lot and some patients are getting very sick.” She looked over the baby, who was naked. He shivered and wailed. “This rash is one of the symptoms.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how widespread it is; there is nothing on the news. But sometimes that can be the worst sign.”
“I’m sure the government knows about this. They will do something,” Chen said.
Chunhua’s expression twisted. “Yes, of course they will.” She opened her mouth as if to say more, then she closed it. She pursed her lips and finally went on. She looked at her grandson. “I have never seen something quite like this.” She paused and closed her eyes. She opened them. “I don’t think they can quarantine all of Hangzhou.”
Chen gasped. “Quarantine! How serious is this?”
Chunhua busied herself with her grandson. “I do not know.” She wrinkled her brow and looked at Chen. “I will stay and watch him. You will make tea and dumplings. I have not eaten yet.”
It was not a request. But it was a concession. Chunhua famously refused to eat Chen’s dumplings, even though Chao loved them. Ha! Probably because he loved them.
Chen nodded. She would make the dumplings if it helped her son.
As she headed for the kitchen her nose tickled and she sneezed.
Ten thousand kilometres from the bright, sun-lit eyrie of Chen Lin Li’s luxurious forty-second floor apartment, Donna Barolo sneezed too. And coughed. But she was not infected with the HPAI B1 virus. She had burned her own hair trying to light a cigarette and inhaled the foul smoke from the greasy, unwashed ringlet.
Donna had been saving the cigarette, the last in her pack.
It was going to kill her. She knew that, and not in some abstract way. Donna Barolo was going to die because she had stepped into an elevator about fifteen seconds after a lieutenant in the PLA’s Unit 61398 unleashed a packet of malign code specifically designed to attack the software running on the servers of four, large commercial property management businesses in the US.
Donna worked for the international law firm Baker and Mackenzie. Bakers, as they were known, retained one of the four targeted businesses to provide building management services in their brand new office tower in LA. There was nothing specifically about Bakers which attracted the attention of Unit 61398. Nothing much, either, about the property management firm they retained, other than its size and market reach, which drew it into the targeting reticle of the PLA. Operation Golden Path simply called for maximum disruption to the urban infrastructure of America’s major cities, as a feint to draw the enemy’s attention away from the critical strike in South East Asia.
Donna Barolo became part of that feint when she stepped into the fourth car in a bank of six elevators which serviced the offices of her employers on floors 33 to 39 of the 55 storey tower in downtown LA. Donna, a paralegal, needed a cigarette and nobody was around to tell her otherwise. The senior partners were all in some crisis meeting; those who were in the office, at least. Half the lawyers and support staff hadn’t made it into work because of the insane traffic.
Four, maybe five seconds after Donna stabbed at the button to take her to the ground floor, the elevator car jerked to a stop and the lights went out.
“Shit,” she muttered.
Donna clicked on the torch on her phone. She always had her phone in hand, even today, even though there had been no service since the previous day. (Another effect of Unit 61398’s diligence). Donna raised the big ass Samsung up in the air, before genuflecting in the hope that some stray signal would connect. It didn’t. The phone’s flashlight threw her shadows up the wall like a looming ghoul.
The elevator’s emergency handset, which she tried three minutes later, was dead, and would remain so ever after. Donna held out for just over an hour before anxiety and nicotine cravings got the better her and she tapped out her first cigarette. She was almost disappointed when the smoke alarms did not sound.
Seventeen thousand six hundred and eighty-two elevators went down across the United States on the second day of Operation Golden Path, the massive militarized Chinese cyberattack which became known to the survivors, as Zero Day. None ever came back online again. Many people were rescued. But many more were not. Over the next week more than thirty thousand people like Donna Barolo died of thirst in the dark.
It was what the war planners of the 2nd Bureau, Third Department of the People's Liberation Army General Staff called a ‘second order effect’.
There were many of them.
3
The best money he never made
Jonas Murdoch lay in bed before dawn, thinking about that twenty-five grand. He was never going to collect the reward payment. He knew that. And not because the cops back down in Seattle would snap the cuffs on him for punching Omar in his fat face back at the warehouse. Or for stealing his roomie’s mountain bike and nearly nine hundred bucks in cookie jar savings, all before fleeing the city.
Nope.
Jonas knew he’d never collect that twenty-five large because the federal government which had offered the money as a reward for the capture of Eladio Morena no longer existed.
Neither did Morena as far as Jonas knew, but he could give less than one wet shit about that.
