After America

by John Birmingham

“I am sorry,” Aronson said. “Some evil has befallen you?” His companion muttered condolences, too, shaking his head.

  “Some,” said Miguel.

  Before dismounting, the riders appeared to consider something between themselves without actually exchanging any words. D’Age shook hands with Miguel while the other man led their horses over to the nearest fence line, where he tied them up. Miguel was surprised to see tears welling in D’Age’s eyes.

  “I am very sorry,” he said again quietly. “Very sorry,” he added while half bowing in a strangely formal gesture toward Sofia.

  The girl smiled, but the warmth didn’t reach her eyes. She didn’t come and stand by her father, however, as much as Miguel could tell she wanted to. She knew not to present a small target by grouping together like that. Aronson knocked the dust from his hat by slapping it on his thigh as he walked back from the fence line.

  “I’m afraid we have had our own problem with road agents,” he said. Miguel noticed that D’Age seemed to stiffen and bunch his jaw muscles tightly as Aronson continued.

  “Raiders hit us outside of Trinity,” he said. “Near Lake Livingston. Took our supplies, a good number of cattle …”

  Miguel waited for them to finish. There was obviously more.

  “And some of our people,” Aronson confessed at last, forcing out the words like squeezing pus from a wound.

  “Your women,” Miguel said flatly.

  Both men nodded. He noticed something like fear tinged with rage in his daughter’s eyes. The vaquero ran one hardened hand through his thick black hair. It came away damp with sweat. The sun was fully up in the eastern sky now, warming the day and causing all three men to perspire. Sofia seemed less bothered by the heat.

  “We had six young women with us,” Aronson explained. “One of them was betrothed to Willem. The others were riding north to our community in KC. They are a great loss.”

  “Your raiders came out of Montgomery, most certainly,” Miguel said, his voice tired and cracked. “Many banditos infest the ruins of Houston. Not like the big Eastern cities, no, but still many. I believe that Blackstone leaves them alone in there because they threaten the refugee trails coming up from the south. They—”

  “You never said anything about that,” Sofia interrupted, looking annoyed.

  He motioned her silent and continued. “They threaten the federale settlement paths out of Corpus Christi, too, another reason for Blackstone to leave them be. In my opinion.”

  Both men looked hollow-eyed and raw. Aronson worked the brim of his hat like a length of rosary beads.

  “I do not take your point about Governor Blackstone, Mister Pieraro, but do you think it is possible the men who attacked us also attacked you?” he asked.

  “Papa?” Sofia asked in a small voice, her eyes looking very large in her face.

  Miguel sighed and shook his head. “I don’t think agents from out of Houston would come this far. I saw no sign that the men who attacked our farm were traveling with prisoners.”

  D’Age looked ill. “But that could just mean—”

  Miguel cut him off with a chopping gesture.

  “No, the men who killed our family were not taking prisoners or hostages. They took nothing. A few who stayed behind were scavenging food, but that was all.” He tried to give D’Age a reassuring look. “The men who attacked you were seeking plunder. They will still have your women and cattle.”

  Sofia surprised him by speaking up and doing so with real force.

  “Then we must help them, Papa,” she insisted, sounding very much like her mother for just a second. His first instinct was to argue with her, but the fierceness of her gaze gave him pause. He could tell she had made up her mind. Miguel spent a few moments sizing Sofia up. For the first time since yesterday he saw a strong emotion other than sadness in her features.

  He saw ungovernable rage, a killing rage suddenly boiled up from within her heart, and it disturbed him greatly.

  He sighed.

  “You are looking for them, are you not?” he asked. It was more of a statement than a question.

  Aronson nodded. “We followed them north as best we could, but we are not country people, really. I am a sociologist by training. I was witnessing in Scotland when the Wave hit, studying at Edinburgh. All of us came home when it lifted. We have tried to do the best we can, Mister Pieraro, but …”

  Miguel could see the that man was losing his composure fast. It was not surprising. Being wrenched from city life onto the frontier and told to make do as best one could, would be enough to break most people, but these poor bastards did not just have surly beasts and stony ground with which to contend. They had fallen afoul of human treachery as well.

