Tom Clancy's The Division: E-Book

Alex Irvine

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

The prequel novel to the highly anticipated latest entry in the blockbuster Tom Clancy franchise, THE DIVISON 2.When Society Falls, We RiseMonths after the outbreak of a devastating global pandemic that started in New York City on Black Friday, traces of rebirth are spreading across the United States. Spring has come to the nation, and with it a glimmer of hope as civilians band together in settlements, trying to carve out a better life.Amidst a ruined government, a shattered infrastructure, and an eroding civilization, The Division – an autonomous unit of sleeper agents activated when all else fails – is all that protects the people from predators who would harm them, scavengers who would take from them, and oppressors who would exploit them.Aurelio Diaz is one of those agents. A man of great honor, he is on the hunt for one of his colleagues who inexplicably abandoned his duty and caused the death of multiple civilians. This trail leads him to April Kelleher, a resourceful civilian who traveled out of New York into a troubled American Midwest. There, she hopes to understand why her husband was murdered and if an antiviral to the deadly disease exists.Together, Agent Diaz and April soon uncover an imminent threat to the future of the country. They must act to preserve civilization's last hope to stop a new virus and save itself from a final collapse.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1: Violet

Chapter 2: Aurelio

Chapter 3: April

Chapter 4: Violet

Chapter 5: April

Chapter 6: Aurelio

Chapter 7: Violet

Chapter 8: Aurelio

Chapter 9: April

Chapter 10: Aurelio

Chapter 11: Violet

Chapter 12: April

Chapter 13: Violet

Chapter 14: April

Chapter 15: Ike

Chapter 16: Aurelio

Chapter 17: Violet

Chapter 18: Aurelio

Chapter 19: April

Chapter 20: Violet

Chapter 21: Aurelio

Chapter 22: Ike

Chapter 23: Violet

Chapter 24: Aurelio

Chapter 25: Ike

Chapter 26: April

Chapter 27: Violet

Chapter 28: Aurelio

Chapter 29: April

Chapter 30: Ike

Chapter 31: Violet

Chapter 32: Aurelio

Chapter 33: April

Chapter 34: Violet

Chapter 35: April

Chapter 36: Aurelio

Chapter 37: Ike

Chapter 38: April

Chapter 39: Aurelio

Chapter 40: April

Chapter 41: Aurelio

Chapter 42: Violet

Chapter 43: April

Acknowledgments

About the Author

TITAN BOOKS

TOM CLANCY’S THE DIVISION: BROKEN DAWN

Print edition ISBN: 9781789091878

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789092134

Published by

Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark St

London

SE1 0UP

First edition: March 2019

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

©2019 Ubisoft Entertainment. All rights reserved. Tom Clancy’s The Division®, The Division logo, Ubisoft, and the Ubisoft logo are trademarks of Ubisoft Entertainment in the U.S. and/or other countries.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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To the Aurelio Diazes of the world, in recognition of thesacrifices they make so the world can be a better place

CHAPTER 1

VIOLET

Violet squished the toe of her boot into the ground at the edge of the flooded zone. Across maybe five hundred feet of water stood the hotel where she and her friends had stayed for a while, right after the Dollar Flu—or the Green Poison, whatever you wanted to call it—had started killing everyone. The authorities had turned it into a refugee camp, under the control of the JTF. Violet didn’t know what JTF meant, but they were the people in charge of all the military stuff. Also handing out food and medicine. Everything at the hotel had been pretty stable… once everyone who was going to die had died, at least. Including both of Violet’s parents.

She wasn’t going to think about that right now. “I miss that place,” she said quietly.

Her friends stood in a group around her. “Yeah,” Saeed said. “Me, too.” The Murtaugh twins, Noah and Wiley, nodded. The other three kids in the group—Shelby, Ivan, and Amelia—just looked. Ivan leaned into Amelia. She was his big sister. Sometimes Violet felt really jealous of the kids in their settlement who still had siblings and parents.

They were supposed to be out gathering herbs and greens, but instead they had decided to take a look at the hotel they couldn’t live in anymore. Government agents had brought the kids there right when the plague hit. When the worst of it had passed, Violet and the rest of the kids had helped plant a garden in its courtyard. Now all the seeds were probably drowned. Everything around here was drowned.

