FKA USA

by Reed King

  MESSAGE ME, SEND ME SOME GODDAMN SMOKE SIGNALS, DO SOMETHING.

  The last message, sent twenty-four hours ago, was so high decibel I had to scrub my ear out with a pinkie. I closed out quick, before it could replay, and right away another urgent message started flashing for attention.

  Annalee.

  I swiped open her holo, half-dreading it: I’d never had anything, seen anything, or done anything, that Annalee and Jared hadn’t had, seen, or done, too, and all the distance between us felt suddenly like one long sinkhole.

  “Hey, Truckee. Please, please, send a message, okay? We’re all so worried. Jared might sneeze out his brain mass.” Even though the visuals weren’t perfect, she was as beautiful as ever. I could tell she was tearing up, and I wanted to reach out and touch her. She leaned a little closer, so the holo blew her chin off the frame. “Things have been crazy since the attack.…”

  “What attack?” I said out loud, and then felt like an idiot. I’d been off my visor for so many days I’d forgotten how the holos did that, tricked you into conversation with old graphics. She was already halfway through her next sentence.

  “… emergency protocol in place. Human Resources patrols twenty-four seven, and makes arrests for no reason. There’s a curfew at eight p.m. and everyone’s scared. So please, please…” She was speaking so softly I could skant make her out, and had to turn on transcription to see the words printed.

  Please let us know you’re okay.

  No matter what.

  I’ll understand.

  You can trust me.

  Quickly, I shut down Annalee’s holo and swiped back to the company alerts: New security protocols, blasts from Human Resources department urging workers to stay calm, progress reports about the ongoing investigation into the foreign intervention in Crunch 407.

  I toggled to the most reliable news feeds I could think of. Less than twenty-four hours after President Burnham had sent me packing, and only a few hours after the bullet train blew off its tracks, the Crunch 407 firewall was knocked out by a backdoor hacker and the whole security system—from spy-eye cams to patrol bots to the HR team’s visors—came down with it.

  And then: chaos.

  As Low Hill turned into one giant riot, hundreds of bigwigs, including President Burnham, were evacuated via helicopter. Some feeds were saying a swarm of desperate backlanders from up near the Exxon-Mississippi River Channel had crashed the border. Some blamed a coordinated task force of foreign terrorists, and the Department of Publicity was saying there was no attack at all, just a widespread panic that swelled to a riot after the blackout.

  That was obviously spam. President Burnham had booted all foreign diplomats out of the Federal Corporation, all from deep within a hidden and securitized bunker that was rumored to exist under New Haven. The Crunch, United, board would meet to vote on sanctions in a few days. All the rioters—hundreds of locals, hauled in screaming for blood to Retirement, the chilly subterranean prison beneath the HR complex—had been fired from the corporation, and half the feeds I read thought that they’d be shipped up to the Dakotas for tunnel work. The other half thought they’d go straight to the Texas hunting preserves, in exchange for the release of a few Crunch, United, spies still dodging Texas gunslingers in the vast prison scrublands near Lubbock.2

  I blew up the photos, stunned by the litter of debris, abandoned gas suckers, ruined holo stations, and toppled bots still sparking in the streets. The offices at 1 Central Plaza had been torn apart: walls split to the studs, desks overturned, chairs gutted of their stuffing. In one 2-D, a dozen crumbs were setting torch to a trash heap piled in front of the glittering white chemical haze that remained of Production-22. I blew up the image some more, and my blood turned to northern freeze.

  Their eyes were full of leaking black.

  When a vidcomm request popped up over a secure line—stinging my eyes with a retinal scan before I’d even accepted—I swiped yes before I’d really registered the company’s corporate logo. For a second, my visor went dark, and I could hear the system purring with effort as it tried to graft together two encrypted chat spaces. Finally, President Burnham’s face wrenched itself in 3-D out of my screen, so suddenly I jerked back as if he really might head-butt me.

  “Truckee Wallace, thank the bank,” he burst out. “I was afraid you were dead out there.”

  “No, sir,” I said. “Not yet.”

