North

by Frank Owen

  He lay back and waited. Near mid-morning there were the sounds of engines, cars coming in a line from the other end of the city – the quiet end. He watched them cross a bridge, some turning off left, and others right. Far below he saw a battered Jeep stop beside an old man carrying a pole and two balanced buckets of water. He watched them talk, too distant to hear the actual words. Then the old man raised a finger, pointing up and up, the digit raising like the sight on a gun, until it came to rest on a window in the next building over. The men with guns streamed into the building, emerging minutes later dragging a prisoner behind them. Some kind of policeman or military man, judging from the badge sewn to his shirt. Kurt watched them load him into the Jeep and then the crowd dissipated, as though they were simply seeping into the ground.

  ‘Those fellas have a home base somewhere, Linus, and it’s top secret. Otherwise they wouldn’t bother with the smoke and mirrors. And I’ll take a bet – let’s say the good pronghorn fillet for the winner – that Uncle Felix is with them. Now we just got to play it cool.’

  He crouched down, out of sight.

  25

  Adams was kneeling beside Dyce as he retched, one hand on his shoulder, soothing him like a child with night terrors.

  ‘Shh, shh. It’s all right now. Take all the time you need.’

  Dyce shrugged the hand off and kept kneeling over the maw of the toilet. There was no amount of time that would make things easier, or numb him to the last few days. Some people dealt with change easier than others: Hey, sure! This is how the world is now? No problem! Hand me that handkerchief!

  He was not one of them. He felt another spasm coming and he hocked a string of bile down the open pipe. Some days he knew he wasn’t all the way over the sickness he’d caught before he’d met Vida, there in the way-back; some days were just better than others. Were they really going to make him recount that nightmare time under the Mouth in front of all those hopeful Southern faces? He shook his head like a terrier with a toad, the foam flying.

  Those minutes underground he counted among the worst of his life – and there was a fair amount of competition. He sat back on his haunches and tried to breathe, but the images stayed stubbornly in his head.

  The pitiless, expanding death the boys had seen from Gracie’s window as it approached, a miasma.

  Bethie and Garrett’s tiny baby, come too early from the body of its sick mama, born lifeless under the sick sky and then discarded.

  And Ester! A woman – only just a woman – bartering colostrum for a living, like her sisters were dairy cows. Even the ones who seemed to survive were the walking dead.

  And between every scene: always the mushrooms. They sprouted, ever-living, in his memory, patient as cancer. Between his waking up and swinging his legs off the bed, they were there. In the quiet before sleep took him they rose up and swamped him. Behind his eyes the bright white buttons stared back from the black nursery of his brain, hungry for hosts. It felt, though Dyce wouldn’t admit it, not even to Vida – especially not to her, and especially not now – that those fungal eyes shielded themselves behind his own, watching the world as it went by, seeing everything he saw. They were part of him now, and he was part of them.

  And so was every other person who had died horribly down there in the mines, sacrificed in their making of this knobbly cannibal chain. They had laid their pitiful selves down in his bones, and he owed them.

  ‘Easy, there,’ said Adams. ‘How about we talk man to man? No real need to put you up there in front of all those folk. That’s not helping the jitters. It was just an idea. I like things out in the open and I can’t resist a bit of a performance, I’ll admit to that. How about you clean up and I’ll take you somewhere to talk – somewhere we can get a little fresh air.’

  Dyce coughed and heard the echo, hollow and wet, from the toilet’s workings below. I’m a trophy. He wanted to show me off.

  ‘Okay.’

  He stood up, his knees complaining.

  ‘Get some water on your face. You’ll feel better.’

  Dyce splashed his eyes and stared at his yellow features splintered in the mirror over the sink. How did he still look so normal from the outside?

  Adams led him dumbly away from the bathroom, away from the gathered crowd, and they doubled back to the main foyer. He turned around, looking up, like a tourist in a church.

  ‘We’ll go there,’ he said, pointing above his head. Dyce shrugged.