Still, coming down here and feeling sorry for themselves as a group had to be better than hunting around for edible greens along the overgrown parts of the National Mall, which was what they were supposed to be doing.

* * *

They had to supplement the gardens already growing at the Castle. Maybe they could go to another park or something, to stay away from the Mall. A lot of the old museums and stuff seemed to be full of bad people now. The people up at the Castle would understand.

Violet was still nervous, though. She tended to follow rules more often than not, because she’d seen some bad stuff when the Green Poison swept through Washington, DC. They all had. Seven kids in their group, all between nine and eleven years old, and they’d all lost at least one parent. Not to mention siblings and friends. That was part of what brought them together. It also meant that the other people in their settlement tended to lump them together as the Kids Who Needed Looking After… which was irritating and kind of nice at the same time. Most of the other kids in the settlement tended to avoid them, like being an orphan was contagious.

Until the flood, they had lived with about a hundred other people in the lower floors of the Mandarin Oriental. The outside of the hotel was boarded up and fortified, and JTF soldiers stopped by often to make sure things were okay. They got water from rain barrels. It was a pretty safe place, compared to some. Or at least it seemed that way, the same way it seemed that things in DC were getting a little better than they had been over the winter. Maybe that was just because it was easier to feel good about things when flowers were blooming and everything was green.

Then in early April, the river came over its banks and they had to get out.

Now they were staying up at the old Smithsonian Castle. It was pretty crowded because a lot of the people from the hotel settlement had gone there. Some of the others were supposed to be up on the other side of the Mall somewhere. A couple of groups had decided to head over toward the east side, hoping that things were more stable near the military base there. She couldn’t remember what it was called. “Saeed,” she said. “What’s the name of that army base over by the river? Not the Potomac River, the other one.”

“Joint Base Anacostia–Bolling,” Saeed answered. He always knew stuff like that. Just like he knew JTF stood for Joint Task Force, and he could tell you all about how the JTF was put together when military units and first responders died so much that all the survivors were reorganized with a new name. And he could tell you that the Dollar Flu was really smallpox that came from New York. Violet was glad Saeed was around. He was like having the Internet around even though the Internet was gone along with everything else.

Violet wondered if it really was safer over there by the Anacostia River. The problem was, she knew there were some bad guys between here and there. The whole area around the Capitol Building was a no-go zone for the kids. Everyone at the settlement agreed on that. It had been true since before the floods, and now someone warned them about it almost every morning. Like they hadn’t already survived a superplague and all the bad stuff that happened after it. Adults didn’t understand that kids could figure out how to survive just as well as adults could.

But they let the kids run in a group, pretty much anywhere they wanted within a certain limit. Today they were pushing that limit. Instead of picking greens along the edges of the Mall, they’d gone the other way. South on Seventh to Hancock Park, where the railroad tracks were above street level at the Metro stop. They followed the tracks until they sloped back down to ground level, and then disappeared at the edge of the flooded zone. Huge empty office buildings loomed around them. To the south, along the regular riverbank, tall skinny condo buildings stuck up out of the water. The river churned along out there, muddy with little whitecaps like bits of frosting. Violet turned up her collar and angled herself so the wind was at her back. Down here by the water it was chilly.

“How long do you think the water’s going to stay?” Shelby wondered. She was the youngest of them.

“I think it’s still rising,” Amelia said. “Last time we came over here, we could get closer to the hotel.”

Violet thought so, too. How much higher would it get? She thought the Castle was on higher ground, but not that much higher. Would they have to move again?

At the same time, Wiley and Noah said, “We should probably go.” They weren’t identical twins, but they looked a lot alike. They also had a lot of quirks that only identical twins were supposed to have, like getting the same idea at the same time.

“Maybe,” Amelia said. “But we really should collect some greens before we go back to the Castle.” The adults didn’t keep very close track of them most of the time, but they did expect Violet and the other kids to follow instructions.

“Yeah,” Violet said. “We can look along the part of the Mall over by the Lincoln Memorial, maybe.”

“That’s a long walk,” Ivan said. Shelby agreed.

