Afterwar

by Lilith Saintcrow

  When you were a raider, good folk could mean anything from “knows their ass from a hole in the ground” to “won’t give you up if the Firsters come knocking.”

  Both were rare, and the overlapping space in the middle even rarer.

  “Yes ma’am.” Chuck nodded. “You was with McCall, right? Harpies? You know a kid named DeShawn?”

  Lara turned the smokes over. It was a half-full pack of Camels, stuffed with nicotine, not the new smokes they called candies. Old-school, old-fashioned, good enough to buy a week’s worth of food if you had a contact on the kitchen staff. You would have to be careful not to let your contact get greedy, ration them out by ones and have a good place to hide the balance. Everything that could be stolen would be, unless you were smart, fast, and vicious.

  Regular criminals got the kitchen and sorting sheds, the light labor. The twenty-niners—resisters, deniers, and partisans, politicals by default—could barely dream of such easy positions. It was hard labor for them, and summary judgments—a few grams of lead, as the saying went, right in the back of the neck. Jar kaptains, responsible for keeping their entire barracks in check, were “regular” criminals too. They ended up brutal if they hadn’t been before, effective, and terrified of losing their privileges.

  There’d been one good jar-kee in Gloria, and he’d been shot for it.

  For the first month at Gloria, Lara had been on rock detail, until the day she almost made a break for the electrified fence. She’d straightened, dropping her wheelbarrow handles, and maybe she would have made the run if the black-jacketed Kaptain hadn’t been passing, in his high-shine boots and red-piped uniform, staring at her while her head filled up with colorless fumes. A couple hours later she’d been shoved through the warehouse doors and told to find something to wear before getting to work.

  Sorting Duty meant you could filch trade items from the possessions of pogs going straight into the baths. It was a plum position, one politicals couldn’t aspire to, and she hadn’t really understood her luck until two weeks afterward when the Joy Duty kombers came to fetch her. Those two weeks had been a nightmare of fearing someone would find out she was a political and send her back to the death hole of the quarry, or she’d be bottled and dumped in the baths…

  It took a few moments to wrench herself back to the present, and the man across from her. He’d asked her a question. DeShawn.

  “Last name?” Her throat was dry; she had to scrape the words out.

  “Williams.” His mouth set itself, sculpted lips thinning as his nostrils flared. Bracing himself for the worst.

  There was a lot of worst going around.

  She nodded, finding the face in memory. Thin Willie, they’d called him. “He was Second Band,” she croaked, trying to enunciate over the noise. Lara tapped at her left shoulder, almost crushing the carton of smokes in her fist. “Missing front right tooth. Had a star here.” Where the hot tag had been taken out of his shoulder when he escaped from the plantation in Florida. Those star-shaped scars were a death sentence if you were caught in Firster territory, either by summary or by remand to the nearest plantation for a hanging, if you were lucky.

  The unlucky were put on shit details and worked to death, after forty lashes.

  Lara watched Chuck’s face go through relief into unwilling hope, and settle itself near expecting the worst again. The man’s rifle, poking up between his knees, was a good place for him to rest his hands, and by the set of his knuckles, he was squeezing like he wished he had a Firster throat in his palms.

  “That’s him.” Chuck didn’t ask anything else.

  You learned not to. You learned to just wait.

  She shook her head. Her skull was full of emptiness, a high drilling buzz, and the bandanna made her invisible again, just another kampog. “Alive last I saw. Two weeks before Memphis when Second Band peeled off to get into position.” Another two weeks of feverish activity, running messages, scavenging for supplies; Forster and Goggles taken the day before the attack; the sick thump in her stomach when the Firsters found her medical station. The screams of the wounded, the Firsters going bed to bed putting a bullet in the head of everyone incapable of walking.

  A doctor was supposed to protect her patients.

  Chuck absorbed the news. There was nothing else she could say. The chances of Thin Willie still being alive were…not good. The squat, spit-frothing screamer initially in charge of the Memphis prisoners had made it clear what anyone who didn’t Put America First could expect from his henchmen. Partisans were the lowest form of traitors, worse even than violators of the Clean Blood Act.

