Cindy French nodded, apparently pleased that she’d noticed. ‘We did a lot of it ourselves,’ she replied, which Sofia took to mean the trucking companies, not her three friends in the rigs behind them. ‘Had to clear a path through for the trucks, of course. But all that crap had to be moved because of ambushes as well. You get a convoy coming into a place like this, especially if they’re fully loaded, all those big trucks slowing down - well, it makes a tempting target for raiders. And big piles of crap by the side of the road, that’s a pretty handy ambush spot, right? So over time we did our best to clear it out. And here’s the thing - you remember before when I told you about the feds turning a blind eye out this way? That wasn’t entirely true. They sent the army engineers down here to check on our clearance work, and even assigned a company of soldiers and a couple of ‘dozers to bring it up to spec!’ She smacked the steering wheel with her open palm, as if the story had amazed even herself.
Sofia nodded and tried to look sympathetic, but she found the prospect of ambush out in the wastelands unsettling. She’d had her fill of those, from both sides.
‘So there’s nobody here, in Emporia?’ she asked. ‘No soldiers or militia or anything?’
Cindy ground down through the gears as they entered the centre of town. ‘No, it’s too far out from KC to be worth securing. But like I said, it’s still a little too close to the city for any bandits or freebooters to feel completely comfortable setting up shop around here. Sometimes the army or the militia will make a temporary camp out this way, for deeper patrols into Kansas and Oklahoma, but for the most part, it’s a ghost town.’
Sofia’s concern must’ve been obvious, because Cindy reached over and patted her on the arm. Again, the teenager didn’t flinch. Something about this older woman disarmed her, and that alone made her a bit nervous. Sofia Pieraro wasn’t a touchy-feely type of person.
‘Don’t you worry yourself about it, girl. There was another group of drivers came through here yesterday evening. We spoke to them on the radio before I got to the diner. The town’s empty. And safe.’
With the toxic effect of the nightmare still coursing through her nervous system, Sofia found the reassurance difficult to accept. But she had no choice. She was beholden to Cindy and the others in the convoy for her transport south. There was no point arguing about the details.
They drove through a ground mist thick enough to almost obscure the road surface. Even at this hour of the morning, it seemed to lie all over the town, and the bright halogen lamps of Cindy’s Kenworth were at just the right height to illuminate the fog bank without actually piercing it. The effect on the deserted town was creepy enough to have her shivering again. After her dream, she could very easily imagine the doors of all these haunted homes creaking open as the soulless, re-embodied corpses of the Disappeared shambled out into the night. Gooseflesh convulsed up and down her arms and across her shoulders.
‘Spooky, isn’t it?’ grinned Cindy. ‘I hate coming through here by myself. Almost never do it, in fact. But we should take a break, and you really need to hit the stores. This is the last secure stop we’ll be able to make before we get to the federal depot down in Wellington.’
Sofia hugged herself against the cold she could no longer feel.
She wondered if it was possible to get a gun here.
22
DARWIN, NORTHERN TERRITORY
The recently retired smuggler and zone runner was drunk, but not ruinously so. You needed terrifying quantities of alcohol to drop three hundred pounds of dense, hard-muscled, pachyderm meat. But as he shouldered his way through a dozen or so sailors who were heading into the pub, he had reason to believe that six bottles of the Duckpond Tavern’s proprietary lager may have left him a couple of sheets into the wind.
The sailors, decked out in civvies, were off the amphibious assault carrier USS
One of the sailors caught him before Newton’s laws took hold. ‘Whoa there, big guy!’
The sailors were pretty good about it, but nothing would distract them from their appointed rounds. The Rhino was passed and pushed through their group until he staggered out onto the kerb, here made up of old railway timbers, where more drinkers stood around the huge, open-sided shed that was the Duckpond Tavern, laughing, cursing and roaring. A steady trade in empties and newly filled glasses continued through the vast openings, where slatted wooden bi-fold shutters had been lashed back to allow a tepid breeze some chance of flushing out the crowded beer hall.
A couple of the brown-shirted local cops meandered past, showing zero interest in enforcing the city ordinances against drinking in the street. They’d have been more zealous in the old town, but the tavern sat squarely in the middle of twenty blocks of warehouses, factories, cheap boarding houses, brothels and bars that had filled up a couple of acres of waste ground behind the old Darwin Duckpond marina. Even now the Rhino thought he could hear the grumble of earth-moving equipment and the dull concussion of explosive excavation work a short distance south, at the site of the abandoned convention centre. A giant wharf was going in there to service the Combined Fleet of the newly formed Pacific Alliance.
The Rhino decided to head in exactly the opposite direction from the cops. Turning awkwardly, he fought the head spins that threatened to send him spiralling into the old railway sleepers - a Wild West design touch that extended only as far as the corners of the tavern. If he fell, drunk, to the ground beyond that, he’d face-plant in the mud and the brown-shirts probably wouldn’t ignore him. Besides, he had a powerful need to get something other than Duckpond Lager into his belly, and there was a takeaway rib joint around the next corner that did a Rhino-size newspaper cone filled to the brim with buffalo wings in hot sauce. His stomach started rumbling a split second before he’d even made a conscious decision to drop his last ten bucks on a feed there.
Raising himself up to his considerable height, he sucked in a deep breath and laid a course for Blue Smoke Ribs and Barbecue.
*
New Town, Shah told her, was even more crowded than usual because of the fleet’s arrival in port. Thousands of US personnel, and as many allied sailors and Marines
Music mingled with the scent of fried meat, which was strong enough to overpower the rank odour of thousands of men and women all rubbing up hard against each in the hot, dank air. Not all of the city was the same, she knew. There was old money here in Darwin, and new money that didn’t care for the sour stench of the gutter. They would have their own enclaves. But New Town was all gutter. It was where the city’s considerable population of the transient and the displaced gathered to feel as if they still had some purchase on the world. Every port town she’d ever passed through was the same. Class mattered in these sorts of places. Her father would have understood that as soon as he drew in the first breath of fetid air. He’d have stayed in one of the old colonial neighbourhoods, somehow, but he’d have done his best work down here, in the worst part of town.
As Julianne weaved through the heaving crowds she heard American voices everywhere. Enlisted men and women. The proles of the service. Unless they were sending their money home, the officers would most likely take their leisure in Darwin’s older, more exclusive quarter, spending six months of accumulated pay on electronics and clothing and finer brands of firewater than the lesser ranks were inclined to shell out for. Attachment to the Combined Fleet was a much sought-after billet. It was one of the few postings in the present-day US military where you were guaranteed that your pay would arrive. Granted, payday had taken a step backward, away from electronic accounts. Post-Wave, it consisted of a petty officer or sergeant, accompanied by a pair of armed guards, counting out currency to sailors, Marines and anyone else waiting in line. But nobody here was complaining.
These idiots were just as happy to spend Australian dollars, Korean won and Japanese yen, all of which were changing hands around her, as they were American newbies. A couple of happy sailors, who looked too young to be
