Afterwar

by Lilith Saintcrow

Nothing in here was trapped, but it was still good to be cautious. “It’s all right.” Spooky sounded very far away, even to herself. A familiar rushing filled her ears, but she forced herself to look at the headrest, wobbling because the clamps had been loosened. Looked like he’d added padding to keep the head still. “Just thinking about it.”

  Prink tapped twice on the doorframe, his carroty hair sticking up in clumps. “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah.” Spooky rubbed at her knee. There was gonna be a helluva bruise there tomorrow. “What else we got?”

  “He didn’t write anything down, if that’s what you’re asking.” The redhead’s hands washed each other, an unconscious motion, the stub of his missing finger twitching. “No notes, no nothin’. Swann called yet?”

  Zampana shook her head. What Prink was really asking was completely different. “Motherfucker plazzed Lazy in the gut. I don’t know, Prink. Nobody can tell with a wound like that.”

  And even gutshot, the kid had managed to shoot the skinny-ass Firster bastard with his sidearm, then ping for backup. It was a damn good thing he’d been carrying a comm cell. Minjae was at the hospital waiting for news while Swann argued Proustinek, the military governor this entire pisswah had landed on, into turning Simmons loose again. Proustinek was a one-eyed bastard—literally, he’d taken shrapnel to the face during the Topeka Offensive, and it had soured his disposition.

  He was, alas, no Crunche. He wasn’t even a Poulson.

  “Well, the kid got him.” Prink pushed on either side of the doorframe. “What was he doing here? You think he was, maybe, warning ’em?”

  Spooky rubbed at her knee. It would be fine, but that gave her a reason to look down instead of at Zampana, whose silence turned as fierce as the sunlight assailing the outside of the tumbledown house. A few long, unhappy moments ticked by, all the fine hairs on Spooky’s body rising, her shoulders drawing up almost to her ears. Her uniform trousers were breaking in really well, even if she had to cinch them double tight with a regulation-issue webbing belt.

  It was funny, sometimes she wondered if she’d ever really worn a skirt, felt material sliding against shaved legs, bared her shoulders. She knew she had—she could remember dresses, and the pink soylon dress he had brought her. She could remember holding up one or two falls of shimmering material in the sorting shed…and the gentle swaying of a body in a blue-and-yellow floral summer frock.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Prink said quietly, as if Zampana had yelled at him. “Prolly came to get the fuckers himself. Him and his fuckin’ thirty.”

  Spooky’s head jerked up. What was that?

  Thud-thud. A pause. Thud-thud.

  “It was the wrong knock,” she muttered. “Shit.”

  “What the fuck?” Prink turned on his heel, his hand dropping to his sidearm.

  It was Zampana who caught on first, though. “Shh!” She waved a hand frantically. “It’s a Firster, Prink. Maybe the fucker we’re after. Go pretend you’re one of them, get him inside.” Her other hand dropped to her sidearm too, and her upper lip lifted, showing her strong, horsey white teeth. “Spooky, come on.”

  The tension snapped, a shower of cold relief inside Spooky’s chest. A strange chill certainty settled behind it. She could tell herself she only suspected who was at the door. It would be a lie, because she didn’t “suspect.”

  She knew.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  To Mean Something

  Peter Skelm’s mouth felt like a wool coat, fuzzy-thick and at once too dry and uncomfortably sweaty. He shivered in the shade of the overgrown, cavernous porch. Standing in the sun was worse, his armpits and thighs greasing up under the heat. This place had better have some goddamn antibiotics, or his wanderings were going to come to an inglorious end. It wasn’t right for a man who had served his country to die of tetanus, but the world was an unjust place at best, his grandfather always said, and this just proved it.

  He coughed, twice, into his left hand. Have to wash up as soon as he got in. He stared at the green-painted door—chips and cracks, a few thin glass panes a little above eye level, the doorknob of blackened metal sitting indifferently cockeye. Why even bother knocking?

  Oh, that was right. There was a code. Good way to get shot, knocking on doors these days. Salesmen were probably having a tough time of it.

  His vision blurred, the fever slipping him through time and memory, and for a moment the door was another one—a trim white-painted slab of wood neatly set in its frame, with two black-clad guards on either side.

