Afterwar

by Lilith Saintcrow

  The report was on Leavy’s desk, along with other bad news. A whole avalanche of it. He almost preferred the fucking war to this.

  Not really.

  Dr. Hovins, his round reddened face shining faintly under the fluorescents, stood just outside a half-ajar door. This wing of the hospital was under the tightest security possible, patrolled every quarter hour, everyone checked and double-checked at every hallway.

  It was just like McCoombs to fucker up his own goddamn suicide and cause problems for everyone, Leavy thought sourly, and plastered what he hoped was an interested expression on his face. “Evening, Doctor.”

  “Good evening, good evening!” The doctor bobbed up and down a little at Kallbrunner. “What an honor, Mr. President.”

  He probably said the same thing when he checked McCoombs’s colostomy bag. Leavy quelled a grimace.

  “I hear you’re doing good work,” Kallbrunner said urbanely. “Do you know what was in the capsule yet?”

  “Well, we’re not quite sure. The burns are somewhere between acid and caustic—it’s hard to discern. He won’t say, of course. There’s a great deal of compromising of the facial structures—”

  “Thank you, Doctor.” Leavy cut across the nattering, motioning Kallbrunner along. If you got this asshole going, he’d be telling you the composition and color of his patient’s stool before you knew it. “Mr. President, this way.”

  The room was dim except for the counter along its left side, where the sink glowed metallic and the cabinets were full of medical supplies tucked quietly away. The whole place reeked of disinfectant and yellow-brown pain collecting in pus-pockets. The bed, its upper half tilted so McCoombs didn’t drown in his own saliva, stood in the very middle, the windows covered with bombproof netting instead of curtains. With all the ordnance lying around, someone could send a rocket-propelled grenade through the glass, if they had a mind to.

  Leavy almost wished them luck.

  Kallbrunner stopped at the foot of the bed. A monitor showed a pulse; the sheets were crisp and clean. It was a far cry from the field hospitals during Second Cheyenne, or the chaos of the immie clinics in Arizona or New Mexico.

  A gleam showed under a pouchy, bruised-looking eyelid. The bastard was probably awake, doped up on pain meds.

  “Well.” Leavy swept the door closed, right in the face of the two guards supposed to follow Kallbrunner at all times and take a bullet for him if necessary. “Here we are.”

  “The best of care.” Kallbrunner approached the bed, still ponderously slow. “Hello, Doug.”

  Leavy folded his arms, his back against the door.

  Douglas McCoombs gave no indication of hearing, but the pulse on the green-hued monitor picked up a little.

  “Heard you were in court today.” Kallbrunner stepped along the side of the bed. Stopped, examining the slack, half-bandaged face. “Must be nice to get a trial, instead of being dragged out of your house and shot in the street. Or hung.” He paused. “Or starved to death in a shitty little camp.”

  Leavy’s fingers dug into his arms. The old man didn’t sound angry. Instead, he sounded a little…wistful. Envious, maybe? Or just tired.

  The body on the bed raised its eyelids. Bleary, bloodshot, one half clouded as if by cataract, the gaze of the man who had once made the entire world afraid of nuclear winter stared at Kallbrunner. The cheek bandage twitched.

  Kallbrunner stood for a few more moments, then turned sharply, almost clicking his heels on a face-left. He took three steps and opened a cabinet door, then another. He found what he was looking for, and when he turned around, his spidery, veined hands held a thin hospital pillow. “General Leavy?”

  “Yessir?”

  “You might want to wait outside.”

  “Is that an order, sir?”

  “No.” Kallbrunner approached the bed again. McCoombs exhaled, a soft gurgling sound. What was it like, to have your voice gone after you’d spent years bludgeoning everyone around you with it? Leavy could remember the breathless magazine articles, the screaming at the election rallies, the sick thumping realization that his country had gone to war against itself. Every single night afterward, wherever Pat Leavy happened to be, hoping he could sleep despite the crushing, feverish worry, the nausea returned. “Not in the least.”

  Leavy set his jaw. The man had a right, he supposed.

