Red America: Green Light

Chapter One: High Voltage

Lorna Dane finished her dance with a flourish, the clear, glitter-laced paint that coated her naked body beginning to run ever so slightly as she held her arms above her head and then took an expansive bow. It did this every night, thanks to the combination of the heat of the dismally-ventilated bar and the effort of dancing so energetically, but Lorna had long since grown used to it and took it in her stride as part of the job. As long as she danced well and left her public feeling entertained, she thought it was a small price to pay. Retreating off the stage as discreetly as she could, she returned to her dressing room, clad only in a robe that she had left just behind the curtain at one side of the stage. Dabbing the sweat from her forehead with a small towel, she thought again how much she would enjoy a hot shower to clean herself off a little. She didn't think Frank, her boss, had arranged for her to have any private "sessions" with Russian soldiers this evening, so she was looking forward to having some time to herself. It was always nice, she thought, not to have to try extracting information from drunken Russkies who were more interested in pawing clumsily at her private parts than in having any sort of conversation. She found her dressing room, pushed open the door with her free hand, and then slipped inside, closing the door behind her.

She turned – and found Jim Logan sitting in the room's single chair, leaning back against the wall and gulping a mouthful of beer from a long-necked bottle. She shrieked in surprise and felt her heart jump into the back of her throat. "Jesus, Jim," she said, when she had managed to get her breath back. "Do you have to show up like that every time you come here?"

A smile cracked Jim's weathered, hairy face. "Yup," he chuckled. "Sorry, darlin' – I just love the look on your face when you see me, that's all."

Lorna raised an eyebrow. "You're an asshole, you know that?" She crossed the room and opened the door to her small bathroom. "I'll be in the shower. You can wait if you like, but don't expect to get an eyeful while I'm getting dressed. You want to see that, you can damn well pay the door charge like everyone else."

"Maybe you should wait until you hear what I came here to ask you, Lorna," Jim said matter-of-factly, just as she was stepping through into her bathroom. "It might just change your mind."

Lorna's fingers slipped off the door-handle and she returned her gaze to where Jim was sitting. Folding her arms, she inclined her head to the right slightly and took a deep breath. "I doubt that, somehow. But go ahead: surprise me. What do you want this time, Jim?"

"I need someone to do a little under-the-wire work for me," Jim said. "I figure you're the best person for the job."

"No way," Lorna snapped. "I'm not a soldier. You leave me the hell out of your damn war."

Jim paused for a moment, and then said "No offence, kid, but the moment you started givin' me information, you made it your damn war too."

"Don't try and guilt-trip me into this, Jim. I find you your information the way I do for a damned good reason," Lorna said, spitting the words out as if they were knives. "I have a daughter, remember? You think I'm going to risk leaving her on her own? You can spend your life fighting the Ivans if you like, but my daughter needs me. I'm all she's got, and I'll be damned if I put her in danger just to satisfy your ego." She drew in a juddering breath, ran her hands over her face, and then pointed to the door. "I think you'd better leave."

Jim started to say something, but the words died in his throat as Lorna speared him with her angry glare. "Okay," he said at last, holding his hands up as if to ward her off. "Okay, I get the message. I'll find somebody else."

"Good," Lorna said, her jaw tensing almost painfully, before she continued "Have a drink on me outside if you like, but I don't want to see you here when I get out of the shower, got it?"

"Got it," Jim replied, and walked towards the door. As he opened it, he paused, and turned his head just enough so that she could see his left eye. "You change your mind, you know where to find me."

"Yeah." Lorna folded her arms across her chest. "I wouldn't hold your breath, if I were you."

She watched him leave, and let out a long breath when she finally couldn't hear his footsteps any longer. When the room was totally silent, she realised that her hands were shaking, and she clenched her fists tightly, feeling her nails dig so deep into her palms that they were almost drawing blood. She stood perfectly still for a few minutes, doing nothing but feeling her heartbeat slowly return to normal. When she felt able to do so, she slipped into the shower for ten minutes, feeling the hot water wash away all the tension she had just acquired, and then dressed in a plain white t-shirt and blue jeans. She pushed open the door to her dressing room after throwing on her battered leather jacket and tying her long green hair back into a ponytail. A loosely-curled ringlet of it escaped and bounced down to the left side of her face as she slung her kit bag over one shoulder as she walked through the bar towards the exit, and she tucked it behind her ear, just to keep it out of the way until later.

