Текст книги "Jericho Iteration"

Автор книги: Allen Steele

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He stops talking to look around at the tenement buildings surrounding him. An ERA gunship flies low over the block where he lives. “We don’t want no trouble,” he says after it passes by. “We don’t want to go on living like this. I understand each bullet that thing carries costs the taxpayer five dollars. They want to make things better? Fine. Gimme five bucks for each shell casing some kid brings to me from the street … we’ll turn this side of town around.”

PART ONE

Ruby Fulcrum (April 17, 2013)

1

(Wednesday, 7:35 P.M.)

There was a man on the stage of the Muny Opera, but what he was singing wasn’t the overture of Meet Me in St. Louis.In fact, if he was singing at all, it was a demented a capella called the New Madrid Blues.

My guess was that at one time he had been a young, mid-level businessman of some sort. Perhaps a lawyer. Possibly a combination of the two: a junior partner in the prestigious firm of Schmuck, Schmuck, Schmuck amp; Putz, specializing in corporate law. A yuppie of the highest degree, he had been a graduate of Washington University, graduating somewhere in the middle of his law school class: good enough to get an entry-level job with Schmucks and Putz, but not well enough compensated to have a place in Clayton or Ladue. So he had lived in a cracker box somewhere in the south side and commuted to work every day in the eight-year-old Volvo he had driven since his sophomore days at Wash You. Five days a week, he had battled traffic on the inner belt, dreaming of the day when he would have a Jaguar in the garage of a suburban spread in Huntleigh and his law firm would now be known as Schmuck, Schmuck, Schmuck, Putz amp; Dork, as he steeled himself for another grueling day of ladder climbing and telephone screaming.

And then the shit hit the fan last May and the bottom fell out of hostile takeovers of candy stores. His apartment house had fallen flat, burying his car beneath a hundred tons of broken cinderblock and not-quite-to-code drywall plaster, and the week after he moved into Squat City, where he had been forced to share a tent with strange ethnic persons who didn’t wear fraternity rings and to survive on watered-down chicken soup and cheesefood sandwiches, he discovered that the Schmuck Brothers had decided to let some of their attorneys go. Sorry about that, we’ll let you know when there’s an opening …

And his mind had snapped.

So now here he was, standing on the stage of the Muny, waving a black baseball bat over his head and raving like a crack fiend who hadn’t had a decent fix in days.

“When selecting a baseball bat,” he shouted, “there are five things to remember …!”

His ragged, oil-splotched London Fog trenchcoat could have been looted from Brooks Brothers. That wasn’t what tipped me off; it was his shoes. Handmade Italian leather loafers which, even though they now were being held together with frayed strips of yellow duct tape, fit him perfectly. And although his hair had grown down over his shoulders and his gray-streaked beard was halfway to the collar of his mildewed dress shirt, he still had the unmistakable articulation of an attorney, although I doubt the senior partners of his firm would have recognized him now.

“One! The size of the bat should be the right size for your hands to grip and hold comfortably!” He demonstrated by gripping the taped handle of the black mahogany bat between his fists, his anger causing the knuckles to turn white. “That means it’s gotta be the right size for you to do some serious damage to some fucker’s face!”

Scattered applause from the first few rows behind the orchestra pit. Give us your poor, your downtrodden, your teeming masses yearning to be free … and if they can’t have freedom, then there’s always cheap entertainment. Farther back in the open-air amphitheater, though, only a few people seemed to be paying attention. At least a thousand people were crammed together into the Muny tonight, enduring the cold rain as they watched the nightly parade of homeless, half-mad speakers march onto the stage. On the proverbial one-to-ten scale, the former lawyer barely rated a four.

“Let’s hear some music!” This from a woman in back of the seating area. A small group of down-and-out rock musicians stood in the wings, waiting for their chance to set up their equipment and play for any food stamps that might be tossed into their hat.

The lawyer either didn’t hear her or wasn’t paying attention. “Two!” he yelled, his voice beginning to crack. “The bat should be light enough so that you can swing it with the greatest speed!” He whipped the bat around like Ozzie Smith driving a grounder in Busch Stadium twenty years ago. “This means, y’gotta have the right instrument in order to knock their brains right outta their fuckin’ skulls!”

A few yells of approval, this time even from the rear seats. He had their attention now; nothing gets people going like a little unfocused hatred. The bat looked a little familiar, though. I edged closer to the railing surrounding the orchestra pit and peered through the drizzle. There were white-painted autographs burned into the black surface of the bat.

