Tropic of Kansas

by Christopher Brown

  74

  The new hotel room was pretty crappy. Not nice enough for a business traveler, but not nasty enough to have been taken over by Maxxheads. It was in East St. Louis, on the river, with a view of barges in sludge. Those were the nice rooms. Tania’s was on the second floor, door to the exterior, situated such that when you stepped out it was almost like you could take one more long step and be in the middle of the elevated freeway, dancing with the high-speed trucks.

  Tania couldn’t sleep, agitated by the noise and anxiously awaiting the reply to her latest inquiry. So she watched TV. Not the analog set. The Feed box in the hotel room.

  There was Newton Towns again. One of those celebrity interviews about an upcoming movie he was working on—Jupiter Under Siege—about New Orleans and the White House. Tania got creeped out watching his crazy smile as he talked about the challenges of the new project, the research he planned to do visiting the affected areas, the challenges facing the country, whether there would be a fourth movie, the duty to make art that makes your country better. She wondered who they would get to play Maxine Price, and how she would play it.

  That got Tania wondering what the Maxine Price version of the movie would look like.

  She looked out the window, at the run-down city. A zone of colonization. You could never purge it of its original sins, of which there were many. Change would not come without strife, and a change in power would hardly guarantee an end to corruption. But you had to fight for something better. Accepting the world in the condition you found it was no longer an option.

  Especially when you saw the country as it really was, far from the secure comforts of the capital.

  Suddenly the risks that had seemed so horrifying felt like the opportunity for liberation. Even if you didn’t know if you were leaping onto the cloud floating by, or about to splat onto the hard pavement underneath it.

  Tania had an idea that she knew how to get to the cloud.

  She checked the pocket drive again, to make sure it was still there.

  She read more of the files, as the shock of the information grew into righteous anger.

  She thought about Mom, the things she said, the life she led, the life of futile struggle Tania thought she had escaped.

  She called Cousin Mell. It was late, but she answered. Mell always answered.

  “What are you doing?” asked Tania.

  “Watching the news, instead of my own nightmares.”

  Tania laughed, a gallows laugh, and Mell laughed with her.

  “Can you get a message to my mom?”

  “Sure, honey, I was going to go over there tomorrow anyway and take her some books.”

  “Just tell her I decided to take her advice.”

  A little while later, after they hung up and Tania got to work in the dark of night, her computer pinged with the secure reply from her contacts.

  When she called the number they gave her, it rang to a series of clicks, and then a voice came on. It sounded like another revolutionary white lady, but it was hard to tell because they were using some kind of filter.

  “We read what you sent us,” said the voice. “We want the rest.”

  “That’s a lot to ask for,” said Tania. “I’m already taking a huge risk even talking to you.”

  “We appreciate that. We know you can be trusted now. We can protect you. You must trust us or you wouldn’t have reached out.”

  “It’s not like there are any actual journalists left who could do anything with it that wouldn’t get them prosecuted.”

  “We can do what needs to be done with your information. We want to meet you. Tonight. We will send a car.”

  Tania laughed.

  “You’re making me feel less safe,” said Tania. “Not more.”

  “We are so much more safe you have no idea.”

  “I want to go to New Orleans.”

  “That is very hard right now. Do you want to fight?”

  “I want to help.”

  “Yes, you say you do.”

  “And I think I’ve already proved I do. But like I told you people, I have family issues I need to deal with first.”

  Quiet on the line. You could hear the crackles when no one talked.

  “I understand.”

  “How can you get me to New Orleans?”

  “Call us again in twenty minutes. We will send you a new code. We need you to stay where you are.”

  Tania pulled on the old turtleneck in front of the mirror and watched her hair spring out as her head popped through. True hair, and true self, maybe. Whether she would stick with that version remained to be seen. Once you got your head around the idea of spending some serious time in jail, your fears became very different. It was like the first time you figured out that to do your job right you needed to kill your fear of getting fired.

