by Alice Sabo
Nick went out to the lobby to check the system map. Taking up an entire wall, a large board showed the railway superimposed over a map of the United States. Over the years the train lines had shrunken away from areas that were no longer livable. Open stations were indicated with a green light. The ones along the coast were all dark, endangered by rising sea levels. Some places had been claimed by storms years ago. A couple of lines that ran through the plains were dark also. Decades of drought, windstorms and wildfires made that part of the country too dangerous to live in. When Nick traced out the northern branch he saw that Missawaug was dark. It could mean bandits or a closed settlement. Disease and weather were the main reasons that settlements were closed. He hadn’t heard anything, and made a note to check when he got home.
Seeing the food from Missawaug had him wondering where it was produced. There was a factory somewhere churning out these meals. And farmers delivering produce to them. And truckers packing it all up to cart away. But it wasn’t anywhere nearby. And no one he’d spoken to knew where those factories might be. Or didn’t care to share that information. Another secret that the government was keeping.
A bright metal box, sticking out from the wall caught his attention, shaking him out of his morbid musings. It was new. He went over to inspect it. Blue letters stenciled across the shiny surface read US Mail. His throat tightened when he read the words. Hanging below it was a water-proof sack marked High Meadow Med Center. He looked inside. There was a letter for Angus and the first piece of junk mail he'd seen in a decade. It was a hand-lettered sheet for cheese orders coming from a settlement on the southern branch track. He laughed out loud. “We're making progress,” he said to the empty station.
He left the bag hanging there, planning to pick it up on his return. It buoyed his spirits to see things like that. Another sliver of normalcy. Not just mail, but the possibility of cheese. The Hoofed Flu in Year Four decimated the cattle industry. Anybody with milk kept it for themselves. It became a precious commodity. Goat, sheep and other sources for milks were just as badly hit. Cheese went scarce; a common household staple gone from the marketplace. He wrote the location in his journal. If he came home empty-handed, he might run by that settlement. Sometimes people would barter for labor. It’d be worth a day of mucking out stalls to bring a wheel of cheese home to High Meadow.
Nick went down to the platform. Frank waved from the observation window of the control tower high over the tracks. Nick acknowledged him with a nod. Not every station was manned. From what Frank had told him, Nick knew the trains could run pretty much on their own. A human being was mostly a safety officer. And the eyes and ears of the train company.
The train shushed into the station, right on time. Sleek and silver. The doors opened to empty cars. Nick entered and took a seat. A clock over the door counted down minutes to departure. He took out the breakfast Susan had packed for him. The first of the spring wheat was finally in, and she'd made bread. She’d met him at the kitchen door with food that she’d packed up early this morning, giving him a sweet smile that had him wishing he wasn’t back on the road so soon. He bit into a thick egg sandwich, relishing the taste of the bread. They were still sorting out the garden to table ratio. The first year the crop of wheat barely lasted a few days, but the amaranth had lasted for months. Not the best flour for bread, but it could also be eaten as hot cereal. The chime sounded a warning and the doors slid closed. He wondered if they could trade some amaranth to the cheese folks. That would have made this sandwich just about perfect.
The train came up to speed and the windows darkened. Looking out at cruising speed would cause vertigo. It was only minutes before they decelerated for the first stop. Nick hoped to be at Clarkeston by lunch.
He went over his plan. Now that he knew about the mail and the flyer for cheese, he could use that. Ask people about it. Distract them from his actual goal. Ask if anyone had traded with them. People were always happy to give their opinions. He took out his journal and made a few notes about things to discuss with Angus and Susan. The train slowed, rising toward the Clarkeston station. There was a river to cross, one of the few bridges on this old line. The train would go above ground here and proceed at speeds under 100mph. Nick liked the view out over the water.
The train burst out of the tunnel into murky sunlight. The windows cleared showing roiling gray clouds. Nick lurched forward to see more clearly, something was terribly wrong. Then the scene came clear. The train didn't stop. Clarkeston was burning.
