Apocalypse Atlanta (48 page)

“Where’s Crawford?”

“Bathroom.” Swanson said, shrugging.  “Hey, I heard something about the stove working?”

“Yeah.” Roper grunted, now busy taking cans of food down out of the cabinet.

“So, what’s the chance of coffee then?” Swanson asked, the hopeful tone in his voice almost comical.

“Depends on if there’s coffee in here somewhere.” Roper said, still absorbed in the contents of the cabinet.

“How long then?”

Roper turned and gave Swanson a look.  “What, you jonesing for a fix or something?”

Swanson held his hands up again.  “Hey, I’d love some, but I’m okay.  But Crawford, she’s a fiend all the way through, and she’s not the only one.  She said something about having a headache.  It’ll help us out if you can come up with something.”

“Us?” Peter gave him a look.

Swanson shrugged again.  “I know her.  She can get pretty unpleasant if she doesn’t get her fix.”

“What does she normally do on deployments?” Peter asked curiously.

“Bitch a lot.” Swanson said, his tone completely devoid of any humor.

Peter opened his mouth, then saw a silhouette appear in the hallway that led to the bathrooms.  He flinched, his hand starting to move back down to his holster once more, before he saw the figure was picking its way through the sleeping figures scattered around the living room.  A zombie wouldn’t move past, it would start snacking.

“Fuck me, I need some coffee.” Crawford said as she arrived and leaned on the counter next to Swanson.  “What’re the chances the people who lived here were civilized?”

“Christ, give me some time to figure out what’s going on.” Roper said in an annoyed voice.

“I’m not in the mood.” Crawford said.

“Patience.” Peter said, trying to intercede before things had time to really light off.  Morale could yaw wildly on even small matters unless a firm hand was taken.

“Look, I have a raging headache.  I need coffee.”

“Sarge has some pills that might help.” Roper said as he moved over to the stove and started opening cabinets there.

“Tylenol.” Peter said with a shrug when he saw Crawford’s eyes move to him.

“No good.  I need coffee.” Crawford said, pulling out a pack of cigarettes from her pocket.  Peter hesitated, then turned and fished a bowl out of the cabinets behind him.  He stepped forward and dropped it on the counter in front of her, then retreated to his spot.  Crawford stuck a cigarette between her lips, then sparked a small lighter to ignite the end.

“Hey, light me too.” Swanson said, pulling out a pack of his own.  Crawford waited while he got one out and positioned, then lit it before putting everything back in her pockets.  “Aaahhh, that’s better.  Thanks Cindy.”

Peter started as Roper made a sort of strangled sound that was somewhere between a bark of laughter and inhalation of surprise.  He glanced over, a little annoyed, and saw Roper had spun around and was staring at the two smokers with a wide grin on his face.  “Cindy?”

“Swanson you stupid fuck-head.” Crawford said in resignation, shoving at him.

“Ouch.  I forgot.  Lay off, okay?” Swanson swayed away from her.

“Fuck you.” She hit him in the arm again.  “You’re just lucky I’m too tired to kick your ass right now.”

“Your name is Cindy Crawford?” Roper asked, sounding like this was the greatest news ever.

Crawford said nothing, just glared steadily at him as she drew on her cigarette.  Roper returned the gaze with interest, polite but expectant.  Peter opened his mouth, then decided to see how things played out.  So far the only one in any trouble was Swanson, and even that was probably not going to boil over until later.

“Look, I found coffee filters, so there’s probably some coffee around here.”  Roper finally said after about half a minute.  “And since it’s not in any of the cabinets, I bet I know where.”

“If you can find it, so can I.” Crawford told him.

“Yeah, but can you make it without the coffee maker?” Roper asked with an even wider grin.

“Sarge might know how to.” Swanson said, apparently eager to try and earn some good behavior points for himself.

“Leave sarge out of this.” Roper said.  “So, how about it Crawford?”

