An old chart laid out in grid squares flapped across the wooden table, stirring up dust motes in the wan light of the office. 'Here, gentlemen, you see the Potomac river. It is so wonderfully fitting that my new Army of the Potomac will be turning the tide on this menace. I've thought often of that irony, especially in draft revisions five and six, which seem to fit best with the current situation. Revisions seven, eight and nine assume an insurgence of anarchists from the Mexican border. I don't feel that applies to us now, no.'
Purslane Dunnstreet's botulin-paralyzed face couldn't show the years of tiny strains, the pockmarks of decades spent crouched over situation papers and classified troop strength analyses and ordnance maps, all the years of being ignored in her fly-specked pigeonhole where the light coming through the window was the color of old tobacco stains and even the radio got bad reception. The frozen contours of her eyes couldn't demonstrate the obsessive nature of her task, or the million slight frustrations the years must have brought her. The mental enervation of planning and planning and revising and re-envisioning and drafting and rewriting and compiling five hundred page reports guaranteed to be only glanced at before they were filed away in the Pentagon's back hallways, in the White House sub-basements, but most of all, the sanity fatigue of just working at it, spending every waking moment obsessed with one singular idea that no one else ever took seriously'that strain could not manifest on her face.
Instead it came out in her fingers.
She touched her neck and sighed happily. 'Honestly I was beginning to doubt the Dunnstreet Maximum Faith-Based Provisional Order of Battle would ever need to be invoked. I suppose the Boy Scouts had it right after all. 'Be Prepared', it really is the most essential thing.' She waggled her digits in the air and Clark's stomach churned.
Thin, white, worm-like appendages, extruded lengths of flesh that twisted around one another in complex patterns. It was not enough to say that she wrung her hands in excitement as she laid out her Big Idea on the table before them. She tied her pasty fingers in knots, cracked the knuckles with a sound like mice being trodden underfoot, drummed her fingertips on the table so fast her French manicure blurred while Clark watched it dance.
'The New Citizen Army will sweep through here, and up through Georgetown, cutting off any advance. The city will be secured. And then it's onward to New York.' A new map clattered across the table, blasting cool air into Clark's face.
He shook himself awake. He'd been so mesmerized by the fingers he'd lost almost all the details of the plan. He had the gist of it, though.
Purslane Dunnstreet's foolproof plan would have worked marvelously'against an invasion of Nazi stormtroopers. She wanted entire columns of armored vehicles stationed on the Beltway. She wanted to draw in every element of the military'regulars and reserves'that could make it in time to create a single overwhelming force to protect Washington while the rest of the country was left defenseless. She wanted constant overflights of D.C. with nightly bombing runs. She had provisions against insurgencies by Fifth Columnists and a contingency for providing disinformation to any spies who cropped up. She wanted commando raids on enemy strongholds and a network of resistance fighters to sprout up in the occupied territories.
Not a single part of her plan made any sense when applied to a horde of mindless, unarmed civilians who outnumbered the military units a hundred to one.
The infected didn't send spies into your camp. They didn't hold strongpoints or even beachheads. You could bomb them into paste and others would just flood in to take their place.
Clark glanced over at the Civilian, who was paring his fingernails with a tiny nail clipper attached to a keychain.
The Civilian must have understood the look on Clark's face. He shrugged in reply.
When Dunnstreet finally finished her presentation she went to the printers and handed each of them a hefty document, still warm and redolent of ink. Clark leafed through his, finding hundreds of pages of information on how to deal with looters in a time of martial law.