Ark

30

The construction gang was marched away from the junction and moved down the line of the 470, maybe half a kilometer to the south.

Holle caught glimpses of the tangle of fortifications that lay beyond the perimeter of the road, further east. A swathe of properties had been demolished or bulldozed, leaving a scar a hundred meters wide in the landscape. This open ground was populated by rows of barbed-wire fencing and big concrete blocks, each of them as tall as she was, set out in rough lines like tank traps. There were people everywhere, some in uniform, standing or sitting in silent blocks, or marching purposefully. The most impressive single fortification was a ditch big enough to contain whole digging machines, with a sharp slope on the near side and a shallower slope on the other. Groups of machine-gunners and snipers had been drawn up on the lip of the ditch. She saw the idea; coming from the east you’d tumble in easily enough, and would be exposed to the guns all the way down the slope, but you would have a tough time climbing out up that sharp western slope, into the teeth of the guns. It was like an earthwork out of the Iron Age.

Then they came to a slight rise, and Holle was able to see further to the east, along the line of the old I-70 and beyond the limit of the fortifications. As far as she could see the road was full of people, gray with them, a river of humanity pouring along the highway toward Denver, spilling onto the verges and crowding under the battered road signs. This was the invading army all these defenses were intended to repel. She heard the distant pop of rifles, a crump of grenades.

“So you’re the concrete mixer,” a man said, behind her. “I was after you in the line.”

She turned. He wore a patched AxysCorp coverall; he was aged perhaps fifty, but looked strong, like a farmer, with big, dirt-encrusted hands. She said defiantly, “So what, are you going to turn me in?”

“Not me. I don’t know much about construction.” He looked at his big hands. “But I used to run a smallholding, on the east bank of Back Squirrel Creek. I can use my hands. I can dig a ditch or lay a fence, I think. Anyhow sooner here than in the combat units, or the Honor Corps.”

“What is the Honor Corps?”

“Look.” He pointed to blocks of people sitting passively just behind the fortifications on the highway surface. “If they get through the fence our eye-dee friends are going to have to fight their way through that. Could you take a machete to a disabled boy in his wheelchair? It’s a human shield, an old tactic perfected by Saddam Hussein-well, I suppose you’ve never heard of him.”

“Never work,” somebody said, a burly man in a hard hat. “If those eye-dees have fought their way through the National Guard they’ll not stop for that.”

“But they aren’t monsters,” the smallholder said gently. “They are like us. They’re Americans.”

“Tell you what I’d do. Grab those guys in front, give them a gun, and turn them around the other way. That would work, let them grind each other down. Eye-dee bastards…”

“Looks like I found you just in time.”

Holle whirled. Kelly was standing right behind her, in a drab olive green coverall, a rifle in her hand and a phone clamped to her ear. Holle felt a peculiar mixture, of intense emotions and yet a kind of disappointment. She was aware of how the smallholder pulled away, watching her. She hugged Kelly. “You came for me.”

“Well, you did bring me those bags of diapers,” Kelly said. “Come on, Mel is waiting in a jeep back beyond those processing desks. We can catch up to the buses but we’ll have to cut across country.”

They hurried away, back down the line. Kelly had a pass she kept flashing at the supervising soldiers and cops. Holle glanced back, looking for the smallholder, and for Mrs. Green in the shield units, but she couldn’t see them. It was hard to believe how lost she had felt just seconds ago.

“How did you find me?”

“Not easily,” Kelly shouted. “You’d be surprised how many Holle Groundwaters passed through here today. But you made the right choice, to bullshit your way into the construction corps. If you’d been sent out to the front, out to the fucking First World War they’re mounting out there, I couldn’t have got to you. I’d like to have seen you try to mix concrete, though. Hah! Listen, by the way. It worked.”

“What did?”

“The warp test. We saw it. Or rather Venus and the planet-finders in Alma did. The optical distortion-the gravitational lensing as it went past the face of the moon-it was unmistakable. They sent a feed to the buses.”

“My God.” Holle looked up to the sky, trying to imagine the relativistic miracle that had come to pass far above her head, all on the same day as the urban horrors she had gone through. It didn’t seem to fit, as if it wasn’t possible for both these things to be true. One must be false, or the other.

Automatic fire clattered. Kelly dragged her down. Holle fell heavily, old bruises aching.

And a bomb went off, the detonation massive, overwhelming. The ground shook and hot air washed over them. Holle found herself covered in dust, with her ears full of a close ringing noise.

Kelly stirred, and helped Holle get to her feet.

Not everybody had reacted as quickly as Kelly. All around them people had been thrown to the ground. Their mouths moved, but Holle couldn’t hear their voices.

She was distracted by a metallic glinting, off to her right, out along the line of the highway to the east. The attack on the junction seemed to have been the signal for the eye-dee army to mount an advance. They cut their way through the lines of the city’s conscript army, a gray swarm washing through the brown lines, marked by a sparkle of knives and machetes rising and falling in the morning sun, and rising puffs of smoke from the guns.

Kelly was tugging her sleeve, shouting in her face to get her attention. Kelly’s face was dust-coated, blood trickled from her mouth, and her hair was a tangle. Holle couldn’t hear a word she said.

A wall of dust was scouring along the 470, away from the intersection where the bomb had exploded, driving people like cattle.

They turned and ran.