Afterwar

by Lilith Saintcrow

  “Firsters almost burned Spooky at the stake. We’re kind of protective.” The first half was sort of a lie, unless one counted camp internment as immolation. Which wasn’t far off.

  Hendrickson’s chin dipped a little. That was all. “So the nosebleeds are normal?”

  “Not so much anymore.”

  Hendrickson nodded as if he’d expected the answer. “MREs? Protein packs? Ammo?”

  “For Chrissake.” Swann leaned in, began scanning and tapping. “Gonna need another sled to carry all this.”

  “Well, at least I’m useful.” Hendrickson’s teeth showed, a semicircle rictus. “Want to know how I got this?” He lifted his left hand a little, displaying the scars. “My unit got taken by the Reklamation fucks in north Colorado, during their first big push. Sent us to Pilgrim. I wasn’t shoved right into the bottles there, for some reason.”

  That made Swann pause, turning his head to regard the other man steadily.

  “They were big on branding there.” Hendrickson’s tone had turned thoughtful, distant, just the same as Spooky’s when she mentioned something about fucking Gloria. He looked at the burn scar, fingers closing slowly, opening again. “One of the Butcher’s boys did it. Made a mistake, though. Didn’t tie me down enough.”

  Swann looked down, tapped at the touch screen. No reason to pass up a resupply chance, and people had an easier time talking when you weren’t staring at them. “That so?” He was getting really good at not looking at soldiers while they told him horrible shit.

  Of all the skills wartime had given him, it was one he liked least.

  “Yeah. I hooked up with Kellogg’s crew after I went through the wire. Saved me from a patrol sent to drag me back to Pilgrim.” A faint hitching sound, clearing his dry throat. A thin sheen of sweat on his forehead could have been the heat outside, or something else. “What I’m trying to say is, I’m not the enemy, okay?”

  Never said you were was on the tip of Swann’s tongue, but he decided that was probably not what Minjae, or even Prink, would call tactful. Besides, it was a damn lie, and while this fellow might be a watchdog, he wasn’t a Firster. “Okay.” There. That was a reasonable response, he decided. He caught himself reaching for his hat again, and finding nothing but skin and his own hair.

  Fuck it. When he got back to the sled he’d root through his luggage and find the damn thing. If he wasn’t allowed some goddamn retirement, neither should a piece of soggy-ass, leathery felt be.

  Maybe it satisfied the Army man, maybe not. In any case, Hendrickson pointed at the screen with a thick, callused finger. “You done?”

  “Think that’ll do ’er.” Swann nodded at the depot sergeant, whose eyes glittered a little, like Chuck’s.

  “Hell of a Christmas list.” The sergeant stretched, a long lithe movement, and scratched at the side of his neck. “Take me a little bit.”

  “No hurry.” There wasn’t, until they had a good direction. Which Spooky and Minjae would give them. Sometimes all you could do was wait. That was 95 percent of the goddamn war, waiting around. The other 5 percent was sheer terror, and all of it was sickening.

  Hendrickson made a short sound that could have been a laugh, or his own impatience, as the console powered down and a flimsy printer whirred into life, producing a paper list with checkboxes. “Don’t tell him that, we’ll be here all night. Let me through, Sergeant, I’ll help.”

  “Sir?” The sergeant stiffened. “Are you sure, sir?”

  Swann thought it pretty likely the fellow didn’t want Hendrickson seeing any bare spots on the shelves. Selling from the depot on the sly was a good way to make a few writs or a lot of friends, but if an officer came by, you were looking at some uncomfortable times indeed.

  “Very sure,” Hendrickson replied, and his faint steely smile, sly as a Sicilian farmer’s, made it obvious he was thinking along the same lines.

  Swann left them to it, heading back out into the damp, breathing night. He took a few steps sideways from the door and lit a candy. It was time for some thinking, and he didn’t like the way said thinking was already tending.

  The world was full of problems. There was Simmons sliding further and further into twitchy violence, Prink and his shaky hands, Sal and his unspoken but sensed desire to quit this goddamn shit work and go home. At least Sal had a home to go back to, but he was a calming influence, and Swann hated to lose anyone.

