After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia (36 page)

Which is to say, there’s nothing over there.

“You never wonder about it, though?”

“Why would I? Besides, the bridge ain’t safe to cross anymore.” Max pointed south
to the long span of it. Lots of the tall trusses, which used to be steel, have dropped
away into the sludgy river a hundred and fifty feet below. Lots of the roadway, too.
“You’d have to be crazy to try. And since there’s nothing over there, you’d have to
be extra crazy. You know what suicide is, right?”

“I think about it sometimes, is all. Not suicide, just finding out what’s over there.”

“Same damn difference,” he said. “Anyway, we ought’a be getting back.” He turned away
from the river and the bridge, the island and the other side of the river. So that’s
why I didn’t ask Max to cross the bridge with me. I knew he’d say no, and I was pretty
sure he’d tell one of the olders, and then someone would stop me. I followed him back
to the barracks, but I knew by then I was definitely going to climb the chain-link
fence and cross the bridge.

Oh, I almost forgot, and I want to put this in, write down what I can recall of it.
On the way home, we came across Mr. Benedict. He was sitting on a rusty barrel not
far from the NOW|HERE wall. In THE BEFORE, Mr. Benedict—Mr. Saul Benedict—was a physicist.
He’s one of our teachers now, though he isn’t well and sometimes misses days. Max
says something inside his head is broken. Something in his mind, but that he isn’t
exactly crazy. Anyway, there he was on the barrel. He’s one of the few olders who
ever talks much about THE GOO. That afternoon, he said hello to me and Max, but he
had that somewhere-else tone to his voice. He sounded so distant, distant in time
or in place. I don’t know. We said hello back. Then he pointed to the bridge, and
that sort of gave me shudder, and I wondered if he’d noticed us staring at it. He
couldn’t have overheard us; we were too far away.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he said.

“What doesn’t make sense?” Max asked him.

“It should have fallen. Steel and concrete, that’s one thing. Iron, steel, precompressed
concrete, those materials, fine. But after the bots were done with it…that bridge,
it should have collapsed under its own weight, even though, obviously, its not nearly
as heavy or dense now as it was before. Plastic could never bear the load.”

This is the thing about Saul Benedict: he asks questions no one ever asks, questions
I don’t understand half the time. If you let him, he’ll go on and on about how something’s
not right about our understanding of THE EVENT, how the science doesn’t add up right.
I’ve heard him say the fumes from the outgassing plastic should have killed us all
years ago. And how the earth’s mass would have been changed radically by the nano-assemblers,
which would have altered gravity. How lots of the atmosphere would have been lost
to space when gravity changed. And how plate tectonics would have come to a halt.
Lots of technical science stuff like that, some of which I have to go to the library
to find out what he means. I’m pretty sure very few people bother to consider whether
or not Mr. Benedict is right. Maybe not because they believe the questions are nonsense,
but because no one needs more uncertainty than we have already. I’m not even sure
I spend much time on whether or not he’s making sense. I just look up words to see
what the questions mean.

“But it
hasn’t
fallen down,” Max protested, turning back toward the bridge. “Well, okay. Some pieces
broke off, but not the whole bridge.”

“That’s just the problem,” Mr. Benedict said. “It hasn’t fallen down. You do the math.
It would have fallen
immediately
.”

“Max is terrible at math,” I told Mr. Benedict, and he frowned.

“He doesn’t apply himself, Cody. You know that don’t you, Max? You don’t apply yourself.
If you did, you’d be an exemplary student.”

We told him we were late for chores, said our until laters, and left him sitting on
the rusty barrel, muttering to himself.

“Nutty old fart,” Max said, and I didn’t say anything.

Before I went to cross the bridge, I did some studying up first. In the library, there’s
a book about the city that used to be Jacksonville, and I sat at one of the big tables
and read about the Mathews Bridge. It was built in 1953, which made it exactly one
hundred years old last year. But what mattered was that it’s about a mile and a half
across. One morning, I talked Mr. Kleinberg at the garage into lending me his stopwatch,
and I figured out I walk about three miles an hour, going at an easy pace. Not walking
fast or jogging, just walking. So, barring obstructions, if I could go straight across,
it would only take me about half an hour. Half an hour across, half an hour back.
Maybe poke about on the other side (which, by the way, used to be called Arlington)
for a couple of hours, and I’d be back before anyone even noticed I’d gone. For all
I knew, other kids had already done it. Even more likely, some of the olders.

