What Tomorrow May Bring

by Tony Bertauski

  We’re camped again tonight in the Bighorn mountains as I ponder the numbers for the millionth time. Our tent isn’t much—a leaky spread of canvas on some aluminum poles. The bandits that have been trailing us for the last few days don’t seem to know where we’re at anymore. Russell says they used to call this mountain Hesse. He thinks the highest peaks on the range are still several thousand feet above the water, but right now we’re only a few feet from the edge, in case we have to move out quick—in case they find us. All I know is it’s cold as hell up here. And out there, on the water, it looks like the dirty canvas that our tent is made out of, except it goes on forever. I can see a couple other spikes rising out of the canvas—other mountain tops. Some more rock than mud, some only mud. Our boat’s no good though. It won’t make it much farther. And I think ice has been forming on the water for the past few days, but Russell says it’s my imagination.

  When I can get Russell to talk about it, the time before the rain, he doesn’t give me too much. He only likes to talk about why it started. Which theory he buys. Since Rapid City though, he doesn’t want to talk about anything but Leadville.

  When he found me, and my dad died in the rain, he took me because he was worried someone might try to eat me. That was fourteen years ago. He said it didn’t matter that I was a happy baby girl, with bright blonde hair and a smile that vanquished the gloom of the rain. They’d eat me as soon as burp me.

  He usually mentions the solar flare first—he says it was a sunburst, something that comes once in a long time. The scientists talked about it on TV he said—TV is when there are pictures of people that move. So the sun shot out a long branch of invisible something, messed up the Earth’s magnetic field, currents, or jet streams, or something like that. And then it happened—the great Pacific started swooping up into the sky, as he says. And everywhere else, the rain started.

  It came slow at first, and sometimes, not even every day. Russell seems to like telling this part, but I have a hard time believing it. I’ve never seen the rain turn off. He said no one even wore plastic yet, covered their skin, worried about exposure, hypothermia, or the rubber flesh that forms and slides off like a glove. And then it became clear to everyone that the rain wasn’t going to stop. It was just going to keep on coming. And everyone thought that there’d be some explanation, something that would help fix the problem. But there never was.

  The other theories are bullshit, he’s told me a thousand times. Conspiracy theories. Weather manipulation, manmade effects of pollution. All of it bullshit. Only the sun could cause this, he says.

  I don’t really care too much about the reason it started. I guess, since it’s been this way my whole life, it would be like contemplating that you fall down after you jump up. You accept that it happens, and you move on.

  And that’s what we’ve been doing for the last fourteen years. Moving. One place to the next. I remember when I was a little girl, and we walked on the roads a lot more. Russell says where we’re going, there are whole towns that are still above the water. We’ll be walking roads again. And there’s a place where it’s stopped raining. That’s when I know the bullshit has started coming from him instead of the conspiracy theories. It’s raining everywhere. I’ve never seen anything to make me think otherwise. And we’ve traveled from New Jersey to Wyoming. But now we have to move 520 miles south he says. Leadville, Colorado. He hasn’t stopped talking about it for the last year. We’re going to Leadville, there’s a whole city there, thousands of feet above the water. Where the veneer is still thick.

  But we couldn’t go directly there, because the route across the Great Plains is flooded. Thousands of feet of water, but moving water. I don’t mind the still water. I hate the moving water. And the worst are the waterspouts. Used to be called tornados, Russell says. But there are too many of them on the Plains, tall and clear and deadly, spinning arms to heaven, and we had to move north first. And that’s how we picked up this crew of face eaters, as he calls them. They’ve been following us for days, but suddenly, they haven’t been in sight. Each time we cross a valley of water along the Bighorns, they’re behind us, rowing after us in their boat, a canoe similar to ours. There’s three of them, so they can rotate bailers more often, and they move a bit faster over the brown. I thought we’d hit a patch of water too wide, and they might overtake us, but we didn’t. We’ve kept them at bay. But now they’re gone. Russell thinks they drowned. But I haven’t seen any bodies floating by.

  I think the canoe has about had it—it’s made out of some kind of manmade stuff, fiberglass, I think. He says that it will make the trip to Colorado. How long will we have to be on the water, I asked him. A week he said. We’ve never been on water for more than a day, and we stop when we can, so a whole day is a lie. A day with rest stops.

  The exposure is worse than the face eaters. It’s creeping down again today, I can feel it. Cold wet sickness. And this is the longest we’ve been without a fire. Russell says he’ll find what we need for one tomorrow, but I don’t see how. All the trees are ripped away or waterlogged up here. And now, while the sun’s showing behind the gray, he’s sleeping. Sleeping during the day is a waste, he says. So I adopted his attitude. Looking at him, it’s a waste to me, because he’s breaking his own rule. But he needs it after all the rowing. I let him be.

