The Filter Trap (8 page)

“Nana made it to the bridge.” Lee tugged at Allan’s coat lapel, leading him toward the flare.

They pushed in the unchanging darkness for hours through the sea of people to reach the base of the Golden Gate. Many times desperate San Franciscans begged for help, but Allan and Lee had little to offer.

The thick trees flanking Veterans Boulevard sheltered refugees of the Event. Lee stopped to help fashion splints for broken bones out of tree branches. She taught mothers how to warm shivering children with a kindling fire, never letting her eyes break too long from the north sky where she’d seen the flare.

They didn’t walk directly toward the flare, but traveled on Veterans toward the 101 Freeway ramp. Lee hoped the Army had secured the freeway and they could hitch a ride once they got all the way up.

With the ramp in sight, Lee turned away.

“Where are you going?” Allan yelled.

She motioned for him to follow.

A brisk run through Dragonfly Creek left them on the blacktop of Upton Avenue.

Lee looked left and right, searching for something in the red-topped buildings of circular Ralston Avenue a short block away. Beyond them, in the large grassy oval of the Presidio graduate school, thousands of bodies lay on top of each other. Morose faced men and women moved quietly between the bodies searching for identification and affixing tags to fingers or toes when successful.

Lee ran past the depressing sight to enter a large building to her right. Allan stopped by the placard near the door: “United States Government National Park Service: Park Police.” Candlelight flickered in the old windows. After some searching he found Lee speaking on a landline telephone. The short conversation ended as Allan came in.

“They’ll be here in a few minutes.”

“Who?”

“I had a hunch USPP would have a landline to the bridge. Operational hub would normally be at Fort Point, but that’s flooded so our rendezvous is at the pavilion.”

A Humvee and a few soldiers arrived minutes later. As they approached the bridge entrance Allan noticed more armed soldiers standing guard. The Army enforced a loose circle around the lip of the Presidio that ended where the Golden Gate Bridge began. Those well enough to make the hike up from Crissy Field hoping to leave the city found a wall of green camo with rifles at the ready.

On the other side, Lee and Allan were ushered into the museum at the pavilion. Inside, they found silence for the first time in many hours.

A woman in uniform, reviewing reports and scribbling notes, stopped when she heard their footsteps. She rose from behind a table at the back of the little room. “What ch’all here for?”

Allan didn’t know her rank, or even her branch of service, but Lee’s reaction showed she must have been high up, maybe as high as Britely.

“Sir, Second Lieutenant Green, Hickam AFB, accompanying Doctor Allan Sands. I’m here to reconvene with my crew and find our evac: Doctor Jill Tarmor.” Lowering her voice a few decibels, Lee added, “Have you seen my bubbas, sir?”

“Bubbas?” The woman moved her pursed lips to the left for just a moment, then produced terse sentences. “Yes, I remember: what momma-birds call their chicks in the Air Force.”

A vague smile brought attention to a long, white, diagonal scar over her lip.

“Expected you, Lieutenant. Good news and bad news. Bad news is bad for both of us. Your bubbas got here before you. Seems the wind blew harder this direction after the professor jumped, so you two landed behind everybody else. That ain’t the bad news yet. More good news first: we found your other professor, civilians saw her on high ground before the waves hit. Now the bad news: she ain’t here. You gotta go get her.”

“Thank you, sir. Where is she?”

“Your target wouldn’t be far yesterday, but after what this city has been through, Coit Tower is one hell of a walk from the Golden Gate.”

‘Coit Tower!’ Allan remembered the same trip to San Francisco more than a decade prior. Before pulling over in the fog, they’d visited the tower. But he knew that wasn’t why she went there now. She didn’t know he was coming, after all. She reacted the same way he had when the Event happened: she went somewhere she could look up at the sky.

The woman with the scar continued speaking as she motioned for Lee and Allan to follow her out the back door to walk down Battery Trail toward Marine Drive.

