“ Quiet! ” Stealth turned her head to each of them. “The next person who interrupts,” she said, “I will break their right ring finger. Is that clear?” They looked at her with raised eyebrows and slack jaws. Then, one by one, they shifted their gazes to St. George. The Mighty Dragon shook his head and crossed his arms. “Whipped,” murmured Gorgon. Josh and Danielle bit back their laughs. Barry tried and failed. Stealth and St. George glared at him. “May we continue?” They nodded. “We are all making wild guesses and assumptions. Without information there is nothing else we can do.” She gestured at the map. “Therefore, we need to go make an assessment. The Seventeen’s exact location, numbers, resources. If we can, determine how many of them have become exes. We know most of their activity has been centered here in Beverly Hills, between La Cienega and Century City. The last time Zzzap made a pass, three months ago, this seemed to be their base of operations.” Barry nodded. “They’ve used cars and a lot of the old National Guard barricades to block off roads and make walls. Gregory, Maple, Pico, Century Park East. They’re all just one massive pile-up, three cars high at places. Decent amount of barbed wire and stakes, too. Pretty much impassable by anything that can’t think and climb.” His finger made a set of slashes across the map. Gorgon shook his head. “That’s a hell of a lot of space. How many people are we talking about?” Barry shifted on the table. The dark woman traced the outline he had described. “We are estimating about twenty-two thousand,” she said. St. George’s palms hit the tabletop. “What!?”
“That was three months ago. A population of that size has had several births and deaths since then.”
“They’ve got twenty-two thousand people living there,”
repeated Gorgon. “They’re doing better than us?”
“It’s like the Dark Ages,” Barry said. “They don’t have electricity past a few generators. Barely any working vehicles that I’ve seen.
Most of their people are using torches and cooking over bonfires. Half their guards are armed with baseball bats and spears.”
“They have raw numbers,” said Stealth. “We have everything else.” St. George cast his eyes between the woman and the darkskinned man. “Why didn’t you tell us this?”
“I decided it would be demoralizing to the populace of the Mount. The more people who knew, the better the chance it would slip out.” Gorgon shook his head. “So this asswipe gang we’ve been telling everyone is no real threat is actually ruling their own kingdom with almost five times the manpower we’ve got?”
“Assuming they recruit children and the elderly into their ranks,” said Stealth, “yes, they are. I believe less than twenty percent of that number are actual members of the Seventeens. To continue the medieval analogy, the rest are living as serfs in exchange for protection.” Josh pointed with his good hand. “Is that Roxbury Park?”
“It was,” said Stealth. “They are using it as their own farm now.” He nodded and twisted his lip. “I proposed to Meredith there.” Gorgon sighed. Barry looked up to examine a ceiling panel. “Question,” said Danielle to fill the silence. “What about this Peasy, their big boss?” She looked at Gorgon. “You dealt with the Seventeens all the time. Who is he?” The goggles swept back and forth over the map. “No idea.
None of the guys I knew who were near the top before things fell apart.
Might be a new player.”
“Are you sure?” He shrugged. “There were a dozen or so men in their upper circle. The only ones with similar names were two Pedros and one idiot who called himself Painkiller, real name Fernando.” Stealth tilted her head under the hood. “Painkiller?”
“He was a fucking idiot, trust me. Convinced he had some kind of superpower. Tried to fight me twice with his eyes closed, once while wearing a welding mask.” Danielle tilted her head. “Did that work?”
“No.”
“Did he have any kind of power?”
“Besides a superhuman ability not to learn from his mistakes?
No. Neither of the Pedros struck me as ruthless enough to run the gang, either. Good lieutenants, not real leaders.” Stealth looked at the map. “Is there anyone in the next level who might fit?”
“The next level is a hundred guys. Probably twice that if they’ve gotten as big as you’re saying. Without a real description it could be anyone. Hell, Peasy could be someone who just moved in and took over.” He swiped at the map and knotted his fists once or twice. “What?”
“It pisses me off,” he said. “I used to know the SS backwards and forwards. We’ve downgraded them as a problem for so long we don’t know a fucking thing about them anymore.”
“Thus, the recon,” said Stealth. “A small team. Two at most.”
“Just us?” asked Gorgon. “Or were you thinking of civilians?” She shook her head. “After Zzzap, St. George and I are the fastest. We are also the best suited to operating without support.” St. George raised an eyebrow. “How tough do you think this is going to be?” Stealth ran her finger across the map. “Four and a half miles each way. Keeping a low profile, that is a full day of travel with no backup.
With actual reconnaissance time, we will be gone for almost two days.” Danielle tapped the map. “Why not just have Barry do another fly-over? Faster and easier.”
“Since he cannot hold anything,” said Stealth, “we cannot get images. Everything would come down to his memory, descriptive ability, and how long it would take to debrief him.”
“Plus I’m not exactly subtle,” he said with a wink. “Hard to do covert ops when you’re brighter than the sun.”
“We need to see what they are doing when they believe we are not observing, get a solid idea of their forces, and perhaps discover who this Peasy is.” The pen Josh was twirling between his fingers clicked on the table. “Oh, hell.”
“What?”
“Not Peasy,” he said. He looked up at them. “Pee-Zee.” Barry tilted his head. “What?”
“I was thinking about the virus and how it doesn’t mutate, and that got me thinking about the contagion and all the news announcements they kept making to keep people updated, and then it just hit me—”
“Pee-Zee,” repeated Stealth. St. George glanced at their faces. “Am I the only slow one?”
“Patient zero,” said Josh.
It’s What’s Inside That Counts
THEN
Even with the shortage of pilots these days, we rated air travel. The rest of the team was in a passenger plane, sitting in real padded seats. I was on a bench, leaning against the interior wall of a C-130J Hercules, strapped into a fivepoint harness. Cerberus was broken down into over a dozen components and stored for transport. The crates were strapped to the sides of the plane, heavy Anvil cases mounted on solid wheels. With the way things were collapsing across the country, I wasn’t about to let it out of my sight.
The Cerberus Battle Armor System took five months to design and another four to build. At least six weeks of that was waiting for parts. Plenty of people had been working on exoskeletons before me. There was the Hardiman stuff the Navy tried in the sixties. Just before everything fell apart, Hugo Herr at MIT had one. UC Berkeley had their Bleex rig and the Hulc. Sarcos Incorporated had a great one. And all I had to do was flash my DARPA card, say “National security,” and I got to look at the blueprints and software for all of them, whether they liked it or not.
Then you can add in all the optional extras. The Army’s Future Force Warrior system. Interceptor body armor. The latest Taser designs. Motion-sensor targeting programs. All this technology was just sitting around, waiting for one clever woman to put it all together. Yes, I stole from the best. New York’s been lost. No one wants to say it, but there it is.