The Junkie Quatrain (14 page)

The infected man threw his full weight on Quilt, driving them both to the ground. Quilt already had his hand up, bending the junkie’s head back so neither his teeth or the streamers of drool came near exposed skin. The man flailed at Quilt, raining down a flurry of savage blows that would’ve been lethal if they’d been aimed with any degree of skill.

On his back, Quilt yanked his knee up, hitting the junkie in the groin. The man was an animal at this point, but he still yelped and froze up for a moment. It was all the time Quilt needed to collapse the man’s trachea and draw his knife. He flipped the junkie over and drove the blade up into the man’s skull where it joined the spine. A quick twist of the knife turned the junkie’s brain into a purposeless mass of waterlogged flesh. Blood spread across the floor. Quilt cleaned his knife on the man’s shirt, stepped carefully around the puddle, and headed up the stairs.

He stopped at the third floor landing. This model of card reader could be defeated by half a dozen magnetic master keys. It had been cracked open and hotwired. The work of someone not used to covering their tracks.

Quilt swung his rifle down and slipped into the third floor hallway. He could smell blood, not fresh but only a few hours old at the most. He listened for a moment and determined if anyone was still on this level of the building they were at least as skilled as he. Which was not a pleasant thought.

The door for suite 331 had been kicked open. Again, a crude method with no attempt to hide the invader’s presence. It had taken two or three blows. Quilt was about to enter the office when he noticed the lock. It was a Medeco3 dead bolt set. Not the building’s standard, but very common with the U.S. government.

He examined the frame and found three additional sensors past the building’s standard security lines. There was a micro-thin pressure pad on the threshold. Someone had wanted to know every time this door opened.

Quilt let his rifle hang and drew his MK23 SOCOM pistol.

Suite 331 had the same layout as his own office. A small reception area with two small rooms on either side and a larger room behind it. Perfect for a small business or production company.

Or, in this case, a covert field hospital.

When valuable agents or assets were wounded and a public facility wasn’t an option, most agencies kept a well-stocked, low-profile infirmary in every city. Quilt had seen rooms like this before. His left kidney had been removed in one. Bandages, sutures, surgical tools, braces, crutches, a fully-stocked pharmacy, and equipment to monitor everything from heartbeats to brain waves.

Judging by the style of the furniture in the reception area and the design of the lone examination table, he estimated this room had been here for just over twelve years. It was well-established when he set up his bolt hole two stories above. If he was the smiling type, Quilt’s lips might have twitched at the thought of the embarrassing situations which could’ve resulted from this unfortunate coincidence.

The field hospital was missing several things. More to the point, he noted, many things had been left behind. Most of the equipment. Almost two-thirds of the chemicals and drugs, including narcotics. Whoever had done this was not looting. They had been searching for very specific items and materials. He could see outlines in the dust where bottles and cases had been pulled from the shelves.

Quilt knew the names and purposes of most of the drugs and compounds that were still there. So the things that had been taken were specialty items. Things only a professional in this field would know about or have use for.

The card reader on the fifth floor landing had been broken and hotwired the same way. He slipped into the hall and listened. Again, there were no sounds.

His office door had been pried away from the lock and kicked open. The fact that the desks and cabinets were searched told Quilt whoever had done this had no idea what they were looking for. His suite had not been examined, it had been ransacked.

They had found both gun racks, hidden behind the false wall panels he’d installed seven years ago. The ammunition drawers had been pried open. Both supply closets were broken open, and the concealed closet in the other office.

A third of his rations were gone. Almost a full month’s worth of food. An AA-12 shotgun, three M4 carbine rifles, and two P90s were also missing, along with a dozen assorted pistols and tactical gear.

They had taken his machete. One of his very few sentimental items. That machete had gotten him through North Korea. He’d crossed close to two hundred miles of jungle with nothing but the heavy blade and an AK-47 with a single round in it. Because of the machete, he’d never needed to use the bullet.

Quilt frowned. For the first time in months, he felt annoyed. Not annoyed, angry. Angry at the amateurs that had found his bolt hole and looted it.

The thieves had not discovered the twin safes beneath the carpeting. One contained approximately one-point-five million dollars, divided into dollars, euros, and yen. The other was the hard drive and processor for his personal security system. He had ten cameras in the office, four in the hall, two in the downstairs lobby, and another five on the building’s roof.

They appeared on his desktop screen. Six men and four women, wearing sporting equipment as if it were body armor. He’d heard people like this called
outsiders
over the past few months. As the disease spread and junkies became more and more common, the services of those who dared to go outside—and could make it back unharmed—were becoming more and more valuable.

Quilt watched them enter the office and search. He saw them discover his cache and dole out weapons and supplies among themselves. He memorized their faces.

According to the outside cameras, they’d left the building seventy-one minutes after entering. Twelve-thirty-seven. And there’d been some kind of altercation with another pair of scavengers.

He squinted at the high-angle shot on the screen. The two other scavengers were both women. One, the soft one, became a hostage in less than a minute. The other one, the wiry one, had a baseball bat. Quilt was not a romantic, by any means, but he had a keen awareness that running into the same women twice in two days was noteworthy.

The soft one had panicked. Her screams had brought junkies. Eleven of them. The thieves had left on bicycles—good, quiet, dependable third-world transport. The two women had run back into the office building. Four of the junkies had followed them in. The other seven had chased the thieves.

Quilt remembered the smell of blood on the third floor, and he considered the matter with the mystery women solved.