Crawford glared at him for another couple of moments, then sighed heavily.  A cloud of smoke roiled up around her, lit eerily in the greenish light of the glow stick.  “My mother was pretty doped up from the pain drugs and labor when she had me.  She didn’t catch what dad had put on my birth certificate until they got me home from the hospital.”

“How old are you?” Peter asked, finally injecting himself back into the conversation.

“Twenty-four.” Crawford said.  She tapped ash into the bowl, glanced briefly at Peter, then returned her steady glare to Roper.  “My dad was a fan.”

“I’ll bet.” Roper said, sounding highly amused.

“Look, I answered your question.” she said with a touch of desperation.  “Now are you going to hold up your end or not?”

Roper went over to the refrigerator and opened the freezer.  A moment later he pulled out a foil bag that had the Starbucks logo on it.  “Hipsters always keep their stash in the freezer.”

Peter sighed.  “I don’t even want to know.”  When the other three, all decades younger, gave him an odd look, he waved his hand in a dismissive gesture.  This was probably not the time to try to explain what ‘yuppies’ had been.  In his opinion, a precursor to the ‘hipster’ label making the rounds today.  “Forget it.  Just make the coffee.  In fact, if there’s a pitcher or something around here, make a lot.  The other watches–”

He trailed off as a tremendously loud and ominous sound came from outside.  Peter’s hand dropped again to the grip of his holstered pistol, but even as his fingers closed on the grip he knew he was being foolish.  There was no way that was something zombies were doing.  If nothing else it was way too loud.  He pushed away from the counter, heading for the sliding glass doors that led to the apartment’s balcony.

When he got there and swept the vertical blinds aside with one hand, he stood peering out curiously.  Nothing seemed out of order for a moment, then his eyes were drawn to motion.  His gaze went up, and up, and up some more, until he was looking south at the city skyline.

“Jesus.” Peter breathed.  The Westin Peachtree, having been on fire since the previous day, was finally giving up the fight.  It was barely four blocks away, and as he watched its torturously slow collapse he wondered if that was far enough away.

The hotel’s structure was making tormented sounds, slow and groaning and punctuated with other more complicated sounds of breaking and fracturing as the building tipped eastward.  He could see fragments of the building cracking and shattering to fall free of the structure, hear the steel and metal of its frame protesting its own weight as it bent away from vertical.

“Fuck me.” he heard someone say next to him.  Looking over quickly, Peter saw Candles had awakened and was looking out at the same scene.  In fact most of the room was conscious now, and staring like they couldn’t believe it was happening.

Peter heard something snap in the collapsing building, a sound so loud it reverberated through the city like a titan’s gunshot.  He noticed several of the upper floors had already folded up against others below them.  A serious shower of debris began as the building tipped further to the east, far enough that gravity was able to begin pulling pieces out rather than down.  Abruptly the building’s tilt became too much to resist any further.  As the angle reached about thirty degrees off vertical its sideways motion abruptly accelerated.

Peter knew the hotel was on Peachtree Street.  He was trying to remember what buildings were east of the Westin, but he couldn’t get his thoughts to summon the information forth.  He felt trapped, unable to look away yet sickened to be watching as the landmark building disintegrated and spread itself across the even more historic street.

It was an Atlanta joke, one it often took tourists or newly arrived transplants years to fully appreciate, just how many streets in the city contained the word ‘Peachtree’.  There were a
lot
of them.  Peachtree Circle, West Peachtree, Peachtree-Dunwoody; it was like the city’s planners over the decades had thought it was the best possible name for a thoroughfare.  But this was the actual Peachtree street, the first one.  The only one about which you could just say ‘Peachtree’ and have another native know what you meant without further clarification.

“It’s just a street.” Peter told himself, though he knew it wasn’t.  It was a piece of Atlanta character, just like the collapsing building.  He watched with a sick feeling twisting his insides as the stricken structure went out of view behind an intervening building.  But the sound when it slammed into whatever was across Peachtree to the east was the loudest accompaniment yet.

