“Try being married to the bozo who’s always complaining about how much being president sucks.”
Kipper flinched as Barb pinched a small fold of skin just below his Adam’s apple while trying to fasten the top of his dress shirt.
“Oh my God, Kip. You are such a baby. It’s lucky none of your marines can see you right now.”
“They’re not my marines,” he protested, finally stepping away from his wife to peer around her shoulder at the full-length mirror in the bedroom of their private quarters.
Hmmph. He was a wearing a fucking penguin suit. With tails and everything. It was all he could do not to make little barking penguin noises.
“Do I really have to do–“
“Yes, Kip. You really have to. It’s part of the job.”
“But poetry …”
Kip turned from the mirror as Barbara fiddled with her earrings at the antique dresser in their bedroom.
“Come on, Kip,” she teased. “Rhyming couplets aren’t the worst things you’ve had thrown at you the last couple of years. It might even be fun.”
Maybe. If he was allowed to get a few beers in, and who knew, the poems might even rhyme. He could hear the musicians, some sort of small local chamber orchestra, playing downstairs. Violin music and the growing murmur of a small crowd pushed up through the dark wooden floorboards of their bedroom. Kipper mentally ticked off the hour, at least, he would have to wait before ripping the top off his first brew.
“Mister President, if you’re ready, sir.”
Barbara smiled at their protocol chief. “Oh, Allan, he’ll never be ready, but I’ve done the best I can. Let’s go downstairs.”
Kipper hadn’t seen anyone appear at their door, but he wasn’t surprised to find him there. Privately he referred to Allan Horbach, the White House protocol chief, as Casper because he was always spooking around somewhere, although admittedly Kipper needed more protocol wrangling than your average president. Barb and Allan fell into a hushed but animated conversation as the three of them made their way down the hallway toward the main staircase. As the background noise swelled to a reasonable roar, Kip estimated that there had to be nearly two hundred people crammed into the reception area on the ground floor of Dearborn House. He’d long ago done away with a good deal of the formality that made these events so punishing, meaning he did not now have to endure that nearly unbearable moment when Allan announced their arrival as though he were stepping onto the bridge of an aircraft carrier or something. Even so, as they came down the stairs smiling and waving, it seemed as though everybody there turned as one toward them.
And then, just like stepping off the bank into a deep, fast-flowing river, he was pulled into the crowd.
Half of Seattle had somehow crammed itself into the music room and formal parlor of Dearborn House. He winced to see the Greens’ leader, Sandra Harvey, bending the ear of his appointments secretary, Miss Hughes, and made a note to remind Annie that when Sandra came calling, he was always out. He had just enough time to register Jed Culver, his chief of staff, deep in conversation with Henry Cesky, the construction magnate. He wondered what dark schemes those two could be cooking up, and then Allan was suddenly at his side, gently directing him by the elbow toward the British and French ambassadors who appeared to be arguing over something to do with Guadeloupe.
He was pretty sure that was a country, not a tapas dish, but not sure enough that he wanted any part of the argument.
“Mister President,” said Horbach, “we must greet the ambassadors, then the speaker of the House, the governor, the …”
Kipper zoned out. They were no more than a minute into this reception, and already he was screaming inside. He had no idea how Barb smiled and chatted through it all as though she were actually enjoying herself. Christ, maybe she was. The next thirty minutes passed in a painful series of meet ‘n’ greets with a procession of dignitaries, foreign guests, senators and Congressbots, and Seattle City Council officials, all of whom had been elected well after he’d left the City Engineers Department. It was with a truly pathetic sense of gratitude that he spotted Barney Tench, his old college bud and now reconstruction czar, working the buffet over by the windows.
“Barn! Man, how you doin’?” he called out over the heads of the crowd, instantly drawing the attention of about fifty or sixty people to Tench, who was caught stuffing a giant piece of crabmeat into his mouth. Allan Horbach actually face-palmed himself, and Barb gave him a small kick in the back of his leg.
“But I need to talk to Barney,” he protested. “It’s about work.”
“Not now, Mister President,” the protocol Nazi insisted. “Mister Ford is about to perform.”
“The poet?” said Kip. “Oh. Great.”
Back through the press of the crowd they went, every step blocked by somebody who wanted a small piece of his time, all the way up to the front of the room, where Kip was introduced to a thin, nervous-looking man in a slightly ill-fitting suit. He instantly felt for him. Ford looked no more comfortable than he did.
“Mister President,” said Allan Horbach, “might I present our first poet laureate of the new age.”
That’s what we’re calling it now, he thought. When did we start calling the end of the fucking world a new age?
He shook Ford’s hand and leaned in close to be heard over the crowd.
“Don’t worry, buddy; by tomorrow this’ll all just be a terrible nightmare.”
“What?” Ford looked shaken. “Oh. A joke. I see. Okay, then. Shall I read now?”
“I think the president wants to say a few words first,” said Horbach.
“Well, I don’t really want to,” Kip said, earning a glare from his wife, “but what the hell. We’re not getting any younger. Let’s do it to it.”
A bell rang somewhere as he ascended the small dais that had been erected and then tapped the mike.
“Hey, everyone, how you doing?” Kip said as the soft roar of two hundred voices finally trailed away. He winked at Ford. “As you all know, I’m not a big fan of these formal shindigs, but I do believe it’s important to pull on a monkey suit every now and then. As my grandmother used to say, if something is worth doing, it’s probably worth wearing a clean pair of pants.”
Polite chuckles washed up at him from the crowd, but no more than that, except for Barney, who was stuffing more crabmeat into his face at the back of the room and laughing such a big genuine laugh that Kip worried his old friend was in danger of choking. God, he thought, these are so not my people.
“Anyway,” he continued. “Tonight is definitely worth pants.”
He gave Adam Ford a big thumbs-up and was rewarded with what looked like a real smile from the poet, whose eyes were twinkling a little more brightly the longer Kipper had the floor.
“Barbara and I invited you all here tonight to … well, hell, you know why you’re here. We’ve got us a new poet laureate!”
He boomed out that last, as though announcing that the local college football team had brought home the national championship. The applause and some of the whoops of approval that rolled back up at him from the floor were actually heartfelt this time.
“I’m glad to see you’re as stoked as I am about this,” said the president, settling into his delivery, “because this is totally stokeworthy. You know, a lot of what we’ve been about the last few years, it’s been little more than brute survival. Feeding ourselves, defending our homes, just keeping our kids alive, has been …”
He paused, searching for the right words. To the endless frustration of his staff, Kipper rarely delivered prepared speeches or even spoke from notes.
“… it’s been, well, calling it a challenge would be … inadequate. It’s been hell.”
The room was quiet now.
“Our world went to hell on March 14, 2003. That’s the only way I can describe it, because we still don’t know what happened, and frankly, I don’t think we ever will. I have hundreds of scientists still working away at this every day, throwing all sorts of theories and tests and experiments at it, trying to tell me where that Wave came from and where it took all our friends and families. They’ve been studying it for years now, and they are no closer to knowing. So perhaps it’s time to come at it from a different angle, a different kind of knowing. That’s why Adam Ford is here tonight. He’s not a scientist, he’s a poet, and from where I stand looking back at everything that’s happened since the Disappearance, I reckon his way of trying to come at the meaning of it all is every bit as valid as all those scientists writing all those reports for me. Probably more so.” He gestured to the poet to make his way to the microphone. “Adam?”
Loud applause carried the poet laureate up onto the stage and the president down from it. Ford pulled a single sheet of paper out of the breast pocket of his jacket and coughed before thanking Kipper and waiting for the minor roar to die down. When the room was quiet again, he read.
“This is a poem called ‘Aftermath,'” he said.
“They weren’t lost at sea. They are not missing in action.
We weren’t at their side as they breathed their last.
There are no bodies to identify.
They were here. Then they weren’t.
We’re left behind with nothing to point to,
No evidence that says, ‘This happened here,’
No shadows burned into the sides of buildings,
No mountain of glasses, suitcases, and shoes,
No pile of skulls, no handheld footage
Of papers and shattered glass raining down.
Just the near-infinite density of collected grief
That distorts our universe like a black hole–
Grief that we, who remain,
All bear as one as we search for our place
In this strange, new, far-too-different world.”
1
New York
“No siree, Mister President, you do not get these from pettin’ kitty cats.”
James Kipper nodded, smiling doubtfully as the slab-shouldered workman flexed his biceps and kissed each one in turn. His Secret Service guys didn’t seem much bothered, and he’d long ago learned to pick up on their unspoken signals and body language. They paid much less attention to the salvage crew in front of him than to the ruined facades of the office blocks looking down on the massive, rusting pileup in Lower Manhattan. The hard work and unseasonal humidity of Lower Manhattan had left the workman drenched in sweat, and Kipper could feel the shirt sticking to his own back.
Having paid homage to his bowling-ball-sized muscles, the workman reached out one enormous, calloused paw to shake hands with the forty-fourth president of the United States. Kipper’s grip was not as strong as it once had been and had certainly never been anywhere near as powerful as this gorilla’s, but a long career in engineering hadn’t left him with soft fingers or a limp handshake. He returned the man’s iron-fisted clench with a fairly creditable squeeze of his own.
“Whoa there, Mister President,” the salvage and clearance worker cried out jokingly. “I need these dainty pinkies for my second job. As a concert pianist, don’tcha know.”
The small crush of men and women gathered around Kipper grinned and chuckled. This guy was obviously the clown of the bunch.
“A concert penis, you say?” Kipper shot back. “What’s that, some sorta novelty act? With one of those really tiny pianos?”
The groan of his media handler, Karen Milliner, was lost in the sudden uproar of coarse, braying laughter as the S&C workers erupted at the exchange. That did put his security detail a little on edge, but the man-mountain with the kissable biceps was laughing the loudest of them all, pointing at the chief executive and crying out, “This fuggin’ guy. He cracks me up. Best fuggin’ president ever.”
Kipper half expected to be grabbed in a headlock for an affectionate noogie.
That would have set his detail right off.
But after a few moments the uproar receded.
Kipper’s gaze fell on a woman, who’d remained unusually reserved throughout. Doubtless one or two of his detail were watching her closely from behind their darkened sunglasses. He caught her eye and favored her with an indulgent grin by which he meant to convey a sense of amused pity. She obviously did not fit in with this gang of roughnecks. Her features were fine-boned, and she didn’t look like somebody used to long days of heavy manual labor. As he so often found when he traveled around to “meet the peeps”–his daughter’s term, not his–the peeps intrigued him. This nation of castaways and lost souls all had their stories. And you had to wonder what paths had brought biceps guy and this quiet woman to New York three years after the Wave had dissipated as mysteriously as it had arrived.
“Mister President,” Karen Milliner said, “we really need to get a move on–the schedule, you know.”
Jostled out of his momentary ponderings by the director of communications, his flak catcher in chief, he nodded and smiled apologetically to the workers.
“I’m sorry, guys. Just like you, I am a mere civil servant, and my boss here”–he jerked a thumb at Milliner–“says I gotta get back to work.”
The small crowd booed her but cheered him as he waved and began to walk away with his personal security detail shadowing every step. Cries of “Thank you, Mister President” and “Way to go, Kip” followed him down into the graveyard of corporate America.
The stillness of the ruins soon returned. Grit and debris crunched underfoot as the party picked its way through the wreckage of Wall Street. Only the sound of the pigeons, which had returned to the city in plague numbers, broke the silence. The ecosystem within the Wave-affected area seemed to be outstripping all scientific predictions in terms of recovery. Wood chips and piles of tree branches lined the streets. The buzzing roar of chain saws joined in with the heavy metal crash of machinery. Much of the cleanup work in places like Manhattan pertained just as much to brush clearance as to vehicle pileups or burned-out buildings. It wasn’t like the great charred wastelands left by the firestorms that had covered so much of North America. There was life here, of a sort. He could smell it in the fresh-cut timber of an island fast reverting to its original, heavily wooded state.
Away from the raucous cheers of the salvage crew, Kipper fell deep into the well of his own thoughts. He took in the sight of a Mister Softee ice cream van that had speared into the front of the Citibank at the corner of Wall and Front streets. A couple of bicycles lay crushed under its wheels, and jagged shards of glass had ripped through the scorched, filthy rags that once had clothed the riders. He had to remind himself that they hadn’t died in the auto accident. They had simply Disappeared like every other soul in this empty city, like everyone across America four years ago.
“Traffic’s not too bad here,” he ventured to Jed Culver for want of something better to say. “Not like back on … what was that last cross street, where those guys were cleaning up?”
“Water Street, sir,” one of his Secret Service detail offered. He was a new guy. Kip didn’t know his name yet, but his accent was local. You had to wonder what that was doing to his head.
“Most of these cars were parked when the Wave hit,” Culver added. “Mostly pedestrians and bike riders through here, health nazis, that sort of thing. Water Street was busier.”
Culver’s soft Southern drawl, a Louisiana lilt with a touch of transatlantic polish, trailed off. The silence of the necropolis, a vast crypt for millions of the Disappeared, seemed to press the air out of him. Kip turned back to gaze down the shadowed canyon of the old financial district. The intersection of Water and Wall was a wrecking yard of yellow cabs, private cars, and one armored van that had been broadsided by a dump truck and knocked completely over. The impact had smashed open both rear doors, and a few buff-colored sacks of old money still lay unwanted on the ground. None of the salvagers bothered with the dead currency, which long since had been replaced by the less valuable New American Dollar. They had returned to attacking the tangle of metal with earthmoving equipment, sledgehammers, chains, and pure grunt.
It was the loudest noise in the city.
Kip shook his head and turned back.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s keep going.”
At the corner of the JP Morgan Building they encountered the weather-worn facade of the New York Stock Exchange. A large soiled and tattered American flag hung loosely from the Roman columns of the neoclassical structure, held in place by creeping vines as much as by nylon ropes. Kipper had never been to Wall Street, or New York City for that matter, and photographs of the Street always made it appear larger than life. Now, here, in the presence of what had been the most powerful engine of capitalism on the planet, it felt small and almost claustrophobic.
Down at the end of the street he could see a church of some sort, dwarfed by the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan. Kipper wasn’t a religious man, but the sight of the steeple deepened his melancholy, driving it toward the deeper blue depths. More than a few nut jobs had proclaimed their own end of days interpretations of the Wave. For his part, he still believed that there had to be a rational explanation.
But what that explanation was, nobody knew.
He indulged himself in a melancholy sigh.
The party was small for a presidential caravan: just Kipper, Jed Culver–Karen Milliner, and half a dozen security men in dark coveralls and heavy combat rigs. There was no getting rid of them. An army of looters was currently denuding the eastern seaboard of everything from sports cars and heavy equipment to computer game systems and jewelry. Kip often found himself contemplating the lot of Native Americans when whitey turned up. An entire continent was ripe for the taking, and nobody seemed to care that a small number of locals already had a claim on the place.
The irony, or tragedy he supposed, was that most of the Native American population had been wiped out by the Wave. He wasn’t sure how many remained. Next year’s census would, he hoped, shed some light on that. There simply hadn’t been time to organize a full survey of the population since the Wave. There was too much to do just keeping their heads above water. For one thing, the East Coast was overrun with raiders and pirates. Many were part of big criminal syndicates out of Europe and South America, some of them operating with tacit state backing–where states still existed to give that backing–and the balance was a swarm of smaller private operators mostly based in the Caribbean but sometimes hailing from as far away as Africa and Eastern Europe. From the briefings he’d had back home in Seattle, he knew you really didn’t want to tangle with those guys. Half of them were whacked off their heads on weird-ass cocktails of jungle drugs. They came for the luxury cars and high-end goods. They came for the salvage potential of so much copper, iron, and steel. They came for the jewels, gold, and art, leaving MOMA and a dozen other museums stripped bare, their treasures scattered to the four winds.
And some came specifically to kill any American they could get in their sights.
According to Jed, on any given day there could be up to eight or nine thousand freebooters in New York, and unlike the army or the militia, they were not hemmed in by rules and law. “You ever work here, Jed?” Kip asked.
“On the Street, you mean, Mister President? No. I did a stint in New York about eight years back. Worked in-house with Arthur Andersen. But never on the Street, no.”
