What Came After (2 page)

Carmichael sat on a pile of metal scrap like some reluctant caliph. The president of AmeriBank and the very definition of Ownership if Ownership needed a definition. Nothing but a silvery metallized blanket between him and the world. His son at his side. The two of them eating for supper the things they’d brought with them from New York, delicacies refrigerated in the cooler built into the SUV. Fresh fruits and vegetables from distant blue islands remote as Eden, islands dotted about the Pacific and shielded around by gunships in ring after bristling ring. Preserved meats straight from the fabled stockyards of Chicago where men still butchered cattle fed on real grass in certain sectors of the Midwest, walled sectors where undoctored grass still grew free or at least free enough, provided you had the means to acquire a leasehold.

A man stumbled against the scrap metal pile and the boy jumped. Dropped his fork. The man was blind and he tracked the fall of the fork by the sound it made. He stopped and bent double at the waist and retrieved it, and then he pulled himself upright and held the thing straight out. An offering. Smiling sweetly and saying, “What’s your name, child?”

“Peter,” said the boy. Reaching toward the upraised silver until his father stopped him.

The man just stood. Arm out and trembling. “Peter,” he said. As if he’d learned a secret.

Carmichael spoke to his son. “You tell him he can just hang onto that. It’s solid sterling. Not plate. We don’t use plate.”

“Many thanks, Peter,” said the blind man. Rubbing his thumb against the family monogram cut into the handle. “Solid. I could tell.” Raising the tines to his pale tongue and licking them clean. “Many thanks to you as well, sir.” He bowed his head and moved on.

*

They spent the night in a borrowed farmhouse. More like commandeered. Darkness and dead quiet all around. No trucks on the distant highway and no insects in the tall grass and no creatures scrambling through the underbrush or calling from among the trees. The lack of sound made an unearthly void, although it wasn’t so unearthly anymore. A normal night on a poisoned earth.

To the boy it was a source of terror. He had never heard such silence in the city. Not even in the high walled nighttime precincts of Central National Park, where his father had taken him on another of their adventures. It was closed at night and they had it all to themselves. The park preserved such wildlife as had once made New York its home. Coyotes and alley cats and field mice. Cockroaches and crickets. A tiny tattered population of scavenging pigeons that flapped like rags against the wire mesh that overarched the compound. To the boy’s innocent ears, that small wilderness had been a roaring arena where a million blood contests took place at every moment.

This was different. This terrible silence. It made him claustrophobic and self-aware, it filled his head with the sound of his own blood, and he wanted to stopper his ears to keep it out.

He was alone in the bedroom and his father was in the front with some people. The people talking low and his father listening. He’d left the boy alone hours ago, after trying the satellite phone one last time and reminding him that a Black Rose team would be on the way before long. On the way to pull them out.
Extract them,
he’d said, using that military term. They wouldn’t just send little bitty choppers either, but those big Hueys and Black Hawks they kept for real emergencies. The ones that no eight-year-old could get enough of. Wasn’t that right? Maybe even that twin-rotor Chinook they had down in Washington under glass. What did he think of that? The office would wait twenty-four hours and they’d decide something had gone wrong and they’d send Black Rose after them, guns blazing if necessary. Wouldn’t he like to see that? Sure he would. That’s what they paid Black Rose a retainer for.

His father had said there were a half-dozen radio tracking devices built into the SUV, as if that yellow paint weren’t enough to get their attention. You could practically see it from outer space. “So don’t you worry about a thing,” he said.

But now his father was gone and the boy was alone. Poking at his throat with one finger, trying to locate the brand that had been implanted there the day he was born. The brand was a transmitter, too. It wasn’t long-range, but it might help. If these people cut the Hummer up into a million pieces and Black Rose couldn’t find them and he and his father were at the end of their rope, out here in the Empowerment Zone, where anything could happen.

