John Birmingham - Without warning

Dave snorted in disgust. ‘Fucking Loyalists. Bullshit. Nobody loyal to nothing but Allah ever partnered up with those raghead motherfuckers.’

Melton let that one slide past. He had no idea what game plan the Loyalist Committee were running and wouldn’t have been surprised to see them turn on the Arab street fighters and massacre them wholesale if the need arose.

The Land Rover rumbled down a deserted street in which all of the trees had died. The rain was still heavy, reducing visibility to about thirty yards, and he could tell from the neglected appearance of the buildings, with gaping broken windows and doors left ajar, that most of them were empty. Every now and then a figure would dart furtively from cover, but only for a few seconds at most. In the back, Dave’s companions kept their weapons at the ready.

‘You don’t think?’ said Dave.

‘Sorry. I don’t think what?’

‘You don’t think the ragheads and Loyalists are teamed up?’

Melton shrugged. ‘They have a common enemy, but that doesn’t make them friends or even allies. Loyalists are fighting Sarkozy because they think he’s a dictator. A fascist. The street Arabs from the banlieue are fighting him because he sent his troops into their neighbourhoods and served up a big bowl of smack-down. As for the skinheads, they’re fighting the Arabs because they’re skinheads. The other white gangs are fighting the Arabs because fighting’s all there is now. You fight, you eat. You eat, you live. Don’t know that there’s much more to it.’

Dave grunted and lapsed back into silence as Don Dudley started singing that he was king of the road.

And just out of the corner of his eye, Bret Melton saw the telltale, snaking smoke trail of an RPG round. A warning cry was in his throat but never got out.

Then the world turned upside down with a head-cracking roar and a geyser of hot fire.

It was raining, of course. Jed pulled his overcoat a little more tightly around his stout frame as he left the foyer of the Hotel Monaco. The caucus was still running in his three suites. It ran twenty-four/seven all week, forcing him to retain another private room on a different floor. He scowled at the weather and tugged his hat down a little more tightly, feeling like an extra from a B-grade film noir movie.

There was no avoiding it, though. The temperature had dropped away dramatically as spring succumbed to a ‘Disappearance Fall’ and a wide-brimmed hat was the only way to keep the acidic rain off one’s face. For good measure, he popped open a large black umbrella as he stepped out onto the street. He had a four-block walk in front of him. Only the military and emergency services were getting any gas in Seattle, and they didn’t rate Jed Culver’s needs high enough to afford him a car and driver. He rather missed Hawaii.

The Monaco might have been one of the hippest little boutique joints in the world a month ago, but now it was full of rowdy conventioneers and tobacco-chewing soldiers who clomped so much mud through the place that the management had given up attempting to keep the public areas clean. Instead the hotel staff had laid down massive canvas tarpaulins everywhere. As Culver was leaving the establishment just now, he’d found a quartet of soldiers standing around one of the carpet-shampoo machines, trying to figure out how it worked. He overheard someone, probably a sergeant, saying he wanted to leave the place in a better condition than they’d found it. If they left, Culver thought, as he trudged through the quiet streets.

Huddled deep inside his coat, he shuffled quickly past an abandoned building site where oily water gathered in pools and dripped from torn plastic sheeting. Some locals had told him it would have been their new public library, but nobody expected it to be finished now. Jed walked on down 4th Avenue, with his free hand jammed into a coat pocket. He pressed a leather document wallet up against his body with that arm. Despite the thin leather gloves he wore to protect his hands from the burning rain, he preferred to keep them tucked away anyway.

The streets were quiet; save for a few council workers who all wore bright yellow ID laminates around their necks, and small groups of soldiers who tried to stay under cover at every street corner. Some managed a little respite under an awning or a bus shelter. Those who didn’t looked as miserable as Jed Culver had ever seen grown men and women look. His own laminate, which guaranteed his passage through the downtown area, was an embarrassing hibiscus pink, identifying him as one of Governor Lingle’s representatives to the convention.

A gust of wind, whipping through the canyons of the city, threw a spray of toxic water into his face, forcing Culver to stop and wipe it down with a handkerchief, one of a collection he carried for just that purpose. He had stopped outside Simon’s Espresso Cafe, where he’d managed to score a quite decent prime-beef sandwich on his first day in Seattle, two weeks back. But between grousing about the ‘fascist-pig-dog-maggots’ who’d ‘taken over’ the city, and muttering darkly about the secret military experiment that had caused the Wave in the first place, his waiter – a life-support system for three hundred and ninety-two stainless steel ringlets, studs and spears – had advised him to enjoy the dead flesh. It was one of the last sandwiches Simon’s would serve. And sure enough, the cafe was soon closed and dark, like most of the retail outlets in the city. As he wiped the stinging water from his face, Jed wondered idly what had happened to the freak with all the piercings. Probably joined ‘the Resistance’.

He had to laugh at the studied pretension of those losers styling themselves on the French Underground. As bad as things were in Seattle, it wasn’t Paris under the Nazis. And when you got down to it, these Resistance idiots were simply making things worse. Every time they hacked a server at Fort Lewis, every time they broke into a food bank to ‘liberate’ the supplies for ‘the common people’, every fucking time they chopped down a tree or spread small iron spikes on a road to ‘deny’ it to military traffic, they aggravated the situation. They weren’t achieving anything – a major sin in Jed Culver’s book – and they were handing Blackstone one rolled-gold opportunity after another to maintain martial law. What was worse, of course, was that they played right into the hands of the pinhead lobby who wanted to hijack the convention as the first step in reframing the Constitution, adapting it into something that Ferdinand Marcos or some Argentine general might have approved of in the 1970s.

Still, thought Jed, as he shuffled down the road, dabbing away the stinging water on his face, these Resistance characters were an element of the game, another piece on the board, and they could be played, too. That’s why he had contact numbers and encrypted net addresses for some of the larger cells in his smart phone.

‘Hey, buddy. Got a mouthful, did you?’

The lawyer looked up with a start. He had no idea where the man standing beside him had come from. Correction: the soldier standing beside him.

‘Sorry, hope I didn’t scare you. Ty McCutcheon’s the name. Major Ty McCutcheon. But you can call me Mac, if that suits.’

‘Uh-huh,’ replied Culver, warily. He felt he’d been put off balance on purpose, but for what reason he wasn’t sure.

‘I’ve seen you at the convention,’ said McCutcheon. ‘I’m heading up there myself now if you’d like the company. It is kinda lonesome round here at the moment. I feel like the Omega Man some days.’

‘The what?’ asked Culver in a flat voice.

‘You know, Charlton Heston? End of the world, last man alive – a great, great flick. Even with those dumbass hippie vampires. I’m telling you, Jed. They won’t ever make ‘em like that again.’