And Zampana, less drunk than the rest of them, remembered Spooky’s white, set face, and how the new medic had bloody knuckles the next morning.
Chapter Fifteen
Magchip
May 9, ’98
The end of America, and Kaptain Eugene Thomas was stuck in a shitty little shack with a bunch of mouth-breathing dregs, the bandage on his head sticky and warm with blood. Of course the stupid fucks held their mouths slightly open—concussions from artillery shook the farmhouse, drifts of dirt or plaster falling from the ceiling. They cowered, all equal in the face of terror, blond blue-eyed Sorenson with his pants full of crap and the reek of it assaulting Gene’s nose.
That was something not covered in the Patriot schools, how a man could casually shit himself when the shooting started. All the heroic movies and the music videos with soldiers staring manfully into the fray didn’t show it. They didn’t show a man holding a double handful of his own guts blown out by shrapnel either, or the tumble of bodies from a killing bottle into the bays. Like sticky spaghetti sliding out of a pot.
Gene’s legs ached from trying to push him backward into the concrete of the basement wall. Another good hit or two would bring the whole thing down, and good luck scrabbling out of the rubble.
The knife was rusty, but it pierced his skin. He worked it back and forth, ignoring the other Patriots’ screams as another shock wave jolted the building on its foundation. The inside of the left forearm, where a small nubbin held cargo that could kill him after the surrender.
He wasn’t like the other fools in here. Anyone with half a brain could see the Federals had won. When they did, they would process anyone lucky enough to survive surrendering, and he wasn’t idiot enough to think anyone with a Patriot’s record would be left alone, no sir. “The wheat and the chaff,” he muttered, while working the blade into the pale underside of his arm. Red blood welled.
She had a rectangle of scar tissue on her forearm, where a lase had cut her magchip free. The goddamn rebels were well supplied. She wouldn’t say how she’d been seduced into joining them—not that he’d asked. Not that he could remember, anyway. Somehow her file had been corrupted, only the vitals remaining—name, age, height, weight. He didn’t even know where she’d gone to school. All he knew was seeing her straighten that one sunny day in Gloria, and reading the determination in her thin shoulders. Those huge, starving eyes, somewhere between hazel and green, and—
The tiny chip corner pushed up on a welling of blood. Good clean Amerikan claret. Gene dropped the knife and worked at the sliver of metal with his filthy fingertips. He’d probably get tetanus or gangrene and save the degenerates the trouble of killing him.
Another hit, close to the already half-shattered farmhouse they were all hiding in. The reverberations died away just as he got the chip free. He squeezed it between dirty fingernails, bending the sliver back and forth, ignoring the pain in his arm. Had he cut too deep? Christ, if it got infected, he’d be in trouble.
The silence jerked his chin up. They’d stopped lobbing shells. The Patriot major nominally in charge of this ragged band stared apathetically at the wall, his tricorne hat cockeyed and his uniform coat flopping loosely at one torn sleeve. He had a ragged, filthy bandage low on his left forearm, too.
Probably wasn’t a combat wound.
Gene picked up the knife, wiping it uselessly on his dirty trousers, and one of the other soldiers—Polk, a jug-eared kid who reminded Gene of his vanished Gloria Kamp orderly—whimpered. Flat-footed old men and kids barely out of grammar school—the government was scraping the bottom of the barrel. How had it come to this?
It didn’t matter. Thomas braced himself against the wall, dropping the broken magchip. He ground it under the flopping heel of his boot, once mirror-shiny and polished by a kampog twice a day. Amerika had gone mad. The degenerates had won. No use in pretending.
The Federals didn’t throw a grenade down to clear the farmhouse basement only because they’d already shot Sorenson, who edged out waving a scrap of material that was nowhere near white.
The surrender was well under way.
Chapter Sixteen
Back Home
May 15, ’98
Two weeks after Memphis, Crunche received the turn-in-your-guns order he was supposed to enforce on all raiders under his command. They were to take enlistment in the regular army and join the chain of command for realsies, now that the fighting was supposed to be over. There was to be no more raiding, no more sabotage, no more derailments or lightning runs against Firster installations. The surrender had been signed by the rump of McCoombs’s cowering cabinet, most of them caught trying to get over the border into Canada.
