Page 3 (2/2)
Which was not to say he was alone
He had passed the early hours of thein the first week of June, teon the balcony of the penthouse he had occupied since the second week of the crisis It was a gigantic place, like an airborne palace; the kitchen alone was the size of Kittridge’s whole apartment The owner’s taste ran in an austere direction: sleek leather seating groups that were better to look at than sit on, glealass tables that appeared to float in space Breaking in had been surprisingly sie hadThe cops were long gone He’d thought about barricading hi houses up in Cherry Creek, but based on the things he’d seen, he wanted soh
The owner of the penthouse was a ular customer at the store His name was Warren Filo As luck would have it, Warren had co had broken to gear up for a hunting trip to Alaska He was a young guy, too young for how much h-tech IPOs On that day, the world still cheerily hue had helped Warren carry his purchases to the car A Ferrari, of course Standing beside it, Kittridge thought: Why not just go ahead and get a vanity plate that says, DOUCHE BAG? A question that must have been plainly written on his face, because no sooner had it crossed Kittridge’s mind than Warren went red with e his usual suit, just jeans and a T-shirt with SLOAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT printed on the front He’d wanted Kittridge to see his car, that was obvious, but now that he’d allowed this to happen, he’d realized how duer at Outdoor World who probably rand a year (The nue allowed his this kid didn’t knoould fill a book-and he let theto make the point I know, I know, Warren confessed It’s a little much I told myself I’d never be one of those aholes who drive a Ferrari But honest to God, you should feel the way she handles
Kittridge had gotten Warren’s address off his invoice By the ti and safe in Alaska-it was sier’s office, putting it into the slot in the elevator panel, and riding eighteen floors to the penthouse He unloaded his gear A rolling suitcase of clothes, three lockers of weaponry, a hand-crank radio, night-vision binoculars, flares, a first-aid kit, bottles of bleach, an arc welder to seal the doors of the elevator, his trusty laptop with its portable satellite dish, a box of books, and enough food and water to last a th of the west side of the building, was a sweeping 180 degrees, looking toward Interstate 25 and Mile High field He’d positioned cameras equipped with motion detectors at each end of the balcony, one to cover the street, a second facing the building on the opposite side of the avenue He figured he’d get a lot of good footage this way, but the money shots would be actual kills The weapon he’d selected for this task was a Reton bolt-action 700P, 338 caliber-a nice balance of accuracy and stopping power, zeroing out at three hundred yards To this he’d affixed a digital video scope with infrared Using the binoculars, he would isolate his target; the rifle, e of the balcony, would do the rest
On the first night, windless and lit by a waning quarter e had shot seven: five on the avenue, one on the opposite roof, and one h theof a bank at street level It was the last one that made him famous The creature, or vampire, or whatever it was-the official terht into the lens just before Kittridge put one through the sweet spot Uploaded to YouTube, the i all the major networks had picked it up Who is this man? everyone wanted to know Who is this fearless-crazy-suicidalhis last stand?
And so was born the sobriquet, Last Stand in Denver
From the start he’d assumed it was just a matter of time before so quite a stir Working in his favor was the fact that this sa Kittridge’s IP address was functionally untraceable, backstopped by a daisy chain of anonyht Most were overseas: Russia, China, Indonesia, Israel, Sudan Places beyond easy reach for any federal agency that -two million hits the first day-had more than three hundred mirror sites, with more added all the time It didn’t take a week before he was a bona fide ide phenoes found their way into the ether without his lifting a finger One of his fan sites alone had more than two million subscribers; on eBay, T-shirts that read, I AM LAST STAND IN DENVER were selling like hotcakes
His father had always said, Son, thein life is to e’s contribution would be video-blogging from the front lines of the apocalypse?
