Afterwar

  “Amen to that,” Zampana added. “So that’s our hand boy?”

  “Looks like it.” Hendrickson began to tap the keyboard in earnest, halting every so often to work the touch-responsive screen. He very generously didn’t point out that he’d found the fucker first. “Man, wouldn’t that be something if he was waiting at Malm for us?”

  Spooky couldn’t move. She was close enough to smell the soap from Henny’s morning shower, close enough to catch a faint breath of the booze in his coffee metabolizing out through pores. Close enough that the edge of his body heat touched hers. Her arms trembled, her legs seizing up.

  It would be something. The shivers finally receded enough to let her drop a hand to her sidearm, the same one Zampana had organized before they left Gloria.

  It wasn’t him. It couldn’t be him.

  But if it was…well, Spooky decided, she was ready, and this time she could take that first step.

  Her entire hand itched. Her fingertips caressed cool metal. She didn’t have the strength for the full list. Not now, and maybe not ever. But she had enough in her guts to carry her through this.

  The first act would be cleaning him up. The second would be cleaning herself.

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  We Found Out

  Swann stood on the metal sled floor, though he’d prefer to be buckled. Better yet would be squatting, his group in a loose ring and a stick in his hand, jabbing at the dirt while he mapped out the run. “Pana. You take Spook and Sal, look around here, get the lay of the land.” He squinted, one hand clutching overhead cargo netting and the other at his side, full of his new hat. “Chuck, you run the home office for them. Henny and Reaper come with me—we’re gonna go up to Malm and take a look at those Firsters that fired on us t’other night. See what they can tell us.”

  “You ain’t takin’ Spook?” Chuck’s hair was dreading up nicely, and his eyebrows almost vanished into the soft blur above his forehead.

  Spooky, hunched behind Pana, didn’t protest or look up. Instead, she stared at Henny’s laptop screen, a random series of green loops running as the screensaver thought its electric thoughts.

  Swann shook his head, mashing his hat down with a quick, impatient motion. “Nope. Malm’s not that far away. Might take more than overnight, though, if the assholes are cagey.”

  The Reaper moved a little in his chair, a gentle swaying. “Won’t be cagey for long,” he muttered. Swann pretended not to hear.

  “Strap in,” Ngombe sang from the front. “We’re coming up on Helena, chilluns. Sit down so I can land, willya?”

  Everyone hopped to obey, with maybe a little more alacrity than was strictly necessary. Spooky didn’t buckle in, despite Zampana’s prodding; she just sat down and bent forward, her head on her knees like she was going to start heaving again. Hendrickson began shutting down the laptop, and the heavy tension in him had receded quite a bit. Sal, in the copilot’s chair, closed his eyes, his Adam’s apple jumping as the prototype bounced a bit.

  It took an hour on the ground before Henny could get all the paperwork in place, and another two and a half before the prototype was at full charge again. Which left Zampana, Sal, Chuck, and Spooky on the landing pad late on a bright, warm afternoon, watching the sleek black sled rise gracefully and loop around the pad once before climbing arrow-swift, pointed north.

  Zampana, her arm over Spook’s shoulders, sighed heavily. “Ain’t gonna end well.”

  Sal hitched Minjae’s bag up higher on his shoulder, glancing up at Chuck. “Reaper’s gotta let off some steam.”

  “Prolly gonna do it on the Fed.” Chuck’s frown wasn’t quite as deep as usual, though.

  “Nah, Henny’s okay.” Sal patted at his freshly oiled hair, making sure every strand was in place. “Tight up, though. Maybe gonna end up a Reaper Junior.”

  For some reason, Spooky found that funny. At least, she laughed, a thin, pale sound lost in the rattle-whine of another sled cycling up, the next slot over. Pana hugged her a little tighter, only letting go when Chuck started moving along the safe line, his crutch thocking steady time.

  Spooky sobered, but only partly. Nobody asked what she found so fucking amusing.

  A tiny cube of a room, its walls thick with successive layers of industrial beige paint, the bed pushed against the wall and a soft lump in its depths under a scratchy Army-issue blanket.

  “Pana?”

  A slight stirring. Fingers curling around a hilt, the animal consciousness of another creature’s breathing.

