Afterwar

by Lilith Saintcrow

  The most sickening thing was that it smelled like any other meat. Pork roast, to be precise, and the mouth would begin to water before disgust crashed through every nerve.

  Disgust couldn’t stand up to the hunger. Some of the prisoners had rosy cheeks and imperceptibly shaking hands, pariahs who didn’t mind the loneliness as long as they could get their teeth into flesh.

  Any flesh at all.

  Fear, rising from a slow simmer to a roiling boil. Stupid, coppery fear, adrenaline flooding her thin tired body again. All she had to do was take the first step. Then she’d be committed, and if they shot her, fine. It would hurt, but everything did. She could put up with it, as long as she knew it was going to end. Maybe, before the curtain fell, she’d feel the tickle and dreamy slowness of Lara’s thoughts through her own head, hear their secret language given breath again, feel her sister’s fingers in her hair. Gentle braiding, her own hands moving slightly as if she felt the strands.

  Just one step. Move. Do it now.

  Why didn’t she? Why did she just stand there, straight and trembling? Why?

  Her legs refused to work. Her idiot body simply refused. There was no reason to keep going, Lara was gone, her sister was dead and swinging from the walnut tree and there were no take-backs, no do-overs. She was utterly alone, even with the blaring sirens of other people’s shouting brains splashing against her, a starfish’s leg torn away from the body. Salt stinging along the wound, idiot cells growing and dividing, bodily processes going on with dumb plodding stubbornness.

  No. Get moving.

  Her legs wouldn’t move. The longer she stood here, the more chance one of the jar kaptains would notice and stroll over with a sickstick to hurry her up, and there went her plans of a…

  …dignified?

  No. A relatively painless exit. It was too much, all of this was too much, she was stupid and weak. She was a coward. Had always been.

  Even a coward could loathe herself enough to finally do something about it.

  The wind picked up, cold and raw despite the thin sunshine, the frayed edges of the rag around her stubble-bristled head brushing her nape and forehead with tiny sweat-stiffened fingers. A black uniform oozed across her peripheral vision, and her right foot twitched.

  Something inside her skull twitched, too.

  The guard—tall, blond, pale blue eyes, a recruitment poster in impeccable black wool—turned his head. Stared at her. The twitching inside her brain intensified. Shoot me. Come on, shoot me.

  He examined her, his right hand low at his hip where the pistol lurked. Habit hunched her over again, her rock-sore fingers curling around a chunk of stone. She lifted it, without a grunt—wasted energy, and she couldn’t afford any of that.

  Not if she was such a fucking coward she had to go on breathing. The chance was lost now. Frittered away, gone.

  Spooky jerked into wakefulness, her right hand digging for her sidearm. The private wisely froze behind the counter. “It’s ready,” he repeated. “Easy there, ma’am. Easy.”

  She licked cracked lips, shook out her hands. Her ass was numb, and her legs would hurt once she hauled herself up. “Okay.” A dead husk of a word. Her mouth tasted like Gloria mud.

  “You were dreaming.” He had both hands up, palms out. “Okay?”

  “Yeah.” She very carefully took her hand away from the gun. “Sorry.” She began working her way up to standing, wincing as her legs reminded her nerve compression was not happy, and they could just as easily refuse to carry her, thank you very much.

  His shrug said Don’t worry about it, but the faint gleam of sweat on his forehead said Shit, that was close, trigger-happy raiders, goddammit.

  “I got the prints isolated and packeted to CentInt.” Sheepishly, he lowered his hands. He’d taken his jacket off, and his undershirt was wilting fast. “They told me it’d take a little while to run, even with Priority One.”

  “Okay.”

  “You should maybe get some sleep?” Tentative. So you don’t shoot someone, his expression shouted. No spook factor needed to decode that.

  “Yeah.”

  “Want me to call someone?” A simple, decent human kindness. Out here, they could afford it.

  After Gloria, could she? “No.”

  In the end, she went back to the landing pad and thumbed the lock for the prototype’s hatch. Climbing inside, she stretched out on the metal grating floor, her head pillowed on Minjae’s empty laptop case, and fell, finally, into mercifully dream-free blackness.

