by Reed King
I could of pointed out that I’d heard stories from my mom about the Starve too—or, more specifically, about the Five-Month Freeze that had come before it. A few years before I was born, during the android uprising that blew up Silicon Valley, Texas stopped shipping oil to any countries that wouldn’t put in with the Real Friends© of the North to stomp the rebellion.4 It was a bad winter up and down the eastern seaboard and a brutal one in the mid-plains—this was two years before the first Arctic Cyclone system, and only a little dribble of what was to come, but at the time the cold broke all the records in the server. The Federal Corporation could barely get enough oil to grease a lug nut. Three hundred thousand people froze between December and April, and that was just the official tally.5
“Point is, ain’t nobody more Texas than me. But let’s be honest. You nothing but an ant, and so am I. It ain’t ever our wars. We’re just the ones have to live with the manure.” Bernie tapped a cartridge of fresh into a pipe and lit up. “You ever been to Texas before?”
I pressed the can of sweet tea to my neck. A bit of melting ice slipped down my back. “Until last week, I’d never even left Crunch 407,” I admitted.
“Well, just keep your peepers open. You in the land of the free, now. Some of the big boys don’t take kindly to strangers.”
“Where are we, exactly?” I asked.
“Used to be called Pampa,” she said, “till the Koreans6 bought up the penitentiary for one of their production plants. Now it’s Pampa-Juche Maximum, and a tenth of the batteries in the nation’s plasma get cranked out right in that work yard over there. Twenty-seventh largest prison in the country.”
I couldn’t imagine how there could possibly be twenty-six prison cities larger than the one I saw splooged on the horizon against a purple-neon sunset, and I told her so.
“Oh, honey,” she said. “Ain’t you ever heard everything’s bigger in Texas?” She cracked her sweet tea. “Cheers.”
I knew we should move. But after however long underground, it was nice there on that patio, looking out over a wash of plywood squats and Old World tumbledowns running up toward the glittering prison yards of smokestack and bunkers. Barnaby nosed around some cacti splintering the steps, and Sammy hung back in the shade while Tiny Tim and Bernie yammered about friends they’d once known, skirmishes along the Colorado border, and the possibility of going to war with the New Kingdom of Utah for trickle from the basin countries.
Then, suddenly, Bernie sat up. Pushing herself out of her seat, she reached slowly for the rifle.
“What is it?” I asked.
She hushed me sharply. “It’s one of them things I told you about.” She squinted out into the yard. “Wild dogs.”
Now I saw a man weaving between the tumbledown squats, doing a sweep of the singed grass, occasionally bending to collect something. He was talking to himself. Short explosions of sound reached us across the distance: Never. Hopeless. Punishment.
Bernie plugged the rifle to her shoulder. “We started seeing them around a few weeks ago, all jacked up like you could never believe.” She didn’t move, didn’t even blink, just stayed there with one eye on the scope. “We call them the wild dogs ’cause of how they lose their minds. Like animals, foaming and spitting, and dangerous too.”
Jump. It had to be. Even though it was well past a hundred degrees, I felt like shivering.
“Goddammit.” Bernie lobbed a wad of green-flecked spit on the porch. “This one’s got hold of a gun.”
He was close enough now I could see what he looked like. I’d never seen a face like that—like a corpse taken out of the ground. The bulge of a revolver strapped beneath his waistband was visible when he raised his arms.
“Well.” Barnaby tottered to his feet. “Seems like you’ve got the situation well under control. I think I’ll just nip inside for a bit, get away from the flies.” He began backing toward the door. “Anyone need anything? No? Great.”
But as he turned around he sent an empty beer can flying from where it was perched. The can bounced off the porch and landed in the dirt, and Bernie sucked in a breath, and Barnaby whimpered, and Sammy said Oh no, and Tiny Tim said Oh no, what? And I lost my voice and breath together.
Because the guy turned and stared straight at me.
I swear his eyes were three times the size of normal and black, just like Billy Lou Ropes’s had been—but roiling, sticky black, the black of shadows slickly moving. Looking into his eyes gave me a feeling like waking up in the middle of the night sick as hell realizing you’re the last person alive on earth.
