North

by Frank Owen

  ‘Fuck Renard,’ he murmured. It snapped him fully back into the present.

  ‘Amen.’

  Adams pulled the car up outside a deserted coffee shop and came to a stop. ‘Can’t just stroll up to the front door. Got to do some crawling before we’re in the clear.’

  17

  In the night the car had stopped once. Vida slept through, but Dyce opened a slit eye to watch Buddy get out of the vehicle and hurry off into the darkness, coming back with a jerry can, retrieved like treasure from some hidey-hole only he knew. He poured the gas into the tank – his face twitchy, lit by the red glow of the rear lights – and then scurried back to his side and got in. He slid the can over onto the passenger seat and closed the door quickly. They rolled back onto the 680. He said nothing, but he didn’t have to: they’d passed no gas stations since they’d left Wyoming. You didn’t cross these plains without planning ahead. The rising sun revealed the flat expanse of the Iowa prairie, low grassed hills like ocean swell. The few trees looked foreign, the masts of scuttled ships.

  ‘I was going to suggest waking her in a bit.’ Buddy spoke without turning around, locked into his all-night long-distance gaze. Vida’s head lolled heavy on Dyce’s lap. He was just grateful she could sleep. Her leg must be less bothersome. ‘As I said, Capitol Building’s sealed up pretty tight – you only really know it’s night in there by the shade of the dark. When you’re in, you’re in – there’s no coming and going. No daily stroll around the parking lot out back. Resistance rules. But you adjust. Most of us jog every morning: ten circuits of the lower floor, hit the stairs and then ten more circuits upstairs. It’s okay, but if you find yourself in there for as long as I’ve been, you’ll start volunteering for whatever’ll get you some fresh air – even driving the border in the storm of the century. I’ll remember every minute I’ve had out here – even if it was in old Nebrasky.’ Buddy smiled, but he kept his eyes on the road. ‘So, if she’s done sleeping, then maybe she’d like to see daylight for a bit. I know I would.’

  ‘Sure,’ replied Dyce. ‘In a bit.’

  Buddy leant down and tried to find a radio station. The signal had hissed gradually into static as they approached the edge of Wyoming and he’d turned the thing off: that was the way it had stayed all night.

  ‘Lucky if I get anything this far out,’ he said, twiddling the dial. ‘If the wind’s blowing right, it works.’ Dyce watched the red bar move clean across the numbers, like a Ouija board, then Buddy brought it all the way back. Nothing. He gave up, and Dyce looked out of the window as they passed tall silos and then went over a bridge with the familiar foaming brown water rushing underneath. Would it never end, the mindless destruction? Everything he’d known had been washed away, and still it wouldn’t stop.

  ‘Capitol Building doesn’t sound too bad,’ said Dyce eventually. ‘Being holed up is basically my life. When the wind blows we hunker down – or at least we used to. We’d be out in the open, my brother Garrett and me, and there’d be this change of pressure. I could feel it in my head. Garrett was pretty useless at knowing: he would’ve been dead long before if it wasn’t for me. Same goes the other way round, I guess. Gotta look out for your people, right? When the wind’s coming, the far-off trees start shaking, and if you’re in a town, you get inside fast. But, man, if you’re out in the open, you got to find a hole. Like hide-and-go-seek, except if it finds you, you don’t get another turn. Some winds blow in and they blow out. But some blow for days, so you got to have all you need packed and ready in a bag: water and food and something to do. Something to do is the most important.’

  He stopped talking. He wasn’t sure why he was telling Buddy all of this, maybe to make up for almost stabbing him in the neck with a pair of sewing scissors. Maybe just to have someone hear it.

  ‘You been with Vida long?’

  ‘Not long.’

  ‘You two gonna get married, or is it too early to tell?’

  Dyce snorted a laugh and Vida stirred.

  ‘What’s funny about that?’ Buddy asked.

  ‘No one gets married down South.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because “Till death do us part” might be “Till next week Thursday”.’ Dyce smiled but Buddy’s lips tightened.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah. Fuck Renard, right?’

  The two men sat in silence, and Dyce let Vida sleep until they could see the skyline of Des Moines.

