V.

Death Machine #24 stood at attention in the outer courtyard of the defeated enemy objective. He had orders not to move.

#24 followed orders.

Sweep and clear, hold and defend, seek and destroy. #24 had survived eighteen engagements because he hardly needed the voices in his ear to do what he had to do.

He could follow orders almost before they were given.

His armorers and handlers were sure he was a professional athlete or a vet, probably a Marine. Tully Forbes, the machinist who rigged the steel beartrap replacement for his missing mandible, swore that once, when he shouted, "Gimme ten!" #24 a.s.sumed the position and did pushups until Tully made him stop with a sleep spike.

But that wasn't true. #24 could count to ten, and sometimes even higher, when his medpak was working overtime.

Over and over, he tried to count the bodies laid out in front of him. After ten, things got foggy, but he didn't have to use his fingers. If he used his fingers, he'd only be able to count up to seven.

The bodies were covered in sheets. The cleanup crew dropped color-coded tags on them. Green, red, or black. Hardly any green ones; the sheets over them were only spotted with blood. Lots of red and black. The red ones were a mess, but the black ones were yard sales of loose and charred body parts.

A couple of men and a woman walked down the line. They wore white pressurized biohazard suits, but #24 smelled the bracing stink of their breath and sweat venting out of their gas masks. Even as his medpak kicked down a bolus of tryptophan to make him drowsy, he ached to have them.

The woman was different. She smelled dead, but she walked and talked and the others listened to her angry orders.

The dead-smelling lady came over to review the surviving Raiders offensive line. Her skin was a dull gray-green behind her mask, shot through with black capillaries. He could ignore the itching hunger aroused by her a.s.sistants, but her rank aroma screamed at #24 to shoot, burn and behead her, sweep and clear.

But the order never came.

As she inspected them, she snapped over her shoulder, "Who runs these f.u.c.king rodeo clowns?"

A flunky checked his PDA. "A civilian contractor, Sherman Laliot.i.tis. He was a professional gamer prewar, the best in the world at squad-based combat simulations."

"Reliable?"

"He's a sociopathic little p.r.i.c.k, ma'am, but he'd do the work for free. Loves his toys."

"Get him on the phone. If he still can't deliver viable candidates, then he's either incompetent or he's a saboteur."

She stopped and looked into the eyes of #24. Her eyes were the color of bile. She never blinked. "Check the headset on this one."

"We did, ma'am. It sustained no cranial damage during the engagement."

"Check it again, and double its downers. They're supposed to be in a coma, and this one's looking at me."

A flunky unscrewed the bolts on #24's helmet with a drill, while the other tugged it off. Several shots had cracked the high-impact plastic helmet, but the Kevlar liner had stopped them from damaging the electrical wiring and neurotransmitter pumps screwed into the dome of his skull.

He wanted to stop them and gut her, but he had orders not to move.

#24 followed orders.

VI.

On the dead side of Market, the Berkeley social science geniuses were building museum dioramas in the old storefronts, re-creating the bustling life of the old City. Celebrating its heroes-both the surviving and the fallen-in frozen pantomimes of earnestly rosy history.

You couldn't see it at night, but they'd actually sculpted a plaster statue of Eagle and put him on a bike-next to Lester the Professor in his wheelchair and crazy-eyed Emperor Norton II, his courageous freak comrades in that first desperate year of rescues and food runs, before Big Brother came back to take over the job. A plaque at their feet said: They Kept the Embarcadero Lights Burning They Kept the Embarcadero Lights Burning, And Kept The City Alive. And Kept The City Alive.

They'd posed for it together, three unlikely loners who had just tried to stay alive and protect their neighbors, when n.o.body else could. It was h.e.l.la f.u.c.king surreal, hilarious, and also an incredible honor.

But under the self-deprecation and pride was a creeping sense of having already died having already died. Their purpose fulfilled. Their glory days noted, memorialized, and gone.

Like the boy in the hundred-year-old statue behind him, on the domed-in corner of Montgomery and Market at which Eagle paused, finishing his joint before rolling out into the toxins.

It was a monument erected in 1850, or at least that was the date of the quote on the base. It showed a handsome young fellow in miner's togs with a pickaxe in one hand, a flag in the other, standing tall against all comers.

The inscription read: "The unity of our empire hangs on the decision of this day." W. H. Seward, on the admission of California vs. Senate.

And now, San Francisco was a sovereign nation.

"Pffffft...Thanks, America!" Eagle said. "It's been fun!" And then coughed up a plume of Master Kush and Kilimanjaro. Eagle said. "It's been fun!" And then coughed up a plume of Master Kush and Kilimanjaro.

