Afterwar

by Lilith Saintcrow

  She’d be grateful for the coat and the escape—she would have to be. He’d finally see her smile.

  The Kaptain accepted the salutes of the black-clad guards still unfortunate enough to be on duty with a single, frosty nod as he passed, keeping his step firm and unhurried in shining, scraped-clean boots. The ancient yellow lino in the hall of the admin building squeaked a little under his soles; there were no kampogs in striped headscarves or faded dungarees working at streaks of tracked-in mud with their inadequate brushes. One or two of the guards enjoyed smearing the worst filth they could find down the hall and kicking pogs while they scrambled to clean it, but Porter frowned on that.

  The smell alone was unhealthy. Just because the pogs lived in shit didn’t mean the soldiers, being a higher class of creature, should get it on their toes.

  Soldiers. Gene’s upper lip twitched as he lengthened his stride. As if any of these assholes had ever seen real combat. Kamps were supposed to be cushy jobs, good chances for advancement once your loyalty and capacity were proven. An endpoint like this meant hazard pay and extra alcohol rations, both useful things. So what if combat troops looked down on them, or if his fellow shoulderstraps were a collection of paper pushers and rear-echelon weekend warriors? He was probably the only true patriot in the lot.

  A thumping impact made the entire admin building shudder just as he reached the side door, and he took the stairs outside two at a time. Mortars. At the fence. The degenerates weren’t in the hills anymore. They were moving fast, just like the hordes descending upon Rome back in the day. That rather changed things—he had to get back to the joyhouse and collect the girl—

  Another wump. Something smashed past the fence, and a high whistling drone screeched across Gloria before the admin building shuddered again, hit from the opposite side. There was an instant of heat in Gene’s left calf, a flash of annoyance as the world forgot what it was supposed to do and heaved underneath him. Then the world turned over like an egg flipped on a griddle, and after a weightless moment he hit gravel with a crunch. It was a minor wound, all things considered, but the guard he’d paid and left with strict orders to watch the kerro dragged his superior to the now-dusty, low-slung black vehicle. Before Gene could shake the ringing from his ears, he’d been tossed in the back like a sack of processed starch lumps, and the guard—a weedy, pimple-faced youth who had less than twelve hours to live, though neither of them knew it yet—was already accelerating on the wide macadamized road out of Gloria.

  Instead of watching the girl with her wide, empty eyes and pretty cupid’s-bow mouth and full underlip, Gene had to work shrapnel free of his own leg and grind his teeth, improvising a pressure bandage as the kerro bumped and jolted. The wheelless vehicle wasn’t meant for gliding at high speed, its undercells humming and sparking as chips of pressed rock jolted free under the repeller field.

  Driving that way would have gotten the kid a reprimand two weeks ago. Now, though, Gene just dug under the seat for a bottle of amber Scotch—the good stuff, imported, he’d been looking forward to seeing her reaction when he produced it—and didn’t bother to glance out the back bubble, wasting a bit of the stinging, expensive liquid to disinfect the cut.

  One small Rome had fallen, but the rest of the empire would endure. Or at least, Kaptain Thomas hoped it would. He settled in the cushioned back seat, easing his wounded leg, and took a healthy hit from the bottle.

  If he drank enough, he might even be able to forget her—and the pink room—for a little while.

  Chapter Three

  Last Bloody Hours

  It was the third camp they’d…what was the word?

  Found? Bombed? Liberated?

  Each was worse than the last. At least by this time both raiders and regular infantry knew mostly what to expect, and CentCom was moving up supplies—electrolyte drinks, gruel, medics with clean needles, sanitation engineers. The filth was indescribable, and the skeletal campogs could perforate their tissue-thin stomach walls gorging on ready rations. You could kill just by performing the oldest of human kindnesses, sharing your calories.

  The shitholes were all bad, even the showplace camps closer to the more densely populated sectors. But Reklamation Kamp Gloria, lost in swampy pinewoods, was…Christ. It was the first Reklamation site, the one where the Central Federal Army found the bath bays, their glassy sides holding deep, shimmering caustic unfluid capable of swallowing flesh, bones, even tooth enamel when a mild electrical current was passed through. That current did double duty, shocking those who tried to cling to the sides, too. If a victim managed by some freak of fate or chance to hang on to a simulacrum of consciousness in the killing bottle, the chute poured them dazed and convulsing into the bays, and they were eaten away in short order. The side products—saponified fat, traces of gold or other valuable metals and minerals from bones, the magchips in left arms, or old-style fillings—were skimmed off and shipped away.

