After America
( Without warning - 2 )
John Birmingham
John Birmingham
After America
PROLOGUE
Seattle, Washington "Man, being president sucks."
"Try being married to the bozo who's always complaining about how much being president sucks."
Kipper flinched as Barb pinched a small fold of skin just below his Adam's apple while trying to fasten the top of his dress shirt.
"Oh my God, Kip. You are such a baby. It's lucky none of your marines can see you right now."
"They're not my marines," he protested, finally stepping away from his wife to peer around her shoulder at the full-length mirror in the bedroom of their private quarters.
Hmmph. He was a wearing a fucking penguin suit. With tails and everything. It was all he could do not to make little barking penguin noises.
"Do I really have to do-"
"Yes, Kip. You really have to. It's part of the job."
"But poetry…"
Kip turned from the mirror as Barbara fiddled with her earrings at the antique dresser in their bedroom.
"Come on, Kip," she teased. "Rhyming couplets aren't the worst things you've had thrown at you the last couple of years. It might even be fun."
Maybe. If he was allowed to get a few beers in, and who knew, the poems might even rhyme. He could hear the musicians, some sort of small local chamber orchestra, playing downstairs. Violin music and the growing murmur of a small crowd pushed up through the dark wooden floorboards of their bedroom. Kipper mentally ticked off the hour, at least, he would have to wait before ripping the top off his first brew.
"Mister President, if you're ready, sir."
Barbara smiled at their protocol chief. "Oh, Allan, he'll never be ready, but I've done the best I can. Let's go downstairs."
Kipper hadn't seen anyone appear at their door, but he wasn't surprised to find him there. Privately he referred to Allan Horbach, the White House protocol chief, as Casper because he was always spooking around somewhere, although admittedly Kipper needed more protocol wrangling than your average president. Barb and Allan fell into a hushed but animated conversation as the three of them made their way down the hallway toward the main staircase. As the background noise swelled to a reasonable roar, Kip estimated that there had to be nearly two hundred people crammed into the reception area on the ground floor of Dearborn House. He'd long ago done away with a good deal of the formality that made these events so punishing, meaning he did not now have to endure that nearly unbearable moment when Allan announced their arrival as though he were stepping onto the bridge of an aircraft carrier or something. Even so, as they came down the stairs smiling and waving, it seemed as though everybody there turned as one toward them.
And then, just like stepping off the bank into a deep, fast-flowing river, he was pulled into the crowd.
Half of Seattle had somehow crammed itself into the music room and formal parlor of Dearborn House. He winced to see the Greens' leader, Sandra Harvey, bending the ear of his appointments secretary, Miss Hughes, and made a note to remind Annie that when Sandra came calling, he was always out. He had just enough time to register Jed Culver, his chief of staff, deep in conversation with Henry Cesky, the construction magnate. He wondered what dark schemes those two could be cooking up, and then Allan was suddenly at his side, gently directing him by the elbow toward the British and French ambassadors who appeared to be arguing over something to do with Guadeloupe.
He was pretty sure that was a country, not a tapas dish, but not sure enough that he wanted any part of the argument.
"Mister President," said Horbach, "we must greet the ambassadors, then the speaker of the House, the governor, the…"
Kipper zoned out. They were no more than a minute into this reception, and already he was screaming inside. He had no idea how Barb smiled and chatted through it all as though she were actually enjoying herself. Christ, maybe she was. The next thirty minutes passed in a painful series of meet 'n' greets with a procession of dignitaries, foreign guests, senators and Congressbots, and Seattle City Council officials, all of whom had been elected well after he'd left the City Engineers Department. It was with a truly pathetic sense of gratitude that he spotted Barney Tench, his old college bud and now reconstruction czar, working the buffet over by the windows.
"Barn! Man, how you doin'?" he called out over the heads of the crowd, instantly drawing the attention of about fifty or sixty people to Tench, who was caught stuffing a giant piece of crabmeat into his mouth. Allan Horbach actually face-palmed himself, and Barb gave him a small kick in the back of his leg.