  What was that screamer’s name? Galb, that was it—she’d glimpsed his breast tag. That bastard was on her list. Whenever she thought about a time after the war, if she didn’t end up in a shallow grave or a bath bay, she went over the list and thought of what she would do to each of them.

  Every single one.

  Lara leaned forward, gingerly offering the smokes back. Chuck shook his head. His own black bandanna was knotted around his temples and looked far too tight to be comfortable.

  “Keep ’em,” he said.

  Lara held still for a little bit, in case he changed his mind. Finally, though, she settled back, her hips wedged firmly against the seat. She watched Chuck’s face, his eyelids drifting down to half-mast, until the fact that she had really left Gloria began to sink in and she fell into the deathly half doze that passed for sleep in the kamps.

  When the truck stopped, she wanted to be ready.

  Chapter Five

  Total War

  March 30, ’98

  A chilly early-spring evening starred itself with blares of bright white, the spotlights stabbing skyward in defiance of any electricity rationing. Antique helicopters and the newer cell-bottomed sleds burred and buzzed overhead, the crowd raising their fists each time the throbbing mechanical heartbeat crested. On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial—the abolitionist’s statue inside draped with sackcloth and ritually spat at during schoolchild visits—the lectern was empty, but ranged on either side were the luminaries. There were the generals at the bottom of the stairs, in black uniforms except for Kallbrunner, who wore the old blues. Nobody paid much attention to him, anyway; the Marines were a faded branch, dishonored by the Parris Island Plot in ’93 and superseded by the Patriots. Kallbrunner was a frail, broken scarecrow, generally under house arrest but dusted off and brought out for the occasion.

  Which meant something special was going to happen.

  The huge LED screens, on gleeson cells like the sleds, floated serenely before the pillars. They rose slightly and sank in increments as loudspeakers blared “The Star-Spangled Banner” over and over, its hum a constant reminder. Each time it began again, the crowd would dutifully tense, and each time the chorus swelled, their voices rose with it.

  When it cut off abruptly and the beginning bars of “America First” rose, brassy and full of electric guitar shred, the crowd pushed forward against phalanxes of black-clad Patriots with their tricorne dress hats. The Patriots faced the People, just like at every rally, but the other floating screens at the back of the crowd made sure they didn’t miss a single image, a single movement of the damp, mobile mouth of First President McCoombs.

  But where was the great man? The first verse finished and the second began, everyone doing their best to remember the words. Just mouthing it wasn’t acceptable—it was too easy for a seagull-size T-drone humming by to capture your expression or the fact that your vocal profile was missing. The drones could also see if your right arm, fist raised high in the America First Salute the historians and traitors had never liked, wavered too much.

  You could be fined for insufficient patriotism, if you were lucky. If you were unlucky, well, the kamps still had room.

  They always had room.

  The second chorus, with its bloody imagery and jerky, impatient rhymes, ended. It was not at all usual for the great man to make his crowd wait this long, but there were disturbing rumors about
the war. Maybe that was what this rally was about? Nobody really knew—only that it was, as usual, obligatory to attend.

  The bridge blared from the speakers, then a swelling roar went through the crowd, front to back. The screens blipped, darkened, and the live feed came up, zooming in on a familiar, heavy-jowled face, its cheeks apricot from dermaspray, with goggle-circles—bright white above, puffy and bruise-colored below—around small, dark, glowing eyes. His thick black hair gleamed as he pursed his shiny lips, and the generals ranged behind him all politely clapped.

  Except Kallbrunner. The old man stood straight and stick-thin, his thumbs precisely arranged at his trouser seams.

  On the steps below the lectern, facing outward, stood the glittering court. Platinum-dyed Mrs. McCoombs, her broad corn-fed Kansas face set with Botox, her cat-slanted eyes heavily ringed with brown liner, smiled vacuously. McCoombs’s sleek dark-haired daughter Vanessa, trim in a Young Patriot uniform since she was that organization’s titular head, smiled blankly. Instead of her vanished, rumored-to-be-a-globalist husband Jack, Swastika Stevie the Secretary of State stood next to her, round and rumpled with pitted cheeks, his cold-coffee gaze moving in predatory arcs over the backs of the black uniforms, rarely rising to take in the crowd packed on either side of the long, rippling reflecting pool. There was the porky head of the Patriots and the New Justice Department, squeezed into an acre of black broadcloth and gleaming medals, shifting from one overloaded, black-booted foot to the other. The powerful used to be grouped alongside McCoombs when he spoke, but since the battle of Second Cheyenne, they were relegated to a space not quite spectator but definitely not shared.