  ‘Getting close,’ he finally said.

  She sat up, taking it slow. Her leg was numb from sleep; it had taken the edge off the worst pain, but now it had stiffened and she’d have to walk like she was ninety. She wasn’t sure if she could. Just try, said her stepdaddy’s voice in her head. She closed her eyes again and she was back when Everett was whole and alive, tossing the old tennis ball to her over and over until she could face the baseball pitch. You gotta try, Veedles. Cain’t win it if you ain’t in it. In the long-ago evening light his face was seamed with kindness, and back in the pickup her heart squeezed with sorrow. It never went away.

  ‘Let me give you the tour,’ Buddy was saying. He waved a sarcastic hand like a magician.

  There were no other cars and no people on foot – and there wouldn’t be, either. Dyce whistled and shook his head, unsure what was worse.

  ‘Mostly deserted, as you-all can tell. City’s too big to be full, and most communities are south-side of the river.’ They kept driving, and the endless empty parking lots and four-lane roads channeled the wind and the dirt northward.

  The Capitol Building rose abruptly out of the ruined city. The blurry doors and windows that Vida could see were boarded up with plywood. Somehow the gold leaf on the domes was still shiny and intact, the way she imagined a Russian church or the Taj Mahal.

  Or a mushroom.

  The building stood proud above a coiled razor-wire fence that ranged ten-feet high and rusted. But who would want to get in anyway? The grass that had once grown in sloping terraced lawns had turned to rubble. Through it grew shrubs and the sapling children of the original oaks, sawn-off trunks poking through the mess in a warning to trespassers.

  ‘You can see why it’s a good headquarters,’ said Buddy. ‘Kind of looks like you’d be killed just for side-eyeing the thing. Des Moines folk don’t come near it. Like it’s cursed.’ But he was puffed with pride even as he disparaged the place, and Vida understood how much it meant to him. For Buddy, the Resistance was everything.

  ‘It’s pretty, though,’ she said, ‘if you imagine it how it was.’

  ‘Oh, she’s a beauty for sure, even without her makeup on. Five domes. Count ’em. More than any other state building. How about that?’ Now he was driving slowly right by the building. He turned the truck into a side street so that the view of the domes was obscured. ‘I’m overshooting by a few blocks and we’ll walk back a little way. Hope that’s okay with your leg and all.’

  ‘We’ll manage,’ said Dyce. He had seen Vida’s heaviness but called it sleep. She’s tired, he told himself. We just got to get her inside. She’ll get through it.

  Buddy rolled the truck nose-first in front of a vandalized shop front and stopped beside a De Luxe, the soft top replaced with makeshift plywood and painted white. The glass from the Starbucks window still lay in diamonds on the floor. When they crossed over the wasteland, it crunched underfoot.

  ‘Anyone want a latte?’ Buddy asked.

  ‘I already drank my own piss today,’ said Dyce, looking up at the mermaid. Good old Mami Wata, taking care of her own.

  18

  Felix and Adams got out of the car slowly, then picked their way over shards of glass along the sidewalk toward the Capitol Building. At least there was no dog shit: you could say that for the apocalypse. Human – sure; dog – not so much.

  Adams led Felix into a dead-end side alley, and then over to a dull green dumpster set on casters. He leant against the side and it rolled away to reveal a square sewer cover inscribed with PROPERTY OF THE CITY OF DE
S MOINES. He wedged his fingers along the edge and lifted it. Felix bent to help and they set the rusted plate beside the hole.

  ‘Age before beauty,’ said Adams. He had to hold his cheek when he smiled. ‘Wait when you get to the bottom, okay?’

  Felix sat himself down on the edge and groaned, his legs dangling into the black. ‘Damn straight I’m waiting. Didn’t get to be this old rushing in where angels fear to tread, sonny.’

  He felt inside the hole for rungs and tested them for weight. They held. Then he turned his back on Adams. In seconds he had descended into the darkness like a miner down a shaft.

  Adams waited until the old man’s fingers were out of the way, and stepped onto the iron rungs. He leant forward and pulled the dumpster back in jerks until it was over the entrance.

