a display case, groaning a little at the sudden throbbing ache in her shoulder. This was the third time she'd popped the thing, and every time recovery took longer and was less complete.
'Rhino,' she said, coughing as she choked on the dust in her mouth and throat. 'Rhino? Are you there?'
'Quiet,' he said softly. 'Pirates.'
That one word brought her rushing back to full consciousness, or close enough that it made no difference. It was dark in the store and outside on the street. She calculated quickly that she must have been out of action for most of the day. She remembered the sudden fall of the rockets, the way a tsunami of explosive fire had rushed toward them up the narrow street, and the weirdly familiar sensation of being blown clear through the air. It was like standing on a ship's deck in a fierce storm and being catapulted through space by the impact of a rogue wave. She remembered with shuddering horror how Ryan, who had been standing a good ten yards away from her, closer to the blast, had simply come apart and spewed his inner life all over the whitewashed facade of the store on the corner.
She understood then that they had not been attacked by pirates or caught in one of their mortar barrages. They'd been mistaken for pirates and targeted by the army. Or maybe not. Perhaps they were just firing blindly into this part of Manhattan because it was crawling with freebooters. She pawed at her chest, seeking the reassurance of the weapon she'd set out with a dozen or so blocks back on Duane Street.
'I've got it,' the Rhino said in a low voice. 'You're in no state to fight anyone. I put your shoulder back in and doped you up. Now just lie still and try not to get us both kilt.'
Kilts, she thought, somewhat baffled. Why would she be looking for kilts?
Her eyelids drooped again, and she dozed off.
It was very dark when she next awoke, but her head was much clearer. The morphine must have leached out of her bloodstream. She blinked her eyes open and shut a few times and carefully rolled her injured shoulder. It was stiff and sore, but she could move the arm even though the Rhino had fashioned a basic sling out of what had once been a very expensive silk scarf.
'You awake?' he asked. 'For good now?'
'Water,' she croaked, and the former coast guard man passed her a canteen. It was smeared with blood, and she could taste the coppery scum of it as she put her lips to the plastic bottle. The water was warm and tasted brackish, but she gulped it down gratefully.
'S'okay,' said the Rhino. 'The pirates have moved on. They didn't come in here. Guess this season's fashions are just so 2003, eh?'
He held up a pair of gold leather sandals and grinned.
Jules stared at him.
'I've been unconscious for most of the day, and that's the best line you could come up with?' she asked.
His grin grew wider as he saw she was going to be okay.
'Can you move? Or carry your weapon? Because believe me, I can handle two of these puppies on the leash, don't you worry,' he said as he hoisted up both P90s. Julianne sucked in a deep breath, rocked back, and then rolled up onto one knee before standing, exhaling, and taking another deep breath to control her dizziness. The Rhino was quickly at her side with a strong arm for support.
'The fighting's moved downtown and west a ways,' he told her. 'Lucky thing for us, too. Thought we were gonna get ourselves squashed between both sides for a few hours there.'
Jules allowed him to lead her though the wreckage of the store, which was so badly trashed that she couldn't tell what damage was new and what had been done by neglect and the elements over the years since the Disappearance. Here and there she was able to pick out a pile of clothes and accessories that were rigid and black with the congealed leftovers of whoever had been wearing them when the Wave struck. But mostly the store was just a shambles of collapsed shelving, broken glass, ruined stock, and…
'Oh…'
She closed her eyes and swallowed when she saw a disembodied arm poking out from under a blackened display cabinet.
'Damn, sorry, Jules. I thought I'd policed up all the remains.'
He moved to pick it up, but Jules squeezed his elbow and shook her head.
'Doesn't matter. Come on. We should get moving. I want to get to Union Square before sunup.'
The Rhino helped her out onto the street, which looked like a scene from wartime France, illuminated by the shells of burning buildings. Explosions had picked up car bodies and tossed them willy-nilly, smashing them into shop fronts, tearing the chassis into jagged knots of metal. Tires burned. Shop fittings burned. The long, ruined canyon of Mercer Street, once one of her favorite parts of this city, was illuminated by the oily orange glow of a hundred separate fires. Light rain, more of a sooty drizzle, drifted down, coating the rubble in a thick patina of ash and toxic chemicals.
They picked their way along the cobblestoned street, threading through entanglements of fallen scaffolding and brickwork. A huge steel garbage can blocked the path down near a boutique she vaguely recalled visiting during the three weeks she'd spent here in 2000, shortly after the millennium celebration. The can had been blown high into the air and come crashing down to lie with one end propped up against the first floor of the boutique. It had buckled in the center and now effectively closed off access to upper Mercer.
'Let's cut through,' said the Rhino, gesturing at the boutique with one of the P90s. 'We should get out of the main thoroughfares, anyway. There'll be a lane or something out the back of these buildings. We can get up the block using that.'
Jules muttered her agreement, preferring to concentrate on not tripping and further injuring her arm. They climbed over the windowsill of the nearest shop front, a gutted homewares store, and navigated their way to the rear of the building, first by the light of the fires and then by means of a torch the Rhino clipped onto one of the machine guns. A jet screamed overhead while they searched for a rear exit, chased by the thump-thump-thump of a big antiaircraft cannon. She'd heard of the pirates mounting such things onto pickups but had wondered at the truth of such rumors. Surely the city's road network was too locked up with the rusted remains of all the vehicles that had crashed after losing their drivers.
'Here we go,' said her companion as the thin beam of torchlight picked out a heavy metal security door. 'Stand back, Miss Jules.'
She did as she was told while he pressed down the locking bar and tentatively pushed open the door. No gunfire greeted the movement, and the Rhino slid through.
'Clear,' he announced a few seconds later, and she followed him through, emerging into the cold, gritty rain that pattered down into the space between those buildings fronting Mercer and the ass-end of their counterparts on the next block over. She tried to remember which street ran parallel on that side but came up blank. The back alley, as always, was much less disordered than the main streets. There were a few vehicles parked here and there, but they had been parked back in '03 while their drivers ran deliveries to the businesses on either side. The smugglers had learned very quickly, right back at Duane Street, in fact, that such hidden, disused passages were safest when one was trying to traverse the contested island.
She recalled this as they sloshed through three inches of rancid, stagnant groundwater collected in the artificial valley between the two terraced rows of buildings on Mercer and whatever streets. Rats the size of small dogs swam away from the thin shaft of torchlight, trailing V-shaped wakes.
Didn't there used to be alligators in the New York sewers?
'Rhino,' she said lightly. 'Do you recall whether the Wave disappeared crocodiles and suchlike?'
He halted in front of her and turned around, keeping the torch pointed down to avoid dazzling her.
'Crocodiles? You mean gators?'
'Yes,' she said, trying to sound casual.
'No idea, Miss Julianne. What is it they reckon now? It took humans and most of the higher primates. Chimps and apes and so on. And killed about half of anything that had a spinal cord. But not so as you could predict what was gonna get zapped beyond people and apes.'
'Don't worry about it,' she said, feeling rather foolish.
The Rhino sketched a devilish grin.
'Do gators have spinal cords? Or do they just like to eat them? Hmm. Do you know, Miss Jules?'
'Shut the fuck up and keep moving,' she scolded, waving him forward.
The Rhino sniggered and turned back to resume sloshing through the filthy watercourse. The grumble of bomb
