After the Zap

by Michael Armstrong

  As I flew over that country I got this slight twitching, not much, just a little twitch. Distant, ethereal bells went tinkle, tinkle, tinkle in my subconscious. I’d been here before, I knew. Not from the air, but on the ground. The land, the country, the terrain looked familiar. Nothing else I’d seen in the PRAK had the suggestion of home, but this . . . this wasn’t home, but it was where I’d been. I knew that.

  We passed over some more cabins, but nothing as big as the fort. A large road paralleled the river, but all the bridges had either been washed out or blown up; the Kenaitze cut the peninsula in two. People came out of their cabins to watch the Wonderblimp float by. We maintained battle stations; Nike said if any planes flew up we were to shoot them out of the sky.

  About an hour later we came to the first fork, a river that actually had a name on my map. Moose. It was the Moose River. We vented gas and came down to about a hundred feet. On the north bank of the Kenaitze, just west of the confluence of the Moose and the Kenaitze, was an air strip, and at the end of it was exactly what we needed to land: a crude derrick with a platform big enough to plunk our cone on. Whoever this Rei guy was, he was expecting us, and he knew how to follow directions.

  We set the cone and landed.

  * * *

  Once the Wonderblimp got snugged into the Naptown pylon like a babe sucking her mother’s teat, Nike, Ruby, Lucy, and I went down to see Rei. We walked up to a small red log cabin with a blue and white sign over the door that said NAPTOWN POST OFFICE. Post was this paper stuff that people sent back and forth before the Zap—kind of like memor messages. Inside, the post office looked dead and ruined. Paper littered the floor and dust had settled on everything, including the body of an old man sitting in a chair.

  The old man looked like all the air and water had been sucked out of him, leaving a thin shell of papery skin. He had a long neck, and his head hung down on his chest. Shaggy gray hair hung over his forehead, and a pair of wire-rim glasses rested in his lap. A book—The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick—lay open on a table next to him. Heat radiated from a small wood stove in the center of the room.

  “Rei?” Nike asked. He gently shook the old guy’s shoulder. “Rei.”

  The old man stirred, sat up, blinked. He put his glasses back on his hooked nose, smiled.

  “The Wonderblimp arrives, and saviors from the heavens come to give us light,” he said.

  “So to speak,” Nike said.

  I picked up the book, kept his place, riffled the pages. “Dick,” I said. I knew this book. A great book, about this guy who throws the I Ching.

  “You pause at the pages like a man who knows the word and makes sense of sign,” the old man said.

  I nodded. “I’m a reader. And you?”

  He shook his head.

  “The words make no sense. Philip K. eludes me still. Great sadness and pain. I stare at the words, hoping they will give me meaning. Read me words, any word.”

  I shrugged, started reading the page he’d left the book open to.

  “ ‘Tomorrow I will have to go out and buy that Grasshopper book, he told himself. It’ll be interesting to see how the author depicts a world run by Jews and Communists, with the Reich in ruins, Japan no doubt a province of Russia; in fact, with Russia extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific. I wonder if he—whatever his name is—depicts a war between Russia and the U.S.A.? Interesting book, he thought. Odd nobody thought of writing it before’,” I read.

  “Ah, ah, words made flesh,” the old man said. “The Castle comes alive now. You can read, it’s true.”

  I smiled. “Well enough.”

  “A reader,” he said. “Who are you?”

  “Holmes,” I said. “Holmes Weatherby, Aye-Aye-Aye. And you?”

  “I’m R-E-I Coop. I have a message for you”—he smiled at me—“ears only. And you?” Rei looked at Nike. “Are you Nike, captain of the Wonderblimp, Order of the Atom?”

  “I am,” he said. “Do you have a message for me?”

  “A message for you, ears only too, of great import. But Holmes’s message comes first,” Coop said.

  He took me into a small room off the main room of the cabin. Rei took me by the shoulders and smiled again.

  “A Reader, eh? Well, hear the words of this memor:

  That which is hidden

  Will be found when feet unshod

  Meet shoes of dull brown.

  “That’s it?”

  Rei nodded his head, like a woodpecker scratching for bugs. “Yup. I knew you would understand the whole message. Go. Send Nike to me.”

