Dust of Kansas (Calm Act Genesis Book 1)

by Ginger Booth

  “Duck hunter,” Emmett mused. “Maybe Wisconsin. Keep your mouth shut and no one will even know you’re a damn-Yankee.”

  Emmett reclined on his elbow, lying on the second king-sized bed in their hotel room. The hotel screwed up, giving them only the one room. There was barely any floor left to stand on, around the huge beds. Emmett wore his usual civilian attire, a jewel-toned button-down shirt—vivid purple today—untucked, over button-up jeans and well-worn cowboy boots. He refused to dress to blend in. Missouri was his owned damned state, after all, and they were slumming the night on the Mo side of Kansas City.

  “Would you two like the room to yourselves for an hour?” Zack offered awkwardly.

  “Maybe later, thanks,” Dwayne agreed with a smile. “Let’s head out and find some fun!”

  Finding it a bit early yet for street violence, Emmett selected a dive barbecue pit for authentic local flavor. The interior featured dim lighting and black walls, overpowering the red checked vinyl tablecloths with murk. Judging by the sidelong looks of some of the other patrons, Dwayne wasn’t nearly black enough to make the regulars comfortable with their party. But the owner served them willingly enough—their money was good. So was the barbecue, a mixed-meat platter with cole slaw and fries for four active, hungry men. And the first pitcher of beer. Emmett picked up the tab for nearly $200.

  “I like Kansas City so far,” Zack proclaimed at the table, licking tangy-sweet sauce off his fingers. “Did you come here much growing up, Emmett?”

  “God, no. First time here was last year, when I got to Leavenworth. Why?”

  “Isn’t this the closest city? To home?”

  “About a four hour drive,” Emmett replied. “Guess it depends on what you want a city for. For entertainment, we might go to Branson. Or Springfield. Joplin. Missouri’s ten times the size of Connecticut, Zack.”

  Zack, too, was from Connecticut. The coincidence hadn’t merited much comment from Cam and John. They’d each supplied their home towns, and admitted to not being very familiar with each other’s. And that was that.

  A rather beefy man scooted his chair around and extended his leg into Emmett’s personal space. A couple other hostile men sat on the far side of his barren table.

  “Something I could do for you, sir?” Emmett inquired dryly.

  “You gonna eat the rest of that?” Half a pound of meat remained on the family-style platter, as Emmett’s foursome sat back over their beer.

  “Nope. Want it?” Emmett offered. “Maybe you could talk to us a bit in exchange.”

  “Talk about what.”

  “Race riots around here.” Emmett offered the platter, but held onto it. The man perforce stabbed only one piece of chicken with a fork, before Emmett replaced the platter on his own table.

  “Who’s asking.”

  “Major Emmett MacLaren, U.S. Army. I’m doing a school project on the race riots.”

  “School?” The stranger looked Emmett over, clearly dismissing him as too old for school.

  “Fort Leavenworth, command school,” Emmett supplied. “My pal Preppy over there, too. The others are just friends. Backup.”

  Emmett watched as the man finished his first piece of meat. His covetous eye lit on the platter again. “Willing to talk?” Emmett asked again.

  Apparently it was a tough choice. But eventually this yielded a rough nod, and a single word. “Jed.”

  Emmett passed him the platter. Jed and his pals fell onto it ravenously.

  “So Jed. Where can I see some race riots tonight, you think?” Emmett inquired.

  Jed froze.

  “We hope to observe,” Emmett clarified. “Not participate.”

  Negotiations continued slowly, and involved replenishing the meat platter for the next table, and the pitcher of beer for their own. But Jed mapped out for Emmett where riots had flared up in the past week, and what he’d heard about tonight.

  “I have a theory, Jed,” Emmett shared with him. “That these are food riots. Not race riots.”

  An increasingly benevolent Jed sat back in his chair and nodded. “You’re white. You can afford food. We’re black. We can’t.”

  “I’m a U.S. Army Major,” Emmett argued, with a half-shrug. “Pay’s not bad. Working conditions are a bit rough now and then. Two purple hearts. You got any purple hearts, Cam?”

  “One,” Cam agreed sourly.

  Jed nodded judiciously. “Yeah, you guys are alright.” He squinted a reservation at Dwayne in his Mickey Mouse ears, but let it go. “Got dog tags?” Emmett extracted his with an index finger to dangle for display. “Wear those out.” He nodded. “Nice cross.”

