by Reed King
My mom could see I was on the edge of bawling, and slung an arm around my shoulders. “We all die, Truckee,” she said. “It isn’t that we die. It’s how much life we got to live.”
I admit, with my pulse throbbing a half centimeter away from the tip of a none-too-clean knife, I wasn’t sure I could of said the difference.
“Brimstone and hellelujah, the party’s just getting started.” A woman with a strong resemblance to an enormous molting caterpillar charged out of the darkness with Sammy in her grip. “We got a tin man over here. Or is it a tin woman?”
“Ugliest sex doll I ever seen in my life, if that’s what she’s supposed to be. I wouldn’t even fuck her with Thrasher’s dick.” The man who had me pinned gave me a nudge down the hill. “All right, start stomping, Sally.”
We broke out of the trees and half-stepped down the steep embankment. Close around the fire was one of the ugliest road crews I’d ever seen. They were Devil’s Army demons, no doubt about it. Two men had the brand of the devil, 6-6-6 planted right on their mugs.
I prayed Barnaby had run off to safety. Maybe, just maybe, he’d even run for help.
But no. He was too much a coward. Besides, there was no help to get.
The Devil’s Army demons forced Sammy and me down into the dirt next to another prisoner, by far the largest man I’d ever seen in my life. His shoulders were twice as broad as a normal man’s and his biceps the size of both my thighs together. When he raised his eyes to me, I wished he hadn’t. They were empty, somehow, as if someone had gone in with software and photo-edited out the light. A thick, ugly scar, as pink as a worm, stretched between his eyebrows to the crown of his head.
A Straw Man. No wonder he looked so hopeless. He’d had the fight taken out of him, literally.
“Well, well, well. When it rains, it pours.” A soft voice spoke up, a voice like the first quiet fizz of dust thrown up against the windows by a hurricane twenty miles away. “What do we say when the devil provides?”
“Give the devil his due.” The Devil’s Army spoke together, like a bunch of tatted, jumped-up, filthy schoolkids.
“Give the devil his due,” the man echoed, and stepped into the firelight.
His face was raw with scars and burns. Where his right eye should of been there was nothing but an empty pit, a smooth socket of skin. His left cheek, seared to melting, had been clumsily remade out of plate metal and hammered tin.
He wore clothes of filthy leather and a belt so full of weapons it would of made Biff’s arsenal look skint by comparison. I counted half a dozen knives, at least two handguns, a set of brass knuckles, a billy club, a tomahawk, even a goddamn scimitar. I thought about trying to beat it, but knew I wouldn’t even make it to my feet before he had my head swinging off his belt buckle too.
“Welcome to hell, soldiers.” He kept his eyes on me. “My name’s Zeb, and I top this crew.” His smile corkscrewed into the scarred part of his face. “Let’s see, now. Not a bad haul for a sorry stretch of old Okie in the middle of the night. That’s two new bodies to sell, plus a code-error.”
My stomach puddled into my intestines. I hadn’t counted on worse than the Devil’s Army—but they were body pickers too. The more rotgut they shipped to the graveyard plants,1 the more green they could collect. Not for the first time, I wondered how the people of Florida Island2 could live with themselves, knowing all of their lights were powered by a constant flow of dead bodies.
“The biggie counts for more than one,” said another demon. He was the half bionic of the Federal Corporation armies of the north3—a deserter, then. “I bet a fart out of his cheeks could power a truck for a quarter mile. They’ll get the juice of three men from the stink in his belly when they slit it.” And he lobbed a spitball of old chewables directly at the man’s bald head. It burst against his scalp and slid down to his left ear before dropping.
“All right, then. Let’s get this pinball game on the road, shall we?” Zeb looked like a man in front of a big plate of CrunchMeat Chopz™. Too bad we were the chops. He unhooked a long, needle-like knife from his belt. “Who’d like to go first? The brute or the baby?”
“Wait,” I said. My mouth was dry. Trying to speak was like trying to spit out a sock. “Wait a second. You don’t want to hurt me.”
“I doubt that,” he said.
“I’m telling the truth,” I said. “Look, I come from the Federal Corp. My dad’s an uppercrust in Corporate. He’ll pay a lot of swag to have me back in one piece.”