I picked the day I’d go—July 18, which was on a Friday. I’d go right after my morning
chores, during late-morning break, and be sure to be back by lunch. I didn’t tell
Max or anyone else. No one would ever be the wiser. I filled a canteen and I went.

It was easy getting over the fence. There isn’t any barbed wire, like on some of the
fences around Sanctuary. I snagged my jeans on the sharp twists of wire at the top,
but only tore a very small hole that would be easy to patch. On the other side, the
road’s still asphalt for about a hundred yards or so, before the plastic begins. Like
I said, I’d walked on THE GOO before, so I knew what to expect. It’s very slightly
springy, and sometimes you press shallow footprints into it that disappear after a
few minutes. On the bridge, there was the fine dust that accumulates as the plastic
breaks down. Not as much as I’d have expected, but probably that’s because the wind
blows it away. But there were heaps of it where the wind couldn’t reach, piled like
tiny sand dunes. I left footprints in the dust that anyone could have followed.

I glanced back over my shoulder a few times, just to be certain no one was following
me. No one was. I kept to the westbound lane. There were cracks in the roadway, in
what once had been cement. Some were hardly an inch, but others a foot or two across
and maybe twice as deep, so I’d have to jump over those. I skirted the places where
the bridge was coming apart in chunks, and couldn’t help but think about what all
Mr. Benedict had said. It shouldn’t be here. None of it should still be here, but
it is. So what don’t we know? How
much
don’t we know?

I walked the brown bridge, and on either side of me, far below, the lazy crimson St.
Johns River flowed. I walked, and a quarter of a mile from the fence, I reached the
spot where the bridge spans the island. I went to the guardrail and peered over the
edge. I leaned against the rail, and it cracked loudly and dropped away. I almost
lost my balance and tumbled down to the crimson river. I stepped back, trying not
to think about what it would be like to slowly sink and drown in that.…

And I thought about turning around and heading back. From this point on, I constantly
thought about going back, but I didn’t. I walked a little faster than before, though,
suddenly wanting to be done with this even if I still felt like I had to
do
it.

I kept hearing Max talking inside my head, saying what he’d said, over and over again.

Since there’s nothing over there, you’d have to be extra crazy.

You know what suicide is, right?

Ain’t nothing over there except what THE GOO left.

It took me a little longer to reach the halfway point than I thought it would, than
my three-miles-an-hour walking had led me to believe it would. It was all the cracks,
most likely. Having to carefully jump them, or find ways around them. And I kept stopping
to gaze out and marvel at the ugly wasteland THE GOO had made of the land beyond the
Mathews Bridge. I don’t know if there’s a name for the middle of a bridge, the highest
point of a bridge. But it was right about the time I reached that point that I spotted
the car. It was still pretty far off, maybe halfway to the other end. It was skewed
sideways across the two eastbound lanes, on the other side of the low divider that
I’m sure used to be concrete but isn’t anymore.

But all the cars were cleared off the bridge by the military years ago. They were
towed to the other side or pushed into the crimson river. There weren’t supposed to
be any cars on the bridge. But here was
this
one. The sunlight glinted off yellow fiberglass and silver chrome, and I could tell
the nano-assemblers hadn’t gotten hold of it, that it was still made of what the factory
built it from. And I had two thoughts, one after the other: Where did this car come
from? And, Why hasn’t anyone noticed it? The second thought was sort of silly because
it’s not like anyone really watches the bridge, not since most of the Army and National
Guard went away.

Then I thought, How long’s it been there? And, Why didn’t it come all the way across?
And, What happened to the driver? All those questions in my head, I was starting to
feel like Saul Benedict. It was an older car, one of the electrics that were already
obsolete by the time THE EVENT occurred.

