After America

by John Birmingham

  The Blackhawk slowed to a hover as the crew chief threw the ropes out. Milosz was up and on the rope first, grabbing it with his hands.

  The chief sought clearance from the cockpit and received it.

  “Go-go-go!”

  Milosz stepped out of the aircraft, his feet gripping the cord between his ankles in one fluid motion. He slid down into the maelstrom below.

  22

  Texas Administrative Division

  “You have more of these?”

  Miguel held up the heavy black goggles to admire them. They did not look very comfortable, but if they did what Aronson claimed and allowed the wearer to see in the dark, they would be more than worth a little discomfort. The Mormon leader—Miguel had come to recognize him as the head of their party—shook his head.

  “I am afraid not,” he said. “We only have two pair. We originally picked them up to keep an eye on the herd at night. It never occurred to us that we’d need them for any other reason.”

  Miguel placed them back on the faded Formica top of the table in the diner attached to Leona’s general store. He made no comment on Aronson’s lack of foresight. The night vision goggles had been designed for soldiers to use in night fighting. Surely it must have occurred to someone in their party that they might have a purpose beyond babysitting cattle through a long Texas evening. It was not his place to question other people’s judgment, however. After all, he was the man who could not save his own family. At that thought he could not help taking a quick, flitting glance at his daughter to reassure himself that she was nearby.

  Sofia was no more than a few feet away at another table in the diner, helping sort through stores brought up from the basement. She was still very subdued, but he could tell she was making an effort to be pleasant with the new people. For their part they were solicitous of her feelings, and Aronson’s wife Maive in particular seemed to be trying very hard to look after her. Miguel was grateful for that. He moved the night vision goggles off the road map they had spread out on the table, where it covered a dark black stain left by whoever had been having a meal here when they Disappeared. All the remains were gone now, respectfully removed and buried in soft ground at the back of the store. Not that there were many “remains” as such, just a lot of clothing, stiffened and stained by the noxious organic waste that the energy wave had left behind when it hit people. Not knowing the faith of those they had buried, the Mormons had enacted a small brief ceremony of their own that seemed specifically tailored to mourning those who were not of their church. Miguel had kept a respectful distance, but Sofia had seemed interested in the unusual prayers and display of faith, and he had no objection to her watching more closely if the Mormons did not mind. They did not.

  “It is a pity about the goggles, then,” he said. “We will need to hit them at night if they are as numerous as you say.”

  “There were at least two dozen of them, I’m sure,” Aronson said.

  The cowboy nodded. “I have never heard of Blackstone’s men traveling in small bands.”

  Aronson looked up from where he had been studying the map and frowned. “You keep referring to them as Governor Blackstone’s men, Miguel,” he said. “But they are just bandits. Blackstone has outlawed them.”

  Miguel waved away the distinction.

  “They serve his ends,” he said, “even if he denounces them. I have spoken to other settlers about this. Many agree with me. As do the banditos from south of the Rio Grande. Did you know they will not cross the agents’ territory? They consider it Blackstone land already.”

  Aronson looked like a professor challenged by a particularly obdurate student, but even if he felt like arguing, Willem D’Age was in no mood to be distracted.

  “We need to catch up with them, to cover this ground as quickly as possible,” he said as he swept a hand over the map. “And we will need to travel at night. Is that right, Miguel?”

  He nodded. “Not at first, when we set out from here. But yes, we must assume they have scouts out the closer we get to them. We will need the darkness then. It is the only way. There are many more of them, and … they will be seasoned killers. Your party, Aronson. It is …” He trailed off.

  Aronson conceded the point with a lift of his shoulders. “No, you’re right; we are not like them. There’s no point pretending otherwise.”

  “We will need to take them by surprise,” Miguel said. “It will be difficult and unpleasant. Very unpleasant. I have been thinking about how we might do it and have written down a few ideas and a list of supplies we will need.”