  Which brought him to Lazy. The fucking kid, going off and getting himself gutshot. The surrender was supposed to put an end to that bullshit. The crew needed a wake, but were they going to have to drink everyone else they’d lost into the ground, too? How many times until it took?

  There probably wasn’t enough rotgut in the world to keep all the dead quiet.

  Lazy. The stupid kid. The stupid, lovable, goofy-ass kid.

  Last of all, the two big problems, which were really one: Spooky. The Federals certainly suspected she’d been at Baylock, so they’d sent in this nice little captain with raider credentials to gather what intel he could? It was just sneaky enough to be possible.

  Candy smoke wasn’t as harsh as tobacco. It was no Camel, that was for damn sure. He listened while he inhaled, drawing it down deep in the lungs. It just gave you something to do with your idle hands, really. Sedative his ass.

  Night insects singing, crickets and what-have-you. Whine of kerro engines to the east, swords of white light jutting down from the slow-moving drift of sleds. Keeping an eye on things; there was probably a refugee site over there, to judge by the smoke. Other kerro whines and the deep grumble of a gleeson slightly to the south, more bright lights and the sounds of construction. Either they were digging this temporary base in deeper or they were hauling away leftover crap from a battle. Twisted metal, burned-up junk, shell casings—a rich magnetic harvest. At least the Firsters hadn’t used much in the way of mines.

  Mines and IEDs were a raider trick. You used everything you had to even out the playing field, behind the lines and running hard.

  Swann stood, and smoked, and thought about all of it. After a few minutes he stiffened, the candy’s glowing-red cherry tip jerking.

  If the Federals didn’t already know Spooky had been at Baylock, they suspected strongly enough to keep an eye on her. And there was no goddamn way they would give raiders, even ones who had signed up and did good work, this kind of carte blanche unless someone else was after this Dr. Johnson, too.

  And let’s just say, Swann thought, for the hell of it let’s just say his raiders caught this bastard. The Federals probably wouldn’t hang him. Someone who could make Spookies? They’d scoop him up and set him to it. Imagine that, a bunch of soldiers who could do…what she did.

  It was enough to give you nightmares.

  There was no way around it, Swann decided, tossing the candy away as if it were foul. They tasted sugary, true, but that was some kind of chemical lie. Probably give you a new kind of cancer.

  He was gonna have to have to think about how to make Lara, now Anna, their Spooky, disappear from Federal sight.

  Just in case.

  Part Three

  Gloria Mundi

  Chapter Forty-Four

  A Fine Subject

  July 20, ’98

  Another day, another shitty little hole in the ground in some godforsaken flat stretch of the Dakotas. A clapboard house set far away from anything resembling a town or civilization, but only two miles from the charred remains of what had been a frontier kamp. Not a Reklamation site, but a short-term, dig-up-the-sod piece of prairie—Retraining, for those who had the proper racial heritage but, for one reason or another, needed a little convincing about contributing to the Greatest Society. The last safe spot had given them a rusting old petrol-burning piece-of-shit truck, and while it was a relief not to be staggering along behind the hatchet-faced son of a bitch, the cloud of stink made Gene long for at least a hybrid.

  It was all academic, because something wasn’t right. Gene’s legs wouldn’t quite obey him, and the hi
gh whining in his ears made sleep or coherent thought almost impossible. The doctor gave him some capsules, and he washed them down with mineral-tasting ditchwater without thinking.

  This place had a bedroom full of liquid prairie light, its only furniture an ancient iron-framed bedstead the doctor pushed hard against the wall before setting to work. The world went away for an indeterminate time, becoming a droning buzz and smears of weird color. As soon as Gene opened his eyes, he knew he had a fever, and the hard pinch on the inside of his left arm was a needle pushed into a vein. A sharpish, sour smell of rotting potatoes warred with a vomitous stink, and he tried to roll onto his side.

  “Now, now,” a familiar, leathery little voice said. It was the doctor, his face swimming into view. “It will pass; it’s a common reaction.”

