Unamerica Read online

  Praise for Cody Goodfellow & Unamerica

  “A vertiginous, conspiratorial rabbit-hole set at the end of the American century. . . Unamerica fuses the acid paranoia of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 with the low-life and high-tech exile of John Carpenter’s Escape From New York. Goodfellow leads us down a path to salvation that’s populated with depraved conglomerates, violent criminals, bizarre shamans, cruel angels, and strangest of all. . . hope.” —Ross E. Lockhart, editor of Eternal Frankenstein

  “Cody Goodfellow is untouched as a breathless reporter of violent action, relating it in hurtling prose full of striking and sometimes hilarious metaphors.” —Strange Aeons

  “One can certainly see influences of Lovecraft, the New Wave of SF writers of the sixties, the Cyberpunks and Splatterpunks—and even surrealists like Kafka and Borges. Don’t get me wrong though, Cody Goodfellow is one of a kind. Highly Recommended!” —Dark Discoveries

  “It doesn’t matter if he’s doing crime, Lovecraftian short stories, strange literary fiction disguised as madman narratives, horror, or something in between, you always get an explosive mixture of ideas and superb use of language when reading Cody Goodfellow.” —Gabino Iglesias, author of Coyote Songs and Zero Saints

  First Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 2019 by Cody Goodfellow

  Cover design © 2019 Matthew Revert

  www.matthewrevert.com

  King Shot Press

  P.O. Box 80601

  Portland, OR 97280

  www.kingshotpress.com

  in association with

  Broken River Books

  El Paso, TX

  www.brokenriverbooks.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Where the names of actual celebrities or corporate entities appear, they are used for fictional purposes and do not constitute assertions of fact. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental. This book is best when read under a blanket. Popping candy and flashlight sold separately.

  Paperback ISBN 978-1-7321240-5-9

  Printed in the United States of America and worldwide

  UNAMERICA

  Cody Goodfellow

  KING SHOT PRESS x BROKEN RIVER BOOKS

  PORTLAND | EL PASO

  For those who must cross borders seeking sanctuary, freedom and work. . . and against those who would stop them.

  PART ONE

  Success is a level of violence where the people feel comfortable about living their daily lives.

  GEORGE W. BUSH

  May 2, 2007

  Could we all be put on prison fare for the span of two or three generations, the world would ultimately be better for it.

  OHIO PRISON CHAPLAIN

  1851

  0

  All Jaime Blasco knew was that Natron Spinks hadn’t slept for twelve days, and was looking for him.

  Spinks shook down Jaime’s patch on Alameda Escobar and tossed his crib in Superbloque VII, looking up on the Circus and down in the Gutters and in places nobody would think to look until they’d been tweaking for two solid weeks, like inside other people. So Jaime packed a rectal bag of free samples and bugged out to the Burbs.

  Now, whenever he gets winded or dizzy climbing the slanted ladder up the forty-story ventilation shaft, he pictures the bug-eyed debt collector reaching for his ankle with box-cutters for fingers, and he keeps climbing.

  And soon he’s out through a hole in the pavement behind a burned-out grocery store. With a ski mask rolled down over the dirty brown thought bubble of a bushy, bellicose afro, Jaime steps over catatonic, fetal Baby addicts, like sleeping suicide bombs.

  Baby’s a bitch of a drug that takes you back to the womb, mushes the sounds of the world into the omnipotent beat of your mother’s heart, but it wears off as swiftly and absolutely as birth, and born-again Baby addicts are like real babies—they cry, shit everywhere and generally wreck everything.

  The Burbs look rougher than usual. So many freaks creeping around up here that he won’t stick out, but fuck only knows when the cops will start cleaning house. Safer back in the Gutters, or even on the Loop, than up here at the end of a botched build.

  He knows it’s dangerous and stupid, but he climbs up on the grocery and lies on his back looking up at the sky. The moon is nicotine yellow and full as a toothache, with stars dazzling diamond static on the velvet belly of the night. For just a moment, he’s content, then viscerally jealous of the Burbs’s view. Someone went to a lot of trouble to make their sky look real.

