by Bob Proehl
“I’m not doing unto anyone,” says Carrie. “Just conducting a bit of good old American commerce.” She slides her hand down and takes her wallet out of her back pocket. She holds it up by the corner, both hands in the air but ready to drop the wallet and grab for the knife. If they’re going to have a go at her, they might as well get it over with.
“This isn’t America,” says the man. Everything pauses. These men are acting out a scene they saw in a movie. The mechanic slams the Kia’s hood, shattering the mise en scène they’re trying to build. The tension breaks, and all attention shifts to the old man, who hocks a thick loogie onto the broken asphalt.
“Girl’s right,” he says. “Money’s money, and I’ve got bills same as you. Head back into town and don’t be getting yourselves into my business.”
The men haven’t planned this encounter past the issuing of vague threats and look relieved. They sulk back to their truck, cramming in so tight that Carrie wonders if they have to sit on one another’s laps. The truck roars to life and kicks up a cloud of dust as it leaves.
“Fuckin’ crackers,” the old man mutters. Carrie is comforted that his use of epithets is so multivalent. “Make it so a man can’t make a living.” He points to the car. “You’re all set there, miss. I wouldn’t take it far if I was you, but I don’t imagine you’ve got much choice. Thing is built cheap and once it starts coming apart…” He shakes his head grimly, issuing a terminal diagnosis.
Carrie thanks him, pays him what he asks, and continues west, happy to have Sioux City in her rearview. She enters the expanse of the plains listening to Nick Cave singing about murder and feeling blessedly tethered to nothing, unmoored from the world.
Clay makes it through most of the day at work. In the middle of the afternoon he’s struck by a splitting headache, a pain that radiates out from the center of his head. He pulls his ability back, listening to the mechanisms in the Chair wind down.
“You guys mind if I call if for the day?” he yells up to the booth.
“Please!” says Omar Eleven over the speakers. “Six and I are going to be here all night processing this shit.”
“Fahima says send the data to her,” Clay says.
Both of the Omars stop what they’re doing. They talk to each other without activating the intercom for a minute, then press the button to speak to Clay. “You saw her?” Omar Six asks.
“I’m fucking with you,” Clay says. He worries he’s done something wrong, betrayed Fahima’s trust, although the Omars are all devoted to her.
Clay takes the subway home. At the other end of the car, two teenagers, overdressed for the weather in thick parkas with faux fur–edged hoods, shadowbox with their abilities. One feints at the other with a fist lit up by electric sparks. His friend bobs, weaves away, then lands a punch to his padded gut. The high chemical smell of burnt Gore-Tex floods the car as the electrical boy curses his friend for ruining his coat, and then they’re at it again, fiercer this time with less feint and more fury. A broadly missed uppercut opens the fiery boy up for a shock to the kidneys that staggers him back into the seats. He huffs and comes up grinning maniacally, licking the coppery taste of electrocution off his teeth.
It could easily spill over into true violence. Part of Clay wishes it would, and recognizing the bloodlust in himself, he feels sick to his stomach. He wants the boys to stop. He wants to get off the train, but he worries if he moves, they’ll see him. The train stops at DeKalb and a Bloom of Faction agents get on. No one he recognizes. They group around one of the poles, doing that thing Faction Blooms sometimes do where they look as if they’re miming a conversation without moving their mouths. They pay no attention to Clay or the boys, but the fighting stops and the boys return to their seats, folding their hands in their laps as if chastised.
Clay has the feeling he’s been caught doing something bad, as if the Faction saw the flash of blood hunger flare up in him. There are no laws against casual cruelty, and nowhere is it written that anyone should strive to do no harm. A society is a system of trade-offs, sacrifices and benefits, limits in exchange for protections. Look at the choices made and read a culture’s priorities. Since the war, freedom is the thing most highly prized. Some might argue it’s equality, but equality is a place to start from. Beyond equality is the promise of infinite freedom. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. When a society creates open space within itself, a level field, there’s the risk it’ll become an arena. A place of battle, free of restraint.
