After America

by John Birmingham

  “I’m very proud of you, son,” he said with some difficulty. “We all are.” He tilted his head to indicate the cluster of high-ranking men and women gathered around him. “And you need to know that we are in your debt forever now. I don’t know that we can truly pay you back, but you need to know that as long as an American draws breath somewhere, that debt will be acknowledged and honored.”

  “Thank you, Mister President,” Tomlinson said in a quiet voice. “I was really just helping my buddy.”

  “And that’s what makes it admirable,” Kipper said as he leaned forward to pin the medals to Tomlinson’s pillow.

  He bade farewell to the boy and moved on to decorate a number of unconscious patients. Once or twice he had to stop and take a few breaths to get his balance back.

  With one of the injured soldiers, however, he couldn’t identify the race or gender. Blood-spotted bandages covered the trooper’s entire head. An air tube forced oxygen through a fleshy hole that didn’t resemble a mouth in any way that Kip recognized. There were no eyeholes cut through the bandages.

  He asked why.

  “Shrapnel struck this soldier in the face, Mister President,” Leong explained without needing to check the chart. “She has lost her lower jaw. She also received additional shrapnel in her sinuses and eyes. This soldier will never see again, but we believe once we stabilize her, we can send her on to Sydney for reconstructive surgery.”

  Kipper stayed focused on the soldier. Her chest rose and fell regularly. He placed his hand on her shoulder and whispered into her ear. After stroking her bandaged forehead, he pinned a Purple Heart to her pillow, stood up, and walked on.

  Culver asked what he had said to the woman. The military officers and medical staff couldn’t help hanging on his answer, either.

  The president rubbed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Jed,” he replied, “I asked her to forgive me. For my weakness.”

  38

  Texas Administrative Division

  Road agents had been through Palestine. Miguel and the other riders stayed on their mounts as the animals slowly clip-clopped down the wide-open thoroughfare, snorting and neighing in distress, their ears twitching ner-vously. Miguel leaned forward and patted Flossie on the neck to calm her down, taking the opportunity to check on his daughter. Sofia was tight-lipped and pale-faced with her Remington laid out across her lap. She seemed to be holding up well enough, though, all things considered.

  “There now, girl, be still,” he said to the horse. It was not easy to keep his voice calm and soothing with such a black oily rage threatening to boil up from deep inside his guts.

  He had first thought to climb down and lead the mare in on foot after the long ride from their last camp, but now he wanted to be able to spur away if necessary. Unfortunately, that put him on eye level with the corpses. They swung on ropes that creaked and groaned under their burden. Twenty-three of them he had counted so far, all strung up from the cross stays of the telephone and power poles that ran along the street.

  “They were from the south,” Miguel said quietly.

  “How can you tell?” Aronson asked in a tight voice. “They’re … pretty far gone.”

  He was right. The bodies had turned black and bloated with gases before rupturing and spilling over the refuse-strewn footpath below. Crows and other carrion birds had been at them for some time. Drag marks evidenced the efforts of wild dogs and other ground scavengers to carry off a tasty prize.

  “The way they are dressed. And their hair,” said Miguel. “All of them had black hair. Like mine.”

  “And Mama’s,” Sofia said in a strangled voice.

  He considered sending her back to the edge of town with Adam, but there was an evil air about this place, and he wanted his only blood kin right where he could see her.

  A mechanical click had him reaching for his Winchester, but it was just Adam with a camera. After Crockett, Miguel had taken the lad under his wing, and he had seen that Sofia seemed to relax in Adam’s company, too, even though he very obviously had eyes for poor Sally Gray. Adam seemed somewhat wary of Sofia after her actions in Crockett, but Miguel thought he detected admiration there, too.