They compromised on the Constitution Gardens, halfway between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. But first they had to skirt around the flooded area all the way up to Independence Avenue. They crossed the wide, empty street to the Mall and stood there, keeping an eye out for groups of strangers. If December and January had been horrible, February and March pretty good, then April so far was somewhere in the middle. There weren’t dead people everywhere and guns firing all the time, like in the winter. But it wasn’t as peaceful as it had been for a while in March, when the adults back at the hotel were starting to think that maybe the government was still working and everything would be okay.

Violet wondered who the president was. There were rumors that President Mendez had died, but didn’t that mean they had to pick a new one? Maybe they had and nobody knew. There weren’t phones or Internet anymore. Violet and the other kids only knew what they overheard adults talking about.

“Violet, you coming?” Saeed was looking back at her. The rest of the group was ahead of him, skimming along the southern edge of the Mall.

She jogged to catch up. The Mall made Violet feel weird. Everything was a museum. Not just the museums. Everything. The tourist information booths, the National Park Service bathrooms… all of it seemed like it had been made for a different world. Violet was only eleven years old, but she recognized that feeling, like she had lived through something so huge that the world after it was always going to be different from what had come before.

Ivan was looking up and down the Mall. He was always their sentry, keeping an eye out for people who might be a threat. They’d had a counselor tell them lots of kids who had been through a trauma did that. It was called hypervigilance. Sometimes it made Ivan a little hard to be around, but it also came in handy. There were still a lot of bad people in DC. The government was gone, the army was gone, the police were gone. The floods had been hard on everyone. Just when they were getting settled and starting to adjust to the way things were, all of a sudden they had to move again.

Everyone had to look out for themselves. The Division agents couldn’t do it all.

When she got to the group, Saeed was looking past her. “I know,” she said when his gaze shifted over to her. “You want to go to the Air and Space Museum.”

He nodded. “Yeah.” Saeed wanted to be an astronaut. Violet remembered going to the Air and Space Museum on a field trip a couple of years before, in fourth grade, but she didn’t remember a spaceship. She wasn’t big into space. Biology was more her thing. She wanted to be a veterinarian. Or a poet.

But she did remember seeing the Apollo 11 capsule in the huge entry hall, with planes hanging all around it. She wondered if it was still there. The Air and Space Museum was one of their no-go spots. Supposedly some bad people had taken it over.

“What’s up, Vi?” Ivan poked her in the arm. “You look sad.”

Thinking about museums got her thinking about old things, and how people put them in museums so they would be remembered. Now one of the old things people remembered was the way things used to be before the plague. Field trips, weekend outings with your parents, all the normal everyday things that people used to do.

She wasn’t going to cry in front of Ivan.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s find some salad.”

CHAPTER 2

AURELIO

Division agent Aurelio Diaz picked up the lone civilian coming into the Dark Zone just after noon. He was on a rooftop overlooking Fifty-eighth Street and Fifth Avenue, across from the memorial to William Tecumseh Sherman. He stopped there every day on his normal patrol, if emergent duties didn’t take him to other parts of the city. It was low enough to let him get to the street fast if he needed to, but high enough to give him a view of the barricades keeping people out of the Dark Zone.

The woman vaulted the barricades and paused just inside, taking in her surroundings. Diaz’s first instinct was to run her face through ISAC’s facial-recognition database, using the specialized gear all Division agents wore: advanced contact lenses to capture her image, the SHD smartwatch to sync the images from the contact and turn them into a three-dimensional projection, and the so-called ISAC brick, a communications relay device attached to Diaz’s backpack. The brick connected Diaz—and all other Division agents—to ISAC, a proprietary artificial intelligence network.

The problem was, she was moving at an angle away from him so he couldn’t get a good capture of her face. Either way, she made him curious. Division agents were supposed to enter and exit through the checkpoints spaced around the zone’s perimeter, which ran from the southwest corner of Central Park down Broadway to Twenty- third Street, then around and back up past Grand Central Station all the way to Sixty-fifth Street. In theory nobody else was supposed to go in or out under any circumstances. The zone had been one of the first quarantined spaces in the city when the Green Poison had struck, and the overwhelmed Joint Task Force had walled it off and tried to save the rest of the city.

