Afterwar

by Lilith Saintcrow

  Zampana would always shiver and cross herself, thinking of small spatters of rain hitting the ground, a fresh rank green scent as the earth welcomed water, a sky-grumble somewhere far away. And Spooky, just out of reach, blindly avoiding standing gravestones and other impediments, her hands stretched out and her face a blank mask of suffering.

  Still, it didn’t occur to Pana to let the younger woman go.

  Not then.

  Chapter Eighty-Three

  Cold Kisses

  Bushes rattled. Gene slumped sideways, eyes glazing, heartbeat a slow thundering in his ears like artillery pounding the hills. Something splatted on his lap. A bright, spreading crimson drop on his filthy pants. Another droplet fell, and he watched it change shape in midair like a glob of wax in hot water. A long time ago, there had been lamps like that—he remembered his grandfather had one, and child-Gene had been fascinated until one night when he touched the top and burned his six-year-old fingers.

  Learntcha a lesson, didya, Eugene?

  The drumbeat in his ears was soft and heavy. His fingers fell away from the syringe, flexing, releasing. He stared, the world a warm hazy blanket.

  Finally, after all the struggling and the insect feet and the filth, there she was.

  She looked different now. Put on weight, her cheeks rounding, her neck no longer straw-thin. It only made her prettier, and the deep itching inside his head arched and stretched under the claw-scratch of seeing her. Her hair was still short, but it had been trimmed, and blown curls framed her face. Her mouth firmed, and Gene tried to smile.

  Here. She was here. This hallucination was a good one. He could see the texture of her canvas coat, the tough webbing of her belt, the Federal pistol hanging at her side. He’d wondered what she looked like as a raider, paging through her file when he organized sending her to the sorting shed first, then the brothel after he got one of those rooms cleared of its former inhabitant. He’d had to slip a fifth of good imported vodka to the clerk doing the selektion roster, but the killing bottles could always take one more.

  She probably had no idea what he’d done for her since that day in the quarry, when she stood straight and proud as a queen gazing at a struggling worm.

  More movement. The camouflage cloth he’d arranged so carefully trembled, collapsed. There was a wide-hipped immie behind her with a dark, round, stupid face, thick ropes of black hair crisscrossing her head. The immie said something he couldn’t hear through the thud-thump brushing his ears, and the thought that this was no hallucination struggled through the warm blanket.

  His mouth moved, slurring something. The immie bitch looked at him, squatting easily just out of reach. One of her brown hands darted out, snagged the travel belt—when had he taken it off? It didn’t matter.

  What mattered was that she was here, somehow, and he had a chance to say it again.

  I love you. He tried to force the words out. I came back for you.

  Surprisingly, when Hannah spoke, her voice didn’t fade into the thumping. It bypassed his ears, arrowing directly into the center of his head. Crawling in on little insect feet, pushing those buttons again.

  “You hurt my sister,” she said, her lips shaping the sounds so beautifully. “You hurt her.”

  Sister? What the fuck? Maybe his bafflement showed, because she leaned forward, and she was touching him now, her fingers above the stump of his left wrist, bracing him. Her other hand straightened the needle; it pinched through the warm blanket, and Gene realized something was very wrong.

  Her eyes had widened, they shimmered. Fat drops slid down her cheeks. Cold kisses touched his fevered forehead, hissed among the leaves. Rain? Or was she crying?

  A single, convulsive moment.

  Hannah pushed the needle’s plunger down the rest of the way, sending the remaining three-fourths of the full syringe directly in.

  Chapter Eighty-Four

  Follow Suit

  “Luffffoooooo,” the one-handed man moaned. “Lufffffffffooooo.”

  Spooky let go of the needle. It stuck up, quivering as the one-handed man jerked, foam working up at the corners of his mouth, his eyes bugging out, his mouth open.

  Pana’s quick fingers turned the travel belt inside out with little help from her brain; it was reflex to strip a corpse quickly out in the woods. She palmed a small black stick—a jumpdrive, a heavy-duty one. There was cash in there as well, but Pana zipped it back up and tossed it onto the odiferous blanket next to the overdosing man. She crouched, her heart pounding, trying to get enough breath into her heaving lungs.

