by Tom Abrahams
Sally looked up from the glass. The sweat had dried on her forehead and cheeks. Her neck was cooler now too. The trembling in her hands had subsided.
“Tens of thousands of people,” she said. “That’s entire towns. Whole cities. All because I was good at sneaking around without getting caught.”
“Then what happened?”
“It got harder,” Sally said. “Sometimes I couldn’t get to the women in time. Or they wouldn’t follow me exactly. They’d get caught. Their kids would get caught. I’d watch it happen. From a dark corner or alley, maybe from a window. I’d see it. I’d think about running to them and doing something.”
Sally was still looking at Gladys, but her vision was focused elsewhere. She was in another place and time. Tears formed and her eyes glistened.
“I told myself I couldn’t risk getting caught. If I did, then there would be others I couldn’t help. That’s what I told myself. I was helping more people by letting a few end up…”
The first of the tears rolled down her cheeks. Her chin quivered. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.
“Is that what haunts you?”
Sally spoke without thinking about it. She said what floated to the surface, what she’d submerged for so long. “That, and the isolation. The loneliness of it all.”
“Loneliness?”
Sally knuckled the corners of her eyes. She sniffed, wrinkling her nose. “The railroad shouldn’t be called a railroad. In a railroad, all of the cars are connected.” She lifted her arms and laced her fingers, her hands in front of her. “Everything is moving in the same direction together. All advancing as one singular thing. What we do is different. It’s like all of the cars are headed in the same direction, but every car is on a different track.”
Gladys appeared truly interested in what Sally was telling her.
“You know how it works,” Sally said, counting off on her fingers as she explained. “The passenger contacts somebody. That person lets ticketing know what’s what. Ticketing tells the porters. The porters tell the conductors. Each conductor takes a leg. They never know each other. I mean, maybe you recognize someone, vaguely, but you don’t know them. The passengers keep switching conductors until they get to wherever it is they’re going. Sometimes it’s family; sometimes it’s a safe house. Sometimes it’s the Harbor, I guess.”
“You guess?”
Sally raised her shoulders in a shrug and held them there. “Until recently I didn’t know it was a real thing.”
“It’s a real thing,” said Gladys. “And I think it’ll be good for you.”
Sally shifted in the chair, turning her body toward Gladys. Now she was the one truly interested in the conversation. She sniffed back the last of the tears and blinked a couple of times to clear her vision. “What do you know about the Harbor?”
A smile stretched across her face, changing Gladys’s appearance. Her back straightened and her shoulders squared. Gladys carried the stature of someone who’d done something so big that the mere mention of it made them glow.
“I built it,” she said. “From the ground up.”
CHAPTER 22
APRIL 19, 2054, 7:10 PM
SCOURGE +21 YEARS, 7 MONTHS
EAST OF BAIRD, TEXAS
The sun was blinding. It was a bright orange-yellow disk that hung above the horizon. Heat warbled around it, and vapor rose from the asphalt. Even with the visor down, Marcus had to shield his eyes with one hand as he drove west on Interstate 20.
“Why does the sun get bigger when it sets?” asked Dallas. “It’s so small up in the sky around noon, but at sunset sometimes it’s huge.”
Marcus glanced at the man-child in the passenger’s seat. He considered saying something sarcastic. He was sure Lou would have said something biting. Dallas might expect that. But it was an honest question from a child of the apocalypse without real schooling. Deciding against derision, no matter how much fun it might be, Marcus offered an honest answer.
“It doesn’t actually get bigger,” said Marcus. “It’s a trick your mind plays on you.”
“Trick?”
“Some people think it’s what’s called the Ponzo illusion,” Marcus explained. “It’s about the perspective of things. You take two lines of the same size and put one against objects that look smaller, it’s gonna look bigger.”
Marcus glanced again at Dallas, seeing he was trying to process it. Dallas frowned. Marcus pointed over the dash and wiggled his index finger.
“Look at the road ahead,” he said. “See how the road looks like it gets smaller?”
