Angels of Vengeance: The Disappearance Novel 3 (39 page)

At least it made him feel better about his own manifest inadequacies. He was the type who loved to crack wise about Dubya before the Wave. Now he imagined a pantheon of departed American presidents, looking down on him, smacking their foreheads in constant aggravation and cursing, ‘What a fucking moron!’

The commercial breaks had likewise changed greatly since ’03. Many of the spots were taken by the Advertising Council. A particularly entertaining one tonight featured an African-American male doing pull-ups for the camera and stating that he didn’t need to take his heart medication because he was just fine. As he hoisted up into the camera for the last time, he could be seen twitching before dropping off the bars and out of view with a loud thud. It ended with a reminder to go see your doctor and take care of your heart.

The ads for private businesses tended to be hyper local. One shaky camcorder spot featured a large man in bib overalls rocking back and forth on his feet, trying to convince folks that they needed his lawn-tending services. Kip’s favourite place in Pike Place Market, Frellman’s Brats and Sausage Hut, was a little slicker. Home of the Thrown Brats, they gave you a fishing net to snare the bangers out of the air.

He was surprised to see a lengthy, much more professional-looking ad for Cesky Enterprises’ new prestige apartment project in the renovated Smith Tower. It reminded him of the days when television advertising wasn’t a cottage industry.

‘What did Jed want to talk about, honey?’ Barbara asked when they had finished eating.

‘Oh, I’ve had him and Sarah working on what we might do with all those people in the camps back east,’ Kipper declared, around licking his fingers. He knew he couldn’t tell her the real reason Culver had called in, to try to bully him into sending Agent Monroe to Fort Hood.

‘They’re mostly women and children, aren’t they?’ said his wife.

‘Mostly. There’s a couple of old geezers in there. And we’ve got another camp full of fighters who survived New York. They’re more of a problem. But most of them have ties to the women and children.’

Barb finished her wine and thought about pouring another one, before deciding against it. She placed the empty glass carefully on the coffee table, next to her plate.

‘Can’t send them home, then?’

‘Not all of them, no,’ Kip sighed. ‘A lot of places in Europe, if that’s where they hailed from, won’t have them back. And a lot of their original homelands still glow in the dark.’

The show was returning from another ad break, but Barb used the remote to mute it.

‘And I’ll bet Jed is worried about how you sell the idea of letting them stay,’ she ventured.

‘Hell, I’m worried about that myself. Honestly, they don’t deserve to stay. If he had his way, he’d stick them on a garbage barge, tow them out past the twelve-mile line and sink them if they tried to come back.’

‘Most people would.’

‘I know. And I totally get that. But these guys were just servants, followers. After every war we’ve ever fought, we’ve eventually forgiven the enemy. It’s what makes us better than them. Stronger, I believe, in the end.’

He wondered if there could ever be forgiveness between Blackstone and himself. Probably not, if the FBI turned the case Jed Culver had made into a real indictment. Hell, it could even lead to the mad bastard trying to secede. But Kipper didn’t see that he had any choice. If there was some link between the Governor of Texas and the Emir’s forces in Manhattan, the President had to maintain as much distance from the investigation as possible. When they finally went public, there could be no suggestion of political interference. Jed, however, wanted to handle the whole thing in as Machiavellian a fashion as possible.

‘Why?’ asked Barb. She turned around to face him on the couch.

‘Huh?’ She’d surprised him. Was she talking about Jed – about Monroe even? Had he mumbled something in a beer haze? ‘Er, why what, Barb?’

‘Why does it make us stronger than them?’ she said, dragging him back on topic.

Kip’s heart sank. He really didn’t want to get into this, not on pork chop night. On the other hand, at least he hadn’t inadvertently blown the Blackstone investigation . . .

‘A couple of things,’ he began. ‘The strong forgive, because they can, and because holding on to their hatred makes no sense past a certain point. You beat your enemy, and then you move on. If you can’t do that, you become as obsessed with your never-ending war as he probably was to begin with. You start to see everything as part of the war. In the end, you’ll lose your life to it, as surely as you would getting killed on the battlefield.’

He finished his own drink, but unlike his wife he decided to have another one. He stood up to go to the kitchen, picking up her glass too as he did so. Barb shook her head.

‘I thought we might go to bed early,’ she said. ‘We could snuggle a bit.’

