Innocence: A Novel (38 page)

The three children were small, and there was room for them in the backseat with Moriah.

We drove a block in silence, and we knew that however far we might go, we would find the multitudes shining and observant and sorrowing, sentinels to the end.

Suddenly more traffic appeared on the streets, far less than you would expect on a night of good weather, more than I had ever seen in a snowstorm. The drivers were heedless of risk, as if all of them were being pursued.

In Ford Square, the Jumbotron loomed like a giant window that offered a somber view of our future as it was already playing out in Asia, where the dead were lying in the streets and desperate mobs struggled to board ships already overcrowded. The news crawl listed American cities where deaths from the swift-moving plague were being reported, and the geographic spread was so wide that already it should have been clear even to the most confirmed optimists that there would be no refuge.

When three snow plows crossed an intersection in front of us, one after the other in a train, moving fast with emergency beacons flashing, Gwyneth said, “They aren’t serving the city now. They’re fleeing it.”

We fell in behind them, and they cleared the way for us, though that was not their intention.

Soon we reached the outskirts of the last borough, where we first saw looters. Bent-backed and frenzied, like figures from a nightmare
of lupine predators, they poured out of shattered store windows, pushed grocery-store carts, pulled laden slat-sided wagons as if they were dray animals, loaded SUVs and cars with the latest electronic gear and all manner of luxury goods, some of them as wild-eyed as spooked horses and others as giddy as little children on a birthday-party treasure hunt.

The Clears stood witness to this, as well.

By the time that we were passing through the suburbs, the city plows no longer leading us, many of the sacked businesses were on fire, and the looters were stealing from one another now, defending their swag with guns and tire irons and pickaxes. A man in burning clothes ran across the street in front of us, still clutching a box bearing the Apple logo as the flames leaped from his coat to his hair and broiled him, screaming, to the pavement.

BY DAWN, THE SNOW STOPPED, AND WE WERE DRIVING
through territory that had been less heavily blanketed, the roads clear except for some vehicles driven by desperate or panicked people, most of whom didn’t seem certain of where they were going, recklessly bound nowhere in particular.

We were at first puzzled that the roads were not choked with traffic, that thousands weren’t fleeing to remote places, even though they knew escape was impossible. Then we heard on the radio that the president had ordered Homeland Security to close off major arteries out of cities that offered international air traffic and shipping,
because the first wave of plague reports were coming from those metropolitan areas. The hope was to contain the disease. We had gotten out just in time.

The pointlessness of the government’s action was made clear when a squall of cedar waxwings burst into flight from a berried hedge, fluttering across the road, up and away, reminding us that birds were a vector. For its spread, the plague didn’t depend on travelers from Asia debarking from planes and cruise ships.

Although tired, we were loath to stop short of our destination. The previous night, when Gwyneth had driven to the pond in Riverside Commons and given me my first ride in a motor vehicle, she mentioned a place in the country that her father had prepared for her, in the event that, for whatever reason, she ever needed to leave the city. We hoped to make it to that haven before nightfall.

In the backseat, Moriah slept. The three exhausted young ones were bunked down in the cargo space behind her.

At a Mobil station and convenience store in a quaint country town, a man dressed in khaki pants and shirt lay dead and befouled outside the raised doors of the repair garage. The establishment was otherwise deserted, but the pumps were working. We didn’t have a credit card. Steeling myself for the horror, I chased the pecking crows from the corpse, found the right plastic in his wallet, and filled the tank of the Land Rover.

In the convenience store, I loaded a handbasket with snack crackers, granola bars, and bottles of apple juice, provisions for the last leg of our journey.

Gwyneth’s father, Bailey, had given her both detailed directions and a map, but once she’d entered the destination in the Land Rover’s navigation system, we no longer needed to consult them.

