But since then, his commands had become erratic, and tended to change, depending on who transcribed them. When he said to move the ashram to the city, Ajay almost risked his karma by raising doubt.

The dead had indeed been swept out of San Francisco.

But their worst enemies here were not the dead...

No birds called, and no fish swam, as the Higgins boat sailed out of the fog and into the lagoon behind the stadium. In this place where hopeless Giants fans in kayaks used to paddle around waiting for Barry Bonds' home runs, the vintage military ship-to-sh.o.r.e vessel ran aground like a sea lion, unnoticed.

The ramp dropped and slammed the mud.

And the Oakland Raiders came stomping out onto land.

A flurry of movement in the parking lot depths caught Ajay's sleep-deprived eye. n.o.body'd spotted a deadhead in weeks, and the ones still walking around were nothing to waste ammo on.

Cranking up the volume on the Master's chanting voice, Ajay cracked his knuckles and waited for whatever it was to come into range.

"I am surrounded by light..." he murmured, drawing a bead with the big sixty caliber...

...just as the hot wind brushed him back...

A drone helicopter no bigger than a toy hovered before him. Its miniature fuselage pointed a camera lens, a parabolic mic, and a shotgun barrel at his face.

He blinked, tried to hoist the heavy gun off its bipod.

The shotgun blew off the left half of his scalp.

Ajay yelped and squirted, dropping his machinegun over the railing. "Wake up!" he screamed into his walkie-talkie, belly-crawling down the ramp to the guardhouse, wiping blood out of his eyes. he screamed into his walkie-talkie, belly-crawling down the ramp to the guardhouse, wiping blood out of his eyes.

A hollow, unfamiliar robotic voice hissed back from the handset, "All your base are belong to us."

The Raiders double-timed it to the gatehouse under scattered wild fire from above. They wore SFPD tactical body armor draped with silver duct tape, Raiders jerseys, and dented football helmets.

The first one through the turnstile set off a homemade claymore filled with bathtub napalm. It set him alight, but did not stop him. Sheathed in flames, he stalked through the atrium yard, raking the guardhouse with a belt-fed automatic shotgun as flares, bricks, and small arms fire rained down.

One crazy devotee jumped from cover and charged, but his M16 jammed. The burning Raider cornered and hugged him as its ammo cooked off.

Aerial recon had the ashram's sixty-four devotees holed up in the press boxes. Moving as a hedgehog, the Raiders crossed the courtyard and tossed grenades into the spiral pedestrian ramp. They never spoke or cried out when they got shot. They spent their bodies as cheaply as their bullets.

A gang of wild-eyed devotees dressed in dhotis or long underwear charged down the ramp, brandishing machine pistols and howling the Master's name. Another drone chopper swooped into the open well around which the spiral ramp wound, a toy with twin flechette cannons in its nose. They sounded like tambourines shaking, but they reduced the defenders to a blizzard of red confetti before they could get off a single shot.

The only effective resistance the Raiders faced was the sluice of gore they slipped in as they climbed the ramp.

On the press level, Ajay ran past a barricaded snack bar with two machine guns.

"Get down!" Sister Sharon bellowed from inside. "Move your skinny a.s.s, Ajay!" And opened fire. Sister Sharon bellowed from inside. "Move your skinny a.s.s, Ajay!" And opened fire.

She cut the first Raider in half, blew his torso clean off his hips, but still couldn't stop him. He dragged himself up to the snack counter while his teammates laid down withering cover fire.

Ajay prayed for a weapon. He prayed for the courage to do something.

The mangled upper half of the Raider crawled right past him. He saw a gray human face behind the facemask, but telescoping goggles covered its eyes. It had no lower jaw. Earbuds in its helmet screamed loud enough for Ajay to hear the Raider's tinny mantra: "Get some, 49, get some, get some... take that nest, you little b.i.t.c.h." "Get some, 49, get some, get some... take that nest, you little b.i.t.c.h."

The Raider tossed two grenades in through the gun slits. They bounced off the menu board and detonated in Sharon's lap.

Ajay ran without looking back until he'd hopped the barricades and found them unmanned. He picked up an MP5 off the sandbags, but before he could find the safety, the corridor was engulfed in flames.

The Raiders swept into the luxury skyboxes, where the Master's favorites were kept. Their guards resisted with pistols that didn't dent the Raiders' body armor. Room to room they stalked, giving out headshots or grenades.

Ajay shot one of them in the back without even getting its attention. He almost threw himself upon them with his fists, but he knew it would be suicide, and the Master forbade martyrdom. It would be easier to die than see the end of everything they had built, of everyone he loved.

Ajay went to the window in the owner's box and looked out on the field. Together, they'd bulldozed the wreckage of a relief center into the cheap seats to make room for a ma.s.sive tented victory garden, and a parking lot to mirror the one outside.

