John Adams - The Living Dead 2

Half the open spaces in the Green Zone were vertical farms now, hydroponically providing for the needs of the city; and thank God they understood that quality weed was every bit as fundamental as rice and beans, in this new economy.

Eagle wheeled around the Embarcadero, past tribal art galleries and acid jazz bars where third-shifters decompressed, downed shots of sketchy bathtub liquor and hoped for the best.

Outside the bubble, the world was still dead. And you could still see it, if you wanted to look. The black ash fields that used to be parks. The ferry terminal mausoleum. The south side of Market Street, where the lights were still off. All just a window away.

But just a stone’s throw from the edge-one block from the Transamerica Pyramid, on the corner of Front and Clay-was Pizza Orgasmica: the only surviving 24-hour gourmet pizza emporium.

“Couple of outcalls, if you want ’em,” said Bud, as he entered for refills. “One code red, and one from somewhere out in the Black. I told him fuck no, but the guy said he knows you.”

“Really?” Eagle said, grinning.

Sometimes it was fun to go outside.

Death Machine #24 stood at attention in the outer courtyard of the defeated enemy objective. He had orders not to move.

#24 followed orders.

Sweep and clear, hold and defend, seek and destroy. #24 had survived eighteen engagements because he hardly needed the voices in his ear to do what he had to do.

He could follow orders almost before they were given.

His armorers and handlers were sure he was a professional athlete or a vet, probably a Marine. Tully Forbes, the machinist who rigged the steel beartrap replacement for his missing mandible, swore that once, when he shouted, “Gimme ten!” #24 assumed the position and did pushups until Tully made him stop with a sleep spike.

But that wasn’t true. #24 could count to ten, and sometimes even higher, when his medpak was working overtime.

Over and over, he tried to count the bodies laid out in front of him. After ten, things got foggy, but he didn’t have to use his fingers. If he used his fingers, he’d only be able to count up to seven.

The bodies were covered in sheets. The cleanup crew dropped color-coded tags on them. Green, red, or black. Hardly any green ones; the sheets over them were only spotted with blood. Lots of red and black. The red ones were a mess, but the black ones were yard sales of loose and charred body parts.

A couple of men and a woman walked down the line. They wore white pressurized biohazard suits, but #24 smelled the bracing stink of their breath and sweat venting out of their gas masks. Even as his medpak kicked down a bolus of tryptophan to make him drowsy, he ached to have them.

The woman was different. She smelled dead, but she walked and talked and the others listened to her angry orders.

The dead-smelling lady came over to review the surviving Raiders offensive line. Her skin was a dull gray-green behind her mask, shot through with black capillaries. He could ignore the itching hunger aroused by her assistants, but her rank aroma screamed at #24 to shoot, burn and behead her, sweep and clear.

But the order never came.

As she inspected them, she snapped over her shoulder, “Who runs these fucking rodeo clowns?”

A flunky checked his PDA. “A civilian contractor, Sherman Laliotitis. He was a professional gamer prewar, the best in the world at squad-based combat simulations.”

“Reliable?”

“He’s a sociopathic little prick, ma’am, but he’d do the work for free. Loves his toys.”

“Get him on the phone. If he still can’t deliver viable candidates, then he’s either incompetent or he’s a saboteur.”

She stopped and looked into the eyes of #24. Her eyes were the color of bile. She never blinked. “Check the headset on this one.”

“We did, ma’am. It sustained no cranial damage during the engagement.”

“Check it again, and double its downers. They’re supposed to be in a coma, and this one’s looking at me.”

A flunky unscrewed the bolts on #24’s helmet with a drill, while the other tugged it off. Several shots had cracked the high-impact plastic helmet, but the Kevlar liner had stopped them from damaging the electrical wiring and neurotransmitter pumps screwed into the dome of his skull.

He wanted to stop them and gut her, but he had orders not to move.

#24 followed orders.

On the dead side of Market, the Berkeley social science geniuses were building museum dioramas in the old storefronts, re-creating the bustling life of the old City. Celebrating its heroes-both the surviving and the fallen-in frozen pantomimes of earnestly rosy history.

You couldn’t see it at night, but they’d actually sculpted a plaster statue of Eagle and put him on a bike-next to Lester the Professor in his wheelchair and crazy-eyed Emperor Norton II, his courageous freak comrades in that first desperate year of rescues and food runs, before Big Brother came back to take over the job. A plaque at their feet said: They Kept the Embarcadero Lights Burning, And Kept The City Alive.

They’d posed for it together, three unlikely loners who had just tried to stay alive and protect their neighbors, when nobody else could. It was hella fucking surreal, hilarious, and also an incredible honor.

But under the self-deprecation and pride was a creeping sense of having already died. Their purpose fulfilled. Their glory days noted, memorialized, and gone.

Like the boy in the hundred-year-old statue behind him, on the domed-in corner of Montgomery and Market at which Eagle paused, finishing his joint before rolling out into the toxins.

It was a monument erected in 1850, or at least that was the date of the quote on the base. It showed a handsome young fellow in miner’s togs with a pickaxe in one hand, a flag in the other, standing tall against all comers.

The inscription read:

“The unity of our empire hangs on the decision of this day.” W. H. Seward, on the admission of California vs. Senate.

And now, San Francisco was a sovereign nation.

“Pffffft…Thanks, America!” Eagle said. “It’s been fun!” And then coughed up a plume of Master Kush and Kilimanjaro.

The Market Street South airlock was four lanes wide and a city block long, which included the sealed-off BART station just past Montgomery.

He snuffed the roach and swallowed it on his way through the door. No waste in this city. No littering, either.

Eagle’s locker was near the back and the showers, with the rest of the regulars. He suited up, put on his goggles and gas mask, checked the hazmat seals on the pizza cozy one more time.

Then he rode out through the gate and into the Red Zone.

The New City reclaimed the corpse of the old a block at a time. Clearing the wreckage off the streets, purging the buildings of any lingering human wreckage-dead or alive-was only the first step.

They were also repairing infrastructure, and cleaning up the chemical residue from the bombs that had leveled the playing field-or at least cleared it.

Eagle had watched from his bolthole in the Hyatt when the Navy choppers flew over the City that day. He watched the chemical bombs descend, on what they all unofficially called Black Flag Day.

He couldn’t tell what kind of bug spray they dropped this time, but the thousands of loitering dead that filled the streets didn’t respond to the powdery gray clouds like all the other times: getting all tweaked and fidgety, or eating themselves, but still standing.

This time, they just melted. Like the Wicked Witch of the West, an army reduced to runny, rancid meat that pooled in their shoes and overflowed the gutters around their fizzing, blackened bones. Then all was still, and death was dead.