  ‘This is the home stretch,’ he called down softly.

  Felix expected him to pull a flashlight from his pocket or to light a match, but it looked like he’d done this trip enough times to feel that that was a waste. Adams kept low and moved fast, and Felix crept along behind him in the dimness under the city, listening to his heavy breathing and the scrape of his feet on the damp floor. No one would be flushing a toilet any time soon in the heart of Des Moines, so there was that, at least, and if there were any gators left in the sewers, they’d probably had to turn cannibal.

  It wasn’t long before Adams stopped and stood up straight. Felix did so too, aware of his own harsh panting. Adams seemed to check a map in his head and then made his way to another set of rungs – a different kind to the ones at the entrance. Felix saw a glowing halo of pinpricks at the top – some sort of drain, or a vent for a defunct air-conditioning system that had babied the lungs of fat-ass politicians as they sent the turning world to shit.

  ‘You coming?’

  Felix followed Adams upward, his old legs burning with each ponderous lift. When Adams reached the top, he knocked on the underside of the plate – some kind of code like you had when you shared a house with a roommate who couldn’t keep his mitts off the sticky magazines under the bed.

  ‘The others are coming,’ he said. ‘Takes a while.’

  For a moment Felix felt his heart shrink. What if this was all some sort of set-up and he’d walked straight into a Northern trap? He swallowed, his throat thick with sudden doubt. Another minute of silence.

  Then there was a scraping, and dusty second-hand sunlight poured down the hole, thick as honey, and a woman’s face peered out.

  Adams lifted himself up and out and then turned to give Felix a hand.

  The woman was past her prime, but pretty. She stepped back as Felix emerged. Then she covered her mouth.

  ‘Felix Callahan! Is that you?’

  Felix looked at her to see whether he knew her, something he’d not done in years. But there was no spark of recognition in the slow lobes of his skull.

  ‘You don’t know me. I’m Edith, the one who spotted your phone call.’

  He nodded. She nattered on, undeterred.

  ‘We’ve been monitoring the phone numbers that belonged to Southerners for, what’s it now, seven, eight years? Yours was the first one, you know. It’s just hard to believe you’re real! Oh, come here! Let me hug you!’

  Felix didn’t answer in time, because Edith stepped forward and squeezed him tight. It felt good to have a kindly woman’s arms around him, and a younger Felix might have given plump Edith some prodding through old Mr Norma’s hand-me-down trousers. But all thought of arousal evaporated when he looked over her shoulder at the room where they all stood.

  ‘My God,’ he said. He set Edith aside, none too gently.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Here? The same room? Really?’

  Adams stepped between the old man and the woman, his hands spread in warning and surrender. ‘Hey, now. What’s up with you?’

  ‘Ain’t you got no shame?’ Felix hissed. ‘You using this room, where she died?’ He pointed a scarred finger at the cubicle toilets.

  One porcelain bowl was missing, the U-bend left decapitated. If they had tried, the three people in the room would have been able to peer down into the subterranean dankness of the crater the ill-starred bomb had made.

  Oh, Felix knew this little room and its cracked white fixtures. How could he not? He had gone over its twin structure a dozen times with Tye McKenzie in the days of the Concession.

  The ladies’ room. The same one they had turned into a mausoleum for Renard’s lovely lady wife.

  19

  The short walk to the dumpster made Vida sweat. It helped some that Dyce took care to wipe her face, but he had enough going on trying to hold her up. She knew her wounds were seeping through the bandage: the slurry of fresh blood and antibacterial cream kept creeping to the surface.

  After that there was a descent, Dyce telling her where to place her feet on the rungs, Buddy asking questions about how come he could see so well in the dark. Oh, this? Dyce wanted to say. This is a little present I got for nearly dying in the South because of your fearless leader’s fucking viruses. Well, I didn’t die. I hung in there even though I shat my brains out and got Garrett killed into the bargain, because the trail of crap led the Callahans straight to us. But the bonus prize is being able to see real good in the dark. A war wound, I guess you could call it. Fair’s fair, right, Buddy? Fair is fucking fair.

