The Fall of the Republic (The Chronoplane Wars Book 2)

by Crawford Kilian

  He found the house he was seeking, saw that the car he was seeking was parked in front, and went on around the corner to cut back through the alley behind it. It was a drab little house like all others, with an overgrown backyard where a rusted pickup truck sat low on flat tires. Three people, all men, were supposed to live there; they could well have girlfriends and buddies as well. No lights showed.

  The kitchen door opened easily. Pierce stepped inside, the hood of his jacket low over his forehead, the collar of his turtleneck pulled up to cover his mouth. The floor squeaked under his shoes, but he ignored the noise. A straightforward footstep in the dark would cause less alarm than a surreptitious one. A penlight gave him enough light to guide him into the living room, stinking of hashish and unwashed bodies. Someone was asleep under a blanket on the couch: a young man with a beard, his mouth agape. Pierce moved on down a short hall, past a small bathroom to a single large bedroom.

  Two mattresses had been dropped on the floor. Another young man snored on one of them. He was Donald Dwayne White, right down to the scar on his chin and the Marine globe and anchor tattooed on his upper right arm. Not that the son of a bitch had ever been a Marine. He was alone. On the floor beside the mattresses was a pink scarf: Maxine’s. A trophy hunter.

  Bingo, thought Pierce.

  He stepped into the room and drew a Mallory .15 from the inside pocket of his rain jacket. It was light and comfortable, almost all plastic. Using the penlight to help him aim, Pierce thumbed off the safety, set impact to maximum, and fired six flechettes into the sleeping man. They struck as silently as blown kisses, shoving Donald Dwayne White down into the mattress and bouncing him up again. The man made a coughing noise as air was forced from his lungs.

  Pierce stepped forward carefully and studied the body. He was dead, all right. No need to look for a pulse. The mattress was already soaked red, and the man’s eyes were rolled up. The room smelled of suddenly released urine and faeces.

  Walking back through the dark house, Pierce felt a mildly pleasant buzz. He had never killed anyone before, and it had been much easier than he’d expected. He’d thought he might have to shoot everyone in the house.

  It was also much more satisfying than he had ever imagined, and he had imagined it very often over the years of his childhood and youth. He would be writing to his mother later in the day, and he wished he could mention it to her.

  Three days later, in New York City, a young Trainable named Eric Wigner sat at his own Polymath.

  “Serendipity,” he murmured, pushing a little tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. In a simple survey of statistics on violent crime, he had run across the death of Maxine Shultz and the subsequent death of her presumed killer by a person or persons unknown. The detective in charge of investigating the two deaths surmised that some unknown enemy of Donald Dwayne White had killed him, by coincidence, within hours of the prostitute’s death. The case was still open.

  Wigner took ten seconds to review all the documents, looking for some fact he might have missed. Nothing. So the conclusion remained: Wigner had serendipitously spotted a Trainable killer. He felt immensely cheered by the discovery.

  CHAPTER II

  In camouflage fatigues, Pierce went on patrol every morning during that cold, wet autumn. Usually he took a helicopter to another part of the district; on this particular morning, the patrol was through Mountain Home. He sat in the back of his Plymouth, being driven by an army Spec-5. Occasionally Pierce glanced at the laptop beside him, but he kept most of his attention on the outside. Reality was slower than a flickerscreen, but often revealed much more.

  This morning, reality in downtown Mountain Home was a line-up in front of the federal food dispensary: over one hundred people, each of them known to Pierce in more detail than they could have imagined. Reality was a dozen men and women (he knew them all, knew how long they had been jobless) leaning against the front of a decaying English-style pub, waiting for it to open so they could spend their alcohol stamps. Reality was a row of empty stores: drugs, men’s wear, insurance, video, coffee shop. Reality was a gas station that would not open until noon, but that had to have two bored young GIs guarding it to prevent fuel theft or even arson.

  The Plymouth moved on through the rainy streets; a mile down the road, the Spec-5 turned into the parking lot of Hometown Mall. The lot was empty except for a cluster of camper trucks and RVs parked near the main entrance. Traders liked to live close to their work, especially with fuel so expensive these days.

