Afterwar

by Lilith Saintcrow

  Spooky slid out and closed the door softly, like it was a hospital room or something. She never walked down the middle of a hall if she could help it, always sticking to one side or the other. Less chance of being noticed that way, maybe. A camp habit.

  She stopped just out of arm’s reach. “We dragging him?”

  “Yeah.” Swann rubbed at his face now. Christ, this made him tired. “We’ve got a nineteener.”

  Her bloodless lips curved a little. “Toldja.” She straightened a little, waiting for orders. “He’s repeating himself now. We have a direction but no contact name.”

  “Well, shit.” That was half the reason to drag the asshole out of here, to pump him for more details about Big Butcher Skelm’s destination, not just his travel direction. “You sure? No, you know, jogging his memory?”

  She shook her head, a pained grimace pulling up one side of her mouth. “If he knew, or knew and didn’t know he knew, maybe. But no. They’re getting a little smarter.”

  “So are we.” When you worked in cells, it was best if nobody knew any more than the general direction of their next contact. Old strategies were surprisingly durable when you were the insurgent instead of the empire.

  She nodded. “Yeah.” Her hair swung a little, and she stripped it back from her face with impatient fingers. It wasn’t long enough for a ponytail yet, and Chuck had run out of red thread. “One at a time, that’s how it’s done.” Quoting his own words back at him.

  Swann sighed, restraining the urge to kick at the thick rubberized strip along the bottom of the wall. “Yeah, one at a fucking time.” You couldn’t drag the motherfuckers in wholesale. Or, you could, but not with refugees spilling out of the goddamn South, infrastructure shot to shit, electricity still intermittent, and the damage to the ports and all…not to mention New York. The financial nerve center of the whole goddamn world, even if it had slid under Firster mismanagement and the meteoric rise of the Chinese markets, now gone in a flash.

  Spooky just stood there, patiently waiting. Finally, Swann sighed again, a deep one, coming all the way up from his heels. He ticked his head impatiently to the side, and she fell into step behind him.

  It was glare-bright in the interrogation room. Walt Eberhardt jerked upright in his chair as the door banged open, and the whites of his eyes showed like a frightened horse’s.

  “Well?” Swann asked. The single word bounced off the walls, the false mirror watching with its silvery eye.

  “He’s being helpful.” Zampana smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “Aren’t you, Walt?”

  “Please,” Walt moaned. “Please, yes. I’ve told you all I know, everything.”

  Swann had heard that before, more times than he liked. Of course he had. Only nowadays he was hearing it in cop shops instead of forest hutches or RVs.

  Any suspected raider, or person with “sympathies,” or, God forgive, an immie brought here a few years ago wouldn’t have been in one of these rooms. There was always a basement in buildings like this. Walt had it easy. Swann had seen the bodies; he knew what the cops—maybe the very same fat fuck sweating on his phone in his office down the hall—did before they handed you over to the Patriots for Reklamation or Re-Edukation.

  If you lived that long.

  Simmons straightened. His face had gone blank, and the Reaper lurked below the corn-fed aw-shucks regularity of a sweet Nebraska boy descended from good-natured Scandinavians. His hand was on Walt’s shoulder, and his big blunt fingers dug in a bit.

  “Minnesota,” Walt repeated. “There’s a man, I don’t know his name, in Minneapolis. In an old grocery store, but it’s a house now. That’s the only safehouse I know!”

  Zampana studied Swann’s face. “We have the address.”

  “We don’t need this asshole, then.” Simmons’s hand tightened again.

  Walt whimpered.

  “Simmons.” Zampana, very softly.

  Each time, it took a little longer for the Reaper to glance at Swann for direction. The seconds ticked by. Finally, the Reaper’s upper lip lifted, his cheeks reddening. “Okay.” When he did look up, it was at Spooky first. She held his gaze, level and cool. “Well?”

  Walt whined again. His face was puffing up, and his tongue probed for what was probably a tooth loosened in the first go-round.

  “Cuff him.” Swann sounded tired, even to himself. “Zampana and Spooky can prep him for hauling. I need you for something else.”

  “What?” Simmons didn’t move.

