After America

He shrugged and took up his surveillance of the next hundred yards of ground.

"I'm not even a local, you know, and I have more faith in the city than you," Julia

"Miss Jules, your ironic detachment is almost Buffy-like in its awesomeness. But how about we get our game faces on? According to that Polish guy, it's go

Jules conceded the point with a nod and took a grip on the P90 with her good hand. She wore it slung around her neck and clipped to a combat harness, but taking hold of the weapon did help focus her mind again.

"I'm sorry," she said. "Game face on. It was just that apart from Sydney, this is the first time since the Wave I've really been in a big city I knew and loved. And, of course, Sydney was full of people. This is…"

She gestured helplessly, a sweep of her gun muzzle taking in the ruined metropolis stretching away to the north. From their new vantage point she could see how a suddenly driverless yellow cab had punted a street vendor's cart through one of the huge plate glass windows of an office building, and a solid river of mangled steel appeared to have frozen at the intersection of Park Avenue and 54th. Heavy traffic flowing east on the morning of the Wave was now piled up in a giant, crumpled concertina of metal and broken glass. It wasn't impassable, but they might have to climb over it if they wanted to keep heading north. The Rhino sca

"Yeah," the Rhino grunted. "I know. I might have lived the last twenty years in the court of King Bubba, but my folks were Pe

He spit a wad of dark, viscous tobacco juice out the side of his mouth. It landed with a plop in a small puddle of filthy rainwater.

"Sorry," Jules said. "My selfishness can be staggering at times. Legacy of that landed gentry lineage."

"Well, you're earning your keep now, missy. So let's get to work." A sniper opened up on them just short of 59th and Park Avenue, although "sniper" was probably too grand a word to describe the crazy man dressed in a florid yellow shirt leaning out the fourth-floor window of a tall brownstone building and unloading on them with an AK 47. At least the Rhino insisted that was what it was. Jules didn't much care. All that mattered to her was that somebody was firing lots and lots of bloody big bullets at her, and were it not for the shooter's obvious incompetence and the riot of jungle that had grown up over the median strip along which they had been progressing, she would probably have been ventilated at six hundred rounds a minute. As it was, she found herself huddled up against a concrete planter, leaking blood from somewhere and all but vomiting and fainting from the small white supernova of pain that had exploded in her damaged shoulder.

"Stay down," roared the Rhino, entirely redundantly. She wasn't moving anywhere. Park Avenue was gridlocked for at least a mile in either direction with a massive pileup of smashed, burned-out auto bodies-the reason they had been creeping toward their objective along the relatively unobstructed center strip. Unobstructed, that is, save for three or four years of unrestrained plant growth along the strip that formerly divided north-and southbound traffic. At times the Rhino had been forced to hack a path through with a machete, but they had chosen the slow path along the thin overgrown corridor because it provided good cover from anyone enjoying the high ground on either side of them. Anyone like the drug-addled pirate asswit currently trying to kill her, for instance.

He had to be fucked on kif or something, she was certain, because he was playing "Who Let The Dogs Out?" on a giant portable stereo and singing along, laughing hysterically, as he unleashed a whole clip of 7.62-mm on them. The gun roared sporadically with impossibly long strings of rapid-fire pops and booms, reminding her, insanely, of a woodpecker on speed and all but drowning out the most a

No. She would not be moving anywhere soon.

She didn't even dare turn her head to see where the Rhino had gone. She had a brief impression that he'd dived to the right, somehow arcing over the crumpled hood of a flame-scorched yellow cab, but how he'd managed to get such an enormous mass of Rhino flesh airborne at speed, she had no idea. The firing stopped for a few seconds, but not the music or laughter. Reloading presumably, although she wasn't quite ready to test the theory by hopping up and exposing herself to another fusillade. Perhaps if she'd been close enough to hear the hollow clunk of a mag swap…

The frantic drumming of the Kalashnikov started up again, disintegrating leaf and branch all around her, caroming off car bodies, and shattering the odd unbroken window. Jules's shoulder was in agony. Black spots bloomed and spread across her vision. And then the terrible din abruptly ceased, cut off by two short bursts of fire from a P90. The glassy tinkle of falling shell cases terminated with a giant crash, causing her to jump.

"Nothing to worry about, Miss Jules," the Rhino a

"Thank Christ for that," she said, finding her feet somewhat shakily and brushing off the worst of the mud and foliage with her good arm. "What do you think his story was?" she asked.

The Rhino slitted his eyes and peered at the building from which they had been sniped after a fashion.

"Du

"The enemy of my enemy…" Jules said.

"Something like that," he answered, sca

The Rhino helped her up and over the hood of the nearest car wreck, and they hurried into the foyer of an office block on the corner, jumping straight through the hole where a plate glass window had been smashed. Given the lack of water and rubbish in the foyer and the neatly presevered remains of the Disappeared, perhaps a dozen of them in all, it appeared the window had been intact until very recently. There was a chance the shooter with the boom box had taken it out, for there seemed to be no evidence that the foul weather of the previous twenty-four hours had encroached in there. The smugglers retreated from the street front, where they might be seen and targeted, and laid out the map of midtown that the soldiers had helpfully updated for them.

Central Park was still listed as no-man's-land, but the Serbs and Chechens were present in much greater concentrations on the far side of that wilderness than the Rhino's last update had indicated. They faced off against each other across West 64th, and the Chechens were thought to have pushed into the park, taking over the Tavern on the Green as they attempted to flank their Serbian rivals. That was as far into the park as any raider clan was known to have pushed. According to the female soldier they'd met, the air force had armed drones constantly over the area and standing orders to fire on any movement within the confines of the park.