Chapter 6
“Subsequent years of the virus were named by the animals that died. Year One was rats. Their populations had swollen the previous year due to an increase in food and lack of exterminators. When they died off in mass numbers, many people were thankful. We didn’t yet know that they were the harbingers of a new outbreak.”
History of a Changed World, Angus T. Moss
Wisp was ready to leave the minute Lily woke. He'd packed some food and medical supplies. William would need help. He wondered what the children could know that would have soldiers torturing a boy for it. And how to speak of it to the girl? She would need to know what they would find at the end of their quest. He hoped William would last that long. This morning the link to him felt weak, faded, yet jagged with pain.
Lily's waking was like a small explosion in his head. She was bubbling over with eagerness and questions. He let her choose a breakfast of train food. She ate while he cataloged his possessions. There was always a possibility that he couldn't come back to this place. And with mercenaries in the neighborhood, perhaps it was time to move on. He collected a few items that were hard to find: a good knife, his favorite canteen and some clothes that were fairly new.
“You did a good job with your braid,” Lily said.
“Thank you.” Wisp knotted a bandanna around his neck. Today might have fighting in it. Loose hair was a liability.
“Can you do mine, too?”
He sat her on a stool to comb the tangles out of her long, brown hair. When he touched her, he saw Iris for a moment and another woman, older, with the same red-brown color of hair, perhaps her mother. Both memories were pushed down hard as soon as they rose. Avoidance was sometimes survival. “Today will be difficult,” he warned.
“Because we have to walk far away?”
“Because we go to a dangerous place.” He tied off her braid with a bit of string.
Lily turned and gave him a serious look. “Will the men with guns be there?”
“Yes.” He collected his pack. “Come.”
She followed him up through the darkness and out to the cluttered yard. The morning was cool and moist from the night's storm. Tendrils of fog rose from damp corners like smoke. Wisp led her to the road on the back side of the factory. A narrow strip of asphalt, crowded with saplings and crumbling from seasons without repair, followed along the bank of a broad river. Trees leaned over the road shading them from the first rays of morning sun.
“Oh, what's that?” Lily ran to edge of the road where it came near the river.
“Dragonfly.”
“It's pretty.”
“We need to hurry,” he said, not pausing in his stride. She caught up with him and skipped a few steps ahead. He spread out his senses. There was no one about. The child was safe to stray.
“Will we find William today?”
“Yes.” He didn't say that the boy might not see tomorrow if they didn't. The girl didn't need to know that pain yet.
“By lunch time?”
He thought about the right words to use to make her understand without frightening her too much. “Lily, I need to talk to you about the men with guns.”
A tremor of anxiety shook her. “Okay.” Her voice was small and shy.
“I will find a safe place for you to wait. Then I will go and look at where the men with guns are. Then I will come back to the safe place and tell you what we will do next. So I need you to stay where I tell you to stay. Can you do that?”
“Yes.”
Her hand stole into his, small and frightened. He let her set the pace. Her short legs were muscular. She had fled before. What she lost in stride, she made up for in speed.
* * *
The sun rose above the trees heating even the shade to a level of discomfort. Wisp called a stop, and they ate the train food he'd packed for lunch.
“Is it much further?”
He opened himself to William, feeling his pain and confusion. The boy was close. Reaching out, he felt the men guarding the boy. Four, maybe more, if some were sleeping. He didn't like the feel of the men.
“Are you talking to William?” Lily asked.
“No.”
“But you know where he is?”
Wisp pointed in the direction they were headed. “I can feel him there. Lily, he is hurt.”
Her lip trembled before she bit it. “Did they shoot him?”
“I don't think so.”
“Shooting is bad. If they didn’t shoot him, he’ll be okay.”
