by Tom Abrahams
The response was immediate. “Copy that, GFAGA5.”
“Talk later,” said Gladys.
She turned a knob on the face of the component and the volume lessened.
“That was the Harbor,” Gladys said. “Had to check in. They moved a few weeks back, and things have been tenuous since then.”
Sally’s eyes widened. “Where is it?” she asked. “Where am I headed?”
Gladys curled her lips over her teeth and studied Sally. She spun the chair to face her and rubbed out the creases in her nightgown. Then she rolled back to a shelf on the wall perpendicular to the desk. Sally was so focused on the electronics, she hadn’t noticed the shelf until now.
Gladys pulled a thick, folded piece of paper from the shelf and placed it on the desk. Rolling back to face the flat surface, she unfolded the paper. Sally realized it was a map.
Gladys pressed the map flat, working its folds, and then traced her finger along the face of it. Sally stepped closer to her and eyed the multicolored chart. It was a representation of the United States as it had been before the Scourge. Some of the creases were torn along their seams.
Various locations were marked with blue, hand-drawn stars. There were lines traced atop highways or interstates. Some of them were precise; others looked shaky.
Gladys’s finger stopped and she tapped the map with her finger. It was pointing at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. “It was here. It was a great location; somewhat secluded, underground, decent security. Winters were tough, but with the bulk of everything being in a bunker, that wasn’t much of an issue.”
Sally bent over. “You moved it?”
“Yes. We were compromised. There was the possibility that the Pop Guard might find us there. So we packed up and moved out.”
“Where are you now?”
Gladys slid her finger along the map, tracing the route from White Sulphur Springs. She tapped the new location. “Here.”
“There?” asked Sally. “Really?”
Gladys nodded. “I know, it’s an unusual choice. We have our reasons though, one of them being ease of access.”
“Or lack of it.”
“Exactly the point,” said Gladys.
“Is there a bridge?”
“No. Long gone.”
Sally scratched her chin. “Then how do you get there?”
Gladys chuckled. There was a hint of condescension in her tone. “Boat.”
Sally’s face grew hot and her cheeks flushed. “So I’m taking a boat?” she asked. She’d never been on a boat before.
“You’re taking a boat,” said Gladys. Her expression hardened. “Assuming you make it that far.”
CHAPTER 20
APRIL 21, 2054, 9:00 AM
SCOURGE +21 YEARS, 7 MONTHS
LATEX, TEXAS
“Thanks for the first aid,” Marcus said to the conductor. He was in the passenger seat of the eighteen-wheeler.
“Happy to help.” The conductor shifted gears and pressed the accelerator. “That’s a nasty wound. Is the aspirin helping?”
“Some,” said Marcus. “Thanks for that too.”
He held his left hand across his chest above his heart, which helped to lessen the pulsing pain that synced with his heartbeat.
The driver thumped on the steering wheel, a percussive rhythm that filled the silence between them.
“I didn’t know they had many of these left,” said Marcus, trying to make conversation.
He was in too much pain to sleep. Plus, they were getting close to the wall.
The conductor’s bushy black eyebrows lifted into distinctive arches, almost reaching his hairline. His Roman nose crinkled. “Any of what?”
“Trucks,” said Marcus. “I’d think the diesel alone would be prohibitive.”
The conductor chuckled, his Adam’s apple sliding up and down his throat. “When you transport for the government, diesel is the least of your worries.”
Marcus loosened his seatbelt across his chest with his right hand and turned toward the driver. He wasn’t sure he’d heard the man right. His ears were still ringing from the firefight. “You work for the government?”
He thumped out a crescendo on the steering wheel and nodded. “That I do. Perfect cover, right? Nobody suspects a government trucker is working for the railroad.”
“So you transport a lot of people?”
“Enough.”
“Why do you do it?”
The driver shrugged. He downshifted and the cab lurched. Marcus tightened his seatbelt.
