: Fevered Fall part 14 of 16 (NND)

                                      Chapter Fourteen

         “Feel for the bubbles,” her mind told her.  It was odd, she
thought, how book-learning intruded into her brain at a time like this. 
She was in womb-like blackness, black night above, black water below. 
She was down in the depths, and the depths would claim her forever
unless she swam very quickly.
         But which way?!  “Feel for the bubbles,” her mind told her
again.  Her lungs simply begged, “BREATHE!”
         “Fool lungs, we are under water,” her mind replied.  Then, her
mind told her again, “Feel for the bubbles.”
         As she’d been taught in survival training, she put her hand to
her mouth.  She exhaled precious air from her lungs, into the water.
         Then it was that she realized she was wearing leather flight
gloves on her hands, and the bubbles, released from her lungs through
her mouth and nostrils, escaped into the black void of the watery depths
without her being able to feel which direction they went.
         She gaped into the dark night of the undersea world.  She tried
to find the escaping bubbles with her eyes.  She looked ‘up’.  (Or was
that direction actually down?!)  She could see nothing.  Nothing but
darkness, with the all-enveloping darkness of eternal death just around
the corner from her consciousness.
         Judy Dan ripped the leather flight glove off her hand.  She
clapped her fingers to her lips and exhaled again.
         The bubbles travelled sideways off her fingertips.
         Sideways?!
         “Good God, we’ll just be swimming sideways, deep under the
bay’s surface, and we shall drown!” something inside her squalled.
         “No!  Bubbles travel toward the surface!  ‘Sideways’ is really
up!” a voice in her head commanded.
         With her lungs screaming, her mind increasingly a bewildered
mass of confusion, Judy Dan swam frantically ‘sideways.’
         As she swam, in the rising terror of her oxygen-starved brain,
she saw herself swimming through the corpses that she’d shot on Clinton
Bridge.  
         “But they’re only children!” her co-pilot, most certainly dead
now somewhere down in the drowned Hoodoo, screamed to her in the
depths.  Judy Dan pictured herself swimming through them.  She pictured
them reaching out to her and welcoming her into the eternal night of
death.
         Her head burst gasping and shocked from the water.  The fires
along the shoreline of New Washington burned into her eyes.  It was the
sight of rioting and death, but to Judy Dan, it was as if she were
viewing Paradise itself.
         Air!  She inhaled.  Her lungs went to work.  Her mind cleared. 
The groping hands of the corpses, flung by her Gatling from Clinton
Bridge, receded.
         “And even you, Patroclus!” rattled through her mind, like dead
bones written on dry leaves.
         “Not tonight,” her mind answered the corpses floating in the
waters of the bay.  “Not yet, anyway.”
         She swam with a strong stroke toward shore, tearing her
waterlogged flight suit from her body as she went.  She was like a snake
shedding an old skin; boots, her other glove, her zippered jumpsuit with
all her prized patches sewn carefully onto it.  All gone, all the skin
of her old, almost-dead self.


         Tongsun Anu walked back to the stern of the boat.  He came up
beside Harold and stood next to him in the darkness.  In the distance,
he saw an Imperial Coast Guard cutter passing.  It moved against the
Oakland shoreline; the fires there mingled with the cutter’s nautical
lights.
         “How’s it going?” Harold asked.  Tongsun nodded, silently.
         “Good,” Tongsun replied.  “She’s sailing us just fine.”
         The boat rocked casually with the waves.  Its engine murmured
like the voices of a dozen oarsmen, lashed below decks, moving a Roman
warship through Mediterranean waters.  Tongsun stood beside Harold.  He
remembered a half-learned history lesson:  Rome against Carthage.  Who
had won?  He knew Rome had been like the Imperium, in that it had
considered itself strong.  He couldn’t remember which side won, though. 
He thought about it for some time.  Then he remembered how powerful the
Nazis had felt.  He smiled.  He knew the outcome of their regime.  A
desire for total control had ended in total failure.
         A wave slapped the side of the boat.  It cast up salt spray
into Tongsun’s face.  He hoped it wasn’t a bad omen.  He looked at
Harold.  The spray had hit him too.  If the Coast Guard cutter were as
low in the water as their own small boat, Tongsun told himself, the
water would splash the crew of that vessel too.
         Harold wrapped his arms tighter around his chest.  He looked at
Tongsun.
