Afterwar

by Lilith Saintcrow

  “Yeah, well, Zampana’s a Christer, Simms is a psychopath, Swann don’t like sleepin’ if he don’t have a hat, and you and me, we twitch all the fucking time. What the fuck you think about that? Huh?” Minjae’s round cheeks flushed and her dark eyes flashed. “We ain’t none of us right, Prinky. Cut it the fuck out.”

  He stepped back, raising his hands in surrender. “Fine. But if shit goes down, Imma say I told you so.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You do that. I’m gonna go take a shower and forget we ever had this conversation.” She pushed past him, and he could smell the healthy, oily shine to her hair as well as the simmering of an angry woman. Halfway to the door of the girls’ locker room, though, she stopped. “Prink?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I like your suspicious little brain, you know? It got us out of some trouble in the woods.” Teeth flashing, that slow sleepy smile that turned him inside out. “Just keep it on a leash, okay?”

  “Okay.” Now he felt like a dipshit. She was right, of course. Minjae was pretty much always right. He watched her hips move under the towel, and couldn’t help but think of nights when she’d slept between him and Chuck, huddled for warmth, and he’d been able to pretend…well, it didn’t matter.

  Not much mattered anymore, now that the war was over. Go home, all the Federal regulars were saying. As if home wasn’t bombed, burned, leveled, scraped flat and pissed on by black-clad Patriots and the fucking Firsters. Nothing left but this shitty work sifting through the cesspool for the biggest turds, eating leaves and drinking to blackout when he could. The war took all the good ones, and left the dregs, like Simmons, and the fucking uncanny, like the Spook.

  He also couldn’t help thinking Spook wasn’t what she was supposed to be. Something was wrong as fuck—Zampana had said as much. Had Spooky done her thing to both Pana and Swann? They didn’t seem any different, except Swann and his hat, and he could have just gotten tired of wearing the fucking thing.

  Prink found he was rubbing his hands together, over and over, dry-scrubbing. Again. Each time, it felt like his fucking finger was there, and the germs were crawling over his skin.

  Yeah, Min was right. He was jumping at shadows. Suspecting everything and everyone kept you alive behind the lines, but it also fucked you up royal.

  Prink shook his head and dug for a candy. Smoking inside was technically against regulation, but he was a raider, for fucksake. And if he waited long enough, Min might come out, and he could walk her back to the sled.

  With that prospect in mind, he almost cheered up. Still, it nagged at him.

  Everything did.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Riot

  July 22, ’98

  Nobody was in any kind of a good mood when dawn came up and they drifted over a fugee site turned into a cauldron of smoke, screams, and flapping canvas. Spooky huddled in a seat, her hands clapped over her ears, even though the sled was high enough that the noise was only a faint scratching murmur through the radio. “—in progress.” The air controller’s voice crackled over the comm. “Do not, I repeat, do not land on the east side!”

  “Get us over the base,” Swann said. His hat was back—clamped on his head like an old friend—but featherless. “God damn it. What the fuck they fighting over down there?”

  “Want me to ask?” Hendrickson steadied the controls. “We need a recharge.”

  “What’s the holdup?” Zampana called from the back of the sled. Even she was getting twitchy.

  “Riot, looks like,” Swann said over his shoulder. “The base is only a half-klick from the fugee site; fugees are at the fuckin’ gates. We’ll be down soon.”

  A general chorus of groans rose, with Simmons’s taking on words. “Then what are we doing hanging over the goddamn—”

  “Simms.” Swann pinched the bridge of his nose. “Not helping.”

  Hendrickson was close to losing his temper, finally. “It’s the only approach that wasn’t jammed.” A popping, whining zing, and the sled lurched. “Son of a fuck!” Hendrickson yelled. Red lights bloomed across the console, and Swann, tossed sideways, began cussing too.

  The sled spun, something crunched, and Minjae, still buckled in, let out a yelp of furious irritation. “Lost a panel!” Hendrickson yelled, a mad edge of glee to the words. “Hold the fuck on!” Swann was tossed again, but he managed to fall sideways into the copilot hole and clutch at the sides for dear life. Gyros whined, something else cracked, and the Federal laughed, the high, insane sound of a man facing something he’d trained for but never realized he’d have to actually do. World turning over, Zampana’s cry transforming into a prayer at the end, Sal yowling as the seat harness pinched his balls unmercifully, Simmons and Spooky deadly quiet, Prink jolted awake from the floor and breathless-cursing.

