Angels of Vengeance: The Disappearance Novel 3

by John Birmingham

  Sofia frowned. ‘But wouldn’t we be scavenging?’ she asked. ‘If there was a Cavalry patrol down there, why wouldn’t they arrest us, or even shoot us, for looting?’ The last thing she wanted was to fall back into the clutches of the authorities now that she was so close to escaping them.

  Cindy smiled. ‘Well, legally, we would be scavenging, yes. And if the Cav swooped down in one of their helicopters, or rode by in a Hummer, and shot the hell out of us, legally – officially – we wouldn’t have a lot to complain about. But unofficially, the Cavalry is well aware that the trucking lines use the two towns as supply depots. They’re well beyond the city limits, and the Cav don’t much care. Anything that greases the axles, you know. Besides, we’re regulars. They come to us for news on the road, and it wouldn’t do to get on our bad side.’

  The truckie didn’t seem too concerned at the prospect of helicopter gunships hammering down on them while they picked through a camping-goods store. She bounced in the seat as they pulled out of the Flying J Travel Plaza and turned westbound down Front Street, passing under Interstate 435.

  ‘Hauling road freight can be a dangerous business, Sofia,’ Cindy explained. ‘Seattle needs that freight hauled, especially with all the trouble they’ve been having on the railway lines. So any informal arrangements that smooth the process . . . well, the people in the field tend to look the other way. I suppose there’ll come a day when this is all less of a frontier . . .’ She waved at the darkness outside the truck windows as she spoke. ‘But for now, frontier rules apply.’

  Sofia turned sideways in her seat, leaning against the padded headrest behind her. ‘And what are the frontier rules?’ she asked.

  ‘Whatever it takes, hon. Whatever it takes.’

  ‘I am familiar with that rule,’ said Sofia in a quiet voice.

  The driver appeared to measure her up with a long, calculating look. Long enough that Sofia began to worry that Cindy wasn’t paying attention to the road. But she seemed to know where she was on the highway, even though it was covered in snow. Warehouses flanked both sides of Front Street, many of them still dark, deserted. Every so often, an island of lights would appear in the inky, snowy night where someone had established a business of one type or another in the ruins of the old civilisation.

  ‘Yes, I imagine you are familiar with it, Sofia,’ she replied, before turning away to check her rear-view mirrors. By leaning forward a few inches herself, Sofia was able to find the other trucks in a small convoy strung out behind them.

  They passed – bounced perhaps was more accurate – across the Chouteau Trafficway intersection. Kansas City Power and Light maintained a large facility of spare parts at the north-west corner of the intersection. Rows of repair trucks idled in the yard, waiting for the stressed power grid to fail under the weight of the blizzard. Down the road, it was just possible to make out the grey skyline of Kansas City’s skyscrapers. Most of the roads had long been cleared of debris and wrecks.

  Trains powered through the yards on the south side of Front Street bearing the logos of Kansas City Southern and Union Pacific. Sofia remembered how her father would take her down to the railroad tracks along the Missouri River, back when they’d first arrived here, to watch the trains rumble by. It bored her witless, but Papa seemed to find the sight reassuring. ‘They are stitching the wounds of this land together,’ he would say.

  There was very little traffic on Front Street, mostly large trucks like Cindy’s, some of them pulling two trailer beds, reminding her of the massive articulated road trains she’d seen down in Australia. That’s what they called them – ‘road trains’. An evocative phrase, but accurate too. As best she could tell, none of the trucks in her convoy were pulling more than one trailer.

  Her eyelids grew heavy and began to droop as Mary Lou ate up the miles. She had imagined Cindy would want to talk, but the trucker seemed content to concentrate on the drive, as if she understood that her passenger needed to rest. With a belly full of warm, heavy food, and snug in the fleecy cocoon of her new coat, Sofia wanted nothing more than to slip into a deep slumber. Yet she found it impossible to get any rest. Every time she closed her eyes, Cindy’s rig would slam into yet another pothole, bouncing her head against the side window. Pothole repair was near the bottom of the city’s list of priorities. The post-Wave firestorms may have spared KC, but at times it seemed as though it might just fall apart anyway.

