She would survive her grief. But Jackson Blackstone would not survive her determination to settle with him.
*
The cab struggled down Highway 210, west towards Interstate 435. The driver took his own sweet time, saying he was fearful that the snow-clotted roads might pitch him into the median, where they could run out of gas and freeze to death. Sofia shrugged. She’d heard that freezing to death was not a bad way to go if you had to go.
Once on the I-435 Missouri River Bridge, the young girl in the dark hoodie sat up, tensing her body, willing the car not to slide off into the river. The driver’s knuckles were tight on the steering wheel, the only vehicle in the southbound lanes at that time of night. A lone Humvee crawled along northbound, in the direction of one of the casinos the government had converted to dormitories. Covered over in plastic canvas, the poor souls in that vehicle would be frozen to the bone.
Once they had cleared the river bridge, Sofia slipped into a brief, fitful slumber, losing just a few minutes. She woke when the taxi bounced through a deep pothole in the tarmac, opening her eyes to the sight of the all-night diner at the Flying J truck plaza. Fairy lights and yellow neon bathed the interior of the cab, casting a sick, malarial pallor over her skin and disorienting her for a moment. Startled awake, she had the unpleasant sensation of not knowing where she was and then recalling the events of the previous evening anew - Papa, no! - before scolding herself for dozing off when she was so vulnerable. For one brief moment, she was about to cry, but she managed to stuff her feelings back into the tight little container she stowed them in.
The truck stop was busy with all manner of vehicles, military and civilian. Most of the truck drivers were probably wary about pushing out into the ink-black night, where petty criminals waited to pick them off if they didn’t travel with their assigned military escort. Here and there, small knots of men and women stood outside in the brutal cold, smoking and clapping their hands together.
‘Here we are,’ said her driver. ‘I hope you do not get in trouble for being late. I drove as fast as I could.’
‘S’okay,’ said Sofia.
He pulled up directly in front of the door to the recently built diner, for which she was grateful. Although they had taken a good twenty minutes, the distance travelled was not great and the fare was only six dollars fifty. Newbies did go a long way. She didn’t tip and the driver seemed to think nothing of it. Now that everybody was scratching to survive on the minimum federal wage, no one had anything to spare. She’d just spent half of every dollar she possessed.
Sofia thanked him and hopped out, hurrying towards the humid, greasy heat of fried food behind the sliding doors. In the short time she was exposed to the cold, she felt like the skin was being flayed from her body with dull iron knives. The oily, metallic stench of diesel in the air propelled her to the warmth inside. She had no idea how the smokers did it. They were banished so far from the gas stop, they must have been exposed to the full, bitter fury of the weather.
Addiction, she thought. A killing weakness.
Once through the doors, the smell was all fat, fried meat, salt and sugar. Gringo music, stupid with drums and crunching guitars, crackled out of speakers fixed high on the wall above the counter. Heads turned in her direction as she entered, a few of the men not bothering to look away, or even have the decency to be embarrassed, when she caught them staring at her lecherously. It was wrong. As a good Catholic, she marvelled at their lack of shame. A small part of her, the lost little girl she had once been, wanted to turn around and run away. But inside her mind, she found that little girl and quietly, methodically, shoved her into a small, dark box for the duration. There would be no time for weakness and sorrow on this trip. She had nothing to run to and nobody to protect her. She had to push through with this.
Sofia was not hungry, which was just as well. The food looked awful. Pre-made hamburgers bundled up in wax paper sat inside glass hot boxes, leaking grease through their wrapping. She was about to buy a bottle of water until she noticed an old aluminium tray near the cash register, piled high with glasses and a water jug. After pouring one for herself, she took a seat in the corner, where she could keep an eye on the other patrons. She knew she couldn’t stay here without ordering something, but was reluctant to spend what little money she had.
A waitress came over, an older woman who looked like everything from the chest up had slumped southwards in some terrible landslide of collapsing body mass a couple of years ago. She frowned at the youngster’s glass of water.
