Afterwar

by Lilith Saintcrow

  The shock treatments at Baylock hadn’t helped. Leather in her mouth, the smell of ozone, Lara’s ghostly face bending over hers. Go away, her twin sister said. I’ll make it hurt less. Then the needles, and the sickness. High fever, the white-coated monsters leaning over her, tossing cryptic terms back and forth. Lara told her what each long medical word meant, just like Lara knew how to set a bone or deal with a combat wound. Everything blurred, and sometimes Hannah wasn’t sure…

  Not Hannah. Lara. Now Anna.

  What was the point?

  I love you, Lara whispered. You have to go. Be me.

  Before, there were four hands, four feet, two hearts making a whole. Now there was only her. During the Uprising, all through Baylock, through the transit kamps and the long nightmare of Gloria, it had been Lara suffering, Lara in pain.

  It was Lara he said he loved, while he did those things to her. He hadn’t let her die on the electrified fence. No, he’d pulled her out of the quarry and done those things to her, over and over. Sometimes there were the restraints, her body inert on the bed while he grunted and heaved.

  “Anna,” Spooky whispered. “Anna Gray.”

  The fog inside her skull slowly receded. Anna Gray, from a place that didn’t exist anymore. A ghost like all the others.

  “Anna Gray.” Her voice firmed, took shape, was no longer a cricket-reedy breath. “Swann’s Riders, Crunche Company.”

  Now she knew what she had to do. She folded the paper carefully, tucking it inside her new uniform jacket, and wiped at her nose with trembling fingers, dried blood mixed with snot forming crusty nuggets. Next time it probably wouldn’t bleed. Her neck and shoulders ached, but that was all right.

  Everything was all right, really. Now that she had the last goal in sight.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Attended Personally

  May 21, ’98

  Some things were best attended to personally. Like arranging for one’s own safety.

  The degenerates’ excuse for a kamp was soft, but that didn’t make it any less humiliating. No roll calls, simply a morning shuffle past medical staff before breakfast, and those with missing magchips were quarantined. The cots were too soft for true patriots, and there were showers. Actual showers, with hot water. The food was hot too, even if much of it was beans or bean-derived. Several times, Gene overheard someone remark that if they’d known captivity would be like this, they would have surrendered sooner.

  Such sentiments were not expressed loudly, but they were still too common for his taste. He’d often thought the Three Percenters were exaggerating when they crowed that only a few among the master race would resist, but it looked like they’d been masters too, of fucking understatement.

  All in all, though, it wasn’t so bad. Gene had ditched his silver Akademy ring, though it hurt to do so. He kept his story simple, switching middle and last names and adding a -son, admitting he’d dug his magchip out because he was an officer, but regular Southern Army instead of Patriot Korps. I was afraid, he said, and the questioners seemed to accept it as a given.

  And what questioners! Cunts, for God’s sake, two of them, both looking white but obviously immie sympathizers. Blood traitors, then, both of them. Neither of them taking even the least amount of care with their appearance, so probably raging dykes, too. Or both fucking the black man in the old but well-maintained Marine dress blues who headed the troika, too. The rumors were that the other “certification boards” were similarly staffed by the unfit, polluted, and traitorous. Gene bowed his head each time, searching for just what they wanted him to say, aiming for a thoughtful, repentant expression. Yes, he’d believed in McCoombs—the man brought jobs back, and pride. No, he hadn’t been lucky enough to get into the Patriot Korps, and he was thankful for it now. No, he hadn’t gone to any special schools. He’d joined up at the beginning of the war, flush with patriotism.

  It wasn’t a bad set of lies, he told himself. Believable, admitting a little cupidity and wrongheadedness, but altogether normal. You heard the same story everywhere in the camp. Whether it was universally, objectively true or not, well, who cared? The war was over. The mud underfoot had warmed up, civilian clothes were rationed out. Probably from the central warehouses Gloria and other kamps had baled and sent excess to. The thought that he was wearing a degenerate’s jeans and fatigue jacket was bleakly amusing.

  He had four meetings with the troika, which was standard. His story didn’t change, except in small, reasonable ways. Interrogation was an art, and these degenerates were too blunt to dissect him. He was just a fish in a crowded pond, nothing exceptional, a pasty face in a crowd of similarly badly shaven men.