  Christ. What had the bastard done to him? Antibiotics, he’d said. I don’t like the way that looks.

  It wasn’t Gene’s face; it wasn’t the wound in his calf either. It was the small rusty-knife incision just above his left wrist, swelling hard and black now under a thin pane of stretched, pink, shiny skin. A dirty wound. Splashing through mud and oily, infested water hadn’t done him any favors. Red streaks crawled up his arm, he sweated when he wasn’t shivering, and he’d passed out in the truck. Amerika had died, now he was dying, Eugene Thomas understood as much.

  “Oh, don’t be so dramatic.” Something cold probed at his wrist. “We just have to drain this.” Poking, prodding. The stink grew worse. “You really should have said something before now. Not so long ago, you’d probably lose the arm.”

  “Gee,” Gene heard a drunk man with his own voice slur. “Thanks, Doc.”

  “He thanks me.” Amused, the doctor pulled the needle out. “No, don’t thank me, young Patriot. As it is, you might just lose the hand.”

  Gene starfished, arms and legs thrown out, but he was feeble and feverish. Besides, the doctor had strapped him to the bed’s convenient, heavy frame.

  “Stop that.” Sharply now, and the doctor’s face changed, stretching like a reflection in a funhouse mirror. “Or I’ll leave you tied here to rot.”

  Gene quieted. He suspected, even in his state, that the Baylock man would do it. Christ, if he could just get on his feet…

  Johnson turned away, rummaging in something set on a plain stripped-pine nightstand pulled close to the bed. “Much better,” he mumbled. “You know, I’ve always wanted to…never got the chance in med school. Sequencing and editing are all very well, but sometimes you want to get your hands dirty. Right?”

  The crazy fucker. Gene tried to think. All he could summon, though, was a croaking groan as something warm spread up his arm. He saw her again, those hazel-dark eyes and her dark hair, the full underlip. Standing up in the quarry, straight and graceful, those eyes catching his, that gaze burrowing into him…“—naaaaah,” he moaned, the last half of her name. She never seemed to listen when he called her by it, responding to direct commands only but also submitting to whatever he wanted.

  Anything at all.

  “A little cocktail of my own devising. Is it pleasant?” The doctor leer-grinned, thin mouth stretching, and the world distorted sideways. A cold probing at Gene’s left wrist, a sharp spike of pain breaking the warmth for an excruciating second, a jet of foulness. “It isn’t for me. Christ, this stinks.”

  Gene shut his eyes. Whatever the doctor had loaded him on was pleasant. The world went away for a while, except a faint, persistent tugging on his arm and a nose-scouring wave of disinfectant.

  With the young man finally resting comfortably, the doctor could stand in the front room of the old farmhouse, looking at his grandfather’s sagging armchair. The red corduroy upholstery held both damp stains and the round, mean little eyes of cigarette burns, and if Sam Johnson concentrated he could see the old man himself lounging there in one of his yellowed wifebeaters and overalls, legs stretched out and a mug of exquisitely hard homemade cider to hand. He could even almost see little Sam, rolling one of his beloved Hot Wheels along the worn carpet and listening to the television bark out the staccato rhythms of old war movies, his grandfather every once in a while laughing or saying, That’s right, git ’em!

  It was a risk coming here. Perhaps the incident in Minnesota had been a coincidence, perhaps not. Science demanded methodical thinking and precision, and caution was handmaiden to both. If it meant he obsessively checked the lump in his traveler’s money belt, strapped securely under whatever approximation of clean clothing he could find in his bag on any given day, well, a little obsession showed a certain strength of character. Discipline, a commitment to ideals. All things his grandfather might have approved of.

  Approval might be too strong a word, though. Certainly the old man had hated little Sam’s father.

  The chair was moldering, and the entire house had been shut up for too long, but it was better than the bedroom reeking of foul-smelling pus squeezed from a wound. Who would have thought the young blond man could have so much infection in him and still manage to remain upright? At first Captain Thomas had been protective camouflage, but now Johnson was thinking he could be useful in other ways. The early Patriot recruitment drives had high standards of both genetic and ideological fitness, and while Johnson sniffed at the latter, the former was nearly ideal for research purposes.