Now, five months after the outbreak, the Dark Zone was quieter than it had been, but still no place for a lone civilian. Often it was no place for a lone Division agent. Other parts of New York were almost livable, but the Dark Zone was completely lawless. Not just lawless—it seemed to attract the most deranged and dangerous people in the city. They were particularly congregated in the northern end of the DZ, because the Division and JTF work in the city spread south to north. Some of the southern DZ neighborhoods were almost normal again, but up here it was still a war zone. Worse than a war zone, in fact. More like a mass psychotic break, where each individual psycho was heavily armed. Not to mention the omnipresent threat of lingering virus that could start a new wave of lethal infections.

And here was a lone woman jumping a barricade to get in. Diaz watched her head east on Sixtieth. She was calm, purposeful. She knew where she was going—or at least wanted watchers to think she did.

He dropped down to street level and followed her. Entering the Dark Zone, ISAC’s AI said. Yeah, Diaz thought, I know. The only other people on the street were wandering scavengers.

Earlier that morning, Diaz had figured he would run his patrol and then talk to the JTF command down at the Post Office base of operations about whether they still needed him here. He could have left anytime he wanted to, of course. Division agents were empowered by Presidential Directive 51 to act with more or less unlimited discretion. They had no rules of engagement, and answered to no authority within the military chain of command. They were recruited and trained in secret, and activated only in times of critical emergency, when the American government, and social order, was in danger of collapse. Before the Dollar Flu, Diaz had been a gym teacher in DC, with two kids and a wife who worked at a bank.

All of that had changed on Black Friday, when some nutcase had unleashed a weaponized smallpox on the world, starting right here in New York City. Within weeks it had spread all over the world… and Diaz’s wife, Graciela, was dead. Maybe she had touched one of the twenty-dollar bills first infected with the virus—thus the nicknames Green Poison, Dollar Bug, et cetera— or maybe she’d caught it from someone who had. In the end, it didn’t matter. She had died along with millions of others.

Now, five months later, order wasn’t exactly restored in New York, but spring had brought new hope. Pretty soon, Diaz figured he would be able to leave New York and head back home. His kids were there. Mobilized in DC, he’d come up to New York after the first wave of Division agents were killed or went rogue in the violent chaos after the outbreak. At that time, New York had needed help and things in DC had seemed relatively stable by comparison. He wasn’t sure that was the case anymoreçƒand either way, he’d been away from Ivan and Amelia for too long. The JTF was supposed to be caring for them, but Diaz wanted to be certain.

Getting back to DC was still his plan, but before he could check in at the JTF safe house down on Forty-fifth and Broadway and exit the Dark Zone, he had to see where this woman was going and why. He couldn’t just leave her to wander around on her own.

She stayed on Sixtieth to Madison, then turned south. Fires had raged along this part of Madison, and it was mostly abandoned. Fifth and Park were different. Entrenched bands of raiders and bandits had carved out territories along the entire stretch of those avenues between Fifty-second and Sixtieth or so. The boundaries fluctuated.

Trailing her, Diaz was suddenly sure she was choosing her route to avoid that dangerous stretch of Fifth and Park Avenues. She knew this part of the Dark Zone. That made him real curious. He was also curious about the Benelli Super 90 shotgun slung over her right shoulder, next to a pack that sure looked like Division issue… just like the Super 90 was a standard room-sweeper that some agents preferred. But she didn’t have a watch, and there was no brick on her pack. She wasn’t an agent. So who was she?

She cut back west on Fifty-fifth, and Diaz’s alarm bells went off. At the corner of Fifth and Fifty-fifth, the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church was home to a gang of apocalyptic cultists. They would be on her like a school of piranha if she went that far. He stepped up his pace, closing to within a hundred feet of her before she noticed and looked over her shoulder. Pretty good situational awareness, he thought. He saw her clock his Division gear and mentally categorize him as no threat. Interesting. That meant she knew she wasn’t doing anything she thought would bring her into conflict with a Division agent.

Even so, she was still walking straight toward the church cult.

Diaz cut up Madison at a run, and then headed west on Fifty-sixth to get ahead of her. He scrambled through the ruins of a restaurant that had burned in the aftermath of the plague. Behind it was a narrow alley that ran between the church and the looming skyscraper just to the north. He hopped the fence and came around to the front of the church.

A fresh body dangled from the gallows in the church courtyard. Diaz filed it away. He, or another Division agent, would have to do something about the cult. But today he had another mission. The heavy wooden doors facing Fifth Avenue opened and a group of the cultists saw him. He stayed facing them, his G36 aimed low, generally in their direction but not targeting any one of them specifically. “Stay cool,” he said.