Whether Bailey had intuited why the likes of his daughter were
being born into the world or whether he simply thought that in a crisis she would be safe only far from the nearest people, we will never know. The cabin was remote, on considerable acreage owned by her trust; and within a year of its completion, Bailey ordered trees to be felled across the one-lane dirt track and weeds to be seeded along its route to encourage Nature to take back the trail as quickly as possible.

A caretaker named Waylon, something of a modern mountain man, hiked into the property once a month and stayed for three days at a time, ensuring that it was maintained. He wasn’t likely to be staying there now, and when Gwyneth could not raise him by phone, we thought he must be already ill with the plague or dead.

By noon, the wintry landscapes were behind us. We had removed the tire chains. Among the golden meadows, backdropped by green pine forests, here and there a lone house stood, or a house and a barn, behind pasture encompassed by split-rail or ranch-style fencing. Although they might once have appeared picturesque and welcoming, they were now held in a stillness like miniatures inside snow-globe paperweights but without the snow, the sunlight falling so plumb that no building cast a shadow, all of them standing silent, stark, and lonely.

Shortly before three o’clock in the afternoon, the navigator warned us that the paved county road would lead to a dead end within a mile. From there we would have to proceed on foot.

We had traveled two-thirds of that mile when the dogs began to appear. Labradors, German shepherds, golden retrievers, and various mixed breeds came from the fields and woods, angling ahead of us, bounding onto the shoulder of the road and then running alongside the car, grinning up at us, tails lashing the air. We counted twenty of them, and we couldn’t imagine whose dogs they were or where they
had come from, but their joyful behavior assured us that they were no threat.

The pavement ended at a line of metal posts spaced close enough to one another to prevent the Rover from passing between them. Beyond lay a dirt road rutted, rocky, and unpromising.

When we got out among the dogs, they were without exception eager and affectionate, panting but neither growling nor barking. They milled around us, pleading with their soulful eyes for a touch, a scratch. The four children were enchanted by the animals, and for the first time I saw the three younger ones smiling.

We had nothing to carry other than granola bars and cellophane-wrapped packets of peanut-butter-and-cracker sandwiches, with which we stuffed our pockets.

The map promised to guide us through the wilds by a series of nature’s landmarks. The dogs seemed to think they had been hired as scouts, for they gathered in a pack and set out ahead of us, glancing back to be sure we were following.

The dirt road began in a curve, and when we rounded it, we came upon the gunmen.

FORTY FEET AHEAD, A JEEP WAGON HAD BEEN PARKED
crosswise to the dirt road. Four men outfitted in hunter’s camouflage and carrying fully automatic rifles were gathered near the tailgate, but when they saw us, they separated and took up defensive positions, three of them using the vehicle for cover.

The one still exposed shouted at us to halt. He said we could come no farther, that there was no disease in their land and that they meant to keep it that way. But though they might have been too distant to be turned violent by our difference, I thought that the speaker was pale and gray-lipped as Telford had been, and in this cool air there seemed to be a thin sheen of sweat on his face, so that I could only conclude that they were in denial of their peril.

I told them that the six of us were not infected, that we only wanted to pass through to a place of our own a couple of miles to the west, but they were not disposed to believe me or even to care whether I told the truth. The leader squeezed off a burst of four or five rounds, over the heads of the dogs and wide of us, and demanded that we retreat.

As if the gunfire must have been a summons, more dogs began to appear out of the tall grass in the meadow to both sides of the road, startling the four men. They seemed not to emerge from hiding, but instead almost to effervesce out of common wild grass. Twenty or thirty of them came forth to join those already leading us, until there were perhaps fifty in the pack.

The mysteries and wonders of the city were the mysteries and wonders of the world, as prevalent here as anywhere, as we would learn in the days to come. The dogs gathered around us, to all sides, as if they were our praetorian guard, the extraordinary nature of the pack evident in the animals’ perfect silence and in the way in which every one of them turned its gaze on the Jeep and the gunmen gathered around it, not in threat but as if challenging them to set aside their fear and behave humanely.