Predictably, one of the patrons decided tonight was the night he would try his luck with her. Lorna rolled her eyes as tonight's swarthy, unshaven specimen lurched drunkenly towards her with lust clearly etched onto his face, and then simply flat-palmed the idiot right in the centre of his sternum. The force of the impact knocked the breath right out of his lungs and dropped him to the floor, wheezing and coughing as he tried desperately to get some air back into his lungs. Standing over him as he tried to sit up, Lorna instead put her foot squarely on his chest and looked down at him scornfully, her hands curling tightly into fists as she did so.

"There's a 'no touching' rule for a reason, jackass," she said, her green-painted lips curling in disgust. "Try that again, and I'll break your fucking arm." It was probably a little over the top, she realised, but after what she'd just heard, she wasn't in the mood for any more crap. On the plus side, though, she thought it might stop any more unwelcome advances from men who could barely stand – at least in the short term, anyway. Storming out of the bar, leaving the unpleasant, sweaty little man picking himself up off the ground in utter humiliation, she walked over to her bike, one of the last surviving American-made motorcycles in New York, and sat astride it, hearing the engine purr loudly as she twisted the keys in the ignition. She opened the throttle and roared out of the parking lot, her hair whipping out behind her as the wind caught it, and covered the distance of the two blocks to her apartment far more quickly than she would have been able to at any other time. The Russian curfew virtually always ensured that she got home quickly, since it tended to make motorists get off the roads a lot sooner than they otherwise would do. Pulling up next to the battered apartment building that served as her home, she parked the bike and dismounted. Fishing her apartment block's door keys out of her jacket pocket, Lorna entered the building quietly and blinked a little as the sterile interior lighting hit her eyes. She walked towards the elevator, but then paused and headed to the stairwell instead, thinking that she might enjoy the exercise. Besides, these days there really was no telling whether or not the thing was even working. Climbing the stairs to the third floor, she put her keys into the closest door and pushed it inwards. The door opened only a little way before it stopped, the chain-catch on the other side pulling taut. Lorna muttered something crude under her breath and then called out "Mom, it's me. You can take the chain off now."

She heard movement on the other side of the door, and then it opened fully, revealing a middle-aged woman with greying brown hair and circularly-framed glasses, dressed in a functional red woollen sweater, white blouse and black cotton trousers with a fresh, sharp crease down the front. In her right hand, she held a baseball bat, and when Lorna looked at it in disbelief, she said simply "Well, you never can be too careful. You know how people can pretend to be somebody else these days, don't you?"

"I'm pretty sure I'm who I say I am, Mom," Lorna said wearily, kissing her mother on the cheek and taking off her jacket, hanging it on the coat-stand by the door. "How's Libby?"

"She's fine," her mother replied, in a slightly less confrontational tone, putting the bat down by the side of the door. "She's had a quiet evening – by her standards, anyway."

Lorna laughed. "You've fed her, then?"

"Fed and changed her, yes. She's sleeping now, but I'm sure she'll be happy to see you. She got pretty tired of having to play with Grandma all this time." Her mother smiled. "Poor thing was asking for you all evening."

"Well, I guess I'd better make up for lost time, then, hadn't I?" Lorna said, walking towards her bedroom, where her daughter's bed was situated.

"You know, if you got a job with better hours –" her mother began.

"Don't start that again, Mom," Lorna snapped, turning back to face her mother again. "My job was the best I could find at the time. I could do without all the drunken assholes that walk into that bar, sure, but I make good money dancing, and I can buy my daughter nice things with it. To me, that says I should keep doing it, and not risk everything on trying to get a lousy job with lousy pay at some lousy seven-eleven somewhere in Brooklyn. Now please, can we have this argument again when I'm not so damn tired?"

"All right, darling, but I'm only doing it because I worry about you," her mother said. "You know that, don't you?"

Lorna sighed. "Yes, Mom, I know you do – I worry about you as well. I guess that makes us just about even." She paused, rubbing at her eyelids with her fingertips. "I need to get some sleep. I'll see you in the morning, Mom."

