FKA USA

by Reed King

  “I’ll go slow,” I said, as if there were another option. I patted his big head, slick with sweat. “I’ll find somewhere for us to sleep.”

  “Take this.” He tried to pass me the last food we had, the third Singles™ meal, and deep in the heat-broiled soup of my mind I knew what he was doing. I almost took it too.

  Almost.

  But the truth is I was so thirsty I couldn’t even swallow.

  “You be quick,” I said, and he nodded again.

  I left him kneeling on the road. I put my whole back into wheeling Sammy, though she couldn’t have weighed forty pounds. I didn’t even have the energy to turn around when I heard a thud, like a palm smacked to the ground, and knew Tiny Tim had fallen.

  * * *

  I don’t remember when the sun came up, only a red world, like the color behind your eyelids when you squeeze them too tight. Only a blood world, turned inside out with the guts of it exposed.

  I don’t remember, either, where I left Sammy. Only that one moment I was pushing her and then I wasn’t, and thinking she had wandered off, and starting out across the desert thinking I was calling for her though I couldn’t hear anything but the pressure of all that heat, like the jaws of something wheeling closed. There was water on the horizon, a big lake of it: I went toward it but found it kept trotting away, found that every time I reached for shade it evaporated, and by the time I realized I’d left the road I could no longer see it behind me and didn’t know which direction I’d walked. And still the lake, that giant lake of shaded trees and spring-fed water, was too far away to reach. I was eating dust. A spider scuttled past my eyes before I scanned I was on the ground.

  The earth trembled. I heard wheels and motion, saw dust tracking into the sky as though kicked up by a giant monster. Voices called to me. Evaline bent over me, and then my mother, soothing me to sleep.

  INTERLUDE

  A SHORT EULOGY

  Three days after ground crew scraped my mom’s body off the concrete, poured her into a corrugated cardboard coffin, and shoved her into Plot 2882, I got a summons from HR.

  It was brittle cold, with ash blowing in from wildfires raging so hard in BCE Tech it almost looked like snow. Tears froze my lashes together and scalded my eyeballs, turning solid before they could fall.

  In the sprawl of beige-carpeted block-cells that counted for Corporate Regulation, I met with the typical HR rat: mid-thirties, with the pale flabby look of a vitamin-enriched loaf of Crunch bread. According to her name tag, she was Melissa! Not Melissa. Melissa!

  When Melissa! stood up to offer her condolences, I could see the gun holster riding high on her waist, revealing a roll of stomach flab. That really got me: the fact that her organs beneath that stomach were still working, and my mom’s weren’t.

  “Truckee Wallace,” she said. HR idiots always made a point to use our full names, as if the fact they didn’t just refer to us by ID number was a big gift. It was one of their weird tricks. “I’m so sorry about what happened to your mother.”

  “Thank you,” I said. The HR department gave me the creeps: the thin chill of the air, the medicinal smell, carpeting that suctioned up sound and windows that looked out onto a belching waste incinerator and thousands of rows of dead crumbs, and beyond that, to the river Technicolor with chemical slick.

  “Go on, sit down,” she said. Another HR trick. The chair drawn up to her desk looked as if it had been stolen from one of the nursery schools. Sitting in it would place me eye to eye with a framed certificate commemorating Melissa! on ten years of service to the corporation, and a small standard-issue Glock, sleek and snub-nosed.

  I sat anyway. Melissa! gave me back my mom’s visor, which was pointless, both because it had been wiped already and because I still had only thirty days to return it to Technical Support before I got docked. But the SmartBand, she said, was mine to keep. The inside was all brown from my mom’s sweat, and if I put it to my nose and inhaled, I could smell her: vape and fresh and cream to combat dayglo.

  “We’ve been reviewing your file,” she said. There was no “I” in Human Resources. Only a “we.” Like they were a single consciousness hacked up into different physical bodies. “You’ve shown no tardies, only one HealthPass day in the last year—you must be eating your VitaCrunch™ in the morning.”

  I didn’t eat VitaCrunch™. Nobody in Crunchtown ate VitaCrunch™, because VitaCrunch™ was pumped full of so much nicotine it would stop your heart if you weren’t careful. But I didn’t say so.