  “Amerika!” McCoombs raised his arms, his small hands spread wide. The famous pinkie ring with its pink diamond glittered sharply, and his wedding band on the other hand squeezed its host finger unmercifully. “Amerika, can you hear me?”

  The crowd heard. Baying, they waved their right hands furiously overhead. Any sign of less than total excitement would be logged. The small silver oblong drones zipped and zagged in an algorithmic pattern, meant to catch the most raw data for facial-recognition-and-analysis feeds.

  Even now, the great man said, some people didn’t believe in Amerika, best of all countries. There were people who doubted Amerika would win the war, people who doubted how huge and great Amerika would be. A nasal weight filled the words. The bobbing tone, added to the habit of putting a fruity weight on any vowel—especially an ooh sound—turned it into classic leaderspeak. At least, that’s what the pundits had named it back before the Press Responsibility Initiative had made it worth a spell in a reedukation kamp to do so.

  The actor who had played McCoombs in several comedy skits late at night during the Last Election had disappeared first.

  Even now, McCoombs said, licking his lips between words, the Federal degenerates were committing atrocities in the West, slaughtering Patriots. The traitors and their immie bastards were fighting dirty against the Firster armies, and McCoombs had to do something he didn’t want to. He wanted to ask them first, though, because he was their President.

  A hysterical cry rippled through the crowd. The Patriots stood stone-faced, arms linked to make them a human fence, chests proudly forward. “U-S-A!” the citizens chanted. “U-S-A! U-S-A!”

  McCoombs let the frenzy rise, smiling in his peculiar way, his eyes almost lost under his eyebrows and his cheeks bunching at the top. When he’d had enough, he raised his hands, a gentle, fatherly motion, and his glare-pale palms quieted them. When the noise had died somewhat, he leaned into the microphone, gripping both sides of the simple wooden lectern he affected to favor, with its huge round shield—the Stars and Bars the liberals had tried to steal, with a stooping eagle over it—glinting on lase-etched metal.

  He told them what he wanted, and they erupted. Screaming, spittle flying, they didn’t even notice the drones had retreated to a safe distance, scanning with bouncers instead of risking delicate lenses in the crush and press of a mob. Seen from above, rosettes of violence bloomed—shoving matches, jostling, a ring of anger around an unlucky, too-brown face that could possibly have been an immie spy or sympathizer. The sirens wouldn’t start until later, when the crowd spread out across DC and the nightly news leapt from one city to another, blatting over loudspeakers, televisions in every home flicking to the state channel or turning on as the override signal was broadcast.

  There would be no more Federal prisoners taken. The entire economy, at last, was to be geared for war. There was to be no quarter given to immies, to sympathizers, to Federals, to anyone who lifted a finger against God’s greatest nation.

  Kallbrunner the Marine, his hands tense at his sides, gazed over the bobbing heads and raised fists. He did not move, and his mouth was a thin line as the generals around him chanted with the crowd. The leader of Amerika First, the president of a shrinking number of semi-united states, nodded along.

  Boots stamping, fists flying, somehow the crowd also found time to weep and to chant, over and over, the two words McCoombs had poured, almost lovingly, into his microphone.

  “Total war. Total war. TOTAL WAR.”

  A week and a half later, DC was bombed for the first time.

  Chapter Six

  Incoming

  April 12, ’98

  “Incoming!”

  The first mortar hit came over the pine-clad ridge—a local counterattack, maybe, or some jackshit diehard Firster commanding officer deciding to go out with a bang. The raiders hit the ground first, as usual, because you were either quick to eat dirt or you died, running behind the lines. Shrapnel whickered, peppering the canopy, and more mortars pop-thumped.

