John Birmingham - Without warning

‘Look,’ the major said, instantly switching back to his usual calm and spookily cheery self. ‘They haven’t been arrested as such, just detained preventively.’

‘What the hell do you mean, “preventively”?’

Blackstone answered for him. ‘To prevent them being arrested when they fuck up so badly they really do get a lot of people killed.’

‘Like this morning?’

‘Oh grow up, Kipper,’ snarled Blackstone. ‘This is serious. We don’t want to take over here. We don’t want to take over anywhere. Hell, we’re desperate for someone to tell us what to do, but nobody’s putting a hand up. Everyone’s arguing about fucking cookies.’

‘Bullshit, General, that’s an exaggeration.’

‘No,’ said McCutcheon, tag-teaming again. ‘It’s a metaphor. For “pointless, infuriating contention about complete fucking inanities”. Like cookies – which I can assure you they did argue about. Somebody said they needed to start conserving food, so they spent three-quarters of an hour debating whether they were entitled to a packet of fucking Oreos at their meetings. This was just last Thursday, by phone hook-up, during the worst of the pollutant storm. By phone hook-up, Kipper – they were all at home. They could have eaten their own fucking cookies.’

Kipper rubbed his tired, burning eyes, but it only made them sting all the worse. ‘So what are you gonna do, Major,’ he asked, ‘keep arresting people until you get someone you can work with? You gonna go all the way down to the dogcatcher?’

‘If we have to. But really, I’ve met that guy. He’s a freak – got that gimpy eye, and half of one ear chewed off. Wouldn’t be a good look for the next President.’

‘President?’

‘Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. We need a President, and pronto. If we don’t get a handle on this situation, we’re all going to hell in a hand-basket.’

Kipper bumped up against a filing cabinet, jarring his elbow on the corner. ‘Shit! Who the fuck talks like that? “Hell in a handbasket”!’

The air force man’s eyes twinkled. ‘Granny Mae McCutcheon. Eighty-six this year and still skinning her own beaver… Oh man, that didn’t come out right. She’s a trapper’s wife – or she was. Granddaddy McCutcheon passed away back in ‘92. It was Clinton that killed him. Seeing that gladhanding cocksucker take the oath, it was too much…’

‘Back on message, Major,’ said Blackstone. ‘Mr Kipper, we have some command and control issues here, and elsewhere. Here it’s bad enough, elsewhere it gets worse by an order of magnitude. That mess at your food bank this morning was a C-3 issue. That’s what happens when command, control and communication break down. Blood. Gets. Spilled.’

Kipper’s head was reeling. He wondered if the heating had been turned up too high or if any contamination had made it into the building through the filters.

‘Do you know anything about the line of succession, Kipper?’ asked Blackstone.

‘The line of what?’

‘Succession,’ echoed McCutcheon. ‘You know, the President gets whacked in a motorcade, the Veep steps up to the plate and bam! - any hopes the enemies of freedom had of exploiting our temporary constitutional befuddlement are right down the crapper.’

‘Are you sure you’re an air force guy?’

‘Sure, born and bred. Anyway, the line of succession – focus, dude. Right? You with me? It’s toast. We got nada. Nobody. Everyone we could’ve tapped for the top job is gone. Everyone we’ve approached since is like: “Oh no, don’t ask me, I’m too fucking busy. I got this fucking cookie crisis exploding in my face here.”‘

The engineer exhaled a deep breath he hadn’t even realised he’d been holding in. That probably explained his dizziness. ‘So, what do you want me to do about it?’

‘About that? Nothing,’ said Blackstone. ‘That’s our problem for now. But this city is yours. Kipper, you’re now on the Executive Committee. You and your department heads. I need you to do a better job running this place than we’ve seen so far.’

‘Whoa! Wait on a second. That’s a political appointment. Only elected officials can sit on the committee.’

McCutcheon shrugged. ‘Only elected officials on the civilian side, and they’re all unavailable now. So General Blackstone is the senior member, and he’s appointing you and the other department heads.’

‘What are we – your Good Germans?’

‘No, you’re the only people we can rely on to keep this place from falling apart.’

‘You don’t get a choice, Kipper,’ growled Blackstone. ‘The days of easy choices are over. You’ve been drafted. You can either get with the program or you can fuck off and we’ll find someone who will.’

‘Jesus Christ, you people…’

‘Yeah, wrestle with your conscience in bed, if you have to. But you need to decide whether you’re going to help pull your city through, or walk away.’

It was too much. Kipper turned and stormed out of the door.

Was it his imagination or did the Municipal Tower seem to be even more overrun with military uniforms than he’d thought when he first came in? Kipper shook off the thought. No sense getting paranoid. A lot of the support staff were scurrying about on fast forward. A few saw him and looked relieved, others seemed even more frightened and just put their heads down, hurrying past.

The soldiers didn’t seem to be intimidating anyone. Indeed, some of them looked pretty well spooked, too. But their very presence, in full combat gear, including their weapons, was enough to put the zap on anyone’s head. And what the fuck were they carrying arms for anyway, what did -

Kipper pulled up in confusion. He’d been so angry, so unbalanced by the meeting with Blackstone and McCutcheon, that he’d stomped right around the corner into the Planning Department. Cursing quietly, he retraced his steps to the city engineer’s office, his office, a small suite of rooms behind a plain dark wooden door inset with marbled glass. It felt like a holy sanctuary right now. He pushed through, praying that he’d find no military people inside, with their feet up on his desk and guns lying on top of the filing cabinets.

Instead he found Rhonda, his secretary, a large and formidable African-American presence in a room full of frightened white folk.

‘Kipper! Thank the Lord at last!’ she cried out when she saw him. ‘We were beginning to worry they’d arrested you as well.’

‘Not yet, Ronnie. Not just yet. So you’ve heard then?’

He smiled wearily at his team, or what was left of it. Barney Tench, his deputy and old college bud, who looked about as glum as Kipper had ever seen him; Marv Basco, the sanitation chief, a dead ringer for Larry from the Three Stooges; Dave Chugg, water, who looked a lot like Curly to Marv’s Larry, at least when you stood them next to each other; and Heather Cosgrove. Sweet, fragile, freaked-out little Heather.

‘Whoa. What are you doing here, darlin’?’ Kip asked in surprise. ‘You should be at home.’

‘I wanted to come in,’ she said, sounding preternaturally calm. He wondered if she’d been medicated.

Barney shrugged and shook his head. ‘I dropped her at her apartment, Kip. But she talked some dumb grunt into giving her a lift back in.’

Kipper sighed. ‘Okay. Heather, I’m not sending you home again. But you shouldn’t be here. You’re in shock. Go and sit yourself down on that couch over there and do not get up again. Ronnie?’

His PA nodded and bustled the girl as gently as she could over to the old brown couch in the corner. Heather didn’t really protest or resist. When he thought about it, Kip understood. She had no friends or family in Seattle. Her work colleagues had been caught behind the Wave in Spokane. The only people she had left in the world were here, in this office. It would have been cruel to send her out again.