the chill of the morning, she could hear some light traffic noise drifting across the rooftops. The streets immediately below her were gridlocked with car wrecks, so there was no chance of a patrol driving by. Even so, she wouldn’t be staying here long. When night fell she would move again. Somewhere a little further away from what few inhabitants there were here. She’d heard voices and the crunch of boots on broken glass at one point, sending her flying off into the bedroom, there to keep a silent vigil in the gloom until they had passed.
It had been a nerve-racking experience getting here after the gunsmith’s, but she certainly hadn’t wanted to stay in that part of town. It was very close to the interstate, but removed enough from the Federal Center that she’d worried about falling outside the protective envelope offered by their presence. Even in KC, people clustered around the heart of the city and the relatively crowded resettlement areas; it was not unknown for small raiding parties to prey on homesteads located further out. All of Sofia’s previous experience in Texas led her to imagine that it would be much worse this time, seeing as she couldn’t even trust the authorities to look after her. The
And if she ran into troopers from Blackstone’s TDF - what then?
She swore under her breath as she cleaned out the barrel of the handgun.
A song that she liked came on, and she turned up the volume on her little transistor radio, just a notch. A risk, but worth it. It was an English band. She wasn’t sure of the name, but the tune was very danceable, and it had been all over the pop stations right before she’d left home.
The table blurred in front of her eyes, and the Magnum became a silvery waterfall as tears filled her eyes. She carefully rested the pistol on the white cotton pillowcase on which she’d been cleaning it, and pushed her chair away from the table. The apartment was small, and the bedroom only a few steps away, but she found she was hurrying to throw herself onto the mattress.
Her grief had been coming like this, rolling over her in unexpected waves, ever since she’d parted company with Cindy. There was no mystery to it. Sofia had been forced to maintain an iron grip on her feelings while in the company of the other woman. Cindy’s maternal instincts were obviously aroused by her plight, no matter how fictional it might’ve been, and Sofia didn’t want her deciding that she was too much of a basket case to be left on her own. But now that she was on her own, she was free to give vent to the agonies of her soul.
The bedclothes were dishevelled and the pillow still wet from the floods of tears she had poured into it less than an hour ago. As wretched and powerless as she felt, however, as tormented by her lot as she may have been, there remained a cold, disconnected part of her mind that all but told her to get on with the business of grieving for her lost father, to get it out of the way, so that it would not interfere with what she had to do to avenge him. The callous tenor of that voice at the back of her mind did nothing to attenuate the torrent of grief pouring out of the girl. She was forced into smothering herself, so fiercely did she jam her face into the pillow to prevent the sound of her moaning cries escaping the apartment.
Alone.
She was alone in the world. Everybody she had ever loved had been taken from her. Not by the cosmic dice roll of something like the Disappearance, which would have been bad enough. No, she had lost everyone and everything to the evil of one man’s ambitions. She’d watched her beloved father hollowed out by his impotence, by his complete inability to do anything about what had happened to their family. It was almost as though having delivered her to Kansas City, he had suffered a moral collapse, and could find within himself none of the resources needed to turn around and do what he’d promised to do on the day those road agents attacked the homestead. Instead, he had tried to content himself with the idea that the
Her feelings about her father roared and rushed around her like the swift and deadly waters of the flash flood that had destroyed their party and the Mormons’ cattle in northern Texas. She felt torn one way and then the other, as likely to be dashed on the submerged rocks of her anger with him as she was to be lifted up and thrown free of danger by all that he had done for her.
She wasn’t sure how long she lay on the bed, curled into a foetal ball, racked by violent sorrow. She checked her watch and found it was well after one o’clock when this particular episode of unrestrained anguish finally abated. Fifteen minutes may have passed, perhaps as much as an hour. Undeniably though, she felt much better for having allowed it to run its course. Almost rested, in fact.
Sofia dried her eyes and rubbed her face with the sleeve of her hooded sweatshirt. She took in a deep breath, held it, before letting it go slowly, like an athlete recovering from a hard race. She shivered once, and then it was all over. She was able to return to cleaning her pistol. She methodically worked through the remainder of the process with the Magnum, before putting it aside to study the other weapons she had taken from JM Firearms.
The machete was not primarily a weapon. She had grabbed it to cut a path through the thickets of scrub and wild grass that strangled most of the city. But in a pinch the honed edge could be useful against man or beast. She gave the blade a polish, but nothing more. She was not an obsessive. For Sofia, guns and knives were simply tools. Having grown up on a farm, she’d been taught to think of them that way, and nothing had changed her opinion in the intervening years. Not even the hard necessity of having had to kill men with a firearm. They remained tools; implements for taking life.
Because she wasn’t obsessed with guns, there was much about the other weapon in front of her that she didn’t know - its name for instance. She was sure that something as particular as this would’ve had a special name. She recognised the gun, an assault rifle, as a variation of the kind she had seen some road agents and individual bandits carry at various times. An AK-47, they were known as, although this one looked like a much nastier and improved version of the old wood-and-stamped-metal machine gun preferred by peasant armies the world over. It may have come from China or somewhere in Eastern Europe, perhaps even Pakistan before the recent war there. She neither knew nor cared. What had drawn her to this weapon the moment she saw it was its reputation for reliable lethality.
During the long trek north in the spring, she had often listened to the men discussing their firearms. Adam, too, had been an invaluable teacher in this regard. Like many teenage boys, he was fascinated by guns and had studied them in much greater detail than she would ever have bothered to. Something he used to say that seemed to amuse him greatly had impressed itself upon her memory.
‘AK-47. When you absolutely, positively got to kill every motherfucker in the room …’
32
KILLEEN, TEXAS ADMINISTRATIVE DIVISION
By the time she got to Texas she was entirely someone else. Colonel Katherine Murdoch, United States Air Force - ‘Kate’ to her friends, of whom she had none in Fort Hood. Colvin had almost caught her off guard at the hotel in KC, exhausted as she was, but the flight south allowed Caitlin the chance to properly assume the role and persona of her cover. The travel requisition that got her on the C-130 flight from KC to Robert Gray Army Airfield, south-west of Fort Hood, put her on the passenger manifest in her ‘jacket’. To the flight crew, she was a USAF officer, seconded to the White House Chief of Staff in an advisory role. As she was to the feds and Texas state authorities. As she had been to Colvin and everyone she met in KC. There was only one man down here who knew she wasn’t some sort of military liaison officer for Jed Culver, and he surprised her by turning up personally to collect her from the airport.
General Tusk Musso, United States Marine Corps (retired), the President’s ‘special representative’ in Texas, was Seattle’s ambassador in all but name. He was waiting for Caitlin at baggage collection, which for federal officers in the Hood meant a large, unventilated tin shed at the northern end of the airfield. The day was cool and overcast, but she couldn’t help wondering what this place would be like in high summer. Unbearable, probably.
‘They know how to make you feel special from the get-go down here, don’t they, sir?’ she said as Musso shook her hand.
He smiled. Shaven headed, slab shouldered, clad in Hugo Boss khakis and a windbreaker, he managed to maintain a military bearing even in civilian garb. ‘Colonel Murdoch, nice to meet you,’ he replied. ‘And yes, Southern hospitality is not what it used to be.’
The general took her large suitcase and wheeled it out of the shed.
