After America

by John Birmingham

  “Hungover, cowboy?”

  He turned to find that the very woman had ridden up behind him, catching him woolgathering and unaware. She was not a natural in the saddle. Indeed, the gelding struggled a little with its inexperienced passenger. But the strange “manbivalent” woman with the cheeky sense of humor and the warm laugh rode easily enough at this sedate pace. Most folks did nowadays, at least in the countryside.

  “Good morning, Miss Jessup. And no, I am not so used to drinking as I once was,” he admitted, tipping his hat to her.

  “None of us are, Miguel,” she replied.

  “Oh, Papa was never much of a drinker,” said his daughter, teasing, as he she rode over. “Not much of a drinker or a rider or shooter, really.”

  He showed her the back of his hand, but he was only playing, of course, and glad that Sofia’s mood had lifted enough for her to be able to joke at his expense. Miss Jessup’s face he could not see in the gloom, but he sensed that she was smiling, too, if a little sadly.

  “It used to be nothing for me to finish a couple of bottles on my own,” she said. “Occupational hazard. You know, I’ve dropped five sizes since the Wave came. Only put one back on last year, and I like to think that was muscle mass as opposed to table muscle.”

  “Table muscle?”

  “Fat,” Trudi said flatly. “Lard.”

  “Ah,” he replied, turning his attention back to the cattle.

  The herd was a heaving, dusty river, flowing north now, away from danger. He took in the scent of morning glories and honeydews that mingled with the stink of the beasts. A hint of rain in the air, perhaps. He wasn’t sure of the weather, and there was no way to check. Most of the AM band Texas radio stations had fallen behind them, and the stations outside Texas concentrated on the weather in Seattle or Kansas City, which didn’t help their situation one bit. Batteries to power the one radio they had were precious in any case, and no one was in the mood to listen to the gibberish coming out of Fort Hood or Governor Blackstone.

  Miguel relaxed in the saddle and released a pent-up breath he hadn’t even noticed he was holding. The morning sun started to peek through the chilly fog, ready to burn the thin sheath of frost off the land. With every minute that passed he felt better about leaving, about adding so many miles and weeks to their trip.

  “Penny for your thoughts?” Miss Jessup asked.

  “I am sorry to be so quiet,” Miguel said. “Tell me, what did you do, Miss Jessup? This last year, I mean, that you should find yourself in Texas, captured by road agents?”

  As soon as he asked the question, he regretted it, thinking himself too forward and rude for inquiring about another’s personal business. But Trudi Jessup seemed not at all put out.

  He saw her shoulders lift in silhouette.

  “First up, my name is Trudi. Remember. Second, I was working for Seattle, like everyone else,” she said. “Or so I thought. Before I wrote for magazines, I used to work in restaurants and catering. A lot of it is just logistics. Knowing how much food to have in store, predicting demand spikes and troughs, organizing transport. But you’d know some of that if you worked for the Golden Arches.”

  In fact, he had merely bossed their herds in one particular part of Mexico and knew very little about the hamburger clown’s wider business. Once the cattle were out of his care, they were no longer his concern. And where all the potatoes for fries and apples for pies came from and went to he had no idea. Although he had heard dark rumors that the globby, glutinous filling of Ronald McDonald’s apple pies were not apple at all but some sort of reconstituted root vegetable in sugar syrup. A rumor he dismissed as foolishness but one that never seemed to go away. Even down in Australia, they still talked about the apple pies as though they were made of mystery vegetables and secret chemistry tricks. When the family—again, a knife twisted in his chest as he thought of them—had passed through Sydney on their way back to America to join the resettlement program, he had taken them to spend the last of their local currency at a McDonald’s down near the port from which they were to leave. Miguel Pieraro would swear on his life that the apple pie contained only apples and maybe some sugar.

  “Well,” Miss Jessup continued, unaware of his private musing, “I put all that down on my forms when I got back from Sardinia. I would have stayed; it is absolutely gorgeous there with so much history and culture. And the food …”

  Miss Jessup … Trudi … sighed.

