by Dave Ring
She frowns, mouthing the sentence again to see if it feels as purple and self-important as it felt the first time.
“I don’t know, maybe don’t use that,” she says aloud.
A young woman with short, dark curls and an alarmingly bright smile steps from one of the Cirque cars and carves a path through the players. Sam immediately decides she’s interesting and follows her movements through the passing loading crew. The woman’s boots are untied and her dark overcoat flaps open at the hem to reveal an emerald satin lining and Sam swallows hard to calm the fluttering that begins in her stomach when she sees the woman is approaching her.
Well, not me, obviously, Sam thinks with a snort. The coffee stand. Unsure how to register the impression, she clicks off the recorder and sips the terrible coffee to slake her sudden thirst.
“Hey,” the woman says cheerily as she reaches the coffee stand. Her eyes sparkle and the copper apples of her cheeks have already begun pinking in the wind.
Sam nods and says an anxious “hey” into her cup. But at least the ice was broken.
“How’s the coffee?” The woman pours herself a cup.
“Ever drink actual tar?” It’s Sam’s best stab at cleverness.
“No. Is today my lucky day?”
“We’ll find out in a second.”
Sam watches as she puts the steaming cup to her exceptionally well-moisturized lips, and counts the seconds until her face changes to something that borders both disgust and hilarity.
“Oh god.” The woman gags.
“Right?” Sam reaches into her tattered messenger bag for a small jar. “Here. Maple sugar. That and a little water should take it down to a pleasant oil slick.”
She pours her a proper dose and the woman stirs it with a long, lacquered finger before trying it again, this time frowning considerably less.
“This is less bad, thank you. I’m Layla,” she says.
“Sam.”
“I’ve never seen you here before. You’re a trader? Really unfortunate barista?”
“Writer. Kind of,” Sam says.
“Magician. Also kind of. Illusions for the disillusioned.” Layla replied with a bit of a theatrical flourish.
“Really?” Sam raises an eyebrow. “Why can’t I think of a single other female magician?”
“To be fair, they just called them witches.” Layla winks.
“Brave new world.” Sam lifts her cup and Layla toasts with her own.
“Brave new world.”
This is going well, Sam tells herself. She finds herself taken with the little black stars in Layla’s ears, the neatly painted navy color of her nails, that Sam notices when Layla turns to wave at someone in the marketplace. She’s about to ask about the whole magician thing when Layla turns back with what shockingly seems like keen interest.
“So what do you write?”
“Food...journalism?” Sam chokes out. It feels like such a silly thing to say seriously now that everything’s fallen apart.
“You sure?” Layla chuckles.
“For now. I work in the horticulture department for the Stadium settlement in South City. I’m being hosted at the Currant, though, to interview people about how our food culture has changed since the end.”
“Ah, a food nerd! Okay! That’s how you know maple sugar is a thing, I take it.”
“Only natural sweetener indigenous to the whole continent. Our Master Gardener is Mvskoke so we’re re-learning all kinds of stuff.”
You’re showing off. Don’t be weird, she scolds herself.
“Genius. The magic of giving the land back.” Layla gives an impressed nod.
“That’s what I said.”
A tall, brown-skinned woman in a weathered Star Wars sweatshirt rushes by, rolling a hand cart stacked high with reusable bins that rattle on the uneven pavement.
“Door. Door, door, door. You,” she says breathlessly, glancing in their direction.
Layla grimaces as she finishes what remains of her coffee and backs away.
“That’s all you. I’ve got some shopping to do before Redd gets on the horn. Don’t stray too far or he will leave you,” Layla advises. “I’ll see you on the rails.”
“Wait! I want to know about this magic stuff. What do you do?” Sam calls after her.
“Come find me for an interview. I’ll show you a trick.”
“Door.” The tall woman barks, and Sam drops her smile a bit, leaving her duffel bag by the coffee stand to get the door for her. A flood of cinnamon and citrus rushes out of the open door and Sam activates a lift to get the trolley onto the right floor before moving aside and clicking on her recorder.
