Tropic of Kansas

by Christopher Brown

  “Or make better TV,” said Sig.

  Xelina had stayed behind that day, leaving Alé in charge of the on-site footage.

  Clint hollered into the radio, telling the crew to disperse.

  That wasn’t soon enough. It rained hot metal.

  Three of the kids died that morning. Six were captured. Moco ran south with Slider, while Sig led Pancha and Mongoose into a storm sewer, which they followed all the way to the spill-off where it drained into the river. They huddled in the bay of an empty barge for an hour, until the sounds of their hunters dissipated. Then they split up and searched for sanctuary.

  Part Eight

  The Colonel and the Mastodon Queen

  86

  Neon lights crackled and glowed in the alley of pop-up bars along the wharf, where the adventure capitalists celebrated another prosperous day. The improvised street had no name, but everyone knew where it was: in the labyrinth of converted shipping containers beyond the Quarter, where the official city disappeared in the contaminated ruins they said even the robots feared.

  When the searchlights of a low-flying helicopter patrol passed over, Tania glimpsed the bombed-out buildings of the Vieux Carré looming in the shadows. It was an apparition out of time, a beacon across two decades of natural disaster, exploitation, insurrection, and invasion.

  The crowd of ruggedized network administrators and Kevlar-suited middle managers were too busy staggering through the Mardi Gras before the end of the world to notice. Tania almost stepped on one guy sacrificing the contents of his stomach to a dead president stenciled on the painted cinder-block wall.

  The revelers did not look like pirates. They had great teeth, dressed in tactical variations on business casual, and brought their lawyers with them. The military merchant companies always lawyered up on deployment, to make sure they didn’t violate the heavily negotiated terms of engagement chartered by Washington and end up blowing their corporate liability shield. Depending on who your direct report was, that could be worse than getting fragged by the local insurgents.

  New Orleans was one of the first major MMC hubs, the launching point for excursions into Central America. They all got evicted when Maxine and the Colonel’s improvised army took over the city with the support of the streets and declared independence from the Motherland, setting in motion a series of events that resulted in MMCs being deployed stateside in support of the federal troops who now occupied the city pursuant to the special emergency authority.

  Tania thought a retreat to the MMC sector would be a safe sanctuary from the people who wanted her files, but being a black woman in this drunk mob of off-duty capitalist conquerors made her feel almost as vulnerable as she had on the boat.

  Tania ducked into the most crowded-looking joint. She elbowed her way through and into a space at the end of the counter.

  There must have been fifty people crammed into this little metal box. Bigfoot’s little brother stood behind her, a tall, still white guy with a big brown beard, weather-worn bibs, and a ball cap embroidered with the logo of Deadhorse Conflict Truckers. He looked like he was working off a few thousand miles of bad road with whatever that was in his plastic bottle.

  A brunette in a T-shirt for Alpharetta Tactical Informatics was at the bar next to Tania, a wad of fresh renminbi next to her glass, trying to blow off the predatory-looking suit talking in her ear. The dudes playing stud at the tables by the door wore their PKX and Zapata colors—the crews who built data pipelines through jungles and next-generation prisons out of banana plantations. The loudest of all was the woman next to them, a PR flack from Fairfax Unmanned showing a highly entertained trio of Alabama cargo agents her capacity for shots of Roq.

  On a television over the bar, Ashton Brightwell was on Freedom Network News reporting the breaking headline from New Orleans: federal forces’ daring interception of an attempted hijacking by known terrorists of a truck carrying a nuclear device for delivery to Naval Drone Station Algiers.

  “The terrorists used children as bait,” explained Brightwell, “while they lurked in safe positions. Sadly, three of the children died, but most of the rest of the gang were captured. Only three are thought to remain at large, including this man, who federal authorities say has been one of the principal actors in a string of kidnappings and attacks on federal and contractor facilities over recent weeks.”