  “But with the Arab-Israeli thing and my funds turning into so much pixelated static, it just wasn’t tenable to hang out in that part of the world. So the feds paid for my passage, and I signed away five years of my life, figuring I wouldn’t be doing much more than digging ditches or clearing roads. God or the cosmic dice must love me because I got sent down here to organize the logistics train from settler farms like yours back to Seattle and up to KC. That’s how I got caught by the agents. I was out inspecting homesteads not far from where Aronson’s congregation got themselves bushwhacked.”

  Miguel whistled at Red Dog and sent her forward to chivvy a couple of head that looked like they might have been splitting off from the herd. The little cattle dog, a streak of fur in the dark, flashed off at his command, barking and leaping. Without being asked, Sofia urged her mount forward to support her.

  “So, before you were captured, did you have other problems with Fort Hood, in your work, I mean?” Miguel asked. He was forever searching for information about Blackstone that might help when he arrived in Kansas City.

  Trudi laughed. “Oh, you have no idea.

  “I learned pretty quickly not to route any requests through there,” she said. “Blackstone’s all but replicated the federal bureaucracy back in the Northwest, you know, and at first I thought that was a good thing. It can take a long time to hear back from Seattle, and I figured, naively, I suppose, that we were all in this together. So early on I tried cutting a few corners, sent out a few feelers to Fort Hood, to see if maybe we could get a few back-channel contacts going, you know, help each other out with stuff. All the usual informal give-and-take you get when people are making do in pretty rough circumstances.”

  “And they were no help?”

  She laughed again, but not happily.

  “They tried to shitcan me! Said I lacked the requisite ‘credentials.’ Said I’d have to sit a course and exam in Fort Hood before they could even deal with me. Do you believe that shit? Academic credentials in this environment?”

  She waved her hand around.

  “That’s when I knew they were just dicking me around. I’ve been doing this sort of work for longer than most of those assholes had been in uniform. But that wasn’t enough, of course. When I pushed back, they complained all the way back to my head office about me trying to subvert their duly constituted authorities and systems and structures and all sorts of petty Weberian bullshit?”

  Miguel did not understand exactly what she meant by “Vayberian,” but he had a pretty good idea.

  “It is as I thought,” he said. “It is even possible, Miss Jessup—”

  “Goddamn, Miguel. I’m Trudi! My name is Trudi.”

  “Sorry, I forget. The nuns beat me for bad manners when I was a boy. It is even possible … Trudi, that you were targeted by the agents because you were sent by Seattle.”

  She was silent at that, riding along for nearly half a minute under the cold fire of the stars.

  “Possible,” she conceded at last. “It wasn’t but a few hours before meeting them that I had a nasty brush with the TDF. Some bald clown with a goatee and a really filthy chaw tobacco habit.”

  Miguel could see that the riders ahead of them had turned the herd to the northeast, as agreed. They had traced out the next week’s trek on a new road map taken from the study of the holiday home. For much of the journey they would follow the road network, avoiding some difficult geography between here and the grasslands, although the final approach to the first reserve would see them traverse a long forested valley north of the town of
Commerce. Of that part of the state they had no knowledge, although it was so far from the cluster of federal settlements in the south that Miguel did not expect to encounter any problems there. In his experience, one was more likely to rub up hard against the Texas Defense Force and the agents near areas resettled by the federales.

  He looked east and found the skyline there discernible at last, just a faint difference in shading between earth and heaven at that point but enough to let him know that dawn was not far off. He found himself wishing that Miss Julianne and Miss Fifi and all his friends from the dead golfer’s boat were with him. By the Sacred Mother, they would make short work of any agents who attempted to interfere with them. Those mountain men from Nepal, if he remembered, the soldiers she had hired … Gurkhas! He could never remember their unusual names, but he well remembered how fiercely they had fought to protect the boat and his family from pirates down at the bottom of the world.