  “Pana?”

  For a moment between sleep and waking, she was a child again, at her grandmother’s bedside in the middle of the night. Abuela, abuela, Pana-pana…Only now Zampana was her grandmother, because someone else was saying that name, a tiny little-girl whisper.

  Pana-pana, wake up.

  Zampana lunged into full consciousness, the knife jerked from underneath her pillow and her head full of the past.

  It was Spooky, her shoulders and throat ghost-white, her undershirt straps dingy and loose. She hovered out of knife range, her eyes huge in the dimness, her hair a mop. “Pana,” she whispered again. “Can I sleep here?”

  “Dios mío.” Zampana’s throat had shrunk to a pinhole. She coughed and nodded, loosening enough to lie back down on the bed. It smelled like damp disuse in here, but at least they were billeted in base housing instead of a barracks. “Sure, chica. No—” She put out her free hand when Spooky squatted, obviously intending to stretch out on the floor. “Come on up. Plenty of room.”

  Spooky was taller than Minjae, and her hips were not nearly as round. It took a little rearranging before both of them—still with their boots on, with the unspoken accord of women who often have to sleep near groups of men—were snuggled up, Pana’s head on Spooky’s bony shoulder, the fine thin shivers going through Spooky easing when Pana settled the blanket with finicky care. The radiator bolted under the window groaned a little. Old-fashioned still worked, especially out here in Big Sky Country.

  When Zampana had everything settled to her liking, and her hair padded enough of Spook’s shoulder, she settled and took a deep breath. “Bad dreams?”

  “Yeah.” Spooky shivered again. Her thin arms hugged with surprising strength. “Sorry.”

  “Nah, we all got them.” Pana sighed. “Lucky we’re not outside; I might’ve shot you.”

  Spooky nodded. Her cheeks were wet. Pana’s arm, stuck uncomfortably between them, warmed quickly. The older woman’s breathing deepened. There was no use in asking. You learned not to, learned just to wait. Whatever was going to crawl out of the cave of another person in the middle of the night took its own time.

  “I had a sister,” Spooky whispered.

  “Sí.” Pana’s eyes were closed, her lashes sooty arcs against her high cheekbones. Her throat moved again.

  “She was the brave one, helping raiders in the woods.” Spooky paused, forged ahead. “They caught her.”

  Pana nodded slightly, her hair rubbing Spooky’s shoulder. She knew this song. “My abuelita. She was a labor organizer.”

  “I keep seeing her,” Spooky whispered. “Hanging.”

  “Sí.” Zampana settled her hip a little more firmly. The mattress was thin, the springs were worn, but it was far better than the ground. “They shot her. Hung her body on a fence.” Each word slow, precise. “She would say, ‘I am old, what can they do to me?’”

  “She said she’d meet me,” Spooky whispered. “That we would go together.”

  “‘What can they do to me?’” Pana repeated. Parallel tracks, moving into the night, both of them carrying cargo on rickety wheels. “Well. We found out.”

  “I hate them. I want to kill them. All of them.”

  “Oh, sí.” Pana sagged wearily into the bed’s embrace. “And when they all gone, what you gonna do?”

  Spooky didn’t reply. She didn’t need to. The answer hung over them, an invisible weight. Finally, after a long while, Pana turned over and dropped off, the knife b
ack under her pillow. The younger woman, settling on her right side, her arm folded under her head and her back cuddled against Pana’s warmth, stared across the dim room at the cafeteria chair she’d wedged under the doorknob until her eyelids grew too heavy.

  For the rest of that night, neither of them dreamed. Or if they did, they did not remember.

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Degenerates

  August 5, ’98

  Rattling down the other side of the Bitterroots in a whine-celled gleeson hybrid bus, Gene rested his aching forehead against the slick, gritty glass of a window painted black on the outside—a precaution against nighttime strafing, the color peeling and chipping now that the surrender was signed. The umbrous atmosphere, full of the swampy breathing and heaving of other passengers, settled in his throat and coated his skin with grease. Immies, traitorous Federal soldiers in their slouchy uniforms, women with crying, probably illegitimate children—it was a tube full of degenerates, and he was a lone particle trapped three-quarters of the way back. An anonymous, foreign object.

