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Honor smiled at the desk sergeant a smile that she hoped would be interpreted as seductive in Caveman.

“Let me help you with that.” Honor said, and reached gently and maternally for the policeman’s belt. He gratefully held his hands away while Honor slid his gun from its holster, placed it under his chin, and blew the top of his head off. The noise and stench, while spectacular in the enclosed
space, were hopelessly inadequate accompaniment to the fountain of blood and brain which painted the previously transparent walls and the remaining police officers. Never-the-less the kickback tore the gun from her hand and the smoke blinded her and she was completely deaf, apart from a persistent ringing the approximate pitch and volume of a steam whistle.

As the whistle subsided and the smoke cleared Honor could see that the policemen, having been introduced to their use, had drawn their weapons. They pointed them at her as though of one mind and pulled the triggers or, rather, tried to pull the triggers, which behaved exactly as triggers should when the safety catch is on. Honor recovered her gun and, holding it tightly with both hands, turned it on the glass wall of the briefing room and spread it like a vapor across the hall.

What should have been a victorious dash down the hall and back to the stairs was stalled before it started as Honor anticipated navigating the shards of glass carpeting the floor with only one shoe. But the policemen were recovering from this unexpected maneuver and there was nothing left to do but hop, so Honor hopped on one foot as fast and as with as much dignity as she could marshal and which the situation allowed, which was quite slow and with no dignity at all.

The policemen moved as a unit to cut off her line of escape, fortunately, because it meant that while they were much faster than Honor they were denied access to her by a limited understanding of the properties of glass and the important distinction between walls and doors. So Honor hopped down the hall and the policeman tracked her from panel to panel and from room to room like fraternal cocker spaniels pursuing a mailman from behind a lengthy picket fence, feet away from their prey but unable to reach her. Honor had to merely maintain the discipline of the hop and not panic and break into a doomed sprint.

A doomed sprint began to grow in appeal as Honor’s hopping leg, having already contributed more than should be expected of any standard leg during the drunken bicycle race, began to markedly lose elasticity. Her right leg would do its part and swing the team forward but with each leap the left knee would bend deeply and return slightly lower and appreciably slower. The policemen, however, showed their training and if anything were growing in enthusiasm for the hunt. They ran along next to her, stopping occasionally to batter at the glass with their guns and grunt romantic overtures.

But the sea of broken glass was thinning and was gone altogether in only a few courageous bounds and just beyond that were the stairs. Similarly, the invisible magic maze keeping the squad out of reach was coming to an end in the form of a bay of tributary halls. The race was absurd and lethargic and it was going to be a photo-finish.

Honor was at the door at the same moment that the policemen discovered themselves at the intersection of glass halls, one of which was a direct and unimpeded path to the woman for whom they harbored such mixed feelings. Honor fell through the door and pulled her shoe with her and kicked at the door which insisted on closing at its own agonizingly slow, spring-loaded pace. It clicked into position just as the policemen piled against it and Honor took a moment to breath, confident that her pursuers wouldn’t associate keys with locks for, conservatively, years.

She sat on the stairs and clutched her gun and her shoe and massaged her tortured leg. The door boomed like a kettle drum as the policemen threw themselves against it in what sounded like evenly distributed turns. And then nothing. A full two minutes of this same nothing passed and then a familiar explosion shook the door and a bullet passed through it and bounced around the stairwell. And after another short pause a cacophony accompanied dozens of bullets piercing the door and clattering about the landing. Honor returned to the parking garage.

The venture had been, in spite of everything, a success. Honor had visited the police station to get a gun and now she had a gun and as a bonus she had a glamorous backstory which almost entirely explained how she came to not be Chinese. All that remained to officially declare the plan a masterstroke was the all-important getaway. Honor used the bike light again to survey the darkened garage. She needed something slim and speedy, like a motorcycle, to zip between the stationary traffic and roving mobs or something that could just go over them, like a tank.

She panned the garage and the beam did a double-take as it nearly skipped past six police motorcycles in a uniform row, their wheels neatly turned to the left, like a chorus line. One of them would do nicely. And then it wouldn’t, because just beyond the motorcycles, parked in a dark corner and cordoned off with incident tape, was a tank.