         “Hey T, it’s cold, man,” Harold said.  His voice had a slight
whine to it.  He looked tired.  They’d both been up for many hours now. 
Tongsun rubbed his eyes.  The adrenaline rush they’d both felt up on
Clinton bridge, battling their way through the throngs back to the
International Port, had passed.  Tongsun exhaled.  He saw his breath in
the air.  
         “I know.  I’m cold too,” Tongsun said.
         The fog had thickened.  It blurred the lights of the buildings
floating above them, the Sky Dwellings.  It blurred the white-lit
veranda on the White House across the bay from them.  They stared at the
residence of the President of the Imperium on the bluffs across the
water.
         “Have they broken in to the Sky Dwelling yet?” Tongsun asked
Harold.  The blonde boy looked over at an Asian boy who wore glasses. 
He sat amidst a cluster of boys on the deck of the small boat they had
stolen.
         “How’re you coming?” Harold asked the Asian boy.  The Asian
stared at the screen of a portable computer in his lap.  It was the only
source of light on their boat; on purpose, to avoid detection.
         The Asian boy, named Wally, nodded.  “Working good,” Wally
said.  “Uplink works.  I think I’ve got-- I’ve got it!  Contact!”
         There was a small cheer among the boys, and two girls, huddled
on the boat.
         “Keep your voices down!” Harold hissed.
         “We have bush,” Tongsun said.
         “Huh?” Harold asked.  Tongsun nodded his head, as if to disavow
the unnecessary noise he’d made.  “An old line from a movie,” he
whispered to Harold.
         “Oh,” Harold said.  He turned and looked at Wally again.  Two
boys, one Hispanic, the other Puerto Rican, were staring over Wally’s
shoulders.  Their faces were gently illuminated by the glow of the
laptop’s screen.
         “Click on that,” the Puerto Rican suggested.  He pointed over
Wally’s shoulder at the screen.
         “Really?” Wally asked.  A quizzical look appeared on his face. 
But he followed the Puerto Rican’s advice.  There was the click of a
mouse.  
         “Shit!” the Hispanic declared.  His eyes, like those of the
other people clustered around Wally, brightened with glee. 
         “We’ve been granted root access!” Wally said in a low voice,
triumphantly.  He looked up from the screen at Harold and Tongsun,
standing in the boat’s stern.  Tongsun sighed.  He looked up at the
building hovering over the seaward approach to the White House.
         “Their so-called ‘civil society’ became a playground for them
and a prison for us,” Tongsun said.  The boat rocked.  There was silence
on board.  Tongsun’s voice had the eerie sound of a verdict being
delivered on the Imperium.  Several boys on deck, including Harold,
nodded their agreement.
         “Playtime’s up,” Harold said.  Being with Tongsun had given him
an ability to say cryptic things.  Things like his Samoan friend
sometimes uttered.  He looked at Tongsun.  He grinned.  But Tongsun
appeared sad, as if he wished, even now, for some peaceful way to end
the regime.
         “Tongsun.  I’m waiting for your command to perform a Full
Drop,” Wally said.  His voice was low, but serious.  He now held the
lives of all the building’s inhabitants in his right index finger, the
one hovering over the mouse.  
         Tongsun sighed.  He appeared, for a moment, to doubt his
mission.  So many lives!  He didn’t even know anyone in that building! 
Yet he would kill them all, with one word.  At this moment they were
reassuring themselves of their safety, of their immunity to mortality. 
Their cupboards were stocked with Vitamin E and Vitamin C and they had
fitness centers and medical centers and an army of guards, maintenance
people, and technicians.  And one very nasty bug in their computer that
controlled their Lift Engines. 
         A wave rose up over the bow and slapped seawater into Tongsun
and Harold’s faces again.  Tongsun blinked.  The sea, like gravity,
didn’t care about him, he realized, or even about the Imperium itself. 
The sea was implacable, unfeeling.  It was a domain unto itself, and the
humans in a boat lying on its surface were nothing to it.  In the
timeframe of the ocean, humans were but children of wayward fish.  They
were children of fish who’d been foolish enough to crawl out of the womb
of the sea.  The sea was their original mother and, like real mothers
sometimes, the sea would happily swallow them back up.
