Chapter 4: Simplex
Leon's thumb was already on the key when Claire's hand closed over it.
She didn't say anything. She shook her head once, a small hard movement, and kept her eyes on the radio as if it could see them.
The voice let the silence run. It was a patient silence, the kind a man leaves when he's used to people needing a moment. "You needn't answer tonight," it said. "It's late, and I imagine it's been a long week. I'll listen on this channel at midnight, every night, for as long as it takes. Talk it over between the two of you. You and Miss Redfield."
Then the hiss, and nothing in it.
After a minute Claire took her hand away. Leon set the mic down on the cracker tin as carefully as if it were wired to something.
"He's gone," she said.
"He's listening." He kept his voice low; the radio couldn't hear a thing unless he keyed it, and he whispered anyway. "Claire. I never said your name on the air."
She frowned. "Hollis heard Sherry say it."
"Claire. Sherry said Claire. When we talked to Hollis I said I had one civilian with me. You asked about Sherry. Nobody said Redfield." He watched her get there. "Not once."
"Sherry knows it," she said slowly.
"Then he's talked to Sherry. Or to somebody who has."
The vault was very quiet. Somewhere up in the building a beam ticked as it cooled.
Leon had sat through one week of interview training at the academy, and the only thing he remembered clearly was a sergeant tapping a slide and saying People tell you what they know by the order they tell it in. The voice had said a friend first. Then, at the end, as an afterthought, Miss Redfield. A man doesn't save a name for last by accident.
"He wanted us to know he knows," Leon said. "That's what that was."
"And reassigned." Claire had pulled the blanket round her shoulders. Her bad foot stuck out of it, wrapped and swollen. "Who says reassigned? Nobody says reassigned about somebody they like."
"Somebody who wants you to hear it the other way."
"Do you think Hollis is dead?"
"I think he's not on this channel." He didn't want to guess past that out loud.
At two she shook him awake for the second capsule, and he realized he'd fallen asleep sitting up against the wall. She held the thermometer under the lantern. A hundred point eight. Down six tenths. She wrote it on the pad without comment, and then she sat on the mattress beside him with her shoulder against his and didn't go back to her side, because there wasn't a side any more.
"We were in the middle of something," he said.
"I know we were." She put her forehead against his collarbone, briefly, and he felt her breathe out. "Later. When there isn't a third person in the room."
They both looked at the radio.
On the eighth day Claire turned to a clean page of the legal pad and wrote two headings.
WHAT HE KNOWS. WHAT HE DOESN'T.
Under the first she wrote: State simplex channel. 2 clicks. Hollis listens 0600 every other day. "Police station." My whole name. Under the second, after some thought: The vault. That L is sick. That I'm hurt. How much food. Whether we'll answer.
She turned the pad so Leon could see. He was sitting up by the stove, gray under the eyes but steadier, eating his crackers one at a time under her supervision.
"That second list is short," he said.
"It's all we've got." She tapped the pen against it. "He wants us to come out. If he could just walk in and take us, he wouldn't need to ask nicely."
"He doesn't know where in the building we are. It's a big building and half of it's on the floor." Leon brushed crumbs off his knee. "He also didn't tell us his name."
"So we give him one." She wrote it at the top of the page. MR. MANNERS.
That got a tired smile. Then he went serious again, and they had the argument she'd known was coming since midnight.
He wanted silence. Every word they gave a man who opened with reassigned was one more thing he knew, he said. Let him sit up at midnight with his headphones on and hear nothing until he wondered if they'd died.
"And then what?" Claire said. "He gives up and goes home?"
"Maybe."
"Leon." She put the pen down. "What if he's real?"
He looked at her.
"I don't think he is. I'm not stupid. But what if?" It came out more raw than she meant. "If he's real, he's a doctor for your shoulder. He's a hot shower and a bed and food that isn't from 1962. He's Sherry. He said her name, and he knew mine, and that means she's been talking about me to somebody, and I'm supposed to sit in a basement and not even find out?"
He didn't say anything for a while. She was still getting used to that about him: he let a hard thing sit in the air instead of rushing to fix it.
"Okay," he said at last. "Then we find out. But we don't find out by walking up to his helicopter."
"No," she said. "We find out by telling him where to send it."
She'd been working it out since dawn. Give him a place they could see from the roof. Tell him they were there, hurt and holed up, and watch what came. If it was medics and a stretcher and a man with a megaphone calling their names, she'd been wrong about him and she'd apologize to the radio personally.
"And if he doesn't," Leon said, "we'll know, and he won't know that we know." He took the pen from her and started drawing, the way he had for the antenna: the station, five blocks of street, a cross for the pharmacy. "One approach from the air. Nowhere for us to be seen from. We watch, we don't move, we don't shoot at anything, no matter what it does." He looked up. "That last part's for me."
"I know who it's for."
The pharmacy was the obvious place: anyone would believe two hurt people had gone there, and from the roof she'd seen its green cross without even trying.
Which left the roof.
