Tropic of Kansas

by Christopher Brown

  “Why are they on fire?” asked Sig.

  “Flareoffs,” said Clint, the uncle, smacking a mosquito on his neck. “Burning up the excess so they don’t blow up.” Clint was an urban cowboy—wiry, strong and rangy, but with a left arm that came to a cinched-up stump just below the elbow. He owned the storage locker with his wife. Dallas lived on-site and helped with security. His mom was Clint’s older sister.

  “Candles on the cake of the gods,” said Xelina, the aunt, standing up to fetch more food. She was a dark, skinny Tejana in her late twenties, a few years younger than Clint. “They’re having a party to celebrate the end of nature.”

  “Thanks for that, bruja,” said Clint. “You be sure to tell us when you figure out how to make your own energy.”

  “That one makes weed killer,” said Xelina, pointing at one of the plants. “The one next to it makes liquid polyester. Polypropylene, polyethylene, polyvinyl, all the stuff you can’t even pronounce, sweetie, that only powers this fucked-up imperial consumer society you claim to dissent from but make your living off.”

  “Hey now,” said Clint. “We store a lot more important stuff than people’s household junk.”

  “Careful what you talk about in mixed company,” said Xelina.

  Sig stared at the jewelry of bone and gold Xelina wore, some woven into her hair, some pierced through her skin. He had never seen anything like it.

  “She makes most of it herself,” said Clint, busting him. “Looks pretty fucking good, right?”

  Sig nodded. He thought of Betty. She would like this lady.

  Xelina struck a pose, stretching her arms out. There were words in Spanish tattooed in cursive on her left forearm. When her pearl snap shirt spread out like black wings, you could see the image stenciled on her tank top. An antenna made of human bones, radiating waves. You could also see the pistol holstered in the waistband of her jeans.

  “Did you grab the beers?” said Clint.

  “Forgot,” said Xelina. “Sorry, too busy trying to finish the new video.” Sig had seen her from behind when they first arrived, through the door to the room behind the front office, bent over a computer in a room full of TVs.

  “I gotcha hooked up,” said Dallas. He pulled four Alamo Martyrs from the cooler. Dallas was one of those guys who made being fat seem healthy and natural. Maybe it was the fisherman’s tan.

  “All right,” said Clint. He took two beers, popped the tops on the edge of his belt buckle, and handed one to Xelina. Dallas opened the other two and gave one to Sig.

  “You like that?” said Dallas, nodding at Clint’s buckle trick. The buckle was brass, engraved with the picture of a cowboy throwing a lasso. “He won that thing.”

  “In a rodeo where the other ropers all had two whole arms,” said Xelina.

  “Long time ago,” said Clint.

  Sig sucked down half the beer, and burped. The beer was so cold you could hardly tell how bad it tasted.

  Dallas took a pill bottle, cracked the top, shook two shiny black capsules out, and swallowed them down with the beer.

  “When are you gonna wise up and get off that shit?” said Clint.

  “Dude, this Maxximol makes me feel like a superhero,” said Dallas.

  “Yeah,” said Clint. “Like a mutant. Your fucking skin is turning orange.”

  “Team colors,” smiled Dallas, making horns with his hand.

  “Don’t let him push that poison on you, Sig,” said Xelina. “Supposed to improve your performance and mood, but the real reason is to make you more docile.”

  “So your masters in the glass buildings can get you to do whatever they tell you,” said Clint.

  “I’ll stick with this,” said Sig, holding up his beer.

  “Wise man,” said Clint.

  “I’m the one who just got a promotion,” said Dallas.

  Sig held the can close to his face and looked at the label. A big 3-D star rising out of the ruins of an old fort.

  “So this really was another country?” asked Sig.

  “Hell, yes,” said Dallas. “This ain’t Minnesota.”

  “We invaded New Mexico once,” said Clint, with a sly smile.

  “Where you got your asses kicked by Indians and then surrendered to Mexicans,” said Xelina.

