After America

by John Birmingham

  “Kansas City, of course,” he said.

  “Are you sure, Papa?” Sofia asked. “Are you really sure about that?”

  “The federales are there …”

  “And what of the Wave, Papa?” Sofia asked. “The Americanos, for all of their power, were wiped off the face of God’s earth by the Wave. Where is safe?”

  “The Wave will not come again,” he said.

  “Are you sure of that?” Sofia asked. “How can you be sure of anything, Papa? I am certain of only one thing now—that feeling safe is an illusion. Can you tell me otherwise?”

  Miguel shook his head. He had never had this sort of trouble with Sofia before. She had never questioned his authority like this. He felt rage flickering at the edge of his temper again and quickly did his best to defuse it.

  “Papa.” She reached out and grabbed his arm. Her grip was firm, solid around his bicep. “We must protect each other. We are all that we have left. And whether you like it or not, I will do my best to protect you. Your belt does not frighten me anymore, not now.”

  He looked Sofia in the eye. He saw that in some respects he had lost her as well. The laughing, happy daughter, la princesa, had passed away just as surely as the rest of his family. In her place was this changeling, this cold, hard …

  Woman, he realized.

  “Papa.” Her voice sounded much as it had years ago when he used to hold her high over his head. “I love you very much, and I could not bear to lose you.”

  He took her into his arms and held her close, as if it might be the last time. He remembered bringing her those silly little toys out of a McDonald’s Happy Meal, how much she had enjoyed them. More so because her papa had brought them for her. He remembered taking the family down to the beach on one of his rare vacations away from the trail, watching the children play in the surf.

  Miguel remembered teaching Sofia not to blink when she pulled the trigger, to squeeze the trigger, not yank it, when the ten-point buck came into view. Headstrong even then, Sofia had taken the buck at nearly three hundred yards, which startled everyone to this very day.

  “I love you, too,” he said.

  Later in the day, Miguel gave her back her Remington.

  “You should not feel bad about what we had to do this morning or last night,” Aronson said as they resumed their trek back to the rest of the Mormon host. “Those men were killers and rapists and thieves. Both Texas and Seattle law allows for summary execution under those circumstances. God will judge them as he judges us all.”

  Sofia regarded the Mormon leader with some confusion. “I don’t feel bad,” she said. “I don’t feel anything for them. They got what they deserved. That’s all that happened this morning.”

  “But you do not look very happy,” he said.

  She waited a moment before answering.

  “I thought it would help,” she said. “I thought it would make me feel better.” She shrugged again and then trailed off.

  “The only thing that will make you feel better is the thing you can’t have,” said Miguel. “Everything the way it was. That is what we all want. And that is impossible. But it is possible to have some justice from the sort of men who killed Mama and your brother and sister and the others. And while it may not make us feel better, I can promise you it does make the world a better place every time one of them leaves it.”

  Miguel turned to Aronson. “I can understand that you might wish some time to recover from all this, and I will abide by your choice, but if you are caught here by Blackstone’s men, by the TDF, so close to the evidence of the agents’ destruction, it will go badly for you.”

  “But we were defending ourselves and our women and reclaiming our stock,” Aronson protested. “We cannot be punished for doing that, not justly.”

  “Out here, justice is a bullet,” Miguel replied. “You have the most bullets, you get the most justice.”

  His daughter, he noticed, nodded in agreement with that. Both of the Mormons looked troubled.

  “But Fort Hood condemns the road agents,” Aronson said. “They send patrols against them and have made membership in the gangs a hanging offense. We hanged those men on that authority.”

  “They are the first agents I know of being hanged,” said Miguel. “None have been caught or punished by the TDF.”

  He looked up at the sound of a whip crack to see Adam and Orin mustering the herd toward the field on the far side of the road that ran by the football stadium. Martin Luther King Drive or Boulevard, he thought it was called.