  Vida couldn’t tell whether the blackness was because they were travelling underground. Her eyes felt glued shut and she was giving herself over to the heat rising in her veins, the blood pounding in her brain until she thought she would pass clean out. She felt Dyce gripping her, keeping her on her feet. Then the temperature and the air pressure changed, and there were voices echoing like they were in a chamber. For a moment Vida felt panicky and deaf; they were in those dank, hopeless tunnels under the Mouth again, and this time Ed would never let them go. She and Dyce would join all those poor dead people who only wanted to be left in peace, but who would spend eternity choking on the mushrooms crowding their mouths.

  But then her ears popped and she came back to herself. It wasn’t the Mouth. It was somewhere like it – a place filled with noise and jostling bodies, a station of some kind. And there were some people she knew! That wasn’t right. They belonged in the South. Why were they here? Maybe she hadn’t recovered. Maybe her leg had been too bad, finally, the thing that had done her in after all this time thinking she was immune. Maybe none of it had happened – not Buddy, not the plane, not the perv with his hand in his pants. She was dead, wasn’t she? She knew it because there was an angel who looked like her mother, peering anxiously into her face, her hair a springy backlit halo against the bathroom ceiling.

  Vida opened her eyes properly. Ruth was still there. Oh, this felt good. This felt so good. She wanted to laugh.

  ‘Hey, Mama. Where’s Everett?’

  ‘Oh!’ Ruth put her hand over her mouth, and then recovered herself to grab Vida’s hand again.

  Don’t hurt her, Dyce wanted to say, but he kept his mouth shut.

  Ruth squeezed and squeezed the bones of her daughter’s fingers. She leant in and rested her head on Vida’s shoulder and sobbed.

  ‘Get her some water.’ She had to keep clearing her throat, but she wouldn’t let go. Vida blinked, and Dyce faded out of her blurred circle of vision. ‘She needs a proper place to lie down.’

  Vida felt herself being jostled and lifted into what felt like a hammock. There were people at the corners – no, she told herself, more angels, and started to giggle. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John! Saddle the horse till I get on!

  ‘Stop,’ said the head angel. ‘You’re hurting her.’ They thought she was crying!

  Then they were carrying her in her sheet up a flight of stairs, into the vaults of heaven with its wooden paneling and gilded cornices and the mosaics of cherub-chubby wagon riders carrying wheat and grapes, all followed by flocks of cotton-ball sheep. Vida tried to rub her face, clear her mind of these hallucinations – but these were also real. L
ooky there! The frescoes on the walls of the Capitol Building lived in their glorious past. Look at all those families! And their food! Real soil-grown crops! No locusts they were catching – bright-eyed does and fat rabbits, ready for the skinning. Her stomach hitched and burnt at the thought.

  There was music too, not trumpets but something earthly and kind, a guitar maybe, and a man’s voice singing high and sweet. I wonder what happened to Dyce’s mandolin heads, thought Vida. I hope he still has them. He’s no good on the harp.

  They had arrived in a room with a carpet that had a pattern of swirling autumn leaves. Vida wanted to lie down there with Dyce and cover herself in a dusty, crackling blanket of them on a cool forest floor; take off her stiff and sweaty clothes and give herself over to the comfort of his hands on her naked skin.

  Instead the stretcher-bearers lifted her onto a bed and Ruth folded the sheet in around one corner of the mattress; the wounded leg they left open to the air. Ruth looked at it a long time. Then she made up her mind.

  ‘Give her some space,’ she said. ‘You too, Dyce, please.’

  Vida wanted to say: No. Let him stay. He’s the one I want here with me. But there was no strength in her.

  Dyce obliged, setting down the bottle of water. He took Vida’s hand and squeezed it tight, then left.

  Now Ruth was stroking her damp forehead. ‘Close your eyes, baby girl,’ she said, but Vida didn’t want to.

  ‘Are you real?’

  ‘I hope so. Have a good look and tell me what you see. If this doesn’t persuade you, nothing will.’

  Vida opened her scratchy eyes all the way. Ruth was holding out a raggedy cloth-covered book to her, and Vida wrinkled her nose. The pages smelt of damp and fire and desperation.