Cindy cleared her throat, before powering up the radio and calling up the other trucks. ‘Hey fellas, we’re about ten minutes out. Y’all up for a pit stop?’
A speaker box crackled somewhere above their heads and a man’s voice answered.
‘Sure enough. How’s your passenger doing?’
‘She’s fine, Dave. Slept like a baby inside your old coat.’
‘Good to hear. Signing off. See you in ten.’
There was nothing about the approach to Emporia, Kansas, that marked it as being any different from a thousand other haunted towns, other than the banks of tangled vehicle wreckage by the side of the road, indicating an obvious effort to clear a path. As she knew only too well, so many places remained exactly as they’d been left when human life departed them on 14 March 2003.
Or rather, as the towns and cities had become in the hours, days and weeks afterwards. She still marvelled at the biblical scale of destruction she witnessed when walking and riding up from Texas. It was not sinful to compare the perdition that had come upon America with the Old Testament tales that the nuns had scared her with as a child. The cities of the plain had nothing on the Midwestern ruins she’d seen.
As they entered the outskirts of Emporia, the roadside wreckage began to thin out.
‘What happened to all the old cars?’ Sofia asked.
Cindy French nodded, apparently pleased that she’d noticed. ‘We did a lot of it ourselves,’ she replied, which Sofia took to mean the trucking companies, not her three friends in the rigs behind them. ‘Had to clear a path through for the trucks, of course. But all that crap had to be moved because of ambushes as well. You get a convoy coming into a place like this, especially if they’re fully loaded, all those big trucks slowing down - well, it makes a tempting target for raiders. And big piles of crap by the side of the road, that’s a pretty handy ambush spot, right? So over time we did our best to clear it out. And here’s the thing - you remember before when I told you about the feds turning a blind eye out this way? That wasn’t entirely true. They sent the army engineers down here to check on our clearance work, and even assigned a company of soldiers and a couple of ‘dozers to bring it up to spec!’ She smacked the steering wheel with her open palm, as if the story had amazed even herself.
Sofia nodded and tried to look sympathetic, but she found the prospect of ambush out in the wastelands unsettling. She’d had her fill of those, from both sides.
‘So there’s nobody here, in Emporia?’ she asked. ‘No soldiers or militia or anything?’
Cindy ground down through the gears as they entered the centre of town. ‘No, it’s too far out from KC to be worth securing. But like I said, it’s still a little too close to the city for any bandits or freebooters to feel completely comfortable setting up shop around here. Sometimes the army or the militia will make a temporary camp out this way, for deeper patrols into Kansas and Oklahoma, but for the most part, it’s a ghost town.’
Sofia’s concern must’ve been obvious, because Cindy reached over and patted her on the arm. Again, the teenager didn’t flinch. Something about this older woman disarmed her, and that alone made her a bit nervous. Sofia Pieraro wasn’t a touchy-feely type of person.
‘Don’t you worry yourself about it, girl. There was another group of drivers came through here yesterday evening. We spoke to them on the radio before I got to the diner. The town’s empty. And safe.’
With the toxic effect of the nightmare still coursing through her nervous system, Sofia found the reassurance difficult to accept. But she had no choice. She was beholden to Cindy and the others in the convoy for her transport south. There was no point arguing about the details.
They drove through a ground mist thick enough to almost obscure the road surface. Even at this hour of the morning, it seemed to lie all over the town, and the bright halogen lamps of Cindy’s Kenworth were at just the right height to illuminate the fog bank without actually piercing it. The effect on the deserted town was creepy enough to have her shivering again. After her dream, she could very easily imagine the doors of all these haunted homes creaking open as the soulless, re-embodied corpses of the Disappeared shambled out into the night. Gooseflesh convulsed up and down her arms and across her shoulders.
‘Spooky, isn’t it?’ grinned Cindy. ‘I hate coming through here by myself. Almost never do it, in fact. But we should take a break, and you really need to hit the stores. This is the last secure stop we’ll be able to make before we get to the federal depot down in Wellington.’
Sofia hugged herself against the cold she could no longer feel.