  The Quonsets were emptier than at the last camps they’d come across, because Gloria, sunk in the marshland, wasn’t really a work site. Though it had a quarry and workshops, the rail spur only led in; the side products were trucked out in boxes. Literally and figuratively, Gloria was the end of the line.

  The Army InfoSecs managed to capture about 60 percent of the records before the digital worms could finish their work. The black-jacket, red-piped Patriot administrators and officers were gone, probably got away right as the Federals arrived. All the Special Group motherfuckers, the hardcore Patriot believers in the Leader and the Flag, were long gone too, probably because the advance had finally sped up since Swann’s Riders knew the terrain. And fuck if it wasn’t that asshole General Leavy who busted the other asshole General Specter, who wouldn’t fucking listen to the raiders because they were outside the chain of command.

  With Leavy in charge things started to steamroller, what with a raider or two in every damn company telling them what to look out for and how to avoid getting their asses blown off by booby trap, guerrilla action, or rear guards grown brutal after four years of Insurrection Kontrol.

  Chuck Dogg, a helmet clamped over his ’fro, was the first of Swann’s through the gates, tagging along with the army grunts hopping to secure the damn place. Chuck was, in fact, with the platoon that found the goddamn bath bays, and sometimes Zampana said he was never really right again after that. He just stood for a while, watching the harsh overhead lighting ripple on the placid, green-glowing surface. It was him and Hank Simmons—Simmons the Reaper, that big blond bootstrap bastard—who rounded up what they could of the uniformed fuckers captured in Gloria’s corners and tossed six of them in the bays before they were stopped. It took Swann himself, striding in with his boots almost striking sparks and that goddamn vermin-ridden hat clamped firmly on his shaved head, to get the Dogg to stand down.

  Raiders believed in eye for eye, tooth for tooth. You had to, running behind the lines and sabotaging installations or gathering intel. CentCom called them “irregulars,” and the Firsters called them “partisans” or “traitors,” but they were raiders, and the name meant vengeance.

  It also meant no quarter.

  The InfoSec squad got an eyeful of the prisoner rolls, and one of them grabbed Simmons—who was almost skunkfucking drunk by then, but still ambulatory through some freak of his big old Norwegian constitution—as smoky dusk hung over the swamp, to tell him there had been twenty-eight raiders sent to the camp. Easy to tell who had been a raider: they were the prisoners with a thick band of lase scar tissue across the left wrist, which meant they had to be magtatted instead of chipped.

  There was no use wasting a chip on an enemy of the state.

  Twenty-six of the raider prisoners had gone right to the baths upon arrival. One died right after liberation, his emaciated body found in the mud of the central plaza, where he’d fallen in the middle of the Kommandant’s speech and hadn’t been hauled away yet by his jar fellows.

  The last remaining raider prisoner was in the two-story building slapped wit
h blistering red paint, transferred there after a stint in the sorting shed where the belongings of each prisoner who hadn’t already been processed through another camp were searched, stacked, fumigated, baled for transport, and taken back into the heartland to be distributed to America First party members.

  No name and no citizen file, which meant she hadn’t broken under any torture and given them any information that would find her in the old gov databases. Just a half-wormed prisoner number—QIP-x834xx16x—and a single note in the locator field: Remanded to Joy Duty rm 6, Kpt E. Thomas.

  Joy Duty. That was what they called the brothel.

  When Simmons found Room Six at the end of the second-floor hall, he also found a hollow-cheeked, painfully thin but not skeletal prisoner—they had better rations in the red house, just like the prisoners forced to work the bath bays did—in a paper-thin viscose slip, sitting primly on a pink soylon bedspread and staring vacantly at the wall. The pink dress she was supposed to wear to match the room had been torn into strips, and she stared at the Reaper for ten very long seconds. Some of the dress’s pink soylon was wrapped around her bloody right fist, a rough and nonabsorbent but very capable bandage.