"But I need to talk to Barney," he protested. "It's about work."
"Not now, Mister President," the protocol Nazi insisted. "Mister Ford is about to perform."
"The poet?" said Kip. "Oh. Great."
Back through the press of the crowd they went, every step blocked by somebody who wanted a small piece of his time, all the way up to the front of the room, where Kip was introduced to a thin, nervous-looking man in a slightly ill-fitting suit. He instantly felt for him. Ford looked no more comfortable than he did.
"Mister President," said Allan Horbach, "might I present our first poet laureate of the new age."
That's what we're calling it now, he thought. When did we start calling the end of the fucking world a new age?
He shook Ford's hand and leaned in close to be heard over the crowd.
"Don't worry, buddy; by tomorrow this'll all just be a terrible nightmare."
"What?" Ford looked shaken. "Oh. A joke. I see. Okay, then. Shall I read now?"
"I think the president wants to say a few words first," said Horbach.
"Well, I don't really want to," Kip said, earning a glare from his wife, "but what the hell. We're not getting any younger. Let's do it to it."
A bell rang somewhere as he ascended the small dais that had been erected and then tapped the mike.
"Hey, everyone, how you doing?" Kip said as the soft roar of two hundred voices finally trailed away. He winked at Ford. "As you all know, I'm not a big fan of these formal shindigs, but I do believe it's important to pull on a monkey suit every now and then. As my grandmother used to say, if something is worth doing, it's probably worth wearing a clean pair of pants."
Polite chuckles washed up at him from the crowd, but no more than that, except for Barney, who was stuffing more crabmeat into his face at the back of the room and laughing such a big genuine laugh that Kip worried his old friend was in danger of choking. God, he thought, these are so not my people.
"Anyway," he continued. "Tonight is definitely worth pants."
He gave Adam Ford a big thumbs-up and was rewarded with what looked like a real smile from the poet, whose eyes were twinkling a little more brightly the longer Kipper had the floor.
"Barbara and I invited you all here tonight to… well, hell, you know why you're here. We've got us a new poet laureate!"
He boomed out that last, as though announcing that the local college football team had brought home the national championship. The applause and some of the whoops of approval that rolled back up at him from the floor were actually heartfelt this time.
"I'm glad to see you're as stoked as I am about this," said the president, settling into his delivery, "because this is totally stokeworthy. You know, a lot of what we've been about the last few years, it's been little more than brute survival. Feeding ourselves, defending our homes, just keeping our kids alive, has been…"
He paused, searching for the right words. To the endless frustration of his staff, Kipper rarely delivered prepared speeches or even spoke from notes.
"… it's been, well, calling it a challenge would be…
inadequate. It's been hell."
The room was quiet now.
"Our world went to hell on March 14, 2003. That's the only way I can describe it, because we still don't know what happened, and frankly, I don't think we ever will. I have hundreds of scientists still working away at this every day, throwing all sorts of theories and tests and experiments at it, trying to tell me where that Wave came from and where it took all our friends and families. They've been studying it for years now, and they are no closer to knowing. So perhaps it's time to come at it from a different angle, a different kind of knowing. That's why Adam Ford is here tonight. He's not a scientist, he's a poet, and from where I stand looking back at everything that's happened since the Disappearance, I reckon his way of trying to come at the meaning of it all is every bit as valid as all those scientists writing all those reports for me. Probably more so." He gestured to the poet to make his way to the microphone. "Adam?"
Loud applause carried the poet laureate up onto the stage and the president down from it. Ford pulled a single sheet of paper out of the breast pocket of his jacket and coughed before thanking Kipper and waiting for the minor roar to die down. When the room was quiet again, he read.
"This is a poem called 'Aftermath,'" he said. "They weren't lost at sea. They are not missing in action. We weren't at their side as they breathed their last. There are no bodies to identify. They were here. Then they weren't. We're left behind with nothing to point to, No evidence that says, 'This happened here,' No shadows burned into the sides of buildings, No mountain of glasses, suitcases, and shoes, No pile of skulls, no handheld footage Of papers and shattered glass raining down. Just the near-infinite density of collected grief That distorts our universe like a black hole- Grief that we, who remain, All bear as one as we search for our place In this strange, new, far-too-different world."