  Zampana yelled for backup, but Lara was already running toward her, bent double and scurrying between explosions of turf on either side. No helmet, not even a hat since her bandanna was knotted around her left arm now, just her filthy dark curly hair flopping as she dove for Pana, who was ministering to a couple regular grunts. One of them was gurgling on his own blood, a hand clapped to his throat—the shrapnel had sliced clean through both carotid internal and external on that side, and antiseptic foam didn’t do shit with spraying wounds. Welling, sure, all right, but spraying dispersed the proteins too damn quick. Chunks of white vertebrae showed in the wound, cervicals sheared and shattered, adding to the whole mess.

  Lara snatched a knotted blue do-rag from the grunt’s beefy arm, doubled it, and slapped it over the wound, pushing on the other side of the throat as well while she glanced at the second injured asshole. Her scrawny, dirty fingers clamped with surprising strength, and the first man’s consciousness would flee quickly; there was no saving him. The second grunt only had a splinter of flung metal through his lower leg; Zampana already had it removed and the antiseptic foam setting. Heavy black braids crisscrossing over Pana’s head were dewed with blood; sweat grimed her forehead. She nodded when her gaze met Lara’s.

  Black card. Dead where he fell, goddammit. Get his tag.

  No words were needed. Raiders knew what death looked like, and Lara had already done what she could to make it painless. More explosions. Someone was screaming for their mother, a high-pitched cry mixing with the blood and the shit and the massive noises. In a few moments that other smell would roll through the thicket of young pines and damp, smoke-belching firs, a brassy reek you couldn’t pin down, but you knew if you’d spent any time on the front lines. Death delivered en masse, maybe souls exuding a compound as they left all at once.

  It was always the same, whenever the dying started. Mama and that smell, death and Mommy.

  Lara snapped the bottom third of the Category 1’s—combat casualty, already gone, don’t bother—tag off, her fingertips slipping in blood. Zampana made one of her Christer signs, supposed to help a person leave the body or something, but Lara just pointed with two fingers at the leg wound and then at their six, toward the rear. Get him to the med station. I’ll go up. In another moment she was gone, not waiting for Zampana’s nod, dodging through smoke a
nd ground-shattering impacts, heading for another cry of “Medic! Medic!”

  Light support had already been called in. The shimmer-shaking of armored sleds, drifting on their gleeson cells and pushing aside treetops, filled bones and back teeth with a weird whining; you had to keep your mouth partly open so the change in pressure didn’t fuck up your eardrums, just like the artillery jungoes on their own slippery, straining, jury-rigged gleesons.

  Plazma shots flashed through rising smoke. The sleds began to toss cannos onto the other side of the ridge, using the canopy as a screen, shells locking onto heat signatures and biometric nags. The familiar crisscross popping of the cannos rose, and Lara skidded on her knees into a shallow declivity holding another small squad. Their sarge had taken a hit—mushroom cartridge, a chunk torn out of his left side, but it didn’t smell like the bowel was cut. Lara’s right hand plunged into her mud-crusted bag, her left peeling back uniform and pushing aside the man’s canteen, probably nothing drinkable left in there. Two of the squad were one-knee, rifles up as they covered both sides; their comms man was screaming into his handset; small-arms fire popped and pocked around them. A fallen tree, wet from the rains and sending up foul-smelling steam from a shell hit, sheltered most of them, and Lara’s head turtled between her shoulders as she found the soyplas tube she wanted by feel and tore its top edge off with her teeth. This motherfucker was lucky—blood stippled his paper-white face, she got the ragged edges of what could have been a nasty gut wound together, smearing the plasco-norpirene as it filled in, crackle-dried, and shrank. You needed a light touch to get plasco to cover everything without bunching up.

  “Sonuvabitch!” the sarge howled, but Lara already had the pop-pack of antibiotic in her left hand and smacked it over the wound with just enough force to get it to seal and discharge, but not enough to rupture the edges of the plasco bandage. The man howled and thrashed against the grunt holding his arms—it must have hurt like a bitch, especially since they were short on painkillers—and sagged, his face going pale gray, a weird smoky tint under his stubble.