  Swann hooked his thumbs in his wide leather belt. He didn’t reply, and after a few more tense moments, Simmons turned Walt loose with a last vicious squeeze.

  The captain restrained himself from saying Good boy. There was a word for a dog that didn’t particularly care what it bit, and the word for a raider gone into the red was the same. “We got a nineteener,” he said heavily, and Simmons’s eyes lit up with that particular cold, sterile blue glow. “I think we’re gonna talk to him up close.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Cures God of Us

  July 8, ’98

  “Reminds me of Texas,” Zampana said, squinting at the road as the sun sank bloody orange. “Raiders there used RVs too. You could clear ’em out and haul an ultralight in one, or even a small prop plane. Miles of nothin’, and we used the ham radio sometimes to bounce messages around before the Firsters got wise. Hit an installation with air cover, man, then vanish. They had the helicopters, but we could move the planes around…the only problem was getting gas—we didn’t have any sleds or retrofits.”

  Spooky made a soft noise, just marking that she was listening. She liked it when Zampana talked like this, quiet and low, reminiscing. With the hum of the tires and a bottle of distilled water in reach, it was…nice.

  Zampana sucked on her top teeth for a moment, then continued. “Nah, the retrofits only came after Second Cheyenne, when I hooked up with Swann. He’d been pushed all the way back there, one step ahead of the Reklamation Army. Those were dark fucking days, I tell you.”

  The first offensive, meant to take back the seceded Western States, had been breathtakingly successful until it ground to a halt near the Rockies. First Cheyenne had been called a Firster victory at the time, though the bloodbath had pretty much skimmed the cream of the RA. It took Second Cheyenne to do that army in completely. Of course Spooky had only heard about the latter piecemeal.

  At Baylock, right before the bombing.

  “Reklamation,” Spooky agreed, a shudder shifting her hips in the seat. When the Fourteeners had gathered up all the “blood-pure” organizations, it was the Klan who gave the most lasting gift, putting k’s in everything and flipping words around. Patriot. Re-Edukation. Rendition. Blood. None of it meant what it used to in the dictionary, and all of it was horrifying. Out of all the words, though, reklamation was the worst.

  If you weren’t going to be a part of Greater America, well, everything on you and in you would be “reklaimed.” The killing bottles and the bath bays were just a natural extension of that concept, that one little word.

  Their RV slowed, Zampana sensing potholes ahead. It wasn’t a difficult guess—refugees cluttered either side of the freeway, some moving in clumps, others collapsed atop whatever they’d managed to carry from their homes. Yellow dust rose in veils, bugs splattered the dry windshield, and the vehicle swayed a bit as Zampana slowed further. Some of the power poles around here had been splintered or lopped short by artillery, and great scars gouged the fields on either side, greening at their edges since the human beings had stopped blowing shit up everywhere.

  There were still scattered pockets of Firster crap, sure. America was huge. Some of the Firsters down south had taken a few pages from the raiders’ playbook, but with plenty of major cities shelled to bits and so many people deciding that leaving the smaller towns was preferable to starving to death, the assholes didn’t have many to steal from, beg from, or kill except their own supporters.

  “The RA wasn’t at Memphis,” Spooky f
inally added. They’d already been moving west by then. “But I heard, later. In the transit kamps.”

  The back of the RV was quiet. Simmons was sacked out on the couch-like bench along the strip of dining table, the only place big enough for him to rest. Sal was sleeping too, fussily buckled into a jumpseat and lolling with his mouth half open and a bubble of saliva collecting in the corner, his cheeks rough with stubble and his black curls tumbled. Minjae was in the overhead bed, curled around a couple pillows. Prink sat on the floor with his back to the door of the tiny bathroom, bent over a cheap paperback with a pink cover showing two women in a lustful and exceedingly gymnastic embrace. His carroty hair flopped as the RV’s pads hummed over a series of frost hillocks in the pavement.

  Swann, Chuck, and Lazy Eye had transit duty this time, and were on a sled with Walt Eberhardt trussed like a bird for roasting. The potbellied motherfucker was probably just glad Simmons wasn’t along for the sled ride.

  “Shitty.” Zampana leaned forward, arching, stretching in the seat. Long trips were hell on the back no matter what you were driving.

