Zero day code, p.24
Zero Day Code, page 24
part #1 of End of Days Series
But Tommy ‘The Tripod’ Podesta was not careful.
The Tripod was the sort of guy more likely to drop every fucking dollar he had on a 300-1 shot at the track out at Los Alamitos, than he was to be careful about his fuckin’ outgoings.
Thus it was that a two hundred and forty pound, broke-ass, clinically depressed but violently anti-social, third-rate standover man was trapped in his shitty, rusted-out Camaro in gridlocked traffic in front of Damien Maloney’s Temescal restaurant on the morning that General Chu ordered Unit 61398 into battle.
Being a guy who was deeply invested in the cash economy, the Tripod was not much affected by the opening salvos of the cyberwar between his country and the Middle Kingdom.
But he was affected—he was fucking homicidally enraged to be perfectly honest about it—when some slanty-eyed gimp in a Nissan Leaf ran right up his ass while he was trapped in the motionless hell of this monster fucking traffic jam. That was bad enough. But while thus trapped, the Tripod had not been wasting his time. He had been busily, and somewhat desperately, trying to nut out a way to explain to Paulie Milano how the four grand he was supposed to be bringing back from San Francisco had literally disappeared while in the strictly temporary possession of licensed bookmakers out at Golden Gate Fields.
He had won, for once. That was the hell of it.
Tommy had chanced a few dollars…okay, four thousand of them… on Dufflecoat Supreme, a six to one prospect at the Golden Gate. And he had fucking won. Twenty-four fucking grand.
His horse had come in — about a minute before the stewards had shut down all business at the track for the duration because of a problem in the computerised tabulating computers or some shit.
Tommy had won and they hadn’t paid him because their fucking computer was on the fritz.
Oh, they promised to honour his ticket once everything was sorted out, but that could take days and he had to be back in LA with Paulie’s four large by midnight.
Was Paulie likely to buy this story?
No. This was the sort of story that got a guy buried in the desert halfway to Vegas.
The Tripod sat in his overheating Camaro and despaired. He was nothing but a degenerate fucking bum who couldn’t be trusted not to fuck himself in the ass first and every chance he got. Deep down, he knew it.
A six to one payday and before he even leaves the track, he gets rolled by fucking computer gremlins?
So, you can see why Tommy Podesta got out of his Camaro, ready to throw down, when some rice-eating asshole banged into his rear fender, interrupting the flow of his thoughts.
Even worse, the little Chinese faggot gets out of the Leaf and starts yelling at him, for fucks sake. At the Tripod! Like all of this was his fault. The guy obviously had some issues in his life.
That’s when the Tripod gives him a slap for his disrespect, and you wouldn’t fucking believe it but this diminutive fucking hero squares up with all this Kung Fu and shit.
Well, at that point Tommy Podesta has had enough. He straight up hauls off and punches this guy in the face and the guy falls down and cracks his head on the gutter.
Is that Tommy Podesta’s fault?
Seriously, is it?
Nobody can say, and it doesn’t really matter. Because the man Tommy Podesta knocked down and killed in a traffic jam outside of Fourth Edition was not the first or the last to die in the city that day.
But he was an agent of Bureau 13 of China’s Ministry of State Security. His colleagues knew him as Benny Wong.
Benny never did get to lunch.
24
Power Down In Crazy Town
Mel Baker lived in a townhouse complex that had been fashionable a few minutes before hypercolor t-shirts took over as the new hotness. The mock Melrose Place bungalows sat back off the shoulder of State Route 112 through Darnestown, maybe ten- or fifteen-minutes’ drive from Rick’s place, depending on traffic. They weren’t set all that far back from the road, though, and a thin line of dying Sycamores didn’t do much these days to screen out the noise of passing cars and trucks. Still, her small one-room studio was cheap, because it overlooked the driveway and at night as cars rolled into the parking garage downstairs the headlamps speared into her apartment. The walls were thin and it sounded at times as though she was trying to sleep in a 24-hour parking garage. It was not a great place to live, but it had been better than staying with her ex-husband.