One Faction agent flicks his gaze at Clay, noticing him for the first time. Clay feels seen with a brutal intensity. He feels it as a weight on his skin, a pressure in his stomach, and a chill in his skull. They give the impression they know everything already. In Faction interrogations, there’s no need to compel confession. People’s guts come pouring out because they assume it’s already too late. Clay imagines that when this Bloom gets off the train, they’ll dispatch another to Clay’s house to pick up Rai and send him out into the Wastes. It’s already happening; he’s sure of it. He betrayed his son, he betrayed Dom. He broke his family apart without so much as a thought.
The next time the doors open, he hurries off, a fifteen-minute walk from their apartment. He’s certain he’ll come home to a door off its hinges, Dominic in the living room in tears, Rai’s room tossed. A hurricane of bedsheets and books with an emptiness at its center where Rai should be. But he arrives to find the door locked. Dom is in the living room, watching reruns of some sitcom. He looks startled when Clay comes in, then relieved.
“You’re back,” he says, muting the television.
“I should have called,” Clay says. “I was trying something new with the Chair, and I got caught up.”
“All night?” Dom says.
“Yeah,” says Clay. There’s a conversation Dom’s trying to prize out of him, but Clay isn’t having it. “Listen, I’m exhausted.”
“I bet.”
“Something you want to say?” Clay asks. Clay’s not an idiot; he knows he’s upset about keeping Rai’s secret and he’s letting it out as anger at Dom. But knowing’s not the same as stopping. Dom turns his attention back to the television, watching it with the sound off. “I’m going to crash out, but I was hoping you and I could make some time to talk.”
This gets Dom’s full attention, which is not what Clay wanted. We need to talk is a phrase that can’t help but set off alarm bells in a relationship even when it means only what it means.
“Are you leaving me?” Dom says. It’s a telling phrasing. Leaving me rather than leaving us. Dom says Clay would never think of leaving because of Rai. Being parents together is different from being married. The latter isn’t a bigger deal than dating. There’s documentation, legal and financial knots that bind, but nothing that couldn’t be coolly severed. All that ends when you become a parent. There’s no Solomonic swipe to divide a child evenly. When they adopted Rai, sureness descended on their relationship. Underneath was Dominic’s fear that one day Clay would take Rai and go.
“Nothing like that,” Clay says. “There are things we need to discuss. If we don’t carve out the time, we never find it.”
“If there’s something bad, don’t make me wait for it,” says Dom.
“It’s nothing bad,” Clay says. “I want some of your time. And I can’t right now. I’m tired, and I have a headache. I’ll take a day off. You take a day off. We’ll go out for lunch and talk. It’ll be like a date. It’ll be nice.”
“Okay,” Dominic says, not in the least mollified. He turns the volume back up. On the way to the bedroom, Clay touches him on the shoulder and there’s the tiniest flinch, like a petulant child refusing comfort.
Supplies run from Chicago to Boulder weekly, if not more often. Mostly medicine, sometimes electronics and food. It’s the easiest of the longer runs. The Faction turns a blind eye. Picking off smugglers with a truckload of Rez is o
ne thing, but it would be bad press to starve an entire city. Carrie never makes the run, but she knows the locations and shibboleths.
Boulder is walled off like a medieval keep, quarried stone and mortar sanded smooth as glass. They could have built more housing, Carrie thinks. Solar panels and hospitals. They could have saved more people. Instead they made this to keep people out. She can’t deny it’s effective. Las Vegas doesn’t have a wall. Its dense city center metastasizes into tent cities that snake across the desert. Its Wild West ethics appeal to people haunted by cowboy dreams and Mad Max fantasies. You’re more likely to get rolled for your shoes than you are to find an apartment with the doors still on. Boulder has laws and regulations, a gated community at the end of the world. You can raise a family here, provided you can get in.