  Somehow Hendrickson got the sled level, but by then it had plunged dangerously close to the burning fugee temporaries. The sled spun on a vertical axis, canvas ripping outside the sled as it tore through the tops of large tents, guy wires snapping with musical twangs and smoke belching in through the vents, the whickering chaos filled with steam and thicker vapors.

  Spooky shut her eyes, going limp. The straps were too big, so she jolted inside the chair’s indifferently padded cradle, bumped and bounced. Round and round, spinning, trapped, anything not tied down turned into a missile, safety glass breaking, more snapping impacts as Hendrickson fought the whirling. A kaleidoscope, and softer bumps were human bodies as the sled cut through the heart of the riot, scattering fear-maddened human beasts in every direction. Screams bubbled and boiled, oddly faint outside the sled’s hard carapace. More flame belched, the cells on the sled bottom whining. The unbroken ones, sparking and overstrained, failed; the instant they did, their whine cutting off sharp and clean, the sled stopped spinning and simply dropped.

  Crunch.

  It wasn’t the initial crash that did the damage, though. It was the flip afterward, the edge of the sled digging in and the rest attempting to continue on its trajectory. Up and down changed places, dancing like water flicked across a hot pan, a sudden hot stink, and right before everything went black, Spooky thought, Oh, Lara, I’m on my way.

  “Easy. Easy there.” A familiar voice. Zampana’s bloody face swam into view, her hand cupped under Spooky’s head. “Attagirl. Look at me. Look.” Checking the pupils. Hot slick nastiness coated Spooky’s face. She coughed, feebly trying to bat away Zampana’s hands as the older woman clicked a small flashlight. “Okay. Easy, Spooks, it’s Pana. It’s me.”

  Spooky subsided. Burning. Smoke in the air. Was it the drone bombing again? No glass breaking, but the screams and the groans, and the smell of blood and bowel and…

  Everything faded away, came back again as she was lifted like a child. Where was her sister? If it was bedtime…

  “All right,” someone said. “Over here, over here. There’s another one.”

  “Shit. What happened?”

  “Firster in the bread line, they’re saying. Shoved an immie, and the whole thing just—”

  “Over here! Still breathing!”

  They picked through the wreckage, human ants swarming at a fiery hill. Screams of pain, softening as medics, camp staff, and soldiers pressed into cleanup duty kept working. Zampana, shaking off a male medic trying to get a look at the blood on her face, waved Simmons to the tent set aside for them. Spooky, cradled against his chest, was heavier than she looked. Anyone was when they were deadweight, not even conscious enough to help. He swung from side to side, staggering, but got her in through the flap.

  “Set her down there.” Hendrickson, his arm in a sling and his uniform torn into jagged strips, pointed at an empty cot. “Gently, goddammit!”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Simmons snarled in return.

  “They find Swann?” Chuck, ghost-chalky under his melanin, clutched at his shoulder and hobbled closer, a crutch socketed into his armpit. He’d lost some blood, and his uniform trousers were missing their right leg. At least, missing mos
t of the material, cut away so medics could get at crushed muscle with norpirene and foam. Thankfully, the bone was still intact.

  “Not yet.” Simmons, bloodshot eyes blazing and dust in his short-spike hair, glanced sideways. Minjae, crumpled on a cot and clustered by two field medics and a surgeon, coughed weakly. “No Prinky either.”

  “Shit.” At least the Dogg’s boots were in good shape, and they hadn’t cut the right one off, just yanked it free because it had been unlaced while he slept. Small miracles, the only kind that ever happened.

  Sometimes, even a small one was enough.

  Hendrickson hovered over Spooky’s cot, collaring a passing surgeon with his good hand and barking something. Nobody was sure whether they should treat him like a hero for bringing the sled down with everyone inside it in human-size chunks instead of bite-size, or clap him in irons for going down in the middle of a full-fledged riot and spreading fugees around like paste. The brass inside the base was, at this very moment, hearing about how someone had fired a rifle at a military flier.

