Afterwar

by Lilith Saintcrow

  Kallbrunner’s dark eyes were faded, but still sharp. “Which aren’t scheduled yet.”

  “Have to get international observers.” Osborne tented his fingers. “Everything aboveboard. Congress has to be cleaned out, too. Legal challenges about certification and voting rights.” Joe sighed. “I don’t blame you for not wanting to. You’re just the only person everyone will follow.”

  “Right off a cliff,” Kallbrunner said heavily. “Like my Parris Island boys.”

  “Sir…” There was nothing to say, so General Leavy, sitting gingerly in a rickety tube-metal chair, shut up after the single word. The Marines, cadets and teachers alike, who hadn’t died defending the installation had been hanged, unless they were ringleaders and went in front of a firing squad. The ones who hadn’t been shot weren’t dropped cleanly, either—the gantry had been lifted to strangle them instead of giving a good swift neckbreak.

  Osborne tried again, his gin-blossomed cheeks pale except for the broken blood vessels. “America needs you.”

  “America elected that piece of shit.” Kallbrunner was not having it, but at least he was looking at them now, not off into the distance with the set, constipated expression of I’ll hear you out, but don’t expect anything.

  That got Osborne’s hackles up. “Not by popular vote. And then the New Soviet hackers—”

  “New Soviets? Is that what they’re calling themselves now? Ask them for another hand puppet.” It would have been difficult for the old man to sound more pissy-bitter.

  Patrick Leavy didn’t blame him one goddamn bit. The New Soviets were indeed in town, wining and dining and using chaos plus diplomatic immunity to the hilt. It was all the British could do to keep the ruins of their Continental Union together now that Russia had swallowed Ukraine and half of Poland again, Germany and France rearming as fast as they could, and the smaller players nervous as cats in heat. China, as usual, was waiting to see who would come out on top, while selling to both sides and making diplomatic protests about New Soviet “border incursions.” Japan was not seeing the benefit of pacifism anymore, and North Korea…well, without America minding the store, Leavy thought, the entire thing was going to hell. Independence here, commie bootlickers there, Hawaii seceding even from the West Coast bloc, the Middle East in flames because petroleum wasn’t what it used to be…

  Yes, the New Soviets would probably love to finance another McCoombs. If they couldn’t find one willing to take the job, they’d make him out of spare parts. “I’m sure they’d supply one.” Leavy couldn’t quite match Kallbrunner’s bitterness, but he could try. “Christ knows they’d love to take Alaska too, if they think we’re not looking.”

  “One problem at a time,” Osborne said grimly. He’d suggested rounding up the goddamn Russkies and interning them before shooting the whole bunch, but that was just blowhard anger talking. He quit when Leavy made the point about that being a classic McCoombs strategy, though not gracefully.

  Working this closely with a man rarely turned out graceful. Unfortunately, he and Osborne were where the goddamn writs were stopping nowadays. Leavy had no idea there would come a time when he would want politicians dealing with this crap just so he could get some sleep. The South Americans were all relatively helpful, though, except for Venezuela, and God alone knew what was happening in Cuba anymore.

  Their host pushed away from the tiny table and shook his head, still thinking about the goddamn second-to-Last Election. “We should have been smarter. I was there, young man. I saw it go down.”

  “So did I.” Leavy leaned forward. The chairs were cheap metal and flowered vinyl, and he had the unsettling thought that the Marine had deliberately kept two of the more unsteady ones for guests. Or made them unsteady. “You did the impossible, standing up to him. And surviving.”

  “You call it surviving? The fucker kept me around like a lapdog.” Kallbrunner rose, with an old man’s finicky care to each part of the gesture—straightening the knees, easing the hips, pushing the shoulders back. “Let me ask you this, son. You ever regret enlisting?”

  The correct answer was, of course, No sir, I love the Army, sir. Anything else was unpatriotic…and yet, wasn’t that how they’d gotten in this whole mess in the first place? The desire to love your country turned into a car salesman’s cheap shill and ended up a goddamn black hole.

  His neck hurt. The shrapnel in his knee, from the Topeka debacle and the retreat after, throbbed. The scar on his neck made it hard to look over his fucking shoulder too, so Leavy decided to tell the goddamn truth. “Several times. It’s not every goddamn day, but it’s close.”