  The cowboy shook his head. Even running for their lives, it seemed there would be no avoiding the telenovela of teenage entanglements. Adam’s family had Disappeared, a fate he had avoided by virtue of a school trip to Edmonton, sister city to his hometown of Nashville. Miguel had been impressed with the boy during the rescue of the women, not just with his bravery during the fight but with his even greater bravery for speaking up beforehand about his fears. In Miguel’s experience, very few men were able to admit they found the idea of doing violence to another completely unnerving. But it was true. He had once heard an old circus boxer say that for normal men, far greater than the fear of being hit was the fear of hitting. It was a secret, shameful thing for most. Young Adam, though, had come right out and confessed it. And then he had proved himself every bit as courageous as any grown man Miguel had ever known by shepherding the ladies away from the heart of the road agents’ lair in the thick of the very worst fighting.

  That was why Miguel was so angry with him now.

  “What are you doing, Adam?” he asked in a low voice as the boy snapped photographs of their grisly discovery as though he were on holiday. As soon as Adam dropped the camera from his eye, however, the cowboy understood. The boy’s face was nearly white with strain, and the muscles in his jawline bunched and unbunched with such fierceness that he could have been chewing on bitterroot.

  “Evidence,” was all he would say.

  “Okay,” Miguel said, a little humbled. It had not occurred to him to bother with such a thing.

  They came to the burned-out shell of a coffee shop. A charred sign atop a pile of blackened bricks that might once have been yellow read OLD … GNOLIA … and Miguel wondered why it had burned when so much of the town center remained intact. Perhaps on the day of the Wave a gas burner had been on and caught fire. But why had it not spread? Was it raining here, then? He shrugged off the idle speculation. Every town they had passed through was the same. Some areas were destroyed. Some looked as though they had merely been abandoned. Modern ghost towns.

  Adam’s camera continued to click and beep.

  To Miguel the wide, dusty streets of Palestine evoked images of the 1930s, the Depression. The scattered, sun-faded hulks of late-model cars ruined the illusion, but the overall sense of the place was one of weariness and abandonment.

  Except for the bodies of the lynched settlers, of course. They lent the scene a dark and immediate energy.

  Even in the thirties, though, with the Klan active in the South, one would never have witnessed something as gruesome as this. A single corpse strung up from a lamppost, maybe, but not almost two dozen of them. Miguel, bored during the long transit from Australia to Texas, had often attended the history lectures provided aboard the USS Wasp. From what he understood, the purpose of lynching one person was to terrorize the rest into submission. This had nothing to do with submission.

  This was about extermination.

  Aronson dismounted and tied up his horse outside the café. One hand fingered the pistol at his hip while with the other he rubbed at the rough golden-red beard he had lately grown. His eyes were haunted, and Miguel could swear his face had a distinctly green tinge.

  “Adam, over here,” Aronson called. “Bring that camera. Sofia, please stay back.”

  Miguel’s daughter favored her father with a questioning glance, but he shook his head. A warning gesture.

  “Mister Aronson is right, Sofia. You do not need to see any more. Adam neither. Give the camera to us.”

  “I may want you both to scout around town,” he said quietly. “Keep an eye out for anyone headed our way. Understood?”

  Sofia and Adam nodded.

  He took both of his weapons as he dismounted and tied Flossie to the roof rack of a red station wagon.

  A cold wind whipped up dust devils an
d small twisters of rubbish along the street, stinging his eyes with grit. A traffic light, one of the kind that hung from thick black cables across an intersection, swayed in the breeze, and somewhere a crow shrieked at the gathering gray clouds. Packs of feral dogs could be heard barking in the distance.

  “I was wondering why there were only men hanging from those ropes,” said Aronson. “Now I know. Brother Adam, Miguel is correct. You need not see this wickedness. Nor Sofia either.”

  Adam hesitated, drawn by the power of whatever lay within the tumble of charred bricks and roofing iron, but Miguel stepped in front of him.

  “Do as your elder says, boy. He is trying to spare you.”

