Tropic of Kansas

by Christopher Brown

  Sig wondered if a thing like that could fly.

  It turned out it could fly really well. The trick was getting it into the air.

  The season’s last snow came the night before they drove up to Cedar Rapids. It was bigger than expected. But not big enough to block the roads. Or to mask the stench of Cedar Rapids, where the biofuels plants filled the air most days with the odor of a sugarcoated slaughterhouse.

  They set up in the parking lot behind an abandoned office building. The pavement was wet and slick from snowmelt, but plowed clear. Fritz fiddled around with the engine of the plane while Sig watched for patrols. The engine sputtered and kicked in. It was pretty loud.

  “Okay, clear!” said Fritz over the engine noise.

  The plane accelerated as it moved. The engine throttled up. It sounded kind of like a leaf blower. And then it lifted, as if pulled by an invisible string.

  Sig drove the car while Fritz drove the drone. Fritz had the backseat set up as a cockpit. He had a TV, a bunch of computers and radios, and a video game controller. It was so packed with gear that Fritz had to slide down through the sunroof to get in and out.

  Fritz knew where the militia base was. It was a house in the rich part of town. The home of some guy who had sold his family’s factory to one of the big biofuels companies and now spent most of his time in New York. The guy was one of the main sponsors of the militia and gave them the run of the house.

  They drove closer to the house and parked on a quiet street a couple of blocks away. Sig moved to the back and watched the grainy black-and-white footage that came in from the drone. The house was huge. It looked like it probably had ten bedrooms. The lot was bigger, maybe three acres. There was a big garage, a shed, an empty swimming pool, and a boarded-up cabana.

  The yard was full of trucks, the snow packed down from the weight of the vehicles driving all over it.

  Six prisoners in sweatsuits stood in the bottom of the empty swimming pool, milling about under the watch of two armed guards.

  Fritz circled overhead for twenty minutes, while Sig made a map in his head. Then they landed the drone and took a lunch break when it was almost time for dinner.

  It was dark when they finished eating, and a lot colder. Fritz said those were perfect conditions to fly the copter.

  The copter did not look like a helicopter. It looked like a flying ball made out of toothpicks. It was smaller than a basketball but bigger than a baseball. The balsa wood lattice was dotted with little fiber eyes all attached to a controller the size of a pack of gum. It had six small rotors inside the superstructure. It made no more noise than a fan. Like the plane, it did not look like it could fly. And it didn’t. More like it floated.

  It had a short range, so they had to park down the street to launch it, which made Fritz nervous. But it worked. They flew in and bobbed around the outside of the house, peeking through the windows and seeing what was going on inside, until they found the room where they kept Moco.

  Fritz was very pleased with this, until Sig said he wanted to go in that same night.

  40

  Tania drove to the outskirts of Iowa City, looking for a safe place to hide and figure out next steps. She kept waiting for a militia truck to appear in her rearview mirror, but there were hardly any vehicles coming from either direction, just big transports moving cross-country loads. The only passenger car she noticed was a bright yellow Benz wagon that looked like it was older than Tania, headed in the direction Tania was coming from, spewing old-school diesel fumes.

  She called Bert, but he didn’t answer. She left a reckless message, asking if Bert had any idea how she could arrange a prisoner transfer. She wanted to help Moco, but to do that she first had to protect herself, and save Mom. A task that now seemed a lot harder, after learning from Moco that she had just missed Sig. First Lisbet, now this. She needed to regroup.

  Tania scoped out the corporate hotels along the interstate, out by the big plants. At the truck center, she nearly maxed out her credit card buying prepaid cards off the rack, to use as anonymous cash equivalents. Gift cards, mostly, one of which the clerk showed her could have its limits altered at the register.

  She pulled up to the lobby of a corporate clean M-Class hotel on a big berm along the frontage road, but got a dangerous vibe watching two business-casual guests stumble in from the bar. So she drove closer into town and decided to try the River Inn, a place that looked clean but on the empty side, with the kind of old cars in the lot that people drove when they wanted to stay off the satellite, or couldn’t afford to be on it.

  The night clerk looked like a hippie mortician, which in this case was a good thing. Tania prepaid a week with her new Bux card and gave the guy a fake name. Have a nice stay, Ms. Rourke.

  She persuaded him to give her a corner room on the second floor, far from the elevator and close to an exterior exit, with a view of the highway and the field behind.

  Before she unloaded the car, she found a beat-up old cash machine and took out her limit. Then she picked up provisions at the cooperative convenience store—bottled water, noodle packs, night snacks, a prepack sandwich, and Iowa wine. It calmed her to see she was in a town that had figured out how to take over an abandoned corporate outpost like Kwik Stop and turn it into a trading post well stocked with local goods.

  She parked the car around in the back, behind a shed, where it wouldn’t be seen unless someone was looking really hard.

  She sent an incomplete update to Gerson and then spent three hours trying to figure out how to disable the tracking devices in her gear, including the uplink in her car. She told Mike she was on the move, without telling him more. She sent an encrypted message to Todd, asking if he’d had any luck getting access to the DdB, and if he could get her a tap into the security feed of this motel.