The president craned his head upward, looking for the Marine Corps sniper teams that had slotted themselves into the buildings above his intended route. He couldn’t see them and had to suppress a shiver. There was just something wrong about this place. Vegetation had come back much more quickly than anyone had imagined, probably helped by the flooding and storms of the last few years, and the entire city reminded him of a weed-choked cemetery–a cemetery that was also a battleground.
It had taken one of the U.S. Army’s remaining brigade combat teams, augmented by militia units, to clear just the southern end of the island for his visit. And even that clearance was less than perfect, leaving porous gaps through which everyone and anyone could slip. It took an additional force of marines, special forces, and private contractors to secure a solid wedge from the World Trade Center down to Battery Park and across to the ferry terminal for his visit–and once secured, a battalion of Governor Schimmel’s Manhattan Militia irregulars threw up a cordon none could pass without lethal consequences.
Karen Milliner stepped up to his elbow and spoke quietly.
“The media are on site, Mister President. We’d best a get a move on.”
He wasn’t sure why she felt the need to keep her voice down. He had specifically said he wanted to make this part of his inspection alone, just himself and his chief of staff. Karen came along simply because of the media events that bracketed his stroll through the dead city.
Kip turned away from the NYSE only to pause and stare at the grand Doric columns of Federal Hall. Washington’s statue still stood on a plinth in front of the building, which had gotten through the last few years in much better shape than some of the larger, more modern buildings around it. A cleanup crew had swept away any debris and vegetation from the stone staircase, and the first president’s statue gleamed as though freshly scrubbed.
“Just gimme a minute,” he said.
Kipper crossed the street, prompting his security cordon to follow him, with Culver huffing and puffing to keep up. At the steps of the building he gazed into the upturned eyes of George Washington before reading the inscription at the base of the statue.
ON THIS SITE IN FEDERAL HALL APRIL 30, 1789 GEORGE WASHINGTON TOOK THE OATH AS THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
“Mister President?” Culver tugged at his arm.
Kipper frowned at his chief of staff. He’d labored manfully to get Culver to call him Kip or even Jimmy–ordered him to more than once, in fact–but the former attorney insisted on the formalities. Kip suspected he enjoyed them. Jed’s considerable bulk was constrained in a dark blue three-piece suit, which must have been a terrible inconvenience; the president wore jeans, tan Carhartt work boots, and a ballistic vest over an old L.L. Bean shirt. Even that modest outfit was uncomfortable in the heat and humidity. The damn weather, it was still all over the goddamn place.
“Just one more minute, Jed.”
Looking at the statue, Kipper wondered what truly had gone through Washington’s mind on that day. He was the leader of a newborn nation on the brink of a vast wilderness surrounded by both real and potential enemies. He had given up command of the army against the advice of many officers who’d argued against the move. Faith in the system he was helping to establish–that was the lesson Kipper took from Washington.
Reading presidential biographies was a self-imposed requirement for a job he felt poorly qualified to do, yet they never truly got to the heart of the men who were his predecessors. Of them all, Kipper really identified only with Truman, who felt as if the barn had fallen in on him when Roosevelt died.
At least he knew it was coming, Kipper thought ruefully. He marveled at the path he had traveled: from being an anonymous city engineer in Seattle to provisional president and ultimately elected to a full four-year term as president of the much reduced United States in January 2004, not long before the Wave finally lifted. A hell of a trip.
“Okay, I’ve probably seen enough,” he conceded. “Just thought it was important, you know, to have a look for myself.”
“That’s why people like you, sir.” Culver smiled. “You like to get your hands dirty. Come on, shall we get back to the convoy? This place gives me the creeps.”
They retraced their steps along Wall Street, carefully picking their way around the occasional pile of rags that had not been blown or washed away. There weren’t many left after so long. Jed and Kip both swerved to avoid a rusted three-wheeled baby stroller that had tipped on its side. They studiously avoided looking too closely at its contents. At one point a shaft of light between two burned-out buildings illuminated a small galaxy of twinkling stars on the footpath. Some of the smaller, more desperate freebooters did nothing but sweep the streets clear of rings, watches, bracelets, and other smaller bejeweled trinkets left behind when their owners died. There was a mountain of such stuff still lying around. As Kip sidestepped an pricey-looking silver watch, the thud of faraway gunfire reached them. His detail chief spoke briefly into a radio, but even Kip knew the small battle was too far off to concern them.
The convoy was waiting back at the intersection with William Street, four black Secret Service Humvees and three Strykers bristling with machine guns and grenade launchers. More security men hurried toward his walking party as they approached.
“Trouble?” Jed asked.
“Nothing we can’t handle, sir,” replied the agent in charge. “Just a little flare-up over on Canal. It won’t bother us, but we should get moving anyway.”
Kipper distinctly heard the crump of multiple explosions somewhere far off in the city. The muffled thrum of helicopters grew louder but faded away before he could see them. At least they’re ours, he thought. You couldn’t always be sure these days. The detail hurried him over to his vehicle and almost pushed him inside. Jed climbed right in after him, followed by Karen Milliner. The young woman’s expensive-looking black silk slacks were covered in dust and grime. She pulled herself into the cabin and seated herself directly in front of Kipper.
“Sorry, sir, but I’ve just been talking to the Service, and I’m afraid I probably have to advise against going on with this. There’s been three big-ass firefights across the island this morning and more over in Brooklyn. A real humdinger near JFK with air force security forces.”
Kip enjoyed Karen’s totally ingenuous use of words like “humdinger.”
“Karen, there are gunfights all over this city every day and night,” he said. “Mostly freebooters and pirates fighting among themselves. There’s never going to be a time when you get the nice quiet background vision you want. Just roll with it.”
Doors slammed up and down the convoy, and the engine turned over in their vehicle, a heavily armored SUV.
“And while we’re on the topic, sir, respectfully and all, you really should have let me assign a camera crew to at least shoot some pool vision of your little walk around back there. I mean, what is the point of all that meetin’ and greetin’ if we don’t get any good coverage out of it?”
Kip smiled and shrugged as the vehicle lurched forward. “The point? To meet and greet folks?”
Karen opened her mouth to protest, but Jed cut her off.
“Give it, up, darlin’. You’ll never win. I’ve been trying to get him to dress like a grown-up ever since I took this job, and he still looks like he’s about to go and boss a crew of ditchdiggers somewhere.”
Kipper waved his hands back in the general direction of the salvage workers they had just met.
“Well, mostly that’s what I do, Jed. This job is not what it used to be. Matter of fact, it’s not far removed from my old job for the city, and I’m just fine with that. The country doesn’t need a commander in chief nearly as much as it needs a chief engineer, if you ask me. Just look at the work that needs doing in this city if it’s gonna be our main eastern settlement again.”
Jed gazed morosely out the windows as the convoy slowly rumbled down Broad Street. The fire-blackened shell of Goldman Sachs loomed just ahead.
“But Mister President, we cannot do that work without securing the ground first. Those people we just met back there–they could not be doing what they’re doing unless that part of the city had been cleared of raiders and pirates. And now that we have cleared them, that is, killed them all and cordoned off that part of Manhattan, we’ll need to hold the area, which will mean sustaining militia forces and at least a brigade of regulars, and securing JFK, the bridges and roads between here and–“
Kipper held up his hands to cut Jed off.
“I know all that, Jed. You don’t have to remind me. Some days I feel like I’m living in some weird-ass History Channel show and we’re trying to settle, or resettle, the Wild East. I got hostile powers to three points of the compass, a weakened military, massive debt, feuding state and federal governments, and an economy that pretty much ceased to exist four years ago. None of this is news to me, buddy. But when I agreed to do this job, I agreed on one condition: that it was to be about rebuilding. And yes, I know that retaking ground and fighting off all comers is part of that. But it’s not the main game. Not for me. Restoration, reconstruction, and renewal are my three R’s. Otherwise I just walk away.”
He shook his head and folded his arms to emphasize the point. Nobody would ever doubt that James Kipper meant what he said. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to run in the next election, and he had been entirely open about that, a level of honesty that drove his handlers to distraction most days.
Culver threw up his hands in mock surrender. “You’re the boss.”
“Yes, I am,” said Kip. “It says so on all my underwear.”
2
Texas, the Federal Mandate
An icy morning crust crunched and melted beneath Miguel Pieraro’s boots as he knelt down to grab a fistful of cold, damp soil. He sniffed the richness of the East Texas earth, worked the black gritty loam between his fingers, and marveled at the sea of emerald that spread before him under a heavy gray sky. His horse, Flossie, tied to a fence post, dipped her head and pulled at the grass, tearing great clods and mouthfuls of feed from the ground with a hard, ripping sound while his oldest daughter patted and stroked the chestnut mare’s twitching flanks. A warning rose in his throat, but he stifled it. Sofia was still a teen, a young teen, but she had an easy confidence around horses born of a lifetime’s experience.
Miguel turned back to surveying his domain. One thousand acres of land. Government land for the moment, but it would be his in a few years. As would the livestock and all the capital, the homestead, the barns and equipment, everything. And something else, too, something even more precious. Citizenship. Belonging. For now, however, he and his family worked for Presidente Kipper, and he was a happy man for the chance to do so. As he watched, a dozen Bedak Whitetails wandered over the next ridgeline, big four-legged beef factories imported from Australia. Heads down, tails swishing, they methodically mowed through the dense carpet of feed at their hooves. Here and there the grass cover was thicker and appreciably more lush. Miguel had learned early on that such dense clumps of verdant growth often signaled the final resting place of a previous occupant of the ranch, usually a longhorn, but not always. Although many animals had survived the initial appearance of the Wave, many more had perished during the ecological collapse afterward.
“Sofia,” he called out. “It is time to saddle up and check the back ninety.”
He spoke in English to his daughter, as he insisted on speaking to all of his clan these days. English was the language of their new home, and they would settle in here with much greater ease if they all spoke it well. He did not ban Spanish or Portuguese, the two crib languages of the Pieraro household, but he did not encourage them, either. In Miguel’s mind, his family members, all of his extended family, were not simply farmers. They were settlers, making a new history for this country, and he wanted his children especially to be able to play as full a part in that new story as possible. They, too, would probably work this ranch, but their children might one day go to one of the universities in the Northwest or even, God willing, in the East, once the bandits and criminals were driven away and the cities were reclaimed for respectable people.
His daughter led both horses over: his own and her smaller gray pony.
“Dad, is it lunchtime yet?” she asked with just a slight trace of an Australian accent, a legacy of eighteen months in the refugee camp outside Sydney that had given all his children a flat, nasal way of speaking that sounded harsh and alien to his ears. He did not bother to correct them, however, certain that within a few short years they would have adapted to the local Texan drawl. Of course that was just as foreign to Miguel, but at least it was familiar.
Not that he had anything against Australia. Life had not been so bad there, he had to admit. Certainly not as hazardous as it had been on Miss Julianne’s boat. His family had shelter and food, and the children were schooled properly while the adults worked six days a week on government projects. Agricultural work mostly but also some rail construction for the army in the last couple of months. But as the world had slowly, painfully returned to … well, not to normal … as the world had settled, say, after the madness of the Disappearance, Miguel and his wife had finally begun to look beyond the end of each day, to think about the future as something more than a food handout and a cot in a refugee camp.
“Papa? Lunch?”
“Lunchtime will come and go without us noticing on this trip, biggest sister,” he quipped, but the classical reference was lost on her. Sofia probably had no idea who John Wayne was. For Miguel, he was still the vaquero’s vaquero.
She pulled a face at him and produced an apple from her saddlebag, crunching into it, then dramatically rolling her eyes as the pony implored her to share the good times. Miguel unhitched his mount and swung up into the saddle, taking a moment to enjoy the view across his land. Or what would be his land. There was a powerful difference, he had to admit, between laboring for a bossman and pouring your sweat into soil that you could call your own. Acres of greensward swayed in a gentle breeze, rippling downslope to fields of genetically modified spinach and silverbeet and durum wheat in the back ninety, the new strains growing at a greatly accelerated rate and for longer each year, increasing the yield of his holdings at least threefold. They could handle the harsh cold and heat of Texas far better than the pre-Wave crops could. And if there were any problems with them, Miguel had not noticed yet.
He was not much fussed about the GM crops himself. Whatever worked for his family was an unqualified good in his estimation, although he knew that the Greens in both the national Congress and the Washington statehouse were forever conniving to ban the wonder plants. He shook his head as he nudged the horse away from the old wooden fence. Why would they do that? It was madness when the country had so much trouble feeding itself now. Not through a lack of good land or seed stock but from want of experienced farmers and the–what was the word?–the infrastructures to harvest and deliver crops to market. Finding parts for the farm equipment was a hit-or-miss affair. And once the crops were harvested, moving them from the farm gate to the grain silos was often a matter of long horse-drawn convoys, which in this part of the country were liable to be set upon by bandits.
Sofia ambled up beside him, and he felt his heart swell with pride at her ease on the horse and the straightness of her back. She was a good child and would be a fine woman in a few years. He would be needing his shotgun, especially as the district filled up with more settlers, as surely it must. For now they shared the valley with just a handful of families, at least half of them, like him, hailing from abroad. He liked the Poles the best. They were quiet, hardy folk from good farming stock. The Yankees who had moved here from Seattle, in contrast, though pleasant people, were softhearted, soft-handed fools when it came to the ways of the land. They had a lot of funny ideas about the land, which they called Mother Earth or some equally silly-sounding name. Gay something or other.
They were forever at odds with the resettlement authorities over Seattle’s insistence that a certain percentage of their crops be the new genetically modified strains. Instead they harangued the inspectors and overseers who came through every few months to be allowed to experiment with their crazy ideas about organic this and biodynamic that. And they were absolutely horrified by the deer hunt that had taken place on Miguel’s ranch last fall, riding over to personally protest his murderous ways. When Sofia ran up, covered in blood and gore, and held up the ten-point white-tail she had bagged and dressed that day, one of the folks from Seattle actually fainted. One of the men.
Miguel did not expect them to last.
“What are you smiling about, Papa?” she asked as she finished the apple.
“Nothing,” he said contentedly. He was truly at home. The ranch was coming into its own. His herds were expanding, fattened on the lush grazing lands. Even the old apple orchards back at the hacienda seemed to be doing well enough, producing a palatable cider that made Mariela’s roadside watering hole very popular with the other settler families. The corn whiskey from his other crops didn’t hurt matters, either.
Prosperity beckoned, he thought, patting his horse. Her ears flicked up, eyes darting skyward. She jerked at the bit, pulling at the reins in his hand.
“Easy,” Miguel whispered in his native tongue. “Easy.”
And then he could hear it, too, the rapid pop and crack of gunfire. A gallon of ice-cold water seemed to sluice into his stomach. The noise reminded him of hail on the tin roof of his toolshed, but he was all too familiar with the sound of weapons fire. Could the uncles be leading a practice shoot for the younger boys? They all practiced frequently with their weapons, but that was usually after dinner and the shots were controlled, designed to improve marksmanship. This was rapid, indiscriminate fire.
Trouble, he thought.
He quickly rode up the small hill blocking his view of the homestead and dismounted before the crest. Sofia followed, unable to conceal the worry on her face. She held the horses while her father inched up to the ridgeline. There were more pops, and he thought he heard screams. With a sick fear twisting in his guts, Miguel pulled the binoculars from around his neck up to his eyes. He could already see a collection of vehicles in various states of repair parked outside the hacienda. Some of them were four-wheel drives mounted on what the gringos called lift kits, giving them extra ground clearance. They were dirty, battered, and heavily burdened with a motley collection of goods. Plunder, he thought instantly. Twenty or more men had fanned out through Miguel’s property, bearing military-style weapons.
There were bodies.
Miguel felt his innards clench tight as he focused the binoculars on one of the lifeless forms. Little Maya, no more than seven years old, lay on her back, staring up at the gray late-winter sky. Crimson horror flowed out of the ragged mess where her belly had been. Memories arose unbidden of him blowing tiny tummy farts for her while she squealed and laughed and complained how much his bristles were scratching her. Grandma Ana was next to the child, facedown and unmoving in the frost, a knife clutched in her hand. One of the men kicked the old woman’s corpse as he nursed what looked like an injured arm.
