by Reed King
I spent twenty-four days a month straight on the waves, working security detail to keep off the fuel thieves that used to come up on their boats in the dead of nighttime and try and pick off some barrel—or worse, the Dakota rigs conspiring with Crunch, United, just to blow us into barbecue. I met a cute little rounder named Suze, and on my days off we kept mostly to ourselves, doing hardly nothing but laying around in bed and doing what have you.
I think I was happy for the first time in my life.
But one day the big boss came to visit the camp and caught scry of me, and told me he’d double up my pay if I agreed to be his bull in a new rodeo they was putting on. I knew all about the rodeo and what they did to guys on the circuit, especially the bulls and broncos had to saddle up and try and throw a man. But since the big boss was one of the richest scrubs in Texas, I couldn’t do nothing but yessir him. Never trust a little guy wearing a suit and smoking a big cigar. It always means they trying to make up for something.
So one day a month I got saddled up and shot up and let loose. Turned out I was real good as a bull, could throw a rider in fifteen seconds or less whether or not he had spurs. I hated it though. Got cut up and beat up and souped up on all the shit they gave me to make me madder, and no matter how much I won and how much the big boss swore he was gonna pay out, something always happened to make him put off the payday. The man was lining his pockets with my blood and sweat and giving me peanuts.
Well, they don’t get to be big bosses wearing fancy suits by paying out, do they?
One Sunday after a real bad one—got dug up good from a rider north of Houston, had to get stitches put in my eye and was sore as a steak paddled with a hammer—I got into a real black mood. Me and some buddies was drinking down at one of the camp bars. Now, most of the time I stay well clear of drink, especially moonshine that flows out of the bellows, but sometimes a man needs to get a little loose and that was one of them days. Somehow I got it into my head that I was gonna take back some of my winnings. Way I figured it, the haul was mostly mine anyway.
Getting into the big man’s office was cake. I knew where he kept his money, since he was always bragging how much he kept in the safe, and I don’t mind saying I had her ready and open faster than you could say please.
I didn’t take the whole stash, not even close. Just a few bills, what I reckoned was more’n fair for all the months I’d been bucking for him. He had some cigars stashed in there, too, and I couldn’t help but snatch a few of those, figuring I’d smoke one to celebrate and maybe give one to Miss Suze too.
It was the cigars that did me in, see. Wasn’t two hours after I’d smoked one I was laid out in the camp infirmary, puking my guts out, and my tongue black as Monday. This is where you got to cred the big man for being smart. Turns out he had those cigars in there for a reason, and it wasn’t to keep the tobacco all nice and chewy. He’d laced them up good so if they ever got stole he’d know right away who did it.
The big boss had me brung into central and my record came up soon as they tagged my prints. It turns out the old greenie, the one we subbed in on account of Goose getting sick, was so shitpantsed he ran straight to the first Texas soldier and gave himself up, said as how it was all my idea and I was the one who fired.
So I went into booking and they did tests to say I was a bad apple, through and through. There’s no point growing a bad apple, it’ll never give anything but rot. That’s why they started doing the Straw work in the first place, because there’s no point in feeding and clothing and keeping a man locked up who’ll always be the same kind of man when instead with a cut and tuck you can change him. That’s what they told me anyhow.
At least they didn’t send me off to the sporting camps. I know some of those guys make it years living out there in the woods but I wouldn’t want to live like that, waiting, looking over my shoulder, and in the end a hunting party tracking me down and nailing me to be stuffed and pickled and hung on a wall somewhere.
In a way, you could say I got off easy. Since I got the cut, I been making my living as a grifter, working routes all the way from Crunch, United, to the Dust Bowl. I like to think I know a fair trade when I see one. And I can’t say a few brain cells for freedom ain’t a good and fair deal.
14
The Missionary soldiers of the New Kingdom of Utah may look like a bunch of day-old chicken tenders, but don’t let the clean of their shirts fool you. I swear, I once saw a fourteen-year-old girl gut a full-grown gangbanger without getting so much as a drip of blood on her Bible. She even left a condolence card tucked into his body cavity. I thought that was a nice touch.
