Tropic of Kansas

by Christopher Brown

  It was twenty minutes before, remembering all the things she had done and risked and given up to find him, that she decided to turn around again. Maybe he could help her.

  She waited until daybreak, then followed his path through the same well-used hole in the fence.

  Looking out across the unclaimed scar on the other side, she saw no path at all. Tall grass grown over old concrete. The shells of a few buildings here and there. Like one of the ghost cities you could still find in parts of the Tropic.

  One building stood out at the eastern edge of the zone, backlit by the morning sun. It was a stubby high-rise, maybe fifteen stories sticking up out of the ruins. An old office building, late twentieth century. A brutalist concrete fortification that would probably still be standing after the next apocalypse.

  There was no sign on the building, but she knew what it would have said if there were. Wexbank Tower.

  She walked to the closest building. It looked like an old storefront—two-story brick with one side completely blown out. The original interior stairs were gone, but someone had left a wooden ladder you could get up despite the two missing rungs.

  From that vantage, she could see the ruin sprawled for at least twenty blocks. She looked around, until she saw movement inside one of the relics. An old church, with its steeple only partly severed. The motion was slow smoke from a fire inside.

  Then he stepped into view. Eating. Corn on the cob, it looked like, from the way he was holding it, until he took a big bite and she realized it was a whole fish. With whiskers.

  89

  Sig drew lines on his face with one of the cool charcoals from the edge of his fire. He had that feeling of machine surveillance, and a long open field to cross. The pattern was equal parts digital raccoon and pixel-hacking war paint. Xelina told him you could frustrate the facial recognition that way, a temporary version of the tattoos some guys got. “Neoprimitive augment,” she called it. “Improvise. Keep it irregular.”

  He found a ratty old brown blanket left behind by someone who had camped in the shelter of the church.

  He stood in the doorway and looked east at the tower. If it really was true that the Colonel was there, then she might be able to help him and his friends. He wanted to get them out of jail. Then he would deal with Walker.

  He stepped out and into a crouch under the blanket, morphing into a blob that moved out of pattern through the vegetation grown up between the expanses of old paving stones and foundation remnants. A few doves flushed out as the man-thing interrupted their feeding in the tall grass.

  The ground was littered with mismatched detritus. Broken glass, bits of electrical cable, shards of brick, parts of old signs, shreds of paper, a shoe, a ball, the teeth of an animal. The glistening brass of spent rifle cartridges that might have been there an hour, or a decade.

  The sun burned away at the flat green paint of a marooned old military tank. The gun barrel was broken off, the head covered with a hundred spray-painted eyes.

  Fast shadows glided over the ground just ahead. Sig pulled back the blanket and looked up. A trio of turkey vultures, riding the thermals.

  It was already hot, and never stopped being muggy. He dripped sweat under the wool, soaking through his clothes.

  In the shadowed interior of an old office building, Sig saw the silhouettes of four people standing around the flame burning in the base of an old oil drum. A wary, wily street dog lurked outside.

  The sounds of the city seemed banished.

  Sig clambered up the remains of a demolished building across from the tower, grabbing a spot on the roofless second floor where he could study the tower from behind the frame of an old window.

  The tower rose up out of dense scrub trees, brambles, and bushes. You could see bits of a rusting old fence, sidewalk fragments, and crumbled roadbed. There was no sign of gate or guard.

  A few yellow songbirds pecked around on the ground under one of the trees, foraging in the gravel and grass. A big tomcat leapt out through the bars of the fence, pounced on one of the birds, and snuck back into its weedy little jungle.

  Sig’s eyes followed the long concrete spines that ran up the sides of the building, worn from weather and the collateral damage of warfare. Sunlight shimmered off the glass of the tower, revealing cavities where the windows were knocked out. Sig thought he could see a figure looking out through one of the tall windows on the top floor, but then it was gone.

  That’s when he saw the lady walking up, out in the open where she was sure to be seen by the vehicles he heard coming from the north.

  90

  Tania watched Sig walk out of the church and disappear right in front of her eyes. He ducked into the grass like a wild dog. Every time she thought she saw him, it was just the wind.

  She climbed down and tried to follow his path. She walked, out in the open, anxious at being exposed to eyes in the sky and who knows what else. Or maybe they didn’t bother watching an area that had been emptied of people for a generation.

  She remembered the story, sort of. Something about a barge with toxic cargo. Tropical disease, strain unknown, carried in the trash. An accident. Thousands dead. Unsafe for fifty years. Quarantine.

  Then the deluge. Deluges.

  A smaller city they would have just cleared out the whole town, but this place was too important, especially after Maxximol really took off. Oil and human performance stimulants. Food for the machines and fuel for the workers. Draw a hundred-mile circle around the city and you could really see its economic necessity to the Zeitgeist. The military-industrial orifice through which they extracted what was left of the Tropic of Kansas and staged their way south looking for fresh meat.

  She looked out over the ruined landscape. Maybe the end of the world already happened and nobody noticed.

  Tania freaked when a shadow rushed over her, but then realized it was just a passing cloud.