  He reached into his jacket pocket to fetch an old folded envelope on which he had sketched out his plan, such as it was. Instead, he accidentally brought out the photograph he had taken from the homestead just before they left. Seeing his wife smiling and surrounded by their children, he felt as though he had been struck a blow just below the heart.

  “Excuse me,” he said quietly as he returned the photograph carefully to his pocket.

  The day was heating up outside, turning into one of the warmer days Miguel could remember in quite some time. It had been a hard winter in East Texas, but the air in the diner grew thick and close as morning closed in on noon. The Mormon women, with the help of Sofia and the two boys, Adam and Orin, were progressing well with the job of restocking the group’s supplies. He was glad that Sofia had work to distract her. It was undoubtedly better that she not spend today in the saddle dwelling on what had happened back at the homestead. Helping these people would help her; he was sure of it. Unfortunately, there could be no doubt that helping the Mormons would also serve to put his daughter in the way of grave harm, because that was where Miguel himself was heading.

  “It will be a difficult business scouting this town,” he said as they surveyed the map of Crockett. “Although if I was driving a herd of stolen cattle and looking for an easy time of it, I would probably graze them here on the southeastern edge of the city. Near this school or college.” He pointed at a cluster of buildings and playing fields on the map.

  “Well, none of us are real cattlemen, Miguel,” said Aronson. “We’re willing to take your counsel on that. So then, do you think that’s the direction we should approach from?”

  “Not directly,” he said. “And we do not even know they are there in town, let alone camped in this particular field. If they are, it would be best if we came in through cover. You cannot tell from this map, but we must hope there is forest or brushland along any line of approach we might take. But unless there is someone among you who knows this town well, we shall just have to be careful and scout it out properly.”

  The screen door behind him creaked open, admitting to the diner a giant by the name of Ben Randall. He carried sledgehammers and clothing wrapped in a giant bundle.

  “Got what you wanted,” he said to Miguel.

  “Good. Just put them over there on the table next to the women.”

  Randall unburdened himself of the load, which landed on the table with a dull crash. He was one of the biggest men Miguel had ever seen, some sort of engineer in his former life who’d been working on an oil rig somewhere off Indonesia when the Wave struck. He had grown up on a farm, however, and of all the Mormons, except Peter Atchison, their senior horse wrangler, he seemed the most comfortable in the wild. Joining them at the map, he wiped a thin film of sweat from his brow as he appeared to take in all the squiggles and lines converging on the town.

  “Guess we’d better pray for some cover.”

  “Pray if you must, Mister Randall,” Miguel said. “But I believe the good Lord will look after those who are best prepared and who have investigated their enemies.”

  Aronson looked troubled, and it was not long before he spoke up. “On that matter, Miguel. How are we to approach this? I am not comfortable splitting up our group. We would have to leave one or two men behind with the women, including Sofia, and even that is no guarantee of their safety. And what happens if our scouts do find these agents in Crockett? They will the
n have to backtrack for the other men if we are to have enough guns to have any chance of pulling this off.”

  Randall and D’Age looked to the cowboy for an answer. That was only natural. Unlike Miguel, they had no experience of leading men in a situation like this and, until they were attacked by the road agents, probably had precious little experience of fighting them, either. Miguel had been bossing vaqueros for twenty years, during which time he had regularly had to enforce his will with boot and fist. And of course he had had his fill of deadly violence escaping from Mexico with his family on Miss Julia’s boat. His brow creased, and he grunted as he pushed away the memory of the massacre yet again. It flashed before his eyes many times every day, distressing him greatly. Until Sofia was safe, surrounded by the armies of Presidente Kipper, he could not indulge in the weakness of memory and regrets. First came her safety, then came vengeance, and only then, if he still lived, would there be time for mourning.

  He chewed his lower lip as he thought over the difficulty Aronson had raised. A couple of errant whiskers got caught between his teeth.