Carrie drives past the city, parking the Kia in foothills three miles out. She pockets her iPod and crams the things she took from her old house into a tote bag to hike the two hours back the way she came. From the east, the wall is a sheer face looking out on miles of crater where Denver used to be. To the west, the wall is dug into the contours of the wooded landscape. The lip is level, but the base runs a jagged line along the ground. There’s a dry culvert set into the hillside that runners use for entry. It’s not big enough to drive the Kia in, much less the trucks used on runs. In the normal course of things, a team helps runners unload. She enters the culvert alone with the dim glow of her iPod to guide her. Ten yards in, there’s a thick metal grate crusted with rust and filth. On one side are shiny new hinges, and on the other a keypad lock. Carrie enters the code, and it swings outward.
The light behind her condenses to a point before any light emerges in front. Feeling her way along the edges, she moves in darkness. Maybe this is faith, she thinks. Groping in the dark toward a light you’re not sure is there. A beam of bright yellow shoots out of the black at her, a flashlight in an unsteady hand, bucking and shimmering in the confines of the space.
“Who’s that?” calls a woman’s voice.
“Blackwell,” Carrie answers. She has a set of nicknames she uses on runs. When she delivers food, she’s Cicely Tyson, after the chicken company. If her truck’s full of electronics and computer parts, she goes by Fiona Apple. On medical supply runs, her pseudonym is the decidedly less funny Liz Blackwell, the first woman to receive an MD in the States.
“You new?” calls the voice. “It’s supposed to be Rosie.”
“First time on this route,” says Carrie.
“You have antibiotics?”
“I’m not on a run,” says Carrie. “I just need help.”
“Don’t we all,” says the voice. The woman holds the flashlight like a kid telling a ghost story. Her features cast strange shadows upward.
“I’m picking up something for someone back east,” Carrie says. “Sentimental value. If I can get a place to stay for the night, I’ll be out of here tomorrow. I’ll owe you a favor.”
“I don’t need favors. I need drugs,” she says. “Tetracycline, erythromycin. We’ve had an outbreak of typhus.”
“They haven’t sent you drugs?” Carrie asks.
“Thousands of people,” she says. “Drugs come in and they’re gone.” She snaps her fingers; the small sound echoes in the dark.
“I can’t piss antibiotics,” Carrie yells. Her voice caroms off the pipe. She takes a deep breath. “I will do my best to help you, but I need you to help me first.”
“You don’t have to scream about it,” the woman says. “Come on, then.” Even though the pipe is level, Carrie can’t shake the feeling she’s descending into storybook depths. Dante’s Hell and Carroll’s Wonderland. The mines of Khazad-dûm and the city of the Silurians.
A dim light appears. “Thank God,” mutters Carrie. Her steps pick up from the slog of the last ten minutes. The light feels breathable, pouring into her through her eyes. The culvert ends in a small water treatment plant. Sodium arc lights burn bright white. A chlorine smell hangs above the fug of moldering concrete. Boulder doesn’t treat its sewage anymore. It dumps its shit in Boulder Creek to the south, millions of gallons’ worth. They don’t put sentries on the southern wall; the smell is defense enough. This fuck wherever our shit lands psychology is the same one that built the wall and arms the sentries. We take care of our own, the city says. Everyone else can get fucked.
“You’re a nurse?” Carrie asks.
“I’m a doctor,” the woman says. “My name’s Alyssa.”
“Why are you hiding in a pipe?”
“I get pinged when someone opens the gate,” Alyssa says, pulling up the edge of her shirt to reveal a clunky beeper. “I assumed you were bringing drugs.”
“I’ll get word back,” says Carrie. “A friend of mine can piss antibiotics. He’ll churn out tetracycline for you faster than we can carry it here.” When she says it, she means it, but there’s no way of getting word to Hong except through the Hive, and Hong avoids the Hive even more studiously than Carrie does.
“You have a first name?” Alyssa asks.
“Liz,” says Carrie.
“Short for Elizabeth?”
“Yeah.”
“So you’re Elizabeth Blackwell?” Carrie nods. “Sure, whatever,” says Alyssa. “We’ve all got trust issues.”