  Pierce saw the two new RVs at once and read their Utah license plates to the laptop. It silently flashed its answer back to him. Trouble. He’d known that already. The only people who drove gas-guzzling RVs from out of state were people who could afford to. If they could afford to and they weren’t officials, they were crooks, confident ones.

  “Stop here,” Pierce told the driver. He ran a few more files and crosschecks through the laptop and then put it aside.

  The mall was busy. Around the entrance, farmers had rigged stalls with orange plastic tarpaulins to keep the rain off their apples and potatoes. Usually they waved and nodded to him, but today they ignored the Plymouth. Pierce could see why: four or five young strangers in denim jackets with JACK MORMONS SLC embroidered across the backs. The strangers did nothing except to wander idly among the stalls; their faces were unreadable behind sunglasses.

  Aware of the newcomers’ casual interest in his official car, Pierce considered his choices. This was a case of illegal interstate travel by persons with criminal records. Technically, therefore, it was a matter for the police; under emergency regulations, the Military Administration was not to intervene directly in routine criminal matters. In practice, of course, it intervened all the time, as Pierce had in the Maxine Shultz killing a week before. The police didn’t mind; it got them off the hook when the Military Administration decided to take unpopular steps.

  If he handed this job to the police, however, he suspected the Jack Mormons would find a legal pretext to stall. Or they would simply buy off the police. Then Pierce would have to discipline the officers, which would have political repercussions.

  If he made this a MilAd matter, he would have to delegate it to the Air Police out at the base. Their senior officer would want fifty forms filled out and twice as many legal opinions from the Adjutant General. Meanwhile the Jack Mormons would be entrenching themselves, extorting money and goods from Pierce’s people, beating up a few to ensure the rest kept silent. All Pierce wanted was to get them out of the district, as fast as possible, so his own people could get on with trying to make a living.

  Logic dictated that he would have to deal with the matter personally. Politics dictated that he would have to deal with it publicly. He composed himself for a moment, then straightened his cap and picked up his swagger stick before leaving the car and walking into the mall.

  Much of the mall was built around a domed plaza that had become a centre of trade and commerce since the Emergency. At the benches and tables under the dome, gamblers played poker or shot craps. Around the curving rim of the plaza, various hustlers had moved into the abandoned shops: craftspersons, re-cyclers, labour brokers. Home brewers had moved into one boutique, and now traded their beer and berry wine for lumps of pork, FDA-certified minimum toxic and highjacked off federal trucks. Pierce didn’t care as long as the trucks had been outside his jurisdiction.

  He enjoyed the mall; it was surely livelier than it had ever been before the Emergency. He had no intention of dampening that liveliness. Under a regime as harsh as the Emergency, people needed a certain latitude. They had to feel they could beat the system in some small, meaningful way. Rob them of the joy of beating the system, Pierce believed, and they’d turn violent. Corruption was the great social stabilizer, the consolation prize for accepting a life of boredom, sickness, and hunger.

  He knew whom he was looking for, and found them quickly. Another ten or twelve Jack Mormons sat in folding aluminium beach chairs in a former jewellery store,
drinking beer and smoking dope. They looked at him with blank faces.

  “I want Joe Bauer,” Pierce said quietly.

  “Go away, asshole,” one of the young women said.

  “Now.”

  “Dinchu hear the lady?” said a young man. His words came out in smoky puffs. “Jack Mormons don’t listen to no asshole in a crazy quilt uniform. We’re minding our own business. Maybe you oughta do that, too. Asshole.”

  Pierce looked at the young man. “Your name is John Tyler Moore, age twenty-two, height six feet, weight one hundred eighty pounds. Your business is befuddlers and extortion. You have six arrests for drug trafficking, and four convictions.” The laptop had told him all that, and more. Now for some creative use of John Tyler Moore’s anxieties, as recorded by several Utah Corrections Service psychiatrists. “You’re a bisexual — ”

  “Just a goddam minute!” The young man erupted out of his chair while his companions hooted and laughed. “I ain’t no goddam bisexual, you son of — ” He lunged at Pierce.

