After America (36 page)

The smaller one was smoking and occasionally drinking from a flask he would take from inside his full-length coat. That was good, the vaquero thought.
Drink up, my little friend. Drink up.
They shivered and stomped around a small campfire they’d lit near the northern end of the running track that ran around the football field.

Or did they call it a gridiron field here?
he wondered. True football was a game played with a round ball between civilized people.

Miguel waited another five minutes, until total silence had fallen over the empty wastes of suburban Crockett. When he was certain the main body of partygoers had exhausted themselves with debauchery, he made his move.

First he removed his shoes and dropped his pants—took them right off—before putting his boots back on.

Then he donned a leather motorcycle jacket salvaged by Ben Randall from an auto shop in Leona two days earlier, thankfully, not from the remains of its former owner. After his scare in the general store, that would have been too much. Miguel was certain he would have felt the dead man creeping all over him within a few minutes of pulling it on. But the jacket had been hung cleanly on a hook in the workshop of the town’s garage. It matched the clothing of one or two of the road agents he had spied back at the club. They had also sought out other equipment, but without luck. Thus, he had no silenced pistol or hunting bow with which he might quietly send these two worthless
chochas
into the next world to account for themselves.

But he did have a plan.

And so, without pants but leather jacketed, with a bright yellow Caterpillar baseball cap pulled down over his face, he emerged from his hiding spot and began a long, staggering walk across open ground, waving a half-empty bottle of bourbon around.

He was praying that with the night being so dark and the agents partly blinded by the small campfire, his bizarre approach would disarm their suspicions. If it did not, he was dead and the Mormon women almost certainly, too.

Miguel kept his head down as best he could, allowing himself only brief glimpses of his quarry as he staggered theatrically every few yards or so. The guards noticed him when he was about fifty yards out, the shorter of the two pointing and laughing.

“Hey. Is that James? Jimmy James Jefferson? Y’all brought us some bourbon but none o’ that tight Mormon pussy, you dumbass?”

A few of the nearest cattle bellowed and snorted, but they moved away and resumed dozing, chewing their cud, or swatting flies with their tails.

Well before Miguel entered the full glow of the campfire where he would have been identified as an impostor, he deliberately stumbled facedown into the dirt, where he stayed, groaning, with his ass pointed squarely at the road agents.

He hoped they would not be so familiar with the ass of this Jimmy James Jefferson that they would be alerted to his ruse.

From their braying laughter, they did not seem much perturbed.

Typical, thought Miguel, that men of this ilk would do nothing to help a fallen comrade with neither pants nor dignity to his name. They seemed content to chat to each other while he lay in the dirt.

He groaned loudly again and pushed himself up on one his elbows before throwing one arm out and crashing down again, this time with the bottle of bourbon where they might see it draining away.

“Hey!” cried one of them, the smaller man, he was certain. “Don’t spill it all.”

Miguel dragged the bottle back toward himself and waited.

He forced himself to go completely limp as he heard both sets of feet approaching. He had his right hand tucked away inside the leather jacket, his fingers wrapped around the handle of the footlong Bowie knife. A cattleman, he had worked with knives all his life and knew what speed, strength, and a finely honed blade could do to living flesh when driven with enough force and skill and merciless intent.

When he felt the men’s hands grab for him roughly, he rolled over and struck out in one, two, three flashing movements. He whipped the knife through a short vicious arc that took the killing edge of the blade deep into the throat of the smaller man, who could not even scream, so quickly was his trachea sliced in two. As he continued to sweep around, launching himself like a coiled rattler, he switched to a backhanded stabbing grip and drove the evil-looking steel shaft deep into the temple of the second man, whose eyes seemed almost to pop out of their sockets at the very moment the last spark of life died in them. He reversed the flow of his attack, ripping the blade out, bringing huge gobbets of flesh and slivers of bone chip with it. With a final lunge he drove the Bowie up under the floating rib of the first man he had cut, making sure of his end by ramming four inches of hardened steel into his heart.

