Ark (14 page)

28

O
ut in the open air the sky was clear, blue as a bird’s egg; it was a beautiful Colorado fall morning of the kind the old-timers said you rarely saw any more. To the west the Rockies rose, serene as always, grand above the human fray. But Holle was shocked at the barrage of noise, and an overpowering stink of burning.

There were people everywhere, confronting lines of cops and National Guard troopers. The crowd was surging around the main entrance on Colorado Boulevard. The intention was to take the Candidates south down Colorado, and she could see that the roadway was being kept clear, a corridor of fencing and barbed wire manned by troopers stationed every few meters. The buses were lined up waiting for them, fat with armor, their windows sealed up with bulletproof plate, weapons bristling from gun ports. There was her own bus with B-6 clumsily marked on its unpainted flank.

The Candidates were smuggled through a wire tunnel toward the junction of Colorado with 17th Avenue, and the buses. And suddenly, beyond the fence, just a meter from Holle’s face, were hostiles, as Don called them, mostly young men, but older folk and women and children too. Some, crushed by the great weight of the people behind them, were pressed up against the wire so hard the diamond mesh pushed into the flesh of their hands and faces. When the Candidates were recognized there was a kind of howl. The mob pressed harder, and the fence actually swayed. Troopers fired warning shots in the air.

Kelly flinched. “Jesus.”

“Just keep moving,” Don murmured, his automatic rifle ready in his hands.

Edward Kenzie grunted. “Strategic errors. You’re too close to the City Park and its eye-dee camps. And we should have got you guys out of here long before evacuation day.”

“But they’re not all eye-dees,” Holle said. “Look, that guy is in a cop uniform.”

“It’s all breaking down,” Don said bleakly. “There just isn’t room for everybody in the big new fortified camps in the Rockies. Even if you were a federal worker or a cop or a doctor or a lawyer yesterday, if you lost out in the block ballots you’re on that side of the fence now, suddenly you’re an eye-dee, just as worthless as the rest.”

Holle knew the basic plan, the city’s response to the final crisis. Although the experts said it might be another year yet before the waters actually lapped over the steps of the Capitol and the famous “mile-high” engraving, Holle had heard that from downtown skyscrapers you could already look out over the city, and see the bare peaks of the Rockies Front Range to the west, and to the east a shimmer of blue-gray, the ocean that had drowned America. And as the eastern states collapsed, Denver, the largest city for a thousand kilometers and the home of the federal government for nearly twenty years, had become a sinkhole for refugees. Holle had seen satellite images of the great transportation routes turned to muddy brown threads by the unending columns, each pixel a human being, adults laden with children and old folk and pulling carts and barrows.

President Peery and his administration had fled already, nobody was sure where to—perhaps to the great Cold War bunker buried deep inside Cheyenne Mountain. The bulk of the urban citizens, those selected by the lotteries and who had chosen to go, were being shepherded west to new fastnesses in the Rockies, cities of tents and plastic panels thrown up on the remaining high ground. The main official evacuation route ran from the south of here, along Sixth Avenue which then became US 6, and from there along the 470 beltway to the I-70 and west. Holle and the rest of the Project Nimrod people, however, were being sent south of here, down Colorado Boulevard through Glendale to Englewood, and then they would take the I-285 toward the southwest, where some would be siphoned off to the Mission Control complex at Alma or the launch center at Gunnison. Both of these centers had been well provisioned and fortified.

This was the best the government could do in this final emergency, as its very capital was overrun, and its control over the people and their resources began to dissolve. This was the plan.

But right now Holle still hadn’t got on the bus.

“See that pillar of smoke over there?” Kenzie said harshly. “The State Capitol building burning to the ground. These people make me sick. They should be building fucking rafts. Not taking it out on the cops or smashing stuff up or screaming at a bunch of kids.”

Kelly’s baby started crying.

And the fence collapsed.

Holle saw the glint of wire-cutters. The great press of people did the rest. Hundreds of ragged bodies spilled forward onto the ground. The troopers, reacting to bellowed commands, stepped back, firing into the swarming mass. Blood splashed and there were more screams. But the danger came not from the initial heaping of fallen people but from those who followed, who stayed on their feet and stepped over the bodies, armed with knives, clubs and machetes.

Holle saw all this in a few blurred seconds. She stood in shock, still clutching her pack.

Then there was a crush from behind as the bus passengers closed up, driven by Don and the other military. “Get on the buses! On the buses! Drop all your shit, just get on the buses!” Holle fought to stay on her feet, to move forward. Her pack was ripped off her back in the crush. She didn’t know where her father was.

