Tropic of Kansas

by Christopher Brown

  They lasted almost two years. Then came the Repo. And the Purge.

  There was still fighting going on. People hadn’t given up. She saw the hero clips every night around eleven on Channel Zero. Scenes of resistance sent in from New Orleans and all over the Tropic. Vehicles on fire. Grainy zooms of primitive bombs detonating at the gates of storage depots and biorefineries. Shaky fragments of unlawful arrests and citizen roundups at the end of electric truncheons. Morale videos of disabled veterans making their own machined prosthetics as they prepared for what was coming. Combat-ready DIY cyborgs.

  The clips were curated. Some nights by Walker himself, but mostly by others when he was “in the field.” When the sound was bad, or the shot didn’t speak for itself, they added voice-over narration.

  At the end of each segment they flashed a long code across the screen. An address, Tania gathered. The direction to transmit your own footage for inclusion.

  Maybe it was her set. Maybe Todd got the wrong kind of box. Or maybe she was missing some essential hardware you needed to make the thing interactive. Watching the broadcasts, and the messages from the other viewers that flashed on the screen, she got so frustrated with the primitive controls of the idiot box that she wanted to smash it.

  Then she saw Sig there, fighting in the snow. It was an aerial shot, ethereal, the scene bathed in ambient light pollution and blue moonlight off the crust of ice crystals.

  Blood on the ground. Then fire in the building.

  She tried to capture the footage, but was too slow.

  She wondered how old the video was.

  Then she recognized where it was.

  A brief glimpse of Sig, in bad light, hauling Moco through the snow.

  No wonder the militia came around looking for her.

  He was right here, under her nose, and she had blown it.

  Blown her best shot at getting Mom out, sitting in a hotel room trying to decode answers over the airwaves when she should have been out working the streets.

  She took a chance. Logged into the securenet, looked for reports. Militia hadn’t even logged the loss of their prisoner, or the assault on their “facility.” She tried to remember exactly how long ago it had been that she was there at that place, interviewing Moco. Did the math. Looked at the map, and imagined how far they might have gone.

  It was a big circle. Partly because she didn’t yet know that Sig preferred to walk.

  She needed to get moving. Just as soon as she could get that antenna outside the window to show her the way.

  She had given up and started packing when they began running shots of old pay phones on Channel 13. They didn’t explain why. But the images included text that gave the exact location.

  Tania looked at the old dial-tone phone in the room and got the idea to plug it into the analog receiver Todd had given her.

  She had glimpsed a similar setup at Mr. Wizard’s. The revelation took a while to percolate.

  The trick was figuring out how to make the TV set work as a transmitter, as well as a receiver.

  The phone worked as a keyboard. Primitive, and excruciatingly slow, but it worked.

  The handout from the Minneapolis rally, the one with all the program frequencies, was the key. One of the frequencies was an access code. She learned this through trial and error. When she finally typed it in, it opened up a new window on the screen.

  It was like a community bulletin board, newsletter, post office, bank branch, and draft board all rolled into one. With some work you could find bridges between different rooms.

  She found the Minneapolis boards and got an update on her Mom.

  She posted a note, with her reply code, asking for leads on the whereabouts of Sig.

  She made inquiries about safe transport to New Orleans.

  She asked about Moco. Maybe a bad idea.

  She found Lisbet, and sent her a message, a coded explanation. Definitely a bad idea.

  She eventually found the way to contact Todd, inside the network. The way the net worked was like a refer-a-friend system. She could leave him a message that showed him the door in, packed with his code for opening it.

  She would come to regret that the most.

  55

  Perched in a big hackberry at the edge of a North Dallas office park, Sig waited for breakfast.

  He could smell them coming. They were upwind, close by, but not close enough to hear, at least not over the noise of the air conditioners cooling empty buildings.

  An owl called from the woods behind him. Sig and Moco had spent the night back in there, a thin strip of forest sandwiched between the office park and the freeway.

  They were broke. In Oklahoma they tried to pick up some day labor, until they heard the rumors about outlaw cops rounding up vagrants and putting them in work camps. One of the guys said the “work” was fighting with each other for gamblers. They sold videos you could buy under the counter at the right C-stores. He’d seen one in the hostel. “The kind of fights where the loser never gets up.”

  By the time they crossed into Texas, people hunters were tracking them. Moco was convinced he was still giving off a signal. He’d been digging at the wound where they cut out the tattoo, and now his whole arm was infected. They had stayed ahead by keeping to the woods, moving at night. It was getting harder, especially as Moco got slower.

  A jumbo jet flew over from the west, on approach, blinking lights and churning air.

  The lamps over the parking lot crackled. You could hear the bugs crashing into the plastic covers. First light was just starting to seep over the treetops.

  Sig looked for his reflection in the dark glass of the nearest building. He wondered what was on the other side.

  He saw the deer. Four does, loitering on the manicured grass around the machine-made lake in front of the office park.

  Sig waited.