  “I guess every place was another country once,” said Sig. “And will be again.”

  “Sooner than you think,” said Xelina, tipping her bottle to Sig and smiling.

  “I’m gonna have to get you one of those ‘Secede!’ bumper stickers,” said Dallas. “Just as soon as you get a car.”

  “I like to walk,” said Sig.

  “California will secede before Texas ever even gives it any serious thought,” said Xelina. “Too hooked on the MMC business.”

  “Nothin’ wrong with that,” said Dallas. “Couple buddies of mine been with Kodiak since the Greek thing, and they make good dough helpin’ freedom fighters turn their projects into moneymakers for everybody. Told me they’re hirin’ like crazy for Nicaragua and the Tribal Areas. Like seventy grand a year, housing and food paid for, plus combat bounties. I might check it out.”

  “I thought you were on our side, son,” said Clint. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Just about wantin’ to make some better money and see cool shit,” said Dallas. “They keep showing those recruiting ads when I can’t sleep late at night. What’s not to like about raisin’ hell on commission?”

  “I’m gonna have to break this bottle over your head to knock some sense into you,” said Clint. “How cool would that look?”

  “Give him a break, Clint,” said Xelina. “It’s a good thing to want to see the world. Maybe he can meet our new investor.”

  Dallas perked up at the word. Clint squinched up his face.

  “He’s the one buying our videos,” said Xelina. “And helping us fill up more lockers with more important stuff. He was telling us the other day how he needs some out-of-town help. Security work, like you do, with travel overseas.”

  “Hell, yes,” said Dallas. “I want to meet this guy.”

  “We’ll talk about it,” said Clint, looking at Xelina. “But in the meantime we need your help. Got a new site you can help me access with all them fancy codes they put on your phone. So tell me again where you scouted teen Tarzan here?”

  Sig took a deep bite into a juicy piece of white meat.

  “Another one of my patrols,” said Dallas. “This old junkyard on the bayou that got took over by museum people for some project. Found him squattin’ back there. He kicked my ass halfway to the road before I calmed him down. Offered him a job on the spot.”

  Clint laughed.

  “Dallas said you could get me into New Orleans,” said Sig.

  “Did he,” said Clint. “Dallas talks a lot, you might have noticed. What do you want to go into the middle of that mess for?”

  “I promised a friend,” said Sig.

  “Is that right,” said Clint.

  “I told him you knew how to get into the emergency zone,” said Dallas. “He was sayin’ how he was just gonna walk and I told him that’s a bad idea.”

  “You might say that,” said Clint. “How old are you, anyway, Sigurd?”

  “Nineteen,” said Sig, grabbing another taco.

  “Got no ID,” said Dallas. “Not in the system at all. Least I couldn’t find him on our office net, and we get the main Motherland database updated every day.”

  “Huh,” said Clint. He and Xelina were staring at Sig now, both with curious smiles.

  “And he’s tougher than a mean dog,” said Dallas. “So I thought maybe he could help with these screwy projects y’all are doin’.”

  “Why aren’t you in the Army, son?” said Clint. “You sure look plenty fit enough.”

  “Why aren’t you?” said Sig.

  “I did my mandatory service,” said Clint, shaking the phantom fist at the end of his stump. “Eighteen months in bugfuck Panama with the Rangers after those dumb shits b
lew up the canal and fucked up our already fucked-up economy. Hunting Cubans in the swamps and building pontoon highways with a bunch of crazy-ass Malaysians.”

  Sig drank more beer. He wondered what a Malaysian was.

  “I told you,” said Dallas. “He ain’t in the system. No ID, no plastic, nothin’. Not registered. Not in a single dang database. I checked ’em all.”

  “Well that is pretty awesomely convenient,” said Clint. “Let’s hang out, Sigurd. How do you feel about hunting some pigs with us?”

  Sig thought about cowboys chasing cops. About hunting all the law that had ever hurt him or taken someone from him.

  “He doesn’t mean that kind,” said Xelina, putting her hand on Sig’s shoulder. He pulled away.