  “You could tell when the offensives happened.” Spooky’s eyes unfocused; the roadside masses blurred together. Skinny, wan women with sheared hair, some of them in long sleeves and skirts despite the heat, holding pleading signs a little higher as the RV passed, mostly variants of WILL WORK FOR FOOD. Plenty of the women had bruised faces, too—in some places, Firsters took a page out of the Christian Court playbook and branded “fraternizers.” The women who had survived the Firsters’ Scarlet Woman Initiative had longer hair, were not quite as thin, and were considerably less vacant-looking. The men, gaunt or stocky, were all hard-eyed and dirty, sitting in whatever shade they could find or trudging along with their thumbs out, shoulders hunched. “There would be a bunch coming in with flash burns or crushes. Lots of striping the day after.”

  “Jesus.” Zampana crossed herself. In the camps, the lashes weren’t counted like they were for Public Atonement. Instead, the flogging went until the flesh came off the bone, and kept going.

  “Can I ask you something?” Spooky dug in a coat pocket, bringing out half a ration bar. She hunched, unwrapping it a little guiltily. None of the fugees outside could see her, but it still felt…wrong. She quashed the urge to look over her shoulder. There was no jar kaptain to grab the food, or singer to inform on her.

  Habit was hard to break.

  “Go ahead.” It didn’t look like Zampana minded. “Should get you some protein shakes, too. How’s your stomach?”

  “Fine.” She flattened her free hand across her belly, dug her fingers in briefly, and really thought about it. “Yeah, fine. You a Christer? I mean, what kind? If you want to say.”

  “Catholic. Don’t let it worry you, I’m not a thumper.” Zampana grinned. Her hair, damp from a cold shower at the last stop, poured over her shoulders. In a little while someone else would drive, and she’d braid and pin the mop up. “You?”

  A short, harsh caw of a laugh escaped Spooky’s throat. “Kamps cured me of God, Pana.”

  “Yeah, but what cures God of us, mi Abuelita would say.” Zampana slowed still further. “Look at this. They’re all over the road.”

  They were indeed. A scuffle had broken out on the wide, dusty meridian, yellowing grass beaten down by foot traffic. Zampana whistled, a long low noise, the RV slowing to a nudging crawl as a tide of humanity blocked the freeway’s ribbon. A sign to the right had a perfectly placed hole in the middle—looked like a mortar hole, but how did it hit perpendicular like that? God only knew. The shot had eradicated the lettering but left the fact of the sign itself, and someone had strung a tarp below to make a sort of tent.

  “No,” Spooky murmured. “Grenade launcher.”

  “What?” Zampana glanced over at the blasted sign. “That? Huh, yeah, looks like. What are they fighting over?”

  “Can’t see.” Nibbling at the bar was soothing. When you were eating, there was nothing else in the world as wonderful or interesting. She leaned forward too, peering at the scrum. Looked like men involved, and a bright red flash of blood glowed fresh through the dust. They had one down and were stomp-kicking. “Maybe a Firster?”

  “Not a lot of those advertising it anymore. Ration thief?” Zampana guessed. “Look at that, his head’s…ew.”

  More blood spattered, and the growling crowd-noise took on a higher pitch. The disturbance spread, a clot of violence around a sodden crumpled mass that had once been a man fracturing into smaller pieces of shoving, yelling, a high short scream from a woman caught at the edge.

  Swann might have made Zampana stop and tried to restore some order, but Spooky just watched as the RV drifted forward through the crowd. The sea noise of excited voices all babbling at once washed against the windows, and she bit off a good chunk of the bar, luxuriating in the tang of fresh cranberry. You could get new bars instead of old, crumbling ones now, and they were good. Some of them even had real chocolate shavings instead of carob stubs, but it was the vitamin C ones Lara liked best.

  No. Not Lara. Anna, or Spooky.

  Each time she caught herself, there was a slipping sideways motion. Inside, not outside, as if everything inside her had come loose for a split second and jolted to a stop on a protruding nail. Like the scar on their father’s hand, a short sharp brutal pink hyphen.

  “What’s going on?” Prink, near the back, shaken free of his book by the change in speed.

