After America

by John Birmingham

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “As you say.”

  Jules noted that the woman shifted her stance slightly to be able to track the Rhino with a small movement of her automatic rifle. Who was this chick? She knew the Americans were so pressed for manpower these days that they’d opened up a lot of their combat roles to women. But this woman was no grunt.

  “Go on,” she said. “What did you see at Saks?”

  Jules tried to recall the memory with as much detail as possible.

  “We were tucked away in the rubble of St. Patrick’s, I think it was. Dozens of these characters suddenly emerged from the department store and took off downtown in groups of five and six. It was noticeable because there were a lot of other fighters heading into Rockefeller Center in even greater numbers. They’re holing up there, I think.”

  “I know. Were many of them wearing headscarves? Keffiyehs? You know, like you used to see on the Palestinians on television?”

  “I have been to Palestine, you know.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” said the woman. “Did you see anyone near Saks who looked like they might have been part of the leadership group, somebody who could have been in charge?”

  “Of the beardy nutters, you mean?” Jules asked. “No, I’m sorry. We didn’t. We were just checking out the ground. Making sure we didn’t get caught up in somebody’s turf war.”

  The Rhino confirmed her story with a shake of the head that nearly tipped off his helmet. “Sorry, ma’am. But no, we didn’t see anyone like that.” He approached her carefully, holding out a massive paw full of papers. She gestured for him to put them down on a nearby table.

  “Okay, then. I’m gonna go. And so are you. You need to get yourself uptown and bunkered down, and you need to go now. There’s nothing here for you anymore.”

  “You don’t need to tell me that,” said Jules.

  “What about those documents?” the Rhino said. “You’re not going to have time to deliver them to anyone. And they’re important. They need analyzing.”

  “I can’t believe I’m being lectured by a busted-ass smuggler without the fucking sense to do some basic research before he takes on a job. So what, Coast Guard, are you offering to come on board for the big win now? You going to carry these precious documents back through Injun country, are you? Because that would mean I’d have to give them to you first, which would make me a bigger fucking idiot than you.”

  “Such spunk!” The Rhino grinned. “I like her, Miss Jules. I like her a lot. This is the reason America is still chewin’ gum and kickin’ ass.”

  Julianne sighed. “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Irrelevant.”

  “Okay. Fine. Look, mystery girl, you’ve got all sorts of whiz-bang-looking comms gear hanging off your spanky little outfit. If you can talk to the military, get hold of some special forces bods we ran into; they’ll vouch for us. We did save them from their own unpleasant incident of ass fuckage, as you put it so very well. We can carry your papers back if they okay us. As you said, there’s nothing here for us now, and frankly, I’d like to get the hell out of New York. It’s all been a very bloody fear-and-loathing trip, to tell the truth.”

  “Hell yes!” said the Rhino. “We were somewhere around the edge of the city when the drugs began to take hold and the giant bats swooped down. Remember that, Julesy? The giant bats?” He grinned maniacally.

  Jules couldn’t help but giggle at the incongruous fucking madness of it all.

  The woman with the gun shook her head. “I hate this fucking city.”

  50

  New York

  “Down, down, down!” Wilson shouted, taking cover behind the splintered, pockmarked doors leading to the public reading room of the library.

  “I am down, Wilson,” Milosz yelled back. “And I am staying down now until stupid asswits and ragheads get bored and go home. This is not so much fun anymore.”

  Tracers spewed out of the vast reading room into the smaller catalogue area where the rangers and militia troops were holed up. They poured through in a lethal torrent of tracers, cutting down anyone foolish enough to stick his head in the way. Milosz kept himself well out of the line of fire, which was coming from a makeshift stockade constructed of dozens of upturned wooden desks and the wreckage of a large, dark wooden booth that appeared to divide the vast cavern of the room on the other side of the doorway. The uproar of gunfire and screaming from inside was so loud that you had to shout into someone’s ears to make yourself heard.

