was trying to dislodge a Lexus from the rear end of a UPS truck.
'Really, Manny? Who's they?' she asked.
'You know, the pirates, out there?' The small, wiry Puerto Rican waved in the direction of uptown Manhattan. 'Fuckin' pirates, man. Africans. Wetbacks. Crazy fuckers, all of them.'
The clash and boom of heavy tools on twisted metal and the grumble and roar of the heavy equipment, the dozers and scrapers and skid steer loaders, made it all but impossible to hear him. The clearance crew had been working on the pileup in Water Street all day and had made some obvious progress. An assembly-line process started with knots of vehicles such as the one Julianne's crew was working on, breaking apart the impacted vehicles. Salvaged NYPD tow trucks pulled the smaller vehicles over to the forklifts that would in turn load them onto army HEMTTs. The Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Trucks were eight-wheel vehicles with large flatbeds. Once their beds were full, the HEMTTs would bounce down the recently cleared streets to the river, where barges awaited the busted-up vehicles. Heavier vehicles were moved by army five-ton tow trucks or M88 armored recovery vehicles. All of them where headed to the same location, down by the river.
Another team of free enterprise types, some of them veterans who had served their time and were not subject to the resettlement program, would work over the vehicles. Luxury vehicles such as the Lexus commanded their attention for the leather seats, sound system, and other parts. After being stripped, they were tossed into garbage barges along with the rest of the car wrecks of Manhattan.
So far, the clearance crew had only reached the Flatiron Building. Some streets were still jammed, made worse by the recent fighting that had torn through the financial district during the early days after the Wave lifted. That said, at least there was still a city to be salvaged and cleared. Many urban areas had been reduced to blackened scars of rubble and ruin that stretched for miles in every direction.
Julianne couldn't help feeling the hopelessness of the job when she thought about the whole city still waiting to be cleared and the country beyond that. Not that she would be around to help out. But it did rather get one down if one let one's thoughts stray that way.
'What's that, Manny? What'd you say?'
The Rhino's bellowing voice was powerful enough to be heard no matter how loud or harsh the background noise. Manny leaned on his sledgehammer for a moment and wiped his face with a dirty red cloth, which he then stuffed back into his jeans.
'Fuckin' pirates, Rhino. They took a shot at President Kipper this morning. About an hour after we saw him,' Manny explained. 'That was all that banging and booming we heard downtown. They fuckin' shot rockets at him, dude.'
'I heard it was mortars,' said Ryan, a big, raw-boned kid from Kentucky who'd been traveling through Germany when the Wave hit. 'Heard they put mortars on top of some building, you know, for the extra range, and they tried to get him while he was doing something down at Battery Park.'
'So much for the Green Zone,' Manny said.
The Rhino frowned deeply as he swung a massive sledgehammer into the crumpled snarl of the Lexus. Jules took a moment to catch her breath as Manny and Ryan argued about who had the dopest of the inside dope. The Rhino kept swinging and swearing around the stub of a well-chewed stogie. Jules knew that he liked James Kipper, and he seemed more than a little pissed off at the news.
'Who'd you hear this from?' he asked.
'Bossman,' said the Puerto Rican.
'Lewis, the security guy,' Ryan said.
'But he's okay, right?' Rhino asked. 'He didn't get hurt or nothing.'
Both men shrugged and shook their heads.
'Don't think so,' Ryan said.
'Boss said it was cool,' Manny agreed.
The Rhino muttered a few curses under his breath and swung the sledgehammer with an almighty effort. The impact broke apart the grille of the Lexus, freeing up the vehicle. Teenagers with chains and nimble fingers slipped under the UPS truck, hooking the chain to the axle. A waiting tow truck dragged the vehicle away, making room for the next tow truck to remove the Lexus.
'Dial it down, Rhino,' Jules said as she moved up beside him. 'Don't wear yourself out. We have a long way to go yet.'
He nodded and took a breather, moving out of the way of an army five-ton that was inching forward.
'It's just, you know, fuckin' pirates. I hate those guys, Jules. Nothin' but worthless fuckin' bottom feeders the lot of them. Never heard of one worth a pinch of shit when I was in the Coast Guard, and these assholes we got running around now are no better. Just scavengers is all. Fuckin' parasites and worms, the lot of them.'
'Yes, Rhino, I'm sure, but let's not get carried away, shall we.'
She gave him a warning look, one eyebrow raised and her head dipped like a disapproving schoolmistress.
'Okay, Miss Jules. Whatever you say.'
Rumors of the attack swirled through the salvage and clearance crew all afternoon. Some said it was a car bomb; others insisted on a lone sniper. At one point Manny became convinced that ninjas were involved.
'As if,' Ryan Dubois snorted. 'Ninjas and pirates never work together.'
The gang boss called time at four in the afternoon after a day that had started at four in the morning. The grubby rainbow coalition of people that made up the salvage crews dragged themselves onto a long line of salvaged double-decker New York City tour buses driven by Pakistani survivors of the Indo-Pakistani War of '05. The buses would take them back to their quarters, a hotel in the center of the island's pacified area. Julianne purposefully tuned out of the horrible Pashtun music and local conversation buzzing around her, knowing that nobody on the crew could really have any idea of what had happened earlier in the day. It wasn't that she was not interested, far from it. But until she could access a news source back at the Duane Street Hotel, she saw no point in drinking from the bottomless well of ignorance on the bus.
Instead she closed her eyes and tried to rest. Two weeks they'd been working clearance in New York, and her body was only just getting used to the abuse. Blisters had covered her hands, broken, and been replaced by new and even more painful blisters. Her back ached constantly, and her arms were so tired that she had trouble raising them to wash her hair at night. But, she kept telling herself, a job was a job.
Not the salvage work, of course. Manual labor had never been her thing. That was just a convenient and marginally safer way of getting into Manhattan. But the real job, the Rubin commission that had brought them to the East Coast, promised a payoff that would put her back on the water with a decent boat and a reliable crew. There was no way on God's green earth that Julianne Balwyn was going to play frontierswoman for the rest of her life.
The small convoy of buses and their Humvee escorts, after making sure to hit every bump, pothole, and obstruction in the road, finally pulled up in front of the somewhat stark modernist facade of the Tribeca Hotel. It had been a boutique establishment back before the Disappearance, not at all the sort of place a rough-headed bunch like this would have stayed. But it sat well within the Green Zone secured by the army and the private contractors-mercenaries, for want of a gentler euphemism-and it had its own diesel generators for power and light. Two such contractors with beards and massive arms cradled their M4s, their eyes hidden behind high-end sunglasses liberated from the Big Apple. The zone they protected was an oasis compared with the brute creation that had taken over the rest of the city.
'Drink later?' Rhino asked as they dragged themselves into the foyer.
'Bath first, then dinner, then a drink,' said Jules. 'I'm knackered.'
They parted at the elevators, where Jules punched the button for the fourth floor, a women-only level. They were all grown-ups, of course, and there were no rules against socializing, but Lewis Graham, the head security contractor, had insisted on that measure, and for her part Julianne was more than happy with it. The salvage and clearance crews were not your cookies and cucumber sandwich types, and she didn't fancy having to secure her room at night against any possible incursion by some drunken ape with a whole lot of loving to give.
As she walked slowly toward her room, a couple of the other women from the crew emerged from the second elevator, laughing and talking about the dates they had lined up for later. Jules was in no mood to socialize and was glad to get into her room without having to fob off an invitation to join them. She kicked the door closed behind her and turned left into the bathroom, where she immediately stripped and ran a hot, deep tub. Some bubbles in the bath and a flask of brandy from her bedside table and she was ready to soak her aching muscles for a few
