Dandelion Iron Book One (7 page)

The door at the front of our train car banged open, and in walked four border guards. No dresses for them. Each wore a uniform, including pants, and carried an MG21 assault rifle. A sharp-faced woman marched down the aisle, asking for tickets and ID.

I tensed, but Wren just laughed. “Don’t get your
shakti
in a bunch, Cavvy. Those women don’t care about people going into the Juniper. Nope. Only about people getting out. We couldn’t play act our way past them if this train was pointed east, not without ID and a better story than we had in Cleveland.”

Two years ago, I hadn’t really thought about the border crossing ’cause I was fourteen and innocent. Now, with Wren, I was anything but.

The video screens lit up, and I noticed something I’d missed before—a chain-link fence, topped with razor wire. Living in Ohio, I hadn’t really thought much about the effects of the SISBI laws. The news feeds had focused more on the privacy issues involved and less on the security fences around the Juniper.

The woman in charge woke a mother and her little girl a couple of rows down from us. She went through their papers, and then continued until she got to us. Wren gave the woman her ID and our tickets. She barely glanced at it. The guards moved on without a word. Didn’t even give Wren’s guns a second look.

Still, I was in a sweat. Their MG21 machine guns were American standard issue, hardcore military. Once more, assault rifles were going to be a part of my life.

The little girl’s squeal startled me. Her and her mama had got on in Omaha, but the little one had been sleeping. Now, the girl was wide-awake, waving around a comic book.

“Mama, are there really mutants in the Juniper?”

Wren opened her mouth to say something, then closed it.

“Mutants? Maybe. There are all sorts of strange things in the Juniper. Watch now.”

The lights in the cabin went off. Then, darkness for a moment, until the sapropel lights hissed on. A heavy oily smell followed. Sapropel was the leftovers of the leftovers of oil shale like torbanite. It was weak stuff, but I grew up under its murky amber light. Smelling it again, hearing the hiss, sent my heart thumping. The memories. Lord, the memories and the guns.

The train lurched forward down the tracks. Outside, the flickering video screens disappeared behind us, swallowed up by the darkness as we moved west through the open plain of the Juniper; Nebraska land no more.

(ii)

Ten minutes later, the little girl once again peppered her mama with questions. “And what about June Mai Angel? I heard that song about how she pulled the zeppelin out of the sky.
The Ballad of the Black Dog
, that’s the song. It says she killed them all except for one girl, so she could tell the world how bad June Mai is. Does she rob trains, too?”

“I don’t think so, Laura.”

Wren half stood, but I put a hand on her shoulder. “No, Wren, it ain’t worth it. She’s only a little girl.”

“And what about the savages?” the girl kept on. “In my comic book, they attack trains and kill everyone, but this train is guarded, right Mama? We saw the guards and their big guns.” She meant the border guards, but no, they were long gone.

Wren shook me off and strutted away, all hips and pistols. She sat down next to a frumpy woman in a New Morality dress across the aisle from the girl and her mama.

“Hi, my name is Willie Carson, and I couldn’t help but overhear you talkin’.” Wren smiled, showing white teeth, which should be white, as much as she brushed them.

I sat in my seat praying Wren wouldn’t cuss too much.

The mama pulled her daughter close, eyes glued to Wren’s Colt .45 Terminators. “Can we help you, miss?”

Wren grinned at the mama. “Your daughter had a whole passel of questions about the Juniper, and I was born in the Colorado territory. Lived there and all over the Juniper. My mama was one of the first ones to go in for salvage work after the Yellowstone Knockout.”

The girl sat up straight. “People call it the Yellowstone Knockout,” she said knowingly, “but it wasn’t a knockout at all. We fought the Chinese even after they nuked us. Even in the forever winter times.”

The nuclear winter. For three months, the temperatures across the northern hemisphere fell to subzero, even in June. The temperature stayed low and average rainfall dropped by seventy-five percent for years after that. I’d heard lots of scary stories about that time when the sky went dark and everything not dead wanted to die. Folks didn’t have fresh produce for years—meals came out of a can, and they were grateful for every bite.

The Yellowstone Knockout.

I’d grown up with that great event shadowing every part of my life. Really, it created not just the Juniper, but me, my family, a whole generation.

