Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Stephenson, Neal

  “You can set your bags down and they will be as safe as if they were locked up in a bank vault,” said Larry, the manager on duty, using a thumb to shift the strap on his shoulder and expose a sweat-darkened stripe of T-shirt. Dangling from the strap was an assault rifle, poised in such a way that its muzzle was usually aimed at the ground. Which seemed dangerous; but Larry for his part was aghast at his four young customers’ unwillingness to let their bags out of their grasp and clearly imagined that wherever they came from, no property was safe.

  Sophia had her glasses up on her forehead. She was tempted to flip them down and see if they could face-rec this Larry and if so find out who his editor was—or more likely what edit stream he subscribed to and what particular flavor of post-reality it was pumping into his mind. But Larry didn’t have his glasses down and so it would have been somewhat impolite.

  He turned away and led them across heat-softened asphalt toward an old vehicle that Sophia recognized vaguely as a Land Cruiser or Land Rover or one of those: boxy, upright, of a general design that was four or five decades old. But it was clean, well cared for, beaded with rinse water from the car wash. It had been modded in various ways that Larry wanted them to notice and to appreciate. He stepped up onto a running board, carefully adjusting the angle of his assault rifle so it wouldn’t bang into the side of the vehicle, and patted the roof, which was covered in bright yellow composite.

  “Kevlar,” he announced. “Now. Contrary to the scare propaganda you have probably been fed, celebratory fire is overrated as far as danger. A descending round has lost most of its energy. Terminal velocity is much less than muzzle velocity. So you don’t need full armor on the roof. This will do you fine.”

  “Is there a lot of celebratory fire where we are going?” Julian asked.

  “No. Iowans are stoic,” Phil answered in the unduly confident tones of one who was just reading about it.

  “That’s not the point Larry’s making,” said Sophia. “The point is, why spend money armoring against a nonexistent threat?”

  Larry nodded. “Doors and windows, of course, that’s a different story, but those are full.”

  “Full?” Julian asked.

  “Fully armored. As a precaution. In case of stray rounds, accidental discharges. Wouldn’t do you much good in an engagement. But that’s what Tom and Kevin are for.” Larry hooked his thumb back over his shoulder at a pickup truck idling at the edge of the lot. Tom and Kevin were seated in the cab, luxuriating in the A/C. Mounted in the pickup’s open bed was a tripod, currently vacant. A steel locker running athwart the bed, triple padlocked, contained the machine gun that they would take out and mount to the tripod when venturing into regions where an impressive show of force was deemed prudent. Sprawling across the roof of the cab was a streamlined shape that might be mistaken for the world’s most aerodynamic cargo rack until you realized it was actually a fixed-wing drone.

  Larry stepped down and opened the driver’s-side door. “Now,” he said, “which one of y’all claims to be able to drive a car?”

  Sophia raised her hand as the other three sidled backward. Larry gave a little nod.

  “Where are you from?” Sophia asked.

  Larry looked a bit startled. “I’m from here.”

  “But how far back?”

  “As far back as you wanna look. Great-greats came over from Holland. Why do you ask?”

  “You said ‘y’all.’”

  Larry was confused.

  “Never mind. Sorry,” Sophia said. “I’m the driver. I’m the only one who can drive.”

  “If you would just show me. Just take it for a spin around the lot,” Larry said.

  “I understand. Requirements of insurance,” Sophia said, shoving off against the running board and vaulting into the driver’s seat.

  “We don’t got none,” Larry responded. “This is a requirement of us.”

  “What was that about?” Anne-Solenne asked, as soon as they were out on the streets of Des Moines, headed west. She was riding shotgun. Phil and Julian were in the backseat gazing at the outskirts of the city, which looked exactly like any other place.

  “What?” Sophia asked. It had been a little while since she had driven a car and she was rigid: eyes locked on the tailgate of Tom and Kevin’s truck, hands clenching the steering wheel. Surrounding traffic was at least 95 percent robo-piloted, and giving their little caravan a wide berth since you never knew what a human-piloted car was going to do.

