What Came After (7 page)

Almost running.

Lifted up.

THREE
The Tigris and the Euphrates

Children on the broken road. Eight or ten of them in a cloud, all ages, raising dust as they went. A little army moving between green fields, half of its motion forward and the other half a busy side to side tussling.

Penny’s face brightened when her father pointed to them from the top of a rise. The swarm of them down below, moving along the valley floor. She caught their movement and their long shadow and heard the sound of their voices, a song filtering up, and she took her father’s hand and they walked a little faster. Aiming to meet them at a fenced-in crossroads. The fences were tagged with the PharmAgra wheat stalk and her father was certainly aware of trespassing on this road, but how much trouble can you get into when eight or ten little children are doing the same. No tire tracks on the gravel whatsoever. It had been forever since this road was last traveled by anyone but the likes of these.

They came near, and the children shied. Penny and her father at the center of the crossroads and the children hanging back a few yards, milling, as if they’d met some invisible resistance. Weller raised his hand and called out to them. The sun so low that at this distance he stood practically in their shadow. His own stretching a mile behind him. They didn’t answer. They just shied, their eyes like horses.

Penny broke the spell, dropping her father’s hand and running forward. The children swarmed around her and enfolded her.

They were brown children, and they made Weller think of Indians. They were creatures of the outdoors and they looked it, even though they’d been on their way home from school. Chattering like birds now that they’d been let out. Imagine that. A school out here. One room, they said. It must have been like in the old days, before education turned into an industry and then into an industry that failed. Just a little antique falling-down one room schoolhouse, as if there was something to learn and some reason to learn it. Something up ahead to get ready for.

He and Penny followed them home. Down the broken blacktop and through a hole in a chain link fence and up rows of tall corn. The children invisible beneath the plants this late in the summer and Weller almost invisible too. They said there were other ways. Other ways for other seasons and other cover. They passed through a wirecut fence again into a different field and down into a mansized culvert running slow with mud. They passed a couple of men coming the other way with backpacks and exchanged not a word. Came up in a tobacco field.

*

There were fences all around, but they were different. Tall fences tagged PharmAgra but poorly kept. Rusted in spots and painted over and rusting through again. Weller guessed the pieces had been dragged here from some great distance. Salvaged elsewhere and brought here for camouflage. To make this place look ordinary. He thought of how much work that must have been. Work and stealth combined.

And all because there was something different about the tobacco here. The leaves were too small, the plants too weak and spindly. It was nowhere near as dense and vigorous and large-scale profitable as the big engineered plants growing everywhere else. It wasn’t PharmAgra. Weller didn’t know much about agriculture, but he knew this. He thought of those men with the backpacks, going out. Pictured them with their payloads of old-growth plants or disengineered plants or whatever it was they were growing here. Risking a run-in with some bounty hunter like that old Black Rose. The amount of trouble that men doing a job like that would face. And the rewards.

“Children.” A voice came from behind him, soft. “They trust everybody.”

Weller turned.

“Grownups like us, not so much.” The woman speaking was small and intense, her dark hair shot through with gray. She watched the children pick up some game they’d left off before school. Penny included. Lines and squares scratched into the dirt. Pebbles tossed into the grid and shouts raised. She smiled as she stood there watching, but her eyes were rueful. An afterimage of something in them, burned there.

Weller said, “This will do my daughter a world of good.”

The woman nodded.

“Which of them are yours?”

“None.” Not looking at him. “None of these. I did have two. A boy and a girl. My husband kept them behind.”

“Whereabouts?”

“Bangalore.”

Weller was silent.

“His parents. Tradition. The plan was that I would fly back once a month.” Toeing the dirt. “I did it for the longest time. These days, Bangalore may as well be on the moon.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too. They’re grown up now, I would hope.”

“I’m sure they’re doing fine.”

The woman was silent.

In between the rows it was Penny’s turn to throw, and her stone happened to land somewhere close to the right place and a cheer went up.

“Take good care of her,” the woman said.

“I’m trying.”

“It’s a shame about her eyes,” she said.

“Yes. Yes it is.”

“Was it—”

“Yes.”

“I thought so. It’s a twisted world we live in.”

“No question.”

“You grow something in God’s earth with your own two hands and you can’t even eat it.” She looked at Weller and he didn’t look back. Studied the vertical slit alongside his windpipe. Freshly crusted over. Better to talk about that. “Tell me how you went generic,” she asked.

“I didn’t.”

“I don’t think you cut yourself shaving.” Narrowing her eyes toward Penny, Penny standing on her toes and clapping her hands together.
“She
certainly didn’t.”

“She’s second-generation. Me, I’m one of those that the Zone just kind of came up around. I still live in the house where I grew up. I still run my father’s old workshop.”

“Tradition.” She nodded. She knew all about tradition.

He touched the cut.

“So what about that?” she said.

“That? That was basically a misunderstanding.” He told her about the old man in the bunker. A corporate mercenary gone freelance.

She said knew all about him. Said he’d never managed to find his way to the fields that they kept under cultivation but then again he’d never needed to. All he had to do was haunt the edges, stay near the spots where the gravel roads met the highway and close by the big culverts where men with packs and duffel bags might hide themselves and their merchandise—where they might meet other men with credits in their brands and black market scanners and ideas about the redistribution of wealth—and a bounty hunter like him didn’t need to bother locating the actual source. The reward money was more consistent if he didn’t. That old scavenger. It hadn’t been much more than a day since Weller had left him, and there were reports already that he wasn’t in any of his usual hiding places. That he might be out of commission. Apparently they owed Weller a debt.