  McCoombs’s eyes flickered. He looked from Leavy to Kallbrunner, and the pulse monitor spiked. Even in the dimness, beads of sweat turned visible on his high-domed, yellowing forehead. Christ, he looked small lying there. Not like the huge posters of him in any Amerika First rekreation kourt, or the flickering images on Patriot newscasts, shot from slightly below to make him appear taller.

  This was just a rancid old wreck in a hospital bed. And yes, he had shat himself. The sudden stink was almost monstrous. It was a wonder anything in his bowels had made it past the stoma.

  “Let me ask you.” Kallbrunner leaned over McCoombs. “How do you like this, Dougie? How do you fucking like it?”

  Goosebumps raced up Leavy’s back. His underarms, for the first time in a long while, were damp, even though it was a steady sixty-eight degrees in here. His throat was dry, but he forced himself to watch.

  McCoombs gurgled.

  Chapter Sixty

  Among Friends Again

  August 2, ’98

  The truck rattled along, rolling at a good clip over macadam and under a bloodred, smoky sunset. Moving by day was a risk, now that the fringes of the DMZ grasped and waved along freeways and larger roads. Working south was a risk, and so was too far north. Another risk was moving at night—headlights shouted your location, especially to overflight patrols. Which thickened the closer you drew to the invisible line the Federals had drawn as soon as McCoombs signed the Good Neighbors Immigration Act barring all “undocumenteds” and “undesirables.” Right after that was the executive order criminalizing protests, and the West Coast had gone berserk. Not Our President was their response, a bumper-sticker side order of secession drenched in hippie sweat.

  Johnson sometimes snorted quietly, thinking about it. McCoombs could have gotten much more cooperation by using the old, familiar terms. Nobody really wanted a tide of immies and degenerates swamping America, but the bumbling, misguided Man of the People had been too impatient.

  So Johnson and his subject rattled and rolled toward the Continental Divide, listening to the patchwork of coded talk and silence you could find on AM radio, if you knew where to halt the dial and how to winnow the lip service. Before McCoombs, they’d called it old-people analog. Evangelists, sports, and right-wingers, the lonely voices crying out about the slow strangling of a shining city on a hill. Sometimes you were even mocked for listening to it, like Johnson’s grandfather. The goddamn Federal liberals made fun of honest working people all the time.

  The good doctor had gone to college, but he knew what was what, as his grandfather might have said.

  There was an orange stain on the horizon—Rosebud, if he was reading the maps right. Maybe he should risk going farther north? Occasionally he regretted the necessity of medicating his companion; it would have been nice to have the soldier read the map and verify one or two small things. Christ, all Johnson wanted was to get to Boise. He hadn’t had a hot meal since Duluth.

  To make it worse, the subject splashed gasoline each time he refueled the truck, and the smell was making Johnson light-headed, even with the windows down. The smoke riding the wind scratched at his eyes and throat; even the subject had developed a hacking cough.

  Maybe that was why Johnson didn’t spot the checkpoint until they were almost on it.

  It was a shoddy little affair, but then, you didn’t have to do much to choke off a lonely two-and-a-half-lane Montana road. Just plonk down a couple of scavenged, rusted carcasses that had once been trucks like the one Johnson drove, add a rough crossbar of splintered, weathered fence posts lashed together with barbed wire, more reels and rolls of the wire tangling off to eit
her side. The road funneled inexorably toward it, old-style guardrails on either side, and Johnson hit the brakes a little too hard. The subject, held back by a mere lapbelt, folded in half, and woke from his daze with a strangled sound. His hair flopped, dark with oil and grime—really, you’d think a Patriot would be more fastidious.

  Everything still might have been all right, if not for the pothole. The front left tire dropped in with a sickening crack, and the pop of the threadbare tire blowing was just the thing to set off itchy trigger fingers. The truck, which until then had performed with many groans but unflinching readiness, jolted; the doctor, confused, jammed his foot all the way down, stiffening and pressing back into the bench seat. His hands jerked, a completely instinctive action, and the moment of weightlessness as the back end lifted gracefully was strangely gentle.