  “‘Where are you from? How far back?’ Those weird questions you were asking Larry.”

  “Oh. Something I heard from my mom—who heard it from my uncle.”

  “Dodge?” Anne-Solenne asked, with the forced casualness that people always affected when uttering that name.

  “Yeah. About people who say ‘y’all.’ Or, ‘We don’t got none.’”

  “Just sounds like rural America to me.”

  “Southern America. It’s totally a Southern way of talking. Iowa is a Northern state. Fought on the Union side in the Civil War. Never had slavery. Settled by Scandinavians. So, either Larry is a migrant from the South—”

  “Which he just said he isn’t . . .”

  “Or he, or his dad, adopted—affected—Southern stylings. Northerners don’t talk like that, they don’t drawl, they don’t say ‘y’all’ . . .”

  “Or put the Stars and Bars on their bumpers,” said Julian, getting into the spirit of things. He extended an arm forth between the front seats and pointed at a Confederate flag sticker on the back of Tom and Kevin’s truck. It was balanced, on the other side of the license plate, by a “Remember Moab” sticker.

  “I don’t know, man,” said Phil. “I see that shit all over the place. Always have. It’s a constant.”

  “To you,” Sophia agreed. “Point being, it was not like that to my uncle, who lived from the mid-1950s to about seventeen years ago. He saw the change during his lifetime. When he was born, the Civil War was only ninety years in the past—almost within living memory. It would have seemed weird for Northerners to paste the traitors’ flag on their bumper or cop an accent from Alabama. But while he was alive—”

  “The cultural border shifted north,” Anne-Solenne said.

  The border, of course, was not a line on a map; it couldn’t be, because it did not legally exist, had no official reality. It was a blended zone that straddled that belt of the outer suburbs where Walmarts tended to exist. As they moved outward from the city, vehicles containing nonwhite people found reasons to pull off the street into the parking lots of businesses, parks, schools, or churches. Nothing ever impeded the flow of traffic outward. Vehicles coming the other way, inbound from the country, were rarely if ever stopped Checkpoint Charlie–style. But they were sure as hell scrutinized. Nothing came in from that direction without being seen and scanned by a hundred cameras. Vehicles that were hard to see into, because of darkly tinted glass or no glass at all, tended to get pulled over by peace officers who expressed polite curiosity about how many people were in the back and what they were carrying. It was all so understated that an inattentive observer might not have noticed it. Had Uncle Dodge been somehow resurrected and joined them on this drive, he might have seen very little overt change from how it had looked in his day. But, gray and blurred as it might have been, the border, staked out by Walmarts and truck stops, was as real as anything from Cold War Berlin.

  But nothing really happened; there was no one moment when they definitely crossed over into Ameristan. The closest thing to a formal ceremony was when Tom pulled over onto the gravel shoulder of a two-lane road between cornfields and turned on his four-ways. Sophia followed suit. Kevin got out of the passenger side, ambled back, and yanked off the truck’s license plate—which was evidently held on with magnets. He then went round in back of the Land Cruiser and collected its plate, then gave the back of the vehicle a companionable slap. He tossed both plates—now stuck together by the magnets—into the back of the pickup. Then the caravan was back on the
road.

  “When in Rome,” Julian said.

