What Came After (8 page)

Penny went to school and she loved it. It occupied her entirely, her mind and her heart and her imagination. She was a natural. Only at night did she miss her mother, only at night in the lamplit underground where she kept her father company, watching him work and helping him where she could. Holding a light maybe. That flashlight from the bunker. It was cold until he got the generator working again and hooked it up to a space heater that hadn’t run before and the temperature finally began to rise. Things starting to dry out.

They slept side by side on a pallet, beneath a low ceiling with roots reaching down. Clusters and strings of shallow roots and runners entwining themselves with the salvaged barn timbers, all of it combining into one unmovable thing.

Patel herself slept behind a curtain. She had made do this way for all these years. She needed nothing, or at least nothing that she could obtain here. As Weller drifted toward sleep he whispered to his daughter, and his daughter whispered back, and behind her curtain Patel couldn’t help but overhear. She hadn’t slept right since Bangalore.

An hour before dawn he came awake and lay listening to Penny breathe. Wanting to be up making things happen and wanting to be on his way to New York and wanting to stay right here with her in this moment of darkness and hope. Calculating how long he might delay getting her seen by a doctor in return for helping build a world where mutations like hers might never rise up again. Imagining the other children to be saved. The potential children. But unable to put them over his own daughter for long.

*

He was on his knees in a ditch, checking welds on a length of pipe, when footsteps startled him. Two men with oversized backpacks and weary postures and steady gaits, coming through the high grass. Two men worn out with traveling. He hailed them and asked where they were bound as if he had the right to ask, and they looked at him the very same way. Suspicious men in a suspicious world. He could be anybody. They asked what was he doing here.

He scooped sweat from inside his thick lenses with a dirty finger and looked up at them and said in case they hadn’t noticed he was installing a gas line and they said oh is that what that is. They’d thought it was just junk lying in a ditch. Ha ha ha. The two of them adjusting their shoulder straps and moving on. Saying good luck with that. The undiluted arrogance of the man of the world, the man connected to nothing.

He climbed out of the ditch and followed them back to the compound. In spite of their weariness, they moved along with the steady rhythm of machinery. Into the culvert and through the long darkness and up again into the sunlight. Mud on their feet and mud on Weller’s feet. In the tobacco field no one paid them the least bit of attention. People bent over plants or tending low fires or working looms. People grinding vegetable compounds into paste between stones in support of Patel’s work. People cutting iron pipe in support of his. One by one they looked up at the travelers and looked away. Weller followed anyhow, along the rows and down the ramp into Patel’s lab. They knew exactly where they were going.

She greeted them and they laid out the contents of their backpacks on her worktable. Money first, of course. Cash. A sheaf of tattered old U.S. greenbacks and AmeriBank scrip mixed together. The colony’s cut. She laid a hand on it and said they’d come just in time. She had to get a supply run under way and back before the fall closed in. They’d have trouble making it through the winter otherwise. The two men nodded their understanding. The filthy pair of them standing there like heroes, smiling through grime. She riffled the bills and cocked her head and said were they sure this was all of it. She said it seemed low.

They said no, that was all.

She said don’t make me count it. I don’t have all day.

One of them smiled at the other one and then at her saying he thought maybe they could part with another hundred just to show how much they cared.

She said make it two. Two hundred.

The second one said one-fifty but only because we love you. Teasing her and teasing out the money like this was some game. Weller watching from the bottom of the ramp and hating them for working her over and wasting her time.

She leaned on the table and said all right, before we settle on a number let’s see how much you love me to begin with. And then she counted the money. Not just once. Twice. Making them wait while she did it and making Weller wait if he cared to see how this turned out. Maybe doing it for his benefit. He didn’t know. Putting the dollars in one pile and the scrip in another and scribbling out a calculation based on the exchange rate between the two. Last thing she knew scrip was going for almost double what the old currency was worth.

When she finished she said to hell with that one-fifty they had said would make up the difference. Unless they’d given her tobacco away, they owed her another five hundred and that was being generous on her part. Even if they
had
given it away. She didn’t want U.S. dollars either. She wanted another five hundred in good solid AmeriBank scrip. They weren’t the only runners in the world.

They said four and she said five. They could find another source if they wanted.

They said all right five. Five just because they loved her.

She said she knew they did. She had known it all along.

*

The rest of what they’d spread out on the table was a varied lot. Tools. Knives and a file and some wirecutters. A tin of multipurpose oil and a couple of empty flasks bound up in rags. What looked like medicine, tablets of some kind in a plastic bag and dark red fluid in a bottle with an eyedropper in it. Patel went over these and counted them off on her fingers against some mental list and asked about a few things that were missing. Things she needed. The men didn’t have them but they had plenty of excuses instead. Places they hadn’t been able to get to and people they hadn’t been able to see. Short supplies and bounty hunters. She said never mind. She’d go to some other source. They didn’t argue. She counted out a little money and said there would have been twice that much if they’d gotten everything she needed and they didn’t seem to feel any regret over it. They just shrugged, as if to say let somebody else take care of the details. They had troubles enough of their own.