It was still dark outside, and his Spartan habits had not entirely fallen away, even as the world fell apart around him. Jonas always rose early. This morning he woke, as he had for the past week and a half, in the best cabin out back of Big Al’s Diner, in the village of Silverton, nestled into the first folds of the High Cascades. A former logging town, a couple of hours northeast of Seattle, Silverton had fallen back on the tourist grift when all of the old growth forest had been worked out. The first week of Fall had come upon the picturesque little village with crisp mornings and a hint of frost, even as the long brutal summer heat threatened to creep back into the day most afternoons.
Jonas stretched luxuriously under a single blanket on the king-sized bed and rolled over to place his half-erect penis between Tomi Yates deliciously warm and agreeably firm butt cheeks. Like him, she was naked, and after a moment of sliding his cock up and down between those well-toned ass cakes, Tomi groaned and started grinding back into him.
After some slow-n-easy rubfucking, just to say good morning, Jonas had a rail spike boner and Tomi guided him into her from behind. Their fucking quickly turned noisy and feral.
She came first and Jonas flipped her over and finished on top, roaring like a bull as he shot his wad.
Fuck yeah. That twenty-five grand was the best money he never made.
Sheriff Dave Muller, who both loved and looked a bit like a glazed donut, had put Jonas in for the reward after he’d body-slammed Morena in Silverton’s main street. Not the sort of vigilante action a straight-arrow like Muller would normally encourage, but Morena had been punching the jellied shit out of Al Barrett, owner of Big Al’s and sponsor of Silverton’s three junior high sports teams and, for good measure, the town’s amateur landscape painting club.
It was not a mystery to Jonas why nobody else had stepped up to save Barrett’s life — and nobody doubted that Jonas had done just that, least of all Big Al himself. Morena’s attack had been fast, savage and calculated to dissuade any local heroes who might try and prevent him from stealing the thousands of dollars in cash Al had just withdrawn from the S&L on Main Street.
Jonas was neither a local boy, nor a hero.
He attacked Morena in a blind rage because the greasy fucking bean-eater was pounding on Al in the middle of the road, where Jonas was speeding along on his stolen bike. Motherfucker almost made him crash, avoiding the fight as he came around the tight curve into town at speed. Reason enough to lose his temper. But Jonas Murdoch was not just a bicycle thief. He was a proud All-American five-star bigot who purely fucking hated wetback assholes like Eladio Morena. He had good reason for that, but long story short, Jonas had kicked that shithead into raw taco meat when everyone else in Silverton was too paralysed by abject fear and confusion to do much of anything but stand and watch like drooling retards.
2
An old woman speaks in dog farts
The end of the world had arrived. It just wasn’t evenly distributed. Darkness fell hardest where the light of civilisation had burned with the brightest splendour. The crew of the International Space Station were ideally placed to observe the dying cities of the North American continent, but immediately after the Chinese cyber-attack on the US, there was surprisingly little to note. Unlike the morning of the 9/11 atrocities, no vast grey plumes soared into the atmosphere like dark volcanic ejecta.
Indeed, as the edge of darkness crept across the continent at the end of that first day, the Canadian crew member, Dan Frith, noted that the dense filigree of electric brilliance that traced the veins and arteries of urban life far below, seemed noticeably brighter – a consequence of tens of millions of automobiles trapped in gargantuan traffic jams. Second order effects of the cyber strike, such as panic buying, creeping hunger, and eventual mass starvation were not readily obvious from four hundred kilometres above the Earth’s surface, unlike the accelerating collapse of the power grid over the following week and a half.
It would be six months before the continental United States was completely dark, save for a few hundred pin points of light scattered far from the ruins of the great cities. But by then the four men and two women who had observed the trifling struggles of mankind as the Gods once had looked down from Olympus, had themselves perished. No NASA missions came to their rescue. The European Space Agency, like Europe itself, was taken into the maw a new Dark Age. Roscosmos, ESA’s Russian equivalent was quickly militarised with the outbreak of hostilities on the Eurasian landmass, and just as quickly destroyed in the short, brutal war that followed.
Roscosmos was always an unlikely hope for salvation, Frith noted in one of the last mission logs. A quirk of the crew rotation schedule meant that he had replaced the previous Russian crew member, Cosmonaut Colonel Danya Spasojevic, when the final Soyuz docked with the space station, two weeks before the catastrophe that came to be known, however briefly, as Zero Day.
Nobody read Frith’s mission log.
The ISS burned up on re-entry fifteen months and two days after General Chu Jianguo of the 2nd Bureau, Third Department of the People's Liberation Army General Staff pressed a single bright red key, labeled ENTER, to launch Operation Golden Path.