  Miguel shook his head.

  Pirates. At the bottom of the world.

  What strange paths his life had taken.

  Midafternoon and storm clouds building up in the west confirmed what Miguel’s nose had told him earlier. The road agents were unlikely to get them now even if they had helicopters or planes to help them. The purple thunderheads, livid and bruised at the heart and tinged with green at the edge, already were flashing with a malicious promise of violence. Thunder, distant but ominous, rolled over gentle hills toward them. The weather front advanced rapidly, blotting out the clear sky as it came. At its current speed, Miguel could see it would overtake them long before they left the valley.

  The herd stirred with agitation, calling to one another. Flossie snorted, shaking out her mane, struggling against the reins. She started to back-step and fight the bridle.

  “Easy,” Miguel said, giving the reins a short, sharp tug. He leaned forward to stroke Flossie’s neck and whisper a few reassuring words in her twitching ears.

  “Don’t see many of them at this time of year.”

  Cooper Aronson had ridden up and was examining the wall of cloud as though it meant to give him personal offense.

  Miguel pointed at the storm with his Stetson. In the few minutes he had been watching, the storm front had cut the distance between itself and the herd appreciably. Anxiety sat heavily just beneath his heart, and he cast around for his daughter. She was riding on the far side of the herd, chatting with Trudi Jessup. He had to suppress the urge to cut across and tell her to be wary. They might have a half hour, perhaps even less. “No,” he said. “That looks like a summer storm, one of the worst kind, but the weather, it has been loco for years now.”

  “I had thought it was calming down some,” Aronson ventured. “At least these last twelve months.”

  “Maybe the last twelve months, but not in the next two hours,” Miguel said. “I do not like this, Aronson. Look at the land around here. We are driving through a wide valley, and as I recall from your map this morning, there are at least four streams within a few miles of us.”

  “A risk of flash flood, you think?” the Mormon asked.

  “There is a lot of rain in that storm,” Miguel said.

  The protests of the cattle grew more insistent as lightning strobed through the huge, evil-looking bank of cloud and the trailing thunder grew noticeably louder than before. Miguel could see all the riders turning in their saddles to examine the spectacle as the shadow of the front fell over the tail end of the herd. His dogs began barking, and he called out harshly to them to be quiet. He did not need them spooking the herd any worse than it was already. Sofia, he was glad to see, gave him a querying glance before edging her horse onto slightly higher ground. She appeared to call to Miss Jessup to follow her, and the former restaurant woman did just that.

  The rapid clip-clop of thudding hooves preceded Willem D’Age’s approach at speed. He and Aronson acknowledged each other with brief nods before D’Age spoke up.

  “I think it might be best if we moved the herd and ourselves to the nearest high ground,” he said.

  “Miguel feels the same,” Aronson replied, “but of course on high ground we’ll be exposed to the danger of lightning strikes.”

  Miguel waved off that point.

  “That is a concern, Aronson, but a very small one. There is a chance of being hit by lightning but a certainty that many of these animals will drown, and us with them, if this valley floods.”

  The storm seemed to emphasize his point by unleashing a cannonade of thunder and lightning at that moment.

  “How far is the nearest town or settlement; do we know?” Miguel asked. A cold breeze started up, bending long stalks of grass and a few scattered saplings to the west as the giant cell began to draw air into itself, as if to fill its lungs. The cattle, he noticed, had picked up their pace, trotting now, to match the increased urgency of their protesting calls.

  “There is nothing close, nothing on high ground for a good twelve or thirteen miles,” Aronson said, without consulting a map. “There’s a small crossroads village there. I don’t know whether it’s on the floodplain, but the land does appear to rise in that direction.”

  He dipped his head to the north.

  “Then we should hurry,” Miguel said, looking to D’Age for support. He often found the younger Mormon to be the more cautious and reasonable of the two, perhaps as a result of the encounter at Crockett. Miguel snapped his reins and sent Flossie forward at a canter to match pace with the herd and the other riders.

