The American Zone

by L. Neil Smith

  —Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin.

  Knitch! Knitch! Paweeeeng!

  That last of that pair, bouncing off a rock, had damn near taken my head off. In the position I found myself in, barely holding on to the scrubby-covered damside, there was no way in hell that I could draw either of my—

  BLAMMM! Somehow, Will had gotten off a shot. Knitch! Pwing! Another bullet struck within mere inches of my all-too-prominent backside—why were they picking on me?—and ricocheted off toward Wyoming.

  BLAMMM! BLAMMM! Will’s shots were followed by a haircurling scream that started somewhere near the top of the dam and continued as its source tumbled past us, finally stopping below us with an audible gortsch! Sneakiness had gotten us partway there. Now we had to rely on firepower and darkness. Shots began to rain down on us from both sides of the dam. Abruptly, or so it seemed, the slope pitched over and the ground was almost level. We’d made it! But there was a price: the vegetation up here should have been a lot thicker, but it had just been mowed back. A few dozen yards away was the paved road that traversed the top of the dam. All of a sudden we three had zero concealment and even less cover (the difference being that cover is something that stops bullets).

  Lucy found a rock only a little bigger than she was, huddled down behind it, and opened up on the badguys with her .50 Gabbett-Fairfax, the world’s loudest handgun. Apparently she hadn’t brought her new piece, the nuclear plasma thingie. At 145 years of age, I don’t suppose she could be expected to scramble up a mountainlike object lugging two guns.

  Flonk! So much for the cover of darkness. A dazzling floodlight on the other side of the road suddenly made us all sitting ducks. I leveled my trusty .41 Magnum and shot at the one thing I could see. The floodlight went out with a delightful noise of imploding glass. There was also an agonized shout, apparently from someone standing beside it. I rolled a couple of yards to my left so I wouldn’t be in the last place they’d seen me.

  Then we got a break. The moon had set around lunchtime, twelve hours ago, which was probably why they’d chosen this particular day and time. What they hadn’t counted on was somebody on the other side of the lake, with a great big floodlight of their own—we learned later it was a pizza restaurant—curious about all the sound and fury coming from the dam.

  Suddenly the light was there, perfectly silhouetting three losers who’d come to the edge of the road to try and look for us. As quickly as I could, I fired all five of my remaining .41 Magnums at the middle figure, relying on Lucy and Will to make life impossible for the bookenders. Nobody yelled, but all three figures disappeared. I rolled to the left again. My .41 really lit up the night. I opened the cylinder, hit the ejection rod and heard brass tinkling away down the rocky hillside—a very pretty sound—shucked in six more with a speed loader, and closed the cylinder. Reaching around behind my back, I drew the Browning with my left hand. With a gun in either mitt, I got up and charged with my head lowered, gaining sixty feet, bringing me within yards of the road.

  I flopped again and recoiled—I was lying on something big and warm and wet!

  And quiet—it must have been the guy I just shot.

  Temporarily blinded by my own gunfire, I couldn’t tell much more. There was just enough of that floodlight to see that it was Bennett Williams—one of them, anyway—still clutching a huge .440 Anderson & Arts almost as old-fashioned as Lucy’s Gabbett-Fairfax. I tucked the captured pistol in my waistband—you never know—and crab-skittered a few yards closer to the road, hiding behind a big gimballed trash can.

  “Ssssst!” On my right, I guessed that Will had advanced beside me. I almost whispered back to him but I stopped when I caught an errant whiff of something … what? … cloves? Wherever this guy came from, they smoked clove cigarettes.

  “Ssssst! Where are you?” Now I could see the guy’s blocky form, partially hidden where he squatted behind a three-foot creosoted post marking the edge of a parking shoulder. Both his arms were extended in front of his body, his weapon, whatever it was, searching for something to shoot. It wasn’t a long shot. I took careful aim, squinted my eyes shut in the last fraction of a second—not a generally recommended combat tactic—and stroked the broad, easy, mirror-polished trigger of the Model 58.