They sat and looked at each other's injuries. Her ankle was a purple fist inside the elastic bandage. His right arm still wouldn't go higher than his chest without the color leaving his face, and his shoulder was taped over a wound she'd watched tear open under a joist two days ago.
"Between us," Leon said, "we have one good climber."
"I've got two good arms. Ladders are arms."
"I've got two good legs and one arm. We'll take turns being a person."
In the end they took a coil of rope from the evidence room, tagged for a kidnapping case from the spring, and worked it out on paper: she'd go first, he'd follow on the rope's tail, and at every landing he'd haul while she pulled. There were binoculars, too, in Chris's locker under where the sweatshirt had hung. She'd left them on the third day because her arms were full and a man was counting minutes in her ear.
At eleven that night Leon ran the generator for forty minutes to top up the car battery. Transmitting drank more than listening. Afterwards he wiped the sight glass with his thumb and read it to her, and she wrote it down. Diesel 17 gal.
At midnight he picked up the mic.
"This is Kennedy."
The answer came back so promptly that she knew the man had been sitting with his finger on the key. "Officer. I'm so glad."
"We're not at the station," Leon said. "It came down on us. We've moved to the pharmacy on Warren Street, five blocks east, for the medicine. She's hurt. She can't walk far."
"I'm very sorry to hear it." The voice was warm and grave. Claire hated it more than if it had been cruel. "Stay where you are. Noon tomorrow, an aircraft will come. Keep to the back, away from the windows. Don't come out when you hear it. Our people will come in to you."
"Put Hollis on."
"The sergeant's off shift tonight. He's quite well."
"Then ask him something for me." Leon's voice was easy. "Ask him what the girl ate at his checkpoint."
The pause was less than two seconds. Claire counted it on her fingers.
"I'm afraid I wasn't there for lunch, Officer." Something like amusement. "Noon. And thank you. I know it isn't easy, trusting a voice."
Leon let go of the key. The hiss came back.
Claire wrote two words on the pad and underlined them. POUND CAKE. Then, under it, smaller: He doesn't know.
"He's a liar," she said.
"So am I," Leon said, "as of about a minute ago."
At six on the ninth day Leon sat with the radio on State simplex and listened to nothing.
No clicks. Hollis's hour came and went in a long featureless hiss, and Claire turned the dial off at ten past without either of them saying anything about it.
His fever was down to ninety-nine point six. The cephalexin, or her glaring at him while he swallowed it. He felt like a towel wrung out and left on a radiator, but his hands were steady when he held them out flat, and she checked that too.
The climb took them an hour and ten minutes.
She went first, her bad foot hooked behind the rung and her arms doing the work, and he came behind her on the rope with his left hand on the rail. At the landings he braced and hauled while she pulled, and at the third landing they both sat on the steel grate in the dark with their backs to the wall and breathed like old men.
"This is the stupidest thing I've ever done," Claire said.
"You rode a motorcycle into a city full of zombies."
"Shut up and pull."
At the second floor she swung off onto the sill and limped down the east corridor and came back with the binoculars round her neck. At the top, the machine room. The broken door. The light.
The roof was colder than he remembered, and windier. Claire thumbed the survey meter on and read it twice. "Point one." On the third day it had been point four up here.
They lay on their stomachs in the ash behind the parapet, a few yards from the foot of the bent mast, where the steel lattice threw its tangled shadow. Claire had the binoculars. He had the pistol, which he'd promised not to use, and the watch.
11:40. 11:50. Five blocks east the pharmacy sign hung from its bracket over Warren Street, the green cross tilted like a picture nobody had straightened.
At 11:56 he heard it before he saw it: a deep chopping thud from the north, rolling off the shells of buildings.
The helicopter came in low over what had been downtown, dark green or black, with nothing on it at all: no numbers, no letters, no insignia on the tail. It slowed over Warren Street and hung there, nose down, kicking the ash off the road in a great gray ring.
"Doors," Claire said. "Four of them."
Ropes dropped. Four men slid down, one after another, fast and easy, and spread out across the street in a loose line. Gas masks. Dark coveralls. Short rifles held high and tight.
The first man reached the broken front window and threw something through it underhand.
The flash lit up the inside of the pharmacy white for an instant, and then the bang reached the roof, flat and hard, a half second late. A second man threw something through the side door. Then they went in.
At the academy they'd shown a film about room entries, and the instructor had stopped it at a moment like this and said, Notice they don't knock.
Muffled shots inside. Short bursts, controlled. A burned infected came lurching out of the alley beside the store, drawn by the noise, and a fourth man who'd stayed by the door turned and put it down with two quiet coughs from a suppressed barrel without even appearing to hurry.
Two minutes. The men came out. The last of them pulled something from his vest, tugged at it, and tossed it back in through the window, and the pharmacy lit up from inside, a fierce white glare that turned yellow and then orange as it caught the shelves.
"That's not how you pick up an injured civilian," Leon said.
Claire didn't answer. She had the binoculars pressed so hard to her face he thought they'd leave marks. He could see her jaw.
Everything Claire had left on those shelves would be burning in there now. The rest of the stock bottles, the gauze, the reading glasses and greeting cards.
