Afterwar

by Lilith Saintcrow

  “Just that you do good work, Captain Swann.” Buckley’s face lit for a moment, a flush creeping up his slablike cheeks. “Real, lifesaving work. I’m proud to know you.”

  Well, wasn’t that sweet of him. “Thank you, sir.” Swann didn’t bother to salute, just stumped for the door, not bothering to glance at Hendrickson, either. He caught a flicker in his peripheral—the young man’s hands stowing his hat, the scarring across his left fingers shiny in the golden incandescent lighting. It was past dusk, and Swann didn’t feel any better about today than he had about the last week as a whole.

  He had some thinking to do, and none of it was particularly pleasant. At least he got out of Buckley’s room without Spooky being mentioned at all.

  How long, Swann wondered, would that last?

  Zampana, her boots shiny, her black braids in place, and her expression as sour as Swann felt, peeled herself away from the wall and fell into step beside him, lengthening her stride to keep up. She didn’t ask who the tagalong was, and she didn’t jump on him with any other bad news.

  It was time, Swann decided, for a fucking drink. And to see if any more of his Riders had managed to get into trouble.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Sad Little Stiff

  It took Spooky a half hour to match the prewar map to the shell-pocked, ghostly terrain. It was easier than figuring out what the fuck in a forest, and the place was only five miles from the base’s eastern border. Bumping along in the passenger seat, Simmons smoked, his eyes half lidded and the used-sugar reek of bourbon greasing his skin. He said nothing, even when a civilian jalopy, belching clouds of cheap petrol smoke, sped through a prewar stop sign and almost hit the truck sideways. Headlights glared, Spooky leaned on the horn, and the seatbelt cut cruelly across her hips. She blew out between her teeth, downshifted, and muttered a long, entirely new word that had fuck as every other syllable.

  War damage fell away on either side, the road smoothed out, and they slid into the northeastern quadrant of suburbs, where the surrender of the city’s Firster garrison had shielded structure and infrastructure alike. The streets were still narrow and cracked but much less bumpy. You could almost pretend it was a normal neighborhood, if you ignored the dead streetlights and the flickering bright points from only some windows. Candlelight, or another open flame, because this part of the grid wasn’t turned on.

  The victors needed what electricity there was, and didn’t feel like sharing.

  There were even uninjured street signs, standing tall and regular, glittering under headlight glow. Several of the houses and other buildings hurriedly blacked their windows, sensing nothing good in a vehicle out after curfew. Spooky began to count, and found the one she wanted. It was like groping around in a dark room, one where you knew sort of where the furniture was. Enough not to skin your shins, but not enough to avoid bumping into a lamp. She missed the place on the first pass, circled another block, and cut the lights.

  Simmons crushed his candy out. He sat up, ran both hands back over his buzz cut, checked his sidearm. In the subtle glow from the dash, he looked peppier than a man who had taken down that much alcohol had any right to. “Blue house?” he said, and she nodded. Plenty of people had taken the numbers off their walls, but the mailboxes still stood sentinel over the ghosts of reflective paint lingering on high narrow curbs, most of the boxes holding tiny gold stickers pronouncing the numbered slice of real estate they belonged to.

  The blue house, thin with a high-peaked roof, frowned neglected at the street. The yard was weed-choked, the slim driveway plunging to a garage set below. Probably a split-level, which meant a tactical nightmare. He studied it as they rolled to a stop, the kerro dying with a faint whine. Two of the bottom windows were boarded, but the plywood was worm-eaten and caked with dirt—which meant it had been lying on the damp, warm ground until recently. Simmons peered past her, and now that his eyes were dark-adapted, he could see it too.

  “Girl, you are a ninth wonder.” A short, bitter little laugh. “We gonna get shot at the front door, like Lazy?”

  Spooky considered the house. Her hair, scraped and clipped back, the fried ends crinkling, was an inky cap in the dimness. “Not if we go in the back?” It could have been gallows humor, or it could have been an honest suggestion.

  Simmons paused, one corner of his mouth twitching before he sobered, staring at the house. “You think he’s gonna make it?”

