Tropic of Kansas

by Christopher Brown

  She paid Alfonso a couple hundred as well, hoping it would buy his discretion.

  It was when they were headed down to where Alfonso said her hotel was that she noticed they were being followed. She told Alfonso to keep going past the hotel, and by the time she thought they had lost the gray Lincoln, Alfonso looked like he was tired of pedaling.

  83

  “I knew this kid had a square head on his shoulders,” said Walker. “Finally someone else who gets it. The way to make this revolution succeed is to give it a profitable business plan. Tell me more, Sigster. How much do you need? Bearing in mind they froze most of my assets.”

  “You forgive that loan you gave Clint,” said Sig.

  “How about I let you help him pay it off interest-free,” laughed Walker. “You ought to be able to make that in a month.”

  “Can you help us fence what we get?” asked Clint.

  “Sarge, matching buyers and sellers of goods and services of dubious title and/or uncertain legality is how I cut my teeth,” said Walker. “My first programming was the illegal classifieds. Just remember my commission varies depending on the particulars of each deal.”

  They were seated outside the station, drinking beer in the shade of Walker’s new craterside cabana. The cabana was made of lead plate Walker harvested from one of the salvage lots.

  “You can float your commissions if you get us good information about where to hit,” said Sig.

  “Yeah, they don’t always put dollar signs on the shipping containers that matter, do they,” said Walker. “Information is not a problem, boys. My network is good. We just need to be careful about not rubbing the rhubarb in a way that provokes too much heat from the Prez. The status quo is pretty good here right now.”

  “We don’t need a political editor,” said Xelina. “We need a peddler. And we need to get these scumbags out of New Orleans. Bring back the TAZ.”

  “Is that your victory condition, honey?” said Walker. “Restore the Tchoupitoulas Autonomous Zone? Those nutjobs fucked things up so bad, people couldn’t even get a roll of toilet paper at the corner store, to say nothing of a decent steak.”

  “A new political system based on self-determination and real democracy doesn’t happen overnight,” said Xelina. “And a correction of predatory mercantilist monopolies takes even longer. The people are ready for free networks without bosses and rulers and the men with guns who serve them. The TAZ isn’t dead. It just went underground. And viral. With your help, by the way.”

  “The victory condition is to make the whole country the TAZ,” said Sig. “We feed the people by liberating the food, and fuel, and money and property your friends stole from us.”

  “Ex-friends,” said Walker. “How do you think you pull that off? March on Washington?”

  “Cut off the head,” said Sig.

  Walker knocked three times on the lead roof of the cabana. “You didn’t just say that,” he said.

  “Why not,” said Sig. “She showed me your commercial offering to pay for it.”

  “That was a joke!” said Walker. “I mean not a ‘ha ha’ joke. A provocation. A rhetorical prod. A psyop. A contribution to the national conversation.”

  “It’s a good idea,” said Sig. “We want to make you pay for it.”

  “It’s a real good idea,” said Clint.

  “If you say so,” said Walker. “Maybe we can get you your own alternative MMC charter. In the meantime, kids, let’s talk about which trains you might want to rob.”

  84

  “The worlds merged on a day when the dimensional bones of a glass gate on a country road on the Southern Continent of the place you can call Everywhere (but really is just part of it) synced perfectly with those of a trellis behind a shotgun shack on Prytania Street that belonged to a lady named Bernadette Duval. No one could tell when it was happening, except for the Visitors, who were the emissaries from Everywhere that came for the express reason of watching it happen (and taking great notes). But when it was over, maybe a few days after, people could tell. It was something in the light.”

  Tania found the re-bound old book in the common hallway, on a small bookshelf with other banned tracts. The Monsters Parade was the last volume in the series. A book so important to some that it caused sectarian arguments over whether the author meant for it to have an apostrophe in the title, and if so, where exactly it was supposed to go.

