She had never actually counted the horses, but from many hours of standing at the window and gazing out over the parkland, she estimated there might be two or three dozen roaming around down there. The city was happy for its citizens to keep their horses in this way. For many people, they had become as important as cars had once been. And as important as horses had been before that, she thought.
So the city authorities – or maybe it was the government out in Seattle, she wasn’t sure – let people graze their horses and other animals in the public parks, which were otherwise used as market gardens. A good deal of Kansas City’s food supply normally lay out there, in the warmer months. Today, having to peer through the snow, she could make out a few hardy goats and dairy cattle. There was only the most basic stabling for the animals when the weather turned bad, though, and Sofia worried that their horses, Flossie and Marvin, would suffer in the cold. She had named both, of course, much to her father’s dismay.
Maybe later she would run some apples out to them. Papa wouldn’t get too upset about that. Being trapped inside was giving her a severe case of the crazies, in any case, and if he got upset, so what.
Truth be told, she didn’t care a damn about what her father thought at the moment. He was off enjoying himself at the markets with Maive. Sofia felt a stab of jealousy at that, without being able to pin down exactly who she felt jealous of and why. All the fifteen-year-old knew for sure was that she was stuck here in the loft concerned about the horses and bored out of her brains.
She sighed and her breath fogged up the glass directly in front of her face. She rubbed it clean with the arm of her sweater, wiping away a few marks she hadn’t known were there. They looked like ghostly impressions of her face – probably left over from the last time she’d stood pressed to the window while being held prisoner in the apartment.
The glass vibrated against her forehead. Living one floor above them was a rail-thin, long-haired meth head who cranked his stereo up during the day to sleep off the previous night’s drug binge. His favourite pastime of late was to stand in his window, waving his genitals to passers-by while shouting ‘I’M OKAY! I’M ALL RIGHT!’ Complaints to the landlord and the local authorities achieved nothing. There weren’t enough cops to respond or medical personnel to treat him, and they didn’t have room in the jails or psych wards anyway. She knew that from her part-time job, her three afternoon and evening shifts a week at North Kansas City General. The man was a public nuisance, but no one could quite bring themselves to throw him out on his own. He was a veteran, anyway, and so virtually untouchable. Her father had threatened him more than once, which a sane man would have taken to heart. But their neighbour was not sane. He was a crazy fucking loser. Papa had eventually given up trying to do anything about him. Like he had given up on so much else.
The meth head was just one of many in the neighbourhood. On the rare occasion she watched the news, Sofia saw a fantasy version of what life was like here in Kansas City. Safe streets patrolled by friendly cops, and militia working side by side with wholesome, smiling families – they always seemed to be gringo families, to use her father’s embarrassing term – rebuilding America.
Above her, the volume went up, as her neighbour started dancing, rattling the plates in the kitchen cabinet. She considered going upstairs and punching the genital helicopter square in the face, but thought better of it. One assault a week was enough.
Her knuckles still hurt from that last one, a foolish situation that she cursed herself for now. She should never have hit that asshole at school the way she did. No, she should’ve whacked him with a hammer fist, breaking his jaw with the hard, callused edge of her hand; like someone pounding their fist on a table to make a point, the way her father and Trudi Jessup had taught her to punch when they’d all been running from the road agents.
It was a terrible thing, but in some ways she missed those days. Not the madness of it, nor the raw anguish of having lost everyone in her family except for Papa.
Mama, Grandma Ana. Little Maya and her brothers. Her uncles and aunts. She would gladly have cut her arm off to avoid having to live through that. In fact, she knew she would have given her own life to spare them – the trail had taught her that. God had given her life, had given all of his children life, to be lived, and if necessary to be spent, for others. But standing here, witless with tedium, feeling as though she had been imprisoned within these walls, Sofia missed the hard freedom of that horrific time.
It was the same in school. Within a minute or two of sitting down at her desk at Northtown High, she would find her mind wandering. She had killed people. Shot them down as they raged and ran about during the gunfight at the Hy Top Club in Crockett. She had watched on as her father gutted two men, and she’d felt nothing bad about it. So it was just too much to ask, to expect her to sit indoors with a classroom full of drones and assholes, listening to the same old shit, day after day. And so much of it about a world that was gone. Gone. When were people going to get over it?
The glass fogged up again. Her breath had come hot and fast as she’d grown agitated, thinking about the kid who was responsible for her being locked up like this.
Scotty Malleson. A jerk. He had been on her case for days.
Malleson was like that. He’d decide to get on someone’s case and then simply wouldn’t give up. He just rode them and rode them into the ground. And everyone had to put up with it, of course, because his father was on the North Kansas City Council and an even bigger asshole than little Scott. From what Sofia had heard, if you got on the wrong side of Councillor Malleson, you’d find yourself kicked out of your cosy government-approved apartment or house. Your easy eight-to-six job in an office somewhere could just disappear, overnight. And then you were suddenly living in one of the emergency shelters or migrant camps, shovelling dead-people goo out of whatever suburb the city had decided to reclaim next.