She reasoned that this was some sort of riot vehicle but it looked like no vehicle that Honor could find in the same nebulous database that told her that she could drive a sports car and a motorcycle and bulldozer. It didn’t look very like a vehicle at all, as much as it did a metal boat with a battering ram on the front, assuming that was the front, and four massive tractor tires which gave the tank a clearance of marginally higher than the roof of a Ferrari. It was the ideal getaway car.

Dr. Tom Spivic looked out the window at the darkening city and reflected on his dismal options. The least appealing was the easiest — he could settle in with the newly formed society of primitive health care workers and patients and wait for the dawn when, in all likelihood, he would cease to be Dr. Tom Spivic.

Or he could tear this laboratory apart in the vanishingly slim hope that some trace of the vaccine or indication where it could be acquired was hidden somewhere among the unreasonably scant paperwork and beakers and bottles.

Finally he could try to make his way in the world. He could return to the original plan and escape the psychiatric ward and chance finding help somewhere in a Los Angeles that was now seething with primitive factional violence. Or he could jump off the roof.

It had been roughly 12 hours since his first memory in the mental ward, a very rough 12 hours. Whatever torments this dystopian world had visited upon him in that time — and it had somewhat overachieved in the area of dystopian torments — and whatever it yet had in store he felt reasonably certain that there was absolutely nothing now that would surprise him. And he was wrong about that. As he sought inspiration out his laboratory window his eye was drawn by three giraffes, two adults and a baby giraffe, travelling north at a leisurely gallop on the otherwise abandoned Pacific Coast Highway. They seemed to have some idea where they were going and from this the scientist deduced that animals were somehow or to some degree immune to the effects of the sun’s radioactive outbursts. Anyway there were giraffes on the freeway.

The former Ray scanned back along the freeway for other surprises and found one. At that distance it was difficult to say with any certainty that what he saw was actually a tank, but what looked very much and behaved even more like a tank was driving over the cars blocking Venice Boulevard, heading toward the ocean.

Casting his mind back, he found that he couldn’t. He opened his eyes to find that he was looking directly into the sun, which profited from the opportunity to punch him squarely in the back of the brain, so he closed them again. He had a headache. He was a headache. His head ached with a blunt, expansive, exhaustive, prize-fighting and prize-winning ache. He had a headache bigger than his actual head.

Sunlight pressed on his eyelids like deep-sea fishing weights but when he raised an arm to cover them he found that the headache was a distraction, a very potent distraction, from a general malaise throughout his body but with particular emphasis on the joints, which felt as though they’d been packed in ice, ready for shipping. In his stomach something was growing slowly but determinedly larger and it was now ready to leave the nest. His lips and tongue had been, apparently, upholstered.

With no clear memory of a similar sensation he diagnosed with absolute certainty the symptoms of a monstrous hangover. He tried to lay motionless with a very fuzzy plan to remain that way until the sun went down, however long that took, but his body insisted on rocking in gentle, consistent, rhythmic and nauseating waves, as though he were on a boat in the ocean. He could even almost hear the water slapping against the hull and seagulls screeching like poorly aligned disc brakes somewhere overhead.

With a heroic force of will he isolated the sound of the gulls as not a symptom of his condition but as a real external stimulus. It was actually seagulls and he really could hear waves and he was, in fact, on a boat. The rest was still a hangover.

He yawed into a sitting position before risking opening his eyes again but there was little improvement. He was on the top deck of a wide fiberglass yacht of a pure white that faithfully reproduced the sun’s assault on his squinting eyes so that everything glowed like a dream sequence in an Italian art film. He was even dressed from shoulders to feet in pristine white sailor’s cottons and was, until further notice, indistinguishable from the deck. And he had reason to doubt these were his clothes. They had nothing at all in the pockets, which could have borne very little in any case, and they fit his boxer’s frame like a sausage casing.

He stood, finally, with the stability of a
Great Dane on a trampoline, and took in the horizon, which required the further effort of turning in a complete circle because the horizon was everywhere. In all directions for as far as he could see there was the ocean’s edge, simmering in the close, cloying heat of the sun so that the edges blurred into the sky. He was alone on a yacht in the middle of the ocean and he hadn’t a fuzzy, achey, throbbing idea how he got there. But was he really alone? Probably not. Probably there was someone else on the boat who knew who he was and how much he’d had to drink, if that was even measurable.