  “Not just yet, anyways,” said Clint.

  “Oh,” said Sig. “What’s the pay?”

  Clint laughed. “All you can eat, son. This is about food, not money. Especially since having money doesn’t guarantee a full pantry no more. Half these lockers are stockpiles, for when it gets even worse.”

  “Okay,” said Sig. He understood hunger, and was happy to help get food for the group.

  “We can give you a better place to sleep, too,” said Xelina, smiling.

  Sig looked around and tried to see if this place looked safe enough to stay in.

  “Come on,” said Dallas, and they drank the rest of the beer while they loaded the guns in the truck.

  60

  “The Second Moon was not a moon. It was not even a place. It was the infinite connections between all places. The threads that tie all beings to each other. The one that is the absence of one. You might call it a network, if it were not imbued with the divine, and devoid of line.”

  Tania took the Maxine Price paperback she found in the hotel on the road. Mr. Wizard packed it for her, not knowing it wasn’t hers. Maybe it had answers to questions she didn’t know to ask. She gave up when she realized she had read the same page about seven different times. Some people claimed the books worked that way, that any random passage encoded the full message. As if the words rewired your brain the more you read them, in whatever order you wanted.

  Through the window of the train car, she could see the networks that were imbued with something other than the divine. The lattices of aboveground pipelines that carried the fuel. The telephone pole bulbs that transmitted the Feed. The rutted tracks that guided the dumb generation of old drones that patrolled the back forties.

  She looked up at the sky. The flybots didn’t even leave any contrails, but sometimes you could see them, when the light and the baffling were right. The bombings had given them the green light to choose their own patrols based on the latest predictive analytics that churned the available data about suspicious people and patterns. Now they were talking about letting them choose their own targets. Maybe they already had.

  The train was a single passenger car attached to a short freight. The after-crash railroad version of a tramp steamer, with a handful of motley stragglers along for the ride wherever the cargo was going. St. Louis, in this case.

  Tania looked at the other five passengers sitting on the metal bench and tried to figure out which ones might be there to keep an eye on her. And which side they were looking at her from. She had two inbound and unanswered messages from Gerson, after days of silence, and had to assume they would try new ways of tracking her.

  Then she took another look at her bookmark. The name and number Mr. Wizard had given her to call when she arrived in St. Louis. Tania had taken a chance, and told him why she was looking for Sig. Told him about Mom, about how they were using her, about how she was ready to switch sides. When she said it, it felt true.

  Either it worked, and he believed it, or she was walking into a bigger trap.

  Fritz said he would make some calls about Mom. He knew the name, and knew people up there who could help.

  She asked him which faction they were with.

  “There are no more factions,” he said. “Only nodes. The network pulls people together, through deep connectors built by the people who came before.”

  She asked him what the hell that meant. He said you have to find out for yourself, and pointed at the contact codes.

  She wondered if it was really possible. That Maxine Price could unite the factions around a single cause.

  She heard a loud noise in the far distance. She looked, and saw a burning silo on the horizon, spewing plasma fire like a gelatinous smokestack.

  St. Louis was the industrial heart of the Tropic. Broken infrastructure had made the river relevant again, and the big railyards pointed east. The biggest bots came out of the assemblies here and floated down to their customers in New Orleans for deployment in green territories farther south.

  Tania got in at dusk, to a shipping depot near the docks. She asked around, and found a place where the guest workers from Tecate and Juarez stayed, outside of the secure zone. An old business hotel that had changed hands and still had the Marriott sign on the side, short an r. It was known among the locals as El Mar Blanco. A little expensive for Tania, but she didn’t plan to stay long, and the network reception was solid. She had figured it out on the train. She was going where those barges loaded with bots, batteries, and raw fuel were going. She was going to New Orleans.

  Just as soon as she could figure out how to get a ticket that wouldn’t generate an alert.

  And get her handlers off her back.

  Gerson called shortly after Tania got to her room. Tania needed to pick up this time.

