Ark

28

Out in the open air the sky was clear, blue as a bird’s egg; it was a beautiful Colorado fall morning of the kind the old-timers said you rarely saw any more. To the west the Rockies rose, serene as always, grand above the human fray. But Holle was shocked at the barrage of noise, and an overpowering stink of burning.

There were people everywhere, confronting lines of cops and National Guard troopers. The crowd was surging around the main entrance on Colorado Boulevard. The intention was to take the Candidates south down Colorado, and she could see that the roadway was being kept clear, a corridor of fencing and barbed wire manned by troopers stationed every few meters. The buses were lined up waiting for them, fat with armor, their windows sealed up with bulletproof plate, weapons bristling from gun ports. There was her own bus with B-6 clumsily marked on its unpainted flank.

The Candidates were smuggled through a wire tunnel toward the junction of Colorado with 17th Avenue, and the buses. And suddenly, beyond the fence, just a meter from Holle’s face, were hostiles, as Don called them, mostly young men, but older folk and women and children too. Some, crushed by the great weight of the people behind them, were pressed up against the wire so hard the diamond mesh pushed into the flesh of their hands and faces. When the Candidates were recognized there was a kind of howl. The mob pressed harder, and the fence actually swayed. Troopers fired warning shots in the air.

Kelly flinched. “Jesus.”

“Just keep moving,” Don murmured, his automatic rifle ready in his hands.

Edward Kenzie grunted. “Strategic errors. You’re too close to the City Park and its eye-dee camps. And we should have got you guys out of here long before evacuation day.”

“But they’re not all eye-dees,” Holle said. “Look, that guy is in a cop uniform.”

“It’s all breaking down,” Don said bleakly. “There just isn’t room for everybody in the big new fortified camps in the Rockies. Even if you were a federal worker or a cop or a doctor or a lawyer yesterday, if you lost out in the block ballots you’re on that side of the fence now, suddenly you’re an eye-dee, just as worthless as the rest.”

Holle knew the basic plan, the city’s response to the final crisis. Although the experts said it might be another year yet before the waters actually lapped over the steps of the Capitol and the famous “mile-high” engraving, Holle had heard that from downtown skyscrapers you could already look out over the city, and see the bare peaks of the Rockies Front Range to the west, and to the east a shimmer of blue-gray, the ocean that had drowned America. And as the eastern states collapsed, Denver, the largest city for a thousand kilometers and the home of the federal government for nearly twenty years, had become a sinkhole for refugees. Holle had seen satellite images of the great transportation routes turned to muddy brown threads by the unending columns, each pixel a human being, adults laden with children and old folk and pulling carts and barrows.

President Peery and his administration had fled already, nobody was sure where to-perhaps to the great Cold War bunker buried deep inside Cheyenne Mountain. The bulk of the urban citizens, those selected by the lotteries and who had chosen to go, were being shepherded west to new fastnesses in the Rockies, cities of tents and plastic panels thrown up on the remaining high ground. The main official evacuation route ran from the south of here, along Sixth Avenue which then became US 6, and from there along the 470 beltway to the I-70 and west. Holle and the rest of the Project Nimrod people, however, were being sent south of here, down Colorado Boulevard through Glendale to Englewood, and then they would take the I-285 toward the southwest, where some would be siphoned off to the Mission Control complex at Alma or the launch center at Gunnison. Both of these centers had been well provisioned and fortified.

This was the best the government could do in this final emergency, as its very capital was overrun, and its control over the people and their resources began to dissolve. This was the plan.

But right now Holle still hadn’t got on the bus.

“See that pillar of smoke over there?” Kenzie said harshly. “The State Capitol building burning to the ground. These people make me sick. They should be building fucking rafts. Not taking it out on the cops or smashing stuff up or screaming at a bunch of kids.”

Kelly’s baby started crying.

And the fence collapsed.

Holle saw the glint of wire-cutters. The great press of people did the rest. Hundreds of ragged bodies spilled forward onto the ground. The troopers, reacting to bellowed commands, stepped back, firing into the swarming mass. Blood splashed and there were more screams. But the danger came not from the initial heaping of fallen people but from those who followed, who stayed on their feet and stepped over the bodies, armed with knives, clubs and machetes.

Holle saw all this in a few blurred seconds. She stood in shock, still clutching her pack.

Then there was a crush from behind as the bus passengers closed up, driven by Don and the other military. “Get on the buses! On the buses! Drop all your shit, just get on the buses!” Holle fought to stay on her feet, to move forward. Her pack was ripped off her back in the crush. She didn’t know where her father was.

The eye-dees closed in. Now Candidates were fighting, using fists and feet. She saw Wilson Argent in his bright costume driving his fist into the face of an eye-dee who was trying to haul him out of the line.

But she was close to the buses now. The first bus was actually moving off, its doors and windows sealed up, driving purposefully with people clinging to its doors and its armored roof. She was only a couple of meters away from B-6, but a mass of people were still in her way.

“Holle! Here!” It was her father. Over the heads of the struggling crowd she saw that he had got to the bus. He was clinging to a rail with one hand, and was reaching out to her with the other. “Holle! Grab my hand! Come on-”

Holle launched herself through the crowd, struggling and pushing. If she could just get to her father she could yet be safe. She reached out. His hand was half a meter away.

Kelly screamed, somewhere to her left. “Get off me!” A couple of eye-dees had hold of her. She swung her fist, but, clutching her baby in his papoose, there was little she could do.

Holle didn’t even think about it. She hurled herself into the struggling mob. Sheer momentum carried her past Kelly, who broke free. Holle landed one satisfying fist in the face of an eye-dee-a middle-aged man, she saw, his face bloodied, dirt-streaked yet neatly shaven, a bewildering detail.

But he didn’t fall. He grabbed her by her shoulders and hauled her bodily out of the melee. Now more hands grabbed her arms, legs, somebody even got a handful of her short hair, and she was hauled away into a crush of squirming bodies and legs. She was being carried away from the bus, from her father. Panicking, she struggled. She was kicked and punched. Nobody reacted when she screamed, because everybody else in the world was screaming.

Then she was dumped on the ground, still surrounded by the mob. A face loomed over her, a man’s face, neatly shaven. The man she had first attacked. “I’m sorry!” he yelled down at her. “Sorry! It’s for my daughter. Try to understand…”

She felt hands at her neck, her waist, her clothes being pulled from her. A blinding pain erupted in her head.