  She called Odile, but no answer, not even a voicemail prompt.

  She looked at pictures of her mom, and of Sig.

  She looked out the window, looking for danger, and noticed an old antenna off to the south.

  The Feed box was on, in the background, tuned for news, with the sound off. It wasn’t until she decided she was probably safe for the night and needed to rest that she bothered to try to change the channel, saw that the same show was on every channel, and remembered what night it was.

  The anniversary. The Day of Memory. Another day since they killed the hostages.

  Flags and dirges and photos of the dead. The national pain that can never be fully avenged.

  Tania wasn’t even born when it happened, but they made it the centerpiece of the patriotic narrative starting in grade school. Maybe that was why it still worked so well to get people worked up into a nationalistic fervor.

  Remember the Martyrs

  Before every commercial break, they showed a one-minute life of one of the sixty-six. Newton Towns narrated the sequences about the military response, with documentary voice-over solemnity.

  Tania felt the programmed feeling coming on. Empathy for this long-dead young woman’s life cut short. Felt the cry coming up inside, even though she knew she was being manipulated. She wasn’t just crying for this dead American diplomat with feathered hair. She cried for her own dead future, in sudden recognition that her entire career was a misguided emulation of these childhood icons of nationalist virtue, noble public servants whose own innocence masks the sins of their master. She cried for Mom, the soul-tired in her eyes from fighting her whole life against a leviathan she could not even scratch. She cried for Moco, the spirited kid learning the ugly lessons about what they did to those who tried to freely move, especially if they came from one of the camps. She cried for Tracer, the teen who had the foolish courage to challenge his own family’s privilege. She cried for Sig, out there roaming Lord knows where, surviving like an animal, alone. She even cried for untouchable Odile. And for America, her country gone cannibal.

  Her radical white school friends used to say Martyrs Day was the event that broke the American heart and turned it bla
ck. When she repeated that to Mom over dinner, Mom said it just gave them permission to be more honest about it.

  Tania turned off the set and stood. She looked at her reflection in the black screen. She went to the window again. Saw two blinking lights on the mast in the distance, one red and one white. Maybe it was time to watch a different kind of TV. Time to figure out a way to find Sig, and free Mom, without having to rat anyone out, or lie, or exploit old friends. If she played it right, and got a little lucky, she might be able to keep them all free.

  Tania went to her laptop bag and dug out the portable set Todd had loaned her. She set it up on the coffee table. She grabbed the sheet they handed out at Ganymede, with the frequencies. She plugged in the power. Then she got to work on tuning it in.

  She got a dot in the center of the screen, and then it grew into a blizzard of electronic noise.

  She flipped the channels. Each one, variations on the same thing.

  She fiddled with the focal knobs. Thought for a second she saw the contours of human faces in the dissonant dots, then laughed at herself for thinking there would be answers in that noise.

  And then the phone rang.

  Tania didn’t recognize the number, but when she saw the time, she knew who it was, and what she needed to do.

  41

  Fritz said they could run back down to Iowa City and get a gun from the safe, but Sig said he didn’t want one. He didn’t like guns and he didn’t think he’d need one.

  Fritz said Sig’s idea to put spikes in his cast so it would work like a mace was goofy. But he helped him anyway. They made the new outer layer from long carpet nails and duct tape they bought at the Stone City Maker Co-op.

  They got most of the materials for the bomb in the garden department.

  Fritz gave Sig a headlamp to use if he needed it. He put one of his little drone cameras on there, too. They didn’t have a radio, but at least Fritz could watch and know when they were coming back. He didn’t say if.

  It was a little after three in the morning when they got started for real. They parked in the same spot a block away, and Sig set out on foot. He cut through the backyards to the house he’d seen that came right up to the back of the militia mansion fence. Even with one hand, he was able to climb up the drainpipe on the garage, then work his way up two stories onto the roof. From there, it was an easy jump down into the snow.

  He could hear the whine of Fritz’s big drone.

  He jogged across the yard, using what tree cover he could, and came around behind the poolhouse. The pool was empty of prisoners now. There was one big militiaman standing back there walking patrol and smoking a cigarette. Sig went back to the fence and around the long way to the east side of the house.

  It was clear. He ran up to the basement window. It was partly covered with snow, but you could still see down into the room. The lights were on. So was the radio, playing some kind of loud rock that sounded like power tools. Same as the SUV that had delivered the militia to the Co-op. Moco was curled up naked on the floor. He looked like shit.

  “Hey!” said a voice behind Sig.

  Sig looked around. Guard, with flashlight on Sig.

  BLAMF BLAMF BLAMF. The sound of bullets penetrating snow. Sig dove into the snow, and swam.

  He came up away from the window and ran toward the front of the house.

  An alarm went off, blasting a klaxon inside and outside.

  BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM.

  He ran like a wild animal. He was used to it. He had been hunted before.

  He heard the whine of the drone coming in. He stepped into a drift too deep, and fell flat on his face in the snow.