  This was Maxine Price’s hometown. The principal setting of her books. Looking out the window of her second-floor room to measure the light against the paragraph she’d just read, Tania wondered if maybe her hero’s old house was in view. But all she could see were the tents and pop-up sheds of Forward Operating Camp Byrd, which started in the empty space under the elevated freeway and sprawled north along Tulane for twelve blocks.

  It was crazy that this dump she had found on Rampart was so close to the base, when you could tell it was like a hostel for the kind of people the soldiers hunted, with its cryptic sign over the front door, the old TV in the lobby tuned to Channel Zero, and the portrait of the Colonel hanging on the wall and the book she held in her hand. But Tania was learning that hiding in plain sight often worked a lot better than you would think.

  She looked at the picture of the Colonel, posed in the insurrectionary edition of her National Guard uniform, tough dark eyes and the brown skin of the global South. She was the force that really made Maxine Price’s TAZ possible, the one who saved the city after the flood and grabbed the power in the process, the face the streets loved the most, but who let Price do most of the talking in public. She had gone underground after the Purge, the one the feds said was leading the last pockets of guerrilla resistance to their new order.

  The people she was about to contact probably knew her.

  Maybe they were her.

  Tania used the house phone to call the number they had given her. No clicks on this line. Just static and a series of tones that sounded like a cross between a food processor and an old fax machine.

  To Tania’s surprise, the number worked.

  As the voice at the other end said hello through its creepy machine filter, Tania suddenly thought of the possibility that the people she was calling were the ones who had been following her since she got off the plane.

  She cleaned her sidearm before she went out that night.

  In the bar on Carondelet, an old man in an electric kufi hat played the blues for his dead city on a huge baritone saxophone that looked older than the crumbling warehouse they were in. The crowd was sparse among the mixed-up collection of tables and chairs in the vaulted room, and half of them looked like the kind of folks who’d wandered in off the streets with no place else to go. The bar seemed to welcome them, asking nothing in return.

  The horn was loud, an improvisation on the sound of the civil defense alarms. Just the kind of sonic background these people liked to conduct their meetings in.

  Tania sat on the side, with her back against the wall so she could see the entrance, which was close to the table she picked. But when the couple came to sit with her, they came from behind the stage.

  They were a burly, olive-skinned white lady and a short little white guy with a black goatee going gray. They said to call them Rhoda and Cinder. They could just hear each other over the noise.

  “What are you doing here?” said Rhoda. “You were told to meet our cousins up north.”

  “I saw your recruiting ads on TV,” said Tania. “Your comrade the pirate Ward Walker is especially persuasive.”

  “He’s not our comrade,” said Rhoda.

  “He’s a parasite,” said Cinder. “A convenient one.”

  “He’s a pornographer,” said Tania.

  Cinder nodded. He looked like a grad student gone astray.

  “He makes you pay for the airtime?”

  “He accepts our protection so he can occupy the people’s property that he claims to own. He gives us our own channel to program. He uses our energy and helps us obtain new tools to restore
our sovereignty.”

  “What kind of tools?”

  “Use your imagination,” said Rhoda. “Let’s talk about what you brought to exchange.”

  “Information,” said Tania. “Whether it’s a tool depends on what you do with it. It’s a lot more powerful than anything you can get from Walker.”

  “We don’t know that unless we see the whole thing. And this special edition you won’t even let us peek at.”

  “You probably want to see if you’re on it,” said Tania.

  “I think she’s a cop,” said Rhoda.

  Cinder looked a little freaked out.

  Tania kept an eye on their hands.

  “I’m here alone,” said Tania. “I’m here to make a deal.”

  “What do you propose?” said Rhoda.

  “I want agreed terms on how we get the information in these files out to the world.”

  “We can talk about that,” said Cinder.

  “Maybe,” said Rhoda. “So long as you agree with our plans.”

  “And I want you to get me to my brother so I can get him out of here.”

  “Who’s your brother?” said Rhoda.