  “As soon as we got word about the blow-up on the train, and we lost you on our geo, I started praying for you to pop up on the system.” His funny sunken face kept collapsing into 2-D as he twitched out of the frame. “But I was beginning to lose hope.”

  “I haven’t tripped a wire since just now, sir,” I said, and told him about finding the Devil’s Army, and how they’d mistaken Barnaby for the second coming of Satan. “The goat’s doing just fine,” I added, since he hadn’t asked. “I think he’s enjoying himself, actually.”

  Burnham shook his head. “Damn backwoods people. Superstitions and blood—that’s half the continent for you.”

  I couldn’t disagree with him.

  “So the blow-up … was it—?” I stopped myself from saying Rafikov out loud. Never knew who was listening. Instead, I swiped: Rafikov’s fault?

  “Who else?” His mouth seized into a line, like a horizontal exclamation point. “But enough chatter. You aren’t safe. I don’t know how she figured us so fast, but she has. We need to get you out of there.”

  I swear I could of kissed him. With tongue.

  “I’m sending some of our best agents out to Granby. Can you make it to Granby?”3

  I nodded before remembering the service was too slow to register the motion. “We’re headed that way now” was all I said. Granby was a town nudging up to the border of Texas that paid rent to Blythe Capital. Over the years, Zeb told me, it had swelled to a bustling city, full of grifters and expats, con men and slicks, adventurers and the businesses that catered to them, plus people waiting to get clearance from Immigration to cross.

  “Mind your nuts and fingers until you get there. Don’t bother making contact. We’ll find you. Got it?”

  I managed to say, “Yes, sir.”

  “Good.” Now his whole face collapsed into 2-D, as if flattened by a sinkhole opening behind his nose, which meant he was only seconds from signing off. “You stay safe out there, Truckee Wallace.”

  Then the feed cut out.

  * * *

  Just as soon as I’d showered, shaved, and air washed my studs, the tornado siren started singing. The sky turned a vivid green before puking its guts out in the form of sheets of driving rain and hail the size of acorns.

  Not many hostels were itching to take in ten Devil’s Army demons loaded to the teeth, plus a Straw Man, an aging android, a skinny crumb, and a goat festooned with necklaces of dried cicada husks (Fats, it turned out, had a talent for making jewelry). Luckily, we found a storm shelter, where a few bucks would buy us a roll-up cot and twelve hours of safety.

  We waited in line behind half a dozen local hillbillies. The girl in front of me wore enormous trousers that hitched to her shoulders with suspenders. She was missing several toes to frostbite. But she had cloud-soft hair that reminded me of Kerry, from Production-22, and the same sweet mouth, like a piece of candy tacked to her maw. I had visions of being inside with her, warm and dry. Of sitting cross-legged on the floor, our knees touching, and listening to the storm outside.

  But when I tapped her shoulder to offer her my jacket, she jerked back like I’d hit her.

  “You’re Devil’s Army.” She had to shout over the wind. It was hard to believe a voice so full of hate could come out of that beautiful mouth. “You’re going to hell. You’re all going to hell, and you’re going to burn.”

  I opened my mouth to reply, but just then Bee leaned forward, slinging an arm around my shoulders, and rearranging the warts on her face into a smile.

  “We’re in hell, dearie,” she said sweetly. Across the street the wind took do
wn an awning and cartwheeled it down the sidewalk. “Haven’t you noticed?”

  The girl only glowered at her.

  The storm shelter was down beneath an old shopping mall, and old parking spaces yellowed in rows between the roll-up cots. A generator as big as a freight truck kept a few electrical lights going and compacted waste from the two toilet stalls.

  Even underground, we knew when the storm came. We could feel it, like the pressure of a giant vacuum that sucked all the air from the room and made my ears pop. Then: a roar, a monstrous clangarang of metal shriek and wood blowing down into splinters.

  We got our share of tornadoes in Crunch 407—in the winter months they were so common they hardly ever touched off the emergency system anymore—but there the hover of red dust and the chemical pressure systems drove off the worst of the wind before it ever reached the city. But out here in BCE Tech there was nothing but empty space and earthquake-emptied towns and sinkholes, miles and miles of unobstructed air where the tornado could whirl itself into a monstrous vortex.