‘I’m all up for snuggling,’ he replied, heading for the door while at the same time finding he was warming to his little dissertation. ‘But, you know, the other thing is, we can
use
these people. We can use everyone who’s willing to put up their hands and declare for us at the moment. Those fighters, if they want to live here, if they want to see their families again, they can damn well earn the privilege fighting for
us
. I’m more than happy to watch them get chewed up seeing off pirates on the East Coast. Plus, the intelligence guys tell me we can turn them and send them out pretty much anytime we want. As long as they’ve made the commitment to us. They become our weapons.’

‘And Texas?’

‘I have no idea,’ said Kip unconvincingly. ‘Jed’s forever scheming against Blackstone. He leaves me out of it, thank God. In some ways they’re made for each other. But I’m not sure exactly what he’s up to at the moment. Guess I’ll find out tomorrow. Gotta say, though, my gut feeling is that I should just go down there and have it all out with Mad Jack myself.’

His wife looked sceptical. ‘Kip, he’s such an asshole.’

‘Yeah, but maybe he’s a well-intentioned asshole. I really think he only wants what’s best for the country. It’s just that, you know, he’s an asshole about it.’

‘Well, I’m sure if you fly down and tell him that, man to man,’ she said, cocking one eyebrow at him, ‘he’ll totally come around to your way of seeing things.’

He could tell that she’d be just as hard to convince as his Chief of Staff. The more he thought about what Jed had told him, however, the more likely it seemed that he was going to have to go down and confront Blackstone, even if it was all behind closed doors. Because if the FBI did confirm a link to Baumer and New York, there was no way Mad Jack would go quietly. He’d scream and kick back and fight this thing every inch of the way.

It made the option of sending somebody like Special Agent Caitlin Monroe down there even more tempting. Not to whack the guy, but perhaps to ease him out of power quietly, informally. Kipper was adamant, however: Monroe was going nowhere near Fort Hood.

Forget about coming up with a plan to sneak into Blackstone’s lair at Fort Hood. She might not live that long. There were five dogs in the pack. Not wolves or coyotes, but vicious and hungry-looking ferals, with none of the light of kindness of man’s best friend in their eyes. They had been born to the wild and had the rank stench of it about them. They circled in front of her, growling. She was almost backed up against the brick wall in a laneway behind the supermarket. The pack could not get behind her to rush in and snap at her heels, but nor did she have anywhere to fall back to.

Sofia tracked the largest of the beasts with her handgun. She could shoot it down and drive away the other dogs, but to do so would bring the soldiers running. There were two patrols out on the streets of Temple that she knew of this evening. They were proper American soldiers, and as much as she held no fears that harm would come her way from them, the Mexican teenager had no intention of being taken into custody, protective or otherwise. Shooting the dogs, while not out of the question, would not be ideal. She hefted the machete in her other hand, waiting for the right moment to make that choice.

She knew it was coming. The growls were getting lower and more intense, turning into short, aggressive barks. Her flesh crawled, an ancient reflex she was powerless to control. She had learned this when she was last in Texas. A brave woman was not fearless. She simply refused to become a prisoner of her fears, to let them rule her. The feelings that coursed through her body, the racing heartbeat, tensed muscles, the way all of her senses seemed to open wide and let the world flood in, were all symptomatic of the fear that wanted to cripple and kill her. But she’d survived on the trail because she had learned from her father, from Maive and Trudi and the others, that the very same feelings could be channelled into a killing rage.

And so she waited.

The pack snarled and skinned their lips back from long yellow fangs. She fancied she could smell the foul odour of their breath, and even in the darkness there was light enough from the moon and stars that their eyes shone like silver dollars laid on the orbs of a dead man. She knew the attack was moments away when two of the animals moved, attempting to flank her on both sides. Ears pinned back, they lowered themselves onto their haunches, where massive knots of muscle and meat quivered and twitched with anticipation of the kill. The sound of their growling slowed, like a powerful engine winding down.

Sophia took a long, deep breath.

The pack leader lunged forward ripping out a fusillade of barks, snapping its jaw like a threshing machine, as its pack-mates launched themselves in from the side. They came flying at the girl as though hurled from catapults. But she had already moved, leaping towards the dog to her left as she swung the machete in a vicious blur of sharpened steel that connected with the animal just below its ear. The sickening crunch of blade on bone and gristle was simultaneous with the horrified, outraged howl of the beast and the crack of the pack leader’s skull as it impacted the brick wall where she’d been standing. A fraction of a second later, and she heard the dull thud of the third animal colliding with the top dog as she used the momentum of her first strike to draw the blade down and out while she pivoted around for an upward stroke that sliced off the snout of the nearest dog, halfway along its jawline.