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Good News, Bad News

  August 3, ’98

  “We have winners!” Hendrickson, flimsy sheets flopping in his hands, thumped down on the cafeteria bench next to Swann, who blinked over the rim of a zinc coffee mug and tried not to choke.

  Simmons, across the table, bent over a mound of eggs and bacon. Real eggs, real bacon, and he was consuming a small mountain of each, his clean damp hair slicked down. Sal had a stack of pancakes roughly the size of manhole covers, his unoiled curls flopping as they dried, and Zampana had contented herself with scrambled eggs and a stack of the same gigantic flapjacks, drenched in syrup for her sweet tooth. Ngombe, shoveling down buttered oatmeal in a truly prodigious quantity, reached for a saltshaker with the quick, darting speed of a ferret. Between her and Zampana, Spooky picked at a smaller bowl of oatmeal, hunching a little guiltily and spooning up more whenever Pana glanced at or elbowed her.

  Swann swallowed half-aspirated coffee, cleared his throat, and wished his nose wasn’t stinging so badly. “You get some chow?”

  “Gonna. Got possibles on the prints from some half-wormed kamp system shit. Also got some good news.” Hendrickson, showered and shaved, looked altogether too energetic for the amount of rest he’d probably had.

  “Eat first.” Swann made a grab for the flimsies.

  Hendrickson surrendered them willingly. “I will, in a second. The hand’s got a couple pings from the kamp system—they finally have most of it batched up. But the really good news is those numbers.”

  “Numbers.”

  “The pad near the radio? I looked at them for a little while, went to sleep, and when I woke up they made sense.” Hendrickson outright beamed. “They’re coordinates and place-names, along with code words, a whole fucking dictionary. I req’d another laptop and did some crunching. The safehouses—they’re mapped out. And that’s not even the best news.”

  “Jesus.” Simmons paused just long enough to pour something from his flask into his own coffee mug. “You’re a wonder boy, you know that?”

  “Damn straight.” Nothing could bring the Fed down this morning. “Swann, sir, I know where the motherfucker’s going. CentCom’s gonna be so fucking pleased with you.”

  Swann’s graying eyebrows rose. “With me?”

  “Yeah, well, you can break it to them. I didn’t want to ping without getting your thumb on it.” Hendrickson bounced upright, knocking his knee against the table. “Ouch. Anyway, I’ve got the safehouse locales mapped, and the laptop’s working on timetables if he’s in a gas-burner. I’ll tell you the bad news when I get back.”

  “Great.” Swann forked up more eggs. He would’ve preferred the bad news first, but the Fed was excited. Hendrickson swung away, heading for the steadily growing chow line, and the set of his shoulders shouted satisfaction.

  “Huh.” Simmons glanced at Pana. “That Henny, he’s all right.”

  “Looks that way.” Zampana’s tone clearly said she was still undecided but willing to be convinced.

  “I don’t like him,” Chuck muttered.

  “You don’t like anyone.” Sal reached for the tin syrup jar.

  “Come on, chica. You need the fiber.” Zampana elbowed Spooky again. Of course the most dangerous time was right after you got out of camp; you could rupture your stomach, eat yourself to death. The second most dangerous was when the trauma started catching up.

  Food wasn’t always food. It could be comfort, safety, control; it was
never just plain, simple nourishment.

  When Hendrickson returned, the spot next to Swann was still open, and he was greeted by Simmons’s crooked morning grin. The Reaper set his flask carefully on the table halfway between them, next to the white plastic saltshaker. “Want a little pick-me-up?”

  “Don’t mind if I do.” The Fed sniffed the top before he poured a splash into his coffee mug, though, and returned the flask with a nod. “Okay, so the bad news is, remember those Firsters?”

  Swann shoveled in a mouthful of real bacon, salt-crispy and loaded with fat. Jesus, it had been a long fucking time since he’d had something this good. “Which ones?”

  “The most recent set. They caught a few of them jackrabbiting after we plowed their bikes under. Holding them at Malmstrom. They’ve been doing rolling roadblocks, you know, fleecing fugees. Possible they may have seen our good doctor or know more about the goddamn network moving him around. I told ’em to keep the mofos able to talk for us, if you want.”

