American Apocalypse Wastelands (41 page)

He listened, nodded, and looked away for a bit when I finished.

“You ever notice that you always see at least one hawk in the air when she's around?”

I thought about that.
Damn
, he was right. “Yeah. So?”

“You know why the aerial feeds we get are in black and white?” He didn't wait for my answer. “I think it's because hawks don't see in color.”

I waited for more. There wasn't any. “So are you going to share, Max? It's obvious she was busy ice-skating inside your brain, too. What did you see?”

I didn't think he was going to answer. I was okay with that; hell, it was his head.

He hesitated, but then he said, “It was the strangest thing, G. I guess the closest thing I can come up with is that it was like running down a hallway lined with huge flat panels, each one with a different image. They showed me what I needed to know, where I should go next.”

I knew it! His was different, like he had the next version of the software. For a second I felt jealous and angry. Then I realized that he was welcome to it. Hell, once I got rolling I wanted to turn the damn thing off anyway.

Max must have seen the change flash across my face.

“It creeps me out a little too, G. I don't know what to make of her. We could always unplug her…permanently,” he said. He knew he was taking a risk saying that to me,
since he knew I had a soft spot for kids. And even if Freya wasn't a kid, she sure as hell looked like one to me. But I also understood what he really meant: If she turns into trouble, we have the option of turning her out.

“Max, you forgot to mention that she says she's a goddess.”

“Yeah. Shelli thinks she is Freya incarnate. That's why the Burners are interested. You do know that Shelli is a Burner?”

“Yeah. She also makes a great apple pie.”

He laughed. “Yeah, there is that. You think she's a goddess?”

I was tempted to say, “Shelli?” Instead I answered as honestly as I could. “Max, I don't know. If she is, then she is not a major one. I mean, come on, where's the cape? I looked up ‘Freya' a couple of days ago. The Valhalla thing sounds cool. To answer your question, Max, I don't know and I don't really care. I do think the kid from that old movie
Firestarter
would be a lot more fun.”

 

The biggest problem about the Burner meeting was deciding where to have it. All of us rallying into the conference room at the station would be guaranteed to draw attention and generate gossip. The town hall would have made it an official meeting and expanded the guest list. The pastor seemed to be a fairly tolerant man, but heading a discussion about the powers of kid goddesses might be asking too much. There were other pastors in town who, if they heard about it, would be racing each other to burn Freya at the stake. I wasn't sure she would burn, but by the time everyone figured that out, I would have shot a couple of pastors and a handful of zealots.

So, Shelli decided to have a dinner party. As Night and I were getting ready for it, I asked her, “Do you think Shelli will burn everything she cooks?”

“No. It will be fine. Wear the clean shirt I washed. Not that one.”

This is getting pretty formal
, I thought. I decided to skip wearing body armor but I brought it with me. I remembered the last time we had met with the Burners. It had been tense, but there had been serious money on the table then. Now it was just a goddess.

We were supposed to be there at 1900. We didn't make it on time. We were late due to Night's inability to find the right shoes. This was her first ever dinner party, and she wanted to look right.

Freya and I sat on the steps outside waiting for her.

“Anyone tell you what this is about, kid?”

“No, but I know.”

“Okay. What kind of shoes are you wearing?”

She stuck out her feet.

It was the same pair of moccasins she had on when we found her.

We sat there silently until Night came out.

We were driving Tommy's car because ours was low on gas.

I had tried to fill it up two days before, but the pumps were down because there was no power. The guy running the place said he would fill my car and set aside a five-gallon container for me when the power came back on. He even told me “no extra fee” for doing it. If he was gouging locals, we were going to need to have a talk.

We got to Shelli's house late and had to park on the street. I'd recently given Night my opinion of the places
she wanted me to look at. The house I liked was three doors down from Shelli. When I told Night, she wanted to know why that one. Then we—well, she—had spent two hours discussing the relative merits of each one. Damn, that had been boring. I wanted to scream, “Just pick a fucking house!” but that probably would not have been cool.

We knocked on the front door, and Shelli let us in. The house was nice. Red brick, old, fireplace, wood floors. Anybody who had been an adult during the real-estate boom saw houses as resalable objects first, homes second. Even I, who had been priced out of the market since I was born, had not been immune to the mindset Shelli had decorated the place very New Age. Not a surprise. I just knew there had to be an Indian dream catcher hanging somewhere. One of my coworkers had one in her cube when I worked at the mortgage company. I had hung a plastic spider in its web. She was not amused.

The Burners were sitting in the living room talking. As we came in, I noticed there was a shotgun hanging on the wall of the entryway. Max's work probably. We took off our coats, and it was time to meet the Burners.

It was the same team as before. The woman still looked good, too. We did our greetings and settled down in the living room. It was civilized—almost pre-Crash normal, except for the kerosene lamp that was throwing more shadows on the walls than any electric light ever did.

I was almost getting used to their smell. It was going to be interesting to see if we could keep enough K-1 on hand this winter, let alone come up with enough safe lamps to burn it.

Night and Shelli hugged like it had been a year since they had last seen each other. I nodded at Max, who was sitting in a leather chair next to the fire.

The Burners had gone completely silent. It was total focus-on-Freya time. They walked over to her, since she had made no move to come to them.

The woman looked over at Shelli. “You're right. My God, I can see it!”

The man with her began squinting. I guess he wasn't seeing it.

The woman asked, “Are you the . . . Freya?”

“Yes.”

The woman put her hand to her throat, where a charm of some sort dangled. “Oh my. Well, my name is Electra and this”—she indicated the man next to her—“ is Burning Sun.” She stuck out her hand tentatively.