The Market Street South airlock was four lanes wide and a city block long, which included the sealed-off BART station just past Montgomery.

He snuffed the roach and swallowed it on his way through the door. No waste in this city. No littering, either.

Eagle's locker was near the back and the showers, with the rest of the regulars. He suited up, put on his goggles and gas mask, checked the hazmat seals on the pizza cozy one more time.

Then he rode out through the gate and into the Red Zone.

The New City reclaimed the corpse of the old a block at a time. Clearing the wreckage off the streets, purging the buildings of any lingering human wreckage-dead or alive-was only the first step.

They were also repairing infrastructure, and cleaning up the chemical residue from the bombs that had leveled the playing field-or at least cleared it.

Eagle had watched from his bolthole in the Hyatt when the Navy choppers flew over the City that day. He watched the chemical bombs descend, on what they all unofficially called Black Flag Day.

He couldn't tell what kind of bug spray they dropped this time, but the thousands of loitering dead that filled the streets didn't respond to the powdery gray clouds like all the other times: getting all tweaked and fidgety, or eating themselves, but still standing.

This time, they just melted. melted. Like the Wicked Witch of the West, an army reduced to runny, rancid meat that pooled in their shoes and overflowed the gutters around their fizzing, blackened bones. Then all was still, and death was dead. Like the Wicked Witch of the West, an army reduced to runny, rancid meat that pooled in their shoes and overflowed the gutters around their fizzing, blackened bones. Then all was still, and death was dead.

Nearly a million zombies, dispatched in an hour and a half.

Along with every plant, animal, insect or human being that wasn't safely under gla.s.s.

Black stains like Hiroshima victims, silhouettes etched deep into the pavement wherever they dropped. Static shadows of what once was, ghosts of an explosion still lethal two years later...

Eagle rolled over them, coasting the cleared stretch of Market, where the work crews were now opening up the frontier.

A few other cyclists pa.s.sed Eagle as he hopped the curb and crossed the plaza with its defunct fountain and dead ginkgo groves. They wore elaborate Hopi sacred clown gas masks, and shouted his name as they pa.s.sed.

The big red City truck was parked at the edge of Civic Center Plaza, with a string of worker trailers behind it. The crews worked in a long line, scrubbing the buckled marble flagstones and shoveling concrete debris into a sinkhole that had gobbled up half of Grove Street.

The workers wore orange convict jumpsuits and skid-lid motorcycle helmets. They played sandblasters over the marble to scour away the black scabs where the dead had melted. A cancerous seagull from somewhere far away wheeled down and perched on the head of one of the workers, pecked at its runny gray eyes.

Eagle saw a few other encouraging signssickly yellow weeds pushed through the cracks in the sidewalk, c.o.c.kroaches ran in the gutterbut the domed palace of the Civic Center still looked like an ancient ruin. He remembered the day he'd delivered twelve pizzas to a wedding feast on the steps, the last weekend gay marriages were legal in the City. All of them now, as dead as the Romans.

The airlock on the back of the truck hissed and irised open as Eagle parked his bike and hefted the thermal pouch with their order in it.

Eagle stepped in and closed his eyes to the spray and blowoff. He kept his mask on until the inner airlock popped. The lucky pizza pies were way better protected than Eagle. A piping-hot message of love in a hermetic polystyrene metaphorical bottle, they would stay warm, yet crispy for at least twenty-four hours. Or until someone opened their boxes.

(Some Navy jerk on Treasure Island had b.i.t.c.hed about the soggy cardboard when Eagle shipped a batch of deep dish pies out there; but the next day, he shipped a batch of these s.p.a.ce age containers the submariners designed for keeping food hot without noisy microwaves. Another breakthrough for the evolving world.) "Hey, Eagle," Ernie cheered. "You remember that pizza place, Escape From New York, over on Van Ness? Ada says they gave you free pie if you could order in Italian. Is she full of s.h.i.t or what?"

Eagle peeled off his mask, but he was in no hurry to jump into the argument, or breathe the air in there. Ernie Nardello and Ada Glaublich worked Red Zone cleanup 24/7, so they practically lived in the truck. Somebody must've p.i.s.sed in their air recirculator. Hazmat suits, masks, dirty longjohns, and more than a few of Eagle's special pizza boxes lay ankle-deep on the floor.

"I dunno, Ernie. I never delivered for them." Popping the seal on the pouch made the truck warmer by five degrees. Garlic and oregano overpowered the truck's manifold stinks. Even Ada made a noise, and Eagle had never heard her say a word. At least not to the living.