—from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA
The storm brought down half the outpost overnight: buildings smashed, roofs punched in, trees uprooted. The locals had been sorting the wreckage since sunup, pocketing anything that wasn’t claimed, hammering signs back into place, hauling branches, and making a little money out of it too.
Overflowing cisterns sheeted the main thoroughfare with six inches of dirty water, carrying off a film of people’s trash, old wire-plugged phones that hadn’t worked in a half century, empty vape canisters and crumpled packets of fresh bubble gum, condoms used and unused. Wires sparked in the street. The whole town stank of shit, and I spotted more than one toilet tank swirling past us on the eddies. One woman set up camp to grift waterlogged studs coming to her on the filth. Another was fishing out soggy Singles™ for resale. Barnaby was thrilled with the brand-new buffet of trash, and netted half a dozen socks and a few plastic bags for breakfast.
“One man’s trash is another mammal’s amuse-bouche,” he said, and let out a burp that smelled like mothballs.
But the squall brought down more than just the rooftops. A heap of black-winged drones were dipping their smashed tails in the floodwaters just outside the storm shelter, good for nothing but copper now. Searching through the tangle of wire and steel, I found Soviet lettering: it hadn’t taken long for Rafikov to find replacements for the drones Thrasher had shot down above the bullet drain.
I had to get to Granby, and fast.
Zeb and Bee went door-to-door to look for the dead, and came back midmorning with a tally of twelve rotguts. They would have to spring for an ice van, since the closest pickup would lose them precious money in early bloat. The old wagon was gone—either stolen or, more likely, picked up by the wind and simply tossed into kindling.
We all sloshed down Main Street together to the rotting husk of a high school that housed an open-air market of pharma booths and flavor peddlers, used T-shirts still sporting pit stains, and first-generation visors. A unionist1 with an ancient American flag tourniqueting his hair sold rigs from out of the gym. A blackened basketball net still clung to one wall like a sad bit of pubic hair. The place was huge, dim, and packed with wheels: horse buggies and bicycles, grocery carts and wheelbarrows, golf carts rigged with outboard motors and ancient mopeds pitted with rust, primitive deliverables bots and even a salvage horse, its copper-wire hair gleaming, and a sign cautioning feed of Purified Veggie Scrap Oil only.2 There were wheels from the early twenty-first century, beautiful to look at but as dumb as bricks; towers of scrap, old engine parts, coolants and lubricants, wheels and wheel spokes, jumper cables, extra batteries, and even drums of gasoline.
I wandered through the maze of wheels for sale, trying to shake off my glum. Jump had flowed into Low Hill already. How many other places had it spread too? What would happen when Rafikov decided on war?
“You’re upset,” Sammy said. I hadn’t heard her come up behind me. “I can tell because of your hands. You’re squeezing them.”
I forced a smile. “Good job.”
“Thanks.” She rearranged her interface into a smile. That was a new one. Being on the road had kicked her learning into high gear. “I’ve heard that the new generation has a much easier time with facial expressions and body postures, since their coding is so much more sophisticated. There are still so many things I don’t under
stand.”
“Like what?” I said.
“Like upset,” she said. “You can upset a sports team, a kitchen pot, or a stomach. There are so many different definitions. Disordered, deranged, nervous, irritable. So which is it, Truckee Wallace?”
“All of the above,” I said. “Well. Except for deranged. I’m not deranged. Not yet, anyway.”
She shook her head. “Sometimes I think I’ll never really understand humans.”
“Lucky you,” I said.
On the far side of the showroom, where sliding doors let in thick slabs of butterspray-colored sunshine from the outside, I squatted down to admire the gleaming rims of a fifty-year-old John Deere tractor with nothing left to plow. Each rim was six times the size of Tiny Tim’s head and just as shiny. The exhaust pipe looked like a middle finger, the wheels spank-new rubber, and the hood colored a green-and-yellow stripe that reminded me of the carnivorous bees supposedly making mince of the plantations3 of the Confederacy.