  A trigger-happy soldier or a refugee who had a piece—who knew? The wreckage was still burning, along with half the fugee site.

  Spooky surfaced hazily a little after that. Hendrickson loomed over her head, his black hair wildly disarranged, glowering at a skinny, horse-faced male nurse taking her blood pressure.

  “Don’t care who you have to save, Sergeant,” he told the man, low and fierce. “This one gets priority care, and that is an order.”

  Spooky had enough time to look at the underside of his chin, blisters marching along a deep burn, before someone outside screamed, a high, agonized cry that halted all activity for a moment. It trailed off, raggedly, and Spooky pushed the nurse’s hands away, fish-flopping to get out of the blood pressure cuff.

  She knew that voice. It was Zampana’s.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Inescapable Weight

  It wasn’t Swann, though Pana’d seen the hat and let loose that gawdawful cry. No, it was Prink, smeared into a paste because he hadn’t been buckled down. Swann’s lunge into the copilot’s seat had saved him, but his hat had been knocked free, fluttered around, and ended up over Prink’s face and the charred remains of his coppery hair.

  Minjae, burned over most of her body and both her plump pretty legs broken, was finally airlifted into the base, where there was a hospital in a Quonset. She held on for sixteen hours. Zampana passed out at her bedside from shock and blood loss, but it was Chuck who took it hardest, turning his face away from any visitors and going mute. Swann, almost miraculously untouched, was with Min until the end, between her bed and Chuck’s; Zampana’s bed, with her black, black hair swallowing the crisp white pillows, was on the far side of Min’s.

  Min—and Prink—had come through the war, only to end up biting it in the middle of a shitty fugee riot.

  Simmons, one eardrum ruptured and packed with norpirene and sterigel, his face set and white when it wasn’t madly twitching on the left side, had to be physically restrained. He swore he was going down into the camp to find whoever had fired on them, and nobody who heard him say it thought he’d be particularly choosy about the evidence used to convict. But it was Sal, seemingly unharmed except for a black eye and his mercilessly squeezed nuts, who went down into the camp and began shooting every adult male he saw.

  At least he left the women alone, Swann said dully, staring down at Minjae’s torture-breathing form. Pana was sedated, but Chuck turned away, pulling his own pillow over his head.

  Swann lit a candy and stood there, smoking. Every time someone came to tell him it wasn’t allowed, they got the fierce, dull glare of a man who has had enough, and decided to go enforce the rules elsewhere. When they came to take Min’s body, he let them, but he didn’t move away. Just smoked, staring at the empty bed, his face stippled with blood and bruised up the right half. His lean nose had been broken and set; he sometimes touched the throbbing bridge gingerly, as his eyes puffed and he peered through the slits.

  It was Hendrickson who talked Sal down and got the base brass to turn him loose, and Hendrickson who got Spooky and Simmons moved into the Quonset hospital next to Chuck and Zampana. He even dragged the Reaper to a chair and set him to keeping watch on Spooky, though it wasn’t anything the big blond bastard had to be pushed too hard for.

  Through it all Swann stood, staring down at Minjae’s empty bed.

  “Sir?” Hendrickson, red-eyed, stopped at the foot, his full, chiseled mouth pulled tight and bitter. “Captain Swann, sir?” As if Swann outranked him.

  Swann swayed. His rawhide-tough shoulders drooped alarmingly. He’d worked his way through two packs of candies and just…stood there, staring.

  “Sir, they’re all settled.” The Federal eased another step closer, around the corner of the bed. His sling was a white ghost, floating. Simmons sat at Spooky’s bedside, his head in his hands, possibly asleep. Zampana, still sedated, tossed and muttered. The darkness, lit only by night-lights and the bright bulbs at the nurse’s station, was full of the rustling of wounded soldiers at 0400, just past the long, breathless lagoon of time the old and the gravely ill succumb during. Soon there would be reveille, and the able-bodied would sort out more of the mess in the fugee site. “You should eat something. Or maybe some coffee?”

