FKA USA

by Reed King

  And finally: silence.

  29

  There’s two kinds of cartels up in the Free Territories: the ones that deal in drugs and make their money offline, and the ones that deal in water and have a finger in half a dozen countries’ politics. But in my mind there’s only one difference that counts: the Juarez boys will kill you quick. But the Flow-Fists will let you die slow.

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

  Imagine being in an oven. Then imagine the oven shoved inside a furnace, and the furnace sunk into the molten core of the Earth.

  That’s what the heat in Arizona was like.

  Bone melting. Skin bubbling. It liquefied brain mass. It scorched our thinking.

  We’d crash-banged in one of Arizona’s notorious ghost towns—according to our best estimates, more than three hundred miles away from any water source.1 The only good news about being completely void on gas was it had saved us from getting torched in a skin-melting explosion. Of course, if we’d had gas we wouldn’t of crashed in the first place, but there was no point in focusing on the negative.

  Signs of crippling drought were everywhere: hydrants busted open, decades-old water-shortage notifications, dirt-clotted cisterns, and long-neglected “rain totems”—ugly fugs of wood and decomposing stuffed animals and clothing, desperate offerings to God or the local-channel weatherman. The gutters were clotted with empty plastic bottles and shriveled purines, as if on the way out of Dodge all the people had wanted to leave evidence of why they had to run in the first place. Even the air was dry, and thin, and needed a good old plumping.

  We had to move while the sun was down, even if it meant facing giant desert rats and nuclear spiders and other crazy beefed-up predators roaming the unspoiled desert. But we stopped to check the taps in every restaurant, business, or home we passed. We filled our purines with some dribbles of scalding water eked out from an old bar. From another tanning salon we scooped yellow water from a toilet tank. We shimmied through the shattered windows of a looted grocery store and scanned the aisles for bottled water or food or anything we could use. Behind a toppled shelf, we turned up a package of seaweed-flavored crackers fifty years expired.

  We took them anyway.

  Then we set out again, trying to cover as much ground as we could before the sun came up—and with it, the heat.

  * * *

  Barnaby suffered the most. It was pathetic to watch him stumble beneath all that shaggy fur, tongue out, eyes rolling in his head as if they were looking for a way to escape. But even Sammy began to error in the sun. One morning we couldn’t get to shelter fast enough and she powered down completely. Tiny Tim had to push her the rest of the way to a township, head down, sweat moving in slick slug trails over his bald head. It took her half a day to come alive again, and for all those hours I sat there chunked up with guilt, afraid she’d never wake up.

  Barnaby cried when he thought no one was listening. The dust matted his fur to filthy braids. I couldn’t believe he had liquid left to turn to tears. On day three, with the sun scorching an old gas station even through the slatted wood nailed to the windows, his voice woke me.

  “It’s my father … he won’t leave me alone … he won’t let me sleep.…”

  The effort to stand left me seeing stars. I moved closer to Barnaby and squatted so we were roughly eye to eye. The smell of him was all funk. It was like he was leaking tears out of his skin. “Hey. It was just a nightmare. All right? Just a dream.”

  He didn’t seem to hear me. “They found him one morning in his cage. He’d managed to get hold of the polyethylburitane.…”

  “I know, Barnaby. You told me.”

  “Poison. That’s what it is. Poison.” He was shivering, despite the heat. “It was my fault. I should never have been born.…”

  “Shhh, Barnaby. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.” What else was there to say? The sun through the wood slats sifted dust motes into layers of deadly gold.

  “He hated me.” Suddenly his eyes found mine and he gave a little bleat. “You hate me too. I know you do. Oh, I don’t blame you.” He was losing it. He gave a low bleat that sounded almost like a laugh. “Why wouldn’t you hate me? I’m disgusting. I’m a mistake. A freak show. I don’t belong with animals. I don’t belong with humans. I don’t belong anywhere. I shouldn’t even be alive.” He began to cry again. His whole body heaved with the shake of it.