  Too bad everything underneath it is a burnt-out ruin.

  The adjoining grid of three-bedroom homes looks like a fried circuit board. A few peaked roofs still burning. The dormitories against the far wall are an idiot’s crossword puzzle, a minority of windows lit by fitfully blinking fluorescents or guttering fires amid expanses of inky blackness.

  Fuck.

  It’s worse up here than downstairs, worse than he’s ever heard. Bad enough it might be more than just another shock test. None of this shit makes sense.

  Spinks is the enforcer for the protection squad that runs Jaime’s street, but Jaime is paid in full, as always. The Black Gangster Disciples took over his patch a month ago, but they actually lowered his percentage, and Spinks happily accepted his money.

  Never mind that it has nothing to do with money. Never mind that it has nothing to do with Jaime, that Spinks is just terminally cracked out. It still reflects badly on him, and whatever response he takes will only drag his reputation deeper into shit. Running is bad. Everything else is worse.

  He will settle it somehow and come back looking good. Better. A professional.

  Something splatters the sagging rebar all around him. Jaime can’t tell if it’s condensation, or if the circling drones are dusting him.

  He hasn’t eaten anything in twenty-eight hours but the peeling skin off his own lips. Watching the alley below, he peels off the ski-mask and dons a pair of stunglasses to blank his face on video captures. He reaches into the bushy fastness of his bangs and pulls out a Spacebar: most of the chocolate melted off the crusty orange filling. He wolfs it down and licks the wrapper, then his fingers—every empty partially hydrogenated calorie is another minute he can stay awake and moving.

  At the mouth of the alley, a gang of kids in Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald masks crack plastic ampules of Fierce under their noses and test the actions on plastic pump shotguns, revving up for a robbery. As if there’s anything left to steal. . . .

  Behold, the fucking atomic bomb in the War on Drugs. Witness its inspiring force as it makes kids want to risk certain death to rob a store with no money, in an inescapable city where everything’s already free. This shit’s gonna make some motherfuckers rich Outside.

  Jaime peeks out into Main Street. No cops, but plenty of pedestrians.

  Jeep technicals prowl the narrow side street, a coked-up gunner in a gas mask jerkily swiveling the mounted M60, going eeney meeney miney moe. Jaime has nothing to fear from most gangs. Most of them owe him, but not so much that he’s worth killing. He’s got no clue why Spinks is really looking for him, but the enforcer told everyone who’d listen that he couldn’t stop dreaming about Jaime Blasco, and that he had to make it stop.

  A pack of feral kids on the rooftops across Main Street rain flaming garbage down on the jeeps, which retort with volleys of red and green tracer rounds. One of the kids catches a bulle
t and staggers off the roof. He hits the ground almost at Jaime’s feet. The jeeps lay down cover fire and speed out of the street before the kids can regroup. The rain shuts off like someone hit a switch.

  Jaime looks over the ten-year old, noting the alien quality of the kid’s hand splayed out on the asphalt between his ratty Converse high-tops. What’s wrong with it? Extra fingers, no thumb? Jaime’s looked far too long before realizing it’s the absence of a bar code. The kid’s anything but fresh. Looks to be born here. Even the dregs down in the deepest of the Gutters got a barcode, if they want to eat. Most inductees stumble around in denial until they get offed, but the pollos settle right in. They think this is America. Only better, because they don’t have to work themselves stupid or learn a new language.

  Where’d this kid even come from? They must be breeding like rats down in the Gutters, maybe starting a whole new country. If he even thought in words, Jaime wonders, what did he think of this place? Maybe he thought this is the real America.

  He creeps back towards the alley just as the Fierce-huffers hit the store, firing their guns in the air. Jaime hears the drones coming back and climbs down the back of the store, up the alley after the jeeps, onto the main drag.

  Dio De Los Muertes.

  Fuck. . .

  He’s been holed up so long, he lost track of the calendar.