Born Adam Glaublich, the shy civil engineer was on top of the list for s.e.x change surgery when the dead f.u.c.ked up everything. Ada was a stone b.u.mmer, but Ernie loved her, and talked more than enough for both of them.

Ernie cracked the top box and nearly fainted. "Aw s.h.i.t, I thought you said there was no more pineapple!"

"We got a couple more cans out of the Holiday Inn, so I saved 'em for you."

"Dude, I could blow you right now."

Eagle held out his wrist. "I love you, too. But how's about you just pay me instead?"

Laughing, Ernie scanned him with a light pen. "They don't pay you enough to come out here, man."

"No, that's your job." He looked at the screens, the fly's compound eye view of the Civic Center, the sinkhole, his bicycle. "Working hard?"

Ada munched a slice while she monitored their crews. "17, you're cold," she purred. "Warm up and work. Shovel faster." She jogged Ernie's elbow and pointed at a blinking indicator, but Ernie ignored her.

"This is bulls.h.i.t busy work, man," Ernie said. "The Navy says the s.h.i.t got washed out and neutralized eighteen months ago. That's why the f.u.c.kin' Bay is dead, right? There's never gonna be enough live people in this city for them to open the Green Zone this far."

"I beg to differ, dude," Eagle said, wiping the steam out of his goggles. "There're still people people out there. It's our town. You're cleaning it up, so the people will come back." out there. It's our town. You're cleaning it up, so the people will come back."

"We're just polishing rocks for a life-sized museum, but thanks. They'll have meat puppets good enough to do our jobs by then. Hey, if anybody shows up at the gates who can turn my partner's hot dog into a taco, let me know, okay? Then I'll be at peace with the world."

Ada punched his shoulder. "17's acting up. Seagull ate his eyes."

"So shut him down," Ernie growled. "I'm not suiting up now. I'm eating lunch. You going back to the Bubble?"

"Not right away." Eagle picked the old boxes out of the mess on the floor. "Got another delivery."

"Out here? Where?"

"Haight and Stanyan." Eagle strapped on his mask in the airlock.

Ernie's eyeb.a.l.l.s bounced off his HUD goggles as he dropped the first seal. "Say what?"

"It's a long story. I gotta go, guys. Take care."

Eagle popped the outer airlock and jumped down.

The zombie was waiting for him.

#17 stenciled on its helmet. Seagull s.h.i.t and a sparking wire in its empty eyesockets. It dropped its shovel and lurched at Eagle, who threw the empty pizza boxes in its face and instinctively backed into the gate of the truck, groping in vain for a weapon worth having.

He hated guns, but he always carried one. A cop-issue Glock 9mm with soft hollowpoint rounds hung in its holster on his bike, next to his canteen, about ten unreachable feet away.

"Ernie! Call off your f.u.c.king dog!"

Ernie's voice popped his headset. "What? Oh, holy s.h.i.t... Ada!" "What? Oh, holy s.h.i.t... Ada!"

"MAKE IT STOP!" Eagle shrieked as #17 pawed his gas mask with one work-gloved hand.

Up close, the employed dead-the slave dead-glistened. Hi-tech Glad Wrap vacuum-sealed their skin, locked the sickness in and the freshness out. It was the only way to slow their inevitable decay, and make them humanly tolerable.

Under the industrial worklights, #17 glowed like a leftover angel. But underneath the shrink-wrap was the same old hunger. Its humanity was just a mask.

Up close, Eagle recognized that mask.

#17 had a Kirk Douglas chin. A Bruce Campbell chin. A chin among chins, with a nose to match.

That red-headed guy who used to barback at the Albion... Short-tempered, the regulars called him Fireplug...

I used to deliver pizzas to this guy, he thought.

Ernie and Ada were both hollering in his headset, but Eagle couldn't hear it. He was lost in the moment. Pushing at #17, both hands on its chest, boxed in tight with no exit room. Watching it stagger back, lurch in, moaning.

"Ada, pop 17! Just do it! We got you, Eagle! Duck and cover, brother!"

Eagle dropped to his knees. The charges in the rogue worker's head went off like firecrackers in a watermelon, wetware jumping out the top of its skull and spraying all over the f.u.c.king place.

"Eagle, you okay? Jesus, man, I'm so sorry!"

#17 wobbled and dropped. Eagle checked himself, wiped a few black specks off his parka. Willed his heart to slow down.

"Yeah, I'm good. f.u.c.king freaked, but good."

"Okay. We're okay?"

"We're okay."

"Just..."