The upper deck where he’d been sleeping was empty but for countless Champagne bottles and from what he could see of the main deck it was deserted too. He eased down the steps to the main deck at the bow and walked with his knees cautiously bent to absorb as much of the motion of the waves as possible. It was a big boat. He had a long walk ahead of him to the aft where, he reasoned, he would find the cabin and the bridge and, of greater importance, some shade.

And his instincts had been exactly right. After a long and not notably scenic tour of the boat’s gleaming white port side, interrupted by a refreshing pause to release some of the overflow of the self-reproducing swill in his stomach, he arrived at the stern with a diving platform and steps up to the bridge and wide and curtained French patio doors leading to the cabin.

The cabin was, if anything, hotter than it was outside. There was no circulating air and the thick atmosphere testified to several hours in this state. This was clearly where most of the celebrating had been done. There were yet more bottles, this time of hard liquor and wine and the sweet liqueurs of unnatural colors which contribute so efficiently to the well-rounded hangover. There was evidence of food, as well, and the smoking of cigars and a total dereliction of duty on the part of the cleaning staff. And finally at a banquette table fixed to the starboard wall was a man and a woman in their late sixties eating jam with their fingers.

They didn’t look like the sort of couple who normally ate jam with their fingers. They looked like the sort of couple who normally told the staff of their yacht how they liked their steaks, although it was always rare because it always is with the very best cuts of meat. They were dressed as though they’d been to a wedding of someone they didn’t know very well. She wore pearls. He wore epaulettes. They both wore a look of total stupefaction. They looked at the intruder with fear and suspicion when he came in through the French doors and turned with their pots of jam toward the wall in a clear gesture that they were unwilling to share.

“Hi.” croaked the hangover, and vainly tried to clear his throat. “Do you know who I am?” Neither of his hosts looked at him, they just accelerated their consumption of jam.

“I’m guessing that’s a no.” he said. “It’s mutual. Do you know where we are? Where the crew is? Where land is? How about aspirin? Do you know where you keep the aspirin?” The couple finished their jam and licked their fingers and scanned the wreckage for more leftovers. Simultaneously zeroing in on a shrimp cocktail ring with a sauce that had grown a thick skin, they raced for it, retrieved it and took it back to their little lair.

“Okay, that’s a little strange. But fine. It’s not a pressing matter. I’ll just call you Marmalade and Apricot. You can call me, say, Clint. Clint Hardcastle. No, Clint Hardcliff. Yes, I like that. Clint Hardcliff.” Marmalade and Apricot made no objection and the formalities were complete.

Beyond the expansive salon was a galley door and the man who called himself, quite recently, Clint, left his new acquaintances to investigate the deeper recesses of a luxury yacht. The door led to a corridor of modern eclectic excess. The deck was polished oak and the walls brushed aluminum with glass wainscoting and mounted photographs of, presumably, celebrity visitors to the boat. Stateroom doors and stained-glass wall-lamps alternated down the hall and everything from the hand-polished floors and beveled glass moldings to the overly composed pictures of movie stars and mobsters was covered with a coating of congealed blood. What forensic examiners lyrically call the splatter pattern suggested a fast-paced sabre battle between unevenly matched opponents or the lively pursuit of a spirited amputee by mountain lions.

One after another Clint quickly opened and looked behind each door and found himself taking a rough accounting of the crew. With at least one in each stateroom and the two in the galley — one with his throat artlessly cut and the other shot through the sternum with a spear gun — there was a crew of eight. Of those, the total that had been killed in what appeared to be a fast-paced and impeccably evenly sided battled, was eight.

The remainder of the main deck was one large stateroom eerily free of blood and bodies and another door with a dark portal window which opened to the stairs down to the even darker lower decks. Clint balanced the evidence so far with the probability that he’d find a friendly and helpful stowaway hiding in the darkness and barred the door with a mop handle. The kitchen had almost no food and in particular the jam supplies were completely exhausted. And to Clint’s immense surprise there remained a great deal to drink. Whatever purpose had brought this boat so mysteriously far out to sea there was strong evidence that it was to allow everyone on board to drink themselves to death.