The Sino-American War started on July 28, 2028. Not even a year later, the Chinese nuked Yellowstone on Good Friday, 2029, which caused all sorts of evil things—darkness, disease, starvation. Could’ve been worse. The Chinese used a hydrogen bomb, fusion not fission, so most of the radiation was nullified in the blast. That was just the beginning though.

That intense heat so close to the surface capped off the Yellowstone caldera, one of the most active volcanic regions on Earth. Lucky it did, or it might have been the end of us all. Once the surface was sealed, things got interesting, geologically speaking. The pressure building underground finally cracked open, causing a flood basalt. As it happened, the channelized basalt flowed out of the Yellowstone’s throat in just the right combination of ionized molten iron, direction, and speed that it created a massive electromagnetic field.

And the EM field didn’t go away. A gigantic plume of magma under the ground kept the ionization going as it poured up and out of the ground, pushing the field of cooling lava down the Yellowstone Valley toward the Snake River in Idaho. The problem wasn’t the flowing lava, which moved about thirty centimeters a day, like a slow-moving tsunami wave. The problem was the ionized molten iron coming out of the Yellowstone’s throat. That kept the EM field active and relatively stable. As the video screens in Buzzkill demonstrated, at the edge of the Juniper the power fluctuated. On the border it didn’t fry electronics outright, only disrupted the current. But inside the EM field, it not only killed all electricity, but due to the strong, highly variable magnetic nature of the phenomena, it wiped out any type of compact flash memory. Which was why I had to sell my slate in Chicago.

No one knew how long the EM field would last. The Deccan Traps in India, another example of a flood basalt, had erupted for a million years. We were only thirty years into it. If the lava kept flowing at the current rate it would overtake Boise in about seven thousand years. The geology gave the scientists a lot to study—how it happened and how to bring power back to the Juniper.

Why nuke Yellowstone? That was another question everyone asked, and theories drifted around like cottonwood fluff. Political scientists and military minds argued about it, just like doctors argued over what caused the Sterility Epidemic.

There were a lot of mysteries for people to ponder, but right then I had my own little conundrum far closer to home. How could my sister be so gentle and kind to this little girl? Wren’s smile was so soft. “I like you, Princess. What’s your name?”

The girl glanced at her mother, who nodded. “Go ahead.” The woman relaxed a little, and I figured she was curious about the life of a Juniper gunslinger. From the looks of them, she and her daughter were prolly on their way to Sterling to visit relatives or some such business. A real adventure for them, though Sterling was the safest city in the Colorado territory.

“Laura Tucker,” the little girl said.

“Well, Laura Tucker, you’re right. We didn’t give up after the Knockout. But I don’t wanna talk about the Sino. I want to tell you the truth about the Juniper.”

“Are there mutants?” Laura squinched up her face like she wouldn’t be able to handle the truth.

“Nope. No mutants.”

The frumpy woman next to Wren spoke up. “But what about the radiation from the Knockout? How can you be so certain?”

Wren’s eyes narrowed and her voice got quiet. “Ain’t no mutants. Like I said, I’ve been all over the Juniper, traveling with a circus, sometimes as a sharpshooter, sometimes as a trapeze artist, and I would’ve seen a mutant in a sideshow somewhere along the way.”

The woman harrumphed loudly. I suppressed a desire to go over and explain to her the difference between fission and fusion.

The girl fell over herself to ask another question. “What about the savages?”

The mama shushed her. “Now, Laura, that ain’t politically correct to say. Right, Miss Carson?”

Wren shrugged. “I guess. In the Juniper, we call ’em the Wind River people. We took their land away from ’em once, but the Knockout gave it back, and they’re not gonna let history repeat itself. You go up into Wyoming or Montana, well, the Wind River people’ll cut your throat rather than look at you. To protect their land.”

Even though the Native Americans killed to keep their borders sealed, some folks supported them. Mavis Meetchum, for example, who was the biggest rancher in the Northern Colorado territory, let loose a thousand head of buffalo into Wyoming—partly as a peace offering, partly to give the Wind River people something to eat. Mavis was as clever as she was rich, which made Sterling such a safe place.

“Trains can’t go north,” Wren continued, “so to get to California the Union Pacific and Amtrak have to run their trains south through New Mexico. Can’t go through the Rocky Mountains, ’cause of the weather and the Outlaw Warlords.”

“Like June Mai Angel.”

