But as a white person, Carl Hollywood might not weather it very well at all. It was better to be across the river, in Pudong, with the rest of the Outer Tribes.
From here to the waterfront was about three blocks; but since this was Shanghai, those three blocks were fraught with what in any other city would be three miles' worth of complications. The main problem was going to be Fists; he could already hear the cries of "Sha! Sha!" boiling up from the streets, and shining a pocket torch through the bars of his balcony, he could see many Fists, emboldened by the destruction of the foreign Feeds, running around with their scarlet girdles and headbands exposed to the world.
If he weren't six and a half feet tall and blue-eyed, he'd probably try to disguise himself as Chinese and slink to the waterfront, and it probably wouldn't work. He went through his closet and hauled out his big duster, which swept nearly to his ankles. It was proof against bullets and most nanotech projectiles.
There was a long item of luggage he had thrown up on the closet shelf unopened. Hearing the reports of trouble, he had taken the precaution of bringing these relics with him: an engraved lever-action .44 rifle with low-tech iron sights and, as a last-ditch sort of thing, a Colt revolver. These were unnecessarily glorious weapons, but he had long ago gotten rid of any of his guns that did not have historical or artistic value.
Two gunshots sounded from within the building, very close to him. Moments later, someone knocked at his door. Carl wrapped his duster around him, in case someone decided to fire through the door, and peered out through the peephole. To his surprise, he saw a white-haired Anglo gentleman with a handlebar mustache, gripping a semiautomatic. Carl had met him yesterday in the hotel bar; he was here trying to clear up some kind of business before the fall of Shanghai.
He opened the door. The two men regarded each other briefly.
"One might think we had come for an antique weapons convention," the gentleman said through his mustache. "Say, I'm frightfully sorry to have disturbed you, but I thought you might like to know that there are Fists in the hotel." He gestured down the corridor with his gun. Carl poked his head out and discovered a dead bellboy sprawled out in front of an open door, still clutching a long knife.
"As it happens, I was already up," said Carl Hollywood, "and contemplating a bit of a stroll to the waterfront. Care to join me?"
"Delighted. Colonel Spence, Royal Joint Forces, Retired."
"Carl Hollywood."
On their way down the fire stairs, Spence killed two more hotel employees whom he had, on somewhat ambiguous grounds, identified as Fists. Carl was skeptical in both cases until Spence ripped their shirts open to reveal the scarlet girdles beneath. "It's not that they're really Fists, you see," Spence explained jovially. "Just that when the Fists come, this sort of nonsense becomes terribly fashionable."
After exchanging some more self-consciously dry humor about whether they should settle their bills before departure, and how much you were supposed to tip a bellboy who came after you with a carving knife, they agreed it might be safest to exit through the kitchens. Half a dozen dead Fists littered the floor here, their bodies striped with the marks of cookie-cutters. Arriving at the exit they found two fellow guests, both Israelis, staring at them with the fixed gaze that implies the presence of a skull gun. Seconds later, they were joined by two Zulu management consultants carrying long, telescoping poles with nanoblades affixed to the ends, which they used to destroy all of the light fixtures in their path. It took Carl a minute to appreciate their plan: They were all about to step out into a dark alley, and they would need their night vision.
The door began to shudder in its frame and make tremendous booming noises. Carl stepped forward and peered through the peephole; it was a couple of urban homeboy types having at it with a fire axe. He stepped away from the door, shrugging the rifle from his shoulder, levered in a shell, and fired it through the door, aiming away from the youths. The booming stopped abruptly, and they heard the head of the axe ringing like a bell as it fell to the pavement.
One of the Zulus kicked the door open and leapt into the alley, whirling his blade in a vast, fatal arc like the blade of a helicopter, slicing through a garbage can but not hitting any people. When Carl came piling through the door a few seconds later, he saw several young toughs scattering down the alley, dodging among several dozen refugees, loiterers, and street people who pointed helpfully at their receding backsides, making sure it was understood that their only reason for being in this alley at this time was to act as a sort of block watch on behalf of the gwailo visitors.
Without talking about it much, they fell into an improvised formation there in the alley, where they had a bit of room to maneuver. The Zulus went in front, whirling their poles over their heads and hollering some kind of traditional war-cry that drove a good many of the Chinese out of their path. One of the Jews went behind the Zulus, using his skull gun to pick off any Fists who charged them. Then came Carl Hollywood, who, with his height and his rifle, seemed to have ended up with the job of long-range reconnaissance and defense. Colonel Spence and the other Israeli brought up the rear, walking backward most of the time.
This got them down the alley without much trouble, but that was the easy part; when they reached the street, they were no longer the only focus of action but mere motes in a sandstorm. Colonel Spence discharged most of a clip into the air; the explosions were nearly inaudible in the chaos, but the gouts of light from the weapon's barrel drew some attention, and people in their immediate vicinity actually got out of their way. Carl saw one of the Zulus do something very ugly with his long weapon and looked away; then he reflected that it was the Zulus' job to break trail and his to concentrate on more distant threats. He turned slowly around as he walked, trying to ignore the threat that was just beyond arm's length and to get a view of the larger scene.
They had walked into a completely disorganized street fight between the Coastal Republic forces and the Fists of Righteous Harmony, which was not made any clearer by the fact that many of the Coastals had defected by tying strips of red cloth round the arms of their uniforms, and that many of the Fists were not wearing any markings at all, and that many others who had no affiliation were taking advantage of the situation to loot stores and were being fought off by private guards; many of the looters were themselves being mugged by organized gangs.
They were on Nanjing Road, a broad thoroughfare leading straight to the Bund and the Huang Pu, lined with four— and five-story buildings so that many windows looked out over them, any one of which might have contained a sniper.
A few of them did contain snipers, Carl realized, but many of these were shooting across the street at each other, and the ones who were firing into the street could have been shooting at anyone. Carl saw one fellow with a laser-sighted rifle emptying clip after clip into the street, and he reckoned that this constituted a clear and present danger; so at a moment when their forward progress had stalled momentarily, while the Zulus were waiting for an especially desperate Coastal/Fist melee to resolve itself ahead of them, Carl planted his feet, swung his rifle up to his shoulder, took aim, and fired. In the dim fire— and torch-light rising up from the street, he could see powder explode from the stone window frame just above the sniper's head. The sniper cringed, then began to sweep the street with his laser, looking for the source of the bullet.
Someone jostled Carl from behind. It was Spence, who had been hit with something and lost the use of his leg. A Fist was in the Colonel's face. Carl rammed the butt of the rifle into the man's chin, sending him backward into the melee with his eyes rolled up into their sockets. Then he levered in another shell, raised the weapon to his shoulder again, and tried to find the window with his sniper friend.