  I’d never stopped to think about how crap Barnaby’s life had been: born suddenly into a cage, a splice-and-dice experiment without a single living friend. And then years alone, hunted and despised, taking refuge in the shell of a library with only moldy books for company. I was almost glad that we’d never reach San Francisco now. I was glad I’d never have to admit I’d lied, that his skull would never meet Cowell’s scalpel in the moneyed heart of the Emerald City, that he’d never know I was only leading him out there to die.

  “Hey.” I reached out to pat his head. His fur was clammy with sweat. But I didn’t pull away. I just stayed there, gently stroking the fur between his ears. “You belong with us,” I said.

  He wiped a bubble of snot on his foreleg. “You don’t mean it,” he said.

  “Sure I do,” I said. And I did.

  For a moment, we sat in silence. “I have to tell you something.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  He looked away, working his mouth over his long teeth. “That day with your friend, Billy Lou Ropes…” For the first time ever, the words seemed to be chewing around in his mouth, not the other way around. “I did mean to die, you know. I wanted to.”

  “I know,” I said. “You told me.”

  “Just listen.” But then he went quiet. I sat there, waiting, with the explosive sound of insects everywhere, moths as big as fists colliding with toppled metal shelves and pinkie-nail-sized ants swarming the walls. We could of been the only living beings bigger than water bugs left in the whole world.

  Finally he started talking again, whispering now. “I remember he lifted me up and I could see the long fall, the hard break, and the peace that would come.” A tremor shook him, nose to tail, like a current scrolling his whole body. “Only at the last second, I didn’t want to die. I couldn’t stand to die. I would have given anything to live. I would have begged. I was too afraid, you see.”

  He closed his eyes, shivering again.

  “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to live, Barnaby,” I told him.

  He shook his head. “I’m a coward.”

  “You aren’t,” I said. “Besides, there’s nothing wrong with being afraid either. We’re all scared sometimes. I’m scared a lot of the time.”

  “Just once,” he said with a sad little smile, “just once, in my whole life, I’d like to do something brave.”

  I put a hand on his head again. “You will,” I said, because what else could I say? We make promises to ourselves and to each other, even—especially—when our promises are lies. “You will.”

  * * *

  We were crisp and we all knew it. We would die here in the Dust Bowl formerly known as Arizona: miles and miles of a world turned bone-white, and wind that hissed through the emptiness.

  We crawled through bombed-out craters and scrolled through shopping malls reduced to rubble by homemade IEDs. Toppled water tanks looked like cracked eggs in the dust. Old Texas militia tanks still sat corroding in the weather and hacked-up Halloran-Chyung aid crates blinded the windows of the squats that survived, stained over decades to the deep maroon dust that settled everywhere. Ruined tent cities studded the horizon. Cars with dust-choked engines and their rubber tires long puddled to the asphalt sat on cracked ribbons of highway: monuments to a last, desperate exodus.

  I escaped to the Yellow Brick Road when I could, for a few minutes at a time, trying to squeeze every bit of juice from my battery pack. I stood in front of the simulated fountains, passing a hand through the pixelated water. Or I scrolled shaded VR halls, imagining I could leave my real body b
ehind, molt it like an old shell.

  When I still had the energy to talk, I talked to Bad Kitty. Even through an interface in a simulated landscape filled with druggies and pedos, I could forget all about being locked out of Crunch, United, and tagged for an armed terrorist. I could forget about Jared and Annalee, forget about my mom, forget about what I’d lost or been forced to leave behind.

  I learned her real name was Evaline, and she lived on the east side of Mount Hood in New Los Angeles, with two younger brothers, her mom, and three CARRIEs,2 the android models who had raised her. Her parents divorced after her dad fell in love with a long-legged avatar in a virtual-reality hotspot and spent half the family’s fortune on new plug-ins and flash skins for her. He was in recovery now, she told me, but she wasn’t sure she could ever trust him again.

  Her favorite smell was silicone.

  I learned when she was twelve she got fixed on the idea of tracking down the specific carrier who’d birthed her in one of the ground-level clinics, but had only gotten as far as a number: 224w. I learned her mom was pissed that the gene modulation they’d spent a fortune on couldn’t do a thing about Evaline’s sarcasm, or her habit of biting her nails.

