[h1]Kansas[/h1]
[h2]Topeka[/h2]

“Would you like any more coffee, sir?” the waitress asked politely. She wore a tight-fitting white dressed, dutifully bleached so that it shone in the incandescent lighting of the diner. Her hair combed back, it was wrapped in a tight bun. She couldn't have been older than sixteen, and her youthful face held back anxious reproach as she looked at the man.

Dirty, and covered in dust the man she addressed at the table was the clear opposite of the diner. Linoleum floors shone clean and mopped in the warm lighting and the autumn sunlight on the white table top.

“Nah, I don't think so ma'am.” the man said in a low crackling voice. He was the diner's opposite, his voice cut around the edges with an abrasive gritty rattle. His skin was baked dark by the sun, deepening his already half-breed Native American complexion. But in the dark rings around his eyes a pair of strong blue eyes looked up at the young girl.

“Alright, thank you.” the youth smiled, nervously. She shuffled away, timidly plodding to the next table quietly, as if her foot steps would somehow rouse the sandy gentlemen at the table into anger. And why wouldn't it? Unbeknownst to her, just the other day he had marched someone out into their death in the middle of a dust storm.

“Hey Duke, whadd'ya think we'll find when those records come through?” asked one of his table mates across from him. Duke, the driver looked over at him, and considered.

He and him were both of two different stocks. Duke, a half-Indian had a certain wide heavy build to his bones that bulged his shoulders and gave him a wide rounded chin. He looked to be the son of a warrior chief of old, and his hands looked able to scalp a man without the help of so much of a knife. But he was also half-Swedish, and the sandy blonde hair that hung down across his forehead and his sharp sapphire blue eyes certainly added considerably European features to his aboriginal looks.

The other, Paul was a skinny sort of German or Dutch man. His thick head of hair seemed never to be clean and as such could one day be a dark brown, oily black, or a rusted red. He was also loosing his hair early, and his forehead was quickly growing taller as his hair fell out. Five years younger than Duke at twenty-six he had ambled into the special government service they were in as almost like a drifter for hire from the ranching days. He'd been looking for work, and presented Duke with the old family revolver he hung openly on his hip, as one of the few people to actually do so. He had a wiry ranch-hand look about him, a greenhorn ranch hand.

“Another breadcrumb.” Duke replied, sliding the half-empty coffee cup back and forth between his hands.

“An' we'll keep peckin' and keep peckin', sooner enough we'll be so full of breadcrumbs we won't move. Most well fed vigilante on the dusty prairies for well over twenty years naw.” smiled a man next to Duke, he starred wistfully across the street to Topeka just outside.

The streets were busy enough, some folk had work enough and Browder and his Congress had tried to get people to work by throwing open the old car factories that had been shuddered after the war. In so far, Duke had only heard of them manufacturing replacement parts for folk trying to keep their Chevrolet and Model A's limping along from day to day. Most of the time, these parts simply forced the cars to turn into Frankenstein machines with the parts built for cars from the long-dead car company that once had used them, loosely adapted to the general idea of a Ford or GM car. Some others he had heard more, went to Topeka as aircraft parts.

Topeka was a modern city in the sense of the word as it applied to the Midwest. It had tall buildings, but none going much higher than ten stories. Mostly offices and apartments. The otherwise drab and dirty exteriors had been painted over in the last few years with encouraging murals that fill people in on the slogans that Wichita ran on.

“Blacks are as good as whites”, “Unions are the cornerstones of the new Democracy!”, “Communism: the new Americanism”. These were accompanied in some way by paintings of men shacking hands across the races, or across unions, or Anarchists with what Duke could only assume were the neat and tidy democratic socialists. Sometimes he couldn't quite grasp it. Yet he hadn't yet found anything for people of his mother's background, the Osage. But he guessed it was implied with the bi-racial symbol of unity of the white man shaking hands with the black.

The man next to Duke was a survivor of the Great War. He bragged he was one of the first Marines to enter France and the first American rifle to shoot a kraut in Europe. His claims couldn't be proven, but what could was that he was one of the many who had left Europe ruined by the war. A grenade had early in the war tore at the left side of his face, deeply scarring his skin and destroying his eye. He was a jovial man, who smiled despite it, and each time he did his grin was crooked and showed teeth at the edge of his lips. He was sensible though, and he made attempts to hide his face. A patch to cover his eye, and a wadded mas of fabric that served as a replacement for the old facial prosthetic he had lost between the war and now.

He was large, even more so than Duke. With a big bulbous nose like a doorknob and deep dark eyes. He had been a Sgt. MacAllster before the war, but now he was simply Buff.