  The numbness in my left foot is getting a little bit worse. It comes and goes. He says at these altitudes in Wyoming we’re too far north, so we can’t stay here long, and winter’s coming. Going south to Colorado won’t be much better. If the winter comes early, we won’t have a chance. It used to be that we could camp on rooftops for months at a time, keep a fire throughout the winter. Back in Philadelphia we did that. And Pittsburg. Then again in Chicago. Indianapolis. Sioux Falls. Rapid City. But Wyoming is like no man’s land. To the east, like a high island, is Yellowstone. But Russell says we can’t go that way. There’s nothing on those mountains. To me they look like rescue. And when I look south, I don’t see any more peaks. Just the canvas of water. Little dancing splashes all over it, letting me know the rain is at medium. When it’s on high, there is a mist that rises up, like a low-lying cloud that kisses the surface. The rain never goes to low anymore. The last time I saw a drizzle I was six.

  If the skin is left out, it prunes at first. Then it becomes rubbery. Eventually, the skin slides off. It’s like it’s been all filled up, like it absorbed all the rain, the constant sloshing, and there is no other way for the body to expel the moisture. So the skin slides right off.

  It happened to part of Russell’s left leg. He keeps the plastic on that leg real tight. But the infection comes and goes. He says he’s never seen the rain this bad. He thinks it’s getting worse.

  I wear plastic gloves, but there are a few small holes in them now, as always come with shitty plastic gear. My fingers are constantly wrinkled, and when we’re in the rain for too long, I start to think of Russell’s leg. Sometimes I worry that when I take off the gloves, my hand will slip off with it.

  He showed it to me once. Normally I just look away when he changes plastic. It looked like a dark red hump, as if it was still swelling up after all the years. Only the skin is gone. And the hump is something else. I don’t know if it’s muscle or tendons or what. I never really asked for the science on it, and he’s never volunteered.

  Although Russell hasn’t said anything, I know we’re almost out of food. Our last major pickup, a high rise apartment near Rapid City, had a crate full of hardtack. That and some cans of beans, rice, lentils, and some kind of powder soup. A survivalist’s den. But we lost half the hardtack. The canoe tipped over. I can’t believe Russell managed to get the pack on the hull in time to save any of it.

  The waves are what really scare me. They used to be called avalanches, Russell says. They would come sliding down the mountain. Now, it’s the swells. They rise up, and the blank stretch of brown canvas gets rolly, like something is boiling down there. And then the white foam starts up, and the howling wind. And
he calls it a gale. We both row, and I do my best. I’m sixteen years old and as strong as any boy I’ve ever seen. Stronger. He says we have to point into the waves, and I listen, although it doesn’t make sense to me with how much the swells seem to want to drive us under.

  Once there was a waterspout right next to us. It started in the sky, coiled down, touched the water, then disappeared like a sharp snarling tendril of storm cloud. Then it came back down, stuck, and started to draw up water. It threw us away from it. I was afraid it would drag us in, down, to the forgotten cities below us, the graveyard, as Russell calls it. It was beautiful though, clear, miraculous, powerful, like something apart from the rain, something that was fighting the rain. It kept up the fight for almost ten minutes. Then it fell away, just like everything else does.

  I’m still stronger than any boy, but I’m a lot skinnier than I used to be. I can tell by looking at my legs, my arms. I’m glad we don’t carry the mirror anymore. That was when he shaved. I still try to. But the razors are lines of rust now, useless, dangerous. I should stop using them.

  Russell thinks the antibiotics are no good from the rain. He thinks his leg infection might come back. And he worries about me. I’m not sure why, but he’s always worrying about me. He thinks that if I get sick now, the antibiotics won’t work. He doesn’t want me to use the razors anymore, so I do it at night. I use the rain. It helps keep me sane. If he’s noticed my legs are still bare, he hasn’t said anything.

  I tried to get an age out of him twice, and from his replies, I gather he must be twice as old as me. Maybe older. I can’t tell. But all he said was, “Old enough to be your Dad.” And I told him that no he wasn’t. Then he said, “Close to it.”

  We don’t celebrate birthdays. But we used to celebrate food. Whenever we found a survivalist’s stash, we would celebrate. He would sing, I would try to. We tried dancing sometimes too. He’s no good. He thinks I’m pretty good, but I know he’s full of shit. But now that we’re out past the Great Plains, we don’t celebrate anymore. It’s like we’re too close now, too close to something that can save us.