         Tongsun turned away from the sea, from the view of the Oakland
shoreline across the bay.  “Thanks,” he said to Wally.  “Just hold it a
moment.  Don’t click yet.”  Tongsun wiped the salt spray out of his
eyes.  He motioned for the girl behind the wheel of the boat, in the
wheelhouse, to straighten the boat out.  “Shit,” he muttered to Harold. 
“We’re not ready.”
         “We’ve got root access,” Harold said to Tongsun.  “What more
could you want?”
         “We need to get onto dry land,” Tongsun told Harold.  He
pointed to the shoreline, looming black and large before them.
         “We just came from the International Port,” Harold said.
         “Yeah, but there’s gonna be a big wave generated when we drop
that building,” Tongsun said.  “We need to moor our boat and get up out
of the water.”
         “Oh,” Harold said.  “You’re right.  “There’s never a time like
the present to go visit Sausalito.”
         “Yes,” Tongsun said.  “But we won’t have to go that far north.”
         Harold looked at the girl in the wheelhouse.  She glanced back
at them.  Her silhouette stood out black and stark against the
wheelhouse’s front windshield.  Beyond that loomed the dark shoreline of
Lime Point.  Harold wrapped his arms tighter against his body.  It was
cold, he complained to himself.  His teeth chattered.  He watched the
cluster of boys around the computer screen.  They waited, tensely, for
the word to drop the Sky Dwelling.
         The small boat puttered toward the northern shore of the bay.  
         A boy in the bow of the boat turned on a flashlight.  He
scanned the shoreline ahead of them.  They were quite close to it now. 
He looked for an opening in the rocks of the shore.  Suddenly, his
flashlight fell into the aperture of a small cove.  His beam became lost
in blackness.  On either side of the lost beam stood tall, wave-worn
rocks.  They were wet with seawater round their bases, where they sloped
into the bay.  The wave-splashed parts of the rocks reflected the lights
of New Washington and the Oakland shore.
         “Holding at root directory level,” Wally announced, softly.  He
stared at his computer screen.
         Tongsun drew in his breath.
         “Time is on my side,” he said in a low voice.  Harold turned
and looked at him in the darkness.  “Then again, maybe it isn’t,”
Tongsun added.  His voice rose.  “Listen, everyone,” he said.  “I’m
worried.  I’m afraid we’ll run out of time to drop that building before
we get ourselves out of this boat.  They could detect our presence in
their computer at any moment.
         “Right,” the Asian boy agreed, nodding.
         “The dropped building is going to make a pretty big wave in the
bay,” Tongsun said.  “It might swamp our boat.  If we don’t get up on
dry land, the wave could drown us.  Where’s the person who said we
should bring along Glad bags for our guns, in case it rains?”
         “Here,” someone said in the darkness.
         “Good,” Tongsun said.  “Bag everything.  Bag all your weapons. 
Do it right now.  Get them in bags and stow them wherever you can.”
         “What if we’re attacked?” a boy asked.
         “Then we’ll get our asses blown off, ‘cause all our shit’s
stuck inside garbage bags down on our boat,” a boy answered.
         “We’ll take our guns with us if we can,” Tongsun said.  “But if
we run out of time to get up on dry land, we won’t have time to haul all
our guns up with us.”
         There was a murmur among the boys.
         “No talking!  Just do it!” Harold said.  
         “If you have a pistol, and a belt and a holster for it, no
problem,” Tongsun said.  “Anything heavier needs to be bagged and
stowed.”
         A sound of furious bagging ensued.  The boat drew up along the
shoreline in the darkness, guided by the the boy at the bow, with his
lone flashlight.  Weapons were wrapped.  A roll of packing tape was
passed around to seal them shut against the water.  
         “Y’know, Glad bags can be used as body bags too,” a boy said. 
“Should we save a few in case we need to bag the president?”
         “Quiet!” Harold said.  A ripple of laughter passed through the
boys on deck.  
         There was a scraping sound.
         “Captain, we’ve hit land,” a boy said.  
         Their boat passed along a large, half-sunken rock.  It scraped
algae off its stony surface.  They moved into the hole between the rocks
that formed a small cove.
         Harold glanced back at the Presidio shoreline.
         “Too bad there’s not a Sky Dwelling right over the White
House,” Harold said to Tongsun.  “Then we could just drop the building
straight down onto the president’s head!”
         Tongsun laughed in the darkness.  “They’re not that stupid,
Harold,” Tongsun chuckled.
         “Shit!  I think we’ve been discovered!” Wally blurted.  He
sounded worried.  He didn’t bother to keep his voice down.  
