Chapter Five
The Sino-American War sure was a hungry thing. The Sino ate up all of our natural resources just like it ate up our sons, our fathers, our brothers. Then it chewed on all of us during the nuclear winter after the Yellowstone Knockout. It even devoured five whole states. Left nothing behind but salvage.
—Former President Jack Kanton
On the 28th Anniversary of the Yellowstone Knockout
March 30, 2057
(i)
The train rolled into Buzzkill, Nebraska after sunset on Thursday night, a day and a half after I used the stunner on Wren. The buildings of the town tumbled together, all squat and gaudy, painted in bright colors. The Hindu elephant god, Ganesha, dressed up like a cowboy, welcomed us from a neon billboard glowing brightly thanks to Eterna batteries. Across the way slumped a hotel painted an eye-biting yellow. A mural of Sita and Rama covered the side. I knew who they were ’cause my friend Satya Nayar did a report on The Ramayana in the fourth grade. Anju also gave me an education, though she’d see me get uncomfortable and switch topics. I’d found the stories interesting, but being Roman Catholic, learning about other gods felt blasphemous.
However, I’d studied enough European history to know religious intolerance led to mass murder, and I wasn’t going to sin by letting hate and fear govern me. So I went out of my way to befriend people of other cultures, including those from a religion that didn’t just have one or two other gods, but millions. Besides, I’d grown up surrounded by Hindus.
The Sino had cut the U.S. population in half, and the Sterility Epidemic didn’t help things any. Employers couldn’t run their businesses without employees, so President Jack relaxed immigration laws and brought over anyone who wanted to come. Mostly, East Indians had answered the call. India hadn’t been pulled into the Sino, and their country was overflowing with folks. As we’ve seen throughout history, immigrant labor is more fluid and more desperate. A lot of Hindus ended up in the Juniper, so in the territories, we had cowgirls and two kinds of Indians, Native Americans and Hindus. Ironic.
Before the Yellowstone Knockout, that section of Nebraska had been empty except for a few ranches and farms, but once folks figured out it had become the edge of civilization, the city of Buzzkill sprang up overnight to handle the salvage work. Mama had told us stories about the early days of Buzzkill. She said it had been a shantytown, more tents than buildings, with stacks of salvage teetering in towers—stuff like used cabling, copper piping, wood, furniture, Nintendo ShockBoxes, and other electronics. It’d lie in piles until auctioneers could sell it off to salvage merchants who would take it east in trains or trucks. Billions of dollars and megatons of junk moved through there.
Now Buzzkill thrived on Juniper livestock and produce. Marketing people, hired by the likes of Dob Howerter and Mavis Meetchum, had convinced the Yankees that Juniper homegrown was healthier for them than anything factory farmed. And better tasting, I might add, though President Jack said Juniper beef tasted like sagebrush and sorrow.
Thanks to some bipartisan hijinks circumnavigating the 22nd Amendment, that man had four terms as president. It gave him ample opportunity to say a lot of clever things, but I never cared much for him. President Jack was no Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he gave up too quickly on the Juniper, in my opinion. First thing he did in office was sign the Masterson-Wayne Act, which officially set the states affected by the Yellowstone Knockout back to being dusty territories, barely governed.
The only real law was the cattle barons and the Outlaw Warlords. Some said Howerter was as bad as an outlaw, though he didn’t move around as much. The Warlords scrapped over territory, trade routes, and taxes. Not that there were real taxes involved, only protection money. Give them cash or they’d burn down your farm and steal your livestock.
Even though it was late, people packed the streets of Buzzkill, Yankees and Juniper folk alike. Women in rainbow saris mixed with girls in worn cowgirl leathers. Quite a party. I could smell the spicy food, and my mouth watered. The food on the train was pretty good, but it wasn’t like down-home Hindu lentils or Mexican carnitas.
The train stopped at the depot near the border of the Juniper, which was the part of Buzzkill I liked the best. Outside were stacks and stacks of computer monitors, TVs, every type of screen, from 25 centimeter slate ECDs to the 550 centimeter Sony Reality Simulator Displays. The screens showed all kinds of video—cooking shows, music Youtubes, old-timey Westerns, that new science fiction show, Altered, and, of course, Lonely Moon.
On the edges of the Juniper, electricity flickered. The screens would buzz out and go dead. Thirty seconds later, they would light back up and the parade of video would go on.