  I went back into the main room, told Nike to talk to Rei, sat in Rei’s chair. Ruby sat in an understuffed couch, silver-black braid over her shoulder. What did Rei’s message mean? I thought. And how did Rei know I would come that way? Or was it like Lucy said, memors just took all messages, and waited for the right person to come along? A few minutes later Nike came out.

  “Let’s go to the Wonderblimp and look at your map,” Nike said. “Ruby, go talk to Rei, memor to memor. He wants to dump on you—and negotiate our memor tribute, okay?”

  Back on the bridge, Nike spread the north quad map of the Kenaitze. “We have to make a delivery,” he said. “It’s a little tricky.”

  “Deliver a nuke?”

  He shook his head. “Nope. Something I’ve had in the hold a long time. Something I’ve been waiting to get rid of for quite some time.” He looked down at the map. “Rei said we’re to follow the Kenaitze River until we meet a railroad. There we’re to wait until the train comes, and they’ll tow us north.

  “We go north until we get to a place called the Redoubt, up road near a wayside called Kaditali Station. Kaditali is: ‘On a marsh, the first / town where the road and the tracks / fork, by a long bay.’ When we get to the Redoubt, we’re to deliver this stuff to a guy named Maxwell Silverhammer Everton. In return, he’ll give us six disarmed knapsack nukes.”

  “Six nukes?”

  “That’s what Rei says. Anyway, where is this Redoubt?”

  I looked at the map. “Up river to the railroad” was easy. The Kenaitze ran under a line with lines scratched across it: railroad. I followed the railroad north, along a narrow bay— Turnagain, it said on my map—and to an area printed with little blue symbols, symbols that looked like tufts of grass: the marsh. A red line paralleled the railroad almost the whole way from the Kenaitze River north; it split away from the railroad at the marsh.

  Bingo.

  There were two black squares at the fork—houses?—and a thin line going uphill from the squares to another dot. A creek flowed along the thin line; someone had pencilled in KADITALI. I took a pencil, traced this route from the river to the marsh. Nike smiled.

  “Yeah, that would be about right.” He clapped me on my shoulder. “Kid, you’ve earned your pay for this trip.”

  “Not yet,” said Ruby. She’d come onto the bridge like a cat; I hadn’t noticed her.

  “What?” Nike asked.

  “Rei is going to keep us a while. For memor tribute, he wants Holmes to read him that book by Dick.”

  “The whole thing?” I asked.

  “Yup,” said Ruby. “The whole thing.”

  I smiled; there were worse things to do with my time.

  * * *

  It took three days to get the book read. I could have done it in one day, but Rei kept interrupting me. “Read that section again,” he’d say, and I’d have to go back and repeat a paragraph. He kept up a running commentary on the book’s passage, and not wanting to be rude, I felt obligated to respond to his questions. But I liked the book, especially the parts about the I Ching, so it wasn’t that big a chore. Everyone else was twiddling their thumbs.

  Nike got nervous being there so close to Fort Redoubt– Kenaitze. He worried that those crazies would mount an attack, sneak in at night and net the blimp like the Verts had tried to do in Kachemak. Everyone except me had to stand watch. But I finished in three days, and at the end of it Rei leaned
back in his rocker and grinned.

  “Got it all, everything,” he said, and he tapped his head. “Between that and the Bible, I may become a library.”

  “Glad to help,” I said. “Can I . . .” I held up The Man in the High Castle, not daring to ask.

  “Go with Philip K.,” Rei said. “I have the words forever.” He tapped his head. “Bless you, Holmes.”

  So we left, one old man happier, one young punk richer. We unsuckled from the Naptown mast and floated back from the pylon, into the wind, and up the river to the railroad.

  At the railroad we saw the woman in the gold lamé dress.

  CHAPTER 7

  She was walking down the middle of the railroad tracks dressed in red long johns, fur coat, and snowshoes. She didn’t have a hat, just this mass of platinum blond curls. She was walking like someone had sliced the muscles on both calves; there were these big white boots on her feet, and the way she was walking, it looked like each boot weighed twenty pounds each.