Dallas nodded. “Yeah.”
“Now take your finger and hold it horizontally in front of you and up above the edge of the dash.”
Dallas complied. “Okay.”
“See? It’s one size compared to the road. Now lift it higher and squint your eyes to compare it to the size of the road in the distance. See?”
Dallas grinned with understanding. “Ahhh, I get it. So what’s the other idea?”
“Other idea?”
“You said some people believed it was Ponzi’s illusion.”
“Ponzo.”
“Ponzo,” Dallas echoed.
“Other people think it’s the shape of the sky,” said Marcus. “We see the sky as a flattened dome, with the zenith nearby and the horizon far away. Take the moon or the sun and move them along that flattened dome and they get bigger as they move toward the ends of the dome.”
“Huh,” said Dallas. “That makes sense too.”
The truck hit a pothole and bounced. The tailpipe rattled against the undercarriage. Other than the occasional pothole, divot, or forced detour, they hadn’t encountered much in the way of obstacles on their way west. Marcus kept expecting the bottom to fall out. Nothing should be as easy as their five-hundred-mile trek had been.
“How come you know so much?” asked Dallas. “Lou says you know everything.”
“I don’t know how to throw knives.”
Dallas laughed. “Seriously, how do you know so much?”
“I don’t really,” said Marcus. “I know a little bit about a lot of things. It makes me seem a lot smarter than I am.”
“Maybe. But Lou said you survived a war before the Scourge. Then you lived through that. You built some super compound; you rescued people, including Norma. They called you Mad Max, right?”
“Sounds like some dude in a dime-store novel, doesn’t it?” Marcus joked. “Like some pulp fiction writer made up some unkillable soldier type, dunked him into one horrible situation after another, and the dude survives against all odds. Like the trials of Job but worse. Makes you wonder what hell I’ve got in front of me.”
“One question,” said Dallas.
“What’s that?”
“What’s a dime store?”
Marcus shook his head and chuckled. “A store that sells cheap things.”
Dallas nodded and then did a double take at the road ahead. He extended his arm and pointed ahead, toward the south side of the highway.
“We’re getting close,” he said. “The place is only about a mile up here. You can turn off at the next exit.”
Marcus shielded his eyes with a flat salute and scanned the road ahead. It was still an hour before sundown. That would give them a little bit of daylight when they arrived at the house. They’d get a half-decent night’s sleep before leaving in the morning.
Dallas had taken off his seatbelt. He was sitting on the edge of his seat, his hands on the dash, fingers tapping nervously on the hard plastic. “You think we’ve got enough gas?”
Marcus checked the gauge. The tank was half full. “I thought you said it was a mile from here.”
Dallas tapped his fingers on the dash. “No, I mean do we have enough to drive all the way back to the wall?”
Marcus glanced in the rearview mirror. “Maybe. We’ve got the half tank here and another twenty gallons in the bed. It’ll be close. It definitely won’t get us all the way to Atlanta. We’re
probably going to—”
“Turn here,” Dallas said. “This exit.”
Marcus eased the truck toward the exit and slowed as he navigated around a large crumbling hole in the middle of the road. Dallas sat back in his seat, then leaned forward again. The kid reminded Marcus of a dog at a window, watching squirrels run around outside the glass, who couldn’t sit still.
“You gotta take a leak?” asked Marcus.
He navigated another pothole and drove off the edge of the exit ramp. Dirt and rocks crunched under the tires and he accelerated back onto the asphalt. Swinging the wheel left, he tapped the brake, drove under the overpass, and punched the gas again.
“No,” said Dallas. “I’m just excited to see my wife. And maybe my new kid.”
Marcus understood that. He envied it. His mind drifted to the day he and Sylvia brought Wes home from the hospital. It was the happiest day of his life, next to the day they’d gotten married, and the day he left Syrian soil for the last time.
Wes was a good kid. He slept a full eight hours the second night they had him home. Marcus said it was a blessing. Sylvia worried something was wrong.