  ‘Sorry, hon,’ Cindy said. ‘The roads are shit in this town. Always have been, even before the troubles. It’ll be better once we hit 35. Sometimes I wonder why they don’t just knock it all down and start from scratch.’

  Once they’d pulled onto the Downtown Loop, the ride smoothed out. The dark shadows of the snow shrouded the world outside as they made their way around the loop until arriving on the I-35 southbound. They were rolling through parts of Kansas City she had never seen, past the West Side, where the city’s original Latino population lived. Now it was crammed with the latest generation of migrants. Indians, some Chinese mixed in with arrivals from a dozen other countries. Some of her friends at school lived down here, in the West Bottoms.

  Friends. Did she really have friends? She wouldn’t miss anyone from KC, that much was certain.

  She was vaguely aware of Cindy flicking off the citizens’ band radio, to allow her to get some rest, just before her eyes closed for the last time in Kansas City.

  20

  DEARBORN HOUSE, SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  ‘Don’t patronise me, Jed,’ warned Kip. ‘Whenever you tell me I’m doing something admirable, I get a lecture about how I’m also being stupid and need to accept changed realities, or the situation on the ground, or some crap like that. Not this time.’

  James Kipper folded his arms, creating a barrier between them.

  ‘I agree you’re onto something,’ he went on. ‘But the way we do this is by the book. You turn it over to the FBI . . .’

  ‘Oh, please, not the feebs . . .’

  ‘Yes. The FBI. And you let them run the investigation. If they agree there is enough to go on.’

  Kip bit off a mouthful of cheese cruller, his breakfast of choice when Barb wasn’t around, and washed it down with a slug of hot chocolate, another indulgence. He too had a hangover after slamming a six-pack down with Barney Tench at the end of last night. It wasn’t improving his mood or his judgment this morning.

  A small field of documents lay between them, the bare minimum Jed needed to make his case that Blackstone may have been involved, even if unwittingly or at some remove, with Baumer’s New York jihad. Kipper was impressed by Jed’s prosecution of the matter, but he remained entirely sceptical about the Chief of Staff’s preferred option for dealing with it.

  ‘Agent Monroe may well be the world expert on this guy,’ he conceded, spilling a few cruller flakes onto the blotter. ‘But you know as well as I do that she is a grossly inappropriate choice to take this any further. Put aside the fact that she’s personally compromised because of the attack on her family, she’s Echelon, Jed. She can’t blow her nose within the borders of the US without breaking half-a-dozen laws.’

  Culver didn’t think much of that objection, and it showed. His eyes burned with sleeplessness, and fatigue cramped the muscles in the backs of his legs. He could feel his calves jumping and twitching as early morning traffic appeared on the streets outside Kipper’s office window.

  ‘If you turn this over to the Bureau, sir, they will do their usual thorough job, which will take about eighteen years. During which time Blackstone will get wind of what’s happening, giving him plenty of opportunity to build a large, roaring bonfire of incriminating evidence that could heat this city for Christmas and beyond. Monroe has the skill-set, the background and the motivation to close the file in weeks, if not days.’

  Kipper’s hand cut through the air in front of him like a heavy blade. ‘Enough! Agent Monroe, who now works for Echelon UK, as far as I remember, Jed, is not a criminal investigator. She’s an assassin, for God�
��s sake! I can’t imagine a worse person to send down to Fort Hood under our imprimatur.’

  Culver stood up to stretch the painful knots out of his legs, but also because his frustration was mounting to the point where he had to walk it off. He stalked over to the fireplace.

  ‘She is not just a trigger-puller, Mr President. She’s a lot more than that. Fact is, she had two years’ training at Quantico, pre-Wave. An accelerated investigator’s course. She can play an undercover cop, if it helps to think of her in that fashion.’

  ‘No, Jed,’ said Kipper. ‘It doesn’t.’ The President pushed away the better part of his breakfast, uneaten, before continuing. ‘I don’t much like what Agent Monroe does in the name of this country, what she represents about us, or at least the way we used to do things. I can accept that she herself is a dedicated servant of the people, and I’m happy to acknowledge the sacrifices she’s made and the dangers she has faced in that service. What she did in New York, or tried to do, was outstanding. But she is the wrong person for this job. The wrong tool.’