  Getting through the DMZ checkpoints was easier than he’d dared to hope. The ID blanks Johnson had carried were high quality; the only problem was getting the proper-sized photograph. Fortunately, the Patriots who’d buried the doctor sent Gene along with the appropriate signs to the next stop on the pipeline, a shitty little shack on the outskirts of Ralston, a mere fifty klicks from Helena. Waiting for bus service was the worst, between his stock of vials diminishing and the lack of a door to close and lock when he shot another jolt of sweet oblivion into his veins. When he got to Helena, he thought he’d start cutting back, but the sudden press of so many people after so long on the road made his nerves ragged. So he made himself another bargain: he’d cut back when he got through the DMZ.

  Here he was, and Gene was thinking he wasn’t going to make it to Boise. The bus rattled and scraped along on indifferently dipped gleeson cells that needed tuning, gliding over potholes but jolting every time the driver pulled back on the throttle to cut speed going downhill. Back and forth on curves designed to turn your stomach inside out, the heavyset immie woman next to him stinking of eggs and grease and cumin-seed sweat, the noise jabbing through Gene’s head, and his arms itching, itching, itching.

  His seatmate snored unconcernedly. Her flat brown nose shone; her cheeks were thick and pockmarked. Gene closed his eyes, leaning as far away as he could from the immie’s fat arm relaxed along the ancient shared armrest. Summoned up a picture of the girl in the pink room—thin, those big hazel eyes, her dark hair growing out, a little smile he’d never seen her wear but could imagine. Standing straight up in the quarry, chin raised, her gaze an electric jolt all the way down his spine and into his balls. The electricity pulling, nagging, demanding, pressing buttons he hadn’t even known existed inside his own skull.

  Was she still alive?

  Even when he could stick the needle in, what came in the middle of the blissful smeared haze was the scent of her nape, under her damp hair. So many little presents brought to her—extra food, the pink soylon dress, arranging for the room so he didn’t have to share. She wouldn’t recognize him now, with his new face. His right hand, slack against his thigh, turned into a fist.

  His vanished left hand ached, too. The pain was a constant.

  He’d washed the doctor’s travel belt, and it was secure around his own thinning waist. Nothing in it but scrounged Federal cash, vials of precious unconsciousness, and a thumbdrive. It probably wasn’t worth plugging the latter into a machine, even if Gene had access to one. Whatever was on it could stay there; he’d get to Boise and vanish. Whoever the doctor was carrying it for was going to be disappointed; the motherfucker hadn’t written down the final destination.

  Probably wise of him. If Gene had found out, he would’ve killed the fucker himself and shown up to collect whatever payday was offered. If it was a good one, it could’ve bought more vials, or something similar.

  One of the babies on board began to wail, a desultory, hungry sound. Gene’s ears popped, air pressure thickening as they descended.

  Four and a half more hours to Boise, not counting whatever stops on terrible mountain roads the silver bullet of a bus found it necessary to make.

  Gene wasn’t quite sure he’d last that long.

  The bus station was a roar of hustle and bustle, announcements blatting; domestic air travel was still curtailed so land transport was doing booming business. Gene sat on a hard wooden bench, his skin twitching all over, and tried to concentrate. Late-afternoon sunshine pierced high windows, bars of throbbing gold gilding the ticket windows and worn linoleum scuffed by thousands of trudging feet. Every time he made up his mind to get up and head for the closest restroom, someone else would go in, or a cop in a tan uniform would stroll by, eyes roving. Or a Federal would go past, in camo green or taupe. Even women wore the uniform, ugly when you were used to decently dressed females. Some of the younger immies waiting for a bus wore short skirts in bright bird-colors, probably to air their worn-out coozes. It was a cesspit, and he itched, itched, itched.

  Every time he closed his eyes, the insect feet ran all over him, and they were sharp. When the gold bars falling through the windows turned buttery and rose above the ticket windows, filling the old-fashioned arrivals-and-departures board with glare, he decided it wasn’t going to get any less crowded and managed to get to his feet, staggering on pins-and-needles legs into the bathroom. It had a handicapped stall—how long had it been since he’d seen one of those? In the real Amerika, the cripples went into the baths instead of eating good food and wasting space the healthy could use.

