Tropic of Kansas

by Christopher Brown

  The roof was covered in solar panels. Sig navigated through the spaces between the panels to the center, where he found the big fan he had seen from the lobby. He looked down the shaft and saw the green of the foliage and the gray of the rubble.

  On the other side of the fan someone had hauled barrels of dirt all the way up here to make a raised bed. The garden grew long rows of leafy greens. One end had a small patch of unmowed grass, with two cheap plastic chairs and a small cooler on which someone had left a book. Nearby stood a rain barrel with three hoses running from the base, and a small compost pile.

  On the other side of the barrel was a hatch. It was open, with a ship’s ladder leading down into the interior.

  Sig put his shoes back on, took out his knife, and descended.

  He came into a quiet apartment filled with the indirect light of northern exposure. The floors were covered in carpet remnants laid over flimsy floors that gave a little bit with every step. There were signs of people, but their smells were masked by incense and candles.

  The apartment was open along the length of the north wall. A couple of the windows had been ventilated with small screens cut into the top. The opposite wall was a patchwork of mismatched pieces of painted and unpainted wood, plastic, and plaster. There were five doors built into the wall. A small plastic sign hung from the door on the right.

  NO MOLESTAR

  Hôtel Colon

  Managua

  In the center of the wall was a kitchenette made of found objects. The counter was a piece of green freeway sign on slats of lumber atop cinder-block stacks. A hose with a trigger spigot dangled from the ceiling over a metal basin cut into the table. A mini fridge hummed on the floor, plugged into a long orange extension cord. To the left of the counter was a big propane camp stove. There were wooden bowls of fresh fruits and vegetables, stacks of canned goods, pots and pans, a coffee can full of knives and utensils, and thick candles, some in glass cases with skeletons and saints.

  Two of the candles were lit.

  A machete leaned up against the wall. The handle was hand-carved. Colored leather fringes and feathers dangled from the hilt.

  In front of the kitchen was another table made from a pair of inlaid wooden doors. One door had the image of the sun in the form of a beardless masculine face. The other had the face of the moon as a goddess. There was a teapot on the table, cold to the touch, and an empty but recently used clay cup. Loose papers were spread across the table, held down with small toys and plastic dice in bright colors and unusual shapes. In the center was a map drawn in pencil on a big sheet of graph paper. The map looked like part of the United States, detailed with drawings of castles, rivers, mountains, forests, and roads. A thick hardbound book held down one side of the map.

  Wizards of the Catacombs

  The Creature Compendium

  There were plastic soldiers and tanks on the map, tiny figures from gumball machines. Sig picked up one of the figurines—a painted tin rider. The rider was a woman with long yellow braids and a jeweled golden headband, wearing a steel bikini and a flowing white cape, riding on the back of a wooly mammoth with huge tusks and an armored helm. The rider held the reins of the mammoth in one hand and held a sword over the head with the other, as if preparing to lead a charge.

  The sword was bent. Sig straightened it.

  There were chairs at the table, around the room, and along the windows. Boxes and crates served as footstools and coffee tables. More than anything there were books—stacked against the wall, piled on the floor, shelved inside the crates.

  An automatic pistol lay on top of the stacks of books. Sig removed the clip and pocketed it.

  He found a door ajar on the other side of the apartment. It was a big room, dark, illuminated only by the green diodes of a rack of stereo equipment stacked on a small table near the door. An incense cone burned in a small metal dish atop the stereo. The unit was an old tape player like Sig’s mom had, but with a small microphone attached. Tapes were stacked up all over the table in their plastic cases. Some were factory-labeled recordings of music Sig recognized. Old bands his great-uncles listened to like Crimson Lloyd, Alfred & Sibyl, Electric Hephaestus. But most of them were homemade, labeled in old-lady script.

  5/3—Network as Polity

  11/1—The General in the Mall

  3/2—Crossing the Concrete Hellespont

  7/4—How to Arm an Infobomb

  There was a magazine photograph that had been cut out and taped to the wall. It showed a woman in a suit coat standing before a gigantic crowd, one hand gripping the podium while the other stretched out at the end of a strong arm in an oratorical gesture, with a skyscraper-sized obelisk behind her.

  As his eyes adjusted, Sig looked into the darkness and saw a figure recumbent in the shadows. He could hear the slow breathing. It was a woman, curled up under layers of blankets on a daybed at the very back of the room. Her face was badly scarred. In the dim light, the flesh looked almost like a putty you could mold, the nose a bulbous, misshapen mess.

  The woman rumbled from deep within, then exhaled with an impatient, growling plea.

  98

  Her captors wore purple berets. Or at least the three young ones did. The older black woman didn’t look like she needed a uniform for anyone to know who she was.

  Bywater Masques. In the early days of the fighting, the news reports used to show them in actual masks, but Tania always figured that was some kind of psyop. By which side, she didn’t know.