“The Currant is opulent by today’s standards, with wood and brass finishes, a polished bar, and damask wallpaper the color of ripe pomegranates. Everything here seems to fit unlike everywhere else. The kitchen appears to be on the lower le—Oh.” Sams stops when she notices the woman’s irritated glare from the other end of the car.
“You’re the foodie Acres sent us,” she says.
“Something like that, yes. Sam Duchamp.” Sam makes an effort to sound pleasant and self assured as she extends her hand.
“Yvette. Proprietor of this establishment.” Yvette shakes her hand aggressively.
“Oh you’re Yvette,” Sam says, relieved if not for the gun she’s only now noticed on Yvette’s hip. “I’d love to interview you when you ha—”
“You a stranger to work, Sam Duchamp?” Yvette cuts her off.
“Not at all. I grew most of the collards on this haul.”
“Good, because we don’t have room here for anyone who doesn’t work. You’ll do all that writing business on your time, not mine. Understood?”
“Yes, of course. Thank you for having me.”
“Good.” Yvette sighs, grunting as she goes back to securing her bins. “You’ll bunk with the kitchen staff six cars down that way past baggage. Cars beyond that are off limits to anyone but security personnel. You get space for two bags and whatever’s on your back. Hope you brought sheets. Quartermaster is a Mr. Redd. You’ll know him when you see him. You have any problems, you take them to him. Don’t get caught out after he sounds that damn horn. They will absolutely leave you wherever you end up.”
Sam waits in silent anxiety, not sure if she’s dismissed or allowed to ask questions. She hasn’t left the colony in years and the new rules are daunting.
“Is…that all?” Yvette asks finally.
“I just had a couple of questions. How long you’ve been here, why the name Currant Dumas, things like that,” says Sam.
“Six years, four months. ‘Dumas’ because French author Alexandre Dumas’s collected works were the only intact books onboard this particular car when we found it, and ‘Currant’ because there was a lot of this paint, too. Everything’s random in the apocalypse. That all?” Yvette wipes her brow with the sleeve of her sweatshirt and blinks at her impatiently.
“For now,” Sam replies, trying to keep the words in her head until she could record them without being weird about it.
Yvette huffs and heads back toward the door. “Good, because I have things to do. Redd will leave my ass behind, too. I’m only mean when I’m busy. He’s an asshole all the time. Get what you’re getting and get back here. See you on the rails.”
Sam steps back off the train long enough to collect her things from where they wait for her beside the coffee stand, and walks five cars down, past the green Cirque cars and their sounds of practiced music and scent of cloves and incense, to a trio of steel-blue ones. A windowless black car separates the ones designated for passengers from two tankers and a caboose. Armed personnel stand guarding them.
Sam finds her bunk in the second blue car, marked by a torn scrap of paper pinned to the bed curtain. With not much else to do, she considers wandering off to look for Layla again. But a mountain of a man with an impressive red beard walks by the doorway yelling effortlessly and impossibly loud for everyone to board. They make the briefest eye con
tact and she’s shocked by how furious he looks for what seems like no reason.
“Annnnd…that’s Redd,” she says aloud to no one and sits back on her gym mat of a bed, hoping she packed sheets.
Yvette’s room is a private sleeper cabin in the performers’ residential car. The hallway is filled with music and through the window, the afternoon sun is almost obscenely bright this far northwest, set in the first blue sky Sam has seen since she was fourteen. The storage shelf above her bench has been converted into a bookshelf, lined in part by Dumas’s works. A collapsible table stands between them, doubling as workspace and keeper of the ashtray into which she taps her impeccably rolled Dutch.
“I always dreamed of owning a restaurant,” Yvette says wistfully, exhaling smoke out of the open window. Sam’s recorder ticks away the seconds of Sam’s first interview as a food writer. They’ve been here for twenty minutes already.
