Tropic of Kansas

by Christopher Brown

  “Sorry,” said Tania. “I used to idolize you. Both of you.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” said the Colonel.

  “You did that a long time ago,” said Tania. “When you fucked it all up.”

  “Who is this bitch, Claude?” said the Colonel. “And why is she not hooded?”

  “She’s with me,” said Sig.

  “Who are you?” said Claude.

  “Stray dog,” said Max.

  “Exactly,” said Tania.

  She looked at Sig. Those unfathomable eyes. Almost feral, except you could sometimes see the feeling.

  “You have to see what she brought,” said Claude.

  Tania looked at the eyes of Maxine Price, which were the only part that looked the way she remembered.

  “Show me,” said Max.

  “What’s that smell?” said Bao.

  Tania looked at Sig. He smelled it, too.

  “Those motherfuckers,” said the Colonel, moving toward the metal door behind her. “We had a deal.”

  Then Tania heard a click, and the floor exploded.

  103

  The trapdoor in the far corner blew into the air with a single subterranean boom. The blast knocked them all down, except for Bao. Smoke filled the room.

  The Colonel and Max crawled away.

  “Safe room!” yelled the Colonel.

  Two gunmetal eggs arced from the hole and clattered on the ground. They popped as they rolled, blasting the area with intense flashes of bright light.

  Sig covered his eyes before the flash. He looked back up to see three black figures crawling up out of the hole. Men in combat coveralls, faces hidden behind gas masks, eyes looking down the red beams of laser targeting scopes.

  SEA Eagles, coming at them, for kill or capture.

  “Wall Walkers!” yelled Bao. She pumped the first one, shot to the neck. He fell back in the hole.

  The other two had good firing positions, halfway out, arms on floor. They unloaded.

  Sig and Bao dove behind furniture.

  Everything shredded.

  Tania was down. Claude was with her. She tossed Sig a pistol, then dragged Tania back to the safe room.

  “Lock it!” yelled Bao.

  Tommy and Dot were at the front door now, leaning around, pushing back the invaders.

  Sig put a bullet in the side of the second guy’s face. It was armored, but he buckled.

  That was the last bullet in the gun. Sig tossed it.

  Helicopter chop pierced through the noise and blast-muffled eardrums. Sig looked out the window. Saw nothing. So he ran up onto the roof.

  A black-green twin-rotor Mohawk came around the corner of the building, same level as the apartment, cannons scanning, hunter-killer.

  Sig jumped.

  He hit hard, but with a good grip on the left skid, and was able to pull himself up before they saw him.

  The chopper was full of fuel.

  People would watch the films of the burning high-rise for years to come. Especially after they found out who lived there.

  Part Nine

  The Auteur Theory of the Hostage Video

  104

  Sig was sitting naked on the floor of his cell when he heard the guard and another man approaching.

  “Ten minutes, strict,” said the guard. “I’m gonna lock you in there with your client so I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “Thanks, Sarge. Enjoy the care package—you boys deserve it!”

  The guard opened the cell door and Sig watched as Ward Walker stepped through, wearing an “I hope you’re happy to see me” smile.

  “About time you got a haircut!” said Walker.

  They had shaved his head before they hosed him down with chemicals. SOP.

  Sig tripped Walker with an ankle lock. Walker fell hard—old man hard. Then Sig grabbed him with his left hand on Walker’s right ear and his right hand around Walker’s necktie, picked him up, and shoved him against the wall so hard it almost seemed like it would give.

  “Hey!” grimaced Walker. “That’s no way to treat your lawyer.”

  “Lawyers don’t lie as much as you,” said Sig.

  “It worked to get me in here to see you,” said Walker. “That and some well-placed bribes of cash and contraband.”

  “I should call them down here and rat you out and get you the special cell they’re saving for you.”

  “I came here to help you,” said Walker.

  “Snake,” said Sig. “They call me a thief, but I don’t steal other people’s liberty. I should crack your windpipe. Spare others the tricks that sneak through your lips.”

  “What are you talking about, swamp thing?” said Walker, pushing back. “Capitalism is not a crime. And if it weren’t for me nobody would know what a star you are. I’m here to get you out of confinement again. I even talked to your actual lawyer.”

  “I don’t have a lawyer,” said Sig, releasing Walker.

  “That’s not what he says,” said Walker, straightening his glasses. “Donny Kimoe. Moco made the connection. Great guy. I use him, too—go figure.”

  “Okay,” said Sig. “What did he say?”

  “Not much good yet, unfortunately,” said Walker. “But he has a conference call with the judge tomorrow morning to see if he can get bail set. And if he does, I’ll help pay for it.”

  “You’ll pay all of it, with the blood money.”

  “Look, it’s not like you think.”

  Sig scratched himself. Walker lit a Churchill from the crumpled pack in his jacket pocket.

  “Do you suppose if I ask where they put your clothes, that guy screaming down the hall will answer?”

  “They burned,” said Sig.

  “Yeah, that was pretty intense,” said Walker. “I could see the fires from the station. Wish Xelina had been there with her camera.”

  “Where is she?”