  They picked up speed on a decently paved two-lane highway, navigating a few bends that took them down to a bridge across a motionless brown river. Then they climbed up into flat farmland. Sophia dropped back a little in case Tom hit the brakes, and Tom didn’t seem to mind. Conversation halted. The others flipped their glasses down and lost themselves in stories or games. Left alone behind the wheel, Sophia kept the conversation going in her head for a while. But there was nothing to sustain it. The occasional fiberglass statue of a political leader, erected by a farmer in the front yard of an isolated house, or a makeshift billboard railing against contraception. Not so much different from what Dodge might have seen. About an hour out of Des Moines, they did pass by a tiny sign—Sharpie on plywood—bearing what might have been the burning-cross logo of the Levitican Church. An arrow pointed to the right down a gravel road that seemed to lead nowhere. She recognized it only a fraction of a second before she blew by it, and was left wondering if it had been real. The only other person who seemed to have noticed was Kevin, in the escort truck, who turned his head to the right and scanned the horizon, more curious than alarmed. Then he turned and exchanged words with the driver, Tom. Kevin bent forward for a few seconds. When he sat up straight again, the barrel of an assault rifle came into view, pointed up at the ceiling next to his head. He made some remark to Tom and both of them had a laugh. Tom reached out with his right hand and fiddled with something on the truck’s center console. That fixed-wing drone rose into the air from the pickup’s roof and climbed into the sky. Kevin pulled his glasses down over his eyes—though “goggles” might have been a better term for what he was sporting. They did all the same things as what Sophia and her friends wore. But those were styled as eyeglasses, meant to be small and unobtrusive. Those worn by Tom and Kevin came from a whole different aesthetic universe and Sophia was pretty sure that their advertising copy made frequent use of the words “tactical,” “rugged,” “mil spec,” and “grueling.” What Kevin was presumably seeing through them now was a drone’s-eye view of the surrounding few square miles of landscape. Here, that was pretty much guaranteed to consist of a graph-paper matrix of two-lane roads, some paved and some gravel, dicing the flat green territory up into square-mile production units.

  Ameristan couldn’t have had less in common with how it would have been depicted in a movie or video game. Tom and Kevin had perceived or imagined some threat. Its nature was hinted at by the handmade sign they had passed at the crossroads. Maybe these guys also had access to edit streams of geodata showing hot spots of gunfire and of traffic slowdowns that might suggest roadblocks or checkpoints. But whatever they were worried about would have little to no visual signature. There was not going to be a central base, a nerve center with roads and wires converging on it. You could put anything in a barn.

  Or maybe Kevin was bored and wanted to exercise the drone.

  Their overall course was diagonal, but because of the grid they were always going either north or west. This made sense and worked perfectly in the almost obscenely flat middle part of the state. But the big rivers all ran from very slightly higher ground in the northwest to the very slightly lower southeast. So the caravan’s rectilinear zigzagging caused them to cross and recross rivers, and around the rivers there was some interesting topography, some actual valleys between legit hills, forested country a stain on the land infallibly marking every part of it that was too steep to profitably cultivate. The higher places—worn-down traces of a glacial moraine, she suspected—sprouted wind turbines of the most enormous type. The bigger they were, the slower they turned, which was a good thing for birds. Some didn’t turn at all because, one assumed, they were down for maintenance, or not finished yet. She grew used to them as hours went by.

  And that was how the giant Flaming Cross of the Leviticans sneaked up on her, though the people working on it would probably have felt that she sneaked up on them. It wasn’t actually flaming. It wasn’t even capable of flaming yet, because it wasn’t finished. Its general size and shape were not terribly far off from that of a wind turbine. It was sited on the top of what passed for a hill around here—not to catch the wind, but to be seen from a distance as it burned in the night. Anyway, by the time she accepted that she was actually seeing it, the thing was less than a mile away. She could see a clutter of pickup trucks parked around its base and some pop-up canopies sheltering tables where workers could take water breaks. A row of portable toilets stood sentry next to an office trailer.

  On an impulse, she opened a voice channel to Tom. In normal circumstances, his edit space and Sophia’s were totally disjoint; they would never encounter each other online, never meet, never see the same news stories. Anything that originated from the likes of Tom would be fastidiously pruned by the algorithms used by Sophia’s editor before human eyes ever reviewed it, and anything that came from Princeton or Seattle would never reach Tom’s feed until it had been bent around into propaganda whose sole function was to make Tom afraid and angry. But for today’s purposes they had a direct channel, unfiltered, unedited. “Hey,” she said, “how do you think those people would feel about our dropping in for a visit? Just, you know, in tourist mode?”