For a second, he was frozen, and we were frozen too.
“Go on,” Bernie said to him. Her voice was steady. “You ain’t welcome here.”
He didn’t move. He just kept staring at us with that same inhuman gaze, as if there were nothing inside looking out.
“Go on,” Bernie said again, a little louder, making a motion with her gun. “We don’t want any trouble.”
Something moved from his ankles to his hips, snapped his spine backward, spat his head forward, unhinged his jaw, and punched out the world’s most horrible scream.
He launched for us at a sprint.
Arms up, fingers hooked like he was going to take us apart with his bare hands and suck on our eyeballs and lick our brain cavities. For a second, I was sure he would.
Then Bernie’s shot cracked him right between the eyes, clean as if she’d drawn on his forehead with a marker. He stiffened. A razor line of blood tracked down his forehead and angled down his nose. He barely made a sound when he hit the ground.
“Jesus.” I felt like crying. They were like zombies—zombies, just waiting for the signal to go for blood. What would happen when it came? “Jesus Christ.”
“How strange,” Sammy remarked. “I’ve never seen a human move so quickly.”
“Wild dogs.” Bernie lowered her gun. “At least that one was by himself. Sometimes they travel in packs. Can’t do nothing but lock your doors and pray.”
Almost immediately, a swarm of fist-sized insects set in to pick apart the Jumphead’s corpse. Two houses away, some kids edged onto the porch in the blue of a box light and tried to peg him with empty bottles and plastic caps.
“Should we call somebody to get him?” I asked.
She turned and stared at me. “What for?”
I swallowed back the foul taste in my mouth. “You can’t—you can’t just leave him there to rot.”
She sighed. “Pickers will come for him eventually. They always do,” she said. “Three things you can count on in this world, boy. Death, taxes, and someone to make money from your damn corpse.”
25
Los Alamos in New Mexico was the birthplace of some of the world’s most badass science. The physicists, engineers, and rocket scientists of the area have given the rest of Halloran-Chyung its post-dissolution flavor. It’s a country unlike any other on the continent, full of freaks, geeks, and freewheeling quanta enthusiasts who’ll run on about the possibility of interdimensional travel before you’ve had time to take a coffee and shit in the morning.
—from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA
We left the same night. There was a freight train heading west that would take us all into Halloran-Chyung—possibly, if war came, the last train headed west, at least for a Confederate age—and we had to hustle to be on it.
Luckily, and despite Texas’s rah-rah about progress and economy, the sizzle was rationed here like it was everywhere. Even after sunset, almost every house was dark, except for a few burning old-school candles or hand-crank lamps.
The freight train was enormous: forty or fifty cars, dingy with dust and graffiti, cabled together on the line. We bartered a private car that came with not one but two pillows, a pile of woven blankets we wouldn’t need, and a shiny plastic bucket so we didn’t have to fan our ass cracks over the tracks to shit. Tiny Tim and I tacked purines to the hooks screwed to the walls for that purpose: a flow of forced oxygen helped the urin
e separate quicker, and soon we’d need every drop we could get.
“You think Texas is big, wait till you get out in the Dust Bowl with nothing but lava heat and a storm of sand for days in every direction,” Tim said. “We was born in water and to water we go. It ain’t natural out where we headed, I’ll tell you straight.”
“So why go west at all?” I asked. It was true that grifters fought hard for their routes, and had to keep fighting for them—there was always competition, and always new blood waiting to swoop in. But I couldn’t believe that anyone was waiting anxiously on the coast for Tiny Tim to arrive with an empty can of ReadyBeans™. Since I’d met him, I hadn’t seen him sell a damn thing.
“I told you,” he said. “I got a lead on a big haul.”
“You mean the seed bank?” I swallowed a sigh. “You know there’s no such thing, right? You know that’s all empty talk?”
Tiny Tim just shook his head and smiled. “You gotta believe, Mr. Truckee. Else what’s the point in doing anything at all?”
