Fail State Read online

  Fail State

  A Novel of the End of days: a cyberwar apocalypse

  John Birmingham

  Contents

  1. The Soldier of Fortune swimsuit edition

  2. An old woman speaks in dog farts

  3. The best money he never made

  4. More Deliverance than Salem’s Lot

  5. The three river reach

  6. It was like Sharknado season

  7. Moral jeopardy

  8. A big hit off the chemtrail bong

  9. The human wave

  10. The Plague

  11. Nobody walks away from three bags of Doritos

  12. The Headreach Cut Off

  13. (Interlude)

  14. Instagram baller pirates

  15. Cream of groundhog stew

  16. The tiny wooden hammer of power

  17. Blowback

  18. (Interlude)

  19. Stronghold

  20. The Horror Clowns McGuigan

  21. Mere anarchy is kicking ass

  22. (Interlude)

  23. Am I a bad person?

  24. I think like a bullet

  25. Hashtag, blessed

  26. All the truth you need

  27. (Interlude)

  28. A walk in the forest

  29. A deep-fried clusterfuckturducken

  30. A passage to Canadia

  31. Silverton on the eve of the great battle

  32. A change of mind

  33. The Battle of Silverton

  Afterword

  1

  The Soldier of Fortune swimsuit edition

  They did not make it to Montana. On the second day out, they came up against a couple of trucks blocking Route 50 just east of Aurora, a West Virginia flyspeck on the road map Rick held folded in his big, scarred hands while James drove. Sat-nav was down and phone cover was spotty at best. Although it had been flaking out long before they’d escaped the gridlock around Winchester. Melissa and Michelle sat in the rear cabin of the Sierra with Nomi the black labrador laying between them, accepting ear scratches and tummy rubs as though they were only her due. The trucks hadn’t crashed. They’d been arranged in a crude road block. Just parked across the tarmac, bumper to bumper. Armed men and women sheltered behind them and a local sheriff’s car was parked out in front.

  Hand-painted signs by the side of the highway warned drivers to SLOW DOWN, TURN AROUND and GO BACK. The red and blue turret lights on top of the police cruiser flashed briefly as James’s big SUV was about to come out of the woods beyond the edge of town.

  “What do you want to do?” he asked, slowing down. A dense forest of black spruce and fir trees crowded up close on either side of the road, but gave way to farmland up ahead where Route 50 approached the tiny hamlet. The locals had set their roadblock out in the open, maybe a hundred yards beyond the tree-line.

  “Best pull up here, I reckon” Rick said.

  The turret flashers stopped as James eased over, still in the gloom of the forest, about three or four hundred yards from the blockade. Nomi, sensing something was up, whimpered softly, until Rick reached into the rear of the cabin and gave her a pat.

  “You want to come with?” he asked Mel. “Talk the talk?”

  His girlfriend smiled.

  “Cop to cop, you mean? Cos I don’t think anyone up there is gonna rate my three years with the Old Bill.”

  “We should go,” Michelle Nguyen said, meaning Melissa and herself, alone. “It’ll be less threatening if it’s just a couple of girls. Plus I got this to wave around.”

  She fetched her ID card out of a shirt pocket. The laminate identified her as a senior research officer with the National Security Council.

  Rick Boreham didn’t much like the suggestion, and they could all see it on his face.

  Michele Nguyen softened her delivery with a smile.

  “Rick, you’re a cover model for the swimsuit edition of Soldier of Fortune, and James here looks like he’s totally gonna try to sell them life insurance or a newsletter subscription. Either way, they’d be justified shooting you both on sight. Let us go. We’re pretty and non-threatening and we tick all the diversity boxes.”

  Rick didn’t smile. But he did think on it for a moment before answering.

  “Okay, but take Nomi,” he said. “People love dogs more than they do people. You’re less likely to get shot with her.”

  “You’re probably right,” Michelle conceded. “Come on, girl.”

  “Wait!” James said. “Your guns. Are you gonna take them?”

  Both women spoke at the same time.

  “Yeah,” Michelle said.

  “No way,” Mel answered.

  Two beats of silence.

  “Okay,” James said into the stillness. “This isn’t awkward at all.”

  “You can’t go unarmed,” Rick started, but Mel cut him off.

  “We have to go unarmed or not at all,” she said. “Look at that set up. There’s a dozen or more of them pilchards up there. Everyone packin’ shooters, for sure. These things are just gonna get us killed.”

  She held up a Glock 26 subcompact. They all had weapons now.

  “She’s right,” James said.

  Both Rick and Michelle turned their disapproval on him.

  “You just said the two of you would be better because you don’t look like a threat,” he gently reminded Michelle. “And do the math. Twelve or thirteen guns, firing from cover, against two in the open. We don’t want trouble. We just want to keep driving. I’ll go if you want. I’m cool to go talk to them.”

  “You’re not going anywhere, Poindexter,” Michelle shot back, but he could see from her chagrined expression that she had accepted his point.

  “I’ll go with Mel” she said. “And no guns.”

  “Sorted,” said Melissa.

