America Pacifica

by Anna North

  He was looking around from face to face, performing. Every word he said was meant not just to answer Darcy but to keep his followers together, to hold them on his side. Darcy remembered the kindred feeling she’d had for him in the shack, when he’d told her that Tyson should fear her. They wouldn’t have a moment like that again, she realized, a time that was entirely private, because everything Ansel said now was for an audience, his every word an instrument to consolidate or extend his power. And he had probably always wanted it that way.

  “They are our enemies,” she said. “Glock gets off on danger. I can tell just by looking at him, there’s nothing he won’t do.”

  “Is that so bad?” Ansel asked her. His eyes flicked toward Sunshine. “When we stood on principle, we didn’t get anywhere. Then you came along and opened everything up. Now here we are—you’re a hero and I’m the commander of an army. It’s a new island, Darcy, and it’s going to be amazing.”

  Then he made an effort to scrub the glee out of his voice. “Did you find your mother?”

  Darcy looked straight at him. “She’s dead.”

  He lowered his eyes and tried to make his expression respectful, but the enduring thrill of his newfound importance was impossible to hide. She thought of his shoeless Hell City childhood, the long sour years of thwarted ambition, and now the triumph, half surprise gift and half entitlement, something he would cling to long after it turned black and septic like a gangrenous limb. Sorrow tugged at her belly—not as strong as the constant gnaw she felt over her mother, but sorrow still. She turned to Pine, pointed at Esther and Nathaniel.

  “Get them some food and some clean clothes,” she said.

  Pine raised her eyebrows and slouched her shoulders, but then she nodded reluctantly and walked off. Darcy turned to Sunshine, still immobile on the bed. A streak of blood ran down her left arm. Her eyes were as haughty and self-contained as ever. Darcy thought of the night in the shack when Sunshine had slapped her face. She probably knew Ansel better than he knew himself, knew what he would do now that he could do anything he wanted.

  “Will you come with me for a minute?” Darcy asked her.

  Ansel smiled, but he looked nervous.

  “When you come back,” he said, “we can discuss what to do about the Board.”

  Sunshine followed Darcy out of the room and up the path to Tyson’s house. Darcy stopped when she was high enough to see beyond the wall. The flames in Manhattanville had multiplied, and the noise was louder.

  “What’s going on out there?” Darcy asked Sunshine.

  Sunshine shaded her eyes like an explorer.

  “When Glock and his guys came over to our side, it really split the guards,” she said. “They’re fighting against each other now, and they’re not guarding much of anything, so it’s a free-for-all for the gangs and anybody else who feels like doing some looting. Once people hear about Tyson, it’s going to be even worse. We’ve got a rough time ahead.”

  A skinny guard Darcy didn’t recognize stood at the door of the house. He saluted. Darcy stared at him until his arm shook; then she nodded to let him relax.

  “Is Glock in there?” she asked him.

  The guard shook his head; she and Sunshine went inside.

  Marie’s body was already gone, and a red-black bloodstain lay on the carpet where she had fallen. The living room smelled strongly of dead flowers. In the bedroom a shaft of yellow light threw itself across the covers. Tyson lay in it, unchanged. No one had bothered to kill him. His eyes stared; his mouth hung slightly open; his face remained frozen in impotent fear. Sunshine sat down in the chair next to the bed.

  “I used to think if I ever saw him I’d want to kill him,” she said, “but now I’d rather let him live.”

  “I’m afraid this will happen to Ansel,” Darcy said. “I mean, not this exactly, but that he’ll be like Tyson, and then somebody will come and throw him out, and it’ll be exactly the same thing all over again. How can we keep that from happening?”

  Sunshine looked at Tyson, and then she looked at Darcy, and then she began to laugh. Her laugh was cold and shrewd and mirthless and pitying.

  “I forgot how young you are,” Sunshine said when she was finally finished laughing.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Sunshine rubbed her eyes and looked wryly at Darcy.