  It was the habit of not wearing a seatbelt, married to the wrenching of the wheel, that crumpled Dr. Johnson and flung him halfway through the musically shattered windshield. His companion felt the forward jerk, then gravity and sky changed places. Crunching, more rattling, a great painless blow in the middle of Johnson’s belly, and when the men at the checkpoint approached with guns drawn, they found a one-handed blond man with a cut on his forehead grinning and tugging at the mangled lower half of the driver’s corpse, freeing a travel belt that held no greenbacks or Federal writs. It was a pity; they could have used them.

  The small black jumpdrive was already stashed in Eugene Thomas’s fatigue pocket, and he let the men pull him from the wrecked, hot remains of the truck, gasoline pouring from its ruptured tank. They even thought he was brave, because once he shook the dizziness out of his head, he kept running back to the wreck despite the risk of fire. They thought he was heroically trying to rescue a comrade. It took at least a half hour for Gene to realize they weren’t Federals or reservists manning a DMZ checkpoint, but Patriots intent on fleecing fleeing refugees for every spare valuable they could, and when he did, his grin widened to nothing short of maniacal.

  Johnson, almost severed at the waist, had bled out in seconds, but Gene had found where the man stashed the narcotics.

  And he was, after all the struggling, among friends again.

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Inside the Ride

  August 1, ’98

  Swann gave the okay for Ngombe to bring the sled to the grassy, neglected swath of what had been the farmhouse’s front yard. It took the rest of the day and half the night to shake the place fully, going over each inch. Finally, Swann decided they weren’t going to get any more blood from the turnip, and they gathered inside the sled’s air-conditioning.

  “I ain’t opening that shit.” Chuck set his jaw, rubbing at his injured leg. “Nuh-uh.”

  “I don’t think we have to.” Zampana tapped the lid just to see him flinch. “A 3-D’ll do ’er.”

  “Casper’s closest,” Hendrickson told Swann. “They have the resources.”

  Spooky chewed on her right index finger, working at a nail that, despite all her efforts, still showed a sliver of white. Her canine, with the funny groove near the tip just like her sister’s, was the perfect tooth to shave with, and she kept at it, staring at the spiderlike piece of meat and bone floating in the jar’s cold chemical embrace. Scanning it with a 3-D would indeed work; the only problem was, there wasn’t one aboard the prototype. It had everything else, and that was, she mused, just the way things went. If you needed a knife, all you’d find were sporks.

  Sal was only mildly upset that they hadn’t found a body. “All this fucker’s family were dead before the war. And he’s going west, for fucksake.”

  “The DMZ’s sewn up tight. He’s got to have a contact.” Simmons, buckled in though they were still on the ground, stared at the hand like he’d seen it twitch.

  “Sure, we can get to Casper.” Ngombe nodded, thoughtful and solemn for once. “It’s right at the edge, though. We’ll need a charge there.”

  “Get on the bouncer and tell them to expect us.” Swann pointed at Hendrickson. “Get us in the air and headed there, Ngombe. Sal, Pana, get everything buckled down. Chuck?”

  “Yessir?”

  “Get on Minjae’s deck, paw around, see what you can find on that paper the asshole left. If you ain’t got nothin’ in an hour, I want Johnny Fed to try. Spook, move over next to him, work your fuckin’ magic. Talk to the goddamn hand if you gotta. Simmons!”

  “I’m right here; y’all don’t have to shout.”

  “Yeah, just want to make sure the wax ain’t filled your ears. Weapons check, my nose is twitchin’. List everything we got.”

  “And my swinging cod?” The Reaper hit the release on his harness, with only a token hesitation.

  Swann snorted. “If you gotta,” he repeated.

  The sled rattled as Ngombe began the prelift sequence, the hatch closing with its eerie slow hiss. “You expecting trouble, Captain?” Bright and chirpy, like she was asking if there was a good restaurant in town.

  “Pays to be prepared.” He mashed the new hat more firmly on his stubbled head. “If’n I were the Russians, I wouldn’t sit and wait for Dr. Zed to come to me. I’d send someone to fetch him, and if that someone’s heading for the ping same as we are, well.”

  “Think he’ll ping again?”

  Spooky stood, dreamily, slow. She scooped up the jar and headed for the seat next to Chuck’s; he shook his head, dreads bouncing. “Don’t let that motherfucker touch me, woman.”

