“It’s a landmark right now. Needs all new tires, possibly new wheels. If we can get a crew there in the morning before the Seventeens strip it, it should be salvageable.”
Beneath the mask her face shifted. She pushed back the hood a few inches and pressed slim fingers against her temples, turning her eyes up to the ceiling and pushing her chest out ever so slightly. After a year and a half, St. George could talk to her without his eyes straying when she struck a pose. When they strayed now, it was a deliberate choice.
“Tell me it was worth it.”
He leaned against the table. “We got around four hundred pounds of food. A third of that’s a big bin of wheat flour. Some basic medicine and first aid stuff. Lee and Andy found a shotgun with about thirty shells and a bunch of 30.08.” His fingers did a quick drum roll on the table. “We only had two-thirds of our usual time.”
“I understand.”
“So what happened here?”
“They attempted to rush the gate. I counted twenty-three of them.”
“Gorgon said fifty.”
“Gorgon enjoys a degree of exaggeration where his own exploits are concerned.”
St. George almost made the laugh sound like a cough. “What gave it away? That we were a decoy?”
“Your situation made no tactical sense,” she said. She tapped her maps, running a finger down the same stretch of Vermont he’d been on earlier. “If they knew what was or was not in your truck, they either would have attacked when you were further away from the Mount or not at all. If they did not know, it was foolish to set a trap at all since they know you go out with almost every mission, often with another hero. Since theft was not the motive, the next would have been just what they accomplished—-leaving you, Cerberus, and Zzzap stranded.”
“Getting us out of the way for an attack,” he mused. “You are amazing, my dear Holmes.”
Stealth pointed to a section of the map south of Century City, making a slow circle with her finger where she had marked several streets and blocks with green ink. “They are becoming more aggressive and frequent in their attacks. We may need to take offensive measures.”
“You mean, go after them?”
“I mean locating and eliminating them.”
He furrowed his brow. “In what sense?”
“In the sense of eliminating them.”
“We’re not killers,” he said. “We sure as hell can’t be saving mankind if we go out and murder a couple hundred of them.”
“By my estimates the Seventeens have grown well into the thousands,” she said. “And unlike our group, they are mostly fighters.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“It will.”
He slammed his hand down on the map and felt the table crack. “We aren’t going to stoop to that,” he said. “We’re the good guys. The idea is to save everyone, not just the people we like.”
There was a flurry of movement on one of the monitors. Van Ness Gate. A small ex, a boy, had squeezed through the barricade of trucks, and was staggering toward the gate guards. They tripped it with a pole and pinned it down with their rifle stocks. A woman ran into frame with a sledge and crushed the little skull.
St. George and Stealth watched in silence as they wrapped the small figure in plastic and started hosing down the pavement.
“If that is your feeling on the matter,” she said, “we can proceed in that direction for now. You know I value your opinions.”
The hero let out a breath and twin trails of smoke curled up from his nose. “A year and a half ago I was doing maintenance at UCLA,” he said. He stared at the map, at the dozens of green crosses and lines south of Wilshire. “You see movies where society collapses this quick and you just laugh it off. You figure there’s the police, the military, the feds... I mean, they couldn’t all lose it at once, right?”
Stealth looked at him. Even through the mask, he could feel her skeptical stare. “They did.”
“But not everyone loses it at the same moment,” he insisted. “You’d think people would’ve helped each other, tried to hold onto things.”
“Do you remember Katrina?”
He tossed the name back and forth. “Which one? We’ve lost two or three, I think.”
“Hurricane Katrina,” said Stealth, “which decimated New Orleans in 2005. The levees collapsed, brought the floods, and what happened? No one came to help and the city fell into chaos in mere days. Looting. Gangs. Militias. There were hundreds of thousands of citizens who had spent years believing their government did not care about them and were now seeing the proof of it. Then the same government that left them to drown for a week came in, imposed martial law, and ordered them all into what were essentially concentration camps without food or water.”