Tropic of Kansas

by Christopher Brown

  They unpacked Clint’s lockers—shoulder launchers, the missiles to go with them, and a hundred rifles—and put them back behind the cage with the previous shipments.

  Clint showed him the cars. A Toyota Timbuktu pickup with an M-60 installed into the bed. An old Land Cruiser being bulletproofed with sheets of scrap. A vintage Nova sanded down to gray putty-colored primer and outfitted with an off-road suspension.

  “It’s like a whole factory,” said Clint. “Not much of a match for the war machine, but it will come in handy when the shit starts to really go down. And they come up with some pretty cool stuff. They get all these nerds from all over the country, smuggle ’em in, put ’em to work, give ’em a place to crash and a reason to go on and all the beer they can drink. Engineers, industrial designers, architects, welders, grease monkeys, gunsmiths, plumbers, you name it.”

  “So he’s the leader of the underground?”

  “No. The network doesn’t really have leaders. Not like you’re thinking at least. He’s like I said. An investor. He’s in it for money. Raises money from even richer guys, big business types who have had enough with the way El Presidente plays favorites and are ready for a change of management. Phase one was building out the communications networks, finding programming to put on ’em. Now he’s branching out into guns and stuff.”

  “You trust him?”

  “Hell no,” said Clint. “But I’ve been doing good business with him. And he has done some pretty cool shit. Right now I just got one big-ass problem and I gotta trust or hope that he can help me fix it.”

  When they went to meet with Walker he was in his office, sitting at a gray metal desk, talking into a red plastic phone. It was an old phone, the kind that plugged into the wall.

  On the desk by the phone were a revolver, a daily diary, an unlabeled bottle of liquor, and a Rolodex. Four monitors behind the desk screened surveillance camera feeds, with toggles for sound. The walls were decorated with photos of Walker hanging out with other suits and celebrities, a map of North America with different countries drawn in, a trophy redfish, and a framed handgun.

  “Yeah?” said Walker. “Fuck you, too.” He banged the handset on the desk and smiled at his guests.

  Paula was there, sitting in an armchair by the desk.

  There was another guy sitting on the couch on the other side of the room. Big blond guy with button-down shirt and fancy cowboy boots. Boots looked up for a second, then turned his gaze back to the battle in progress on the old color television set against the wall.

  “Holy shit,” said Clint, looking at the screen. “That’s you!”

  Sig watched the scene. A house exploding. Drone’s-eye view. Zoom in on two guys fighting in deep snow.

  “You still there?” said Walker, still on the phone. “Tell you what. How about if I up it to five? Plus the motherboards. Yeah? Seven tonight? Deal.”

  The video was surprisingly clear.

  “Jesus, what the fuck is that?” said Boots. Clint was gaping, too. “Are those nails sticking out of your hand? No you can’t have—fuuuuck.”

  There was no sound on the video.

  “Ouch,” said Walker, hanging up the phone. “Trey here just got that footage awhile back from our sources up north, friends of our seditious neighbors in Bywater. Maybe we can get a sequel now that we found out Clint’s been the one hiding Kid Spartacus here all this time.”

  Sig wasn’t sure what that meant.

  “So, kid,” said Walker, “you ever consider the business implications of the idea of redemption through gladiatory death?”

  Trey and Paula laughed.

  “No?” said Walker. “We should talk some more. The death part is strictly optional. You’ve got raw talent, kid. Real charisma. Not a lot of people can shine through a surveillance camera like I’ve seen in your clips. I’m glad Clint brought you here.”

  “You want to update Clint?” asked Paula. “His shipment checked out.”

  “Yeah?” said Walker. “What a guy. Goddamn one-armed roper. Well we’re doing our part, too, my friend. I found your lady.”

  “Where?” said Clint.

  “She’s on her way here,” said Walker. “Those P-B boys are selling her to the feds. Turns out she’s on the Enemies List. Which kind of makes me nervous to hear, since the reason I use you all for so much stuff is because I thought you were below the radar. Very messy.”

  “Taking her here? To the Dome?” asked Clint. “I’ll show you messy.”

  “Relax, cowboy,” said Walker. “I just made a deal. I may be on page one of the Enemies List myself, but I still have some friends at Pendleton-Bolan, and I’ve done enough deals with those guys to know they’ll always change their minds for a little more money.”

  “How much?” said Clint.

  “Five hundred K,” said Walker. “Plus some extra goodies I threw in to close it. And all the footage we’ve got of whatever it was they were up to. They sounded like they wanted that more than anything.”

  “Footage fine—I seen you already ran some of it anyway—but I ain’t got five hundred thousand goddamn dollars,” said Clint. “Just tell me where and when and I’ll get her back for free. Sig’ll help me.”

  “‘Sig,’” said Walker. “Love it. Love you, Clint, when you get crazy like this. But you need to chill the fuck out. I know you don’t have that kind of cash on hand, and I can tell you these guys don’t take snowflakes and I don’t even want to tell them those things exist because I’m not sure they’ve figured it out yet. I am going to give you credit for your shipment, and loan you the rest.”

  “You’re gonna loan me four hundred grand?” said Clint. “I already owe you three.”