Sofia, shaky and fearful, reached him from behind.
“What is going on, Papa?”
“Stay where you are, Sofia,” he said harshly. His throat had clamped tight and did not want to work.
Screams drifted up from the hacienda: a woman’s howl, his own woman. Mariela Pieraro. She screamed in her native tongue, lashing at her tormentors, who all appeared to be gringos, although most of them were so filthy that it was hard to be certain.
Road agents, he thought, the very words like a rattlesnake in his mind. A collection of vaquero pretenders, costumed in a motley collection of army camouflage, urban gangbanger, and cowboy fetish outfits. They ran like vermin all over the outer wastes of the Texas Republic, but Miguel had never known them to venture so far into the Federal Mandate. That was why he had brought his family to settle here, so they would be safe. His head swam and squirmed with horrified rage as he realized how wrong he had been about that. He had led them all here, and now they were dying for it. His hands were shaking so badly, he could hardly make out the scene below. A hard mercy in a sense, because at that moment three men were attacking his wife.
Just a few seconds’ exposure to the atrocity was more than enough for Miguel. He could no more stand to watch the unfolding horror than he could have perpetrated it himself. He let the binoculars fall and tried to push himself up from his prone position hidden in the lush greensward on top of the ridge overlooking his family home. His stomach heaved as he did so, and he dry retched, stumbling badly as he turned to hurry down the hill to his daughter.
Perhaps his only surviving child now.
Teetering and almost falling down the slope on legs as stiff and unyielding as a tin soldier’s, the cowboy almost knocked over his oldest girl, so blinded was he by the shock.
“Father? Papa?”
He took the reins from Sofia with violently trembling hands and somehow pulled himself up into the saddle. Maybe someone had managed to get away, or perhaps some of the gunshots were from the survivors, trying to fight the agents off. He could ride down there, perhaps help out. Maybe give the survivors a chance to fight back, even the odds.
Maybe, just maybe …
“What is it? Father, Papa, tell me,” she pleaded in a small voice cracking with panic. She, too, could hear the gunfire and screams coming over the ridgeline.
Miguel unholstered his Winchester, feeling its deadly promise in his shaking hands. It was too late, far far too late to save his loved ones, but high time indeed for a reckoning with those who had taken their lives.
Maybe …
He checked the load and slid the rifle back into the saddle holster. With a tap of his heels, his mare began to crest the hill. Sofia mounted her animal and followed suit. “I’m coming with you,” she cried out to him in strangled English
Miguel shook his head fiercely. “No, you are too headstrong for your own good. Stay here. I will–“
The boom of a large-bore weapon rolled over the crest like a single note of distant thunder. He turned quickly in the saddle, pulling the binoculars up to his eyes so quickly that he smacked himself in the face. His wife’s body was slumping to the floor of the wide veranda that ran around the hacienda, leaving a dark smear on the whitewashed wall. One of the rapists spit at her, as she lay on the ground.
A small sound escaped from Miguel’s lips, something between a groan and a strangled squeak. His vision grayed out to the edge, and dark blossoms of poison night flowers bloomed in front of him. He swayed and very nearly passed out.
The guns fell quiet and silence filled the atmosphere, broken only by the cackles and shouts of the road agents. He scanned the landscape for some forlorn hope that one of his sons or Mariela’s brothers had made it to cover, waiting with their own weapons to back him.
Sofia was suddenly by his side. She took the binoculars from him and surveyed the scene herself.
“No,” she whispered. “No, please.”
“It changes nothing,” Miguel hissed, his head clearing. “Wait here.”
Sofia reached over and took the reins of her father’s horse in her hand. He turned on her with a look that caused her to flinch away. She drew back a bit but did not drop the reins, however, keeping them firmly in her hands.
“Sofia.” His tone was low and even. “Give me the reins.”
“No, Papa, please. Don’t leave me up here alone. Don’t go down there. They will kill you, and I will have no one.”
His daughter’s face, a contorted mess of terror and pain, began blurring and running in front of him as tears filled his eyes. Miguel had trouble speaking. “Sofia, you may think you are too old for a whipping,” he choked out, “but I will give you one if you do not hand me the reins.”
“I will gladly suffer that if it keeps you alive,” she said. “Pleeease.”
Miguel felt as though he might die. Whole continents of loss, huge tectonic slabs of grief and rage, were breaking up and grinding around inside his body. It was entirely possible, that his heart might explode. Through it all only one thing grounded him and kept him tethered to reality: Sofia’s small pale hand gripping his arm, stopping him from rushing headlong into violence and annihilation.
As tremors racked his upper body, she stood in the saddle and examined the property with his binoculars. Engines turned over amid shouts of pleasure and curses of aggravation. A few random shots pierced the air, but none in their direction.
“They are leaving,” Sofia said. “They have not seen us.”
Miguel reached for the binoculars, causing Sofia to pull back farther, taking Miguel’s horse with her.
“Please,” Miguel said. “The binoculars.” He did not wish her to see any more.
She handed them over.
The road agents pulled away from the hacienda, taking a few potshots at the windows. One of the vehicles stopped by the chicken coop. It was a faded sky-blue Ford F-150, an older model, rusty in places and in need of a muffler. A driver remained at the wheel while the other men went for the chickens. The birds, already spooked by the gunfire and screaming, took fright and scattered in all directions as the main body of the agents’ convoy rounded a bend in the road and disappeared from sight. The stragglers made no move to join them. Instead, the driver of the truck climbed out of the cabin to join his comrades in chasing the chickens. He was carrying a small cooler, from which he took a can of beer.
Miguel’s eyes narrowed.
Three to one was much better odds than twenty to one, he thought silently. This would be a start.
“Here.” He tossed the binoculars at his daughter’s face. “Catch.”
He heard her yelp as he swiped the reins from her hands and rode off.
“Stay here,” he ordered, from the crest of the hill. “I mean it, Sofia. I will call you down when it is safe.”
He didn’t look to see if she obeyed. The lack of hoofbeats behind him told him she was staying in place. Miguel drew his Winchester again and levered a round into the breach. The reins he laid lightly in his lap, controlling the horse with his knees and occasional shifts of body weight. This was not Hollywood. He did not charge down the slope or scream his vengeance to the skies. He rode slowly at first, increasing his pace to a canter as he drew within range. The three road agents were entirely distracted attempting to round up his chickens, presumably for their lunch or dinner. They were even laughing at their own haplessness and incompetence. The moronic sound of it drifted uphill toward him.
The awful scenes of murder and violation that assailed him on all sides, he ignored. Or rather, he simply shut down any human reaction to them, letting a crust of dried blood as hard as an iron carapace form around his heart. An easterly breeze blew the smell of spilled blood and corruption into his face, carrying with it the harsh laughter of three of the men who had destroyed his family. He could tell now they were drunk, staggeringly so. As his horse pulled up in a clatter of iron-shod hooves on hard-packed dirt, one of them, the driver, finally noticed him. A look of dumb incomprehension clouded his bovine features as Miguel dismounted. He half smiled, half waved before finally raising his beer can to take a sip.
The driver was at least a hundred yards away, and two bodies lay between him and Miguel, one of them the cowboy’s son. The other looked like old Armando, Mariela’s uncle. A swollen river of black hatred poured through Miguel’s head.
“Hola,” the road agent slurred. “?Como estas?”
Miguel lifted the rifle mechanically and shot the road agent in the forehead. The beer can from which he was drinking exploded fractionally before his head flew apart and his body tumbled over backward.
“Hey!”
“What the fuck?”
The other two had noticed his presence at last. The man farthest away, a fat stringy-haired gringo in blue jeans, circus cowboy chaps, and a long leather jacket, had actually managed to grab one chicken. He at least had the presence of mind to drop the bird and try to retrieve the assault rifle hanging from his shoulder, but Miguel gutshot him before he was able to lay a hand on the weapon. He screamed and fell to the ground, his body shuddering under the impact of two more bullets.
The last intruder turned tail and ran for the truck. Whether he was going for his guns or attempting to escape, Miguel did not know. He tracked the running target for two seconds before shooting him in the hip. The man went down like a galloping horse that had snapped a leg in a gopher hole. His screams were pitiable, animalistic. Miguel chambered another round and advanced on him without mercy. He was a scrawny specimen, although possessed of a potbelly he had tended well over the years. Like his friends, he was dressed in an eccentric combination of Wild West castoffs and modern hoodlum chic. As he scrabbled through the dirt, still trying to reach the sanctuary of the pickup truck, he kept one clawlike hand clamped on his ruined hip, from which geysered thick dark gouts of arterial blood keeping time with his failing heartbeat.
Miguel ground his teeth together so painfully that he thought they might shatter as he stalked past the body of his son. Every good and decent instinct in his body was drawing him toward the little boy, urging him to scoop up his body gently as though he were just sleeping and might be revived by a father’s kiss upon his eyelids. But Miguel knew from a brief horrified glimpse at his wounds that his only son was gone. He squeezed off any good or decent feelings that might have remained in his heart as though he were crushing a small bird within his fist.
He was just dimly aware of one small surviving voice of rationality, a mere whisper in the chorus of rage and loathing that filled his mind. It was his own voice, speaking from a better time, telling him he had no choice but to preserve the life of this man in front of him no matter how wretched a creature he might be, because he needed to know who had done this and why. But a hot gust of intemperate hatred blew that small, reasonable voice away. With his face distorted in a rictus of pain and malice, he very carefully and slowly walked up to the whimpering, moaning creature attempting to escape from him. When he was in range, one swift boot into the rib cage flipped the man over, causing him to cry out anew. Miguel raised his knee and stamped down viciously with the heel of his boot on the man’s face, muffling his scream of protest and agony. Again he stomped down, shattering a mouthful of teeth and shredding lips and cheeks.
Stomp.
Stomp.
Stomp.
By the time he was finished, by the time the demon that had arisen inside his head and apparently taken over his body was finished, Miguel’s leg ached. His boots and jeans were soaked with blood and smeared with gobs of brain and bone chips. The road agent’s head was no more than a gruesome pancake. A cold wind seemed to pass through him, and he collapsed to the earth, shivering.
3
Wiltshire, England
Caitlin awoke to the crying of her baby. The child would be hungry and in need of changing, and today was Bret’s morning off, which sounded a lot more indulgent than it really was. He might get to hide under the covers for a few minutes more while she tended to little Monique and brought the coal-fired stove back to life for coffee. It was a good idea to keep the fuel banked up overnight and never to let the stove go out completely. Not unless you felt like flapping around before dawn with a cold draft blowing up your nightdress as you got down on all fours to jam rolled-up paper and fresh coal into a dead hearth. Caitlin tried to rub another night of broken sleep from her eyes and squinted at the glowing dial of her watch. Looked like about oh-four-hundred-twenty hours. “Omigod-thirty,” as Bret referred to anytime before the sun rose. She swung her long, finely muscled legs over the side of the lumpy mattress and dropped in bare feet to the flagstone floor. A fair drop, too. The antique wrought-iron bed was huge.
“Want me to get her?” Bret mumbled without much enthusiasm from under the duck feather duvet. Summer was not far off, but the weather had been chilly since the Disappearance, and although it did seem to be returning to normal, they still often slept under a couple of layers of woolen blankets and one oversized quilt.
“Not unless you can grow a pair of working udders in the next three minutes,” Caitlin croaked, aware of just how swollen and heavy with milk her breasts were again. Monique was a good sleeper mostly, for which they were profoundly grateful, but that meant that Caitlin woke up most mornings needing to get her on for a long feed. Bret’s half snort, half snore told her just how sincere the offer had been.
She wearily worked her feet into a pair of slippers and padded through into the baby’s room, ducking under the low wooden lintel. At least he’d offered, and if she had genuinely been too tired to deal this morning, he would have dragged himself into the nursery to change the diaper before sliding Monique into bed beside Caitlin for a feed and a cuddle. They had all fallen asleep like that more than once.
The baby’s cries, which had been short, disjointed, and scratchy when she first awoke, were growing longer and more insistent as she realized she was both hungry and trapped inside a large, wet, and very unpleasant square of not-so-white toweling cloth. Disposable diapers were almost impossible to get now, and as Caitlin gently wrestled with her daughter in the semidark, she tried to tell herself she was doing the right thing for Mother Earth. She quickly scraped Monique’s poop into a chamber pot, wrinkling her nose in distaste. They routinely saved the malodorous contents for recycling in the farm’s composting pits, but doing so was a hell of a hard sell at omigod-thirty with a thrashing baby kicking her heels in a puddle of what looked like undercooked chicken curry.
“Goddamn, sometimes I think I’d rather be back in Noisy-le-Sec,” Caitlin muttered without conviction as she wiped the baby’s bottom the way the midwife up at Swindon had shown her.
“Midwitches, more like it,” she whispered to Monique as the offending mess went into a bucket by the change table and a fresh new terrycloth diaper and liner went under the infant’s now clean butt. The liners, too, were very scarce. They were impossible to find on the open market, and the National Heath allotted them only seven per week. She really didn’t want to wash and reuse them, but what choice did she have? This kid needed six or seven changes a day, not a week.
She marveled at how the quick, spare movements to secure the diaper in place had become second nature, even in the dark. She could do it blindfolded, although, of course, she could also field strip and reassemble the small armory of weapons on the manor under the same conditions. It wasn’t so much the ease with which she had adapted to the thousand little tricks of parenthood that gave Caitlin pause for thought. It was the very fact that she’d become a parent in the first place. Settling into the enormous cracked leather armchair overlooking the southern fields, she eased little Monique onto her right breast while she watched the first stirrings of movement in the workers’ camp beyond the security wall. The foremen were already awake, moving quietly up and down the long lines of ex-British Army tents, seeing to the campfires and the cooking wagons. For just a few moments of lingering darkness, it looked as though a regiment had bivouacked on her farm, so familiar was the strict and orderly fashion in which the men went about the job of rousing the sleepers from the long straight lines of tents. But as the baby sucked at her nipple and squirmed into a comfier position, the first hint of dawn softened the faraway line of the horizon over the Savernake Forest, and the true nature of the camp revealed itself.
Her workforce was composed almost entirely of refugees, mostly American but with a leavening of Continentals, with a cadre of former military types from the Home Guard to keep them all in line and on the job. They were the foremen she could see moving around before everyone else. After a few minutes Caitlin carefully hoisted the baby up onto her shoulder and patted her on the back waiting for the hearty burp she knew was coming, without any milk vomit, she hoped, to further stain and stink up her dressing gown. She didn’t indulge herself in any limp, liberal bullshit about feeling sorry for the refugees or guilty for living in relative luxury here in the old stone manor while they slept and toiled in the fields. She did her fair share of toiling, and the bottom line was that they had all chosen to stay in the United Kingdom even after it became possible to return home to America. They were earning their room and board, to use a local phrase. Two years’ labor for the Ministry of Resources and they would be free to settle wherever they wanted in the British Isles or the wider Commonwealth. Despite what some people said, England wasn’t a gulag. All the men or women working her fields or those of her neighbors were at liberty to take themselves down to Portsmouth, where a free berth to the United States was available. Of course, once they stepped off the boat at the other end, they’d find themselves obliged to work for Uncle Sam for five years as payment for their passage.
Caitlin shifted Monique to her left breast and stroked the baby’s head as she struggled to stay awake. She heard Bret grunt and throw back the covers in the next room. He soon appeared in the doorway, dressed in brown U.S. Army boxers and a white T-shirt.
He yawned. “You want some coffee?”
“When she’s finished,” she answered, stroking Monique’s head again. “I had one while I was feeding her the other day, and man, it was like she’d snorted a line of speed or something. Didn’t sleep all day. Warm milk and honey would be nice, though.”