  The screen showed grainy footage of a lean guy with long dark hair running through a backyard and vaulting a fence. It looked like a scopecam outtake from one of those Sunday morning hunting shows, the way they filmed the guy. As he landed, the guy looked back over his shoulder and up at the camera. Freeze frame and zoom, but too pixelated to really make out the face.

  Tania tried to look closer, but they cut back to the anchor.

  She wondered.

  “Motherland reports that they have been unable to identify this perpetrator by name, but ask that any leads be reported immediately. The suspect should be considered armed and dangerous.”

  “Turn on the game, will ya!” hollered a voice from one of the tables. “Blockbusters are playing!”

  “Hang on,” said the bartender, turning up the volume and watching the report. Another face came on the screen, one Tania recognized.

  “We now go live to New Orleans,” said Brightwell, “where none other than actor Newton Towns was actually there at the scene this morning, while researching for his newest role. Newton, what an amazing story! How did this happen?”

  Towns smiled, revealing his 70 mm teeth. He wore a fancy waxed field jacket. Behind him were a trio of armed paramilitaries in their swamp dungarees, watching from the tailgate of a battle-armored Ford pickup.

  “It’s crazy, Ashton—the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in person. We’re here scouting locations for Jupiter Under Siege, and I came along to ride with these guys on some of their patrols into the areas still being purged. It’s all so surreal, and then today—wow!”

  “Straight out of one of your movies,” said Brightwell.

  “Totally,” said Towns. “What an incredible show of force by our guys. Can you imagine if those people had gotten their hands on a functioning nuclear device?”

  “Turn on the fucking game, man!” yelled the Blockbusters fan. A Californian, to Tania’s ears.

  “Hold on, buddy,” said one of the guys at the bar, watching rapt. “That’s the Newtron Bomb talking. I saw him out there yesterday riding with Skunks, headed for Bywater. Let’s hear what he’s got to say.”

  “Who gives a shit?” said the Californian.

  “Did you have an active role in the operation, Newton?”

  “Well, I was ready, Ashton, but I didn’t need to fire my weapon. I was out with the Nacogdoches Militia, and we helped in the search for the bad guys who fled the scene. These Texans are great guys and I’ve learned a lot working with them as they help the feds clean up the outlaw holdback neighborhoods.”

  The guys behind the actor grinned and flashed hand horns at the camera. One held up a weird-looking modified shotgun.

  “That’s amazing, Newton, I wonder—”

  The bartender clicked to the Blockbusters game.

  “Thank you!” said the Californian. Tania looked over at him, sitting at a table to her left. He was a good-looking blond guy in an expensive blue suit and open collar, surrounded by an entourage of other combat preppies.

  The game quickly cut to commercial. The bartender muted the sound. The crowd had quieted watching the news flash.

  “In any event,” smiled the Californian, drawing his audience back in, “these idiots have no idea what they’ve got.” He stopped to pour a fresh glass of Kentucky Hunters from the bottle making its way around. “Like a hundred acres of Louisiana weirdwood growing right there in the hillsides around Lake Nicaragua. Meaning: Artemisia auduboniana, the essential, and increasingly impossible to find, ingredient in Maxximol. Worth maybe a hundred million to those pharmers in New Jersey—enough to support at least a decade of production at current
levels.”

  Right, crazy, amazing, nodded his crew.

  “You know what those stupid fucking Nicaraguans have been doing with it?” said the Californian. “Making chairs!”

  Laughs all around.

  “Okay, I know,” laughed the Californian. “Weirdwood is a weedy shrub with nice thick branches, and you kind of have to know how to read before you can practice ethnobotanical entrepreneurialism.” The last part came out a little sloppy and slurred, but he made up for it with enthusiasm. “So I won’t blame the chumpesinos for being who they are. But that doesn’t mean I have to tell them what they’ve got, right?”

  Snorts and guffaws at that. The guilty group laugh of a privileged high school gang. Tania wondered if any of them would have jobs after she figured out how to get her files out there.

  Behind the Californian was a dog-eared motivational poster pinned to the wall near the jukebox. This one had the President walking in the mountains with his dogs, hand pointing toward the horizon.