It was probably best that they didn’t make it; ever since the Ontario Five trial, public feeling in the Great White North had precluded any fraternal hand-holding with McCoombs’s “presidency.” Everything had to get back to normal now, with the Federal government moving back home in dribs and drabs. Part of that normal was making sure the oddballs who’d developed a taste for sabotage, bombing, terrifying Firster watch posts and breaking Firster stockades were tucked neatly away.
Oh, sure, they were heroes in wartime. But this, suddenly, was peace.
“So.” Swann pulled his lips in, bit at them as if he had to stop a curse or two from escaping. He read the order again, nice and slow. “So, we don’t join up as buckytail privates, you arrest us?”
Crunche, his bloodshot eyes blinking, leaned hipshot against the wheel bulge of a retrofitted Umvee while he rummaged in his pocket for a fresh cigar. “Well, that’s the spirit of the damn thing, but not the letter, my man. Occupation duties, it says. Discretion on the part of the immediate commander.”
“Huh.” The single syllable held a world’s worth of disdain.
“It’s a shitty order,” Crunche agreed, chewing at the end of the brown-wrapped tobacco tube. He never lit them; he just masticated. “Officially it ain’t arrived yet. I ain’t thumbed it, Azer hasn’t been able to find me.” His right eyelid drooped a fraction, his version of a wink. “Figured I owed you that much, at least.”
“Mmhm.” A noncommittal sound.
Azer stood about six feet away in the shelter of a comms tent, studying a table of maps with apparent unconcern.
“We lost that truck over there in the pileup on the highway, too.” Crunche scratched at his cheek. “Just now catching up on paperwork for everything we left on the way.”
The army-green truck in question sat, in plain sight, with half of Lazy Eye vanished under its hood. The boy was a mouth, but he was also good with engines and retrofitting. His gray, much-worn rag of a T-shirt rode up a little; ropy, vivid, healed welts peeked out. The seamed scars on his back—the reason he rarely took his shirt off and stayed filthy rather than shower with everyone else—were from Public Atonement in the small town he’d grown up in, the Firsters believing in that spare the rod, spoil the child thing, and someone had accused him of being an atheist.
The kid had survived thirty lashes, which was damn near miraculous. Lazy hummed as he banged on something deep in the engine’s guts. “…that, you sonofawhore,” he finished, slithering backward and hopping lithely to the ground. “Yep, that’ll do it.”
“How long we got?” Swann asked.
Crunche bit down on the cigar end again. “I won’t thumb the order ’til sundown.”
“Well, I ain’t making any promises.” The raider nodded thoughtfully. “Be a goddamn shame to miss that next poker game.”
“Not for me, you bastard.” Crunche owed Swann fifteen smokes and a pile of credits.
Swann offered his hand. “You’re a good egg, Crunche.”
“You too.” They shook, and Crunche ambled away, studiously avoiding looking at Zampana or Simmons, who were occupied with roasting a couple rabbits over a fire instead of waiting for the line around the field kitchen. Zampana caught sight of Swann, elbowed Simmons, and they both leapt to their feet. Lazy Eye hunched his skinny shoulders, and
when Spooky wheeled out from under the truck, chewing on a ration bar, her face grimed with motor oil and dirt, she froze, catching the tension.
By now, even she knew that look.
They gathered around the truck, instinctively close to shelter while Swann laid it out for them. Simmons leaned against the quarter panel, smoking meditatively, his eyes half closed. “Occupation duty,” he quoted, and shook his head. “Babysitting.”
“Not necessarily,” Zampana weighed in. “Could mean hunting Firsters.”
“Now that’d be something I’d like.” Prink exhaled sharply. “Minjae? What’s our chances?”
“Mathematically?” Minjae rubbed at her close-cropped black hair, her round face shining with sweat. Her hips shifted slightly under her trousers, deceptively soft. She was all packed muscle underneath. “Sign on, get pension. Good bet.”
“Pension.” Simmons blew out a long cloud of smoke. “Never thought I’d live that long.”
