Tropic of Kansas

by Christopher Brown

  “Can you help me?”

  Bert didn’t answer.

  Tania would have run right then, but she was afraid to go outside. Afraid to even leave the room.

  I can’t do this anymore. Tania said that out loud, but did not type it for Bert to read.

  “Best I can do is try to cover for you at work,” blurted Bert. “Gotta go now bye.”

  Tania stared at the suddenly lifeless figure of Jasmine, and the flickering cursor waiting for her to tell it her next move. She could hear the wind hitting the building as the isolation started to burrow its way in, and wondered where she could find friends out there in the dark.

  43

  When they got in the car, Sig helped Moco cut the new tattoo from his flesh. When they were pretty sure they had gotten whatever tags were in there, they threw them out the window.

  They heard the choppers and sirens as they drove, saw the searchlights, wondered about the things they couldn’t see.

  Fritz had extra clothes for Moco, a flask of brandy, a bagel, a bottle of water, and some vitamins. He had a first aid kit that Moco and Sig both used.

  Fritz knew some pretty good back roads from bicycling. He got them out of town and drove them an hour south to the Missouri state line.

  He dropped them off behind an abandoned motel where they could crash until they were ready to move on. Fritz gave Sig a piece of paper with his and Billie’s contact info, the names of some other Subway conductors between here and New Orleans, and the code he said would let him access his snowflakes. The code was a crazy long string of numbers and letters that took up one whole side of the page. Then he gave him another piece of paper sealed in an envelope that he said he wanted him to deliver to the people in New Orleans, the people Moco would know how to find.

  Fritz held Sig’s arm for a long time when he was telling him about all that.

  They never got to see Fritz’s videos on the news, at least not until a long time later.

  Part Five

  Movie Nights

  44

  In the dream, Tania was in the cage, shivering and naked. Moco was standing right there on the other side, sneering at her, holding a fire hose. Mom was behind him, smiling.

  Mom said something. Again? Moco went for the nozzle.

  BOOM BOOM BOOM.

  Someone pounding on a door.

  Tania opened her eyes. It took her a minute to remember where she was. That ugly wallpaper.

  More knocking, harder.

  Tania got up, looked through the peephole. It was the hotel night man. He looked worried.

  Tania cracked the door, leaving the chain on.

  “Hey, Ms. Rourke,” he said, looking down the hallway both ways as he talked. “I wanted to tell you some people just came around here and I think they were looking for you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Militia, with a couple of state troopers. They didn’t have a picture and they said a different name but they gave a description that sure sounded like you. They said they needed to ask you some questions, maybe something to do with that raid that just went down.”

  “Are they still here?”

  “I got rid of them,” he said. “But you can bet they’ll be back. I don’t think they liked the way I blew them off.”

  “What time is it?” said Tania.

  “Half past five.”

  A good time to make an arrest.

  “Thank you,” said Tania. She grabbed her purse and handed the clerk a hundred-dollar bill, so old and dog-eared that it was hard to believe it came out of a machine, but that was how almost all of them were these days.

  “You betcha,” said the clerk.

  “There’s more where that came from,” said Tania.

  Tania closed the door back up and looked at the den she had made. The room was littered with her stuff. Suitcase open and half-unpacked, wires and cords, files, snack food remnants, boxes of takeout, half-drunk bottles of water and soda and one mostly drunk bottle of wine. It hadn’t been that long, but the days stretched out when you locked yourself up in a room like this, more so when you used it as a portal to disappear into your screens, hunting in the clouds.

  It was time to move on, before they came by looking for her again, before Sig got too far.

  As she thought about packing up, and where she would go, Tania looked at Todd’s portable TV there on the desk, her open notebook full of scrawls on one side, sleeping laptop on the other. She remembered how she had stayed up most of the night experimenting with different tuning strategies and interpretations of the Ganymede codes in search of a clear transmission. She gave up in frustration sometime around three, but left it on just in case.

  It had finally worked. The screen was filled with a test pattern, made from a cartoon of a robot armadillo, its plates painted in the colors of the rainbow, standing on a logo.

  Channel Zero

  Please Stand By

  She turned up the volume, which she had muted in the night, tired of hearing the white noise. The static was still there, but she heard a voice. Not the same voice as she heard in Todd’s lab, but saying the same kind of thing, reading numbers and codes aloud.

  She couldn’t move now, or even turn off the set, and risk never getting the signal back—for all she knew it was tied to this spot, and the current transmission was definitely tied to this moment in time. Just a couple of hours, at least, she thought.

  Tania started taking notes, and tried to listen for hope in the coded transmissions instead of the danger lurking in the sounds outside.

  45

  On the television, they were torturing the President of the United States. The crowd in the bar cheered them on.

  It wasn’t actually President Mack. It was an actor playing the role of the President—before he actually became President. In the movie he’s a freshman senator from New York who takes leave to reactivate his Navy wings and help liberate the South Koreans, only to get shot down and captured on the wrong side of the DMZ.

  On-screen, Mack struggled against his bindings. He was tied to a chair bolted to the floor of a windowless room. Shirt ripped off, toned torso spritzed with fake sweat and blood, face pulled into a tight grimace.