  It was time to play hard to get. Tania closed the laptop before the new code came in and walked down to the river.

  Part Seven

  The Tchoupitoulas Autonomous Zone

  75

  They drove east through the swamps, over highways on stilts.

  At dusk you could see the alligators out there, and the big wild birds that looked like little dinosaurs. Old houses with legs and boats for cars. And the petrochemical extraction machines shoved into the biome like giant robot mosquitoes.

  That was after they went to the storage lockers, where Sig got to see some of the special things Clint was keeping for folks, and for himself.

  Dallas had told him Clint had an arsenal in there. He wasn’t kidding.

  They loaded up the Amok with foot lockers and wooden crates packed with heavy metal. They left Loco and Watermelon Head to watch the yard. Clint said his brother-in-law Luis would look after them.

  Clint played a tape while they drove. Country twang about pickups and Kalashnikovs.

  Something about the song got Clint to talking about how Luis and his buddy Jerry in Tomball were working on a special project for Clint and “the Investors.” Jerry was a tinkerer, Clint called him, an electrician who worked at NASA until he got fired for telling the truth in the comments pages of the news Feed. The thing they were building now was called “the flashlight.”

  When Sig asked what’s so special about a flashlight, Clint said it’s not really a flashlight.

  “It’s the kind of superweapon you can build in a garage,” he said.

  Sig still didn’t understand, but didn’t want to sound stupid, so he didn’t ask anymore.

  The land between Houston and New Orleans was a cyborg swamp. The lattices of pipeline traversed all terrain, whether woodland or bayou, flooded forest or open gulf. They drove with the windows open to the mug, and the sweet toxic smell of the gas filled the cabin. In the darkness you could see the silhouettes of the big storage tanks under the flame of the flareoffs and the pulse of the warning lights, and whenever they slowed down enough to kill the wind whipping through the windows, you could hear the machines beating the earth with loud hammering knocks.

  “Vulcan works for Mars.” That’s what Xelina said.

  Sig remembered the northern swamps of his childhood. Clean wasn’t the word, but healthy. Alive. Mostly left alone. Room for all the other species. You could take what you needed, and know the space that was left would be quickly filled.

  “You really think we can fix it?” said Sig, looking out at the creepy landscape. “All this? Like Xelina says.”

  “My queen of the Anthropocene,” said Clint. “Gotta start somewhere. I look around and figure we’re just setting ourselves up for the big die-off. Mother Nature’ll take care of that. But doesn’t hurt to try. It’s like the Jesus freaks say. ‘It’s comin’. Look busy.’”

  Sig saw a night heron out there sitting on a half-submerged pipeline. Maybe it was the things Clint said, or just the weird moon, but for a minute he could see the future, when the wet earth takes back all the metal and feeds on our remains.

  “Fuck,” said Clint, looking at the rearview mirror.
r />   Sig turned to look.

  White and red flashers, approaching fast.

  “Be cool,” said Clint.

  He pulled the car over to the side of the road.

  “Glove compartment,” he said.

  Sig opened it and reached in. DIY pistol of steel and PVC, like the bad dream of some loco plumber.

  “Just hide it under yer hoodie or something,” said Clint.

  Clint had his own pistol already out of sight, between the side of his seat and the center console.

  Sig looked out into the swamp.

  “We should just run,” he said.

  “You can bail if you want, but I’m gonna get this cargo to its destination. Most of these guys are happy to have you pay the unofficial fee if you know how to talk to ’em.”

  Sig watched the lights approach in the rearview mirror. And then they drove right by, followed by a convoy of six armored tanker trucks with a corporate personnel carrier as the caboose.

  On the back of the CPC was a guy sitting in the turret, wearing his night-vision helm. He was so close that you could see the ghosts of the green screen inside his visor.

  “He just took our picture,” said Sig.

  “Yup,” said Clint. “Asshole. Better change our route.”

