FKA USA

by Reed King

  Tiny Tim told him about getting run out of Granby and I jimmed him off before he could let too much slip. But Kink just waved off my explanations.

  “That’s a’right, kiddo. You mind your beans, and I mind mine. Just glad you made it out with both balls intact. Seems like you had a close shave.” He fingered the bullet hole blown in my rucksack.

  “You’ll never guess what saved this turkey’s neck either,” Tim said, and turned to me. “Go on. Show him the book.”

  I’d never seen a change like the one that squeezed Kink’s face into a look of wonder. He handled the cracked leather cover like it might fall apart if he breathed too hard. He stroked the spine with trembling fingers.

  “My, my, my. I haven’t caught a whiff of one of these in years,” he said. Then, a little more sharply, “You ain’t thinking of selling, are you? I’ll give you fifty freebacks for it.”

  I actually thought about it, until Tiny Tim laughed. “You still a son of a bitch, Kink, even if you gave up grifting. The book’s worth ten times that and you know it.”

  “Old habits die hard.” Kink crooked me a guilty smile. When I reached for the book back, he held on tight until the last second. “I’ll tell you one thing, kid. Everything I know about the game, I learned from that book you have there in your hands. To us buy- and sell-boys, that book is good as our Bible. If I ever meet the grifter wrote it, I’ll get down on my knees and kiss his toenails.”

  Somehow, listening to Kink talk, the book began to feel like a message, like something alive that tethered me back to Billy Lou, to my mom, to those old maps we used to walk with our fingers together.

  It wasn’t too bad there on the ridge with the steam of the springs hissing vapor toward the luminescent mold and the mushrooms slowly blowing dreams through my blood. But my mind kept turning over what Kink had told me about Burnham. With war brewing, I was running out of time to clear my name—and to stop Rafikov.

  For the thousandth time, I wished I could just press a button and shut down into sleep mode, like Sammy could. Instead, I opened up the Grifter’s Guide. If nothing else, I figured the static type would put me to sleep. Wedging my flashlight between chin and chest, I cracked open to the first page.

  INTERLUDE

  THE GRIFTER’S GUIDE TO THE TERRITORIES FKA USA

  I’ve been a grifter my whole life, in one way or another. Even before the territories were the territories, even when there was a United States, I was a grifter. There were other names for it back then. Hustler, scamster, con. I used to steal candy from the back of a local store and sell it back to the owner. I could pick a man’s pocket and get a reward for returning his wallet. Some kids are born good. Some kids are born bad. I always had a little of the devil inside, you could say, although I don’t go in for the God crap. But then again, who was I really hurting? When the world’s gone mad, you can either go mad with it, or you can go your own way.

  I always chose my own way.

  I’ve been crisscrossing these territories for twenty years now. Been to every country and in all the ungoverned lands, too, everywhere except Alaska, which they say might not even exist anymore. I’ve met plenty of people on the road, and I’ve filled in from their stories where I’ve had to.

  My goal in writing all this down was simple: to help the wanderers and adventurers and grifters like me to set down what’s out there and waiting, so you don’t get caught with your pants around your ankles and a bayonet in the back when you’re just trying to get through Georgia.

  Wherever it is you’re going, I hope this book helps you get there.

  * * *

  I can’t explain it, but that line really hit me, just punched me somewhere in the spleen. I tried to scroll forward and then remembered that with books you had to turn the pages. They were sticky with wet and it took me a click to get the hang of it.

  The Underground began as a single route connecting Odessa,1 known as the unluckiest town in Texas, to the Oklahoma border. Odessa also happens to be the birthplace of Mr. J. C. Straw. Coincidence?

  In the past twenty years the Railroad has grown to one of the biggest illegal trading routes in the country. Yes, I say trading routes, except what’s traded here is freedom, pure and simple. Criminals go in, free men come out. Poof! Like a magic trick. Except I met some people who choose not to come out at all.

