The: soldiers, I suppose; unless they're the only racially integrated street gang outside a movie: stopped and leveled their weapons.
Eddie smiled broadly, raising his hands palm-out. "Hey, no problem. You guys the law around here?"
"We are the law and the prophets," the black man said, in a deep rich voice. "We are the nobody-fucks-with-us Portland Protective Association, and you'd better believe it."
"Where do we join?" Eddie asked.
Several of the spearmen looked at each other out of the corners of their eyes and grinned, not a pleasant expression. The man in the pedicab waved his fly whisk eastward.
"That way. Here."
He handed over two disks on strings; squinting at his, Eddie saw "Probationary Applicant" printed on it.
"Being an Associate of the PPA isn't all that easy, but you can try-and they'll find you something to do. Those let you go straight through to headquarters, and man, you do not want to be caught wandering about."
He made a lordly gesture with the fly whisk, and the two wanderers headed east. Signs of order increased; traffic on foot and on bicycles and in weird tandem arrangements hauling cargo, an occasional group of marching armored troops: and at what had been the green lawns of Couch Park, a huge pit.
Thick acrid black smoke poured out of it; a gas tanker stood nearby, feeding lines that spurted burning gasoline over the deep hole. Eddie watched a handcart pulled through a gap in the raw earth berm around the fire pit; it was heaped with skeletal bodies, some no more than bones held together by rotting gristle, some nauseatingly fresh and juicy, swarming with maggots or tunneled by exploring rats. Even now he gagged a little at the smell of the smoke, and of the carts lined up to feed it. He supposed the gasoline kept the fires hot enough that flesh and bone themselves would burn.
"Why're they doing that, Eddie?" Mack asked.
"Not enough room or time to bury them all," Eddie said. This bunch doesn't fuck around, he added silently to himself. "Rotting bodies make people sick, Mack."
The big man nodded, looking nervous. You could fight to take food or anything else you wanted, or to fend off a band after your own goods or the meat on your bones. But you couldn't fight typhus, or cholera, or the nameless fevers that had taken off nearly as many people as the great hunger, or the new sickness people whispered about, the black plague.
They went past the line of dead-carts; the guards keeping the workers to their tasks on that detail wore scarves over their mouths, and stood well back. Another civilian overseer-this time a fussy-looking middle-aged white accountant type-intercepted them. Besides his clipboard, he wore a suit and tie, the first one Eddie had seen since right after the Change.
"Doesn't anyone listen?" he half shrieked, looking at the disks around their necks. "South from here! See that building?"
He pointed to a tall glass-sheathed tower with beveled edges. As Eddie followed the finger, he saw a rhythmic blink of light from the roof; some sort of coded signal, worked with lights.
"That's the Fox Tower. Stop two blocks west of it and then turn south. Straight south to the Park Blocks; that's where the sorting is today. And you'd better be careful; the Protector himself is there this time!"
"The Protector?" Eddie asked. "He the man, here?"
The clerk's lips went tight. "You'll see. And you'd better be respectful."
Eddie looked at the line of spears, and the burning ground. Several other pillars of black smoke rose from the city, and now that he knew what they were he could easily tell them from the ordinary plumes from random fires.
"Oh, yeah, duibuqi, so sorry, no disrespecting, man. None at all.
"
The streets were mostly empty; the long rectangle of park swarmed. Several of the big grassy areas had been fenced off; some held horses, others men learning to ride horses; one fell off and staggered to his feet clutching an arm as Eddie watched.
Much of the rest of the park had been converted to vegetable gardens; a whiff told him where the fertilizer had come from. And another line of spearmen was prodding several score men with disks around their necks towards a small baseball park with bleachers, the kind neighborhood kids would have used back before the Change. Another man with a clipboard waited there; he had a belt with tools around his waist; beside him cooks were boiling something in big pots over wood fires. It smelled like porridge of some sort, and Eddie could hear Mack's stomach rumbling.
The man with the tools shouted for silence.
"All right," he said, when the newcomers had damped down the rumble of their talk. "First thing, anyone lies to us is really going to regret it-but not for long. Understand?"
Eddie preempted Mack's question: "He means if you lie and they find out, they'll off you."
"Oh," Mack said, nodding thoughtfully.
"We need skilled workers," Mr. Handyman went on. "Any blacksmiths first and foremost. Farriers too."
"Well, that lets us out," Eddie murmured; the closest he'd come to blacksmithing was a few hours of shop in high school, and he didn't even recognize the name for the other trade.
"Plumbers, fitters, machinists, bricklayers, carpenters," the man went on. "Doctors, dentists. Gardeners and farmers too. Line up over there at the desks and give the details. And people, do not lie. General laborers over here."
Over here had another bunch of tough guards, and a bin full of metal collars.
No, not my thing, Eddie thought.
There was a scattering of men and women sitting in the bleachers around the baseball field, mostly close up by home base. There were also racks of weapons near the entrance- spears and shields-and an alert-looking squad with crossbows.
Eddie nodded, unsurprised. Yeah. An elimination event.
Also there was a big horse-drawn carriage, the type they'd used to show tourists around town before the Change; it had four glossy black horses hitched to it, and another couple standing saddled nearby, with collared servants holding them. Plus six or seven big armored men, standing by their mounts. Eddie's status-antennae fingered them for muscle.
One more servant sat in the carriage, holding up a lacy parasol-a blond chick, and a real stunner, dressed in something out of a pervert's catalogue and a silver collar. Across from her was a woman in her twenties, a brunette- no collar, and a fancy dress. Leaning back against the side of the carriage with his arms negligently spread along the top of the door was a tall man who seemed to be clad in a rippling metal sheath.
A little closer, and Eddie could see that it was armor- thousands of small burnished stainless-steel washers, held on to a flexible backing with little copper rivets through the holes in their center; it clad the man from neck to knees, slit up the back and front so that he could ride a horse.
Around his narrow waist he wore a leather belt carrying a long double-edged sword and a dagger; over his broad shoulders went a black silk cloak; on his feet high black boots with golden spurs on the heels. A servant nearby held his shield and a helmet, hammered steel with hinged cheek-pieces and a tall raven-feather plume.
The face above the glittering armor was narrow and aquiline; the hazel eyes that surveyed the field were the coldest the young man had ever seen. Eddie estimated his age somewhere between thirty and forty; that sort of bony look didn't show the years much.
I think I'm in love, he grinned to himself. Man, this dude is bad! Look at those chicks, that carriage, that gear, all of this. I want a piece of it. Oh, sweet motherfucking Jesus, do I!
"Hey!" he shouted aloud. "I didn't come here to shovel shit. I came here to join the Association and fight. I want to be with you when you move out of Portland."
Mack rumbled agreement, and about a dozen others among the crowd did as well; none of them had come through since the Change looking plump but they were notably less gaunt than the others.