  The first car of the morning, a delivery guy in a beat-up old Ford, spooked the deer. Three of them broke for the woods as he approached. The fourth followed when the plastic-wrapped junk mail flew from the car window.

  It worked. One of the does stopped on the trail beneath Sig for a moment, smelling but not seeing. It wasn’t much bigger than a big dog.

  Sig readied his knife and dropped on the deer.

  The doe tried to bolt as Sig locked on to its back. Sig sunk in the knife as the deer bounded. It leapt off balance and landed on its side with Sig underneath.

  The doe flailed, but did not get up.

  Sig cleaned the animal there, just inside the tree line. Through the trees, the people were arriving for work in their cars. None of them even looked his way.

  The vultures saw.

  Sig dragged the cleaned carcass back into the woods to their spot, a shelter made of canvas he had pulled from a dumpster and camouflaged with cut branches from the nearby scrub trees.

  Moco was really sick now. Sig thought the fresh game would help. It didn’t. Moco had lost his appetite. He was burning up. His arm looked like it was mostly made of pus.

  If they didn’t keep moving, they would get caught.

  That afternoon they went to an emergency hospital by the freeway. Moco went in alone. Sig gave him all the money they had left, which wasn’t much. When Sig went back later to check on him, they wouldn’t let him have any information because he couldn’t prove his relation. He tried again the next day, and he found out that Moco had been taken to a detainee clinic.

  They were not successful in detaining Sig.

  56

  The jarring ringtone of the land line jolted Tania from her fidgety slumber. She opened her eyes to the frantic red pulse, and only then remembered that the phone was plugged into the alternet.

  She picked it up anyway, and listened.

  “Tania,” said the voice at the other end. Crackly, scrambled and reassembled, but identifiable.

  “Lisbet,” she said. “How did you find me?”

  “How did I not find you. You plugged this damn BellNet line into the network, a major
security breach. And they’ve been watching you since you got there. You think we don’t talk to each other? Now you’re lighting up every node, sending out crazy notes, including to me, notes that have them wondering if I’m some kind of informer.”

  “It’s not what you think.”

  “You need to stop. You need to go back to Washington.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I can’t believe you tricked me like that. Tricked us.”

  “That wasn’t me, Lisbet. They were tracking me. I had no idea.”

  “What the fuck happened to you?”

  It’s complicated.

  “I shouldn’t even be calling you,” continued Lisbet. “These people are almost as crazy about their security as your people.”

  “I’m just trying to find my brother,” said Tania.

  “That’s what you say. So why aren’t you out looking for him? Did you really think we wouldn’t find out?”

  “Find out what?”

  “If you keep snooping around they are going to disappear you, you stupid bitch. And I won’t grieve. You ratted out my friends. I—”

  The signal wavered. A high-pitched electronic scream shuddered over the line. Tania pulled the handset away from her head.

  “Hello?” she said. Nothing.

  She grabbed her mobile to try to hack the open line, but when she picked the house phone back up there was a beeping dial tone.

  She turned on the lights. Daylight was seeping through from behind the drapes.

  The room was a disaster. She had mostly packed her stuff, but hadn’t touched the crazy network configuration, which sprawled from the window to the desk to the TV counter to the coffee table, barely leaving room to walk.

  She was staring at it and thinking how she could break it down for travel when there was a knock at the door.

  Part Six

  The Edgeland Hunters

  57

  Sig came to Houston tracking Moco, but he lost the trail.

  It took him two and a half days to get there from Dallas, walking and hitching, finding his own food along the way.

  He roamed all over Houston looking for the detainee clinic, but either no one knew where it was, or they didn’t want to say. One old black guy outside the street hospital told him they keep that stuff secret, unmarked, no signs. “Hidden in plain sight.” He told him where he thought it might be.

  What Sig found there was a refugee camp made out of an old parking garage and the empty lot next to it where a building used to be. He had never seen that many tents. One tent was big and white, with a red cross on it, but when he went in there all he saw were sick kids and old people. The refugees were all from New Orleans, mostly escapees from the fighting, some from the disasters that came before. Nobody there had any useful information, except for some ladies doing laundry in a repurposed feed trough who told him they thought the place where they kept sick prisoners was near the bayou, east of downtown.

  They were wrong, too.

  But Sig did find a good place to hide down there. An abandoned shed right on the banks of the boggy river that ran through town, behind an old junkyard. He could hear people talking in the building by the junkyard, but they wouldn’t hear him. As the sun went down, Sig ate the bag of beef jerky he had stolen from the gas station, and watched a nutria walk right out between him and the bayou, big whiskered snout sniffing in the turf along the bank. He thought about trying to catch it, but then, as if it knew what he was thinking, it got in the water and started swimming around like some oversized, oily water rat.

  Sig fell asleep early that night, on a sheet of Tyvek he pulled out of a tree by the river, with his mostly empty little duffel for a pillow. It was a dark spot back there, dark enough to be out of the city lights but not enough to see the stars. He listened to the bugs and the frogs and slept hard, until he woke to the sound of some man’s voice, and opened his eyes to see a big silhouette behind a flashlight and a gun.