  It wasn’t the same, he thought, bracing the vial between his legs, tilting it to get the sweet nectar inside near the syringe tip. Missing a hand was a combat wound, right? It wasn’t like he’d been born lacking. He’d done his duty, served his country…

  Getting the air tapped out was tricky, and each time he wondered if it was worth just letting whatever bubble there was slide through his system. A tiny little particle, just like him, ready to clot somewhere and blow out an important vessel. An embolism for the fucking degenerates.

  Sitting on the paper-clogged toilet—they had real paper here, no shortages on this side of the Rockies—and finding a vein, he pressed the plunger down and realized, a little too late, that he’d drawn it from the uncut vial instead of—

  Soft blackness. He collapsed sideways, and it was a half hour before anyone found him propped against the stall wall, uniform pants around his ankles and the needle still stuck in his bared arm, a crust of foam drying around his slack mouth.

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Suspiciously Like Home

  August 4, ’98

  Neither of the male Firsters was missing a hand. They’d been softened up a bit by the soldiers on duty, but sometimes it took a raider to get the full chowder-to-cashews.

  The skinny rotten-toothed one swallowed his own severed fingertip, the other was a gibbering, pulped-down mess by the time Simmons was finished, and Henny was looking a little green. Still, the Fed played good cop tolerably well, and when Henny said That’s enough, Simmons didn’t protest at all. He just smiled, a rather slow, sleepy expression, and leaned in close to the second Firster, a grizzled heavyset man with swastikas tattooed on both biceps. “Better hope you made my old man happy,” the Reaper crooned. “’Cause if you didn’t, it ain’t gonna be a finger you lose.”

  “Come on, now.” Henny made a show of pulling Simmons away. “Let’s get some coffee, give the gentlemen a rest.”

  “Oh yeah. Nine grams of rest.” Simmons showed his teeth, and the door to the interrogation room shut behind them with a bang, leaving Fat Swastika shuddering and sweating, sagging against handcuffs in a chair bolted to concrete.

  Swann was in the fluorescent-lit, pea-green hall, his hat jammed firmly on his head and its feather a little more bedraggled than it had been. “Tell me you got something good.”

  “What?” Simmons stretch
ed, sweat showing in half-moons under his long golden-haired arms. Muscle flickered; he had stripped down to his yellowed undershirt. “We got what we got.”

  “Let me guess.” Henny, just as warm but considerably more dressed, scratched at his cheek with blunt fingertips. “That rear-echelon bastard who tried to keep us out is making noises.”

  “Careful, you’re sounding like a raider.” Simmons elbowed him, but not nearly as hard as he could have.

  “Well, don’t you get a prize.” Swann’s mouth turned down. “I think the finger sent him over the edge.”

  “I’ll take care of it.” Henny sighed. “No good news, I’m afraid. You want to tell him?”

  “Nah, you go ahead. I want some water.” Simmons set off for the end of the hall. There was a pisser on the other side of the bars and the bored sentry on duty. Simmons rarely missed a chance to wash up.

  “The woman knows more than she’s telling.” Henny folded his arms, his mouth turned tight and unhappy. “Pretty sure it’s nothing we need, though.”

  “Let me guess. Simms was a gentleman.”

  Henny made a wry little motion. “Yeah, well, he said you bitched at him last time he hit a girl. Okay, so they were running roadblocks to fleece the fugees, right? None of their group was missing a hand, but get this. Few days ago, a truck—a real old bastard of a gas-burner—almost ran down the roadblock. Swerved like a motherfuck and dropped into a pothole, and the driver took a header through the windshield. Splattered up real good. The passenger was a guy with—you ready for this? One hand.”

  “Shit,” Swann breathed.

  “Yeah. Gets better. One-Hand kept going back to the truck to get stuff. They thought he was loopy, trying to drag a komrade out. He vanished after a night in their shithole base a few klicks up the road; both of these fucks assume he was sent on down the pipeline because he was real Patriot material. They buried the driver, neither of them can remember just what mile marker.”