His father was powerful enough to buy the latest imported clothes, shipped direct from Seattle. No salvaged rags from Abercrombie & Fitch or American Eagle for his son. Only the best for little Scotty. It was Daddy Malleson’s way of waving his dick in everyone’s face and telling them to suck it up.
So people took the kid’s bullshit, and smiled and said thank you very much. But not Sofia.
She’d pretty much let it slide the first time Scotty had fronted her. She wasn’t at all intimidated when she’d taken her head out of her locker during morning recess to find herself surrounded by Malleson and his posse. Four more pathetic whitey bitch-boys who stood sneering as he loomed over her and said he’d heard she was a good ride.
All that time in the saddle. You know.
He was a great rider too. You know.
He tried to stop her as she moved to push past him, and she made a pointed fist, the trail-hardened knuckle forming a blunt spearhead, which she then drove up into his armpit with the speed of a striking rattler. He yelped as his arm spasmed and white-hot chain lightning ran down into his fingers.
Trudi had taught her that one too.
The next day, though, she’d known it was serious. You didn’t enrage a little boy like Scotty Malleson, and you really didn’t enrage and embarrass him in front of his posse. It meant he had to come back at you. The gossip mills were rolling hard with word on Scotty’s humiliation. It was much worse than the time Amy Place giggled at the size of his so-called ride. As Sofia moved down the purple and grey hallways, towards the school cafeteria, everyone gave her a wide berth. Guilt by association could be a very real problem where the Mallesons were concerned. Nothing happened, though. She spent the day on edge for no good reason.
The bus ride home was equally uneventful. Perhaps he was going to let it slide as well?
When she found him and his crew waiting on the steps outside the apartment block, Sofia realised she’d underestimated him. Scotty sneered as she approached. He was trying to look like the scariest motherfucker in the world, in his Hugo Boss jeans and Lacoste windcheater, and of course his well-dr
essed boyfriends were backing him up. But he was nothing. The lamest trail bandit she’d ever crossed could have frightened Scott Malleson into wetting his pants, just by saying ‘Boo!’ His eyes flicked nervously away from her own steady gaze, and she could’ve sworn his curled lip quivered just a little when she didn’t even break stride. This would have to be settled today, she knew, one way or the other.
Sofia didn’t even let him get a word in. She saw him physically gather up his resolve as he pushed himself off the steps. As soon as he got up in her face, she swung on the asshole, a short-arm roundhouse punch into the jaw. Put all of her body into the pivot, snapped her hips in there too. Felt the jawbone go under the impact, heard it crunch. But in the rush of the moment, she’d hit him the old-fashioned way. With her fist bunched up, leading with the knuckles.
Sofia knew it was a mistake less than half a heartbeat after she’d felt his jaw shatter, as pain suddenly lanced up through her wrist. It didn’t stop her swinging a boot into his face as he went down, and then again into his stomach when he’d hit the ground. And she still put her fists up when she spun around to face the others – when she could actually see she’d done something stupid. Her knuckles were badly damaged; one of them had been sort of pushed back up her hand. It was enough to make you a little sick, just looking at the thing.
But it was one of Scotty’s bitches who threw up when he saw it. And then Malleson Lite puked too. The posse all ran off, leaving their leader choking on his own vomit at her feet.
Sofia sighed now and left the arctic vista of the picture window. She clenched and unclenched that same fist. It still hurt.
She pushed the thermostat up a couple of degrees. The day was getting so cold, they might even need to draw the heavy curtains across the large, exposed windows of the former warehouse space, to keep in the heat. Rubbing at her swollen right hand again, she had to acknowledge that Papa was right: he had to be seen to punish her, or the boy’s father would become involved. Not that Malleson senior wasn’t straining like a pitbull at the end of his leash, anyway. Oh Lord, had there been trouble over Scotty’s broken face . . .
Her heart beat a little faster just thinking about how she’d endangered their position here by beating up the city councillor’s boy. Papa was right. If it wasn’t for the government in Seattle looking after them – or, to be more accurate, having an interest in them because of their road agent stories – Scotty’s old man would’ve had them out of the loft and probably even barred from bunking down with the Indians over at the railway camp. They’d have been on the road again, run out of town.
Her father and the principal of Northtown High School had decided that she should serve a three-day suspension. And there would also be the supplementary grounding to contend with, of course.
Sofia pulled up the chair where she’d been sitting earlier, at the big table in the open space by the kitchen. They ate their meals here. There was no dining room, no separate living areas in the house. Just their bedrooms, the combined bathroom–laundry, and the communal room here. She found it annoying sometimes, having nowhere she could be alone save for her room. But such thoughts were always followed by a flush of shame that the only reason she could truly be alone these days was because, apart from Papa, her whole family was gone.
She sat down in front of the textbooks she was supposed to be studying and tried to settle herself into a more academic frame of mind. The snow was falling so heavily now, whipped into twisting curlicues and sheets of white that the park was almost entirely obscured. She shook her head and pulled the thickest textbook, which wasn’t very thick at all, over to her.
She opened it at the chapter relevant to her assignment. The history of the Great Depression. Like anyone cared.