  “Pinche rich boy,” yelled a lady at the next table, laughing.

  “¡Mátalo!” hollered a guy in the front.

  “Newton Towns,” said Moco to Sig, drawing out the sound in ridicule. “This actor is such a ball-licking pendejo. Look how he has the hair waxed off his chest! I think he is one of those Furmanólogos.”

  Sig drank his Sandino and scanned the room. The bar was windowless, too, except for the slider on the door that the armed bouncers looked through when you knocked to get in. From the outside, the place looked like a concrete bunker, marked with a painting by the door of a cheesecake Aztec princess remotely piloting a giant flying snake with a fleshy joystick. The spot was remote, at the end of a gravel road back behind the big drone plants in East St. Louis. Sig still didn’t feel safe, but they had been running long and hard enough that Moco talked him into sitting still while they waited for Moco’s contacts to show up and close the deal. It helped that the place had the biggest television Sig had ever seen.

  Crazy eyes stared from the screen. Close-up on a wide-faced woman with thick black hair piled up in a beehive, Mao jacket unbuttoned to reveal a jade skull necklace and telenovela cleavage. The woman smiled and held up the exposed end of an electrical cable, sparking blue.

  The crowd in the bar whooped and yelled like they were watching a boxing match.

  “¡MAGA MAGA MAGA!” they yelled. “¡Ya se armó!”

  Moco looked at Sig and laughed. “This lady is like the godmother of Mexican crime movies,” he explained. “She ain’t no Korean. She’s Guatemalan. Margareta Ana García. ‘Doña Maga.’ Before she moved to Hollywood to be devil dictator daughter and shit she was a big diva in Mexico City, pop singer who started playing the queen of crime.”

  Newton Towns as President Mack gritted
his porcelain teeth as the electricity ran through his body. Techno tuba notes pumped out of the jukebox on the other side of the room, competing with the hoots of the crowd and the crackling sound of the President being fried.

  Sig looked around at the other patrons. They were mostly women—Mexican armorers and assemblers who spent their fat paychecks from the flybot factories on the flavors of home and TLC procured from hungry locals.

  “Why do they need to hire these people from so far away?”

  “Do the math,” said the woman seated at the table behind Moco. “The locals can’t.” She patted the blond hair of the skinny white boy who was giving her a neck rub. “Es la verdad, right, Bobby?”

  The boy laughed, pulled up the collar of the woman’s coveralls, and poked the embroidered robot on her shoulder.

  “Everybody knows the maquilas produce the best drone techs,” said Bobby. “And the best of the best are the ladies of Juárez.”

  The torturer was asking the President a question, but you couldn’t hear it over the noise.

  The name on the door of the bar was “El Agasajo,” which meant something like “the royal treatment.” Of which, according to Moco, the staff offered several variations. But few people ever used that name, he said. Mostly they just called it the Embassy. For obvious reasons, and not so obvious, like the fact that the walls were lined with lead to provide total privacy from prying electronic eyes. And as if that weren’t enough, he claimed some of the factory workers were gradually reprogramming all the machines they worked on to read the place as a blank spot on the map.

  Smoky vapor came off the heaving pecs of Newton Towns as Thomas Mack.

  “This isn’t personal,” said Mack, busting his right arm free from its bindings. The camera went in close. “It’s business,” he said, eyes twinkling.

  Plink. Plonk. The sound of metal bolts snapping.

  The President ripped the chair from the floor and shoved it at his tormentor, producing a mix of laughs and boos from the ladies in the bar.

  “It’s business,” said Moco, raising a can of Huckleberry Lite.

  Sig nodded. He had a dollar and change in his pocket. They were running up a tab on the come. Parked outside was an ugly red Mercury they jacked from an abandoned farm when they were moving cross-country two nights earlier. The trunk was filled with fourteen guns they stole the day before from the storm cellar of a small-town VFW hall outside Kirksville. Home-modified assault rifles from old wars and a dusty crate of grenades that someone else would have to test. Moco said they needed money to travel right, and this was a way to score and help the cause at the same time. He “borrowed” Sig’s last fifty to buy their way across the bridge, thanks to a fat-ass militiaman guard whose name he knew. The guard told them a pair of hunters had come through an hour earlier showing pictures of Moco and talking about a hundred-K bounty. Now Moco’s contacts, the ones who were going to “buy the car,” were working on an hour late. And the President was escaping.

  He had a stolen machine gun of his own now and was blasting his way through the inside of a military prison packed with guards.

  “Bulletproof,” said Sig.

  “In real life he probably bought his way out,” said Moco. “I heard a story he left his copilot behind. They say the dude’s still rotting in a prison over there, all deformed and shit from crash burns.”

  “Se llama el Elefante,” said the woman behind Moco.

  The bartender came up to Moco. Butch redhead with a pit bull made out of sequins smiling across her bosom. She whispered in Moco’s ear.

  “They’re here,” said Moco, thumbs up. “Right outside, in back.”

  “Shouldn’t we meet them inside?”