They looked past him and saw the woman. She saw them, too—and she saw Aurelio.

Her response intrigued him even more. She cut across the street to give herself some room, but she didn’t panic, didn’t run. She was no average civilian, that much Aurelio could tell. She passed down the block, staying on Fifty-fifth toward Sixth Avenue. Aurelio backed toward the street. The cultists came out onto the church steps, their eyes boring into him. He’d seen that look before. They wanted him on their gallows, too. Pulling the trigger on the G36 would solve a lot of problems, he thought… but until they made a hostile move, he couldn’t justify it. Per Directive 51, he could have mowed the whole group down and nobody would ever have said anything, but that wasn’t what Aurelio Diaz—or the Strategic Homeland Division, commonly shortened to SHD—believed in. He backed into the courtyard gate, opened it, and stepped out onto the sidewalk.

“You stayed cool,” he said, and kept walking. None of them followed him. When he got to the corner he saw the woman at the far end of the block, almost to Sixth. She turned north, surprising him. She was definitely taking the long way to wherever she was going, and although it made sense for her to avoid Fifth Avenue, clearly her intel about the area wasn’t complete or she wouldn’t have gone anywhere near the church.

So where was she going?

Fifty-eighth Street, as it turned out. When she got there, she stood for a long moment looking at a nondescript open storefront on the north side of the street next to a parking garage. A shredded awning flapped over the storefront. The inside looked like it might have been under construction. He couldn’t see much.

The woman crossed the street and went inside. Interesting, Diaz thought. There was nothing he knew of in that building. Nothing in the garage would be of interest. Over the old store were a few floors of ordinary windows. He thought he saw light in one of them, but couldn’t tell whether it was just reflected through a different window from one of the skyscrapers on the same block.

Diaz decided to stay where he was for a few minutes, see what happened. He’d developed a pretty good sense for when people were up to no good—you didn’t survive in this ravaged New York without one—and he wasn’t getting that sense from her. Still, she’d walked a good mile or more after entering the Dark Zone within five hundred yards of her target location. That piqued his curiosity.

If she came out soon, he would stay on her trail until he left the Dark Zone. Partly that was just because he thought she might need an escort, but also he was curious. Usually people tried to get out of the Dark Zone, not in. What was she up to?

CHAPTER 3

APRIL

She’d spent the spring looking in the Dark Zone, following clues she’d pieced together over the winter. Over the past weeks she had become familiar with every block of the barrier cutting the zone off from the rest of the city. She knew where there were holes. She knew where underground connections between buildings led in and out. None of those holes and tunnels stayed open long. Either the JTF sealed them or criminal elements took control, making them too dangerous to use. But as quickly as they closed, others appeared. Keeping an area the size of the Dark Zone completely sealed was impossible.

The problem was, the place she needed to go was in the worst part of the DZ, just south of Central Park. The southern areas were a little easier to move around in. Still dangerous, but the main JTF base was closer to the southern edge of the Dark Zone. In the months after the Dollar Bug tore through New York, the JTF—and the Division—had begun to restore a semblance of order from about Thirty-fourth Street south. Not so in the north. Up here, Division agents were rarer and the JTF presence was limited to fortified safe houses scattered along the edges of Central Park and the surrounding neighborhoods. She had learned to assess how dangerous an area was based on how often she saw a Division agent’s signature gear: the orange circle on the backpack, the optical and audio gear, and most importantly the autonomy. They moved where they wanted, with no rules of engagement beyond a mandate to do what was necessary to keep civilization from collapsing utterly. The more of them she saw in a particular area, the more dangerous the area tended to be—and areas where they usually moved in teams rather than alone were the most dangerous of all.

The northern sector of the Dark Zone was one of those areas.

So she watched, she played it cool, she took her chances as they came up. She only entered during the day, staying close to groups she trusted and ducking out the minute things got hot. Some days it was impossible to get into the Dark Zone. Division agents or JTF patrols turned her back, or there were firefights… or fires. Entire blocks were burned-out shells, thanks to apocalyptic gangs that popped up like mushrooms after the plague struck. Even when she got in and had a chance to scope out an approach to the building she wanted, sometimes she got into tight scrapes. More often than not, she’d been able to avoid violence, and she owed her life to Division agents three or four times over. A couple of times she’d had to shoot someone. Even though she knew they couldn’t have been prevented, those deaths weighed on her. She didn’t want to live in a world where lethal violence was as common as hot meals.