“I don’t know,” he said, “why are you here? You don’t have a dog in the hunt. These babies ain’t yours.”
Marcus took a deep breath and exhaled through his nose. “I’ve got a dog in the hunt,” he said, using the man’s vernacular. “That’s family.”
He smiled, reached for a thermos with his right hand, and popped the top with his thumb. He took a swig of whatever was in it and winced as he swallowed. Then he offered it to Marcus.
Marcus thanked him but declined.
“No offense,” said the conductor, “but none of those folks in the back are your family. I mean to say, maybe you’re close to them, but you’re not blood.”
“How do you know that?”
“’Cause you didn’t deny it. Plus none of ’em look anything like you. Not a bit.”
Marcus glanced out the window at the landscape. Dense thickets of dead pines raced by. They were evenly spaced, planted for logging decades earlier. Then they died.
“I’ll take money from the government if they’re willing to give it,” said the conductor, “and I’ll use their equipment against them.”
“Why do you do it, though?” Marcus asked. “It’s a big risk.”
The conductor winked, his smile now wider on one side of his face. Marcus was convinced there were a dozen smiles and he regularly alternated between them.
“Anything worth having is risky,” the conductor replied. “And I don’t like what they’re doing.”
Marcus tried moving his thumb in the tight wrap the conductor had wound around his hand. A jolt of electric pain sparked along the right side of his hand. He stopped moving the thumb.
Both hands on the wheel, the conductor leaned in and spoke as if in confidence, his breath washed in moonshine. “You know this overpopulation thing is a red herring. Since when is there a population problem when two-thirds of the world died off a generation ago? That makes no sense. It’s a false flag.”
Marcus didn’t think the conductor was using either of the terms correctly, but he didn’t bother arguing the point. It was moot.
“This is about power,” he said. “It’s about control. The truth is, the government wants people to have too many babies. Then they can come along, take the extras, and indoctrinate them. It’s no different from what those damned tribes are doing here in Texas.”
Marcus nodded. “I’ve heard that.”
“It’s true. One hundred percent. I don’t like it. I don’t like what it does to families. It’s some Eastern Europe fascist baloney, if you know what I mean.”
The conversation stalled when the truck dipped over a rise in the road and a wall loomed ahead of them a half mile up highway 1999. It wasn’t a wall. It was the wall.
The tension stiffened in Marcus’s joints, his chest tightening with unconscious apprehension.
The wall.
No matter where he saw it, or crossed it, it was the bane of his existence.
“Now, you let me do the talking,” the conductor instructed. “I’ve done this a thousand times. They’re going to stop us, I’m going to have to show them the cargo in the trailer, they’ll look at my manifest, I’ll bribe them, then we’ll be on our way. It’s as simple as that.”
“Bribe them?” Marcus asked. His attention was on the wall as it grew larger, looming closer to them. “You work for the government, so do they, and you have to bribe them?”
“We may work for the government,” said the conductor, “but we al
so work for ourselves. Every hauler like me always has a little extra in the trailer, stuff we sell on the black market. It’s expected. If we don’t, it’s suspicious, so we bribe them. It’s a wink, wink, nudge, nudge thing.”
Marcus thought of the old Monty Python skit. It’d been among his digital collection in the solitary years after his family died. He smiled, picturing the comedian Eric Idle and his elbow jabs.
“Say no more,” said Marcus.
The conductor laughed and slapped his thigh. His seat bounced on its shock absorbers and he downshifted. Once they reached the wall, an armed guard stood in the middle of the highway, holding up a hand to stop them.
Another soldier adjusted his helmet and tugged the strap across his chin. Eyes forward, he marched deliberately to the driver’s side window of the truck, motioning with one hand for the conductor to lower his window.
The conductor, his omnipresent grin brightening his face, complied and reached for a tablet charging underneath the center console. A couple of taps and swipes across the screen made it glow. “Here you go,” he said, handing the tablet to the soldier as he climbed onto the running board beneath the driver’s door. “Everything should be in order.”