And yet the world went on The sun still shone To the west, the ed their indifferent rocky bulk at man’s departure For a while, there had been a lot of sround-but now this had dissipated, revealing the desolation with eerie clarity At night, regions of blackness blotted the city, but elsewhere, lights still glittered in the gloo stations and convenience stores with their distinctive fluorescent glow, porch lights left burning for their owners’ return While Kittridge hteen floors below still dutifully turned froain
He wasn’t lonely Loneliness had left hio He was thirty-four years old A little heavier than he would have liked-with his leg, it was hard to keep the weight off-but still strong He’d been married once, years before He remembered that period of his life as twenty months of oversexed, connubial bliss, followed by an equal nu, accusations and counteraccusations, until the whole thing sank like a rock, and he was content, on the whole, that this union had produced no children His connection to Denver was neither sentiotten out of the VA, it was simply where he’d landed Everyone said that a decorated veteran should have little trouble finding work And e had been in no hurry He’d spent the better part of a year just reading-the usual stuff at first, cop novels and thrillers, but eventually had found his way to , For Whom the Bell Tolls, Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby He’d spent a whole h Moby-Dick Most were books he felt he ought to read, the ones he’d soenuinely likedin the quiet of his studio apartment, hisa long drink after years of thirst He’d even enrolled in a few classes at the co the day, reading and writing his papers at nights and on his lunch hour There was soes of these books that had the power toto before the dark currents of hter days, he could even see hi on this way for some time A small but passable life
And then, of course, the end of the world had happened
The e had finished uploading the previous night’s footage and was sitting on the patio, reading Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities-the English barrister Sydney Carton had just declared his everlasting love for Lucie Manette, the fiancee of the haplessly idealistic Charles Darnay-when the thought touched hi could only be improved by a dish of ice cream Warren’s enormous kitchen-you could run a five-star restaurant out of the thing-had been, unsurprisingly, al since throay the er contents of the fridge But the guy obviously had a weakness for Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie, because the freezer was crammed with the stuff Not Chunky Monkey or Cherry Garcia or Phish Food or even plain old vanilla Just Chocolate Fudge Brownie Kittridge would have liked so to be no more ice cream for a while, but with little else to eat besides canned soup and crackers, he was hardly going to co his book on the arlass door into the penthouse
By the tiun to sense that soh this i specific It wasn’t until he opened the carton and sank his spoon into a soft e Brownie that he fully understood
He tried a light switch Nothing Helamps and switches All were the sae paused and took a deep breath Okay, he thought, okay This was to be expected If anything, this was long overdue He checked his watch: 9:32 AM Sunset was a little after eight Ten and a half hours to get his ass gone
He threw together a rucksack of supplies: protein bars, bottles of water, clean socks and underwear, his first-aid kit, a war hell with hi), a toothbrush, and a razor For a , but this seeret he put it aside In the bedrooo pants, topping this off with a hunting vest and a pair of light hikers For a fewon a Bowie knife, a pair of Glock 19s, and the retrofitted Polish AK with the folding stock: useless at any kind of range but reliable close in, where he expected to be The Glocks fit snugly in a cross-draw holster He filled the pockets of his vest with loaded , hoisted the backpack over his shoulders, and returned to the patio
That hen he noticed the traffic signal on the avenue Green, yellow, red Green, yellow, red It could have been a fluke, but he doubted it
They’d found hie stack on the roof He stepped into his rappelling harness, clipped in, and swung first his good leg and then his bad one over the railing Heights were no problem for hie of the balcony, facing the s of the penthouse Fro helicopter
Last Stand in Denver, signing off
With a push he was aloft, his body lobbing down and away One story, two stories, three, the rope sh his hands: he landed on the balcony of the apart of pain shot upward froritted his teeth to force it away The helicopter was closing in now, the thrus He peeled off his harness, drew one of the Glocks, and fired a single shot to shatter the glass of the balcony door
The air of the apartment was stale, like the inside of a cabin sealed for winter Heavy furniture, giltof a horse over the fireplace; froh the becallance At the door he paused to attach a spotlight to the rail of the AK and stepped out into the hall, headed for the stairs
In his pocket were the keys to the Ferrari, parked in the building’s underground garage, sixteen floors below Kittridge shouldered open the door of the stairwell, quickly sweeping the space with the beam from the AK, up and down Clear He withdrew a flare from his vest and used his teeth to unscrew the plastic top, exposing the igniter button With a coe held it over the side, taking ai down there, he’d know it soon His eyes followed the flare as ita contrail of smoke Soht Kittridge counted to ten Nothing, no movement at all
Three flares later he reached the bottom; a heavy steel door with a push bar and a se The floor was littered with trash: pop cans, candy bar wrappers, tins of food A ru shohere so, as he had