Oh, God, this was a sacrilege. This sick puppy had managed to get his mitts on one of the team bats that had been on display in the Cardinals Hall of Fame. Probably stolen shortly after the quake, when Busch Stadium had been overrun by the newly homeless, before the Emergency Relief Agency had chased out the looters and set up their base of operations inside the stadium. By then, everything worth stealing from the display cases in the mini-museum was gone. I prayed that he hadn’t gotten his hands on a pennant-year bat; that would have been the worst insult of all. A bat with Stan Musial’s or Lou Brock’s signature inscribed upon it, now in the hands of some crazy with a grudge.

“Three!” he howled. “The bat should be long enough to reach across home plate and the strike zone as you stand in a correct position inside the batter’s box!”

“Get off the stage!” someone yelled from the seats.

The demented yup ignored him. “Remember, a longer bat is harder to swing, regardless of how much it weighs!” He hefted the bat menacingly. “That means you gotta get in good and close, so you can count his teeth before you bust ’em out of his goddamn lyin’ mouth …”

Now that I knew where the bat had come from, I made the proper association. He was reciting, with significant annotation, a list of batting recommendations that had been posted in the Hall of Fame museum next to a cutaway of a Louisville Slugger. The instructions were meant to advise Little Leaguers and other potential Cardinals champs of the future; now they were being howled by a psycho who would have given Hannibal Lector the chills. An innocent set of guidelines, reborn as directions for up-close-and-personal homicide.

(And with that memory, another one: Jamie sitting next to me on the MetroLink a couple of weeks before New Madrid. Saturday afternoon. We were on our way back from the stadium after watching the Cards stomp the gizzards out of the St. Petersburg Giants.

(“Pop?”

(“Yeah, kiddo?”

(“Can I play Little League next year?”

(“I dunno … we’ll see.”)

“Four! If you plan to buy a bat and you normally wear batting gloves-”

“Get outta here! Yer not funny!”

The memory of a quiet Saturday afternoon with Jamie evaporated as suddenly as it had materialized. I couldn’t have agreed more: it was not funny, if it had ever been funny in the first place.

I had come to the Muny in hopes of finding something worth reporting for the Big Muddy Inquirer.I was facing a Friday deadline and Pearl was breathing down my neck for my weekly column. Because I had heard that the squatters had recently broken the padlocks on the Muny’s gates and turned the amphitheater into an unauthorized public forum, I had come to Forest Park to see if I could hear any revolutionary manifestos. I was sure that there were some budding Karl Marxes or Mao Tse-tungs out there, screaming for their chance to be let out of the box … or just screaming, period.

So far, though, the only interesting speaker had been the psychotic Cards fan, and things were tough enough already without my repeating his advice for using a stolen baseball bat as a murder weapon. I turned and began to make my way up the concrete steps of the left-center aisle, feeling the rain pattering on the bill of my cap as I emerged from beneath the stage awning.

Huddled all around me were the new residents of Forest Park: people who had been left homeless by the New Madrid quake, either because their houses and apartments had collapsed during the quake or, as in the case of the north side communities, because last December’s food riots had caused so many of the surviving buildings to be burned to the ground.

Forest Park was the largest municipal park in the country. Before the events of last May it had been a pleasant place in which to spend a quiet Sunday afternoon. The World’s Fair had once been held here and so had the Olympic games, both more than a century ago. Now that the park had become a little bit of Third World culture stuck in middle America, the Muny was the only bit of free entertainment left available to the city’s vast homeless population. Tommy Tune no longer danced across the stage, Ella Fitzgerald was long gone, and the national touring companies of Catsor Grand Hotelno longer performed here, but people still found their pleasure here … such as it was.

I looked around as I walked up the steps, studying the dismal crowd. Men, women, and children; young and old, alone and with families, white, black, hispanic, oriental. No common denominator except that they were all clinging to the lowest rung of the ladder. They wore cheap ponchos and cast-off denim jackets and moth-eaten cloth coats donated by the Salvation Army; some didn’t even have raingear to speak of, just plastic garbage sacks and soaked cardboard boxes. In the weak, jaundiced light cast by the few sodium-vapor lamps that still functioned, their faces reflected hardship, pain, hunger …

And anger.