‘What can I get for you, darlin’?’
‘A plate of fries, thank you,’ said Sofia. ‘No cheese.’
They were the last thing she wanted, and her stomach turned at the thought of having to eat them. But fries were one of the cheapest things on the menu, and she could always string out the time by eating them one by one. It was the sort of thing the staff here would expect a teenager to do. The carbs would provide energy, too. Another lesson from those months on the trail: store energy whenever you can.
With her order placed, Sofia went back to surveying the room. It didn’t look too promising. The majority of the truckers were older men, enormously fat for the most part, probably as a result of sitting on their asses all day eating crap like this. There were a couple of younger drivers, but she didn’t like the look of them. The lines on their faces were drawn too long and too deeply. There was a crude ugliness of character that seemed to ooze out of their pores under the harsh, flat lights of the diner. Methamphetamine. The telltale signs were all there.
Unlike the fat pigs, the two meth heads were razor-thin with sunken cheeks. Their teeth were worn nubs, consumed by the constant need for sugar. You could turn a pretty good trade in Kansas City if you started cooking up crystal meth in an abandoned home or disused McDonald’s. Workers trying to get through gruelling shifts or long drives frequently resorted to it, trading short-term alertness for long-term health problems.
Their eyes stared out at her now from darkened pits. One man caught her looking at him, and smiled back with real malevolence. Not that one, she decided.
She wished she had something to read, something to hold in front of her face and hide behind, but no way was she going to waste money buying a copy of the local newspaper. It would just be filled with the usual garbage from the resettlement authorities, proclaiming Kansas City to be a paradise found. Not a word of the meth epidemic, of course, or the shootings, stabbings and other crimes that were a regular occurrence in the lives of most people here. Or at least, the people she knew. Sofia took to staring out of the window at the big rigs as they grunted and rumbled around on the tarmac. Occasionally one of her fellow diners would finish his meal, get up and leave, but most of them seemed content to sit for a while. She wasn’t sure what they were waiting for. The weather wasn’t likely to improve, and it wouldn’t be light for many hours. Perhaps they were all worried about bandits.
Sofia picked at her fries when they arrived, hating the oily taste. But the more she ate, the hungrier she seemed to grow. After half an hour, she had finished the lot.
She became aware that the two youngest drivers, the speed freaks, were staring openly at her. They appeared to be talking about her, pointing, greatly amused by something or other. It made her wish she’d been able to stop by the apartment. Papa kept three guns there in a cabinet: his saddle gun - a sort of sawn-off shotgun he’d always carried with him on horseback - his Winchester repeater, and the .357 Colt he had been teaching her to use. She would’ve been grateful to have that handgun with her now, tucked inside the waist of her Levi’s, hidden under the weight of her hoodie top.
Thoughts of the loft at Northtown, and her father, seemed to uncap a deep wellspring of sorrow, which bubbled up inside her so quickly she was almost overwhelmed. She took a deep breath and threw down the rest of the water. The drugs must’ve been wearing off, she realised. All she wanted to do was go home, crawl into her bed and wake up in the morning to discover that it had all
been a horrible, cruel dream. To find her father there making breakfast for them both and teasing her about how grumpy she was in the mornings. If she could do that, she would promise Jesus and Mary to never disrespect Papa again. To always do as she was asked. And for ever after to appreciate what she had.
Sofia pressed her lips together, lest the merest whimper escape from them. She bit down and swallowed her grief. She would allow herself to grieve properly later on, in private. For now, she had other priorities. Actions changed the world for the better, not feelings. Papa had taught her that.
She looked over again at the meth-head pair and returned their stare, hoping to infuse it with enough hostility to forestall any interest on their part. So intently was she glaring at them that she completely missed the threat approaching her from the side.
‘Seems like you might be in a lot of trouble, Miss.’
