Sometimes, Kim thought, being in the Marines meant just being along for the ride. First they’d been sent to Desperation, the shittiest town this side of, well, anywhere, to build what looked like an internment camp, and then suddenly, minutes before the president’s address, the company was peeled off from the brigade at full scramble. The whole company, nearly 150 Marines leaving behind close to five thousand, loaded up in a mix of brand-new Joint Light Tactical Vehicles and old, sand-scarred Hummers. They’d heard the quarantine order over the radio as they busted down the road ten miles back to the highway. And when they got to the highway, there were already two M1 Abrams tanks—tanks!—blocking traffic. Nobody in or out.
The captain ordered them out wide, the two tanks on the road and the mix of JLTVs and Hummers bouncing off the shoulders of the highway out into the scrub, until they were nearly one hundred yards wide on either side, far enough out to discourage any drivers from getting cute and trying to glide past the blockade, because there was no question that somebody would have tried. The civilians were getting antsy. It was past two in the morning. By now, Kim figured, with the traffic piling up and piling up for hours and hours, it might reach as far back as Los Angeles, quarantine order or no quarantine order. Even out in Desperation, putting together fences and working their asses off, they’d started hearing about what was going on in LA. At first, it sounded as though things were confined to one neighborhood, and it seemed like crazy panic with nothing to it. Just people freaking out over the idea of freaking out. There hadn’t been much in the way of video: shaky images with lots of screaming. But then, suddenly, all the news—Internet, television, radio—was spiders, spiders, spiders. Spiders swarming over the city, spiders eating some people and leaving others alone, spiders drifting from the sky onto rooftops, spiders coming out of drains and scuttling under doorways. Private Goons said he’d heard from a cousin that all Los Angeles was on fire. Nobody else knew if that was true. And then they were bounced from Desperation to the highway, and Kim was facing down American citizens with a fifty-caliber machine gun. Kim’s fire team had landed one of the new JLTVs. They were all the way out on the farthest edge of the left side, in the brush and scrub and dust. At first she thought it was silly. There were tanks on the road. Who was going to try to get past those? Did they really need to be so far off the road? But as night came, Kim started to think that maybe a pair of tanks and a few Hummers and JLTVs might not be enough if all these people decided they weren’t interested in obeying the president’s quarantine. The towers of portable floodlights sent a white glaze a couple of hundred yards back, but past that, from her perch on top of the JLTV out at the wing of the blockade, Kim could see headlights for what seemed like forever. There’d been announcements on the radio and the captain had sent a couple of men out to a distance of two miles to make sure motorists knew the road was blocked off and to encourage them to turn around and go home, but it had turned into a clusterfuck—with the backup from the roadblocks, people started trying to drive the wrong way down the highway, so now it was backed up on both sides. Nobody could go forward. Nobody could go back. The only way out was past the tanks, past the Hummers and JLTVs, past Kim and her .50 cal, and they were under orders not to let anybody by. Not good.
Some prick in a black BMW Roadster three vehicles from the front of the line got out of his car and came to argue with Captain Diggs for what must have been the fifth or six time, and Kim couldn’t help smiling when she saw the man frog-marched back to his car. She kept her hands off the .50 cal. She had wedged an old shell casing under the butterfly trigger as an improvised safety. But still. The Browning M2 could barf out five hundred rounds a minute, and while it was one thing to accidentally punch out somebody overseas in a war zone, she didn’t want to be the one to accidentally light up some civilian.
“Gum?” Elroy stuck his hand up out of the truck. Kim reached down to snag a piece.
“Anything new?”
Elroy popped his head up and showed her his phone. “No signal, and then no battery, so no, no news. Just what you hear on the radio.”
Ten yards in from where her tactical vehicle sat on the outside of the blockade, Kim could see Sue’s Hummer. The Hummers weren’t in the best shape—they’d seen heavy use in the desert, and the army was taking its time with decommissioning—but Kim wasn’t worried about IEDs in Southern California. “Sue,” she called across. “You guys got anything?”
Before Sue could answer, Kim heard the call on the radio.
“White SUV leaving containment. Fire team leader Lance Corporal Bock, on your side. Copy.”