"Goodnight, then," her mother said. "I'll make us some waffles in the morning – I bought some maple syrup today and I need to test it out."

"Sounds great – I'll look forward to it," Lorna replied, trying not to sound irritated. "Goodnight, Mom."

She slipped into her bedroom and walked quietly over to the corner of the room where her three-year-old daughter Liberty was sleeping. She hadn't spoken to the father since long before her daughter was born – he had run away with his tail between his legs as soon as he heard that he might actually have to support a family, as opposed to just having sex with a hot stripper every week. Her mother had expressed serious concerns over the idea of calling her child by such a provocative name, but Lorna had been adamant about it – it was both a statement about how neither she nor her daughter needed anybody to get by in the world, and a way to thumb her nose at the Red Army and the Soviet government without getting the boot of a soldier on her neck. Besides, if she was questioned about it, she could simply lie and say that it represented freedom from the corrupt American ways of the past. She figured that that was a good enough defence for now – but if necessary, she was sure that she'd think up something better later.

"Hey, sweetie," she said softly, reaching down with one hand to stroke her daughter's fine, soft green hair. "Sorry I couldn't be around today, but I had to work. I'll spend some time with you tomorrow, I promise."

Moving across to her own bed, she pulled off her t-shirt, exposing first the alpha symbol tattooed onto her right shoulder, and then the omega symbol on her left, and then put on the plain one she had tucked under her pillow. Taking off her boots, jeans and socks, she slipped under the covers of her bed and, after a few moments of trying to find a comfortable position, closed her eyes. Sleep came fairly quickly after that.

Lorna opened her eyes with a start. Explosions thundered through the streets a few blocks away, the usual dawn chorus of New York that greeted her every day. The sound was, as usual, mixed with Libby's fearful wails, as she heard the noise filter in through the open window and echo softly around the room. Reacting to the more immediate concern, Lorna swung her legs out of bed and rushed to pick Libby up, hugging her to her bosom and whispering comforting words into her ear, in order to try and quiet her daughter's panicky shrieks. As she was doing so, Lorna walked across the room and switched on the television, afraid of what she might see despite herself.

The sight that greeted her confirmed her worst fears: Soviet tanks were trundling down the cracked road, their turrets rhythmically pounding shells into an already weakened apartment block. Chunks of stone crashed down onto the street below, shattering on impact and sending puffs of stone dust in all directions, and splinters of glass exploded in all directions. Then she heard a voice, its volume augmented significantly by a loudspeaker (presumably not just for the benefit of the people it was being directed at, but for the civilians in the surrounding area as well).

"Attention rebels," the voice said, with an air of smug over-confidence. "You are surrounded and, if you do not surrender, you will be killed to the last man."

The camera recording the raid swivelled around to reveal who it was who was speaking, and Lorna saw a Red Army officer with a megaphone standing in front of two tanks. Instantly, she recognised the cruel and unforgiving face of Colonel Norman Osborn, one of the many Americans who had risen to high places in the Soviet military. She recalled seeing him on television before, when he had formally accepted control of New York from Commissar-Colonel Braddock, and she also remembered seeing the increased levels of Red Army troops on the streets immediately after he had taken command. She'd thought that it couldn't get much worse than it had been under Commissar-Colonel Braddock's rule... but she'd clearly been wrong. After all, this wasn't the first time she'd seen Colonel Osborn at the forefront of an assault on the rebels holed up at various locations in the city; just as they were doing now, the Soviet-controlled news programmes were always keen to show him in an overwhelmingly positive light, as a morally-spotless hero of the proletariat. Lorna almost found herself wishing for Commissar-Colonel Braddock to return – at least she had not treated the television as a tool for self-aggrandisement, and had not courted the public's affections so vigorously. Against her better judgement, she had often found herself expressing a grudging respect for the woman's shrewd restraint, brutal and merciless though she might have been. Colonel Osborn's approach, on the other hand, caused her nothing but nausea. He radiated a hunger for power that she found utterly repellent.