17
DEARBORN HOUSE, SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
Hours later, back in his office upstairs and nursing a Gentlemen Jack, Jed Culver had reason to ponder the role of serendipity. He was not somebody who believed in chance. Victory went to those who prepared, who stayed focused, and who did not relent no matter how much damage they were taking. And yet, sometimes the merest happenstance could change everything.
It was something Henry Cesky had said while he was bitching about Blackstone locking him out of government work down in Texas. Jed had no doubts at all that the businessman had been blacklisted for his role in toppling Mad Jack’s military junta a month or so after the Wave, and then for publicly and volubly aligning himself with Kipper during the election that eventually followed. Blackstone was indeed a vengeful cocksucker. Bill Gates wasn’t welcome down in Fort Hood either.
But he was a sloppy, arrogant, overreaching cocksucker too.
Culver sipped at his bourbon and enjoyed a warm, satisfied smile as he flipped through the folder he’d just received by safe-hand courier from Vancouver. Some things were worth sitting up late for.
He had seen this file before. Or rather, he had been briefed on its contents a few weeks earlier. The briefing did not cover the sort of information most people would’ve thought relevant to the files in front of him, amid his city scape of stacked folders and binders crammed with information about the government of Texas. But Jed Culver, alone in all the land, now knew there was a link. The safe-hand courier had travelled down from Echelon HQ in Vancouver because, a short while after Cesky had complained of being locked out of salvage operations in Texas, the vast archive of information stored inside Jed’s grey matter had begun to reformat itself around a potential link between two apparently disconnected data points.
He held in his hand an after-action report, written up, he was gratified to see, by a Special Agent Caitlin Monroe. He well remembered talking to this woman shortly before she had parachuted into New York in a last desperate attempt to lay hands on the Emir. Baumer was his real name, of course. But back in the old world, with its old wars and blood hatreds, he had also been known as al Banna, and he had been a medium-level functionary of al-Qaeda’s globally franchised jihad. The task of infiltrating and disrupting his particular cell of that hydra-headed monster had been the responsibility of one Special Agent Caitlin Monroe. Not surprising then, that she’d been the one to tag him as the provocateur behind New York.
Jed flipped slowly through the Echelon file.
‘Oh, Agent Monroe,’ he said softly to himself. ‘You are going to be my new best friend.’
He read and re-read the relevant paragraph.
The Subject Luperico stated that extraction of Subject Baumer was effected by Subject Ozal using the assets of the Hejaz Shipping Line, a wholly owned subsidiary of Subject Ozal’s Hazm Unternehmen (Corporation).
‘My new best friend forever,’ he added with a smile.
Culver now turned his attention to the file balanced on his lap. A report from the Secretary of the Treasury’s office concerning contracts signed by the government of Texas, ultra vires - or in layman’s terms, ‘beyond the powers’ of that government. On page 25 of Annex B, he had what he wanted. A listing for a salvage contract, worth twenty-five million New American Dollars, signed between the Blackstone administration and Hazm Unternehmen. The contracts were notarised and exchanged one week before the Hejaz Shipping Line was confirmed by Echelon London to have sent three large vessels carrying somewhere between four and five hundred combatants from the Libyan port of Tobruk into American waters, where they eventually made landfall on the East Coast. At New York.
‘Gotcha …’
18
KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI
‘Cindy French is my name. I haul that big-ass classic Kenworth out there, the one with the sky-blue cab? Rocky Mountain double? Got me a load of Maersk containers heading down to Corpus Christi.’
Sofia hadn’t said a word, hadn’t invited her to sit down, but that’s what this Cindy was doing - sliding herself into the booth, juggling a plate piled high with fried chicken and mashed potatoes, and two huge paper cups filled with Coke. When she had herself comfortably settled into the booth, she pushed one of the drinks across and smiled. The smile reached into Cindy’s clear blue eyes, drawing to Sofia’s mind memories of her grandmother.