  “My daddy’s,” said Emmett. He rose and rapped Jed’s table with his knuckles. “Thank you very much for the intel, Jed. Gentlemen. Hope you enjoyed your dinner.”

  Out on the street, Cam remarked, “Your map looked like half of Kansas City’s on fire, Emmett.”

  “Yeah. About three times the extent as a month ago.”

  “You’ve done this before?” asked Zack. At Emmett’s nod, he added, “When did you get two purple hearts?”

  “Never,” admitted Emmett. He sighed. “But the ‘I’ve bled for my country’ thing impressed Jed. Good to know. You have a purple heart, Cam?”

  The younger Major gave a bare nod.

  “You never used to lie, Emmett,” Zack said, concerned. “Maybe it’s time you gave this up.”

  “Nah, I’m a lifer,” Emmett said. With a curt nod, he got them moving, to join a current of pedestrians up the dark unkempt streets toward a noisier area. Most of the storefronts were boarded up. The barbecue pit they exited was boarded, too, with a door-hole cut into the plywood for customers. “Zack, lying to that Jed doesn’t matter worth a good god-damn.”

  “We’re all lifers now,” Cam murmured. “Duration of the crisis. No one can resign from the armed services anymore.”

  “Duration of the—” Dwayne echoed, irate. “Climate change crisis? There is no end to the climate change crisis. Since when?”

  “Last month,” Cam said quietly. “Doesn’t matter, Dwayne. Emmett and I are West Point. We were lifers anyway. Us. John. Our classmates.”

  Zack laid an awkward hand on Emmett’s shoulder. “Sorry, man. Didn’t know.”

  After another block, Zack added, “Still. Used to be a point of honor with you, Emmett. You don’t lie.”

  “Yeah, I don’t have honor anymore either,” returned Emmett. “Drop it, Zack.”

  He pulled up short, and the others closed in with him. They’d reached a broad thoroughfare lined with a mixed bag of small older houses and concrete-aproned chain stores and drive-throughs. The plywood fairies had been busy here, as elsewhere on their walk. A faint smell of gunpowder and an increasingly loud roar drifted from up the road to the left.

  “Tear gas or gunpowder, you think?” Emmett asked his companions. The men had all smelled both before. They smelled a lot alike, at first.

  “Tear gas,” decided Dwayne. He thoughtfully unrolled his decorative polka-dot bandanna, and tied it on as a kerchief around his neck instead, ready to pull over nose and mouth. The others hadn’t thought of that.

  “Coming toward us?” Cam suggested. “Perhaps we could observe from here. With a wall at our backs.”

  Emmett nodded grudging assent, and headed to the left. They could get closer to the roaring while they scouted for a vantage point.

  The four-lane avenue was eerie. Beat-up cars, random streetlights smashed, glass on the sidewalks. No traffic at all. No car traffic, at least. A smattering of people darted on foot in an unnerving lack of pattern, in ones and twos and threes, heading all different directions. A couple teenagers zig-zagged the road on too-small bikes, popping wheelies. The roar ahead of them suddenly roared louder.

  “This house, Emmett,” Cam urged. “Now.”

  “I think I’d rather get arrested, actually,” Emmett returned. “Can you get them back to the hotel alone, Cam?”

  Zack grabbed him by the arm and sta
rted dragging. “No, Emmett. He can’t.”

  “Harkonnen, get off me! I’m trying to do something here—” Emmett objected.

  Cam grabbed Emmett’s other arm, and hissed, “If you’d get your head out of your ass, maybe you could hear better. Come on!”

  Just then, the mob turned a corner onto the boulevard only two blocks away, and the roar rapidly quadrupled. Whether this started as a peaceful protest march was a moot point. Signs were dragging and dropping onto the ground, as people started to run. Dwayne was right. The smell was definitely tear gas.

  “Kids!” Dwayne cried. He pointed to a row of big eyes peering out from under the living room blinds in the house they’d been dragging Emmett toward.

  “Left,” Cam decreed.

  Emmett finally wrenched his arms away from Cam and Zack, and pelted ahead of them for the left house. “More kids,” he called out.