  “Crowd in the road.” Zampana, losing a little patience, hit the horn once, twice. Light taps, but the blatting jolted Spooky. It sounded too much like roll call. “Looks like a fight. Or they caught someone stealing.”

  Prink made a low, chuffing, disgusted noise. “Prolly a nineteener.” Certification was a slow process, and with records wormed or burned, you had to catch false certifications in interrogation or get witnesses. Funny, those who’d had Patriot pins and Party posts all seemed to have vanished, pictures of McCoombs were now torn down, and everyone was now someone who had resisted.

  At least, that’s what they wanted you to think.

  “Who knows?” Zampana hit the horn again. “They should stay out of the road.”

  “Run a couple over.” With that wisdom shared, Prink went back to his book, licking his dry lips and stretching out his legs.

  “That’d make the cells sing.” Zampana kept the RV nosing forward, counting on the whine and buffet of the pads to keep the crowd away. By the time Spooky grubbed the last crumb out of the wrapper, they’d broken free of the worst of it, and the refugees started to scatter for the sides of the road. Some tried to flag the RV down, but the festoons of barbed wire gleaming along the sides of the vehicle discouraged barnacles. At least this wallowing hulk didn’t have tires that could be spiked by the desperate. The flat, reflective buffer pads along the bottom, full of glow from the kerro engines, were way better. Except when something fleshy got caught under them, and squealed.

  “How many camps were you in?” Zampana’s curiosity was thoughtful, not prying.

  Spooky counted on her fingers. Baylock. A transit kamp, then another. Maybe another one before Gloria? “Four? They blur together. I got sick. Don’t know why I wasn’t selected into the bottle.” Sick was one way of putting it.

  “Dios.” Zampana crossed herself, a quick reflexive movement. “Used up all your luck, chica.”

  “Maybe.” Spooky folded the wrapper in half, folded it again. You could get them really small if you did it the right way. A pad of foil-ish wrapping was useful in several tiny ways, and it was habit not to throw away anything that could be repurposed.

  They passed another road sign, this one shattered and hanging in curls of metal. A plank had been attached to one of the poles, proclaiming CAMP 2MI in sloppy white reflective paint, an arrow pointing drunken-crooked to the right toward a venomous glitter of bright blue water. Two sleds winked above the liquid gleam, circling slowly—maybe bringing in purification tabs; Christ alone knew what was in the groundwater around here. Or
maybe they were just keeping an eye on a seething mass of humanity. At least the refugee collection sites weren’t fenced.

  Still, it was good Spooky wasn’t in one of them. She didn’t have to shuffle in line for rations or sit through certification questioning. Less mud, less crowding, less of the breathing crowd pressing in on her, shoving, forcing, screaming all at once. The only trouble was, before, she could pretend that the one voice she wanted to hear was in the middle of all the others, just drowned out by the cacophony.

  Now the unsilence was deafening. How did people born in ones instead of twos stand it? All the…loneliness.

  “But maybe not all,” she added, as the RV accelerated past the exit, through the clogged artery of a smashed overpass. Gangs of refugees had been put to work clearing the roads, small human hands hauling chunks of unforgiving concrete. “Or maybe just the bad.”

  “That’s a good way to look at it.” Zampana rolled the window down a little, and fresh hot summer air roared past. “Light me a candy, Spooky.”

  “Thought you didn’t smoke.”

  “They’re not real cigarettes.” Zampana shook her head, her drying hair raveling into curls. “Besides, after seeing that, I need something.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Ten Threes

  July 10, ’98

  He checked the map twice and decided yes, this was the place. The address numbers were taken off, and the streets were woozy staggers, some of them pocked with craters from drone attacks; their crumbling sidewalks, put down in the previous century, were too thin for the size-obsessed America that followed. Some of the trees had survived, and there were gangs of fugees sweeping the debris up into piles. Humans just like ants, scurrying back and forth to get things lifted, arranged, put away. Nobody took any notice of a skinny kid in a dusty tan sports jacket, loitering in the shade of a miraculously unhurt poplar, its leaves fluttering in a breeze redolent of dust, exhaust, and colorless kerrogel reek, plus the edge of rot from bodies trapped in ruins.