“Nice try, crumb,” Zeb said. “You don’t think I can spot a nobody when I see one?” When he leaned close, his nostrils flared in and out, in and out, waving thick hairs at me. “Desperation has a smell, Suzie Q. You reek.”
“Smells like a virgin too,” said the woman who looked like the oversprouted grub, and all the others laughed. That bothered me even more than the idea of the methane in my gut powering someone’s hair dryer.
“Okay, fine,” I said. “You’re right. I am a crumb. I’m a nobody. But I’m on state business for President Burnham.”
This made the Devils laugh even harder. Top-secret intel and I gave it up like a nervous belch. But President Burnham should of known better than to give me the job in the first place.
“President who?” Zeb said. “Don’t know anybody by that name.” He made a big show of turning to the rest of his crew. “You ever heard of a President Burnham?”
The tattooed suck-ups all tripped over their gorges to pipe up: No, no, never heard of ’im, sounds like a real lube, sounds like the kid’s conning.
It was only then I really scanned how far I was from home. Out here, in the free-for-all continental backlands, President Burnham didn’t matter, and the laws of Crunch, United, didn’t matter, any more than a dress code mattered to a feral cat.
Zeb turned back to me. The firelight caught his one good eye and sparked it full of golden flames. “You’re in the danger zone now, crumb. No laws out here and none of your precious Human Resources to run ’em.”
I felt like telling him that he was welcome to game-over the entire Human Resources department. I would even help him ice-pack their bodies to Florida. But of course, I didn’t.
“You’re making a mistake,” I squealed as he lunged for me, even though he wasn’t and I knew it and he knew it too.
Zeb seized my hair and yanked my head back so hard my eyes watered. “Save your air, kid.” He worked the tip of his knife up and down my larynx, stroking it. “Now,” he continued, in a softer voice, “we’ve got to get the right spot. Very important not to overdo it. Don’t want too much blood running out in the wagon … the devil knows it don’t need no more paint.”
“Hang on.” Another man spoke up just as Zeb’s knife tip broke skin, and Zeb hesitated. A warm trickle of blood ran down my neck and pooled in the collar of my shirt.
“You got a problem, Thrasher?” Zeb asked.
Thrasher really did look like a demon in the firelight, especially because of all the tumors. I would of banked he hailed from the nuclear fields of Halloran-Chyung. “What’s the use killing ’em now? We’ve got another day, day and a half walking before we hit the crash. No point in hauling dead weight when they got feet.”
“Thrasher’s got a point,” another demon ventured. He had a straggly goatee, metal shrapnel studding his ears and lips, and the raw, shredded look of a dimehead.
“But what if they run?” protested a third—a ze,4 by the looks of them, with shaved eyebrows, and twin shoulder holsters.
“They won’t run.” The grub tipped her head to Sammy. “This one don’t have the heart for it. This one”—she nudged the giant with a foot—“is missing half his brain.” Finally she turned back to me. “And this one’s missing both his balls.”
“All right, okay. Very funny,” I said, to more laughter. For a cult of murderous body traders, they seemed well fucking cheerful.
The grub leaned forward. Her breath smelled like four-day-old TunaSaladz™ Bars left to bake in the he
at. “It’s all right, sugar. I was just fooling. I believe your balls is good as new.” She reached for my crotch and I slapped her away. “Aw, what’s the matter? You like boys, is that it? That’s all right. The devil takes all kinds. We got big-titter dick swingers and thems that get with anything at all, like Oreo over there. Just don’t call them a she, or they’ll bite your dick off.”
I ignored that and spoke instead to the demon named Thrasher. “You said there was a crash. What kind of crash?”
Zeb spat about an inch from my toe. To my surprise, he answered. “Train derailed an hour west of BCE Tech. Half them damned on board died in the fire.” Zeb sounded as if he envied them for dying. “Forty, sixty bodies aboard, all ripe for the picking. Which ones aren’t burnt to a crisp, that is.”
“Derailed?” I’d never heard of the bullet train going off track. “Derailed how?”
“Someone messed with the field,” Zeb said.