“Got it,” he said in a voice still hoarse with sleep. Her husband disappeared into the depths of the farmhouse to stoke the wood-fired stove and dole himself out a small serving of black market coffee, another perk of her job. The rattle and tink of metal cooking pots drifted across the small stream from the camp, which was quickly coming awake as people spilled out of the big twelve-man tents. She could see quite a few children already, picking up the games they’d been forced to abandon by nightfall the previous evening, running through the dew-soaked grass, chasing and being chased by four or five dogs. Strictly speaking, the young’uns were supposed to be boarded elsewhere; there were schools for foreign children, again mostly Americans, in both Swindon and Basingstoke, but Caitlin had heard nothing good about them, and she quietly used her connections in London to allow as many families as possible to stay together at Melton Farm. One of the tents was given over to an all-ages school run by three teachers who’d been traveling through Italy when the Wave hit. It was one of the things that made placements on their farm so popular.
Bret returned just as Monique fell off the breast, fast asleep and sticky with milk. “Look at her, would you.” He smiled as he passed Caitlin her warm honeyed milk, making sure to keep it away from the child. “It’s a good thing she got your looks and brains, sweetheart, because she is a lazy-ass sleepin’ fool just like her old man, and she’s gonna need something to fall back on in life.”
Caitlin nodded, honestly wondering how her nearly-narcoleptic husband had ever made it through ranger school.
“Well, we don’t know that she’ll be a rocket scientist,” she said. “But she is pretty.”
“Like you,” Bret said as he leaned forward to kiss her on the forehead.
“Guess I could have had my coffee, after all,” she said.
“Take mine,” he offered. “I don’t mind milk and honey.”
“I can’t do that. You’re down to half a bag of beans.”
He shrugged. “You’ll get more. You are still going to the city, aren’t you?”
She nodded, a little distracted. She was already planning her morning run. Maintaining her fitness was not negotiable. Bret did not bother as much now that he was a self-proclaimed househusband, although farmwork kept him fit and strong enough. Caitlin, however, had no choice. She still answered to her old paymasters even though she was no longer on field duty.
She had run five miles just a couple of days after Monique had been delivered by elective cesarean. (And hadn’t there been some tut-tutting from the midwitches over that.) A week further on and she was back in the gym she and Bret had set up in a sunroom overlooking the swimming pool. And yes, she had been more than a little surprised to find a working English farmhouse with a heated in-ground swimming pool, but that had been one of the things that had attracted them to the property. That and the peppercorn rent paid to the government, an indulgence in return for her services as a “consultant” to Echelon.
Bret stood by the window, silhouetted by the rising sun, causing Caitlin a momentary rush of blood. There had been a time in both their lives when they would have instinctively avoided exposing themselves in such a manner. Her husband had been able to get over it.
She hadn’t.
Arguably, Caitlin did not need to maintain her combat readiness and field craft the way she did. Her consultancy consisted almost entirely of analytic and training work, and having hunkered down here in the heart of the English Home Counties, they could hardly be more secure. Bret had tried to get her to ease up, but her Echelon training had taken hold down at a cellular level. She could not stop being who and what she was. Looking at her husband, she often envied his ability to simply walk away from his army past.
Monique stirred and grumbled in her mother’s arms, perhaps disturbed by her dark shift in mood. Bret turned away from the window where he was watching the workers’ camp come to life and offered to take the baby. His limbs were all heavily muscled, and the small swaddled infant disappeared into the crook of one arm without waking. He started to pat her lightly on the back, rocking her gently and humming an old Willie Nelson standard. “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys.” The song never failed to have a magical, soothing effect on the baby, and Caitlin could tell that Monique was falling more deeply asleep in her father’s arms.
She stepped back into their bedroom and quickly changed into her running gear: black Lycra leggings, an old T-shirt of Bret’s, and a Berreta M9 pistol in a specially fitted holster at the small of her back. Her husband didn’t give it a second glance. He had spent his adult life around weapons and knew his wife well enough to understand why she would never stop carrying one.
“Are you riding up to Swindon today to that GM crop briefing?” she asked. “I’ll just tell the stable guys is all, if you’re gonna need one of the horses.”
Bret eased the baby back into her crib and stood up, stretching his back with an audible cracking of bones. Like her, he carried a good deal of scar tissue and old injuries.
“Thought I might take the mountain bike up if you don’t mind,” he said quietly. “I could do with the cardio workout.”
“You could,” she teased him, grabbing for a fold of skin at his belly. He wasn’t carrying any fat, but he batted her hand away defensively anyway.
“Hey, you squeeze it, you buy it, lady.”
“Really?” she said, closing on him.
When she grabbed at him this time, he didn’t resist.
An hour or so later, jogging on the spot to keep her heart rate elevated, Caitlin enjoyed taking in a deep draft of chilly morning air and shooting one last glance at her home before plunging back into a long cross-country run. Thick tendrils of coal smoke were creeping out of the kitchen chimney, where Bret would be preparing hot drinks for the foremen before briefing them on the day’s work. They’d be plowing the new GM soy into the eastern paddock today, half a mile up the road toward Stitchcombe, and without a gasoline ration, as usual these days, it would all be done by hand. Most of the camp would turn out for that, although a smaller number would be at work in the southern fields, scattering a new weed-n-feed mix as part of a trial for the Resources Ministry. They were being paid in fuel coupons for letting the government’s eggheads conduct field tests on their property.
She shook her head at that again.
Their property.
The previous owner, a minor Saudi prince, had lost the farm during the “resettlement” period in the year after the Disappearance. Caitlin’s mouth quirked downward at the bloodless euphemism. “Pogrom” would be more accurate: ethnic cleansing on a scale to put into the shade the earlier atrocities in the Balkans. The prince had not complained, however. He’d been at a wedding in Damascus when the Israelis nuked the city.
She shook off the grim memories and took off again, shortening her stride as she dropped down a hillside where long summer grass covered the tangled roots of chestnut and elm and holly oak trees. She didn’t need a sprained ankle or worse to teach her not to run blindly over treacherous ground. Small families of birds took flight at her approach, starlings and robins as best she could tell. They’d experienced something of a population boom earlier this spring, rebounding from the collapse of their populations after the pollution storms. Turning onto Thicketts Road, which wound down through the hills toward the village of Mildenhall, Caitlin settled into a long, loping stride. She felt good this morning and decided to add another couple of miles to her course by circling the village a few times. That way she might even catch Bret and Monique on the way home if he was cycling up to Swindon as planned. She played her thumb over her wedding ring. It was still so new, she hadn’t built up a callus on her palm beneath it. Just as her mother and father had. She remembered the feeling of their hands as though she had just let go of them, a tactile memory so sharp that she had to wonder whether it had anything to do with the tumor that had been cut out of her brain. The doctors had said there would be side effects from the treatment.
She pushed away the troubling idea that her mind was not quite right and never would be again, preferring to concentrate on her breathing and balance as she powered along the country road.
She and Bret would build up their own calluses, their own family history, here or back home in America, with Monique and any more children who came after her. She knew they would. There would be a long time ahead of them for all that.
4
New York
Culver took a spot at the back of the press conference in Castle Clinton, the old sandstone fort at the northern end of Battery Park. It was possible, standing on the freshly raked gravel and staring over the heads of the reporters, to look at the skyline of Lower Manhattan and imagine that not much was wrong in the world. You merely had to ignore a few scorch marks and broken windows, maybe squint your eyes a little to fuzz up the details, and you could have been standing in the New York of old, with life teeming around you, ten million people, seemingly twenty million cars, the subway rattling and roaring underfoot as you walked downtown, the smoky, earthy fragrance of frying meat from a hundred street carts, the clip-clop of horse-drawn carriages around the park. It was almost as though he could close his eyes and be back there, strolling up to Redeye, his favorite bar and grill, for a perfectly cooked fillet of Chilean swordfish with San Moriglio sauce.
Instead, the thump of two Blackhawk helicopters circling the southern tip of the island drowned out what little ambient noise there was, mostly distant gunfire or the crash, rumble, and grind of salvage work.
The White House chief of staff folded his arms and pushed the pleasant daydreams away. It would be a long time before anyone in this country could indulge in daydreams again. While Karen Milliner warmed up the audience by taking questions on the issues of the moment–Jackson Blackstone’s antics down in Fort Hood, the Indo-Pakistani wars, and the congressional hearings on the Lands and Homesteading Act–Culver contented himself with scoping out the scene. The colonnaded cloisters of the roughly circular fort were deep in shade with the sun climbing high overhead, and he could make out Secret Service details stalking through the shadows, ever watchful. The reporters were arrayed on plastic chairs in front of Karen Milliner, who spoke from a plain black podium.
Jed turned his attention to the reporters who were going back and forth with Karen as prelude to the main game, Kipper’s appearance in a few minutes. The national networks, for want of a more accurate term, had sent their heavy hitters; the bloggers were a bit of a rabble, as always, and the news sites and daily papers had assigned their national security guys rather than their Seattle correspondents. That told him right away how they were going to play the resettlement story: as a battle for the Wild East.
Kip wasn’t going to like that.
He really did prefer to concentrate on the constructive side of nation building, or rebuilding. The uglier, more violent aspects of reclaiming the frontier were something he considered a grim necessity, best left to the experts.
Jackson Blackstone–Culver refused to refer to the man as “General,” since he had been forcibly retired–was undeniably one of those experts. However, you could hardly count the elected territorial governor of Texas as one of the president’s men.
The White House chief of staff suppressed a rueful grin as someone questioned Milliner about Fort Hood again.
“Ms. Milliner, my sources indicate there are significant efforts to evict and deport families vetted under the Federal Homestead Program. Does the president intend to do anything about the racists and rebels at Fort Hood?”
That had come from a blogger, of course, Krist Novoselic from the Seattle Weekly. Culver still didn’t know why Kip had insisted on accrediting any of those assholes. They had zero respect for the conventions of the old press corps. You couldn’t even leak to them without the fact of it appearing in the opening paragraph of any resulting story, as he had discovered to his undying chagrin very early in the administration.
“We are monitoring the situation in the Texas Territory, Krist. The president isn’t pretending to be happy about it. But he’s not about to go hauling out the big stick to beat on Mister Blackstone just to prove that he’s a tough guy. Frankly, President Kipper is a busy man, Krist, and Fort Hood is a tenth-order issue at best. I probably shouldn’t have to remind you, either, that Mr. Blackstone is not a rebel. He was actually elected. So no, we won’t be sending the cavalry. And if that’s what you were hoping for to boost your traffic stats, I’d suggest you prepare for disappointment.”
A ripple of amusement ran through the arena. Milliner was famous for her refusal to coddle the press. It was why Kip had chosen her for the job and kept her on in the face of some frenzied back-channel protests from the surviving old school media.
Culver winked at her as she gave the blogger a taste of her own big stick, but she was professional enough to ignore him, of course. A small flock of starlings zipped overhead, and he watched them disappear out over the water. The birds were one of the first things he’d noticed on getting back. There seemed to be a lot more of them than he remembered. More birds. Fewer rats. He was going to have to ask somebody about that one day.
“Is the president planning on talking to the Commonwealth prime ministers about speeding up the repatriation process, do you know, Ms. Milliner?”
That question came from Ted Koppel at National Public Radio, and Culver winced as soon as he heard it. Two million of the estimated fifteen million surviving Americans had made the choice to stay in the foreign refuges, mostly in the other English-speaking democracies. They were a real point of friction with the country’s surviving allies. Hell, Koppel himself didn’t even live in the United States, preferring to stay at the NPR field office in London, which made him a bit of a hypocrite in Culver’s book for even asking the question. But Jed couldn’t really blame Koppel or those two million others. Those people were desperately needed back home, but home wasn’t nearly as friendly a place as it had been once upon a time. The hungry time after the Wave was still fresh on everyone’s mind, and many were convinced they had not yet turned the corner on food production and distribution. Food shortages were still a very real problem.
“Freedom of movement is still one of our fundamental rights, Ted,” Karen said, quickly throwing up her hands. “And before anyone gets on my case about the Declared Areas, can I just say, grow up. They’re declared for good reason, and you know it. As to our expatriate community, what can I say? Every American is free to come and go as they please. This stuff I’ve been reading about foreign governments impeding their return, it’s just hogwash. Obviously, we would prefer to have everyone back home again. We need all hands on deck to rebuild this country, but we are not in the business of forcing people to do anything.”
Koppel was on his feet again, waving a pen at Milliner to beg her indulgence for a supplementary question.
“How can you say that, Ms. Milliner, when the administration indentures returnees for five years?”
Karen smiled.
“That’s overstating the case, don’t you think, Ted? People are free to return of their own volition, and if they do it at their own expense, they are free to live and work wherever and however they choose. But I don’t think it’s wrong to ask people to give something back if they rely on the taxpayer to get them here and support them when they arrive. There are no freebies anymore, Ted. Everyone works. Everyone pays. Everyone does their bit. The Congress and the president have made that clear, as have the American people, given their repeated endorsement of the mutual obligation policy at the ballot box. Was it not Captain John Smith at Jamestown who said, ‘He who does not work, shall not eat’? We are not asking anything less than Smith did.”
Culver almost rolled his eyes at Milliner’s chutzpah, but he remained outwardly blank-faced. Very few people had the resources to get themselves home from overseas, which left most returning expatriates with only one option: to hitch a ride with Uncle Sam. And it most definitely was not a free ride. Koppel looked like he was gearing up for a head-butting session with Milliner, but she cut him off with a wave and a disingenuous smile as Kipper suddenly appeared from within the shadows behind her, where he’d been waiting, skimming the notes Culver had prepared for him, they hoped. The boss was notorious for refusing to stick to his talking points and for going off topic at the merest provocation. He did like talking to people, and even reporters were people, as he’d told Jed more than once. Kipper squinted briefly as he passed from shadow into the bright, warm light of high spring. He seemed to sniff the air and took the time to look around as he made his way to the podium.
Karen Milliner formally introduced him, and everyone stood for a moment, which was where the formalities pretty much ended. James Kipper did not enjoy the formal trappings of office and shook them off at every opportunity. He took his place behind a single microphone that was used to record audio for all the assembled media, his hands in the pockets of his jeans. He’d ditched the flak jacket before appearing in front of the press, some of whom were still in their own.
“Thanks for coming, everyone,” he said chattily. “I know it’s a hell of a trip getting out here, and I appreciate the effort involved. It’s important.”
Koppel waved his pen at the president, probably hoping to take up where he’d left off with Milliner, but all he got was a cheeky grin.
“I’m sorry, Ted. I’ll be happy to talk your ears off about the Homesteading Act and the whole mutual obligation thing on the plane going back, but we’re here to talk about one thing this morning, and I have promised Karen and Jed that’s all I’m gonna talk about.” Koppel did a good job of looking chagrined, but he settled back to listen.
“As you know from the precautions we had to take getting you all here today, this city is not the safest place. My security guys had what my granny would’ve called a fit of the vapors when I told them we were coming here.”
Jed watched the audience closely. Only a few of them smiled.
“Right now,” Kip continued, “while we’re sitting here in this old fort, there are probably a minimum of eight thousand looters, scavengers, whatever you want to call them–a horde stripping this city of anything they can carry off. There are tens of thousands more up and down the East Coast and all the way around into Texas. Most of them are just small-time racketeers, crooks, and so on. But there are a couple of big organized criminal groups out of Europe and Africa, too. The navy and coast guard have been doing what they can to interdict them, but we just don’t punch at the same weight we used to. A lot of them get through, and they are stripping the cities bare. Some of them are even pushing into the interior.”
Jed resisted the urge to let his head drop into his hands. There was just no telling Kipper. As much as he tried to teach his boss the dark arts of spin and issue management, the guy was determined to speak his mind, no matter how damaging. Culver could see the headlines already. “President Admits the East Is Lost.” “Raiders Pushing into the Heartland.” Most of the reporters were already madly scribbling away on their notepads. He shared a quick, furtive, and despairing glance with Karen Milliner as the president pushed on.
“Now, while I agree that capturing and killing as many of these thugs as we can is important,” Kip said, “it’s not the only answer. I could order the army to kill every single pirate in New York today, and a month from now the city would be crawling with them again.” More furious scribbling. “President Throws in the Towel.” “President Admits Piracy Problem Is Beyond Him.”
“There is only one way to reclaim the eastern seaboard, and for that matter the interior of our continent. And that is to actually reclaim it.”
Kipper paused to let the moment sink in. Here it comes, Jed thought. The money shot.