Most of all, anger: the dull, half-realized, hopeless rage of those who were pissed upon yesterday, were pissed upon today, and undoubtedly would be left standing beneath the urinal tomorrow. Halfway up the aisle, I was jostled aside by a burly man making his way down the steps; I stumbled against a chair and almost fell into the lap of a young woman who was holding a child in her arms. The little boy was chewing on a piece of government-issue cheesefood; his eyes looked glazed beneath the hood of his undersize sweatshirt, and the long tendril of mucus hanging from his nose told me that he was ill. If he was lucky, perhaps it was only the flu, although that could quickly escalate into pneumonia. His mother glared at me with silent, implacable rage– What are you looking at? – and I quickly stepped away.

No one here wanted pity. No one wanted the few government handouts that were still being given to them. All they wanted was survival and a chance to get the hell out of Squat City.

The mad yuppie was through with his screed by the time I reached the covered terrace at the top of the stairs. The terrace was at the rear of the amphitheater, and it was crowded with people trying to get out of the drizzle. Through the stone arches and past the wrought-iron gates, I could see the glow of dozens of trash-barrel fires in the adjacent parking lot, silhouetting the people who huddled around them for warmth against the cold spring rain, watchful for the apes …

Yes, apes. Real apes, not metaphorical in any sense whatsoever, although a case could be made for the ERA troopers who patrolled the park. One of the unforeseen side effects of the quake was that the Forest Park Zoo had practically split open at the seams, allowing lions, tigers, and bears-not to mention a few giraffes, antelopes, rhinos, and elephants-to escape. Most of the animals were recaptured by zoo personnel within the first few days after New Madrid, although quite a few wild birds had taken wing, and a handful of coyotes and bobcats had been wily enough get out of the inner city and into the county’s wooded west side. Some of the zoo specimens, unfortunately, didn’t make it back to their cages; two weeks after the quake, a rare Tibetan white leopard was shot by a redneck National Guardsman after it was cornered foraging through garbage cans in the University City neighborhood. When zoo officials arrived at the scene, they found the leopard’s decapitated carcass lying in the alley; the weekend warrior who had shot the leopard had carved its head off and taken it back to his place in Fenton as a trophy.

But the apes that had survived the collapse of the monkey house had done much better. Only a handful of apes had been recaptured, mostly gorillas and orangutans; most of the chimpanzees and baboons had taken to the trees and had survived the short, relatively mild winter that followed the earthquake summer. Indeed, they had been fruitful and multiplied, adding to their numbers as the months wore on. Now monkey packs roamed the park like street gangs, raiding tents and terrorizing squatters.

Even the ERA troopers were frightened of them; there had been one rumored account that a chimpanzee pack had fallen upon a parked Hummer and chased its crew into the woods. If the story was true, then good for the chimps; I had more sympathy for runamok apes than for runamok goon squads.

There was no sign of apes, either human or simian, so I found a vacant spot beside one of the Doric columns holding up the awning. After looking around to make sure I wasn’t being observed, I unzipped my leather bomber jacket and reached into the liner pocket to pull out my PT’s earphone.

“Joker, can you hear me?” I said, switching on the PT and holding the earphone against my ear.

“ I hear you, Gerry.”Joker’s voice was an androgynous murmur in my ear: HAL-9000 with a flat midwestern accent. It was picking up my voice from a small mike clipped to the underside of my jacket collar.

“Good deal,” I replied. “Okay, open a file, slug it … um, ‘park,’ suffix numeral one … and get ready for dictation.”

I usually typed my notes one-handed on Joker’s miniature keyboard. Like many writers, I intuitively prefer to see my words on a screen, but there was no way I was going to fish out my palmtop and open it up in plain view, thereby revealing myself to be a reporter. During the December riots, too many of my colleagues had been attacked by rioters who had seen them as being authority figures, and a Post-Dispatchphotographer had been killed by crossfire during the torching of the federal armory in Pine Lawn. Even if some of these people didn’t necessarily see the press as their enemy, there was always the chance someone might try to mug me in order to grab Joker. A stolen PT was probably worth a few cans of tuna on the black market.

But somebody in the crowd knew there was a reporter among them.

“Gerry?”

“Yes, Joker?”

“There’s an IM for you. I would have signaled you earlier, but you told me not to call you.”

Indeed I had; Joker’s annunciator would have tipped off anyone nearby that I was carrying a PT. “This is a little strange. Although the IM was sent directly to me, it’s addressed to John Tiernan. I was not informed that we would be taking John’s messages.”