  “Look,” she said, “I know you think you’ve had a rough life, and I’m sorry about your mom. But try showing up someplace that’s supposed to be your fucking paradise, only to find out you got there too late and you’ll never even have a real roof. No matter how hard you work, no matter what you do. Try watching your baby die from a disease they didn’t even have when you were growing up, while five miles away other kids get to take medicine and not even miss school. Try being on the very bottom all your life, and see if you don’t want to be on top. That’s what we’ve always wanted, and I don’t care what Ansel does with it, and I don’t care if one day someone comes to kick us out. That’s how revolutions work. That’s how people work. Anyone who tells you anything else is either lying to you or lying to themselves.”

  The light from the window had reached Tyson’s face. His features seemed to have softened, almost as though he were agreeing. Darcy wondered if it would be a relief to him to realize his life had been just one turn of the cycle, no better or worse than any other, neither success nor failure.

  “What about Daniel?” Darcy asked. “What about my mom’s plan?”

  “If you think there are still people on the mainland, and you can actually contact them, and they’ll somehow be better than the people here, go ahead. I’m not standing in your way.”

  Sunshine stood up.

  “You’re a hero now,” she said. “You can do what you want.”

  Darcy stayed with Tyson after Sunshine left. She sat in the chair by the bed, and she listened to him breathe, and when a slug of drool crawled down his chin she wiped it away. She watched his unmoving face as the shaft of light crawled up and over it, and when it left him in shadow and his eyes quested momentarily, impotently upward, she looked away.

  She rolled up her jumpsuit leg, undid the buckles of her cast, and let it fall open. Her leg was jellyfish pale, and the calf muscle had gone flabby, and when she ran her hands down her shin toward her ankle, she felt a bump that smarted when she pressed it, but the leg felt like hers again. She stood, and put her full weight on it for the first time in weeks, and felt a shifting within herself, a realignment of the bones, but little pain. Her right foot turned slightly inward toward the left one now. She was broken, but she was new. She walked across the room and felt a limp in her step. She thought of Ansel with his monkey arm. She thought of Nathaniel, the savage scar up his thigh that he never regretted. She imagined feathers of ice sprouting beneath her fingernails; she imagined herself flying away.

  13

  You can’t go by yourself,” Esther said.

  “You want to come with me?” Darcy asked.

  Esther looked at Nathaniel. They were sitting on a bench by the pond. Their clothes were clean; Esther was eating an apple. Guards strode back and forth across the courtyard, carrying boxes of ammunition from a storage room to the wall protecting the Northern Zone. The afternoon light had turned an ugly dusky yellow, and the air stung Darcy’s eyes.

  “Maybe you should give Ansel more credit,” Nathaniel said. “You didn’t think he could get us out, and he did. Maybe you’re underestimating him.”

  “So you’re not coming.”

  “We would have died if it hadn’t been for him,” Esther said. “I think we should give him a chance. And also”—she paused, as though embarrassed—“it’s been a long time since I had a family. Tyson’s gone, Marie’s dead, and I want to stop and enjoy it for a while.”

  Darcy wasn’t surprised. Nathaniel and Esther weren’t her kin—no one was. She was prepared to go to the mainland alone.

  “That’s fine,” Darcy said. “But I’m going.”

  “Don
’t you think you’d be more useful here?” asked Nathaniel. “I mean, if you really think Ansel’s corrupt, don’t you think you should stay and watch him?”

  “If I stay here,” Darcy said, “I’m going to end up like Marie. I’m just going to get madder and madder, and maybe eventually I’ll do something about it—maybe I’ll even get rid of Ansel and take over myself—but it won’t stop me from being mad. But if I leave, maybe I’ll turn into something else.”

  “There might not be anyone left in Los Angeles,” Esther said. “For all we know that boat was full of refugees.”

  “Then at least I’ll see the mainland before I die,” Darcy said. She slung her backpack over her shoulder. She’d filled it with Tyson’s things: the atlas with its maps of the sea and sky, Kon-Tiki, a little money from his dresser drawer, and the old sextant from the nightstand by his bed.

  “How in the world are you going to get there?” Nathaniel asked.

  “I’m going to go to the docks and get a boat,” Darcy said. “If the guards are busy fighting, they won’t be watching them too closely.”