  “Worthy’s had it,” Gardener hollered, dragging the militiaman back toward them, using the cover from the old catalogue files. Worthy had lost his melon and most of his gray matter trying to throw a frag into the main room. The same grenade had gone off a few yards away and clipped two exposed members of the New York militia, who were screaming as a medic did his best to shut them up.

  “Got one critical here,” he yelled.

  “Get some of those militia pukes to drag his ass out of here,” Wilson shouted. “Fred, we need to gather up some claymores. And a bucket. A big fucking bucket. Gardener, can you handle that?”

  “Holy shit,” she protested. “Sex discrimination case? Would you like me to come back barefoot and pregnant, too?”

  “No, just fetch me a fucking bucket, zoomie.”

  The Polish NCO snaked forward, his ass puckered and his head down. Hundreds of rounds zipped and cracked through the air just above him. “You have a cunning plan, Wilson?”

  “I always have a plan, Fred.”

  Milosz stuck his carbine up over the ruined cabinet behind which he was sheltering and popped off three rounds. Elements of their ad hoc team were trying to break into the reading room from multiple points of entry, but where those other points were, Milosz had no idea. He tossed another precious frag into the reading room, where it went off with a cracking roar that seemed to interrupt the volume of fire coming at them for a second or two. Charred and burning pages of God only knew how many good books came drifting back into the anteroom.

  Milosz shook his head.

  This was not right. Destroying a library like this. Libraries were sacred places—his father had taught him that. Hallowed halls where silence and stillness and modest learning was the order. Not screams and gunfire and crazy fucking schemes involving explosive mines and big fucking buckets that Master Sergeant Wilson would not even bother to explain to him.

  More hammering automatic fire started up somewhere behind and above them, but he had no idea where.

  “Motherfuck—”

  “Man down!” someone shouted.

  “Worthless fucking militia,” Wilson muttered, using his 203 launcher to plunk another 40-mm HE grenade into the reading room. The boom sent another dirty snowstorm of shredded, smoking paper into the air but this time it did very little to turn down the volume of fire coming their way.

  Gardener’s feet squealed and skittered across the marble floor as she returned with two steel buckets and a mop.

  “Damn, we didn’t need the mop,” Wilson shouted over the din.

  “Sorry,” Gardener cried out. “Couldn’t hear you. Fred, give me your claymore, buddy.”

  Milosz unlimbered the olive drab bandolier holding two M18A1 claymore antipersonnel mines. He fired a burst of suppressing fire through the door and tossed it underhanded to Gardener across the deadly gap between them.

  Tech Sergeant Gardener spilled the contents of the bandolier onto the floor.

  “You’re supposed to leave the mine in the bag,” Milosz said, regretting it instantly. He simply couldn’t help himself.

  “I didn’t know this was a common task test, motherfucker!” Gardener shouted back.

  “It is just that I have investments now,” he called back. “A reason to live. I plan to die as wealthy oil tycoon, not stinky-ass soldier with head blown off.”

  She ignored him and unrolled a copious amount of slack from the spool of firing wire. “How much do you think we need?”

  “Thirty
feet,” Wilson said.

  “Right.” She unspooled thirty feet of slack and set the wire at her feet before jamming the mine into the bucket. Milosz smiled as he read the words FRONT TOWARD ENEMY. That always made him smile. Perhaps they should have had a tag at the end of their rifle: BULLET COMES OUT HERE. VERY FAST.

  Using “hundred mile an hour” tape, the air force lady fixed the mine firmly in place and opened the detonator well.

  The tracer fire abated just a little, and Milosz could hear voices through the ringing in his ears. The sound of a muffled footfall reached him. A lieutenant from the 82nd Airborne dived and slid across the floor to fetch up beside him.

  “You Sergeant Milosz?” he asked at full volume.

  “Not if you are from Immigration.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry. Bad joke. Relieves tension of waiting for pointless death. Yes, yes, I am Milosz. You bring good news for me, yes? Otherwise, you will please to be fucking off backward out door through which you slid. Nice work, by the way.”