“This morning I signed an executive order requiring the armed forces to seize and secure eighteen strategically important sites on the East Coast, including here in New York. We will spread out from those sites, which will become colonies, if you will, where any returnee who is willing to take on the risk can settle freely anytime six months after their repatriation. Those six months will be spent in full-time preparation for resettlement. Additionally, any immigrant willing to take the fast track to U.S. citizenship can settle freely after two years, including eighteen months of mandated service and six months of settlement training. Long story short, that’s it. Any questions?”
It took all of half a second for the press corps to react, but when they did, it reminded Jed of the ringing of the bells at the old stock exchange. In one master stroke the president had outbid the foreign powers for U.S. human capital and most likely performed an end run around Blackstone down in Texas at the same time. The reporters all seemed to explode suddenly out of their seats, flinging questions at Kipper, who smiled and waited for the uproar to die down a little before pointing at Joel Connelly from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
“So, Mister President, you’re rescinding the requirement for returnees to work in the National Reconstruction Corps for five years?”
Kip smiled and shook his head. “Only if they take on the risk of settling in one of the new colony sites.”
“What about exemptions for veterans?” Novoselic asked. “Will they be obligated–“
“They’ve already given their pound of flesh,” Kipper replied. “We won’t be asking anything more of them.”
More furious questions flew up at the podium, but Connelly won out again.
“Well, just how risky will it be?”
“Very,” said Kip. “It’s a frontier, Joel. And frontiers, as we know from our old history books, are dangerous places. Some of our efforts will fail. Some people will die–“
Kipper never finished the sentence. Two Secret Service men suddenly slammed into him, driving him backward off the stage a second before Jed heard a high keening whistle that quickly became a screech before disappearing inside an abrupt, roaring concatenation of thunder. Time stretched out as though the whole world existed on the skin of a balloon that was quickly inflating around and away from him, slowing everything as it receded. He saw the reporters start from their seats, some sprinting in slo-mo replays of Olympic runners flung from the blocks by a starter’s gun, others half standing, then sitting, bobbing up and down like puppets jerked around by a small child. Everything moved so slowly even as he knew everything had accelerated, and then–oof!–an agent clad in black coveralls shoulder charged him, lifting his considerable bulk right off the ground, two clear inches of air between the soles of his oxfords and the white, crunchy gravel as he was driven back into the shelter of the colonnade like a water boy T-boned by a linebacker.
The world clock caught up with his fear-quickened senses, and a rush of visions flowed over him. Dirty orange blooms of fire consuming the heavy earthmoving equipment on the muddy, torn-up grass outside the fort. An explosion above him, off to the right, as something detonated on the old roofline, sending dark, wicked fangs of black roofing slate scything away through the air. A deep rumbling in the earth as the volcanic eruption of fire and thunder built to a crescendo. A woman, a reporter, running full tilt, right into a blossoming explosion that roughly quartered her body, flinging the remains to all points of the compass.
Then more men, all clad in black body armor, all over him, slamming his shoulder into something hard and unyielding. A wall? A door frame? It was dark, and he couldn’t see anything beyond the spots of light blooming in front of his eyes. Jed felt himself thrown to the floor, a polished wooden floor he noted just before his cheekbone cracked into the boards. The thunder rolled on outside but became distant, muffled. Black spots spread over his vision, and he fell into them.
5
New York
Yusuf Mohammed was unimpressed by his fellow fighters. Although many of them were older than he, some by many years, they behaved like foolish children. He did not imagine that most would survive an encounter with the Americans when they came. Looking out across the river, craning to catch a glimpse of the great broken spires of Manhattan, Yusuf knew the Americans could not be far away now. He crouched in his fighting pit, chosen for him by one of the emir’s very own lieutenants, and wondered where the other men of his saif might be.
To judge from the yipping cries and gales of laughter that reached him between the volleys of rocket fire, they were still dancing and capering around the launchers. Yusuf shook his head in dismay. He was no more than fifteen, maybe sixteen years old. Nobody knew for sure. But he had been a soldier for nearly ten of those years, and he had seen unknowable numbers of men and women and of course children, such as he had once been, who had died because they did not take the business of war seriously.
Another string of missiles shrieked away into the sky, describing a great soaring arc over the river, traced by dirty gray trails of smoke. From his makeshift bunker, where he clutched an AK-47 to his chest and leaned against a canvas bag full of loaded magazines, he could not see the launch of the rockets or where they fell on the far side of the water. But he could hear them as they crashed down on the heads of the infidel, the thunder rolling back across the river like the sound of God’s judgment.
Laughter and the words of an obscene Somali drinking song also reached him.
Drinking!
He sighed heavily. Allah’s judgment would fall heavily on both sides of the river today.
Yusuf risked a peek over the barricade of broken concrete blocks and bricks and loose black soil behind which he was hidden. Amid the roaring rush of the missile barrage he thought he heard the distant buzzing of attack helicopters, a terrible sound he knew only too well. From his vantage point overlooking a large rectangular field covered in thick, tall swards of grass and a small forest of gray stunted trees, he could not see the southern end of Manhattan, but he had a clear view of another large island directly across from the mouth of the large dock that all but cut Ellis Island in half. A small swarm of black metal insects appeared to be rising from somewhere within the middle of that island. They had been told by the emir’s officers that it was a base for one of the American militias and that they could expect the response to their attack to come from there.
Yusuf tightened his grip on his weapon and marveled just a little at how nervous he was. He had fought in many battles in his short life, but most of them of course had been in Africa against other primitive forces. As the vague dark shapes resolved themselves into the outlines of the helicopters he knew as Apaches, the young fighter allowed himself a small measure of pride in how far he had come. There was a time when he thought of his first allies, the small band of Ugandan child fighters by whom he had been abducted and with whom he fought for five years, as the finest, the toughest, the most ferocious warriors in the world. Now, hunkered down thousands of miles from home, or at least from the continent he called home, he thought of his first band of comrades and their fabulously cruel commander Captain Kono as nothing more than stupid savages. They fought for the same reason he had fought. Because Captain Kono and his men had taken them from their homes, murdered their families, and threatened to kill them if they did not fight for him. Yusuf checked his weapon one last time, looked around in vain for the other mujahideen who were supposed to be manning a strongpoint with him, and mouthed a quiet prayer of thanks for the opportunity the emir had given him not just to escape Kono and the ridiculous Lord’s Resistance Army but to lift himself up into the light and the forgiveness of the one true God.
“Allahu akbar,” he said quietly to himself. Not fiercely, not boastfully, but quietly and piously and most of all with great love in his heart for the infinite forgiveness that Allah had bestowed upon a former infidel such as he.
He crouched down below the lip of his fighting pit. The emir’s men had trained him well. He knew all about the wondrous technology with which the Americans still fought in spite of the great blow God had smashed down upon them. He knew that merely popping his head up for just a second or two might be the last thing he ever did. It made the stupid, animalistic laughter and shouting of the other fighters, who were still apparently dancing around the rocket trucks somewhere behind him, all the more galling. Had they learned nothing?
The answer came in the form of a sudden high-pitched screeching sound as the Americans finally reached out with their own rockets and missiles. Yusuf burrowed as deeply into his little pit as he could and breathed out to protect himself from the waves of overpressure that surely would follow the impact of the aptly named Hellfire missiles. Huddled into a tight ball, pressing himself into the earth, he had only the vaguest impression of the sky above the island suddenly turning lethal. Whereas their rockets, launched from the back of trucks driven in darkness over the long causeway from the mainland to this former migrant-processing center, had lanced through the air like the spears of Zulu warriors, the American attack seemed to fill the entire space a few feet above his head with roaring death. There was no whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of volleying rocket fire. There was only a huge and instantly terrifying eruption of noise and fire and smoke as the very earth seemed to shake beneath his cowering form. Shock and horror rolled over the boy soldier as he thought it possible the Americans might just demolish the entire island, pouring fire onto the rubble until it subsided beneath the waters of the river.
He did not know how long he lay there, quaking in fear. His abject terror was so great, so overwhelming, that a few times he felt himself subject to a whole-body hallucination, the feeling that he was being squeezed out of his mortal remains in the bottom of his bunker. His mind seemed to float free of the hell in which his body was trapped, but it did not escape, falling instead down a long dark tunnel at the end of which a smaller, younger version of himself lay quivering in fear many, many years ago. As in a dream, he had no grasp of the hard edges of this vision. It was more a sensation and a few half-remembered images he had long ago tried to forget. His mother screaming in pain after Captain Kono’s men had cut the lips from her face. His tiny, spindly little boy arms shaking and useless, all but paralyzed with mortal dread as he held a makeshift club and stood over his uncle Bongani while Kono screamed in his face to kill the old man if Yusuf wanted to live.
Of course in those days his name was not Yusuf Mohammed. He did not remember what his name had been when he lived in the village with his mother and uncle and brothers and sisters and all his cousins. He did not remember being happy, but at times even now he assumed he must have been, even if that happiness was born of ignorance.
Yusuf Mohammed forced himself out of the waking nightmare before it could get any worse. And it could get much worse than the memory of his murdering a kindly and much loved uncle just to save his own life. He forced himself to open his senses to the real world even though it was a hell of fire and death. He was surprised to find himself lying on open ground a few feet from his dugout, which was smoking and ruined as though from a bomb blast. His heart, already trip-hammering, lurched sickeningly in his chest as he caught sight of a disembodied arm and a leg trailing the gruesome tendrils of torn flesh and muscle and meat he knew so well from the battlefield. But as he pushed himself up off the ground, he knew they were not his limbs. He was still all in one piece.
His weapon was still secured to him by its strap, but the canvas bag full of magazines was missing, and his chest throbbed with a great dull pain as though he had been struck heavily.
A terrible sound like the clanging of a large metal press brought him further back to his senses as one of the Americans’ Apache helicopters flew overhead, hosing long lines of machine gun fire into an unseen target. A scalding hot rain of empty brass shell cases began to tinkle around him, burning his skin whenever one touched him. Yusuf scrambled to his feet but stayed crouched as low as he could, running for cover into the nearest building. He nearly tripped on the remains of one of his fellow fighters who was lying a few yards away. A head and maybe a third of the upper torso, the rest just viscera and bloody ruin. He thought he recognized Abayneh the Ethiopian. An unbeliever gone to his punishment. He had probably been one of the drunken fools cavorting around the rocket launchers. Why did the emir’s lieutenants allow the consumption of liquor among the janissaries? Among the fedayeen it was strictly forbidden. At the end Abayneh remained a pirate and an ally of convenience, nothing more. Most of the men on the island were like him. Only a handful of the righteous had been salted through their number to stiffen their resolve and attend to the technical aspects of managing the rocket barrage so that it fell as close to the target as possible.
As one of the righteous, Yusuf knew his duty. He rushed toward the nearest building clutching his weapon, his lungs burning as much from the smoke as from the exertion. For the first time since the American counterattack had begun he heard voices, speaking in Arabic. His spirits soared. Some of the fedayeen must have survived and rallied together in this building. He rushed onward, his feet seeming to fly across the ground as a burst of machine gun fire from above scythed down the chest-high grass in front of him. He ran on regardless of the danger. If it was Allah’s will that he should die, then he would die.
But he did not. Diving through a shattered doorway, he found himself inside a large room, empty except for what looked like some desks and chairs that had long ago been pushed into one corner and covered with a heavy dust cloth. He came up out of his roll, clutching his weapon as he had been taught, and found two comrades shouting orders out of a window. It was hard to hear them clearly over the uproar and the clatter of American fire, but merely hearing the familiar sound of their voices was enough to give him heart for the fight.
“Allahu akbar,” he cried out.
One of the men spun around, pointing his gun at Yusuf but smiling a little wildly, perhaps even crazily, when he saw it was the Ugandan convert. The young warrior recognized Mustafa Ali, one of the officers responsible for coordinating the rocket barrage. A Pakistani, a good man with a large family over in one of the outlying camps. “Come, come quickly,” he cried out to Yusuf. “They are here. Quickly now, follow us.”
Ali and his comrade, an Arab that Yusuf recognized but did not know, grabbed a pair of RPG-7s leaning against the windowsill and ran for a doorway at the end of the room, motioning for Yusuf to follow them. He did so, catching a glimpse through the window of the truck-mounted rocket launchers on the roadway outside. They had been destroyed, utterly destroyed, as if a giant had smashed his fist down on top of them. The wreckage was aflame, and occasionally small explosions tossed twisted metal refuse into the air as ammunition or fuel cooked off. Of the janissaries, or the foolish drunken pirates as he thought of them, there was little to be seen beyond a few chunks of burning meat and random limbs scattered here and there.
It meant nothing to Yusuf. The carnage of battle was familiar to him, even if the terrible intensity of the American attack was something new. Feeling dizzy, with his legs wobbling and his ears ringing, he hurried to catch up with Ali and the other fedayeen. The rolling thunder of rocket and bomb blasts had abated somewhat in the last few minutes, giving way to an increasingly furious crescendo of gunfire and the clattering roar of helicopters. The three men ran toward an internal staircase, passing a couple of pirate mercenaries on their way. The pirates were no longer laughing and singing. They looked shocked and furious. Indeed, so murderously angry did they first appear that Yusuf thought it possible they might turn their weapons on the fedayeen. He almost raised his own gun, but Mustafa Ali was in the way. Probably a good thing. The pirates would almost certainly have turned on them if he had reacted that way. Instead they simply ran past one another, shouting incomprehensibly in some language he did not recognize. Yusuf followed Ali up the staircase, covering two flights of steps in what seemed like no time.
The Arab and the Pakistani exchanged a few brief words on the second floor and came quickly to an agreement. Beckoning Yusuf to follow them, they ran down along the corridor with ruined offices on one side and a long line of mostly shattered windows looking out over the burning wreckage of the rocket launchers on the other. Every inch of flesh on Yusuf’s body crawled sickeningly as an American helicopter swept by. It was one of the fat troop transports they called Blackhawks. A door gunner seemed to look right into his eyes as he worked frantically to clear a jam on his weapon. Yusuf jumped in surprise as Ali fired an RPG out of the window without any sort of warning. Thick acrid smoke filled the corridor and burned his eyes, but he was still able to watch the long looping flight path as the rocket-propelled grenade sped out of the building and flicked across a short distance to the second lumbering metal bird, striking it squarely in the cockpit.
All three of the fedayeen warriors yelled in surprise and delight as a greasy orange ball of flame engulfed the front of the Blackhawk, wrenching it out of its flight path. Yusuf saw the door gunner flung backward into the cabin just before a secondary explosion tore the main body of the helicopter in two. It dropped from the sky with sickening speed, spilling four–no, five–of its occupants out into clear air. Two of them were engulfed in flames, but the others looked like rag dolls as they fell. Exaltation and horror swirled in Yusuf’s mind. He made to run over and congratulate Ali on the fluke shot, but even as he took the first step, his comrades flew apart in front of his eyes, their bodies disintegrating as the corridor around them suddenly was chewed up by a savage storm of return fire.
The boy soldier dropped to the ground without conscious thought. He could hear the pounding thrum of the helicopter that had swept in immediately after the first one had gone down. It must have been very close, because the sound of its miniguns spewing thousands of rounds into the space where his comrades had stood, living and breathing just half a second ago, seemed to fill the world right out to its very edges. Though he couldn’t see it, he thought it must have been one of the small egg-shaped helicopters from the gunfire, which sounded like the ripping of a great sail. They had warned him about those metal devils. Giving no conscious thought to his actions, Yusuf moved with animal quickness, crawling through the nearest open door and getting a couple of inches of solid brickwork between himself and the lethal rain of fire. Not that he had any illusions about the safety of hiding behind a wall should the Americans turn one of their satanic cannons on him, but by hiding at least he might escape their attention.
His skin felt as though he were on fire. He realized he had soiled his pants, but it did not matter. At least he was alive. The frightening hammering sound of the helicopter’s machine guns trailed off, and with it the dull thumping beat of its rotor blades. He gave himself a minute to recover from the shock before crawling out of the room and into the corridor, where all that remained of Ali and the other man whose name he did not know were a few bloody rags and scraps of smoking meat. Yusuf kept his head down and his weapon in front of him as he belly crawled away from the horrible scene as quickly as he could. He was certain he could hear harsh flat voices shouting in English somewhere nearby, and he imagined the whole building filling up with cruel American soldiers. There was nothing for it but to get himself away from here so that he might fight another day.