“Babies don’t do that,” she said. “They don’t sleep through the night that fast.”
They stood over the crib at one o’clock in the morning, whispering to each other and watching him as he slept. Marcus had never seen anything so peaceful as the look on his son’s face. His pale, smooth skin almost glowed in the shaft of moonlight that shone through the white sheers that decorated the window in his bedroom.
Marcus stood behind Sylvia and wrapped his arms around her. He lowered his head, resting his chin on her shoulder. “I think he’s sleeping through the night so we’ll have a second one.”
Sylvia slapped his hands then rubbed her thumb on his wrist. She giggled softly. “Hush. We barely have one and you’re ready for a second? You didn’t have to carry that bowling ball around inside you for nine months.”
“It was only a bowling ball for the last trimester,” he said, nuzzling her. “And my point is that if he didn’t sleep through the night, we wouldn’t want another one. The less this one exhausts us, the more likely we are to want another one.”
Sylvia sighed. It was a contented sigh, one that told Marcus everything was right with the world.
They were together. They were a family. They had a lifetime ahead of them.
Until they didn’t.
Until the world ended and he found himself the hero of a fiction too fantastic to be real. Until he was in a truck going back to a place he said he’d never go again. Until the road ahead was as uncertain as anything had ever been.
His stomach lurched and a sour taste filled his mouth. Marcus exhaled slowly, bringing himself back to the present.
“Make another left,” said Dallas. “Here.”
Marcus swung the wheel with one hand and slowed into the turn. They were running east now, away from the sun. He felt it on his neck as he accelerated again. Dead trees and barely living shrubs cast long shadows on the dirt and the asphalt. The lines that divided the lanes were virtually gone, barely visible. Not that it mattered. Marcus figured there wasn’t much vehicular traffic outside Baird, Texas.
There was horse traffic, though. Fresh mounds of manure dotted the road in front of them, on the shoulders. There was a lot of it, the product of several horses. And it was a couple of days old at most. Flies swarmed the piles.
“Lot of horses around here?” asked Marcus as they motored closer to the house.
“Not really,” Dallas replied. “Other than ours. We’ve got a couple. Why?”
“No reason,” said Marcus. “Just curious.”
Dallas appeared ready to jump from the truck. He couldn’t sit still.
“We might want to stop the truck before we get to the property,” said Marcus. “Make sure we’re ready.”
Dallas looked at him quizzically. “What do you mean?”
“Check the weapons.”
He eased the truck to a stop, slipped it into park, but kept the engine idling. The two of them hopped out and moved to opposite sides of the truck’s bed. The stale of odor of manure hung in the air.
“Somebody on horseback was here,” Marcus said, making sure he had a round chambered in the rifle. “Several somebodies, I think. Yesterday or the day before. You know who it could be?”
Dallas stood with one hand on the truck and the other on his head. He looked toward the house and shook his head. When he turned back to Marcus, his expression had morphed from nervous excitement to concern.
“I can’t be sure,” he said. “But it could be the Pop Guard.”
Marcus raised an eyebrow. “They ride horseback? They’re government. Why would they do that?”
Dallas checked a rifle. “They like the flexibility of the horses. They can get to places fast and quiet that a truck wouldn’t allow, and they don’t have to worry about gasoline. They can cover a lot of ground looking for babies. Then when they find them, they’ve got room for them on any of the horses. A truck’s only got so much room for extras.”
Marcus studied the ground for tracks, but there wasn’t much evidence other than a few random horseshoe prints in the sandy dirt. The sun was behind him. His own shadow stretched in front of him on the asphalt. It was tall and lean. For a moment, it reminded Marcus of the man he used to be.
“How about you hop in the bed,” said Marcus. “I’ll drive.”
Dallas swallowed hard. Deep wrinkles dug across his forehead. “How come?”