  The two men climbed the stairs and then took a service entrance up to the base of the dome. The stairwell was narrow, and Dyce felt like the air there was thinner, barely enough for the both of them, as if everything, all the hopes and prayers and wishes – and experiments too, because what were those if not prayers to some other deity? – was directed up into the very top of the dome, closer to God.

  It opened onto a landing, and he could see into the heart of the whole beehive structure.

  And that was where the Weatherman was, right in the center of things, wrapped snug in his blankets like a Mexican, lying asleep against the pale curved wall. Always liked to be high up, didn’t he? When the winds weren’t keeping him camped underground, that is. Keep an eye on the goings-on. Don’t have to be a weatherman to see which way the wind is blowing. He squinted when Dyce and Adams appeared, but didn’t say anything about the intrusion. He rolled over, expecting them to pass by, like nurses on night duty.

  But Adams stopped. Right above Felix’s gray head was a window in the wall – locked, Dyce saw, because Adams had to lean over the old man where he lay in his cocoon and struggle with the corroded latch. It gave, and he opened it outward. The blast of fresh air and daylight was so pure it almost knocked Dyce off his feet.

  Felix shielded his eyes. ‘Hey,’ he complained.

  Adams ignored him. ‘Keep up,’ he said.

  Outside the window was a set of iron rungs welded onto the dome. Dyce followed Adams as he ascended, rung after rung, half afraid to look out or down in case it triggered some residual queasiness in him: the bile still burnt in the back of his throat. They were aiming for the top of the golden dome, he saw now, a little round room like the crow’s nest on a sailing ship.

  No, he thought. Like a shrine in an old encyclopedia. He wasn’t stupid. He knew what holy places ought to look like, even if he’d never been in one himself, like those towers in India where they set out the dead for the birds to feed on.

  He watched his hands, his fingers gripping tight to the metal, his feet finding their way blindly to step after step until they reached the parapet. Adams hoisted himself over and then turned back to help Dyce, who swatted his hand away. He allowed himself to look out now while he caught his breath. It was like they’d climbed from the bowels of hell, through the crust of the earth with its dirt and its trees, then up through the clouds and into heaven. They looked down over the world with its rubble-strewn gardens. Old paths looped in bald patterns; dried fountains lay cracked, their shards being quietly smothered with creepers. The lonesome flagpoles rattled their halyards in the breeze, though no flag flew.

  Stretching out behind the Capitol Building were parking lots, and the skeletons of buildings ransacked long ago for firewood, and for their piping and wiring. The lots were empty but for the leaves and branches blown there by the storm – and a single car, rusting gently on its bricks.

  Adams swept his arm over the ruins. ‘Can you believe there were ever enough cars to fill these? And enough gas to run them all?’

  Dyce shook his head and peered into the distance, where among the high-rises of Des Moines city center there were a few lonely columns of smoke that gave away day-to-day lives. Some people were still there, holding out like bacteria, hardy and tenacious, trying to start again. A handful of tiny glows flickered, flame-orange. There were some electrical bulbs, Dyce gathered, and the phones seemed to work inside the Capitol itself. But there was no excess: bare-bones electrickery in the cables of Iowa, and none at all in the death-dark plains.

  Dyce shi
vered. It wasn’t just the breeze picking up. It was strange to be outside without checking the weather. The clouds were rolling in, though they seemed higher than before, dark only in the North, but it was okay. He and Adams had somewhere to go if it all turned to shit.

  Adams sat with his legs dangling through the grille of a flaking railing and Dyce sat down too. They looked out between the bars like prisoners.

  ‘So,’ Adams began.

  Here it comes. He’s going to try and sell me some bullshit about my responsibility and the good of the community. Truth, justice and the American fucking way.

  ‘You’re the guy who knows how we’re going to win this thing. Think about that when you tell me the details. I know it’s not easy. But with your help we can make a change. We want it as bad as you and that’s the truth. Think about your family – the dead ones as well as the ones still alive. This is for them.’

  For a second Dyce had forgotten that Garrett was dead. Now it came rushing back, the way it always fucking did. But this time the sick loss carried something else along with it: up at the top of the dome, Dyce understood that people like them were the end of a line – the last of a species, like you used to see in zoos.