Reaching the stairwell up which they had just climbed, he dragged himself back to his feet and hurried down unsteadily. He knew that to run out of the building was to invite almost immediate death from the circling helicopters, and so as soon as he reached the ground floor, he turned down another hallway and ran as fast as he could on rubbery, shaking legs and with his lungs burning as though he were drowning in blazing gasoline. He did not see any other fighters, which was probably a good thing. If they were as traumatized and unbalanced as he, they were likely to kill one another. Hurrying away from the part of the island where the rocket launchers had been parked, he found himself in unfamiliar surroundings. The noise of battle dropped away just a little, but his confusion increased. He soon found himself at the end of the hallway where a door, apparently shattered by gunfire, opened onto an area of concrete tarmac and beyond that the water. Driven by fear now, and humiliation, Yusuf threw his assault rifle away and sprinted out the door and into daylight, covering the short distance to the edge of the water in just a few seconds. A single loop played in his mind. He could not let himself be captured. None of the fedayeen were to allow themselves to be captured. Gunfire cracked somewhere behind him, and it felt as though every muscle in his back was clenched tight in anticipation of the bullet that must surely be coming for him, but he ignored it and ran on, launching himself into the air and out over the dirty green water. He did not expect to survive.
6
New York
“Incoming fire!” the Blackhawk pilot shouted.
Milosz winced as his headphones amplified the man’s cry to painful levels.
Between the crackle and chatter of the headset and the hammering blades of the helicopter, Sergeant Fryderyk Milosz could not hear the distinctive and all too familiar sound of the BM-21 rockets that were pounding Castle Clinton. But he didn’t need to. He could easily follow the bright arc of their flight paths as they zipped in over the river, and the results were laid out beneath him like a grotesque work of art painted in blood and fire. It greatly distressed the former Polish Army GROM operator to see his new countrymen scurrying about, trying to avoid the pepper-black bursts of high-explosive warheads. It distressed him even more to see some of them fail. Scattered around the grounds of Castle Clinton were a number of mangled bodies, some still crawling, some limping heavily, others writhing on the ground in agony. Here and there a few crimson lumps did not move at all. Fortunately, the bastards behind this atrocity were very poor artillerymen. Many of the rockets fell short into the river, throwing up plumes of dirty brown water or not exploding at all. A handful of warheads flew wide, crashing into the surrounding skyscrapers, detonating with extravagant blasts of color that rained deadly shards of glass into the concrete canyons of the city below. A largely empty city, he thought, thank the Virgin Mary.
“I have them. The island at two o’clock,” Milosz called out over the intercom, pointing at a collection of massive, aged brick structures on the island to the north of the big Liberty Lady statue. “In the car park behind the buildings. There! See?”
He pointed out the launch plumes to the ranger fire team in the cabin. Great eruptions of smoke and flares that would not have been visible from ground level on Lower Manhattan, hidden as they were behind the buildings.
“Copy that,” the pilot said. “Viper one-three, this is Saber six-one, approaching Ellis Island from the northwest for a visual.”
“Viper one-three copies,” Milosz’s headset told him. He glanced out over the water to see if he could catch a glimpse of Viper one-three, an Apache tank killer assigned to the security detail. He found the helicopter and turned his attention back to the island. “Approaching low from the east. ETA thirty seconds.”
“They are BM-21s!” Milosz shouted, scoping the truck-mounted launchers with his rifle. They were still too far off for a decent shot. Plumes of smoke obscured one or more multiple rocket launch systems, Katyushas. As the Blackhawk, flying high and out of reach, orbited Ellis Island, a voice in his headset crackled, “I count six, seven … no, make that a dozen combatants and two launchers.”
“Viper, this is Saber. Did you copy last?”
“Viper copies. Stay clear of the island. It’ll be rotten with RPGs,” Viper one-three said.
“No! Get us closer,” Milosz insisted, taking aim at one of the combatants, African by the look of him, clad in ragged olive drab fatigue pants and a ludicrously loud yellow and red patterned shirt. “I can take them. Get us in there.”
“Not no, but hell no,” the pilot called back.
“But if you get us closer, I can take them out,” Milosz argued.
“Negative, Sergeant,” the pilot replied. “They’ll be waiting in there for us with RPGs.”
“Saber six-one, this is Viper one-three. I count fourteen combatants around four truck-mounted BM-21 launchers parked in the parking lot of Ellis Island on the west side. Possible combatants in the museum complex. I am not authorized to fire on a historic landmark,” Viper said.
Milosz felt as though his head was going to turn inside out.
These Americans will lose their country yet, he thought, amazed and not a little angry at their reluctance to fire on the enemy. He gauged the range at well over a thousand meters away, too far to make a decent shot with his M14 rifle. It was a good weapon, especially with the Leupold scope, but not quite what he needed for the nig nogs on the island. Now, if he had a fifty-caliber, the story would be very different. Milosz had to content himself with scoping the launchers as a furious exchange went back and forth between the pilot and somebody higher up his chain of command. Even at this distance, with the vibration of the Blackhawk shaking his view in the sight, he could tell the pirates were whooping it up down there, loving every minute of this. They danced and twirled, and a few even performed somersaults as the rockets flew away. Milosz shook his head.
Fools. He tuned out an argument between the Blackhawk’s crew chief and the pilot over whether to engage with the M240 door gun. The crew chief lost the argument, fueling Milosz’s frustration that much more. He lowered the scope and shook his head at the other three rangers in the bird: Wilson, Sievers, and Raab. Hollywood pussies, he had once called their sort, and his time among them had not changed his opinion entirely, even if it had made him more circumspect about expressing it. They were good men, dedicated, but not as dedicated as his former comrades in the Polish Army. When Germans and Russians have had their boots on your throat for generations, you learn to explore new whole levels of dedication to the task of defending yourself from their ilk.
“Eager to die for your new home, Fred?” Master Sergeant Wilson asked, a thin black man who served as Milosz’s squad leader.
The Pole shook his head. “No, I am eager to kill the enemies of my new home.”
“The chance will come soon enough,” Wilson said, holding a pair of binoculars up to his face. “Looks like Africans or Arabs, do you think? Maybe Jamaicans.”
“What does it matter?” Raab asked. “One dead fucker’s the same as any other, right?”
“Angolans or Yemenis most likely,” Milosz replied, ignoring Raab’s contribution.
“Why do you say that?” Wilson asked.
“Those states operate that particular model of BM-21,” he said. “They have many to spare and run big looter gangs here, no? It is nothing to loan one to these so-called pirates. That is why I say this.”
“Could be anyone,” Wilson said, examining the scene below as they banked around to the west.
“We shall see,” Milosz said. He watched a U.S. Army AH-64D Apache Longbow come to a hover over the water, outside the reach of the few on the ground who noticed it.
“Stand by,” Viper one-three said over the headset. “Engaging. Missile away.”
“Put a hurtin’ on them fuckers,” the Blackhawk pilot said.
Smoke and the flame of more steel javelins climbing away from the launchers in the parking lot obscured the enemy, but as Milosz watched, a barrage of 2.75-inch folding-fin Hydra 70 rockets sliced through and struck the vehicles, tearing them apart in a maelstrom of explosive fire. The cabin of one truck went spiraling high into the air, lazily describing a tumbling flight path back toward a big patch of cleared ground on the Jersey side of the bay but falling well short, dropping onto the causeway that ran out to Ellis Island.
Milosz heard the words “chain gun” through a rush of static just before dark charcoal-gray bursts of smoke began chewing over the parking lot, which quickly disintegrated into a storm of torn steel and fleeing men. Meat and metal swirled in the air, caught in a tornado, as the 30-millimeter cannon fire set off secondary explosions in the wreckage of the Katyusha launchers.
“Yeah!” the Blackhawk pilot whooped. “No one’s coming back from that party.”
Weapons fire winked at them from one of the larger buildings, a rather beautiful and ornate structure to Milosz’s mind, somehow reminiscent of a wedding cake, with four green domed turrets, at least two of them occupied by hostiles. He instinctively reached for a grab bar as the chopper dipped and turned to avoid a line of tracer. The brutal ripping noise of the chain guns sounded again, and when the helicopter had leveled out and he had regained his balance, Sergeant Fryderyck Milosz could see that those turrets were no more.
So much for not shooting up historical monuments, he thought wryly.
“It is good, yes,” he said to nobody in particular. “Better that monuments get shot up than Milosz.”
An RPG spun forth from a window on an unerring heading, straight toward the Blackhawk.
“Incoming!” Milosz shouted.
The chopper banked and surged, and his stomach felt as though the patron saint of alcoholics had reached inside him and tried to rip it out through his ass. G-forces pressed him down into the deck, and he had trouble holding his head up to watch the action below.
His efforts were rewarded by the sight of another Blackhawk taking an RPG round in the cockpit.
The fast rope insertion went without incident. The four-man team dropped onto the flat roof of what looked like the second largest building, under the shadow of a towering water tank and northwest of what Milosz continued to refer to as the wedding cake building. He thanked the Lord that no shooters had thought to position themselves up there, although he had to admit, that if they had, the Apaches would have reduced them to pink gruel by now.
“On me,” cried Master Sergeant Wilson, and the operators rushed to follow him across the roof toward the small cabin that would give them access to a stairwell dropping down into the structure. It was maybe a hundred yards, but it felt like a mile to Milosz, who could not help glancing over at the smoking wreckage of the nearest turrets on the wedding cake. What chance that some new hobgoblin would suddenly pop up there and start spitting fire at them? The hammering thud of an orbiting gunship providing them with cover allowed him to wrestle his thoughts back to the here and now. He fingered the safety on the matte black Mossberg 590 shotgun he had substituted for his M14 back on the chopper. The first shot in the chamber was a breaching round, a shell filled with wax-bound metal powder that would be no good in a fight unless you jammed the muzzle right into the face of your man. It was, however, purpose-built to destroy deadlocks, hinges, and door handles. The team made the entry point as a stray bullet caromed off the sheet metal roof structure. Milosz heard the sudden roar of the Apache’s chain gun but did not turn around to see the results. Wilson and Raab took up positions on either side of the door.
Milosz wasted no time, calling out “Clear!” as he ran up, took aim, and blasted a melon-size hole where the door handle had been. Racking another round into the chamber, a man killer this time, he kicked in the door and fired into the interior.
“Frag out!” Raab called as Miloz sidestepped and the corporal tossed a grenade into the breached doorway. They all took cover from the explosion, which seemed to shake the entire roof structure beneath their boots. Sievers entered with his M249 squad automatic weapon up and ready to hose off any resistance, but no answering shots came from below.
“Man in left,” he called out, and Milosz entered, his finger with a half pull on the trigger, the muzzle pointed down the dark musty stairwell. The rangers switched on their tac lights, illuminating a small world of mold, peeling paint, and pigeon shit. The stairs were slick with four years of inattention to care and cleaning.
Wilson and Sievers followed him, the team moving down the steps like a death adder with its teeth out. The crash and uproar of the battle outside fell away only marginally, and Milosz could tell from the heavy drilling sounds below them that at least one heavy weapon was still firing from this building. Every so often, he could hear the whoosh of an RPG climbing away.
Wilson held a closed fist up to halt the squad in place in the stairwell while he queried the enemy’s position via his headset. Milosz moved up with Sievers to cover the door leading to the top floor.
“This is Romeo one-one to any element,” Wilson said. “We’ve effected entry. Request location of hostile elements, over.”
Milosz could not hear the reply on Wilson’s headset. He watched the black soldier nod his head once, twice, then a third time.
“This is Romeo one-one, verifying. North side, one floor down from the top floor, one heavy machine gun and an unknown number of RPGs. Is that correct?” Wilson asked the unseen, unheard voice.
After a fourth nod, Wilson signed off. Milosz often wondered why, in the American Army, he could get a headset in the Blackhawk but they did not have individual headsets for soldiers. Delta Force had them, those few he had encountered, GROM had them, and even the British doled them out to their troops, but not the Americans. And so in this way the Americans wasted vital time yet again.
“Okay,” Wilson said in a low voice. “Like I said, one floor down, at least halfway along the northern face of the building, we got a crew-served machine gun, something heavy and nasty, and a couple of RPG launchers, which are pinging our birds. Some prisoners would be good but not essential. Let’s go. Sievers, you’ve got the SAW, so you got the lead.”
“And lovin’ it,” Sievers said without any real enthusiasm.
The team moved out behind him, sweeping the hallway in front of them as they went. Milosz brought up the rear, pausing and turning to cover their asses every ten yards or so. There was no indication of any hostile activity on this floor, no sounds of gunfire or voices. Outside the building, though, all was murder and bedlam. They turned the corner at the end of the corridor and flowed around into the next hallway. Rocket fire had struck heavily on this side of the building and opened it up to the outside, collapsing part of the floor between this level and the one below. Small fires burned here and there, and Sievers brought the team to a halt well short of the worst of the devastation. Milosz could see the sky through an enormous hole that looked as though some hungry giant had taken a bite out of the top floors of the structure.
A rocket-propelled grenade whooshed away into the air from somewhere below. Milosz heard a babble of excited Arabic that he lost in the roar of a heavy machine gun from the same location. The team perched silently, their weapons trained on the enormous breach. Wilson signaled to Milosz to ready a couple of frags, and they all inched toward the opening. The thunder of battle rolled on outside, with the crump of rockets and the pounding of guns drowned out by the percussive roar of close-quarter Blackhawk and Apache flybys. The ranger fire team took up position just back from the ragged edge of the collapsed floor and wide-open facade, every man tossing his grenade at a signal from Wilson. The detonation hammered at the floor underfoot like a short, spastic tom-tom beat, and when Milosz’s ear stopped ringing, he could hear nothing of the men below.
“Clear,” called Raab, who had moved up to take a quick, furtive look over the edge.
“Right, let’s keep moving,” said Wilson.
Milosz was exhausted. He had not been this tired at any time in Iraq. But then, he had not been involved in such dangerous, close-quarter battles there.
An hour after the last shot sounded in anger, Miguel lifted a cigarette to his lips with a badly shaking hand.
Why didn’t I stay in Poland?
He knew the answer to that. There was no future in Poland. But having just nearly been killed in a room-to-room firefight with three dozen doped-up pirates who weren’t worth … what was Wilson’s phrase? Ah yes, hen shit on a pump handle. A good phrase. He would note it down in his little book of useful American words. Yes, having nearly been killed by these fools, he did have cause to question his decision to move out here with his brother’s family. They were safely tucked away in some big homestead down in Texas where the cowboys lived while he was being shot at by pirate fools who did not even have the decency to allow him to get close enough to stick his fighting knife in their gullets to settle the score.
When Raab and Sievers had attempted to capture one of the wounded pirates, the crazy man had blown himself up, killing Raab and crippling Sievers and very nearly doing the same to one Fryderyk Milosz, too.
Perhaps he would be better off behind a mule, like his brother. Perhaps it was preferable to holidays in the woods of Washington State trying to harden soft volunteers into rangers who were less soft. Perhaps behind a mule would be better than filling out requests for the Special Forces qualification course, the next step on his journey toward Delta Force. A maddeningly slow journey since the U.S. Army made him go through the hoops regardless of his GROM service.
But farming was not an option, of course.
He was here because his service had bought the ticket that allowed his brother Stepan and his family to join the federal settler program down in Texas two years ahead of time. He hoped his brother appreciated it, Milosz thought as he manhandled a naked and wounded Somali out of the building and toward the Manhattan militia patrol boat.
The Somali was naked because neither Milosz nor Wilson would take his surrender without proof that he had not booby-trapped himself like his crazy-ass Arab friend. Two civilians in khakis and dark polos took the man without comment, probably superspooks from the National Intelligence Agency. He was not the first naked pirate they had carted off, apparently. Milosz gladly washed his hands of the African fighter and made his way over to the ruins of a barge, stepping over the guts and brains of a recently departed combatant without batting an eye. A pair of Navy SEALs were in the debris, sifting through it all.
