so does everyone else. Mrs Deever at number 36, with her two little ones – she needs formula, Mr Kipper. And sweet Jane at 29, the retarded girl, she needs her medication. The Songnamichans – that very large Hindu family, he’s a Microsoft manager – well, they must nearly be eating the wallpaper by now, with all of those children. What
She’d arrived right in front of him by now, yapping the whole time, a classic demonstration of fire and movement. He hadn’t had a chance to speak or retreat. But her questions gave him the opportunity he needed.
‘Mrs Heinemann,’ he said forcefully. ‘You need to get back inside right now. It is not safe out here, yet. We haven’t had a chance to take any measurements of air or water quality. I’m only out here because it’s my job. You need to get back inside where it’s safe, this very minute. Go on. Right now. Don’t delay. And don’t drag any mud into the house with you. You’ll need to strip off, bag up that outfit, and scrub yourself thoroughly. You still got water stored in the house? Good. Then, get going. Right now!’
He made sure his delivery was every bit as rapid and incontestable as her own. He waved her back towards her own house, shaking his head and brooking no backchat. In his peripheral vision he could see curtains twitching aside in a couple of houses and he made sure that everyone watching could see he didn’t want anybody wandering around until it was safe.
‘But Mr Kipper -’
‘No! Move along now. Go on, Mrs Heinemann. You’ve no business endangering yourself out here. Now git. Go and decontaminate yourself.’ He took her upper arm in a deliberate grip and gave her a hurry-on towards home.
‘Oh my. Oh dear,’ she mumbled as she toddled off at high speed.
Shaking his head, he returned to the pick-up and climbed in, carefully knocking any mud from his boots before doing so, mostly for the benefit of his audience. The cabin was cold and still smelled of the McDonald’s Family Meal he’d brought home late on day one. He’d also picked up a whole heap of canned fruit and eighty gallons of spring water in big ten-gallon plastic bottles, but that was the extent of any hoarding he felt necessary – because of all those freeze-dried, vacuum-sealed meals he’d bought in bulk near the end of last year, from some camping store that was closing down. Man, hadn’t Barb changed her tune on that little purchase. He’d got himself a new one torn at the time.
The engine needed turning over a couple of times before the truck grumbled into life, sounding louder than usual in the unnatural stillness of the morning. He checked the fuel gauge as soon as he had power, making sure he hadn’t been siphoned. The city council’s Emergency Management Committee had banned the sale of gasoline for ‘non-essential’ purposes on the second day, but hadn’t had the manpower-or the will, in his opinion-to enforce the measure when thousands of people ignored it and started queuing at gas stations. They bid up the price to almost fifty dollars a gallon at one point. That was when the army had rolled out of Fort Lewis to lock down the city and get everyone off the streets as the sky had blackened and the rain turned to acid.
Kipper’s truck had three-quarters of a tank, and he could get more from a council depot without any trouble, yet. But that’d change. No commercial shipping or air traffic had come into Seattle for five days, and he didn’t expect any in the foreseeable future. The only supplies they could draw on were aid shipments: food from Australia and New Zealand, one supertanker of petroleum so far from Taiwan, and more food and medical supplies from Japan. It was enough to keep things ticking over, if it kept coming, and if people didn’t panic. Two big fucking ‘if’s.
The island was quiet, and people were sticking to the curfew. Mostly. Kipper searched the radio dial for anything besides the recorded EBS messages, which told him nothing new, and said nothing about the raid on the food bank. He picked up a scratchy, inconsistent transmission from somewhere in Canada, but it was all electronic dance music, which in his book was worse than nothing. Sighing, he punched the button to cut off the radio and pulled away from the curb, wondering what the hell he was going to do about
His route took him along West Mercer Way. Normally a quiet, tree-lined drive through some of the more exclusive real estate the island had to offer, it felt eerily deserted, with sodden rubbish and leaf litter strewn along its length. He took the Homer Hadley floating bridge across Lake Washington into the city, and again found it hard to get his head around the empty lanes. At this time on a Friday morning, traffic should have been crawling over the span, bumper to bumper.
There was some vehicular movement, however. Mobile army patrols stopped him three times. Then there were the roadblocks and checkpoints he hit on another four occasions. His pass, countersigned by three city councillors and the ubiquitous General Blackstone, carried him through each obstacle, but he understood why there were so few people about. After the food riot on day three down at Ivar’s Salmon House, under the I-5 bridge, and a shoot- out at the 7-Eleven on Denny Way that left four people dead following an argument over who was going to get the last of the frozen pizza subs, the army had put away its smiley face. Three young men, who’d have been thought of as burglars a week earlier, got shot down as ‘looters’ while trying to make off with a carton of hot dogs from the Wendy’s on Rainier Avenue that evening. A vagrant, emerging from a dumpster behind a KFC the following day, was cut in half by automatic weapons fire from an armoured fighting vehicle. Far from attempting to cover up the incidents, the same General Blackstone who’d scrawled the signature on Kipper’s ‘transit documents’ appeared on television and the radio to detail exactly what had happened and to assure the citizens of Seattle it would happen again, to anyone who broke curfew and attempted to steal from their fellow citizens by ‘subverting’ the rationing system. Things went quiet around the city after that.
Talk-back radio and a couple of current affairs shows on the local TV networks had raged against the ‘injustice’, but that defiance was short-lived, lasting only as long as it took four Humvees full of troops to roll into their parking lots. Some lawyers who arrived at City Hall to serve papers on the administration for First Amendment violations were still in custody somewhere. There’d been no more open dissent and, incidentally, no more food riots or looting either. But the self-proclaimed Resistance appeared shortly afterwards in the form of an email spammed throughout the city warning of a fascist takeover and promising to ‘take back the streets’.
Kipper wasn’t happy about any of it – how the hell could you be? But on the other hand he knew how desperate the situation was, and just how easily it could spin totally out of control. He really hoped this Blackstone asshole would see sense and ease off the thumbscrews a little. People were hurting and scared; you couldn’t keep the whole city under house arrest indefinitely. And he could only pray that this dumbass Resistance thing turned out to be a bunch of dope-addled bullshit artists. God knows, Seattle was full of
Speaking of which… He hauled the wheel around, crossing over the median strip and pointing the truck towards 4th Avenue South, where the main food distribution centre for the CBD was located, at a Costco wholesale warehouse near the train yards. He wanted to see for himself how the food aid system was working.