Hundreds of Jaguars, Rolls Royces, and Bentleys filled the infield.

Before the eye of Kali Yuga opened on the world, the media had mocked Master Ganguly's weakness for British luxury cars, but the fleet had brought them all here from the ashram in Big Sur quickly and in fine style.

He could get the keys to one of the Range Rovers they kept in the underground VIP parking. He could get away, and live with a coward's karma. But he heard his brothers and sisters chanting in the big room. If this was truly their karma, they would gather at the Master's feet to meet it.

Ajay ran into the banquet hall with his hands on his bleeding head. There were at least three dozen of them, and even the women and kids were armed and shooting at the double doorway entrance.

The Master sat at the wheel of his favorite Silver Ghost Rolls on a dais in the center of the room. He gunned the engine and honked the Rolls' regal horn. The inner circle of devotees locked arms around the car.

A hulking Raider linebacker stepped into the room and got its face shot off. Inside its hollowed-out torso was a veritable Whitman's Sampler of grenades, RPGs, and a TOW missile.

Even as the hail of lead chewed its helmet and head off, the linebacker fell to its knees and unleashed a holocaust.

The windows and walls blew out of the banquet hall. The secondary explosions brought the upper tier bleachers down on the banquet hall.

But when the smoke cleared, four Raiders were still standing.

"Game over, b.i.t.c.hes," said Ajay's walkie-talkie. He threw it away and ran for the VIP staircase. said Ajay's walkie-talkie. He threw it away and ran for the VIP staircase.

The corridor was choked with burning bodies, but n.o.body stopped him as he barged through the door and ran down the stairwell.

He got four steps before he crashed into a Raider's back and hit the stairs on his tailbone. His legs went numb.

DEATH MACHINE, said the name above the number 24 on its shredded jersey. It turned and looked down at him, c.o.c.king its head and popping its goggles. Ajay's skin crawled as he felt someone intelligent looking at him. Someone who was probably miles away.

"I am surrounded by light," Ajay prayed. "This house is surrounded by light. I am"

The zombie in the Raiders helmet stopped over him and put a gloved hand on his shoulder, gave his arm a gentle little squeeze. "I'm sorry, dude, but my pizza's here," it said.

The gentle hand shoved the nozzle of a flamethrower in his mouth, and pumped a jet of high-octane gasoline down his throat.

"Vaya con huevos, Gandhi," said Death Machine #24. The jet of gas ignited, and Ajay was surrounded by light.

III.

The Dungeon Master peeled off his VR goggles, and shucked his data gloves. Checked his pulse rate. Breathe, barbarian, breathe Breathe, barbarian, breathe.

"Holy s.h.i.t, that was brutal!" He shivered with a bowel-clenching adrenaline chill, despite the suffocating kiln atmosphere of his server bunker. His muscles tensed and twitched like the dregs of an amyl nitrate rush, still juiced from something that happened to somebody else's body. He'd sweated right through his silk Deth-klok pajamas. It felt like someone had dumped a cooler of Gatorade on him, from somewhere up above.

Sherman Laliot.i.tis blinked out of his mystic warrior trance and buzzed in the delivery boy, put his hands behind his head and stretched in his ergonomic office chair. His catheter jabbed his semi-tumescent w.a.n.g as he emptied his bladder. The tube snaked out of his PJ bottoms to join the spaghetti of cables on the floor to the reclamation tub in the closet. Christ Christ, he thought: Life during wartime Life during wartime.

The door thudded shut behind him. "So, uh... Seagull, how much for the pie?" His headset burped in his ear. "Wait. Hold that thought."

His eyes unfocused as he gritted his teeth and listened to Charlie Brown's teacher natter in his ear. "Front office is p.i.s.sed. You're breaking too many eggs."

"Excuse me, but you weren't there, and neither were they! No strategy survives first contact with the enemy"

"We're watching the streaming feed now. They wanted to fire you. I told them you knew what you were doing. They're starting to think you're doing it on purpose."

"Wait a G.o.dd.a.m.ned minute! Those eggheads built these teams to take deadheads, but we haven't seen free-range street-meat in weeks"

"Calm down, Sherman."

"No, you calm down! You have no idea what it's like, running a squad in a hot combat zone! You wouldn't last two minutes in my f.u.c.king chair! Dungeon Master out."

G.o.d d.a.m.n it. Sherman pushed aside the pill bottles and Hot Wheels cars piled up around his keyboard. He forgot what he was looking for, then remembered he wasn't alone.

"So who were those guys?" The pizza guy pointed at the screens.

"Those hobgoblins were a doomsday cult from Big Sur. Moved in after we cleansed the city, and started poaching our supply lines, s.n.a.t.c.hing our immigrants. We warned them, but they fed our messenger to their dear leader. That's him right there."

