What Came After (29 page)

“But it’s never gotten to One.”

“It’s never even gotten to Two.”

*

He finished the tractor after a few more days and had it running at least as smoothly as it had ever run on gasoline. So he went to see Oates. Said he’d done his bit. Said he’d done valuable work that nobody else around here seemed to know anything about and he was happy to have accomplished it. He’d even shown Janey how it was done. He’d broadened her limited horizons and set her up so that with any luck she could carry on without him. “Now it’s your turn,” he said. “It’s time for you to go see Marlowe about my car.”

Oates had his feet up on his desk. Sighting in between them. “I’m way ahead of you,” he said. “Been there, done that.”

“Thanks.” Brightening.

Oates shook his head. “Don’t thank me,” he said. “You’re not going to like the answer.”

“How do you mean.”

“Didn’t you get the memo?”

“Apparently not.”

“We’re at threat level Five.”

“Meaning?”

Oates picked at a tooth. “Meaning the boss says no.”

“No.”

“No. No car, no leaving the premises, no nothing. I can’t give you any access to the outside whatsoever. Too big a risk.”

Weller standing dumbstruck. Thinking of those boarded and chained entrances. The loading dock doors welded shut.

“Consider yourself lucky,” Oates said. “We opened up to let you in, but it’s just too damned dangerous to open up and let you out. You understand.”

“No. Frankly, I don’t.”

“You’ve been out there. You know how it is. I’m saving you from yourself.”

“You’re not.”

“Then I’m saving my people from your lousy judgment. From the things you’d have me expose them to.”

“And what things would that be.”

“Come on. Just because you didn’t run into them doesn’t mean you don’t know.”

“Try me.”

Oates threw up his hands. “Good God, man. All of it. Mutants. Infestations. Monstrosities of every kind.”

“It’s not that way.”

“And I’m supposed to trust you over Colonel Marlowe.”

“It’s not that way. Truly it’s not.”

“That’s comforting, coming from a fellow who’ll do anything for money. You’re as bad as Patterson.”

“I’m no mercenary.” Taking out the photograph. The Polaroid that had been through the mill and looked a hundred years old. The image on it just a dream of itself. Carmichael’s signature gone entirely. He put it on the desk in front of Oates and held one finger on it and slid it forward. Saying, “I came because of her.”

Oates picked it up. Saw the faded traces of a blue sky and green grass. The yellow Hummer and the two fathers and the two children. Smiling, all of them, out there in the world somewhere.

“That’s my daughter,” Weller said. “She can’t see very well, and that fellow there is getting her vision fixed right now. Real doctors and everything. No expenses spared. I said I’d bring him back a car in payment.”

Oates looked quizzical. Opening his drawer and taking out a magnifier. “This is your daughter?” he said. “The one looking off to the side?”

“Yes sir. She began losing her vision the minute she was born.”

“That’s a very sad story.” Looking through the glass.

“I’ll tell you what, though,” said Weller. “That’s the kind of mutation you’ll find out there. Little children going blind. Not monsters. Just little children like Penny. Damaged by what grown-ups have done to the world.”

“Really.” Putting down the glass and reaching into the drawer again. “Little children,” he said. His hand coming back with something silvery in it.

“No matter of what you think,” Weller said, pointing to his daughter, “regardless of what you’ve told yourselves, that little girl right there is the reality.”

“Not according to Marlowe it isn’t,” said Oates. In his hand was Weller’s old Zippo. He spun the wheel and touched the flame to the corner of the Polaroid, which went up instantly. Vaporized. Oates letting it go and then just sitting there with his pistol in its shoulder holster. Smiling and waiting for him. Daring him to contradict the accepted wisdom.

*

He vacillated between cursing Oates for burning the picture and telling himself that it didn’t matter. That he didn’t need it anymore because he’d be back north soon. Back north delivering the ransom and taking Penny and Liz home where they belonged. All he had to do was find where they kept the cars and get one running and hit the road. Steal it right out from underneath them since that’s how it had to be. Oates could burn anything he liked. He could burn the whole place down if he wanted and everybody in it, if that was what it took to sustain Marlowe’s lie.

Once he freed himself to begin looking, the cars weren’t hard to find. They were impounded together in a concrete lot thick with weeds, out where the outskirts of town would have been if there’d been a town. Near where they’d come off the line and not far from the loading docks. Past a grassy lot where kids were playing a game of softball in the light that died early inside these walls. The boy at home plate sizing up a pitch and swinging for the bleachers if there’d been bleachers and the ball arcing into ironwork overhead and bouncing and clanging around scraping loose rust and falling back to earth close to where Weller stood. He caught it and tossed it back overhand like he was some kind of natural. His youth returning. Even his feet feeling better. Every particle of him invigorated now that he was through depending on somebody else’s promises. Now that he was back to relying on himself one hundred percent.

The cars were beautiful. Sleek and smooth and darkly gleaming. Some of them wrapped in clean white paper like the most elegant of gifts, each glowing in the gathering night. There were probably a hundred of them altogether, row after row, two or three different models by the look of it. He walked among them, a countryman moving among cattle, and he dared not touch a single one. Not until he’d found the one he was after.