As they emerge from the facility, the sun is setting and the city is winding down for the evening. The part of town they’re in reminds Carrie of a nicer, richer Deerfield: long rows of ranch houses, evenly spaced. A garbage crew makes its way down the street on foot, pulling a wheeled trash barge. The men who grab bags from the curb have to work fast; if the barge stops, it’ll take the whole team to get it rolling again. The pullers cheer the grabbers on like high school coaches. Out front of one house, a man digs up the dry dead grass of his lawn, piling sheets of sod in the driveway.
“Not enough water for green grass, not enough wood for picket fences,” Alyssa says. Other lawns are covered in slate or gravel.
As the buildings get taller and the city becomes less suburban, vendors take down their displays and roll carts off their corners. Fruits and vegetables. Mass-market paperbacks and iPhone chargers. Batteries of every size and voltage, some of them clearly homemade. Sweaters and scarfs that look unsellable in the morning’s rising heat. Carrie remembers summer trips to buy winter coats. Everything’s cheaper when nobody needs it, her mom said.
Alyssa walks a few steps ahead of Carrie like a tour guide. “You mind me asking what you’re here for?”
“Yes,” says Carrie. They continue in silence for few more blocks. “You mind me asking where we’re headed?”
“All the way to the top,” says Alyssa. She points ahead to a building that looks like a modern iteration of an Aztec ruin. “You’ve got a date with city hall.”
Carrie stops, and her hand finds the knife handle at her back. Alyssa turns to her, frowning. “The mayor asked to meet with any couriers that come through,” she explains. “You’re nobody’s enemy here.”
“I’m not here as a courier,” Carrie says. “This is a private job, and I’ve been asked to be discreet.”
“I’ve been asked to bring any couriers to her honor the mayor,” says Alyssa. “And since she sets my hospital’s budget, if she wants you dropped off on the steps wrapped in ribbons, that’s what I’m going to do.” Carrie doesn’t move. She has the address for the pickup, but she won’t know how to find it on her own. She hoped Alyssa was someone she could trust, but now she’s considering bolting. Alyssa sighs and takes a step toward her. “The mayor’s a sweet old hippie lady. You’ll love her.”
Carrie wants nothing more than something to eat, a bed to crash in, and a clear path out of town. This job feels cursed, not the trap she suspected but bad from the jump, and her best course might be to bail entirely. She musters the energy for one more hurdle.
A woman who is unmistakably the sweet old hippie l
ady Alyssa described stands on the steps of the city hall, perfectly framed by the building itself. She’s plump with a small cloud of gray hair, wearing a faded floral print dress, and she comes down the stairs with her arms open, ready for a hug. Before Carrie knows it, she’s engulfed in flesh and homemade perfume.
“It is so good to finally meet one of you,” the mayor says into the top of Carrie’s head. She frees Carrie from her embrace but holds her by the shoulders to inspect her. “I am fully aware of how dependent our city has been on the efforts of you and those like you, and it just breaks my heart that I have never had the opportunity to thank a single one of you until now. But all of that is about to change.”
“Mayor Cummings,” says Alyssa, “this is Liz Blackwell.” Alyssa’s tone communicates to Carrie that she knows the name’s a fake without arousing suspicion in the mayor.
“Please, call me Pam,” she says. “Everyone calls me Mayor Pam.”
“Pleasure to meet you, Mayor Pam,” Carrie says quietly.
“The pleasure is all mine.”
Alyssa gets a distracted look on her face, like she’s forgotten something critically important, and in the pause while she tries to come up with an excuse, Carrie hears the buzz of a cellphone on vibrate. She wonders if Boulder’s managed to get a cell network up and running, along with the physical phone grid. “Excuse me, Pam,” Alyssa says, “There’s something at the hospital I have to get back to. Liz. I hope to see you again soon. With drugs.” She turns away, fishing in her pocket as she goes.
“This is such an exciting time for us,” says the mayor, pulling Carrie toward city hall by the elbow. A tall, thin man descends the steps toward them. His smile is too sweet for Carrie’s taste, and his shirt, a Hawaiian number with winged hot dogs dotting it, is the kind Carrie’s mother might have disparagingly referred to as fun. “Do you know Mr. Joyner from the Bishop Foundation?”
