What Came After (31 page)

At which point the scanner began talking to itself and to the car and then the car talking back. A pair of machines communing one to another without need for intervention. Janey said this was what she’d been hoping for, they’d shaken hands, and Weller liked that idea. Picturing them with hands to shake. The GPS booted too and it locked onto the satellites and a little likeness of the car began pulsing on its own dashboard against a map of the old South. Cities that were gone to ruin now and roads that weren’t entirely navigable these days and other roads that didn’t exist anymore period. Weller thinking that this car was a time machine. The trip to New York would be easy if only he could go back under its power to the world glowing on that bright and hopeful map. A world with smooth roads and cheap gas and fast food at every rest stop.

Once Janey had the car running, the phone circuitry booted itself. An interface coming together on the screen, but no signal to go with it. Apparently it wasn’t a complete system after all. It was asking for a cell phone, and a cell phone was a nearly mythical thing down here. Just a rumor of something forsaken during Marlowe’s Retreat. Never mind that whatever cell towers were nearby couldn’t possibly be functioning anymore. Weller hadn’t even thought of that. But he had an alternative. The dead Black Rose satellite phone that had set off alarms in Oates’s mind. Let it set off some more alarms if it could. He dug in the back and found it in his rucksack and tossed it to Janey, saying the battery was dead but she could probably rig that too while she was at it.

Telecom had been deregulated under who, Reagan maybe, in a period as unknowable as some dark age. It had been a no-man’s land of competing sources and signals back then, after the first phone company had exploded into a million pieces in that big deregulatory bang and before the slow cooling of it all into one great big corporation, the unironically named Ma Bell that ran what was left of the business anymore, its logo a stylized rendering of a grayheaded old woman at a switchboard or what some artist imagined as one. Not even Black Rose had been able to make Ma Bell share bandwidth, thus this crippled satellite phone right here that Janey made fast work of fixing. She wired it straight into the car and used the scanner to make them communicate. The car and the phone. Not just audio but video, at least incoming. Then the phone talking not just with the car but with the world, and not only on the military channels but on the civilian channels too.

Directory Assistance alone persuaded her that Weller had been right. Directory Assistance. Imagine that. A voice asking for the city and the state as if there were cities left and states too. Demonstrating the truth of it by the asking. The same voice asking for the name of the party once Janey had said New York New York, and then Janey giving up and handing the phone to Weller saying I don’t know what hospital in case there’s more than one. Saying maybe you’d better take it from here and giving him the phone and Weller’s hands shaking.

A face bloomed up on the dashboard screen. Weller didn’t think it was the receptionist he remembered from the hospital desk, but it could have been her twin. Another sophisticated old woman made young by science. Another strange miracle, this one working the night shift. The woman at the desk reached up a manicured hand and tapped on the screen in front of her as if it had gone dead. Leaning forward and squinting into the monitor without so much as a crow’s foot materializing to mar her perfect skin.

Janey took Weller’s arm and held on to it as if he might rescue her from something. Some sudden shifting of the universe.

“Hello?” the woman on the screen said. Her voice came through the car audio, eight or ten speakers’ worth of it turned up louder than it needed to be. Weller finding the knob and turning it down. “Hello?’

Janey held on and studied the woman’s face on the screen and whispered to Weller
is she real?
Thinking she might be a film of pixels wrapped over a wireframe. The look on her face was such a perfect approximation of genuine human curiosity. The mechanics of her face so strangely evocative of both great age and unblemished youth.

“She’s real all right,” he said low, and the woman quit tapping on the screen and sneezed into a lace handkerchief as if she intended to prove him correct.

Janey laughed out loud and the woman cocked an ear and leaned in again toward the monitor. Her eyebrows up in two perfect half-circles. “Hello?”

Weller asked for his daughter by name and room number and the woman said it was after visiting hours. No calls now. Weller said he was the girl’s father and she said family included. He said it was an emergency and she said emergencies were an entirely different department, raising her hand and looking for a second as if she were going to transfer him, until he said he was working for Anderson Carmichael if she didn’t mind, Anderson Carmichael who paid the bills that no doubt covered part of her salary and not just her salary but her benefits package which included that surgery she’d had and she’d keep having as long as she kept wanting to look young, and that changed everything. She patched him straight through.

*

“Henry?”

“It’s me.”

“I can’t see you.”

“That’s all right. I can see you.”

A dim light in the room and Liz hardly visible by it. Almost no light at all. Just the scattershot glow of a video screen with nothing to display but interference. On the table behind her, silhouetted by light rising up from the city below, he could still see the flowers. Those identical bouquets that came every day from
Mr. and Mrs. Anderson Carmichael
and
Your friends at PharmAgra
. Fresh and brand new, just as if he’d never left. As if nothing had changed.

“Oh, thank God, Henry. They told me you were dead.” What looked like a tear in that weird light.

“Not yet. What do they know?” As if it were funny.

“Where are you?”

“Spartanburg.”

“Jesus, Henry.” Her look woeful and lonesome.

Weller wished he could comfort her somehow. Forcing a smile at her image on the screen as if that might do any good. “Never mind me,” he said. “I understand Penny’s had some setbacks.”

“Penny’s fine. Penny’s perfect.”

“But Bainbridge said—”

“Who’s Bainbridge?”

“From Washington. The one who calls to check on you.”

“Nobody calls, Henry.”

“I told you he’d get word back to me.”

“I’m sorry. Nobody calls. Nobody’s ever called.”

“He told me she’d had setbacks, Liz. This was couple of weeks ago.”

