Stephen Baxter - Ark

More civilians clambered aboard, and the troopers closed up the truck. Holle looked around for the Latino boy. He was still in the street, surrounded by troopers. She called, “What are you doing?”

He shrugged and took a step. His leg was withered and he limped heavily. “Can’t walk, can’t work. Never could. Special Processing for me. Just remember what I told you.”

The truck’s engine coughed to life, and it rolled away with a jerk. Looking back, Holle saw the troops were preparing to repeat the sweep operation in the next block, with their net and their dogs and another empty truck. And the Latino boy was being led away, into the shadows.

Standing with the others in the back of the swaying truck, the weak stink of biofuel exhaust filling her head, Holle was driven, not south and west to the I-285 and Gunnison, but the other way, east along East Colfax and then north along Quebec Street, toward the I-70, the main route from the east. After a few blocks they merged into a larger convoy, trucks mostly carrying civilians but a few laden with troops and other gear.

Everywhere Holle saw troops in action, National Guard and army and Homeland and police, shepherding orderly streams of civilians west, or rounding up more discards like her own companions, and engaging pockets of resistance in firefights. In one place she saw snowplows, brought down from mountain roads where snow no longer fell, driving people along urban streets. And in abandoned districts she saw fires being set, mines laid. In Sandown, near the rail track, she saw the blunt profile of a tank.

Mary Green, the older woman who’d helped her, thought she knew what the government planned. “They’ve abandoned Denver now, and everybody’s gone west, and the city’s only remaining use is to block those refugee streams from the east, who will otherwise chase after us and overwhelm everything, like locusts.”

“So they’re setting mines? Killing people?”

“Well, they shouldn’t be here, should they?” Mrs. Green said reasonably. “This isn’t their place, wherever they came from; it never was. We wouldn’t have to move, not for months yet, if not for all this. No, they should have stayed home and built rafts.”

“Where are we going?”

“I think we’ll soon find out, dear.”

The truck reached a slip road for the I-70 and turned, heading east. There was some military traffic on the one lane kept open. On the other lanes more flows of walkers headed steadily west, supervised by troops and cops in cars and trucks.

They reached the intersection of the I-70 with the 470, Denver’s patchwork beltway. But the intersection had been dynamited, the flyovers collapsed, the roadways blocked with rubble. A wire fence with gun towers was strung north and south along the length of the 470, along which no traffic moved. Beyond the fence Holle saw more strings of barbed wire, and moving figures silhouetted against the eastern sky, and she heard distant shouting.

The trucks stopped, and they were made to climb down.

“Help me, dear, I’m stiff after standing all that way.”

The people from the trucks were formed up into a line, and were shepherded toward a kind of stockade, constructed of girders and concrete panels, thrown across the highway. It was almost like a toll gate. Holle saw that after a quick assessment they were being sorted into four lines. The people walked forward meekly, submitting to the verdict passed on them.

Holle and Mary Green lined up with the rest. “Why didn’t you go west with the others, Mrs. Green?”

“We all have our part to play. Didn’t you hear the President’s last speech? You have to walk, you know, walk all the way to the Rockies. Then you have to help build new cities and so forth. There’s no way I can do that, not at my age. But I couldn’t sit at home either, could I? So here I am, doing what I can to protect the others. The President has promised to help us once the crisis has passed.”

“Protect others? How?”

“There’s more than one way to fight a war.” Mary Green eyed her, the dust from the road clinging to a face coated with anti-sun cream, and her voice became stern. “You don’t know anything about this, do you? Maybe you really are a Candidate. I’ve always thought they weren’t teaching those Candidates anything worthwhile. I don’t know what they have planned for you, nobody does. But what’s the point of surviving if you don’t know anything about what matters?”

They neared the desks. Listening in to the brief interviews Holle got a sense of what was happening. Each person was grilled by a police officer, and what sounded like a doctor. Your name was taken, your skills assessed, your basic health checked over quickly. There was no screening for bio, retinal or other idents. If you had papers of any kind you showed them. The very old, the very young, the disabled were taken off down one stream, to a set of huts by the roadside. Special Processing, maybe. The relatively young and healthy were sorted into two groups. One set were taken away to a kind of compound, where Holle could see they were being handed weapons-just clubs, pikes and knives, no guns-and put through rudimentary fight training. The others were led away down the blocked highway, toward the improvised fortifications. A construction crew?

Mrs. Green went ahead of Holle, and was judged to be too old for building or fighting. So she was assigned to the fourth stream-the “Honor Corps,” the police officer called it. She was given a badge to wear. She smiled back at Holle. “Look at that, my own little badge. It’s even got a Stars and Stripes on it.”

“Be careful, Mrs. Green.”

“I think it’s too late for that, dear. Good luck.”

Holle stepped up to the desk. The police officer eyed her. Aged maybe forty, he had a livid scar on one cheek. He wore a uniform but had no badge, no identification. “Name?”

“Holle Groundwater.”

He just laughed. “Fourth today. You have papers?”

“No.”

“Step over for your medical.”

She considered resisting, demanding her rights. She was surrounded by people with guns and nightsticks. She stepped a meter to the left, where the woman who looked like a doctor, no older than thirty, smiled at her. She rolled back Holle’s sleeve, took her pulse and blood pressure and a pinprick blood sample, and made her blow into a bag.

The cop kept talking. “I guess you’re going to tell me you got left behind while all your buddies flew off in Air Force One, right?”

Holle thought it over. “No.”

“Then what do you do?”

“I mix concrete.”

“Really?” He laughed, then looked at her more soberly. “Where did you work?”

“Last, on the ramparts around the Academy. I mean, the Museum of Nature and Science. In the park, you know?” She forced a grin. “I saw the Candidates every day. Stuck-up assholes. Can’t blame me for trying.”

“OK.” He made a tentative tick in a box on his list. “You going to tell me your real name now?”

“Maybe not. There are people I’d rather didn’t know I was here.”

He made another tick. “OK, Jane Doe, that’s up to you. Line three, behind me.”

She saw with relief that that was the line she’d tentatively pegged as the construction workers. Most of those here were young men. Some even carried hard hats and sets of tools. She got a few sideways glances, but nobody called her back. She guessed she wasn’t the only bogus laborer or bricklayer or electrician in this line.

She shuffled forward with the rest.

The construction gang was marched away from the junction and moved down the line of the 470, maybe half a kilometer to the south.

Holle caught glimpses of the tangle of fortifications that lay beyond the perimeter of the road, further east. A swathe of properties had been demolished or bulldozed, leaving a scar a hundred meters wide in the landscape. This open ground was populated by rows of barbed-wire fencing and big concrete blocks, each of them as tall as she was, set out in rough lines like tank traps. There were people everywhere, some in uniform, standing or sitting in silent blocks, or marching purposefully. The most impressive single fortification was a ditch big enough to contain whole digging machines, with a sharp slope on the near side and a shallower slope on the other. Groups of machine-gunners and snipers had been drawn up on the lip of the ditch. She saw the idea; coming from the east you’d tumble in easily enough, and would be exposed to the guns all the way down the slope, but you would have a tough time climbing out up that sharp western slope, into the teeth of the guns. It was like an earthwork out of the Iron Age.