  Spooky crouched too, still clasping the man’s stump of a wrist. You hurt my sister.

  What the fuck did that mean? Pana didn’t know if she cared just yet. What she did know was that Chuck Dogg was going to be in a heap of trouble for firing on a city street, Swann was going to be pissy, and Henny was a question mark at best when he got wind of this jumpdrive.

  Was whatever it held worth all this bullshit? Lazy? Minjae? Prink? Any of the others? Dead raiders, dead patients, bodies giving up in the middle of artillery barrages, soldiers screaming for their mothers—oh, male or female, proud or meek, bullshitter or shat upon, they all said the same thing when Santa Muerte came knocking.

  Mama! Mother! Mommy!

  Movement behind her. Pana watched Spooky as the one-handed man shuddered and choked his last. His eyes rolled up in his head and he fell over sideways, tearing his mutilated wrist from her grasp. A sudden sharp stink of loosened bowels shouted Someone’s dead here, and his breathing hitched and shuddered to a stop.

  Spooky tipped her head back. Her right hand dropped, working at the catch on her hip holster. She got her sidearm free, and Pana thought for a second she was going to put a clip in the bastard from Gloria just to make sure. Which would have been fine.

  Instead, the pistol Zampana had scrounged for her on the outskirts of Kamp Gloria rose at the end of a skinny, bent arm, and it became obvious what Spooky was going to do.

  She’d found this one-handed asshole, and killed him, and Spooky looked like she’d decided to follow suit.

  Another gunshot, its sharp crack end lost under another rolling drive of thunder sweeping down on the city, filled the northeast corner of the cemetery.

  Chapter Eighty-Five

  Someday, Somehow

  Henny tossed the travel belt aside with a contemptuous obscenity. Rain splattered the bushes, drops gleaming in his hair. “Nothing in that but greenbacks. How the fuck did this guy get any cash?”

  “Where there’s a will…” Swann crouched easily, going through the one-handed man’s ditty bag. A few civilian rags; a battered black Patriot uniform hat with red camp piping; a similarly battered old paperback of 4 Turning, that bible for fucking Firsters and white supremacists everywhere. Syringes, two in steri-packs that held the blue-and-orange logo of the Fisherman’s Needle Exchange Program. There was that brick of whatever-it-was, probably uncut. The asshole was a novice junkie, taking a hit off that. How a one-handed fuck had cooked it down and injected it—well, where there was a will, there was a fucking way. “Chuck, anything over there?”

  The Dogg, wincing as his leg complained, peered out from between two overgrown bushes. Droplets were caught in his hair too, and he looked thoroughly unrepentant. “Nothin’ but a wall and some poison ivy. Sheeeeyit.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m glad you didn’t fucking shoot it.”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  Swann refrained from pointing out that while Chuck might have said it, he certainly hadn’t meant it. That would have been unhelpful in the extreme, and if not for Chuck, they’d probably still be arguing with that fat fuck at the gates. Even Henny’s patience might not have stretched far enough to deal with that petty-ass Napoleon. “God save us all from rent-a-cops,” Swann muttered. The ident in the bag matched up with their quarry, Eugene Robertson or Thomas or whatever the fuck. The thin white lines behind the blond man’s ears said plastic surgery. “Pana?”

  “Yessir?” Her br
aids knocked askew and full of leaves, his second-in-command turned her head slightly.

  “How’s the Spook?”

  Spooky, white-cheeked and trembling, hunched next to Zampana. Her sidearm had skittered off into the bushes; Chuck was keeping an eye peeled for it. Finding the two women rolling around fighting over the gun had been a kind of exotic moment, of the sort Swann thought the surrender had left behind them all.

  “She’s okay.” Pana wiped at Spooky’s face, a strangely maternal movement. “Guess it was kind of a shock seeing this guy.”

  “Oh?”

  “Knew him from Gloria.”

  “Shit. Really?” Chuck’s head popped up. “Found it,” he continued, holding Spooky’s gun aloft. “Should I keep this?”