The eye-dees closed in. Now Candidates were fighting, using fists and feet. She saw Wilson Argent in his bright costume driving his fist into the face of an eye-dee who was trying to haul him out of the line.

But she was close to the buses now. The first bus was actually moving off, its doors and windows sealed up, driving purposefully with people clinging to its doors and its armored roof. She was only a couple of meters away from B-6, but a mass of people were still in her way.

“Holle! Here!” It was her father. Over the heads of the struggling crowd she saw that he had got to the bus. He was clinging to a rail with one hand, and was reaching out to her with the other. “Holle! Grab my hand! Come on—”

Holle launched herself through the crowd, struggling and pushing. If she could just get to her father she could yet be safe. She reached out. His hand was half a meter away.

Kelly screamed, somewhere to her left. “Get off me!” A couple of eye-dees had hold of her. She swung her fist, but, clutching her baby in his papoose, there was little she could do.

Holle didn’t even think about it. She hurled herself into the struggling mob. Sheer momentum carried her past Kelly, who broke free. Holle landed one satisfying fist in the face of an eye-dee—a middle-aged man, she saw, his face bloodied, dirt-streaked yet neatly shaven, a bewildering detail.

But he didn’t fall. He grabbed her by her shoulders and hauled her bodily out of the melee. Now more hands grabbed her arms, legs, somebody even got a handful of her short hair, and she was hauled away into a crush of squirming bodies and legs. She was being carried away from the bus, from her father. Panicking, she struggled. She was kicked and punched. Nobody reacted when she screamed, because everybody else in the world was screaming.

Then she was dumped on the ground, still surrounded by the mob. A face loomed over her, a man’s face, neatly shaven. The man she had first attacked. “I’m sorry!” he yelled down at her. “Sorry! It’s for my daughter. Try to understand . . .”

She felt hands at her neck, her waist, her clothes being pulled from her. A blinding pain erupted in her head.

29

“Y
ou might want to put those on.”

A breeze on her face. Something hard, lumpy under her back. Fragmentary impressions. She felt water trickling into her lips, stale, sour. Was somebody fooling around, Wilson or Kelly maybe?

But she wasn’t in the dorm. She shook her head, trying to get away from the trickle of water, and moaned. Her head
hurt.

She opened her eyes. She saw a slab of blue sky, between the walls of two tall buildings. The water hitting her face came from some overflow pipe, high on the wall above her.

Disgusted, she rolled over. Every movement set blinding lights flashing in her eyes. She was sitting in the dirt, on flagstones. And she was stripped to her underwear. “Shit.” She closed her arms over her chest and crotch.

“I said, you might want to put those on.”

She turned around. Somebody sat in the shade, leaning against one wall. He had bare feet, ragged jeans, a jacket with a logo faded almost to invisibility. His hair was a black mop, and he had a wisp of beard. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen, eighteen. He was staring at her chest.

“Quit looking at me.”

“Well, you’re the one with her boobies out. I say again, you ought to put those on.” He was a Latino, she thought, his voice lightly accented.

She looked, and found a heap of filthy clothes beside her, a kind of coverall, an undershirt. They stank. “These aren’t mine.”

“I know. The guy dumped you here, he left them. Said they were his daughter’s. Said you’d understand.”

She stared at him. “Where are my clothes?”

“He took ’em. Guy with the daughter. Fancy red and blue gear, right? I thought I knew your face. You’re a Candidate. What’s it like to be f amous?”

She heard shouting, whistles blowing, a crackle of radios somewhere nearby. Dogs barked. She stared at the garbage clothes, uncomprehending. “This guy—this man. What was he trying to do, make out his daughter is a Candidate? Who did he think that was going to fool? We know each other. Our families, our tutors—
you
know us.”

“That’s true, but it’s a kind of mixed-up day, don’t you think? Lot of people going to end up in the wrong place today. Can’t blame a man for trying. And he didn’t do you much harm. Left you your boots.”

So he had, she saw; her blue plastic boots were still on her feet, below bare legs.

“Course,” said the Latino kid, “I left you your boots too. Mind, blue ain’t my color.” He cackled another laugh, and she saw his teeth had great gaps. “You put your clothes on now.”

“These aren’t mine.”

“Well, you can tell that to the sweep when it comes, can’t you? They come block by block.” He got to his feet stiffly, wiping his nose on the back of his hand.