  Adam bristled and attempted one look over Miguel’s shoulder, but he deflated quickly. Sofia looked as though she wanted to climb down off her horse, but she knew her father well enough to be wary of the furious storm clouds that had gathered behind his eyes. Nodding but saying nothing, Adam took himself across the street to drink from his canteen. Sofia wheeled her mount around and followed him. He deliberately avoided walking under or even looking at the hanging corpses, instead investing his attention in the grimy windows of a bookshop. Miguel watched them move all the way across before turning back to the elder Mormon.

  “Women?” he asked in a voice as arid as a salt pan.

  “And children,” Aronson said. “Here, pass me the camera. I’ll document it for the authorities in Kansas City. Perhaps we should look around for some clue as to their identities. Papers or a camp of sorts.”

  The rising tone of his voice was inflected with the thinnest of hopes. Not that Miguel might find such information but that by busying himself with such details, Aronson might pass through the next few minutes without losing too much of himself. Miguel hazarded a quick look inside the collapsed confines of the building and felt his heart hardening with another layer of scar tissue. He was no policeman, but he could tell from the way the bodies were piled up at the back that they had either cowered there or attempted to force an exit through the rear of the building. They had been alive when the coffee shop was set afire.

  He cast his eyes down at the road surface and after a few seconds found what he was looking for: shell casings. A weapon or weapons had been used here to force the women and children into the building. Almost certainly to keep them there. He picked up the brass casings and metal clips that had held the casings together. The rounds were larger than those used in the M16, possibly a machine gun. He could not say. He was no expert in these things.

  The vaquero shook his head, a banal gesture in the face of such black-hearted malevolence, but since he had nobody on whom he could vent his fury, it was best not to give it free rein.

  A crash and a string of muttered oaths drew his attention outward from his cheerless thoughts. Aronson had tripped on a blackened crossbeam. The Mormons were not given to profanity. Even under extreme duress in Crockett the only real cursing Miguel had heard was his own. But Cooper Aronson emerged from the burned-down coffee shop still swearing under his breath. Distant thunder rolled over the town, and Miguel felt a few spots of cold rain on his neck.

  Aronson shook his head at the cowboy as if he, too, had nothing else to offer.

  “I suppose we had best see to the burial of these poor people,” he said in the tone of a man girding himself for something he would rather put off forever. “I’ll send Adam and Sofia back to the others. We’ll need help.”

  Miguel nodded. “You and I can see to cutting some of them down. It is not good work for women or boys.”

  The Mormon leader flared angrily. “It is not good work for us, either, Miguel.” But his loss of control was momentary, and he added a quick apology. “I am sorry, my friend. That was unworthy. You are right. We should do as much as we can between us. I’m going to suggest we put all of the bodies in the coffee shop and collapse those walls on top of it. It’s not proper, I know, but it’s probably the best we can do short of staying longer to dig individual graves.”

  The rain was coming down harder now, obscuring the silent rail yards to the south of the town in a dark gray band. Miguel shuddered inwardly. This was going to make an already unpleasant task all but unbearable.

  “It is a better end than they have come to already, Cooper,” he said. “I agree. Those walls will come down without much effort, and they will form a good … what is the word for the grave of stones?”

  “A cairn,” Aronson said. “They’ll form a cairn. We’ll just need to be careful that we don’t collapse the walls on top of ourselves.” He called Adam over from where he’d been investigating the bookstore. The lad hurried back, followed by Sofia, both of them carrying an armful of paperbacks, looking a touch happier than they had been. Miguel read with curiosity some of the titles Adam had chosen. An orange book called The Martian Chronicles topped the stack, and beneath it Hammer’s Slammers. He couldn’t make out the writers of those books, but they were not the sort of thing Miguel had read to improve his English for the settler’s test. Sofia, he was happy to see, had picked more appropriate reading for a young lady of some bearing. Some literary novels, by the look of them, by a woman named Helen Fielding. Almost certainly a novelist of high literature with a name such as that.

  “Brother Adam, I want you to ride out with Sofia and have Benjamin return to help us with the burial of these people,” Aronson said. “Tell Willem we will camp by the lake for the night and resupply from the Walmart depot in the morning. Make sure he knows to be alert for more road agents … or Texas Defense Force patrols.” He turned to Miguel. “How long do you think it has been since the agents were through here?”