  “Recently, we’ve had a sudden job opening in the Freight and Shipping department,” Melissa! went on. “Associate pattern regulation, just a notch below management level.”

  I stared at her. “You’re talking about my mom’s job?”

  She blinked. “It’s a huge salary increase,” she said. “Nearly double.”

  “My mom died three days ago,” I said. “She was killed by a package of falling Tater Tots.”

  Actually, crushed beneath a two-ton shipment container of Crunch RealCheez Tater Totz™ that slipped its freight. A freak accident, a faulty restraint, a midcentury safety system that blinked out at just the wrong time.

  My mother, my only parent, with skin like river mud and a laugh like an explosion, knocked straight into the hereafter by vegetable derivative.

  She didn’t even like Tater Tots.

  “Really?” Melissa! leaned back in her chair. “I’d heard it was CrunchVeggie Chipz™.”

  She didn’t say it to be mean, I don’t think.

  “I’ll keep my old job,” I said. “Thanks.”

  On the way back to my shoebox, I noticed thousands of crumbs massing on the rooftops to star-hunt, so many it looked like all the buildings were sprouting mold. But I didn’t care anymore about the Shit Shovel or the Tampon—I didn’t care if North Korea and Texas blew a hole through the whole sky, like they were always swagging they would. It made me angry that the stars were still around, lumps of interstellar flatulence, and my mom was a pile of ash, that her teeth were ash, and her toenails and eyelashes and fingers, that her laugh was ash and her jokes were ash and those cold fires in the sky that had never loved anybody got to keep shining and she didn’t.

  Billy Lou was waiting for me at home. He was smoking shiver—a roll of it flared between his fingertips—and normally I would of yelled at him, but just then I didn’t care. I sat next to him without turning the lights on and for a while we said nothing. The only sound was a low hiss when he inhaled. When I was in my right head, I couldn’t stand the reek of shiver. But I thought it smelled good, sweet and sharp and terrible, like what came up from the incinerators when bodies were getting burned.

  At some point, I reached for the spliff, but he held it out of reach. “No way, kid,” he said. The only time he ever called me anything but Mr. Truckee.

  “Why?” I said. All of a sudden, I was furious. “Why does it matter?”

  He stubbed out the spliff on the edge of the table and pocketed the remainder. “It’s cheating,” he said. “You want to snuff quicker, that’s your business. But I’m not going to give you a boost.”

  Somehow that did me in. It was easier to blubber with the lights off. I cried the kind of crying that’s like swimming in your own snot. I cried like the dimeheads cried when they were coming down. Not because the high was wearing off but because it was never high enough to keep morning from coming.

  Finally I ran through the grief. It passed off like a fever, and I sat there cold and stone-tired, feeling just like a wind blowing through an empty hallway.

  “She loved you more than anything,” Billy Lou said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “She knew you were meant for great things,” he said, and we sat there in silence again. I was sorry both because I knew she believed it and I knew it wasn’t true.

  Outside, the darkness shifted textures. Voices lifted to holler up at the stars. Turd and Dingle, they cried. And look—the Whore’s Bath.

  “You think she’s up ther
e somewhere, looking down at us?” I blurted out. It was an idea I’d heard somewhere when I was a kid: that everyone who died lived bliss-high as a spirit, that all of our loved ones tailed us, spiritual toilet paper stuck to our shoes.

  “No,” Billy Lou said. I turned to look at him and in the trickle of light coming through the window, his face was all pits and craters and crags, moonlike. “I think wherever she is, her view’s a whole lot prettier than this dump truck.”

  We never talked about my mom again. A week later, he was fired for stealing dymo from the company store. By the time HR swarmed his shoebox to arrest him, he was poof and gone.

  But I remembered what he said, and it made me feel better. Sometimes before I went to sleep I liked to imagine her riding the back of a rocket ship made of stars, looking not down but up, up, and up, and up, into a fireworks explosion of past and present and future, all of it burning to make something out of the dark.