It wasn’t really the actual volume level so much as it was the duration.  The impact, the sound of the Westin hitting the adjacent building, seemed to go on and on.  It was like hundreds of distinct impact events were rolling together in a single long sequence of sound.  Peter could feel the sound like a physical presence, on his face and hands, and he realized the glass doors in front of him were shuddering in their frames.  The bass of the event was enormous.

He could no longer see what was happening to the Westin.  A huge cloud of dust was boiling up in the dawn-lit sky.  It was as if a gigantic sandbox had been dropped straight into an even more gigantic vertical fan.  The dust of the destruction was spreading, rolling out as much as it was up, carrying with it a cacophony of breaking concrete and snapping steel.

“Wow.”  Swanson said from behind him.

Peter stepped away from the glass doors.  He glanced around.  Most of the soldiers in the apartment were awake and either sitting up or standing so they could see what was going on.  Peter felt some of the eyes fixing on him as he turned from the glass, and forced a casual shrug.

“Show’s over.  Nothing we can do about it.  Sack back out.”

Candles continued to look out the glass, holding the blinds apart, and a few others lingered for longer looks at the cloud of hotel remains, but most everyone else took the advice.  Peter picked his way back over to the kitchen and resumed his spot in the corner of the counters, leaning back so he could see the living room.  He knew from experience his attention might drift if he sat down, so he needed to stay on his feet.

“So, coffee.” Peter prompted as Crawford rejoined them and lit another cigarette.  He idly wondered what would happen if she ran out of the cancer sticks while suffering from caffeine withdrawal.  It would probably be either amusing as hell or seriously dangerous, depending on who she focused her ire upon.

“Sure.” Roper said, sounding a little dazed.  He pulled a pot out of the cabinets and started filling it from the sink.

“One of you loan Roper a lighter so he can get the stove going.” Peter said.

Crawford dug through her pockets immediately, coming out a moment later with a cheap purple lighter that was half empty.  “Here, my backup.”

“So sarge, you were a Marine?” Swanson asked quietly as he dropped his cigarette butt into the bowl that was serving as ashtray.

“Am.” Peter corrected automatically, though a part of him wondered if a zombie plague would be enough to do what wars, politics, and over two hundred years of a constantly changing world had been unable to end.  He found the thought of no more Corps bothered him more than the notion the country might be done for did, and wondered if that made him unpatriotic.  “I just draw a pension instead of a paycheck now, that’s all.”

“Right.” Swanson said, tiredly shrugging instead of launching into one of the halves of the argument that Army usually supported when discussing the ‘once a Marine, always a Marine’ concept.  “Ever seen anything as fucked up as this?”

Peter had to jolt his train of thought to consider the question, tearing himself from the irrelevancy of whether or not his pension check was going to be sent next month.  It probably didn’t matter; what good was a check if the banks were closed?  Or if the stores were too?

“I’ve been in Afghanistan and Iraq, with us and half the first world militaries bombing and shooting them down to bedrock searching for Saddam, Bin Laden, suicide bombers, whatever.  I’ve spent months sailing around in ships off the coast of whatever the current flash point was at that time, waiting for it to either calm down or boil over.

“Friends of mine, Army guys like you, told me about the Mog in the 90s, said it was a real third-world shithole even before they started running missions that shredded buildings and blocks.  So that sounded no fun, even before all hell broke loose.  But you know what this really reminds me of?”

“What’s that?” Crawford asked, sounding like she almost even was interested in the answer.

Peter smiled without humor.  “I was part of the relief mission the US mounted after the tsunamis damn near leveled Japan.  This is like that, just without all the water.  Whole towns abandoned, buildings crumbing and burning, cars wrecked and resting in the damndest places.”

“But no zombies.” Swanson said quietly.

Peter sighed.  “No, that’s new even for me.  For everyone, I expect.  Even if you love horror movies, I doubt anyone really ever expected to see shit like this.”