  My eyes were open again before the muzzle flash had faded. I even heard the big 240-grain slug slam into the other guy. I frog-leaped toward him—it’s amazing what a person my age can do with enough adrenaline in his bloodstream—and only just in time. A huge racket shook the night, explosions, bangs, and booms of various sizes and timbres. The big steel garbage can disintegrated under the impact of what seemed like a thousand slugs.

  I felt around carefully, wishing I had rubber gloves. Sure enough, the guy by the creosoted post was as dead as Kelsey’s nuts, whoever Kelsey was. One dumbass, one detective.

  That was Will and Lucy’s cue to fire at the source of the shots, then roll off somewhere that the opposition couldn’t predict. I’d shot two so far, both of them Bennetts. Not counting friend Wilhelmsohn—probably up ahead, pretending to shoot at us (note to myself: don’t roll too far out of the line of fire)—that left five of the eight we’d been told about. If Lucy and Will had hit their marks when this started—and they were both better shots than I was—that might leave only three. Suddenly, I heard what I could only describe as an urgent grunt to my right, followed by a BAMMM! I could just make out a low shed in the moonlight. Will was struggling to his knees in its shadow, wrenching something from around his neck. “What?” I whispered as I slithered up beside him.

  Will was disgusted, probably with himself. “Sonofabitch sneaked up and got this around my neck!”

  I examined the object as well as I could and keep most of my attention focused forward. I’ll be damned if it wasn’t an original Rush Limbaugh necktie. I noticed that Will was rubbing the right side of his head.

  “Coal-miner’s tattoo.” He lifted his big matte-silver pistol beside his ear and pointed it backward, demonstrating what he’d done to get out of his predicament. It’d probably be a while before he could hear in that ear again. “Powderburn. Another Bennett. He said if I didn’t do what he wanted, he’d kill me.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, “and?”

  “I believed him.”

  “What’re you two palaverin’ about in the middle of a gunfight?”

  “Yeek!” I screamed as quietly as I could. Lucy had sneaked up on us when neither of us was looking or listening. It gave me a horrible feeling. “Exchanging recipes. Did you kill the guy on the left when the moon came out?”

  “You betcha. It was another one of the Bennetts, armed with this puny thing! It’s an insult t’hafta fight’im at all!” She held out a 92F Beretta nine millimeter, standard U.S. Army issue where I came from, and the choice of those police forces that don’t issue Glocks.

  “The nerve of the cad,” I told her. “Will, is this the third guy from the road?”

  I sensed him shake his head. “I don’t know. For some reason he has a hole in his leg, in addition to the face he’s missing now. So how many does that leave?

  “Two or three,” I guessed, “one of them being Wilhelmsohn. Whaddya wanna do now, Captain?”

  He snorted. “Aside from going home and crawling under the bed? How about we slither on our bellies around this little building and see what we can see?”

  I nodded, although that was kind of stupid in the dark. “Gotcha. I’ll take the left side. Lucy?”

  She didn’t answer. I shuffled over beside her. It was as if she had fallen asleep. Feeling around, I found her pistol, her hand, her arm, her chest—sorry, Lucy—her middle. And a big warm, wet spot. “Lucy!” I whispered as loud as I dared. She still had a strong pulse in her neck. I took my jacket and shirt off, wadded the shirt up, and pressed it to her belly. “Hold this!” I whispered to Will, “Lucy’s been shot!”

  I extracted my’Com from my jacket and hit the button that would get Clarissa. “We’re under cover here. Lucy’s shot and unconsciou
s. I think the only thing to do is finish the fight while you get up here as quick as you can. Look for Lucy behind the toolshed.”

  Clarissa merely nodded and the conversation was over.

  I put my jacket back on, wondering how I’d gotten my shirt off without removing my shoulder holster. With every misgiving, Will and I left Lucy where she was, determined to get this over with quickly. I don’t know why Bennett—the original—hadn’t set his goddamned bomb off already. Somehow, I managed to get around the little building on my belly, Browning reholstered, Magnum held in both hands. At the corner, I heard somebody speak.

  “I wondered what was taking you so long!” Bennett—the original, I was pretty sure—stood by a knee-high concrete barrier at the reservoir edge of the dam, about seventy-five yards away. On the other side, there was probably a hundred-foot drop, straight to the water. The mountains—Pistol Sight on his left—rose from the dam on either side, about a quarter mile away.