  Pierce seemed to be leaning back, as if recoiling from the rush of the young man. That was to balance his right foot, which swept up in a graceful arc that intersected Moore’s face. Pierce seemed to lose interest even before Moore dropped backward and thudded onto the dirty carpeting.

  “I want Joe Bauer,” Pierce said again. The young woman got up, shrugged elaborately, and slouched to the back of the store. A pale man, older than the others, stepped out of a doorway and approached Pierce.

  “Yeah.” Bauer looked at his friend, who was lying on the floor with his hands to his face. “Well, shit. Nobody does that to my people, buster. We take care of our own, and we take care of assholes like you.”

  “You have six hours to get out of District 23.”

  “No way. We like it here. We’re patriotic Americans and we got a right to live where we want. You don’t like us, you can move. While you still can.”

  “That just cost you an hour. If you and your RVs aren’t out of the district by 3:00 P.M., you’ll never get out of it at all.”

  “You don’t get outta my face, boy, we’ll ship you straight to Arlington in an orange crate.”

  Pierce was aware of scores of people watching them: his people, the people he was responsible for, and other Jack Mormons moving in to surround him. He read faces as he would read a flickerscreen. They told him the gang was about to attack. He would have to unbalance them.

  He smiled at Bauer. “I know what happened to Judy Parkinson,” he said loudly. “You pumped her full of Parydine and left her in that motel to die.” Pierce’s eyes snapped to another gang member. “Your sister, right, Brad? Did you know that your hero friend here poisoned your sister and tried to blame it on Maceo?”

  “What a goddam joke!” Bauer snarled. Pierce read hesitation in the gang member’s faces, but not in their leader’s. Bauer was preparing to move.

  “They’ve got all the evidence they need down in Salt Lake, and that’s why you decided to move up here. You just got tired of her, Joe, didn’t you?”

  Brad, the brother, looked uneasy. “How’s he know about Maceo?”

  “Because your hero here is John Tyler’s boyfriend, and John Tyler is a snitch for the Salt Lake cops. But none of you is my snitch, and now I want you out of my district by one o’clock.”

  He turned and walked away, listening to the sudden swearing and shouting behind him. At the doors to the parking lot, Pierce stopped and waited.

  Joe Bauer was striding across the plaza toward him, gripping a baseball bat. His face had turned from pale to pink.

  “You goddam liar, calling me a fag. Nobody says that to me, not even a fake soldier boy like you.”

  Pierce’s swagger stick was a steel rod sheathed in leather and tipped at both ends with lead. He took it from under his arm, raised it, and flung it, whirling end over end, into Bauer’s face.

  Bauer staggered back, one hand going to his broken cheekbone, as Pierce moved quickly up to him and gave him a gentle shove. Unbalanced, Bauer fell heavily. Pierce took the baseball bat from him and threw it across the plaza at the clustered gang members. They ducked away; it clattered across the tile floor.

  “You now have until 12:30 to clear the district,” Pierce called to them in a voice that carried well. “Get going.”

  The Jack Mormons marched across the plaza, two of them carrying John Tyler Moore. Two others picked up Joe Bauer and gripped him at wrists and triceps. They passed Pierce without a glance and headed for the RVs.

  “Way to go, Colonel!” someone yelled, and a ragged patter of applause ran around the plaza. Pierce did not respond to it, but stood at the door until the two RVs pulled away and headed for the road.

  One of the farmers hurried over from his stall to shake Pierce’s hand.

  “Thank you, Colonel Pierce. Man, those guys turned up this morning and it looked like we had us some real trouble. But I knew you’d fix things up.”

  “That’s what we’re here for, Herb. Take it easy, now.”

  Back in the car, the Spec-5 asked Pierce what he’d told the Jack Mormons.

  “Told ’em they didn’t have a business license.”

  “Izzat right.” The Spec-5 chuckled. “Way to go, sir.”