1
New York "No siree, Mister President, you do not get these from pettin' kitty cats."
James Kipper nodded, smiling doubtfully as the slab-shouldered workman flexed his biceps and kissed each one in turn. His Secret Service guys didn't seem much bothered, and he'd long ago learned to pick up on their unspoken signals and body language. They paid much less attention to the salvage crew in front of him than to the ruined facades of the office blocks looking down on the massive, rusting pileup in Lower Manhattan. The hard work and unseasonal humidity of Lower Manhattan had left the workman drenched in sweat, and Kipper could feel the shirt sticking to his own back.
Having paid homage to his bowling-ball-sized muscles, the workman reached out one enormous, calloused paw to shake hands with the forty-fourth president of the United States. Kipper's grip was not as strong as it once had been and had certainly never been anywhere near as powerful as this gorilla's, but a long career in engineering hadn't left him with soft fingers or a limp handshake. He returned the man's iron-fisted clench with a fairly creditable squeeze of his own.
"Whoa there, Mister President," the salvage and clearance worker cried out jokingly. "I need these dainty pinkies for my second job. As a concert pianist, don'tcha know."
The small crush of men and women gathered around Kipper grinned and chuckled. This guy was obviously the clown of the bunch.
"A concert penis, you say?" Kipper shot back. "What's that, some sorta novelty act? With one of those really tiny pianos?"
The groan of his media handler, Karen Milliner, was lost in the sudden uproar of coarse, braying laughter as the S amp;C workers erupted at the exchange. That did put his security detail a little on edge, but the man-mountain with the kissable biceps was laughing the loudest of them all, pointing at the chief executive and crying out, "This fuggin' guy. He cracks me up. Best fuggin' president ever."
Kipper half expected to be grabbed in a headlock for an affectionate noogie.
That would have set his detail right off.
But after a few moments the uproar receded.
Kipper's gaze fell on a woman, who'd remained unusually reserved throughout. Doubtless one or two of his detail were watching her closely from behind their darkened sunglasses. He caught her eye and favored her with an indulgent grin by which he meant to convey a sense of amused pity. She obviously did not fit in with this gang of roughnecks. Her features were fine-boned, and she didn't look like somebody used to long days of heavy manual labor. As he so often found when he traveled around to "meet the peeps"-his daughter's term, not his-the peeps intrigued him. This nation of castaways and lost souls all had their stories. And you had to wonder what paths had brought biceps guy and this quiet woman to New York three years after the Wave had dissipated as mysteriously as it had arrived.
"Mister President," Karen Milliner said, "we really need to get a move on-the schedule, you know."
Jostled out of his momentary ponderings by the director of communications, his flak catcher in chief, he nodded and smiled apologetically to the workers.
"I'm sorry, guys. Just like you, I am a mere civil servant, and my boss here"-he jerked a thumb at Milliner-"says I gotta get back to work."
The small crowd booed her but cheered him as he waved and began to walk away with his personal security detail shadowing every step. Cries of "Thank you, Mister President" and "Way to go, Kip" followed him down into the graveyard of corporate America.
The stillness of the ruins soon returned. Grit and debris crunched underfoot as the party picked its way through the wreckage of Wall Street. Only the sound of the pigeons, which had returned to the city in plague numbers, broke the silence. The ecosystem within the Wave-affected area seemed to be outstripping all scientific predictions in terms of recovery. Wood chips and piles of tree branches lined the streets. The buzzing roar of chain saws joined in with the heavy metal crash of machinery. Much of the cleanup work in places like Manhattan pertained just as much to brush clearance as to vehicle pileups or burned-out buildings. It wasn't like the great charred wastelands left by the firestorms that had covered so much of North America. There was life here, of a sort. He could smell it in the fresh-cut timber of an island fast reverting to its original, heavily wooded state.