  He raised a hand. Fireworks went off, rose, and burst, flooding the road at the top of the dam with light. It was an electric flare—brilliantly burning chemicals held aloft for a few minutes by a short-lived electrostatic device similar to the militia’s flying machine, but about the size of a baseball. Bennett stood by the barrier. At his feet lay a figure I was certain was Wilhelmsohn, tied up, wincing as Bennett ground the muzzle of a big autopistol into the flesh at his hairline.

  “Give up, gentlemen!” Bennett said. “Or I’ll lobotomize your traitorous spy!”

  Yeah, right. It was a long shot in weird light. I lined up the rudimentary sights of my Magnum on his chest, as I was certain Will was doing on my right.

  29: MY BLUE HEAVEN

  Go straight to the heart of the enemy’s greatest strength. Break that and you break him. You can always mop up the flanks and stragglers later, and they may even surrender, saving you a lot of effort.

  —Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin

  Suddenly, the unmistakable roar of an electric flying machine made Bennett whirl to see what was happening behind him.

  Covered with swirling and twinkling lights of a dozen different colors, the thing rose from the lake side of the dam, about twenty yards to his right, exactly like an immense predatory insect that was coming for him.

  Out of shock and relief I was yelling at Will when a bright crimson dot appeared precisely in the middle of Bennett’s forehead, and before that registered entirely on anybody, there was a big boom! and the top of his head disappeared in a scarlet cloud of vaporized blood.

  To our left, the headlights of a hovercraft labored to the top of the switchbacks and the noise of its impellers died as its skirt collapsed. That would be Clarissa. I forgot everything else and ran back to Lucy.

  “IT’S GOOD TO see you again, Buckley.” Lame as hell, I know, but exactly what do you say to a guy who’s just been forced by everything he knows is right to shoot his own little brother in the head?

  “The, uh, gratification is … by all means mutual, Win.” Buckley stood beside me with his shoulders stooped, his head drooping, and that enormous longnosed stainless-steel self-shucker still smoking in his hand, the muzzle hanging down beside his right calf. “Although the particular circumstances leave, er, something … something to be desired.”

  Something, er, to be desired. He could say that again—in Swahili. Lucy was now lying, her liver well and truly perforated, in the back of Clarissa’s medical van, absorbing vein-juice (and whatever else they give you for a hole in that part of you that goes well with fried onions) by the gallon from a big clutch of plastic baggies hanging up over her head. Apparently she would survive.

  She was already making snotty remarks about people who shoot other people with measly nine-millimeter pistols. Meanwhile, the all-but-decapitated remains of Bennett Williams, former cyberspace editor, meatspace terrorist, and would-be Master of the Universe, had already been carted off by the Civil Liberties Association. They’d also interviewed us all and let Buckley know he wasn’t in any trouble. Good riddance, I told myself. We don‘need no stinkin’ Dark Overlords.

  Several of Will’s militia people were clambering around the slope of Pistol Sight Mountain Dam, looking for the other Bennetts—or parts thereof. I would have waited until morning. Now and again, one of them would bend down, pick something up, holler for attention, and then hold up whatever he or she had found. It turned out Arlington Panghurst—who’d more or less started this whole fire drill—was the guy who’d tried to strangle Will and gotten his head blown off for the effort. Will was trying on his colorful new necktie—with an epauletted tan workshirt? I don’t think so, Will—which by some miracle or something had survived the recent fracas without a stain or scratch. He was also squatting on his cowboy-booted heels, conversing earnestly with his wives, who were sitting on the ground beside the now-inactive aerocraft that Fran had piloted up here with her big sister’s help and encouragement.

  Not that Fran had needed much encouragement. It seems that Will’s two girls hadn’t lost the argument, after all. They’d simply known when to shut up and wait until the cat was away. In hindsight, it was just plain stupid of anybody to think that the Kendall sisters—the daughters of Scipio Africanus Kendall—could be kept out of any fight, pregnant or not. For one thing, they loved their husband, and would be needing a father for their children. What else were they going to do? What they had done, having spoken with Clarissa on the’Com while Lucy, Will, and I were making dam fools of ourselves, was appropriated a GLPM flying machine, picked up a couple of Very Important Passengers (one of whom had helped them get their hands on the machine in the first place), and hot-winged it to Pistol Sight Mountain as quickly as they could.