  “It is not true to say that the TDF does not suppress the gangs,” Aronson said. “You know they hanged a dozen bandits in Fort Hood just last week according to Texas Public Radio. And I have read reports of summary executions on the range.”

  “They are said to be quite common,” D’Age added.

  Miguel stopped at a fence post where they had left their jackets and water bottles. He took a long pull from his flask, which was insulated by a neoprene sleeve. The water inside was deliciously cold on his dry throat. He offered it to Sofia, but she produced a small pink hip flask of her own. Miguel had never seen it before and wondered where she had picked it up. It seemed to have a picture of a cat on it and the words “Hello Kitty.”

  “Hangings are said to be quite common,” he said to D’Age. “I wouldn’t trust a word that comes from Texas Public Radio. It is a Blackstone … how would you say? Piece of mouth? And nobody ever sees them, because they are said to take place beyond the boundaries of the settlement. And yes, twelve banditos were hanged last week. And more the week before that. But banditos are not road agents. They are all from well below the Rio Grande. There was a reason those men would not give you their names this morning. It had nothing to do with matters of faith. Agents give up their names and with them their affiliations to Fort Hood on pain of death, or worse.”

  Aronson took a drink before bending forward and pouring most of his bottle over his head and neck, grunting with pleasure at the cool thrill. When he stood up, he shook off the beaded droplets like a dog.

  “That is speculation, Miguel. They didn’t give us their real names because they have their gang names. They’re like the old Hells Angels or the gangstas in the cities before the Wave. They take a gang name when they join. It is their new identity, like being born again, except into sin. These men are no different.”

  Miguel gave him a searching look. “How would you know?”

  Aronson smiled. “I was a doctor of sociology before the Wave. Urban subcultures were my specialty.”

  The cattle were moving en masse now to fresh pasture a short distance away, lowing and trumpeting as Miguel’s cattle dogs barked and yapped with great excitement to herd them through the gates on the far side of the field. The beasts’ earthy scent mingled with the growing cloud of dust as the herd got on the road. Flankers guided the cattle off the ball field with a rudimentary skill that impressed Miguel. The Mormons were fast learners.

  “Get around!” he yelled at Red Dog before she was distracted by a blood patch where he had killed the two guards with his knife.

  Miguel faced Aronson and turned his palms up to the sky, a “whatever” gesture as his daughter called it.

  “Well, I am no doctor, Mister Aronson. But I know what I know, and you will come to regret it if you take the word of Fort Hood on this matter. The road agents are their men, no matter what they say. And if I were you, I would be clear of this place as soon as I could be.”

  Aronson did not dismiss him out of hand, for which Miguel was thankful. He had often found with educated people that they thought his advice not worthy of listening to because he had not bothered with books and learning beyond what was necessary for his work. He could read, and he could write English quite well—he would not have made it through settler selection otherwise—but he did not have the luxury of doing so for pleasure.

  “We shall confer with the women and see what they say,” Cooper Aronson conceded. “But even if we are to leave here as s
oon as possible, we should gather what supplies we can from this town.”

  Miguel nodded at that. “Fair enough,” he said before smiling at an old memory.

  “Fair enough” was what Miss Julianne used to say when she got as much of her way as she was ever going to, just before she started plotting to get the rest of it as well.

  He was right about lunch. Although Miguel had a raging appetite, nobody else seemed to need much beyond hardtack and water. Some of the women had gathered fruit, and the storm cellar of the Hy Top had given up a carton of strawberry jam tins. But only Miguel and, oddly enough, young Adam seemed to have any hunger. Sofia nibbled at the fruit and drank plenty of water, but to her father’s eye she appeared tired and worn down. Everyone had gathered in the shade under a tree near the football field on which the herd was now grazing. At some point the camp whores had been accepted into the Mormon host, but from what Miguel could see, the graft was not taking well. They sat apart, sullen and suspicious.

