What Came After (5 page)

In the sack was a folded-over note from Liz addressed to both of them, but he didn’t read it out loud. He didn’t even mention it. He just saw it and drew it out between his fingers and tucked it away.

She sat on her backpack and drank a little water and picked at the granola in her palm. Leaving the nuts. Letting ground-up bits of them slide back into the sack every time she went for another handful and thinking he wouldn’t notice.

“Eat those, you skinny thing,” he said, when he couldn’t let her keep it up any longer. “You need the protein.”

She did. Licked her palm clean and made a face.

“Good girl. We’ve got a ways to go yet. Have some more.” He told her about a time when kids her age ate everything in sight and just about couldn’t stop eating. Couldn’t help themselves since food was everywhere in those days and it cost next to nothing. This was before his time, but his parents had lived through it. Blame those big factory farms, pumping out more food than people needed and finding ways to make them want it anyway. Poisoning it with sugar. It was as if somebody had thrown a switch and the whole business forgot how to stop or even slow down, so it just kept going.

Things were different now. Supply and demand. Hardly enough of anything to go around. But boy did it cost.

*

The fenced-in fields gave out after a while and they walked on among low rolling hills. Trails of broken blacktop going off in all directions and lines of concrete split by tall grass and crumbled cinderblock ruins set one after another. Here and there a metal pole angling up out of the ground with a frame for a sign on top but the sign dangling or just plain gone. He told her they’d called this a subdivision and she didn’t ask a subdivision of what. It was just a word.

“Are we getting close to New York?”

“No.”

“How much closer are we now than when we started?”

“As far as we’ve walked.”

“Daddy.”

“A few miles. I don’t know.”

“Carry me.”

He did.

*

Miles went by with him walking and her on his shoulders. Heading south and a little west with the face of the white cat for warding off trouble. Stopping every half hour or so to rest. As they went along one subdivision bled into another like it was all the same thing, although there had been a day when it was divided up and parceled out. When there were townships out here and school districts and high schools with longstanding rivalries on the football field. When different things belonged to different people. None of this belonged to anybody now. PharmAgra owned the fields and National Motors owned the highways and AmeriBank carried the paper that kept it all straight. But out here in the Zone the idea of ownership had gone back to the way it was before any white man had set foot here. When the Indians possessed it all and didn’t even know they possessed it because they didn’t want to possess anything.

There wasn’t even a means for staking a claim. But some still did. Even right here. Exactly here. The dark low noise of a tarpaulin flapping signaled it. The day was fading and the sun was dying and they heard that batwing rustle from off to one side of the road. Up along a half-circle of blacktop with a big wrecked building at the far end. The blacktop surrounding a patch of broken dirt and in the middle of the dirt a steel pole jutting up. A chain hanging loose from the top of the pole, clanging in the little breeze. The low rustling sound rose from somewhere back in the direction of the building. They weren’t ignorant and superstitious like city people about what kind of terrors might be out here, but the girl was only five years old and no bigger than a breath and the sounds were darkly suggestive. The ghost ship clanging of the chain and the liquid rustle of something furtive rising up as the sun went down.

She leaned into her father like a bareback rider and nudged her knees into his shoulders and whispered “Go,” and he went. Running or at least jogging, his breath coming harder. Going not away from anything, he told himself, but toward something. Some better place to string a rope between a pair of trees and hang their tarp from it. Some secluded place. All alone he’d have slept anywhere, but not tonight. Not with her. He’d have slept by the roadside with trucks screaming past or under a ragged outcropping with bats fidgeting over his head. He’d have slept in a newdug grave if he’d found one. But not now. He thought he’d pictured this trip pretty well but he hadn’t pictured this part. Their exposure in that makeshift tent. Her exposure.

The fear constricted his throat and made his breath come harder, and he jogged on as long as he could but not long. The dirt road was washboarded and riddled with potholes and he told himself he didn’t want to break a leg in the early dark. Where would they be then. He looked back and saw his footprints in the dirt and didn’t like seeing them. Standing there panting. What if somebody. What if. Don’t think. He set the girl down and didn’t let go of her hand and she wouldn’t have let him anyway. “Let’s keep going,” he said.

“Where,” she said.

“Just a little farther.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Me too.”

They slowed so he could find an apple in her backpack and they shared it bite by bite. The PharmAgra label got caught in his teeth and he spat most of it out. She was still hungry and so was he, but neither of them said it. They’d eaten the apple down to the seeds and the stem and they were starving but who wouldn’t be.

She said, “We could plant these seeds if we wanted.”

“Sure,” he said. “Grow ourselves an apple tree. But that’d take a few years.” Working at the rest of that sticker with a fingernail. “We’re better off eating what we packed, don’t you think? That’s quicker.”

She sighed and gave a theatrical shrug. “I meant
when we get home.”
Like wouldn’t he ever understand anything.

They marched on. They came to a ruined intersection with lamp posts and sign posts and a traffic signal still hanging overhead on wires. Little gabled roofs over the stacked holes where the colored lights used to be. All of it hanging dark up there against the rising moon. He pointed it out and described what of it she couldn’t see. He said it sort of looked like a big birdhouse. She asked him what kind of birds lived there and he said they probably didn’t have birds here anymore. Just like they didn’t have them at home. Which he guessed wasn’t much of an answer, so he said maybe robins. Robins like in the book she had. Robin redbreasts. But they’re all sleeping now. It’s bedtime for everybody.