“They’re sending me to Los Angeles. Something’s brewing, maybe something to do with your evac. Whatever it is they don’t need me to oversee mop-up here, so I can’t do much to help you. It won’t be easy to find Tarmor out there. The city is flooded, on fire, or both at the same time. I’ll send you as far as I can in a Hummer. Driver’ll have infrared to get you through the smoke down in the Holler. You can hike up the rest of the way yourselves before extraction. I need my troops here in case the crowd wakes up during the change of command.”

She pointed into the eastern night, black flood water reflecting stars behind a veil of smoke pillars. “Anybody—any
thing
—left out there is a killer. Watch out.”

“We’ll stay frosty,” Lee noted.

“The water at Crissy Field must be up to people’s ankles,” Allan mentioned to the others in the Hummer as they plowed through the swamp lapping at Marine Drive.

“I seen this before,” the driver said. “I got sent in after Katrina. People were dragging bodies out of flooded homes in knee-high water in the 9th Ward the day after the storm.”

“That president failed to act quickly and decisively. I think this president will do better,” Allan claimed.

“You think!” The other soldier turned his head. “This is Katrina times a thousand, all along both coasts.”

They climbed up the hill in silence from Marine Drive.

“Then again, you on his little list, so you’d know,” the driver sarcastically stated.

Passing over the Presidio by taking the 101, he lamented, “Hope he’s right. We almost there.”

The Humvee halted near Cow Hollow, miles from Coit Tower.

“Why did we stop?” Lee demanded of the young Army driver. “I thought you were taking us to the hill.”

“I don’t give the orders, Lieutenant, I just carry them out,” he said gruffly without turning to face her. “Brig-gen says take you to Cow Hollow and we do it. I don’t ask questions and neither do you.”

Lee wanted to sock him in his smug jaw. He loosened it a bit after seeing her expression.

“But . . . if I had to guess, Lieutenant, I’d say the chatter we’ve heard over the radio about the streets being flooded with busted water mains all along the northeast part of the city have something to do with it. We can ride along those marshes back there on Marine just fine, but this sucker ain’t a boat.” He patted the ceiling of the Humvee hard. “We try to drive through that shit and they’ll have to evacuate
us
too. Another dead Hummer ain’t gonna help them poor folks in the swamp none when the food comes.”

“I’m sorry, Private, will you help us unpack, please?”

“Course, Lieutenant,” he said and brought the radio linked to the second Hummer behind them to his lips. “Hup to!”

Both drivers leapt out of their trucks. Their passengers filed out of the cramped quarters. As they walked to the second truck Allan leaned in to LARS and asked, “What’s brig-gen?”

Allan might as well have asked why the sky was blue or apples fell from trees.

“Brigadier general. Duh.”

A lifetime of studying planetary orbits didn’t leave much room for military hierarchy.

“Is that better than a major?”

“Good Jesus, yes,” LARS answered. “But you might as well treat them all the same. We’re about to enter as close to a war zone as
you’ll
ever get, so stay close and do everything we tell you to the letter.”

LARS patted him on the shoulder and Allan winced. The last time LARS did that she shoved Allan out of a perfectly good helicopter.

The lesser of the two privates unloaded supplies from the top of the second Hummer: a large backpack, which could be turned into a raft in a few seconds, bottles of water, and dry goods the brig-gen could spare.

“It’s a long hike up there, Lieutenant,” the driver informed Lee. “Not so bad for us roughnecks, but, uh,” he looked at Allan’s gut, “you folks are used to sittin’”

“I’ve walked from the Palace of Fine Arts to Coit Tower and back,” Allan said defiantly.

“How many decades ago?”

Lee sternly cautioned the private, “We’ll see everyone gets there in one piece. You still need to tell us how to call the evac once we get up there.”

“Right,” the driver remembered. “Brig-gen said you’d have a flyover every six hours, reconnaissance across the bay area out of Travis. Check your watch, next opportunity is about four hours from now. Send up this flare.” The private took it out of a box strapped to the inside of the wheel well of the truck and put it in her hand. “Huey’ll come out for ya.”