Unit 61398, the spearhead of the PLA’s digital war-fighting regiments, was designated by foes in the US military and intelligence complex as an ‘advanced persistent threat’. It did not long remain so.
With two fleets of the People’s Liberation Army Navy heavily engaged in combat with at least four US allies in South East Asia, the President authorised independent operations by those US forces which survived the precision attacks on the 7th Fleet. One such asset was SSN 777, also known as the North Carolina, a Virginia-class fast attack submarine which had been lurking sixty fathoms beneath the Taiwan Strait when China’s East Sea Fleet put out from Ningbo and Shanghai.
Appraised of the location and track of the enemy’s passage by encrypted satellite burst, Captain Michael Sharp ordered Helmswoman Nicola Webster to bring the North Carolina around. The boat’s ninth generation nuclear reactor fed full military power into the pump-jet propulsors, accelerating her to 35 knots as she raced into engagement range with Admiral Wen Bo Xi’s carrier battle group.
Seven minutes before Sharp would have ordered the release of an anti-surface ship strike package, orders arrived from the national command authority re-tasking the 777 onto a priority land attack mission. Sharp was the very model of professional restraint, keeping wholly to himself his opinion of such a strategically ruinous directive. He ordered his crew to reformat the weapons package. The sailors in the boat’s payload module were every bit as professional as their commander, but they were not subject to the strictures and constraints of command rank.
As they swapped out the anti-ship weapons for a smaller flight of long range cruise missiles, they volubly cursed the treasonous stupidity of their civilian masters. All to no avail, naturally. Captain Sharp ordered the launch as soon as the track was plotted. Six long range cruise missiles shot from the vertical launch tubes along the North Carolina’s spine, breaking surface a few seconds later and burning away towards the Chinese mainland. They speared into the headquarters of Unit 61398 after thirteen minutes of supersonic flight time, obliterating the entire complex in a small supernova.
General Chu was not there. Most of Unit 61398 was not there, having been dispersed to alpha sites before launching their strike on the American foe. Eventually, more missiles would end them, but not for a little while. And General Chu was not among their number when the second, more successful strike came in.
He was at home, in bed with a cold.
He had contracted the cold, which grew rapidly worse, from his driver and bodyguard, Lieutenant Bo Min. The good lieutenant had his dose from a girlfriend, a dancer at the Flower Drum Club in Shanghai, and she in turn had encountered the HPAI B1 subtype virus from a contractor, hired as a cut out by an agent of the CIA’s Special Activities Division.
The Agency had not chosen the contractor imagining that he would deliver America’s vengeance upon General Chu Jianguo. The contractor was infected because he was Han Chinese and so lacked an enzyme which worked as a trigger to kill the replicator switch in the tailored virus. He was also known to the Agency as a source of synthetic opioids, a massively lucrative business which had blighted millions of American lives over the previous decade. The Agency were not moral arbiters. They had chosen on occasion to use the contractor because he did good work. On this occasion they chose him because he was biologically suitable, but also well placed. It was not possible to run a business such as he did without at least the tacit approval, if not active connivance, of the state security apparatus in China.
Thus Contractor P7X-T9 was judged to be a viable transmission vector for delivering the virus directly into the social circles occupied by the highest levels of the PLA and Chinese Communist Party.
As indeed he was.
The bug leapt from the contractor, to the dancer, to the driver to the general, and from them to 99.94% of everyone they encountered during the three day incubation phase.
There were three hundred contractors.
The virus spread rapidly.
Within three days, Li Wei, a five-month-old boy in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, tossed about in his little bed, his tiny face scrunched up as he whined. He rubbed his ears and his nose ran with clear snot. He seemed overtired and unusually irritable to his mother, Chen. She changed his nappy and was alarmed to discover a quite striking rash on his upper thighs. It had not been there half an hour ago. It was not a common diaper rash and she wrung her hands as she debated calling her mother in law. Her own mother lived in distant Fuzhou; her husband Chao’s family was here in Hangzhou. Chen and Chao had met at University, and their marriage had been fairly happy, even when Chao travelled so much. She knew he did important work for the State, although she wasn’t entirely sure what. It paid the bills, however, and there were so many of them with a new baby. It seemed impossible to get ahead of them.
Li Wei squealed and writhed and Chen put aside thoughts of her absent husband. She put a slender hand on her son’s forehead. He felt very hot. Her sleek Vivo cell phone lay on the table; it was one of the rewards for a family with a sky-high Social Score.
Should she call?