  The moles get nice and cozy down there where there’s no sun to shine on them and police to pick them up or militia to take potshots at them just for walking or looking the wrong way. There are men down there blind as worms who can smell prey instead of seeing it, men in the deepest tunnels crab-walking on all fours, babies born in darkness never learn to spell a word but’ll steal up behind you and take your guts out with their bare hands—

  A spider pinged off my elbow and I nearly screamed.

  The chapter was making me twitch. I turned back to the beginning.

  GARY, INDIANA. 20—

  Ah, Gary. If New Jersey is the armpit of America, Gary must be its grundle: just as smelly, uncomfortably in between, leading straight down into the asshole of the soul. It hasn’t improved in the twenty years since I was last here, sadly. If anything, it’s worse. The strip clubs are still around, although half of them been converted into dollhouses since the state legalized android prostitution last year.2

  The whole place is crawling with guttersnipes and bums, dimeheads and hopheads and flopheads and some good old-fashioned pipe smokers, plus a bunch of Devil’s Army freaks convinced the gateway to hell must be in one of the smokestacks shitting chemicals to the sky every day. You can’t blame ’em. The sun doesn’t even rise out here anymore. The sky just turns from yellow to green, like it’s in different stages of getting sick …

  The chapter wasn’t over but I skipped ahead anyway, marveling at all the places this nameless grifter had visited, cities I’d heard of barely or not at all.

  AKRON–

  I’ve always liked the Midwest, long as you can avoid the cannibalistic cornfields and potato spuds so heavy they plunge right through to the aquifer. Even now that the Sinopec-TeMaRex conglomerate’s got their corporate fingers on every last strip of soil, and sent tens of thousands of good people to die pruning back fast-cycling crops that didn’t get the message about the sale, I like it. There’s something about the big sky, and the sun hitting all that pavement and its consumer logos. Good people too—friendly, and all of them eager to hit their daily spend limit to prove their citizenship to Big Business.

  But mostly I like the engine growl that stutters the roads like a constant heartbeat: for a grifter like me, there’s something about the wheel capital of the continent that just gets my pulse up. I like the stink of old diesel and the sweet rot of methane from the garbage plants, all those shiny hangars rolling off private shuttles for the high altitudes of New New York and cattle cars for its lower ones; pouring out flycraft for Halloran-Chyung and water carriers for the dry countries and souped-up armored tanks for the swells of New Los Angeles. The real industry isn’t in the cars, see, but in the myth of having somewhere decent to go …

  DENVER, CARTEL TERRITORY–

  Like they say, you go to Denver to die or you don’t go at all. So I admit I wasn’t feeling too swell about the outcome when I got myself turkey-trussed and frog-marched through the Underground tunnels toward Terminal Z. It was all my fault and I knew it—I’d heard a dumb rumor that the cartel would cut a deal to grifters passing through so long as they weren’t carrying trade that might cut into the cartel’s business. I should of known better than to cred it, but hey, like they say—hoping is the deadliest thing next to giving up hope for good.

  The problem was that I was late on my route because of a freak radiation storm east of the Rockies and the tornado-blown wildfires that blacked air for two hundred miles because of it. I had a pack full of brand-new Silicone Celebrity Faces™ in all the newest fames—a top haul, worth as many likes and winks in the Real Friends© as any one of their feed stars could get in a year. So I tosse
d a coin and landed with two cartel foot soldiers and four AK-47s between them.

  Things weren’t looking too good for yours truly until I had to unload my pack in front of the big boss and lo and behold he started squealing like a ten-year-old Glitterati at her very first VR concert. Turned out he was quite the fanboy of the Xtreme-Feed Star Jonny X Crash, and for the price of Johnny’s Silicone-face—and the promise that with a little skin bubbling and bone crushing and mold setting he, too, could have those world-famous chiseled looks—I was on my way again …

  THE LOWLANDS–

  Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink—unless you want some fierce runs and black vomit to go with it.