Without a greeting, the soldier leaned on the door and took the tab with his free hand. He studied the display, his eyes shifting as he read. After a minute he handed the electronic device back to the conductor and tapped the side of the door. “Okay, you know the drill. I’ll need the engine off, you and your passenger at the back of the trailer with the keys.”
“Sure thing,” said the conductor. His affability seemingly genuine, he turned off the engine.
The truck rumbled, coughing itself into silence. The conductor motioned for Marcus to exit the passenger-side door and then used his shoulder to push his way through his.
Marcus opened his door with his good hand, forgetting to undo his seatbelt. He tried getting out and found himself stuck. It took him a second to realize what was holding him in place, and he reached across his body to unlatch the buckle.
It took effort to get to the ground, but he managed without losing his balance. The jump jarred his knees, and Marcus knew he was doing more harm than good on this trip. His body didn’t much like him at the moment. He limped toward the rear of the eighteen-wheeler, walking along the edge of the highway, carefully sidestepping the crumbling edges of the asphalt, and maneuvered around the wide tailgate of the trailer to the rear of the vehicle.
The guard was already in the cargo area, standing with his back to the conductor. He checked the crates, lifting lids, picking through contents of random containers. After a few minutes he turned toward the conductor, cocked his head to one side, and pointed at Marcus. “What happened to his hand?” he asked. There was no hint of emotion in his voice, no compassion. If anything, suspicion punctuated the question.
“He can answer for himself,” the conductor replied, with a glance at Marcus. “He can talk.”
“So talk,” the soldier deadpanned. “What happened to your hand?”
Marcus wasn’t giving him any more than he needed. He was going to play coy to the conductor’s Chatty Cathy.
“Accident,” he said simply.
The soldier took a step toward the trailer’s exit. “What kind of accident?”
“Stupid one,” said Marcus. “It’s embarrassing.”
“Embarrass yourself, then,” said the soldier. His tone had gone from suspicious to condescending. He clearly liked his authority.
“Sliced it open on the loader. I was checking the hydraulics. Wasn’t watching what I was doing, tore it open between the thumb and forefinger. Hurts a lot.”
The soldier stared at Marcus for a moment longer than was comfortable, then thumbed toward the front of the trailer behind him. He redirected his attention to the conductor. “I’m gonna need to check back here,” he said. “Leave the door open. Try anything funny and it’s a big problem.”
The conductor raised his hands in surrender. “Do what you need to do.”
The soldier tapped the side of his helmet, and a white light illuminated at the center of it. He walked deeper into the truck, disappearing amongst the boxes and draped containers.
Marcus shot an uneasy glance at the conductor, who shook his head imperceptibly and, maintaining his grin and keeping his eyes on the soldier, whispered, “Don’t worry about it. This is for show. He won’t look too carefully.”
“You sure about that?” asked Marcus. “He seems to be thorough.”
“They all do this. They’ve got nothing else to do at these checkpoints. This kills time as much as anything else.”
“As long as that’s all it kills.”
The conductor stifled a laugh. He stuffed his hands into his pockets, puckered his lips, and started whistling. It was an unfamiliar tune, something Marcus imagined was made up.
Several long minutes later, the soldier returned to the back of the trailer and tapped off the light on his helmet. He climbed down, landing hard on the asphalt. Marcus noticed the soldier, whom he’d initially pegged for someone in his mid to late forties, was closer to thirty. He might not even have been that old.
A thin whip of a mustache grew above his upper lip. It was a pitiful attempt at facial hair, though not nearly as weak as the patchy mange of a beard that spread across his cheeks and along his soft jawline. Was everybody young? Or was Marcus really that old? It was a combination of both, he figured.
The soldier cleared his throat. “I saw a couple of…irregularities…in the back there,” he said. “But it’s something I think is fixable.”
There were the words he was speaking and, more importantly, the ones he wasn’t saying aloud. He shot glances at both of them and raised his eyebrows such that they disappeared under the brim of his helmet.