  “I don’t know.” And she didn’t, because she didn’t want to. Plazma to the gut, at close range? They’d be lucky to salvage some of his intestines. The way plaz went for bone, he’d be lucky to be able to feel his legs ever again, much less use them.

  “He better.” Simmons reached for the door handle, easing it open and sliding free. The overhead light didn’t turn on, and Spooky was just as quiet on the driver’s side. The house on the left—a ramshackle brick number—exhaled a cold breath of neglect; the one on the right, like the small one across the street, flickered with candle- or lamplight. Either the residents hadn’t noticed a kerro out after curfew, or they were just glad it hadn’t stopped in front of them.

  The walkway gritted underfoot—old concrete, full of pebbles, weeds forcing up through gaps, wooden spacers rotted and providing nutrition for creeping bits of trashlife. Not like the mud of the camps, sterile and baked dry in summer, deep and sucking when it wasn’t steel-hard frozen in winter. Even dandelions and crabgrass refused to grow inside the electrified fences. The misery soaked into the ground and blighted everything.

  Simmons had vanished into a damp-breathing postdusk, the sky turned indigo as a fresh bruise. A really deep one, with serrated crimson teeth at the edges. Name that contusion, Lara whispered inside Spooky’s skull, but she ignored it. It was kind of uncanny how the big blond Reaper could simply disappear, even in gloaming when it was easy to blur.

  The house drew nearer, reeling her in. The boards over the lower windows, clotted with drying dirt, were wart-scabbed eyelids. It dozed, unaware of the woman creeping to its door. A seashell held to her ear, the song of blood moving through veins, but she strained to hear the other, subtler sounds.

  Heard nothing.

  The front door was unlocked; she pushed it open by degrees. The smell—ripe, gassy, hot weather spurring decay in the house’s hollows and crevices—boiled out. You couldn’t shut your nose off; death crawled in and greased your sinuses, thick and slick and heavy. A slight creaking, the house settling as it cooled, and she heard, suddenly, cricket song rising and falling all through the neighborhood. Tiny insects rubbing their little legs together, screaming for mates.

  It was a split-level. She waited until the feeling changed upstairs, like a storm front—Simmons was in. Stealth served raiders better than kicking down doors, especially when you knew there were only one or two hostiles. Any more, and the house would have felt different.

  Besides, a raider worked with what she had, and what Spooky had was Simmons and her own creeping catlike sense of danger. That was all.

  Simmons appeared, his face a ghostlike smear at the top of the stairs. Shook his head. He could smell it too, and pointed down. Spooky, flattened against the right-hand side away from the door hinges, slid down step by step, the reek growing thicker. The carpet was squishy—damp burrowed in, and a place without occupants started to fall apart quickly. So he’d come back, boarded up the windows, and…

  They found him on the lower level, in what had once been a comfortable finished half-basement. “Well, shit,” Simmons whispered behind her. “Someone beat us to it.”

  The corpse, bloat-squeezed into a Patriot uniform with polished buttons, sagged sideways in a straight-backed wooden chair. All around the edges of the basement ran shelving, dipping and rising crazily, swelling and shrinking, for a model railroad. It buckled and warped with the damp; the small trains and tiny painted trees and houses were discolored too.

  Spooky’s boots squelched afresh on the carpet, now alive with small moving things drawn to food. She peere
d at what remained of the puffy, blackened face under its slick of thinning reddish hair, strands sticking in the mess his head had become when the bullet tore through the back of his skull. “Bricks,” she murmured. Sergeant Brixon.

  He’d watched over what they called the quarry, digging for rocks to break in the swampy bottoms, and this guard’s favorite game was to force jar kaptains and other high-ranking prisoners to pile the stones in the press—a board sandwich with human filling and a crate on top for the stones adding more and more weight to whatever luckless prisoner hadn’t greeted Sergeant Bricks with alacrity, or who had greeted him when he didn’t want it, or had smiled, or had not smiled, who had ignored him, or who simply caught his eye.

  Sometimes they lasted a while in the press. Once or twice, even overnight.