  They always saluted him, even though he wasn’t precisely a soldier, but McCoombs said any man who did the disagreeable work of keeping the peace was a soldier in his Amerika, and God if that wasn’t good to hear. It was good to mean something. He’d read the history books, he’d signed on to all the Fourteen Words message boards when he was a kid, and for ten goddamn years, the Fourteen Words had been gloriously adhered to.

  Now, of course, they were back to being a dirty little code. Seeing the way things shifted made a man think. Meaning was slippery; it changed from day to day. Not like a bullet, or the lock on the door of a killing bottle.

  Maybe the fever was tetanus. He didn’t know. All he knew was the shrapnel flickering through the air, like the end of a whip, cracking and then the pain in his thigh, and the smell. It was probably the cut on his foot, oozing a bright green-yellow pus, that was the bigger problem, because that was the injury sending red streaks up his ankle and his calf, branching veinlike fingers.

  The green-painted safehouse door shuddered, bringing Skelm back into the present with a jolt. It opened a crack, and a hook-nosed redheaded idiot, his muddy eyes a little too close together and his hair too long for a real Patriot’s, peered out at him.

  Skelm’s own hair was too long, and filthy besides. He tried to keep himself clean, but staggering through fugee camps full of degenerates and immies wasn’t good for your health.

  A short, barking laugh escaped his thin, pale lips. “Amerika first,” he croaked.

  He heard movement on the other side of the door. For a long, hideous moment he was afraid he’d somehow bungled the password, or hadn’t found the right house. With everything shelled and fuckered-up, it was hard to navigate, and the fever…

  “Amerika always,” someone husked from the other side of the door, a low sweet voice. The redheaded idiot pulled it open and beckoned him inside with one limp hand. Christ, were they even using faggots on the underground railroad now? Sensitive, his mother called it, but Pete knew what that meant, yes indeed. It got your file marked and made the Army a no go, because don’t ask, don’t tell was one of the dark-age liberal victories.

  Looked like the fuckers had won in the end, though. Won all the way to DC, and the big man probably spirited away, hiding in the mountains for a while. At least, that’s what Skelm hoped. McCoombs was the only hope for this goddamn country. They’d regroup. Fight back. Somehow.

  He tacked gratefully through the door. There was a doctor at this stop, they’d told him. That meant antibiotics, and stitching up his foot, and maybe even—

  It wasn’t until there was a slam behind him and he saw the two women, one a goddamn immie with a broad greasy taco-bender face and the other a pale stick in a brand-spanking-new Federal Army sweater despite the heat and an unholstered 9mm pointed right at him that Peter Skelm, the Big Butcher of Pilgrim, understood there was no safety here, and he’d been caught at last.

  Funnily enough, he didn’t mind so much, as long as they had some goddamn medicine. He smiled weakly, charmingly, and lifted his shaking hands. “I surrender. Don’t shoot.”

  The stick-woman’s hand tightened, her finger tensing on the trigger.

  Skelm smiled drunkenly and collapsed against the wall.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Palliative

  July 12, ’98

  The world swam back into focus, one piece at a time. The heavy, funny, floaty feeling was new, and so was the smell—clean, bleached cl
oth. Sheets. Hospital sheets.

  “I ain’t gonna babysit,” a familiar voice said, hard on the consonants, clipped on the vowels. Simmons, with the buckle of the Bible Belt rubbing through every syllable. “Give me that.”

  “It’s not babysitting,” Chuck Dogg replied, a deep rumble. “And you’ve done enough drinkin’, my friend.”

  “Fuck.” Simmons was just visible, a large blond smear, his gray-green fatigues a blur underneath. “I think he’s awake. Hey, kid.”

  Lazy’s chin dipped slightly. He stared into the man’s familiar face—stubbled now, the tip of each small aggressive hair flaxen pale. “Sim,” he managed, through a throat dry as the back porch that summer he burned the pages from the Bible in the backyard and his little sister Connie’s face, white and awestruck, lifted to his like a sunflower’s. “Hey…man.”

  “Definitely awake.” The Reaper made a quick motion with one hand, a sketch of a wave. Chuck Dogg’s face swam into sight as well.

