When the Dust Fell, page 19
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The walk took them nearly twenty-five miles and most of the day. They reached the George Washington Bridge that spanned the Hudson River and connected what was still called New Jersey to the Kingdom. It was the largest bridge Gabi had ever seen. On their side of the wide river stood a gray giant arch made of crisscrossed steel beams in box forms that seemed to stretch from the water to the clouds. In the late afternoon light, the rugged lattice of metal cast long shadows like fine lacework on the asphalt and the water. A third of the way up from the river’s surface were suspended two mostly empty multilane highways, stacked double decker style. Perhaps a dozen vehicles and pedestrians were making their way along the Jersey half of the road in both directions. Far in the distance, on the Kingdom side, stood the arch’s twin. Even from where she stood, maybe as far as two kilometers away, its hulking scale still impressed. From the tops of the twins, enormous steel cables ran, slacking gracefully downward from the Jersey side toward the middle of the highway and then sloping upward again to the top of the second arch. The structure was brutish, completely devoid of decoration. It seemed to her a pure expression of utility and power and strength, its brashness a breathtaking beauty. Gabi was awestruck, almost too frightened to take another step.
Her index fingers went after her thumbs with a vengeance. “Now what?” she asked the girl.
“See that roadblock in the middle? That’s where we go. If he’s short on coin, that’s where we’ll find him.”
“Find who?”
“A friend of Tapper’s. Total asshole, but he used to be super connected. Calls himself Kino.”
27
Sarah’s hometown was southeast of Columbus and butted up against I-70. The giant highway was noisy and ugly but it held the promise of other places, and because of that Sarah had always looked upon it as one of the little town’s best features. Her family shared next to nothing. Not meals, not TV shows, not jokes. On the subject of the Interstate, though, they were aligned. The road trip was how the family vacationed. They’d drive out of Lancaster, eastbound on I-70 toward places like Philadelphia, Newport News, Washington, DC, and once, when she was already a teenager, the Jersey Shore, with a stop at Liberty State Park on the way. The very place she was leaving now.
Road tripping was the group’s singular indulgence.
Jack kept a tight leash on his money. Not because he was broke or miserly, or even responsible. The way Sarah saw it, Jack’s tightfistedness was just another outlet for his cruelty. Another kind of fist. He had a job as a floor supervisor at the Anchor Hocking plant that manufactured glass kitchenware, storage containers, and measuring vessels. Sarah’s mother had been an admin at the small Lancaster campus of the University of Ohio. There hadn’t been a lot of money coming in, Sarah knew. But there was money. Still, no wish was too small to refuse. Nice things, at least things Sarah, her sister, and her mother might consider nice, were universally off limits.
The rule would have held were it not for her mother’s lone act of marital defiance. She had an old mayonnaise jar she hid in the back of the cabinet below the kitchen sink, a place she knew Jack would never look because Jack, who never did the dishes, would never have need to reach into that cabinet for a clean sponge or more soap. In that jar went every penny or quarter or dollar her mother could squirrel away. She called that jar her secret closet because she’d use the stash to sneak-shop clothes for Sarah and her sister. They’d keep the clothes out of sight from Jack by changing into and out of them at school. At first the secret and the efforts to keep it felt like another form of family struggle, another sign that her home life was a hopeless mess. Eventually the dereliction of it took on the contours of an exciting game.
It was a special kind of retail therapy. No matter what the screen-printed words across the front of a new tee might have actually said, in Sarah’s mind the message was always the same, “Fuck you, Jack.” Every time she’d pushed her hand through the sleeve of a new jacket, she’d made sure to give him the finger.
But for cars, his cars, Jack always had money. Parked in the cracked and slopy drive next to their small clapboard cottage with its peeling paint and mossy roof tiles was usually some version of a well-polished Lexus or BMW. It was in those roomy, leather- and Bose-appointed coaches they’d glide out of Lancaster on their annual road adventures, each playing a part in the make-believe theater of a family united in pursuit of fun.
So Sarah knew the route to Lancaster: I-78 to I-76 to I-70. The same roads she’d traveled dozens of times. She’d skirt Allentown, go through Harrisburg, Somerset, bypass Pittsburgh, and cross the Ohio River. By car it would be less than a day; on foot it would be weeks.