  Culver’s spirits flagged a bit at that. When Kip got going on the engineering metaphors, it usually meant he’d made up his mind, or was very close to getting there. His tone grew ever more sarcastic as he spoke.

  ‘I mean, where is this Lupérico she talks about in her report? This guy running Sarkozy’s secret dungeon. Oh, that’s right – she blew his brains out in the jungle. No chance for anybody to verify his information, not to mention the illegality, the basic . . . wrongness of an extrajudicial execution. And make no mistake, that’s what happened. She flew into a sovereign country, committed an act of war, kidnapped a man, tortured him for all we know, and then executed him. What part of that process are you comfortable with, Jed? Because it sickens me from start to finish, and if I’d had any say in the matter, it simply wouldn’t have happened. I’m furious that it did, even if responsibility for the murder can’t be laid directly back on us. Calling it an Echelon operation and saying it had nothing to do with us, it’s just . . . it’s weasel words, that’s what it is. And we won’t be doing it again.’

  His face had become flushed with anger, and when he finished speaking he smacked his desk with an open hand to emphasise the point. Jed struggled manfully to restrain his own rising anger. He knew that getting into a fight with Kipper would serve no purpose.

  ‘Mr President,’ he said wearily, ‘I’m not suggesting we send her down there to whack him. But I am suggesting that unusual circumstances demand unusual responses. Having the FBI roll up on Blackstone’s front door to ask him to come down to the office to answer a few questions isn’t going to work. I don’t see why the justice system should be preferenced when dealing with what is essentially a black operation. New York was a black op. For Baumer. And possibly for Blackstone. Two different operations, maybe, I’ll concede. And maybe Blackstone’s went horribly wrong. There will come a time when we have to address the legal consequences of what happened. But right now, I would argue very strongly that we are still in the operational moment. And that moment demands a Caitlin Monroe, not a district attorney.’

  Kip shook his head. He had his anger under control, but he had not changed his mind. ‘No, Jed,’ he said. ‘If our system is not strong enough to do things the right way, it is not worth the effort we put into maintaining it. We either do things lawfully or we’re as bad as Baumer and Mad Jack. Now I want you to get on the phone to the FBI and have them send over a team to take charge of the case you’ve built up. I want that to happen today. Are we clear?’

  ‘Yes, Mr President.’

  Jed checked his watch. Dawn had arrived, but the world outside Kipper’s window looked even darker.

  21

  EMPORIA, KANSAS

  She dreamed again. Not of Texas this time, but Oklahoma. In the strange attenuated temporal landscape of dreams, they had only just escaped the flood. Their clothes hung in rags from them. The horses were all swept away, drowned and torn apart when the raging waters dashed them against rocky outcrops in the accursed valley.

  Papa was with her, supporting her on his strong right arm as he helped Adam and Maive escape the pull of the roaring river that had boiled up around them. As terrified as she was, Sofia’s heart swelled with joy at the touch of her father. She felt safe just being with him, knowing that he would let nothing bad happen to her.

  And then the river was gone. Not receded, not fallen away – simply gone. They stood on the outskirts of Tulsa, which looked as though an Old Testament God had rained down fire and damnation upon it, smashing it flat, burning the ruins, before smashing a fist down on it again. It was as if they were standing on the verge of a city ruined in antiquity, rather than just a few years earlier. They had come to Tulsa seeking supplies, needing to replace all they had lost in the flood, but instead found themselves staring at a wasteland of ash and desolation.

  The others spoke in her dream, but she could not understand them. Fear began to fill up the empty places inside her as the four of them advanced cautiously through the charred remains of the city, under a lowering sky of poisonous clouds turned the colour of bad blood and meat sickness. She clutched Papa’s hand tightly as dark shapes flitted at the edge of her vision.

  The dead and the Disappeared. They had all come back from wherever the damned go when the world is done with them.

