What Came After (37 page)

They stopped at the first off-ramp, not caring where it led. Weller and Janey bailing out and going at the fencing with wirecutters, starting near ground level on each side. Weller could reach higher than Janey could, and when he was done he went over to her side and made more cuts. About to work his way across the top when he heard a car door and looked back to see Liz climb behind the wheel and guessed what she was up to. She blew the horn and he and Janey stepped back and she dropped the transmission into gear, the car plowing through the fencing and losing paint in long parallel slashes about three inches apart because why wait for them to cut the top of the hole when they were in a hurry.

“Did you see that?” he said to Janey. “That’s my girl right there.” And then they were on the road again.

*

Northward through nothing. The car had a compass built into it but it didn’t work. All those electronics and you couldn’t tell one direction from another. Weller still had a pocket compass with a Black Rose logo on it. He hated looking at it but it worked and the electronic one didn’t so they followed it through the maze of ruined roads. Angling north by northeast and trying to approximate their old steps even if they couldn’t quite recreate them.

They thought they remembered a few landmarks, but it was impossible to be certain. They wove through intersections jammed with abandoned cars where people had lived for a little while until the coyotes and the bears had moved in and where the coyotes and the bears had lived for a little while until they were supplanted by foxes and crows and rabbits and mice and so on down the food chain all the way to bugs and then not even bugs anymore. Weeds and lichen and mold. The world of living things winding down all the way. They passed squat buildings that could have been shopping centers or offices or hotels, and tall buildings that looked more or less like the squat ones stood on end. There was no particularizing mark on anything beyond stains where electrical signage had been taken down long ago for scrap, and the sameness of it all merged into one compounded uncertain thing that disoriented them and made them desperate. Weller said he wished he’d taken notes or blazed a trail or something. He’d never thought. Penny on the other hand said she was pretty sure she would remember every inch of this on her next time through if there should be a next time, since she could see perfectly now and every single object looked just like itself, and even though her father wasn’t so certain about that he didn’t say.

They passed through the commercial districts and into the moonlike landscape of the drained-out suburbs. House after emptied house. Cars left where their gas tanks had run dry. A school bus the same, yellow and black and rust-red, squatting on bare wheels stripped of rubber. Penny had never seen a school bus and her father didn’t tell her what it was. It was just another wreck.

Weller looked at the road. Penny looked at everything but. And Liz and Janey watched the sky for helicopters.

They pressed forward. Along blacktop roads gone back to gravel and gravel roads gone back to dirt and dirt roads gone back to plain earth. The fencing on either side was PharmAgra now, not National Motors, for there were crops to fence in but not highways. Strange as it seemed it felt like home. In the distance a handful of people walking slow down a dirt lane, their day finished and their tools shouldered, men and women and children all alike. Their people, in their world.

They knew they were heading in the right direction when they saw the smoke.

*

Just a thin gray column going straight up into the air. Creeping upward into a heavy atmosphere as still as the grave, and dissipating as it went.

Weller spun the wheel and took the car down into a gully and across an unfenced field toward a fenced one. The car bounding over ruts and Weller not slowing it in the least. Never lifting his foot from the gas. Hoping that that fragile little spare held out but not actually caring if it blew because he’d just keep going on the rim. Everybody hanging on.

The fence wasn’t new and it wasn’t in good or even fair condition. It was rusted through everywhere and painted over. Salvage of a sort that Weller recognized. A battered PharmAgra badge stolen from someplace else and held on by string. Whatever was behind it hadn’t been fenced in by PharmAgra but by Patel and her people, which meant they were close now. The gray column of smoke maybe a half-mile away as the crow flies but farther than that by the way they had to go. Along the fence until they found what looked like the weakest spot and straight through without so much as slowing down and along the culvert he remembered to where it vanished under the earth and then straight.

Keeping an eye on the column of smoke and navigating toward it as it began to move. The draft from a rising helicopter buffeting it and dissipating it in places and in other places making it whip snakelike. It was an earthbound tornado and it made Weller think of those pictures on the movie film he’d found in Greensboro. The little girl and her dog and the danger she was in. Watching the smoke waver and watching the helicopter rise before him.

He looked at Janey. “There’s your second chance,” he said.

“There were two,” she said.

“Get them one at a time.”

“But there’s just the one signal. This one, I guess. Where do you suppose the other one is?”

“Down, maybe,” he said. “Maybe it hit a different bridge or something. They were cutting it close. Playing around. Bunch of yahoos.”

“Maybe they stayed behind to meet the convoy.”

“Either way, there’s just the one right here to worry about now.” Pressing forward. The car bouncing along the margin of the field, toward the place where Patel’s people lived underground. Whatever it was that was burning, it wasn’t tobacco. The fire was too small, too confined.

A burst of gunfire came from up ahead, preceded by a flash of light from the helicopter. Janey stood up and pushed her head and shoulders out through the sunroof and said it’s one of the houses. The underground houses. Smoke’s coming from the roof and somebody just tried to climb out and they shot him. They shot him coming out.

Weller wanted to look over his shoulder at Penny but the car was going too fast. He could count on Liz and he had to. The helicopter swooping this way.

Janey said they hadn’t even let him come out, and Weller grabbed her hand and pulled her back down. She sat and breathed hard and wiped dirt from her eyes and said they were laughing up there. She’d made out two men in the helicopter and they were laughing at what they’d done. Up there in the sky enjoying this.

*

Somebody closed the sunroof as if that would help. Janey back in her seat working the scanner and Weller looking out the top of the windshield over the tops of his glasses and that synchronized beeping starting up between the scanner and the satellite phone. The beeping and the lights that meant she was in.

