North

by Frank Owen

  The hall thundered with applause. Ruth pulled a face at Dyce: they were worried that the noise would wake Vida even in her drugged state.

  The remnants of Horse Head were smiling, uncertain but pleased with their reception. It was friendly fire.

  ‘We got to let our new guests have some rest pretty soon. They’ve all been through more than you and I can imagine. But I figured there ought to be some kind of formal introduction. So from me and the rest of us here in Des Moines: welcome! This is your home now.’

  The audience clapped wildly, flushed with excitement and the prospect of change.

  A voice from the back, near Felix: ‘Go on! Tell us about the South!’

  ‘No, no.’ Adams was holding up a placatory hand. ‘We got lots of time for that later. I’m sure these folks need to clean up and then get some rest.’

  There was a roar from the spectators, and Adams saw that his trophies wouldn’t get away so lightly.

  ‘Quiet down, please, and let’s show some respect for our guests, who’ve traveled so far to be here.’ He waited. There was shuffling and mumbling, but the Northerners let him speak.

  ‘Now, I can tell you that I did have the good fortune to speak with one of the Southerners, and he was able to confirm some of what we’ve suspected about what goes on behind the Wall.’

  Someone else shouted, ‘Fuck Renard!’ Other voices yelled, ‘Yeah!’

  ‘Well, it’s worse down South than we’d thought. The whole place is a wasteland, plagued by viruses on the air. There’s no one that side to send viruses our way – it’s Renard himself who’s poisoning the air. Some of us have suspected that for a long time, I know, but these folks bring confirmation. If their reports are true, then this handful of people here might be all the Southerners left in the whole wide world.’

  Adams let his words sink in, gauging the mood.

  ‘Of course, we’re hoping – we’re all hoping – that this group is all we need for our own work. Together we will bring down Renard! And the Wall! And end the stranglehold he has on us with his everlasting an-tee-dotes!’ He could barely be heard over the cheering as he finished off, but he gave it a try. He pumped the air with his fist.

  ‘America will be one free, diverse nation once again!’

  The audience kept up the giddy applause, but Adams had to hold his hand over the sticking plaster on his cheek. The speech had made him sweat. He paused to tamp down the covering.

  ‘We’re gonna let our new friends rest now, so please let them go to their rooms. Don’t bug them with questions – like I been doing.’ The crowd offered another, weaker laugh. ‘And tomorrow we will set our plan in action. So all of you: get some sleep. Tomorrow is a big day for us all. Tomorrow is the day Renard will remember as the beginning of the end.’

  There was something contagious about Adams’s certainty, and when Dyce looked around at the people from Horse Head, they all had confused smiles on their faces. For most of them, up until now, the only certainty had been death.

  He turned to check on how Felix was receiving the news that he was the instrument of Renard’s defeat, but he was already leaving the chamber through the gigantic carved wooden doors. He was shaking his head. Maybe that one attempt on Renard’s life all those years ago had been enough.

  The rest of the Southerners stood too and filed out between the black leather chairs and the counters.

  In the passageway outside, a woman was waiting for them, her wild gray hair tied ferociously back in a bun, her pregnant stomach bulging against the worn fabric of her dress. Surely she was too old!

  She caught at Dyce’s arm as he tried to pass the alcove where she stood.

  ‘Lock your doors tonight,’ she said in a stage whisper, and put a finger to her lips.

  ‘Excuse me?’ asked Dyce.

  ‘At night. Lock your doors.’

  ‘Why? What would want to get in here?’

  ‘It’s not about what can get in, silly,’ said the woman. Message delivered, she set her wrinkled hands over her stomach and went scurrying away down into the darkness of the stairwell. Dyce only barely caught the rest of her warning. ‘It’s about what’s already inside.’

  21

  In the late afternoon a dull siren sounded in the Capitol Building, and all the able-bodied men in the place seemed to know what to do. They came flying down the staircases and running breathless along the corridors. There was something frightening about how quiet they were. In a real emergency, you didn’t scream.