  “Thanks. I’m looking for you and a Master Sergeant Wilson and—”

  “Present!” cried out Wilson.

  “And T.S. Gardener.”

  “That’s me,” she yelled without stopping her work on the improvised mine. Milosz was beginning to worry about the punch she was trying to pack into those two buckets. Wilson had collected another three claymores from the militia troops scattered about the room.

  “I’m Lieutenant Cleaves,” the airborne man explained. “I got sent here by battalion. They need to confirm you met a couple of civilian contractors, a—” He checked a small piece of folded paper and frowned. “—a Mister Rhino A. Ross and a Ms. Julianne Balwyn.”

  “That’s Lady Julianne,” Milosz corrected as Wilson looked up and gave him a warning look. “Her family once had castle and everything. Not so much now, though. Why you ask?”

  “We’ve had flash traffic from a classified source. Says they have some documents and need airlift immediately.”

  Milosz leaned around the corner of the cabinet and squeezed off a round. The tracer fire resumed, impacting against the marble wall above his head, steadily chewing through the masonry and showering him with stinging chips of hot rock. The small clutch of militiamen hiding over there scurried away to find better cover.

  “Is this hippo man and lady saying they have documents or classified source?” asked Milosz.

  Cleaves could only shake his head in confusion. “Sorry?”

  “Does not matter? What for you need to speak to us?”

  “Command needs to verify these people before it’ll task airlift to get them out. The source says you can do that.”

  Milosz, Wilson, and Gardener had a whole conversation without saying a word. Milosz had no idea what was going on but had to assume that the smugglers had found whatever they needed and had somehow lucked into a way of getting out of the free-fire zone. It was infuriating that he didn’t know for sure, but what was he to do? He just had to assume that if they could talk their way into an airlift, they could talk their way out at the other end, especially if they convinced this “source” to help out. He hoped that didn’t mean a further dilution of his cut. And if it did mean he got his ass kicked, so what? Soon enough Fryderyck Milosz would be a wealthy former soldier whose only care was how to get the wealthy former Technical Sergeant Gardener to show him a good time.

  “Yes,” he said at last. “Tell battalion they should pick them up. These are good guys, this hippo and Jules lady. They saved my Polish ass from angry pirate asswits.”

  “Good to know,” Cleaves said. “Do you, er, think I could get a little covering fire?”

  Milosz and Wilson obliged, with a couple of the militia pukes throwing in for good measure as Cleaves exited the anteroom as quickly as he’d arrived.

  “What the fuck was that about?” Wilson shouted.

  “Ours is not to know, Master Sergeant. Ours is but to protect our investment in offshore oil field and not get fucking heads shot off like dopey militia unit inappropriately named Worthy.”

  Another surge in fire from the reading room had them fucking the marble floor and Gardener demanding to know how much ammunition the towelheads had, anyway. As Milosz watched, she gave herself a meter of slack; taking the plug from the detonator well of one of the claymores, she slid the blasting cap through and with great care screwed the plug back into place, arming the mine.

  “Got ’em both,” she said. “Would have been quicker with a satchel charge.”

  “This is the army, my friend,” Wilson said. “We go with what we got; now give me one bucket. And give Fred the other one. You keep the firing devices.”

  She handed them over and allowed Wilson to connect the device, the “clacker,” to the firing wire.

  “You motherfuckers had better knock that shit off,” Wilson shouted at the reading room.

  The fire slackened momentarily. “Fuck you, George Bush!”

  The Americans looked at each other in astonishment.

  “Man,” said Gardener. “Some people just cannot get their heads out of the past.”

  Milosz popped around the corner, sighted in on the loudmouth, and punched a single round through his forehead.

  “Ha! Stupid nig nog!” Milosz shouted. “Second Amendment trumps First every time.”

  Wilson stared at him like he was insane.