  The vaquero came to a decision.

  “There is a store here in Leona,” he said. “It has a well-stocked cellar, protected from the heat and rain. You can take supplies from there. I will show you. As for your raiders, if they are not here and they did head north, they will have set down in Crockett for a few days. It has not been reclaimed, and much of the town still stands. I believe the power failed there after the Wave. If you wish, I will help you take back what is yours.”

  The men gaped at him as though he had just materialized in the morning air. He was aware that compared with them he must look every bit as rough and untrustworthy as the bandits who had attacked their party. Their questions spilled out one on top of the next.

  “You would do that?”

  “You would help us?”

  “You’re sure that’s where they would be?”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “We are also traveling north. It will be safer for my daughter if we travel with a large group, even though we may attract more attention. If you will have us as companions, I will help you. Sofia, however, I must insist be protected. If there is fighting to be done, I will do it.”

  He gave her a stern look, as if to cut short any dissent, but she bristled anyway.

  “I want these men as much as you do, Papa,” she protested through thin lips.

  Miguel folded his arms and shook his head. “They are not the same men, Sofia. And even if they were, it would not be your role to settle our affairs with them. That is my duty and mine alone. Your mother, God rest her soul, would not have it any other way. As you well know, young lady.”

  The Mormons tactfully found something interesting to look at off on the horizon while the surviving members of the Pieraro clan played out their small confrontation. Miguel did not glare at his daughter. Indeed, he was proud of her for wanting to exact vengeance with her own hands. But although a life of hardscrabble farming had given her great strength and fitness for one of her age and sex, she remained at heart a young girl, and he would do all he could to protect her innocence as much as her life. While she fumed and pouted, he merely stared back at her, waiting her out. After a few moments she expressed her exasperation in the time-honored manner of all teenage girls, rolling her eyes and muttering loudly about the unfairness and indignity of life.

  Miguel shrugged.

  “We are all heading north.” he said to the two men. “It is a dangerous path we take, especially for Sofia. If you help us through Blackstone’s land, I will help you through this. Is that a fair trade?”

  The dogs sniffed at the feet of both men and wagged their tails, pronouncing them acceptable. D’Age looked the more pained of the two, and Miguel remembered he had lost someone to the raiders.

  “Why do you think they will stay in Crockett?” he asked.

  Sofia spoke before Miguel could. “To rape the women and enjoy the spoils,” she said. “That is what they did to Mama.”

  Miguel felt sick. He’d hoped to have protected Sofia from that knowledge.

  “Come,” he said. “We have much to do.”

  18

  New York

  Some people were just lucky, but Ryan Dubois wasn’t one of them. The mortar round that exploded and blew him into three large, messy pieces of burned meat merel
y tossed Julianne through a store window that had already been shattered. She tumbled through the air, eerily detached, recalling a childhood misadventure involving a trampoline and a dislocated shoulder. Her sense of time passing stretched like a rubber band, and then—snap! The world sped up again in a violent, jaggy swirl of color and pain and the loudest noise she had ever heard in her life.

  Jules screamed in agony as she hit something hard and immovable and the same shoulder was wrenched out of place with a grinding pop. She rolled across a wooden floor, every turn a flaring supernova of pain in her back and side, dark purple blossoms opening in front of her eyes as she fought to hold on to consciousness. Impact knocked the wind out of her, and she had trouble taking a breath, as though she’d just been gut punched by Lennox Lewis. Attempting to push herself up off the floor, she collapsed, screaming again as white-hot flames seemed to shoot down one side of her body. The rolling thunder of rocket fall and mortar fire lashed at the street outside, and she was oddly certain the Rhino was dead, disassembled at high speed just like poor Ryan, but then he unexpectedly landed feet first on the floor next to her. His filthy bloodstained boots crushed a small glass figurine a few inches from her face as he knelt down to help her up.