She set out on the weed-pocked frontage road that ran alongside the hulking highway. The sun was straight above her and she hoped the warmth would melt away the chill that goosefleshed her neck. It didn’t. As she traveled, she couldn’t help but compare the open, flat, concrete landscape around her now to the closely tangled web of Amsterdam. Even with people shuttered behind closed doors and the narrow, cobbled streets practically empty, Amsterdam had felt more alive. This place, without the persistent buzz of traffic and planes, was like a movie set about a world where everything looked normal, except the people had all mysteriously vanished. Although I-78 had none of the familiar trappings of a Hollywood apocalypse—the abandoned cars, the downed planes—it felt just as doomed. It was the absence that spooked.
The big rigs that bullied the freeways of her memories were nowhere to be seen or heard. Instead, the few vehicles she saw were small electrics and light trucks traveling at breakneck speeds. She’d hear their tire and engine noises long before she’d actually see them, like impending swarms of locusts. When they’d come into view, they were like apparitions solidifying from fog. Not there, then there, then gone in a flash. Between vehicles it was unnervingly quiet. Sarah kept one arm pressed against her coat as she walked to feel the heavy, comforting lump of a weapon.
Up ahead on the right side of the road, a row of tract houses began. They were the small and mostly identical single-story brick boxes that filled the yawning maw of America’s suburban sprawl of the 1960s. Red- or oatmeal-colored finish-brick in the front, plain Chicago brick on the sides, a large picture window trimmed with a piece of live-edge limestone that would alternate in placement from house to house on either the right or left side of the white aluminum door which was invariably accessed by a narrow two-step-high landing of poured concrete. The gray-speckled hip roofs lined up in perfect order along the street Sarah was traveling, with only narrow strips of dead grass and weeds and a cracking sidewalk between the little buildings and the road. Just beyond her, over her left shoulder, facing the row of picture windows, was the great asphalt expanse of I-78.
Sarah wondered if the people who now lived in these houses, if there were people living there, welcomed the unnatural quiet that had her so on edge. Or did they miss the screaming hurricane drone of traffic that kept them awake at night but at least told them the world still worked? She passed a red-brick version. Someone had taped a hand-lettered sign on the big window. One of its corners had come unstuck and the sign hung there crooked and forlorn. “Have a nice day!” it read.
Six houses into the block she heard a door squeal open and then shut behind her. She stopped and slowly turned around, her heart picking up its pace. On the landing two houses back was an elderly black woman, a tightly packed round shape of pale-yellow sweater topped in gray set upon two stout legs stuffed into blue jeans. She was barefoot.
“Hello.” She waved.
“Hello,” Sarah said.
“Could you help me? Please?”
The woman was clearly weaponless, the sound of her voice kindly and needy. Sarah walked slowly toward the house. She noticed the side windows were pushed open, their panes jutting out like fins from the pale brick. She stopped at the sidewalk in front of the short concrete path that connected it to the stoop. The woman smiled broadly, but there was no hiding the worry in her eyes.
“I’ve been sitting in this front window for days, watching and waiting. Everyone’s gone, you know. Now you’re finally here.”
Sarah waited for the woman to keep talking.
“It’s my son,” the old lady said. “I need to get him out of bed, but he’s too heavy for me.”
“Is he hurt?”
“Oh no,” the lady said flatly. “He’s dead.”
Sarah stayed on the sidewalk, processing.
“I have crackers, and good peanut butter.”
Sarah studied the house and looked over at its neighbors. Both houses were dark. She squeezed an arm against her side to feel the duster again. “Okay.”
The woman walked back in the house, and before Sarah got to the first step of the narrow porch the smell of feces and decay hit her. Inside it was much worse. She stopped on the few rows of tile that separated the front door from the living room carpet and tried to get a sense of the place before going any further. The living room was tidy but crazily small, with barely room enough for the two upholstered chairs and a television that sat beneath one of the open windows Sarah had seen from the outside. The wall that separated the kitchen from the living room had a large breakfront cutout letting it get some light from the big picture window. The woman had headed to the back of the house where Sarah guessed the bedrooms must be, and she stood in the little hallway in front of the pink-tiled bathroom. The woman, even in this bizarro moment, appeared steady, poised. Her eyes, when they met Sarah’s, were trusting.
