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She stopped and looked into the eyes of #24. Her eyes were the color of bile. She never blinked. “Check the headset on this one.”
“We did, ma’am. It sustained no cranial damage during the engagement.”
“Check it again, and double its downers. They’re supposed to be in a coma, and this one’s looking at me.”
A flunky unscrewed the bolts on #24’s helmet with a drill, while the other tugged it off. Several shots had cracked the high-impact plastic helmet, but the Kevlar liner had stopped them from damaging the electrical wiring and neurotransmitter pumps screwed into the dome of his skull.
He wanted to stop them and gut her, but he had orders not to move.
#24 followed orders.
VI.
On the dead side of Market, the Berkeley social science geniuses were building museum dioramas in the old storefronts, re-creating the bustling life of the old City. Celebrating its heroes-both the surviving and the fallen-in frozen pantomimes of earnestly rosy history.
You couldn’t see it at night, but they’d actually sculpted a plaster statue of Eagle and put him on a bike-next to Lester the Professor in his wheelchair and crazy-eyed Emperor Norton II, his courageous freak comrades in that first desperate year of rescues and food runs, before Big Brother came back to take over the job. A plaque at their feet said: They Kept the Embarcadero Lights Burning, And Kept The City Alive.
They’d posed for it together, three unlikely loners who had just tried to stay alive and protect their neighbors, when nobody else could. It was hella fucking surreal, hilarious, and also an incredible honor.
But under the self-deprecation and pride was a creeping sense of having already died. Their purpose fulfilled. Their glory days noted, memorialized, and gone.
Like the boy in the hundred-year-old statue behind him, on the domed-in corner of Montgomery and Market at which Eagle paused, finishing his joint before rolling out into the toxins.
It was a monument erected in 1850, or at least that was the date of the quote on the base. It showed a handsome young fellow in miner’s togs with a pickaxe in one hand, a flag in the other, standing tall against all comers.
The inscription read:
“The unity of our empire hangs on the decision of this day.” W. H. Seward, on the admission of California vs. Senate.
And now, San Francisco was a sovereign nation.
“Pffffft…Thanks, America!” Eagle said. “It’s been fun!” And then coughed up a plume of Master Kush and Kilimanjaro.
The Market Street South airlock was four lanes wide and a city block long, which included the sealed-off BART station just past Montgomery.
He snuffed the roach and swallowed it on his way through the door. No waste in this city. No littering, either.
Eagle’s locker was near the back and the showers, with the rest of the regulars. He suited up, put on his goggles and gas mask, checked the hazmat seals on the pizza cozy one more time.
Then he rode out through the gate and into the Red Zone.
The New City reclaimed the corpse of the old a block at a time. Clearing the wreckage off the streets, purging the buildings of any lingering human wreckage-dead or alive-was only the first step.
They were also repairing infrastructure, and cleaning up the chemical residue from the bombs that had leveled the playing field-or at least cleared it.
Eagle had watched from his bolthole in the Hyatt when the Navy choppers flew over the City that day. He watched the chemical bombs descend, on what they all unofficially called Black Flag Day.
He couldn’t tell what kind of bug spray they dropped this time, but the thousands of loitering dead that filled the streets didn’t respond to the powdery gray clouds like all the other times: getting all tweaked and fidgety, or eating themselves, but still standing.
This time, they just melted. Like the Wicked Witch of the West, an army reduced to ru
Nearly a million zombies, dispatched in an hour and a half.
Along with every plant, animal, insect or human being that wasn’t safely under glass.
Black stains like Hiroshima victims, silhouettes etched deep into the pavement wherever they dropped. Static shadows of what once was, ghosts of an explosion still lethal two years later…
Eagle rolled over them, coasting the cleared stretch of Market, where the work crews were now opening up the frontier.
A few other cyclists passed Eagle as he hopped the curb and crossed the plaza with its defunct fountain and dead ginkgo groves. They wore elaborate Hopi sacred clown gas masks, and shouted his name as they passed.
The big red City truck was parked at the edge of Civic Center Plaza, with a string of worker trailers behind it. The crews worked in a long line, scrubbing the buckled marble flagstones and shoveling concrete debris into a sinkhole that had gobbled up half of Grove Street.
The workers wore orange convict jumpsuits and skid-lid motorcycle helmets. They played sandblasters over the marble to scour away the black scabs where the dead had melted. A cancerous seagull from somewhere far away wheeled down and perched on the head of one of the workers, pecked at its ru
Eagle saw a few other encouraging signs-sickly yellow weeds pushed through the cracks in the sidewalk, cockroaches ran in the gutter-but the domed palace of the Civic Center still looked like an ancient ruin. He remembered the day he’d delivered twelve pizzas to a wedding feast on the steps, the last weekend gay marriages were legal in the City. All of them now, as dead as the Romans.
The airlock on the back of the truck hissed and irised open as Eagle parked his bike and hefted the thermal pouch with their order in it.
Eagle stepped in and closed his eyes to the spray and blowoff. He kept his mask on until the i
(Some Navy jerk on Treasure Island had bitched about the soggy cardboard when Eagle shipped a batch of deep dish pies out there; but the next day, he shipped a batch of these space age containers the submariners designed for keeping food hot without noisy microwaves. Another breakthrough for the evolving world.)
“Hey, Eagle,” Ernie cheered. “You remember that pizza place, Escape From New York, over on Van Ness? Ada says they gave you free pie if you could order in Italian. Is she full of shit or what?”
Eagle peeled off his mask, but he was in no hurry to jump into the argument, or breathe the air in there. Ernie Nardello and Ada Glaublich worked Red Zone cleanup 24/7, so they practically lived in the truck. Somebody must’ve pissed in their air recirculator. Hazmat suits, masks, dirty longjohns, and more than a few of Eagle’s special pizza boxes lay ankle-deep on the floor.
“I du
Born Adam Glaublich, the shy civil engineer was on top of the list for sex change surgery when the dead fucked up everything. Ada was a stone bummer, but Ernie loved her, and talked more than enough for both of them.
Ernie cracked the top box and nearly fainted. “Aw shit, I thought you said there was no more pineapple!”
“We got a couple more cans out of the Holiday I
“Dude, I could blow you right now.”