Wisp considered her oblivious optimism. She hadn’t yet experienced all the ways a body could be damaged. Sometimes the worse injuries were internal. But she didn’t need to know those things yet. “Maybe,” he said, all the warning he could give.
Lily hopped up. “We better go.”
* * *
When he decided they were close enough, Wisp led Lily down to the river. They walked the damp verge until he found an undercut high above the water. The roots of a lumpy old sycamore splayed across the bank like ancient steps. The lowest were exposed as the river washed more soil away every flood season. At the top of the bank, a root as thick as his waist ran horizontal creating a small cave beneath it. It was dry and sandy and large enough for Lily to hide in. “Here is the safe place for you to stay.”
Lily grabbed his hand. “What if you don't come back?” At her touch, her panic hit him hard, racing up his arm like an electric shock. She'd been covering it very well for someone so young.
“This time is just to look.” He knelt down to be closer to her. “I will come back and tell you what will happen next.”
She nodded, eyes wide, lips tight, not quite able to trust his word. Her small fingers squeezed his hand nervously before letting go.
“I will be back before you can count to one thousand.” He tossed his pack into the undercut.
“One thousand is a lot! I don't know one thousand!” Her fear of abandonment was shoved aside by a sudden spike of resentment.
“What do you know?” he asked, dismayed at her lack. The children born since the virus weren’t being educated. It was a failing that he found inexcusable.
“A hundred. I know how to count to a hundred.” She glared at him, hands on slim hips.
Wisp smoothed a place in the damp earth. He took a stick and wrote the numbers one through ten. “One thousand is ten hundreds. So count to one hundred ten times. Each time you get to one hundred, cross out one number.” He handed her the stick.
“Okay.” She frowned at the numbers in the sand. He worried that she couldn’t read either. “That’s not really a two. You didn’t do it right.” She said poking the stick into the dirt.
He glanced at what he’d scratched out. They looked like normal numbers. “Cross off one symbol each time you count to one hundred.”
She seemed more assured when she gave him a wide-eyed nod. He double-checked the area for strangers. No one was closer than the men who had taken her brother. “Start counting.”
Her voice was swallowed up by the sound of the river in the time he'd taken three steps.
* * *
Wisp slipped through the undergrowth stealthily. Here at the edge of the water, thickets of bramble and saplings made the woods quite dense. He kept his senses open, making sure that the only human minds in the area were William and his captors. And yet, at the very edge of his awareness, he could feel another person. Someone from the settlement downriver perhaps. The person was far enough away not to be an immediate threat, and felt clean, a mind bright with healthy curiosity. Maybe just a fisherman looking for a good spot. There was a greasy darkness to the men holding William. A heavy shadow of wrongness that Wisp had felt once before in mercenaries that had tracked him for the reward. He doubted that the bright mind was working with the darker ones. Although if it wandered closer, Wisp might need to intercept or divert it.
The mercenaries were holed-up in a derelict factory. There were dozens of similar sites along the river. When he’d first come to the area, Wisp had looked at this one, but it had no basement. It was older than the one he’d finally chosen. The forest was taking it over. Trees and weeds and vines had thrust up through floors and scrambled out windows. From the look of it, a storm could bring down the remaining walls any time now. Wisp wondered if they were foolish or had access to weather forecasting. He would never have made a camp in there.
Breathing in the rhythm of the woods, Wisp moved through the undergrowth like one who belonged. Hard to see in the dappled light, and protected by a broadcast suggestion that he was just another shrub swaying in the wind, he advanced confidently. The trees petered out into saplings and weeds working hard to reclaim the parking lot. He settled in a patch of long grass and concentrated on pinpointing every mind in his surroundings.
There were two men out in the woods. Possibly walking patrol, but they were arguing, their attention on each other, not their environs. Sloppy. One was angry, distracted, the other smug. Neither was doing his job.