  “That’s bad news?”

  “Well, it’s all the way up at Malmstrom, and they may be a dead end. You never know.”

  “Huh.” Swann thought this over.

  Zampana elbowed Spooky again. “You need some bacon, too. Get some fat back on.”

  “Get some mamacita hips, eh?” Simmons stuffed a gigantic clump of egg into his mouth and grinned, jaws working furiously.

  “Shut up, Reaper.” Pana rolled her eyes. “Come on, Spook. Good stuff.”

  “I know,” Spooky mumbled, staring into her bowl like it held a universal secret or something. “I know.”

  “What are the chances they saw our fellow?” Swann filled his mouth with too-strong boiled coffee. It was heavenly. He began to shuffle through the flimsies, scanning each and deciding which ones he should spend a little more time on.

  “Fifty-fifty.” Hendrickson began to apply himself to his plate, barely pausing to chew. “The route matches up.”

  “And where’s he headed?”

  “Boise.”

  “Boise.” Past the DMZ. “Now that’s…”

  “Whole lotta shit in Idaho before the war,” Sal said suddenly. “North in the panhandle. Fucking Nazis and Minutemen. Practically screamed to join the Firsters, the whole shitty lot of them.”

  Swann sucked in his cheeks. Took another deep draft of coffee. “So we got us a bunch of Firsters deciding to head to Seattle or some shit?”

  “Alaska.” Hendrickson started shoveling chow. “And we all know who’s there.”

  “The fucking New Soviets kayaking across the strait. Why didn’t this bastard go east?”

  The Fed shook his head, washing down a barely chewed mouthful and grimacing slightly at the engine cleaner in his coffee. “What, right where all the Feds are checking everyone? It’s kind of smart, actually. Head back to the DMZ, figure out a way across now that it’s peacetime, and hop up to Alaska. Then the Russkies’ll pay for what he’s got.”

  “Pay him nine grams right in the back of the neck.”

  “Not necessarily. They’ll need him to help sort and apply the data. He’s got more in his head, probably. They’d want someone who worked on it to help them. And if it looks like the Russians’ll get nasty, there’s always the Chinese to sell to. Fuck, even Japan would take this, and offer some kind of immunity.” Hendrickson sobered. “I send this in, CentComm’ll want to do a gigantic fuckery-up all over the DMZ, and that’ll muddy the waters. Part of why I held off.”

  “The Russians gonna get themselves some Spookies, huh?” Simmons made a face into his demolished pile of henfruit and pig. “Fuckers.”

  “Simmons, shut your fucking mouth.” Swann didn’t quite bang his fist on the table, but it was close.

  Spooky’s spoon settled in her bowl. She sat, staring at the oatmeal’s lumpy gray. A thick pat of butter—real butter, not margarine, since the front lines had moved on and second echelon had plenty of time to get things rolling again here—had turned into an oily golden blob. A spot of sunshine on a lunar hellscape. There was dust on the moon, wasn’t there? Thick and powdery, with no wind to stir it.

  “Could you be any more of an asshole this morning?” Zampana’s arm settled over Spooky’s shoulders. “Come on, Spook. That’s barely a quarter.”

  “I could.” Simmons sucked in his cheeks again. “Sorry, Spooks. I don’t mean it.”

  “I know,” she replied numbly.

  “Huh.” Swann shuffled the flimsies again. “Not a lot of safehouses in the DMZ. Except that Helena one, right there, Christ, right near the base. And then fucking Idaho.”

  “Yeah. You wanna question the motherfuckers in Malmstrom? Two male, one female.”

  “It’s right there, close.” Swann thought about it. When he straightened slightly, it was only to reach for the saltshaker. “I think we can squeeze it in.”

  Spooky picked up her spoon again. Ngombe, on her other side, was barely restrained motion, moving to a beat inside her head, jittering like she’d overdosed on coffee already. She didn’t care where they were going, as long as she was flying.

  Steadily, Spooky dipped the anonymous stamped stainless steel spoon, lifted it to her mouth. The bad-luck feeling was still there, and the longer it went on, the more she wished she’d taken that step in the quarry. Just the first step.

