Back in bed

I woke up on the couch — neck stiff, spittle on my chin, still wearing my bright yellow rubber suit and leaded boots. The light was on and a half-finished glass of gutter vodka was on the floor next to me. I lay there dazed, rubbing my eyes. My neck was stiff, my body ached, pain shot down my spine when I tried to turn my head. I groaned. I checked the clock. It was noon. I must have passed out while watching the raid take place on the feed…crashed after all the adrenaline left my system.

I slowly pulled off the suit and boots, went into the kitchen to put the kettle to boil, and went to the bathroom to wash my face. I brewed tea and some instant oats and then ate and drank in silence at the kitchen table. I then wandered around my apartment, checking the window and door seals for leaks, inspecting the filtration system, making sure my rad meters were on and calibrated…I then made a half-hearted attempt at exercising — Five pushups, some squats, then stretched a bit and did some windmills with my arms. Starting tomorrow, I pledged to take my lockdown exercise regimen more seriously. After not moving for five days in a row, my body had seized up like a clenched fist. I wasn’t getting any younger…

I made a second cup of tea, but I still couldn’t wake up, so I turned off the light and got back into bed. I lay there, in the dark, staring at the ceiling. Scenes of the raid replayed in my mind. All night, people uploaded videos and photos to the feed — and they really were an epic thing. It wasn’t a raid…it was an attack…an invasion. As it turned out, it was the Sactown groups that organized the raid. They had joined forces to mount an attack on the San Francisco Triad. One party focused on the Richmond District. The other hit Chinatown. A third hit the Mission. But the locals were waiting for them. In fact, it looked like the Sactown guys walked into a trap. As soon as the convoy crossed Arguello Boulevard, into Richmond proper, they got hit from all sides. I saw videos of drones dropping grenades right on top of them. People posted shaky footage of guys popping up on roofs and throwing firebombs and firing off rocket launchers at the armored jeeps below and then disappearing into the night. Apparently, there were IEDs waiting for them, too, roadside bombs that shredded the invaders. Anyone who tried to get out of their cars and flee on foot got hit with machine gun fire. It was a massacre. I’m not sure there were any survivors. There was similar footage coming out of Chinatown and the Mission. Columns of cars decimated, charred…guys cooked alive in their anti-radiation suits. I hadn’t seen a gang war like this…well…never. The fights that had started breaking out right after the war were never this organized. They were smaller…more reactive. It was never this well-planned. I wasn’t sure if this was a good or bad thing. I guess it was, neither. It just reflected our reality…our new normal. And in this new normal, we had a dual government. There was the official one, the San Francisco Emergency Government — with its dictator and her direct control over all levels of government…the police, the official courts, sewers, the water system. And then there was the Triad.

Before the war, the city was run by the usual forces — the developers and landlords, the Silicon Valley guys, the VCs, and the finance bros. They controlled the political machine, elected the mayor and the city council, bankrolled the non-profits, the arts and cultural institutions. They paid the influencers and they owned the local press. They had the money and they ran the economy, so this was the natural order of things — or so they thought. After the war, telecommunication systems went down globally, banks stopped working, and the financial system ground to a halt. No one went to work, no one produced anything or shipped anything, no one paid their rent…or even cared about it. Suddenly all their wealth and power had disappeared. And they themselves disappeared, too. They fled to their private bunkers — taking their jets with their families and security teams to Nevada, New Mexico, New Zealand, Hawaii… Funny enough, a lot of those guys never came back from their luxurious hideouts. When things got real, the security goons that they had hired to protect them weren’t interested in taking orders from their bosses anymore. Why should they? Who cares if your boss was worth $100 billion? What did his money mean when you’re all hiding out in bunkers while radioactive clouds killed everything they touched? The world was coming to an end and you had the guns and you had the physical strength…so why should you be bossed around? And so the bodyguards turned. They took over the bunkers, executed their bosses, took their wives and daughters as sex slaves and servants. There was justice in it. The guys at the top had thought they were apex predators. They strutted around like they were untouchable. They thought that they had amassed their wealth and power because of their naturally superior abilities. They were the peak of human evolution…lions among sheep, they thought. Of course society had rewarded them with immense power and privilege, given them the right to rule over the peasants. This was their due. But in those last moments, before they got executed, the truth of it must have come to them as a shock. They weren’t naturally strong. They were weak…just as weak and vulnerable as the rest of us. It was the system, with its vast technocracy functioning like an high-tech exoskeleton…that’s what was making them strong.

I’ll keep publishing bits of RADIANCE as the novel progresses.

Read the previous chapter and all the other chapters here.

With most of the elites gone and the system in collapse, other people rose to the top. In San Francisco, a few cops tried to take control, but most of them didn’t live in the city or even anywhere close to the city and had no real connections to the community. So the cops were out. There was no big military base around, either. And so it was the locals that rose to the job.