All eyes turned to Chuck Dogg, who looked fixedly at the ground. “I dunno.” He took his time thinking, and they waited patiently. “I ain’t too keen on taking orders from no come-latelies.”
Swann nodded, his lean face expressionless.
Zampana made a restless movement, her palms pressed together as if she were praying. “They could break us up, too?”
Dogg nodded, his collection of small, red-tied braids bouncing a little. “Crunche wouldn’t. But above him, who knows?”
“Unless he’s gonna rank me in to where I can keep y’all together.” Swann rubbed under his hat band with one finger, scratching hard and thinking harder. “Can tell him we want to hunt those fuckers down.”
“You think he’d agree?” Lazy piped up, eagerly. His eye rolled a little, his cheek twitching.
“To which one?” Zampana elbowed him, a gentle nudge.
He leaned into the contact, the regular half of his mouth pulling up in a smile. “Both. Either.” The kid sobered, folded his arms. “I ain’t got my thirty yet.”
Simmons settled more firmly against the truck, rubbing his big chapped hands together. “What are you gonna do if you get ’em?”
“Start on another.” Lazy’s face squinched up, restrained from a Well, duh by Zampana’s warning glance.
“Might run out of Firsters.” Sal coughed a little, hunching and cupping the brief flame of a lighter, inhaling from an old-fashioned. That caused a general movement among the others, and for a little while, the smokers smoked in silence, while Zampana, Lazy, and Lara simply stood thoughtfully.
Swann smoked almost down to the stubby filter before turning his head to gaze at the new medic, a line between his fiercely furred eyebrows. “Well?”
Her mouth had turned to a thin colorless downward curve. “Reservists?” Her nostrils flared as the last sibilant of the word slanted up, a tentative slide common among camp veterans.
“Ha, good idea.” Minjae fieldstripped her smoke with a sigh. “Hunt the bastards one weekend a month.”
“Be all you can be,” Chuck cracked.
When the laughter died down and the last smoke had been fieldstripped under boots broken in by hard use, Swann straightened, settling his hat the way he did before giving important information. “Anyone who wants to go home, that truck’s the ticket. Sundown’s when I have to answer.”
Chuck shook his head, digging one bootheel into the half gravel, half mud. “Shit, man, anyone got anywhere to go back to?”
Spooky shrugged. Zampana whitened. Simmons did too, his blue eyes lighting with a suspicious, familiar glow.
But it was Lazy who said what they were all thinking. “This is home now.” He rubbed at his forehead with the back of one grimy hand.
Crunche had some pull with Division, and he used it to get Swann in as a captain. He wasn’t so sure about keeping them all together even if they did sign on, but fortunately, a brass head at CentCom had a brainstorm right in his uniform trousers. Getting conscripts back into the peacetime economy was the overriding concern; the regular army had its hands full with other cleanup, including certification—the only way for a card-carrying Firster to rejoin society after the surrender—and the pool of raider manpower was tailor-made and motivated to pursue another task.
That was how the Blue Companies were formed; they were mostly squad-sized and nobody knew quite where the name came from, but it stuck. Their mission was simple: to find the jar kaptains, the officers, and the black-clad Patriots who staffed the kamps, from the simple work or Re-Edukation stockades to the killing grounds. Not to mention the petty Party functionaries who submerged once it was clear the Federals would win.
Ideally, the Blues were to bring them in for televised trials, so the world would see America regain its favored moral high ground.
Chapter Seventeen
Reality
It didn’t quite work out that way.
Chapter Eighteen
Paperhead
May 19, ’98
Inside a commandeered Clarkesford elementary school, Swann’s Riders stood in a tightly bunched group, scrubbed and sullen. A pen scratched, and the lean, close-shaven, long-nosed man behind the principal’s desk wore rank stripes and the supercilious air of a longtime paper pusher. A pair of steel-rimmed glasses glittered on the desktop, usually perched in the little divots on the officer’s nose. “You were with the division that liberated Reklamation Kamp Gloria, correct?”
Spooky, her hands dangling limp at her sides, her medic’s uniform still too large but now well laundered, tensed.