The thieves had headed up the road, which meant they had either gone straight and headed into Hollywood proper or turned at Barham and crossed over the freeway into Universal City. Scared people tended to go in straight lines and follow the path of least resistance, and the thieves didn’t look professional enough not to be scared. With the hardware they’d stolen from his bolt hole, seven junkies shouldn’t’ve been a problem, but they’d chosen to run. That means they’d avoided the sharp turn onto Barham and also the two or three residential streets that led uphill.

The thieves were in Hollywood.

* * *

It took him half an hour to confirm his suspicion. On the downhill side of the valley was a thin line of fresh, dark rubber, barely visible in the fading sunlight, and a slight drift of grit and dust. A dozen yards further he found another fresh tire mark where one of the thieves, now carrying extra supplies, had squeezed the brakes a little too hard.

It was sundown by the time he reached the base of the Cahuenga Pass and the Hollywood Bowl. It didn’t bother him. Enough of the streetlights were still working, and Quilt had probably spent more of his life awake at night than during the day. His scope had a night vision setting, but he rarely used it. He preferred to keep his natural senses sharp and not become dependent on tools.

He passed several junkies. They had passable night vision since the disease dilated their eyes. Most of them still didn’t see him. One pair did and he slit both their throats when they lunged at him. Another, a bony woman, managed to get the drop on him and grabbed him from behind. He broke the woman’s arm, knocked her head back with the heel of his palm, and drove his knife up into her brain through her jaw.

Quilt made his way down through the city. The streetlights were on, but no one was home. The tourist traps hadn’t seen any traffic in at least ten weeks. The roads were empty. His life had hardened him to the sights of war, and the various aftermaths of it. He still found the sight of an empty, abandoned city to be almost unnerving.

He followed the trail for another three miles as it cut back and forth through residential neighborhoods. He killed fourteen more junkies as he went, most of them with his bare hands or the knife. A small pack charged him and he put a round in each of their heads with the MK 23.

As he stepped out onto Wilshire Boulevard, a junkie child lunged at him, sputtering high-pitched nonsense. She was a girl of five at the most, dressed in filthy clothes that had been bright pink and yellow once. Quilt grabbed one shoulder and the top of the thrashing child’s head and twisted. Her five-year old spine made a noise like a bundle of celery being torn apart and she dropped to the ground. As her head hit the sidewalk, a scent drifted past his nose.

In Quilt’s opinion, smoking was one of the worst vices a professional soldier could pick up. Any addiction was bad, but one that risked uncontrollable coughs and shortness of breath was deadly. Worse yet, cigarette smoke had a strong, distinctive smell that could carry up to half a mile in certain conditions.

Such as an abandoned city.

The thieves had made a camp for themselves inside a fast food restaurant just east of Wilshire and LaBrea. Quilt studied the burger shack from the unlit parking lot of a small strip mall across the street. A horrible choice. They were too visible in the front and had no view in the back. There were limited exits, too. Again, the lack of professionalism gnawed at him.

It was time for their first lesson.

He scaled the strip mall and stretched himself flat on the roof of a sushi restaurant. The G36 came off his shoulder. He flipped out the bipod and gave the suppressor a half-twist to make sure it was still locked.

Four of them were on their roof keeping watch. One was smoking. He took a long drag and the ember lit up like a tiny flare. Another reason a professional soldier didn’t smoke. Quilt could see it from across the six-lane street. It pinpointed the man’s head, even with the streetlights.

He lined up and waited for the guard to inhale again. His finger applied pressure to the trigger. The rifle made a noise like a loud cough.

The cigarette scattered in a flurry of red sparks. The thief fell over. Quilt picked up the rifle and shifted fifteen feet to his left. Even with the suppressor he would not take two sniper shots from the same position.

It took two minutes for any of the other guards to notice their friend. They called out jokes about sleeping on the job and not sharing the good stuff. When he didn’t answer, one walked over to kick him awake.

Quilt pressed his eye to the scope. He let his breath slide out. He counted his heartbeats.

The next thief, a woman, gave the dead man a gentle boot in the ribs. Then a firmer one. She bent down to shake the man awake.

There was another cough.

The second thief continued bending at the knees and slumped over the first. She never made a sound. Her rifle, one of the P90s from Quilt’s office, rattled on the rooftop.

It took a few moments for the other two to register what had happened. One, another woman, dropped flat. She had a long braid which Quilt thought was asking for trouble. The other one, a man, lifted one of the M4 carbines and began twisting randomly back and forth, as if he’d suddenly catch sight of the sniper. He looked like an idiot. An idiot who thought he looked intimidating.

Neither of them signaled the people in the restaurant below them. Quilt felt another quick flare of annoyance as he settled into his new position. His trigger finger flexed and the idiot thief twisted one last time.

The braided woman twisted away and vanished. She’d rolled straight off the edge of the building, dropping out of sight as quickly as possible. Quilt decided to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume it had been deliberate.

A minute later the woman appeared in the restaurant. She limped over and shook one of the thieves awake, a bearded man who slept with Quilt’s AA-12 within reach. They had a brief but animated discussion.

While they were talking Quilt marched along the roof and used up eleven more rounds shooting junkies. Eleven hits in twenty-eight seconds. Not as fast as he could’ve done on a range, but still not bad. It was a bit wasteful, but this was the most enjoyable evening he’d had in at least two months.

He stretched out again and watched their body language while he reloaded the rifle drum. The woman from the roof was tense. Another two women and three men who’d been inside didn’t seem to understand what was going on. The bearded man, their leader, seemed calm but alert.

Quilt pressed the drum back into position, set the rifle against his shoulder, and read lips though the scope. The braided woman was smart. She was keeping back with the bearded man, out of lines of sight. Not far enough back, but better than the man and woman pressed up against the glass. They were the ones who noticed the dead junkies.