  “Second Cheyenne,” Joe Osborne said, in the heavy silence that followed. He was staring at the flowered plastic tacked over the tabletop, but he still felt Leavy’s glance. “What? I know what they say about it. Have to be fucking deaf not to hear. It bought us the time we needed, but I stay up at night and think about them.” A heavy pause. “All of them. My boys and girls, dying to buy us minutes. Hours.”

  Kallbrunner paced across the kitchen, stared out the window into the ruthlessly cropped weeds of the backyard. His thin shoulders had dropped, and his spotted hands rested on the lip of the enameled double sinks. Tendons stood out on the backs, his fingers spidery but the tips blunt and spatulate. “I wonder.” After a long pause, his head drooped a little. “I wonder what my daughter would say.”

  Amy Kallbrunner. Human rights lawyer, part of the First Wave of opposition protest. Vanished into the first Reklamation Kamp—Marikopa, plunked down in Texas wasteland and run by that bastard who used to lock immies up in tin boxes during Arizona summers. The Firsters had razed it once the tide turned, before the Mexicans got close enough to liberate, and the data was so wormed…well, maybe the old man hoped.

  That was another thing. Mexico had taken all they were going to, and getting Texas back from them would be a headache. Assuming America even wanted a rump of it back. Miles of fucking nothing, and where it wasn’t the Mexicans themselves, it was inbred Firster don’t-tread-on-me fucks the Mexicans were welcome to deal with in their own way.

  Hard.

  Osborne, for once, didn’t venture an opinion. Leavy looked down at the table with its faded yellow flowers, their green stems puke colored now. What was it like, he wondered, living in this shitty shotgun shack, brought out for rallies where you were spat at and held up as a disgrace, wondering when the black SUVs were going to come and take you away, probably to the same death-hole they’d put your child in? And that was another thing—being helpless to protect your buddies, your troops, your own goddamn kid?

  A man’s nightmare. Even worse for an officer. That is, if you were any good as an officer. The stripes meant service, not royalty.

  The old Marine shook his head. His shoulders came back up, a straight bar of duty and pain settling right where the neck began. Once you carried that load, it sank in. You couldn’t wash it out or wriggle away. “I know what she’d say,” he continued meditatively. “‘Get back in the fight, Dad. It matters.’” It was a good imitation, even if it was rasped out through a throat more used to barking commands at swabbies.

  Apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Amy Kallbrunner had been all over the internet, that viral video where she blasted McCoombs. Clicks didn’t give you immunity. Not when the Firsters had both houses and the entire swollen Homeland Security department, the CIA, FBI, NSA, TSA, all the alphabet soup too craven to stop the slide into bloodshed.

  “You’re a good man.” For once, it didn’t sound like Osborne believed himself a better one.

  It was fucking uncharitable to think of your fellow soldier that way, but when you worked this close to someone, you saw the cracks. They saw yours too, but at least Osborne had the decency not to point Leavy’s out to him. The least Pat Leavy could do was return the favor.

  “No.” Kallbrunner did an about-face, and Leavy wasn’t surprised to see the old man’s faded eyes were wet. “The good and the innocent are dead. McCoombs saw to that. We’re what’
s left, gentleman, and I suspect this is just the first in a long series of unpleasant things you have lined up for me.”

  If he’d still been able to flinch, Leavy might have done so. Eventually, they were going to have to talk about Baylock, the missing Dr. Johnson, and X-Ray, as well as the fact that the New Soviets, god damn their pseudocommunist asses, and anyone else who had heard a whisper of what the Firsters were doing in North Carolina, were in the race to scoop up Johnson and his data, too.

  And the worst part? Due to a fucking two-bit refugee riot in the Dakotas taking down Swann’s team, it looked like someone else might manage to pick the prize up first.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Thought It Was Personal

  July 26, ’98

  “I dunno.” Sal kept arms folded high over his beefy chest. His hair hung, lank and oily, over his bruised face; his right eye was puffed shut. His legs were a-spraddle, probably to let his junk breathe after the beating it’d suffered, and his boots were double tied, raider fashion. “Maybe. Eventually.”