  That’s not exactly true, little brother, Garrett drawled in his head. You ain’t the last of the last.

  True enough. Inside Vida’s belly was a tiny creature with the whole of the Jackson family history in its veins. And it was fighting a fever so it could live.

  ‘The mushrooms.’ Dyce kept looking at the horizon, his head turned south toward where the Mouth had been. ‘The thing is, they have to grow from dead bodies. That’s the trick. And I know how that sounds.’

  For once Adams was quiet.

  ‘And I only saw the . . . the bodies at the end. I didn’t see how it was done.’

  ‘You know how long it lasts?’ Adams searched. ‘The antiviral effects, I mean.’

  ‘Close to two weeks, so far. That’s all the science I got.’

  ‘We need to test that. Gotta be sure.’

  Dyce nodded.

  ‘One of you Southerners maybe drinks only rainwater from now on – none of Renard’s magic from the tap. Then we can figure out the time frame of cover. We got a rain tank from the old tests. Gutter feeds in from the roof, clean and pure, the way the good Lord meant it.’

  ‘That makes sense.’ Might as well do something while Vida’s lying there suffering, Dyce told himself. ‘It ought to be me.’

  Adams nodded. ‘You happen to bring any of these mushrooms with you?’

  Dyce nodded again. ‘What’s the plan?’

  ‘We can salvage the spores, right?’

  ‘Should be able to. I mean, they replicate themselves in the wild. You can take a few, not all. Pete still has a couple.’ He stared hard at Adams. ‘I want you to know, I brought out a bagful with me, and I paid a pretty high fucking price for the elixir of life. I haven’t exactly slept much since then. Some days I think I shouldn’t have taken them at all, considering the havoc they caused in the beginning. It was a total shit-show down there. And maybe I ought to be laying there too, keeping all them dead folks company.’ His mouth twisted.

  Adams grunted, careful not to interrupt now that Dyce had got going.

  ‘Depending on what’s on the other side, of course.’

  ‘Son, that’s our lot. We got no business wondering what’s on the other side. It’ll be there when we get there, one way or another, and I’m dead set on delaying the day I find out.’

  ‘The thing is,’ Dyce said, raising his voice now against the wind, ‘if it was easy, I mean, if farming the antivirals was simply about finding some dead folks for compost, then Ed and his crew would’ve just gone out looking. I suppose there weren’t a lot of people left down South – but even so. Why not shoot first and spread the spores later, like ordinary mushrooms?’ He shook his head. ‘No, I got a nasty feeling, Mister Adams, that these particular mushrooms – the super-special, antiviral, eternal-life motherfucking mushrooms we need – only work when they’re first settled in living people. They’re like fetuses. They have to feed.’

  26

  ‘You got to know where to look,’ said Kurt, pulling Linus along behind him. ‘We’ll find where all those men disappeared to. How, you wonder? Well, young Linus, I’m a damn good tracker. Remember that on the day you try to make another escape.’

  Kurt was at street level again. He’d marked in his mind where he’d seen the men go. But when he got to where he figured he’d find trace of them, there was nothing. He was quiet as he kicked through the ruins of a windowless laundromat, the red and white linoleum like a high-school corridor.

  ‘I’m not going to lie. It’s an off day for me, Linus,’ he said. The truth was he had no idea what he would actually do if he found anyone. ‘Play it as it lays, right?’

  He wandered out to the street and into another shop – HOT BUNS BAKERY, if the peeling sign was anything to go by. But they hadn’t stopped for coffee and croissants, the men who’d only minutes before been swarming the streets, hunting the other one. There was no sign of them. Kurt sat on a cinder block and held Linus up to his face.

  ‘My mother always said not to make excuses. So this ain’t an excuse, right? But back South I looked for the way grass had been stamped down, snapped branches, disturbed dew drops – that kind of thing. It’s much harder here, is all I’m saying. Here it’s just plastered walls and asphalt, and none of it is much good to me. Don’t think less of me, cat.’

