The Filter Trap by A. L. Lorentz

identification and affixing tags to fingers or toes when successful.
    Lee ran past the depressing sight to enter a large building to her right. Allan stopped by the placard near the door: “United States Government National Park Service: Park Police.” Candlelight flickered in the old windows. After some searching he found Lee speaking on a landline telephone. The short conversation ended as Allan came in.
    “They’ll be here in a few minutes.”
    “Who?”
    “I had a hunch USPP would have a landline to the bridge. Operational hub would normally be at Fort Point, but that’s flooded so our rendezvous is at the pavilion.”
    A Humvee and a few soldiers arrived minutes later. As they approached the bridge entrance Allan noticed more armed soldiers standing guard. The Army enforced a loose circle around the lip of the Presidio that ended where the Golden Gate Bridge began. Those well enough to make the hike up from Crissy Field hoping to leave the city found a wall of green camo with rifles at the ready.
    On the other side, Lee and Allan were ushered into the museum at the pavilion. Inside, they found silence for the first time in many hours.
    A woman in uniform, reviewing reports and scribbling notes, stopped when she heard their footsteps. She rose from behind a table at the back of the little room. “What ch’all here for?”
    Allan didn’t know her rank, or even her branch of service, but Lee’s reaction showed she must have been high up, maybe as high as Britely.
    “Sir, Second Lieutenant Green, Hickam AFB, accompanying Doctor Allan Sands. I’m here to reconvene with my crew and find our evac: Doctor Jill Tarmor.” Lowering her voice a few decibels, Lee added, “Have you seen my bubbas, sir?”
    “Bubbas?” The woman moved her pursed lips to the left for just a moment, then produced terse sentences. “Yes, I remember: what momma-birds call their chicks in the Air Force.”
    A vague smile brought attention to a long, white, diagonal scar over her lip.
    “Expected you, Lieutenant. Good news and bad news. Bad news is bad for both of us. Your bubbas got here before you. Seems the wind blew harder this direction after the professor jumped, so you two landed behind everybody else. That ain’t the bad news yet. More good news first: we found your other professor, civilians saw her on high ground before the waves hit. Now the bad news: she ain’t here. You gotta go get her.”
    “Thank you, sir. Where is she?”
    “Your target wouldn’t be far yesterday, but after what this city has been through, Coit Tower is one hell of a walk from the Golden Gate.”
    ‘Coit Tower!’ Allan remembered the same trip to San Francisco more than a decade prior. Before pulling over in the fog, they’d visited the tower. But he knew that wasn’t why she went there now. She didn’t know he was coming, after all. She reacted the same way he had when the Event happened: she went somewhere she could look up at the sky.
    The woman with the scar continued speaking as she motioned for Lee and Allan to follow her out the back door to walk down Battery Trail toward Marine Drive.
    “They’re sending me to Los Angeles. Something’s brewing, maybe something to do with your evac. Whatever it is they don’t need me to oversee mop-up here, so I can’t do much to help you. It won’t be easy to find Tarmor out there. The city is flooded, on fire, or both at the same time. I’ll send you as far as I can in a Hummer. Driver’ll have infrared to get you through the smoke down in the Holler. You can hike up the rest of the way yourselves before extraction. I need my troops here in case the crowd wakes up during the change of command.”
    She pointed into the eastern night, black flood water reflecting stars behind a veil of smoke pillars. “Anybody—any thing —left out there is a killer. Watch out.”
    “We’ll stay frosty,” Lee noted.
     
    “The water at Crissy Field must be up to people’s ankles,” Allan mentioned to the