“Two reasons,” said Marcus. “If there is an army there, you’re already in a position to fire on them. If there isn’t anybody there, this truck isn’t going to look familiar. We don’t want Rudy, Norma, and Lou thinking we’re attacking them or something. They’ll see you in the bed. We’ll be fine.”
With the rifle in one hand, Dallas moved to the tailgate, flipped it down, and climbed into the bed. He stepped around the gas cans and stood behind the cab, leaning on its top with the rifle aimed straight ahead. He glanced down at Marcus. “What are we waiting for? Let’s do this.”
Marcus heaved himself back into the driver’s seat. He laid the rifle on the passenger’s seat next to him. The truck in gear, Marcus accelerated slowly at first and then found his cruising speed.
He drove on a narrow road, south of a lake, and past a rickety deer stand. Ahead, beyond the lake, he saw a collection of buildings. At the center of them, and out front, was what appeared to be the main house. It was two stories with a wraparound porch. Behind the house he could see other, smaller buildings, one of which was a barn.
There was no sign of any intruders. There were a couple of large horses grazing at the weed-infused dirt. Marcus recognized them as Appaloosas.
Two bangs on the roof of the cab startled him and he jerked the wheel. Another pair of hits and Marcus slowed the truck to a stop. Dallas leapt from the bed. Marcus lowered his window.
“Those aren’t our horses,” Dallas said breathlessly. “I don’t recognize them.”
Marcus put the truck in park and shut off the engine. He grabbed his rifle and joined Dallas on a driveway. His knees and hips ached, his neck was stiff, and his lower back ached. He flexed his fingers on his right hand. The knuckles hitched and popped.
Road trips weren’t good for an old man’s joints. He eyed the horses and wondered how far he could make it in the saddle. It had been years since he’d ridden any distance on horseback.
“You were right,” said Dallas. “Somebody’s been here. Looks like they’re still here.”
“What are those buildings?” Marcus asked, gesturing with his chin at the barn and the buildings past it.
“Barn, our place, and storage,” Dallas said. “It’s possible Lou and David are in the barn. That was part of the plan if the Pop Guard showed up.”
“If the Pop Guard showed up, they’ve been here a while.”
Dallas frowned. His attention darted across the yard, as if he’d forgotten something and
was trying to remember where he’d last seen it.
Marcus raised his rifle to his shoulder. He used two fingers to point to the left; then he motioned to the right.
Dallas nodded his understanding and moved to the left, his rifle leveled and scanning the yard for any threats. Marcus moved to the right, scanning the buildings and the dead trees beyond them. Despite their lack of foliage, the trees could hide hostiles looking for a perch.
He swept his eyes across the trees, the tops of the outbuildings, and the roof of the main house. He didn’t see anything that set off alarms. He deliberately moved forward, closing the distance between himself and the barn. He’d check there first. But he didn’t get more than a half dozen steps before a voice told him to stop moving and lower his weapon. It was behind him.
“Hold it right there,” came a woman’s voice. “Don’t move or I’ll put a bullet in your head.”
Marcus didn’t move. He kept the rifle pointed toward the barn. His knee throbbed, but he kept his weight on it.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I’m looking for Lou,” he said. “Her kid, David, and—”
“She’s not here. Who are—”
“Norma?” Marcus’s back was still to her. How had she gotten the drop on him without Dallas seeing her? He started to turn to face her.
“Stop,” she ordered. “Who are you?”
“It’s me, Mar—”
Then Dallas called from the other side of the yard. “Norma, we’re back. Are you okay? Where’s Lou?”
“Dallas?” she said, confused.
Dallas’s boots crunched on the dirt as he ran toward them. Marcus could hear his hurried steps, his breathy questions.
“We made it back,” he said. “Long couple of days.”
Marcus slowly turned to see a woman he hardly recognized. The look on her face told him she didn’t truly recognize him either.
Dallas reached her and threw his arms around her. In the embrace, Norma stared at Marcus. Her wide eyes and open mouth gave her the appearance of someone who’d seen a ghost and couldn’t process whether it was real or a figment of her imagination.