  Her grin, pale and tense, was surprisingly mischievous instead of pained. “Not even the jar?”

  “That’s the other thing,” Swann said grimly, still mashing at his hat. “If I was him, I’d move and ping, then double back. We may be chasing this fucker all over the continent. Or a ghost trigger, like we used to do.”

  “Playing tag with the Firsters.” Zampana pushed Spooky’s shoulders. “Sit down and buckle in, chica. Chuck, how that doin’?” A short jab at his leg.

  The Dogg smacked at his thigh, a light glancing blow. “Itches like a motherfuck.”

  “Soon’s we’re up and level I’ll take a look at it.” Pana headed for the med cabinet, and Spooky buckled herself in, the jar clasped firmly between her knees.

  “Great.” Chuck dropped the sheaf of papers in Spooky’s lap; she darted him a venomous glance, struggling to get them all together. “Just hide that shit, okay? I don’t like it.”

  For once, she had an easy response. “I’ll put it in your sleeping bag.”

  Pana’s laugh, a bright little cackle, bounced off the sled’s interior. Even Simms smiled.

  “Bitch, please.” Chuck shook his head, nascent dreadlocks bouncing. “You don’t want to know what I’ll put in yours. Do your thing. What those numbers for?”

  Spooky bent her head over the papers full of their quarry’s blue-ink scrawls.

  The prototype hummed, rattled a little, and began to lift. “Keep yo’ hands and feet inside the ride, chillun,” Ngombe crowed, and Swann groped into a jumpseat, his forehead damp. Sal, already buckled in tight, opened his mouth to say something—and closed it, his gaze catching on the captain’s hat.

  Swann, God knows where, had found a feather.

  It was black.

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Thank You and a Citation

  August 2, ’98

  Sunrise was a raw red blister behind the mountains, and even inside the sled’s filtered atmo there was a tang of smoke. Sleds were slower than helicopters, slower even than prop planes or drones. Short bursts of speed were all right, but fast flying ate up the charge like a mofo. They made up for it with robustness, and fuel costs were minimal, but the flight time was a shitpile of passenger boredom.

  Out of habit, Kelly Ngombe flicked the specters. You didn’t really need ’em over an ass-empty slice of Montana, but they were fun to play with, and like Nana Bona always said, squinting into the sagebrush distance, every once in a while you had to shake things to see what would fall out.

  In the copilot seat, th
e Johnny Fed with his greasy black hairdo glanced at the stat screen. “Neat, isn’t it. Never thought I’d see one of these in the air.”

  “They was workin’ on it the whole war, they said.” She frowned at the round spec screen. It wasn’t lighting up like it should. Her right-side ribs hurt a little, old injuries acting up. “Still got kinks to work out.”

  “Doesn’t everything?” He had an easy smile, that white boy, and didn’t seem to mind the way the raiders treated him—like he was a booger, or a splinter under a nail. Which could mean he was an asshole just waiting to show it, or that he was eyes and ears for someone they didn’t give much of a shit for.

  Ngombe still hadn’t made up her mind which it was, but it didn’t matter. She was right where she wanted to be. Flying. Except the damn specters were making her uneasy. “Yo. Dial up your specter, willya?”

  “Yes ma’am.” They’d been up awhile, and the Chuck guy was still staring at the laptop, determined not to let the Fed have a crack at it. So far, Swann hadn’t said anything, but sure as shit he’d noticed, Kelly thought.

  He didn’t seem the type to miss much. He and Bona both had the same expression: sour and watchful, smarter than the average bear but unwilling to let it show. Quiet and steady was what you looked for in a raider leader.

  Oh, some would follow a flamboyant motherfucker, like McCall and his Harpies, or that creepy-ass Madam Gulpa in Florida with her voodoo and her habit of sending water moccasins in boxes to the local Firsters. That sort of shit was funny as fuck, but it also got you sloppy, and sloppy got you killed.

  “Shit.” The Fed tapped at his round specter screen with one blunt, dirty fingertip. “That’s…” Back in the sled’s quiet cavern, Spooky flinched, her dark eyes flying wide open and her legs stiffening like she wanted to push herself back through the seat and the wall as well.