  Part IV

  WALDEN → LAS VEGAS, LIBERTINE

  30

  They say if you can make it in New New York, you can make it anywhere. But that’s only if you’re lucky enough to make it out of there first.

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

  In my dream I was back at 1 Central Plaza, in President Burnham’s office, relaxing in the cool tongue-lick of the air-conditioning. It was very dark. Soon I figured why: President Burnham had plunged his office down inside the Underground.

  You can never be too careful, he said. On his desk an enormous glass jar filled with murky liquid let out a queasy green light. Suspended inside of it were two small globes that trailed long, pink tentacles. Even in my dream I knew the jar was real, that I’d actually seen it. I edged a little closer.…

  Sorry about that. We had to take out your eyes. Shrapnel.

  Then I was blind and on a gurney while a health manager rooted through my stomach. Where is it? A smiley face floated in the darkness behind my eyelids. Where did the rest of it go?

  Use the drones, if you can’t find it, Burnham said. I could see again, barely. Tiny metal drones condensed the air into a flash of metal. When they poured down into the cavity of my open stomach I screamed. Then they were sliding down my throat as well, all that cold metal, pouring into my lungs and freezing them—

  I woke up cold and shouting.

  “Shhh. Drink. It’s good for you.”

  There was water in my throat and mouth, water soaking my pillow, water thick on my tongue. The stranger by my side was a silhouette in the darkness. Through an open door, I saw a moon bloated with its own light, floating tipsy-like among the stars.

  “It’s all right.”

  The stranger—a woman—pulled away. I began to cough, and then I began to cry.

  “Shhh. You’re safe now. It’s all right.”

  Where am I? I wanted to say. But already the dream took hold of me again, and pulled me down inside it.

  * * *

  When I woke again, it was very bright, and the same stranger was touching my face. She had a long gray braid and a face full of pits and crevices that reminded me of my mom’s. But there wasn’t a hint of dayglo on her.

  “Finally, you’re awake.” When she smiled, all the creases in her face folded together, like they were joining for the effort. “I was just putting some aloe on your burns. You got toasty. You want some water?”

  Whatever she poured wasn’t water. It was music in liquid form.

  “How long was I out?” I asked. My throat felt like a trash bag filled with barbed wire.

  “Two days. You’re lucky we found you,” she went on. “You were a few minutes from turning into a giant blister.”

  Suddenly memories tumbled me down into a panic. I remembered the mirage of water beyond my reach; Tiny Tim on his knees; leaving Barnaby and Sammy, poor Sammy, behind.

  I tried to sit up. “I was traveling with friends. There were three others. We have to help them.”

  “It’s all right.” She pressed me back against the pillows. “We picked them up. Your friend Barnaby is doing just fine, now we plumped him full of fluid. He’s been telling the young ones all about his book. And Tim, bless him, asked to trade us matchbooks for a meal.” She laughed again. “As if we’d ask for payment from a friend in need.”

  “What about the android?” I said. “Is she okay? Has she woken up?”

  The woman hesitated. “We’re working on it,” she said, and just like that my relief evaporated. “Don’t give up just yet,” she added softly. “We’re keeping her in a cool, dark place, and looking at the damage piece by piece.”

  I knew she was trying to help, but the idea of Sammy hacked up into component circuit boards made me feel even worse. It was all my fault. I’d crashed the hover. I’d forgotten to check for gas. I’d hurt Sammy’s feelings.

  And I’d never even had the chance to apologize.

  The woman leaned forward to place a hand on my sleeve. She was as ugly as a backland witch but she smelled like an uppercrust, very clean. “Believe me. I’ve seen Engineered People make miraculous recoveries. Your friend might be stronger than you think. And we have experts here.…”

  She trailed off as the front door opened with a groan. I had a quick view of green—not neon green or yellow green or lime green, but green like the park simulation inside the Yellow Brick Road—before three kids scooted inside. When they spotted me, all three dropped their jaws at once.

  “Well? Go on. Take what you need and flam.” The woman shooed them off behind a floral sheet, strung up like a curtain next to the bed. I heard mysterious banging noises, drawers opening and shutting. When they reappeared, they were decked in strange metal armor that looked like early-century cookery.

