He calmed himself with the thought that Sofia, at least, was safe for the moment. Hidden well outside town with the rest of the Mormons, she would not be exposed to the ugliness of what was going to happen there this night.
“For banditos, Blackstone’s Texas is a hard country,” he explained patiently. “Deadly if they are caught. For these men, however, not so much.”
He jerked his chin in the direction of the Hy Top, which was illuminated by fires burning in oil drums. Rock music thumped and howled from inside. White man’s music. Crunching guitars and pounding drums to drown out all but the loudest wailing of the female prisoners. He stilled his sense of outrage, which was considerable, and regarded the scene with a heart crusted in salt and black ice. The camp followers were easy to distinguish from the Mormon women. Although just as likely to be struck or kicked or even dragged into the darkness by the agents, they did enjoy a noticeable freedom of movement not granted to the newest captives. They also enjoyed the privilege of kicking down on the other women. As he watched through the NVGs, two of the camp whores delighted a small number of agents by tripping one of the captives after she had delivered a tray of beers outside. They fell on her, pinning her struggling form to the ground, and then one sat on her face and shook her ass, laughing and yelling something that Miguel couldn’t make out but that he was certain could only be a cruel taunt. It reduced the audience of road agents to helpless laughter.
Hot waves of fury washed through his head, making him dizzy.
Lying on the thick carpet of pine needles, he felt Aronson go tense and start to move. Miguel reached over and grabbed the man’s upper arm, digging into the flesh with fingers as hard as rail spikes.
“No,” he said firmly but quietly. “Now is not the time.”
“But … they’re … that’s Jenny over there, Willem’s betrothed.”
Miguel drilled the tip of his thumb into a nerve bundle beneath Aronson’s bicep. The Mormon was not a soft man, but the pain was excruciating and overwhelmed any other considerations. When Miguel was certain he was subdued again, he let go.
“I am sorry, Aronson, but if you move against them now, you will die and she will die. Possibly all of your women will be killed. And not quickly. The agents will make sport of it. We must wait. The others will not move until we report back, and we need all of them.”
Aronson was silent for a moment, allowing more screams and reports of debauchery to reach them from South Cottonwood Street.
“This is intolerable,” he said at last in a weak, broken voice.
Miguel nodded in the dark.
“Yes. We should withdraw for now, back to the meeting place. I can return and watch the agents’ camp by myself. It might be better, anyway. I need to move around them, and I want to scout out the field where they have left the cattle. We must find out how many of them are on guard there, and I can do that without being caught. Probably. You, probably not. Let us go, then.”
Without allowing the poor man another second to think about it, Miguel was up, drawing the Mormon to his feet and exiting the overgrown lot where they had been conducting their surveillance. The agents had set themselves up in a poor area of town, southwest of the main business center. Miguel could see that even before the Wave it would have been home to the poorer folk of Crockett. Many of the houses that still stood looked small and mean, especially on the western side of Cottonwood Street, where remnant forest still covered the hills and fields. A good deal of refuse and rusted machinery lay where it had been abandoned in gardens and driveways long before the inhabitants had Disappeared, but unlike the town center and some of the more affluent neighborhoods, the area had not been ravaged so completely by fire and looters. To judge from the scenes he had just witnessed, the Hy Top Club had not been relieved of its liquor supply in the years since the Wave had swept away its clientele.
He pondered that.
Perhaps one of the road agents was a fortunate local, someone who had been out of the country in 2003. Perhaps with the army in Iraq. If so, he could have led his comrades here after they had attacked Aronson’s people. In the post-Wave world a little local knowledge could be a very precious resource.
The two men retreated carefully through the darkness. This far from the club, with so much scrubland in the way, not much light made it through from the burning oil drums, but the stars burned with cold brilliance high above and a half moon laid an opalescent glow over the ruins of the town, allowing them to pick their way through. They took it slowly, retracing their steps of an hour before, finally emerging into a small open area where the surrounding forest of hickory, elm, and sweetgum gave way to knee-high grass and a few thin saplings. In twenty years, thought Miguel, it would all be forest again.
Aronson whistled, a trilling call like a night bird, and five silhouettes arose from the grass in front of them. Miguel was impressed. Had he not known the Mormons were secreted in the little glade, he would not have spotted them unless he was especially alert. They had even taken care not to tamp down the grass, leaving a telltale path as they walked over it. He recognized the outline of Willem D’Age as the man spoke in a low, anxious voice.
“What have you seen, Brother Aronson? Are our women alive? Are they well?”
“They are alive, for now,” Miguel said, before the other man could set off a panic among his fellows or tell D’Age anything that might tip him over the edge into a righteous fury. “And they will stay that way if we keep our heads about us. Gather around.”
The group clustered around the returned scouts. Miguel deferred to Aronson, who delivered a competent report of what they had seen on the edge of town. He managed to contain his obvious distress about their women and shaded the details to spare his comrades. Nonetheless, they could not help themselves.
“So these animals, they have taken the women as chattels?” D’Age asked.
“They treat them very roughly, brother,” said Aronson.