“She’s a beauty, isn’t she?”
I whipped around at the startle of a soft voice behind me. Standing in a patch of sun was the whitest guy I’d ever seen: white-blond hair and brows and lashes, white shirt without a smudge of dirt on it, even white socks. White matching socks. I hadn’t seen matching socks in a decade.
“Yeah,” I said, ignoring the brain-scratch saying I knew the guy from somewhere. “And for fifty-five thousand Crunchbucks, a real bargain. Can you imagine having that kind of bling?”
The boy came closer. His shoes, shined to a mirror polish, ended up right next to where I was squatting.
“The only currency that matters is God’s favor,” he said.
And just like that the idea scratching my brain opened its palm: the kid was Friendly Militia.
Right away my tongue turned to iron in my mouth. Dozens of foot soldiers were filing in through the sliding doors now, all of them sleek in spotless white shirts and clean socks. I had no idea how you could even get a clean like that. Even President Burnham couldn’t completely shake the grime of air pollution and the gray that clung to every crease and fold.
But the New Kingdom of Utah wasn’t hurting for cash—that was obvious from their artillery. Each and every one of their missionaries was holstered with top-of-the-line heat, belts of ammunition, spanking-new handguns, rifles.
Not a single one of them missed saying excuse me either. A few of them gave me a nod and a smile, and one girl even complimented my visor. They really were the sweetest army in the world.
It was like everyone always said: Couldn’t be a better way to die.
Twenty, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five … I counted forty-two missionaries by the time the last one made it inside and rolled the doors shut with a click that sounded just like the cock of a gun. With the wedge of sunlight gone, the light in the gym turned the murky green of infected urine.
Trapped.
I could barely think through the throb of terror in my head.
The owner of the shop cleared his throat. “You’re not welcome here.”
“I don’t mean to contradict you. But God’s soldiers are welcome everywhere,” said the elder I pinned at maybe twenty. “The whole world belongs to Him.”
“My fist belongs up your shithole,” Bee spat out. “How dare you mention that filth here, in front of His Unholiness and His most faithful servants?”
Barnaby froze. He was nearly white enough to pass for a foot soldier. One by one, every last missionary pivoted in his direction.
“Well, now,” he said. “No need for all that Unholiness stuff.…”
A sharp gasp went through the Militia when Barnaby spoke. It was like a giant had knocked the air out of all of them at once. For about the thousandth time I wished I had any kind of weapon, even a goddamn fork.
The baby-faced elder recovered quick. “We seem to be in the right place. As the Book says, And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues.”
Fats clapped his hands over his ears. Bee hissed air from between her two best teeth.
“Don’t spit your lies to us, boy,” Zeb said. He hadn’t gone for his guns, yet, but he’d unzipped his jacket so his belt and all his ropes of ammo were visible. “Scroll back to your so-called kingdom, and take your tots with you, before I send you down in holy hellfire.”
The elder didn’t react. He was still squinting at Barnaby, like he was trying to figure out how fast he would burn in the afterlife. “There are rumors of a scourge in the water basin. The river plants have slowed to a trickle. A throng of black-eyed monsters who fly on dark wings of evil to do hell’s work. A scourge of the Godless, and harbingers of death—”
“Death don’t need no harbinger, dick slice.” Zeb spoke with a hatred that twisted his face into something uglier than it was already. “Death does just fine on its own.”
“So it does.” The elder smiled. He legitimately smiled, like he was glad he and Zeb had found something to agree on. “But the devil needs earthly servants. Will you deny you serve him?”
“We serve Him, fluff Him, rub and tug Him, if He wills it. But we never been north of cartel territory,” he added, before the elder could cut in. “We don’t know squirrel about your black-eyed scourges, or your flow. Why don’t you drink your Bibles, if they got everything you need?”
“Water is a gift from the heavens,” the elder said calmly, and the demons did some more moaning. “It flows to us as it flowed to Abraham and his flock in the desert.”