  Below, some of the brothel’s inhabitants were screaming at random intervals. They couldn’t help it—they would stop in the middle of drinking or shell-shocked wandering and begin to shake, and a long cry would ribbon up and out, accumulated terror whistling through vocal cracks. The sound of smashing glass from the bar, which had supplied the uniforms and some of the more favored jar captains, had just petered out; even drinking to blackout didn’t stop the random cries of the newly liberated.

  A couple MPs at the door earned a lot of heat for keeping even the frontline officers out of the red building, but orders were direct, thorough, repeated, and unequivocal from General Leavy, who might have been an asshole but was not a man who thought troops deserved a little fun whenever or wherever there were cunts—especially brutalized ones—hanging out to dry.

  How Simmons got past the MPs was a mystery even to him. Maybe because he was a raider, and they weren’t known for rape. Or maybe because he was too drunk to even contemplate getting his pecker swabbed, which was, even for that blond bastard, very drunk indeed.

  Simmons blear-blinked, trying very hard to focus, his rifle poking over his shoulder and his breath enough to kill a cactus at fifteen paces. He took in the room, the faded silk flowers in a tiny scrap-glass vase on the nightstand, the sliver of mirror over a washbasin—even that sliver was splintered; someone had driven a fist into it, to judge from the bloody mark in the middle of the breakage. She stared at him, the dark-haired woman in the cheap slip, and even through the liquor he saw glaring bruises on her skinny arms. Around her ankles, too.

  Her pupils shrank a little, her dark eyes focused, and she coughed, a painful, racking sound. “Lara Nelson,” she said, in a cracked, reedy whisper. “Senior medic, Third Band, McCall’s Harpies.”

  Big, pale-headed Simmons stood there, filling up the door, and tried to think of a reply. Any reply.

  “Lara Nelson,” she repeated. “Medic. Third Band. McCall’s Harpies. Captured March twenty-second.” Her face crumpled slightly, smoothed. “Year…ninety…ninety-six?”

  Simmons finally found his voice. “It’s ’98. At ease, soldier.” It came out crisp instead of slurred. Even a raider couldn’t drink enough to get away from the fucking war. You could pour down engine degreaser until you went blind, it didn’t fucking matter.

  “Ninety…” Her chin worked a little, her mouth trying to open, closing, turning into a thin line. Simmons watched it, and of all the situations in the goddamn Second Civil, he would later say that was the second worst. Here’s this girl, and she’s been…Christ, man. They even had kids in that goddamn house, we found an eleven-year-old boy from Indiana in the stalls downstairs, and here this girl was, repeating “McCall’s Harpies. McCall’s Harpies.” And I couldn’t fucking tell her McCall was dead at fucking Memphis.

  Memphis, that graveyard of raiders. Of course she knew McCall was dead; she’d been captured during the ill-fated uprising. The one the Federals were supposed to push in and relieve the pressure on, supposed to coordinate with. The one they hadn’t helped a tit’s worth with, because cooperating with irregulars wasn’t part of CentCom’s strategy back in ’96.

  Simmons ended up taking off his rancid camo field jacket—a veteran of both the Casper and Third Cheyenne battles, where Swann’s Riders had run supplies for the Federals and bloodied themselves taking out rails and quite a few bunkers—and wrapping it around her shoulders. He picked her up—she weighed less than his kid brother—and carried her out of the red house, straight to Swann.

  Who didn’t want to fucking debrief her, and double didn’t want any more goddamn problems…but he poured himself another shot of colorless engine cleaner, downed it, and told Dogg to get the new medic some fucking clothes and whatever kit could be scrounged. There were bales of civilian clothes in the sorting shed, but the girl refused to go in there, so it was Zampana who eyeballed her sizes and went in with Dogg, both of them nauseous at the sheer amount of clothing. Plenty of it had been shipped from other camps to be sorted and packaged here, but still, it was hard to look at all the jackets, shirts, skirts, jeans, and the small mountain of unsorted shoes and not see the bodies tumbling from the gas-filled killing bottles into the placid-looking, caustic bays.