She expected to find the block quiet and deserted when she returned. The odd hours Mel worked, she was used to coming and going day and night. Mid-morning was always a dead zone, with almost everyone else in the townhouse complex away at work. Not this morning, however. She pulled her pickup into the driveway, meaning to take one of the two visitor parking slots. Her little studio didn’t rate a space of its own, another inconvenience that made it affordable. Surprised to find both of the visitor bays occupied, she had to reverse back out onto the main drag. The kerbside parking was also tight, with half-a-dozen vehicles stacked on the side of the road, as though nobody had gone to work this morning. Mel finally found a space to pull into around the corner, wondering what the hell was going on. Walking back to the main entrance she could hear radios and the sound of arguments. That was odd. Most people kept their places buttoned pretty tight and ran the AC through summer. The traffic noise really was hard to take otherwise. Walking down the driveway, she saw most of her neighbours had their doors and windows open, letting in the hot air and car fumes.
Crazytown.
“Power’s out, Mel.”
She stopped and craned her head back, shading her eyes against the fierce late morning sun. As she feared, it was Mrs Comino up on the third floor.
Bugger.
She totally didn’t want to be taken as a conversational hostage this morning, and Marie Comino was one of those old jabbertooth tigers who latched on and never let go.
“In a hurry, Marie,” she shouted back. “Sorry! Late for work.”
Doubling her pace across the baking concrete of the driveway, Mel put her head down and almost ran into the doublewide figure of George Neary emerging from the stairwell up to the first floor. Neary, a retired Coastguard veteran rarely got his arse out of the armchair he’d parked in front of Fox News about ten years ago, not even to answer the door for UberEATS. He left his door unlatched and tipped a little extra to have his Wendy’s and Chik-fil-A delivered right to his lap. Marie Comino said he had a loaded handgun in one of the TV remote holsters hanging from the arm of his recliner, just in case somebody other than his food guy came through the door.
George had always been pleasant enough the few times Mel had run into him, but he looked angry and fit to burst when he came stomping out of the shadows of the stairwell.
“Goddamn cable’s out!”
“What?”
“Cable’s out,” he barked, as though to an idiot. “Power too. But the cable went first. I saw it. And now this piece a crap too.”
He held up his cell phone, looking as though he might throw it across the street.
“Sorry,” Mel said, performing a rather neat irime senkai as she slipped past him and tossed the apology back over her shoulder. It was cooler in the darkened stairwell. Still hot of course, but nothing like the open furnace out in the car lot.
God.
She just wanted to get out of here and back to Rick. Part of her, a large part actually, wanted to get out of here and never, ever come back. But she was pretty sure her new boyfriend would run halfway across the continent if she tried to move in with him just an hour or two after they’d first bonked.
Boyfriend?
Was he?
She paused, ever so briefly on the first stairwell landing and considered it.
Yes, Mel decided. He probably was. They knew each very well, after all of those training sessions he’d helped her with out at Bretton Woods. It wasn’t like they’d met in some bar, got drunk, and bumped uglies.
God. Was it?
No. Mel scolded herself for second guessing her own thoughts and feelings. She knew her own mind. Always had. That’s what’d given her the strength to leave Gary. And she knew in both heart and mind that Rick could be good for her and she for him. Resuming her climb up the stairs she turned left on the first floor and started searching for her keys.
The door to Mister Gilmartin’s place, the one next to hers, was open. Like so many others in the complex. Henry Gilmartin lay face down on the bare wooden boards of the short entry hall. A small white dog, his Maltese terrier Frankie, trembled and whined near his head. It started barking when Mel passed by. She had been so intent on getting her stuff and pissing off as quickly as possible that she hadn’t noticed poor old Henry collapsed on the floor.
“Shit,” she said when she saw him, hesitating for the briefest moment before her years of training and experience as a London copper kicked in. She rushed into the apartment, shooing Frankie away when he started yapping and barking in protest, or perhaps in excited relief. His little claws skittered on the floorboards as he darted forward to lick Mister Gilmartin’s ear.