“Sure thing,” said the conductor. He pulled a small pouch from his front pocket and offered it to the soldier with a handshake.
The soldier took the pouch and nodded. Without even looking at the contents, he released his grip and weighed the pouch in his hand before shoving it into a pocket at his thigh. He flashed a smile that evaporated instantly. “Okay then,” he said. “We’re all good here.”
Five minutes later, they were in Louisiana. The conductor was tapping on the steering wheel and whistling.
“What did you give him?” asked Marcus.
“Drugs. That’s all they want. Every last one of them.”
“Drugs?”
“Yep,” said the conductor. “Legal drugs, illegally obtained. Typically it’s uppers. They need something to keep them alert during their long shifts, and coffee ain’t in the supply it once was. With the drought, it’s harder to come by coffee than it is allergy or ADD medication.”
ADD. Attention deficit disorder. Marcus hadn’t thought about that since he’d taken Adderall as a kid. “Is that even a thing anymore?”
“ADD?” asked the conductor. “Who knows? But the drug is good for narcoleptics, so it still gets made overseas. The government imports it, doles it out judiciously. Us employees, we can get whatever we need. And as truckers, they want us awake and driving as many miles as we can handle. No union or FMSCA regulations like there were before the Scourge.”
“You don’t look old enough to have been a driver before the Scourge,” Marcus noted.
The conductor laughed and shook his head. “I wasn’t; my dad was. He drove long haul for years, had his own rig. I learned how to drive a stick and double clutch in his truck.”
Marcus humored him. “Did you?”
“Imagine that,” said the conductor. “A kid knows how to drive a truck before he can drive a little old Chevy. Funny, right?”
“Funny, yes.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes; then Marcus glanced over his left shoulder toward the bunk in the back of the truck. “They’re okay back there?”
The conductor shifted into a higher gear and refocused on the road ahead of them. They were heading due east toward Shreveport. �
�Of course. That secret compartment is pretty handy. And I’ve done this enough I’ve got it outfitted pretty good.”
“It looked comfortable,” Marcus admitted. “Spacious enough, I guess.”
“Oh yeah,” the conductor said with pride. “I could fit ten in there if I had to. I’ve had to do it, actually. Three families at once. That breaks the railroad protocol, you know. We’re really not supposed to handle more than a half dozen at a time. But sometimes necessity dictates we break the rules.”
Marcus pictured the eight-foot-square space and its pair of twin bunks bolted into the ceiling and floor. There were pillows, blankets, a stack of books, and a mini-fridge that ran off the truck’s power.
“They’ve got plenty of water,” the conductor said. “I think I’ve even got some tangerines from Florida in there. They’re fine until we get to where we’re going.”
Marcus sank a little into his seat and plucked at the belt running diagonally across his chest. He rested his left hand against his chest. The throbbing was now a solid, constant ache. His eyes were getting heavy. “Where exactly is that?”
“Where exactly is what?”
“Where you’re taking us?”
The conductor drew in a deep breath, shifted gears, and exhaled with a puff of his cheeks. He pinched the bridge of his nose and knuckled his eyes, rubbing them. “Not sure I can tell you that.”
“Is it all the way to the Harbor? Is that why you can’t say?”
“Oh no,” he said with an overly dramatic shake of his head. “No. No. No. I’m not taking you to the Harbor. That’s someone else’s job. Heck, I don’t even know where the Harbor is. Plus, I have to stick to my work route. I can’t stray from that or my government bosses would get suspicious.”
“It exists though?” Marcus still had his doubts. “The Harbor is real?”
“Yes,” said the conductor. “It’s real.”
“Why can’t you say, then?”
The conductor glanced at the display in the dash. His fingers danced along the top of the steering wheel. Now the motion was more like a pianist flitting his fingers along the keys instead of a drummer thumping out a rhythm on the taut skin of a bongo head.