  At 2 a.m. Clint pulled off the road and tuned the radio to a station way over to the left of the dial. The sound of some lady talking, reading numbers out loud. Clint kept an eye on his wristwatch and waited until the lady paused. When she started again Clint wrote down all the numbers on a piece of paper. Then he looked them up in a little pad he had in his shirt pocket.

  “Message?” asked Sig.

  Clint shushed him and kept writing.

  “Money,” Clint said when he was done.

  “I thought you needed the video for that.”

  “Yeah, it helps, but if you have to you can do it this way, too. Radio tunes the video frequencies pretty good, but it’s a pain when you wait for ’em to actually read your new number over the air. Some people trade ’em for cash money, but I like to stick with the codes. No hyperinflation, no pictures of fascists, and no trace.”

  “What did you sell?” asked Sig, as Clint pulled back out.

  “Everything inside one of those lockers I showed you. One of the ones that’s mine, not the ones I’m keeping for this guy we’re goin’ to see. Dude in California paid me forty. Might be enough to get whoever’s got my wife to sell her back without us having to go to war over it.”

  “I had some snowflakes, but I just gave my keys to a lawyer,” said Sig. “Maybe he hasn’t collected them yet. I can check if it would help.”

  “I’m good,” said Clint. “And good luck gettin’ money back from a lawyer.”

  “He seems okay.”

  “What do you need a lawyer for anyway?”

  “Trying to spring a friend.”

  “Okay, long as you’re not wasting money on that dumb-ass nephew of mine.”

  Sig shook his head.

  Sig opened his eyes a few hours later to dead trees sticking out of gray water, crisscrossed by weathered pipeline, as far as he could see.

  Clint was quiet. He was hauling ass. The truck was vibrating pretty hard. Sounded like something might pop.

  The road passed back under living treetops, wound through the phantom topography of a forest that had been clear-cut for pharma harvest, and then widened and slowed into something like a town. A very messed-up town. Signs of damage from extreme storms. Broken trees and demolished buildings. Flooded-out cars decaying in the ditches. People salvaging from wood and drywall ruins. Sometimes with Bobcats, sometimes with their bare hands.

  There were military vehicles there, too. And paramilitary. Corporates. Some local militia. Typical wildlife of the emergency zone.

  At one intersection there was a pickup parked in front of a bombed-out Kwiky Mart, tanking up from broken pumps. The truck was custom-painted matte black with a big white stripe, jacked way up on a crazy off-road suspension and monster tires. Mud was spattered all over the fenders, a wet, black dirt the color of old blood. One dude was sitting up on the cab in ballistic overalls, smoking a cigarette. He wore a necklace of animal tails and strips of hairy leather. An assault rifle half-covered in duct tape hung down along his thigh on a low-slung shoulder strap. He caught Sig looking at him and pointed at Sig with a finger gun and a fucked-up smile.

  “Skunk hunters,” said Clint. “They do the jobs the federal law can’t, or won’t. Not even official militia—just kinda who’s-gonna-stop-us types. Homegrown versions of the death squads they use to keep people ‘liberated’ south of the border. Hire ’em out to the corporates for special projects. Couple guys I grew up with in Pasadena run with those dirtbags. Hopefully I won’t have to kill ’em this trip.”

  Sig looked at the map as they drove on. It was an old paper map, half worn through at the creases, hand annotated with secret routes and scribbled encryptions of landmarks no regular map revealed. Double red lines encircled the areas under federal control, the biggest of which was around New Orleans. Other areas were marked off in orange hatch marks to indicate toxic no-man’s-lands. That’s all there was where the town they drove through should have been.

  The flip side of the map was a detail of the city. Clint pointed to the spot that was their destination. It was already marked on the printed map, with an icon for a big antenna.