Most of them had narrowly averted that fate, but were nevertheless now of very little use to Clint. The boat was becalmed, in fact the ocean was particularly gelatinous under the cloudless skies and ruthless sun, and it normally needed a crew of, apparently, eight to go anywhere. Lord and Lady Marmalade Jam had clearly suffered some sort of preserve-related trauma which put them beyond usefulness and in any case looked like the sort who didn’t usually drive their own vehicles.

Clint climbed the stairs to the bridge. It was a mostly enclosed high-technology show-room surrounded by vast windows on three sides and open at the back. He inspected the banks of computer screens and GPS units and keyboards and radar displays with the engaged understanding of a Christmas shopper who’s accidentally walked into a New York Gallery to get out of the rain. None of the machinery meant anything to him and in any case none of it was on, which he received as something of a relief.

But he recognized the moment he saw it the classic shape of a ship’s wheel, the only wooden thing on the deck, with spokes and handles and brass fittings and a salty character that made it look a little intimidated by its state-of-the-art surroundings, like a retired bomber pilot invited to sit in on a moon launch. Next to the wheel was a chrome lever that almost had to be a throttle and next to that was a key in a housing that looked just like a car’s ignition and which Clint concluded was very probably a boat’s ignition. Concentrating on only those three elements and barring disasters it was just possible, Clint thought, that he could make this floating penthouse apartment go where he wanted it to go.

Which might have been true, but he didn’t know where he wanted it to go. He hadn’t the most distant idea which was the direction home except there was only one of those and an almost limitless number of directions toward desolate and empty sea and an eventual death by alcohol poisoning. Clint felt sure that he could point the boat in the rough direction of shore if he had a compass and watch and at least some idea how it is that people navigate with a compass and a watch.

Clint allowed his hands to sweep over the arc of the wheel and smooth ergonomics of the throttle hoping in some way to commune with the machinery in the way he imagined that great navigators of the early days of discovery transcended GPS technology. Stationed thusly, he took in the horizon and it all looked for as far as the eye could see and in a perfect circle exactly the same. The was no wind nor wave to decide direction for him. No other vessels to hail. No sound nor cloud nor friendly dolphin to guide him home.

And then there was something else. Something so indistinctly anything that it had an air of having been there all along but now there was just a bit more of it. It may have been as simple and subtle as a change in the air pressure but whether up or down Clint couldn’t say. It may have been a sound but if it was it shared a frequency with the shy hush of the ocean. And in a moment it was a thing. It was real and solid and big and it was a passenger jet and it was dropping right out of the sky and onto Clint.

He couldn’t, but Clint imagined that he could see the pilots’ calm and cheerless faces, reconciled to their fate, as they hurtled toward the yacht. It would all be over within seconds and Clint found himself wondering if the plane had been coming from land or going toward it when, by all appearances, it ran out of gas. He had little expectation of surviving what was about to happen but meant to profit from the development if he did.

The jet passed over head and the immensity and forced perspective and general oddness of such an occurrence created the illusion that if he’d climbed on top of the bridge and jumped he could have touched the bottom. Certainly the jet was for a moment the entire sky and then it was passed and still whole. And then it hit the water.

The jet had managed to travel possibly another one or two miles in the few seconds between passing over the yacht and becoming one with the ocean in very much the same way that a snowball maintains its identity until colliding with a field of snow. The impact was spectacular and was for a moment the only physical presence of the merging of water and airplane. The ocean was the very concept of impact made physical and the jet was gone altogether. Water rose into the air in the shape and size of a Roman colosseum and then inverted and pursued the plane to the bottom, frozen for a moment in the form of an impossible hole in the sea.

And then came the rebound as the hole filled itself, generating shockwaves that raced away from the point of impact as though the nursemaids of the gods had taken hold of the vast bed sheet on which rested the tiny yacht and given it a sharp snap. A wave like an enraged runt mountain gamboled toward the boat, consuming the horizon and rapidly picking up speed and mass and murderous intent.