  And time was up. The wave of fleeing mob crested onto them. People tried to pass the crowd to left and right, spreading the throng out onto the lawns. Emmett and Cam picked a spot between the two occupied houses, and made a ring, all four of them holding onto each other. A single person, even a man in peak condition as these, could get jostled and swept away. Four men eddied out at the edge were a lot harder to budge. Crowd runners darted around them.

  “White and black, estimate proportions!” Emmett yelled.

  “Sure!” Zack yelled at him sarcastically.

  A string of chuff! noises erupted nearby. “Canisters!” Cam yelled back.

  Each man got something over his face, as best he could, and closed his streaming, burning eyes. People pushed around them even more frantically, trying to escape the gas. Cam had to let go of Dwayne for a second, as he doubled up in a paroxysm of coughing. Zack still held Dwayne, but a panicked couple bolted between the two, breaking his grip. Dwayne got jostled loose. Emmett grabbed for Dwayne at the last second, and both of them were borne away into the street, unable to beat their way back upstream in the mob, in near-blinded agony from by the teargas.

  Cam and Zack linked arms and reluctantly waded in after them. But buffeted by an ever-increasing mob of sick people, coughing and retching themselves, they couldn’t even catch a glimpse of their friends.

  “Emmett will take care of him,” Zack yelled to Cam.

  “Dwayne can handle himself,” Cam agreed, doubtfully. “Let’s get out of this. Next right street.”

  Alas, the police didn’t want the mob going that way. Right was into a better neighborhood. Fire hoses blasted them back into the boulevard. A bunch of darting kids tripped Zack in the confusion, and he went down hard on a bicycle abandoned in the street, with an agonizing jab to the knee.

  With Zack limping on Cam, they were too slow to avoid the police roundup. They were arrested and carted away.

  Chapter 4

  Interesting fact: Long before the Calm Act was officially ratified, there was an increasing disconnect between mainstream media news, and street-level observation, of what was going on in the U.S. Many attribute this to corporate consolidation and vested interest in the media, which was controlled by a small group of billionaires.

  “Thank you!” Dwayne cried, enveloping Emmett in a hug as he was released from lockup.

  Emmett would have preferred to stay in the gymnasium lockup and interview rioters. Unfortunately, the police separated whites and blacks, obeying the ‘race riot’ theory. Which made interviews less useful, and tore Dwayne away on his own. It seemed highly unlikely that Dwayne’s accommodations were better. Guilt propelled Emmett to get Dwayne out of there.

  “Uh-huh,” said Emmett, with a wary eye on the mob surrounding them. He extracted himself from the hug, and pulled Dwayne out the door into a crowded city high school parking lot. “You’ve got a misdemeanor on your record. Sorry. Paid your fine.”

  Dwayne snorted wryly. “Thanks for that. Any sign of the others?”

  With liberal application of their phones, the foursome managed to rendezvous. With Zack limping, and the streets closed to any traffic except the police, it was a long walk back to the hotel. The night guard there tried to turn them away, but Emmett managed to bully their way through.

  Back in the room, Emmett and Zack stripped down to boxers, and got Zack laid out on their bed. Emmett gave his old friend three painkillers and set to cleaning his gory knee.

  The quiet relationship squabble on the other side of the room erupted. “This trip is over, Cam! You take me back to Leavenworth, right now!”

  “Dwayne, it’s 5 a.m.,” countered Cam. “We’ll sleep here, and talk in the morning. Later morning. Whatever.”

  “You could sleep in my bed, Dwayne,” Zack offered. He winced as Emmett jabbed a thumb into his thigh muscle, for wading into the couple’s fight. “Ow?”

  “Come with me to get ice, Dwayne,” Cam suggested. “And some soda cans. Anyone want to drink the soda?”

  “I like orange or coke,” Emmett said.

  “So we can fight in the hallway? Oh, that’ll help!” Dwayne ranted.

  Cam’s boyfriend mode turned off like a light switch. Cam the officer turned on Dwayne. “We have a wounded man. I’m getting ice.” He grabbed the bucket and left. Dwayne stripped and headed into the shower.

  When Cam returned from his errand, Emmett jerked his head toward the bathroom in suggestion. Cam scowled. Emmett shrugged. “Privacy of a sort,” Emmett suggested. “Dwayne’s damn good, Cam. You’re lucky to have him.”

  “Fuck,” agreed Cam.

