The DHS Agent swore the houses were empty and that he’d checked them out himself. “Honest, there’s not even a stick of furniture in there and no goddamned food at all.”
Unconvinced I sent squads of girls into every building we passed. “There must have been other people here,” I said. “Nobody posts a field agent to a place like this if there’s nothing for him to do.”
“There were more,” Kreutzer said, clutching at his bandaged hand. “There was a garrison. When the Epidemic broke out we needed a hardened location for emergency management ops. We reactivated the base here and staffed it with Operations Directorate irregulars. People used to flying in and out of air fields with little or no notice. Some useless fucking moron in the Pentagon thought you could fight dead fucks with helicopters and law enforcement aircraft.”
I looked around at the trees rattling in the wind, at the yellow houses. “That would take some pretty serious infrastructure.”
Kreutzer tilted his head toward the western part of the island. “Over that way. This is all touristy crap. When the city took over in 2003 they spruced up here and started letting visitors in. They kept the real stuff out of sight.”
I nodded and signaled for the girls to regroup. We headed across a lush green lawn past the star-shaped stone edifice of Fort Jay.
“So like I was saying-me and Morrison, my partner, we got detailed here to run sigint and systems while the Guard guys ran their flyovers. We were Systems Directorate before we got rolled up into Homeland Security. At first I was pissed to get stuck in this latrine while guys I outranked were doing a real man’s job in the city. Then the choppers started turning up missing-whole crews never came back-and I figured maybe I had it okay after all. Finally we got a call from Washington, they needed all our units for a tactical event along the Potomac. Morrison and me stayed behind to keep the site maintained for when they came back.”
Kreutzer had brought us to the side of Liggett Hall, an enormous brick dormitory building that cut the island in half. A line of trees behind the structure hid a chainlink fence topped with barbed wire. A gate stood open, revealing a dirt pathway to the other side. “I’m guessing they never did,” I said.
“Well two points for you, shithead. They got slaughtered, from what we could hear on the blower. They were useless up in the air and when they put down they got fucked, royally fucked.” Kreutzer stopped before entering the gate. “I don’t know about this. This is a restricted area.”
I pushed past him and entered the real base. A broad central lawn ran most of the way to the far shore, dotted here and there with baseball diamonds. A concrete airstrip had been laid down across this lawn, which was flanked with dilapidated prefab buildings of the kind I associated with American military bases. Time and rust had been unkind to most of the structures but I could see a few hangars that still looked operational as well as an air traffic control tower.
“We held on the best we could. Occasionally one of those dead assholes would climb out of the ventilation tower but we took ‘em down by the numbers. We managed to close off the louvers eventually so that’s not a problem anymore.”