  “I don’t like it when my sources blow me off,” said Gerson.

  “Sorry,” said Tania. “I don’t want to bust my cover when I’m getting so close.”

  “You’ve been in a hotel room watching TV. Do you think we are that stupid?”

  “Do you think I’m that stupid? Do you have any idea what I have uncovered?”

  “I would if you gave me complete reports instead of misdirection and bullshit.”

  “I have the keys to the whole network. Which actually is a network. One that all the supercomputers in Crystal City have completely missed. It’s huge.”

  “Nice try, but you are not going to distract me from the fact that your target, your baby brother, is a thousand miles from you.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “We picked up one of his fellow travelers. Said they were together until they split up in Dallas.”

  “Dallas?”

  “I thought you were going to be much better at this than you turned out to be. Just shows you how the tests can lie. Very disappointing.”

  To Tania’s surprise, the put-down stung, even though the idea of earning Gerson’s approval made her sick.

  “I need you to come in,” said Gerson. “You can report to local Motherland there, and they will arrange your transportation home.”

  Home. D.C. That wasn’t really home. Never had been.

  “What about my mom?”

  “If you really have something as good as you claim, then maybe we can keep our deal. But if you are not in my office day after tomorrow with the real shit, we are going to find you and lock you up and transfer your mother, and you can see if you can lawyer up good enough to get a cell to share in Detroit.”

  “Give me five days,” said Tania.

  Gerson was silent.

  “Three,” said Tania.

  “I can do that,” said Gerson. “Make it worth it.”

  Tania put down the phone and tried to collect herself.

  She washed her face with cold water and tried to see who it really was looking back in the mirror.

  She went to the window and looked at the city. The room was on the ninth floor. To the west she could see the fortified section of old homes where the managers stayed. The owners lived a lot farther away. To the east were the factories, and beyond that, to the south and east, sprawled the blocks where everybody else lived. The big river hid in all that, somehow, as if all the life of the whole continent had drained out where
it used to be.

  She closed the blinds, opened her bag, and got to work rebuilding her network connection. Fritz had given her a small peripheral that made it easier to log in from anywhere with a signal.

  When that was done, she contacted the address Mr. Wizard had given her and told them where to find her.

  And then she went to the pay phone in the lobby and called Odile.

  61

  They drank more beer and waited until it was time. Sig watched for animal sign in the overgrown grasses of the abandoned golf course. Dallas showed Xelina his arsenal of pawnshop pistols while Clint wrapped the dogs in Kevlar.

  The dogs knew what the vests meant. Clint could barely hold them still. East Texas fighting dogs, they looked like pit bulls crossed with bulldozers. The black one was Loco, the white one Watermelon Head. You could tell the names fit.

  “They smell the pigs,” said Sig.

  “Yup,” said Clint. “They’ve been having fun with no greenskeepers around.” He pointed his chin toward the shaggy fairway. You could see the giant ruts. “Looks like some drunk’s been tearing around in a jeep.”

  Dallas brought more guns than he had hands, and seeing him pound beers while he loaded them made Sig wish they’d brought extra Kevlar.

  Clint mumbled at the dogs and they jumped up into the bed of his old Cheyenne. Sig joined them and helped Dallas up to where he could sit on the cooler. Xelina took shotgun.

  Clint drove slow, lights off, rolling over the fairway. He cut past a water hazard and the edge of a big sand trap, back to the spot he had baited earlier. A flat green with a flagpole. The pennant was going back to thread but still showed part of the number 9.

  Clint slowed down as they approached the green from a higher grade. He cut the engine, put it in neutral, and rolled down closer.

  The bait was dried corncobs covered in cherry Kool-Aid powder. It worked. Sig smelled the musk, heard the snorts, and saw the movement in the dark.

  Clint flipped the lights—brights and rooftop. Sig blinked away the flash and counted again. Nine wild hogs, pigging out. Snort snort snorting in chorus while they ate. Six big ones, two juveniles, and one monster.