The attack collapsed in a hideous discord of animal shrieks and yelps. She was drenched in hot blood and urine; the dogs’ and her own. But the threat had dissolved in a heartbeat as those that could flee did so. The beast she had all but decapitated spasmed at her feet. She brought one booted foot down on its head in a hammer kick, telling herself she was putting the mutt out of its misery as her father had always taught her. But knowing that, in a darker place, she was punishing the thing for having attacked her, taking vengeance out on a dangerous but defeated enemy.

And then it really was over.

The protests of the vanquished pack drifted further away until she could hear them no more. Adrenaline backwashed through her nervous system, bringing with it nausea and tremors. She had to lean up against the wall and take a minute to breathe deeply and slowly. For the first time since Sofia had realised she was being hunted, she heard the twittering song of night-birds again. She listened hard for any sound of footfall or human voices. But heard nothing. The short, savage caterwauling din of a dogfight was not unusual in Temple, as she had learned.

Time to move.

The grocery market lay next to a railway line that ran through the eastern side of town. On the far side of the tracks, a wasteland of charred ruins stretched away to the horizon. A few houses stood undamaged, but the further away from the train tracks she looked, the more the scene recalled the devastation of a city beset by war. Sofia did not dwell on the reason the firestorm that had burnt so many acres of housing had died out before leaping to this side of the tracks. Fire, she had learned, was as arbitrary as a tornado, sometimes wiping out one half of a street while leaving the other half untouched. Having survived the dog pack, she did not care to spend a second longer than was necessary contemplating the ruins of Temple. She moved off, uncomfortable and a little disgusted in her blood- and piss-stained clothes.

The market had been built right up to the edge of the road surface and a large tarmac remained largely free of vegetation. A few hardy weeds poked through cracks in the concrete here and there, but unlike in so much of this ghost town, she did not have to wade through waist-high grass in which any number of dangers might lay.

The doors of the market were jammed open. They had attempted to close on a trolley on the morning of the Disappearance. No moonlight penetrated the interior. Sofia pushed the trolley out of the way, forcing it over the pile of clothes lying on the floor just behind it. After holstering her Magnum and flicking on a small flashlight, she could see the remains of the Disappeared everywhere. The authorities had not been through here to clean them up, and nor had there been any attempt at salvage. That made sense. Unlike her, the
federales
could rely on being properly fed and watered, and by now, Sofia knew, most of the contents of this store would be unusable. The fresh food had all rotted away or been eaten by vermin years ago, so too with most of the packaged food. But her needs were simple.

Crossing herself and murmuring a prayer for the dead, she stepped deeper into the gloom. Her senses were still amplified after the fight for her life. She could hear rats scurrying deep inside the market building, but nothing larger than that.

The first of her provisions she found in the third aisle. Five-gallon plastic bottles of water. The contents would taste foul after all this time, but water did not go off as long as the seal on the bottles remained unbroken. With no running water in the motel she’d chosen to lay up in tonight, she had no choice but to seek out potable supplies. Food was more of a challenge. On the journey to KC, they had hunted and trapped wherever possible, but occasionally they came across stores of food preserved well enough to use. Sofia knew what to look for, thanks to Trudi Jessup, who had schooled all of them in the shelf life of canned and dried groceries.

Into her backpack went half-a-dozen cans of corn, a tin of peaches, two packets of vacuum-sealed lentils and – the Lord Jesus be praised – one large canned Christmas cake. A real score. She checked the tins for dents and swelling and the packets of dried food for any sign of insect infestation. She would do a more thorough check once back in her room, but as an experienced scavenger, she was confident she’d just secured enough food and water for three days.

Once upon a time she would’ve thought nothing of walking the ten or twelve blocks back to her new hideout. A trip of maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. But returning from the market this night, she was heavily weighed down as she negotiated a treacherous passage through more streets overgrown with vegetation and blocked by wreckage and fallen trees. Advancing in short bursts of movement. Scurrying from cover to cover. Always watching and listening to avoid being discovered, Sofia took over two hours to return to the Economy Inn, a two-storey motel of brown bricks and weather-faded trim on the southern edge of Temple’s town centre. It was close enough for her to feel as though she was in some sort of contact with the
federales
, but far enough removed from their comings and goings that she didn’t have to remain in hiding every hour of the day.

Despite the chill of the night, she was sweating by the time she got home.

Home.

How sad that she should think of the Economy Inn as her home.