“You tell me,” I said. “You’re the genius.” It was a low blow, sure, but trying to talk sense to him was like trying to make gold from a firefly’s asshole.1
The train snaked us past squats abandoned after dissolution or emptied by the vast San Antonio prisons, where a quarter of the Texas population was housed. We ran alongside the sprawling shantytowns that washed up alongside every medium- or maximum-security city, where girls in high heels and cowboy hats pimped shot-for-shot gun bars, every pay station was thick with signs barring androids from charging stations and common areas, and barbed-wire fences spiked moonlight off their deterrents. A road ribboning through the desert pointed the way to one of the hunting preserves, where criminals lost their lives at the hands of gun-toting bigwigs. Tiny Tim pointed out the way to South Lubbock Penitentiary and Reform, where he’d lost half his straw to the knife. For once, he wasn’t smiling.
In between stubbly towns, talking billboards shouted the Right to Life, and giant AR projections fingered the illegal android populations for everything from the lack of job opportunities to a rise in the crime rate. (One of them even warned of a robot plot to enslave humans for use as food supply, even though robots didn’t eat.) Chemical food plants and Russian orthodox churches the size of sprawling cities dotted the horizon; bull-riding arenas and vents the size of rocket engines fissured out the chemical scent of barbecue; there was Jesus in towering hologram thundering words of warning across the emptiness and the rack-tack ear pop from the gun ranges; there was desert scrub and shimmering heat and oil derricks crowded in the distance like spiny people walking to their execution.
I couldn’t believe how much space there was. I couldn’t cred that, for a few hundred years, it had all been the same space—bound by laws and money and a common idea about what it meant to be a person. Looking out over all that land, it amazed me not that America had fallen but that it had ever existed at all.
Amazing that so many people had tried to fight to keep it together.
Texas might of been hard to enter, but it was cakewalk to leave. I fell asleep with Grifter’s Guide fanned out on my chest, and woke up to the weird blue-green tinge of a Halloran-Chyung sky as we swayed past the border cordon—a sling of sagging fence and mostly empty guard towers. Enormous ghost cacti, hobble-backed and wet-looking, glowed ominously in the early morning light. Moonflowers were just closing their pale-white fists.
A few hours later, the train slowed to a crawl at Santa Rosa. Tim, Sammy, Barnaby, and I slunk off just before the station, taking a jump-and-roll down a bank of stubbly ground and dried-out purines.
Halloran-Chyung was different shades of membrane-pale plants and sudden explosions of ultrashock color: blood moss2 clinging to the rock crags in the distance, hardy sprays of radioactive flowers shouting from the bleached dirt. Spiky cactus plants looked like alien invaders in the half light.
Everywhere I turned I saw heavy ground artillery, national guns sweating it out in the morning sun, trying to blend in with the Gorgon cacti. The water plants were under cordon by a moat of soldiers ten deep, some of them still suited up in the South Korean uniforms they’d been shipped in.
Signs pointed the way toward Kunashiri,3 one of the largest nuclear power plants in the country, and also one of the sites of its largest nuclear meltdowns. I knew from Politics-03 that most of Halloran-Chyung was owned by the South Korean oligarchs who’d funneled money into the expansion at Los Alamos and the Halloran-Chyung Space and Dimensional Exploration Program in exchange for a steady flow of uranium—and, some people said, even a heap of finished nuclear weapons.4 I guess the fat cats in Halloran-Chyung didn’t care if Russia dropped a bomb,5 vaporized the middle of the continent, and spawned a whole new generation of eight-legged children. They’d be well out of harm’s way, in one of the sixteen other livable dimensions predicted by the newest quantum models.
We began our hike toward a public float tethered in the distance: a massive, flying sperm cell that would glide us toward Santa Fe. Halloran-Chyung bragged the largest fleet of hovercraft on the continent. Coming into Santa Fe Sung, we got knotted up in a jam not just on the road but above it. Two hovers had collided on the third altitude, and both police drones and air-traffic controllers swarmed the scene, trying to feed traffic up or down to keep it moving. When a doughy-faced goon in a sleek, fire-red sports hover tried to cut into our lane from above, he nearly dropped straight down through the windshield.
“Hey, what’s your glitch?” the float driver leaned out of the window to shout. “Your system got a bug or are you just too dumb to program it right?”
The guy just stuck his hand out the window and gave us the finger before launching into the sky again.