“Anything?” Milosz asked.
“Who the fuck are you?” one of the SEALs asked.
“Fryderyk Milosz, staff sergeant, army rangers,” he growled back. “That’s who the fuck I am, you dolphin-fucking dickwad. So. Did you find anything?”
“No, Sergeant,” the SEAL said, not much chastened. “Aside from some old Soviet-era manifests, we haven’t found shit. Some of these crazy fuckers preferred blowing themselves up to giving it up for us. Ended up shooting most of them. Anything else, Sergeant?”
Milosz grunted and walked away. He sometimes grew tired of the xenophobia of some Americans, especially ones who should know better. Did he not just prove himself to this man? Had he not been proving himself since he set foot here and took up a rifle for his new country? Seemingly not.
He left the SEALs to do their work and returned to the Blackhawk, where a subdued Wilson was sitting with his legs dangling from the cabin, pouring the contents of a Tabasco sauce bottle into an MRE meal pack.
“Want some, Fred?” Wilson asked. He set the bottle on the floor of the Blackhawk with a badly shaking hand and started to turn the food over with a shit-brown spoon. “Got chili mac for once. They are getting harder to find.”
“No thank you,” Milosz said, squatting down beside Wilson. He removed his kevlar helmet and proceeded to rub his scalp until the blood flowed again.
“Don’t let that asshole bother you,” Wilson said. “I’m glad you’ve got my back.”
“Yes.” Milosz nodded wearily. He jerked his thumb back toward the barge. “I am not to be upset by asshole who eats the pussies of rotting beached whales, no. I am tired and upset by Raab and Sievers. They were good guys, yes?”
Wilson exhaled raggedly, “Yes, they were. I only knew them since getting out here from the West, but they were a good team. We all were, Fred. You were a big part of that. Still are.”
“Thank you,” the Pole said as he leaned against the chopper and felt waves of lassitude roll over him. “Is it normal, these pirate bitches blowing up themselves and good guys like Raab and Sievers? It reminds me of crazy men in Iraq, yes? Before Jews turn them all into melted glass.”
The senior NCO gave two empathetic shakes of his head.
“No way,” he said. “I was here for the sweep and clear of Lower Manhattan. Didn’t see nothing like that. Didn’t see much resistance at all, really. Pirates just sort of melted away.”
“Have you heard anything yet about who these brazen nig nogs were to be shooting rockets at President Kipper?” asked the Pole.
Wilson pursed his lips and shook his head.
“Fred, you’re gonna have to learn to watch your words, my brother. You’re an American now. You cannot say things like that.”
Milosz tilted his head, genuinely perplexed. Does Wilson think I am referring to him as well?
“Like what?”
Wilson looked as though he’d been struck by a bout of the squirting assholes and was straining to stay puckered.
“You know, the N-word.”
“Nig nog?”
Wilson winced yet again. “Yes, please. Don’t say it anymore.”
Milosz shrugged. Never mind that he heard many black soldiers saying far worse to each other. He had seen more than one confrontation erupt when someone who was not black also said it. The rationalizations and counter arguments made his head spin. What was the saying?
Oh, yes: not the hill you want to die on.
“If you say so.”
They were strange, these Americans, he thought as he dug a half-melted chocolate-covered cookie, a track pad as they called them, from one of his pockets.
They would think nothing of killing a thousand nig nogs in a morning’s work but became entirely discomfited if you referred to the nig nogs in any but the most delicate of terms.
He had come to a very peculiar place.
7
Texas, Federal Mandate
They used bedsheets and coverlets as shrouds for the dead. Few words passed between them. Sofia seemed too stunned to say anything. Miguel had expected her to cry or lose control of herself, but that had not happened. Sofia moved mechanically to collect her rifle from the house along with a first-aid kit. She took the keys to the gun cabinet from him without a word. Even though he implored her not to, she passed from body to body, checking vitals to see if anyone was left among the living. He managed to stop her before she reached little Maya; that was a task from which he wanted to spare her. She flatly refused his offer to remove herself from the scene of the massacre and stand watch for the road agents.
The agents had turned right at the main gate to the ranch less than an hour ago, probably headed for the village of Connor, a few minutes up the road toward the junction with Route 21. Perhaps they had looting to be getting on with up there, or perhaps they had carried on to one of the other settler ranches. For now Miguel’s main concern was to be gone before they returned in search of their dead comrades. But before he could get Sofia safely away, he had his own dead to attend to.
He carried all the bodies inside the homestead himself. One of the few times he did speak to Sofia was to tell her not to pick up her little brother.
“No, no,” he said softly as she bent over Manny like a poorly strung puppet, all stiff limbs and awkward swaying. “I shall do that. Go inside and get me some more blankets.” He spoke as gently as he could, adding “please” as an afterthought.
Miguel did not need any more sheets or shrouds; he had plenty, but nothing was served by having the girl there.
He was determined that she would not carry through life a memory of the terrible dead weight of her brother in her arms. One day, with God’s blessing perhaps, she might remember Manny smiling and squealing as they wrestled on the floor of the homestead.
What God? he thought bitterly. No loving God could visit such horror on the world.
He turned again to Sofia. “Could you see to the dogs, I can hear them barking; they are still tied up in the barn out by the pond.”
She nodded stiffly, as though she had hurt her neck, before moving slowly away. Miguel spit into the mud and tried to ignore the acid burning in his guts. Much of his body felt numb, his limbs in particular, as though he had lain awkwardly for hours and cut off his circulation. His fingers sometimes tingled painfully, however, a feeling not unlike having grabbed an exposed electrical wire. Having felt like it might explode out through his chest earlier in the day, his heart now beat slow and hard like a pile driver.
He covered Grandma Ana in the bright patchwork quilt she had begun knitting in the evenings in the refugee camp in Australia. Darkness stole in at the edge of his vision and a thick crust of salt hardened around his heart as he draped an army blanket over his son, little Manny. It had been given to them by the federales in Corpus Christi when they arrived to take up their place in the resettlement program. The children had driven Mariela to the edge of madness turning it into a tent in the lounge room on rainy days all through the winter just passed.
Corpus Christi, he remembered, was where he had first heard about the road agents, in a lecture from an FBI man about the dangers of the frontier. He had said nothing about them being Fort Hood’s men, but Miguel had made it his business to find out as much as he could about them. He had thought he was being careful, but it had not helped.
As he moved from one member of his family to the next, covering them for the last time, he tried to murmur a prayer for each one, but found that the words would not come. He had no prayers to offer. Just once in the terrible business of collecting his dead did he falter, when he picked up Maya. Still so small and looking as vulnerable in death as she had in life. A high-pitched keening sound caught in his throat, and he had to bite his cheek hard enough to draw blood to regain some control over his feelings. He would mourn for her later. He would mourn for them all later, but for now Sofia still lived and it was to her safety and welfare he would have to attend first, after seeing to the remains of his family.
Only Mariela, his wife, his lifelong love, did he pick up and carry into the homestead without first wrapping her body in some kind of shawl. Her eyes were closed, mercifully. He would not have wanted to look into those lifeless orbs. It was bad enough having to hold her and feel her dead flesh against his. A primitive, irrational part of his mind tried to will his life into her where their bodies touched, skin on skin, hers still warm but slick with blood and so terribly still. He kissed her lightly on the forehead as he maneuvered through the screen door into the parlor, for all the world looking like a newly married man carrying his wife across the threshold of their future together. Miguel laid her gently on the couch and shook off the admonishing voice in his head that scolded him for getting her blood on the fabric. Mariela’s voice, of course.
Once inside, he could hear Sofia upstairs in her room, crying like a small child. Obviously, she had not made it down to the barn to untie the dogs. He could still faintly hear their frenzied barking off in the distance. Sofia’s crying reassured Miguel, oddly enough. It was at least a change from the cold, nearly unresponsive puppet of a few minutes ago. Part of him knew he should fly to her and fold her in his arms. But that was not possible. There were hard necessities of the situation that could not be avoided or denied.
The screen door clanged as he pushed through it out into the yard to continue gathering up his dead. The sun had climbed a little higher in the sky, but the morning was still cool. Trees on the horizon slumped heavily under a sheen of ice and a few clumps of snow, dragging their branches low to the ground. Overhead a pair of black crows cawed at him, the noise sounding like the laughter of cruel and stupid men. Dizziness came over him in waves, and he feared he might pass out, falling to the ground and possibly never getting up again.
But there was still Sofia. He had to get her away from here and the agents as soon as he could. The need for haste helped, hurrying him through the awful business of collecting the bodies of his family and carrying them inside so that he might escape with all that remained for him in the world. With Sofia.
The silent farmhouse sat nestled at the edge of a thick glade of myrtle and basswood trees on the southern foot of a small rise overlooking his fields of lima and pole beans. A whitewashed two-story wood-framed house with deep verandas around three sides, it had been crowded with all his relatives crammed inside, but Mariela had insisted on keeping everyone together. He chose not to dwell on the bitter irony of that as he carried the last of his extended family into the parlor.
He could not bear to stand and look at them, even shrouded as they were, for more than a few moments. It was not just that he could feel his heart seizing up painfully; there seemed a good chance that he might go mad if he gave in to the urge to lie down among them and give up. Instead he forced himself to make the sign of the cross before backing out of the room and closing the door. He would never set foot in there again. Instead, he trudged upstairs, where he could hear his daughter still crying.
The door to her bedroom was closed, the room she had shared with her little sister Maya. He hesitated outside for a moment before pressing on to the master bedroom. Everywhere he saw evidence of violation: drawers pulled out and the contents emptied, clothes on the floor, toys scattered around, a chair knocked over and left lying halfway out the door. On a normal day Mariela would never have allowed such chaos in her domain.
He clenched his jaw, tasting his own blood, and hurried into the bedroom, quickly stuffing spare Levi’s and shirts and two pairs of boots into a sports bag. He dug an army surplus arctic-rated sleeping bag out of the bottom of the closet and a thick lamb’s wool coat. There would be nights when they would not be able to find shelter, and the chill of the deserts and badlands after dark was enough to finish off the unwary. Although he would doubtless be able to scavenge much of what they needed on the trail, there was no point leaving things to chance at this early stage. The main thing right now was to get the hell away from Blackstone’s territory with Sofia, to seek out help wherever he could.
He knew he was alone among his neighbors in believing the road agents to be tools of Jackson Blackstone, but Miguel had invested a good deal of time, before arriving here, consulting much more widely than the “experts” on offers to prospective settlers. He had sought out a number of Mexican sources, vaqueros like himself, some of them settlers, some bandits working the border regions. To them there was no question. The agents did the bidding of Fort Hood.
Miguel was about to leave when his eye fell upon a small silver-framed photograph of Mariela and the children resting on an old mahogany chest in which all the drawers stood open. Hesitating momentarily, he finally picked it up and carefully removed the picture from the frame. His hands were shaking but he allowed himself a few seconds of indulgence, gazing at his family as they had been just a few short hours ago. He struggled with the enormity of it all. That happy time was now as distant and impossible to touch as the surface of a cold star twinkling in the night sky. How could there be so much life in his gnarled brown fingers as they stroked the image of his beautiful wife and children when they were all gone now.
Miguel stuffed the picture into his wallet before his emotions could boil up again and unman him.
He padded softly out of the room with his bag, painfully aware he would never set foot in there again. The vaquero paused outside his daughter’s room, listening to her wretched, strangled sobs. He knocked lightly and entered, not waiting for a reply. Sofia lay on her side with her knees drawn up under her chin, shivering violently, crying, and hugging a small stuffed bear she had carried with her from the day she had found it on the Aussie Rules. Aware that every moment’s delay put her in danger, he nonetheless approached quietly and cautiously, easing himself down on the mattress beside her. She jerked away from him, her tear-reddened eyes wide with fear. Miguel tried to brush her long hair away from her face, but she flinched.
“Easy, Sofia. Easy. I know it is hard,” he said softly, “but we must go. Now. The men who did this will be back, and if they catch us here, I cannot protect you.”
She drew in a shallow hitching breath and tried to speak but was unable to form any words at first. Miguel was worried by the violence of the tremors racking her slim body. He glanced briefly out her window, which overlooked the area in front of the house, including the driveway winding up toward the main road. How long would it be before the road agents returned?
“I am sorry, but we must go; we have to get you away from here, Sofia. We have to go now if you are to live.”
“I … I d-don’t want to l-live,” she cried pitiably.
Another glance out the window.
Nothing yet.
He took a moment to lay down beside her and fold her into a hug. She did not resist, although she was shaking so hard, he wondered whether she would have been able to anyway. Miguel tried to speak, but his throat was tight with grief, forcing him to push his feelings down tight. When he knew he could talk without falling apart, he spoke quietly into her ear.
“Crying is good; you must cry for all of them. But we must go, too, Sofia. Your mother, your brother and sister, all of your uncles and aunts, they will haunt me if I do not get you safely away before those men come back. And they will come back, Sofia. Very soon. So we must go.”
He kissed her head, which felt hot with fever, and rubbed his callused hands gently on her upper arms as he spoke. Slowly the tremors that shook her body trailed off and the awful, gut-wrenching tenor of her cries became less like the sounds of an animal and more like the bawling of a little girl to whom something bad had happened, something very very bad. When Miguel judged her sufficiently in control of herself again, he eased up, pulling her with him.
“Come on, then, come with Papa,” he said softly. “You can bring your bear and a few personal things, small things like photographs, but you must gather them quickly and keep them all in one bag. Pack some clothes for traveling, for trail riding, warm clothes. And be quick, Sofia. Those men will be back for their friends soon, and we will give them nothing. Nothing, do you understand?”
She sniffed and nodded uncertainly.
“Do we have time to bury them? To say prayers?”
He shook his head firmly.
“No. We must be gone, but we will not leave this house to the agents, and we will leave no one to the dogs or the wolves.”
She nodded shakily and tottered over to her dresser drawer on stiff unsteady legs. When he judged her sufficiently composed, he left the room and hurried downstairs, where he tossed the bags and heavy jacket onto the kitchen table. He fetched a couple of saddlebags from the utility room at the rear of the house in order to pack them with trail food. Rice, beans, dried meat, sugar, coffee, and a bottle of vitamins. Mariela had baked biscuits that morning, and the rich, malty smell of them was still thick in the kitchen. He found a jar of cookies in the pantry and wrapped a few in an old tea towel. They would do for a quick meal this morning, and he felt it important not to leave them behind.
Finally he unlocked the cupboard under the main staircase and flicked on the bare lightbulb inside. Using a key on a separate ring hanging from his belt, Miguel opened a small gun cabinet he had fixed to the rear wall. He took out his favorite rifle, a Winchester Model 1894 Lever Action 30.30, and his saddle gun, a double-barreled Sicilian-style Lupara. He then grabbed six boxes of ammunition for the long arm and two boxes of shells for the sawed-off shotgun. He threaded a heavy clublike Maglite torch through one of the big steel key rings on his belt. Sofia had already collected her hunting rifle and the ammunition for it. He was not keen on her carrying the Remington on a regular basis, although if she had had it with her this morning …
Stop it, he told himself as he tried to figure out what other weapon to get for his child. Neither of them was a soldier and he didn’t want to be loaded down with a lot of useless ironmongery. As it was, they simply couldn’t carry enough weapons to fight off more than a very small band of road agents.
He grunted and decided that the Remington would have to do.
Shuttling all the supplies out to the horses required four trips, with Sofia joining him on the last run. He was glad to see she had changed her clothes and carried her personal belongings in a small backpack with the head of her teddy bear sticking out of the top. She remained subdued, and he could tell from the furtive way in which her eyes sometimes darted here and there that she was wondering where he had laid out the bodies. Miguel did not want her dwelling on such things. He gave her a bag of beans to carry out to the horses and told her to transfer the rifle he had ridden out with this morning to her own mount.
“For the next few weeks we must always be armed,” he said. “Both of us. Until we get somewhere safe.”
“Are we going to Corpus Christi?” she asked in a small voice. “Wouldn’t they expect us to go that way?”