  “I know, and you’ve been a great investment, so I insist. I’m gonna let you pay me back in services. There’s plenty to do. You just gotta get your buddy here to work for me, too.”

  “Yeah, he’s good,” said Clint. “Right?” He looked at Sig.

  “He doesn’t look so sure about all this,” said Paula.

  “That’s ’cause he hasn’t heard the part yet about how I’m going to make him a TV star,” said Walker. “Just what our underground network needs to win hearts and minds.”

  80

  Captain Herman and his mate came to arrest Tania early morning on the third day, before sunup. Three of the Choctaw managers were with them.

  She was already up, waiting for them.

  Captain Herman said the ship told him that JoAnne Martinez was no longer with Cavalier Robotics. That Tania matched the profile of a woman who had just come up on the alert list for a security breach. “Detain if possible.”

  Tania told them you’re right and you’re wrong. Said her real name and her real job. Said she was undercover, investigating Cavalier Robotics and Choctaw Logistics for violations of Reg MM under the National Security Act and the rules governing demilitarized autonomous vessels. Specifically, she said, she was documenting how the ship was failing to enforce the cargo reporting and health and safety rules with which it was supposed to be inflexibly programmed.

  She asked Captain Herman if that was an alteration made by him, or by corporate.

  He said he didn’t have the access and didn’t know how to code his own desk lamp, let alone the specialized intelligent computer running the ship. Which he called a fucking bitch.

  Tania knew the ship was listening. She had never negotiated with an autonomous marine vessel before, especially one that talked through a fat white man.

  She said they had forty-five days to remedy the violations before she came back. Documentation would come after she got back to the office.

  Tania told the computer to drop her off in Memphis, thirty minutes downriver.

  And it did.

  81

  Sig went to the handoff with Clint. It was out west, by the airport, down at the end of an industrial road past the international cargo warehouses.

  It was basically a dead end, which made them both uncomfortable. Sig suggested he hide in the woods
to jump these guys if they pulled anything, but Clint wanted to follow the instructions they were given.

  While they waited they talked about Dallas and their theories of where he might be.

  When the P-B guys pulled up in their big black Chevy Shiprock, Sig had a flashback to that night in the northern borderzone, when he lost Betty and Merle and almost himself. It seemed so long ago now.

  “Keep your cool, wild boy,” said Clint as he got out of the car.

  Sig waited in the backseat of the Amok with the side door open, Clint’s old Mini-14 in his arms but below the seats, chamber loaded and the safety off.

  The MMCs were predatory-looking motherfuckers. Three big white boys with the eyes of people hunters and an Asian guy who looked like the finisher. They carried their grisliest souvenirs around their necks, and the tools to collect new ones hung from their belts.

  They brought Xelina out and stood her up in the middle of the road. She had a black bag over her head. Her hands were tied behind her back with zip cuffs and her legs shackled with duct tape. All she was wearing were her radical tank top, her tattoos, and someone else’s sweatpants. She was very dirty.

  Sig wondered if the tattoos protected her the way he thought they were supposed to.

  He watched, ready, for a long, tense minute.

  But the MMCs wanted the money, so it worked out okay. Just a transaction.

  Sig drove while Clint held Xelina in the rear seat. Even cowboys and revolutionaries cry. They drove to the safe house Walker’s people hooked them up with, an abandoned shotgun on Mandeville that had a second story in the back. The pair disappeared into the bedroom that night. Clint only came out once, to get Sig to help him heat up enough water with the propane stove to make a hot bath, which meant they would need to find more water in the morning, but who was going to argue with what she needed.

  Clint said she’s okay, they just fucked with her, nothing really bad. Sig wondered what the truth was, and what they were going to do about it.

  After dark Sig went up on the roof and watched the skies for dronesign. He knew the skies well. Even had his own secret names for the stars he had made up during his long wander. The best way to “see” a drone at night was by the stars it blocked out. That also meant it was pretty low. He wondered what it would take to take one down from the ground.

  There was a surplus of drones around here. Not just aerial. Marine and terrestrial, too. For twenty years New Orleans had been colonized by the war machine, the base of operations for the never-ending fighting in Central America. The insurgencies and political experiments of the South had provoked a predictable response, which had the unexpected consequence of turning an old city that had flown ten different flags into a domesticated colony. Sig had heard people talk about it for years—people like his mom, Betty, Billie, Moco, Clint—but it was crazy to see it in person.

  The roof was high enough and the town flat enough that you could see pretty far in most directions. To the north was the tent city Moco had called home—Camp Zulu, the sprawl of improvised shelter for tens of thousands of refugees, boat people who escaped the wars in Central America and locals displaced by the violence of several years of civil unrest. The Dome was due west, lit up with its prison floodlights that attracted helicopters like flies to a streetlamp.

  South of the Dome you could see the remaining towers of the business district, and the federal quarters, where the MMCs based their operations.

  To the east was Echo Sector, the neighborhood that had been abandoned after the toxic event they had blamed on terrorists before Sig was born. The MMCs had cleared and leveled most of the buildings of Echo Sector after the federal occupation of the city a year earlier, and it was weird to see it from this vantage. Like someone had just erased most of a twenty-block-square section of the city.