She shrugged in the buzzing video light. “I don’t know where he got that idea. Penny’s fine. She’s more than fine. You should see her.”

“I will.”

“I know.” A little pause. “I hope so.”

“Maybe he said it to light a fire underneath me. Like I needed that.”

“We all want you back.”

“Not Bainbridge. He just wants the car. Carmichael too.”

“I don’t care what they want. I want you. Just come home.”

“I will.”

“Hurry.”

“I will.”

“The thing is, Henry, they’re getting ready to release her.”

“Good. They’ll take both of you home. Carmichael promised.”

“Not without you. They’re just going to turn us loose.”

“I told Bainbridge that I wanted Carmichael to take you straight home.”

“Carmichael doesn’t care. He thinks you’re dead.”

“I’ll bet he heard that from Bainbridge too. That guy’s a fountain of good news, and not much of it’s accurate.” Looking at Liz on the dashboard screen, her face the only thing in the world. “I’m on my way now, honey. I’m keeping my promise. Don’t you worry.”

“We’ll only be around until tomorrow or the next day. The doctor wants to run a few more tests and that’s it. That’s the end.”

“I’ll be there. You hang on. We’ll all go home together.”

*

Janey had already found the acetylene torch over by the sealed-up loading dock, as if she’d read his mind. She had everything set up by the time he got there, and she’d put on the helmet and snapped the visor down and was firing up the torch. He watched her adjust the yellow acetylene flame and watched her add oxygen through the regulator until it turned pure white. That little blue flame inside the stream of white fire. He squinted through his fingers as she knelt to the floor and began cutting a thin line straight up. Sparks like fireworks erupting into the air and falling to the concrete floor and bouncing. Janey moving the torch as slowly and steadily as a machine made for the job and stopping only when she’d gone as high as she could reach, and then Weller dragging the ladder over. She nodded thanks through the helmet.

He went back to the car and disconnected the scanner and tossed it into the back seat and closed the doors. Started the engine and let it rev for a minute until it smoothed out and settled down. The headlights came on all by themselves, which struck him as a nice touch. He had a little trouble navigating among the other parked cars and his initial impulse was to be careful so as not to dent anything but he thought of Bainbridge and Carmichael and he said to hell with it. A few badges of honor wouldn’t hurt. It was going to be a rough ride anyhow. Inside of five minutes the steel door had fallen forward with a monstrous clang and Janey was in the passenger seat and they were on their way.

Through the opening and down the ramp and out into the world.

TWELVE
The Coming of the Fall

It was just dawn, and from the driver’s seat Weller could see the footprints he’d made on the way in. The sun filling them up and the shadows overflowing them. He followed them like a trail of breadcrumbs and where he couldn’t follow them he made his own path. It was easier after he got frustrated and took a chance and cut one of the tripwires and nothing happened. No explosion. No alarm. No landmine. The whole business a charade. He got back in the car and put it into gear.

Janey said she’d been told there’d be bodies out here, bodies among the fences and the trenches and the bombs. Corpses of everything that hadn’t been able to get inside and wreak havoc. Everything that had made the attempt and gotten caught in the defenses and died trying. That’s what Oates had said.

Weller shook his head and concentrated on the path in front of him. The barbed wire was real enough and they had only those two spares on the roof. Three or four solid days’ driving ahead if they were lucky, and Penny undergoing those last few tests, and then what. There was no time for a blowout.

Janey said Oates had described the circle around Spartanburg as a battle zone and a graveyard. A hideous place filled with the bones of things that weren’t human anymore. Poisonous things.

Weller said you never know.

Checking the rear view mirror and seeing the vacancy of the cut-open doorway gaping behind them like a missing tooth. A black spot in the rising sun. He imagined light filtering in through it and he wondered when someone would notice. They’d step away from that open doorway as if the very air and sunlight coming in would burn their skin. He thought how desperate Oates and his people would be to seal the gap before heaven knows what got in and ravaged them all. But the look backwards was just one rapid flick of his eyes, and an instant later he was concentrating on the path ahead once more. Just a few hundred yards and they’d be free. Free of Spartanburg and free of Oates. Free to locate the highway. Free to head north, all the way to Liz and Penny.

*

There were two of them now and they could take turns driving. Drive all day and all night if possible. If the headlights kept working and the roads didn’t deteriorate much more. The car had four-wheel drive but the suspension wasn’t built for anything much rougher than a tabletop. It rode hard and Weller fretted that something might give out if they pushed it, but he worried more about Penny and Liz so they pushed it anyhow.

They located Eighty-Five and got onto it where that exit sign for Spartanburg had been blown half to bits by machine gun fire. Weller realizing that that was meant as a warning too. SPARTA. Like in the history books. As if there were people here to be wary of. It was just a sign.

Up on the highway the world exploded in all directions. Janey hadn’t known what to expect, but she hadn’t expected this. These wide green expanses. These cornfields and beanfields, these vast undulating acres of kudzu. Everything mingled together and burgeoning. Weller said one thing they’d had correct in Spartanburg was that any plant you found growing out here might be poisonous. And the more familiar it was, the more likely it was to do you harm. He told her he’d run out of food on the way down and had had to eat kudzu. Nuts and berries. A two-headed turtle he’d come across in a ditch. Things that people didn’t typically eat, which meant things that PharmAgra and NutraMax and the other chemical companies hadn’t bothered modifying.

She reached into the back seat and rummaged around. Came back with a couple of knobby tomatoes all yellow and green and red. Splotchy things almost ready to explode with the power of their own ripeness. “Want one?”