The men went up the ropes. The helicopter lifted out of its own cloud of ash, turned, and came toward them.
"Down," Leon said, and pulled her flat, and got his body over as much of hers as he could.
The noise came over them like a train. The downwash hit the roof and the ash went up in a scouring gray roar, into his collar, into his eyes, and through it he felt the machine settle into a hover over the old heliport on the east end of the roof, sixty feet from where they lay.
He turned his head an inch. Through a gap in the storm he saw the open side door, a man leaning out on a strap with his mask pushed up, looking down. Looking at the roof. At the mast.
Leon's hand was on the pistol. It was the most useless thing he had ever held.
Under him, Claire had gone completely still. He could feel her heart going against his ribs.
Twenty seconds. Thirty. Then the pitch of the rotors changed, and the helicopter tilted its nose north and slid away over the city, and the thudding went with it and faded into the ridge.
The ash came down on them like snow.
He rolled off her. She sat up coughing, pulled the bandana down, spat gray, and looked past him at the mast.
The antenna wire had been torn off the crossbar. It lay across the roof in long, loose, glinting loops, plain as handwriting.
And down in the street below the station, turning toward the place the noise had been, came the first of the burned ones.
"Not on the mast," Leon said. "Anybody flying over sees it."
"I know." Claire was already gathering the wire, hand over hand, kneeling in the ash. "We go inside the mast."
The lattice had folded over when it bent, and the lower part made a sort of twisted steel cave against the parapet, dark even at noon. She fed the wire up through the machine room's louvered vent instead of over the edge of the roof, ran it along the inside of the parapet where nobody looking down would see it, and tied it off as high as she could reach inside the folded steel. It was lower than before. A lot lower.
"We'll lose range," Leon said.
"We'll lose some. We were losing all of it if they saw it." She pulled the knot tight. "Hold this."
He held it. His hands were shaking a little, she noticed, and his weren't the only ones.
Below them there was a dull bang, and another. Something hitting the cruisers in the mouth of the garage ramp.
"Time," Leon said.
They went down faster than they'd come up, which wasn't fast. At the bottom, in the vault, with the door shut and barred, Claire sat on the floor and read the dosimeters against the lantern while the banging up at the ramp went on for twenty minutes and then stopped.
ROOF 2. Dose: C 0.11, L 0.11. Antenna moved inside mast, lower. Pharmacy BURNED (them). Helicopter: no markings, 4 men, masks, grenades first.
TOTAL so far: C 0.32, L 0.27 + day 1.
She looked at the line about the pharmacy for a long time. Then she wrote under it, very small, He was going to kill us, and crossed it out.
The radio still worked. That night, with the wire inside the mast, the checkpoint channel came in thin and scratchy, and State simplex barely at all, a whisper under the hiss. But it came.
At midnight, Mr. Manners came with it.
"That was very neatly done, Officer." He didn't sound angry. That was the worst part. He sounded like a man complimenting another man's chess. "In your shoes I'd have done the same."
Leon sat on the mattress with his elbows on his knees and didn't move. Claire sat beside him.
"I'll be candid, since you've been so candid with me. You've both seen things in that city that a great many people would prefer had stayed there. I'm not going anywhere. Neither are you." A pause. "Winter comes early in these mountains. When you're cold enough, I'll still be here."
Another pause. Longer.
"Miss Redfield. Sherry asks about you. She'd very much like to know you're all right."
Claire's hand moved toward the mic on its own.
She saw Leon see it. He didn't grab her wrist the way he had the night before. He put his hand on the tin beside hers, flat, close enough to touch, and left it there, and let her decide.
She didn't key it.
The hiss came back. She sat there with her hand an inch from the mic and her eyes stinging, and the anger came up through her in a long slow wave, hotter than the fever had been in him.
"He used her," she said. "He used her name like a, like a dog whistle."
"I know."
"I want to hit him."
"Get in line." Leon's hand moved the last inch and covered hers. "We stay alive. That's what he can't stand. So we do that. Out of spite, if nothing else."
She laughed, wetly, and leaned into him, and he lay back with her and pulled the blankets over them both. She listened to his heart, slower than it had any right to be after that day, and somewhere after that she slept.
On the eleventh day, at six exactly, State simplex woke up.
Not two clicks. A woman's voice, low and quick, a voice used to keeping things short.
"Station, don't answer this. Walt Hollis asked me to find you. He says the clicks aren't his any more." A breath. "And he says to tell you the girl ate the whole pound cake and then asked if there was another one."
Claire had her hand over her mouth.
"If you hear me, key twice. Two days, same time. Keep your heads down."
Hiss.
She looked at Leon. He was sitting up in the blankets, hair flattened on one side, wide awake.
"Pound cake," she said.
"He never told us she asked for another."
"No."
"So either that's Hollis," Leon said, "or it's somebody who's a lot better at this than Manners."
The mic sat on the cracker tin between them. Two clicks: the only thing anyone friendly had ever said to them out here. Manners had taken it once already.
"Your call," Leon said.
Claire picked up the mic, and keyed it twice.