Sofia tried to read a short passage, an interview, in which a man described how he’d worked seven hours to earn the money to buy a bottle of baby formula for his kid, and how he’d run three miles to the drugstore for it, only to find the place was closed. As much as she could see that the situation sucked big-time, his story still didn’t compare with what she’d been through.
Hey, try running to the store chased by half-a-dozen of Blackstone’s road agents, she thought.
Sofia flinched away from remembering the day the gang attacked their hacienda while she and her father had been out checking the back pastures. She could only ever recall those awful moments in her nightmares. Trying to think about them while conscious was impossible, like stabbing yourself slowly in the eye. But she had no trouble remembering other times, some of them just as bad.
An observer watching Sofia Pieraro over the next few minutes would have been astounded by the change that came over the teenager. Psychologists would call it a fugue state. For Sofia, it was akin to time travel. It was what happened when she found herself zoning out at school. She wasn’t simply recalling events. Her mind, her whole consciousness, was back there.
The moaning wind that bent the leafless branches of the trees in the park, she heard no more. She did not see the great white rectangle of the picture window nor the complete white-out brought on by a blizzard for the ages. The Great Depression had never happened. The poor man with the hungry child altogether vanished from history.
She was back in the scrub, in Crockett, Texas. Deep night, and she deep within it, having stolen away from the relative safety of the women’s camp, against Papa’s strict instructions. She had heard the phrase ‘heart in mouth’ before, but until this moment she had never experienced anything remotely like it. But watching her father perform a drunken pantomime as he approached the two road-agent sentries, her heart beat so powerfully and rapidly, and her stomach seemed to contract with such force, that she felt as though she might vomit all of her insides out through her teeth at any moment.
She found it all but impossible to watch the small life-and-death drama unfold through the hunting telescope on her rifle. At least, until she swung the sight off Papa and concentrated instead on the two men he was trying to silence. When she first caught one of them between the crosshairs of her Remington – a fat, ugly pig’s ass of a man, to borrow a phrase she had learned in the refugee camp outside Sydney – it was all she could do not to squeeze the trigger and put a round through his head.
Only the sure knowledge that to do so would alert the other gang members at the clubhouse nearby stayed her hand. She was aware of the ugly scowl that settled over her face as she observed this pair of thieves and killers. The very ugliness of thought and deed that she could see etched into the repulsive features of the man in her ’scope contorted her own face into a rictus of congealing rage as she watched him. Only when her father plunged his bowie knife into the first of them did her expression change.
She smiled.
She smiled under the cover of night in Crockett, Texas, as the ice and frozen soil underneath her thawed from her body heat, soaking her clothes and chilling her to the bone.
And she smiled at the table of the comfortable, renovated loft she shared with her father a thousand miles away, safe in Kansas City. Her eyes, unfocused and unseeing in the present, gazing nine months back to the same night when she’d not just watched men die, she had taken their lives with her own hands. Not up close, as she would have wished if given the chance – to see the red spark of existence snuffed out of their eyes. But close enough. More than close enough.
She’d almost lost her meagre dinner when the enormous Mormon they called Big Ben had brought a sledgehammer down on his first victim’s skull, in the opening seconds of the attack on the Hy Top Club. Choking down her nausea, she brought out the Remington and waited for a target to present itself. In the excitement, she nearly opened fire on the first thing that resolved in her telescope, bracketed against the fire and torchlight of the camp. That would have meant shooting Orin, one of her own group, not to mention giving herself away. Sneakiness was the watchword of the evening, she reminded herself; sneakiness and not shooting the wrong people. She forced herself to wait.
When the fi
rst camp whore screamed, she tracked the muzzle onto her, but a sledgehammer blow silenced the woman before Sofia could fire. The whore’s boyfriend struggled to rise off the couch, where he’d crashed, drunken and sated, on the grass just in front of the tumbledown clubhouse. She recalled him as if he was standing right in front of her in the loft in KC. A bearded, shaggy, potbellied maggot with a red bandana tied over his head.
Sofia brought the crosshairs of her Remington up to Bandana Boy’s unibrow, took a deep breath, and let it out. As she exhaled, she kept the muzzle on target until her finger had completed the trigger pull. Bucking in her arms, the rifle put a single round through the road agent’s forehead, disintegrating the top half of his skull in a spectacular shower of bloody gruel and dropping the corpse back onto the couch. She felt a surge of anger and . . . something else.
A feeling she did not recognise, but it was powerful. No, it was power itself.
She felt her power over the man she had shot, whose life she had taken. It was a good feeling.
Sofia forced herself to mechanically work the bolt, spitting out the spent .30–06 casing and sliding a fresh round into the chamber. The Mormon men, having now traded the sledgehammers for M16s, took cover, uselessly, behind the couch and exchanged fire with those attempting to run back inside the Hy Top.
She tracked two more road agents sprinting for the door, dispatching the first with a clean torso shot, which spun her target off his feet and into the dry wall façade with a crash that shook the entire front of the building. The other man, she drilled in the ass, slowing him down long enough for the Mormons to pour a stream of tracer fire into his back. So intense was the fire, it disassembled him from the hip up to shoulder height.
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