  Felix stood back against the wood paneling to let them pass. A few men had guns in their hands, and others had chosen baseball bats or iron pipes. The years in his shack had taught Felix exactly what was his business and what wasn’t – and he’d thought until pretty recently that he had had the distinction clear in his head.

  The black-and-white had shifted some now that the shack was gone and the South with it, but Felix found that the divide was still useful. A younger version of himself would at least have gone and taken a look. But a younger version of himself was the one who’d nearly met his maker, courtesy of Tye Callahan.

  ‘Best way to get your head blown off is to stick your neck out,’ Felix said to himself. Still, he was smarter than trying to ignore the world around him. That was the other way of getting yourself killed – faster, usually – and so when an elderly fighter passed, Felix asked what the fuss was all about. The old guy was panting, but his eyes were bright with disaster.

  ‘One of ours, ole Otis, captured a border patrolman. Otis had to bring him in ’cause it was pretty clear he knew what he was looking for. We always knew it was just a matter of time before Renard figured out ’xactly what was in the Capitol. But the fucker escaped right before Otis could bring him up through the sewer. Kicked ole Otis right in the sniffer with his boot heel. Hey! Speak of the devil!’

  Two men in white carried a stretcher through the groups of people, pushing against the tide. On the stretcher lay a dark-skinned man who was lights-out, knocked clean unconscious so that the blood was still pooling in his dark moustache and running in ribbons around his neck.

  The old man waved an arm as he went past. ‘Another fucking thing to do. Now we got to hunt that patrolman down before he has a chance to blab about what he’s seen – otherwise we got to move headquarters. Don’t need to tell you what a giant fuck-up that would be. Years of planning, down the toilet. But we’ll get him. Not a lot of hidey-holes in Des Moines that we don’t know about.’

  Felix nodded. The man shrugged and limped away after the others, who were moving a lot faster. Felix thought of that old story about the piper and the rats – and then the piper and the kids.

  It was still strange to talk to a man as old as himself. They didn’t make old bones, down South, and Felix was all too aware that he was on borrowed time. How could he avoid thinking about it? With every friend that passed away over Felix’s long life, and every stranger young enough to be his kid or grand-kid kicking the bucket, he felt the weight heavier around his scraggy shoulders. His time was coming: the Weatherman had already dodged too many bullets. Tye and Stringbeard had both missed him, but not by a whole lot. It had to mean something, didn’t it? That some were saved, and some went to the devil?

  Felix stayed back, watching the men as they dashed for the sewer system below the women’s bathroom, the intent written plain and ugly as hate on their faces. Purpose. Fate. Whatever you wanted to call that motherfucker. You could make your maps and measure your weather and drink yourself blind every birthday, but it never went away. Felix discerned no divinity in it. No. This was good old-fashioned destiny: it came for you and you stood against the machine or you let it go over you. He was facing the engine that Renard had set in motion, and neither of them could stop until it had done what it was meant to do.

  The stampede was over. When the hall was empty again and the echoes had settled, Felix decided that it was a good time to give himself the grand tour, undisturbed. He remembered the place as it was when he’d first visi
ted, but if things had changed even half as much as he himself had, he needed to start from scratch.

  In the foyer he passed his fingers over the numbers of the brass-plate map of the building. Had they taken the audio tour back in the day? Felix couldn’t remember. He had also forgotten about the battle-flag collection in the first-floor atrium and he perused them now, comforted and dismayed by the arrogance of old-world prosperity. The greatest nation on earth. But the ruin was in the small things: the display case had been pulled away from the wall and the empty nylon plugs protruded like bullets.

  The rooms were endless, and unoccupied. Human beings grouped together when they were afraid. Old offices were now storerooms for supplies, or dormitories where people slept in mild discomfort. Felix tried to tally against the map the rooms he’d seen and the ones he was yet to explore.

  And then he was in familiar territory – the kitchen in the old canteen, and the library, with only a skeletal score of books. Burnt for warmth, in alphabetical fucking order, and that was the way of the world.

