FKA USA

by Reed King

  “How much?”

  There was a pause. “One thousand freedom bucks,” he said.

  “One thousand freedom bucks?” I’d never touched that kind of swag in my life. “You must be kidding.”

  “You’re talking all access, pal. That kind of flow-through’s gonna cost you.”

  That was more than triple what I had in the bank. “Can’t you cut me a deal?”

  “Don’t have to,” he replied with a shrug, or at least a ripple. “I’m not the one needs into San Francisco.”

  If he’d been more than a scrap heap of data points, I would of punched him. “I need some time to think about it,” I said.

  “You do all the thinking you want, Einstein. Decide you want in—or out, as the case may be—just ask around Front Street for PJ’s Bar between nine p.m. and midnight. Cash only.”

  I ripped off my visor to see Barnaby, Sammy, and Tiny Tim standing around in the splinters of the busted door, staring at me.

  “What?” Sammy must of read the look on my face, but I was too cranked up to compliment her on her learning. “What’s the matter?”

  I knew squat where to start.

  “President Burnham was pushed into a leave of absence, and the Crunch, United, board is blaming me for the attack on the bullet train,” I said. It was like throwing darts into a sinkhole. “There’s a bounty on my head, and half the continent thinks I’m a terrorist. The Russian Federation is trying to stop us from making it to San Francisco—”

  I broke off as an earthquake of footsteps rumbled the floors, skipped the newly replaced lamp toward the edge of the side table, and percussed the headboard against the walls. For a second, I thought Blythe’s bodymen had swarmed us already.

  But it was just Mama Hazard, moving her ponderous bulk in as close an approximation of a run as she could manage. She stood in the doorway, wheezing heavily, sweating a butterfly pattern between her breasts.

  “It’s security,” she managed to gasp. “Someone musta tipped ’em off.”

  Just then I heard the sound of their coming: the rat-a-tat of shots fired in the air to clear the streets, the shouting, and the drum of boots. One shotgun blast, two semiautomatic snapbacks, and a quick burst of machine-gun fire, repeat; each country had their own way of bursting bullets, like my mom always said.

  “You boys gotta blow before they get here.” She flinched as the rhythm of gunfire moved closer. “I’ll try and hold ’em off downstairs. But don’t count on me. These triggersticks got no friends except what they get paid.”

  She hustled off. Even her rolls of fat were quaking. Already, the Starlite echoed with the catcall of doors slamming and panicked shouts. I didn’t know how many people were canned in its slummy rooms, but I would of banked almost all of them were doing something illegal.

  “The fire escape,” Sammy said. “Quick.”

  The window was painted shut—typical insurance so the shiverheads wouldn’t jump when they came down. I knew our room had a view of the alley just for the trash-and-urine stink, which reached us even through the glass. The sky was just crisping with light around the edges. But it was still too dark to see what was down there, and how bad it would hurt if we dropped four stories.

  We had a minute, two at most. I tried breaking the window with my fist but only cracked two knuckles.

  “A little help, Tim?”

  The stairwell threw up the sound of drumming feet, and the babble of Mama Hazard as she ran through excuses, requests to slow down, to hold on, to wait a goddamn second.

  Meanwhile, Tiny Tim stood there staring at the window like he’d never seen one before.

  “Today, Tim.” My panic had a metal taste, like I was already sucking on a bullet.

  After an infinity, he balled up his fist and swung. A haze of silica exploded onto the fire escape: a rusted, scaly, ugly-looking thing, screwed together with squat more than gum and Southern prayer. Four stories below us, dawn was just washing over a cluttered bum camp full of makeshift tents, old mattresses, and foul and moldering sheets.

  “You sure about this?” Barnaby looked doubtful.

  “You have a better idea?” I fired back.

  When Tiny Tim reached out to test the railing, it came clean away in his hands.

  “Oops,” he said.

  Slowly, the whole rattrap began to lean, and lean, and lean. I nearly threw myself headfirst out the window trying to catch it, as if that would of made a difference, but missed latching on by inches. With a crash and a shudder and a sigh, the whole thing collapsed—banging down into the reeking alley with a ring of steel that made my teeth ache, bringing down tangled ropes of hanging laundry, illegal water lines, sparking portal cables. Half a dozen slummers, nested in their tents and mattresses, dove for cover.

