Afterwar

by Lilith Saintcrow

  Or maybe someone hated the local Party members, or they burned the downtown because it was a raider hole. Whoever could tell them any different was probably in the DMZ with other concerns right now.

  “Coming up on coordinates. We going hot?”

  Pana glanced back. Better safe than sorry. “Captain?”

  Swann jolted out of dead sleep, twitching as if he wanted to leap upright, stopped by the restraint harness. “Fuck!”

  That brought everyone else up, even Hendrickson, whose knee bumped Spooky’s, hard. Chuck, his head tipped back, surfaced midsnore. Simmons, reaching for his knife, swore like Swann, but more creatively, ending with a term of surpassing anatomical impossibility.

  Spooky opened her eyes but didn’t twitch. Only a thin crescent glitter showed beneath her eyelids, and that was the mark of a kamp survivor. You learned not to betray anything, even balanced on the gray edge between sleep and waking.

  “Get your hat on, Captain.” Zampana tried not to sound amused and failed miserably. “We’re almost there.”

  “We got fifty cal and a couple missiles,” Ngombe said cheerfully. “You want them loaded up?”

  “Christ, no.” Swann rubbed at his face. “Set us down about a mile out. Quiet like.”

  “Aw, shit.” The pilot’s grin didn’t change, wide and fetching. “I was hopin’.”

  Swann hit the release catches on his harness and stretched, rubbing at his head with one hand. “Head up and fuel up, monkeys. We got a run.”

  “Aye, Captain.” Simms rubbed at his face, clearing away sleep. “This thing got a coffee machine?”

  “Look next to the med cabinet.” Ngombe whistled out between her teeth. “Which angle you want on it, sir?”

  “Got any eyes?”

  “Maybe. Techie? Dial in, we gotcha full stats.” A full sensor array, infrared to UV, cams, bouncers—well, maybe they’d just stuffed everything on the prototype it could hold.

  “Fuck me,” Chuck groaned, opening Minjae’s deck. “I’m no good at this shit.”

  Nobody asked him why the fuck he wouldn’t let anyone else’s hands on Minjae’s deck. It had a certain fittingness—she wouldn’t want her gear in a nonraider’s paws, and Chuck was about the only person, other than Pana, who didn’t irritate her.

  Hadn’t irritated her. Poor Prink could never figure out if he was coming or going with Min, and Pana sometimes thought Min liked it that way. In any case, they didn’t need much in the way of intel crunching now that they had a direction. When it came time to let go, maybe Chuck would.

  “I could try.” Hendrickson unbuckled. “Or I’ll just bring you coffee,” he continued, pretty much sure of rejection.

  “Let him look.” Swann stretched, joints creaking. “Motherfucker, this is uncomfortable.”

  “I miss the goddamn RV.” Simms banged back for the restroom. “Could piss off the side of that.”

  “What, you want a fugee hanging on your pecker?” Chuck snorted. “All right, Johnny Fed. Help me out of this shitty-ass chair and point me at the coffee maker, and Reaper, if yo’ ass spends more than five minutes in the head, Imma comin’ in to help you shake off.”

  “Never knew you cared,” Simms cracked back, and vanished behind the flimsy partition.

  A few minutes later, Spooky edged for the bathroom, and the boiled reek of instant coffee filled the sled. Hendrickson, his hair stiffened from a few days without soap and crinkle-dried from the shower he’d dumped Spooky in, hunched his broad shoulders and tapped at Minjae’s laptop. “Farmhouse,” he said. “Two stories, probably a cellar too. Garage. No heat signatures outside. Fuzzy, probably has asbestos in the walls.” He tapped a few more times. “Nothing moving except wildlife, Captain.”

  “Why not just blow the fucker up and look for bones?” Simmons slurped at too-hot boiled instant and spluttered a little.

  Zampana stretched, doing her best to touch the sled ceiling and not even close. “Sure. Melt whatever he’s got the data on, too.”

  Simmons rolled his eyes. “Might be best.”

  “He’s not there. The ping’s almost a week old; motherfucker’s moved unless he’s stupid.” Swann accepted his own tin cup of instant. “Christ, this smells like balls, Chuck.”