“What sweep? Where am I?”

“Corner of Garfield and East Colfax.”

Only a couple of blocks from the City Park, where the museum was. She got to her feet, ignoring the banging in her head. She could hear the whistles, the dogs coming closer. If she could talk to the cops maybe she could get some kind of escort back to her people, and this nightmare would be over.

The kid was staring at her again. She couldn’t stand here in her bra and pants. She grabbed the filthy, ragged clothes and pulled them on. She snapped, “I’m going to star in some kind of porn movie in your head tonight, aren’t I?”

He shrugged. “Could have taken your boots. You were out cold. Could have hurt you. You could have done a lot worse than have me find you.” The whistles and barking grew louder. He turned to face the north end of the street. “Coming that way, I reckon. Listen. Tell them you know how to mix concrete.”

“Tell them
what
?”

“Just remember. Woah, here’s the man.”

A squad of military types, National Guard maybe, came marching around the corner from the north end of the block. They wore body armor and helmets that hid their faces. To Holle’s disbelief they carried a net, like a fishing net, stretched out on two poles, extended across the width of the block. Engines growled behind her, and when she turned she saw a lorry, a big farm wagon, pulled up at the south end of the block. More troopers jumped down and lined up in front of the truck. They carried nightsticks and wielded handguns, and they had dogs that barked and snapped.

Now the units from the north end began to work their way down the block. Only Holle and the kid stood here in the street, but troopers broke down the doors of the properties to either side, yelling orders that anyone inside had to come out. Holle heard shouted protests, the yap of dogs, the crack of weapons—even a dull crump that must be a grenade.

People came trickling out of the houses, some ragged eye-dee types who must be squatters, but others who looked like regular residents, old folk, a young couple with a kid of about ten. Some had belongings, others came out empty-handed, bewildered. There weren’t many, maybe twenty. Holle guessed that most had gone already, trying to join the official exodus west.

A family had to be dragged out of one house. A girl, just a teenager, was hanging onto her dog, a ragged mongrel. Pets weren’t allowed on the evacuation marches. Maybe that was why this family had refused to leave. Eventually a trooper got hold of the dog and threw it against the wall. The girl’s father held the girl back as she raged and wept.

And that net swept on down the street, step by step, inexorable as the flood itself, driving them all forward toward the waiting truck.

Holle pushed through the sullen civilians toward the net. None of the troopers looked like an officer. She couldn’t see their faces, their eyes behind their faceplates. “Hey! Can you help me? I shouldn’t be here.”

There was a rumble of laughter. The troopers didn’t break their step, and she had to back up.

“None of us should be here, lady. What you gonna do?”

“I’m a Candidate.”

“Yeah, you look like it.”

“I should be on the buses to Gunnison. Maybe there’s still time. I’m Holle Groundwater. My father’s Patrick Groundwater, who—”

“Yeah, and I’m Kelly Kenzie’s left tit. Just get in the damn truck with everybody else.”

Holle glanced around. She saw that the people driven out of their homes were clambering meekly onto the bed of the waiting truck. This couldn’t be happening. To these other people, yes. Not to
her.
“I’m a Candidate! Oh, listen to me, you fools—”

A nightstick came out of nowhere, wielded in a gloved hand, and slapped across Holle’s face. She was thrown to the ground. Maybe for a second she lost consciousness again. The line closed on her, the heavy net dragging across the ground. She tried to move, couldn’t. She got a kick in the chest that knocked her back out of the way, rolling like a rotten log.

Somebody was pulling at her. “Come on. Up you get. That’s it . . .”

Leaning on the stranger’s arm, she got to her feet, and managed to stagger away from the advancing line, one meter, two. But now she was nearly at the truck.

“Are you all right, dear?” The person who had helped her up was a woman, maybe sixty, solid, her hair a mass of gray. She was wrapped in a heavy coat and had a backpack on her back and sturdy shoes on her feet. She, at least, had been prepared for the day.

Holle said, “All right? I—”

“I know. None of us are all right today, are we? And now it’s come to this.” The woman climbed up a short stepladder onto the truck bed. She reached down and helped Holle up in turn. “I lived here with my husband, even before the flood, you know. It was our first home but we never thought we’d stay here. A nicer place in the suburbs, when we could afford it. That was the plan. Well, that never came about, did it? But I don’t complain, and nor did Herb before the consumption carried him off in ’35. We’ve had it better than many in this suffering world, haven’t we?”

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?”