  “Huh?” Simmons leaned down, studied the way the left eyeball bulged free, already shrunken. The Brick’s mouth was slack and teeming with foulness, and it was a wonder the uniform hadn’t split. It was one of the old high-quality wool ones, far too small for the towering, furious, fat figure he’d been at Gloria. Cross-country travel might have melted a few pounds off, but the flora and fauna in his gut were doing their best to add inspiring girth to a sad little stiff. A piece of gore-spotted paper fluttered from his knee to the floor, and Spooky tweezed it up, delicately, between index finger and thumb.

  “He was at Gloria.” She straightened, a slow unfolding. “That kamp you found me at.”

  “There’s an old woman upstairs.” Simmons turned carefully and stepped across the squishy carpet with the caution of a raider. He examined the tracks running around the room, a circuit of tiny disciplined machinery. The wires were probably corroded. “Laid out on her bed, one in the back of the neck.”

  “Probably his mother.” It seemed fantastic to credit that even the Brick had a parent. Someone had given birth to him, wiped his nose and ass, held his chubby little hands as he took his first steps. Maybe he’d even emailed or written to her from Gloria. Hi Mom, I’m a murdering bastard.

  “Looked old enough. He even put flowers on her. Fake ones.” Even a hushed tone was too loud for this hole. “How you know how to find him, huh?”

  “Papers. From that paperhead asshole in Chicago.” Plus a little help from Skelm’s head, but she didn’t need to say that. In any case, the Butcher had only heard a rumor of a man from Gloria using the pipeline. He hadn’t given her anything new.

  “Huh.” Simms sucked on his front teeth for a moment. “This place likely to be trapped?”

  “I don’t think so.” She lifted the soggy note. Her fingers ached with tension, but she had to hold gently or the paper would tear. “Why write a note if you don’t want it found? We should look around.”

  “Okay.” Simmons’s hair glowed. He didn’t sound too happy with the notion, but anything they got here would be a hedge against a Swann bollocking if the old man found out about him going off post.

  “Then,” Spooky said, “I’ll buy you a drink.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Real Fucking Eggs

  July 15, ’98

  A migraine-pink dawn found Spooky in the rankers’ bar, hunched over a plate of substandard huevos rancheros on a bed of toast and a large mug of coffee spiked with cheap whiskey. The huevos were at least fresh, none of the powdered bullshit that had been the bane of the early war infantry. The cook, McCorkle, one of his eyes swallowed up in plazma scar tissue, said that shit had been pure protein powder, meant for blocking up the intestines of anyone foolish enough to eat it in bulk. Which was pretty much what the early rankers had to do, since most of the MREs had been in depot when the West had declared McCoombs the “Caudillo of DC” during secession.

  Spooky listened to McCorkle’s spiel with half an ear, sliding her coffee mug toward the cook every once in a while for a refill. He waxed rhapsodic about finally having real fucking eggs again; the next step was cheese, but he’d organized some damn fine hot sauce and the whiskey was finally coming in real bottles instead of pots and pans dipped in whatever dirty bathtub the soldiers could find. Over the other end of the bar, a flatscreen was jury-rigged to the wall, its blue glow full of nowcast news, a blonde in a red jacket talking in front of a hastily covered Patriot seal that used to be standard on the cable talkies. The white sheet hanging over the seal was a ghost, and the lower curve of painted plastic poked out, as well as the penile stub of the musket the figure stamped in it held. The chyron underneath was full of names—politicians, mostly, from the reconstituting Senate. They were certification hearings going on, and new elections to organize.

  When Zampana showed up, hitching one hip onto the barstool to Spooky’s left and wriggling the rest of herself up with a sinuous motion, she sniffed at the plate of eggs and fixed the cook with a baleful glare. “You better have some fuckin’ corn tortillas to give me with that, Cork.”

  “Where’m I gonna pull ’em out of, woman? My ass?” Cork’s mouth twisted, his scar-socketed eye turning into an evil, leering wink. “You try gettin’ masa up here in the Great Northeast. Ain’t even got real lard in the depots, just that shitty guvmint cheese.”

  “Hunt down the long pigs and render ’em,” Zampana muttered. “Plenty around. You have coffee, at least?”