  “Yeah.” Swann kept his thumbs hooked in his belt loops. Every part of him hurt, and if he focused on that, he wouldn’t have to think about Minjae’s tortured breathing winding down, inch by inch. “Me too.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want to keep up.” Sal tested one of his legs, then the other. Built low and wide, he had an advantage in brawling, and could wire a charge in seconds flat. There was that one time in the Rockies, hitting a Firster pharmacy, and the front window lighting up with the red-and-blues that meant police. Leave? Not yet, I came to blow this fucker up, Sal had said, and did just that. A timed charge, calculated on the fly to let them get out the door and the Firsters in before the fireworks started. “It’s that…”

  “It’s that you don’t want to,” Swann supplied. “Yeah.”

  A bright, beautiful summer morning folding over the temporary base and the fugee site still reeked of smoke. “It was supposed to be over.” Sal stared at the haze on the northern horizon, glimpsed between rows of Quonsets. “The whole shitfucking thing was supposed to be over.”

  “Yeah, well.” Swann leaned back against the front of the hospital building. The candy smokers’ corner here was deserted, for once. The sun felt good, sinking into hematomas and pulled muscles, skin stretched taut over tired meat. Up in the mountains, the breeze would be full of pine instead of burning.

  That is, if the fucking Firsters hadn’t torched a house, or held one of their bonfires to get rid of seditious literature. The pines would still be fragrant even if there were a hanging, like the one that started Swann on this whole fucking merry-go-round. Little bodies, swinging back and forth. What was the name of that old song, sung in a raspy, throaty ache of a woman’s voice? Something-something fruit, hanging in the trees.

  “Why ain’t it over, Phil?” Sal’s fingers sank into his meaty biceps on either side. Holding on to whatever pieces hadn’t already been jolted free. “They signed the fuckin’ papers, why ain’t it over?”

  “I don’t know.” Papers never meant much, except to a Firster. The right ones could get a raider through a checkpoint, though. Could stave off suspicion, could get you extra rations. But you always had to worry and wonder about the times when some asshole wouldn’t abide by the stamp or the order because he had a gun, and gun meant God. “I wish I could tell you, Nicos. Hell, I wish I knew.”

  Nicos Salvatore’s shoulder touched just above Swann’s elbow. How many times had they stood like this, looking at terrain or turning over alternatives? Too many to fucking count, and there was one thing Swann had never asked. Maybe he should have. “Nic?”

  “Huh?”

  “I never asked, but—”

  “I never asked you either.” Quick, a slamming door.

  “Okay.” Let it be, then. Let the man have his own reasons.

  But then, as he usually ended up doing, Sal surprised him. “You’ll think I’m an idiot. But there’s no reason. Not a goddamn one.”

  Swann freed his thumbs. Dug for a candy. Again surprising him, Sal let go of his arms and made a gimme motion, so Swann gave him the first lit one, lit another. He said nothing.

  “Not a single thing,” Sal continued finally. “Packed up and left my shop in San Fran to sign up with the first raider crew I could find, because it was right. I thought it was, anyway. You remember that? Knowing what the right fucking thing to do was?”

  “Sometimes.” Swann closed his eyes. Took another drag. How could the sun still feel good, after all the blood and pain and artillery?

  “My grandma. She used to watch this old show, space cowboys. There was a priest on it, and he died, but when he did, he said something. You can’t do anything smart, so do something right. She always used to say that.”

  “Wise fucking woman.” Swann felt the story rising in his throat, swallowed hard. “You know what, Nic?”

  “What?” Sal didn’t look at him, and Swann knew, miserably, that he was going to confess.

  “I did the same fuckin’ thing. No family, nothing. Lived by myself and was damn happy with it.” A sigh caught him by surprise, fetching up from the bottom of his aching ribs. “One day the Firsters hung some kids. Bullshit stuff—fucking twelve-year-olds, playing at raiders. Hacked the school district’s network, wormed it to show a donkey’s ass on McCoombs’s face during morning announcements.” He shook his head. “Hung ’em. For Chrissake.” But only because they were brown; white kids would have gotten off with a warning.