The train’s whistle howled, letting us know the engineers were transitioning from batteries to steam. The firebox prolly burned Old Growth coal, synthesized out of old-growth forests—something about the carbon in the aged wood—but of course the environmentalists were against cutting down ancient trees to use in the Juniper. Only a matter of time before Old Growth was outlawed since most Yankees cared more about old trees than Juniper people.
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.”
Wren strutted back to our seat, smiling at all the stares, murmurs, and hate. “Mutants!” My sister half-yelled the word. “Ain’t no mutants in the Juniper. Just a buncha scaredy-cat lies.”
“Quiet down, Wren,” I said, embarrassed.
I didn’t believe in mutants either, not really, but I’ll tell you what, growing up driving cattle to Hays, Kansas, there were some nights I heard things and saw things that made me think rough beasts slouched through the Juniper—creatures that God never meant to walk the earth.
Wren pulled her hat down and was asleep in seconds. I should’ve slept, but I hurt from the trauma of going to war at eight years old. And I missed my mama even though I hadn’t seen her in a long time. Two years.
And now she was gone, and I didn’t want to go back to the violence of the Juniper. I missed my slate, my bed at the Academy, Anju, and her sighs over Billy Finn. The idea of going back to the Juniper made me want to curl up into a little ball and weep.
(iii)
Even after the memories of Queenie faded away, I couldn’t sleep, and a daydream crept into my head. I was at Anju and Billy’s wedding in Ohio. There was a boy there, one of Billy’s cousins. Though he was surrounded by girls, his eyes never left my face.
It was a look that said some things were meant to be.
He excused himself from all the girls ’cause he was real kind and gentle, but when he approached me, I could see he was at a loss for words. I took his hand and said, “Yeah, I felt it, too.” We talked all night long, danced to every song until finally we left and found a bench in a deserted park in Cleveland. I snuggled into his coat as we watched the dawn come up cold on the horizon. My own boy. I wouldn’t care if he was viable or not, swear to God, just as long as he was a boy of my very own.
It was such a nice fantasy, but then I remembered a conversation I had with Sharlotte when I came home for Christmas two years before. It was just us, sitting beside the fire in the parlor. Sharlotte worked on repairing a stirrup. I talked about Robert, a fine-looking viable boy at school who never seemed to belong, viable or not. I didn’t have a chance with him ’cause girls prettier and richer than me clung to him like wood ticks.
Pine burned in the fireplace, and the smoke smelled sweet. I sat on the hearth, enjoying the warmth, talking and talking, until I realized Sharlotte had fallen silent and distracted. She was in the old rocker, her face lost in the shadows. Her leather-working tools rested on her lap. After a while, she spoke. “You’re lucky, Cavvy, to be at that school, to be with boys. Ain’t no boys around here that ain’t taken or promised or already married. If you find a boy, you know to keep him close, right?”
“Ain’t gonna be no boy for me,” I’d said. “Some nights that’s hard to think on, and other nights I don’t care at all. There’s so much more to life than romance, despite what all those cheap eBooks say.”
“It gets harder the longer you go,” Sharlotte said quietly. “Maybe it’s not so much the boys involved, maybe it’s more the desire to be wanted. To have someone look at you and to see the joy on their face and to know you yourself are the source of such happiness.”
In some ways, the generation before us had it easier. At least they’d grown up with the hope of marriage and men. For Sharlotte and me, we’d grown up knowing how unlikely it was we’d marry, and we were too Catholic for any sort of polygamy and too New Morality to be gillian.
It’d been quite the confession from Sharlotte, who generally didn’t say much. She seemed to catch herself. “However, I should hope you aren’t reading romances, eBooks or otherwise. You are there to learn, not to go off into fantasylands. For whatever reason, God is testing us, and as women, we will be strong, we will be chaste, and when the sinful thoughts come, we will let our duty and honor be the compass to guide us to calmer waters.”
“Amen,” I’d whispered.
But Sharlotte going off like that, sounding like she’d memorized a Kip Parson sermon, I knew she’d visited fantasylands of her own.
The rocking of the train finally tricked me into sleeping, until Wren jostled me awake. “We’re getting off in McCook, Princess. We have people to meet and things to do. Or like we say in Amarillo, things to meet and people to do.”
“Don’t call me princess,” I growled. I didn’t want to leave my dreams. Out in the real world I was fearful, sick with sadness, and I had no idea who we had to meet or how we were going to get from McCook to Burlington in a day.
Worse than all that, I was going to leave the safety of the train for the hell and harshness of the Juniper.
My troubled homeland.