  The storm front passed over the sun then, snuffing it out and causing an almost startling drop in temperature. The first real crack of thunder split the sky, and the cattle started moving at speed, the drumming of their hooves becoming a frenzied tattoo. Another quick glance across the vast, seething river of mottled brown cowhide and bobbing longhorns found Sofia and Trudi turned around in their saddles, watching the storm race toward them. His daughter caught him staring at her and gave him a thumbs-up. Whips cracked and outriders yelled, attempting to keep the mob together. Adam and Orin galloped past him, doing their bit. It was no small thing herding thousands of cattle that were already spooked and this close to stampeding in panic. He wished he was over with Sofia. And Trudi, too. She was unusual. Not at all right, yet he could not help but warm to her. The Mormons were good men and women, but by the Blessed Virgin they were a tightly stitched bunch, and Miguel, for all his own hard exterior, did enjoy the company of people who knew how to enjoy themselves.

  CRACK!

  The flash of lightning and the hard-edged peal of thunder were nearly simultaneous. He felt rain on his face, a few droplets at first but quickening to a downpour that slapped down on them with real force. He was drenched through within seconds by the cold, stinging rain. And then it stopped abruptly, and a sickly green light lay over the valley floor, flattening the scene, as though he were riding into a photograph in a book.

  Uh-oh, he thought.

  The first hailstone fell as a single white rock, bouncing off Flossie’s sweat-streaked shoulders. He just had time to hunker down and cinch the drawstring on his Stetson so that it sat tightly before a huge white fist smashed down on them all, a sudden roaring storm of ice that slammed into the earth, raising a shrieking, braying protest from the cattle, and nearly unseating the rider in front of Miguel with shock.

  The vaquero spurred forward at a gallop, ignoring the stinging, burning pain of an Old Testament stoning from above. He recognized D’Age ahead of him, about to tumble from the saddle. Flossie was streaking forward at her top speed now, and Miguel was drawing on decades of horsemanship to maintain his balance. He drew up beside the Mormon and saw the fear in his face, the terror of having lost control of a big beast, compounded by the pounding riot of the stampede a few feet away.

  Yes, the cattle had gone over now. No longer a controlled herd but a fear-shot panicking mob, barreling forward, plowing under any of their own number that fell, their cries like the horns of a thousand ghost trains. Miguel leaned across the gap between his
horse and D’Age’s, precariously teetering on the edge of his balance. He grabbed at the other man’s reins and took a firm grip on the first attempt, applying hard but steady pressure, letting the animal know that it was under the control of a higher power. Calming it. Steadying it.

  The horse never slowed. It was caught in the flow of the great mass of flesh up the valley floor, but after a few moments Miguel felt its wild terror and abandon subside noticeably.

  “Take the reins,” he yelled at D’Age, and for a wonder, the man did so, getting his own fear under control, too.

  He tried to find Sofia in the storm, but there was simply no chance. He could see no more than a few yards in any direction. He prayed as he had not prayed since the murder of his family that she would be all right. Truthfully, he had no faith in prayer anymore, but the Hail Marys and the pleas to look after his only surviving child arose unbidden, anyway.

  Without warning, the hailstorm transitioned to a ferocious downpour, and visibility contracted to just a few feet. A howling banshee wind bit down on them, blowing the gray sheets of water horizontal. Miguel could feel himself being pushed forward by the strength of the wind and water. It shrieked in his ears and lashed at every exposed inch of skin, burning like acid.

  Even the uproar of the stampede faded beneath the monstrous assault of the storm.

  He looked about for his dogs but could see them nowhere. He could see very little indeed.

  He hoped they had just fallen behind, unable to keep up. They were well trained and would not have let themselves get close enough to be trampled, but he could not still the anxious rodent of fear he felt gnawing at his guts.