  The two women exited the car and removed the holsters at their hips. Mel took Nomi by her lead. Rick’s dog gave him a single backward glance but upon his instruction to “Protect”, she put her head down and trundled off with the girls.

  “They do look a hell of a lot less threatening than two guys marching up there,” James said. “Or, you know, you, at least.”

  Rick snorted softly.

  “Guess so. And you’re right, James. I worked enough checkpoints to know what it’s like.”

  He fell quiet for a moment before adding.

  “I hope this is the right thing to do.”

  James left the engine idling, even though they needed to save gas. The price had already spiked to fifteen bucks a gallon and Homeland Security had ordered nation-wide rationing. First time since the late 1970s according to NPR, but James wasn’t so sure of that. He thought maybe there’d been some during one of the Gulf wars, but he couldn’t check, not without data coverage and they had none. That had crashed early and hard. It was frustrating for somebody whose whole livelihood was based on moving information around.

  Of course food was supposed to be rationed as well, but market forces were quickly taking care of that. They had two boxes of fresh vegetables in back of the Sierra, bought earlier that morning from a roadside stall near Leesburg in northern Virginia. A farmer, protected by two shotgun-wielding sons, had demanded a hundred dollars for a small bag of spinach leaves, and two hundred for a pound of potatoes; although James was open to barter and Mel was able to trade three packs of cigarettes for the spinach and a small punnet of cherry tomatoes.

  She didn’t smoke. None of them did. But Rick had suggested taking the Camels purely as trade goods. Seven cartons of them they’d looted, no other word for it, straight from the storeroom at Rick’s workplace, a country club in Maryland, ten minutes’ drive from Darnestown and a solid three iron across the river from one of Donald Trump’s golf courses.

  Ja
mes had wondered since how that trade might have gone if Rick hadn’t been standing behind her, cradling his own weapon.

  “What a mess,” he said quietly.

  Mostly he was just talking to himself, and that just to fill the dead air space. He was a lot less comfortable with silence than Rick, who sometimes seemed as though he was carved from some ancient, living hardwood.

  “Hell of a thing,” his new friend agreed, inclining his head at the trucks.

  The girls walked steadily toward the sheriff’s vehicle, and the two big haulers behind it. One was a large van, but the other had an empty flat bed in back. James recognised it as a container trailer. A dozen or more townsfolk sheltered behind it, all of them armed as best he could tell.

  “Pardon me,” Rick said as he twisted around to reach into the backseat. “Don’t want to get out and set anybody’s trigger finger to twitching.”

  James awkwardly pulled his seat forward, opening up a few more inches for Rick to squeeze through. He grunted and strained, reaching for a daypack that was just out of reach. James shifted again, careful to keep his foot away from the accelerator, even though he’d put the Sierra in park and engaged the e-brake. It was enough, and Rick was able to pull the small pack into the front of the car.

  He fetched out a pair of binoculars. They were well-used, painted in scratched and faded desert camouflage paint. He raised them up and scanned ahead.

  “Melissa?”

  “Yeah Mishy?”

  “What do you think of James?”

  They walked in tandem, their steps drifting in and out of sync as they advanced. Mel Baker was a good foot taller than Michelle Nguyen. She wore Nike Flyknits, which made very little noise as she advanced. Michelle’s Doc Marten’s made for a muffled crunch on the hard road surface. Nomi padded along between them, her nails clicking in counterpoint.

  “Funny thing to ask. He’s your fella, isn’t he?”

  That last sounded like “Inny?”

  Michelle blew out a ragged breath.

  “If I want I guess.”

  “What you mean if you want? Aren’t you too, like…you know?”

  Michelle’s silence was answer enough.

  The English woman almost stopped on the tarmac. Nomi got tangled between them and it took a moment to sort out all the legs and leads.

  “Bugger me,” Mel said. “I thought you two was proper linked.”

  The smaller Vietnamese-American woman snorted.

  “I only really met James a day or so before you did. We kissed the night of the… you know.. The shooting. But nothing since.”

  Mel did stop then.

  “You what, girl?”

  The guardians of Aurora shifted perceptibly in the distance. Nomi panted happily, and Michelle nodded that they should keep moving.

  “Don’t want to spook them,” she said. “But yeah. Status update, it’s complicated.”

  It was Melissa’s turned to exhale loudly.

  “End of the fucking world usually is, eh?”

  Michelle was a moment replying.

  “Usually. Yeah.”

  They were halfway to the blockade when Nomi decided she needed to take a leak.

  “Oh man, this is not the impression I was hoping to make,” Michelle said as Rick’s dog lifted a leg on a hand-painted sign warning outsiders to STAY AWAY.

  They scoped out the townspeople while Nomi relieved herself. Individual faces resolved into unremarkable types.

  “Butchers, bakers, smart phone app makers,” Mel said quietly.

  And a sheriff so bow-legged he looked as though he’d spent a lot more time in a saddle than behind the wheel of his old brown Crown Vic. None of them were smiling, but Michelle was at least reassured by the lack of open hostility in the expression of the law enforcement officer. He seemed content for them to come on and make their pitch. Even if their dog had just pissed on his stern admonition to stay the hell away.