I frowned as I heard this. John was another reporter for the Big Muddy Inquirer.Although he was my best friend, we normally stayed out of each other’s work. Someone trying to send an instant message to John should have reached his own PT, Dingbat, not Joker; nor could we access each other’s palmtops without entering special passwords.

But there was no sense in asking Joker if it was mistaken; my little Toshiba didn’t make errors like that. “Okay, Joker,” I said, “read it to me.”

“IM received 6:12 P.M. as follows,”Joker recited. “‘I got your message. Need to talk at once. Please meet me near the rear entrance of the Muny at eight o’clock.’ End of message. The sender did not leave a logon or a number.”

I felt a cold chill when I heard this message. I believe in coincidence as much as the next superstitious person, but this was a bit too much.

An IM intended for John had been sent to me instead, requesting a meeting at the Muny … and, as synchronicity would have it, where would I happen to be when I received it? At the Muny.

I took a deep breath. “Okay, Joker,” I said, “what’s the gag?”

“What gag, Gerry?”

“C’mon. Who really sent the message? Was it John?” I grinned. “Or was it Jah?”

“Negative. The message did not originate from either of those individuals. The person sending the IM did not leave a logon or a return number, but I can assure you that it was not received from any PT with which I regularly interface.”

This was flat-out impossible. E-mail could not be sent anonymously; Joker’s modem always logged the originating modem number. Joker must have contracted a virus of some sort. “Please run a self-diagnostic test,” I said.

“Running test.”There was a long pause while Joker’s disk doctor pushed, prodded, asked embarrassing questions, and slipped a rectal thermometer up its cybernetic asshole. “Test complete,”Joker said at last. “All sectors are clean. There is no evidence of tampering with my architecture.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I, Gerry. Nonetheless, I do not have a return number for this IM.”

I mulled it over for a second, then Joker spoke up again. “ I have opened a file, slugged ‘park,’ suffix numeral one. Are you ready to dictate, Gerry?”

I shook my head, watching rain running down from the slate roof onto the awning. Squatters wandered back and forth around me, ignoring the guy leaning against a column with a hand clasped to his ear, apparently talking to himself. Down on the stage, a neogrunge band had replaced the killer yuppie; discordant guitar riffs and high-pitched feedback threatened to overwhelm the stolen PA system they had set up behind them. Black-market vendors were circulating through the aisles, hustling everything from wet popcorn to expired pharmaceuticals. Off in the far distance, beyond the trees, were the lights of the city’s central west end: clean, brilliant apartment towers, easily seen by thousands of people who were on prolonged camp-out in old U.S. Army tents, eating cold MREs by firelight and crapping in overflowing Port-O-Johnnies. Your tax dollars at work.

“No,” I said. “Close and delete file. I’m going off-line now, okay?”

“ I understand,”Joker said. “Signing off.”

So. The self-diagnostic check had come up clean, and the IM wasn’t a prank. I pondered these mysteries while I wadded up the earphone and tucked it back into my jacket pocket. Why had a message obviously intended for John reached me instead, even though I was in the right place at the right time?

I had no recourse except to go to the meeting place. Walking around the column, I bumped my way through the wet, hopeless crowd, heading for the amphitheater’s rear entrance gate.

That was how it all began.

2

(Wednesday, 8:10 P.M.)

People were still shuffling through the back entrance by the time I got there. According to the message Joker had received, I was ten minutes late for my appointment … or rather, for John’s appointment. I hung around for a couple of minutes, leaning against the fence near the gate and watching people go by, and was about to chalk off the message as some sort of neural-net glitch when a short figure in a hooded rain jacket approached me.

“Are you Tiernan?” she asked softly.

I gave myself a moment to size her up: a middle-aged black woman, her face only half seen beneath the soaked plastic hood, her hands hidden in the pockets of her jacket. She could have been anyone in the crowd except that her raingear looked a little too new and well made to be government issue. Whoever she was, she wasn’t a squatter.

“No,” I said. She murmured an apology and started to turn away. “But I’m a friend of his,” I quickly added. “I work for the same paper. Big Muddy Inquirer.”

She stopped, looked me over, then turned back around. “What’s your name?” she asked, still speaking in a low voice.

“Gerry Rosen.” She gazed silently at me, waiting for me to continue. “I got an IM on my PT to meet someone here,” I went on. “I mean, it was intended for John, but-”

“Why isn’t John here?” she demanded. “C’mon, let me see some ID.”