  “Oops,” Tiny Tim said again.

  “We’re going to have to jump.” The fall might very well kill us, but getting rounded up by freelance guns would be even worse. If they shipped us into Texas, I would end up cut like Tim, or turned out onto a hunting preserve, or worse. What would happen to Sammy didn’t even bear thinking about. “Go. Jump. Now.”

  Tiny Tim scratched the scar on his forehead. “I don’t say so, Truckee. Never been much a fan of heights.…”

  “Do it.” I gave him a push. It was a little like trying to fire a sneeze at a Soviet roller tank.

  He just managed to fit through the opening. When he tumbled, I heard no scream or cry of pain. It was a very good or a very bad sign.

  “You’re next, Sammy.”

  Sammy didn’t argue, but I knew from her interface that she had her doubts. She was more likely to break than any of us. I could only hope the tide of trash would cushion her fall.

  I had to physically push Barnaby to the window. He was heavier than he looked.

  “I thought goats were good climbers,” I said. He got his jaw around the windowsill and wouldn’t let go, no matter how much I pushed.

  “Climbers,” he bleated, letting go of the windowsill. “Not fallers. Besides, that’s a completely different species of—”

  I shoved him, sideways and screaming, into the air.

  Not a second too soon either: just then, five bodymen burst into the room, guns drawn, all of them shouting at me.

  “On your knees!” The gun in front was screaming through a plate of metal teeth. “On your knees and put your hands on the ground!”

  I grabbed my rucksack. I was clutching it to my chest when one of them fired, a blast so strong it shuddered my knees and blew me backward. For a second, I was sure I was dead. Then my knees cracked the windowsill and I surfed out into the air on a blast of artillery fire.

  21

  There’s only three things in this world come reliably: death, programmed prostitutes, and grifters selling condom packs two days after you needed ’em.

  —from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA

  For a split second, I was weightless.

  A split second after that, I crashed through a loam of fabric, tenting and bedding, and landed on my back in a pile of festering mattresses. The wind was knocked clean out of me—a good thing, since the reek of shit was everywhere. High above me I picked out the window of Room 403 and the kickback blue of gunfire. High above that: the pale blue of a new sky, strung like bunting between the buildings.

  Then a huge black planet with a ridge of white teeth gobbled the view.

  “You’re alive.” Tiny Tim hauled me to my feet.

  “For now,” I said. Better not to jinx it. I didn’t need any more bad luck.

  Dark silhouettes crowded the open window above us. More shots cracked through the quiet. We skrimmed through the wreckage of tents and cardboard shelters, ducking blasts that missed clipping us by inches. Barnaby was leaping, dodging, twisting his way through the litter of human belongings. And Sammy rolled and bulldozed her way down the alley on her treads, taking down more makeshift shelters, dodging addicts startled out of their sleep by the hail of bullets.

  We skidded
around the corner as a bullet took a chunk out of the brick, then went sprint down streets gutting the last of the club kids and loaders into the morning. Tiny Tim still had his mitt clamped to my wrist, and it felt as if my arm would be ripped out of its socket. We zigzagged through the streets until we’d lost the militia, at least for the time being.

  “What now?” Sammy asked as we ducked under the darkened marquee of a last-century movie theater to catch our breaths.

  “We need to get across the border,” I gasped through a sharp pain in my side. When I placed a hand on my ribs I swore I could feel something solid pulsing under my skin, just below the scar I’d badged at Production-22. “I can get us through on an all-entry. But it’s going to cost us.”

  “How much?” Tiny Tim asked.

  I told him, and he whistled. “One thousand freedom dollars,” he repeated. “I never even seen that kind of scratch.”

  “Do you have any money at all?” I asked him.

  He rooted around in the pockets of his jacket—there were so many, he was forever losing anything he managed to scavenge—and finally came up with a handful of loose change from four different countries, some of it gummed with melted chew and stuck with flakes of bac. “I reck I got a dollar or so,” he said cheerfully.