  Crowds of blitzed campesinos and pistoleros fill the street, but scatter away from Jaime as he tries to blend in. A procession lurches down the avenue with effigies on stakes held aloft to the buzzing orange night. Painted skeleton faces and luchador orishas with pie-pan haloes. A jeep burns merrily with its bumper jammed in the bars of a liquor store. A percussion crew marches and bangs on garbage cans and oil drums, and blindfolded dervishes whirl with machetes and torches. A skull-shaped float lumbers through the crowd under a throng of skeletal whores and masked gunmen. Atop a papier-mâché altar, a brujo with wild white hair slaughters cocks with a dagger and turns the birds inside out, spraying the ecstatic crowd with blood, while whores hurl fistfuls of cocaine. Seated on a throne behind the brujo is a hulking man in a tiger-stripe tuxedo and a featureless mask with a big blinking fiber-optic 0 on the front, and a smaller 3 on the back.

  If that’s Tres Ojos, Jaime thinks, he’s been working out. Three Eyes flatters himself in his choice of doubles, but Poison Boys will still take the bait.

  Gunmen wearing the numbered masks of Los Zeros walk alongside the floats, so Jaime combs the crowds for Poison Boys. The Fierce-huffing kids have vanished.

  He catches a few stray snowflakes on his tongue, finds his feet steering him into the mob of glue-sniffing campesinos. The maddening tease of a coke buzz stiffens his dick and lights up his dusty lobes; the tramps are so out of their heads, it can’t just be coke. After every crackdown, the drugs go away for a while, then come back cut with something else, and noses fall off, people go blind.

  The cops, too, are making the most of this holiday. Letting the pollos come up to riot in the Burbs is the least of it.

  His feet slip in pink sludge and crushed sugar skulls in the gutter as he tries to find a path down the street. Red and white ghosts circle him, shrieking into the face of darkness, emptying themselves to be possessed by Chango or Ogun or a dead loved one. Blind men wade through the crowd with machetes hacking away in each hand, empty eyes rolled back in their heads.

  His brain squirms round and round without finding a plan. He had one, right, when he came out of his hole? He ran out of food and grass, and was going to the Green Man or the Poison Boys to beg for shelter, or to the cops to get arrested and locked up until Natron takes a nap and Jaime can afford to have him shivved. But the Green Man is pissed at him and the Poison Boys help no one for free, and Jaime has nothing to sell. His crib will already be cleaned out and reassigned, if and when he gets back downstairs. With Muertes in full swing, he can only hope to stock up on junk food and find another hole to hide in.

  And this shit isn’t organic, not in the least. Maybe they’re setting up for some kind of big, bad test, or maybe the wheels finally came off. . .

  Then a weird thought hits him—he could actually leave, find another vent shaft and just start climbing—and it makes him laugh. There’s nothing he can do to get arrested short of trying to leave, but the punishment for escapees makes whatever Natron wants him for seem like weak shit.

  A blurry, two-hundred-pound shadow seems to drop out of the sky into the middle of the street.

  “I KNOW YOU!” howls Natron Spinks. “I see you, boy! See where you been, see where you goin’!”

  The voice blows Jaime down the street like a plastic dry-cleaning bag. He feels the sugar and drugs burning inside him, juicing his muscles, but he knows by the cool blue fire blazing up his spine to his brain that Natron is right behind him, and gaining. He hears the big tweaker’s pumping footsteps like the ground splitting open behind him, yearning to swallow him up.

  Jaime shoves through a patch of Veggies, rooted to the corner where somebody planted them to watch the parade. They’re naked and covered in sores, goggling at everything with eyes like puddles of congealed semen. They paw at him, chomping at the air with their toothless mouths.

  He lashes out with his arms and whoops a fire engine siren sound that drives them into a dog-pound frenzy. He breaks through as they start flailing and screaming in imitation of the noise. He hears Natron get snarled in their arms, palming Veggie skulls and cracking them together like coconuts, roaring Jaime’s name over the pop of firecrackers and rifles and the crash of drums and the delirious screams of the crowd.