  Everything, everything would have been easier.

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Almost Sure

  The sled leveled off and Simmons quit white-knuckling his armrests; Spooky unbuckled and pulled her legs up on her seat. Hendrickson was now ensconced in the chair with the laptop station; he bit at his upper lip every once in a while, then his lower one, as he concentrated. Chuck, with Minjae’s deck safe inside its glittered-up case and held on his lap, glowered in the Fed’s general direction, but without the edge he might have had yesterday. His leg was better, though he still kept it stretched out and often scratched at his thigh, not daring to get at the bandage on his calf and risk Pana’s ire. He even unbent enough to call the man Henny, and the Fed was wise enough not to object to the nickname.

  Spooky peered over Hendrickson’s shoulder, watching while he collated data and checked subprograms. Nobody quite said things would have gone easier if Chuck had given up the deckwork to the Fed, but then again, nobody needed to because it was thought loud enough to make for a low-level tension, a knot in a string of yarn that only the right angle of careful pressure would loosen.

  Sal took the copilot seat because Zampana and Swann had their heads together, low mutters rising and falling as the sheaf of flimsies passed back and forth. Zampana didn’t like the idea of splitting up, but then again, she never liked that idea. I worry too fucking much about what stupid shit you’ll do without me around, she told him more than once.

  But Swann was Swann, and he carried his point. Pana shrugged and spread her hands. Then they settled down to examining each sheet of flimsy, turning it around and upside down. Occasionally they called a question over to Henny, who blinked owlishly each time he was jolted out of digital space.

  Spooky, her seat shifted forty-five degrees and locked, watched the screen blur and change over the blond soldier’s shoulder. Her stomach was stretched full, warm, and she was sleepy now that the sled was moving. Her chin rested on her arm, her elbow against Hendrickson’s nape, but he didn’t complain. It was enough that they weren’t calling him Johnny Fed anymore, maybe.

  “What’s that do?” she asked.

  His answer was a bare mutter, all his attention elsewhere. “Got a batch of partials from CentInt. Running through them one by one, in case Malm has our targets waiting for us.”

  Spooky froze. She stared at the laptop screen. Her breath touched Hendrickson’s hair. “Stop,” she whispered.

  “Yeah, those aren’t our guy; they’re tagged for—”

  “Go back,” she said. “Go back.”

  He did. She shook her head violently, almost hitting the back of his. “One more.”

  The picture was wormed,
blank pixels irretrievably gone, just a fuzzy arc that might have been a cheekbone and the ghost of a flag in the upper left corner, a drape of fabric. Several fields were blanked, the data wormed right out. The name had remained, though, a few of the vitals, and in the right middle third of the screen, there it was.

  K GLORIA REK/NRET.

  “Spook?” Simmons, across the sled’s central well, his blue eyes hooded and his fingers paling again on the armrests as he bore down. “What you got?”

  “Nothing.” Her tongue had turned to quarry dust, her throat furred with its dry grit. “Kamp fucker.”

  “Someone you know?” Chuck hugged Minjae’s bag.

  How could she answer that? You couldn’t really know anyone, even if you could peer inside their skulls and finger the matrix of memory and weird symbols, shifting through assumptions by instinct. “Maybe.”

  “Well, that’s our missing-a-hand bastard.” Hendrickson maxed the window, studying what was left of a personnel record after worms had been at it. “E. Thomas. Hardcore Patriot, he’s an R3. File’s flagged, so there’s more somewhere in the system. I can run down everything on him if you want, Spook. Don’t know if he’s one of the assholes held at Malm yet.”

  Her ears were full of rushing. Was this the bad luck? A shudder worked down her back, and the oatmeal threatened to crawl up from its warm, dark home and lunge for escape.

  I love you…Wait for me. “Is he certified?”

  “I was gonna check.”

  “Okay.”

  “What are the chances of him being our dude?” Simmons wanted to know.

  “Pretty definite; we’ve got an eighty percent match on his digits. The only uncertainty is we’re working off half-wormed shit here, but I can—”

  “Track it down,” Swann said over his shoulder. “If Spooky pinged it, run that motherfucker down.”