  “You’d know.” Chuck tapped on the bathroom partition. “Spook? You want coffee?”

  She reappeared and accepted a cup, wrapping her fingers around its warmth. Chuck clapped her shoulder, too. But gently, so she didn’t spill. All of them moving and breathing dialed the temperature up, and humidity, too. Ngombe pointed at the dash, and Swann found the temp controls. Cool, dry air soughed in, an unexpected relief.

  “Even has AC,” Simms crowed. “We come up in the world.”

  “Not very far.” Pana stretched again, joints cracking, her face contorting as bruises and muscles protested.

  “A shitter right there, coffee, and air-conditioning.” Sal cackled, straightening his legs in defiance of all manners or good sense. “I’ll take it.”

  “Set us down a mile out,” Swann repeated. “No chances. Sal, you got the demo clips?” Best to treat the entire structure like it was trapped.

  “Sure thing.”

  “Brush ’em up.” Swann touched the buckle on his harness, and decided he could wait to piss until they were safely on the ground.

  Just in case.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Check the Well

  Nothing was trapped. The place was full of mouse shit and dust, skeletal antique furniture standing lonely guard in otherwise empty rooms. Front door, untrapped. Back door, unlocked. Living room, dining room, bedrooms upstairs and the one bathroom downstairs, clear.

  The kitchen, full of midmorning light, was bare and clean as if a farmwife had just stepped into the hall. A chipped enamel double sink seemed luxuriously out of place; the oven, sturdy and avocado-colored, was a useless cave. The floor had been swept but not mopped, though the water was obviously on. Probably a well—Swann glanced through the window and yep, there was a ramshackle well shed. Two mismatched water glasses, upended in an ancient dish drainer of plastic-covered wire, sat mute and unobjectionable. A long-dead houseplant, its leaves gone to powder, perched in a little yellow pot on the windowsill.

  The puzzle deepened with the second bedroom upstairs, with a narrow iron bed pushed against the wall and a large, still-damp stain on the wooden floor, scattered with a double handful of clay kitty litter. A thin, ancient mattress had been hauled out back and left in the sun, flies crusting large soaked-through stains. Urine, it looked like, and shit as well.

  The garage, just as ruthlessly bare, held a fresh slick of dripped oil from a petrol-burner. Simmons studied the disarranged gravel outside the big garage door. “Truck,” he said, finally. “Bald fucking tires, too.”

  Zampana, balanced on an old, handmade wooden step, peered into the mudroom. “Huh.”

  “What we got?” Swann, inside, examined the narrow room, floored in peeling yellow linoleum. Wooden racks for scraping your boots clean pressed down the lino’s loose edges, and the big utility sink still held a trace of moisture near the drain.

  “Simms says a truck. Looks like a gas-burner. What you make of this?” Pana indicated the dish rack on an anemic slice of jury-rigged counter next to the sink, cluttered with bone-dry metal and glass. Wicked edges gleamed.

  “Surgical tools.” Swann’s face set as he holstered his piece. “Sweep that fuckin’ garage twice, Pana.”

  She swallowed a sharp reply, contenting herself with a simple “Wait until you see this.” She crossed herself again too, for good measure.

  Near the ancient, dust-sheathed window, a worktable lay shrouded in canvas. Twitched carefully back, the cover revealed an old radio, its buttons and dials clean of dust, and a stack of paper with spidery handwriting in blue pen. Other tools were arranged neatly, some hanging on pegboard to the left and right of the window, but the thing the raiders gathered to stare at was a tightly capped specimen jar full of clear liquid.


  Inside, a hand floated, the ring finger grossly shortened. Neatly shorn at the wrist, a meaty seaweed, its palm cupped and its nails blunt but clean, it pointed toward the lid. The specimen jar glittered once the canvas was pulled away, sunshine showing finger ridges and whorls, the lines on the palm, a fading ring-indent on the distorted third finger, the cicatrix of a burst blister on the pad under the squat, broad thumb. Sparse hair on the back and knuckles stayed frozen, no ripples in the fluid as they stood and stared at it.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Sal finally said. “Wait until Chuck sees this.” The Dogg was probably almost beside himself at having to stay with the sled and pilot.