  She walked down what had once been a street. There was no sign of Sig, so she headed for the tower, where she was sure he was headed.

  She saw an old billboard off to the left. The face of an elegant woman with a retro blond haircut and a long white cigarette gazed through the peeled-back remains of a vintage Pepsi logo, watching over the empty quarter.

  Tania stopped for a moment in the stillness. She looked up at the tower, only half a block away now.

  She heard gunfire. Close.

  She looked north, down the overgrown old boulevard, toward the source of the noise.

  A battered little white Toyota pickup hauled ass down the roadbed. A screaming guy in a red ball cap manned a machine gun mounted in the bed. The driver was screaming, too, spitting through a thick black mustache, while the front seat passenger leaned out of the doorless cab with a stolen M4 in her arms, aiming as best she could between the suspension-busting bounces.

  Tania hid behind a crumbling wall nearby, peering around the corner to watch.

  They fired at the armored jeep that chased them. The jeep had no driver or windshield—just gun barrels and the painted nodes of eyeless avionics. It looked like one of the aftermarket land drones the Mexican custom riggers put together, usually on old VW suspensions. What body there was had the color of primer and scorch, with a morale slogan stenciled in red and black caps across the battered hood:

  En Este Futuro, Hay Reglas

  “In this future, there are rules.”

  The insurgents pounded the unmanned interceptor with armor rounds, but that did not deter. She could hear the ricochets bouncing off the armor, and the hot thunks as the guns of the drone tore up the fuselage of the old truck.

  Tania drew her pistol.

  She heard the insurgents yelling. They veered left, accelerated over the grassy curb, and drove head-on into the wall she hid behind, launching the gunner from the bed and the passenger through what was left of the front windshield.

  Tania crawled into the grass, got on her stomach, and fired at the robot. She wasn’t trained for this.

  Her bullets bounc
ed off the armor. She wondered if it could image her in the grass. Of course it could. She knew—she’d looked through these things from the other side. Your best hope was that the server would process your face as a Do-Not-Kill.

  The drone pulled up to the side of the demolished truck and stopped. Machine rotors whined and snapped as they turned and adjusted. The ejected gunner tried to crawl through the grass toward Tania. The jeep shot him with five evenly timed single taps, until he stopped moving.

  Tania stood, angered, unloading her clip on the murder machine, trying to find a weak spot.

  BANG.

  Sig appeared from above, jumped onto the back of the truck, a big chunk of concrete debris in his hands.

  BANG BANG CRUNCH.

  Sig tried to crack the armor open.

  The drone bathed the truck and the other two occupants in automatic bursts. Flames flickered up from the engine block.

  The drone swiveled its main turret toward Tania.

  Her cartridge was empty.

  She dove again, behind the wall, crawled, and ran for the dense foliage at the base of the tower.

  91

  The brick was not a very effective weapon against the armor of the drone. There wasn’t even a good handhold on the streamlined hull. Sig pounded against the black glass eyelid. Not even a crack. The guns swiveled, turning their attention from the woman to him.

  Sig glimpsed the woman running for cover. She was black—that’s all that registered. He rolled off the jeep, evading the cannon fire that tore up the wall on which he had been perched moments before.

  The jeep shredded the wall, trying to shred Sig.

  He dove into the dirt.

  When he looked up, the drone was close enough to punch.

  92

  Heart pounding, Tania ran for cover where she could reload and help Sig.

  She could hear her own heaving breaths between the machine fire of the drone.

  She stepped over the broken curb and onto the dirt. Saw the old concrete barriers.

  It was like slow motion. The third step . . . and then the ground wasn’t there. Or it was, but it gave like thin paper.

  She fell, into darkness.

  She hit the bottom hard.

  93

  As the jeep lurched toward him, Sig rolled under the elevated suspension. There were no guns underneath, nor any easier handholds. It was armored for ground ordnance and rough terrain. But there was a hatch. An access port that popped open with the back of his knife and a strong hand.

  The robot was a lot easier to kill from the inside out.

  Sig climbed up into the empty cockpit, ripping and cutting, tearing wires, panels, and plumbing, until the life seemed to have drained out of the machine. He punched his way through the main eye, reeking of gasoline and burnt silicon.

  The rebel pickup was still burning.

  He read the slogan on the front of the drone again while he caught his breath. He wondered what it meant.

  He looked at the scorched bodies of the fighters.

  He turned to the tower. What radiated danger an hour earlier now looked like sanctuary.

  94

  Tania sat up, winded and broken.

  She looked up at the light. The hole was big enough for a car.

  She had fallen on concrete. Maybe fifteen feet. She could feel the smack all along her right side.

  She looked for her gun. She saw a dimly lit tunnel. A hallway.

  There was a man standing there, in an apron and a gas mask.

  He was holding her gun.

  95

  The tower had no locks. The spaces for doors were filled with the dense invasive vegetation that had moved in from the courtyard. The barbed vines and weedy shrubs thrived in these conditions of young ruin.