  Milosz shrugged. “For what purpose is that look, Wilson? I am forced to learn civics classes for citizenship but not to use knowledge learned for taunting pirate asswits?”

  Wilson shook his head. “Let’s just ram the corncob in the hole.”

  He turned to address all the shooters he had at his command.

  “Sergeant Milosz and I are going to save your worthless asses in just a second with a display of ranger awesomeness that will make you pee in your fucking pants every time you remember it for the rest of your lives. But first you got to give us covering fire when I say go. That means hauling your sorry asses up off the ground and actually sending some joy downrange on the fucking enemy. It also means fixing bayonets right now and following us into there when I tell you. Are we clear?”

  The ragged response forced him to yell.

  “ARE WE CLEAR?”

  That drew a louder roar, and Wilson raised his eyebrows at Milosz.

  “Good enough, you think, Fred?”

  “Soon to be finding out, Wilson. Shall we go?”

  Wilson tossed him the heavy bucket loaded with high explosives and shrapnel as the other men in the anteroom clicked their fighting knives into place at the ends of their rifles. When Milosz caught the can and set himself to take off, Wilson yelled.

  “GO!”

  The unexpected savagery of the Americans’ coordinated fire slammed a lid down on the jihadi defenses, giving the two rangers time to leap up and sprint for the door to the reading room.

  “Fire in the hole!” Wilson shouted as he heaved his bucket through the door a fraction of a second before Milosz. The heavy improvised bombs arced up high into the air over the improvised palisade from which the jihadis were fighting. In the surreal silence that seemed to hum inside Milosz’s head he distinctly heard Gardener give both clackers three squeezes.

  Detonated by a small electric spark, the tightly packed C-4 of half a dozen claymores detonated over the heads of their enemy, unleashing a steel rain of more than four thousand ball bearings all traveling at 3,995 feet per second. The explosion was far louder than any other noise in the confined space of the library building, and the concussion was enough to knock Milosz to the floor, even shielded as he was by the thick walls of the reading room.

  “Go, go, go!” Wilson shouted. “Off your asses now!”

  Milosz was dimly aware of glinting steel closing on him from behind as he spun around the corner of the great double doors and opened fire.

  “Fuck you, George Bush!”

  Selim the Algerian was the last man of his saif to die, shot through the forehead, his brains an
d half his skull spraying out behind him, blinding Yusuf with a foul, hot organic gruel that stung his eyes as he wiped it away.

  He could not believe anyone would be so foolish as to martyr himself for the momentary satisfaction of taunting the enemy. Yusuf Mohammed shook his head and burrowed farther into the small foxhole he had built for himself inside the massive chaotic fort fashioned from dozens of desks and chairs and heavy wooden cabinets. Thousands of pieces of paper and cardboard notes and handbooks spilled out, strangely reminding him of his days in the mission school back at the village where he had lived simply and, he supposed, happily until Captain Kono had come and taken everything from him.

  It was odd the way that memory worked. All his life he had never been able to recall anything but the merest fragments of dreams from that time. But just in the last hour or two, as he had come to realize he would probably die in this room, he had found himself able to recall what he had to believe were intensely remembered images and moments from a life he had never really known before. A woman with huge soft arms and a big belly on which he bounced and giggled as she sang to him and tickled him until he was nearly sick with laughter. An old man, gray around the temples and thin, led him down to a river, carrying two poles strung with fishing line. He ran across a bare dirt field, squealing with happiness as he kicked a ball, and other children chased after him, calling out his name. He knew they were calling out his name, but no matter how hard he concentrated, he could not quite make it out.

  “Fuck you, George Bush!”

  And then Selim died so foolishly and wastefully as he sprayed the memories of whatever childhood he had known in Algeria all over Yusuf’s face. The former child soldier, all grown up now, screamed in rage and hoisted the familiar weight of his AK-47 up above the rim of the overturned table behind which he was hiding, firing off the remainder of his clip until the hammer clicked and clicked and nothing happened.