Wild Country (2 page)

As always, the "sir" sounded insincere. Marvin Stearns, grown sleek with inaction, could list a dozen men he would prefer over Quantrill. Ted Quantrill could list several friends who'd become casualties through the inaction of sleek men.

Kent Ethridge, for example. Some men put the entire blame for that on Ethridge himself. Quantrill's reaction had been a deepening fury against those who had made Ethridge's death possible. Now he took a final pause and a gulp of Pearl before: "I'm near Dabney, just north of Zavala County. You want Rawson in SanTone Ringcity, or do I freight him back to you in Junction? Yeah, he's in a bodybag, he'll keep 'til tomorrow. Right. See you in Junction bright and early. A-a-and out," he drawled, putting away the tiny headset with relief.

Ted Quantrill hadn't had a mastoid-implant radio in his noggin for four years, but he still hated any comm set that reminded him of a mastoid "critic," however faintly. An explosive critic had executed his lover, Marbrye Sanger, on command of the murderous Young administration. The postwar excesses of Young's people had driven Quantrill to rebellion; nearly to madness as well. They drove so many good people to the rebel ranks that the elections of 2004 had cut across the lines of Mormonism and federalism. Now it was President Ora McCarty whose cabinet struggled to reconstruct America. As long as the ex-rebel boss Jim Street was attorney general, there would be jobs for men like Quantrill.

Like the American nation itself, old Jim Street had suffered systemic shock during the Sinolnd War. The grizzled, crippled old Texan rode herd on the Justice Department, including both the FBI and the Border Authority. Street had to let other folks wrangle over the new Capitol site, now abuilding in the District of Columbia, Missouri. He worried about foreign entanglements when they crossed American borders—for example, when the Ellfive colonies of New Israel helped Turkish drug merchants open conduits through Wild Country.

Street knew in his chalky bones that America could not survive another reign of unjust rule, of government by terror. As long as he could climb into a wheelchair, he would prowl the corridors of law and order. If Wild Country and Oregon Territory were to be parts of the nation again, they must get fair-handed justice. With deputies like Ted Quantrill, Jim Street's justice reached a long way into lawless regions.

On this day, Quantrill was far into the violent border region claimed by both Mexico and Reconstruction America. Here, whole families sometimes disappeared during a feud or a border raid from Mexican
cimarrones
, wild ones. It was truly no government's land, and it could not be reclaimed without rough justice. When it had to be, Quantrill's was as rough as it came.

Quantrill could have chosen a shorter route back, but his years in the region had given him Wild Country wisdom. Back in the eighties and nineties, before the Sinolnd War, Texas ranchers and hoe men had wrestled chunks of this sun-broiled land into submission. In less than ten years after the war, most of those chunks had gone wild again, returned to the kind of new-world savagery that Francisco Vasquez de Coronado had fought in 1541. A few places, chiefly narrow creekbottoms defended by grit and gunfire, were still cultivated. Quantrill did not relish a mechanical breakdown, not with a deader ripening under the tarp behind him. and he also went wide of the cultivated areas. Only fools and desperadoes took chances in the trackless wild regions over soil that, locals claimed, was "hard as a whore's eye."

Was Quantrill too cautious?

Item: During the first cattle drive east from the Pecos, Coronado's men were forced to build pillars of dung and bones to post the way. Not even their herd of cattle could mark the cactus-dotted hardpan enough to let a man backtrack their path. When those cattle stumbled forward toward water, usually it was deadly alkali water and those cattle had to be whipped away from it. Now it was still possible to find a remnant of a buffalo wallow or a dry hole where a Spanish buckle and bones might gleam, burnished by the dusty winds of five centuries. This was a timeless land, and it would kill you for the slightest miscalculation.

The most pitiless of that land lay far to Quantrill's left. His route was made interesting by deep, brush-choked arroyos and hills. Bit by bit. the stupefying violence of Texas weather had whittled those hills down from mountains to mounds. That weather was thought, by people who had never experienced it, to be just a part of Wild Country myth; but Quantrill kept an eye on his horizons. He knew that in any season, a hellbroth storm might fling hailstones the size of his fist so hard they dented the cowls of hovercycles, with a blazing cadenza of lightning tinted gold and mauve by dust hurled on gale-force winds.