  For a week straight I’ve been sloshing through the stinking stew that used to be solid ground—towns and churches, roads and fast-food chains, all of it now washed out or furred over with the same black-green mud that sticks to everything. Back in the day we used to hear about the Flood back in Sunday school, the great rains that came to wipe out a sinful world and start the whole game fresh. Well, looks like even God’s running out of energy to get the job done how it should be …

  Least I did some good trade with some alligator folks, brought up some decent guns from the slop and been drying ’em out for weeks. They’re good enough people, the alligators, but man, could they all use a breath mint.…

  GOD KNOWS WHERE–

  Today I spent a good twelve hours sorting through the wreckage of an old torch town, burned some twenty, thirty years ago by my count, probably when the flu was spreading. For the most part I got nothing but old char turned by the seasons into grey mud, a few ribbons of melted plastic to off-load for poundage, some sheet metal I might sell to a salvage yard.

  I was about to call it quits when I caught something winking at me from the rubble of past misery. It was a pretty little bracelet, sapphire and gold, still looped around the slender little wrist bone of a skeleton almost totally intact beneath a burial mound of decades-old trash. I swear to God it’s like that woman had been lying in a surf of mud and shit and plastic just waiting for me to come along and find her. And what I get for selling this pretty little piece will keep me on my feet another three, four months even with no sales at all. So twenty, thirty years ago this biddy, whoever she was, made a pact with a no-name grifter who would one day come to her half-starving. She made a trade, even though neither of them knew it yet. Her life would buy him a few more months. Time to get back on his feet. Time to survive.

  You see, we’re all of us grifters, in the end. We’re just a little too small to keep sight of the real tally.

  Part III

  THE SOVEREIGN NATION OF TEXAS → THE DUST BOWL

  24

  You can make a fortune selling to the Texas prison towns. Just make sure to bring plenty of lubricant.

  —from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA

  In the morning—or whatever counted for morning underground—we said goodbye to Kink and went on our way. A bunch of mole children scrabbled along behind us, begging for food and usables, until Barnaby chased them off by bleating.

  We must of been fair deep into Texas: rodeo traffic picked up, with human bulls still saddled up and bleeding from where the spurs had stuck them. Even the Underground started to sprout anti-android signs; we passed at least three shitters that declared, unnecessarily, they were for humans only.

  I don’t know how long we walked—it might of been two days, or twelve. It was crazy how quickly those tunnels broke time down to mush, turned around my rhythms of waking and sleeping, red dawn and smog-set, work and sleep. Time was flashlights and echo calls, pee breaks and pit stops to decode the signs scrawled where the tunnels forked. Space was the taste of mold spores in the air. When there was light to read by, electrical bacterial, I kept on reading Grifter’s Guide, flattening myself down into those pages, into a fantasy of escape.

  In the half dark I could only think of one thing. Why?

  Not just the usual whys—why President Burnham had chosen me for this insane mission, why Rafikov might want to loose an army of black-eyed fry-boys in twenty-four different countries on the continent, why HR had pinned all the blame on me.

  This was deeper. Why any of it? Why worming through the earth, why crawling over a planet that had clearly had enough and was doing its best to boot us off into an early curfew? What was the point for me? What was the point for any of us?

  We were all going a little nutty. At a certain point, Barnaby decided to rap us his memoir from page one. He kept quoting authors he’d digested that none of us had ever heard of, and was growing teary-eyed over passages from something called No Exit.

  Just when I thought I would die, or he would, because I’d killed him, we came to a sign Tiny Tim recognized as the one we wanted. And after two more turns, a staircase.

  * * *

  My first sight of the Sovereign Nation of Texas was an old crank screaming her gourd off and a flabby organ-shaped piece of silicone coming at my head. I later found out it was called a hot water bottle, and had been used for at least a decade to gently squeeze alcohol into the rectum of Werner Castlebottom, Bernie Castlebottom’s second husband.

  Then she spotted Tiny Tim and quit trying to bludgeon me to death.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “I’ll be rammed, Tiny. Time ain’t done you any favors.”