With a loaded slice precariously balanced in one hand, Sherman zoomed in on a pasty mummy with a beard down to his knees, licking the windows of the Rolls with a black, cracking tongue. "Watch this, dude."

Sherman made one of his Raiders punch in the window and feed the mummy a phosphorus grenade. Poom Poom.

"Wow," said Falcon, or whatever his name was. "I read that dude's book. So you're using dead guys against live guys now?"

Sherman killed his c.o.ke and tossed the empty in the trash, found his vasopressin, and shot a blast of synapse-sharpening mist up his nose. Jesus, he was discussing strategy with the pizza boy. Only difference between this bottom-feeder and the meatbags he controlled was that zombies couldn't ask irritating questions.

His headset bawled like a baby with a dirty diaper. "Hold on. Julio? Sharp air support, dude. Love the way you ghosted my whole op by winging that sentry."

"Suck it, Halitosis. I didn't hear you b.i.t.c.hing when I saved your team on that ramp." Julio noisily high-fived somebody, and Sherman almost hung up. G.o.d, he hated speakerphone. "Kid, you are making f.u.c.king up into an Olympic event."

Sherman was a sponsored pro gamer on the Xbox Live circuit before he turned fourteen. The Pentagon's strategic solutions teams all played Necropolis Online Necropolis Online, and he pwned their a.s.ses daily. Air Force and Army were in a bidding war for his services before he finished high school. If the dead had come a year later, these Navy reserve dips.h.i.ts would be calling him Sir Sir. "Julio, anytime you want to get promoted out of air support, I always got openings on my team. You'd look good in a Raiders uniform, bro."

Behind him, Pizza Boy cleared his throat. "Look, man, my other pies are getting cold..."

"f.u.c.k. Hold on, losers." With a wave of his laser pen over the subcutaneous chip in the hippie's wrist, he paid for the food.

"Hey, Halitosis," Julio shouted. "Are you gonna stop jacking off and move your team, so we can clean up this mess you gonna stop jacking off and move your team, so we can clean up this mess?"

The Dungeon Master slapped on his goggles. "Please get out of here now, Pizza Boy." But he was already gone.

IV.

Jeez, thought Eagle. What a douche What a douche. Nice tip, though. Thirty-eight creds. That was the thing about rich motherf.u.c.kers. They thought they could pay off their contempt with pocket change. And they were right.

They also all liked pizza.

Eagle's bike was parked outside the penthouse door. It was a chrome green Moots Gristle-a $6,000 mountain bike-the one he chose out of thousands when they gave him a hero's parade, and his old job back. Talk about perks.

He took a moment to savor the view from the uppermost inner balcony of the Hyatt Regency: gorgeous tiered ultra-modern architecture, sloping down to reveal 802 luxury rooms, all occupied, thanks to him and his friends. His own was #615, and he could see it from here.

Hey, Ma! he thought and waved. But she was dead. And that wasn't funny. he thought and waved. But she was dead. And that wasn't funny.

Eagle rode to the elevator bank, hopped the gla.s.s diving bell down to the lobby. Sheets of illuminated crystal dangled overhead, an indoor aurora borealis that looked awesome when stoned, which he was, waving bye to his friends and neighbors as he hit the domed streets of New San Francisco.

Everybody knew Eagle. That was the great thing. Beneath the sheer poison-and-shatterproof plastic that encased the twenty-block bubble of the Green Zone, roughly 8,000 still moved and breathed, and he saw them all each and every night as he made his rounds through the former financial district, spreading joy with whole-wheat crust, fresh tomatoes and veggies, prewar sausage and pepperoni.

Half the open s.p.a.ces in the Green Zone were vertical farms now, hydroponically providing for the needs of the city; and thank G.o.d they understood that quality weed was every bit as fundamental as rice and beans, in this new economy.

Eagle wheeled around the Embarcadero, past tribal art galleries and acid jazz bars where third-shifters decompressed, downed shots of sketchy bathtub liquor and hoped for the best.

Outside the bubble, the world was still dead. And you could still see it, if you wanted to look. The black ash fields that used to be parks. The ferry terminal mausoleum. The south side of Market Street, where the lights were still off. All just a window away.

But just a stone's throw from the edgeone block from the Transamerica Pyramid, on the corner of Front and Claywas Pizza o.r.g.a.s.mica: the only surviving 24-hour gourmet pizza emporium.

"Couple of outcalls, if you want 'em," said Bud, as he entered for refills. "One code red, and one from somewhere out in the Black. I told him f.u.c.k no, but the guy said he knows you."

"Really?" Eagle said, grinning.

Sometimes it was fun to go outside.