San Francisco
The chopper beat through the air, rotors thrashing, engines drumming, soldiers yelling back and forth over the wind rushing through the hold. Both of the cargo hatches were open and a couple of suits wearing harnesses were sitting in the doors, clipped in with digital video cameras mounted on their shoulders. They were filming something on the ground—something spectacular judging by all the troops crowded around the windows in the forward cabin.
Drake kept his head down, watching from the shadows in the rear of the hold. The helicopter was an old Chinook tandem-rotor heavy-lift transport with a massive cargo bay full of salvaged hardware. Rays of sunlight flickered through the stacks of crates, flashing across the ribbed walls and the overhead racks jammed with packs and duffel bags. He was sitting in an aft passenger section, two rows of seats crowded with spooks in the tail of the chopper. Clouds scudded across the window, then the sun broke through and he could see a lot of black smoke in the distance. Whatever was going on below them, it didn't look good.
Rocking in the turbulence, he closed his eyes for a minute, trying to pull himself together. He had a splitting headache, the back of his skull raw and throbbing, but at least he knew what was causing it this time. Adder's goons must have knocked him cold and dumped him on the chopper. They were flying their patsies to a secure facility, a secret prison, maybe, somewhere clear of the disaster. EFFIGY needed documentation for their cover story and he knew what was coming when they got there. Prepared confessions. A closed tribunal.
The helicopter bounced through some chop and dropped like a stone, leaving him weightless for a second, then it floated back up again, rolling from side to side. He was buckled in with a seat strap, his right hand cuffed to the armrest, but his legs and his other arm were free. Gena was sitting across from him in one of the facing seats, looking out the window, her black, tangled hair flying around in the wind gusting through the cabin. Paxton was sitting on his right, straining against his manacles to look outside, and the goons from the conference room were crowded around the windows on the other side of the aisle, their power ties flapping around their necks. The noise in the hold was deafening.
Gena was wearing a black wristband. He had one, too.
"What the hell?" He tugged at the thing with his free hand.
Paxton glanced over at him, noticed he was conscious again, then tugged at Gena's sleeve to get her attention. She leaned closer, reaching out and grabbing Drake's arm, studying his face with concern. They looked like they'd just seen Godzilla rise out of the ocean.
"Don't bother," Paxton yelled at Drake. "You can't get it off. Believe me, we've tried." He held up his own manacled hand, showing Drake his wristband. "It's an RFID tracker of some kind. GPS monitoring device. They're taking us to the Tangent Facility."
Drake blinked at them, trying to focus.
"How do you feel?" Paxton shouted.
Drake shook his head. "What's everybody looking at?"
"San Francisco," Gena yelled. "They're filming it. Shot us coming on board."
"Media release." Paxton glanced at the thugs on the other side of the aisle. "We're about to be famous."
"What happened?" Drake shouted, tugging at his cuffs.
"Adder's dead. You broke his neck."
"Good," Drake said. "That's what I was trying to do."
They stared at him for a second, then turned back to the window.
They were descending. Drake could feel the pressure change in his ears. The chopper leveled off after a few minutes, then it banked into a slow, clumsy turn and the city rolled into view outside the window, tilted at an angle that made him dizzy. He froze in his seat, clenching the armrests. They were two or three thousand feet over San Francisco, heading northeast towards the Bay Bridge, and he could hardly believe what he was seeing.
*
The city spread out below him, fires burning everywhere, smoke drifting over Nob Hill, the Mission, the Financial District, more fires on the Bridge. Crowds of black dots swarmed through the streets and it took him a second to realize they were people—big mobs pouring through intersections and lines of stalled cars. There was a huge traffic jam on Highway 101 and he could see dozens of wrecked cars and trucks scattered along the approach to the Bridge, more wrecks on the upper deck of the span, smoke rising from Treasure Island. The Embarcadero Towers were on fire. A ferry was burning on the water. Then the view fell away as the helicopter pulled out of the turn and leveled off again, yawing in the rough air. Drake sank back in his seat, staring at the roof of the hold, his heart thumping. No wonder the spooks were filming everything and the soldiers were gawking out the windows.
They were flying over the end of the world.
*
The helicopter circled the peninsula, following the coastline around the city while the suits filmed the carnage below. By the time they reached the Bridge, the full extent of the disaster was starting to sink in and everyone looked pale and shaken. Even the goons looked rattled by the scenes on the ground and the soldiers were staring out the windows in disbelief. Some of them must have been veterans of Iran and Afghanistan, but they'd never seen anything like this.
The chaos was spreading, getting worse by the minute. The Bridge looked like the Highway of Death in the first Gulf War, its upper deck crowded with wrecks, smoke pouring out of the Yerba Buena tunnel. A couple of ferries had capsized on the Bay and tiny figures swarmed over the deck of a container ship listing in the Oakland Harbor. Fires raged through Piedmont, the Berkeley Hills, the warehouse district, hundreds of Mars lights flashing on the streets. The chopper was passing South Beach when a fuel tank exploded on the other side of the channel. Gena yelled something as the fireball surged over the docks.
BLOWTORCH had gone off like an atomic bomb, sending waves of delirium through the Bay Area, warping the mental landscape for miles around. Thousands of commuters had spread the contagion inland and thousands must have been trying to get out when they lost it behind the wheel. The Embarcadero was jammed with traffic, a solid mass of gridlock and burning vehicles, crowds swarming over the boardwalk in a mindless riot, people jumping off the piers. Backed up for miles, the evacuation had stalled on the Golden Gate Bridge, blocked by a chain-reaction pileup in the middle of the span. People were running along the walkways on the bridge, fighting with each other, crowding the railings, leaping over the side—a steady rain of bodies falling into the channel hundreds of feet below. The Bay was littered with sails—yachts and small boats, some of them burning. A solitary lunatic was windsurfing off the marina and dozens of jet skis raced past Alcatraz, a group of survivors, maybe, heading for Tiburon or Angel Island. If they were trying to escape, they were going in the wrong direction.
Paxton shouted something, pointing towards Sausalito.
An iridescent haze drifted over the cities in the North Bay, a strange, glistening smog full of rainbows and prisms of refracted light. Mixing with the smoke from the fires, the haze seemed liquid somehow, translucent, bending the light at certain angles, then fading out again. Streaming across the highway, it spilled down the hills into the Bay, spreading across the surface of the water like a psychedelic fog. Looking around, Drake thought he saw patterns flowing through the streets below, sparkling streams of vapor that weren't quite there. Clouds of particles floated over the rooftops, multiplying, growing larger like ice crystals forming in the air. He blinked, fighting down his panic. He was starting to hallucinate again.
"Tell me you see this," Gena yelled into his ear.
"I see it." Drake pressed against the window next to her, clutching a wall rib with his free hand. They were both straining against their manacles, leaning over, twisted into awkward positions. "Looks organic."
"You can see it growing." She glanced around the hold. The cargo doors were open, the soldiers and pilots exposed to the slipstream. "You think it can get this high?"
"Doesn't matter.They're all vaccinated."
Drake turned back to the window, scanning the horizon to the south. It looked like the chaos had spread as far as Novato and Sonoma, and a question mark of smoke hung over Vacaville in the distance. There was no telling how far the stuff had spread, how many tourists and business travelers had carried it around the country, overseas. It was hard to believe that everything they were seeing had been caused by a tank of compressed gas smuggled into the Waverly Hotel inside a golf bag. Two days. That's all it took.
San Francisco had been wiped out by a molecule of DNA.