  Tania showed them a picture. “He goes by different names.”

  Rhoda and Cinder looked at each other.

  “You don’t watch a lot of Channel 13, do you,” said Cinder, looking at Tania.

  “I’ve watched so much of it my brain is burned and my eyes are rotting,” said Tania. “So yeah, I took a break.”

  “Why don’t you come with us,” said Rhoda, standing.

  “Why don’t you go fuck yourself,” said Tania, drawing her pistol and training it on Rhoda.

  The music stopped. Twenty pairs of eyes on Tania. Probably all in on the secret.

  “Hey hey hey,” said Cinder. “Let’s work this out. We’re on the same side.”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Rhoda.

  Neither did Tania.

  She backed out the front entrance, not as slowly as it felt. And she ran, down the alley she had scoped out earlier, into the darkness of the city about to get a lot darker as curfew arrived.

  85

  Sig heard the explosion blow open the night sky as he ran down Arabella for Annunciation and the rendezvous.

  The oil-train railyard was too well guarded to B-and-E, but it turned out to be pretty easy to sneak onto a moving train out in the country and ride it in to Mom’s house. Sig had hopped enough trains to know the good places to hide, though it wasn’t as easy now as when he was a scrawny teenager.

  Walker was the one who gave them the idea. He told them how much of the oil to feed the war machine moved on trains now. Most of the crude came from the deepwater rigs in the Gulf and the occupied Caribbean or the Canadian excavations, and almost all the stuff from the Gulf moved through the depots in and around New Orleans for processing and distribution. The pipelines out had been mostly destroyed by the TAZ as an act of sovereign assertion—it made it easier to control the stuff that had been expropriated as a resource to be controlled by the people.

  And inevitable that they would come and take it back.

  Fully loaded, the train ran almost three-quarters of a mile. A hundred black tank cars, some shiny and new in the ambient light, others buried under a palimpsest of graffiti, all topped up with petrochemicals.

  Sig wore Xelina’s new camera rig, the one Walker hooked her up with. It tucked behind his ear so slick he almost forgot it was there.

  They had other cameras, too. The high-end one Xelina carried, and a micro mounted in the nose of a little RPV.

  It was weird how if you remembered the cameras were there, your mind kept trying to look through the camera eye while you were doing stuff. So he tried to put them out of mind.

  Sig ran along the tops of the train as it hauled ass through the open country, empty and hungry to reload, headed for the big tit.

  He put the parcels from his pack on the cars, right in the spots Clint told him would work best. The Army taught Clint all about how to blow things up.

  The packages felt like energy bars. Solid goop inside foil soft enough that you could bend it into place.

  The explosions lit up the night sky with a fireball they could see in Baton Rouge. It looked more solid than fire. Like a towering geyser of some infernal lava. It burned until morning.

  “It’s the kind of fire you can’t put out,” said Clint, while they drank beer and watched from the roof of the safe house. “You can try, but mostly you just gotta wait for it to run out of fuel.”

  Sig wondered how much fuel they would have to burn to break the machine.

  That was about the time Moco turned back up. The lawyer Sig hired actually managed to get him out—turned out he was Walker’s lawyer, too. They found Moco when they went to Camp Zulu looking for recruits.

  Camp Zulu was Moco’s hometown hood. More or less. He definitely knew a lot of people in there. Especially the kids.

  They started their crew with twelve other teenagers, mostly a little younger than Sig and Moco. Seven boys and five girls. Kat, Alé, Rudy, Sonya, Eric, Mongoose, Pancha, Slider, Wyn, Martin, Freddy, and Don. Walker set them up in a beat-up house behind the station, next to the windowless old brick building they used as the armory. The neighborhood was pretty well cleared from crash, disaster, and fighting, and the folks who were left paid them little mind. Sig put up a tent in the backyard, since he slept better outside.