“It flows to you through a trade agreement with the ganglands,4 you twat,” Zeb spat out.
The elder didn’t blink. “God works through trinities and trade agreements alike.”
“Look, kid. You want a squall, you got one. But let’s be crystal about one thing. We don’t give a sperm whether you choke to death in the desert. We don’t have no hand in your wars, and we don’t have no hand in your monsters, and we don’t have no hand anywhere except to haul corpses before they rot. Comprende? So stick a tampon in it, because you’re grinding on my last good nerve.”
“Please, fellas.” The unionist was either sweating through his balls or leaking piss. “I’m begging you. Can’t you please take it outside? I don’t want any mess.…”
The elder looked mortified. “Oh, no. No. We don’t want any mess either,” he said. The other missionaries quickly passed around a yes, no, never, of course not. “It’s just that—how should I explain this? It’s always so awkward the first time … we’re on orders from God to bring all of His creatures to the light, to welcome them into His loving arms, and to share His bounty with all living things.” And in a half click, he whipped his AK-47 from his backstrap. “Or else to send their worthless souls into the fiery pits of hell.”
The other missionaries moved in sync: it was like a river of artillery poured into their hands simultaneously. As they all cocked up, a great metallic chck-chck vibrated the room and shook me full of panic that landed right inside my bladder.
“Now you’re talking our tongue.” Zeb flipped two pistols into one hand, and leveled a shotgun at the elder with the other. He twitched his head in Barnaby’s direction. “Tell him, Your Darkness. Tell him all about the fiery hell they’re so piss-scared of.”
There was a long stretch of silence. Zeb cleared his throat. Finally, Barnaby inched his head into view above the wagon.
“Sorry. Were you talking to me?” He peeled back his gums to show teeth caulked with plywood and beetle parts. “I’m not sure I can speak to such weighty philosophical matters.… I am, after all, just a member of the lowly Capra hircus.…”
“Lowly?” Bee could bleat nearly as well as he could. “You are the great Lucifer, Prince of Darkness, Who Rides on the Sulfurous Winds of Hell and Brings Suffering and Misery Before Him!”
Barnaby began to sway on his hooves. “Listen, the Suffering and Misery were actually here already,” he said. “I can’t take credit … it—it was more of a branding thi
ng.…”
The elder swung around to sight him and Barnaby trailed off with a squeak.
“Your tongue betrays you even now, you abominable misery.” The elder made it sound like a compliment. I wanted to scream, to shout at them to stand down, to tell them the truth: that our only hope for stopping the black-eyed scourge was lodged in Barnaby’s gray matter.
But my tongue was gummed to my teeth, and I knew I could never make them listen.
The elder went on: “After I cut your bowels from your belly and your horns from your head, I will carve all the meat from your bones so that not even the insects will have use for you. I hope”—he jogged his AK a little higher—“it doesn’t hurt.”
“This is all a mistake! A mistake!” Barnaby was lock-kneed, screaming like a siren. “I’m a goat! Just a goat! A myotonic fainting goat, at that. Look at me! I’ll be flat on my back in thirty seconds! I’ll be spitting up metal! I’ve got a nervous stomach! I’m a coward!”
The elder froze. Everyone froze. It was so quiet I could hear the rustle of Thrasher rubbing his crotch on one of the two-wheelers. Nervous habit.
Finally, I gummed up enough spit to unstick my voice. “He’s telling the truth,” I croaked out. “He’s not important. Let him go.”
“Shut your fucking grille, greenie, or I’ll stuff it full of bullet shells.” Zeb’s voice was like the hush of quiet just before a tornado comes and punches off the roof. And then, to Barnaby: “Explain yourself.”
Barnaby worked his mouth for at least ten seconds before so much as a squeak came out of it.
“I’m a nobody,” he said at last. “I’m a nothing. Just an average, everyday goat with an encyclopedic knowledge of the works of Baudelaire—an experiment!”
“You lie,” Oreo said. But they looked uncertain.
“You are the Prince of Lies.” Nikhil was even greener than she usually was.