  “It’s fresh,” Hendrickson said. “Look at the tied-off veins, right there. Jesus.”

  “He did it upstairs in the bedroom.” Spooky, in a monotone. She pointed at a wooden box, knocked free of dust and set carefully below the workbench. A thin line of staining at its bottom edges was blood, the spatter and drips starting at a sharp angle. “Had something over that to catch the blood.”

  “So he holes up here, cuts off his hand…”

  “Someone else’s hand.” Zampana shook her head, a restive movement, trying to fit this into the catalog of Firster horrors and finding a place without too much difficulty.

  “Someone else’s,” Spooky agreed. She swayed forward, but subsided when Swann flashed her a warning glance.

  “Do we look for a body? Maybe in the well?” Sal squatted, examining the lower shelves of the workbench. “This ain’t trapped. Maybe he didn’t have time.”

  “But he had time to take someone’s arm off?” Simmons peered at it more closely. “Priorities, man.”

  “There’s something about the angle.” Hendrickson folded his arms, sucking in his cheeks. His five-o’clock shadow was coming in early, matched only by Simmons’s. “Why do it that way? Huh.”

  “Magchip,” Spooky whispered. “It’s a left hand.” A hectic flush spread up her thin throat, staining both cheeks.

  The Fed nodded. “Makes sense. Except why take the whole hand off?”

  “I still say we should look for a body,” Sal grumbled. “Check that damn well.”

  “Papers.” Zampana pointed at the pad next the radio, with its blue-pen hieroglyphs. “Looks like code. What you want to bet he hooked up that old-timey box there, and that’s where they got the ping from?”

  “Lo-fi Firsters. Now we seen everything.” The Reaper’s laugh bounced against the garage walls. “Well, if he’s haulin’ around in a gas-burner, we got a chance.”

  “Wish Lazy was here.” Sal rocked a bit, easing the strain on his haunches. “He’d probably get that thing hooked up and working, tell us something.”

  Spooky stepped forward, her knee touching his back. She leaned, and her small, quick, capable fingers closed around the specimen jar.

  “Jesus fuck be careful!” Swann yelled, but she already had the heavy silica-infused plastic, lifting it free. The hand bobbed gently; the lid had a pressure lock she was careful not to touch.

  It was exactly the type of jar they had shelves of at Baylock. The ward they’d stuck her in after the electroshock had a bank of them, human brains floating in the same colorless solution—some in cross section, some whole, each neatly labeled. When the bomb hit, they’d gone up in volatile flames. Even the toughest jar would crack under that kind of concussion.

  “I told you it’s not trapped.” Sal hunched his shoulders. “Christ, Spook, warn a man next time.”

  “Sorry.” She held the unopened jar at arm’s length, like a kid with a frog to carry home and scare a sibling with.

  Simms took his hand away from his sidearm, with a visible effort. “Whatchu thinking, Spooky?”

  “Fingerprints.” She stepped back gingerly. “Right?”

  “Well, goddamn,” Hendrickson said in the thunderstruck silence. “That’s a good idea. Let’s go.”

  Sal hauled himself up with a grunt. “Imma check the well.”

  Part Four

  Misericordia

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Blood Sooner

  August 1, ’98

  The ’cast went live on a bright, beautiful summer afternoon. Drones whirred over the Supreme Court building, dipping and rising to pan over the crowd spilling down the steps and into the street. Stone-faced MPs kept most of the crowd back, and the drones served a secondary purpose, scanning for weapon thermasigs. Whether they suspected Firsters attempting a rescue or any other group looking to assassinate was an open question.

  Some people carried signs, mostly with requests to let the traitors swing. “Crimes against humanity” was a popular phrase. Immies clustered, safety in numbers, a holdover from the sweeps during McCoombs’s first few years, when the only hope of breaking free of Patriot cordons was to rush their batons and riot gear. Waves of chants went through the restive crowd, and if there were any leftover Firsters, they chanted along with the rest.

  To do otherwise might have been fatal.

  As it was, scuffles broke out around suspected Firster or Patriot sympathizers, the crowd’s mood turning on the thin edge between relief and the desire to bite the kicking boot of the last decade.