  “But how are you going to navigate? Have you ever even been in a boat before?”

  Darcy patted her backpack.

  “I’ve got a book,” she said. “I’ll find someone to teach me the rest.”

  “Be careful,” said Esther.

  Darcy looked around her. She had penetrated the Northern Zone, she was sitting in its courtyard, she could call any guard to her and he would do her bidding.

  “I’ve come this far,” she said. “I think I’ll be all right.”

  “Don’t be too sure. Once you’re out on your own, you’ll be a pretty big target. Remember, you’re important now.”

  Men and women and children were crammed up against the gate in the Zone wall, screaming. At first their voices were a shapeless slurry, their collective body a many-headed monster, but as Darcy drew closer they began to resolve—she saw a man throw a rock at one of the guards, a woman holding up her wailing child, a boy with streaming eyes and a mouth open wide as a melon pushing forward and being elbowed back and shoving his way forward again.

  “South Street Snakes!” someone yelled.

  And someone else: “Justice for the incarcerated!”

  And someone else: “We want real meat!”

  And someone else: “Free elections!”

  The guards dodged rocks and cheese-food cans and a bottle of what looked like urine, and although each carried a fat gun, Darcy could see the fear in their faces. As she approached the gate, one of them shouted down, “Wait, you can’t go through!”

  “I’m going through!” Darcy shouted back.

  She hoped they didn’t storm the Northern Zone. She hoped that Ansel was a fair and gentle leader and that the island would grow to love him, and that he would hold elections and fix the cave-ins and build roofs for everyone in Hell City. But she wasn’t counting on it. When she tried to imagine the island in peace and happiness, she imagined the refineries closed down, and the factories silent, and all pretense of the old way of life consigned to memory. And she didn’t think Ansel was the person to bring that about. She laid her hands on the gate handles and the guards turned to her indecisively, half-pointing their guns.

  “Let me through,” she called. “That’s an order.”

  Three of the guards conferred briefly, then descended the ladders on the northern side of the wall and stood flanking Darcy. They pulled the gate open and people rushed forward like water above a dam. A guard on top of the wall fired into the crowd, someone gave a high cry like a kicked dog, and the wave of people closest to the gate stopped advancing, their attention shattered.

  “Don’t shoot at them!” Darcy yelled.

  “Just go,” said the guard to her left.

  He was in his forties, potbellied and tired-eyed—he looked like he had seen fighting before and was not surprised to see it now. He pointed his gun into the crowd and the crowd, unwillingly, unevenly, cursing and shoving and crying, opened a channel for Darcy. Darcy ran down it, her own gun at her shoulder. The crowd was a block deep, and at the back of it were old women, blind people leaning on canes, and last-boaters so lame and pockmarked and drained of all human power that no revolution would want them, every crowd would push them to its outskirts, and no new order would ever lift them aloft. Darcy saw them try to push their way forward, and she saw the heels and elbows of the crowd push them back, and she felt for them as she had not thought to feel for such people before, but the feeling was impotent and worthless and she ran on, even as they grabbed for her and stuck their faces in her face, and even as she heard the guards at the wall begin shooting.

  She walked along Fifth Avenue, coughing and looking for a bus stop. The rains were over, and in their place was a thick black blanket hanging low over the island, a fat layer of bad air much denser than any she could remember. The smog seemed to ooze up from the ground now, pooling around the buildings and sliding into the sky. A smell of seared seaweed and roasting plastic forced its way into her lungs. Then she saw the burning bus.

  It looked like a carcass picked clean by wild dogs. The entire hood was gone, exposing an intestinal tangle of plastic pipes. The metal side panels were gone too, and Darcy could see the remains of the seats, their Seaboard covers blistered and cracked. Flames still leapt off the roof deck, but down at street level a boy pried off one of the hubcaps and ran away. Sitting on the sidewalk by the bus-stop sign, two men with tattered clothes and last-boat teeth shared a bottle of expensive wine.

  “Are you waiting for the bus?” Darcy asked. “Are some of them still running?”

  “Our bus came,” said one of the men, holding the bottle high.