  Emmett and Zack tried not to laugh, and failed. Cam stripped and slammed into the shower to join Dwayne.

  Still chuckling, Emmett reclined by Zack’s knee. The knee got the ice bucket liner, sloshing with ice.

  Zack said quietly, “Wanted to talk you into business with me in Connecticut. We’d make a good team.” He tactfully omitted, Your life seems to suck here.

  “Politically correct gardening for rich folk,” mused Emmett. “There’s a career concept.” A cold orange soda can alternated between his black eye and split lip. “Darlin’, we’ll always have Estonia,” he added, dripping sarcasm. That’s where they’d met, roommates on deployment in Estonia. “Let’s not spoil the memory.”

  Zack snorted. “In context, that joke could give people the wrong idea.”

  “Point,” conceded Emmett. “Thanks, man. I’m alright. I didn’t mean to put down your business.”

  “‘Uh-huh,’” Zack mimicked him.

  Emmett shrugged. “The whole region’s a powder keg, Zack. No rain. Ground water dries up, wells run dry, and a whole town is dead. Migrants try to flee, but no one wants them. Trying to figure out what to do about that. It’s interesting. Worthy cause. And I don’t have much choice. This is my duty.”

  He popped open the can and drank some of the soda. It tasted and felt better than expected on gas-irritated membranes. “This is good.”

  Zack waved away a proffered can of soda in distaste. “Offer’s open, man. Even if you don’t part on good terms with the Army…”

  “That’ll never happen,” Emmett assured him. He sighed and set the alarm to get them out the door before checkout. “But thanks, Zack,” he whispered.

  “Always, bro.”

  They didn’t have to fake it. They were asleep before Cam and Dwayne were done in the bathroom.

  -o-

  Cam and Emmett took tea in the school commandant’s home office that Sunday morning, in their dress blue uniforms. Except for a single scrape on his cheekbone, Cam’s uniform covered his souvenirs of the Kansas City riots. A black eye and split lip significantly marred the polish on Emmett’s appearance.

  Lieutenant General Schwabacher sat across the desk from them, soft-spoken and white-haired. He sipped his tea genteelly. Reamings-out were not uncommon in the Army. But they were unusual for the officer scholars of Fort Leavenworth’s Command and General Staff College, whose lowest-ranking students—such as these—were 4th level officers. Schwabacher saw no reason to be uncivilized about it.

 
; “So. You’ve had a lively weekend,” Schwabacher opened. He referenced his computer screen, which displayed both majors’ records. “Major…Cameron. Have you ever been arrested before?”

  “No, sir,” Cam replied. His tea saucer was balanced impeccably on his knee, his posture perfect. They learned these things at West Point.

  “No, sir,” Emmett echoed, as the general cocked an eyebrow in his direction. Emmett’s teacup deployment was likewise flawless.

  “From your records, you’re both stellar officers,” Schwabacher praised them. “To what do we owe this…aberration?”

  “This was entirely my fault, sir,” Emmett replied. “I was pursuing a class project on the race riots in Kansas City. Major Cameron and our two house guests offered to accompany me for backup. Which, I apparently needed. My first reconnaissance there was a month ago. The situation in Kansas City has devolved more quickly than I anticipated.”

  Schwabacher’s teacup hung arrested for a moment in mid-air. He lowered it slowly to the desktop. He referred to his computer screen again, and paged down. “You are in the SAMS class. Major Cameron is…ILE. I see.” He took a thoughtful sip of tea. He smiled gently at Cam. “You are free to go, Major Cameron. Enjoy your house guest.”

  “Sir,” Cam acknowledged, and set his tea back on the polished serving tray. “I’ll await you outside, Major MacLaren.” Emmett dipped his head in acknowledgment.

  “Perhaps,” Schwabacher suggested mildly, after the door closed on Cam, “a SAMS classmate might have been a better choice of companion, Major MacLaren. It seems unfair to involve people to whom you cannot explain the purpose of the expedition.”

  “Sir,” Emmett acknowledged.

  “Elaborate, please,” Schwabacher invited.

  “Sir. I’m the only SAMS from this group of states. I’ve attempted to interest others in this line of inquiry.” He paused.

  “Explain your line of inquiry, please, Major. I am fully apprised of the SAMS curriculum this year.” Schwabacher allowed only a touch of grimness to mar his pleasant Sunday morning demeanor.