  It was a high, fine morning, the first week of fall, but the steam press heat of a cruel summer still lingered close. Michelle Nguyen was used to air conditioned office life and she was beginning to leak sweat. Beside her, Mel seemed almost preternaturally cool, which was absurd. Her family background was Caribbean, but Melissa was pure London, and that place was cold and foggy as fuck. Even in summer, every time Michelle had ever been. She glanced over at Mel as they walked on.

  Mel kept her expression pleasant, and her hands where any shooters could see them.

  There were plenty of shooters.

  When they were forty or fifty yards out, the cop stepped forward and raised a hand. Nomi sat immediately. The man wore a pistol at his side, but carried no other firearm that Michelle could see. He didn’t have to. There was a whole arsenal backing him up, including the big honking assault rifle his deputy carried. That would be a military grade, fully automatic unit, she guessed. Not some single shot, wank fantasy substitute.

  The sheriff, who reminded her fetchingly of Bill Murray with his little pot belly and decidedly cherubic nose hooked both thumbs into his belt when the two women and their smiling dog came to a halt.

  “Hi,” Michelle said. “I’m Michelle Nguyen. This is my friend Mel Baker.”

  “And this is Nomi,” Mel added.

  “I’m Sheriff Hughes,” the cop said mildly. “Evan Hughes. And I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you ladies to turn around and go back where you came from.”

  Michelle smiled, trying to look as harmless as possible. For the first time in a long while she was suddenly aware of her tattoos and midnight blue hair. Maybe they should have got James to do this. He looked a lot more like these guys than she did.

  “We came from the DC,” she said, feeling as if she was somehow lying and about to be caught out in that lie. “There’s no going back there. It’s been evacuated. You would have heard, surely?”

  Hughes nodded.

  “I did hear that, yes ma’am. Saw it on the news too. But I’m afraid it doesn’t change the situation here. We’ve secured the town under an Executive Order signed by the President before they evacuated him too. Residents only in town, I’m sorry. You’ll have to move on. It’s only for the duration of the emergency. I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

  “We’d love to move on, Sheriff,” Mel Baker replied. “We’re heading to Montana. We just want to get there as quickly as possible. But this is the way through, and if we could just pass…”

  Sheriff Hughes shook his head.

  “Sorry. I’m afraid I can’t do that, ma’am. We are in lockdown. You’ll have to backtrack. I suggest Route 24. I understand it’s clear south to the Spruce Knob rec park and beyond.”

  The two women exchanged a look.

  Michelle spoke up again.

  “Sheriff Hughes I’m going to take an ID card from my pocket if that’s okay with you?”

  His deputy shifted. He didn’t put his hand on the gun he carried, but he did get ready. Nomi’s tail, which had been happily thumping away fell still.

  “Okay,” Hughes said.

  “I work for the National Security Council,” Michelle said, pitching her voice to carry to the people behind the barrier too. She took out the laminated card, still wrapped in a bright red lanyard and took a few cautious half-steps toward Hughes. A few of the townsfolk moved, some of them raising their weapons, but the sheriff made a placating gesture and they stood easy again, or at least a little easier.

  Hughes beckoned them forward.

  “Come on here then,” he said.

  They walked the rest of the way to him.

  This close, Michelle could see how frightened people were. Not Hughes. He didn’t seem worried about anything much at all. But his deputy was sweating like the Devil’s own nutsack, and the vanilla ghetto posse they’d put together at the barrier was definitively confirmed as a motley collection of up-gunned homemakers, all of them well out of their comfort zone. She wondered if the other end of town was similarly cordoned off.

  The sheriff inspected her ID card and
handed it back.

  “Yep,” he said. “That’s you all right.”

  But he gave her nothing else. Seemed that Sheriff Evan Hughes wasn’t much interested in her connection to the centre of power.

  “Uhm, I need to get to Montana,” Michelle improvised, “… as quickly as I can. It’s a matter of national security. For the… National Security… Council.”

  She trailed off.

  Nomi made a sort of strangled noise. It perfectly captured the frustration that Michelle felt.

  “Route 24 is your best choice then, Miss Nguyen,” Sheriff Hughes said. “Because Route 50 is closed to through traffic. By virtue of Executive Order 14101.”

  “Come on, Sheriff,” Mel Baker tried. Her pleading London accent sounded weird and utterly out of place here. “You can just let us through. You know that. I used to do this job.”

  Hughes shook his head slowly.

  “Not around here you didn’t, miss. Around here it’s my job, and I’m advising you, strongly, to take Route 24.”

  His hand dropped to the butt of his service revolver.

  Nomi started to growl.

  Michelle’s gaze followed the move as though hypnotised. Hughes’ hand was rock steady, but it was old and liver spotted. She stared at the grey hairs and veins that stood out from his leathery, suntanned skin. The dark wood pistol grip looked just as weathered as the hand which settled on it.

  “Come on,” Mel said, taking her by the elbow. “Let’s take the other road.”

  “Good choice,” Hughes nodded.

  His hand moved away from the gun, as though it had never been there in the first place.