Mark Alpert - Extinction

Kirsten lifted her foot off the accelerator. “Should we stop? Get out of the truck and make a run for it?”

In frustration Jim smacked his prosthesis against the passenger-side door, and the truck’s narrow chassis rattled. But as he stared at the police cruisers blocking the road, he noticed something. The front bumper of the patrol car that blocked the right lane was about four feet behind the rear bumper of the car in the left lane. The gap between them was way too small for an ordinary car or truck to slip through, but the three-wheeler’s cab was only four feet wide. “Don’t stop!” he yelled, pointing at the gap. “Go right between them!”

“Jesus! Are you nuts?”

“Just do it!”

Frowning mightily, Kirsten adjusted the steering wheel, carefully aiming the truck’s nose. Jim leaned out the window and fired his Glock, putting the shot above the roofs of the cruisers. As he’d hoped, the police officers leaped out of their cars and scattered. Then Jim ducked back inside the cab and braced himself.

It was like driving full speed through a car wash. The bumpers of the police cruisers passed within inches of the truck’s doors. The cab sped through the gap without a scratch, but the truck bed smashed into a headlight. The rear end of the truck lurched to the left, and for a heart-stopping second the three-wheeler became a two-wheeler. But then the right rear wheel fell back to the asphalt, and after a hard bounce the truck straightened out.

“Holy fuck!” Kristen yelled. “Look behind!”

Jim turned around and noticed that the bale of hay wasn’t in the truck bed anymore. After being jolted into the air by the sideswipe, it came crashing down on the hood of one of the cruisers. The bale disintegrated on impact, showering the whole intersection with dried grass.

“Bull’s-eye!” he shouted. He was so ecstatic he kissed Kirsten on the cheek. “Nice driving, Kir. Keep it up and I’ll buy you a new blouse.”

She smiled but didn’t say anything. Another intersection was up ahead, and six more cruisers were speeding toward it from the left. Kirsten hit the gas again, pressing the pedal to the floor. Soon they were going at least ninety miles per hour, faster than any three-wheeled truck had ever gone, and they blasted through the intersection just ahead of the patrol cars.

Then the road leveled out and began to slope upward. About half a mile ahead, a high tree-covered ridge rose abruptly from the urban landscape. Jim peered at the hill through the truck’s windshield, trying to see if the road went over or around it. Then he noticed a concrete rectangle at the base of the ridge.

“It’s a tunnel,” he said. “We have to go through that tunnel to get to the downtown.”

Kirsten shook her head. “Damn it! They’ll stop us there for sure!”

“Well, we can’t turn around.” He pointed over his shoulder at the half-dozen cruisers that were about two hundred yards behind them.

“Shit, shit, shit! This is one hell of a vacation you booked, Pierce!”

She was still cursing as they sped into the tunnel’s entrance. Jim noticed that the traffic in the outbound lanes was much heavier than the inbound traffic. At any moment he expected to see the flashing lights of a police blockade inside the tunnel, but there was nothing but headlights and taillights ahead of them. And after a few seconds, he noticed that there were no flashing lights behind them either.

“That’s strange,” he said. “It looks like the cops didn’t follow us into the tunnel.”

“They don’t need to,” Kirsten replied. “The whole goddamn police force is probably waiting for us at the other end.”

After another few seconds, Jim saw the tunnel’s exit. At the same time, he heard a low rumbling. He wondered for a moment if there was also a train tunnel that went under this ridge. Then they burst out of the tunnel and emerged at a bustling intersection and, miracle of miracles, there wasn’t a single police car in sight. Just ahead was Xiling Road, Yichang’s main boulevard, full of luxury stores and neon signs and sidewalks crowded with pedestrians. The street was bordered on both sides by skyscrapers, an impressive double row of glass-and-steel towers. The tallest was more than fifty stories high.

Jim’s heart leaped. The riverfront was less than a mile ahead. It would be easy for them to ditch the truck there and disappear into one of the alleys, especially if the police weren’t right behind them. But instead of proceeding down the boulevard, Kirsten slowed the truck to a halt. “Jim, what the hell is that noise?”

The rumbling was louder now, a deep thunderous crashing that seemed to come from the west. Jim noticed that the pedestrians on the boulevard weren’t strolling down the sidewalks. They were running in terror away from the riverfront. Then Jim looked past the running people and saw the skyscrapers shudder. The tallest one swayed violently, then pitched forward and broke apart, disintegrating into hundreds of tons of steel and glass. And beneath the falling debris, a great black wave came raging down the street.

Supreme Harmony observed the inundation of Yichang. Module 104, who’d formerly been the chief of the city’s Public Security Bureau, stood on a high cliff overlooking the Yangtze River, at the eastern end of the Xiling Gorge. From its perusal of the Internet, Supreme Harmony had learned that this promontory had been the site of many battles during China’s long history. It was here, for example, that the Chinese Nationalists had stopped the Imperial Japanese Army from progressing up the Yangtze during World War II. And now the network was using these heights as an observation post for its first battle with Homo sapiens , a battle in which no guns or artillery pieces would be fired. In this engagement, Supreme Harmony’s weapon was water.

The Xiling Gorge was filled to the brim. The Yangtze River, which under normal circumstances flowed calmly eastward at the bottom of the deep trench, now sluiced through the gorge, its frothy surface sloshing against the cliffs on either side. The floodwaters rose so close to Module 104 that he could feel the spray from the roaring current. The color of the river had also changed. This stretch of the Yangtze was usually greenish brown, but the water had been blackened by the billions of tons of silt that had accumulated in the reservoir behind the Three Gorges Dam. According to Supreme Harmony’s calculations, the massive buildup of silt would’ve eventually caused the dam to collapse on its own, without any need for explosive charges. The network had simply hastened the inevitable.

Downstream from Module 104, the Yangtze widened. The floodwaters spilled from the gorge and overran a low island lined with shipyards. There were hills on the southern bank of the Yangtze that kept the floodwaters in check, but downtown Yichang occupied the broad, flat northern bank, only fifteen meters above the river’s normal level. The wall of water coming down the Yangtze was more than three times that height. Surging over the riverfront, it smashed into the city.

Because Supreme Harmony had access to the surveillance cameras that the Public Security Bureau had installed on every block of the downtown area, the network could view the destruction of Yichang as it happened, in real time. The video feed from Camera 168 showed an elderly man rising from a bench in the city’s riverfront park, staring in disbelief at the tall black wave rolling in from the west. The man turned to run, but in the next second the wave slammed down on both him and the surveillance camera, cutting off the video. The feed from Camera 232 showed a crowd racing down Minzhu Road just ahead of the floodwaters, which splintered the tenements on both sides of the street. Camera 307, located in the lobby of the Junyao International Plaza, captured the moment when the wave shattered the skyscraper’s windows, while Camera 308 showed the deluge punching through the building’s elevator banks and buckling the steel columns. The cameras in the lobby ceased operating half a second later, but Camera 451, located two blocks away, showed the damaged skyscraper lean to the side and crash into the adjacent building.