“You got a lot of questions for your own mission,” the other private scoffed. “Did they drop you out here without a plan?”

“The plan was to rendezvous at the Golden Gate. Our evac was supposed to be safe and secure with
you
,” Lee reminded them. “This little Sunday drive wasn’t in our playbook; your pals left our evac out here.”

The first private shrugged. “Sorry. It’s been nuts out here since the Event.”

The other private stopped him from saying any more. “We’ve got better things to do than look for some egghead buddy of the president. People up there on the Presidio are cold, tired, wet and hungry. The rest of ‘em are dead.”

“Thank you for the flare, Private,” Lee said with palpable disdain, turning to the bubbas and Allan. “Onward and upward.”

The doors of the trucks closed behind them ten steps up the street. Before the engines started up, a door opened and the more obstinate private sprinted over.

“Look, it wouldn’t be right to let you leave without telling you: we’ve heard chatter of armed breakins and assaults on survivors. I’ll make sure he takes it slow on the way back, and we’ll keep a channel open for you.” He pressed a long-range walkie talkie into Lee’s hand.

“What’s your first name, Private Thompson?” she asked, looking at his nametag.

“Friends call me Pete.”

“Thanks, Pete.”

After the trucks left, the group trudged down Lombard towards Russian Hill. As they climbed higher on the hill, they saw water more than two feet high still gushed and pooled down cross-streets only a few blocks away.

“Might as well be gasoline around our ankles,” Nana said. “Ain’t doing nothing to put out all these fires.”

“Must look like the Taiwan Sky Lantern Festival from the sky,” Lee emoted.

“What’s that?” SIMI asked.

“A thousand little flames flickering inside boxes eking farther away.”

“Leave it to you to think of something pretty, Fairy,” SIMI chuckled.

Allan thought about pretty things too, but didn’t want them to know. Few of the charming old houses of Frisco still stood. On most blocks, with those higher up faring the best, little remained of the once proud Victorians but concrete foundations and a few lonely walls. Allan wondered if the Painted Ladies had also been reduced to dust up on Nob Hill, just south of their route.

“You see that?” SIMI pointed to one of the windows of a home on the corner, light flickering inside.

“Christmas tree all lit up?” Lee guessed.

“Menorah,” LARS noted as they drew closer.

“It’s still intact,” SIMI noticed with amazement.

“Thinking about converting?” LARS asked.

“Maybe. You heard Doc back at Edwards: ‘God did all this.’”

“I said no such thing! I said it’s beyond our power to understand how this happened.”

“So, a higher power?”

“That is
not
what I meant.”

“Call it what you want, Doc. I plan to side with the winning team.”

“Hey!” Lee turned back. “What if your God is trying to kill us with this shit? You think he’d send a tsunami through the whole coastline just to get your ass to San Francisco and show you a perfect menorah? What kind of a God is that?”

“I’m just sayin’, I ain’t gonna refuse His help right now.”

“His
help
? We wouldn’t need his help if he didn’t start this mess. I need you here with us, siding with
us
. Right now it doesn’t matter how this happened. We’ve gotta find our evac so she can tell us how this happened.”

Allan raised his hand. “I very much doubt Jill will know more than—”

“Shut up!” the exasperated soldiers shouted, taking out their buried qualms with each other on the poor doctor. They quietly prowled the streets further east.

“Mile and a half to go,” LARS said after a half hour.

SIMI countered, “Without electric lights it’s hard to tell where the hill stops and the sky begins.”

“You’ll know it when you get to it,” Allan said from experience. “Your calves will tell you.”

The hill felt like an endless climb, followed by a slippery descent into a rushing river more than five feet deep rolling down Columbus Avenue cutting between Russian Hill and their final destination. No light or Moon illuminated the path, which only made the new sky of stars stand out more. Looking up, they all quietly wondered if someone or some
thing
looked back down.