  He stood and went back out onto the shattered sidewalk. He swept his gaze over the lines in the street: someone had made a spray-paint soccer field. Well, who was there to tell them to stop? No little old ladies were ever going to call the police to complain that someone had broken their windows. Kurt cocked an eye at the gray sky over his head, framed by the sharp angles of the buildings, and then he tucked Linus under his arm and walked out onto the center line, the string collar trailing. It wasn’t like he had to worry about traffic.

  The thumping of leather on the street made him jerk into alert mode, and Linus’s claws dug into him. A boy his own age had appeared from a side street, chasing a soccer ball. Kurt watched him stop the ball with his foot, then pick it up. He had dark hair, black almost, and he was lean, with ears that stuck out like wings.

  ‘That’s a handball,’ Kurt called across to him. ‘That’s cheating.’

  The boy stared at Kurt, there on the center line with Linus under his arm. Then he smiled and came closer.

  ‘You want to play?’ he called.

  His smile dropped.

  ‘You like my blouse?’ asked Kurt. ‘I made it myself.’ He plucked at the material with his free hand. The bloodstains were brown as iodine.

  The boy shook his head.

  ‘You any good at tag?’

  The boy took a step backward, then he dropped the ball and ran, knowing he had to go faster than he ever had for soccer practice. But Kurt was on him with the multi-tool anyway, stabbing with one hand, the other holding Linus by his string lead as the cat groaned and howled and scrabbled to get away.

  When the boy stopped twitching, Kurt stood up and yanked Linus back by his string.

  ‘That was just in case you were still thinking of getting away,’ he told the cat. ‘What have we learnt today?’ He shook the animal by its neck. ‘Tracking in a city is mighty hard, but with all this open space, you know, the chasing is easy.’

  27

  The Northerners took shifts, working in pairs. Dyce thought if they got any closer they’d contaminate the spores, the way their faces were pressed up against the glass containers, like worshippers at a shrine poring over relics. At least they were properly dressed for it. Renard had probably looked the same way back in the day, pacing his laboratory like an evil overlord or a dad outside a delivery room.

  Adams nudged him. ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘Just thinking.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About how you guys look an awful
lot like we did back South.’

  Adams grunted. Then he held a hand across his nose and mouth. ‘Those masks get saturated real quick, don’t they?’

  Dyce shrugged. ‘Just another one of those things you never thought you’d have to find out.’

  Pete’s bag had held maybe twenty mushrooms, all kinds, fragmented and soaked by the mighty Platte, but good to go. That was the beauty of spores, wasn’t it? They grew anywhere, on the things people thought weren’t part of the system. The crew of Resistance scientists had been happy to get them at all, and they didn’t seem deterred by their state.

  As Dyce watched, another pair of frowning workers scraped sterilized pins through the filaments, letting the motes drop onto cooked white rice. It was the method that worked best, Adams confided, boastful now that he was certain of his victory. From a library book, didn’t you know, titled Survival 101.

  ‘As long as it does what it says,’ Dyce told him. ‘My favorite was Pickling, Salting and Drying. You ever read that? My daddy loved that one. And a whole bunch of stuff on natural remedies and purifying water. You know. The usual.’

  The two of them watched the careful hands of the scientists. The trick was to observe the spores grow and to isolate them before mold crept in. It would be a day or so until the first crop came on. And instead of wasting time and hoping that only these ones worked – the progeny of Dyce’s original batch – the other scientists were experimenting. Who could blame them? Wasn’t that how people found things out? Adams could testify to that.

  The end of cities also meant that it hadn’t been hard to find a range of lab rats. Actual rats: the buildings were overrun. There was the king rat, for sure, with outsize testicles and needling teeth, but along with him had come a gallinule, a rock-dove chick and a red-eared slider. Dyce himself would have had trouble slicing open a live terrapin, but the Northerners had briskly set about preparing the flesh – ‘Substrate, right?’ said Adams – by opening the creatures and pinning them out like dissection specimens. ‘We got to get these mushrooms growing on something.’