  “Must of been saving all of ’em for you,” Tiny replied.

  “Ain’t that pretty? Too bad they didn’t cut your idiot tongue out with your brain.”

  Bernie Castlebottom wore a purple bandanna and a smock-coat that showed off the billowing rolls of flesh beneath it. She turned her head to shout at someone I couldn’t see. “Goddammit, Werner. What’d I lip you on about that door staying locked? These fools damn near give me a heart attack, popping up in my living room.”

  “Figged I did,” said a man’s voice from somewhere beneath the festering studs mounded in the corner.

  “You figged.” When Bernie laughed, she sounded like she was trying to cough up her larynx. “You ain’t never figged a single thought in your life. You supposed to have to knock,” she added, turning to me. I guessed this was her way of saying sorry. “Come in, come in. You’ll find everything’s the same around here only worse.”

  “So it goes,” said Werner. It turned out he was the mound of festering studs, a mountainous creature exuding poisonous fumes of alcohol, and wedged so tightly into an armchair I couldn’t see how he’d ever find a way out.

  “You shut your grille,” Bernie said. “Ain’t nobody talking to you.” Then, spotting Barnaby: “Now, who’s this cute little thing?”

  Barnaby dipped his head to his hooves. “Charmed, madam,” he said. “And my apologies for interrupting you so rudely.”

  “Blood and blisters, he talks too. What happened, Tiny? They lump your brain over to this little slice-and-dice?” She wasn’t far off, actually, but there was no reason to get into it and I was trying hard not to think about what would happen to Barnaby out in San Francisco. “You’re welcome here anytime, sugar, with or without these other folk.”

  She was less enthusiastic about Sammy. “Here in Texas we don’t keep truck with robots. Never trust a bit doesn’t shit sitting down.1 That’s what my dad always said. Still, I suppose since it’s here along with you…” She grunted. “Come on outside. You could fry a chicken in this heat.”

  We followed her through a kitchen the size of a postal stamp, buzzy with flies. She sent us out to the porch while she went to wrassle something cold to drink.

  The Sovereign Nation of Texas was saggy shacks and rundown one-room houses, yards littered with old couches and rusted springs, car parts and cinder blocks, all of it baking in a shimmering, dry heat that felt like it cracked your insides. Holos of the Texas flag rippled in a nonexistent breeze. In the far distance I saw a cityscape burned up by a setting sun. From the crowned barbed-wire fences and the watchtowers in the distance, I tagged it as a maximum-security town.

&nb
sp; Bernie returned with an armload of sweet-tea cans sweating against her breasts—and a rifle. I must of reacted, because she grinned. “We been having some problems with wild dogs around here. Better safe than dead, like they say.” She passed out the tea, settled down, and kicked up feet swelled by heat onto the railing. “Where you from, greenie?”

  I hesitated. Bernie hadn’t recognized me, not that I expected she would: the whole reason the Federal Corp was leaning on Halloran-Chyung was to try to rope Texas in line with its manhunt. But Texas and Crunch, United, had a long, bloody history2 and I wasn’t sure I should cop to being a company kid.

  Bernie spared me the trouble by guessing. “Let me guess. You a corporation kid, huh?”

  “From one of the outposts,” I said.3

  She waved a hand. “Let me rap to you, sweet cheeks. I’m a patriot, all right? I’m about as Texas as they come. My brother lost his hand fighting off the border surge, had to get him one of them knocked-off prosthetics, and since then that piece of shit been yanking him to all sorts of trouble. Can’t hardly be outside without his fist launching up into somebody’s face. And my granddad used to tell stories of the Starve, you know, how he made a living scouring the roads for belly-up lizards and snakes not too long in the sun. They used to catch the birds as they came falling out of the sky too. Used to call his squad the Icarus boys, for that dumb cabron tried to fly up to Jupiter thinking he’d find a squat better than this one. Huh.”