  Assuming, of course, the young captain survived, and further assuming they both reached a place of safety.

  Sam Johnson turned sharply and headed for the kitchen. There were still dishes in the cupboard, dusty now but perfectly serviceable. What he was aiming for, however, was the mudroom, with its connecting door to the long, low garage holding the old tractor and the ancient Chevy, acquired near Duluth, that had belched and farted them the entire way here.

  And the workbench.

  Johnson wrinkled his nose at the smell—somehow, old garages always smelled like chicken straw and dry-rotted vegetables. There was an old CB radio on the workbench, shrouded in canvas. With a few minor adjustments, it could be made serviceable and wired in to the old antenna going up the side of the house. The pulse would communicate that he was alive to certain…interested parties. He’d rendered quite a few services; now was the time to call in a favor or two. At least those interested parties would provide him the means to continue the experiments. Hell, they’d even pay him handsomely to do so.

  Johnson twitched the canvas aside, sneezing at the dust. Data flashed through his head, patterns cropping up just like on a monitor. They’d been so close. So few successes, the most intriguing one lost in the drone bombing. But they’d carried on, burrowing under the shattered glass bones of Baylock’s hospital building and scouring the entire shrinking country for subjects and supplies.

  Only around 20 percent of the subjects survived, and of those, only 40 percent showed any promise at all. Those were bad odds if you wanted a whole corps of Enhanced, but considering that each one was worth a good ten ordinary soldiers if researchers could just standardize the application…

  Well, the solution was there. All he needed was enough time with the data, and enough supplies to continue. If his former friends didn’t see fit to rescue him, he could at least carry on his work in some forgotten corner until he had something definite and inarguable to show. You worked with what you had, especially when the stupid called your work illegal or unethical. Silly words, both of them.

  The young Patriot, once his infection was cleared, would make a fine subject. And the good doctor thought the fentanyl he’d just injected would no doubt help keep the fellow manageable.

  Johnson smiled and took a look at the radio. The first step would be scavenging enough power to turn it on.

  Fortunately, the truck engine had a battery.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  None of Us Right

  July 21, ’98

  “Just what are you fucking saying?” Minjae whispered, a fierce hiss usually reserved for someone interrupting her work.

  Prink glanced over his shoulder, hunching de
fensively. “I’m just sayin’ we should think about things. That this isn’t right.”

  “Isn’t right? What’s so right about what you’re—”

  “We don’t know she was a raider.” There. He’d said it. He was dead pale, and his coppery hair was slicked down with damp from the showers. Finding Min in the hallway, wrapped in a towel and dangling a pair of pink rubber flip-flops from one plump hand, had been a stroke of luck. She had her boots on, tied loosely, and she was probably looking forward to hot water. But dammit, he’d been chewing on this for a while, and besides, with the way she looked at Spooky, maybe she was thinking the same thing?

  Minjae’s chin went up. She regarded him for ten long, ticking seconds. “Oh. I think I get it now.” Nodding, her black hair standing up in an aggressive ruff. It only made her prettier, not that she needed any help. “You think Firsters put a spy in a kamp whorehouse and raped the shit out of her just so she could be picked up by us before the surrender, on half-wormed data. Gee, Prink. That’s amazing. I don’t know why anyone didn’t figure that out before.”

  The sarcasm was painful, but Prink persisted. “Think about what she can do. Who’s to say she wasn’t—”

  “Prink.” Minjae glared at him, still dead level. “You want to stop. Right there.”

  “I’m just sayin’—”

  “Remember her hauling you out of that fucking house at the burning camp? You do still remember that, right? She ain’t no fucking Firster, and you want to check yourself, man.” Minjae pitched forward, on her booted toes. You could go around in just a towel, sure, but a raider knew to take care of her feet. “You’re going all Reklamation, and it ain’t attractive.”

  “I don’t think she’s a Firster.” Now he was regretting he’d ever opened his stupid mouth. “I just, I dunno, Min. She ain’t right.”