  “You are right,” he said. “I must admit I have been worrying about this very matter all morning. The bandit gangs are pushing much deeper into the Federal Mandate than they have before. And there seem to be more of them. I do not think it would be wise to split up into smaller groups that could be easily picked off. Altogether we have, what, six men, two boys, your two women, and Sofia. If they can all pull a trigger to protect themselves and if we are careful, that is enough to give the agents pause. A smaller group, however, they will simply overrun, especially if they know there are women to be had.”

  Aronson nodded, seemingly satisfied with that line of reasoning. “So we all travel together.”

  “Yes,” said Miguel. “But if we are successful in tracking them, only the men will fight. There will be work for the women tending the animals and, when we are done and if we are lucky, looking after the wounded. This fight will be no place for them.”

  The chatter of voices from the other side of the diner had gone quiet while Miguel spoke. He turned around to find Sofia and the two Mormon women looking at him. He thought that his daughter might say something in protest. He recognized the flame of indignation in her eyes, but before Sofia could speak, Maive Aronson leaned across a bag full of beans and squeezed her arm.

  “Do you think you could go find Mr. Atchison for me? I have need of inquiring with him about how much we can load in these saddlebags. I believe he is tending to the horses. Here, Adam can help you go find him.”

  The youngest of the Mormon men, a pink-faced boy of maybe sixteen or seventeen, pulled up short as he tried to wrestle a big cardboard box into the room. His companion—Orin was his name if Miguel recalled correctly—bumped into him from behind, almost knocking him over. It was enough to break the tension. Sofia did give her father a cool glare as she left the diner, but Miguel was man enough not to be troubled by the poor opinion of a teenage girl. He even smiled slightly as she swept out of the room with as much dignity as she could muster, pulling Adam along in her wake. His grin lingered for a moment when he saw that the other boy, Orin, was genuinely put out not to have been chosen for escort duties. And then the black fog of sorrow descended upon him again.

  “We should travel fast and light,” he said, almost sighing. “Perhaps we should leave everything here that we will not need in the fight. Your herd can be secured here.”

  Cooper Aronson looked as if he was about to say something, but Miguel cut him off. “There will be a fight, Mister Aronson.”

  The Mormon leader nodded reluctantly.

  Miguel continued, “You are all carrying the same weapons, yes?”

  Ben Randall answered, “Yep. Government-issue M16s. They hand them out when you get off the boat in Corpus Christi. I’m surprised you and your daughter don’t have them,” he said before suddenly blushing bright red and stumbling over an apology. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean …”

  Miguel waved it away with one hand. “We were issued three army rifles when we arrived, but I do not like them as guns. We are not soldiers, and they are unreliable in any case. I took some time when we arrived at the homestead to seek out more appropriate firearms. Some for killing snakes,” he said, patting the cut-down shotgun in the oversized holster at his hip, “and some for farmwork, like my Winchester. I prefer a weapon with which I am familiar. And I have used a Winchester all my life.”

  “And your daughter’s rifle?”

  “She hunts,” Miguel said. “It is no matter. She will not be involved in this. She can protect herself and the women with that Remington.”

  “Is she a good shot?” Aronson asked.

  Miguel nodded. “She brought down a ten-point whitetail buck at three hundred yards.” He paused for a second. “I do not believe she will hesitate before pulling the trigger on a man.”

  Aronson took a moment to digest all that before looking to his wife. “How are the supplies?”

  “We will have what we need to see us through the next week,” she answered.

  “That will be more than enough,” said Miguel. “We will resolve this one way or another in two days.”

  23

  New York

  “Maybe Union Square’s not such a good idea,” said Jules.

  The rooftop garden, which had gone wild in the last three years, afforded them with an excellent view of the soldiers pouring into Union Square, where Jules had been hoping to lay up for the night. She and the Rhino leaned over the guardrail in the constant drizzle and passed a pair of binoculars between them, scanning east on 14th Street to where the army apparently was gathering … well … a small army of some sort as far as Jules could tell. Jules’s injured shoulder forced her to use the binoculars one-handed when she took them, and the image was correspondingly shaky. Her shivering from hunger, cold, and fatigue did not help matters. Only a day had passed since her shower before bed back on Duane Street, yet she was already sweaty, itchy, and greasy from the rain.