  I was up in the forward nacelle, watching for the railroad station or whatever it was where we were supposed to meet the train. Rei had said to head north up the tracks until we came to a station with a blimp mooring mast. I’d asked him why it seemed like there were mooring masts all over the PRAK, and he told me it was like a totem to the Wonderblimp. Memors had been passing the message up and down the line that if you wanted a nuke, you had to make it nice for the Wonderblimp to come.

  That woman down in the snow looked like she was having trouble. The headwaters of the Kenaitze were up in mountains, and the outside temperature was about ten below zero, according to a thermometer outside the forward nacelle. None of us knew where the railroad station might be, but it wasn’t going to be soon enough, not for that lady. I reported the sight to Nike, and he told me he’d send someone down.

  The Wonderblimp slowed to a crawl, then hovered over the woman. Bron and Lucy went down on ropes, hooked her up to a monkey harness—like Lucy had done with me in Kodiak—and yanked her up. I went back to the hold to see this sight.

  I just got into the hold when Bron pulled the person up and in. The first thing I noticed was that I had been mistaken about her gender: she was a he. Even with a wig, heavy make-up, and a dress, it’s hard to disguise a man six-foot-five and 250 pounds.

  He stood flagpole straight, his shoulders spreading out like aircraft wings. Make-up was plastered to his face like poultices: lipstick thick as wax, mascara like mud pies, and eye liner like worms glued to his lids. He’d unzipped his coat, revealing a strapless gold lamé cocktail dress slit up both sides. Gray socks covered the red long johns up to his knees. The white boots were big clodhoppers that made his feet look like rabbit feet. VAPOR BARRIER BOOT, TYPE C, the writing said on each boot. Red toenails had been painted on the bunny boots. The guy saluted, and when he did, I saw that he was wearing matching gold lamé evening gloves.

  “Permission to come aboard, sir,” he said.

  “Permission granted,” Nike said, tossing him a quick wave.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Oh, cut the military crap, guy. You some kind of soldier? What’s your name? And why the hell are you wearing that getup?”

  The marine grinned. “Private First Class Odey. I was kidnapped by terrorists.”

  “What the hell kind of name is Odey?” Nike asked.

  Odey shrugged, pointed to the collar of a green undershirt sticking out from under his dress. He tugged on a white tag, yanked it off, and handed it to Nike. Nike looked at it, handed it to me.

  “Undershirt, Olive Drab,” I read aloud.

  Odey smiled. “That’s me. All my shirts say that. Olive Drab. Odey.”

  “Christ,” Nike said. He shook his head. “What’s this about terrorists?”

  “Terrorists kidnapped me,” he said.

  “Like crap,” said Nike. “Okay, soldier, let’s go get a snack and you can tell us about it.” Nike motioned to us, and we followed him up to the day room.

  “Terrorists,” Odey repeated. “Honest.” We sat down at the captain’s table. Doc North came in with sandwiches and coffee, poured the soldier a cup. “Thanks,” Odey said. He took off the wig, revealing a purple flattop haircut, then took off the coat. He wore a gold stud earring in his right ear.

  “I was on a twenty-four-hour pass from Fort Kenaitze,” Odey said. “I went into this bar and met this real good-looking lady, big tits, gold Mohawk haircut. She was wearing this”—he tugged at the dress. “She came on to me real heavy, so I went home with her, and just when I’m about ready to pork her real good, someone comes up from behind me and grabs my arms and legs and trusses me up just fine.”

  “Hmmph,” Lucy said. “Just goes to show you can’t be too careful about who you try to pork.”

  “Damn straight,” said Odey. He took a big sip of coffee, left red lipstick stains on the cup. “Anyway, they put me in this tent in the middle of a living room and taped stereo headphones to my ears and made me listen to real old kind of music.”

  “Music?” Nike asked. “From what?”

  “This old stereo getup,” Odey said. “I mean, the thing had vacuum tubes and everything. Anyway, they did that for a few days, and then . . .”

  “Yeah?” I asked.

  “Then they dressed me up in this silly-ass outfit, took me out in a dog sled, and dumped me by the railroad tracks. I just started walking. I figured I’d hit a station or checkpoint sooner or later.”

  “Huh,” said Nike. “You’re from Fort Kenaitze?”

  “Yeah,” Odey said.

  “How long ago were you at the fort?”

  “Two days ago.”