  “Spooky.” Pana peered into the younger woman’s face. “Hey, Chuck’s gonna keep your iron for a bit, okay? Just to be safe.”

  “My sister.” The words were raw. Spooky leaned back on her heels. “Lara. Lara. I knew I was blown, I went to hide, told her to meet the raiders and get out of town. I told her to pretend to be me.” A dry, barking sob caught in her throat. “She didn’t want to. Didn’t want to. They caught her. They hung her.” She shuddered again, spine arching, her head tipping back. Rain pattered down, stinging-hard, and the thunder grated along, a little closer this time.

  The storm was moving in.

  “They hung her up. Like laundry.” Another sob. “It was my fault. It was myyyyyyy faaaaaaaaault!” The words ratcheted up into a scream, and Zampana put her arms around the girl, held her tight as she thrashed. Chuck stowed Spooky’s gun and worked his slow painful way through the bushes, crouched next to them with a grunt, and circled his arms, too.

  “Jesus.” Swann’s throat was dry.

  Henny watched this, his eyebrows drawn together and his mouth turned down. He stopped poking through the dead man’s bag, and just crouched, his eyes strangely dark, the rain beginning to slick his hair down. When he caught Swann’s gaze on him, he shook his head a little. “There’s nothing here.” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “We’ll go back to Montana, check the grave.”

  “One thing at a time,” Swann told him, but Henny was already unfolding.

  The Fed walked deliberately across the postage-stamp clearing, crouched, and put his arms over Chuck’s. Spooky’s sobs were an animal’s in distress; she shook like a city under bombardment.

  Swann straightened. The trapped blood from his legs rushed to his head, turning the world into a wavering underwater facsimile for a few seconds.

  When it firmed up, sliding back into the groove of constant pain that was what most living turned out to be, he found himself looking at a huddled family on the floor of a clearing in a cemetery’s forgotten corner, holding one of their own and soothing with Shhh and It’s all right and Let it out.

  That was the first moment Phil Swann felt like someday, somehow, the war might, just might…end.

  Chapter Eighty-Six

  Group Up

  The airfield had three hangars and a storage warehouse; it was the latter they met at while lightning stabbed the sky and the rain intensified.

  “Chetolyne for the gleeson dips,” Ngombe said, pointing, her cheeks gleaming with the humidity. “Right in there. Why?”

  “Find something to get a drum of it open with, will you?” Swann swung his battered, shapeless hat with its drenched black feather, shooing away invisible flies. He rubbed at his stubbled head, and turned back to Simmons, Henny, Chuck, and Sal. “They was twins.”

  “Jesus.” Simmons had turned pale. “No wonder she’s fucked-up.”

  “Lara, Hannah, I’m not even sure she knows which one she is,” Swann continued. “Fucking trauma. But I do know a couple things.” He gazed steadily at Henny, who held a sheaf of loose papers.

  “Well, fucking enlighten me, man.” Simmons’s shoulders drew up near his ears every time a flash painted the wet pavement outside. Artillery and cannos he could live with, but lightning made him nervous.

  “You know we aren’t gonna find the data in the doctor’s grave.” Henny flipped through the useless papers—reports filed, flimsies, plus the scraps and ident blanks the Patriot motherfucker had been carrying. “You know they’re going to debrief me hard.”

  “Is that what you call it?” Chuck’s leg was unhappy and he refused to go back to the sled for his crutch, so he made a face each time he shifted his weight.

  Zampana hustled through the open bay door, a scrap of parachute silk held overhead to block the rain. Spooky ambled behind her, soaked clear through but not seeming to mind much. She paused, seeing them all gathered, and forced herself forward, stepping carefully in Pana’s damp prints on the concrete floor.

  “What you gonna say when they do?” Simmons studied the Fed.

  So did Sal, whose left hand dropped, resting against his lower back. Once, in Kansas, he’d stood like that, and when the knife he kept tucked behind flickered out it had saved Swann’s life.

  Was that why Sal stayed? Who knew?