The float tethered in center city, and we poured off. The morning sky was liquid with drones: drones to measure radiation, drones to measure the direction of the wind and the temperature of the air, drones to record and photograph and feed data back to the Citadel.6 The fly traffic made me more than a little nervous. No telling who was up there, watching.
The streets were filthy with tourists who’d overrun the city to see the launch of Aphrodite 01. The third rocket to leave the continent in decades,7 it would be heading into orbit around Mars with a team of eight astronauts. Vendors hawked purines and water at prices that made me choke. Nuclear produce, tumorous and violently colored, sat pulsating slightly in corner veggie carts.
Pueblo-style casitas and last-century static walkways could of been lifted from the 1900s, except for nudges of smart tech: sizzle towers disguised as spiky-palmed palmettos in nu-neon shades, where shaved-headed androids crowded to juice their batteries. Swarms of nanobots formed custom ad scrolls in midair (TRY POWDER B VITAENHANCE TODAY! LISA-22, WILL YOU MARRY ME? SANTA FE ARTISTS FOR MARRIAGE EQUALITY).
“How about that?” Tiny Tim raised a fist to point. “Someone’s writ your name up there in the sky, Truckee.”
He was right. As we stood there, a bunch of flash-red micro-tech condensed in the clouds. WANTED ON CHARGES OF TERRORISM, ESPIONAGE, DRUG SMUGGLING: TRUCKEE WALLACE, 16, 5′9″. A second later, the nanobots rearranged into a semi-decent sketch of my face, except for the grimace and the bared teeth and the crazy-looking eyes. The wisps of clouds in the sky made it look like smoke was fissuring out of my nostrils.
“For fuck’s sake, stop pointing.” Even though it was so hot that my ball hairs were sweating, I wrestled my hoodie out of my bag and zipped it up high. With my visor on and my bangs pulled low, I figured I was close to unrecognizable.
“They got your chin all wrong,” Barnaby said thoughtfully. “Yours is more pear-shaped.”
“All right, all right. Look, how about you guys try and stock up on supplies, okay? I’m going to hunt down someone to ship us through Hell Valley.”8 Kink had given me an idea: if I could sell the Grifter’s Guide for half of what they said it was worth, I could buy my way into San Francisco, deliver the payload, and hope Cowell could sprout a solution from Rafikov’s old br
ain cells. Just like that, I’d be a national hero.
And then, finally, I could go home.
I laid out one of my last twenties to park it for a few hours in a cheap on-the-fly house where shower and flush prices were approaching reasonable, though I didn’t want to spring for fresh water and had to make due with powering our flow from half-filled purines from management. Still, recycled piss was better than nothing. It was obvious the whole country was on strict water rations. Signs of drought were everywhere, from the billboards blazing high-tech purines with 90 percent efficiency conversion to the lines that snaked around the block at every local wet station. The dry out here felt like sucking on chalk, and it would only be worse in Old Arizona.
Tiny Tim and Barnaby went to scrounge up as much wet as we could carry and Sammy set out to scope for a new battery pack, since her extra had been all but drained underground: Santa Fe Sung was famously pro-android and friendly to robotics.9
I set off to find a tour guide. There was no border to speak of heading into Las Vegas—all we needed was someone dumb or desperate enough to take us. Even though it was a risk, with my face blowing over half the city, I figured as long as I kept my head down, I would be okay. There must of been thousands of people swarming the city center, and if there was one thing a crumb like me knew, it was how to play invisible.
I got bottlenecked behind a flow of traffic at the entrance to the Plaza Santa Domingo–Watanabe Memorial. I counted three human-android couples openly holding hands, seemingly without fear of being arrested, and dozens of natural-born slubs topping T-shirts with slogans like I SUPPORT MIXED-WARE RELATIONSHIPS and JE SUIS CG3.10 Outside an army recruitment center, an in-house physicist was demonstrating a microscopic machine assembled entirely of quanta that would launch into a different dimension.
By the time I squeezed through the crowd to Boulevard Sony Las Muertas, a famous retail strip, I was sweating through my eyelids and thirsty as hell. The drone traffic had only grown thicker overhead, and there was a spidery feeling on the back of my neck, like I was being watched.