I wasn’t sure what we should do, but when the dogs began to move, Gwyneth said that we must move with them. They led us into the meadow, where rabbits bounded away but did not distract our
guardians, and in a wide arc around the Jeep wagon before returning to the track.

The gunmen watched in silence, and if one of them thought the safest course was to cut us down with a spray of bullets, he didn’t act upon that opinion. Whatever happened to those men, we never saw them again.

Into primal woods where afternoon sunlight laddered down through branches, the dogs led us along winding deer trails. Feathery ferns, like an aviary of immense green wings that might catch a draft and soar, arced away into the piney gloom. Ahead of me, the children followed Gwyneth, all of them repeatedly melting into shadows and reconstituted in sunlight, as if the forest wished to remind me that what had been given could be lost.

The cabin wasn’t as simple as it sounds, a sprawling structure of tightly fitted logs caulked with what might have been elasticized stucco, under a slate roof hung with copper gutters that had acquired a green patina. A veranda encircled four sides of it.

While we stood in the large clearing that the house occupied, before going inside, Gwyneth said that of the many provisions stored therein, included were three years’ worth of food. But she wondered how we could possibly feed fifty dogs as well.

As if in answer to her question, the dogs retreated to all arms of the surrounding woods and, within a minute, were gone as if they had never existed. In the days to come, they would keep us company, but they would never eat anything that we offered, sniffing what we had to give them but rejecting it as though it offended their keen sense of smell. From time to time, the dogs wandered away among the trees, not all at once but each to its own schedule, and when they returned, they seemed to be well fed and content. Eventually, we would learn their secret.

THE TWINS’ NAMES WERE JOSHUA AND JUSTIN, AND
the girl who had come with them, Consuela, was not related to them. The boys, starved thin in punishment for the distress they caused their mother, soon fleshed out, and the bleeding evidence of near strangulation in time faded from the girl’s neck without leaving a scar. The depression in Moriah’s skull did not fill out, but her hair concealed it, and she did not suffer any ill effects from it, for she was smart and quick and full of laughter.

They wanted Christmas that year. We cut down a suitable tree and decorated it with holly gathered from the woods and with shiny metal ornaments made from tin cans and painted by hand.

In the main room stood a Steinway, on which Gwyneth played for us songs of the season. She sometimes said she didn’t know a tune that we mentioned, but whenever she tried to play it, she found the right keys and the music flowed without a wrong note through the cabin.

Because his daughter was musically talented, Bailey had stocked this forest home with other instruments: two clarinets, a saxophone, two violins, a cello, and more. We agreed that, by next Christmas, at least I and perhaps Moriah would have learned to play an instrument with which we could accompany Gwyneth’s piano.

ON THE MORNING OF JANUARY 6
,
WHEN I CAME INTO
the kitchen to help make breakfast, the back door was open, and Gwyneth stood at the porch railing, staring across the clearing to the woods, where the trees were skirted with lingering shadows and crowned with early sunlight.

Outside, the day was mild for that time of year, and Gwyneth was in the grip of sadness, which from time to time troubled both of us, though none of the children.

When I stepped beside her and put an arm around her, she said, “Do you feel it?”

“What?”

She didn’t reply, and after a minute or two, I knew the cause of her melancholy. Neither silence nor sound, neither scent nor the absence of it, neither the quality of the sunlight nor the color of the sky offered any evidence that an age had fully ended and a new era had begun. Yet I had no doubt that they were gone to the last, all their vast wealth without an owner, all their amusement parks and taverns and dance halls without celebrants, every city and hamlet without a single voice, every ship upon the sea a ghost ship, and the sky traveled now only by birds.

“So soon,” she said.

It didn’t bear thinking about, but it was our gift, as it was the gift of those who had come before us, to be able to think, to reason and reflect, and with the gift came the compulsion to use it.

If there were other thinkers out there in the quiet vastness of the Earth, they were like Gwyneth and me, small groups in far-flung locations,
alert to the wonder and mystery that were woven throughout the fabric of the day.