the stock seemed to have been piled into a sodden heap out on the road. As she watched, dozens of fighters emerged from the building, but rather than scattering and heading into Rockefeller Center like their comrades, they took off at a sprint downtown.
'What do you think that means?' she mused out loud.
'It means the U.S. Air Force is going to be along very shortly to bomb the living bejeezus out of anyone foolish enough to be loitering in the vicinity of fucking Fifth Avenue,' the Rhino said. 'Come on, we've ticked all the boxes, reconnoitered like champions. We can see the place is crawling with vermin. But it's not our concern unless they make us. We should get going back over to Park Avenue. Quieter there. Wide-open spaces. It's a more amenable environment for your average pachyderm. And it's not like you're going to find anything you like here. I think you've probably left your shopping till a bit late.'
'You're right,' she admitted as she adjusted her sling, which was slipping off her injured shoulder, and crawled backward down the mound of rubble on which she'd been lying. St. Pat's was a gutted ruin, burned out and open to the sky where the roof had caved in. She wondered if it had been reduced to this state on purpose. Small jagged jewels of stained glass lay everywhere, and anything of value had been looted long ago. The vestibule in which they hid reeked of human excrement. 'There's nothing worth having here now,' she said. 'Best we push on, I suppose.'
'Yes, best we do,' he muttered.
Just two blocks away, on Park Avenue, the city was surprisingly quiet again, indeed all but abandoned, allowing them to move with more freedom as long as they exercised some caution. The large number of enemy fighters in the blocks around the Rockefeller Center buildings had caused them a few hours' delay as they picked their way around the obstacles, with Jules insisting that they move slowly and take note of where the gangs had gathered their forces. It never hurt to know where your competition was setting up shop, although from what Milosz and the others had told them, perhaps it was time to stop thinking of the pirates as competitors. They seemed to want to actually take over the joint now rather than just clean it out.
The overnight downpour had abated, and the worst of the flooding was over, although great oily pools of water lay everywhere and small rivulets and streams ran out of some buildings with damaged roofs. The dull background roar of battle to the south probably explained the abandoned streets, Jules thought, as thousands of gang members rushed to join the battle. It couldn't be long before somebody else pushed in to fill the vacuum created by their departure from this part of midtown, however.
'It's all just fucked,' she muttered to herself.
'What's that?' he asked as they paused at the corner of 52nd Street and Park, sheltering behind an overturned meat truck while they scoped the next block of real estate.
'Oh, it's just so fucking disappointing, isn't it,' she grumbled. 'I used to love this town, Rhino. And especially this part of it. I was just sort of hoping that… you know.'
He paused in his scan of the terrain ahead of them.
'That it might not be completely fucked. That there might be some little trinket you could put in your pocket and carry home with you? A keepsake from the past, Miss Jules?'
'God, you put it like that and it sounds so naive.'
'That's because it is naive. This is the reality now.' He gestured with his gun at a bloated corpse lying half in and half out of a Citibank across the street.
'September 11 was the end of the fucking golden age here. The Wave just came in and washed the debris away. There wouldn't have been anything more after that. Come on,' he said, dashing from the wreckage of the van to the cover of another pileup a hundred yards farther north. Half a dozen cars had collided with a big blue bus, forcing them to weave around the twisted wreckage. Gray water had gathered in a small depression, deep enough to reach the top of her boots, and Jules was slowed down considerably by nursing her shoulder injury. 'Sorry,' she gasped, a little winded.
He shrugged and took up his surveillance of the next hundred yards of ground.
'I'm not even a local, you know, and I have more faith in the city than you,' Julianne said, continuing her thoughts from before.
'Miss Jules, your ironic detachment is almost Buffy-like in its awesomeness. But how about we get our game faces on? According to that Polish guy, it's gonna start getting dicey once we're nearer the park. Milosz reckons it's still crawling with bad guys, even with most of them heading downtown, and it's six to five the gangs from the West Side are going to push through there anyway once they figure out there's nobody to really push back.'