They turned there and went up a little distance to where some trees grew. Settled in among them and chose two and hung the rope from one to the other and draped the tarpaulin over the rope like a pup tent. Got supper out. Ate it cold rather than risk a fire, even a low one, even here surrounded by close-set trees and undergrowth dense with the last of summer.

*

Whoever woke them up had a flashlight. Over the years Weller had found plenty of flashlights in the dump and he had devised theories about how they worked, but he’d never seen one lit up. This one was shining into his eyes at close range and the man holding it was drawing back to kick him in the kidneys a second time, so he didn’t have the opportunity to think about it any. He just recoiled. Recoiled and half sat up and put himself between whoever this was and his daughter.

“Hands behind your head.”

Weller reached to retrieve his glasses.

“Behind your head or off it comes.” A clicking sound in the dark. “And then who’ll look after your baby girl?”

Weller put his hands behind his head.

“That’s better.”

The voice belonged to an old man. A powerful old man by how he kicked and a cunning old man by where he kicked, but an old man just the same. An old man who’d lived on cigarettes and solitude by the sound of his voice.

Weller shifted to block Penny better but the old man told him not to get smart. Keep his ass right where it was if he didn’t feel like getting shot. Although if he felt like getting shot he’d come to the right place and the old man would be happy to oblige. It would make things easier. He coughed and spit and said, “A dead fellow don’t complain so much when you take his brand.” Keeping the gun on him and making a rapid cutting motion across his own neck with the flashlight. The beam jumping around in the trees and then settling back on Weller and his child.

Penny peering around from behind her father. Light bouncing off her eyes.

“Come on now. Get up. We got places to go.”

They got up.

“Load those bags full.” He stood clear of the pushed-back tarp, among the trees, pointing with the beam. “Don’t leave anything behind. That’s right. That’s right. The blanket and all.”

Weller jammed and shoved, but everything that had fit the day before didn’t fit now.

“You fold up that tarp and take it. I’ll carry the rope. Nobody’s coming back for any of this, so don’t get ideas.”

Weller didn’t have ideas.

“Now come on.”

They went back the way they came. Weller with Penny on his back and the old man behind with the gun and the flashlight. The flashlight burning like it would burn forever. They went down to the intersection with the birdhouse hanging overhead and they turned and retraced their steps from before.

“That’s a nice kitty cat you got there, sweetheart.”

No answer.

“You like kitty cats?”

No answer. She just wrapped her arms tighter around her father’s neck. Making his breath come harder. He stopped and the old man hollered at him to go on and he went on.

“Turn here.” The place where they’d heard that flapping sound. No sound now. Not that low rustle and not the beating of that chain. No air moving and no sound. They kept to the half-circle of blacktop. The way was uphill and they’d been hurrying and Weller slowed from the slope and Penny’s weight and his desperation all combined. The man came close and pressed something into his side. The barrel of the gun or the flashlight, who could tell. “March,” he said. Giving Weller a shove that set him stumbling. Turning off the light. Sunrise.

It was an old elementary school. Childish drawings still hanging in what few windows were still glassed, faded-out drawings that manifested themselves one by one in the rising dawn. The rest of the windows gaping. They went around to the side. Down a little alleyway cut out of the building like where they’d keep the trash cans. A concrete curb along one side surrounding an opening covered over with a blue plastic tarp gray in the pale light. “Pull that back and go on down.” Stairs below it into darkness. “Go on. Nothing down there’s going to bite.”

It was make a stand now or don’t make one ever. Weller kicked at the tarp and said he had to put the girl down or else he’d lose his balance.

The old man said just don’t get smart.

Weller put her down. She went backwards a half step and no more. Toward the mouth of the alleyway. Weller looked toward the old man and said, “I don’t know what you’ve got in mind but you don’t need us. Just take whatever we’ve got. Take whatever you want.”

The old man pointed the gun at the child and said rest assured he would do exactly that.

*

Alongside a doorway at the bottom, three yellow triangles set inside a black circle. Black paint and yellow paint on a metal sign that was dented and buckled and rusted through in places but unmistakable. The words
Fallout Shelter.
There were no more children in this old school building, but there was still a place for children to go when the worst happened.

“Welcome to HQ,” said the old man. He threw a switch and a generator somewhere started up and a half-dozen lightbulbs strained to life. Clear glass bulbs hanging from wires strung around a big shadowy storeroom with pallets stacked along three walls and a long bare table in the middle. A couple of folding chairs. A single cot and an upturned shipping crate with a few things arranged on it. A heavy ashtray and cigarettes and an antique Zippo lighter. A water glass and some old magazines.

“Have a seat. Both of you.” Pointing with the gun.

Weller took the girl by her shoulder and directed her. They sat side by side at the table waiting for they didn’t know what. For whatever came next.

“Hands on the table,” said the old man. “Up where I can see them.”

Penny had to reach.

The old man drifted toward the upended crate and picked up a cigarette and lit it. Took the ashtray and put it on the long table. Didn’t sit down but looked like he’d considered it. “I’m in the collections business,” he said.

“Collecting what?”

“I think you know.” Tendons standing out in his neck and a vein pulsing in his forehead in the scratchy lightbulb light. Drawing on his cigarette and blowing smoke and coughing and the smoke making Penny cough too. “I think you know what I’m after,” he said.

“I don’t. I don’t know.”

Chewing at his lip for a minute and then laughing in one small burst. “I’m after whatever pays the freight,” he said. “A little flexibility never hurt an old soldier like me.”

He meant it.
An old soldier.
It was in his bearing and in his quickness and in his ease with the gun.