“Sure, if you insist.” I shrugged, unzipped my jacket, and started to reach inside.

“Hold it right there,” she snapped as her right hand darted out of her rain jacket. I felt something press against my ribs. I froze and looked down to see a tiny stun gun, shaped like a pistol except with two short metal prongs where the barrel should be, nestled against my chest. Her index finger was curled around the trigger button; I hoped she didn’t twitch easily.

“Whoa, hey,” I said. “Easy with the zapper, lady.”

She said nothing, only waited for me to make the wrong move. I wasn’t eager to get my nervous system racked by 65,000 volts, so I held my breath and very carefully felt around my shirt pocket until I located my press ID.

I gradually pulled out the laminated card and held it up for her to see. She looked carefully at the card, her eyes darting back and forth between the holo and my face, until she nodded her head slightly. The stun gun moved away from my chest and returned to the pocket of her jacket.

“You ought to be careful with that thing,” I said. “They’re kinda dangerous when it’s raining like this. Conductivity and all that-”

“Okay, you’re another reporter for the Big Muddy,”she said, ignoring my sage advice. “Now tell me why you’re here and not Tiernan.”

“That’s a good question,” I replied, “but let’s hear your side of it first. How come you tried to IM something to John but got me instead?”

She blinked a few times, not quite comprehending. “Sorry? I don’t understand what you’re-”

“Look,” I said, letting out my breath, “let’s try to get things straight. My PT told me about ten minutes ago that I had a message. It was addressed to John but somehow got sent to me instead, and it told me … or him, whatever … to meet somebody right here at eight o’clock. Now, since you’re obviously that somebody-”

“Hey, wait a minute,” she interrupted. “You got this message just ten minutes ago?”

“Yeah, just about that-”

“Ten minutesago?” she insisted.

I was beginning to get fed up with this. “Ten, maybe fifteen minutes. Who’s counting? The point is-”

A couple of teenagers, ripped to the tits on something they had bought off the street, staggered through the gate and jostled me aside. I nearly fell against the woman; she stepped out of my way, then grabbed my jacket and pushed me behind a column.

“The point is, Mr. Rosen,” she said quietly, staring me straight in the eye, “I didn’t send any IMs today, but I received e-mail from John Tiernan this afternoon, telling me to meet him here at eight. Now I’m here, but I instead find you. Now you tell me: where’s your buddy?”

The conversation was getting nowhere very quickly. “Look,” I said, taking off my cap for a moment to wipe soaked hair out of my eyes, “you’re just going to have trust me on this, okay? John ain’t here. If he was, I’d know it. And if you didn’t send that IM to me-”

“If John didn’t send e-mail to me …” Her voice trailed off, and in that instant I caught a glimpse of fear in her dark eyes.

No, not just fear: absolute horror, the blank, slack-jawed expression of someone who has just gazed over the edge of the abyss and seen monsters lurking in its depths.

“Oh my God,” she whispered. “It’s started …”

It was then that I heard the helicopters.

At first, there was nothing except the background rumble of the crowd in the amphitheater below us, mixing with the subtle hiss of the rain and the not-so-subtle screech of electric guitars from the stage … and then there came a low droning from the dark sky above us, quickly rising in volume, and I looked up just in time to see the first chopper as it came in.

The helicopter was an MH-6 Night Hawk, a fast-moving little gunship designed for hit-and-run night missions over the Mediterranean. Something of an antique, really, but still good enough for ass-kicking in the U.S.A.; with its silenced engine and rotors, it wasn’t noticed by anyone in the Muny until it was right over the amphitheater, coming in low over the walls like a bat.

I caught a fleeting glimpse of the two men seated within its bubble canopy, the letters ERA stenciled across its matte black fuselage; then light flashed from its outrigger nacelles as two slender canisters were launched over the crowd toward the stage. The rock band dropped their instruments and pretended to be paint as the RPGs smashed through the heavy wood backdrops behind them, breaking open to spew dense pale smoke across the platform.

The Night Hawk banked sharply to the right, its slender tail fishtailing around as the chopper braked to hover above the amphitheater, its prop wash forcing the milky white fog off the stage and across the orchestra pit into the front rows. I caught the unmistakable pepper scent of tear gas, but many of the squatters, thinking they were only smoke bombs, didn’t flee immediately, even when the first few who had been caught by the gas began to choke and gag.