  Everyone knew, nobody said it. Standing under a flood of sharp thin autumn sunshine, all Swann saw when he looked at the gallows were…kids. They were hooded, of course, but the bruising down skinny, scrawny kid necks glared at him. A man couldn’t look away from something like that.

  Plenty had, though. Swann had told himself for a long time that it didn’t matter. He didn’t vote, he kept to himself, and as long as he did, there was no reason for him to get involved. So he’d stood in the crowd, staring, and it happened all at once, like someone flushing when you were in the shower. A cold bath of hating himself for not bringing a gun. Hating himself for gawking, hating himself for doing goddamn nothing while the pronouncement was read and the lever pulled.

  Nothing made a man as furious as his own fucking cowardice. Everything after was atonement, really.

  “Damn.” Sal coughed a little. He was used to tobacco, not candies. “Thought it was personal.”

  “Ended up that way.” Swann sighed. He couldn’t even remember the kids’ names, and it bothered him. “I’ll get the paperwork for your pension. If the asshole here won’t sign off, I’ll get Spooky on him.”

  “Shit, bringin’ out the big guns for little ol’ me?” Sal leaned in a little, bumping Swann’s arm. But gently. Almost kindly.

  Sal had been with him since the beginning.

  Swann’s throat hurt for a few moments. He pretended to take another drag from the candy. “Don’t think it means I like you, motherfucker.”

  Sal’s laugh, startled at first, turned into a genuine chuckle halfway through. “Feeling’s mutual, but don’t bother.”

  “Huh?” The feeling of missing something was uncomfortable.

  “I mean, don’t bother signing me out. Come this far, might as well stay in.” Sal took another drag off the candy. “I gotta think this is worth something. Even Min. And Prink.”

  “Franco.” Shot, then gangrene.

  Sal’s eyes were half lidded. “Popper John.” Cyanide tab in a holding cell, died without giving up his fellow raiders.

  “Wills.” Choking on his own blood after Second Cheyenne.

  “Mary.” Town contact, taken in a sweep, vanished without a trace.

  “Hogan.” Running fresh vegetables to the raiders, caught by a patrol, again vanished.

  Sal probably couldn’t take it any more, so he skipped to the end of the roll call. “Lazy. The goddamn kid.” They could have gone on, really. The raider dead were numerous. If it went to fucking civilians, they’d be here all week r
eciting them. Kaddish, Hogan would have called it.

  “Yeah.” Something inside Swann’s chest eased. Just a fraction. A fraying rope, slackened right before it broke completely. The release was almost as painful as the strain.

  But not quite.

  Sal turned, almost limping. “Come on. I need my shears.”

  “Fine where I am, thank you.” Swann planted his feet to prove it.

  “No. You are not. Look at the scraggles.” The Greek drew himself up to his full height and glared at Swann with his one good eye, waving a blunt-fingered hand at his captain’s head. “Zampana needs a trim, and so do you.”

  “Fuck,” Swann groaned. But not very loudly.

  Chapter Fifty

  Seein’ the Snakes

  Inside another hastily dropped Quonset, in a large, bare commandeered room smelling of sawdust and plastic just brought out of a warehouse, it was stuffy but not overly hot. Spooky hunched in a heavy regulation-issue office chair, cupping her elbows in her palms. It was nice to feel her own arms pressing against her chest, to squeeze a little tissue over her bones. Gaining weight was hard, but she was managing. Her ribs were beginning to recede.

  Finally she spoke. “Maybe.” She eyed Minjae’s laptop, sitting closed and prim on the table. It looked secretive, and maybe she could put her hands on the keys and tell what Min had been able to dig up. “You should wait for the others.”

  “Don’t know if we can.” Hendrickson slumped in the other chair, babying his left arm. It had bashed pretty good against the sled wall as he fought the spin. His hair wasn’t quite as combed as usual, and his fatigues were wrinkled.

  Through the grainy, temporary plastic of Quonset windows came just enough sun to tell her it was a beautiful afternoon. It would be nice to go stand outside, if she could find somewhere away from people. Nice to feel the sun and the wind and listen to something other than a confusing mishmash of terror and screaming and…