A few cattle bellowed in protest but stayed where they were.

Grimacing with disgust, Miguel stood and stripped off the leather jacket. He was bathed in hot, dark blood, but there was no time to clean up.

He hurried back to where he’d left his pants and his guns.

There would be more such work before he was done for the night.

Kansas City, Missouri

Compared to most big urban centers, Kansas City was relatively intact. As he took in the view from his temporary office on the Cerner Campus in North Kansas City, Kip played connect the dots in his head. He could hear the trains rumbling down the tracks on the other side of Highway 210. He would use those trains in conjunction with the Missouri River to resettle St. Louis at the eastern end of the state, where advance salvage crews were already busy stripping the Boeing plant, among other things. Once St. Louis was resettled, they could begin to reassert control over the Mississippi River. With control of the river, he would hold the beating heartland in his hands and could turn his attention south or east.

This was the part of his job that thrilled and fascinated Kipper. The politics he left to Jed. The necessity, the inevitably of conflict, of war, he was coming to accept as a part of binding up the fabric of a continent that had been torn apart. He was already at war in all but name on the island of Manhattan, and that rat bastard down in Fort Hood seemed intent on pushing him to the edge of a sectarian conflict at some point in the future. But the challenge of rebuilding and renewal, marshaling all the resources at the nation’s call, as diminished as they might be, and applying them in the best way at the right place and time—that was engineering on a scale that went well beyond the merely epic. This was world building. He indulged himself in a few moments of happy satisfaction as he watched school buses full of men and women in overalls and brightly colored safety vests chug out of the parking lot across the street from another Cerner building that had been converted into a dorm. More buses would be collecting workers from Crown Center, the hotels at Harrah’s and Ameristar Casinos farther to the east, and a nine-story loft apartment complex in Northtown. The workers, a mix of people from all over the planet, would fan out across the city to perform their duties and earn their places by dedicating themselves for seven years to the renewal of the republic.

Some would head out to the Hawthorne Power Plant to assist in restoring the facility to its full 435-megawatt capacity. Maybe they’d be clearing the roads of tangled auto wrecks, although KC’s road net wasn’t too badly jammed up by the insane megasnarls Kipper had seen in New York. Anyone with railroad experience, mostly refugees from India, was tasked with restoring the myriad rail yards scattered through the Kansas City area.

Their work might be altogether grimmer, of course. If they had been chosen for their jobs because they had an employment background in the medical sector or had worked with hazardous materials or environments before, there was a chance they were heading out to clean up the remains of the Disappeared. There were still tens of thousands of them to be put to rest, and the God botherers in Congress had kicked up an almighty stink when they’d discovered that the first clearance teams in KC had simply scooped up the leftovers of former residents and burned them in Hawthorne Unit 5’s coal-fired furnace. The Greens hadn’t been too happy, either, although of course those wing nuts had complained about the loss of precious biomass and the carbon footprint of the reclamation efforts, especially pertaining to the reactivation of the coal-fired power plants. Man, he really didn’t relish their likely reaction when they learned that the Wolf Creek nuclear generating station in Coffey County was next on the list of plants to be reactivated.

Kipper rolled his eyes. You would have thought they’d have been content with the collapse of the global economy. That had wound back carbon emissions to early-twentieth-century levels once you corrected for the one-off addition of the toxic firestorms back in ‘03. But no, the Greens had the swing votes in Congress, and they had proved themselves to be entirely ruthless in using their numbers to play off the old Republicans and Democrats. They were even worse in many ways. Their party discipline was kind of frightening. Probably it had something to do with that weird messianic fervor they all seemed to share. In private, he and Jed often referred to them as the Borg, and he was very much looking forward to leaving them behind when his term was over. The next president of the United States could argue with them about who should actually be running Reconstruction. In his darker moments he really hoped Sarah Palin would run. They deserved each other.

“Mister President?”

Kip turned away from the window and found a young woman waiting at the door with a clipboard.