  The Dogg’s hair was damp, moisture caught in its woolen, red-knotted curls. Underneath the incipient ’fro, he looked grave and thoughtful. “Look at that. You a regular cowboy, Lazy.”

  “Amen to that.” Simmons jostled Chuck, reaching into the other man’s fatigue jacket pocket, digging. “Here it is.”

  Chuck’s mouth turned down at the corners. “Man, you shouldn’t drink no more, Sim.”

  “It’s not for me.” The Reaper uncapped a silvery hip flask. Nobody knew how Chuck kept it full; it was enough that he did, and there had been a few times, right around Second Cheyenne, that everyone had taken a shot because fuck it, they were probably gonna die anyway. “Jesus Christ, Dogg, you ain’t my mother.”

  “Damn straight. You too fuckin’ ugly.”

  A tired, slow laugh bubbled and burped up from Lazy’s dry, dry throat. It sounded like he was playing monster again, a flashlight under his chin and Connie giggling, horrified. A good little sister, only moderately annoying.

  If Connie hadn’t told Dad about him burning the Bible, he might not have gotten striped. Did she think about it, did she even remember? Was she even alive anymore? How old would she be? Ten? Maybe?

  Why was he thinking of Connie? It never ended well. That was, in Simmons’s terms, a fucking bad idea.

  Simmons held the flask to Lazy’s mouth. The liquid burned going down, but that was better than nothing. When the coughing settled, Lazy’s eyes watering, he heard the various sounds of medical machines. Beep, boop blurt, rinse and repeat. One was soughing across the room, sounded like his uncle’s breathing when the cancer rolled through his lungs and they couldn’t afford the hospital. Their dad’s application for Party membership had been denied for the fourth time. No reason given, but right after that, Connie had blurted it out at dinner. Bobby burnt a Bible, she’d chirped, and nuffin’ happened.

  “Thought you were gonna get a Firster on your own, huh?” Chuck’s teeth were very white, splitting the lowest third of his dark face. He generally looked fresh as a daisy, and Lazy couldn’t figure out how the hell he did it. Even during the retreat, the Dogg’s pants always had a good crease to them. A real raider. “Swann gonna give you what for.”

  “Shit,” Lazy whispered. “Gotta get my thirty, man.”

  “Amen.” Simmons lifted the flask again. “You want some more?”

  Lazy shook his head. Even that small movement tired him out, and he drifted away again, into a cloud that reminded him of the backyard. Sometimes, the sheets had smelled kind of like this at home. He really missed the sun-dried ones, though. There was nothing like hanging your goddamn laundry out to dry; even though he’d bitched endlessly to himself about his mother making him bring it in, now that he thought about it he’d actually be happy to do it for her. It was really funny, if you stopped and considered. All sorts of shit he used to bitch to himself about, he’d be kind of happy to do now. Like wash the dishes. Even pick up the dog shit, if she told him to.

  It would mean she was alive, and maybe still loved him.

  “He wake up?” someone said, a soft, female voice. Zampana, he’d know her anywhere. Sometimes, way down deep at the bottom of his brain before he went to sleep, he thought about how nice it was when she stood close to him. Her body heat was different than the others’. Warmer, somehow. Or just more direct.

  “A little bit.” Chuck sounded grave. “What’s the word?”

  Lazy drifted away. Funny, nothing hurt except his throat. The clear, fiery liquor burned, a rasping irritant. There was a pooshing sound, and a few moments later, a wonderful warmth slid up his arm to his shoulder, paused there, and spread through the rest of him.

  He didn’t hear Zampana’s whispered words as she flipped through Lazy’s chart, especially the ones that turned Simmons’s mouth into a hard, pursed little line that meant trouble.

  Morphine, Sim. Palliative.

  Chapter Thirty

  Victim’s Luxury

  The IV pole rattled as Peter Skelm settled in the chair. A bare concrete cube, just like all the other interrogation rooms, with the same one-way mirror along one wall. There was no tripod for a vidcaster, though that didn’t mean much—there could be a tiny lens up near the fluorescents, a little wireless dealie for flushing out degenerates and immies. Stick one of those with a rechargeable battery to a ceiling tile, sit back and watch them incriminate themselves.

  If you had nothing to hide, you had nothing to worry about, the saying went.