“You’re saying it wasn’t an accident?” I was thinking again of the alarm in Lilian, and the fact that no one had tailed us. It couldn’t be coincidence.
Rafikov can’t catch even a whiff of what we’re doing, President Burnham had said. But what if she had?
Zeb squinted at me like he was seeing me for the first time. “I don’t know of any accident’s going to board a train afterward and plug a bullet in the brain of each and every live one.”
Biff and Roger: dead. Roger’s nose hair: incinerated. That red-haired engineer: dead. I couldn’t say the world would be worse for it, exactly, but they hadn’t deserved to die, at least no more than anyone else did, no more than these tattooed Satan freaks making flub on corpses.
“Do you have any idea who did it?” I asked.
But Zeb had obviously lost patience with the chitchat. “You ask too many questions,” he said. “Truth is, I’d rather haul your dead body in a wagon than listen to your live little mouth keep yabbering. Maybe I’ll just go ahead and snip your vocal cords in half.”
He seized me by the hair again, and plugged the blade to my throat. A wet slick of blood slid down my collarbones. My bladder gave a wet whimper.
I’m sorry, I thought to nobody in particular. I closed my eyes and tried to call up a memory of my mom. But all I could see was Billy Lou standing there, teeth crusty with blood, his eyes leaking a dark fluid that looked just like shit.
Then a faint rustling noise from the trees, and a heavy thud, froze Zeb’s hand.
“What the fuck was that?” Thrasher whispered.
Once again, Zeb released me. Before I could be grateful, he blinded me with an uppercut. Stars burst behind my eyes. He seized me by the shirt before I could land in the dirt, shaking me so hard my teeth knocked together. “You bring friends with you, squid? Huh? Answer me, you little shit.”
“No,” I choked out. I could hardly see. “No friends.”
He shoved me back into the dirt. The Devil’s Army was on high alert now, guns and knives and axes drawn. Several demons scrolled into the trees and hacked their way through the growth. A minute went by. Slowly, the fog in my head began to clear.
Then I heard a voice: a terrible, fearful voice I knew right away.
“Who are you?” It was the goat, Barnaby. He hadn’t run after all. “What do you want? Leave me alone.”
I tried to shout, to tell him to run, to command him to—but I couldn’t make my voice work. My neck was still leaching blood and Zeb’s fist had knocked my thoughts into a wordless murk.
Run, I thought. But all that came out was a gurgle.
Then two of the demons broke free of the trees, their maws screwed up and terrified, like fabric pegged around a screwdriver.
“What?” Zeb said. “What is it?”
“It’s…” The ze could barely swallow. Even in the dark, from a distance, I could see their Adam’s apple rioting. “It’s … Him.”
Zeb went the color of bleach. “Him?”
The ze tried to speak again, but only managed a nod.
“This is ridiculous.” Barnaby’s voice got louder as he approached. “I’m an intellectual, not a politician. I’m no lord of anything.…”
He came through the trees, flanked by demons. They didn’t have their weapons on him, though. They were actually kneeling, crawling at his side, stopping to kiss the ground where he’d touched it.
And the whole crew let out a single, collective gasp, like a sharp wind had blown through them all at once. “I don’t believe it,” Zeb whispered.
“It speaks,” the demons murmured. “It speaks.”
Barnaby just stood there, blinking down at them. “It is a male, thankyouverymuch, at least in all the critical places, though I admit an instinctive fondness for decorative throw pillows. Very good eating. In any case”—he drew himself up taller—“I’ve sired plenty of young bucks in my day.”
“Of course you have,” Zeb said. Unbelievably, he began to laugh. “And we, Your Darkness, are of your loins too. We of the Devil’s Army, all of us your children.”
Then he threw his weapons down and kneeled. There was a great clanking and clatter as all the weapons went down, all that metal, wood, steel, and stone, and one by one every single demon of the Devil’s Army bowed down in the dirt.
“We’ve waited for you, my lord,” Zeb said, with his nose still pressed to the dirt. “We’ve put our faith in Satan, He of the horns and the hoof, He of the quick tongue and the silver speech, and now, at last, He has come.”