The house was small enough that she had a reasonably safe sense of the layout from her place by the front door. The dead son, she presumed, was in the bedroom behind the kitchen, left of the old woman. If he was truly dead, and it sure smelled like he was, the only real mystery was what or who might be in the other bedroom.
“Do you mind if I take a quick look around first?” Sarah asked.
The woman said nothing, but Sarah detected a shift in the woman’s face, a flicker of curiosity.
“I want to be sure there’s no one else here.”
“Who else would be here?” the old woman said softly, her face relaxed once more.
“I don’t know.” Sarah walked slowly toward the kitchen. It too was neat and orderly. The counters were shiny, the sink empty, the overall cleanliness in sharp contrast to the odor that grew thicker as she pushed her way deeper into the little house.
“Dwayne is in here,” the woman said, pointing to the room behind the kitchen. Sarah went to the other bedroom first. A woman’s room. A soft yellow bedspread, close to the color of the woman’s sweater, was neatly draped atop a full-sized bed bracketed by two dark wood nightstands. The window facing the door was also wide open. All the surfaces, even the dresser that stood directly beneath the open window, shined cleanly. Sarah opened the closet. Once confident there was no one else in the house, she steeled her courage for Dwayne.
“Oh my God,” she muttered under her breath when she walked in the room.
Dwayne wasn’t just dead. He was science-project dead. He lay half on a twin bed and half on the floor. Badly stained bed coverings were twisted about him haphazardly, leaving much of poor Dwayne exposed. Decomposition had bloated his body to the point where the skin had split in several places and rivulets of red and yellow liquid oozed from the breaks, telling the gruesome story of what had stained the bed coverings.
“One day, he just didn’t wake up,” the old lady said. “I tried to move him, but he’s too heavy for me alone.”
“I see,” Sarah said.
“It wouldn’t be right to leave him like this,” the old woman said in a way that finally recognized the sadness of the situation.
Sarah took her hand. “Why don’t you go sit in the living room? I’ll get him in the backyard for you.” The old woman nodded, the look and the nod familiar in a way that raised the hairs on Sarah’s arms.
It took Sarah nearly a half hour to get Dwayne outside. He wasn’t particularly heavy. The bloating had made him seem a much bigger man. But she didn’t want him to mess the house any more than necessary. Before she moved him, she wrapped him in some clean sheets she found in the woman’s bedroom. Twice she had to run to the bathroom to vomit. Eventually, she managed to drag him through the kitchen door and around the house to a patch of grass between the back of the building and a small, well-tended shed. By then the woman had joined her.
“There’s a shovel in the shed,” she said, walking across the patch with a key in her hand. She unlocked the door and Sarah followed her in. Like the house, the shed was immaculate. Garden tools were neatly organized on hooks and clips across one wall. Another movie set. On the opposite side of the shed stood a gleaming, pearl-brown Honda Shadow. Sarah grabbed the shovel and went back to Dwayne.
By the time the hole was deep enough, the sun had fallen to the horizon. Sarah rolled Dwayne in as gently as she could.
“Would you like to say something?” Sarah asked the woman.
“I’ve already told my Dwayne what he needs to hear.”
Sarah gave a short nod and began the work of refilling the hole. When she was finished, night had settled in and she went back into the kitchen. The old woman had a plate of crackers on the counter with a jar of peanut butter next to it.
“You must be hungry,” she said.
“Actually, I can’t believe I am, but I am. Thank you.”
The old woman went to the living room and sat down on a chair facing the dead television. Sarah stayed at the kitchen counter and watched the old woman through the breakfront. The woman put her hands in her lap, crossed her legs at the ankles, and turned to Sarah with warmth in her eyes.
“They’re in the small top drawer to your left,” the old woman said.
“I’m sorry?” Sarah said. “What are?”