  She tried to cry out, to warn him that she was injured, but he had his arms around her and was dragging her away from the open window before she could protest. The pain was grotesque, unbearable, nauseating, and she did pass out for a few minutes. Another white dwarf of agony exploding somewhere inside her woke her up again to a world filled with death and horror and the screaming of a small child.

  After a few seconds she realized the small child was herself and the Rhino had done something to her shoulder. She felt a sting in her neck and then the most delicious warmth as a soothing bath of soft analgesic pleasure flowed out from that point to gently wash away all of her many hurts and outrages. Her eyelids felt heavy and her chin dropped down onto her chest as the Rhino heaved her up off the floor and away into a long, dark tunnel.

  Jules came to consciousness slowly, in fits and starts. She was dreaming. A nightmare, actually. Some penny dreadful horror, probably from eating too much Brie and watching that awful 28 Days Later with Fifi. They’d put the bloody thing in the DVD player only because Mr. Lee had brought a copy back from a trip ashore in Kupang and they simply couldn’t sit through another fucking session of The English Patient. Now she was fighting to drag herself out of the dreadful nightmare of a world emptied of people—no, haunted by them. The world was haunted by millions of souls who had disappeared, and now they were back, returned from some hell dimension with every trace of humanity sucked from their souls. They had eyes like the milky orbs of dead fish and lips rotted away from yellow teeth, and they were coming for her. Of course, she couldn’t run from them. She tried, but she never moved, not an inch, no matter how fast she pumped her legs.

  Jules forced herself out of the half-waking state with great effort, pushing back against the vision of hell as if bench-pressing a huge weight away from herself. She finally woke up in her hotel room in New York on fresh white Egyptian cotton sheets, with the prospect of a day’s shopping in front of her and a night at the theater with Paul, and dinner at Gabriel’s. She would wear her new Kate Spade slingbacks and perhaps the Karen Millen Black Silk Bird Dress, but definitely the Kate Spades, because they were gorgeous and she’d just bought them and the shop was wonderful; it was as if she were floating through it again, turning over and over in the air, with a thousand jagged shards of glass and the disembodied head and upper torso of Ryan Dubois, and she was falling, slamming into the floor, and hurting the same shoulder she had dislocated on a trampoline, and again playing hockey at school, and screaming …

  Screaming.

  She came fully awake at last with a gasp. Still groggy and disoriented and feeling as though she were at the end of a tumbling free-fall through her personal history.

  Paul?

  Dear Paul. God, how long had it been since they had dated?

  And Fifi was dead.

  And she had not shopped in New York for many years.

  And those shoes were lost somewhere back in England.

  And then she knew where she was. She’d been blown through the front window of a Kate Spade store on the corner of Broome and Mercer streets. She had never shopped there. For an infuriating, irrational moment she could not recall where she’d bought the gorgeous slingbacks her sister had stolen so many years ago. And then she remembered. It was in San Francisco, way back in 2000, at the opening of the store. She levered herself up against a display case, groaning a little at the sudden throbbing ache in her shoulder. This was the third time she’d popped the thing, and every time recovery took longer and was less complete.

  “Rhino,” she said, coughing as she choked on the dust in her mouth and throat. “Rhino? Are you there?”

  “Quiet,” he said softly. “Pirates.”

  That one word brought her rushing back to full consciousness, or close enough that it made no difference. It was dark in the store and outside on the street. She calculated quickly that she must have been out of action for most of the day. She remembered the sudden fall of the rockets, the way a tsunami of explosive fire had rushed toward them up the narrow street, and the weirdly familiar sensation of being blown clear through the air. It was like standing on a ship’s deck in a fierce storm and being catapulted through space by the impact of a rogue wave. She remembered with shuddering horror how Ryan, who had been standing a good ten yards away from her, closer to the blast, had simply come apart and spewed his inner life all over the whitewashed façade of the store on the corner.