  “Yes ma’am.” He poured her a tall one in a battered old Navy mug, added a healthy dollop of the aforesaid whiskey, and slopped it onto the bar. “I’ll make you pancakes instead?”

  “Nah, I’ll have what she’s having.” Zampana curled her hands around the mug. Even on a scorching summer day, hot coffee was to be treasured. Especially if it was actual coffee, and not freeze-dried or chicory. “You got in late last night.”

  “Business.” Spooky’s arm twitched, wanting to slide around her plate. It took a conscious effort to sit up, to leave the food unprotected for even a moment.

  “Yeah, well. Get what you went for?” The other medic stared into the dark liquid. Her sidearm sat easy on her hip, and gold glinted in her ears. Most of the martinets knew to leave the Blue Companies alone by now, but some of the enlisteds might have made a mistake or two. Buddy up, Swann was always saying. Not like before, when you could pass another raider on the street and never acknowledge, not even glance at them for fear of giving them away or breaking your own cover.

  Spooky shrugged. Sitting at her elbow was a creased, battered file folder, heavy orange, filched in passing from a desk at HQ. Zampana didn’t glance at it, but Spooky edged it toward her anyway. The gore-spattered, now crinkle-dry note she kept to herself.

  Since everthing is lost I am resining in protest. She couldn’t decide if it was funny or horrifying that a man who had murdered so many, playing God, didn’t even know how to fucking spell.

  “A productive night.” The other medic made her peculiar sound of amusement, like a fox’s dry gekkering. “Anything good?”

  “Dunno. There’s a jumper in there.” A jumpdrive, one she’d turned over in her hands, thinking about it. “Could be nothing.” It could even be loaded with worms, who knew?

  “I’ll take it to tech.” Zampana glanced at the flatscreen before opening the folder to peer at its insides, and Cork, bringing her plate, possibly interpreted that as interest, or maybe was interested himself. In any case, he snatched a remote and turned the sound up.

  “—Baylock,” the blonde announcer said, and Spooky stiffened. “The complex, situated in West Virginia, is the center of allegations including human experimentation and gene editing in violation of the prewar Stark Act.” Over the blonde’s shoulder, an inset appeared, grainy footage of glass towers huddled together, their reflective faces glittering sharply under bright sunlight. “Authorities are—”

  “Huevos rancheros, ma’am.” Cork snagged the coffeepot too, and freshened Spooky’s cup. “You want another jolt?”

  Staring at the screen, Spooky didn’t appear to hear. Zampana, paging through the papers, picked up the jumpdrive and considered it. Black, the length of her thumb, high capacity.

  Cork,
maybe used to soldiers ignoring him, just left it at coffee. He shuffled back for his makeshift grill and the eternal cleanup. There would be more to feed soon, and the day drinkers to think about. The announcer kept talking—she had been a minor celebrity during the war, with her smooth delivery of the news and her mane of golden hair. Now she was probably just glad to have a fucking job.

  The inset footage had to be prewar. Spooky could never remember the sun coming out at Baylock, or any aircraft overhead until the drone bombing. Then again, would she have noticed either sunshine or sled? There was too much to occupy a kampog in sheer, stubborn survival.

  “Hm.” Zampana looked around for a fork, found one, and shut the folder decisively. “I think they’re gonna be happy with this, Spook. You want to say where you got it?”

  “No,” Spooky heard herself say, her lips numb. The screen-image of Baylock vanished, and her stomach turned around inside her once, twice, a dog settling for the night. The blonde moved on to something about a USO concert given for the troops cordoning the New York zone, but Spooky kept looking at the flatscreen, glass towers vibrating in her mind’s eye and the ozone-smelling white light of shock treatments blinding her in turn.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Our Time Now

  The center of power in postsurrender America was a brick building that had escaped shelling, now wrapped protectively in a ring of sleds above and a block-wide cordon below, MPs and checkpoints grimacing at torn-up streets. The sign had been changed to say MCCOOMBS NAVAL BASE years ago, but drunken second- and third-wave soldiers had wrenched off bits of it or just plain shot the fucker to pieces. Now there was white paint on plywood, proclaiming ANACOSTIA-BOLLING again, thank the Lord and pass the ammunition.