  Henny sighed. “The truth.” He spread his hands, a quick, placating movement. “That the doctor didn’t have the data—he was looking to doublecross the Russians or the Chinese, whoever he could get to pay, but only if he could get to Alaska fast enough. That Spooky there is nuts from trauma, and she didn’t do anything weirder than eat spiders the whole time I was with you. That your close rate’s phenomenal because of your direct method of problem-solving.”

  “Sir?” Ngombe poked her head around a partition. “I got one open, sir. We dipping a cell, or what?”

  “Not quite.” Swann beckoned. “Come on, you assholes. Group up, but don’t breathe the fumes.”

  The chetolyne drums stood, painted black, the code for caustic as fuck and flammable too, ya numbnuts stenciled on top, bottom, and twice on the body in glo-paint. Ngombe had pried the lid of one free, and the tar-black goop inside shimmered, oil-slick colors painted on its surface as it reacted with oxygen.

  Swann looked steadily at Zampana, who dug in her trouser pocket. She fished out the slim, finger-long jumpdrive, turned it back and forth, and glanced at her Captain.

  He pointed his chin at the Fed.

  Pana handed Henny the drive. He freed his left hand and cupped it awkwardly, like he suspected it was trapped.

  Maybe it was, but not physically. Sometimes, afterward, Swann wondered who would have made a move if Henny had turned around to walk away. The drum could just as easily get rid of bone, magchip, flesh. Just like the shimmering, caustic bays at Gloria.

  But Henny didn’t turn. Instead, Spooky shuffled next to him and held out her hand.

  He dropped the drive into her palm, and a slight movement went through Swann’s Riders.

  Spooky held her fist over the chetolyne drum. Ngombe, visibly full of questions, kept her mouth shut and her hands in her pockets.

  “Lara,” Spooky whispered, and opened her fingers.

  The drive’s plastic casing began to hiss and bubble. Noxious steam rose, and everyone except Spooky stepped back. Spook watched as the fluid scorched and ate through metal as well, swallowing gigabytes of suffering.

  When the bubbling and steaming stopped, Ngombe hefted the drum lid back on, and they took turns hammering it shut. The sound was lost in the thunder, and by the time the rain slacked and the lid was safe and tight, Henny was looking relieved and Sal had brought his left hand out again.

  Swann folded his arms, fixing them all with his best head-motherfucker-in-charge look. “I ain’t gonna ask if you’re with me,” he began.

  Simmons snort-chuckled, a rich, very amused noise bouncing off the drums and sheet metal ceiling, threaded through with the last thunder roll from what was, after all, only a regular, normal summer storm from the mountain slopes.

  “Shit,” the Reaper said. “To the end of the line, Captain.” He glanced at Spooky.

  “To the end of the line,” she repeated numbly. Her throat worked as she swallowed, and if her dark eyes weren’t quite
sane, well, they could figure that out later. Without stuffing her in another camp, no matter who was running it.

  “Amen to that,” Pana added, and crossed herself.

  “Y’all are weird,” Ngombe weighed in. “But interesting.”

  Sal just shook his head. He didn’t have to say it. Not again.

  Chuck Dogg winced again as he eased his sore leg. “Well, what motherfucker we huntin’ next, Captain?”

  It was on the tip of Swann’s tongue to say I’m retiring. Spooky’s grave, wounded gaze dropped to her feet, and she swayed a little. Something in Swann’s chest tightened into a good hard knot.

  It wasn’t painful. Instead, it felt…steady, for once.

  It was Henny who answered. “There’s no shortage.” He rolled up the papers into a cylinder. Tighter, tighter. “But for right now, maybe we should get something to eat before we get back on the sled.”

  “Oh fuck,” Simmons groaned, with feeling, and a bitter little smile creased Swann’s face.

  Acknowledgments

  This book has had an extremely difficult birth. Thanks are due to Devi Pillai and Miriam Kriss, who fought hard and prevailed; Lindsey Hall and Tim Hely Hutchinson, who bridged several gaps; Sarah Guan, who shepherded a weary writer through the home stretch; and Mel Sterling, best of all writing partners.