  “Great. Now we need nine hundred and ninety-nine more where that came from.” I was all out of patience and running high on temper. “Tell me something, Tim. What’s the point in sales if you never sell anything?”

  “Well, now, hold your horsepower. That ain’t fair. I just sold a belt buckle the other day.”

  “You didn’t sell it,” I pointed out. “You traded it.”

  Tiny Tim shrugged. “Sure did. For a sweet pair of tweezers. Plus I cleaned up a few rounds of poker—some big-time general hails from over near Albuquerque bet me I couldn’t beat a two of a kind, ace high. But I was straight flush. Fat pot too. It’s been an age since I’ve seen a dead man’s limb less it was rotted or wheeled by a picker.”

  “He bet you a limb?”

  “Well, a hand. But it’s got fingers and everything. One of his men lost the whole thing to frostbite up near the hinterlands. The general’s been carrying it for luck ever since. Besides,” Tiny Tim went on, “I got my eye on a big load out on the West Coast. A few months ago I caught wind of a big seed bank out in old California from a grifter down near the Kentucky temp camps.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” For years, there had been rumors of a massive seed bank, miraculously preserved, cataloguing everything that had ever sprouted, flowered, or rooted on the planet—and they had just as much truth as the idea that Alaska was now floating somewhere in the middle of the Pacific, buffeted by balmy trade winds, and that all the inhabitants had survived by surfing on the backs of coral salmon. “You must be the worst grifter I’ve ever known.”

  As usual, Tiny Tim didn’t take offense. “Could be,” he said.

  I was suddenly exhausted. I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes. After a minute, I felt Barnaby’s wet muzzle against my palm. When I opened my eyes, he was watching me, pityingly—like he, too, knew it was over.

  “Well,” I said. I gave Barnaby a careful pat. His fur was surprisingly soft. “I guess that’s that.”

  “Now, that’s no way to be squinting at things,” Tiny Tim said. “What you need that visa for anyhow?”

  I stared at him. He was flubbing with me or he was even dumber than the average brain case. “The Sovereign Nation of Texas has one of the hardest borders in the country.” I spoke very slowly, to be sure he followed. “It’s guarded by a bunch of trigger-happy maniacs and booby-trapped with mines.”

  “It sure is,” Tiny Tim said. “Ain’t no squeak of getting past the border without your papers. But it’s Texas you want to cross, not the border fence, you vibe?”

  I wanted to scream. Instead, I closed my eyes and tried to breathe deeply. “You’re talking garble.”

  Tiny Tim plugged a finger in my chest and I opened my eyes again. “I’m talking ’bout going under the border,” he said. “I’m talking ’bout the Underground.”

  * * *

  The Underground, he told me, was a squiggly place, made up of hundreds of branching arteries, some skant bigger than a drainpipe.1 A network of tunnels, subterranean mining shafts, and safe houses, the Underground was kept up by sympathetics to the plight of the average run-of-the-mill teenage delinquent, dymo addict, thief, or bad seed.

  Or grifter.

  There was only one way in from Granby: a slubby watering hole called the Way Station, kitted with red shades that turned the light inside crimson and meant the place was friendly to payday girls.

  “Here’s how I reconned it for what it was,” Tiny Tim said, cranking a thumb toward the hand-painted image of a wheel fading from its sign. “Plus I got to being friendly-like with the owner.”

  No doubt another woman who’d dropped panties for him. Someday I’d have to ask him how he did it. It sure as hell wasn’t his conversation: only two days ago he’d asked Zeb whether people on the other side of the world walked around on their hands or grew feet from their heads.

  The Way Station was a typical slop shop full of plug-ins and slicks juicing their devices, plus a few real-world games, including an ancient pinball machine. The whole place was shimmery and blue with vape smoke. In the dim, the men and women lumped together on barstools looked like rock formations or nuclear mushrooms growing in huge clusters. Behind the bar a woman with one of the funkiest cases of dayglo I’d ever seen was slinging drinks together from a collection of inserts, powders, and mixers. We took a seat at the bar next to a few squids who looked like the bottles were sucking down their faces and not the other way around.