  We hunkered down in uneasy silence. The demons glared when the girl and her family clasped hands and began to recite passages from their Bible, but said nothing.

  Outside, something huge came down with a giant crack. The static blacked the lights for a split second and we all jumped, even Zeb. A pigtailed girl began to cry.

  “Don’t you worry your head,” the Straw Man told her. “This shake-and-rattle’s nothing compared to what we got in old Louisiana. It’ll blow right through and leave us clean as a whistle.”

  But she only cried harder.

  The Straw Man just shook his head and went back to chewing his fingernails into perfect rounds. I pegged him for fifty or so, though his smooth face, round as a plate, made him look younger.

  “What’s your name, anyway?” I hadn’t thought to ask him yet, probably because I kept figuring he’d be dead soon.

  He spat out a fingernail. “Timothy No-Father’s what’s on my birth certificate,” he said. “But my folks down in the swamp used to call me Tiny Tim.”

  “How’d you get to grifting way out here, then?” I asked him.

  “I been grifting one way or another since I was smaller than a pissant,” he said. “And there ain’t a lot of employment for a Straw Man.”

  He was right. Everyone knew scarecrows were bad luck. “So what happened?” I asked him. “How’d you get the knife?”

  “You asking the legend of Tiny Tim?” he asked. “You want to know how a man gets stuffed with straw?”

  Zeb was laying out his guns, wiping them clean of dirt and hail one by one. But I could tell he was listening. Everyone was listening. Even the little girl had stopped crying. She was sucking on her thumb instead, staring at us.

  I nodded, and he let out a booming laugh, then patted my shoulder with one massive hand. “Okay, Truckee Wallace. I’ll rap for you.”

  And he did.

  INTERLUDE

  THE LEGEND OF TINY TIM

  I was born sometime in November in the last year of the USA,1 in the state of Louisiana, the youngest of nine and the biggest of all of them. My ma always said when the doctor saw my head coming out he near fainted, and from the start they couldn’t never keep up with how quick I grew, coming up faster than the flu and busting through all my clothing.

  I never known my dad excepting his name was Nathan the Second and he was a switch operator. Later, we heard he got blowed up by cannon fire in Alexandria when the Confederacy invaded.2

  We were poor, dirt poor, and I grew up hungry. There wasn’t never enough to go around, not to Owen and Tanya and Kris and Mariah, Ronald and Ella and Reggie and Nathan the Third. As soon as I learned to walk, I learned to steal. Those were hard days for everybody, and the shelves was mostly empty, but me and the brothers, excepting Nathan Three, used to bust into homes or those little soup kitchens that was popping up everywhere and just gank what we could. I got caught once or twice and my ma paddled me with a belt or a birch switch but she never could stay mad at me for long.

  I was eight years old at the start of the First Storm Noah,3 and after the first week of rains my ma said it couldn’t last, and after the first month, when mold grew in our skivs and even the cockroaches were drowning, my ma said it couldn’t last, and when the Exxon-Mississippi jumped its lip and washed away whole towns in a blink, and every day the roads were clogged with poor folk in their soggy clothing weeping their way north, she said it couldn’t last. After six months you couldn’t tell where the water was coming from anymore: the whole world was water, and everything was rotted, and there wasn’t no food to blow a bubble at save for what came by the grifters coming on canoes and rowboats. My ma used to joke that we did better than anyone during dissolution, ’cause we went from living inland on a gobspit of a town to ocean views right outside our door—and during the wet season, inside our door, too, so we got used to waking up puddled in wet to our shins.

  You know the old line about Louisiana? It didn’t fall. It sank.

  But I’ll tell you, it wasn’t no joke the way the infections came. What bred in those waters made your insides turn to flush, made your shit come out like its own kind of storm. The Black Runs, they called it, and surrounded by water as we were you couldn’t find a drop clean of it. Took off two of my sisters, Mariah and Ella, and Owen, too, if you count how he done shot himself after his wife shat out her life and their baby with it.