  The vaquero rubbed the back of his neck and scowled as he examined the nearest of the hanging corpses, trying to see it only as a thing, not a person.

  “I cannot say for certain, but given the state of those bodies, maybe two weeks. They are still black and wet, but they have ruptured from the gases. In cattle that can take ten days. There are many insects on them that you do not see on dry bodies in the desert. So yes, maybe two weeks.”

  Adam was now looking decidedly green and quickly excused himself to be about his duties back at the camp.

  “I’d better get going,” he muttered. “Before it gets too dark.”

  Sofia looked hollow-eyed as she joined Adam.

  “Be careful,” Miguel called out after them as he hurried back to his horse. He did not like being separated from Sofia, but he was certain now the agents had not been here for some time. It was a short ride back to the main party. They were both armed. And woe betide any fool who made the mistake of assuming Sofia would not pull a trigger on him to defend herself.

  The fat drops of icy rain thickened and fell more quickly, forcing the two men across the street and down some, where they could shelter in the recessed doorway of a sports club. It was a large three-story building, the upper floors faced with simple sheets of corrugated iron adorned with giant sun-faded plastic stars. It somehow added an even greater sense of melancholy to the scene. Aronson shivered and hugged himself against the wind, which was now blowing scraps of paper and plastic and drifts of dead leaves up the road.

  “Do you think the gang we took on back in Crockett could have been responsible for this?” he asked. There was hopefulness in his question if you looked past the grim tone.

  “I’m afraid not,” Miguel said, hating to dash the other man’s spirits. “This … this makes no sense. The agents in Crockett would have taken your women as slaves, but they would have let them live. Here they have killed women and children without reason that I can see beyond the pleasure of killing itself.”

  “Ethnic cleansing,” Aronson said darkly.

  Miguel was not familiar with the term but thought he understood what it meant.

  “We are a good forty miles from Crockett,” he said, “which was as far north as that band of agents ever ventured according to their camp whores. No, I think this is another group.”

  Aronson’s face grew even longer.
<
br />   “That would mean that as we head north, we’re moving into the realm of the men who did this.”

  “Yes,” Miguel said. “We are.”

  The rain intensified, solid and heavy enough to raise a roar as it sheeted down on the iron roof of the sports club. Miguel had a sudden urge for a smoke. He had given up the cheap cigarillos of his youth after boarding the golfer’s yacht with Miss Julianne and her people. What was that now, three or four years ago? It was a lifetime. There had been a small supply of very fine Cohibas on board, and he remembered fondly sharing a few with the big friendly gringo who called himself a rhinoceros. But they ran out halfway across the Pacific, and there had been no such indulgences in the refugee camps and on the work farm in Australia. So he had learned to do without and been glad of it, too. He breathed much more freely these days. But now, huddled in the doorway of a darkened tomb festooned with plastic stars, watching the obscene and rotting black fruit strung up by road agents swinging in the wind, he suddenly felt a terrible need to fill his mouth and lungs with fresh, strong smoke, as if it might burn him clean of the corruption he had breathed in Palestine.

  “Of course,” said Aronson, “if it was ethnic cleansing, it would be the case that things went … different … up here because these people were …”

  He trailed off, unable to find a polite way of saying it.

  “Because they were beaners,” Miguel finished for him. “Wetbacks.”

  The Mormon grimaced but nodded.

  “You are correct,” Miguel said. “It may be that they treat their white captives differently. But the men in Crockett would still have killed you, no? And in the end we are all the same color.”

  He nodded at the gently swinging corpses, ruptured and black and crawling with flies and maggots.

  The rain didn’t help matters. The first corpse dropped to the ground with a solid thump as Miguel sliced through the rope, only to explode across the asphalt. That necessitated another trip to collect brooms, shovels, heavy-duty trash bags, and masks. The masks didn’t help much, but the Vicks VapoRub under the nostrils did.