  The Power of the Leader

  Real leaders don’t fight to be first, but are first to fight,

  and are first to risk the ultimate sacrifice to win.

  The Californian held up an instructional hand.

  “They think they have the deal of a lifetime,” he said. “It helps that the mayor of the little town is also the notary I’m using to paper the deal—with a nice little piece of the action thrown in for good measure. We close in the morning for less cash than I spent on my MBA. Then I turn around and call Philly and tell them what I’ve got.”

  He puckered his lips.

  “Those pencil-necked lab rats will have their bankers wiring me more money than the Colonel has stashed in the Wexbank Tower!”

  The Californian turned suddenly, an annoyed look on his face. A figure stood behind him, tapping on his shoulder. A young guy, long black hair, sinewy arms stretching out of a weathered black T-shirt. He looked out of place in this crowd—scruffy, weird, and unwashed, almost like a homeless guy.

  Since the night she downloaded the files, it was almost like Tania had forgotten.

  “I thought they captured the Colonel a year ago,” said the man, in familiar northern vowels. “Burned her out of her refuge on the oil rig and buried her at sea.”

  He looked so different. Not as big as she expected, even on the short side, but somehow looked bigger. Maybe it was the way the light revealed fine scars on his face and forearm. Tania tried to imagine.

  “You believe that propaganda?” said the Californian, playing the gathering crowd. “Anybody with half a clue knows the corpse they showed on TV was someone else. Like, the face was burned off? How convenient. The Colonel is a survivor. You don’t carve out a major American city, however trashed, and turn it into an independent republic or people’s state or whatever without being a seriously formidable negotiator. Maybe you didn’t get the memo, dude, but trust me. The Colonel cut some deal. She’s chilling right now, right over here in the heart of Echo Sector, in her secret bachelorette pad inside the old Wexbank Building, with all her favorite stuff and enough money to buy another sweet little fiefdom to run.”

  Tania looked at Sig. She wanted to call out his name. She held back. He looked drunk. She would get him outside, alone, when no one was watching.

  “If everybody knows it,” said Sig, “why hasn’t somebody ratted her out to the Authority? Send in the people hunters and collect the bounty that’s still posted. I didn’t think masters of the universe like you guys let revolutionaries walk freely through the heart of your cities.”

  The Californian’s eyes popped with astonishment, before his mouth opened with a roar of laughter and his companions joined in.

  “Listen to this fucking Canadian mullet! He’s going to capture the lady even the government couldn’t kill. You watch too many movies, dude.”

  “I’m from Minnesota.”

  “Well, listen to me, Minnesota,” said the Californian, stabbing the air with a confident finger, “here in post-Purge New Orleans, there are more dangerous, competitive, savvy motherfuckers hanging out than you can imagine. If there were a way to extract the Colonel from her hideout, or steal her treasure, it would have happened a long fucking time ago. Her refuge is in the middle of the contaminated heart of the ruins, for fuck’s sake, where the toxic residues are so bad they have to scrub the land drones when they come out. Just ’cause it’s a bank building doesn’t mean you can just like check in with the lady up front.”

  Chuckles from around the table.

  “If you got through the front door you’d have to navigate a maze of booby traps and armed enforcers. And if you got through that you’d have to deal with the meanest bitch in the Western Hemisphere. Redneck juvie hardcase with twenty years in the SEA Eagles before she got stationed back here and went rogue. She’d probably cut you into pieces and feed you to her pets.”

  Sig scowled. “Tall tales. I’ve seen the building you’re talking about. The only guards are water rats.”

  “Listen to this guy!” shouted the Californian, hands raised like he was summoning the gods of the Pacific surf. “Maybe he’s one of those freaks helping Newton Towns, master of kung fu, doing his cinematic portrait of the President as a poseable action hero. Come on, dude, show us the flying roundhouse you used to fight off the North Korean ninja guards!”