  “They haven’t come back from Houston,” said Walker. “Might not at all. You’re all I’ve got left. Moco’s still all freaked about those poor goddamn kids, and the Masques have cut me from the pack. Say I’m a parasite on the body of the people.”

  “They’re right,” said Sig.

  “I absolutely give more than I take, financially and in-kind,” said Walker.

  Sig grumbled. He thought about the dead kids. He thought about who was most at fault.

  Walker took a long drag on his cigarette. He acted cocky but looked almost as yellow as the lenses of his glasses. And if you looked through the lenses at his eyes you could glimpse the real story.

  “Look,” said Walker. “I know how you feel. But we’re all on the same side, and we’re getting our asses kicked. I want to turn that around. I want to live in a free country again. We need a goddamn reboot.”

  Sig took the cigarette from Walker and listened.

  Walker pulled out the black antenna tablet he called his office. “Recognize this guy?”

  The screen showed photos of Newton Towns. Flashing his porcelain canines in a headshot, playing the President on TV, and touring New Orleans with paramilitaries the day before.

  “This fucking guy has seriously lost the ability to distinguish between Hollywood spectacle and dark American reality,” said Walker. “He’s driving around with these loco yahoos rounding up ‘bad actors.’ In the Ninth Ward. With a camera crew following him around. You see where I’m going?”

  Sig looked at Walker. Watched his eyes, and hands, and wondered what his real agenda was. Someone had something on him and he was trying to turn the tables. Or maybe he just saw an opportunity to create a transaction that would replenish his coffers.

  “But that’s not what I really came to talk to you about. Here’s my problem. The goddamn Masques have evicted me from my own house. They took over the station. Said it’s an essential resource of the people or some bullshit like that. It’s an essential asset on my personal balance sheet is what it is. And I thought the current regime was bad about respecting property rights. Now I’m getting
it from both ends! It sucks! You gotta help me take it back. They can still have their channel.”

  Sig grumbled.

  “I’ll cut you in,” said Walker. “Equity stake. Like maybe five percent.”

  Sig smiled.

  “Seriously, you have no idea. This thing is really just getting going and there’s a nice hockey stick coming. The eyeballs are growing exponentially. Viral. The content’s all free. We make money off advertising, DVDs, snowflake transaction fees, product placement. And now that the shit’s starting to fly, look out. There is no one better positioned to make money off this revolution than yours fucking truly.”

  “Except that you don’t have a station,” said Sig.

  “Exactly,” said Walker. “I knew I could count on you.”

  “Look—” grumbled Sig.

  They heard the guard coming.

  “Tomorrow,” said Walker. “I believe in Donny Kimoe. Say that to yourself when you’re going to sleep tonight. And when you get out, you know what to do.”

  Sig wasn’t so sure.

  105

  Tania woke up in a sunny room. An old room. Like Grandma’s house, except it smelled more like a hospital. There was a picture of flowers on the wall.

  She was in a bed, with heavy blankets over her legs. Something else was wrapped around her legs, something wet, and they kind of hurt. There was a tube in her arm.

  Through the window, she had a view of a tall broadcast antenna. All metal, painted red and white in sections, with big boxes and dishes clustered toward the top. There must have been forty vultures perched up there, watching over the city, already satiated from the day before but ready to go out for more.

  The morning light was clean. Her legs burned, but her mind was clarified.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Hey, sweetie,” said a voice to her side, a familiar voice.

  She felt a hand on her arm and turned to see if it was real.

  Mom was sitting there, right next to her. Tania sat up and reached.

  “Lie back down now,” said Mom, hand on her shoulder. “You need to rest.”

  “How did you get here?” said Tania.

  “You got me here,” she answered. “Those friends of yours from Iowa. They got me out of Boschwitz House, me and two other detainees, and drove us all the way here, two days straight.”

  “My friends? But I thought—”

  “They said they tried to reach you after your story checked out, but they didn’t know how. Said we all needed to get to New Orleans to get ready for the big day.”

  Tania lost it as the feelings started to pour out. She grabbed Mom’s hand and pulled it close, laughing through the tears at the bright purple nail polish Mom was wearing. Mom leaned in over the IV tubes and hugged her tight for a long time.

  A few minutes later another woman came in to check on Tania. She dressed more like a biker than a doctor, but said she was the medic. She smiled at the reunion.

  “How’s she doing?” said the medic.

  “She’s amazing,” said Mom. “But she may want to stick with long pants in the future.”

  Mom pulled back her covers, and Tania saw the scars herself as the medic changed her dressing. She thought about making a liposuction joke, but didn’t.

  “We do field surgery here,” said the medic. “Functional stuff. For plastics you have to travel. How’s your pain?”

  “Where am I?” said Tania.

  “Bywater,” said the nurse. “Inside the DMZ. They leave us alone here.”

  “Right,” said Tania. “Part of the cease-fire.”

  “That’s the deal,” said the nurse. “But based on what happened to you, it sounds like the deal may be off.”

  Mom nodded, and looked worried.

  “It’s my fault,” said Tania, seeing it with fresh clarity as she remembered where the scars came from. “They probably followed me all the way, right to the ones they really wanted.”

  “It’s okay,” said Mom, in the way parents lovingly lie.