He lowered himself out of the bed and crept to the curtain that hung across the door and listened. His father humoring a handful of locals. The truth was they sounded pretty polite out there in the dim front room. Taking turns. He held his breath and put out one hand and drew the curtain back no more than an inch and looked. A half dozen of them on the floor, squatting or on their knees. His father on a wooden chair. There were five other chairs around the kitchen table but those chairs were empty and everybody else was sitting on the floor so his father would have the highest place.

Kids he knew in the city had a name for the people out here—
Zoners
—but what did they know? They’d only heard about them secondhand. They hadn’t seen them right up close the way he was doing. As far as he could tell, at least when they weren’t suffering from bad DNA or malnutrition or something else you could see from the outside, they looked like regular people. People who knew their place in the world.

One of them was talking the most. A little man no bigger than a child. No bigger than Peter himself. He was stunted somehow. Down there kneeling on the floor, a little beyond the reach of the candlelight from the table, he almost disappeared. He was broad in the shoulders and sinewy from a lifetime of hard work, and he twitched as he spoke. Animated against his will. Moving from side to side on his knees, and his arms waving. He was talking about a man he knew. A man named Weller. The mechanic, he called him. He said Weller could fix anything and he could fix that SUV if he got the chance. Get them on the road again right away. Call off Black Rose. Save Black Rose for more important things.

Carmichael nodded and said that was fine. No doubt the little man was correct. No doubt this Weller of theirs was a highly skilled individual. All the same, he was extremely fussy about who touched that car of his. It was among his most prized possessions, and that was saying something.

The little man jumped to his feet and caught himself and kneeled back down again and begged Carmichael’s pardon. He said he hoped not to offend him or to press too hard, but Henry Weller wasn’t just anybody. Henry Weller had a gift. The way he said the word made it sound religious.

“I’m sure you’re right,” Carmichael said. “And I’ll consider your recommendation very carefully.” Anybody could have heard the finality in his voice. He tilted his head down in the lamplight and set his voice lower and told the little man that he ought to put Black Rose out of his mind if that was what had him so keyed up. Whispering to him like you’d whisper to a baby. Saying he hadn’t meant anything when he’d mentioned Black Rose. Not anything that he and these other nice people needed to worry about. They should think of Black Rose as they’d think of the fire department, rescuing somebody from a little trouble they’d gotten themselves into. That’s all. As simple as that. He said the words
fire department
as if these people had ever had a fire department. As if these old houses of theirs wouldn’t burn straight to the ground in a heartbeat with nobody prepared to do a single thing about it.

The boy let the curtain close and went back to bed but didn’t go to sleep. When his father came in later he asked him about what he’d heard. About the man who could fix the car. His father shook his head. “Don’t pay them any attention,” he said. “These people believe all kinds of stuff. Plus they’ll say anything.”

The boy asked him why.

“To get a little bit of what we have,” he said. “Something to make them more like us.”

“You’d pay him though. The mechanic. If he fixed the car.”

“Of course I would. But I know these people. He can’t fix the car. I don’t want him fixing the car. I don’t even want him touching it.” He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and told him to go back to sleep. “Don’t listen to them, son. That mechanic of theirs. The miracles they say he can do. It’s just an old wive’s tale. You’ll learn for yourself soon enough. People who are afraid will believe anything.”

*

Carmichael awoke to the sound of a hammer. A high ringing, steady and insistent, metal on metal. The blows had a machine regularity to them except for the way they stopped and started and stopped again. Coming and going through the trees from off in the direction of the highway on a fine light breeze from the south that pushed the window shade back an inch and set it bumping. He sat up and shook himself and groaned. Groaned and stretched and realized. There was only the faintest gray light coming through the window. Hardly anything at all. People out here didn’t begin working until the sun was up. They couldn’t.

It was that mechanic. Damn him.