She gave her son a worried glance. He rubbed his ears with his tiny fists and bawled raucously. The cry grated on Chen’s nerves. Was she a bad mother to feel it so?
Enough, she thought. Enough! She reached for the phone, swiped to unlock it and scrolled down to one of her least favoured contacts, her mother-in-law. Chunhua the dragon. She had set the phone up to display a terrible fire breathing lizard when Chao’s mother rang. As she did often to berate Chen for her poor parenting and lack of wifely virtue.
Just dialing this number felt like failure. But she pressed on. The phone rang, her son sneezed and choked.
“Hello?”
“Good morning, I have a question for you, if you have time?”
Chen felt like an idiot. This was a mistake.
“Of course you do. Speak then, child.”
Chen’s ears burned. Child. She had a diploma in organic chemistry, and she would surely return to work in a few months. Child! You speak in dog farts, old woman, she thought. But Chen held her tongue and spoke.
“Your grandson is sick, he has a strange rash.”
There was a pause on the phone, and when Chunhua spoke again she was all business. “Does he have a fever?”
“Not a bad one. His temperature is thirty-eight.”
“No, that is not so bad. What does the rash look like?”
“It’s on his thighs, it’s hard to describe.”
“Does it look mottled, like lap cheong sausage?”
“Kind of, I suppose.”
“Your supposing will not suffice! I need to look for myself. I will be there within the hour.”
The dragon cut the call.
Gah! What had she done?
Chen paced the room. Her baby cried.
She had done the right thing, she assured herself.
Chunhua was not a good person, but she was a retired army nurse, very senior, with many commendations from the state. Chen had to trust her opinion in this matter if nothing else.
The hour spent waiting stretched out like dry rubber. Li Wei remained restless and crabby. Chen wandering continually to the big window overlooking the city, far below. The view had once thrilled her. Now she felt like a prisoner in a high tower.
The door chimed at last and her diminutive mother-in-law pushed into the apartment, nodded brusquely at Chen and marched directly to the crib. She reached down, picked up her grandson and placed him on the changing table. Chunhua sucked through her teeth as the boy whimpered.
“Ai! I called a friend at the hospital and she said they are seeing this a lot and some patients are getting very sick.” She looked over the baby, who was naked. He shivered and wailed. “This rash is one of the symptoms.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how widespread it is; there is nothing on the news. But sometimes that can be the worst sign.”
“I’m sure the government knows about this. They will do something,” Chen said.
Chunhua’s expression twisted. “Yes, of course they will.” She opened her mouth as if to say more, then she closed it. She pursed her lips and finally went on. She looked at her grandson. “I have never seen something quite like this.” She paused and closed her eyes. She opened them. “I don’t think they can quarantine all of Hangzhou.”
Chen gasped. “Quarantine! How serious is this?”
Chunhua busied herself with her grandson. “I do not know.” She wrinkled her brow and looked at Chen. “I will stay and watch him. You will make tea and dumplings. I have not eaten yet.”
It was not a request. But it was a concession. Chunhua famously refused to eat Chen’s dumplings, even though Chao loved them. Ha! Probably because he loved them.
Chen nodded. She would make the dumplings if it helped her son.
As she headed for the kitchen her nose tickled and she sneezed.
Ten thousand kilometres from the bright, sun-lit eyrie of Chen Lin Li’s luxurious forty-second floor apartment, Donna Barolo sneezed too. And coughed. But she was not infected with the HPAI B1 virus. She had burned her own hair trying to light a cigarette and inhaled the foul smoke from the greasy, unwashed ringlet.
Donna had been saving the cigarette, the last in her pack.
It was going to kill her. She knew that, and not in some abstract way. Donna Barolo was going to die because she had stepped into an elevator about fifteen seconds after a lieutenant in the PLA’s Unit 61398 unleashed a packet of malign code specifically designed to attack the software running on the servers of four, large commercial property management businesses in the US.
Donna worked for the international law firm Baker and Mackenzie. Bakers, as they were known, retained one of the four targeted businesses to provide building management services in their brand new office tower in LA. There was nothing specifically about Bakers which attracted the attention of Unit 61398. Nothing much, either, about the property management firm they retained, other than its size and market reach, which drew it into the targeting reticle of the PLA. Operation Golden Path simply called for maximum disruption to the urban infrastructure of America’s major cities, as a feint to draw the enemy’s attention away from the critical strike in South East Asia.
Donna Barolo became part of that feint when she stepped into the fourth car in a bank of six elevators which serviced the offices of her employers on floors 33 to 39 of the 55 storey tower in downtown LA. Donna, a paralegal, needed a cigarette and nobody was around to tell her otherwise. The senior partners were all in some crisis meeting; those who were in the office, at least. Half the lawyers and support staff hadn’t made it into work because of the insane traffic.