The scene shifted away from the raid itself and returned to SAFN's impossibly-photogenic blonde and blue-eyed anchorwoman, Tatiana Kempinski. "Today," she said, a smug little smile crossing her lips as she spoke, "Comrade-Colonel Osborn has begun an assault on rebels hiding in the city limits, continuing the work begun by his predecessors. SAFN will continue to keep you updated on the progress of the brave Soviet army as they fight to preserve your rights and freedoms –"

You know, it's been five years, and you still talk the same old bullshit, lady, Lorna thought scornfully as she switched the television off, and then took Libby out of the bedroom in order to get some breakfast for the two of them. As usual, there were not many early-morning delicacies in the refrigerator, but Lorna always had enough food to get by, even if she couldn't live like a queen. Her neighbourhood was in a perpetually dire state of disrepair, but she always made sure that her larder was as well-stocked as she could make it. She owed Libby nothing less.

Popping open a container of cheap, mass-produced milk when Libby had clambered into the chair next to the kitchen table, Lorna took a swig from the neck of the plastic bottle and then wiped her mouth with the back of her other hand. "Do as Mommy says, not what Mommy does," she said when she saw Libby staring at her in disbelief. After getting Libby her usual two slices of toast and strawberry jam, she found a box of porridge oats in the large cupboard above the work-surface to the right of the sink. It wasn't much, but it would do for now. Heating the porridge oats and milk in a saucepan, she poured the hot concoction into a bowl and found a spoon with which to eat it, gently wiping her daughter's jam-covered cheeks with a piece of tissue paper.

"Mommy! Stop it!" Libby said indignantly, moving away from Lorna's fingers as if her mother was carrying the plague.

Lorna sighed. This was almost a ritual the two of them were required to perform these days. "Sweetheart, this is for your own good," she said. "You don't want Grandma seeing you with your face all dirty, do you?" Scowling, Libby folded her arms sulkily and let Lorna clean up her face, grunting in protest occasionally before Lorna let her get down from her seat. "Good girl," Lorna said encouragingly, ruffling her daughter's hair.

After going through the usual half-hour of trying to get Libby to clean her teeth, Lorna was relieved to see that her mother was awake, drinking her morning coffee on the small sofa in front of the television. "Morning, Mom," she said, her voice already full of weariness despite the early hour. Her mother smiled, clearly recognising the expression on her daughter's face.

"Morning, honey," she said brightly. "Would you like me to take over for you?"

"Oh God, please do," Lorna said. "I need to go get some groceries this morning. If you can watch Libby just until I get back, I'll owe you one."

"Oh, sweetie, you owe me about a million at this point," her mother replied, chuckling. "No problem. I'm sure we can find something to do."

"As long as it doesn't involve you trying to teach her blackjack again," Lorna said with a wry smile. "I'm onto you, Mom."

Kissing her mother on the cheek, Lorna left her apartment and took the elevator down to the ground floor of the building. There had been problems before with people leaving it not quite closed, since looters were common in this particular neighbourhood and would quite happily break into any apartment they could. She didn't think that there were many of them around at this particular time of day, but it was never a good idea to be complacent. Up ahead was a Soviet patrol of five soldiers, all of whom were armed with standard semi-automatic rifles and hand grenades; pretty excessive for a simple neighbourhood sweep, Lorna thought, but she didn't think it wise to question them. As she walked down the street towards them, one of them spotted her and strode over to stop her in her tracks.

"Where are you going, American?" he said, in thickly-accented English.

"Just to buy some groceries, sir," Lorna replied, making sure to keep her voice civil and as submissive as possible.

"Let me see your pass," the soldier said, holding out one hand and clicking his fingers impatiently, demanding the documentation that gave citizens of New York (who were not affiliated with the Red Army) permission to move around during daylight hours. Anyone caught without them was liable for a sizeable fine – or at worst, a spell in a local gulag. "Come on, American. Quickly." Lorna fumbled in her jacket pocket for the small card wallet that contained everything the soldier was asking for, and handed it over as fast as she could. The soldier took it and looked it over with a cursory examination, before handing it back so that Lorna could return it to her pocket. "Nice to see some Americans know what they're doing," he sneered. Then he waved her on, slapping her crudely on the buttocks as he did so.

Lorna held in the impulse to brain him with his own rifle, and instead continued to walk towards the grocery store on the corner of the street with her teeth gritted tightly, so that she couldn't yell a particularly vicious insult. Think of Libby, she thought sourly. She needs you. Don't be stupid...