“The keys to Dwayne’s motorcycle, dear. That’s what you’re here for.”
“No, you asked me for help, so I came in. That’s all.”
“That’s not even a little of it, Sarahbeara. Nothing on your path is just a stumble. There’s work to be done and it can’t wait. You need that bike.”
Sarah’s stomach went cold. The conversation with Heather, the woman who appeared to her on the ship, raced through her head. And, of course, Elouise. The jet pilot.
“Sarahbeara,” she said. “I hadn’t heard anyone call me that in years. I’ve heard it twice now in four weeks. At least I think I have.”
The old woman smiled softly. In her eyes Sarah saw that strange familiarity again. It washed over her like a warm ocean wave. For a moment she let herself be gently pulled under.
“I know what I’m doing is crazy,” she said. “Nothing about it makes any sense to me. But I’m doing it anyway. Can you tell me why? Can you at least tell me I’m not losing my mind?”
The old woman waited a beat before answering. “Be sure to eat plenty of that peanut butter,” was all she said.
Sarah opened the drawer and took the keys to the Honda.
28
Before being crushed by the Kalelah’s fall, Putin had managed to send three single-payload rockets to America. One burst over a missile silo field in Montana; the other two had exploded over the cities of Houston and Chicago. It had been obvious why Montana was chosen. But why Houston and Chicago? People had all kinds of theories. Putin was an oilman, the most popular notion went, so Houston was taken to knock out a competitor. Chicago had been the center of rail transport, commodities trading and agribusiness finance, and a major tourist destination as well. Mostly, people had said, Chicago was killed because it would hurt. Of all the big American cities, Chicago was the most, well…American. The prettiest of them too.
Kino had been to Chicago only once, to attend a funeral for a moderately wealthy aunt. He stayed an extra day for the reading of the will. When he had learned she’d left him twenty thousand dollars he moved from his room at the Holiday Inn to a suite at the Peninsula and blew through the entire inheritance in three days on steaks, clothes, bourbon, and a breathy escort who called herself Catherine. He still had fond, if fuzzy, memories of Chicago.
As he headed west along Interstate 78 on the way to Lancaster, Ohio, and the mayor’s good graces, he worried about how close his plan would take him to that once great city. On the map, Lancaster sat a hair east of the hot zone jointly fueled by the radioactive heat pouring out of Chicago and Houston. Together, the two sites put up an ionic shroud of slow and nauseating death that stretched from Ontario to central Mexico. If his heat map could be trusted, Lancaster would be clean, and he could at least cross radiation sickness off the list of things that might kill him on this trip.
Except heat maps were like everything else After: suspect. They were drawn by crazies and data mercenaries, their cars fitted with bootleg Geiger counters. The drivers worked north-south routes on each side of the zone. Those who survived the work and earned a reputation for accuracy, or what had become the new and significantly diminished definition of accuracy, were paid a relative fortune by the kings and syndicates who controlled the heat map markets. Kino knew better though than to put too much faith in anything the kings and syndicates had for sale. What did the song say? A liar never trusts anyone else.
Besides, the wind made the whole concept of a map practically worthless. Where he was headed it whipped out of the western prairies over Chicago Ground Zero and pushed eastward across Lake Michigan. It meant the northeastern edge of the zone was always moving. Depending on the wind, the start of the zone could shift more than a hundred miles in either direction. For safety’s sake he had his own counter riding on the dash the entire trip. So far, the needle had been calm, gently bobbing within the normal range.
His vehicle, an imposing electric SUV on loan from the mayor, was painted black with protective cladding around the wheels and a large solar collector on the roof. The radio played nothing but static. He hadn’t expected anything more but turning it on was a habit whenever he drove. Only once in two years had he picked up a pirate signal. Polka music. Of course. Nevertheless, out of habit, he had kept the radio on for a bit, scrolling back and forth along the channel band hoping to catch something to break up the white noise drone of loneliness. By the time he’d reached Pennsylvania, he grew sleepy and switched to Bluetooth. Like most people, he didn’t have much of a music library cached—only a few dozen albums he had pushed onto his phone years ago. “Dancing Days” from Houses of the Holy filled the cabin.