  Everything else they wore was improvised. The Creole boy had brown Carhartt bibs over a worn button-down, the shells for his long-barreled .308 shining from his front pockets. The dirty-blond white girl had faded indigo jeans, a green T-shirt, and a pair of mismatched pistols holstered in two separate belts slung low. The burly Asian girl had a purple ball cap for her beret, a lightweight gray technical jacket, and cutoff cargo pants that told the story of her war in tattoos that covered most of her legs above her tropical boots. And a shop-built twelve-gauge aimed at Tania’s head.

  “What are you doing here?” said the black woman. She had tight salt-and-pepper hair, a black T-shirt, black dungarees fading to gray, and scuffed black boots. No gun. A lot of red in her eyes. Tania noticed the ring on her right hand, a big black onyx set in gold.

  “Trying to make a deal. And looking for someone.”

  The room smelled like a photo lab. A gas-powered generator vibrated loudly in the corner. There were other machines, big white boxes with blinking lights, some with electrical motors running. Buckets, reams of paper, cardboard boxes stacked on top of each other. Each box was stamped with the image of a black pineapple crossed with a hand grenade.

  “What is this place?” asked Tania.

  “It’s a freedom factory,” said the blonde. “Your trespassing interrupted our work.”

  “Don’t you know it’s not safe here?” said the Creole boy.

  “The pigeons don’t seem to mind,” said Tania.

  “They’re immune,” said the boy.

  “You people lie,” said Tania. “Just like your comrades.”

  She saw the job coming off one of the printers. The front side of a stack of two-hundred-dollar bills. The ones the government had introduced the year before in the face of hyperinflation and an eroding dollar. They tried to make up for their intrinsic weakness with the taciturn face of President Haig, wearing the military commander in chief uniform he used for public appearances during his second term, after he crushed the Ayatollah and fought the Soviets into submission across three proxy fronts. Even across the room you could see how the six stars on his lapel stood out in the green and black etched ink.

  “That’s not for us,” said the blonde, almost guiltily. “It’s for people who really need it.”

  “Making care packages,” said Tania. She could see the stacks of pamphlets, shrink-wrapped electronics, plastic jewel cases. “What’s that thing making?” she said, pointing her head at the 3-D printer.

  The Creole bo
y handed her a little plastic box.

  “Check it out,” he said.

  The thing sprang open into branches like a broken umbrella. Right in her face.

  “Fuck!” yelled Tania, throwing it back at the laughing kid.

  While the berets harassed her, the lady was looking through Tania’s bag.

  “Which one of these identities are you wearing today?” she asked.

  “My own,” said Tania.

  “You sure you know which one that is?”

  “Yes,” said Tania. “And maybe we’re on the same side. Can I show you something?”

  Tania lifted out the thumb drive.

  “Keep talking,” said the woman.

  99

  “Will you stop torturing me, Toni?” said the woman.

  “I’m not Tony,” said Sig.

  The woman opened her eyes. Dark orbs reflected the green lights of the stereo.

  “The uninvited guest,” she said. “What a pleasant surprise. It’s so rare that you come to visit.”

  She sat up and turned on a table lamp. The effort set her to a fit of coughing. She drank from a glass of water on the table next to the lamp and collected herself, observing Sig as she did so.

  “I see you found the Mastodon Queen,” she said, looking at Sig’s hand.

  Sig looked down. He was still holding the figure he had found in the main room. He looked at the tiny rider, and back at the woman.

  “One of the few things that ended up in my bug-out bag the night I wiped the contents of my desk into the duffel and fled for exile,” she said. “A souvenir of another time. Or maybe now it’s just a dream.”

  “What is it?” asked Sig.

  “Of course, you are too young. It’s a miniature. Meant to represent a character in a role-playing game. In this case it’s me. The persona I adopted over a series of long Saturdays in college, before you were born, aided by good tea, fertile young imaginations, and amazing California grass. We repurposed the game, made it our laboratory for the invention of new politics, new polities, new natures.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Sig.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “It’s really just a silly war game, if terribly fun. Very low footprint, you know, since it’s basically all in your head. And you can use it to think through pretty much any scenario you want—and change the rules as you see fit. I’ve been teaching it to Toni, and she’s been teaching me her own game theories, and helping me make up new rules. Thinking through scenarios for reversing our current situation. I have strategy, she has tactics.”

  Sig thought about what he saw in the other room. The map, with tanks and airplanes and armed mounted riders.

  “We have such long days up here in our fortress of solitude for two, you see. We need to stay busy.” Sig could see her eyes sizing him up. “Are you an assassin?” she asked. “You look like some kind of redneck ninja. And I mean that as a compliment. I wondered how long it would take them.”

  “I don’t even know who you are,” said Sig.

  “You can call me Max,” she said.

  “You’re not who I’m looking for,” said Sig.

  “You’re looking for Toni,” she said. “Of course. You are a bounty hunter. I never was very keen on westerns. The worst part of the American memescape. All about deluded loners fighting over chunks of land to isolate themselves from each other. Nothing about community building. Nothing about the land as part of the community. Just phallocentric dominion and lots of horns.”

  “You talk a lot,” said Sig.

  “What do you expect?” said Max. “I’m a politician, and before that I was a writer.” She looked at Sig. “You really don’t know, do you?”