But that was the world right now, or at least that was New York. Better than it was, for sure, but still a long way from normal. What would normal even be now, with millions dead, the government collapsed, communications severed, great cities emptied, farms lying fallow… she didn’t know. After a while, normal was whatever you woke up to in the morning. People had to adapt. She had adapted.

Partially this was because the plague and its aftermath had taught her she had a resilience she had never suspected. Six months ago, sitting in front of her laptop, she would never have imagined vaulting a crumbling barricade into a quarantined hell. But she had a mission. More like an obsession, burning in her gut as she survived the plague and the murderous chaos that followed. It had sustained her through freezing nights and starving days, keeping her focused, giving her something to live for. Her most important clue was an address:

117 w 58th

Today she had finally made it there, at least in part because she’d managed to draw a Division agent along with her. She’d spotted him on the rooftop back by the corner of Central Park, and chosen her point of entry into the Dark Zone hoping he would either confront or follow her. With him following, she’d been able to focus ahead, and get here faster. Mentally she thanked him, and wondered what his name was.

The front of 117 West Fifty-eighth was open, like it had been under construction or something when the Dollar Bug hit. Inside was a trashed space that at first glance looked like it used to be a bike shop. She stepped inside, trying to keep her breathing level. This was it.

Before she did anything else, she took a moment to listen. Human presence in a building revealed itself in various ways. Not just sounds, the quick intake of breath or the small scrape of someone shifting their weight—no, there was a sense of presence that registered somewhere behind the conscious mind. Empty buildings felt empty. She’d learned at some point to tell the difference.

Ahead of her, at the rear of the shop area, was a stairway leading up, and past it a fire door jammed open. Through that doorway she could see a hallway disappearing into the interior of the building. To the right was another, shorter hallway, with a door wedged open on the far side. She flicked on her flashlight and through the open door she saw a stairway going down.

117 w 58th basement level

She descended slowly, listening hard and hearing nothing except the soft scrape of her feet on the safety strips that lined each stair. When she got to the bottom, she still heard nothing. The basement was a maze of narrow hallways opening into boiler rooms, maintenance closets, electrical panels, the circulatory and nervous systems of the modern high-rise. She looked quickly into each and moved on. Then she came to a larger room and stopped in the doorway.

In the near corner of the room was a large server rack, dark and inert. Bedding and crumpled cardboard boxes were scattered across the floor along with food cartons and loose cigarettes. Those caught her attention. They were valuable, and if they were still here that meant nobody had been in this room in a long time.

And that meant…

She cut off that train of thought, continuing her careful observation of the room even though she could feel her heart hammering against her sternum. In the center of the room was a folding table with a map of Manhattan Island and various bits of scrap paper with notes scribbled on them. On the far wall was a whiteboard with a list of names written on it, each keyed to a set of latitude and longitude coordinates.

One of the names she saw was her own.

This was the right place. Or had been. The man she’d been looking for was not here. From the smell of the room, the staleness of the air, she knew he hadn’t been in some time. There was no sign of a struggle, no blood on the floor or bullet holes in the walls. No spent shell casings clinking around her feet.

So he wasn’t here, but she guessed he wasn’t far away. Why send an invitation if you weren’t going to be there to receive it?

April I’ve gone dark come to 117 w 58th basement level

She’d done that. Now she was looking at one last puzzle. Okay, she thought. First we do the obvious.

She went back upstairs to the open entry, moving slowly, alert to any signs of movement. Inside the entry, she paused again.

The building—at least this part of it—felt empty. She moved forward through the remains of the retail space that had once occupied the ground floor. Behind a broken-down fire door was a carpeted hall stinking of mildew and urine. At the far end, another fire door. She doubled back to the retail space and looked up the stairs. Before she started climbing, she shrugged her shotgun off her shoulder and held it low in front of her. Still no sounds, no sense that someone was watching.

She went up to the second floor and peered out of the stairwell, listening for any hint of human presence.

Nothing. But he had to be here somewhere. She went up another floor.