He said some food and fresh water would do if they had any to spare. He’d left that bunker in kind of a hurry.

*

The people here buried themselves alive underneath the ground, because even though planes didn’t come over very often what if they did. They dug wide, deep holes in self-defense. Six of them altogether shared by a dozen families in a clearing that wasn’t quite a clearing. Dirt hauled out and heaped up into little low quarter-domes like somebody had buried a gigantic sphere and left part of it poking up by accident. Propped up inside with barn timbers. A doorway cut in and covered over with fencing material with a ramp beneath it leading down, a hole in the middle of the roof for ventilation, and tobacco plants growing everywhere as if these were just humped-up places in the ground. As if in the absence of plows and cultivators the earth had begun retaking its old unknowable shape.

The sun sank low and food appeared and tables materialized. Long tables where they all ate together. The children at one end. The woman at the other, running things. Directing. Not quite the oldest but surely the most revered. Her name was Patel. She was a doctor, but not the medical kind. A laboratory scientist.
“A fish out of water
doesn’t begin to describe it,” she said. And yet she persevered. She had equipment, although it wasn’t anything like the tools she’d had in Bangalore, back when she’d been working for NutraMax. She’d done tobacco there, too. Tobacco was what NutraMax did best. It was the reason PharmAgra had bought them, and the reason they’d shut them down once they’d transferred the technology and commercialized the plant stock. She’d done the transfer and she’d helped with the commercialization. And then the bottom had fallen out and the federal government had quit paying its bills and international relations had gone all to hell. She’d found herself stranded here jobless and hopeless and surrounded by poisons she’d engineered herself. Her two little children back in Bangalore, growing up without her.

She told herself things were better in India. Probably not as good as they were in China, but better than they were here. A mother bereft of her children could take some comfort in that. In the technology and manpower and investment capital that were concentrated where her children were these days. Concentrated to such an extent that India and China didn’t need the western hemisphere at all anymore. North America wasn’t worth thinking about as a market or even as a source of cheap labor, the transportation costs were so high.

It had taken twenty years and more, but little by little Patel had recovered these tobacco plants. Torn the doctored ones apart cell by cell and reassembled them into something close to the original. The thing she’d started with. Real tobacco, nothing poisonous about it except in the ordinary old-fashioned way, and if you insisted on smoking it then you got what you deserved. Some of that danger had been bred out of the commercial strains when the proprietary code had gone in, and wonder of wonders here it was again. You can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but it keeps on coming back. Nonetheless, people who sought the real thing and had the means to buy it and the health insurance to cover the consequences wanted it just the way it was, cancer and all. They thrilled to the risk.

These last couple of years she’d been working mainly on wheat. Just imagine, she said. Tobacco was profitable, tobacco kept their little village going on this tiny patch of land, but with wheat you could expand. You could reclaim the world. Anyone could grow wheat, practically anywhere. Civilization would spread out again from this very spot. It would seek the most remote of places and recover them by means of its own generative power. The Connecticut River and the Long Island Sound would be the new Tigris and Euphrates. Where it all began.

She looked Weller in the eye. Saying just think how the generations to come will remember us.

Stars began to show and candles burned on the table. The children down at the other end raising up their laughter in the dark, and one tall young man riding herd on them. Their teacher from the schoolhouse. Now and then he turned his head and looked over at Patel in the way he might look upon a saint. Only just daring to permit himself.

Twenty years and more was a long time, she said. Things broke. Things wore out. She studied Weller and said he’d mentioned running his father’s old workshop. She wondered exactly what that might mean. What kind of a workshop it was. She hated to be forward but if he could help she needed to know.

Machinery, he said. All kinds.

Oh thank God. The Cradle of Civilization wouldn’t wait.

*

Over breakfast in the flat light of sunrise he watched her swallow, trying to spot an incision in her neck. Her own stigma to match his. But there was none, and he asked was she still branded after all.

Hardly, she said. She’d never been branded at all, and it was the only kindness ever done her by PharmAgra. An accidental kindness at that. They had shown her the door just as they were showing others the knife. She recalled seeing her old labmates at the gas station and the grocery store during those first few weeks, when the surgeons were at their busiest. Seeing them marked. Their necks bandaged white. Each of them proud of having been singled out, and each of them reluctant to meet her eyes.

She remembered paying with plastic in those days, showing identification and signing here, while the others kept their heads high and presented their necks to the scanners that appeared everywhere. Assuming that haughty stance. She remembered watching them and paying with plastic and then paying with cash and then not being able to pay at all. Using food stamps until food stamps gave out. And finally this. This experimental station built of refuse and earth. Out here in the Zone.

*

They went to the dump. Just the two of them. “No limits,” Weller said. “I want you to imagine how anything here might help, and then we’ll work toward it.” There were treasures everywhere. Washers and dryers. Stoves and microwaves. Dish antennas and aluminum siding and fleets of rusted bicycles all tangled up. She settled on a gas range and a chest freezer, fire and ice, refusing to hold with any particular convention as to how the world might end. The freezer was going to need electricity and the gas range was going to need gas, but Weller had promised. He located some old generating equipment and some welding gear with a tank still half full and he brought men to haul it all back. He paced off the distance between the tobacco field and the landfill and drew up plans for a gas installation like the one he’d built at home and set people to work gleaning iron pipe for it from the fencing they’d stockpiled. Had them sorting it by length and fitting it together and digging a trench to bury it in. Sank collection columns and gave welding lessons because he couldn’t stay forever.