  Sig worked his way through the bramble, past the remains of a Chevy Impala with waxy grasses shoving up out of the engine block. The tarnished brass skeleton of an old revolving door moved just enough to open a slit he could squeeze through into the dark cavern of the old lobby.

  The weed jungle continued inside until it came to a big pile of debris. Sig clambered up the side, above the volunteer shrub line, into the ambient light of a gigantic cave made by collaboration between man and natural disaster.

  The tower had no interior floors. He stood on what remained—big chunks of concrete and twisted rebar. From the ruins, new structures had been built up inside the superstructure. Honeycombs of scaffolding and found materials rose up out of the vegetation along the interior, all the way to the roof in some spots. It looked almost organic, as if the whole thing had grown from the ruins of the old city on the fertilizer of a sick future. At the top, the improvised edifice spread back toward the center, clamped on to the ceiling. At the very center, a big fan blade spun in an aperture open to the sky, chopping the long shaft of hot sun that flickered on Sig’s scratched-up face.

  Looking back, he could see how the vegetation thickened in lush green clumps where the water and light came down. And the idea grabbed him that this is what the future looks like. All the wild green things that survive our big binge will move in to tear down what we leave behind after we’re gone, and in a generation the concrete and steel will be covered in new life.

  Scanning the scaffold spans for routes of ascent, Sig could see what the augments were made of. Pieces of chain link, timbers from old buildings, netting, pallets, ornate woodwork from demolished homes, painted metal signs, cardboard boxes, pipes, stained glass from some forgotten church, giant sheets of technical fabric, rusty cables. Sig wondered who the builders were, and where they were now.

  A quartet of foraging feral parakeets skreeted in a nearby treetop, then flew past Sig, finding their way through the scaffolding to a broken window and the open air beyond.

  In front of the broken window, Sig saw the woman he had saved. It looked like she was working her way up to the top of the tower, limping.

  Then, for the first time, he saw her face. And realized it was a face he had seen before.

  He tried to remember her name. It started with a T. He knew her so well once. She was his babysitter. He had a lot of babysitters, until he had none.

  Then he saw the people behind her, with guns, pushing her. It came to him.

  Tania.

  96

  “Keep walking,” said the man. “Don’t look back.”

  Maybe because, as she could hear, he had taken the gas mask off.

  He prodded her up an old cast concrete staircase they had somehow lifted six stories up.

  Her ankle was twisted and her elbow banged up from her fall, but she could walk. She didn’t know if he had reloaded the pistol, but she wasn’t ready to find out.

  They pushed her through rooms filled with signs of human habitation—bedding, clothing, water bottles, cooking equipment, cans of food.

  They crossed a metal deck with no railing. The floor was a battered old sign with a smiling minstrel figure.

  “Stop,” said the man.

  Tania tried to look over her shoulder.

  “Hey,” said the man.

  Too late. She saw him holding his phone, showing something to the other figure she had sensed. A woman.

  Tania looked down onto the carpet of thick green weeds six floors below, all gathered up like hungry supplicants in the space where the light and water landed from the aperture in the roof, and wondered if they would catch her if she jumped.

  She looked to the right, through a broken window from the original construction. A view to the east—temporary housing, maybe barracks. Beyond that the sprawling refineries, depots, and tank farms, where the pipelines ran out to sea and north to the cold country. There were a few shiny new office buildings in the foreground, part of the new tax-free zone they were trying to build in the ruins of Chalmette, launching point for the next leg of the PanAmerican Data Pipeline.

  They pushed her on, through a door plastered with the campaign poster of a dead politician, then another door inlaid with hand-carved images of s
wamp birds swimming in curlicued air, into a room walled with a mosaic of recycled bits of wood and plastic. There was a cot, and a radio on at low volume, playing a broadcast from Nicaragua that came in and out of signal.

  The next door was metal. With a lock. Her captors held her while one of them used the key to open it.

  She heard other voices inside, as her nose filled with the smell of chemicals.

  97

  Sig liked to climb. Climbing had saved his life. During his years outside in the north, he had learned from animals how useful climbing could be—to be able to sleep in a safe place, see predator or prey from the bird’s eye, or reach sources of food for which there was little competition. It was also fun. He had climbed mountains and power line towers, churches and malls, cliffs and dams, sandy embankments and crumbling glaciers. Once, in North Dakota, he had climbed a radio antenna so tall that you almost thought you could see the top of the world.

  He tried to track Tania, but there was no sign, and he kept getting lost in the maze. So he thought the better idea would be to beat them to wherever they were taking her. Which he guessed, from what he saw and heard, was the top.

  He found a spot where the window glass was mostly gone, hung his sneakers from his back belt loop by tying the laces together, and stepped out into the clear air ten stories up.

  It was not an easy climb. The face of the building was completely vertical. But the concrete superstructure was speckled with chips worn in by weather and war, and it was only ten feet between the horizontal forms. He rested when he had the chance to step through another broken window. As the sun reached early afternoon in a sky interrupted with only a few scattered puffy clouds, he finally climbed over the top onto the roof of the building.