  It irked him. He’d excelled all through school and officer training—only the best went into the Patriots, at least until the third year of the war. After that, the manpower crunch had loosened the requirements considerably.

  In the prisoner canteen, he ate slowly, spooning up canned peaches, watching the harsh fall of aggressive sunshine outside the open double doors. Flies gathered, waved away from plates and trays with loose swatting hands. The mud of a wet spring was drying and thirty soldiers had been certified out of the kamp just yesterday, including a few taken prisoner along with Gene. Things were looking up.

  Or so he thought, until his neck began to itch. There, on the unquarantined side of the canteen, was a familiar face. Chalky now, and loose jowled because the bland, overcooked diet here perhaps did not agree with him, Kommandant Major General Porter turtled his graying head between his soft, shrinking shoulders and stared at his erstwhile subordinate with beady, thoughtful dark eyes.

  Gene made no sign of recognizing the man. His chest turned leaden, though. Fingering another Patriot, especially one involved in Gloria, would no doubt get someone preferential treatment. He and Porter had both cut their teeth in Chicago, in the basements of police stations—hunting conspirators, immies, and those who didn’t fit into the vast body politic that was Amerika First. You got to know how the world worked.

  The degenerates were a disease, and Gene always thought of himself as a humble white blood cell, doing dirty work to keep the rest of society whole. He had to survive, to keep the rest of the structure healthy. It wasn’t hubris if you understood you were just a small part of a complex system, right?

  That night, accompanied by the blatting of crickets, he slipped through the quarantine barracks, past a degenerate soldier nodding in the alcove near the door—and at Gloria, he would have had that bastard striped for sleeping on duty—and along the side of the barnlike building. Moving across the clear ground toward the east barracks was the tricky part; it took him a long time to work around the edge, keeping to the shadows. He did have one piece of luck—the guard here had stepped away to piss against the side of the building.

  Inside, it was just the same as the other barracks—snoring, farting, a mass of humanity on makeshift cots or in camp-issued sleeping bags. They weren’t packed together like the jars in Gloria, where the beds were pasteboard shelves on either side of the Quonsets, wide and indifferently supported. Only a few had collapsed, but each time, the mess was cleaned up quickly.

  Gene decided not to think about that. Everything went more smoothly if you just enforced that one simple decision inside your own skull. Follow your orders, arrange and organize what you could, and move forward. Progress didn’t wait for the lame, the lazy, or the immies.

  This was the most personal way to erase a problem. The only thing closer and more satisfying was to sink your thumbs into the windpipe, but that was too inefficiently intimate. Much better to use your forearm across the throat, putting pressure on the carotids. The only trouble was a struggle tipping a cheap cot over, but Porter, newly arrived, had only a bag and a mat. Fortunately, Porter also slept on his back, his snoring oddly harmonic to his neighbor’s.

  Gene squatted over his former commander, feet on either side of the man’s hips. He leaned forward, his knees coming down to rest as his body weight pitched directly o
ver his forearm. The Kommandant barely woke up, his arms flailing fruitlessly, but the lack of oxygen robbed him of strength soon enough.

  He was, after all, an old man with black dye leaching out of his hair. And he was soft.

  There was very little change in the soughing sea of sleep-breathing around him. Just yesterday another prisoner had been stabbed in the showers, blood running across grimed tiles. No man had admitted to seeing a thing, and the shiv wasn’t found.

  It took an eternity to do something right, Gene reflected, the twitching body under him losing its battle. The stink of the sphincters loosening took him back to Gloria, and to the desperate urge to shut some of the filth and the stench away. He concentrated instead on the pink room, the curve of a skinny woman’s hip, her dark eyes lightening every once in a while to hazel. The shape of her lips, crushed under his. He’d brought her perfume—not the cheap, alcohol scent but imported, French, in a fluted glass bottle, full of raindrops and musk.

  Gene Thomas, now Gene Robertson according to Federal paperwork and close to being certified, pressed down a little harder to finish the job thoroughly. And smiled.