  Drones play searchlights over the sea of heads, converging in the float’s wake. Jaime dives out of the path of one as the unmanned sharpshooter picks somebody off in the crowd. They almost always fire paint balls, beanbags or at worst tranquilizers, so nobody pays them much attention, but this time someone screams.

  The mob of motorheads becomes a mosh pit, bunching up. Jaime finds himself smashed against a dead man. He has time to look into the hole in his face and wonder if the guy was anyone in particular, or if the cops are just sick of the parade.

  A hand snatches off his ski mask, and his fake afro is set free with an audible sproing.

  “Jaime!” screams Natron. “My nigga! My fucking dawg!”

  Jaime, who is eight or nine things that he knows of, but not black, takes exception to the epithet in any context, and he must have inhaled enough coke to get a good buzz going after all, because he’s turning to lecture Natron about its use even as the enforcer’s big chocolate hand takes him by the hair.

  He bolts so fast that the wig ripping off the crown of his skull only queers his trajectory, without slowing him down in the least. His scream of terror gooses him right through the crowd as if they’re made of toilet paper.

  Running in great open-field touchdown strides, and every whooping blast of air tells him damn! He’s actually going to make it. And then the crowd vaporizes around him and he sees why they cleared the way.

  The cops have blockaded the intersection and are spraying down the celebrants with some new kind of riot deterrent. A rampart of orange Styrofoam six feet high with wriggling bodies suspended in it like fruit in Jell-O spans the avenue and engulfs the prow of the parade float. The brujo rails at the cops and the whores throw chickens at them, but the headless birds only glance off their plexiglass shields as they climb to the top of the wall and spray down the rioters throwing rocks from behind it.

  Drones begin to wheel like crows over the avenue. The shooters among them play red laser scanners over the people, but he can’t tell if the red lights are telling them who to shoot. He pulls his sleeve down over his bar-code.

  People scream and hands reach up out of the strange orange terrain, tangling his feet so he sprawls into a pile of bodies stuck headfirst in the foam. None of them move.

  He crawls to the nearest building, which someone did a half-assed job of making into a bowling alley. The accordion cage across the front door is sprung, and h
e slips through it and into the open doors.

  Someone, somewhere in the dark, knocks over a bottle. He hugs the closest wall and waits, itchy with sweat and about a half a good scare away from pissing his pants. He fishes in his breast pocket and gets out an injector bullet, jams the end up his right nostril and rams it home.

  The front of his brain feels like someone blasted it with a fire extinguisher, and the dark goes silver-white and bright as noon, and he goes YEAH yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. . . yeah. . . yeah. . . yeah.

  Everything’s going to be cool.

  And even in all that light, even with all that clarity, somehow he still can’t see Natron until the giant tweaker is right up in his face, with both hands on his shoulders. His black and silver Raiders jersey is sprayed with the deeper black and whiter white of dried blood and cocaine.

  Jaime tries to look Spinks in the eyes, though his own are tearing up for every reason a man has to cry. He reaches down inside himself for the one thing he knows he does not, at this moment, possess in any quantity whatsoever, and son of a bitch, he finds some anyway, and he puts it on. “Hey, Nate, what’s up, bruh?”

  “You know I been looking for you,” Natron growls. His voice sounds weird, like he’s been snorting so much cut crank that his septum is gone, and all adjoining tissue necrotizing in his collapsing face.

  “Nah, really? You know who my people are, I’m not hard to get hold of—”

  Natron looks down and his brow knits like he’s trying really fucking hard to remember why he went to all this trouble. A big bubble of blood inflates and bursts from his nose, and he bears Jaime down with him as he sinks to his knees.

  Jaime sees then that the splashes of blood all down Natron’s front are not from chickens. An entry wound the size of a quarter in the crown of Natron’s skull dribbles a little, but he seems none the worse for wear, otherwise. He looks like he could chase Jaime around all night. He smiles at Jaime and pushes him back against the wall. And then he opens his mouth, and his brains fall out, lumpy streams of bloody chowder sloshing out of the fist-sized exit wound in his palate.