  Inside, the cameras watched as the prisoner was settled in an uncomfortable, straight-backed chair. His sober-suited lawyers, their faces set with the disagreeable duty of defense, conferred quietly, shuffling papers from leather folios. The right side of the prisoner’s face was a mass of packed bandaging, snow-white and taped down; the eye on that side was a deflated, rolling grape. Half his jaw was gone, and rumor was he had to be fed protein shake through a straw, barely able to swallow past the esophageal damage. It was probably true, because his suit, as ill-fitting as usual, hung on a slimmer frame than his former jovial bloat. What could be seen of the prisoner’s face had paled, the false tan leaching away to jaundice. An IV pole stood behind him, a bag of tinted liquid swaying gently whenever he shifted.

  A gavel struck. It was the Old Court, elderly men and women squeezed out by Firster appointees under the Emergency Acts. The New Court were in their respective cells at Annapolis, awaiting their turns. The youngest of the Old Court was Kavannen, and she was seventy; nevertheless, her dark eyes behind thick glasses were bright and sharp. The judges’ faces were set too, but a gleam could be discerned here and there—a hand tightening, a lip threatening to curl.

  A complicated dance of legal rhetoric ensued. Precedent was quoted, prosecution arguments listened to, defense counterarguments heard. Another flurry of paperwork and procedural wrangling. Finally, the Chief Justice—ravaged by untreated throat cancer, her eyes swimming behind steel-rimmed spectacles, her proud nose pointed straight ahead—allowed a further argument, on the proper trying of high treason and crimes against humanity. An international court was considered.

  Outside, the crowd waited. Organizations that hadn’t been legal for years—NAACP, ACLU, SPLC, all sorts of acronyms—announced their renewal on makeshift stages buttressed on the steps, and called for the prisoner to face international trial and a public trial before the people of the United States, sea to shining sea despite the rumbles of the West Coast “join Canada” plebiscite. Breathless rumors raced through the mass of people, growing by the hour. Lunchtime became late afternoon and edged into a soft slumberous evening, a cool breeze whistling riverward. A candlelight vigil massed at the Lincoln Memorial, the statue unhooded and cleaned, Firster graffiti even now being scrubbed from marble and the building’s facing. Old polymer matting had been dragged out to cover the grass on the Mall; rationed water had been drained from the pool, and glimmers of handheld candles showed from the bottom.

  Who among them had been at the rally where McCoombs declared total war and bathed in the hysterical screams of his worshippers?

  Some went home; new people arrived. The crowd lived, breathed, moved.

  Finally, a rustling roar went up. Anyone with a handheld popper or a cell dialed into the ’cast turned to their neighbors excitedly. A decision had been rea
ched.

  The rustle became a grumble. At the Lincoln Memorial there was singing—old protest songs, war ballads, and finally, as the moon rose, someone blew into a harmonica. The first few bars of “America the Beautiful” breathed melancholy, and it was taken up from the back of the crowd, sweeping for the front.

  It was at that moment those on the steps of the Court learned that McCoombs would indeed stand trial in international court for genocide and war crimes.

  After he faced a Federal military trial for treason.

  The protests against giving the bastard his day in court started immediately. General Leavy didn’t exactly blame them—of course civilians would want blood sooner rather than later. He’d just been afraid the geezers in black robes would decide to ship McCoombs off to some candy-ass European court that would give him life in prison or some shit. Nobody was going to be happy with anything for a while.

  That, Leavy had decided, was democracy.

  He walked heavy-footed down the hall, salutes snapping from every side. He had to go slowly—Kallbrunner’s stride was firm but unhurried. A new set of old-style dress blues had appeared, and fit the acting President as if tailored. Maybe they had been; this was DC and there was an army of unemployed ready to provide any-damn-thing. The higher-class call girls—and boys—were probably bathing in Federal dollars and writs. Patriot money had collapsed, the breadlines were getting longer, and earlier that evening some Firster bastard who had slipped through the nets had fired at a shed holding three immie refugees. MPs hadn’t been able to keep him out of the hands of an angry crowd, and the Firster asshole hadn’t made it any better by screaming slogans straight from McCoombs’s last rally.