  How many raiders had been held in rooms like this? Only the ones they wanted something good out of. The others would be taken downstairs, to the windowless concrete rooms with stains worked into their walls and floors.

  Spooky leaned back in her own uncomfortable seat. Stretched her legs out under the bolted-down table. His chair wouldn’t move; it was bolted, too. Zampana checked the Big Butcher of Pilgrim’s IV again, glancing at Spooky with reddened eyes. The older woman’s gold hoops glittered fiercely as she moved, her braids pinned high and savagely tight.

  Spooky cleared her throat. “Thanks.” The single word fell, flat and uneasy, against the drain under the table. Right in the middle of the room. You could hose this fucker down, no muss no fuss. Easy cleaning, the housewife’s friend.

  Skelm’s fever was abating. You could see it in the way his eyes were brightening, the sickly flush retreating, antibiotics working overtime to clean his bloodstream. His left leg was bandaged almost all the way to the hip. He would probably lose it below the knee, but the doctors would do their best, even if he was a Firster.

  Even if he was a complete waste of skin, muscle, and breath.

  A faded, bleached hospital johnny and loose cotton pajama pants completed the picture of a patient. One slip-on shoe, the other foot closed in a sheath to keep the bandages full of antibiotic and steri-gel on the newly cleaned wounds. Norpirene was a goddamn wonder drug, cleaning out infection and burrowing in. You could pair it with antibiotics or add it to plasco—it didn’t care, just went quietly about its work.

  Just like a fellow raider, one whose presence you took for granted until he was on a hospital bed, drifting in a morphine haze.

  The Big Butcher was a skinny man now. A smudged ident picture, rescued from a burning file cabinet, showed a much heftier frame. In the picture, Peter Skelm stood near the proud, high-arched gates of the new Re-Edukation Kamp Pilgrim, grinning, a whip tucked under his right arm. His high boots shone, his hair was cut in the universal Patriot fashion—shaved on the sides and back, loose and floppy up top if he was young, bristle-stubbed if older. There was still an echo of the erstwhile healthy, committed Amerika Firster in the collection of bony, grinning, twitching, eye-rolling male across from her.

  Swann had asked her if she wanted the file. She’d just shaken her head. Now Spooky settled herself, and really looked at him.

  The chairs were uncomfortable—hers by default, his by design. The clear liquid dripping into his veins from the IV bag would feed him, fight the dehydration, fill him with yet more antibiotic to kill th
e infection raging up his leg.

  She didn’t have to look through the testimony in the file to know none of his victims ever had that luxury. She also didn’t need the scrawls in the medical section of the paperwork to know the grinning and twitching were probably not an act. Swann’s team had brought him in, so they got first crack at questioning him; Zampana had suggested waiting until the fever was under control and he wasn’t high off his ass with pain meds.

  Spooky just set her jaw and insisted.

  Anyway, she settled her ass against the metal seat, hands dangling off the ends of the chair arms, the back of her head against the top of the chair. That meant she could stare at him from under her lashes. Spooky filled her lungs, let the breath out.

  “Hello.” The left side of Skelm’s face twitched once, twice. “Which are you? Internist? Psychologist? Or are you entertainment?” The last word cracked halfway through. His grin was a death’s-head grimace. “You’re not an immie. A sympathizer, maybe. A blood traitor, I’ll bet.” He leered, almost drunkenly. “I already surrendered. You can’t do anything.”

  Maybe that was so. Prink had been all for shooting him first and making the ID later. Pana had stopped him. We gotta question him, we gotta get something out of this.

  The Butcher was a big fish, but there were others in the food chain—both vertically and laterally. No shortage, as Swann often muttered.

  Spooky let her gaze unfocus. A flutter of something inside her skull, right in the center of the brain. Corpus callosum, Lara’s knowledge whispered. The smell of burned bone from a saw as it carved through the skull, lightly, lightly, so curious students could peek below. The brain felt no pain; most headaches were from neck tension.

  Swann was no doubt watching. All he would see was Spooky in her chair, staring at the Big Butcher of Pilgrim. Who stilled, staring right back at her. The little shudders and shakes of an overloaded nervous system cracking its whip at bone and muscle eased. Skelm’s mouth dropped open, his stubbled cheeks relaxing, and his pupils dilated.