  Sig shook his head. He put down the miniature on the desk and picked up one of the homemade tapes.

  “Amazing. We hear about these Americans who live in a news bubble, but I’d never actually met one.”

  “There are many worlds to see,” said Sig. “Not just the babbling realms of politicians and professors. Ask the animals that live in your walls.”

  Max coughed out a chuckle. “I like you,” she said. “How wonderful to talk with someone who never read one of my books, or saw one of my campaign ads. Though you missed some magnificent debates, the kind television culture rarely allows. Anomalous, really, that things got so bad, the pendulum swung so far, that a ticket like ours could come to power in our country. Of course, they didn’t let it last long. Not even three years. We got too ambitious, and they took us out with a bloodless coup of invented scandal and misinformation.”

  Sig looked at the magazine photo taped to the wall. The speaker looked intense. She was also beautiful.

  “That was after I was back in the loyal opposition,” she said. “The jabbering politica formerly known as the presidential understudy. Suited me better than governing, truth told. Before the burns, at least.”

  Sig looked at Max’s melted face. He saw that her hands were burned, too, many of the fingers mere stumps. He remembered the stories, about the bombing.

  “I know who you are,” said Sig.

  “Oh, well,” she said.

  “Did you do it?”

  She looked at Sig, through keen eyes.

  “Of course I did it,” she said. “After finally deciding it was the only way to secure a better future. But unfortunately I bungled it. Left him in power and me in this degraded state, when I meant to kill us both.”

  Sig watched her take in a long, labored breath.

  “You can’t give up,” he said.

  “You have no idea how long I have been fighting them, or at what cost,” she answered.

  “Where is the Colonel?” asked Sig.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t hear her snoring over there,” said Max. “She works at night and sleeps most of the day. Speak of the devil.”

  Sig turned around.

  A tall woman with brown skin and long gray hair stood in the doorway, wearing a green tank top and black gym shorts. A gold animal skull pendant hung from her neck. The fringed machete was in her right hand, over her head, about to cleave Sig.

  100

  Tania showed them the Kill List on her phone. The Enemies List, too.

  They looked up the names of friends and colleagues. They kind of freaked out at all they found.

  Dot started crying. That was the name the white girl went by. Her colleagues were Tommy and Bao. The lady in charge was Claude. A name Tania had come across before.

  Bao told her to stop, that they knew what they were getting into when they signed up, that this just proved things they always suspected.

  Claude told Tania this information needed to be free. Tania said that’s what I’m trying to do. Claude said then what the hell are you doing in here. Tania explained. It kind of made sense, but she could see the WTF look on Claude’s face.

  Claude said we need to go upstairs.

  Tania asked who’s upstairs. Claude said come on. You, too, Bao.

  Tommy gave Tania a copy of their manifesto, the one about how to build your own country. Tania said she’d already read it, but she didn’t mention her counterarguments.

  Can you imagine, said Tommy, eyes lit up like a little boy describing a new fort he is going to build.

  Tania didn’t want to say what she imagined.

  101

  Sig sidestepped the machete with animal instinct.

  But the Colonel had better training. Government training, the kind that makes it so you don’t have to think.

  She knocked his knife from his hand on the first move.

  She fought like whatever you did, you were replaying some fight she had practiced a hundred times. She caught every punch, and when he landed one she could take it.

  She grunted a lot.

  The floor bounced under their feet, like they might bust right through it.

  And within a minute she had Sig on the ground. Her pin wasn’t that strong, but she had the point of the machete poking right up under the soft tissue under his jaw
, ready to shove.

  He was evaluating whether to try to wiggle out of it when the look came over her face.

  “I know this guy,” she said, not releasing him. “He’s all over Channel 13. And now all over the real news. A fugitive.”

  Sig felt like a free animal must feel when it’s caught, alive.

  “One of ours?” asked Max.

  “No, not a Masque,” said the Colonel. “Not even a political, really. Part of that gang. Does it for money.”

  “Oh, right,” said Max. “The bandits. Social bandits, right? Local heroes? Give the money to the people et cetera?”

  “Maybe some of it,” said the Colonel.

  Sig tried to nod but the machete point broke the skin when he did.

  “He’s tied up with Walker,” said the Colonel.

  “Oh, I see,” said Max. “Maybe we could get him on the right path.”

  “Or sell him to the Authority,” said the Colonel. “He’s a high-value fugitive. We could probably trade him for ten people in the Dome.”

  “Why don’t we talk to him about it?” said Max.

  “How did I know you would say that,” muttered the Colonel. She twisted the hold a little tighter for punctuation, then released it, keeping the machete on him. “Sit up, outlaw. Sit on your hands.”

  Sig did as they said. He sat on the rug on the floor, Max sat up in her bed, and the Colonel sat in the chair, holding the pistol—now with the clip she had repossessed from Sig.

  Then Tania walked in, with an old black lady and a tough short girl that made Sig think of old Kong.

  102

  “Oh my God,” said Tania. She knew who it had to be. She had suspected it when Claude led them up here. But she had no idea.

  “What are you staring at?” said the Colonel.