In the building, he could sense three men with the boy. Listening, tasting, sensing them, he realized they were not guarding. They were bored and frustrated, but there was no remorse for the damaged inflicted on William. They wanted better food, beer, to be more comfortable, for the job to be over. Like the men in the woods, they were careless, not expecting any inconvenience beyond the recalcitrance of the boy.
When he had located every mind in the vicinity, and knew he was out of any sightlines, Wisp crossed the parking lot to peer inside the building. Streamers of sunlight filtered in through the broken brickwork and crisscrossed the dark interior. A damp smell of leaf mold and woodrot pervaded the space. He checked first for the weapons, body armor and whatever supplies they had. The camp, aside from being badly placed, was badly organized. Equipment, clothing and discarded food lay scattered across the leaf-strewn floor. Although the equipment was new and well designed, the soldiers were slovenly. Their uniforms were wrinkled, stained with mud and sweat. The three men inside were busy with their own pursuits, one eating, one dozing and the third trying to start a fire in a small ring he’d made of broken bricks.
With Lily’s countdown running in the back of his mind, Wisp memorized the placement of supplies, weapons and exits, then he looked into the shadows beyond the men. William was tied to one of the remaining support columns. He hung slack in his restraints. There was blood on the floor. And when he saw it, he was aware of the smell. The boy was unconscious, but Wisp was close enough to feel the pulse of life within him. He was alive, but not for much longer. William couldn’t take much more punishment.
The two walking patrol were returning. Wisp could hear their voices, raised and angry. Satisfied that he had collected all the information he needed, Wisp returned to Lily.
Chapter 7
“As a way to stop the looting, the government began distributing food in the mistaken belief that hunger fueled the unrest. It wasn’t hunger. When society breaks down, so too do the social niceties such as obeying rules. The authorities were too busy trying to bury the dead and relocate the living, they didn’t have time to chase criminals.”
History of a Changed World, Angus T. Moss
The sun was high overhead making Nick sweat as he trudged up the river road. It hadn't taken him very long to get a lead. The minute he had stepped off the train in White Bluffs, he'd been mobbed by people demanding news of Clarkeston. They could see the smoke. A call for assistance had gone out over the ether. Clarkeston had firefighting equipment, they just needed
more hands. Nick had been leaning toward joining the crew of volunteers when the whispers reached him. Most of the settlement believed that mercenaries had started the fire. Nick had to believe that there couldn’t be two groups of mercenaries in the area right now. He followed the whispers.
There was no consensus, only rumors of troop movements, wildly inconsistent. Or maybe it was only one heavily armed man. Or a fleet of black trucks packed with men armed to the teeth. Everyone he spoke to had seen at least one man in black military gear and more than one sleek black vehicle. But they weren't regular soldiers. No one had seen the country's soldiers since the riots during the first days of the virus. Back when there were cops and national guard and a formal army. Regular soldiers would be welcome. Mercenaries were not. They made people nervous. Nick heard the same questions repeated whenever the topic came around to the armed men: who were they? What did they want? They were strangers. They must be responsible for the catastrophe in Clarkeston.
The only thing they all agreed on was that the men went north along the river road. Nick had walked that way on his last visit to High Bluffs. Up that way were old factories, one after the other in ranks along the water's edge. It was all the clue Nick needed to hear. The description of automatic weapons and body armor matched the kind of gear he'd seen on the dead man in the murdered girl's house. Too much of a coincidence for them not to be the same group. He drifted away from the gossiping crowds that had gathered by the train station. In the confusion of the volunteer fire fighters organizing a convoy, no one noticed him go. He took a roundabout route to the edge of town watching for anyone following. Once he was sure that no one was dogging him, he headed north up the river road.
It was a long walk to the first factory, but he made good time. The sky stayed clear, not a cloud in sight. There would be no storms today, when Clarkeston could use a pounding downpour to help with the fires. The hot dry days of summer were coming in. Another few weeks and a fire like that could rage unstoppable across the bone-dry countryside. He set a quick pace, keeping to the shaded side of the road.