Freya ignored it. Instead she replied, “No, you are Denise from New Jersey, and this is Brad from Oklahoma.” Then she laughed. So did I. Denise gave me the evil eye and dropped her hand.

Brad looked stunned. “How did you know that?”

Freya didn't answer. Denise did. “Because she is a goddess.” Even I could hear the unspoken,
you idiot
.

I thought that was funny, too. Oh well, I was never good at this kind of thing.

Freya walked off toward the kitchen.

I told Shelli, who seemed a bit perturbed about how things were going, “If you have apple pie in there, you better go rescue it before she eats all of it.” Shelli muttered something and disappeared after Freya.

We all stared at each for a while and then Denise asked, “So . . . how is the power situation out here?”

I groaned inwardly and sat down at the end of the sofa closest to the fire.
Maybe dinner will be served soon,
I thought. I sat and listened while Night and Max—it was his woman's house, so he had to—engaged the Burners in idle chitchat. I watched the flames dance until Shelli called us to the table.

The table looked nice with a white tablecloth and candles. We even had two forks. Freya joined us and ignored the Burners' attempts to draw her into the conversation. I was okay with that, anything to make the evening shorter.

After a bite of venison, Denise tried another tack. “I suppose you all are starving for news out here.” I wasn't the only one who noted a hint of patronization in her tone.

I spoke up. “Yeah, how's the war going out West?”

Years ago, the Burners had been very successful in taking control of large parts of the West, so successful that a previous administration had declared them terrorists. Following that, the government committed serious resources to shutting down the Burners, including targeted assassinations. The government was very good at that sort of thing. It had had years of practice in various countries by then.

The Burners had regrouped, moved part of the organization underground, renamed its legitimate wing, and gone after political control. They called it the “Irish option.” But it hadn't worked out. They weren't the only ones struggling for a piece of the federal carcass, and they had overestimated how dead the body was. A leg or two might have been gnawed off, but it wasn't going to give up the tax revenue from outlying regions that easily.

Brad turned to me. “We are making significant gains in Southern California, especially now with our new alliance with the Mexican Peoples Front. The clash in Oregon with the Fed storm troopers is entering a new phase, and we fully expect to regain control of the Portland area sometime in the next month.”

Denise continued where he left off. “There have been some setbacks. The Fed's hunter-killer teams are quite good. That's why we need you, Freya.” Here she went into sincere projection overdrive.

“We need your blessing. We need you to help inspire those who believe in you. You are the embodiment of so much of what we believe and are working for. Help us, Freya.”

We all looked at the kid. She looked back at Denise.

“You do not understand, do you?”

“What, Freya? Tell us. What do we not understand?” Denise whispered this, leaning forward, eyes glittering. I felt like kicking her in the shins under the table just for the hell of it.

“That you have already lost. For what is coming, you have neither the fire nor the steel. You do not grasp that when the world turns, it is people like you who will be ground beneath the wheel. Now go. Fate awaits you.”

To say that put a damper on things would be an understatement. After they got over their shock, Denise tried to put a better spin on it. The man listened to her try to salvage things for a moment or two and then tossed his napkin on the table. “Enough! We go.”

Night and I sat at the table with Freya while Max and Shelli walked them to the door.

I looked at Freya. “Way to go. They probably would have fed you cookies every day.”

“Those two? They will be dead in an hour. Do you think Shelli will serve the pie now?”

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

The next day I rolled into work. The weather had turned chilly and the clouds were thick, dark, and low. It smelled like snow. There was a Virginia State Police car in front of the station. That was unusual, but not abnormal.

They had come by twice a week for a while. Lately it dropped off a bit. Gas shortage was what one trooper had said. They also were patrolling two to a car now. The backup came in handy, and it kept the troopers busy when they could only fuel half the cars.

Everyone fell silent when I walked in. I did the greeting thing. The two troopers recognized me and gave me a nod and then went back to what they were talking about. Whatever it was, it had Diesel, Max, and one of the locals listening raptly.

“So you have no idea who those two were or what they were doing around here?”

Max answered, “No idea. I can check around if you want.”

One of the troopers, a tall, older guy, waved his hand. “Don't waste a lot of energy on it. That was a Fed hit. I
wouldn't give the Feds the sweat off my balls if they were dying of thirst.” We all chuckled at that, as lame and old as it was.

“Yeah,” he continued, “while they're running around roasting people from the skies, I don't see them doing squat about the grid being down. Y'all know about that, right?”

“We heard some rumors. Then again, power is mostly down nowadays up here.”

The local—what was his name? Frank, I think—chimed in following Max's comment, “Them stupid sonsabitches ain't good for shit.”

We all nodded at that little pearl of wisdom.

The trooper continued, “The whole damn thing is down now. The Feds are saying it was the Burners' fault. Them Burners were always going on about how we need a ‘new power paradigm' or some such bullshit.”

The other trooper added, “The Zones in D.C. lost it two days ago. Things are already getting weird down there. Word is, it might be weeks before it comes up again. If it's more than a week, y'all can expect company up here. Them people ain't gonna stay put if they start getting hungry.”

Max asked them, “What's the state planning to do? You have a containment policy?”

Both troopers laughed. The older one answered, “Shit. There are almost two million people in them Zones. Maybe more.”

His partner nodded. “They start moving, ain't nothing going to stop them. If they really start moving, well, me and Jim here, we're headed to a cabin we got with our families. I am not firing on hungry American citizens and their kids. Nope. No way.”

They chatted a bit more and then headed over to the diner for the free lunch that Shelli gave them. As the door closed on the departing two troopers, Max swore, “Well . . . damn.” That pretty much summed it up, I thought.