  Part Two

  Sic Transit

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Interview

  July 6, ’98

  Simmons grinned, wide and toothy. He slapped the back of the subject’s head, lightly, and stared at his own reflection in the flyspecked one-way mirror. On the other side, Spooky and Swann stood, the Spook’s arms folded and Swann’s hands tense but not quite fists. Sometimes Simmons almost seemed to enjoy being watched while he worked the shake-and-bake.

  “Easy there, Reaper.” Zampana scratched under one of her thick braids, digging luxuriously with a crimson-lacquered fingernail. She’d taken to good cop, bad cop with a zest that surprised exactly no one except Minjae. “You don’t want to hit his head; he’ll get confused. Look, Walt—can I call you Walt?”

  The subject, balding with a hard little hate-gut that certain types retain even when the rest of their frames are skin and bones, blubbered. His mouth was bloody from the first shot of the festivities, his nose drooling little bits of snot and crimson. A red firework, two days after the Fourth, which had been very quiet this year.

  Nobody wanted any more artillery.

  “I’m n-n-not W-W-Walt,” the prisoner moaned. “I’m Jim. Jim Smith.”

  “Creative,” Swann muttered, and glanced at Spooky again. Her expression didn’t change. Dark hair thin and brittle at the ends because the malnutrition had grown out a bit, hazel-ish eyes thoughtful and fixed on the scene before her, she might as well have been a statue.

  “Oh come on, now.” The Reaper leaned forward a little. His high and tight, aggressively waxed, glowed under the fluorescents. “We’ll ask the other guy, Pana. This asshole’s small fry, he’s useless to us.”

  There was a soft knock behind Swann, and the door opened by degrees. It was Lazy, his weak eye blinking rapidly. Swann glanced back, and the kid made the sign for They’re getting restless—a roll of his good eye, left hand stroking an invisible cock. Swann just shook his head—nothing yet. Lazy looked like he wanted to come in and watch, but Swann resolutely turned his back. The kid didn’t need to see more than he already had, for Chrissake.

  “I-I have r-r-rights!” Potbelly stammered. “I’m an A-A-American!”

  “Not until you’re certified, Firster.” Simmons grinned, full of obvious relish. Swann made a restless, uncomfortable movement, but Spooky just continued to watch, unblinking. In the dimness, she might have been staring at a movie screen, flickering lights telling a story. “Remember that? You assholes decided nobody had rights until you said so, and look where that got you.”

  “I’m certified!” the subject howled, his boiled-egg eyes, full of hot salt water, flickering side to side.

  “Under a false name,” Zampana pointed out, kindly. If you didn’t know her usual tone, you’d almost think she was trying to be helpful. “Your real name is Walter James Eberhardt, and you worked at Re-Edukation Kamp Pilgrim. Personally responsible for eight summary executions we have witnesses for; that means you probably killed five for every one we—”

  “He’s useless.” Simmons slapped the back of the man’s head again, a jolly, nasty little swipe. “The other guy’s singing like a boy band. Let’s just go work with him.” Another old trick—tell your subject one of his compatriots was already giving up the goods, adding a whole new layer of pressure.

  “What other g-g-g-guy? Look, I d-d-don’t know anything!” Walt’s voice spiraled up into a begging whine, and Swann glanced at Spooky. She met his gaze, finally, and nodded.

  He was going to break. Damn uncanny, how she could tell. Every damn time.

  “Fine.” Zampana pushed her chair back, its metal legs scraping harshly on concrete. “He’s all yours, Reaper. I’m going to go watch the other guy’s—”

  Potbelly began to blubber. “Don’t leave me in here with him! What do you want?”

  Zampana appeared not to hear, standing and sweeping together the file folders spread on their half of the table. Most of them were stuffed with trash receipts or blank flimsy, but the subject didn’t know that. Simmons leaned down and whispered in the subject’s ear. He had a different set of phrases for each eventuality, and Swann wondered idly which one he was using now. Spooky’s lips moved a little too, like she could hear, or was mouthing along. Or praying, though she wasn’t a Christer.

  “Oh, God,” Walt moaned. “No, no, no. Look, I was following orders, that’s all! I’ll tell you—just don’t leave me in here with him!” The stutter had vanished, and a ratlike gleam filled his rolling eyes.