  “Copy. Stand by,” Tom returned.

  The sound of Sophia’s voice had broken her companions out of their media reverie, and so now came several moments of their pushing up their glasses, being astonished by the spectacle of the cross, talking about it, pulling glasses back down to search for more information.

  “There’s a visitor center,” Tom reported. “With changing rooms. Probably easiest unless you want to have all your garments inspected.”

  “Well, if there’s a visitor center, they must be okay with visitors,” Sophia said.

  Phil, Julian, and Anne-Solenne could not hear Tom’s audio stream and so the changing rooms came as a surprise to them. They were in separate trailers for men and women; all of the Princetonians knew that it would be pointless, and probably inflammatory, to make inquiries about non-gender-binary cases. But the idea of having to don different garments just to set foot on a specific property was new to them.

  “If we don’t, they’ll have to stone us to death,” Sophia explained. “And according to their interpretation of Leviticus, the modern equivalent of stoning people is shooting them.”

  “Oh, I get it,” Phil said. “Because bullets are like little rocks.”

  “Exactly. And a gun is just a modern labor-saving device that makes it easier to throw the little rocks really fast. Basically, to them, every reference to stoning in the Bible is a sort of dog-whistle reference to guns.”

  Phil was working it out: “God knew guns would be invented in the future because omniscient, but He couldn’t insert direct references to them in the Bible because that would be a spoiler for the Bronze Age audience. So He used stoning as a placeholder.”

  “And our clothing is immodest or something?” Julian asked.

  “Not at all.” Sophia reached out as if to grab Julian by the scruff of the neck. Instead of which, she flipped the collar of his T-shirt inside out so that she could read the tag. “Mostly cotton but with some spandex. To make it stretchy I guess. If you wore this up there, they would have to stone—i.e., shoot—you.”

  “They have something against spandex?”

  “Against mixing fibers.” Sophia pointed to a sign mounted to the wall above a table on which a display of neatly folded white paper bunny suits had been laid out, in a range of sizes. The sign was a quote from the Bible, set in Comic Sans:

  Ye shal kepe mine ordinances. Thou shalt not

  let thy cattel gendre with others of divers

  kindes. Thou shalt not sowe thy field with

  mingled sede neither shal a garment of divers

  things, as of linen and wollen come upon thee.

  —Leviticus 19:19

  Phil couldn’t get past the first bit. “Is that a proscription of bestiality between different kin
ds of animals?”

  “Ssh,” said Anne-Solenne, for sitting nearby was an Iowan lady of perhaps sixty, monitoring a table of cookies and coffee, free but, in classic Midwest passive-aggressive style, with a jar for suggested donations.

  “I guess they were anti-mule. Look. Point being we can either strip down and have her read all the labels on our garments, which is gross, or just change into the bunny suits.”

  “What about him?” Julian asked, gesturing toward Tom, who was emerging from the men’s toilet. Then, realizing he had been a little rude, he turned to address Tom directly. “Tom, are you going to change clothes?”

  “No need,” Tom said, and went into a curious routine of patting himself in various places. All of his garb was Tactical, Mil Spec, Rugged, and Grueling, even down to suspenders and socks. All of the tags were on the outside—not concealed in collars and waistbands, as was the normal practice. Which wasn’t obvious because the tags were tactical camo, olive drab or what have you, so that they wouldn’t stand out in a faraway sniper’s scope like stars in the night sky.

  The Princetonians now all felt at liberty to approach and examine. The lettering and logos on the tags were subdued tactical colors and difficult to read until you got close. But all of them—along with the manufacturers’ logos and the incomprehensible laundry glyphs—bore a symbol consisting of a block letter L with a crossbar near the top and flames coming out of it. “It’s just easier to wear Levitican-approved shit,” he explained, “’cause of where I go in the line of duty sometimes.”