  When he tackled the guy and took his gun, the last thing he would have thought was that he was making a new friend. One who could get him where he really wanted to go.

  58

  The old punks at the door let themselves in.

  “We want to talk to you,” said Mr. Wizard, aka Fritz. He had a key to her room. They probably had keys to all the rooms.

  He had a short little lady with him. She had a hard face. Something in her eyes. The other three were dudes. One really old but fit-looking fellow with a silver buzz cut, and two younger guys in work clothes, one with a big lumberpunk beard and one with a corn-fed baby face looking down from the height of a three-pointer.

  Lumberpunk and baby face crowded Tania at the door while the others looked around the suite.

  Her gun was in her bag, on the other side of the room.

  “Interesting collage,” said the woman, looking at Tania’s wall file.

  “Why don’t you sit down,” said Fritz, looking over her improvised networking setup. It wasn’t a question.

  Tania looked up at baby face. She pushed him back.

  “Why don’t you leave me alone,” said Tania, sitting down. The two guys stood over her, ignoring her plea. The lady pulled up a chair and sat across from her. Mr. Wizard kept looking over her stuff.

  “Because you won’t leave us alone,” said the woman.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Who invited you?” said the woman.

  “I invited myself.”

  “That’s not how it works.”

  “It’s a free country,” said Tania, and as soon as the words blurted out she knew how stupid that was, since it really wasn’t.

  The woman just gave her a look that said try again.

  “You want to keep your hands off my stuff, Mr. Wizard?” said Tania.

  “Something to hide?” said the woman.

  “We all have lots to hide, don’t we?” said Tania.

  The woman smiled.

  “I guess,” she said. “But this is a small town. Strangers who show up in our private places tend to attract attention.”

  Fritz was holding up the phone, looking at how Tania had connected it to the television. He unplugged the line from the wall, severing the dial tone.

  “I thought you had an open community,” said Tania.

  “We do,” said the woman. “To people who are on our side.”

  “So what’s the problem?” said Tania.

  “I think you know,” said the woman. “I don’t know if you’re a Motherlanderfucker or a lost little dilettante, but you smell like trouble, and we’ve had enough of that lately.”

  “What if I’m neither?” said Tania.

  “Look, dear,” said the woman. “We don’t detain people. We’re not like them. We don’t have any secret prisons.”

  “Saving that for later?” said Tania.

  “See?” she said, looking at the guys and pointing at Tania.

  “I’m just saying,” said Tania. “If we’re about the Everyone, doesn’t that apply to everyone?”

  The woman threw up her arms.

  “Yes and no,” she said. “What I’m saying is you are free to go. But you need to go.”

  “Get out of town,” said the lumberpunk.

  “Go back wherever you came from,” said the woman.

  “East,” said the lumberpunk.

  “I bet he’s right,” said the woman.

  “And like I’m saying,” said Tania, “what if I told you I wasn’t on either side? If I were just looking for a loved one. One who got lost in the mess we all made.”

  The woman looked at her.

  Tania got up. Pushed lumberpunk back. Grabbed the file. Pulled out the best picture of Sig she had. Showed it to the woman.

  Tania could see it on her face.

  The woman shook her head. “Nope.”

  The tell was in the eyes.

  She wondered if this woman might know her mom, or know of her, through the network. But instead she tried a different tact
ic. It didn’t work. At least not right away.

  “What if I gave you something you could use?” said Tania. “What would it take in a trade?”

  “Fritz here is going to help you pack your shit,” said the woman. She stood up. “And then he is going to help you find your way out of town. You have nothing I could ever want, because everything you have is infected with all of the compromises you have made.”

  That stung, especially when Tania thought about it later. Odile had said something like that to her once, but when this lady said it, it felt true.

  “Don’t come back,” said the lumberpunk.

  59

  Sig wiped a daub of salsa from his cheek, then licked it off his finger and took another bite of the taco. It was as spicy as the food Kong used to make, so spicy it made him sweat, but he couldn’t stop. It was the first real food he had had in a while.

  Next to Sig at the picnic table was Dallas, the security guard who had tried to roust Sig from his squat and ended up chatting Sig up, and even talking him into giving him his gun back—with a promise of a hot meal and cold beer. Across the table were Dallas’s aunt and uncle, who provided the food, after a long drive over the biggest bridge Sig had ever seen.

  The picnic table was on a patch of dirt outside the office of Patriot Bay Self Storage, at the end of a rough Baytown street that ran along the ship channel. Out there beyond the chain link, a massive tanker lumbered home in the burnt orange light of dusk, blowing its horn.

  They could hear bullfrogs and diesel engines, herons and hydraulics, cargo jets cutting through air so thick it slowed down the mosquitoes that swarmed in overfed clouds.

  Behind them were the rows of numbered lockers, a thin stand of pine trees, and the miles of refineries they had seen from the bridge. Acres of giant structures made of plumbing, mud, and the worms of the earth, venting the inferno below.