After America (3 page)

“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.”

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.