Without Warning (24 page)

As soon as the last idea occurred to her, she dismissed it. If the French were aggressively rolling up Echelon cells, they’d be staking out the embassies and consulates.

No. She was on her own.

March 21, 2003

“I don’t want you going out there again, Kip. You look
sick.”

Barb looked worse than him, he thought, but it wouldn’t be worth his life to point that out, of course. Her eyes stared at him from within dark hollows. She’d had little more than an hour or two of sleep a night for the last week. The old bathrobe clutched nervously just below her throat was dirty, and her dark hair was lank and greasy. Nobody had been allowed to run water for three days now, because of the contamination. They were living on what they had stored in pots and bottles and the old claw-foot tub upstairs in the half-renovated bathroom. Kipper needed to get in to work to see if he could change that today.

“Barb, I’m not sick. I’m fine. They’ve been checking us every day. Army doctors. Guys who specialize in chemical war and stuff. We’re fine. We got those biosuits, but we don’t even need them anymore.”

Unfortunately, she would not be dissuaded.

“Kip, you have a family to look after …”

“And I am looking after them,” he countered, with some irritation. “I am the guy who can turn on your taps again. I am the guy who makes sure the
power is there when you flick the switch. Me. Nobody else. It’s my job, Barb. I have to go.”

He wondered why she was so much worse this morning. The pollutant storms were clearing out. The toxic soup he’d had to brave last Tuesday to get into the city had been truly scary. The army had sent some sort of pressure-sealed armored vehicle for him, something they were going to fight Saddam or the old Russians with, and all of the troops were suited up in NBC gear.

“This is insane, James.”

Uh-oh.
He knew he was in trouble when she called him that.

“We should be thinking about getting out of here,” Barb continued. “Not hanging around. Deb and Steve flew out for New Zealand, yesterday. They’re not coming back. They’re too smart. But your martyr complex is going to see us die here. Isn’t it?”

He controlled the anger that threatened to flare up between them, reminding himself that Barb had nothing to do but sit in the house, like the rest of the city, staring out the windows at toxic rain. She must be going batshit by now.

And, he remembered at that very moment, she was also premenstrual.

“Okay,” he said as calmly as he could without shading over into anything that might be mistaken for a patronizing tone. “Deb was born in New Zealand, so they could do that. They got out on a government charter. There aren’t any other flights leaving because no airlines will fly in here anymore. So leaving isn’t an option. Yet.”

“But it’s got to be, Kip. We can’t feed ourselves. We’ll starve soon.”

“We won’t,” he said. “I’ve got all those freeze-dried camping rations down in the basement. Remember? The ones you gave me all that grief over when I bought them cheap. We’ve got at least two months’ worth.”

She shook her head and her eyes hardened.

“That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it. The city is starving. They’re going to have to evacuate people before long. You know that, James. You must have been talking about it at council.”

He tried to speak but she rode in over him.

“And when it happens,
we’re
going, mister. All of us. To New Zealand or Tasmania or fucking Bora-Bora. Anywhere but here.”

Suzie, who appeared at kitchen door to complain that
Bear in the Big Blue House
wasn’t on, saved him any further escalation. None of her shows were on.
Jo-Jo’s Circus, Little Einsteins, The Wiggles,
they had all disappeared offscreen days ago. And every day she grew more upset with their absence. The only TV and radio now available carried Emergency Broadcast System updates. Warnings about dangerous acid levels in the rain. Information about
food and gas rationing. Handy hints for postapocalypse homeowners about fortifying their neighborhoods and establishing Citizens Watch Committees. And pleas for information on “saboteurs and subversives” from the so-called Resistance. None of which impressed the hell out of a little girl who was bored and terrified in about equal measure.

“I want my shows back, Daddy,” she said. “Can’t you make the army men put them on?”

“Can’t you watch a video, sweetheart? One of the movies I brought back?”

“I’ve watched them all a million times,” she complained, in a rising whine. “It’s not fair.”

He looked to Barb for help but she wasn’t giving him an inch. She simply folded her arms and raised one eyebrow. Very much aware that she’d be dealing with this all day, he didn’t dare find fault with that response.

“Tell you what, princess,” he said as he dropped to her level on one knee. “I’ve got to get to work but I promise I will bring home some new videos, ones you haven’t seen yet. Okay?”

“Can you get
Piglet’s Big Movie?
” she asked, suddenly brightening.

“Sure,” he said, without thinking.
“Piglet’s Big Movie.
No problemo.”

He felt rather than saw Barb tense up beside him.

“You run along and get dressed for Mommy now. And no playing outside yet. Maybe tomorrow.”

“But D-a-a-a-a-d-d-y …”

“Maybe
tomorrow. No promises.”

As she scampered away he rose to his feet again with a feeling of trepidation.

“You already made a promise you can’t keep.”

“Sorry?”

“The Piglet movie. It’s not on DVD. It was supposed to be on at the Cine-plex this week. She’s been looking forward to it all year. But you wouldn’t know that, would you?”

His wife turned around and stalked off down the hall.

Oh, for Chrissakes.