12
There’s one thing that bred faster than intestinal rot in the years after secession, and that’s religion. We got more religion on this continent than we got people to worship: I’ve seen towns bending the knee to everything from water spirits to waste-treatment plants. I’ve seen revivalist prophets and witch ladies reading fortunes from corpse innards. I don’t go in for that hoo-haw myself, but I respect a good grift when I see one, and religion’s got to be one of the oldest sells in the book.
—from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA
It turned out the demons of the Devil’s Army weren’t half bad, at least when they weren’t hell-bent on killing you.
Apart from Zeb, there was Bethesda, the grub (“My friends call me Bee,” she said shyly as her wart blushed pink, “and sorry ’bout saying you had no balls.”); Hog, the corporation soldier who’d deserted after the devil appeared to him in the blown-out intestines of one of his platoon-mates; Oreo, the gender-neutral ze who’d lived briefly in a pansex community in the GMAIC;1 Damon and Nikhil, who’d been married by a ventriloquist puppet ordained in the Temple of Satan only that November; Thrasher, only a few years older than I was; Cannon; and Fats, who from his waddle and fat rolls I knew for someone raised on a diet of Crunch Foodstuffz™.
They’d come from all over, East Coast and West Coast. They’d escaped the Appalachian temp camps on the backs of smuggler trucks and crawled out of shuddering bolt holes in the middle of the Oklahoma Furies. Hog had been a freedom fighter for a while, had helped defend New Hampshire’s independence from the Commonwealth, before a misfire from a Texas2 bottle rocket wiped out half his crew and blasted away his left leg just below the hip bone.
“Some days are harder than others,” Zeb told me. “Sometimes you want a break from all the looting and the killing, sure. Sometimes you just wanna kick your feet up, have a drink, play nice with a baby, be thankful you still got an eye to see with and legs to carry you. But,” he added with a quick glance in the goat’s direction, “the devil never got no Sundays off and nor do we.”
We made a funny-looking crew. Two demons scouted ahead, calling back to let us know the way was clear or popping off a warning shot if they spotted something suspect—a house that might be squatted, a road booby-trapped by slicks. A second pair of scouts scrolled directly in front of two teamsters drawing the wagon, from which Barnaby, crowned and festooned and having a mighty good time, made obscure pronouncements. Then came the Straw Man—cabled to the rig, so he wouldn’t run—then Sammy and me. The
rear guard, usually led by Zeb, trailed us by fifty feet.
Now that we were in no danger of being gutted, I was high-key glad for all the guns.
Zeb and his crew had been picking this territory for years. They even paid kickback to some friendly bodymen for the right to keep shipping corpses off the land. But some of Blythe’s hires didn’t play so nice with outsiders, and there was always the risk of backlanders and angry pay-tenants, half-starving on their own rented land. And recently, Zeb told me, they’d started running up against a new kind of trouble.
“We started seeing these crankheads around a few months ago,” he said. “All jacked up like you could never believe. Something wrong with their eyes. I’ve heard say it’s some Halloran-Chyung poison like they tried to pump into our prison lines back in ’58.3 But I’m not so sure. A group of ’em torched a water plant up north trying to bust open the flow for a drink. I heard from crews all the way out near Boston say these high-balls been taking potshots at Canadian freighters and oil frigates off the coast. I even heard tell the drug made its way into the Confederacy, and they ain’t got nothing there but tobacco smoke. Whatever this shit is, it makes dymo look like soda pop and it’s all over the place now.”
Jump. It seemed Rafikov’s supply was getting out, and quick. Even though it was warm enough to bring out skeeters the size of baseballs, I shivered. How many tens of thousands of people were walking around with viral computer code turning their brains into living ThinkChips™? How many people would become remote servers to fire out Rafikov’s commands? Even if we somehow made it out to San Francisco before she’d doped up enough zombies for her army, there was no telling how long it would take to grow the knowledge we needed from Rafikov’s brain cells. Barnaby would die for nothing, and it would be my fault when a legion of cranked-up Russian nationalists started burning their way across the continent.
I needed to talk to President Burnham. But we were so deep in the backlands, there was no chance of getting a message through the portal. Even grifters didn’t run trade out here; it wasn’t worth the price of a blister. My best chance was to hoof it with the demons to civilization—and hope that I wouldn’t be too late.