  I learned her brothers looked like their dad, and she like her mom, but somehow the chins got scrambled and she got the cleft. Her mom wanted to razor it down but quit needling her about it when Evaline threatened to shave her head in protest.

  I learned that once she got lost in one of the poverty reservations on the other side of the 405, and she’d been swarmed by rats. Some of the slummers had come to her rescue to fight them off; there, she told me, they all bred cats as big as oxygen filters to keep the vermin out of their camps.

  If she ever got a cat, she would name him Boris. Just because.

  She was the first thing on my mind when I woke up, and the last thing on my mind when I closed my eyes. She filled my dreams, nudging me out of nightmares of Mark J. Burnham bearing down on me in a wheelchair turned the size of a ten-ton rig, of Yana Rafikov blinking at me from behind the eyes of a sixteen-legged desert spider. It gave me some comfort to think of Evaline under that blue-dome sky, surrounded by the flash of Hollywood VR Palaces and Nutri-Pill factories and Silicone-Mold3 clinics that turned people into their favorite celebrities. In a weird way, it made me feel better to know I would never have had a shot with her in real life. Staying alive wouldn’t help me turn uppercrust, and it wouldn’t make me good enough.

  Which made it just a little easier to die.

  What’s your favorite sound?

  Rain through irrigation.

  What’s your favorite time of day?

  Dawn. Sometimes they get the projection wrong, and the sun rises through midnight sky.

  What would you be, if you could be anything or anyone in the world?

  That one made her pause. Unexpectedly, she switched back to chat. “I’ll tell you what I wouldn’t be,” she said. “I wouldn’t be anything like my parents.” Then: “How about you?”

  With you, I nearly said. Instead I keyed: A cat named Boris.

  I thought she would laugh. But instead her ears drooped slightly, and her eyes turned a deep violet. “You always ask me questions,” she said, in a quiet voice. “When is it my turn?”

  I was so weak I could barely swipe commands. Soon, I said. I promise.

  But even as the words floated into the space between us, transforming to audio, a red light cut the simulation into hard flashes. I was out of power.

  I knew then I would never see her again. Quickly, I tried to memorize her irises, the soft fuzz of fur between her ears, the sweet pink spot of her nose. But I was too exhausted. I couldn’t focus.

  She tilted her head. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  I’m sure. A sudden bitter taste flooded my mouth: I was crying. But I should go.

  Suddenly, she reached out to touch me—the very first time she had. Of course, I couldn’t feel it. “Listen,” she said, with sudden urgency. “I wanted to tell you—”

  But I never found out what she was going to say. At that second, the simulation vanished, and she vanished with it, and my visor went black.

  * * *

  When I woke up, Tiny Tim was leaning over me. I could tell he’d been trying to get me up a long time. I wanted to ask what time it was but my throat was too dry. Words crumbled chalklike in my throat. My tongue tasted like the inside of a purine.

  “Here,” he said. “Drink this.”

  I was so weak he had to help me sit up. I felt the bite of plastic on my lips and wet—glorious wet—in my mouth and throat. I was so surprised I nearly coughed. The water was scalding and full of bacterial rot, but it was still the best thing I’d ever had. Too soon, Tiny Tim pulled away the bottle.

  “Where’d you find it?” I managed to say. For days, we hadn’t even had piss to convert.

  Tiny Tim had no juice to smile. “Found some bones in the basement of one of these lean-tos. Still had the bottle up to his grille. I guess it didn’t do him no good.”

  I wiped my mouth.

  “Ganked these too.” Tiny Tim held up three packages of forty-five-year-old Singles™, some of the very first flavors that Crunch ever printed: Pork-Belly Ramen, Tuna Negamaki, and Kale-Caesar Salad. I swear, I nearly cried again. But there wasn’t even enough moist left in my body to make tears.