Kip stood in the kitchen, clenching and unclenching his fists, trying to breathe slowly. Blood was rushing through his head, and he desperately wanted to say something stupid, but long, hard-won experience kept him quiet. He knew he should follow Barb and work things out, but he also knew that doing so would involve him in at least an hour’s worth of apologies he didn’t feel like making and maddening, circular discussions of his manifest failings on the home front. He was already late, and couldn’t afford to miss
the convoy out to the dam on Chester Morse Lake. Plus, he had to check on the food-aid distribution centers that were kicking off their operations this morning. One of them had been raided by some anarchist fools late last night. Kip hadn’t gotten back to sleep after the cops had called him about it. There’d doubtless be interminable meetings about that today.

So he simply did not have time to get caught up in domestic trench warfare. It wasn’t just a job anymore. People’s lives rested on his decisions.

He knew he’d regret it before the day was done, but Kipper grabbed his car keys and travel pass and walked out through the kitchen door. The headache that had been building eased off a little as soon as he stepped outside and sucked in some fresh air. Well, not fresh, exactly. He could still taste the sharp, chemical tang in his mouth, in spite of the prevailing winds carrying most of the pollutants from the south away over the last twenty-four hours. A gigantic low over the Bering Strait had drawn up enormous volumes of ash and smoke from the conflagration in the Los Angeles basin while a weird, contrary ridge of high pressure to the east had held the lowering toxic clouds over the Pacific Northwest for two days.

Seattle’s chief engineer squinted into the morning sun for the first time in days, and tried not to think about what his family had been breathing into their lungs. He’d sealed the house as best he could—better than most would have managed—by rigging up an air lock and filter chamber in the spare room at the back. Barb had initially been none too impressed at the sacrifice of their best cotton sheets and the new Panasonic air-conditioning unit they’d bought last summer, but the appearance of the towering, septic fog bank on the southern horizon quickly brought her around. When power supply allowed, he maintained a rough overpressure by running the reverse cycle heating and keeping the fireplace in the living room stoked at all times. Hopefully it would be enough.

Kipper stepped off the porch and started down the wet concrete pathway to his vehicle, the same F-150 pickup he’d driven in from the airport on the first day. He felt both guilt and relief at leaving Barb and Suzie behind. The house was large and comfortable, like most on Mercer Island, but it had felt like a cell while they’d been confined inside during the worst of the fallout period, as thousands of tons of toxic waste from the burning of LA had hung over the entire city and its surrounds. Barb’s immaculately maintained garden had turned brown and died as though soaked in defoliant. Stopping at his front gate to survey the rest of the street, he could see that they weren’t alone. Mercer Island was a high-tone enclave, and Deerford Drive, perched on the edge of the lake and snuggled up against Groveland Park, was one of
its better addresses. Truth be known, it was all a bit precious for Kipper, but Barb’s family was Manhattan royalty—or had been, he reminded himself, grimly—and she was used to moving among “a better class of persons.”

“People like us,” she would tease, smirking, knowing that the rude inhabitants of the cheap seats at a Wrestlemania show were more Kipper’s sort of people than any of their opera-loving, sherry-sipping neighbors.

Thinking about her family made him feel even worse. She had cried all through the night of the Disappearance, after wasting hours calling every number she knew back on the East Coast. Her parents, her brothers and sisters, uncles, aunts, old friends. All gone. Kip almost turned on his heels and went back inside, but momentum carried him forward. He
had
to get to work.

The street was sorry-looking and deserted. Nothing moved in a gray landscape of dying trees, brown lawn, and wilted flower beds. Rain had washed away the worst of the fallout, but blackened, soggy clumps of mud and ash had collected at natural choke points in the gutter, behind the wheels of parked cars, and in small ponds of sludge where the ground dipped and runoff normally collected. Normally lush green and manicured to within an inch of its life, Deerford Drive was now sadly unkempt. Kipper shivered in the bleak chill of the morning. It had been unnaturally dark for most of the past week, with the sun completely blotted out, but prevailing weather patterns had finally pushed away the worst of the airborne waste, and although the day was by no means sunny, it was at least a good deal brighter. That wouldn’t necessarily last, however.

Hundreds of cities and towns were ablaze across North America. The entire continent was pouring out vast noxious plumes as the infernos spread with nobody and nothing to stop them, save for the occasional, and completely futile, automated firefighting system. He’d seen satellite photos of it on the web, and once on a local news show, before FEMA took over the airwaves. If he hadn’t known better he’d have bet good money that an angry rash of supersized volcanoes had suddenly erupted all over the U.S. and up into Canada. Vast, slow-moving geysers of smoke, thousands of miles long, trailed away east from city after city. The Atlantic and most of Europe was now blanketed, with the wave front due to pass over the Urals in a day or two. It wouldn’t be long before it had circled the Northern Hemisphere and reappeared back over Deerford.

“Mr. Kipper! Mr. Kipper. Hello!”

Jolted by the unexpected cry, Kipper got his mask in place. He knew the voice only too well. Mrs. Heinemann from number forty-three.

“Is it safe now? Is it safe to go out, Mr. Kipper?”

“Well, you’d better hope so, Mrs. Heinemann. Because you’ll be in trouble otherwise, won’t you?”

The woman was a wire-framed ninety-eight pounds of faded Jewish American Princess. Never married. Never got over it. At fifty-something, perhaps even sixty-odd, give or take some plastic surgery and a high degree of elasticity in her actual birth date, she’d poured all of her considerable energies into her self-appointed role as block capo of the neighborhood. Without a husband or children to harass and make miserable, she busied herself with other people’s “problems”—situations that, generally speaking, nobody had recognized as a problem until Mrs. Heinemann became involved.