Although a young teen in years, Sofia Pieraro was experienced in the dictates of survival. She did not hurry into the motel; she remained in cover where she could observe from a safe distance. Having killed bandits who returned to their own camp sites without taking the precaution of checking for ambushes laid in their absence, she knew to wait and watch for at least an hour. Even though, in this instance, she was certain long before then that it was safe to enter, Sofia cleaved to the lessons of the past. Only when a full hour had passed with no sign of anybody lying in wait for her did she complete the last, short leg of her return trip.

Even then she was not done with caution. Leaving her supplies at the front desk, she retrieved the AK-47 from where she had stashed it, behind a fire hose in a closet on the ground floor. Without night-vision equipment, she had to fix the little flashlight to the barrel with a couple of thick rubber bands she carried for that purpose. Safety off, finger on the trigger, selector to full auto, she performed the last rite of her careful passage back into hiding: effecting an entry into her motel room, as though she knew it to be occupied by an intruder.

It wasn’t, and after a quick sweep of the few places where somebody could be hiding, she collected her food and water and shut herself in.

First priority was to clean herself up and dispose of her soiled clothing. She wouldn’t waste water on laundry, not when clothes could be scavenged so easily from right here in the motel. She stripped off, washed herself down with a cup of water and a hand towel and soap from the bathroom. Changed into a clean pair of jeans and a dark blue flannel shirt. Bundled up her dirty clothing and tossed it into the room next door. Working by moonlight, she fed herself from the dwindling supplies she had brought with her, leaving it until morning to properly examine the cans and packages she’d taken from the market. Dinner consisted of two muesli bars, a sachet of protein gel, and two cups of water.

She was exhausted but wired, still coming down from the shock of fighting off the pack of wild dogs. Part of her, the weak, unworthy part, longed to crawl into bed and dream of happier days. But there could be no happiness for her, not while there was breath in the body of the man she blamed for the death of her family, perhaps even for her father. The tyrant Blackstone might not have driven the car that ran him down, but he had certainly driven Miguel Pieraro to Kansas City, where he had perished.

Wrapping herself around the small, dark furnace of her loathing for Jackson Blackstone, Sofia crawled into bed with the transistor radio, now tuned to one of the two talk stations broadcasting from Killeen. Other local stations played music, and she might well have been able to calm down and sleep while listening to one of them. But she found the talk stations an excellent way of learning about Fort Hood and Killeen. Not so much about the Hood’s interminable feuds with Seattle or its worries about Roberto Morales, Caribbean pirates, migrants and West Coast liberals, all of which seemed to exercise the imaginations of the people phoning in. Rather, she was interested in the calls that gave her an insight into how things actually worked over here.

She knew, for instance, that all the rumours back in KC about only white people being able to walk the streets were wrong. There were many African-American families, Asians and even some Latinos living in Blackstone’s capital. But they were all military people who had joined the Texas Defense Force. Of the settler families who had come here, fewer hailed from all over the world compared with Kansas City. There were no Indians and Pakistanis working on the railways in Killeen. No Arab doctors in the hospitals. No Mexican farmers tending to their own associates, but there were hundreds of them working on government farms that sounded similar, in some ways, to those her family had worked on as refugees in Australia. But very, very different in other ways. On the government farm outside Sydney, they had been free to come and go when not working, whereas here, workers seemed to move only between the fields and the barracks that housed them. Sofia knew this because of callers like ‘Estelle’, who was right then complaining to the host of the midnight shift about the number of ‘beaners’ she had seen walking around, as free as birds, when she’d done her shopping that morning.

‘
What I want to know is where were their bosses and foremen, Ray? Where were they? I didn’t see ’em. I didn’t see ’em anywhere. Do we let these people run around like this nowadays? Is that how things are now? Just like Seattle, where anything goes? Because you can see what happens when anything goes, Ray. It goes to hell in a handbasket
.’

Sofia had heard this complaint a few times in the last day. The good people of Killeen and Fort Hood seemed most put out that they should be inconvenienced by frequent traffic stops and checkpoints, while ‘beaners’ and ‘servants’ seemed to have the run of the town.

Ray assured Estelle that he was certain Governor Blackstone would not condone a situation where anything goes. Governor Blackstone would make sure that Estelle had nothing to worry about. Ray, Sofia had learned, spent a good deal of his time on air assuring Estelle and her ilk of Governor Blackstone’s best intentions.

Estelle seemed unconvinced, but Sofia was satisfied. This was the fourth caller she had heard complaining about unescorted ‘servants’ being allowed to wander around the town unsupervised. That was interesting, thought Sofia. She added it to a growing list of interesting facts she had learned from the radio or gleaned from her conversations with Dave Bowman.