Away from the raucous cheers of the salvage crew, Kipper fell deep into the well of his own thoughts. He took in the sight of a Mister Softee ice cream van that had speared into the front of the Citibank at the corner of Wall and Front streets. A couple of bicycles lay crushed under its wheels, and jagged shards of glass had ripped through the scorched, filthy rags that once had clothed the riders. He had to remind himself that they hadn't died in the auto accident. They had simply Disappeared like every other soul in this empty city, like everyone across America four years ago.
"Traffic's not too bad here," he ventured to Jed Culver for want of something better to say. "Not like back on… what was that last cross street, where those guys were cleaning up?"
"Water Street, sir," one of his Secret Service detail offered. He was a new guy. Kip didn't know his name yet, but his accent was local. You had to wonder what that was doing to his head.
"Most of these cars were parked when the Wave hit," Culver added. "Mostly pedestrians and bike riders through here, health nazis, that sort of thing. Water Street was busier."
Culver's soft Southern drawl, a Louisiana lilt with a touch of transatlantic polish, trailed off. The silence of the necropolis, a vast crypt for millions of the Disappeared, seemed to press the air out of him. Kip turned back to gaze down the shadowed canyon of the old financial district. The intersection of Water and Wall was a wrecking yard of yellow cabs, private cars, and one armored van that had been broadsided by a dump truck and knocked completely over. The impact had smashed open both rear doors, and a few buff-colored sacks of old money still lay unwanted on the ground. None of the salvagers bothered with the dead currency, which long since had been replaced by the less valuable New American Dollar. They had returned to attacking the tangle of metal with earthmoving equipment, sledgehammers, chains, and pure grunt.
It was the loudest noise in the city.
Kip shook
his head and turned back.
"Come on," he said. "Let's keep going."
At the corner of the JP Morgan Building they encountered the weather-worn facade of the New York Stock Exchange. A large soiled and tattered American flag hung loosely from the Roman columns of the neoclassical structure, held in place by creeping vines as much as by nylon ropes. Kipper had never been to Wall Street, or New York City for that matter, and photographs of the Street always made it appear larger than life. Now, here, in the presence of what had been the most powerful engine of capitalism on the planet, it felt small and almost claustrophobic.
Down at the end of the street he could see a church of some sort, dwarfed by the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan. Kipper wasn't a religious man, but the sight of the steeple deepened his melancholy, driving it toward the deeper blue depths. More than a few nut jobs had proclaimed their own end of days interpretations of the Wave. For his part, he still believed that there had to be a rational explanation.
But what that explanation was, nobody knew.
He indulged himself in a melancholy sigh.
The party was small for a presidential caravan: just Kipper, Jed Culver-Karen Milliner, and half a dozen security men in dark coveralls and heavy combat rigs. There was no getting rid of them. An army of looters was currently denuding the eastern seaboard of everything from sports cars and heavy equipment to computer game systems and jewelry. Kip often found himself contemplating the lot of Native Americans when whitey turned up. An entire continent was ripe for the taking, and nobody seemed to care that a small number of locals already had a claim on the place.
The irony, or tragedy he supposed, was that most of the Native American population had been wiped out by the Wave. He wasn't sure how many remained. Next year's census would, he hoped, shed some light on that. There simply hadn't been time to organize a full survey of the population since the Wave. There was too much to do just keeping their heads above water. For one thing, the East Coast was overrun with raiders and pirates. Many were part of big criminal syndicates out of Europe and South America, some of them operating with tacit state backing-where states still existed to give that backing-and the balance was a swarm of smaller private operators mostly based in the Caribbean but sometimes hailing from as far away as Africa and Eastern Europe. From the briefings he'd had back home in Seattle, he knew you really didn't want to tangle with those guys. Half of them were whacked off their heads on weird-ass cocktails of jungle drugs. They came for the luxury cars and high-end goods. They came for the salvage potential of so much copper, iron, and steel. They came for the jewels, gold, and art, leaving MOMA and a dozen other museums stripped bare, their treasures scattered to the four winds.
After America ww-2 Page 1