  They hadn’t erased it all. There were shells of a few old buildings left, and one stubby high-rise over in the northeast corner of Echo Sector, standing intact, lost in time and place. It looked like the kind of building you might see in downtown Duluth, but surrounded by the ruins of an ancient colonial port.

  Echo Sector was still contaminated, they said, off-limits. Maybe they sent robots in, or guys in special suits. But Sig could see a couple of fires in there, inside the shells of the old buildings. Maybe the stories were true, that the zone was the real refuge of the revolutionaries.

  It wasn’t until late the next morning that Clint and Xelina came out. They looked tired, and scarred, but like they were working on getting ready to do something about it. Sig had an idea to pitch. Something he had brewed in the night air.

  82

  Tania flew corporate to New Orleans, on her own dime, almost depleting her remaining funds. You couldn’t get a domestic passenger flight to N.O. You had to go to Baton Rouge and drive, charter a private flight, or get Air America’d on official business. Tania paid cash to charter a small prop from Memphis to Houston, where JoAnne Martinez was able to talk her way onto an AmLog cargo drop out of Charlie Wilson International.

  When they were leaving Memphis, banking over the river, she was pretty sure she saw a Motherland chopper landing on the deck of the Robert Kozlovsky as it fueled up at the docks.

  There were a few other tramps crammed in the jump seats with her staring at the crates of food and ammo strapped into the bay of the big Boeing G-42, aka the Flying Clydesdale. MMCs flashing corporate swag and gunmetal from under their tactical two-pieces. One of them had a lapel pin that spelled out zombie hunter in gold plate. He stared at Tania most of the flight while his buddies traded stories about the most outrageous things they’d seen guys do to score a big lithium deposit. Tania tried to put on her best cop face and plan her next moves.

  When they banked in for final approach, out the little porthole you could see the pipelines and refineries, and the big swaths of swamp converted into farms harvesting weirdwood for the Maxximol plants up north. She wondered if there were any alligators left.

  Tania had kept her shoulder bag on her lap, her overnighter under her feet, and the pocket drive in a safer place. She felt it when she coughed. That was when she realized she hadn’t thought to pull back her hair before she got on the plane. She corrected that before they deplaned and walked into the air arrivals checkpoint.

  Tania flashed JoAnne again at the checkpoint and pretended to herself that her secret cargo was a special message from the President to General Butler at his Metairie command center. The soldiers standing behind the kiosks with their tightly harnessed assault rifles looked her over through the eye slits in their balaclavas, but it felt more prurient than policing. She caught the eye of one of the supervisors after they waved her on and was scared she would get stopped. She didn’t.

  She tried very hard to walk like she wasn’t in a hurry, when the opposite was true.

  On the other side of the checkpoint, the soldiers were replaced by paramilitary private security guards who looked more eager for a reason to demonstrate the capability of their business-class firearms. They monitored the long lines of tired people in line at the single remaining ticket counter, all trying to negotiate passage on one of the daily charters out. Two dozen European aid workers hogged the middle of the hall with their big strapped suitcases, meeting up to check in as a group for their flight home to Geneva.

  A big photo banner hung from the high ceilings over the crowd. The Commander in Chief standing in heroic profile on the prow of the presidential yacht Miramar as it passed through the breach in the Mississippi River Bridge. His shining new prosthesis pointed forward, directing a low-flying escort of five fighter-bombers in close formation.

  COMMITMENT

  Energy, power, and will:

  This is the mix that demolishes the barriers to success

  The gift shop was shuttered, the newspaper boxes were empty, and the Queequeg Coffee was dry.

  She felt eyes watching her, but looking around she couldn’t see who. Maybe it was the ubiquitous surveillance.

  Maybe it was ev
eryone.

  She walked past the little mob of armed chauffeurs holding up their nameplates and went outside into the muggy air. She caught a whiff of cordite and knew she was in the right place. Like existential smelling salts that broke the brain haze and sharpened your political senses.

  The only taxis were people powered. Three knobby-tired pedicabs operated by young men with big legs.

  Tania told her driver the name of the lodging she had called from the road. He headed that way, down the old Airline Highway past the motels repurposed as barracks, car lots, and suburban strips converted into military staging areas packed with diesel armor, gas stations running out of gas, and fast-food joints running out of food. He told her how this was the best way to get into New Orleans if that’s where you wanted to go, because the freeways were closed to most civilian traffic, when they weren’t bombed out. He pointed at the roof of the old Sheraton that had been taken over by General Butler as his field HQ, where a black helicopter was landing.

  Tania asked him if he knew where she could pick up some transportation, a car, and the pedicabbie laughed. She said how about a gun, and he said that we can do.

  Tania watched behind them, and above, scouting for tails.

  The pedicabbie, who said his name was Alfonso, took her to a mechanic’s shop off the main road and introduced her to a big fat guy inside named Lou. Lou asked if she had snowflakes she could pay with. She wasn’t even sure what that was, but she had enough cash for an unbranded “government surplus” 9 mm automatic pistol and two boxes of ammunition. It cost her $1,275, but she was happy to pay it.