It was almost dark by the time he saw it. The X9 he’d been sent for. In this light he thought it was black and it would turn out that it wasn’t but it was close enough. A kind of dark bloody maroon. It was smaller than he’d expected. Not like that big Hummer. Sitting lower than the Hummer had and lower still on tires that had gone flat years ago. There was something feline about the shape of it. Leaning forward like it wanted to run. A white paper sticker still hung inside one rear window with a price printed on it representing more money than would pass through Weller’s hands in a lifetime. Ten times more. A hundred. He opened the door on the driver’s side and the change in air pressure made the white paper came loose and flutter down. He picked it up and began folding it over as a souvenir, and it crumbled in his fingers. Brittle where he creased it and falling apart. Weller deciding he didn’t need a souvenir anyhow. Not with Penny and Liz waiting at home. Then he popped the hood and took a look to see what he was up against before the light went out for good.

*

They’d wheeled in a huge water pump for him to work on the next day, part of the sanitation system, and Janey was helping. He gave her chores that kept her busy while he slipped away on vague errands, pretending to go measure something or consult with somebody while he was actually ransacking back rooms and storage areas for wherever it was they’d put the batteries belonging to the cars in the lot. The batteries and whatever else he might need. By and by he found everything, stored away on pallets and shrink-wrapped in clear plastic, gathered up and fitted together and entombed like the treasures of some pharaoh. Everything was grouped and tagged by serial number. Manuals and empty batteries and shipping instructions. Brake fluid and transmission fluid and motor oil. Keys and remotes and touch-up paint in little vials, along with carpeted floor mats and fancy spring-loaded trim pieces that he didn’t recognize and didn’t care about. Thanks to Janey, he’d already scoped out the shed where they kept the high-test.

For the next couple of weeks he worked two shifts. By day in the shop and by night in the lot. He used borrowed tools and worked by the beam of a flashlight, propping it on an oil can or holding it in the crook of his arm or gripping it between his teeth in the time-honored way of mechanics everywhere.

Whenever he got the opportunity, he brought equipment he’d need for the trip north and stowed it away. Gas cans and water bottles. Cartons of food that would keep. A chainsaw and a hand axe and a short-handled shovel. He liberated a couple of mounted tires from another car of the same model and tied them to the roof, and one night he labored for seven straight hours with a hand pump just airing them up. Seeing Penny and Liz in his mind the whole time, there before him in the dark. He didn’t finish even then, but he had to get back to the shop for the start of the workday.

He never told Janey what he was up to. He just let her believe that maybe he’d found the same kind of sanctuary here that everybody else had. That he was happy to have come in from the cold. That he might never go back.

When he was finished, when he’d topped up the reservoirs and gassed up the tank and adjusted the brakes and charged the battery, when he’d checked and double-checked to make certain that he’d followed every step in every manual he could get his hands on, he got in and put the key in the ignition. Dawn just beginning to gray the sky above the ballfield. He sat in the driver’s seat with the door open listening to something chime. A soft insistent tone like a bell telling him to close the door but he didn’t close the door. He sat with one foot on the concrete and the other on the soft gray carpet watching the sky turn the color of a pearl and seeing lights coming on someplace down a little lane past the ballfield where people lived. People waking up and going about their business. Watching the signs of their lives such as they were and thinking he was almost done. Thinking this was it. There’d be some fine-tuning maybe but that wouldn’t amount to much and then he’d just load up the car and vamoose. Sitting there half in and half out of the driver’s seat, watching the sky and watching the lights and picturing the acetylene torch that he’d hidden underneath the car, the tanks and the hoses and the protective helmet lying there just waiting for him to cut open one of the loading dock doors.

But the engine didn’t start. All he got was a low ticking sound from under the hood and a sequence of images on a big bright screen mounted in the dashboard. A picture from the backup camera mounted in the rear, and some words scrolling past about a hands-free cell phone connection, and then a long series of numbers in some hexadecimal code. An error message never intended for human eyes, streaming past and past and past.

*

“I need your help,” he told her. As much as it hurt to say so.

Janey stood silhouetted in the door of her little apartment. Soft lights inside and music on low. It looked like the kind of place where a person could live his life and grow old and not have too many regrets about it. A world of its own inside another world of its own. Janey’s world inside Marlowe’s world.

She looked at him and saw his need. The weariness he’d been covering up in the shop all week and the abrupt failure that had just now followed it, both of them conspiring to bring him low. She asked what she could do.

“It’s the car.”

“No.” Slumping against the door.

“It is.”

“I thought you’d given that up.”

“I didn’t. I found one. Oates wouldn’t give me one but I found one anyhow and I’ve been working on it. The problem is I’ve gone as far as I can go.”

“You can fix anything.” Kidding him and not kidding.

“I can’t fix this. It’s got one of those screens. Digital stuff. It’s beyond me.”

“Then maybe you’d better just let it rest.”

“I can’t.”

“Let it go.”

“No.”

“It’s a terrible world out there and you’re not meant to go back out into it.”

“It’s not terrible and I am. I’m meant to go back. I have to.”

“There’s a place for you here.”

“No”

“You’re crazy.”

“No.”

She stepped back and made to close the door. If she didn’t help him, no one would. He’d be stuck here. “It’s not worth whatever they’re paying you.”

“It’s not about what they’re paying me.” Weller stood outside the doorway wishing he hadn’t trusted Oates with the picture. Thinking that if he were going to tell the truth to somebody, he’d picked the wrong person when he’d picked Oates. It was too late now. “Look,” he said, “if we can get into that communications center, I think I can show you something you won’t believe.”

“What would that be?” she said.

“The reason I’m here.”

Her whole frame went slack. “I know why you’re here.”

“Right. I came for a stupid car. But there’s a reason behind it and it’s not money. It’s not anything like that. It’s my daughter.”

“Your daughter.”

“My daughter and my wife. Oates won’t let me go back home to them.”

“Your daughter.”