  She was a little girl again, tugging on her father’s arm to gain his attention. But he seemed not to notice. Like he didn’t know she was there. No matter how hard she tried to pull him away, he just led them deeper and deeper into the dead city. And then she lost her grip on him. It didn’t slip or falter, he was just gone.

  No . . . he was up ahead, but holding hands with Maive, and leading Adam into the ruins of a 7-Eleven that had somehow escaped the worst of the conflagration. It was as if he had forgotten her. Had left her behind.

  She was suddenly paralysed with terror. There were wolves stalking them, along with the spectres of the dead and the Disappeared that lay in wait inside the shell of that building. Why was he going in there? Why had he left her?

  Increasingly she was able to make out the features of the ghouls and shadows circling them at a distance, drawing in more tightly with each pass, like sharks intending to feed. She saw the shape of Cooper Aronson, his neck bent at an impossible angle, his eyes just dark ragged holes. Insensate fury twisted the rotting remains of his face into a rictus of ill-favoured rage as the animated corpse contemplated the vision of his wife walking hand in hand with Miguel Pieraro.

  Sofia tried to call out to her father, but then Aronson was gone, and she shuddered as she felt the cold claws of a dead man brush her shoulder. Turning, somehow as swiftly as the flight of an arrow, but as slowly as specks of frozen dust floating through the vacuum of space, she turned and turned . . . and her mouth fell open in a silent scream when she saw Orin, the young Mormon boy they’d found ten miles downstream of where the flood had overtaken them, his body suspended in a tree as if crucified. He reached out to her, his black bloated hands closing around her throat.

  ‘Sofia!’

  She came awake, gasping and trembling. Cindy had one hand on her shoulder, shaking her lightly.

  ‘Sofia, are you all right?’

  For a few seconds her waking panic was every bit as deep-seated and animalistic as her terror in the dream. She had no idea where she was or what she was doing. It was daylight – morning. Why was she not in bed? Where was her father? This wasn’t their apartment . . .

  And then she remembered, and wished she could’ve fallen back into confusion and ignorance. A pitiable moan escaped her throat, until she clamped her mouth shut, forced herself to accept what she could not hope to change.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, as much to stop herself moaning again as anything. ‘A bad dream. Memories.’

  ‘That’s all right, you’re safe now. Just take a moment and get your soul back,’ said Cindy French.

  A ragged breath escaped her. She realised her bladder was painfull
y full, and was relieved at least that she hadn’t wet herself in her terror. She must’ve slept through the convoy’s earlier stop, at Ottawa.

  The truck’s powerful motor propelled them through the dull glare of morning. The road ahead was deserted, but their path was framed between ramparts of twisted metal; the disintegrating bodies of crashed automobiles bulldozed off the highway by army engineers. The government hadn’t bothered removing the wreckage this far out from KC. It would all eventually decompose into the earth. Sofia had seen the same thing many times when coming up from Texas. Clearing the nation’s highways often meant simply sweeping the debris to one side.

  ‘I’m okay,’ she told Cindy in a voice that was still shaky. ‘I just get nightmares.’

  The truck driver mulled that over for a while. The only sound in the cabin was the steady growl of the engine, and the hum of the eighteen wheels on the highway.

  ‘I think we all do,’ admitted Cindy. ‘Anybody who remembers, anyway.’

  She turned to face Sofia again, in that same disconcerting way as before, taking her eyes off the road. At some point in the last few hours, Cindy had removed her own coat and hoodie, leaving a pink tee-shirt with a frustrated-looking cartoon mouse diligently working at a school desk. Underneath the cartoon was a single line of text: No animal testing.

  ‘Aren’t you cold?’ Sofia asked.

  Cindy shook her head. ‘Nah, I’m hot, in truth. But it isn’t menopause.’

  Sofia pulled her jacket in tighter around her. ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Anyway, I know the younger kids are okay with it all – you know, if you were young enough when the Wave came, the world just is what it is now. But I guess you’re old enough to remember it pretty well, eh?’

  She replied with a brief nod as Cindy’s gaze turned back to the monotonous passage of Interstate 35.