  Clint taught the kids how to shoot, using an abandoned bowling alley on St. Claude as their range. Moco let them in on how to steal, break locks, pick pockets—knowledge several of them already had. Sig showed them a few dirty fighting tricks he’d tested, survival 101, and how to start looking at the world through the eyes of a tracker. Xelina gave them history lessons. And once in a while Walker would come by and give his own version, stories about business and “how the world really works.” Eric, Mongoose, and Kat said that was their favorite part.

  When they started going on their raids, Xelina brought along another lady. A lady who wore a black scarf around her head and had even nicer cameras than Xelina. Nassra was a stringer for an Emirati news network who sometimes sold stories to New York, Oslo, Paris, or Santiago. An Omani girl who had gotten herself into Columbia only to graduate to the emergency zone with an expensive degree, a word processor, two video cameras, and three credit cards, looking for the story that would be her big break. It turned out she had good timing.

  The first week, they stole four government cars and one truck full of drone parts, and held up the casino for six hundred thousand. Xelina told them they should do more political operations, and Walker agreed. They hijacked an oil tanker truck and set it on fire in Jackson Square. They started dumpster diving for secrets, planting vidbugs on cars and land drones, and breaking into poorly guarded offices of MMCs, government functionaries, and the oil and pharma operations. They kidnapped corporates from whorehouses and underground Maxx bars and sold them back to their employers. When they got the vice president of surveillance operations, they put him out to sea in a barge with a handheld camera and told him to send pictures.

  They mostly worked at night and slept in the day. Moco taught the kids how to let off steam, and some nights they partied pretty hard. If Xelina got drunk sometimes she would get pretty crazy sad and Clint would get rowdy mad. One night Sig woke up with Nassra in his tent, his face buried in the mop of thick black curls she otherwise kept tightly under wraps. She smelled faintly of some faraway sea, of strange fish seasoned with stranger spices.

  Not long after that they went out in the middle of the day. Sig had the crazy idea they could bait an air drone. He did it by leaping from an overpass onto a passing Motherland Humvee, dropping a smoke grenade through the open turret, and jumping off the front hood onto the street so they could get a good look at him before he ran off down behind the houses, and before the smoke evicted them from the cab. He’d gotten four blocks through backyards and over fences when they first heard the whine of a tri-rot
or coming down into audible range, tracking him almost faster than he could get to the ambush point. Sig jumped through the window of the nearest house when the RPV started firing its dual cannons. The fusillade ripped through the rotted wood siding. Clint was the one who got to fire the rocket from the church steeple down the street, and his seat-of-the-pants one-armed targeting system worked out just fine.

  They split up that night. The kids took pieces of the dead drone back to Camp Zulu and gave them out as souvenirs. Clint and Xelina made a run back to Houston to check up on things. And Sig moved in with Nassra for the time being, in her walk-up on Magazine Street. She cooked in that night, after he watched her file her story about the day, and later while they lay in bed she showed him how it got picked up all over the Feed and all over the world on other networks. Then she showed him other television that featured his adventures, and the bulletin boards where people traded their theories about who he was and the movement he must be part of.

  Nassra was there filming two weeks later when they got ambushed. They’d gone to the East Bank at sunup with the plan to hijack a truck en route to the naval yard in Algiers. Walker told them it was carrying a special weapon to be taken to sea for the fighting in Central America.

  Walker did not tell them that he had ratted them out.

  They didn’t figure it out until four of the gang were already out in the middle of General Meyer Avenue, playing their gypsy trick where one of them acted like she’d been hit by a car and the others were flagging down help. That’s when Sig saw the first recon RPVs. Eight Motherland patrols followed, with five NOPD police interceptors, two SWAT trucks, one militia pickup, and a Marine platoon with forty-two rifles and one squad pushing an AMC “Alligator Snapper” amphibious assault vehicle stenciled with trophies of prior kills.

  “I knew it was a stupid fuckin’ idea to cross the river,” said Clint. “Walker probably sold us out to cut some deal with his prosecutors.”