“Then the bottom fell out. I mean, the way things were, I wouldn’t have been able to afford it anyway. I taught high school and had ‘Black people credit’ so the money just wasn’t ever going to be there. You dream anyway though. Then there’s the storm, which...I mean, there’s your physical threat to a sustainable society, right? It hit and just wouldn’t let up. Half the eastern seaboard is gone, capital’s drowned, so the shit folds even faster with the fallout. And then there’s the existential threat. What if it’s the end? What if it’s just the end of this place? People panic. There’s this exodus at the same time water runs the islanders out of their homes and into the mainland. And like that, boom.” She snaps her fingers. “Fractured States. Everybody’s scattered and trying to scrape together survival conditions and it’s hard. Eleven years on, it’s still hard. But there’s no debt. No systemic oppression because there’s no enforceable currency in a capitalist state. No government, no bank left to say no to your dreams. So you find a train and you do what you want with it.”
Sam tries to see her as a high school teacher and wonders if all the gray streaking her French braids was there from dealing with children or carving out a life in the aftermath. “Sounds like you’re making it work,” she says. “Anything you’re missing?”
Yvette nods and sips tea to settle a cough. “Tetanus shots. Infrastructure was shot to hell before the country collapsed but there’s a thousand gross ways a train exterior will kill you if you’re not careful.”
Sam blinks. “Oh. Okay...”
Out in the hallway, a door slides closed with a bang and someone races up by, laughing.
“Fools won a crate of whiskey in a game of Uno,” Yvette mutters. “They’ll be lit for the next week.”
“Uno?” Sam raises an eyebrow.
“Ever try to find a full deck of regular playing cards in the apocalypse? You can play Uno with damn near anything.”
“What kind of food does the Currant serve that makes it so popular?” Sam asks. The recorder is on 30% battery and who knows where a charging station is on this thing.
“Soups mostly. Or whatever can be made from what we have on hand or through trades and whatnot. Not like we have too much competition for best restaurant.” She suddenly sits forward as if excited. “We used to head out to these places with the menu on a sandwich board out front. One side was whatever was on the menu, other side was ingredients we had available for trade and the quantities we could let go. I started seeing how…excited these women were to get their hands on what we had. So I started opening the kitchen up to them when we stop by and that’s where the real magic happens. A lot of them don’t have access to full kitchens. Ovens, stoves, refrigerators, solid cookware. My favorite thing is just stepping back, watching aunties of every culture doing what they do in the kitchen, feeling like they did when they were back home for a few hours.”
Sam is suddenly excited, too. These are the food stories she wants. These are the food stories Bourdain would get them to tell.“You think I’ll be able to talk to them?”
“You’ll have to ask them. I’m not here to volunteer anyone else’s time. Next station’s in the Northern Lakes. We don’t stop in the mounta—”
There’s a knock on the cabin door and a dark-skinned man Sam is sure is someone’s grill-enthusiast uncle is standing in the hall.
“Did you put sweet potatoes somewhere?” he asks Yvette, either too tired or too busy to acknowledge Sam.
Yvette rolls her eyes. “I brought whatever they loaded on that dolly and I put it in kitchen storage.”
“Kid’s saying there’s supposed to be some sixty pounds of sweet potatoes and we can’t find ‘em.”
“Well if they’re not in the kitchen, I didn’t get them.”
“Dammit. Think they’re in the back somewhere? Somebody put them on the wrong dolly?”
“Tommy, I don’t know.”
“Well, come help me look.” Tommy insists.
“Get one of the kids to do it! You see I’m doing something. If I don’t have them, somebody else knows where they are,” Yvette snapped.
“I’m just saying, Yve, you’re supposed to be running this shit, I don’t see why—”
Yvette stands up and the curses start flying, each person more done with this shit than the other. Without warning, Yvette leaves the cabin and slams the door, both their voices fading as they disappear down the hall.
“End of, uh…interview, I guess,” Sam says into her recorder and clicks it off. “Good talk.”