“The chief of staff is here, sir. And your secure link to Pearl Harbor will be up in the conference room in five minutes. Oh, and Mister Tench is here early. I’ve given him a doughnut and a coffee downstairs.”

The president laughed out loud.

“If Barney is early, you’re going to need some more doughnuts. Tell him I’ll be down as soon as I can.”

He thanked the young lady and said good morning to Jed as he bustled into the room, also carrying a doughnut. Kipper wondered where they came from. Surely they weren’t being flown in from Seattle.

Jed was hauling around a couple of ring binders under one arm, which he dropped onto the bare, rather cheap-looking desk. The office was remarkably spartan for the nation’s chief executive, but Kip liked it because of the great view it afforded him of the reclamation work. From the southwest corner of the building, it was possible to see the rail yards of North Kansas City, the planes coming into Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport, and the skyline of Kansas City, Missouri, proper. Trucks and buses rumbled down Highway 210 laden with workers, salvage, and supplies. A good many horses and bicycles could be seen plying the roads as well. If he looked due west, it was possible to see the restored and fully operational North Kansas City federal medical facility. Kipper felt a pang of guilt, knowing that some of his soldiers were in there struggling for their lives. He needed to get over and see them before he returned to Seattle. Turning away to the east, he could see the stream of smoke rising from Hawthorne Unit 5’s power plant, which provided power for the entire metro area. He hoped he would be able to get out there before the end of the day and personally see how things were going. Or to micromanage the chicken shit and put everyone’s teeth on edge, as Culver put it.

“Good morning Mister President,” said his chief of staff, who was dressed in a perfectly pressed charcoal-gray three-piece suit. Kipper wore chinos and a blue denim shirt, a casual ensemble that was justified in his mind, by all the site visits he’d be making later in the day and possible because his wife was not there to hassle him into a monkey suit.

“Any good news out of New York overnight?” Jed asked. “I’ve been caught up with Treasury.”

“Nothing I’d call good,” said Kip. “Forty-eight confirmed dead on our side, mostly from the clearance teams we saw yesterday. About as many again badly wounded and enormous destruction of the city between Union and Madison squares. The casualties will be flown out to Northtown Medical later today.”

“I see,” Culver said. “Any news of enemy casualties?”

Kipper rubbed his eyes, which were grainy and red. He never slept well the first night in a new bed at the best of times, which these weren’t.

“Six hundred plus, according to the cav. But there’s plenty more where they came from. Including our mystery men. We’ve apparently got an updater coming from Colonel Kinninmore later in the day about that. And what about you, Jed? What complications do you have for me this morning?”

He meant it to be a joke, but it came out a little surly and undignified.

“Sorry,” Kip added. “I’m tired and pissed off. And I have forty-eight very sad letters to write later today.”

Culver joined him at the panoramic windows to look out over the city.

“Well, you know my views on that,” he said.

“And you know mine,” Kipper shot back with a slightly warning tone. “It is not a waste of time, Jed. It is something I have to do. They’re just short notes, but I know they mean a lot to the families.”

Thankfully, Culver chose to ignore yet another of their old arguments.

“The press isn’t too bad this morning,” he said, choosing to plow on in his usual pragmatic style. “They’re getting right behind us in Manhattan. Calling it the Battle of New York.”

“Has anyone started speculating on this business of the—” Kipper checked his notes. “—the fedayeen involvement?”

“Not yet,” said Culver. “But it’s early days, and there are half a dozen or so reporters and war bloggers embedded with our guys and Schimmel’s militia over there. If it’s a live issue, they will get onto it before long.”

Kipper gazed down at the hospital where casualties would be arriving from New York throughout the day.

“Good,” he said. “Maybe they can get us better info than official channels. You know, if they’re writing and filing their stories from the front.”

Culver looked skeptical.

“Unlikely, sir. If they’re embedded, all of their reports are going through our links and getting censored by our intel guys. They’re not going to let raw data like that get out to the public till they’ve had time to work out their own spin.”