  The women they had so recently treated as less than human distinguished themselves by the care and consideration with which they attended to the needs of the whores, who had been cleaned up and dressed in more respectable attire. Perhaps that was behind their surly disposition, Miguel thought, smiling to himself. Once they had been prized out of their leather miniskirts and tight T’s and draped in long, shapeless floral frocks, all of their intimidating sexual power had vanished. The livid bruising and splints and bandages for their wounds did not help much in that regard, either. Miguel kept his eye on them for a few minutes, but they were being guarded by Trudi Jessup, the woman he had rescued last night, who was neither camp whore nor captive Mormon. He had not spoken to her at length beyond quietly accepting her thanks after the executions. She had spent all her time with the other women, but something about her marked her as being separate and somehow different.

  He supposed it was simply because she was not of their church.

  After a short while observing her, it was obvious the whores would be given no opportunity to cause trouble, and he relaxed a little. It was not such a wise thing accepting the enemy into camp like this, he thought. Taking a few apples from a plastic bowl, and supplementing them with a slab of biscuit and a small piece of hard cheese, he walked over to where the leadership group was still discussing what they might do. He had always assumed Mormons to be a little backward in their treatment of women—although no more so than many traditional Catholics, he had to admit—but here the women seemed to be equals with their men.

  “Come over, Miguel, please,” Aronson said when he saw the vaquero watching them idly.

  He had met all the women already, of course, but he was never especially good with names, and despite making an effort to commit them all to memory, he could not be certain who was who. Jenny, the betrothed of Willem D’Age, he remembered without a problem. And Aronson’s wife, Maive, he recognized, of course. She had been very good to Sofia and the only one who did not appear to judge his daughter for her behavior on the night of the rescue, although Tori, the betrothed of Ben Randall, had taken Sofia aside to thank her for shooting down the murderous harpy who had intended him murder.

  Of the others, besides Sally Gray, who was younger and thus no part of this conference, he had no idea, but he was comfortable enough addressing all as ma’am.

  A pall still hung over the small band, with all of them speaking as though they were in church, not quite whispering but not speaking as loudly or gaily as one might expect of people who had just escaped death. Miguel supposed the close nature of that escape would naturally suppress their spirits. The wound of losing one of their own, the violence to which they had been a party, and, most serious of all, the outrages committed upon the women would take some time to heal.

  “Miguel,” said Aronson, “my wife agrees with you that we should not delay long in our departure from this place.” Maive surprised him by placing a cool hand on his forearm and squeezing lightly.

  She looked over at the camp whores, and Miguel was certain he detected just a flash of ill feeling directed toward them, but Maive Aronson immediately softened her gaze and went on.

  “It would be best to get the women away from here. We have enough supplies from the stop at Leona. We should be gone from here as quickly as possible.”

  “That is probably wise,” Miguel said. “I do not know that there would be much worth salvaging here, anyway. The center of the city is badly burned out and looted already.”

  “That was the agents,” Jenny said, with much more obvious bitterness than Maive. “One of them told me they had been using this town as a base for six months and had destroyed a good deal of the town center for the fun of it.”

  She sounded as appalled by the suggestion that anyone would do such a thing as she was by having been captured and mistreated by the same men.

  “Then we should move on as soon as we can,” said Miguel. “Where do you next plan to make camp?”

  “Palestine,” Aronson said.

  33

  New York

  No, thought Milosz, you do not obtain military-specification P90s from stroking pussycats. You steal them or buy them on the black market, or, given the way this country was, you loot them from a deserted gun store. But what the hell. He could not care less where the strange hippopotamus man in the very odd Viking helmet and his English lady friend got the weapons that had saved his ass. All Milosz cared about was that his scrawny ass remained in one piece, while back at Madison and 29th the asses of many nig nogs and crazy ragheaded asswits were scattered about the street in many, many pieces.

  “You need to get out of this part of the city,” Wilson insisted in the same tone of voice Milosz had heard him use when pushing around lower ranks and junior officers.