The man groaned, and Mel felt the smallest measure of relief. He wasn’t dead yet.
The heat was stifling inside the townhouse and his face was dry, and a bright shade of red. His breathing was rapid and noisy, his pulse racing.
Heat exhaustion.
She’d seen a surprising number of cases in London as the summers grew longer and hotter, especially in the council towers where old folk were bottled up in small, airless flats. Mel reached for her phone, suspecting it would be useless, and finding that George Neary spoke true. Cell reception was down. She had a quick look for a landline in Gilmartin’s kitchenette but found nothing. She plugged the small sink, threw in a couple tea towels and pulled open the refrigerator door, looking for ice water. If she tried to use the cold-water faucet it would doubtless run hot from the pipes. The power was down, as Neary had complained, and there was only half a pint of cold water in the fridge, stored in an old Coke bottle. Mel tipped it out over the towels, soaking them while she searched the small freezer compartment. She had better luck there.
Gilmartin groaned and Frankie whimpered as Mel pulled out a packet of frozen peas, now half defrosted, and a tray of ice cubes, mostly melted. The ice cubes went into the sink. She knelt down in the narrow hallway, pushing Frankie away as she quickly undid Gilmartin’s belt and fly buttons.
For a mad half-second she flashed back to her morning with Rick, to the rush they’d been in to get all their clothes off.
This wasn’t that.
Mel almost tumbled over when she unbalanced tugging down Gilmartin’s threadbare brown corduroys. His underpants went next, exposing grey pubic hairs and wrinkled, flabby genitals. Her face ashen and lips pressed firmly together, she quickly jammed the frozen peas into his groin. Gilmartin gasped.
A voice cried out behind her.
“Oh my word what are you doing?”
It was the jabbertooth tiger.
“He’s dying!” Mel shouted at Mrs Comino. “Heat exhaustion. I need towels and cold water. Bring me anything you’ve got. Check the other neighbours too. Go! Hurry!”
For once, words failed Marie Comino, but action did not. She disappeared, crying out to the complex, “Help, someone. Henry is dying, help.”
Working quickly, Mel retrieved the three cold, wet tea towels from the sink. Two of them she packed into Gilmartin’s armpits, the third she used to pat down his head, checking the pulse in his throat as she did so. It seemed a little less volcanic, a little less as though his heart might explode out through his ribcage, but she couldn’t be sure. Frankie yipped, skittered and turned in tight little circles on the wooden floor, his tiny paws finding no purchase and frequently slipping out from underneath him. Mel returned twice to the diminishing store of cold water and rapidly melting iceboxes in the sink before Marie Comino came back with two jugs of cold water and fresh towels, with George Neary bringing up the rear.
“Water in the sink,” Mel ordered and Marie hurried to comply.
Neary took up so much space he had to turn slightly sideways in the harrow entry hall, but he moved with purpose and surety, and he was carrying a first aid kit. He placed it on the kitchenette’s breakfast bench as he squeezed past and motioned for Mel to give him some space.
She did.
He had all those years of service in the Coastguard and he was friendly with Gilmartin. They liked to get together and complain about ‘young people these days’. Neary gave him the same once over that Mel had performed, checking all of his vital signs. His expression was grim, but he kept muttering, “Good, good work.”
Marie Comino appeared behind Neary with a placemat, which she used to fan them all.
“Thanks,” Mel said.
“You get a heart rate?” Neary asked.
“No,” Mel confessed. “I took his pulse, which was running wild, but I wanted to get him cooled. I didn’t do a proper count.”
“I had him at 134 bpm,” Neary said. “We’ll get him turned over. Recovery position, and we’ll check it again.”
George had to move his considerable bulk back to create enough room to manoeuvre Gilmartin onto his side, with arms and legs crossed to stabilise the position. Squatting at Gilmartin’s head, Mel made sure his mouth was pointed down so that any vomit or bile could drain, but that his chin was up to keep the epiglottis clear. Marie ran to and from the sink to deliver cold, wet towels.