She wondered if it was possible to get a gun here.
22
DARWIN, NORTHERN TERRITORY
The recently retired smuggler and zone runner was drunk, but not ruinously so. You needed terrifying quantities of alcohol to drop three hundred pounds of dense, hard-muscled, pachyderm meat. But as he shouldered his way through a dozen or so sailors who were heading into the pub, he had reason to believe that six bottles of the Duckpond Tavern’s proprietary lager may have left him a couple of sheets into the wind.
The sailors, decked out in civvies, were off the amphibious assault carrier USS Bataan, back in Darwin after two months out with the Combined Fleet. He tried to greet them as they passed. It was always good to bump into another exile. But Darwin’s humidity and the gargantuan size of the beer bottles they called ‘stubbies’ in this part of the world - all six or seven (or, shit, maybe even eight) of which he’d sucked down on an empty stomach - conspired to unman him. And so it was that Rhino A. Ross, formerly of the United States Coast Guard, suddenly found his head spinning, his feet entangled and his balance absent without leave.
One of the sailors caught him before Newton’s laws took hold. ‘Whoa there, big guy!’
The sailors were pretty good about it, but nothing would distract them from their appointed rounds. The Rhino was passed and pushed through their group until he staggered out onto the kerb, here made up of old railway timbers, where more drinkers stood around the huge, open-sided shed that was the Duckpond Tavern, laughing, cursing and roaring. A steady trade in empties and newly filled glasses continued through the vast openings, where slatted wooden bi-fold shutters had been lashed back to allow a tepid breeze some chance of flushing out the crowded beer hall.
A couple of the brown-shirted local cops meandered past, showing zero interest in enforcing the city ordinances against drinking in the street. They’d have been more zealous in the old town, but the tavern sat squarely in the middle of twenty blocks of warehouses, factories, cheap boarding houses, brothels and bars that had filled up a couple of acres of waste ground behind the old Darwin Duckpond marina. Even now the Rhino thought he could hear the grumble of earth-moving equipment and the dull concussion of explosive excavation work a short distance south, at the site of the abandoned convention centre. A giant wharf was going in there to service the Combined Fleet of the newly formed Pacific Alliance.
The Rhino decided to head in exactly the opposite direction from the cops. Turning awkwardly, he fought the head spins that threatened to send him spiralling into the old railway sleepers - a Wild West design touch that extended only as far as the corners of the tavern. If he fell, drunk, to the ground beyond that, he’d face-plant in the mud and the brown-shirts probably wouldn’t ignore him. Besides, he had a powerful need to get something other than Duckpond Lager into his belly, and there was a takeaway rib joint around the next corner that did a Rhino-size newspaper cone filled to the brim with buffalo wings in hot sauce. His stomach started rumbling a split second before he’d even made a conscious decision to drop his last ten bucks on a feed there.
Raising himself up to his considerable height, he sucked in a deep breath and laid a course for Blue Smoke Ribs and Barbecue.
*
New Town, Shah told her, was even more crowded than usual because of the fleet’s arrival in port. Thousands of US personnel, and as many allied sailors and Marines, thronged
on the streets: hanging out of the windows of pubs, lining up at the government-licensed bordellos, crowding out tattoo parlours, betting shops and burger joints. Tupac and Snoop Dogg mingled with Garth Brooks and George Strait in a sonic train wreck that threatened to bring on a brain embolism if Jules had to listen to much more of it. She checked the list of bars and greasy spoons where Shah said Rhino hung out. It would be tempting to head straight to his boat to wait for him, but he might not go back there for hours, possibly even a day or two if he was on a bender. So an old-fashioned snipe hunt it was.
Music mingled with the scent of fried meat, which was strong enough to overpower the rank odour of thousands of men and women all rubbing up hard against each in the hot, dank air. Not all of the city was the same, she knew. There was old money here in Darwin, and new money that didn’t care for the sour stench of the gutter. They would have their own enclaves. But New Town was all gutter. It was where the city’s considerable population of the transient and the displaced gathered to feel as if they still had some purchase on the world. Every port town she’d ever passed through was the same. Class mattered in these sorts of places. Her father would have understood that as soon as he drew in the first breath of fetid air. He’d have stayed in one of the old colonial neighbourhoods, somehow, but he’d have done his best work down here, in the worst part of town.