  There was a war room too, the old Secretary of State’s office, though he couldn’t remember that from the concession talks. He padded along the carpet, peering into darkened rooms until he found it.

  It was a coffin-shaped space halved by a desk, a whiteboard on one wall and a chalk board on the other: the statistics of battle. On the hand-drawn attack plans the lines of access were inked in ancient red, like cuts. Was this real? Were these still Renard’s old scratchings?

  ‘Well, a man’s gotta start somewhere,’ he said, and kept looking.

  On the middle desk were maps, and he could tell from here that each was at different scale. These ones were new – the game plan of the Resistance, it looked like. The top one had a red-domed structure stuck onto it, blocking out the entire city of Chicago.

  He paged slowly through them. Each layer revealed what came next; the size of the red dome shrank until it was just a single building on the outskirts of the city.

  Was that it? Renard’s virus factory? It looked pretty ordinary. Was that possible?

  Felix thought it was. It was the Windy City, after all. Where else would that fucker build it? He shivered. The room was cold and airless, and the reindeer jumper was thinner than it looked.

  But one building? It was crazy to put all your poisoned little eggs in one basket, wasn’t it? Crazy and stupid. Warcraft 101. He kept staring, trying to work out the logic.

  And here it was. On the last map, around the building in a neat circle, the zone colored blue.

  No-man’s-land.

  No living man, anyway. Not anymore. Not after Renard had set up shop in plain view.

  Fuck Renard.

  But also fuck everyone else who had stood by and let it happen. How did something like this go unnoticed?

  ‘The viruses are coming from the South, my friends and neighbors,’ mocked Felix in a falsetto. ‘Oh, and don’t mind this fucking virus factory I’ve got going in Chicago.’ He lapsed back into his growl. ‘What is this? Dachau?’

  Silence was consent. He wiped his eyes. ‘It’s consent, you assholes.’ He thought of all the ruined and desolate cities, the waste and rot, the broken bonds between families and friends. Who among them deserved to live on the earth as it was now?

  None of them, that was who, and he was including himself.

  He scrubbed at his eyes. Evening was falling but there was more to see, and by God, he was in the mood to see it.

  He tried to remember that when he arrived at the two rooms behind the terraced House of Representatives, the darkest part of the building. Now that he was here, he was kind of sorry that he’d forged ahead, because the rooms were being used for something bad: he knew it. It smelt like a prisoner-of-war camp. Each door had an extra gate covering it, welded together from scrap rebar, and he bet it was Adams’s doing. That fucker had nothing to lose, him and his face that was caving in.

  ‘Never trust a Northerner, right?’ Felix whispered. ‘And now we’re backstage. That’s where I am, isn’t that so, you lying fuck?’

  He got no answer from the filing cabinets and the low-slung, sick fluorescent tubes; the faint, dark smell of the sewer below was no comfort. His gaze traveled up.

  My God. Shackles, bolted into the walls.

  Fucking shackles! Like the ones you saw in abolition museums! They were solid – so rusted that some links in the chains had fused.

  The small noise alerted him and Felix reversed as fast as he could, but already a woman had appeared at the entrance to the chamber, carrying some washing in a woven-grass basket like a peasant in one of them Dutch paintings. Clearly the drill was over.

  ‘I’m looking for the toilet,’ croaked Felix.

  ‘Oh, no-no-no-no-no,’ she said, like Miss Brown who had marched him to the headmaster when he was in kindergarten a hundred years ago.

  She set her basket down and took Felix by the arm, holding his meatless elbow too hard through the wool, then shoved him out along the passage. She pointed forcefully to the ground-floor toilets. Felix tipped an imaginary hat and followed the directions, putting on his best old-man’s walk and looking up aimlessly at the ceiling as though he’d already forgotten where he was.

  22

  Kurt stopped to check the trunk of the car just outside Saratoga, hoping for a change of clothes. Norma’s cheap old-lady perfume was making him gag and he couldn’t bear it. He felt like it was getting stronger too.