‘Here, hon,’ she offered, ‘the Coke isn’t half bad here. And take some of these taters off of my hands. They’re probably instant, but beggars can’t be choosers. I loaded myself down with a dozen-piece chicken meal so if you want a drumstick, I’d be willing to spare one. But the gravy - oh, that is first-rate sausage gravy right there, straight out of the pan. You can’t go wrong with that.’
Sofia checked across the room. The two men who’d been creeping her out had lost interest now.
‘Don’t you worry about them, hon,’ said the woman. ‘They won’t bother you while I’m here. I once gave those boys an ass whoopin’ with my favourite tyre iron. Taught them some manners. I won’t abide poor manners in a man.’
She picked up a chicken breast and bit into it with evident relish, rolling her blue eyes as she chewed. Sofia watched the woman, who was shorter than her by a good few inches, work her way through the plate of food. It was hard to tell her age. There was a strange, childlike quality to her, especially in the giddy way she ate. Through that veneer, however, there lurked something else. Sofia wasn’t sure what it was, but at the end of a long and terrible day she found she wanted to trust this woman very much.
After swallowing her mouthful of food, Cindy spoke again, not looking at Sofia, but still concentrating on her plate.
‘You know, I’m not going to be here for long.’
She finally looked up. The smile was still there.
Sofia didn’t know what to say. For a split second just now, she thought she’d been tracked down by the police. Instead she seemed to have attracted the attention of a crazy person. Kindly, but possibly crazy. Who went up to complete strangers at a truck stop, sat themselves down, and started insisting they share their food, all the while telling them they were in trouble? No one she had encountered. Everyone wanted something, that was the rule Sofia Pieraro had learned.
Still, she could turn this to her advantage. She had come to the diner looking for someone like this Cindy French. Not so much a crazy woman, but somebody she might be able to trust to move her a little bit further down the road.
‘I am not in trouble,’ she said quietly. ‘I’m just looking for a ride.’
French laughed. Indeed, she laughed so much she had to stop eating.
‘If you came here looking for a ride, believe me, you are in trouble, young lady!’ She took a long pull on her Coke, indicating that Sofia should do the same. ‘You look like you need a little pick-me-up. And you don’t look old enough to drink coffee. Go on, you got about half a gallon of Coke Voltage in there, enough to keep you buzzing until sun-up. Take a drink.’
She did need something to wake her up, that was true. Her nap in the taxi was entirely too short, and she was finding it difficult to keep her eyes op
en here, even under the harsh fluorescents, with the music cranked up loud and the other diners roaring at each other. She was wrung out, all but destroyed by one of the worst days of her life. And she’d had some bad ones.
‘You said you needed a ride, hon. Where you headed?’
The girl found herself momentarily unable to answer. She had come looking for a lift down to Fort Hood, in central Texas, or at least in that direction. But she’d intended to seek out the transport herself, by approaching someone she thought looked trustworthy. She may well have approached this chicken-eating Cindy French had she seen her first.
‘I am going to Texas,’ she said in the end, deciding to run with a version of the truth.
‘Really? Going down to the Federal Mandate, are we?’ The truck driver pulled a drumstick out and tossed it onto the spare plate. ‘Go on. Eat up.’
She was almost tempted to lie and say, yes, she was headed for the Mandate, but she caught herself at the last moment. Anybody with a legitimate reason for travelling down to the Texas Federal Mandate would’ve had any number of legitimate means of getting there. The government did not expect settlers to make their own way through the badlands. Most people would know that, and somebody like French, who probably drove those routes all the time, would definitely know.
‘No,’ replied Sofia. ‘I need to get to Fort Hood.’ There - she had done it.
Cindy continued with her meal, but raised one eyebrow as if Sofia had played a particularly interesting hand in a game of cards. She steered a ball of mashed potato on the end of the fork and used it to mop up some gravy. The mouthful of food prevented her from speaking, but it was obvious she was giving some thought to what she would say next.
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