Janey said, “All right.” She said, “Let’s see how much they enjoy this.”

Penny pointed out her window and said, “Oh no.”

“Oh no what?” asked her mother. Reaching to pull her close but Penny holding onto the windowsill.

“The schoolhouse,” she said. One hand on the sill and one hand pointing toward the helicopter as it veered eastward and away. Its black body the body of an insect and the men within it insects too in bulletproof vests and curved helmets and glinting goggles that witnessed more than men should.

Weller kept on toward the clearing and the smoke, which was growing thicker now, asking Janey if she could take the helicopter down now before it went any farther. Wondering in his heart if the men in the helicopter had seen the little white building and thought they’d have some fun, or if they knew from Penny’s map that it was a real schoolhouse. Where there would be children. The children of these people they’d come here to harm for pay. But not saying that. Just asking if she could bring the helicopter down, which was a ridiculous question because she was trying. Paging back and forth between two screens of crawling data and blinking schematics and zeroing in on something he couldn’t make out for the movement of the car and keying in some command sequence. Looking out the window and back at the scanner and saying come back here, you. Deleting the command sequence and paging between screens again and cursing as the signal from the helicopter faded out. Hitting the scanner with her fist and saying go after him Weller we don’t have enough signal but Weller couldn’t go after him any more than he could fly.

*

The men in the helicopter must have had grenades.

The schoolhouse went up almost directly behind the car, back where nobody but Weller could see what had happened because he had the benefit of the mirrors. The sound was a muffled boom that blended in with everything else and shook the earth they were bouncing over and then flames leapt up and more smoke. The helicopter disappearing behind the ragged black plume of it and not coming back.

Between the seatbelt and her mother’s arms Penny wasn’t protected but felt that way. Sobbing into her mother’s breast. Not even saying what she thought. None of them saying.

They reached the clearing and Weller stopped the car. He told the rest of them to wait. Wait and don’t look at what he had to do, there was no need to look, and he got out and sprinted to the underground house where the smoke was coming up. The humped-up roof of it gaping open in the middle and the tobacco plants on top smoking and the steel beams underneath exposed and scorched. Another grenade. On the far side of the humped-up roof he found the door and it was half open and there was a man or the body of a man crumpled just inside it. His clothes burned and his hair burned and his back full of bullets. Bullets hammered into the dirt all around him like things planted. Like things planted that would never grow.

Weller dropped to his knees when he recognized the body. The tall young man who taught the children at the schoolhouse. If he were here, they must be here too. This late in the afternoon they’d be done. He turned back toward the car and waved his hand knowing that despite his having told them not to look they’d be looking anyhow, and when he saw that they were looking he gave them a thumbs-up. Signaling that all was well. Thinking they could draw from it what they might. The three of them started moving within the car and he shook his head and showed them the same hand palm out, warning them off. All might be well but they’d better stay put.

He pulled the man free and laid him down among the tobacco plants and went down the ramp himself. Two or three families down there cowering. Hidden beneath the dining table and beneath the benches along the walls and beneath the beds. Light shone down from the hole in the roof but it didn’t illuminate anything for illumination wasn’t the order of the day. The air was clogged with cinders and dirt and smoke that choked off the light and swirled in it. Settling the way death settles. Children crying and the low murmur of parents comforting them and comforting themselves for it was all they had. Each other.

Weller called out to them. He didn’t identify himself because what difference would it make. A couple of faces poking out from the shadows and a couple of gleams of recognition. He said the helicopters were gone but they weren’t gone forever and when they came back they’d bring worse. These were just spotters, and they’d be back with a whole army. Black Rose soldiers here to wipe out their crops for money and kill any one of them that got in their way. Maybe just for fun. Like this right here. This grenade they’d tossed just because they could. Waving his arm in the thick dustlight and stirring it up and coughing. Saying grab anything you can’t live without and let’s go.

He took the linens from a bed by the ramp and went back up to the door and out into the sun. Drew a sheet over the schoolteacher. Told him he was sorry he hadn’t gotten here sooner.

*

Regardless of what her mother said, Penny burst from the car the instant she caught sight of the children. Leaving the door open behind her and flying across the tobacco field to meet three of them who’d come up the ramp from the bombed house and then flying to meet two more just emerging from the next house over. A brother and sister coming up into the sun and blinking, as astonished to see her as they were astonished to be alive at all. Figures from a dream spying a figure from a dream. Not one of them looked at the sheet or what was under it. Her father was at some remove, sending other men off to other doorways and ducking down himself into the last one. Getting halfway down and then coming up again and signaling to Liz and Janey in the car. Come.

Patel looked up from her desk as if she had last seen him just a moment ago. As if she’d known he would appear at the very moment of their greatest extremity, and as if she didn’t entirely need him to find a way through it. “I can’t say how they found us,” she said, “but we can hold out. We have to hold out.” Not even looking at the stores and samples and equipment spread beneath the light of a gas lamp that someone had piped from the main in Weller’s absence. Inspired by what he’d done and extending it. The way people will, given a chance.

“It’s worse than you think,” he said. He had a pillowcase and a folded-over patchwork quilt from the bed in the other house and he started filling them. Samples in glassine envelopes. Damp bagged vegetable matter that smelled like death and life at the same time. Telling her as he worked the same thing he’d told the others, how the helicopters would come back and they’d bring an army with them and they’d destroy everything. Janey and Liz bursting down the stairs and Weller saying this is Dr. Patel. Strip the beds. Pack up what she tells you and don’t take no for an answer.