To outlanders, it was all mythology to be taken in good humor. If it were even half-true, they reasoned. Wild Country would be peopled exclusively by the insane. To Ted Quantrill, it was taken for granted—and in good humor. If you lived out here and said you liked it, people figured you'd been too long in the sun without your sombrero. So Quantrill cursed it as necessary and told no one but Sandra Grange that he had learned to love it.

He put in a call to Sandy while sliding up into Edwards County but got no reply; expected none, really. Like as not, she'd be tending her truck garden, and there was no one else to take a call at her soddy. Nine-year-old Childe might hear the VHP beeper, but never answered. If you weren't standing in front of her where she could study your face, Childe saw no point in jawing with you.

Quantrill tried again an hour from the soddy, then shrugged and popped open another cold Pearl. He told himself he wasn't worried about the two sisters; though they lived on the edge of Wild Country, they were rarely more than a whistle away from a mind-boggling mass of four-hoofed help.

Reminded of Sandy's huge guardian, Quantrill slowed the cycle and began to scan overhangs of stone. Generally, Texas rattlers grew larger in regions with more rain. Quantrill knew the legend of Sowell's dragon, the nine-footer killed by mustangs in the old days, and discounted that legend by two feet. He was looking for any handy diamondback or prairie rattler that might serve as a snack.

The unlucky rattler wasn't even coiled, merely stretched out enjoying a recent meal, when Quantrill spotted him. Moving quickly in the late afternoon heat, the ugly brute coiled a good honest warning to this interloper. Quantrill's ventilated boots and brush trousers were snakeproof, with leg panels that served as chaps; but his primary defense against rattlers was a combination of reflexes and untrembling control. That combination had stunned U.S. Army medics when they'd first tested him for lethal skills.

Once in a human generation, a specimen with Quantrill's natural gifts might occur. Those gifts had been viciously misused until Quantrill turned rebel, pitting himself in single combat against his masters. Now that the rebels had won—and despite the best arguments by Sandy Grange—he still used his gifts in combat. He took them as much for granted as the rattler took its heat-seeking sensors.

For another man, Quantrill's rapid right-handed pass before the snake might have been bravado, but for the deputy it was only a way to coax a snake into straightening out. The rattler lashed his triangular head forward, the S-curve of neck and one coil now the size and rigidity of a baseball bat. And now the yellow-white fangtips lanced for the tempting target, but now too the hand flicked out of range, which was roughly two-thirds the length of the rattler.

And one-tenth of a human heartbeat later, the rattler hit caliche dirt, pinioned there by the treacherous hand while Quantrill's left hand grasped the rattler behind its anal opening to keep that cylinder of muscle from whipping around his arm.

Vaqueros
, locally teased by the term "buckaroos," had first learned the trick of whip-cracking a live rattler to remove its head. Once a Mexican cowpoke showed that trick to his Texas neighbors, it became a well-known sport. Some said it separated the men from the boys; some said it separated the smarts from the plain stupids. Quantrill did it because it separated the snake from the sting, and he would not do it while anyone watched. Long ago he'd learned to avoid displays of his quickness. Why put an unknown enemy on guard? Word got around too soon as it was.

A moment later, Quantrill hefted the headless rattler, smiled to himself. Sometimes he brought a toy for Childe, or a spray of wildflowers for Sandy. But this time he curried favor with Ba'al, an enormous Russian boar bred to Texas proportions by Texas A&M researchers before the war. One day when Wild Country was tamed, there would be no room for such a monster, a full five hundred kilos of tusk and gristle, standing tall as a Mex pony and bearing the scars of many encounters with men. It was hard to say if Ba'al accepted Ted Quantrill as a friend. The great animal loved Sandy and, especially, Childe; but Quantrill's odor was the hated mansmell, and the two males had never faced each other without a soothing female presence.