Wren nodded. “Yep. June Mai Angel runs the central part of the Colorado territory. Up north is the Psycho Princess, who paints towns all pink. She kidnaps the girls and brainwashes them to be as crazy as she is. Believe or not, the Psycho Princess kills any boy she meets, viable or not. The Juniper has always had bad women runnin’ around. Prolly where folks got the stupid idea there were mutants.”

The frumpy woman shrugged and looked out the window.

Wren continued. “Why, when I was twelve or thirteen, our ranch got attacked by an Outlaw Warlord by the name of Queenie. She would raid ranches and farms for food, salvage, and boys. To sell. Big trade in boys nowadays, but you know that from school.”

“Only if they’re viable.” Laura tumbled over that last word.

“Uh-huh,” Wren agreed. “But my mama shot Queenie, right between her eyes. She and her girls were comin’ at us, and my sister back there, well, she wasn’t much older than you when she was reloading for Mama, and it was down to the last clip and them Outlaw Warlords were coming in for a last run, and Mama yelled out, and stood straight, and she was just so …”

Wren’s voice fell away.

I felt tears in my eyes as the memories bit me—the dirt stinging my face, the bullets in the air, electrifying my teeth, a crazy terror in my heart.

And Mama, clutching her over-under M16, which we named Tina Machinegun, yelling, “Dammit, Cavvy. You can’t drop no more bullets. You keep jacking up, we’re all gonna die!”

It was bad cursing, but that was what she’d said.

My hands were shaking so bad, and I was crying so much, most of the bullets didn’t make it into the clips. The brass glittered around me in the trench we had dug around our house.

Then this great big woman came up, Queenie, face painted with mud. I remember the flash of her teeth, and she had this big machine gun and it was chugging away at us. Mama was out of ammunition. She’d taken a round in the arm, and her blood dripped on me. One of our ranch hands, Nikki Breeze, screamed from somewhere that she’d been shot, and I was certain we were all going to die, until at the very last minute, Mama snatched a half-load from my hand, slammed that clip into Tina Machinegun and blew Queenie off her feet.

It was dewy-wet that morning. In my young mind, I thought I could smell Queenie’s brains in the mud. Now, whenever I smell that wet, muddy spring smell, I say to myself, “Smells like Queenie’s brains this morning.”

Laura Tucker was looking at Wren with wide-eyed hero worship as my sister told the story.

“But my mama’s dead now,” Wren whispered.

“Was she killed by June Mai Angel?” Laura asked.

“Nope. Heart attack. No one alive could kill my mama ’cept for God. He took her home to heaven, and left us here all alone.”

Laura put a hand on Wren’s hand.

“I’m sorry, miss. For your loss.” She said it with such seriousness that Wren laughed and laughed.

“If the Juniper is such a bad place, why did your mama go there in the first place?” the little girl asked.

The question caught Wren off guard. She didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she answered, “Family. She hated her family in Cleveland.”

“Hated?” Laura asked in wonder. “How can you hate your own family?”

“It’s good you don’t know.” Wren patted her hand. “But maybe it wasn’t just family that sent Mama west and kept her here. You know, the Juniper is a hard place to live but it’s also beautiful, and wild, and it’s the only place left in the world you can be free. The Juniper ain’t got no identity laws, no income taxes, nothing but open plains and starry skies, and a girl can make her way here. If you’re tough, smart, quick with a gun, you can live here, really live.

“I ain’t never gonna leave.” Wren grinned and changed gears. “Well, Laura Tucker, I hope you feel better. With all them questions you asked, I reckon you were a little scared. Well, until we hit McCook, you ain’t got nothin’ to be scared of. Yeah, they have guards on this train, but they ain’t seen what I’ve seen, or done what I done, so until I get off, you got me and my Colt Terminators to protect you, and I ain’t never lost a fight yet. Well, except when my little sister shot me in the back.” Wren paused. “You know, you kinda remind me of Cavvy when she was little and sweet, like my own little baby doll.” Her voice fell away.

For a long a time, it was quiet, Wren staring off. Then she cleared her throat, leaned in, and kissed the little girl’s cheek.

“Now look at my sister!” My sister stood, talking loud and waking everybody up. “Cavatica Jeanne Weller, all grown up. Mark my words, Laura Tucker, I won’t never be killed by anyone that’s not family.”