Four, maybe five seconds after Donna stabbed at the button to take her to the ground floor, the elevator car jerked to a stop and the lights went out.
“Shit,” she muttered.
Donna clicked on the torch on her phone. She always had her phone in hand, even today, even though there had been no service since the previous day. (Another effect of Unit 61398’s diligence). Donna raised the big ass Samsung up in the air, before genuflecting in the hope that some stray signal would connect. It didn’t. The phone’s flashlight threw her shadows up the wall like a looming ghoul.
The elevator’s emergency handset, which she tried three minutes later, was dead, and would remain so ever after. Donna held out for just over an hour before anxiety and nicotine cravings got the better her and she tapped out her first cigarette. She was almost disappointed when the smoke alarms did not sound.
Seventeen thousand six hundred and eighty-two elevators went down across the United States on the second day of Operation Golden Path, the massive militarized Chinese cyberattack which became known to the survivors, as Zero Day. None ever came back online again. Many people were rescued. But many more were not. Over the next week more than thirty thousand people like Donna Barolo died of thirst in the dark.
It was what the war planners of the 2nd Bureau, Third Department of the People's Liberation Army General Staff called a ‘second order effect’.
There were many of them.
3
The best money he never made
Jonas Murdoch lay in bed before dawn, thinking about that twenty-five grand. He was never going to collect the reward payment. He knew that. And not because the cops back down in Seattle would snap the cuffs on him for punching Omar in his fat face back at the warehouse. Or for stealing his roomie’s mountain bike and nearly nine hundred bucks in cookie jar savings, all before fleeing the city.
Nope.
Jonas knew he’d never collect that twenty-five large because the federal government which had offered the money as a reward for the capture of Eladio Morena no longer existed.
Neither did Morena as far as Jonas knew, but he could give less than one wet shit about that.
It was still dark outside, and his Spartan habits had not entirely fallen away, even as the world fell apart around him. Jonas always rose early. This morning he woke, as he had for the past week and a half, in the best cabin out back of Big Al’s Diner, in the village of Silverton, nestled into the first folds of the High Cascades. A former logging town, a couple of hours northeast of Seattle, Silverton had fallen back on the tourist grift when all of the old growth forest had been worked out. The first week of Fall had come upon the picturesque little village with crisp mornings and a hint of frost, even as the long brutal summer heat threatened to creep back into the day most afternoons.
Jonas stretched luxuriously under a single blanket on the king-sized bed and rolled over to place his half-erect penis between Tomi Yates deliciously warm and agreeably firm butt cheeks. Like him, she was naked, and after a moment of sliding his cock up and down between those well-toned ass cakes, Tomi groaned and started grinding back into him.
After some slow-n-easy rubfucking, just to say good morning, Jonas had a rail spike boner and Tomi guided him into her from behind. Their fucking quickly turned noisy and feral.
She came first and Jonas flipped her over and finished on top, roaring like a bull as he shot his wad.
Fuck yeah. That twenty-five grand was the best money he never made.
Sheriff Dave Muller, who both loved and looked a bit like a glazed donut, had put Jonas in for the reward after he’d body-slammed Morena in Silverton’s main street. Not the sort of vigilante action a straight-arrow like Muller would normally encourage, but Morena had been punching the jellied shit out of Al Barrett, owner of Big Al’s and sponsor of Silverton’s three junior high sports teams and, for good measure, the town’s amateur landscape painting club.
It was not a mystery to Jonas why nobody else had stepped up to save Barrett’s life — and nobody doubted that Jonas had done just that, least of all Big Al himself. Morena’s attack had been fast, savage and calculated to dissuade any local heroes who might try and prevent him from stealing the thousands of dollars in cash Al had just withdrawn from the S&L on Main Street.
Jonas was neither a local boy, nor a hero.
He attacked Morena in a blind rage because the greasy fucking bean-eater was pounding on Al in the middle of the road, where Jonas was speeding along on his stolen bike. Motherfucker almost made him crash, avoiding the fight as he came around the tight curve into town at speed. Reason enough to lose his temper. But Jonas Murdoch was not just a bicycle thief. He was a proud All-American five-star bigot who purely fucking hated wetback assholes like Eladio Morena. He had good reason for that, but long story short, Jonas had kicked that shithead into raw taco meat when everyone else in Silverton was too paralysed by abject fear and confusion to do much of anything but stand and watch like drooling retards.