  Zampana paused. “I dunno, my friend. You’ve wasted a lot of my time already.”

  Simmons leered, whispered again.

  “Skelm!” Walt almost yelled, and that was what Swann had been hoping for. “I can tell you where he went! He was in charge, not me!”

  Peter Skelm. Not the most powerful man at Pilgrim Kamp, but one all the survivors whispered about, glancing around nervously, if they could be persuaded to talk. Skelm with his collection of ears, and the habit of locking himself in autopsy bays with bodies for a few hours at a time. Nobody knew what he’d done in there, and Swann didn’t care.

  He just wanted the bastard caught.

  From there it was simple. Walt Eberhardt, one of the Three Butchers of Pilgrim, sang, in short, like a prewar boy band. Zampana took notes, and Simmons prodded whenever the flow of information seemed likely to choke itself. Lazy came back after about ten minutes, and Swann sighed, stepping out into a fluorescent-lit hall just like every other station they’d been in since the goddamn surrender was signed. He dug for a smoke before remembering you couldn’t do that indoors anymore, and his face set itself sourly. There were still unpainted patches on the wall where pictures of McCoombs had lurked, grinning his self-satisfied, lacquer-haired, upside-down smirk at anyone who dared to come to the cops.

  “What?” Swann said.

  “Police dude getting nervous.” Lazy’s shoulders twitched, an approximation of a shrug. “Says he checked fucker’s papers himself. Phone keeps ringing.”

  “Great.” So Spooky was right, and the fat-ass motherfucker who passed for law in this slice of not-shot-up-enough suburbia was nervous because he’d been selling certifications. “Send a double to Poulson. Tell him we have a Section Nineteen and a Three-A.” The former was your regular charge for selling certification, and not likely to get much of a response except for the beating they’d administer to the police chief for being a corrupt Firster-loving motherfucker. The latter, though, was a high-priority capture tag, and Poulson would know it was the Big Butcher of Pilgrim.

  “Okay.” Lazy’s eyes—good and bad—widened, and he might have taken off at top speed if not for Swann’s hand on his elbow.

  “Don’t just send the double—secure a call and verify.” Swann waited until the kid soaked up the caution. “We’re transporting this motherfucker.”

  �
��Aw, shit. Do we have to?” Lazy, like Simmons, was of the opinion that ferrying even a high-value target to a federal condo was a waste of time. Raiders weren’t in the habit of taking prisoners, so the protocols for transport were…strict. They had to be, since most of the Blue Companies had feelings about acceptable wastage.

  In every sense.

  “Orders,” Swann reminded him. “Pop Minjae, tell her to prep the nest for evac.”

  “Yessir.” The kid bounced off, his shoes squeaking against old greenish linoleum. Oughta be in school, Swann had mumbled once, staring after him, and Zampana had elbowed him. The war taught him everything he needs to know, she’d replied, but he wasn’t sure he agreed.

  Swann rubbed his hand over his growing-in, steel-gray hair. No more head shaving. His hat was retired now, and sometimes he wished he could join it. This would make four they’d brought in, all relatively small and easy bags since plenty of Firsters were corralled at the filtration sites. Eberhardt was just a lucky find, and hopefully he’d lead them to Skelm, then to God knew who.

  Maybe at a half dozen caught, Swann could tell Poulson he was getting tired, that it was time to…what?

  The observation room’s door made a small, forlorn noise as Spooky pushed it open. She peered out into the hall, blinking at the fluorescent glare, and maybe she’d once been pretty. The camp pallor was gone, but her cheekbones still stood out too starkly and her thin shoulders were perpetually hunched. Zampana bought girl stuff in the local black markets since rationing was still tight, but Spooky didn’t seem to care that much.

  Not that Swann blamed her, but it was a damn shame. Even the good-time fishgirls at the black markets, with their short skirts and eyelids smeared with grainy charcoal instead of anything so expensive as actual makeup, were getting rounder by the day. Zampana was solid, even when lean, Minjae was a round little bit of a thing too, but Spooky was a stick in a uniform. That was a fashionable look before the war, but nowadays even the nowcast starlets had some meat on them.