“Cody, you go back,” I said out loud, and my voice seemed huge up there on the bridge.
It was like thunder. “You go back and tell someone. Let them deal with this.”

But then I’d have to explain what I was doing way out on the bridge alone.

Are you enjoying this, Max? I mean, if I’ve let you read it. If I did, I hope to hell
you’re enjoying it, because I’m already sweating, drops of sweat darkening the encyclopedia
pages. Right now I feel like that awful day on the bridge. I could stop now. I could
turn back now. I could. I won’t, but I
could
. Doesn’t matter. I’ll keep writing, Max, and you’ll keep reading.

I kept walking. I didn’t turn back, like a smarter girl would have done. A smarter
girl who understood it was more important to tell the olders what I’d found than to
worry about getting in trouble for being out on the bridge. There was a strong gust
of wind, warm from the south, and the dust on the bridge was swept up so I had to
partly cover my face with my arm. But I could see the tiny brown devils swirling across
the road.

Right after the wind, while the dust was still settling, I came to an especially wide
crack in the roadway. It was so wide and deep, and when I looked down, the bottom
was hidden in shadow. It didn’t go all the way through, or I’d not have been able
to see down there. I had to climb over the barricade into the eastbound lane, into
the lane with the car, to get around it. I haven’t mentioned the crumbling plastic
seagulls I kept finding. Well, I figured they’d been seagulls. They’d been birds,
and were big enough to have been seagulls. They littered the bridge, birds that died
twelve years ago when I was four. Once I was only, I don’t know, maybe twenty-five
yards from the car, I stopped for a minute or two. I squinted, trying to see inside,
but the windows were tinted and I couldn’t make out anything at all in there.

The car looked so shiny and new. No way it had been sitting out in the weather very
long. There weren’t even any pieces of the plastic girders lying on it, no dents from
decayed and falling GOO, so it was a newcomer to the bridge, and I think that scared
me most of all. By then, my heart was pounding—thumping like mad in my chest and ears
and even the tip ends of my fingers—and I was sweating. Not the normal kinda sweat
from walking, but a cold sweat like when I wake up from the nightmares of this day
I’m writing about. My mouth was so, so dry. I felt a little sick to my belly, and
wondered if it was breathing in all that dust.

“No point in stopping now,” I said, maybe whispering, and my voice was huge out there
in all the empty above and below and around the Mathews Bridge. “So when they ask
what I found, I can tell them all of it, not just I found a car on the bridge.” I
considered the possibility that it might have been rovers, might be a trap. Them lying
there in wait until someone takes the bait, then they ask for supplies to let me go.
We hadn’t seen rovers—looters—in a year or so, but that didn’t mean they weren’t still
out there, trying to get by on the scraps of nothing they found and whatever they
could steal. Lower than the sneaks, the rovers. At least the sneaks never kill anyone.
They just slip in and rob you when no one’s looking. Ma’am Shen says they’re all insane,
and I expect that’s the truth of it. I wished I’d brought a knife (I have a lock-blade
I keep in my footlocker), but that was dumb, ’cause rovers carry guns and bows and
shit. What good’s a knife for a fifteen-year-old girl out on her own, so exposed she
might as well be naked. No chance but to turn around and run if things went bad.

I shouted, “Anybody in there?” At the very top of my voice I shouted it. When no one
answered, I shouted again, and still nobody answered me. I hadn’t thought they would,
but it didn’t hurt to try.

“You don’t need to be scared of me,” I called out. “And I ain’t got nothing worth
stealing.” Which I knew was dumb because if it was rovers they wouldn’t be after what
I
had
on my person, but what they could
get
for me.

No one called back, and so I started walking again.

Pretty soon, I was close enough I could make out the plates on the front of the vehicle—Alabama,
which we all thought was another LOST PLACE, since that’s what the Army guys had told
us. On the map of what once was the United States hanging on the wall in the library,
Alabama was colored in red, like all the LOST PLACES (which is most of the map). But
here was a car from Alabama, and it couldn’t have been sitting on the bridge very
long at all, not and still be so shiny and clean. Maybe I counted my footsteps after
shouting and not getting an answer, but if so, I can’t remember how many I took.