  I hoovered the Pork-Belly Ramen, even though it was so old it had begun to degrade into its chemical flavors. We gave Barnaby the Kale-Caesar Salad and the rest of the water, although watching him chow I got backhanded by a terrible jealousy. Something violent and dark slotted strange thoughts in my head of spit-roasting leg meat and strips of fleshy pink tenderloin.

  Tiny Tim didn’t eat at all. When he tried to stand up he staggered momentarily and had to lean against the wall. But he recovered quick enough.

  “I’m stronger than an ox and more stubborn too,” he told me. “Don’t you worry.”

  Sammy had shut down completely in the middle of the night. We tried everything we could to power her on, but her interface stayed dark. Not even a blip, a beep, or an error code. I tripped a hard reboot, sweating off the stench of panic, while Tiny Tim and Barnaby stood next to me in the half dark.

  “She’s not working, Truckee,” Barnaby said softly, after my third reboot failed.

  “I know she’s not working, dammit. I’m not blind.” I aimed a kick at the wall and regretted it when my foot sank through the plaster. Wrenching it out took nearly all the energy I had left. For a while I just stood there, panting, fighting off the swells of vertigo trying to rock me off my feet.

  Finally, Tiny Tim cleared his throat. “You and me can take turns pushing.”

  * * *

  I don’t know why we went on. Maybe we were just too scared to wait for what was coming.

  After sludging for what felt like an hour I turned to see how far we had come and saw behind us the shapeless lump of town we’d left behind. We’d gone barely a quarter of a mile.

  The highway was cracked and even blistered, a skin too long exposed to the sun. Spiny desert plants punched through the asphalt. Even after dark, heat came thickly off the pavement, like clouds of insects we kicked up with our feet. On and on through the relentless dark, following the trail of the broken road. Tiny Tim and I took turns rolling Sammy, and lifting her over the worst stretches of road. I felt terrible palming and handling her while she was unconscious, but the alternative was worse.

  On, with no end in sight, no water, no hope.

  Sometime in the night through a dull buzzing in my head I heard voices and thought that at last I’d gone crazy. Instead I realized that Barnaby had begun to speak.

  “… of course the material evidence suggests the existence of not one but several earth gods,” he was saying to empty air. “The Greeks and Romans believed in polytheism, polyamory, polygamy. Marriage was initially a social contract. Only in the past forty years have we begun to see the irreconcilability of Newtonian physics and the social contr
act.…”

  “Barnaby.” Every word was painful. I tried to put a hand on his head and he jerked away. In the dark his eyes were wild and staring.

  “How dare you, sir,” he said. “This is a members-only club and we have strict rules against physical altercations—”

  “Barnaby, it’s me,” I said. “Truckee. Truckee Wallace. We’re on the road to San Francisco.”

  His face changed again. He settled down where he was with a gentle sigh. “California,” he breathed. “I’ve always wanted to go back to California. Palm trees and beach boys. Surf girls and Hollywood…” He settled his head on his hooves and closed his eyes.

  “Barnaby, wake up.” I knelt down to shake him. “Barnaby, you can’t stay here. Wake up.”

  He barely stirred. I could see his nostrils flaring gently in and out, in and out. I could see his eyelids trembling with dream.

  I could see.

  I turned to look behind me and saw a red stain at the horizon.

  The sun was rising.

  “Tim.” I tried to call out to him but my voice wouldn’t carry. “Tim.” Though I was hobbling, bent nearly double just from the effort of pushing Sammy, I caught up with him quickly. He was swaying on his feet. When I approached he cracked down onto his knees. “We have to hurry. The sun’s coming up. We need to find shelter.”

  He shook his big head. “There’s no shelter to find, Truckee,” he said.

  He was right. There was nothing ahead of us but the rusty silhouette of distant mountain ridges, more dusty road, more desert plants knuckling through the parched soil.

  “We have to move, anyway.” My head felt like it was full of flies, pinging dimly around the same idea: One foot in front of the other. Just keep going.

  “You go on,” he said. His breath came in short wheezes, like the air from a mold-choked generator. “I’ll catch up with you later.”

  If I’d been thinking straight, I would of known he was lying.