  The man and woman, however, seemed oddly immune to the master sergeant’s imprecations. “Imprecations” was another word Milosz had learned from reading Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald, along with “orgastic,” which admittedly remained something of a mystery and not a word he was confident about throwing into this conversation.

  “I’m sorry, Sergeant—” the woman began.

  “Master sergeant, United States Army Rangers.”

  “That’s lovely. But I’m sorry, Master Sergeant, no, we cannot leave the city until our work is done.”

  “Your work was hauling rusted fucking car wrecks out to the salvage barges, according to these papers,” Wilson said. “Not spooking around Pirate Island capping motherfuckers and looking for fucking treasure maps. Your work didn’t involve any of that crazy shit at all.”

  “Well,” the woman said, smiling in a rather sexy fashion, Milosz thought, “our work didn’t involve saving your asses from Captain Fucking Feathersword and his merry band of cutthroats, either. But we did. So perhaps you’d be a darling and let us toddle off before your friends arrive. Honestly, being sent back now would ruin our whole day.”

  Milosz peered out of the office window down into the streets of midtown Manhattan. From their vantage point on the forty-second floor of the building to which they had fled he had a good view of the OPFOR concentrations around the approaches to Madison Square Park. They were a lot less concentrated. A lot more “attrited,” as that American colonel had said. The lower end of the city looked like hell. Frankly, he was glad to be out of it for a little while.

  He idly examined the office, wondering what kind of business the occupants of this particular floor had carried on. Whatever the case, they’d been busy on March 14, 2003. The leavings of the Disappeared lay everywhere: at desks, in hallways, mounded in a pile of stiff, blackened suits and dresses encircling a box of petrified Krispy Kremes. He did his best to ignore them and Wilson’s argument with the smugglers, for that was surely what these two must be.

  “Halo to any element, request close air. Location is …” Gardener said into her headset.

  He returned to the drama unfolding below, where dozens of city blocks were aflame. Sunrise was mere moments away. Gunships darted in an
d out of the shattered canyons, hosing long ropy streams of tracer fire onto unseen targets. Every few minutes a jet fighter would fall out of the sky, loosing rockets or bombs into the cauldron of battle, their detonations causing the window in front of him to vibrate. The scale of destruction was fantastic.

  “Troops and vehicles in the open,” said Gardener. “Approximately one hundred effectives plus five civilian trucks moving toward …”

  She sat in a corner that had not been given over to the office of any single executive. A breakout space, she called it, a small open area decorated with a couple of couches and a small coffee table on which lay old magazines and a vase of brown dried-up flowers. Gardener, comfortable on a musty couch, examined the maelstrom through her binoculars, apparently unaware she was sitting on a red dress left behind by one of the lost souls who had worked there. Her muddy boots were propped up on the coffee table, and her carbine lay across her lap. She had taken her helmet off, leaving the radio headset in place, exposing some of her stray blond locks. She pressed her fingers to the earpiece of her headset and called in a string of air strikes, punishing the foes who had killed her partner, Sergeant Veal, and had very nearly taken her life as well.

  “I copy, Talon. What have you got?” she asked. She waited a moment and then replied. “Clusters will be perfect. Do you see them?”

  She pressed her headset against her ears and nodded.

  “Halo copies.”

  Behind Milosz, Wilson raised his voice again.

  “Listen, I am the world’s most grateful motherfucker that you happened along and pulled our nuts outta the fire,” he said. “But you can’t be tear-assing around the AOR on your private business with all of this shit flying around. Have you looked out the fucking window the last few minutes? Huh? We got us Apocalypse fucking Now out there, people. Top-shelf fucking ordnance getting uncorked today. Star Wars shit. Hell, they gonna be firing up the fucking Deathstar and just zapping this whole fucking island to ashes before we’re done, believe it. And you want to go back out into it? You are going to get yourselves killed. And since I owe you for me and my people not getting killed, I have to say no, and furthermore, Hell No. When resupply flies in on the roof, you are flying the fuck outta here.”