  Swann made no reply. He just stopped moving. In the dimness, only the glitter of his eyes, almost swollen closed, showed he was conscious and not just asleep on his feet like a horse.

  “Sir.” Hendrickson tried for Zampana’s firm-but-immovable tone. “You’ve got to eat something.”

  A faint whistling inhale, and Swann spoke softly, reflectively. “Dead men don’t get hungry, kid.”

  Hendrickson’s arm ached, but it was only physical. If he could just get Swann down, both of them could rest. “You’re not dead yet.”

  “Oh yeah? How can you tell?”

  “Because I’m alive, and you’re—”

  “Oh, kid.” Wearily. “You are, too. You just don’t know it.” He patted dreamily at his top right pocket where his smokes should be. Not finding them, he reached for his absent hat, ran his palm over his gray-bristling scalp. “This war, man. This fucking war.”

  “Come on, sir.” Hendrickson took another step closer. “A little coffee, and then you should get some shut-eye.”

  “Can’t fuckin’ sleep after coffee; you know that.” Swann shrank again inside his clothes. Funny how that could happen, a man turning inward all at once, cloth that fit him before suddenly deflated. “Go to bed, Lazy. I’m fine.”

  Hendrickson opened his mouth, maybe to say I’m not Lazy, but stopped. It reminded him of Kellogg, standing in the ashes of what had been a pretty farmhouse amid rippling waves of blasted, dead corn, looking up at the hanging rag that had been her wife, remnants of long blonde hair moving in a blood-drenched clump as the dusty wind came up. The same movement—a human being crushed under an inescapable weight.

  Instead, Matt Hendrickson approached Swann sidelong, the same way he’d seen Kellogg’s lieutenant—quiet, feral, ebon-skinned Popper Grainger—step close to his commander. Matt put his arm around the taller man’s shoulders, and was momentarily surprised by Swann’s solidity. Packed with lean muscle, the older man smelled like candy smoke, blood, pain, and a thin thread of old-fashioned aftershave. Smelled like English Leather—all the men wore it or nothing at all.

  Christ. How you could remember old advertising jingles and forget your own mother’s voice, remember things you’d rather cut out of your own brain and forget…well, all you really forgot was how to be a goddamn human being. It got burned out of you, somewhere between your first tangle with a Firster patrol and the sick knowledge that if you’d just changed course a couple degrees, someone might still be alive.

  Swann leaned into him, and Matt guided him away from the empty bed, its thin blue-striped mattress naked and glowing faintly. There was another empty mattress on Spooky’s other side, and he eased Swann down. The man tensed when Matt beg
an loosening his bootlaces, picking with his good hand.

  “Don’t worry, ain’t gonna take ’em off, sir.” Nice and quiet, that was the way to do it. “Just easy ’em up. Watches are on and the pickets are full.”

  “Good kid,” Swann mumbled. “Fucking war. Good kid.”

  Matt understood. “Fucking war,” he murmured back. He wanted to add something else—like Easy, old man, or even an absurdity, I’ve got this. But instead, he just drew a light, scratchy regular-issue blanket up over the raider captain, booted feet and all. Swann was going to feel this in the morning.

  They pretty much all would, Hendrickson thought, as he cast around for somewhere to lay his own goddamn weariness down. He ended up on the floor next to Swann’s bed, his head on his good arm and his entire body twitching, still believing it was in the sled’s thumping, bucking, spinning hell.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  The Good and the Innocent

  July 23, ’98

  “Well, speaking frankly, sir, you’re the only choice.” General Joseph Osborne sat at the plastic-covered dinette table in a scrubbed-clean bachelor’s kitchen, his back straight and his old dress uniform starched to within an inch of its life.

  “No.” Kallbrunner’s clothes weren’t starched. Nor were they the set of shabby dress blues he’d worn all through McCoombs’s tenure. Instead, the Hero of Arlington wore a faded flannel button-down over a thermal undershirt and a pair of gray wool trousers, ironed but so old they were butter-soft. “I have no desire to be a military dictator.”

  “The true test of that statement would be whether or not you handed power over after the elections.” You had to give Osborne credit for trying, at least.