When she looked out of the third-floor stairwell, she could tell someone was living here. Some of the doors were left open, and the soft hum of electrical equipment came from a doorway halfway down the hall on the left. The power couldn’t be coming from the building supply. She’d seen the burned-out electrical panels. So someone had a line on an illegitimate supply. That meant they were connected. To whom, was the question. The absence of guards suggested the connection wasn’t to a criminal gang. They tended to flaunt their strength.

So: A Division asset, maybe? Hidden away here in the Dark Zone? That fit what she knew… but it also raised more questions.

She walked to the door and paused. Months of searching had led her to this moment. If she was wrong…

She knew she was not wrong. She stepped into the doorway, the Super 90 braced on one hip.

Before the Dollar Bug, this had been a medical suite. Diagnostic equipment lined one wall, and across from it were two desks near a south-facing window. Bright spring sunshine found its way in through the gaps between the skyscrapers to the south. The wall between the medical equipment and the window was lined with bookshelves. From the rows of titles on epidemiology and cell biology and viral genetics, one book jumped out at her: New York Collapse.

She’d lost her copy, the one Bill had given her. She’d used it to stay alive and had kept a diary of the weeks after the plague struck in its margins. Repeated readings of it had revealed hidden clues, and those had led her here, to this man sitting at one of the desks. Maybe sixty years old, his hair a salt-and-pepper wave, reading glasses low on his nose. He was writing in a notebook, pausing to glance at a computer screen on the desk.

She spoke from the doorway. “Roger Koopman?”

He looked up and she saw him register the shotgun before he looked at her face. “I don’t have anything of value,” he said.

“Maybe I should call you Warren Merchant,” she said.

He looked more closely at her and a strange expression came over his face, as if he’d seen someone he’d never expected to see and wasn’t sure how he felt about it.

“I’m April Kelleher,” she said. “I’ve been looking for you for a long time.”

CHAPTER 4

VIOLET

Late in the afternoon, they were hungry and tired, but they had grocery bags stuffed full of dandelion greens. Around the ponds in Constitution Gardens, they had also found a ton of cattails. None of them had ever thought of eating cattails before, but they weren’t too bad. One of the women at the hotel, Luiza, had taught the kids what to look for. She peeled cattail roots and ground them up into a flour. Cattail pancakes were on the menu at the Castle now.

So maybe they hadn’t gone where they were supposed to go, but they were coming back with better stuff than Luiza and the others were expecting.

The sky over the river was cloudy. It was going to rain. “Let’s get home,” Amelia said. “We can’t really carry anything more anyway.”

Cutting across the Mall past the Reflecting Pool, they passed the Washington Monument, staying to the south side of the Mall. Around the buildings north of Constitution Gardens there were gangs of weirdos. The rumor was, they stole kids sometimes. They also stayed away from the White House. There were always people with guns there. Maybe they were protecting the president, or maybe the president was still somewhere else. They didn’t know. Saeed and Ivan always said they could tell the difference between the JTF and the other groups, but to Violet they all just looked like men with guns. Mostly men, anyway.

There were also the Division agents, with orange circles on their gear. They didn’t seem to be part of any group. Ivan and Amelia said their dad was a Division agent, but Violet didn’t know whether to believe them. All of the kids had lost parents and all of them made up stories about their parents to make themselves feel better. Even Violet did this, and she knew both of her parents were dead. She’d seen them die.

She wasn’t going to think about that right now.

When they got to Independence Avenue, going past the Department of Agriculture building, a Division agent ran into view from the south. He saw them going up to the intersection of Twelfth and waved to get their attention. “Get out of here!” he shouted.

They froze, not sure what to do. Get out where? Which way?

“Whoa,” Wiley said. “Look at that.”

He was pointing to the south, and when Violet looked that way she saw a swirling yellow cloud over Hancock Park.

Yellow powder. They’d heard about it. They didn’t know what it was, but they knew it was bad.

“Man,” Wiley said. The Division agent was coming toward them. “We were just there. We’d be…”

He didn’t have to say dead. They all knew.

“Well, you don’t want to go down there now,” the agent said. “Where were you headed?”

He took his helmet off and used his sleeve to wipe sweat from his forehead and his beard. Violet remembered her dad’s beard. The Division agent was a tall, lean white guy with dark hair and streaks of gray in his beard, just like her dad’s.