  She understood then that they had not been attacked by pirates or caught in one of their mortar barrages. They’d been mistaken for pirates and targeted by the army. Or maybe not. Perhaps they were just firing blindly into this part of Manhattan because it was crawling with freebooters. She pawed at her chest, seeking the reassurance of the weapon she’d set out with a dozen or so blocks back on Duane Street.

  “I’ve got it,” the Rhino said in a low voice. “You’re in no state to fight anyone. I put your shoulder back in and doped you up. Now just lie still and try not to get us both kilt.”

  Kilts, she thought, somewhat baffled. Why would she be looking for kilts?

  Her eyelids drooped again, and she dozed off.

  It was very dark when she next awoke, but her head was much clearer. The morphine must have leached out of her bloodstream. She blinked her eyes open and shut a few times and carefully rolled her injured shoulder. It was stiff and sore, but she could move the arm even though the Rhino had fashioned a basic sling out of what had once been a very expensive silk scarf.

  “You awake?” he asked. “For good now?”

  “Water,” she croaked, and the former coast guard man passed her a canteen. It was smeared with blood, and she could taste the coppery scum of it as she put her lips to the plastic bottle. The water was warm and tasted brackish, but she gulped it down gratefully.

  “S’okay,” said the Rhino. “The pirates have moved on. They didn’t come in here. Guess this season’s fashions are just so 2003, eh?”

  He held up a pair of gold leather sandals and grinned.

  Jules stared at him.

  “I’ve been unconscious for most of the day, and that’s the best line you could come up with?” she asked.

  His grin grew wider as he saw she was going to be okay.

  “Can you move? Or carry your weapon? Because believe me, I can handle two of these puppies on the leash, don’t you worry,” he said as he hoisted up both P90s. Julianne sucked in a deep breath, rocked back, and then rolled up onto one knee before standing, exhaling, and taking another deep breath to control her dizziness. The Rhino was quickly at her side with a strong arm for support.

  “The fighting’s moved downtown and west a ways,” he told her. “Lucky thing for us, too. Thought we were gonna get ourselves squashed between both sides for a few hours there.”
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br />   Jules allowed him to lead her though the wreckage of the store, which was so badly trashed that she couldn’t tell what damage was new and what had been done by neglect and the elements over the years since the Disappearance. Here and there she was able to pick out a pile of clothes and accessories that were rigid and black with the congealed leftovers of whoever had been wearing them when the Wave struck. But mostly the store was just a shambles of collapsed shelving, broken glass, ruined stock, and …

  “Oh …”

  She closed her eyes and swallowed when she saw a disembodied arm poking out from under a blackened display cabinet.

  “Damn, sorry, Jules. I thought I’d policed up all the remains.”

  He moved to pick it up, but Jules squeezed his elbow and shook her head.

  “Doesn’t matter. Come on. We should get moving. I want to get to Union Square before sunup.”

  The Rhino helped her out onto the street, which looked like a scene from wartime France, illuminated by the shells of burning buildings. Explosions had picked up car bodies and tossed them willy-nilly, smashing them into shop fronts, tearing the chassis into jagged knots of metal. Tires burned. Shop fittings burned. The long, ruined canyon of Mercer Street, once one of her favorite parts of this city, was illuminated by the oily orange glow of a hundred separate fires. Light rain, more of a sooty drizzle, drifted down, coating the rubble in a thick patina of ash and toxic chemicals.

  They picked their way along the cobblestoned street, threading through entanglements of fallen scaffolding and brickwork. A huge steel garbage can blocked the path down near a boutique she vaguely recalled visiting during the three weeks she’d spent here in 2000, shortly after the millennium celebration. The can had been blown high into the air and come crashing down to lie with one end propped up against the first floor of the boutique. It had buckled in the center and now effectively closed off access to upper Mercer.

  “Let’s cut through,” said the Rhino, gesturing at the boutique with one of the P90s. “We should get out of the main thoroughfares, anyway. There’ll be a lane or something out the back of these buildings. We can get up the block using that.”