  “Things pretty calm there?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Nothing really exciting happened in a week.”

  “Uh-huh,” Nike said. “Tell me about the parade ground.”

  “Parade ground?”

  “Yeah. Big flat area in the middle of the fort. You notice anything different about it?”

  “Different? Nah. It’s flat as a pancake. Why?”

  “Uh-huh,” Nike said. Bron moved a little closer to Odey, and Nike pulled a Suzuki submachine gun from under the table, laid it before him, safety off, shell in the chamber. “What the hell’s going on? You aren’t from Fort Kenaitze.”

  “I’m not?” Odey asked.

  “You’re not,” Nike said. “We blew the fort up two days ago. There’s a crater big enough to hide this blimp in on the parade ground.”

  “Oh,” said Odey, “I see.” He lowered his chin. “Fuck. The Hammer is going to have my ass.”

  “Oh, no,” said Nike. “We already got your ass. Bron, Holmes, go take this guy into the extra cabin and strip him.”

  Odey grinned. “Damn, I’ll go for that. This dress is too damn tight.” He turned to Lucy. “You want this dress, sweetheart?”

  Lucy got up, patted Odey’s cheek. “Oh no, baby,” she said. “I think you look just fine in it.”

  * * *

  About twenty miles up the railroad we came to a station. A little dot on my map said this was Moose Pass—that name hadn’t been erased. Moose Pass was a cluster of buildings and, true to Rei’s word, a blimp pylon. We turned into the wind and docked. A steam locomotive—no life—sat on the tracks, boilers working, smoke wisping out of its stack. It was a damn antique but it looked like it would work.

  Steam made sense. The PRAK didn’t seem to be rolling in oil or gas. The Wonderblimp had variable carburetors on the turbo props: we could take a mix of anything from pure ethanol to methanol to gasoline. “Whatever lifts up your skirts,” Nike always joked. Helium was what was hard to get, though. The blimp used natural gas or hydrogen in the top bags, the vent bags—the stuff we wasted to move down. Mind you, the Wonderblimp didn’t carry a lot of hydrogen, and all of that in double-thickness ballonets wrapped in something called Kevlar, that’s what the label said on it.

  Steam, though . . . Steam was water, water was made by heat, and heat was made by burning things. There’s probabl
y some coal in the PRAK, and for damn tooting a lot of wood. The whole damn People’s Republic seemed to be forest, at least what I’d seen. So a steam locomotive . . . that was a real smart idea.

  We got hitched to the mooring mast and then lowered our gangplank. An old guy greeted us at the bottom. He looked like Rei’s twin: big bird neck, hooked nose, and little granny glasses.

  From the sky they fall

  Kite to roaring engine train.

  Forward into the white,

  he said. “I heard you would be coming.”

  Nike looked at him, looked at the blimp, looked at the steam locomotive. “You heard right,” he said. “I’m Nike, captain of the Wonderblimp. You a memor?”

  The old guy nodded.

  “Ray Coop is my name. I’m the memor of Moose Pass, waiting to pass on messages.”

  “Ray Coop?” I asked. “We met a memor in Naptown named R-E-I Coop. You, uh, related?”

  “We’re brothers. Twins burst from our mother’s womb, now bearing the same card.”

  He smiled, handed me his card; it was the same green-and-white card that the other Rei Coop showed us. I passed the card to Nike; even though he couldn’t read the words, he could recognize it as the same.

  Nike and I looked at each other. Nike shrugged his shoulders. “Uh, yeah,” I said. “Well, the Rei Coop we met at Naptown was the one who told us to come here.”

  “So he did. And he was right, eh?” Coop scratched his head. He waved a hand, like he was swatting mosquitoes. “Well, never the mind. Here you are, the blimp ready to join the train. Might as well get the cable hooked up.”

  Ray Coop pointed at the train, up at the blimp. Nike nodded. “Sure,” he said. “Bron, Holmes.” Nike waved us toward the locomotive, then went back up the gangplank with Coop.

  Inside the Wonderblimp’s hold was a 500-yard spool of twenty-ton cable. Nike had told me before that they had gotten a tow part of the way across the Gulf of Alaska behind a steamer; they had lowered the cable and hooked onto the stern. We were going to do the same thing with the locomotive.