  When Sig looked up, they were crossing through the imaginary red line at the outskirts of the city. They came in from the southwest and tracked onto an old road that followed the river. The Mississippi, twice as wide as when Sig saw it in St. Louis, wider than any river he’d ever seen. In the distance you could see a big bridge that had been blown out, the whole midsection gone, dropped into the muddy river.

  There were more military vehicles on the road and along the side. Engineers and disaster response troops, and a few tacticals.

  The sky was rumbling, filled up with churning clouds that blocked out the morning sun.

  Clint pulled off the road before the bridge, joining a line of civilian vehicles queued up at the riverbank.

  “Wait here,” he said, and got out of the car.

  Sig got out, too. He grabbed the map and sat on the hood. He watched the river and surveilled the scene on the other side, looking for landmarks he could match to the map. There was a barge working its way toward them, loaded with a half-dozen cars and trucks. More cars were lined up on the opposite landing, next to a squadron of soldiers tending a fortified checkpoint they had built at an intersection. Sandbags and razor wire protected the parking lot of a roofless fast-food joint, with two heavy machine gun nests and a cannon pointed at the sky. The sign rising from behind one of the nests announced the change of use in black interchangeable letters crammed into the available space once used to advertise special promotions.

  LOUISIANA EMERGENCY ZONE

  RESTRICTED ENTRY

  ALL VEHICLES AND PERSONS SUBJECT TO SEARCH

  Sig looked for Clint in the mob of people down by the water but couldn’t see him. He looked around at the cars lining up behind them. That’s when he saw the black pickup.

  He slid off the hood. The skunk truck was parked six cars back. Fully loaded, with three heads inside the cab and two standing up in the bed. Sig recognized the scalps before he recognized the faces. Until the guy saw Sig checking him out, and gave him that fucked-up smile again.

  Sig folded up the map and shoved it in his pocket.

  The guy elbowed his partner peering over the top of the cab and pointed at Sig.

  The pair jumped out of the bed and started walking Sig’s way.

  Sig started walking, away from the truck, toward the water.

  The rain started. Hard.

  Sig looked around for Clint. All he saw were soldiers pulling up in a convoy of roofless SUVs, cutting to the head of the line, crowding out any view of the action down at the dock.

  “Hey, you!” hollered the guy from behind him. “Hold up there! We need
to talk to you!”

  Sig started jogging.

  “Motherfucker,” he heard the guy say.

  He heard metal rattle.

  He heard men holler.

  He heard thunder.

  He heard his sneakers squishing into the muddy ground with each step.

  He heard the overtuned engine of the skunk truck rumble into action.

  He looked back and saw the truck skidding his way.

  He sprinted for the water.

  “Stop!” yelled another voice, amplified, from a speaker embedded in the trunk.

  BANG.

  A single warning shot.

  Sig felt his right foot as it hit the ground wrong, then felt all his momentum teeter off balance as his right shoulder went for the dirt and his hand reflexively went out in the lead. He ate it, bad.

  He spit dirt, looked forward, saw the water.

  He scrambled, looked back under his legs, saw the guys on foot, running too fast to aim, and getting too close to miss.

  He rolled, came back up running, slipping.

  RATATATARATATATARAT.

  He heard the whip whine of lead cutting air.

  He dove for the water, leaping to clear the concrete bank.

  He half made it. His shins hit the edge hard, slamming him into the business side of the river wall. Then he tumbled on over and hit the water even harder, a big slap up his left side.

  The water tasted like rusting pipe and insecticide.

  He swam deeper into it, as hard as he could.

  He saw nothing but brown-gray blur that burned his eyes.

  He couldn’t tell if he was swimming up or down.

  He inhaled a gulp of the rank. Then he found the air.

  CRACK TTSSCCHHIIIIING.

  He saw where he was and went back under.

  He swam like a turtle evading a dog, popping up only when he had to. He intuited misdirection, and was more than halfway across when he saw them standing there on the bank he’d left with their truck and their guns, unable to see him emerge.