  No clothes. Instead, he found four sixty-gallon jerry cans of gas – two full, one halfway and the other empty, or as good as. He wanted to whoop. He’d never been in possession of the stuff before in his life. He dipped a finger in the gas and rubbed it on Norma’s collar. It smelt like the future and the best parts of the past – sweet and full of power.

  ‘The gods are smiling on us, Linus.’ He got back in the car and took off east, the weather worsening as he went. He found the headlights and flicked them on. It was like magic, he thought. There were some things that men could be proud of, and cars was one of them.

  He camped the night somewhere in old Nebraska. He hadn’t heard the stories of wild men and the undead come alive in the open lands once night fell. They were Native American spirits, ancestors or gods, riding their ghost horses over the rise – not pale in the moonlight but dark and purposed, come to settle an eternal score.

  He had heard nothing of the monsters, neither, the beasts spawned by the factory-farmed animals turned loose, six-legged chickens, cows grown square from their tight stalls, slack-jawed pigs that bayed but couldn’t bite.

  And there were the ghosts of the people too, of course: the unlucky ones caught out in the open and consumed, sprayed in bloody particles across the countryside they had loved, searching for their bodies.

  Kurt saw none of it, or perhaps whatever lurked in the dark knew better than to cross the boy with the blouse stained with the blood of two good women, four dead at his hands in less than twenty-four hours. Now he approached the day-old pronghorn, the multi-tool open and ready.

  ‘Got to know what you’re looking for, Linus.’ The cat was motionless in the car, curled up against the rear window so that he was as far away as he could get.

  Kurt grunted and dug into the hide of the pronghorn, scoring the skin with the side of the flat-head screwdriver until it gave way and the old blood leaked, sluggish. When he’d ripped an opening big enough, he tore it further and then slid his naked arm inside, searching for the slippery liver. ‘Got to get your hands dirty, kitty-cat. But don’t cut into the poopstring. Then you gotta throw the whole thing away.’

  He wrenched the liver out. Outside the cavity the organ flopped and glistened its deep purple. Kurt sawed at the nerves and veins that still connected it to the carcass. Linus lifted his head, sniffed, and then looked away.

  ‘Don’t be like that. I’ve not done any more nor any less than what’s right. In fact . . .’ he raised his voice, peering into the dim yellow interior of the Toyota and pointing the bloody multito
ol at Linus, ‘I got a long way still to go before things are square. Eye for an eye, doesn’t the Bible say? Well, there’s a lot of eyes at stake here, cat. There’s half a continent wiped out – humans, animals, the works. Animals, my furry friend. Your people too. That’s got to be worth something in St Peter’s big book.’

  He straightened up and slapped the wet liver on the roof. Then he set himself to collecting firewood and finding the dry grass among the wet. He stacked his finds neatly next to the body of the car, the way his daddy had taught him, along with a length of fencing wire that didn’t look too rusted. Kurt had learnt all the ways of starting a fire; back South, there hadn’t exactly been standard-issue cigarette lighters.

  He opened the car door, anticipating the leap that Linus always made for his freedom, and caught the cat. He shoved him firmly back into the vehicle, shut the door, and slid over to the central console. He pushed the plunger of the lighter in, waiting for the pop. It smelt of burning plastic. Then: the click. He pulled it out and turned it over. Like an evil eye – a floating pupil in an iris filamented with rage.

  ‘Looks a bit like you right now,’ he told the cat where he sulked on his perch at the back. ‘Tough luck, buddy.’

  He backed out of the car again and turned his attention to the fire. The grass smoked against the lighter’s coil, wet through from the storm and the relentless drizzle, but a minute later a small flame jumped to life. Kurt stuffed the driest of the grass into the wood pile and heard it sizzle.

  He pushed the wire through the liver, the tissue tearing reluctantly. Then he bent it so that it could stand over the coals.

  ‘Yes, sir. Plenty for everyone,’ he said. ‘Everyone who plays nice. You need to change your attitude, Mister Sulky Face.’