The sky had grown dark with gathering storm clouds. Lightning strikes crackled over the hills to the southwest, and a few drops of icy rain splashed Miguel’s face as he looked up.
“Yes,” he said. “I do not think we can go south. They probably would expect that. We would have to pass through Blackstone territory, and his men would make it difficult for us. We shall ride north, to Kansas City. The federales are strong there. We need to tell them what has happened. They will do something.”
Sofia said nothing. He wondered how much she knew of the political situation in Fort Hood, of the standoff between the Federal Mandate and Governor Blackstone’s regime. It was not something the adults had discussed in front of the children. The horses twitched their ears and shivered while he loaded them with supplies and allowed them to drink from the trough lying in the shade on the eastern side of the house. Miguel did not let himself dwell on the moment that was coming, the abandonment of the ranch that had been the best hope for his family.
He remembered the day they arrived in a salvaged school bus loaded down with supplies from Corpus Christi. A civilian from the Federal Mandate had helped them get settled in, logging their location on a laptop and taking a few pictures of the family. It had been difficult, getting the children to settle down long enough to gather for a photograph. The men had inventoried the salvageable equipment and the structures for the government man while Mariela and the women put out the best spread they could manage. Everyone sat around a cobbled-together table, sampling freshly butchered and roasted beef while enjoying bottles of a New Zealand red wine they had brought with them.
After dinner Mariela was waiting for him in their bedroom, her skin glowing under the candlelight. She held out her hand …
Miguel shook the past away. He took a deep breath and held it for a second lest his self-control finally fail.
He could not afford to think about this, to let go of hope entirely. He had to look to the future, to Sofia.
The dogs were still barking, and he again asked Sofia to ride over to the barn to release them. “They will be upset,” he said.
She nodded, her face a dull mask as she placed one boot in the stirrup and swung up into the saddle.
“Good. If the men come back, you must ride out immediately. Head into the forest. They won’t be able to follow you in there, not in vehicles. You know the clearing? In the middle of the forest? You wait for me there at the northeast corner.”
He considered telling her to make for the militia post at College Station if he didn’t turn up, but she was fragile enough as it was. He did not think his daughter would cope with the prospect of something happening to him while she rode away. Miguel checked that she had transferred the rifle to her mount then waved her off.
He flicked his eyes down to the main road, past the bodies of the road agents, which he had not bothered to move. A pair of black crows, their oily feathers glistening with raindrops, pecked at the wounds of one of the dead men, pausing momentarily as Sofia’s horse approached. Miguel watched her stiffen in the saddle as she rode past them with her head turned away. He ducked back inside for just a moment, bending down to open the bottom drawer in the kitchen, from which he removed a small sheaf of papers in a plastic Ziploc bag. His settlement documents, proof that the government in Seattle had chosen his family to run this farm as part of the reconstruction program. He tucked them away inside his jacket, then pushed a light straw Stetson down on his head and donned a pair of wraparound sunglasses. From the cupboard under the sink he fetched a one-gallon drum of lamp oil, unscrewed the cap, and splashed the contents all over the kitchen.
For a few seconds he hovered on the edge of indecision, unable to do what he had to. But the barking of the dogs reached him, telling him Sofia was releasing them from the barn. With his face contorted into a rictus of loathing, he struck a match and tossed it on to the nearest patch of oil, which ignited with a whoomp. He stalked out of the house without a backward glance.
8
Wiltshire, England
The ambush was a simple affair, two cars in a herringbone formation blocking Stock Lane, just before the T-intersection with Hilldrop Lane about three klicks outside Aldbourne. Bret spotted it as he crested a rise about five hundred yards short of the trap. Somebody without his experience, a local farmer, say, probably would have ridden right into it, assuming a breakdown or even a small crash had blocked the road. But Bret Melton had been through enough military checkpoints to recognize the unmistakable arrangement of vehicles. In fact, the very presence of two cars was enough to give him pause. Very few people had the resources for private automobile travel anymore. He squeezed the hand brake on the mountain bike as he reached the summit of the hill, very much aware of the baby’s presence in a carrier on his back.
“What the fuck?” he muttered before admonishing himself quietly. He was trying not to swear in front of Monique. She wouldn’t understand yet, but it was a bad habit he had to give up. He felt her shift in the backpack as he squinted at the cars. There appeared to be four, no, five men down there. Two white and three dark-skinned, probably of West Indian origin. There weren’t many from the subcontinent free to wander the British Isles anymore. They appeared to be inspecting the engine of one car. The hood was up and three of the men were bent over it, but that made him even more suspicious. The car was a late-model BMW by the look of it, and on the rare occasions that they broke down, there was very little you could do if you didn’t have access to a full suite of computerized diagnostic tools in a licensed repair facility. The baby cried out loudly, and a pulse began to beat in Bret’s temple. This just felt wrong.
The men were looking at him now, pointing. One of them waved, gesturing for him to pedal down to them, as though some passing cyclist might be able to help fix their high-tech sedan. Melton checked his watch. He was due in Swindon in about ninety minutes for the meeting with the Resources Ministry guys. He wouldn’t be missed back at the farm for hours yet. He shook his head. Something felt very wrong about this.
He stood up and pressed down on the pedals as if to trundle down the hill to them but instead turned the bike around and pushed off in the direction of home. A few seconds later the sound of slamming doors and engines firing up drifted over the rise. Damn. There was no way he could outrun these guys. They’d be on him in moments. He skidded the bike to a halt, dismounted quickly, and carried it over to the drystone wall that ran alongside the country road. He flung the bike over without any concern about damaging it, then scrambled over, taking considerably more care not to jostle the baby. He ducked down behind the wall as the first car, the BMW with supposed engine trouble, came roaring over the crest.
He dared not risk raising his head for a look as the cars rushed by. Monique was fully awake now and crying loudly. They wouldn’t hear her over the noise of their engines, but if the men stopped the cars and climbed out, as surely they must in the next few minutes, the baby would give away their position. He looked around desperately. A two-hundred-yard dash would carry him to the far side of the field and another drystone wall. A few trees stood in the northwest corner of this field, and another clump had been allowed to grow up a few hundred yards farther on in the next field beyond, a roughly rectangular paddock waving with what looked like a barley crop.
Bret didn’t debate his next move. He checked that the papoose was securely fixed, then took off at a sprint, bent low, making for the far side of the field. The ground was uneven, recently plowed, and he had to watch his footing lest he turn or even break an ankle. When he was halfway across, he heard the cars returning.
They screeched to a halt just as he made the barrier of the ancient rock wall. Taking it in one leap, he flinched and ducked instinctively as a single shot rang out behind him. He heard voices calling out for him to stop, but they simply spurred him on. If he could just make the next field, he might be able to disappear into the gently swaying sea of grain. Beyond that lay a remnant strip of forest, and from there it was a short, hard dash to the village of Aldbourne and the Home Guard office at the corner of Castle and Malborough. His cardio fitness was not great, not compared with what it had been when he was a ranger or even a correspondent. But he was pretty certain he could outrun the city boys behind him.
For the briefest moment he wondered what the hell they wanted with him and his daughter, but the question answered itself. It probably had nothing to do with either of them. This would be about Caitlin. As soon as he thought of his wife, more guns opened up. He dared not risk even a glance behind as he sprinted toward the wall, attempting to maintain an even, loping stride so as not to shake the baby too much. She was screaming now, a full-throated caterwauling wail.
From the sound of the gunfire he judged his pursuers to be toting light automatic weapons, some sort of machine pistol. A stuttering burst threw up small puffs of dirt about twenty yards to his right. The sorts of light arms they were using weren’t very accurate. If he was unlucky, there was a very good chance they’d hit him or Monique by accident.
Monique.
He cursed himself for strapping her onto his back, where she was exposed to the gunfire. He could have slung her on his chest but had chosen not to because it made riding the mountain bike a little more difficult. He reached and vaulted the next boundary fence in one fluid sweep as a burst of fire chipped sharp pieces of stone from the wall. His lungs were already burning, and he fought to control his breathing, drawing in long, deep breaths rather than giving in to the urge to start panting and gulping for air. This field looked to be about three hundred yards across, and beyond it lay the relative safety and cover of the barley crop. A flight of birds took to the sky from a copse of yew trees at the far side of the meadow. Behind him a machine gun coughed and stuttered, and one of the birds exploded in midflight, dropping to the ground ahead of them.
Bret’s vision began to blur, and he could feel a stitch gripping his gut just above his old appendix scar, but still he pressed on. If I can just get to the next field.
A single shot caught him in the right leg, just above the knee, and he screamed as he went over, throwing his arms out to accept the full weight of the fall so that he would not roll over and crush the baby. He felt a bone snap behind his left wrist, and his jaw smashed into a jagged rock thrown up by the blades of the last plow that had passed through there. He coughed and choked on a mouthful of dirt and attempted to haul himself up again, but the injured leg wouldn’t take his weight and it collapsed underneath him. He began to crawl, anyway, ignoring the raucous, braying laughter he heard from behind. They were close now.
A gun roared, much louder, and chewed up the thick brown earth a few feet away.
“That’ll be far enough, brother.”
The voice was accented slightly. London with an underlay of Jamaica, perhaps.
Bret used his good arm to lever himself up. He’d made it to within ten yards of the wall and lay within the dappled shade of the largest yew tree.
Monique was screaming and trying to crawl out of the backpack.
“Fuck, would somebody shut that little shit up.”
That voice was pure East End, and Bret glared at the speaker, a redheaded tough in his early twenties. He wore a short-sleeved T-shirt, and his arms were covered in the fuzzy, amateurish tattoos of a convict.
“Quite a chase you led us, mon,” said the darkest of his hunters, the one with the slight Caribbean lilt.
Bret was too short of breath to reply. He merely moved his body to put himself between the baby and their captors. Not that it would do any good. They had him at their mercy, and their mercy looked thin indeed.
“What do you want?” he asked at last as they stood over him. His leg was in agony, and the broken wrist felt as though it were on fire.
“It’s not what we want, mon. It’s who. Where is your wife at, eh? The lovely Caitlin? She wasn’t where we were told she would be. She is supposed to run along here, mon. But here you are, and where is she?”
He felt nauseous with the pain and with something deeper and uglier, a creeping sense of his failure.
“If you’d found her,” he said, nearly gagging on the effort, “you’d be dead by now.”
The redhead with the tatts laughed, and Bret recognized his donkey bray from a few moments earlier.
“You reckon, do you, pal?” He grinned just before his teeth disappeared in an explosion of gore.
A thunderclap from a powerful handgun, a Beretta, rolled into a series of short, flat explosions, almost impossibly close together. Another three of the men went down as huge gouts of blood and tissue erupted from the center mass of their bodies. The West Indian, his eyes suddenly as wide and white as Ping-Pong balls, loosed off a wild unaimed burst from his sidearm, an old Heckler & Koch MP5. It clicked empty after a brief stutter of fire, and he turned to run just as Bret caught a flash of color in his peripheral vision, a blurred figure leaping the drystone wall.
Caitlin.
She seemed to materialize instantly at his side in a combat shooter’s crouch and snapped off two more rounds. The fleeing man cried out as the bullets’ impact and his own momentum lifted him off his feet and slammed his body hard into the ground.
Caitlin’s voice was harsh and clipped, almost alien in its tone. “You all right? The baby’s all right?”
Monique was still screaming, but she sounded distressed rather than in pain.
“We’re fine for now, I think.” Bret coughed, spitting more dirt from his mouth and ignoring his agonizing injuries.
Caitlin walked quickly over to where the four men she’d first targeted had fallen. Without preamble she executed two of them with a double tap to the head. Another she kicked, but Bret could tell he was already dead, shot through the heart.
The redhead was attempting to crawl away. The lower half of his face hung in tatters and a terrible, animalistic keening sound came from his throat. Caitlin approached him with the muzzle of her pistol trained on the back of his head. She quickly glanced up to where the last of the five, the Jamaican, was also trying to escape, dragging himself back toward the cars. His legs trailed behind him uselessly.
Bret watched as his wife made some grim calculation before firing two rounds into the head of the man closest to her. His skull came apart, spattering her with blowback.
Monique screamed louder with every shot. Bret did his best with what felt like a broken wrist to unhitch the papoose and drag her around as Caitlin stalked over to the sole remaining survivor. Bret was pulsing blood from a bad wound to one of his fingers. White fire burned through shards of glass rubbing against each other in his leg and wrist, but he managed to cradle Monique in his good arm. He kissed the top of her head, humming softly, and rocking her back and forth. He waited for the last shots, but they never came.
Caitlin approached the Jamaican from behind, waiting until he had levered himself up on his arms as he crawled desperately for the imagined safety of his car. She launched a short, vicious kick into one elbow, snapping the joint with a sickening crack. The man screamed and rolled over onto his side, which allowed her to piston another kick into his solar plexus. The howls cut off abruptly as the blow drove all the air from his body. As Bret watched, horrified, his wife placed her running shoe on the man’s throat and pressed down, all the while training the pistol on his face. After thrashing around for a short period, his body went limp. She delivered a kick to his groin just to check, but he was lights out.
Holding the muzzle of the M9 against the back of his neck, she searched his pockets, pulling out a cell phone.
Bret’s last memory before he passed out was the beeping of the keypad as she called for help.
The hospital, a modern facility, sat next to Junction 15 of the M4 motorway, a relatively short ambulance ride from the scene of the killings. The paramedics assured Caitlin that Bret and Monique would be fine and that she had nothing to worry about, but sitting in an interview room of the Gablecross police station in Swindon, she couldn’t help but worry and fret on their behalf. Bret had lost a lot of blood before she was able to tie off his wounds, and Monique was still screaming when they took her away. The police had refused to allow Caitlin to keep Monique with her, and she supposed she could understand their point. She had just shot and killed four men and critically wounded another. Her running outfit was tacky with their blood, and she kept finding small bone chips and worse in her hair.
“We really can’t help you if you won’t help us,” Detective Sergeant Congreve said for the third or fourth time.
The female constable sitting beside him across the table gave Caitlin a sympathetic look, which had no more effect on her than a small bird flying into a brick wall.
“You need to call the number I gave you and tell them what’s happened,” she said. “I can’t help you. There is nothing else I can say.”
Congreve, a chubby, dark-haired man with a large drooping mustache, frowned unhappily.
“Somebody will be doing just that, Ms. Monroe, but until then, why don’t you tell us what happened. You appear to have been defending your partner and child from armed men. There can be no harm in explaining what happened, can there? Was it just happenstance that you came across the villains while you were running?”
It was total happen-fucking-stance, all right, but she remained silent.
Congreve exhaled slowly.
“Look, Ms. Monroe. You and your ‘usband have a good reputation down in Mildenhall. We never hear anything but good things about how you run your farm, and I know from talking to the Resources Ministry that you’re in tight with the government somehow. I just don’t understand why you can’t help me help you. This isn’t going to go away, you know. Self-defense or not, ‘appenstance or whatever, you can’t go gunning down ‘alf a dozen people without explanation. Now, if you want to see your family anytime soon, and I’m sure you do, you’ll be needing to give me somethin’ to go on with. Who were those men? What were they doing in Wiltshire? Do you know them? Do you know why they’d be lookin’ to do you or yours any harm?”
He favored her with what her old man would have called a hangdog expression, shaking his head at the bother of it all and imploring her with big wet eyes to just do ‘erself a favor.
Caitlin smiled without warmth.
“Call the number.”
Congreve rubbed one meaty hand across his face and reached for the off switch on the video recorder.
“Interview suspended at thirteen hundred and twenty-three hours. Go call the fuckin’ number, Constable.” He sighed. “See what happens.”
The uniformed officer excused herself and closed the door behind her. Congreve shook his head.
“What sort of fuckin’ teddy bears’ picnic have you dragged me into, young lady, eh?” he asked. “Those blaggers we took out of that field, they had the look of nasty men about them, they did. What you left of them, at any rate. And that one you choked off after you shot him, we’ll ‘ave him identified soon enough, and I’ll wager he’s no fuckin’ altar boy, eh? Not a bad morning’s effort for a little lady, was it?”
She shrugged, trying to keep her impatience and frustration under control. She needed to get to her family. Before somebody else did.
