Ark

43

Don Meisel took Mel’s arm and pulled him out of the line for the passenger buses that would have taken him out of the blast zone. Don was in combat gear, wearing a heavy bulletproof vest and carrying an automatic weapon. Under his helmet his face was smeared with dark cream, but it was streaked by sweat on his forehead and under his eyes. “You up for a little action?”

“Are you serious? I haven’t fired a gun in years.”

“We need everybody we can get. Although you fly boys never could shoot straight anyhow. Come on.” He set off jogging toward a big, blunt-nosed military truck in bottle green.

Mel had to wait as a bus roared past him, heading down the heavily reinforced corridor away from the Candidate Hilton and out of the blast zone. Then he followed helplessly.

“So,” Don asked as he jogged, “you see Holle off?”

“I chickened out,” Mel admitted. “Seeing her through a wall of glass-what difference would it have made?”

“Fair enough,” Don said, jogging. “Best to keep busy.”

“So what’s going on?”

“Action all around the perimeter. Here.” There was a heap of armor and weaponry by the truck; Don handed Mel police body armor, helmet and gun. “They’re coming in worse from the west just now. We think it’s an abider faction. But it’s hard to tell, everything’s mixed up to hell with eye-dees and rogue elements of cops and military and National Guard running around everywhere. You strapped up? All aboard.” He helped Mel climb up onto the bed of the truck.

There were maybe twenty troopers jammed in here, cops and National Guard and regular army troops. An officer tied up the tailboard, and they rolled off, heading west, with an engine roar and a plume of dust rising up into the evening dark. The truck followed a trail of white rags tied to sticks, evidently leading it through a minefield.

Don stared straight ahead. Mel couldn’t judge his mood. “So-you OK with everything? The launch and stuff.”

Don forced a smile, and adjusted his chinstrap. “As much as you’d expect. We’d both rather have sent Dexter, but they ain’t taking two-year-olds. Kelly’s gone on our behalf, to live on a new world as we’ll never be able to. As for me, what the future holds God only knows. At one time I had a career path, you know. Worked in the city, in a CAPs squad under an officer called Bundy. Good man.”

“CAPs?”

“Crimes Against Persons. Homicides and assault. It was regular police work. And I was smart. I was thinking of going into Special Investigations. It was compensation, you know, for being thrown out of the Academy. But we kept being pulled out to go man some barricade or other, or break up another food riot at another eye-dee camp. Now it’s all kind of liquefying, and so much for my career plans.” He looked at Mel. “But there’s still work to be done. If you like I’ll put in a word, and-hey, we’re there.”

The truck growled to a stop. The officer let down the tailgate, and the troopers clambered down. There was a sound of gunfire, a stink of burning, a pall of smoke.

Don beckoned to Mel. Stick with me. They made their way across broken ground, the smashed foundations of some building. The gunfire, the shouting and the screams, got louder. I should be on the Ark right now, Mel thought. Not here.

They came to a trench system, and at the officer’s signal dropped down into it and made their way along in a file, Mel sticking close to Don’s back. This trench had been dug out carefully. It was walled with sheets of plastic, and it twisted this way and that, a snakelike layout to reduce the damage from a grenade blast that would clean out a straight-line ditch. The defense of the Ark launch site, on this ultimate day, had been planned over months and years.

There was a deep, double-barreled thrumming noise. Mel looked to the west, and he saw the unmistakable profile of a Chinook helicopter rise up, huge and ugly, its double rotors turning, silhouetted against the darkling sky. It swept low over the ground, and guns in its nose spat visible fire at the trenches.

“Not one of ours,” Don shouted.

With a thunderous crash two more aircraft roared in, passing north to south and screaming over the Chinook. Mel, an air force brat, was pretty sure they were F-35s, Lightnings. Everybody cowered; the aircraft noise, vast and oppressive, was terrifying. But there was no firing; maybe the Lightnings were short of munitions. He yelled, “Where the hell did they get a Chinook?”

“Some rogue faction in the army or air force. Or maybe it’s the Mormons. I told you it’s a mess-”

There was a muffled boom.

“Mortar!”

“Down!”

The shell looped over them. Mel felt Don’s hand on the back of his neck, pushing him facedown onto a torn plastic sheet. The shell passed over them and detonated, and the ground shook.

Mel got up gingerly. “Somebody got a mortar.”

“Yeah,” Don breathed. “And now they got their range.”

The officer leading them pointed. “You, you, and you two, take out that damn mortar. The rest of you follow me.”

“That’s us,” Don said. The other two picked out by the officer had already scrambled over the trench wall, and were making their way west, the way the mortar had come from. Don squirmed up and out after them.

Mel followed without thinking. He lunged over the perimeter and got down into the dirt, crawling after the other three, trying to keep up, squirming through the mud toward a mortar nest. It’s for you, Holle, he thought. All of it’s for you.

The others got to the mortar pit before Mel could catch up, and rushed it. Mel heard the slam of a grenade, screams, and then a bloody gurgle.

By the time he reached the pit Don was already clambering down into it. The mortar itself, looking antiquated, was ruined, but there was a pile of shells that looked salvageable. Don and the others were pawing through them. There was a butcher-shop stink of blood and burned flesh. There had been two people in the pit, Mel saw. One, a man, had been blown in half by the grenade that had destroyed the mortar, his legs reduced to shreds. But he had a pistol in his hand, and blood ran down his chest. He had evidently resisted his attackers.

The other in the pit was a woman. Bloodied, she wore the ragged remains of a dress. She was holding a baby, Mel saw, astonished. The kid, no more than a few months old, was wrapped in a filthy blanket. He was awake, but seemed too stunned to cry. When the mother saw Mel, she held the baby up to him and stumbled forward. “Please-”

A single shot from one of the soldiers felled her, leaving her sprawled on the broken ground, her back a bloody ruin where the bullet had exited.

An engine roar crashed down from above.

“Down!” Don yelled.

Mel threw himself flat on the ground. He pulled the baby from its mother’s arms, tried to cradle it under his body armor, and tucked his helmet down over his face. The roar overhead grew louder, and light splashed around him. He risked a glance up. That Chinook was directly overhead, barely visible behind the glare of its spotlight. Mel thought he saw figures in an open hatch, aiming some kind of weapon at the ground, like a bazooka.

A plane came screaming in, an F-35, no more than fifty meters off the ground. The Chinook gave up on the trenches. It rose up, dipped its nose and headed east, straight toward the center of the Zone, and the Ark, surely its ultimate target. The F-35 continued its run. Mel waited for it to open up its cannon, or fire an air-to-air missile, or evade. It did none of these. No ammunition, he remembered.

The plane rammed the chopper.

The explosion hammered at the ground, and filled the sky with light. Mel cowered in the broken mud, clutching the baby, and waited for the wreckage to rain down.

The baby started crying.