The cruiser was still screaming up Third as if it were on its way to an emergency. The two cops kept up a running commentary on individuals on the sidewalk. All of it was abusive and a good percentage was homicidal.

"Look at that big fat bastard. Imagine pumping a hollow point into his fat gut."

There seemed to be nobody that they did not hate. But, Cynthia reflected, it was actually understandable that the younger cops should behave like an occupying army. That was virtually what they were. After the takeover, working on the principle of divide and rule, the NYPD had adopted the same recruiting policy that the deacons used. They went out and hired country boys from the depressed Midwest. The new rookies came as strangers to a town they disliked and distrusted, and they quickly developed a relationship of mutual loathing with its inhabitants.

They hung a tire-wrenching left on Twenty-third Street and started heading west. Cynthia realized that they were driving directly into the riot area.

"Are you going to drop me off, or what?" she asked.

"Thought we'd take a look around first. You want to see what's happening, don't you?"

"I…"She trailed off as she realized that there was no point in answering. She was going to get a tour of the riot scene whether she wanted one or not. She had seen riots before, more than enough, but she was not about to admit that. It hardly fitted with her current identity.

There was a police barricade across Eighth Avenue. A crowd had gathered on the north side of Twenty-third Street. Quiet and sullen, the rubbernecks kept a cautious distance from the line of heavily armed police. There was a smell of gasoline and burned plastic in the air, as well as the bite of lingering tear gas. Gunships circled overhead with their rotors slapping and their spotlights probing the area. As the cruiser nosed up to the barricade, two patrolmen in full riot gear, visors locked down, pulled a pair of sawhorses aside to let them pass. The cruiser had to give way, though, as a paramedic unit came through. The two cops put on their helmets and downlocked their Remingtons. They were noticeably more tense now that they were in the battle line.

"There's been a lot of casualties. St. Vincent's is having quite a problem coping," the driver said.

Shotgun grunted. "Bastards should be left in the street to bleed."

"A lot of them were."

Cynthia wanted nothing more than to be out of there.

Beyond that barrier, the power was out and the streetlamps dark. The only lights came from flickering fires, the searchlights of the slowly turning gunships, and the rotating red and blue of the dozens of police and fire department vehicles. The center of everything was the supermarket at the corner of Twentieth. It had been reduced to nothing but a burned-out skeleton of blackened girders. To the north and east, the lights on the Empire State Building shone bright and clear. Farther north, the Trump Grand Tower gleamed in the night.

"The firemen couldn't get to the blaze until about an hour ago. There were snipers on the rooftops."

"Can't take the guns away from the people." Shotgun sounded bitter. It was one of the major paradoxes of the Faithful regime that although pornography and rock music had been outlawed, it was easier than ever to get a gun. During the campaign of 2000, Larry Faithful had gotten himself so far into hock with the gun lobby that there was no way he could ever institute gun controls. In a situation of almost complete repression, the American people had the inalienable right to arm themselves to the teeth.

They passed a long line of chained and handcuffed people, covered by riot guns while waiting for transport to the lockup. Other huddled shapes draped in black plastic sheeting were obviously bodies. The car crunched over a continuous carpet of broken window glass. There were still flames inside a building across the street from the supermarket. Cynthia peered through the rear window of the cruiser. Despite all that she had seen, part of her still found it hard to believe that such chaos could result from what was really only a minor distribution screwup in the Daily Bread program. She remembered the words of Tom Weber, her political science instructor back at the camp in the woods outside Vancouver. "It's far easier to run an inefficient welfare program that fouls up all the time than just end welfare altogether. You have the advantage of appearing to do something while, at the same time, you are equipped with an ideal tool to manipulate the underclass. Faithful's Daily Bread program is the perfect example. By substituting a crude handout for every other kind of more sophisticated safety-net program, it reduced the recipients to the most degradedly dependent level. Whenever glitches occur in the system, they spark riots. If you start instigating these glitches according to a planned pattern, you are able to use them as an excuse to raze neighborhoods and relocate unwanted populations."

The cops were guffawing.

"Daily Bread."

"Sounds like a newspaper."

"So let the scum eat newspaper."

The neighborhood looked as if it were well on the way to being razed. Cynthia doubted that the A&P would ever be rebuilt. The cardboard box people would be setting up homes in the ruin inside of a week. The police stood around in tight, watchful knots, weapons at the ready, scanning the rooftops. They obviously had the area secured but were still nervous about random sniper fire. House clearing had already started. A brown-skinned teenager was being dragged from a doorway. Two cops were holding his arms, and a third had him by the hair. There was blood on his face, and his eyes were wide with terror. He put up a certain minimal struggle, and immediately the three uniforms laid into him with their nightsticks. The cops in the front of the cruiser shouted encouragement.

"Yeah! Trash that piece of garbage!"

"Beat some manners into the little bastard!"

Cynthia had had quite enough. "I'd really like to get home now."

"Don't worry, gorgeous. We'll get you home."

"It's been a long day and I'm kind of beat."

"Where were you going to? Thirty-fourth and Tenth?"

"Thirty-eighth and Ninth."

"Whatever. We'll take you up there as soon as we take a look around the side streets."

The two young cops exchanged a look that Cynthia did not like at all.

"Don't you have to call in?" she asked.

The driver shrugged. "There's no point. It's chaos back on Astor Place. Ground control's completely jammed."

He switched on the radio to prove his point. There was a babble of unrelated voices. It seemed impossible that Astor Place communication center was so inefficient. The cop had to be doing something with the radio. Cynthia was now quite convinced that they were up to no good. She wanted to get out right there, but she was not about to walk through the aftermath of a riot. The cruiser was rolling slowly through the darkness of Nineteenth Street. Shotgun was squinting into the shadows, looking as though he had been reared on old Clint Eastwood movies. Midpoint on the block they passed two flattened, burned-out buildings that were the legacy of a previous disturbance or isolated arson. Shotgun thought he saw something. He hit a switch, and a spotlight cut in.

"Goddamn deacons get to have heatseekers in their cars."

At first there was nothing – just heaps of blackened brick and broken spars that were already being swallowed up by drifts of garbage. Suddenly four figures cut and ran in among the piles of rubble. Shotgun whooped.

"There they go! They're rabbiting! Let's go get 'em!"

The driver spun the car in a screaming turn. Even though there was a makeshift trail bulldozed through the debris, the car bounced like a bucking horse, and Cynthia's head made painful contact with the roof. Shotgun was hanging half out the window, letting rip with his Remington. One of the runners went down. The cruiser screamed past the others, the driver spinning it again in a sliding 180-degree turn. The fugitives turned and ran back the way they had come.