At the far end of the table they had left some burlap sacks and bundles, rough fabric tied up roughly. When Patel was finished with everything else she turned her attention to these. Took a scalpel and slit the packages open one after another. Vegetable material packed solid inside each one of them. Weller was no expert. It was all just leaves to him. Leaves and pods and fibrous stalks in various stages of drying or decay. Everything labeled on little paper cards half rotted themselves. Smaller bundles inside the bigger bundles with seeds and seedlings separated out, clumps of delicate threadlike roots wrapped in some kind of moss and kept damp. The way Patel looked at them, Weller could see that the rest of the world had fallen away from her. She was beyond happiness or astonishment or delight or any other ordinary reaction. Picking up the labels and holding them out at arm’s length where she could read them and putting them back down again. Fingers flying from one sample to the next and lingering there for no more than a few seconds before passing on. Ideas forming in her mind. He could see them coming together. She raised her head and noticed that the runners were still there and she dismissed them. The only word for it. Dismissed them like subordinates who’d been waiting upon her word. They left. Weller stayed.

She took a bundle of glassine envelopes from a drawer and began parceling out some of the samples into them. Writing on the envelopes with the nub of a crayon. Rapid little flicks. Weller looking over her shoulder and after a few minutes hazarding a question. “So it’s not only wheat, then?”

No. It wasn’t only wheat. And this little compound in the tobacco fields wasn’t unique, either. There were others elsewhere. The Midwest. The West. The South. Hidden places like this one set back from the roads, and even more deeply hidden places where there were no roads at all. Isolated outposts where research and development went on night and day, season after season, research and development whose goal was to recover the world as it had once been. To reverse time and bring back the dead.

“These runners, then. They’re all right.”

“I suppose. They’re only in it for the money. They don’t care what they carry. It
is
risky, though. These samples are worth a whole lot more to my old employer than every single leaf of tobacco we’ll harvest this year. They’re world-changers. Fortunately, there isn’t a market for them. If one of those fellows got caught, though, or turned them over to PharmAgra, it wouldn’t be pretty.”

“There wouldn’t be a reward?” Thinking of the bounty hunter.

She laughed. It struck him that he’d never heard her laugh before. “They’d take him to pieces,” she said. “They’d move heaven and earth to find out where he’d gotten this stuff. Waterboarding, the whole works. And once he confessed, they’d kill him. I know these people.”

“Cheney all over again.”

“Nobody forgets the good old days, do they.” She was holding up a glassine envelope to the light that came streaming down the ramp. Everything else having fallen away.

“You do all of the lab work right there?”

“Most of it.” The envelope held a damp tangle of sprouted seeds. “Soy beans from Pennsylvania,” she said, tapping on the glassine with a finger. “They’re getting close. Not close enough, but close.” She put down the envelope and sighed. “I guess you know about close.”

Weller sighed too.

He went out and saw the two runners sitting on a dirt berm with a couple of other men he knew. Loading up their packs with bricks of tobacco and filling water bottles and getting ready to go. It made him long for the road himself. For the road and for what lay at the end of it. Penny healed and the both of them home. Liz.

*

He dug in and persevered for as long as he could. Another week of breaking his back and passing on what he knew and getting the trickiest parts of everything nailed down. Drawing plans for others to follow. When he was satisfied enough but not entirely satisfied he knew the time had come to leave. He stocked up for the trip to New York. Food and water and clean clothes for both Penny and himself, washed by somebody else. Somebody else doing their part.

Half of him wished that he could go home for Liz right then and bring her back and dig themselves a hole and settle in. In a place like this where people worked together toward something. But no. Not with Penny the way she was.

At the end Patel slipped him a bundle of cured tobacco leaves pressed flat and wrapped in aluminum foil against the weather. She tucked the bundle into his pack and said, “This is worth more to other people than it is to you. Don’t spend it all in one place.”

He followed Penny out. He let her lead, because she knew the path from going to the schoolhouse and she was proud to be able to show it to him. They said their goodbyes and lifted their packs and went across the tobacco field toward the culvert. Heading toward no-man’s land but some distance to go yet. The sun just coming up. Penny chirped at him and something buzzed in his ear and he slapped at it and pulled back his hand disbelieving. He told her to stop for a minute. Knelt down beside her and said, “Look here, honey. Have you ever seen the likes of this? What’s next? Birds, maybe? Give it time.”

FOUR
The Driver

They left the farms and the rolling hills and the distant emptied-out suburbs, creeping down mile by mile into a denser world of broken concrete. Not all at once but little by little. Moving into it as it moved into them. It was a hollow place devoid of people and empty of their recent signs. Commerce and residence tightly packed together and no more of either one remaining. Weller held tightly to his daughter’s hand as they walked, helping her when she stumbled over cracks and curbs and heaved-up places where the annual cycle of freezing and thawing had rippled the streets of the old densely settled towns and commercial strips and industrial parks. Heaps and valleys of blacktop, like little mountain ranges thrown up.

It was areas like this, thickly populated stretches along the outskirts of the cities, that had died the slowest. The old mythical megalopolis that ran from Washington to Boston, the tightly packed suburbs of Chicago, and the freeform sprawls of southern California. In the beginning, people had come here to be close to the cities, to partake of what the cities offered them in the way of work and riches and culture, but when the economy fractured fully and the cities turned their backs they had nowhere to go. No jobs and no savings and no hope.

Some stayed put, and when the price of food soared beyond reach they cultivated their own little yards and windowboxes with seeds that they’d saved and dried and pinned their hopes upon. Knowing what they knew about genetically altered PharmAgra stock but hopeful nonetheless. Others moved outward, fleeing to the countryside for the plainer life it promised. In either event the results were the same. You never knew what treacherous homegrown unprocessed food might be lurking in plain sight, either in your own kitchen garden or on some farm stand table. Take and eat and die uninsured, or risk watching your children die the same in a few years. Soon the hospitals were overwhelmed and soon after that they were shuttered, because there is only so much charity in the world.