After America (5 page)

“Goddamn, sometimes I think I’d rather be back in Noisy-le-Sec,” Caitlin muttered without conviction as she wiped the baby’s bottom the way the midwife up at Swindon had shown her.

“Midwitches, more like it,” she whispered to Monique as the offending mess went into a bucket by the change table and a fresh new terrycloth diaper and liner went under the infant’s now clean butt. The liners, too, were very scarce. They were impossible to find on the open market, and the National Heath allotted them only seven per week. She really didn’t want to wash and reuse them, but what choice did she have? This kid needed six or seven changes a day, not a week.

She marveled at how the quick, spare movements to secure the diaper in place had become second nature, even in the dark. She could do it blindfolded, although, of course, she could also field strip and reassemble the small armory of weapons on the manor under the same conditions. It wasn’t so much the ease with which she had adapted to the thousand little tricks of parenthood that gave Caitlin pause for thought. It was the very fact that she’d become a parent in the first place. Settling into the enormous cracked leather armchair overlooking the southern fields, she eased little Monique onto her right breast while she watched the first stirrings of movement in the workers’ camp beyond the security wall. The foremen were already awake, moving quietly up and down the long lines of ex-British Army tents, seeing to the campfires and the cooking wagons. For just a few moments of lingering darkness, it looked as though a regiment had bivouacked on her farm, so familiar was the strict and orderly fashion in which the men went about the job of rousing the sleepers from the long straight lines of tents. But as the baby sucked at her nipple and squirmed into a comfier position, the first hint of dawn softened the faraway line of the horizon over the Savernake Forest, and the true nature of the camp revealed itself.

Her workforce was composed almost entirely of refugees, mostly American but with a leavening of Continentals, with a cadre of former military types from the Home Guard to keep them all in line and on the job. They were the foremen she could see moving around before everyone else. After a few minutes Caitlin carefully hoisted the baby up onto her shoulder and patted her on the back waiting for the hearty burp she knew was coming, without any milk vomit, she hoped, to further stain and stink up her dressing gown. She didn’t indulge herself in any limp, liberal bullshit about feeling sorry for the refugees or guilty for living in relative luxury here in the old stone manor while they slept and toiled in the fields. She did her fair share of toiling, and the bottom line was that they had all chosen to stay in the United Kingdom even after it became possible to return home to America. They were earning their room and board, to use a local phrase. Two years’ labor for the Ministry of Resources and they would be free to settle wherever they wanted in the British Isles or the wider Commonwealth. Despite what some people said, England wasn’t a gulag. All the men or women working her fields or those of her neighbors were at liberty to take themselves down to Portsmouth, where a free berth to the United States was available. Of course, once they stepped off the boat at the other end, they’d find themselves obliged to work for Uncle Sam for
five
years as payment for their passage.

Caitlin shifted Monique to her left breast and stroked the baby’s head as she struggled to stay awake. She heard Bret grunt and throw back the covers in the next room. He soon appeared in the doorway, dressed in brown U.S. Army boxers and a white T-shirt.

He yawned. “You want some coffee?”

“When she’s finished,” she answered, stroking Monique’s head again. “I had one while I was feeding her the other day, and man, it was like she’d snorted a line of speed or something. Didn’t sleep all day. Warm milk and honey would be nice, though.”

“Got it,” he said in a voice still hoarse with sleep. Her husband disappeared into the depths of the farmhouse to stoke the wood-fired stove and dole himself out a small serving of black market coffee, another perk of her job. The rattle and tink of metal cooking pots drifted across the small stream from the camp, which was quickly coming awake as people spilled out of the big twelve-man tents. She could see quite a few children already, picking up the games they’d been forced to abandon by nightfall the previous evening, running through the dew-soaked grass, chasing and being chased by four or five dogs. Strictly speaking, the young’uns were supposed to be boarded elsewhere; there were schools for foreign children, again mostly Americans, in both Swindon and Basingstoke, but Caitlin had heard nothing good about them, and she quietly used her connections in London to allow as many families as possible to stay together at Melton Farm. One of the tents was given over to an all-ages school run by three teachers who’d been traveling through Italy when the Wave hit. It was one of the things that made placements on their farm so popular.