Jules conceded the point with a nod and took a grip on the P90 with her good hand. She wore it slung around her neck and clipped to a combat harness, but taking hold of the weapon did help focus her mind again.
'I'm sorry,' she said. 'Game face on. It was just that apart from Sydney, this is the first time since the Wave I've really been in a big city I knew and loved. And, of course, Sydney was full of people. This is…'
She gestured helplessly, a sweep of her gun muzzle taking in the ruined metropolis stretching away to the north. From their new vantage point she could see how a suddenly driverless yellow cab had punted a street vendor's cart through one of the huge plate glass windows of an office building, and a solid river of mangled steel appeared to have frozen at the intersection of Park Avenue and 54th. Heavy traffic flowing east on the morning of the Wave was now piled up in a giant, crumpled concertina of metal and broken glass. It wasn't impassable, but they might have to climb over it if they wanted to keep heading north. The Rhino scanned the block ahead, checking for stay-behinds, ambushes, lone operators, whatever. But Jules was becoming very attuned to the subtle changes in the city's mood as they passed across the invisible boundaries between one piece of turf and the next. And this felt… abandoned.
'Yeah,' the Rhino grunted. 'I know. I might have lived the last twenty years in the court of King Bubba, but my folks were Pennsylvania Yankees going all the way back to the thirteen colonies. I came here every year with my mom and dad. We had family in New Jersey.'
He spit a wad of dark, viscous tobacco juice out the side of his mouth. It landed with a plop in a small puddle of filthy rainwater.
'Sorry,' Jules said. 'My selfishness can be staggering at times. Legacy of that landed gentry lineage.'
'Well, you're earning your keep now, missy. So let's get to work.' A sniper opened up on them just short of 59th and Park Avenue, although 'sniper' was probably too grand a word to describe the crazy man dressed in a florid yellow shirt leaning out the fourth-floor window of a tall brownstone building and unloading on them with an AK 47. At least the Rhino insisted that was what it was. Jules didn't much care. All that mattered to her was that somebody was firing lots and lots of bloody big bullets at her, and were it not for the shooter's obvious incompetence and the riot of jungle that had grown up over the median strip along which they had been progressing, she would probably have been ventilated at six hundred rounds a minute. As it was, she found herself huddled up against a concrete planter, leaking blood from somewhere and all but vomiting and fainting from the small white supernova of pain that had exploded in her damaged shoulder.
'Stay down,' roared the Rhino, entirely redundantly. She wasn't moving anywhere. Park Avenue was gridlocked for at least a mile in either direction with a massive pileup of smashed, burned-out auto bodies-the reason they had been creeping toward their objective along the relatively unobstructed center strip. Unobstructed, that is, save for three or four years of unrestrained plant growth along the strip that formerly divided north-and southbound traffic. At times the Rhino had been forced to hack a path through with a machete, but they had chosen the slow path along the thin overgrown corridor because it provided good cover from anyone enjoying the high ground on either side of them. Anyone like the drug-addled pirate asswit currently trying to kill her, for instance.
He had to be fucked on kif or something, she was certain, because he was playing 'Who Let The Dogs Out?' on a giant portable stereo and singing along, laughing hysterically, as he unleashed a whole clip of 7.62-mm on them. The gun roared sporadically with impossibly long strings of rapid-fire pops and booms, reminding her, insanely, of a woodpecker on speed and all but drowning out the most annoying song in the world and the fairy rain tinkle of shell casings tumbling four floors to the sidewalk. Jules huddled in close to the small concrete revetment as dozens of rounds zipped and zooped and cracked around her, chewing up the foliage and showering her with hot, sharp splinters of wood, metal, and cement.
No. She would not be moving anywhere soon.
She didn't even dare turn her head to see where the Rhino had gone. She had a brief impression that he'd dived to the right, somehow arcing over the crumpled hood of a flame-scorched yellow cab, but how he'd managed to get such an enormous mass of Rhino flesh airborne at speed, she had no idea. The firing stopped for a few seconds, but