  Tania chuckled at that one. Sig looked at the Californian with a gaze Tania didn’t recognize, while the Californian soaked up the reactions of his buddies and the other patrons who had leaned in on the debate.

  “Come on, dude!” shouted the Californian. “Tell us how you’re going to steal the Colonel from the fortified penthouse of her private skyscraper!”

  The lights dimmed for a moment, then tried to come back up. Brownout wheeze of a wounded city.

  “Maybe it takes skills they don’t teach in business school,” said Sig.

  “Fuck you!” shouted the Californian, knocking his chair to the floor as he stood. He had the physique of a class A gym rat, and his suit was cut to show it.

  Tania checked her sidearm.

  “You think we don’t know how to eat what we kill?” said the Californian, roostering. “We own the world, fuckface!”

  Sig turned to leave.

  “That’s right!” mocked the Californian, pushing Sig from behind and brandishing a small pistol. “Get out of my bar!”

  The lights flickered again, then disappeared completely.

  Tania ducked, readied her pistol, and crouched under the edge of the bar.

  She saw shadows collide, and heard the sounds of breaking glass, rips, kicks, punches, screams, grunts, expletives, cracks, and four gunshots. When the lights came back on, the center of the room was cleared except for the body of the Californian, a broken bottle of Falstaff jammed into his neck, blood pooling on the floor underneath him.

  Sig was nowhere to be seen.

  Tania ran for the door, and finally called out his name.

  If he heard, he didn’t stop.

  87

  Sig woke up the next morning in the mud, by the water. The empty bottle of Kentucky Hunters that was not empty when he left the bar told him why it was he couldn’t remember how he ended up here.

  He looked up. He was on the banks of the Industrial Canal, close to where it meets the Mississippi. There was an old bridge that once crossed the canal but now just dropped off the first trestle into the water, a rusting ruin covered in graffiti. It was when he looked at the bridge, and the other bank it used to reach, that he realized he was on the wrong side.

  A little jolt of adrenaline shocked him into alert. This was the contaminated zone. Echo Sector. Too toxic for humans or animals.

  He cursed the bottle for his not knowing whether he’d been dumped here by yahoos or walked over under his own drunken power.

  He sniffed the air. He looked around. He looked at the water. The mud around him was full of the tracks of raccoons that had come down to the water at night. Three egrets and a big heron wor
ked a shallow patch around the old bridge pilings.

  Behind him was a garden of rebar. The cab of a fifty-year-old pickup sunk into the soil and aimed at the sky. A beat-up old warning sign whose letters were mostly chipped off or obscured by mold.

  Danger

  Biohazard Quarantine Zone

  Keep Out

  Beyond that, weeds and volunteer trees as far as you could see, interrupted only occasionally with the profile of an old building.

  He wondered if there was anything more toxic around there than what he’d drunk out of the bottle. The plants looked like they were thriving.

  Sig felt the headache come on pretty strong as he stood up. He also felt the emptiness in his stomach.

  He looked at the canal. He thought about the season. He walked down to the bridge, took off his boots and T-shirt, stepped into the water, and started to look for holes.

  88

  Tania saw a glimpse of Sig outside the bar after the fight but lost his trail quickly as he disappeared through the maze of identical metal boxes along the wharf. It was only after she had given up, walking along the river an hour later, that she heard him singing, some awful weird ballad about guys dying on a Canadian lake or something.

  She couldn’t see him. She called his name, three times, which was two times more than was probably safe. He kept singing. She could hear he was moving. She followed the sound, down the riverbank, then up along the canal.

  When she finally spotted him, he was across the canal, in the western edge of Echo Sector.

  She could see the path. Past the warning sign through a gap in the chain link, then down into the drained concrete bottom above the watergate and back up onto the other side.

  She called again. He looked, but in the wrong direction, then stumbled out of view.

  She looked at the warnings of death, disfigurement, and genetic damage that marked the entrance to the forbidden zone. The signs were old, battered, and effective. She thought about the files she carried in the thumb drive she could feel still hanging from her neck. She turned around, back the way they came.