Bret returned just as Monique fell off the breast, fast asleep and sticky with milk. “Look at her, would you.” He smiled as he passed Caitlin her warm honeyed milk, making sure to keep it away from the child. “It’s a good thing she got your looks and brains, sweetheart, because she is a lazy-ass sleepin’ fool just like her old man, and she’s gonna need something to fall back on in life.”

Caitlin nodded, honestly wondering how her nearly-narcoleptic husband had ever made it through ranger school.

“Well, we don’t know that she’ll be a rocket scientist,” she said. “But she is pretty.”

“Like you,” Bret said as he leaned forward to kiss her on the forehead.

“Guess I could have had my coffee, after all,” she said.

“Take mine,” he offered. “I don’t mind milk and honey.”

“I can’t do that. You’re down to half a bag of beans.”

He shrugged. “You’ll get more. You are still going to the city, aren’t you?”

She nodded, a little distracted. She was already planning her morning run. Maintaining her fitness was not negotiable. Bret did not bother as much now that he was a self-proclaimed househusband, although farmwork kept him fit and strong enough. Caitlin, however, had no choice. She still answered to her old paymasters even though she was no longer on field duty.

She had run five miles just a couple of days after Monique had been delivered by elective cesarean. (And hadn’t there been some tut-tutting from the midwitches over
that.
) A week further on and she was back in the gym she and Bret had set up in a sunroom overlooking the swimming pool. And yes, she
had
been more than a little surprised to find a working English farmhouse with a heated in-ground swimming pool, but that had been one of the things that had attracted them to the property. That and the peppercorn rent paid to the government, an indulgence in return for her services as a “consultant” to Echelon.

Bret stood by the window, silhouetted by the rising sun, causing Caitlin a momentary rush of blood. There had been a time in both their lives when they would have instinctively avoided exposing themselves in such a manner. Her husband had been able to get over it.

She hadn’t.

Arguably, Caitlin did not need to maintain her combat readiness and field craft the way she did. Her consultancy consisted almost entirely of analytic and training work, and having hunkered down here in the heart of the English Home Counties, they could hardly be more secure. Bret had tried to get her to ease up, but her Echelon training had taken hold down at a cellular level. She could not stop being who and what she was. Looking at her husband, she often envied his ability to simply walk away from his army past.

Monique stirred and grumbled in her mother’s arms, perhaps disturbed by her dark shift in mood. Bret turned away from the window where he was watching the workers’ camp come to life and offered to take the baby. His limbs were all heavily muscled, and the small swaddled infant disappeared into the crook of one arm without waking. He started to pat her lightly on the back, rocking her gently and humming an old Willie Nelson standard. “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys.” The song never failed to have a magical, soothing effect on the baby, and Caitlin could tell that Monique was falling more deeply asleep in her father’s arms.

She stepped back into their bedroom and quickly changed into her running gear: black Lycra leggings, an old T-shirt of Bret’s, and a Berreta M9 pistol in a specially fitted holster at the small of her back. Her husband didn’t give it a second glance. He had spent his adult life around weapons and knew his wife well enough to understand why she would never stop carrying one.

“Are you riding up to Swindon today to that GM crop briefing?” she asked. “I’ll just tell the stable guys is all, if you’re gonna need one of the horses.”

Bret eased the baby back into her crib and stood up, stretching his back with an audible cracking of bones. Like her, he carried a good deal of scar tissue and old injuries.

“Thought I might take the mountain bike up if you don’t mind,” he said quietly. “I could do with the cardio workout.”

“You could,” she teased him, grabbing for a fold of skin at his belly. He wasn’t carrying any fat, but he batted her hand away defensively anyway.

“Hey, you squeeze it, you buy it, lady.”

“Really?” she said, closing on him.

When she grabbed at him this time, he didn’t resist.