“We’re going to the Castle,” Shelby said.

“You mean the Smithsonian Castle?”

“Yeah,” Noah said. “We used to live down at the hotel, but it flooded.”

The Division agent nodded. “Yeah, that was a good spot. Who knows, maybe you can get back there when the river goes down.”

“You think it will?”

“Sooner or later, yeah.” The agent put his helmet back on and looked west. “It’s going to be dark pretty soon. You ought to get home. This isn’t a place to be out after dark. And listen. Whatever you do, don’t go anywhere down that way.”

“Like forever?” Saeed asked. “Is it radioactive or something? I read that uranium powder is yellow.”

“No, that’s not it. And I don’t know about forever, but let’s just say you don’t want to go down there anytime soon. I’ll try to get the JTF over there to set a safe perimeter, but they’ve got a lot on their hands.” The agent got a faraway look on his face. After a moment Violet realized he was listening to something in his earpiece.

“Gotta go, kids,” he said. “Seriously, get home.”

“We will,” Violet said. She shifted her bag full of cattails and greens to her other hand and flexed her fingers.

“Hey, mister. I mean, Agent,” Ivan said.

“What’s up, buddy?”

“Do you know my dad?”

“Who’s your dad?”

“Aurelio Diaz. He’s a Division agent, too.”

The agent cracked a smile. “Yeah. I do know him. We went out on a bunch of missions together right when everything was falling apart. He went up to New York in… January, maybe? February? Things were a lot worse up there than they ever got here. Far as I know he’s still there.”

“So he’s not dead.”

“Little man, I make no promises. But the last I saw him he was alive and well, and I haven’t heard any different since.” The agent looked them over as a group. “You guys stick together.”

He jogged northwest, back the way the kids had come.

“See?” Ivan said. “I told you our dad was a Division agent.”

“Man, that’s cool,” Wiley said.

Amelia was watching him go. “He’s really alive.” She was trying not to cry, but it wasn’t working.

Violet tried not to be resentful. “Come on,” she said. “We have to get home.”

* * *

Junie, one of the older women who ran the Castle settlement, saw them coming while they were still out in the garden. The Smithsonian Castle was straight ahead, with two art museums flanking the garden, one on either side. Most of the garden was dug up and replanted with vegetables. Chickens clucked their way around, pecking up bugs and whatever else chickens ate.

“I was starting to wonder if you were coming back,” Junie said. “But looks like you got what you were after. Let’s get those into the kitchen. Ooh, cattails,” she added when she got a closer look at their bags.

“We saw a Division agent!” Ivan said. “He said he knew our dad.”

“A Division agent?” Junie looked out over the garden to the south. “Is that something to do with the yellow cloud down there?”

They all looked. The cloud was gone now. Violet wondered if the yellow powder was dangerous even if just a few little particles of it got on you. The wind was blowing straight down the river, so maybe none of the powder had come this way. But thinking of that made her want to take a bath right then, and find some new clothes.

Junie was looking at her. “Violet. What’s the matter?”

“The Division agent told us the yellow powder was dangerous. He said we couldn’t go down there anymore. Like everything down there is poisoned or something.” Violet didn’t mean to, but she kept talking. “And we were just there!” she blurted out, and then she was crying.

“Hey, now, hey.” Junie folded Violet into her soft old-lady arms. The rest of the kids gathered a little tighter around them. “It’s not easy being a kid right now,” Junie said. “Hell, it’s not easy being anybody. But you guys are doing all right.”

She let Violet cry herself out. It didn’t take long. Violet didn’t like showing other people how she felt. But this day had been too much even for her. Nothing really bad had happened, but seeing the hotel, and then seeing the yellow powder… knowing that, more and more, there were places they couldn’t go because they might get hurt. She felt like everything was closing in, like sooner or later they would have nowhere to go.

But she couldn’t say all that, so she just got herself under control and wiped her eyes. Junie let her go. “Why don’t you get all those greens to the kitchen, like I said,” she suggested. “Then you ought to get something to eat. Bet you’re hungry after being out all day.”

“Yeah,” Shelby said. As a group the kids trooped toward the Castle and went inside. Violet noticed they were still gathered around her, like they were protecting her. She didn’t want them to feel like they had to do that, but it also made her feel good. They were there for each other.