The north passes outside the window in the form of abandoned suburbs with their overgrown lawns. Each is now little more than a place for colonists to loot for supplies if they haven’t been picked clean already. Sam knows there isn’t a house outside South City Stadium with so much as a bar of soap left in it. The horn blares on an overpass where she can see the decrepit roadways are clogged with vehicles first abandoned for want of gas, then looted for want of parts. It’s this blockage everywhere that’s made the Carlyle the only reliable way to traverse the countryside.
She threads through the Cirque cars, trying to find either Layla or a charging station for her recorder. Instead, she finds Redd entering the car through the rear door. His body nearly fills the entire corridor and Sam makes herself small, pressing against the windows to inch past him. He passes without a word, but Sam decides the world on a train is too small already and that she isn’t going to shrink again needlessly.
“You’re Redd,” she calls out and he turns back with a look in his eye that says she’s wasting his time. He has a tattoo of Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem on his forearm, though, that makes him difficult to find terrifying.
“...yes?” he grunts. Neither is certain it was a question.
“Well, I’m Sam Duchamp. Just a writer covering the Currant. I thought I’d introduce myself so I’m not just a strange face in your hallways here. And so if you see me chasing the train when you pull off one day, you’ll recognize me. Maybe stop. They keep telling me you leave people behind.”
“You don’t want to get left, don’t be late.” Redd shrugs.
“Right.”
A moment of silence passes before she decides she’s said what she came to say. But he speaks again just as she turns to leave.
“Who do you write for?”
“I don’t. I mean...just me right now.”
He looks at her then like she’s given the strangest possible answer. “Alright.”
“I did have a question for you. One maybe you can answer as quartermaster since it’s not really food related.”
Redd says nothing, but rolls his hand in an “out with it” gesture.
Sam clicks on her recorder. “Why is it the Carlyle Limited? That means you don’t make every stop possible, right? Seems like wherever there’s people, they’d need supplies.”
“We only stop the colonies with hubs. The ones sprouted up in the cities. About a dozen spots across the...countryside. Some places we don’t stop because fuck ‘em.”
“Fuck ‘em?”
“Yeah.” Redd shrugs. “Some clusters of good ol
’ boys set up their little strongholds mosting in the mountain regions. They still hold onto that white supremacy shit while everyone else manages to rebuild together. The Carlyle is an antifa outfit. So fuck ‘em.”
“Damn.”
“They’re hurting for supplies, though. That’s why you see security around here. They haven’t tried us in awhile, but that just means they’re overdue.”
“...oh.” Sam frowns. Being onboard during a racist bandit attack seemed less than ideal.
“Nah, it’s fine,” Redd adds, with the first hint of a smile Sam’s seen. “We have a secret weapon.”
“Oh,” Sam replies with considerably less disappointment. She wonders if she should pry about the secret part.
“That it?”
Sam clicks off her recorder and smiles, grateful to have cleared the air. “That’s it. Thanks.”
Redd nods and responds to his crackling radio with a gruff “on my way” as he starts back up the hallway.
Sam steps through the door to the Cirque’s prop car to find a handful of players around a table. Only a few of them glance up when she enters. The light is low in the windowless room, generated mostly by a string of twinkle lights strewn across the ceiling.
“Hey, it’s Maple Sugar!” Layla is smiling when her head pops up from behind a beam. She is sitting atop a planetary model of Saturn with a fan of Uno cards in her hand.
“Hey.” Sam’s butterflies return. This time she’s not sure if it’s Layla or the assortment of strangers in the dark room of creepy carnival sets.
“Come, come, come. Everyone, this is Sam, the food writer I mentioned. Sam, love, this is Vannish, our ringleader.” She points to an ageless, beautiful sort of man in shirt sleeves and suspenders who tips a hat he isn’t wearing in her general direction. “And this Jazz, Morty, and Farah, all very good at their respective circus things while being total shit at this game.”
“Says the magician like she doesn’t pull stunts with cards all damn day,” quips the person Sam assumes is Farah.
“What?” Layla gasps in mock incredulity.
“You cheat!” says Jazz, probably.