As Julianne weaved through the heaving crowds she heard American voices everywhere. Enlisted men and women. The proles of the service. Unless they were sending their money home, the officers would most likely take their leisure in Darwin’s older, more exclusive quarter, spending six months of accumulated pay on electronics and clothing and finer brands of firewater than the lesser ranks were inclined to shell out for. Attachment to the Combined Fleet was a much sought-after billet. It was one of the few postings in the present-day US military where you were guaranteed that your pay would arrive. Granted, payday had taken a step backward, away from electronic accounts. Post-Wave, it consisted of a petty officer or sergeant, accompanied by a pair of armed guards, counting out currency to sailors, Marines and anyone else waiting in line. But nobody here was complaining.
These idiots were just as happy to spend Australian dollars, Korean won and Japanese yen, all of which were changing hands around her, as they were American newbies. A couple of happy sailors, who looked too young to be wearing the uniform, slipped past her with a much-prized PlayStation 3. The stupid toy probably cost those sailors their combined pay for the last six months, and now they’d have to start saving for the games. Whatever happened to blowing your money on hookers and tattoos? She shook her head as she threaded through a kerbside shiatsu parlour - three massage tables, all occupied, just dropped into the crush of foot traffic like stones in a river.
Jules stopped outside a noodle house to reorient herself, needing to make sure she was still headed towards the cigar stand Shah said the Rhino used. She’d had no luck at the marina earlier, and was now working her way through a list of his haunts. She remembered, on their long run out of New York, that the old chief had talked about signing up for another hitch himself. Aged fifty-two, he was still relatively young, and twenty years in the Coast Guard would count in his favour with the Navy. But of course, even if he did make it in, he might well end up on some old tub, trawling up and down the Atlantic coast running anti-piracy patrols, instead of serving on board something like the Bataan. There’d be retraining, and he’d have to serve the needs of the US Navy, not the other way around. He wouldn’t even get his former Coast Guard rank back - be lucky to get petty officer third-class, in fact. All of that rubbish plus zero desire on his part to find himself back on the East Coast anytime soon had swiftly put an end to thoughts of re-enlistment. Like her, the Rhino’s main desire after the clusterfuck in Manhattan was a quiet life.
He’d broken the news at the bar of the Idler, shortly after they’d sailed ‘the lake’ yet again, leaving the US for good, landing in Sydney, hoping that Cesky had no pull so far away from Seattle.
‘Best bet for this particular megafaunal rarity is to stay hunkered the fuck down, as low as my massive horn will permit, Miss Jules. And I hunker best on my lonesome.’
Thus, while she’d tried to blend into the cashed-up refugee scene in Sydney, paying her way with a few salvaged trinkets, he’d fetched up in Darwin, the northernmost city of Australia, at the arse end of the world; a weird, frontier boom town that had doubled in size, doubled again, then doubled again in the years since 2003. Military and civilian alike, tens of thousands of the Rhino’s fellow Americans had come here, drifting down - or sometimes running headlong - from the chaos that swept through Asia after the Disappearance.
Darwin hosted former CEOs of merchant banks and vice-presidents of software companies who now worked as debt collectors, truck drivers in uranium mines, or labourers on the huge government farms out on the Ord River. Like a lot of frontier towns, Darwin was a rude, bruising, crossroads settlement, full of chancers, thieves and standover men. It was a good place to get lost and that, he’d told her, was fine by him. There was nothing back home for Rhino A. Ross, just burnt bridges and enemies. Or one enemy in particular, at least, one worth the effort of losing himself down here with all of the other losers.
