After America

The words were brave, but Milosz could see that the woman speaking them was terrified. The yelling and screaming cycled up outside to something like hysteria, and perhaps it was, an insane mix of fury, terror, bloodlust, and vengefulness all about to burst upon them.

"I'll save this for when they come in," Wilson said, holding up the last grenade.

Milosz nodded grimly while sca

He had four bullets left for his own Beretta and resolved to put each of them into a different man, standing up from where he'd crouched below the scarred ruins of the bank's high-vaulted windows and assuming a comfortable shooter's stance, taking careful aim with a two-handed grip. His pistol boomed once, and a charging asswit spun and dropped. He fired again, and the throat of another exploded in red ruin. A third shot smacked into the chest of a massively fat man whose momentum carried him forward so far that Milosz wondered if he had been hit at all. He lifted his aim slightly and shot him in the face, which came apart like a rotten melon, spewing its corruption everywhere.

Bullets struck and whizzed all around as he calmly unsheathed his fighting knife and waited to receive the enemy.

At last they drew close enough for him to marvel at the whiteness of teeth bared like canine fangs, as though they might leap the last ten feet and tear him apart like jackals. And then… a murderous wind blew over them, scything them down, carving through them, raking huge chunks of meat and chips of bone from their dancing bodies. So shocked was he that it took another second before he recognized the dense, ripping sound of a high-capacity machine gun coming from somewhere to the north. And then his knee collapsed under him as Gardener kicked it out from behind and dragged him down below the line of the window.

"What the fuck! Is that the cavalry? The real cavalry?"

The ferocious industrial hammering continued without faltering, and Milosz risked a pop up to see what had become of the assault wave.

It was broken.

A few asswits were fleeing back through the flames and the shattered landscape through which they came, some of them tumbling as short staccato roars from the automatic weapons cut them down.

Milosz looked around, desperate to see who had saved them, incredulous that they had survived. There had to be an explanation.

But all he heard was one loud, mocking American voice.

"No, siree. You do not get these from pettin' kitty cats. Hooaahh!"

29

London "The armorer will see you now, ma'am."

The young gray-suited man pronounced it "marm."

"Thanks," she said. The occasional vestiges of Ye Olde England still amused her greatly. Caitlin swallowed the last of her thin, lukewarm instant coffee with a grimace. That didn't amuse her at all. It was nothing like the potent brew Bret made back on the farm, but it would have been churlish to refuse it. Such offers were not made lightly, even within the confines of the London Cage, where many of the privations suffered by the wider city were ameliorated by black budgets and secondary funding sources.

"I have a few of the usual suspects to see. I'll join you in the briefing room," said Dalby, excusing himself from the scarred Formica table and the trifling remains of a plate of fries-hereabouts known as chips-lying in a puddle of dark brown gravy. Dalby ate his chips with a knife and fork, which Caitlin also filed under Q, for quirk.

They shook hands, the Englishman being a stickler for the formalities. Indeed, the word "stickler" could have been invented just for him. Caitlin picked up her backpack and followed the younger officer out of the staff canteen and into a long corridor lined with closed doors and blacked-out windows. Somewhere nearby a man, or possibly a woman, was crying. Walking behind her escort, she noted that his hair was slightly longer than normal and his chin more heavily stubbled. She wondered if he had just come in from the field-unlikely, given the lowly nature of his duties today-or whether, like everyone else, he was feeling the hardships of the ration system. She was certainly missing the small luxuries of home life at the farm: the fresh eggs and milk, a loaf of bread baked in the wood-fired oven. And Bret and Monique, of course. She couldn't stop wondering how they were faring and how long it might be before she would see them again. Would the baby even recognize her? On cue, her leaky breasts began aching dully.

"Knock it off, asshole," she muttered to herself before mommy guilt could run away with her.

"Excuse me, marm?" asked the suit, turning his head as he continued to stride down the hallway.

"Don't sweat it." She smiled. "Talking to myself. First sign of madness."

"Very good, marm."

They reached a set of stairs at the end of the hall and descended three flights, which would have put them well below the river. The cinder block walls leaked moisture and in places had sprouted cancerous-looking growths between the bricks. Some of the lightbulbs had burned out, making the staircase something of a darkened well. At the very bottom they pushed through a pair of heavy rubber doors into a workshop, an area much better lit by fluorescent tubes and long-life bulbs. Dehumidifiers labored to suck the dampness out of the space with limited effect. The cement floor still had a moist color to it.

Workers in coveralls bent before workbenches laden with the tools of war. Racks of M16s lined the far wall where a couple of men were working with a larger rifle barrel. Probably something that would increase the punch of the pathetically underpowered round. On other workbenches, i

The suit handed her off to a middle-aged woman, a short, squat specimen with an enormous mole on one of her nostrils.

"Hiya, Gerty." Caitlin smiled. "Long time."

"'Ello, pet." The woman gri

Gerty's delivery was uninterrupted by the need to draw breath or apparently to pause while injesting the sodden biscuit she dunked into a cup of tea before pushing it into that mouth full of broken tombstones.

"I'm off to Germany, Gert," said Caitlin. "Probably fly out later today."

"Oh, dear," cooed the armorer. "Nothing good ever comes of intrigues with those sausage-eating bastards. They did for my old granddad, you know, Miss Cait. A Stuka got him at Dunkirk. A terrible shock it was to old nan Dorothy, too. And she with her dicky heart an' all. It's a wonder the family line didn't die out there and then."

The woman put one warm, meaty hand through the crook of Caitlin's arm and drew her deeper into the workshop. A few men and women, mostly men, huddled around machine tools, fiddling and adjusting levers and dials. One ma