  The front elements left Gloria the next morning in a stinking rain that would swell the rivers and make the next set of engagements miserable slogs through sucking mud that sometimes swallowed shells or mortars whole. Swann’s folk left too, and the new medic went with them, big-eyed and clutching two first aid kits Dogg had managed to find. The raiders also drew extra ration bars and stole cans of condensed calories from the camp supplies to soak the bars in, and Zampana got her hands on a Firster sidearm for the medic, too.

  For a Christer, Zampana was all-fucking-right.

  The frontliners were supposed to leave all prisoners in Gloria for critical care, processing, and medivac, but goddamn if Swann’s crew was going to abandon another raider in that fucking place. It was probably a mercy, since the second-wave troops weren’t kept on as tight a leash as Leavy’s boys, as witnessed in DC later that summer.

  That was how Lara Nelson, later christened Spooky, joined Swann’s Riders in the last bloody hours of America’s Second Civil War.

  Chapter Four

  Good Folk

  Lara woke with a jolt as the hybrid kerro-petroleum truck bounced over something a little too high, the undercarriage scraping, and dropped onto pavement at last. Her hands tried to fly up, ready to protect her head. She was wedged so tightly in a breathing, rattling dark, she thought she was in the jar barracks again, or, God forbid, in a closed cattle car shuttling between kamps. It smelled in here, but not of shit and death. No, instead it was kerro fumes, the oily dry dirtsmell of soldiers, and someone who had found a can of beans somewhere and taken them down a little too fast, with the end result escaping air perfumed by gut flora and fauna.

  Across from her, someone else was awake. It was a tall ’fro-headed raider, a lean ebon-black man with grenades hanging across his chest. “Here.” He rummaged in his pack as the truck smack-bumped over potholes. “You was at Memphis?”

  Lara nodded. She dredged his name out of memory—Chuck. He was Chuck. The big blond man sleeping among the boots on the truck bed—Simmons—was snoring almost loud enough to drown the engine noise; Lara was packed between a squat Hispanic woman with a black kerchief neckband on one side and a skinny, cornrowed first sergeant on the other. The sergeant, her eyes half closed, moved her lips as if she was praying; the Hispanic woman was almost asleep herself and doing the same. Christers, both of them, but one was a raider and the other was a Federal, and that was safe enough. Lara hadn’t missed how these two bracketed her so she wouldn’t have to squeeze against a man inside the truck’s deep, malodorous dark.

  It was a damn sight better tha
n the railway car to Gloria, that was for sure. Still, the jolting motion was uncomfortably familiar.

  Chuck found what he was digging for. The whites of his eyes gleamed; he proffered something small and fabric wrapped, jamming his boot toe against Simmons’s beefy shoulder to brace himself as he leaned across the middle space.

  The blond man’s snoring didn’t even pause.

  Chuck’s package was a celluloid box of old-fashioned smokes wrapped in a black bandanna, and Lara regarded his hand for a moment, her gaze stuttering to his face to gauge the cost of this gift.

  “I got plenty,” Chuck said. “And you’re one of Swann’s now. The guy in the stupid hat, he’s our kaptain.”

  Good enough. Lara accepted it, and her quick, bony fingers took care of folding the bandanna. It wasn’t too fresh, but it was cleaner than her hair, and when she knotted it around her head like a kampog her throat threatened to close up completely. Her stomach was warm, a tiny fist clutched tight around a lump of ration crumbles, and even though she was ravenous, the Hispanic woman—Zampana—had her on strict, small amounts.

  Lara didn’t mind. The last thing she needed was the running shits while they were on the advance, or any other gut problems.

  Slow and steady, chica, was Zampana’s advice as she patted Lara’s skinny shoulder gently. You with us now. And oh, God, wasn’t that good to hear.

  She coughed twice before she could speak, nodding to show she understood. “Swann.” Shaven headed and smelling like a distillery, the kaptain was up front with the driver. That hat of his was a weird, furry bundle that had maybe once been wool; it was impossible to tell what shape it had been. A bedraggled red feather depended from its striped approximation of a band, and it looked like the kaptain slept in it. For all that, Swann’s eyes were bright and direct, and his crew were good folk.