  “You got a leash for that fleabag?” She jerked her chin in Barnaby’s direction.

  Tim nudged a smile in her direction. “We ain’t staying. Just looking for a shot of that fireball whiskey.” I figured it for some kind of code: fireball whiskey was a toxic bathtub brew that came out of the revivalist tents in the Lower Belt,2 and besides, he had no cash to pay.

  The barkeep stared at him for a long second. “Fireball whiskey? You for-sure? That stuff’ll kill you quicker’n a superflu.” When Tim only nodded, she scooted out from beneath the bar, flashing me a quick view of her ass saddled into a pair of too-tight jeans. “Let me see what I got in the back.”

  She was gone a long time. I could barely keep on my stool—whenever the door opened, I expected it to bring a storm of BCE Tech guns for hire. I didn’t like the way some of the regulars were eyeballing Sammy either. Granby was host to plenty of day traders who crossed the border to shill Texas product, and half of them would strip Sammy for parts just for the sheer fun of it.

  “Fresh out,” she said when she returned. “One of my regulars left the last of it swimming in the toilet.”

  Tiny Tim slid off his stool. “Think I might hit the throne myself.” He leaned in to whisper to me, “Count to thirty, then come on and follow me back.”

  Barnaby was nosing around for scraps in the corner by a fresh-vend machine. Tiny Tim took him by the ear and chunked him down the hall toward the bathrooms.

  I counted to twenty, slid off my stool, and told Sammy to roll. By then I was sweating, and not just because of the swelter of vape and bac smoke.

  Then a hand came down on my shoulder. An orange dayglo hand.

  The bartender smelled like yeast and perfume. Not totally unpleasant. She pressed a flashlight into my hands when I leaned close. For a second, her purple lips were close to mine, her breath on my cheek, and I thought about kissing her.

  “Not many people going west down those routes,” she said. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  I almost minded her the old saying about hope—only one “p” away from hole.

  I passed into a narrow, reeking corridor that led past a kitchen swarming with gnats. Sammy, Tim, and Barnaby were gone. A supply closet packed with off-brand hop and stank-looking liquors fired a rat into the
hall when I opened the door. One bathroom was overflowing with wadded toilet paper and a flush of filthy water. The only other bathroom was hung with a sign that read OUT OF ORDER.

  Before I could try the knob, Tiny Tim leaned his head out and waved me inside. The four of us could skant fit: the bathroom was hardly bigger than a shower stall and just as moldy. The toilet seat was missing and a scrum of cigarette stubs swam across the surface of the green water.

  Tiny Tim jimmied the cover off the toilet tank, plunged a hand inside, and rooted around for something. When he pulled, a hidden panel in the wall slid open.

  “Ladies first,” he said to Sammy.

  Service stairs corkscrewed us down into the cellar, a cobwebbed place stacked with old cases of TomatoJuz™ and Lemon-Lime Fizz™, and lots of ammunition. I figured it was bolthole, like a lot of people were building even before dissolution. Back in the days when Halloran-Chyung 3 was growing its nuclear energy program and Texas minutemen were planting bombs and taking potshots across the border at night to sabotage them; it must of seemed like Armageddon was soon to ride in. Maybe it had. It sure seemed that way sometimes.

  A portion of the double-strength cement wall had been demolished to make room for a warped wooden door. This opened into a rudimentary tunnel, knobby dirt walls shored up clumsily with wood planks. A cold, musty wind seemed to spring from its gullet, like somewhere deep in the earth, an ancient god had just loosed a belch.

  Tiny Tim was first inside. Barnaby followed then Sammy. I fingered on the flashlight and edged forward into the dark.

  22

  I first happened on the Underground after busting out of a jailing town in Texas. I’d been lockboxed for smuggling rope and tinder into the hunting preserves to give the felons a little leg up. I was so shit-scared of getting shipped to a preserve myself, I spent a solid three months living down in those tunnels. Wasn’t half bad either. I met a mole named Lana who’d been there her whole life. She was practically blind, and thought I was just about the cutest thing she’d never seen.