“One thirteen,” Neary announced, measuring Henry’s pulse against the old steel wristwatch he wore. “I think he’s gonna pull through, but we gotta get him to the ER.”
“An ambulance?” Mel suggested.
“I tried,” Neary said. “No cell cover. And my landline is down too. We’ll have to drive him ourselves.”
Mel cursed inwardly. She had a couple of hours before she was supposed to hook up with Rick again, but this looked like it was going to knock her well off course. If the phones were down, she had no way of contacting him.
Nothing for it, though. The poor old man needed more care than they could give him. Even getting him into the chilled air of a hospital, which would surely have its own back-up power supply, would help.
“I can drive him,” she said, “but my truck’s pretty basic.”
“I don’t have a vehicle,” Neary said. It sounded like a confession.
Mel knew that Marie Comino didn’t either. She’d had to drive her to the grocery store and the pharmacy more than once.
“All right,” she said, accepting the inevitable. “My pick-up can sit three across, if you can come with us and look after him while I drive.”
George Neary nodded.
“I can do that. Cable’s out.”
The hospital was a shit show. Traffic was gridlocked in the surrounding streets, and Mel only got through the snarl by mounting the kerb and driving over a line of orange cones meant to secure a break in the fence line around the Holy Cross hospital.
“What the bloody hell is all this?” she asked, mostly just thinking out loud.
“They’d have a lotta traffic accidents because of all the lights being out,” Neary answered. “And heat stress. Like Hank.” He had one big, meaty arm around Henry Gilmartin’s shoulders, like a drunken friend he was nursing home from a big night out. Mister Gilmartin drifted in and out of consciousness, but never made it to full lucidity.
“You just hold on there, Hank,” Neary said when it sounded like Gilmartin was protesting, weakly. “You’ve had a hard fall, buddy. Miss Baker is driving you to the Holy Cross. In Germantown. You’re gonna be fine. You just hold on.”
He had to hold on for more than an hour.
The hospital had back up power, but the computers had glitched out. Admitting Gilmartin meant fighting through a crowded ER and straight up bullshitting the admissions nurse about his health insurance. Or at least Mel thought Neary was bullshitting her. She found the American health system almost impossible to understand and the few times she’d brushed up against it, it had given her a powerful longing to flee home into the waiting arms of Britain’s moribund and decaying National Health Service.
Ninety minutes after they’d parked in a no-parking zone and carried Gilmartin through the sliding doors of the Holy Cross ER, he disappeared around a corner on a trolley with a nurse hooking up an IV line to his arm and a doctor hurrying alongside, making notes on an old-fashioned clipboard.
Mel checked her phone.
No service. Neary saw her peeking at the screen.
“You should go if you got somewhere to be,” he said. “I’m gonna stay and wait on Henry. They got cool air and television here. More than I got at home.”
He held out one giant paw and Mel took it, her small brown hand disappearing inside Neary’s enormous and calloused but surprisingly gentle grip. The heaving crowd parted and swirled around them, thanks mostly to Neary, who was big enough to break up the surging tides of hot, angry people.
“That was a good thing you did for Henry, Miss Baker,” he said over the racket. “You used to be a cop, right? Back home?”
“In London,” she said.
He nodded, as though pleased to be proven right.
“Well, this is a helluva mess,” Neary grumbled. “Worse than that business yesterday by a long mile. Guess I don’t need to tell you to look out for yourself. People go crazy when the power goes down.”
“Thanks. I’ll be fine,” she said, letting his hand go. “I was heading out of town anyway. Upstate…with my boyfriend.”
She hesitated ever so slightly before calling Rick that, but Neary didn’t seem to notice.
“Nice,” he smiled. “And smart.” He swept a hand around to take in the chaos of the ER. “Looks like it might be worth hunkering down a while in a nice cabin somewhere. I’d pack an extra big picnic basket if I was you.”
She returned his smile, feeling a little ashamed that she had always written him off as the angry old white man who watched too much Fox News. He seemed perfectly nice once you got to know him, and he’d been a godsend with Henry Gilmartin. They said their goodbyes and Mel headed for the exit.