“Well, ah- what I mean is what do you think will be at the end of this?” Paul asked, rephrasing his previous point; or hoping to have. “We'll have to find out something. Duke, you seem to think you know what's up?” he asked, full of energy and vigor.

“All I know is something happened.” he grumbled, “And someone, someones got hella cheated.” he voice dropped thinking about it. Thinking that in Wichita there was a general theory that something had fucked up somewhere and they were sent out in force to figure it out.

They had been ambling about for months, hoping to find answers in where ever. They had charged people in the old state governments who hadn't made the switch, even sent a few to prisons. They had beat and killed their way along. If Duke looked back at the journey so far as a highway, there'd be a couple dark shapes strung up hanging from windmills and telephone poles, beating and swinging in the dry cold and hot winds. 'How much of this was because they were all angry?' he often wondered.

The diner wasn't very full, so there wasn't many people around to catch the drift of the conversation to start asking questions. Though few would ask a man with a Red Bandanna around their necks. Many kept clear. They knew the stories of the armed rogues who dealt with the reactionaries. They were hardly a secret, nor were they very clean.

“You know what I think?” Paul began, “I think it was a German conspiracy!” he proclaimed in a hushed breath, his voice was clearly excited.

Buff gave a loud snorting laugh from his corner of the table and turned his head around to him. “Nah where tha' hell did'ya get that from?” he snorted in his thick molasses Texan accent.

“Oh I don't know, I was just thinking.” Paul answered him, “It's just a theory. And besides, those Fascists are already dug down in New York, what if they had a hand in things earlier and took over the elections? Why else would a Republican like Hoover win?”

“Sounds more lik'a hypothesis t'me.” Buff chuckled grimly, “But keep dreamin' kid.” he smiled. The cloth bandages he used to hid his broken face peeled back a little as he smiled, revealed a crooked toothy mouth at the left-side of his face.

Paul visibly shivered and dropped his face to the plate of half-eaten food in front of him. He seemed to consider it for a minute, then pushed it aside.

The door to the diner opened with the soft chime of a brass bell over the door. Duke looked open to see a group of men as ragged as them enter in. Politely, they tipped their hats to the old woman at the register and walked over to where they were at. One was holding a notepad in his hands.

“Comrades.” the taller of the group said as they came over.

“How was the old archives?” Duke asked them.

“We done got through it good.” the man said, holding up his notebook, “Jackson Donaheugh, lives up in Hill City.”

Duke nodded, looking over at his table mates he groaned, “We'll talk about this outside.”

The new men nodded, and stepped aside as the table emptied.
___________

They had been let out easily enough, the old lady at the register letting them go with a soft quip that, “They'll send a bill to Wichita”. With a polite thanks, Duke let himself out into the streets and the group went around back to an alley where they had parked their cars.

Though still sand-blasted they had cut their chains loose, far from the worse epicenter of the deadly dust-storms, the build up of high-voltage static wasn't an issue. And parked in the long shadows of buildings around them they appeared to be as anyone else's worn down country car. Tough one, a truck, sported the decoration of many coyote pelts nailed to the hood. Their coats were dry and nearly mummified from the sun and sand.

The air smelled like dejected grease.

“Our man it appears retired to a eighty-five square-mile horse ranch north of Hill City, Kansas.” the tall man who had led the expedition into the Kansas state land archives said, “At least that's what I can gather, McKenzie dived into what other records there he could find to help build us a profile, but it appears that after the crash Donaheugh sold as much stock as he had left to try and reimburse himself and dug in at ranch land. We can't tell what he's been doing sense, but by the looks of it he could still be there; he was paying taxes on the land still up until the Revolution.”

“He could have flown the coup.” Duke said, “What makes you confident he's there?” he asked.

“I'm not.” the fellow Red Vigilante said, “I'm just betting. We also found names of his family around the state, if we had to we could split up and talk to any of them on the off-chance he may have left. Figure out if they know of any out of state family or associates.”

Duke nodded, “I like that plan.”

“I thought you would.” the man said.

“Eighty-five miles though,” said Duke with a reproachful sigh, “That's a lot of ground he can use to hide or escape through if he knew we're coming.”

“He might be armed too.” Buff pointed out, adding: “But one man versus even three, the odds won't be in his favor.”

“They sure won't.”

“Then we'll follow it, as always.” Duke said without any further thought, “I want you to look into those family contacts of his too,” he added, nodding to the other vigilante, “do what investigating you can. We'll all head back into Wichita when we're done and compare notes.”

“Sounds good to me.” the other smiled, clapping his hand, “See you on the other side!” he cheered, turning to the coyote-pelt covered truck.