“Then we should go now and release them from this veil,” another voice piped up. “We shall lay the Lord’s vengeance on them for their trespasses.”
The speaker was young, and Miguel recognized him as one of the boys, Orin. He was waving around a military assault weapon, and Miguel could tell even in the starlight that every line in his body was tensed and quivering like a bow drawn too far and held too long. He reached over and placed his hand over the boy’s where it gripped the front end of the rifle.
“Boy,” he said quietly but with great firmness, “this is no game. We shall kill these men tonight. Or they shall kill us. It is not play. Put your weapon away until it is needed. Until blood is the only outcome …”
Miguel hoisted his own rifle, his much-loved Winchester, and held it in front of the boy.
“I have leveled this gun at five men. They are all dead now. Do you understand? Do not wave your weapon around. It is not a toy.”
Not only the overexcited lad fell still, but all the men around him.
“Good,” said Miguel. “Then we can prepare.”
Miguel heard the lowing of the cattle, well before the stench of the animals reached him, and then the wind changed and the familiar bovine reek was in his nostrils, at the back of his throat, everywhere, thick as fresh shit on the heel of a new boot. He smiled thinly. He did not imagine for a moment that the road agents guarding the stolen livestock would be savvy enough to detect his particular smell on the night breeze. To get stuck with a job like this when there was a party to be had, they would be the bottom feeders of the crew, the new recruits with nothing to leverage. Still, he would pay them the heed due to men who would kill without a qualm, given the chance.
That was why they would never get the chance.
Two hours he had been watching them as they made their rounds of the football field that butted up against the big loop road that swung around the southwestern reaches of the town. The sporting field was fenced, and the fence line had not deteriorated too badly in three years without maintenance, providing the agents wit
h a convenient area to pen their newly stolen herd within a reasonable distance of the Hy Top Club. It was, he estimated, no more than a ten-minute walk through the darkness, depending on whether you risked turning an ankle or even breaking a leg by cutting across the overgrown gardens that lay in between.
The sounds of revelry had died away in the last twenty minutes. No more music or laughter drifted through the newly grown forest that was quickly reclaiming the outskirts of Crockett. The occasional scream did so, however, and Miguel could only hope that the Mormons would be able to contain themselves until the moment was right. Before they could move on the main body of the agents, he had to dispose of these two quietly. Even two men, well armed, arriving at the wrong moment could be enough to turn the tide against them.
Miguel settled himself against the rough, sticky trunk of a pine tree and brought the night vision goggles up to his eyes again. There were two of them, both young, as he had thought. One was taller, however, and, unusually for these times, quite fat. A prodigious belly spilled over his belt buckle, and as Miguel watched, he appeared to be shoving some sort of long bread roll into his face. They were both dressed in a ridiculous mishmash of Hollywood outfits he would have thought of as cowboy biker: jeans with chaps, buckskin shirts, studded black leather vests, and wide-brimmed hats. The shorter and thinner of the two was also wrapped in what looked like a full-length black leather coat. They each carried pistols in hip holsters, but Miguel assumed they were modern semiautomatics, not revolvers. They were for show at any rate, because each was also armed with an assault rifle. Some sort of M16 variants if he was not wrong.
The smaller one was smoking and occasionally drinking from a flask he would take from inside his full-length coat. That was good, the vaquero thought. Drink up, my little friend. Drink up. They shivered and stomped around a small campfire they’d lit near the northern end of the running track that ran around the football field.
Or did they call it a gridiron field here? he wondered. True football was a game played with a round ball between civilized people.
Miguel waited another five minutes, until total silence had fallen over the empty wastes of suburban Crockett. When he was certain the main body of partygoers had exhausted themselves with debauchery, he made his move.
First he removed his shoes and dropped his pants—took them right off—before putting his boots back on.
Then he donned a leather motorcycle jacket salvaged by Ben Randall from an auto shop in Leona two days earlier, thankfully, not from the remains of its former owner. After his scare in the general store, that would have been too much. Miguel was certain he would have felt the dead man creeping all over him within a few minutes of pulling it on. But the jacket had been hung cleanly on a hook in the workshop of the town’s garage. It matched the clothing of one or two of the road agents he had spied back at the club. They had also sought out other equipment, but without luck. Thus, he had no silenced pistol or hunting bow with which he might quietly send these two worthless chochas into the next world to account for themselves.
But he did have a plan.
And so, without pants but leather jacketed, with a bright yellow Caterpillar baseball cap pulled down over his face, he emerged from his hiding spot and began a long, staggering walk across open ground, waving a half-empty bottle of bourbon around.
He was praying that with the night being so dark and the agents partly blinded by the small campfire, his bizarre approach would disarm their suspicions. If it did not, he was dead and the Mormon women almost certainly, too.
Miguel kept his head down as best he could, allowing himself only brief glimpses of his quarry as he staggered theatrically every few yards or so. The guards noticed him when he was about fifty yards out, the shorter of the two pointing and laughing.
“Hey. Is that James? Jimmy James Jefferson? Y’all brought us some bourbon but none o’ that tight Mormon pussy, you dumbass?”