  By the time we thought about leaving for the refugee camps in Tennessee, stories had started to run back our way, those temporary camps just as buried in their own shit and overcrowded, no clean water, no jobs, no help, nothing temporary about it.

  They were some hard times. My oldest sister, Tanya, run off and become a Graceland believer.4 I can’t say as I blame her. In those days, they were popping up everywhere. We used to see them walking the watery streets in their dazzle whites and slicked-back hair, groups of them gathered in front of the old markets singing “Hound Dog” to heaven and waiting for Elvis to come back for them.

  When I was ten, rumors started blowing our way that the Confederacy was on the move, taking over territory from Charlotte to Montgomery and looking like our no-name spit of old Louisiana might be next. Instead, the Sovereign Nation of Texas marched up, burning along the coast of Louisiana and laying claim to everything they staked. Those Texas boys took control of our plastics and our freight, and they brought their big ocean rigs and North Korean submarines for patrolling the waters. They put some money into the refugee camps so’s they could build their roads, and started sending through thousands of barrels of oil, all that money going straight through Louisiana on its way to the center belt and leaving us not a drop.

  By then I was fifteen and I’d been making some money here and there doing labor, but the payday didn’t buy much of nothing because all we collected was old coin from dead places. Every time you wanted something you had to bargain for it, my shirt for your MilkStuffs™, half day of roofing work for a couple handfuls of Dymase™.

  That’s the other thing too. My ma had a bad back from working in plastics all those years afore and she got deep into dymo after it came through our area on the backs of some grifter canoes, and it wasn’t long until I went down the road myself. Me and Reggie and Kris used to cook dymo down to shiver and smoke it with our ma and it was the only time we ever saw her laugh, least until she started crying.

  We made a plan to hit up one of the armored trucks Texas was sending through. We didn’t have a single gun between us excepting Reggie’s friend Goose’s old hunting rifle, but we figured we could split up the first load and make enough to buy some real teeth and then we could get an operation going.

  Well. We weren’t the first trying to make it as roadslicks, and you know we wouldn’t be the last either.

  Our plan was to stop the truck and get the driver out. Then we were going to tie him up and make him open up the hatch. We got a broken-up car and had a whole accident staged, Reggie lying in the road like he’d been hit.
We figured even if the driver didn’t want to stop, those new nav systems were made to shut down when they swept life, and at least that would give us some time to figure out a move.

  Then Goose got sick. It was something dumb, a bad batch of shiver that had him puking up his guts, but we had to sub in a different third. The kid was green, never so much as stole an ice pop, and he got scared and done fired off too soon—punched a nail right in the driver’s forehead before he could open the hatch. Wouldn’t you know the guy was wearing a tag for his vitals. As soon as he went cold, we knew the Texas boys would come faster than flies to a shithouse.

  We had to run. I got lucky hitching out with some skinflints who didn’t like the way the wind was blowing. They were bad, real bad, all of ’em murderers and worse, and they’d been just fine when there was no Texas militia around to string them up by the neck for a family picnic. They were talking Libertine or Alaska,5 and who knows whether they made it. I couldn’t stand the sight of them and left them off in what used to be Kansas and at that time wasn’t anything at all but desperate hillbilly towns fighting each other for scavenged metal.

  One good thing about those days was borders weren’t what they are now and it was easier to travel. None too pretty, though. That was during the Great Die-Off,6 and everywhere you went the smell of corpses made you sick, not just floaters but animals dead in droves, rabbits drowned out of their warrens and fish washed onto places they were never meant to be, dogs and cattle, horses and kittens, a scrum of insects so thick that in places the land turned black with them. And birds dropping right out of the sky, too weak and hungry to keep aloft. An eagle landed right in my lap one day and I’ll be damned if it wasn’t the last eagle in the whole wide world.

  I ended up in the heart of Texas National, working illegal in an oil camp south of San Antonio. Back then it looked like Crunch, United, might send Chinese warships up the gulf, and we slurped oil just to keep a cordon burning on the waves. There was never enough hands, not with so many cruds sickening with the flu, or mowed down by the riot police, so the camp boss never checked my tags and put me right on an offshore rig and paid cash in hand.