If Ba'al loathed anything more than man, it was a live snake. A recently dead snake was something else again. His forelegs and snout were scarred from rattler punctures, and the boar dined as often from rattler nests as from wild goat, tender shoots, or stray animals from the nearby preserves of Wild Country Safari. Quantrill hoped that this quivering rattler carcass would be the equivalent of a sherbet for Sandy or a praline for Childe. If not—well, whatthehell, he'd tried to pacify the surly bastard…

Less than an hour later, a few kilometers from Rocksprings, Quantrill topped a rise in view of Sandy Grange's soddy. He tried to deny the sense of relief spying the long, semisubmerged dwelling with its grassy sod roof and spiky agarita shrubs planted on the earth berm. Too many times he had seen roofs caved in by concussion grenades, smoke curling from burnt hulks, well-tended gardens ribboned to mulch by
cimarron
gangs hostile to settlers.

But Sandy's corn stood high and golden, now with a deeper glow from the saffron sun far to the west. Over the years, sunsets were beginning to lose the psychedelic glows brought on by thousands of nuclear blasts during the war years. Atmospheric dust and smoke had brought depressed temperatures and poor crop yields until recently. Quantrill tried once more with his VHP unit, and this time Sandy heard the beeper, complaining that she would not have time to freshen up before he arrived. He thought it better to avoid mentioning his cargo; Sandy tended to get squeamish about such things.

Between two and three hundred klicks southwest of Rocksprings, Texas, lay La Mariposa—the butterfly—a sun-splashed village in the state of Coahuila. In the same way that Kerrville and Junction, Texas, marked the northern boundaries of Wild Country, La Mariposa marked its southern reach. North of La Mariposa lay a parched wilderness of jumbled mountains, Serranias del Burro. Beyond that ran El Rio Bravo, which
yanquis
called the Rio Grande. Contraband flowed between Mexico and Reconstruction America by the routes least likely to be discovered; and if you didn't have guaranteed passage through the Serranias, your most likely discovery was death. You would probably not discover the ruined dude ranch from which the contraband flowed.

The man who could guarantee passage, or oblivion, dismounted at almost the same moment when Ted Quantrill stepped from his hovercycle. In well-bred Spanish he said to his wrangler, "Let him cool off slowly," and bestowed a pat on the neck of his lathered polo pony. The little stallion was an unmarked golden brown; a sorrel. His owner took great pleasure in surrounding himself with variations on the sorrel theme, for he, Felix Sorel, enjoyed a golden lifestyle. When Anglos called him Sorrel, he enjoyed that as well.

Born to wealthy Marxists in Guadalajara, Felix Sorel grew from a handsome athletic child into a golden opportunity for Mexico's soccer hopes—an opportunity that country lost when Sorel's father arranged his education in Cuba. Felix Sorel put Cuba in the World Cup semifinals in 1996, then toured several countries as an honored guest. No one doubted that Sorel would become a millionaire forward on whatever team he chose, until the Sinolnd War flared. World War IV embittered young Sorel chiefly because it interfered with his career. Naturally, he blamed the US/RUS allies for the war.

Sorel vanished during the Cuban-based invasion of Florida; was reported dead twice; then reappeared in Cartagena at the war's end as the guest of a Frenchman from Marseilles. Sorel could not have been an honored guest in that context: it is hard to honor a man by entertaining him on the profits from heroin sales.

Yet Mexico, little damaged by the war and enriched by its oil sales to desperate North America, was anxious to honor Sorel. The media reported that he had put on too much weight, and Sorel proved critically sensitive about it when giving interviews. Felix Sorel returned to Mexico and his adoring fans by executive jet, and promised that he would'be down to a decent weight in the near future. He shed ten kilos of that weight soon after he breezed through Mexican customs, simply by removing the bags of pure heroin, twenty million pesos' worth of it, from around his waist. His gut pads, and the media hype surrounding them, had provided the perfect cover.