A few of the nearest cattle bellowed and snorted, but they moved away and resumed dozing, chewing their cud, or swatting flies with their tails.
Well before Miguel entered the full glow of the campfire where he would have been identified as an impostor, he deliberately stumbled facedown into the dirt, where he stayed, groaning, with his ass pointed squarely at the road agents.
He hoped they would not be so familiar with the ass of this Jimmy James Jefferson that they would be alerted to his ruse.
From their braying laughter, they did not seem much perturbed.
Typical, thought Miguel, that men of this ilk would do nothing to help a fallen comrade with neither pants nor dignity to his name. They seemed content to chat to each other while he lay in the dirt.
He groaned loudly again and pushed himself up on one his elbows before throwing one arm out and crashing down again, this time with the bottle of bourbon where they might see it draining away.
“Hey!” cried one of them, the smaller man, he was certain. “Don’t spill it all.”
Miguel dragged the bottle back toward himself and waited.
He forced himself to go completely limp as he heard both sets of feet approaching. He had his right hand tucked away inside the leather jacket, his fingers wrapped around the handle of the footlong Bowie knife. A cattleman, he had worked with knives all his life and knew what speed, strength, and a finely honed blade could do to living flesh when driven with enough force and skill and merciless intent.
When he felt the men’s hands grab for him roughly, he rolled over and struck out in one, two, three flashing movements. He whipped the knife through a short vicious arc that took the killing edge of the blade deep into the throat of the smaller man, who could not even scream, so quickly was his trachea sliced in two. As he continued to sweep around, launching himself like a coiled rattler, he switched to a backhanded stabbing grip and drove the evil-looking steel shaft deep into the temple of the second man, whose eyes seemed almost to pop out of their sockets at the very moment the last spark of life died in them. He reversed the flow of his attack, ripping the blade out, bringing huge gobbets of flesh and slivers of bone chip with it. With a final lunge he drove the Bowie up under the floating rib of the first man he had cut, making sure of his end by ramming four inches of hardened steel into his heart.
A few cattle bellowed in protest but stayed where they were.
Grimacing with disgust, Miguel stood and stripped off the leather jacket. He was bathed in hot, dark blood, but there was no time to clean up.
He hurried back to where he’d left his pants and his guns.
There would be more such work before he was done for the night.
27
Kansas City, Missouri
Compared to most big urban centers, Kansas City was relatively intact. As he took in the view from his temporary office on the Cerner Campus in North Kansas City, Kip played connect the dots in his head. He could hear the trains rumbling down the tracks on the other side of Highway 210. He would use those trains in conjunction with the Missouri River to resettle St. Louis at the eastern end of the state, where advance salvage crews were already busy stripping the Boeing plant, among other things. Once St. Louis was resettled, they could begin to reassert control over the Mississippi River. With control of the river, he would hold the beating heartland in his hands and could turn his attention south or east.
This was the part of his job that thrilled and fascinated Kipper. The politics he left to Jed. The necessity, the inevitably of conflict, of war, he was coming to accept as a part of binding up the fabric of a continent that had been torn apart. He was already at war in all but name on the island of Manhattan, and that rat bastard down in Fort Hood seemed intent on pushing him to the edge of a sectarian conflict at some point in the future. But the challenge of rebuilding and renewal, marshaling all the resources at the nation’s call, as diminished as they might be, and applying them in the best way at the right place and time—that was engineering on a scale that went well beyond the merely epic. This was world building. He indu
lged himself in a few moments of happy satisfaction as he watched school buses full of men and women in overalls and brightly colored safety vests chug out of the parking lot across the street from another Cerner building that had been converted into a dorm. More buses would be collecting workers from Crown Center, the hotels at Harrah’s and Ameristar Casinos farther to the east, and a nine-story loft apartment complex in Northtown. The workers, a mix of people from all over the planet, would fan out across the city to perform their duties and earn their places by dedicating themselves for seven years to the renewal of the republic.
Some would head out to the Hawthorne Power Plant to assist in restoring the facility to its full 435-megawatt capacity. Maybe they’d be clearing the roads of tangled auto wrecks, although KC’s road net wasn’t too badly jammed up by the insane megasnarls Kipper had seen in New York. Anyone with railroad experience, mostly refugees from India, was tasked with restoring the myriad rail yards scattered through the Kansas City area.
Their work might be altogether grimmer, of course. If they had been chosen for their jobs because they had an employment background in the medical sector or had worked with hazardous materials or environments before, there was a chance they were heading out to clean up the remains of the Disappeared. There were still tens of thousands of them to be put to rest, and the God botherers in Congress had kicked up an almighty stink when they’d discovered that the first clearance teams in KC had simply scooped up the leftovers of former residents and burned them in Hawthorne Unit 5’s coal-fired furnace. The Greens hadn’t been too happy, either, although of course those wing nuts had complained about the loss of precious biomass and the carbon footprint of the reclamation efforts, especially pertaining to the reactivation of the coal-fired power plants. Man, he really didn’t relish their likely reaction when they learned that the Wolf Creek nuclear generating station in Coffey County was next on the list of plants to be reactivated.
After America Page 28