John Adams - The Living Dead 2

“Few others could claim the same.

“When the dead rose up, most of the world’s cities died just like their people. Winking out, then blindly rising to attack their neighbors.

“Like very few others-and Tokyo came closest-San Francisco kept the lights on throughout the crisis, and shone a beacon to the world. The New San Francisco would not just be the last city on Earth, she would be the greatest.

“We never set out to merely rebuild the old order; we used the breakdown to sweep away old mistakes, and make the kind of world we always knew we should have.

“And while the rest of the world sank deeper into chaos, we toiled and dreamed and dared to grow our City for three hard, uncertain years, until-as viewed from space-she was clearly the brightest light yet emanating from our godforsaken planet, and the only real, living city left on Earth.

“History is full of tough, rotten choices and unfair judgments. And few will be more unfair than the condemnation of what we made, by those who failed even to keep the lights on in their own homes.”

4:47 a.m. Down at Candlestick Park, twenty miles outside the Green Zone, the predawn gloom gave way to icy castles of toxic fog. “The Bargain of Kali Yuga,” his Master had called it, once again proving his divine prescience.

Everywhere upon the earth, darkness had won. But here, there was still hope.

This house is surrounded by light…

Ajay Watley was on guard duty on top of the east pedestrian ramp of the long-dead athletic stadium, holding down the sacred perimeter. Below him, the parking lot was a ten-acre graveyard of gutted cars and scattered bones he scanned with amped thermal imaging goggles. He had a sixty-caliber Squad Automatic Weapon, a walkie-talkie, and an old iPod blasting his alertness mantra.

This house is surrounded by light…

Ajay had been a devotee of Bhagwan Ganguly for four years before the Master’s prophecies came true, and he had never had reason to doubt. All of the Master’s visions had come to pass, even the date and hour of his death.

But since then, his commands had become erratic, and tended to change, depending on who transcribed them. When he said to move the ashram to the city, Ajay almost risked his karma by raising doubt.

The dead had indeed been swept out of San Francisco.

But their worst enemies here were not the dead…

No birds called, and no fish swam, as the Higgins boat sailed out of the fog and into the lagoon behind the stadium. In this place where hopeless Giants fans in kayaks used to paddle around waiting for Barry Bonds’ home runs, the vintage military ship-to-shore vessel ran aground like a sea lion, unnoticed.

The ramp dropped and slammed the mud.

And the Oakland Raiders came stomping out onto land.

A flurry of movement in the parking lot depths caught Ajay’s sleep-deprived eye. Nobody’d spotted a deadhead in weeks, and the ones still walking around were nothing to waste ammo on.

Cranking up the volume on the Master’s chanting voice, Ajay cracked his knuckles and waited for whatever it was to come into range.

“I am surrounded by light…” he murmured, drawing a bead with the big sixty caliber…

…just as the hot wind brushed him back…

A drone helicopter no bigger than a toy hovered before him. Its miniature fuselage pointed a camera lens, a parabolic mic, and a shotgun barrel at his face.

He blinked, tried to hoist the heavy gun off its bipod.

The shotgun blew off the left half of his scalp.

Ajay yelped and squirted, dropping his machinegun over the railing. “Wake up!” he screamed into his walkie-talkie, belly-crawling down the ramp to the guardhouse, wiping blood out of his eyes.

A hollow, unfamiliar robotic voice hissed back from the handset, “All your base are belong to us.”

The Raiders double-timed it to the gatehouse under scattered wild fire from above. They wore SFPD tactical body armor draped with silver duct tape, Raiders jerseys, and dented football helmets.

The first one through the turnstile set off a homemade claymore filled with bathtub napalm. It set him alight, but did not stop him. Sheathed in flames, he stalked through the atrium yard, raking the guardhouse with a belt-fed automatic shotgun as flares, bricks, and small arms fire rained down.

One crazy devotee jumped from cover and charged, but his M16 jammed. The burning Raider cornered and hugged him as its ammo cooked off.

Aerial recon had the ashram’s sixty-four devotees holed up in the press boxes. Moving as a hedgehog, the Raiders crossed the courtyard and tossed grenades into the spiral pedestrian ramp. They never spoke or cried out when they got shot. They spent their bodies as cheaply as their bullets.

A gang of wild-eyed devotees dressed in dhotis or long underwear charged down the ramp, brandishing machine pistols and howling the Master’s name. Another drone chopper swooped into the open well around which the spiral ramp wound, a toy with twin fléchette cannons in its nose. They sounded like tambourines shaking, but they reduced the defenders to a blizzard of red confetti before they could get off a single shot.

The only effective resistance the Raiders faced was the sluice of gore they slipped in as they climbed the ramp.

On the press level, Ajay ran past a barricaded snack bar with two machine guns.

“Get down!” Sister Sharon bellowed from inside. “Move your skinny ass, Ajay!” And opened fire.

She cut the first Raider in half, blew his torso clean off his hips, but still couldn’t stop him. He dragged himself up to the snack counter while his teammates laid down withering cover fire.

Ajay prayed for a weapon. He prayed for the courage to do something.

The mangled upper half of the Raider crawled right past him. He saw a gray human face behind the facemask, but telescoping goggles covered its eyes. It had no lower jaw. Earbuds in its helmet screamed loud enough for Ajay to hear the Raider’s tinny mantra: “Get some, 49, get some, get some… take that nest, you little bitch.”

The Raider tossed two grenades in through the gun slits. They bounced off the menu board and detonated in Sharon’s lap.

Ajay ran without looking back until he’d hopped the barricades and found them unmanned. He picked up an MP5 off the sandbags, but before he could find the safety, the corridor was engulfed in flames.

The Raiders swept into the luxury skyboxes, where the Master’s favorites were kept. Their guards resisted with pistols that didn’t dent the Raiders’ body armor. Room to room they stalked, giving out headshots or grenades.

Ajay shot one of them in the back without even getting its attention. He almost threw himself upon them with his fists, but he knew it would be suicide, and the Master forbade martyrdom. It would be easier to die than see the end of everything they had built, of everyone he loved.

Ajay went to the window in the owner’s box and looked out on the field. Together, they’d bulldozed the wreckage of a relief center into the cheap seats to make room for a massive tented victory garden, and a parking lot to mirror the one outside.

Hundreds of Jaguars, Rolls Royces, and Bentleys filled the infield.

Before the eye of Kali Yuga opened on the world, the media had mocked Master Ganguly’s weakness for British luxury cars, but the fleet had brought them all here from the ashram in Big Sur quickly and in fine style.

He could get the keys to one of the Range Rovers they kept in the underground VIP parking. He could get away, and live with a coward’s karma. But he heard his brothers and sisters chanting in the big room. If this was truly their karma, they would gather at the Master’s feet to meet it.

Ajay ran into the banquet hall with his hands on his bleeding head. There were at least three dozen of them, and even the women and kids were armed and shooting at the double doorway entrance.