         “Damn!” Tongsun said.
         Beyond the rocks, the Golden Gate Bridge loomed.  Crowds of
people could be heard, faintly, jostling one another up on the
causeway.  There were sounds of gunfire.  The D.C. Sheriffs were
shooting into the crowd; the crowd was firing back.  Suddenly, a Hoodoo
approached from the Oakland shoreline.  It passed like an auger of death
beneath the overhead buildings.  Without bothering with a megaphone
warning, it opened fire on the crowd on the bridge.
         “Damn!  They’re trying to eject me!” Wally cried.
         Tongsun clenched his fists.  “Full drop!” he yelled.
         “Hang on!” Harold shouted to the boys.  He gripped the gunwale
of the boat and gazed skyward.  A building hovering near the Presidio
side of the bay trembled.  Its underside dipped suddenly lower.  The
Hoodoo passed over the Golden Gate Bridge.  It banked.
         Like a whale caught by a spear, pulled by a whaling ship, but
still full of life, the Sky Dwelling resisted.  
           Wally tapped frantically on his keyboard.  The Puerto Rican
standing behind him gestured frantically, then grabbed the mouse, rolled
it, and clicked.
         The Hoodoo came in for another pass at the bridge.  Its guns
began blazing.
         The Lift Engines on the Sky Dwelling over the Presidio side of
the bay shrieked.  Suddenly, the building dropped 200 feet.  The Hoodoo
finished its pass, rose, and slammed straight into the underside of the
descending building.  A cheer went up from their boat as the boys
watched.
         “Quiet!” Harold muttered.  He stared, open-mouthed, as the
building struggled against the pull of gravity.
         “Dammit!  I’m losing control!” Wally swore.
         “It’s coming!” Harold shouted.  He pointed up.  With a
tremendous roar, its engines still fighting hard, the building lost 500
feet of altitude.  Then it stabilized, briefly, jarring itself to a stop
in mid-air.  Sections of the building broke away, unable to withstand
the force of the mid-air stop.
         Then gravity won, and the building came crashing down.
         There was an enormous splash.  The building toppled toward
Alcatraz as it hit the bay.  Mixed in with the sound of the building
hitting the water, was the sound of violent explosions.  
         Its motor puttering quietly, the boatload of boys and two girls
slipped deeper into the rock-strewn cove.  The view of the bay was lost
to them.  
         Tongsun stared at the rocks which surrounded them.  With fear
in his eyes he gazed at the slip-channel into which they’d passed,
hoping for safety.
         There was a sound as of approaching thunder.  Tongsun turned
and looked at the huddled boys in the darkness.
         “Get ready!  Wave’s coming!” Tongsun shouted.
         The boat dropped suddenly, as the water rushed out of their
cove.  A second passed.  The roar of thunder grew louder.  The
outswirling water drew the boat toward the cove’s entrance.  Then a
scraping sound was heard, and a thud.  The boat settled onto wet sand
and caught itself in rocks on the sandy bottom.  Beyond the wall of
rocks protecting them from the bay, a thousand horses seemed to be
thundering down on them.
         With a mighty crash, the wave caused by the dropped building
hit the rocks on the bayward side of the cove.  Salt spray hurled itself
over the tops of the rocks and came splashing down into the little
boat.  At the same time as the boat was swamped from above, the level in
the watery cove suddenly rose, tossing the boat high.  They were nearly
thrown over the tops of the rocks, only to fall again, within the cove,
and then rise up again, then fall once more.  There was a splintering
sound, amidst the waves, of wood cracking.
         Slowly, the waters subsided.  Tongsun was soaked.  He looked at
Harold.  The boy’s blonde hair was matted against his face.
         “We’re taking on water!  Shit!  The whole deck is flooded!” a
boy said behind them, in the darkness.  Tongsun heard splashing as
people began milling about.
         The sound of the boat’s engine coughed and wheezed.  Then,
remarkably, it returned to its usual rhythm.  The boat chugged out of
the cove and into the bay.
         “Damn.  Nobody told that bitch to move the boat out of the
cove,” Harold cursed.  He stared through the blackness at the silhouette
of the girl in the wheelhouse.
         “It’s okay,” Tongsun said.  “It’s okay!”  His face was
drenched.  His bushy black hair was matted and bedraggled.  But he
smiled.