  “Looks like they’re getting together some sort of armored task force to punch a few blocks north,” said the Rhino, shaking a shower of raindrops from his army surplus Gore-Tex jacket.

  All manner of armored vehicles and even a few tanks were rumbling into the streets around the little park. They couldn’t see much to the northeast, but from the martial thunder and lightning in that direction there was something untoward going on.

  “Well, that’s just marvelous,” Jules replied sunnily, relatively dry in her own Gore-Tex jacket. “We’re going north; perhaps we could thumb a ride … That’s sarcasm, by the way,” she added. “Just in case you got all excited at the idea of a ride on a big bloody tank.”

  He continued to peer through his binoculars, not bothering to answer.

  “Perhaps if we headed down to the river,” she suggested more seriously, stepping back from the sheer drop to West 14th and pushing through the wet, overgrown foliage to a small open vantage point a little farther down. The rooftop garden thinned out there, possibly because it would be in the shade of a looming elevator shaft for more than half the day. The road far below them was badly congested with crashed cars and, for some inexplicable reason, dozens of Dumpsters. It looked as though a small river was running along the street, and at the corner of Seventh Avenue she could see an extraordinary sight: a veritable geyser gushing up from underground through the entrance to the subway there. It made her wonder whether the entire city might collapse in on itself and sink into the rivers that surrounded it.

  “Nope, can’t go west,” the Rhino said, as he moved a piece of chewing tobacco from one cheek to the other. Julianne prepared herself for the inevitable stream of spit, and …

  There it was.

  She felt like shuddering every time he did that, but if he wasn’t smoking cigars—and he wasn’t right now because of the chance they’d be spotted in the dark—the Rhino insisted on getting his tobacco hit via plugs of the foul “chaw,” as he called it.

&nbs
p; “Can’t do that, Miss Jules,” he continued. “I endured a good long time picking Lewis’s tiny brains about who controlled which parts of the city, and he said everything north of Eighteenth and west of Eighth was being fought over by Serbs, Russians, Chechens, and Rastas. You don’t want to be tangling with any of them.”

  An enormous blast a mile or two to the north sent a bright white ball of fire and sparks high into the sky.

  “Do I have to make the obvious point that I don’t want to be tangling with any of these fucking munters?” she asked.

  “Sarcasm again, Miss Julianne?”

  “Yes. Sarcasm. I’m afraid that at the moment I have only the lowest form of wit to offer. And to think I took a first in rhetoric at Cambridge.”

  “Didn’t you cheat your way through college?”

  “Cheated and bonked, but I did have a base level of competence, you know. It’s in my nature. Daddy virtually lived off his wits until he blew his brains out.”

  The Rhino lowered his binoculars and joined her in the small clearing. Jules could recognize a few of the plants that had gone wild up there—some Japanese maples that had burst out of their pots and colonized a large square of native grasses, a thicket of tomato vines, and what looked like zucchini—but most of it was just anonymous shrubbery and scrappy urban jungle. The Rhino spit out the rest of his chaw, plucked a small tomato off the vine, and bit into it, but then he screwed up his face and spit out the pulp.

  “Nasty.”

  The tom-tom beat of a heavy weapon started up, and within seconds Julianne flinched as a jet fighter slipped down out of the clouds and released a couple of bombs that detonated with enough force to shake the city. Pulling out of the dive, the jet fighter climbed back into the clouds, its engines howling at the skyscrapers. The drumbeat did not resume.

  “Bloody hell,” she said as the rumble subsided. It never ceased to amaze her. The sounds on the battlefield were not like the movies at all. You never heard the jet until it was too late to do anything about it, especially if you were the target. She hoped that did not happen to her.