  “I saw another one burning on First Street,” said the other. “Where you headed?”

  “The mainland,” Darcy said.

  “You better start walking then,” said the man with the bottle, and then both of them laughed.

  Something whizzed past Darcy’s head and shattered the window of a furniture store. She tried to run and found she could do it if she favored her left leg and ignored the ghost of pain that hovered around her right. At Second Street she saw two guards with their guns pointed into a fine-foods store. Then a third strode out the door with packages of meat wrapped in Seafiber. The pink juices were seeping out onto his pants. The guards had liverish, suspicious faces and they held the meat close to their bodies like greedy children. The sky looked sick. At Third Street, a woman slammed into Darcy. She was wearing a yellow jumpsuit; she was pregnant; she smelled like fire.

  “You better watch where you’re going,” she yelled in Darcy’s ear.

  Then she saw the gun. She lifted her hands and her belly spilled out onto the street—coins, not a baby.

  At Tenth Street, banners were raining down. People on the rooftops had sliced them from their moorings, and now Tyson’s face, ten times life size, drifted over the crowd and came to rest, crumpled, on the asphalt. A little girl wrapped herself in one and pranced about on the glass-spattered sidewalk, robed in the face of her former leader.

  Upper Chicagoland was full of fighting. A pig was roasting in a rusted-out oil drum, surrounded by men and women slugging it out over who got to eat it. A week ago a pig like that would’ve cost more than Darcy’s yearly salary at World Experiences—now any of these scrabbling, screaming people could have it for a well-laid punch, a kick to the balls. Then a gunshot ripped the fight in half. A man fell and a woman bent keening to him; the fighters stilled their fists and looked wildly around, and three gangsters with guns and red bandannas rushed in to take possession of the pig. Another shot was fired and Darcy ducked down an alleyway between two Seaboard processing plants.

  The light was dim between the tall buildings, but before her eyes adjusted Darcy could sense the presence of other people. The air inside the alley had a human shape, contoured by dozens of frightened faces pressed against one another, breathing shallow breaths.

  “Don’t shoot,” someone said
. “We don’t have anything valuable.”

  The speaker was a man, a little older than Darcy, wearing a jumpsuit and holding a child on his lap. Next to him was an older woman with long black hair, and next to her was another woman, and all down the alley pairs of eyes appeared out of the dark, expectant and fearful. Darcy put her gun in her jumpsuit pocket.

  “I’m not going to shoot you,” she said. “I’m just passing through.”

  The woman with long dark hair said, “We keep hearing shots.”

  “Is anyone in charge?” asked another woman, with a bruise on her face. “Are they going to stop all this?”

  “His name is Ansel,” said Darcy, “and he’ll try.”

  Before she could say more the alley filled with questions, all blending together into one loud many-throated bellow of confusion and fear.

  “Listen!” Darcy shouted. “Ansel took over from Tyson. He’s a last-boater and I think he wants to help you, at least for a while.”

  The bellow started again, but this time Darcy could hear individual bellows within it, each of them asking some variation on What should we do?

  Darcy wanted to answer them. She owed them an answer, owed them help now that she understood what was happening and they did not. It was strange to have more power than someone else, and unsatisfying, because the only way she could see to really help these people was to stay and fight for their jobs and their homes and their safety, and staying was what she had decided she couldn’t do.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t have any advice for you. Like I said, I’m just passing through.”

  Then a girl from the end of the alley spoke out. She was young, no older than Darcy, but her voice was low and loud.

  “Who are you anyway?” she asked.

  Darcy knew she should lie. Esther was right—she was a target now. Anyone could decide to hunt her down—gangsters looking for a trophy kill, guards hoping to get to Ansel through her. Glock. He wouldn’t have touched her back in the Zone, where he was supposed to be friends with Ansel, but if he found her out here, by herself, he might want revenge for his bitten tongue. But she thought of Daniel, too, the way his name had stayed with her mother long after she should have forgotten it, had made her a rebel when she should have been another disaffected diver. Even if Darcy never came back, maybe her name could be like that, a weapon against complacency, an unexploded bomb.