An hour or so later, jogging on the spot to keep her heart rate elevated, Caitlin enjoyed taking in a deep draft of chilly morning air and shooting one last glance at her home before plunging back into a long cross-country run. Thick tendrils of coal smoke were creeping out of the kitchen chimney, where Bret would be preparing hot drinks for the foremen before briefing them on the day’s work. They’d be plowing the new GM soy into the eastern paddock today, half a mile up the road toward Stitchcombe, and without a gasoline ration, as usual these days, it would all be done by hand. Most of the camp would turn out for that, although a smaller number would be at work in the southern fields, scattering a new weed-n-feed mix as part of a trial for the Resources Ministry. They were being paid in fuel coupons for letting the government’s eggheads conduct field tests on their property.

She shook her head at that again.

Their property.

The previous owner, a minor Saudi prince, had lost the farm during the “resettlement” period in the year after the Disappearance. Caitlin’s mouth quirked downward at the bloodless euphemism. “Pogrom” would be more accurate: ethnic cleansing on a scale to put into the shade the earlier atrocities in the Balkans. The prince had not complained, however. He’d been at a wedding in Damascus when the Israelis nuked the city.

She shook off the grim memories and took off again, shortening her stride as she dropped down a hillside where long summer grass covered the tangled roots of chestnut and elm and holly oak trees. She didn’t need a sprained ankle or worse to teach her not to run blindly over treacherous ground. Small families of birds took flight at her approach, starlings and robins as best she could tell. They’d experienced something of a population boom earlier this spring, rebounding from the collapse of their populations after the pollution storms. Turning onto Thicketts Road, which wound down through the hills toward the village of Mildenhall, Caitlin settled into a long, loping stride. She felt good this morning and decided to add another couple of miles to her course by circling the village a few times. That way she might even catch Bret and Monique on the way home if he was cycling up to Swindon as planned. She played her thumb over her wedding ring. It was still so new, she hadn’t built up a callus on her palm beneath it. Just as her mother and father had. She remembered the feeling of their hands as though she had just let go of them, a tactile memory so sharp that she had to wonder whether it had anything to do with the tumor that had been cut out of her brain. The doctors had said there would be side effects from the treatment.

She pushed away the troubling idea that her mind was not quite right and never would be again, preferring to concentrate on her breathing and balance as she powered along the country road.

She and Bret would build up their own calluses, their own family history, here or back home in America, with Monique and any more children who came after her. She knew they would. There would be a long time ahead of them for all that.

New York

Culver took a spot at the back of the press conference in Castle Clinton, the old sandstone fort at the northern end of Battery Park. It was possible, standing on the freshly raked gravel and staring over the heads of the reporters, to look at the skyline of Lower Manhattan and imagine that not much was wrong in the world. You merely had to ignore a few scorch marks and broken windows, maybe squint your eyes a little to fuzz up the details, and you could have been standing in the New York of old, with life teeming around you, ten million people, seemingly twenty million cars, the subway rattling and roaring underfoot as you walked downtown, the smoky, earthy fragrance of frying meat from a hundred street carts, the clip-clop of horse-drawn carriages around the park. It was almost as though he could close his eyes and be back there, strolling up to Redeye, his favorite bar and grill, for a perfectly cooked fillet of Chilean swordfish with San Moriglio sauce.

Instead, the thump of two Blackhawk helicopters circling the southern tip of the island drowned out what little ambient noise there was, mostly distant gunfire or the crash, rumble, and grind of salvage work.

The White House chief of staff folded his arms and pushed the pleasant daydreams away. It would be a long time before anyone in this country could indulge in daydreams again. While Karen Milliner warmed up the audience by taking questions on the issues of the moment—Jackson Blackstone’s antics down in Fort Hood, the Indo-Pakistani wars, and the congressional hearings on the Lands and Homesteading Act—Culver contented himself with scoping out the scene. The colonnaded cloisters of the roughly circular fort were deep in shade with the sun climbing high overhead, and he could make out Secret Service details stalking through the shadows, ever watchful. The reporters were arrayed on plastic chairs in front of Karen Milliner, who spoke from a plain black podium.