  When Sig turned over, the fat Hawkeye stood over him, staring with the third eye of a headlamp. You could see the sweat on his face and the metal of the barrel glowing blue in the weird light of the LED blended with the moon and the crystals of the snow.

  Drone whine, like the sound of a tiny dive bomber coming in. You could see the blur of the shape as it crashed into a second-floor window.

  KRRRRABOOOMM!

  Fritz’s biofuel-compost payload detonated. You could feel the blast before you saw the fireball. You could even see it passing over the face of the Hawkeye as he turned to look.

  Sig got up on his feet and planted his mace fist in the side of the guard’s head, just below the ear. You could hear the sound of the nails going in. The guy screamed. Sig brought his knife up under the guy’s sternum and went all the way in.

  It took a second before Sig realized how much his wrist hurt. He had to cut the duct tape and nails loose from the cast to separate them.

  There was a lot of blood in the snow.

  He took the gun with him as he ran back to Moco.

  There were other militia running around outside now. You could hear a woman and a man barking commands out by the main entrance. It didn’t seem to matter. Whatever paramilitary order they had was broken by the surprise.

  Moco was not in his cell. The door was open. The music was still on.

  Sig smashed the window with the rifle. He climbed down into the room, bringing snow with him. Someone had ripped a poster from the wall. Sig stepped into the hallway, bracing the rifle as best he could with his clumsy left hand.

  Moco was on the hallway floor, pounding away at a guard he had pinned, using the guard’s metal club. You could hear the crunch. Moco looked back at Sig with a crazy face, that look that no other type of animal ever showed.

  Sig waved at him to come on.

  Moco’s expression changed, and he flashed his messed-up teeth.

  They helped each other get back up out through the window.

  They ran through the chaos outside. They saw militiamen attending to the explosion. They got to the spot Sig had seen from the drone eye, where the snow was blown up against the fence in a low spot at the bottom of the hill. They struggled a bit in the layer of fresh, unpacked stuff but managed to clamber up and over the top.

  42

  “You’re late,” said Bert. Except Bert wasn’t really Bert, not in this place. Here Bert was Jasmine, a Yemeni spy with the world’s most insane eyelashes. And when he/she talked, it came through as text messages at the bottom of Tania’s screen.

  “Sorry,” texted Tania, typing on the keyboard side of the remote that operated the hotel room Feed box. “Researching, lost track of time.”

  “Thought you might be watching the special.”

  “Making my own.”

  The speakers filled with the sound of jets, and then the image shook. In the background behind Bert/Jasmine, you could see the pyramids were burning.

  “Sunday nights in Cairo” was what Bert called it, this way to secretly communicate when they were both in the field. The game was Call of Freedom, a multiplayer military shooter set in an alternate universe where the Iran War never happened, the General never happened, and America was in a religious war with Arab guerrillas who hid in mountain complexes and urban tunnel forts. Bert liked it because it was so unpopular, buried in the deep back channels of the Feed where the bots rarely roamed, and because it was almost exclusively populated with buzz-cut special forces guys, frequently shirtless and often grunting. Tania found it grim as hell, from the opening title shot of terrorists flying a plane into the Empire State Building to the way the rules allowed players to torture each other, but Bert was right that it worked well as a clandestine hangout, if you didn’t mind getting virtually shot at all the time.

  “How’s Duluth?” asked Bert.

  Tania did not want to answer that one, so she answered with a question.

  “Ever wonder what happened to Maxine Price?”

  “Not really,” answered Bert. “She was the first American suicide bomber. I just wonder why the bitch couldn’t pull it off. But she always did choke when opportunity struck. Talk is easier than real action.”

  “Maybe. You don’t wonder about the official story?”

  Jasmine shrugged. You could see the pixel Sphinx behind her.


  “They had a body?” said Tania.

  “They had some kind of crispy toast on the Feed,” said Bert. “They always show a body, even when they don’t have one.”

  “Burial at sea,” said Tania.

  “Exactly,” said Bert. “You know I know you’re not where you’re supposed to be, right?”

  Shit.

  “I can’t help you unless you tell me,” typed Bert. “Especially not with this insane prisoner transfer thing you burned on my vmail.”

  “Iowa,” typed Tania.

  “Iowa? You’re supposed to be in Minnesota. The part of Minnesota that’s farthest from Iowa.”

  “I got different orders,” typed Tania.

  “You what?” typed Bert. Jasmine’s inkbrush eyebrows wiggled.

  Tania trusted Bert. She needed help. She told him the whole deal. Most of it.

  When she was done typing, Bert told her she’d been played.

  “Don’t you get it? They’re using you, and entrapping you, all at the same time.”

  Tania processed that.

  “I’ve seen them do it before,” said Bert. “To other informants. You’re going to help them make a bunch of arrests, and then they are going to say you were part of the conspiracy. You told me before you feel like you’re on one of the lists, and they’re just waiting for you to make a big enough mistake.”

  “I have a deal with them. In writing.”

  “Wishful thinking. You know those things are unenforceable.”

  Maybe he was right. Bert had been around a long time, and usually knew.

  “You’re only going to make it worse for your mom,” he added.

  “What would you do?”

  “Run. Bug out. Go under.”