Jules squinted into the fierce sun as she left behind the cover of a wide veranda awning that shaded the front of an Irish-themed pub - the thematic verisimilitude provided by a couple of drunken Paddies beating each other to death with bar stools just inside the swinging doors. Above, a pair of Marine Harriers off the Bataan flew over and drowned out all background noise momentarily with the howl of their engines. She searched her shirt pockets for the pair of faux Gucci sunglasses she’d picked up that morning, but seemed to have lost them. She was worried about the Rhino, and not just because of what had happened to her back in Sydney. When they’d gone their separate ways, he’d seemed bleak and beaten down, which was not at all his natural state of being. She had only been in Darwin a few hours, but already she knew it to be the sort of place people went when they thought they’d run out of options.
Six lanes of traffic pulsed and crawled along Perrett Street, although calling the arrangement ‘lanes’ implied more order than was really the case. In effect, two thick, snaking streams of vehicles, each about three cars across, ground past each other, sometimes mingling, even crunching together as horns blared and drivers hurled abuse into the hot, grey sky in a couple of dozen languages. Again she heard American voices everywhere, shouting down or trying to shout down the flat, nasal ‘strine’ of the locals, or the chittering tonal curses of Chinese, Tagalog or Javanese motorists. A siren wailed somewhere, but never seemed to move, and heat shimmered over the bodies of the cars, rolling through her as though she’d stepped in front of an open furnace door.
She used her elbows and shoulders to force a path through the crowds that spilled out into the fringes of the traffic jam, leading to more near misses and abuse. Part of the problem was the lack of any real division between road and kerb; but also there were just too many people attempting to force their way through too small a space.
‘Another perfect day,’ Julianne muttered to herself as she fought through the heaving masses of sour, sweating bodies on a sidewalk that had reverted to rammed earth. The city still hadn’t got around to paving the New Town development, and water trucks rolled through every couple of hours, spraying, to settle the dust down until the monsoon arrived in late afternoon to turn it to mud. If the monsoon arrived. Mostly they did, but even now the weather remained unpredictable.
*
He felt a little better being mobile again and heading towards a meal. With any sort of luck, he’d get paid this afternoon when Hughie came back from the seafood markets with their cut from the week’s haul. With a wad of the folding stuff in his pocket, a decent feed, and maybe a nap to sleep off the worst of the daytime drink, he might even turn his mind to the depressing topic of what next.
The Rhino had been in Darwin for three months and in
that time he’d done no more than establish the flimsiest toehold. The free port was one of the busiest, most kinetic places he’d been to since the Disappearance. Vast flows of money and people passed through here, and the power structure of the city was constantly shifting, protean, moving in time with the erratic tidal changes that the fall of America had sent washing around the globe. As much as the presence of thousands of US servicemen and women created the impression that Seattle was the big dog around here, the Rhino knew differently.
We’re just the dumb muscle, he figured, like a boxer who’s taken too many hits to the head. They’ll keep us around until they don’t need the help, and then we’ll get flushed like a used condom.
The real power here took the form of Indian money-changers and the former Chinese Communist Party bosses, legions of them, who’d survived the civil war and transformed themselves into princes of the middle kingdom’s coastal megacities. These old CCP chiefs rarely appeared on the streets on Darwin. But the city seemed to clench in on itself whenever they arrived in numbers. They flew in and choppered straight out to the rooftop landing pad of the new Mirvac Mirage Hotel in the old city, there to contend for the mountains of coal, iron ore, gold and uranium being raked out of the earth’s oldest continent. And, perhaps even more crucially, to bid for the crops of one of the few reliable large-scale food exporters left in the world.
The Rhino rubbed a massive paw over his face, flicking droplets of salty sweat onto the dirt in front of him. Traffic crawled along the gravel road, raising a miasma of red dust that slightly dulled the fierce sunburst glinting off chrome and tinted windshields. He grinned at the plight of two black stretch Hummer limos trapped in the slow-moving snarl. Small flags hung limp from their aerials: the new red and gold ensign of the South American Federation. Newcomers in town and utterly clueless with it. He wondered what had brought them all the way here. It wasn’t as though Roberto’s operation lacked for resources. Sprawled across the territories of half-a-dozen former states, the Federation was ridiculously wealthy, at least in potential. It remained a prison camp, however, with the Colombian gangster-turned-dictator still smashing his fist down wherever he thought he detected the slightest opposition.
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