  “Juana won’t let us,” he said. “No business in the club. Keeps her out of trouble.”

  Moco stood, and Sig followed him.

  As they walked toward the back door, down the hallway where the private rooms were, Sig took one look back. One dude who did not look at all like a droner was standing up now, looking back at Sig, talking on his phone. Dark skin, green eyes, blue ball cap.

  On the television behind him, President Mack ran across the roof of the prison, looking for a helicopter to steal.

  46

  That night, while her machine ran a routine to ping the dark nets, Tania made a run for provisions.

  The militia hadn’t come back looking for her. Tania guessed they wouldn’t. At least not without a fresh tip.

  She had thought the town would be safe. It was supposed to be sanctuary, an island of self-determination, regulated by authentic community instead of external authority, instead of guns and machine eyes.

  But when she went back to the cooperative store with all its fresh local foods and goods, she realized everyone else in town was white. Or if they weren’t, they were hiding. Like maybe she should be, she thought, after seeing how some of them looked at her, and wondering which might be the ones who tipped off the militia, or worse. Surveillance didn’t need to be electronic.

  She stocked up enough to not have to go out for a while.

  She sent Gerson an update, saying she thought she was close but needed more time, and asking for a confirm on her mom’s status. Gerson hadn’t replied, to that message or the one before, and Tania wondered if Bert was right, and it was time to go totally dark.

  She decided the best way to disappear was to stay in the hotel room, and figure out ways to act like she wasn’t.

  She stayed off the securenet, using the generic address of the Feed box for open-source intelligence on one screen while she tuned the analog signals of the other.

  She asked the night manager if he knew someone who would drive her car to Minneapolis, or at least Cedar Rapids. He got all shifty when she asked, until she said a price.

  Tania plied the night man for ideas on where someone like Sig might hide in this secretive little burg, but she could tell those questions set off his narc radar. She would focus on finding him—and the network that was moving him and the others—through her screens. If she could just crack the codes and learn what they were saying to each other over this bizarro alternet.

  As she worked to find a way in, she kept thinking about what Moco had said about Maxine Price, and what it would mean if it was really true.

  She was trolling conspiracy theory sites on the back pages of the boards, reading theories of the outlaw veep’s secret life in exile, when the alert came through. It came in the form of a video, or something close to it, a series of sequential stills taken by the camera dot she had affixed to the ceiling over the door before she left for Cedar Rapids.

  The angle, and the frame delay, made it look like a screen grab from some old phone game.

  The footage showed three big men in suits, coming to see her, at the extended stay in Minneapolis where she was still registered as a guest. They knocked. They did not know she was already four hours south of there. They announced themselves as private security. She wondered if they were friends of Lisbet, even if they didn’t look the part. Or “friends” of Gerson, doing no fingerprints work, in line with Bert’s warning. They might even be corporate bagmen, employer unknown, working for a company she had ticked off with one of her cases—or for Odile’s vengeful mother. Tania knew they were not people she wanted to meet.

  They tried the door, but they did not pick the lock.

  Tania tried to remember if she had left anything behind in that room that she couldn’t do without. And then she wished she could do more to make it look like she was still there, as misdirection, like that movie she once saw.

  I want room service, she thought, and when she called she told them to please leave it in the room. She’d be right back.

  And when the scruffy kid came around to take her car keys, Tania gave him the room key as well, and told him to take his girlfriend, stay a few nights, and be sure to run up the tab.

  47

  That afternoon when Moco was driving, Sig had looked at the brittle paper map Fritz had given him.
>
  Pioneer Trails of the Prairie States

  It showed how the modern highways tracked the old unpaved routes. The pioneers got the trails from Indians, who got them from the animals. Up north, some of the trails were so old they were said to have been the trackways of mastodons, the hippie-haired giant elephants that the first peoples followed over here from Siberia.

  In St. Louis, Sig had seen a sign for the old highway his great-uncle had told him about a long time ago, the one grandpa took back from California with his new Mexican wife after he finished his Army tour fighting their wars. He remembered Uncle Borg said the place where Route 66 started in St. Louis had once been a great city of some tribe that built gigantic midwestern pyramids.

  Sig looked at the big red line that cut through the middle of Missouri and into Kansas, which was like a ghost on the map. Out there the trails branched off and turned in unexpected directions. Sig tried to imagine sailing through oceans of grass, beyond the old border of the United States, before they wasted it all.

  He wondered how many different nations this place had been before.

  He wondered if there was a spot on the map where he could stop without worrying about them catching him. If New Orleans really still had some pockets of sanctuary left.

  He looked out the window for signs of lost pyramids, but only saw factories, fuel silos, and a railyard so big you couldn’t count the cars.

  The railyard, it turned out, was where they closed their deal.

  48

  The transmissions were mostly on at night. At least that’s when Tania was able to tune them. Usually late at night. Something to do with atmospheric conditions.

  There was more than one channel.

  Channel Zero was the numbers station. It usually came in on Channel 17 or Channel 64, running codes at dawn and dusk, sometimes by voice, but mostly as graphics—bleeding chyrons flashed in rapid sequence, too fast to record by hand.