  Pierce looked out through the rain-speckled window at the decaying buildings. He felt a mild adrenalin buzz, not as strong as it had been last week with Donald Dwayne White, but agreeable. He’d bought his people another day or two of relative peace. They liked him a little more than they had, trusted him a little more. In the short term, that was good. In the long term, when he could no longer protect them, the goodwill and trust would turn to bitter hatred. At some stage, within the next year or two or three, what was left of the economy would break down completely and the ragged survivors would go looking for someone to blame. Trainables would be at the top of the list. Sure, you saved us last year and last month and last week, but what have you done for us lately?

  Pierce slumped into the back seat of the Plymouth. “Let’s go home,” he muttered.

  What we have done, he thought, is hold things together for you just a little longer. A few score thousand adolescents who were lucky enough to be Train-able and luckier still to be Tested and Trained before the latent talent could evaporate. You were illiterates who’d built a library and now you were wrecking it until we came along. We learned what you couldn’t or wouldn’t learn, and we applied it in your interest, and all the thanks we get is your pigheaded willingness to go on the same way you always did. We know we have no escape as long as you go on poisoning the air and water, parasitizing the land and anyone too weak to parasitize you. You have all the foresight of a cancer cell. You have enormous strength, and we have nothing except our knowledge. We ought to let you choke in your own filth, except that you’d drag us down with you.

  Besides, he thought, looking through the rain-streaked window at two children splashing in a gutter, we love you. We care about you more than you care about yourselves. If we don’t look after you, who will?

  Back in his apartment, Pierce called Polly to attention and invoked a scrambler circuit. Once he was effectively sealed off from any kind of electronic monitoring, he patched into a network known only to district-level Trainables. It was an electronic bulletin board and wailing wall, where over a hundred young men and women exchanged the horror stories and bitter jokes that filled their lives.

  Pierce watched the screen flash with hundreds of thousands of words, the chronicle of one more day in the Emergency, and felt depression settle more heavily still. After a time he shrugged it off and began to add his own contributions: a good-natured insult to the T-Colonel in Salt Lake who’d let the Jack Mormons slip unnoticed out of his territory, some police estimates on ration-stamp forgeries, a report from a medical committee in Pocatello on toxic effluent in the local drinking water. All of it was technically top secret. The MilAd could throw them all into stockades and brigs for such a major breach of security, except that MilAd couldn’t have functio
ned without them.

  After a few minutes, Pierce told Polly to put on some music. She did: Glenn Gould playing Bach. Nostalgia, Trainable style. He sprawled on the couch for a while, listening, and when the piece, was over, he thanked Polly and went to bed.

  In New York, Eric Wigner puffed his pipe and studied what Pierce had put on the bulletin board.

  Pierce drove a dirty pickup truck two miles up a gravel road that ran off Highway 20 north of Mountain Home. Light rain fell through mist onto aspens and scrubby pines. Night had fallen.

  As Pierce slowed for a curve, a tall man swung open the right-hand door and climbed in. He wore dark pants and anorak, and had taken pains not to appear in Pierce’s headlights. Inside the cab, the man pulled back the hood of his anorak. His prematurely white hair gleamed faintly in the dashboard lights.

  “Thanks for coming, Colonel.” His name was Wes McCullough. He built log cabins, or had until the Emergency. Now he lived on basic ration stamps and a small retainer from Pierce.

  “Glad to. How’s Edith? And the kids?”

  “All right, thanks. Listen, Colonel, I think you got some trouble ahead of you. From us.”

  “Serious?”

  “Yeah, serious.” Wes was an involuntary member of the Wabbies, the White American Brotherhood. They were the latest version of radical hick, an alliance of ranchers, loggers, miners, and survivalists. They blamed the Emergency on a conspiracy of Trainables, Blacks, and Zionist-Communists. For over a year the Wabbies had been building up arms caches and recruiting new members. So far they had been a rural nuisance but little more.

  “There’s going to be a protest march in town next Tuesday. To demand elections.” Except that no elections had been held since the Emergency.