John Birmingham - Without warning

His route took him along West Mercer Way. Normally a quiet, tree-lined drive through some of the more exclusive real estate the island had to offer, it felt eerily deserted, with sodden rubbish and leaf litter strewn along its length. He took the Homer Hadley floating bridge across Lake Washington into the city, and again found it hard to get his head around the empty lanes. At this time on a Friday morning, traffic should have been crawling over the span, bumper to bumper.

There was some vehicular movement, however. Mobile army patrols stopped him three times. Then there were the roadblocks and checkpoints he hit on another four occasions. His pass, countersigned by three city councillors and the ubiquitous General Blackstone, carried him through each obstacle, but he understood why there were so few people about. After the food riot on day three down at Ivar’s Salmon House, under the I-5 bridge, and a shoot-out at the 7-Eleven on Denny Way that left four people dead following an argument over who was going to get the last of the frozen pizza subs, the army had put away its smiley face. Three young men, who’d have been thought of as burglars a week earlier, got shot down as ‘looters’ while trying to make off with a carton of hot dogs from the Wendy’s on Rainier Avenue that evening. A vagrant, emerging from a dumpster behind a KFC the following day, was cut in half by automatic weapons fire from an armoured fighting vehicle. Far from attempting to cover up the incidents, the same General Blackstone who’d scrawled the signature on Kipper’s ‘transit documents’ appeared on television and the radio to detail exactly what had happened and to assure the citizens of Seattle it would happen again, to anyone who broke curfew and attempted to steal from their fellow citizens by ‘subverting’ the rationing system. Things went quiet around the city after that.

Talk-back radio and a couple of current affairs shows on the local TV networks had raged against the ‘injustice’, but that defiance was short-lived, lasting only as long as it took four Humvees full of troops to roll into their parking lots. Some lawyers who arrived at City Hall to serve papers on the administration for First Amendment violations were still in custody somewhere. There’d been no more open dissent and, incidentally, no more food riots or looting either. But the self-proclaimed Resistance appeared shortly afterwards in the form of an email spammed throughout the city warning of a fascist takeover and promising to ‘take back the streets’.

Kipper wasn’t happy about any of it – how the hell could you be? But on the other hand he knew how desperate the situation was, and just how easily it could spin totally out of control. He really hoped this Blackstone asshole would see sense and ease off the thumbscrews a little. People were hurting and scared; you couldn’t keep the whole city under house arrest indefinitely. And he could only pray that this dumbass Resistance thing turned out to be a bunch of dope-addled bullshit artists. God knows, Seattle was full of them. A few more stunts like last night’s stupidity at the food bank and they could totally fuck things up.

Speaking of which… He hauled the wheel around, crossing over the median strip and pointing the truck towards 4th Avenue South, where the main food distribution centre for the CBD was located, at a Costco wholesale warehouse near the train yards. He wanted to see for himself how the food aid system was working.

The signal-strength meter on his cell phone read near full and he called Barney Tench on hands free as the pick-up swung around Rizal Park. It seemed a small wonder the call went through – until he remembered that ‘unauthorised civilians’ were barred from using the cell network for anything other than emergencies.

Kipper shook his head and scowled at a measure he thought of as totally unnecessary and counterproductive. It wasn’t like the Wave had just appeared and people were going to be melting the phone-company servers with millions of calls. It was just more repression for no good reason. Exactly the sort of nonsense that fuelled the paranoid dementia of idiots and conspiracy loons.

His temper was building again as he chewed over the many poor decisions that had been made in the previous week, and it was only Barney’s answering the call that short-circuited a bout of foul-mouthed, solitary cussing. His friend’s voice filled the cabin, sounding flat and tinny as everyone did on speaker-phone.

‘S’up, buddy?’

‘Hey, Barn. I’m heading over to Costco right now to check things out. You on your way?’

‘About four or five minutes away. I’m just coming over 1st Avenue Bridge. Heather should already be there. She overnighted in town to get there early.’

‘Oh, okay. I didn’t know that. Good for her.’

Kipper was taken aback for a second. Heather Cosgrove was a young civil engineering graduate on a six-month internship with his road maintenance guys, all of whom had been at a conference in Spokane when the Wave hit. If he was giving out a prize for Most Freaked Out, Heather was an unbackable favourite. She was from Minneapolis, and apart from her job, she had nothing left.

‘It’s spooky, isn’t it,’ said Tench, completely oblivious, ‘without any traffic. Like a doomsday movie or something.’

‘Yeah,’ replied Kip, getting his head back in the game. ‘Listen, did you hear about the raid last night?’

Barney snorted down the line. ‘Dunno that I’d call it a raid, man. What I heard was two dreadlocked jerks got stoned and tried to steal a pallet of Cheetos from the food bank on South Graham.’

‘Well, d’you hear they got shot?’

The speaker-phone hissed quietly for a second, as Kipper swung down the off ramp at South Forest Street.

‘No. Sorry, I didn’t hear that,’ said Barney. ‘Who told you?’

‘Cops rang at about two this morning.’

‘Why’d they call you? Why not one of the councillors?’

‘Said they couldn’t raise them.’

Tench laughed. ‘That’d be right.’

‘Fedayeen!’

The warning cry came from the man at point, a fraction of a second before the hammering of automatic weapons fire started up. The Cav troopers moved for cover as though every man had been jabbed with a stun gun. The dismounted cavalry scouts were fast and flowed like quicksilver, pouring themselves into doorways, around stone walls, and down behind piles of rubble that made vehicle movement all but impossible through the narrow streets of An Nasiriyah. The M3A2 Bradley Cavalry Fighting Vehicles followed them when and where they could. A couple of squads of infantry with their M2A2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles joined them when they moved into the town.

Bret Melton moved with them, the instincts and experience of his own time in the Rangers, and a decade of combat reportage since, rubbing up hard against fatigue and ageing muscles. He landed next to Specialist Vincent Alcibiades, burrowing in under the protection of a massive broken beam of concrete and rebar as small-arms fire chewed up the mud-brick walls of the street, zipping less than a foot overhead.

Melton had picked up an M4 for his own protection, moments before they entered Iraq. Nobody said one word to him. After the carbine, he picked up some MOLLE web gear and some ammo pouches. He already had a matching dark blue set of Level III body armour and a Kevlar helmet. The army issued him with a protective mask and MOPP gear in case someone dropped some germs or chemicals on them, but he’d always been one of the sceptics on the WMD front.

In any case, the fighting was simply too chaotic and disordered for Melton to be able to rely on anyone else to look after him. In the labyrinthine warren of souks, alleys, cut-throughs and ragged streets of the towns and villages in which they’d been fighting, you never knew when you were going to have some asshole suddenly appear right in front of you with murder in his eyes. He hadn’t needed the carbine yet, for which he was grateful. Still, he flicked the selector from safe to semi and waited. Alcibiades let rip with two short bursts, holding his own M4 up over the cover and firing blind. The Bradleys added the hum and mechanical metal-punching beat to the chaotic audio mix, sending.25 mike-mike into buildings without a care for possible civilian casualties.