That’s the mistake everyone makes about tear gas; its innocuous name makes it sound like something that will only make you a little weepy. Few people are aware of the painful blindness it causes when the hellish stuff gets in your eyes, how much you choke when you inhale it. Then, it’s pure evil.

The fog was billowing toward us even as the squatters, now realizing the danger, began to stampede toward the rear entrance. People all around us clawed at one another, trying to get out of the amphitheater, as they were caught in the throes of gas-attack panic.

“Get out of here!” I grabbed the woman’s hand and dragged her toward the gate. “Move it! Move it!”

We shoved and hauled our way through the mob until we managed to squeeze through the jammed gate. Still clutching her hand, I turned to make a getaway through the parking lot, only to find that we were far from being out of danger.

There was more rotor noise from above, much louder than the MH-6, as gale-force winds abruptly whipped through the parking lot, tearing at the tents and plastic tarps, sending garbage flying in every direction, overturning stolen shopping carts, causing the flames of the trash-can fires to dance crazily. I skidded to a stop and looked up to see a giant shape descending upon us, red and blue lights flashing against the darkness, searchlights lancing through the rain like a UFO coming in for a touchdown.

Flying saucer, no; V-22 Osprey, yes. The big, twin-prop VTOL was landing right outside the Muny, and if that was Elvis I spotted through one of its oval portholes, wearing riot gear and slapping a magazine into his Hecker amp; Koch assault rifle, then the King and I needed to have a serious discussion about his new career.

It was a full-blown ERA raid, and I felt like an idiot for not having seen it coming. Members of the city council had been squawking lately about “taking Forest Park back from the squatters,” and never mind that it had been their idea in the first place to relocate nearly seventy-five thousand homeless people to a tent city in the park. A crackdown had been threatened for several weeks now, and squatters trespassing on the Muny had been the last straw. Steve Estes, the council member whose political ambitions were only slightly outweighed by his ego, was making good on his rhetoric.

No time to ponder local politics now. More Ospreys were arriving. The first one was already on the ground, its rear door cranking down to let out a squad of ERA troopers. The air stank of tear gas; people were rushing around on either side of us, threatening to trample us as they fled from the soldiers. Already I could hear screams from the area closest to the landing site of the first Osprey and the hollow ka-chunng!of Mace canisters being fired into the mob.

Escape through the parking lot was out of the question; already I could hear the engine roar of LAV-25 Piranhas approaching from the roadway on the other side of the hill, their multiple tires mowing down the makeshift barricades squatters had thrown up around the Muny. In a few minutes we’d be nailed by tear gas, water cannons, webs, or rubber bullets.

A steep, wooded embankment lay to the right of the amphitheater. “That way!” I yelled to the woman. “Down the hill!”

“No!” she shouted, yanking her hand free from mine. “I gotta go somewhere!”

“You’ll-”

“Shaddup! Listen to me!” She grabbed my shoulders and shouted in my face. “Tell Tiernan-”

Full-auto gunfire from behind us. More screams. I couldn’t tell whether the troopers were firing live rounds, and I wasn’t in the mood for sticking around to find out. The woman glanced over her shoulder, then her eyes snapped back to me again.

“Tell Tiernan to meet me at Clancy’s on Geyer Street!” she yelled. “Tomorrow at eight! Tell him not to trust any other messages he gets! You got that?”

“Who are you?” I shouted back at her. “What the hell’s going on?”

For the briefest moment she seemed uncertain, as if wanting to tell me everything in the middle of a full-scale riot and yet unable to trust her own instincts. Then she pulled me closer until her lips touched my ear.

“Ruby fulcrum,” she whispered.

“Ruby what?”

“Ruby fulcrum!” she repeated, louder and more urgently now. “Tiernan will know what I mean. Remember, Clancy’s at eight.” She shoved me away. “Now get out of here!”

Then she was gone, turning around to dash into the panic-stricken mob, disappearing into the night as suddenly as she had appeared. I caught a final glimpse of the woman as her jacket hood fell back, exposing a few hints of gray in her short-cropped hair.

Then she was gone.

I ran in the opposite direction, battering my way through the crowd until I was out of the parking lot. I dashed across the sidewalk and down the embankment beside the high concrete walls of the Muny. Few people followed me; most of the squatters had stayed behind to wage futile battle against the ERA troopers, protecting what little they could still call home.