  Once again, as she rounded them out the door, I got a good eyeball of vivid green growth, far too irregular to be rectangles of TrueGrass™. The woman must be a real uppercrust. Who could afford so much flow?

  “Where am I?” I asked her. I figured we might of landed in a resort on the outskirts of Las Vegas, blazing “rustic last-century” experience to the tune of five thousand chips a night.

  “Oh, we’ve had different names over the years. But Walden seems to be sticking. Thoreau was a big inspiration.”

  Whoever Thoreau was, he was a shit decorator. The house was smaller than a Low Hill shoebox and crowded, with a bunch of rough-hewn patchstack so ugly it could of been stripped from real trees—though no one would be idiot enough to waste trees on making furniture. Plus, something was missing. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it left me squirmy, like wiggling a full-body loose tooth.

  “Nice place,” I lied. “How far are we from the Strip?”

  “The Strip in Las Vegas?” She laughed. “I’d say you’re still a good twelve hours’ drive from the border of Libertine, what with the roads being all cracked up.”

  My heart sank. God forbid I was in one of the Old Colorado cartel towns that served as lookout points in case banditos or military law came around. “Twelve hours’ drive? But that means we’re—”

  “Still in Arizona,” she finished, before I could say, in cartel territory.

  I stared at her. For a second, I thought she’d lost her straw. “Arizona,” I repeated, and she nodded. “You’re telling me this is Arizona?”

  She laughed again. “Well, a very small part of it, yes.”

  “That’s impossible,” I said. “Arizona doesn’t even exist anymore.” Five million had fled the droughts. Another million and a half had died. Arizona had died.

  “Arizona may not exist. But Walden does,” she said simply, shucking a bit of gray hair behind her ear. “We’re sovereign. We don’t belong to anybody but ourselves.”

  Only then did I register she had no visor. Her eyes were too focused for a retinal implant. And suddenly I scanned what was missing from the squat: there were no wires or cables, no outlets or batteries, boost boxes or speakers or cloud drives or holoscreens.

  I fought a hard wave of panic: we were completely
off the grid.

  The stranger’s eyes were the exact color of a smile. “Welcome to heaven, my friend.”

  31

  There’s plenty of good dross still left for the picking in the old ghost towns, long as you know how to look. Sure, the place’ll be stripped of the obvious stuff—electricals, clothing, food. But remember that after dissolution plenty of people holed up for the siege, and did what all pack rats do: hide shit. I’ve found cellar hidey-holes and money stuffed in chimney flues and more gold than I can count packed in the crumbling caulk of old turd piles in a thousand sewage tanks and outhouses.

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

  Heaven, it turned out, was forty-five miles south of the McDonald’s-Hyatt Canyon™ and the bare piss stream of the Colorado River that still tickled its bottom, and boasted roughly two thousand full-time residents. They’d escaped from the temp camps, and canoed up from the swamp of drowned land near old New Orleans, where no one lived but the alligator men.1 There were cheery, round-faced drook from the Russian Federation and scrawny, bleary-eyed kids, pale as glowworms, still quivering from their trauma in the San Francisco Start-Ups.2

  There were even a handful of refugees from across the ocean, where life was just as bad or even worse. Spain, where kids got pawned off to ant for wealthier neighbors by desperate parents, had shipped over three families. Old countries blasted in half by bombing decades ago had shipped a few dozen more. Somehow, despite the flesh pirates and the ocean pickers and the Russian subs turning half the Atlantic to a war zone, they’d found their way here, to the middle of the old USA, to start over.

  The woman who’d brought me back from the cusp of dying had come from Sinopec-TeMaRex Affiliated. Her name was Susan, and she’d been born on the plains of what was then called Illinois, where for generations her family had been farmers. Her grandparents had made a fortune on the first round of fast-cycling crops, and lost it all once the corn grew so aggressive it stripped off all the soil and started gobbling up houses. The tornado cycles took care of the rest. She’d seen her own father smothered to death by aggressive alfalfa plants, and was fleeing south when she’d caught wind of a so-called utopia springing up in the bones of the Dust Bowl.