Slightly in front of her, Swann nodded, took his time inhaling to answer. “Ayuh, we were.”
“You have three females in your squad, then?” The bureaucrat, that long nose reddened by a nip or two from the bottle in his desk drawer, blinked blearily at the group of indifferently uniformed raiders. Simmons had point-blank refused to change his coat, Zampana’s long hair was against army regulations, and Lazy’s faded, bloodshot eyes half hid under their lids while his left cheek twitched and danced madly. “Cis, I mean?”
“Ayuh.” Swann’s shoulders had set. He didn’t like how this was going. What the fuck did it matter? Women got the shit beaten out of them just the same as men did, in the woods behind the lines, or in a pissant town when a neighbor talked, or in a city when they were caught out after curfew.
They died just the same, too. Holding double handfuls of their own guts. Vanished into the basements of the Party Police. Hanged in the square. Rotted with gangrene since the raiders didn’t have enough antibiotics. Shot, shelled, stabbed, strafed, and more.
“And they all three were with you before Gloria?” The pen pusher looked up, blinking blearily.
Swann had a split second to decide how to handle it. This wasn’t a briefing or a called-to-carpet; it was more like a fishing expedition. Swann’s bunch were just about to draw supplies from the quartermaster, but this asshole had some paperwork he just had to fill out. “Ayuh.” Maybe he should have said Yessir, but a raider didn’t give respect until you’d earned it, by God.
“There was a female raider in the…let’s see.” The bureaucrat’s mouth turned down, sucking on something sour as he shuffled through the stacks on his desk, thin hot-type paper and pop stencils, frangible and probably already fading. They’d have been scanned in, though. “Joy Duty, they called it. The camp brothel.”
“There was.” Swann figured he was committed now, might as well go the whole way. “Died just after.” Everyone knew raiders didn’t last long in camps. Not unless they were lucky, or tougher than usual.
Of course, the new medic had gone through a couple, right? There were news reports beginning to filter through now. One word in particular perked Swann’s ears mightily.
Baylock. It was accompanied by other whispered words. Experiments. Medical. Genetic. And, last and most thought-provoking, mutations.
“That’s a shame.” The bureaucrat gazed at Zampana, at Minjae, at Lara. All three of them stood stolid and silent. With the exception of Zampana’s
raised eyebrow, they were stone-faced as well. “Did you bury her?”
“Wasn’t time.” Swann’s back teeth began to ache, a sure sign of trouble. “Figgered rear echelon would. Why?”
The crag-faced man blinked. “Routine check, that’s all.” But he studied the new medic more intently now. “Vitals were lost in the worming; we thought maybe you’d have a couple clues. We could notify next of kin.”
And that was why the summons had called for all of Swann’s group? The newly made captain took a hold of his temper, as his mother would have said. Lord, but it was irritating when a man behind a desk assumed you were stupid. “Welp. Anyone got clues for the man? That raider, what was her name?”
“Never said,” Simmons piped up. “Died right outside the camp gates.”
“Dysentery,” Zampana drawled, with the particular Hispanic accent she reserved for prying idiots. She’d once gotten waved through a roadblock, pretending to be an immie indentured too stupid to understand much English, brazening out with a shivering Mickle and Prink hidden between wooden boxes holding bags of manure in the back of the truck. Her fake ID had left streaks of ink on her sweating fingers, but they’d let her through, the dogs uneasy but none of the Firster block-guards wanting to get into the back of a vehicle that smelled that awful.
Mick was shot two weeks after that, during the run on the pharmacy in Fredericksville. Gutshot and lung shot, and Zampana had been the one there holding his hand after she used some of the precious stolen morphine to ease him out.
The bureaucrat stared at Spooky. She lifted her chin a little and stared back, her dark eyes lightening to between hazel and green. Swann wanted to elbow her, but he stood, rigid, nailed in place. The clock wired to the wall next to the door ticked, keeping a steady marching heartbeat. Chopping up time into little pieces, like breaking up a ration bar for a toothless child. A few female raiders had given birth in the wilderness. Everyone had pitched in with extra rations to keep them producing breast milk, even though a baby’s cry was a goddamn danger with sniffers and drones over the woods.