  The passenger who’d helped them acquire the transportation was no less than the President of the Confederacy himself (and therefore the loneliest man, professionally speaking, since the Maytag repairman), Olongo Featherstone-Haugh, who was presently supervising as a couple of militia types tenderly hauled Bennett’s bomb out of the deep water of the reservoir where a cetacean member of the team had located and disarmed it. It was a great big one, all right, and it certainly would have done the job.

  Glub, glub, glub.

  “Mind you, Bennett would never have set that thing off before he was clear,” Wilhelmsohn was explaining to us. He was still rubbing his wrists from time to time. The marks where Bennett had tied him up were purple and horrible looking, like ruts in a muddy road. “He was in it purely for the money and the power it could buy him. What he could do was use the bomb for two purposes, the second as a trap for his antagonists.”

  “Meaning us,” I said, extremely mindful that Buckley was standing right beside us, and embarrassed that Wilhelmsohn had chosen this moment for a postmortem.

  “That’s right. I’m thoroughly chagrined to admit that he’d been onto me for a long time, apparently, and planned to use whatever arrangements I made with you at the ice rink as an opportunity to kill all of us.” He paused to gaze over his shoulder in the direction of the aerocraft. “Say, you don’t suppose Will’s wives have another sister, do you?”

  I grinned at Wilhelmsohn with understanding and sympathy—Will was about as lucky as it gets—but I still felt a great need to say something to Buckley. I laid a hand on his shoulder, as gently as I could. “You wouldn’t like to lower the hammer on that thing, would you?”

  He looked down at his hand, absently, and then up at me. “Oh, I do beg your pardon, Win. Would you mind doing it for me, I fear I’m a trifle abstracted.”

  Yeah, I’ll bet he was, at that. Mary-Beth and Fran had let me know that Buckley had been horrified to be told by his old friendly enemy, Olongo Featherstone-Haugh, that his own brother Bennett was the evil intelligence behind all of these murderous and criminal acts that had managed to kill more than two thousand people and shake the very foundation of Confederate civilization. He’d immediately determined to do something about it.

  Remind me never to get in Buckley’s way when he’s determined.


  I took the gun from his hand and let the hammer down. This time I noticed markings on the right grip, a trademark in a round boss, that said, CTC. Suddenly, I found I’d pressed the rubber pressure switch that lit the laser. Wilhelmsohn yelped, jumping backward when the red dot appeared in the middle of his stomach. I eased up on the switch and shrugged apologetically. I started to shove the longslide into my waistband until it clanked against the .440 A&A I’d forgotten was still there. Guess we were all still a little abstracted. Instead, I opened the left side of Buckley’s jacket—he didn’t seem to mind, or even realize that I was doing it—and slid the pistol into the shoulder holster I knew I’d find there.

  I made a mental note (how many mental notes did that make so far?) to tell him later on that I hoped he’d carry that piece with pride, for the rest of his life. It was a hard thing he’d done, but the right thing to do.

  “This is all United Statesian hardware, isn’t it, the longslide and the laser designator?” I asked, I guess to cover my embarrassment about lasering Wilhelmsohn—but immediately regretted what may well have been the most inappropriate topic possible at the moment. This was the very device, after all, that Buckley had used to kill his own brother. “I’m sorry,” I said. “That’s a topic for another time and place.”

  “Not at all, Win,” Buckley replied to my apology. “Life must go on. It’s long been an interest of mine, all of this otherworld weaponry. The Lasergrip, as they call it, is from the Crimson Trace Corporation of Beaverton, Oregon. I am informed that the man to see about it is Clyde.”

  Beaverton, again. What the hell is it with Beaverton? Suddenly, Will was up and running. I’d thought Fran and Mary-Beth had looked uncharacteristic, sitting on the ground like that, but I’d had other things on my mind.