He let Peter sleep and went out, following the sound toward the woods. Hearing people rising inside other houses and smelling the smells of cooking and listening to the sounds of talk. He kept going past where the houses gave out and walked across a cultivated field with his shoes sucking mud and entered the little woods. The hammering got louder but still had that little thoughtful pause now and then, and he went through the woods and came close to the far edge of it and the hammering stopped and he stopped too. Saw the car propped up in the mud on a jack with boards under it. Saw a man drawing himself out from underneath the car, wet mud from the wet ground streaking his back. Weller, the mechanic. In one hand he held the hammer and a bent iron bar with a hole in each end. With the other hand he was slipping something into his pocket. He stood looking at the car. The car and the ground it was sinking into. Rapt and greaseblack and concentrating hard. He slung the hammer into a loop on his coveralls and held the bar out against the horizon. Running his thumb along the top to gauge the bend in it. Cocking his head.

“Get away from my car,” said Carmichael.

Weller gave him a slow look, letting his eyes adjust to the distance. He wore a thick pair of horn-rimmed glasses, third or fourth or fifth hand, things that had passed more than once through some Lions’ Club donation box back when there’d been a Lion’s Club. Back when there’d been lions. He gave him a slow look that was adjustment and appraisal at the same time and after a minute he nodded once and stepped backwards. Slow. Like it had been his idea. Nothing to it. He was just leaving anyhow. He had work to do.

*

The boy was gone when Carmichael got back. He wasn’t in the kitchen, and he wasn’t in the bedroom, and he wasn’t anywhere. His father felt the bed and it was warm. He tried the outhouse but the outhouse was empty. The boy was gone and it wouldn’t be long before Black Rose lifted off from New York and how would they know him from anybody else. A little kid like that who could be anybody. Goddamn it. The town couldn’t be that big. He’d find him.

*

Peter had woken up alone and explored the house and gotten hungry. There were familiar cans on the kitchen shelves but no way to get them open that he could find. Boxes and bags with familiar labels but no way to reconstitute what was inside them. No way that he trusted. He’d been brought up suspicious and it served him well. Looking at the faucet and picturing drinking the water from it raw and imagining the kinds of things that would happen next. Horrible things. Things he’d seen by torchlight the night before. Worse things if worse things were possible.

There was still food in the cooler in the back of the SUV but he wasn’t sure which direction the highway was. He was disoriented because they’d come to the house in the dark, and he didn’t want to get lost. So he set out straight down the street that fronted the house, figuring he’d come to the end of it and then decide what next. Be methodical. Ask somebody if somebody showed up. Or else he could just keep turning the same direction at every corner he came to, as if he were in that maze he’d read about with the torches burning and the thing that was half-man and half-bull chasing after you in the dark. That maze in the story. You couldn’t get lost if you kept turning the same way. You could only get out.

The town was bigger than he’d thought. Maybe more than a town. The street he was on didn’t seem to end, running on and on through cross street after cross street, the houses along it taking on variations he hadn’t expected. Brokenbacked lean-tos and rusted sheetmetal sheds and tumbledown duplexes leaning into each other, half against half. A couple of tall brick buildings that looked like apartments but were empty. Commercial buildings too. Vacant storefronts. Blackfronted offices with the windows knocked out, and the terrifying mouths of underground parking garages. He kept going. People were waking up in the houses and cooking and talking to one another in a hundred different voices. Men were coming out front doors and coming out shed doors and coming out underneath moldy sheets of blue plastic nailed up over holes in plywood walls, entering into the day. Looking at him the same way they’d look at any boy.

He walked on. Up a long hill with a grassy yard gone to dirt along one side of it and a big mansion sitting up on the hill past the yard, stranded there like it was beached. Rotting down to a cage of bone. He kept walking until he saw the gray rooftops of a ruined city in the distance, and then he stopped and turned back. Whatever fields and woodlands stood along the highway weren’t in this direction. He went all the way back to the house where he’d started and past it. Keeping pace with more men walking. Men coming out of houses and gathering in little groups to pause and talk and smoke and walk on together. The farms must be this way. He was learning.