  “What happened to the others?” asked Tania.

  “We don’t know yet, sweetie,” said Mom. “Still waiting for word.”

  Claude showed up about forty-five minutes later.

  “You’re doing all right,” she said. “And you did right.”

  “Glad you think so,” said Tania. “Because there’s no going back.”

  “I know all about that,” said Claude. “The only way out of this life is forward. To a renewed reality.”

  Tania looked at the flowers on the wall, and thought about the ruins outside.

  “It doesn’t seem possible,” said Tania.

  “It’s inevitable,” said Mom.

  “It’s just a matter of when,” agreed Claude. “That’s the way of these kinds of changes. You can wait for evolution to happen at its natural pace. Or you can help it along. And you definitely have given it a kick in the ass. We can’t believe the trove you secreted out. It’s exactly what we’ve needed to turn the situation around.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Oh yeah. Andrei’s already working it. Three editors he trusts. Paris, Berlin, Delhi. We’re going to release it in digestible morsels. And make plenty of copies.”

  “Okay.”

  “I can’t promise people will pay attention.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Tania. “They just need to know.”

  “And they will. It’s so clarifying how things really stand between the President and the people. That ledger, those details, really shows the extent of the corruption. And when the main course is served, the Kill List—that’s prosecutable stuff.”

  “I don’t know,” said Tania. “His judges have neutered the Constitution pretty good. You need prosecutors to prosecute someone.”

  “The people still make the law,” said Claude. “In the final reckoning. Even if it has to be natural law.”

  “There’s a reason they don’t teach the Declaration of Independence in law school,” said Tania. “Or make clear it doesn’t count.”

  “Yeah, well, thankfully most people don’t give a shit what they teach in law school,” said Mom. “They just know what seems right and what seems wrong. What’s fair.”

  “The people are crazy,” said Tania. “Manipulated by political marketers into a rabid toddler mob that feeds the President and his oligarchs.”

  “That’s true, too,” said Claude. “But what if we implanted our own virus? Watch and see.”

  Tania looked out the window at the broadcast antenna.

  “Is that—”

  “Channel Zero.”

  “Yours?”

  “Ours,” said Claude. “That means you, too. And really ours, now. We just expropriated it.”

  “Good,” said Tania. “Maybe you can cancel all the porn.”

  “Uh huh,” said Mom.

  “What happened to the kid?” asked Tania.

  “Which kid?” said Claude.

  “Sig.”

  Claude looked at Mom. When Mom nodded, with a sad face, Tania already knew.

  106

  Sleepless, Sig watched out his cage door and tried to parse the hundred disparate conversations that filled the huge atrium of the enclosed stadium, muffled by rushing blasts of forced air. It was always loud, and always light.

  His cell was in the lower deck, where they had ripped out whole sections of seats from the bleachers and replaced them with temporary cells made from cubicle walls and chain link. More cages were under construction on the upper decks. The cells ringed the old arena, looking down on the unsegregated detainees milling about the fenced-in AstroTurf pitch. A guard tower had been erected on the fifty-yard line out of five shipping containers stacked on top of each other and wrapped in scaffolding, creating a pedestal from which every single cell could be visually monitored. The old scoreboard dangled over the tower from the ceiling, its four Jumbotron panels screening reprogramming videos that really started to get into your head when you had been awake for thirty-six hours.


  Sig’s stomach growled for his attention, just as one of the guards showed up with a bag of takeout and another bag containing’s Sig’s new clothes. Walker had kept one of his promises.

  “It’s your lucky night, big boy,” said the guard, sliding the bags through. “Extra spicy. Sorry I can’t let you have the plastic cutlery, but I’m sure you understand.”

  After he dressed, Sig devoured the fried chicken, until there was nothing left but bone.

  That was about the time the nightly horror show started.

  It started with a siren peal, then a strobe, then a series of booms. The jailers had figured out how to use the full array of light and sound equipment left behind by the previous management. A postapocalyptic halftime show.

  The noise from the speakers sounded like Sig imagined a big earthquake would be. It shook the cages.

  There was music that sounded like power tools grinding on sheet metal, inside your head.

  There were more videos on the Jumbotron, designed to more aggressively demoralize. Live feeds.

  Of interrogations in progress in other parts of the building. Of a grown man, naked, shackled in a back-bending yoga pose, screaming on the floor. Of a man trying to evade a pair of guard dogs straining at their leashes to eat his face off.

  A woman strapped to a metal chair in a dirty hospital gown, watching in horror as an unknown chemical is delivered by a syringe into the thickened veins of her arm.

  A man shoved inside a three-foot by three-foot box, naked with a spider.

  Close-up on the eye of a woman as she watches the torture of her son.

  All the ways to break mind and body they had developed fighting people on the other side of the world, they now used on their own people, justifying it by saying their treason had forfeited their citizenship. Made them stateless aliens, without real rights.

  Sig wondered about Donald Kimoe, Esq.

  While the videos played, some of the prisoners were let out onto the fenced-in football field. Groups of jailers walked the rows of cells, with electric truncheons in their hands and rubber masks hiding their faces, selecting revelers for the floor show.