  It took Russell a long time to figure out we had to keep moving west. He thought we could stay in the cities. We did for a lot of years. But the soil stopped draining the water. And the rain kept going.

  We lost the contact we had with the radio. It’s hard to keep anything working in the rain. When we find a pack of batteries in an apartment, Russell goes nuts. Only thing is we have nothing to put them in, nothing to use them on. I kind of remember the electricity, when it was everywhere, like Russell says. He even goes on about the invisible internet, and how it connected everything with moving pictures and sounds. It sounds pretty made up, and I think he’s been sacrificing food on account of me for ten years, and it must be adding up. He has to be losing his mind a little bit. We need to find vitamins, he says.

  He thinks they’re dead, the bandits. We’ve had a couple close calls, and it seems like they come more and more since we passed into South Dakota. It’s the higher elevation, Russell says. Before we hit Rapid City, it was low country. But the water hadn’t risen so high then. There were more dead bodies. They were everywhere. We saw a raft of them once. A boy and his dog on the raft, floating somewhere. All tied together, the bodies. Some drift wood, probably a house. It looked pretty safe and sturdy. I wonder about how far he made it sometimes.

  Our years in Rapid City were different. More people were alive there. We moved to Harney Peak before long, just over 7,000 feet. Then there were too many people alive. We were traveling on foot more again then, which was a change, but everyone came to the same spots. That’s the problem out west. There’s only these peaks, rising out of the brown canvas. They’re easy to see, and so everyone goes for them. The bandits come to feed.

  When we passed the Great Lakes, coming up from Indianapolis, there was a giant steam powered ship. We lived on it for a long time. I thought we were never going to leave. It was home. The water was calm for such a long time, and we sailed from skyline to skyline. Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee. We had more food than we could ever want. There were no bandits, no face eaters. There didn’t have to be. Russell says society is a veneer, made up of all the human principles. The ship was building the veneer again, he’d said. But when it comes down it, people eat and drink. Anything they can. No veneer.

  On the steamer, the Sea Queen Marie, I thought we were done moving. The daily struggle, finding the next meal, higher ground, avoiding suspect wanderers, was over. No one talked about a place where it didn’t rain because we didn’t need to—the ship had a hundred rooms and a giant galley, and a roof. We had a few attacks after we reached capacity, but nothing much. They couldn’t scale the gunwales. They never even made it halfway up. We were a unit. But it wasn’t the face eaters or the rain that destroyed the Sea Queen. It was a gale, Russell says. All I could tell that day was that the sky had blackened to charcoal, and behind me the sun was out and shining. Two different worlds. It was the first time I’d seen night come during the day. The waves started, and being in deep water like I never had been before, and old enough to be aware of it, I felt scared of dying for really what must have been the first time. I can take a lot, and I can row all day. But I can’t take the waves.

  They started out small at first, swells everyone was calling them. And then the wind came. A lot of arguing happened. Russell had the ear of one of the guy’s who controlled everyone else. His name was Wallace. Everyone called him Cap’n though. Cap’n was arguing with Russell, I remember that. Something about changing course.

  But old Cap’n told Russell there was no more fuel for any kind of moving, and the ship would have to hope that the storm turned, because the ship wouldn’t. Then Cap’n started talking about the direction of the wind a whole lot. He started to say that it was changing, hitting us at first from the east, and then, when the black took over the sky, from the north. I didn’t quite take the meaning of that, but he sure seemed to think it was a big deal. Russell did too, eventually. They called it a hurricane.

  It took the bow of the ship right down into the swells, snapped it off. The only skyline in sight was Chicago. The tower was there. It still stood way above the water. But I thought we might knock right into it, that’s how bad the waves were pushing us. And when the bow went in and snapped off that way, I knew we were going to die. I made peace with it. I thanked Russell for taking care of me. Sometimes, I feel like death would just mean leaving the rain. And then it’s not such a bad thing, death.

  But he wasn’t ready yet. And I guess I wasn’t either, because when the fights over the boats started, I helped him. That was the only time I think I really hurt somebody. Maybe I killed him, I don’t know. Russell won’t talk to me about it, because he said I shouldn’t think about it. We do what we have to and move on, to higher ground, to where we can get warm and dry.

  It’s been a long time since I’ve been warm or dry. And I think I’m dying now, too, but just really slowly this time. But maybe not, because I can still row, and I can still run. But I know we don’t have much food left. And Russell’s been acting too serious, and we have a week on the water till the next land, and I know we won’t make it.

  And I don’t for one minute think those face eaters drowned. We haven’t had a gun that works since Rapid City. Now it’s knives. That’s it. And that’s what they’ll have to, if they’re not dead.

  The ridges of Bighorns poke up in about a thousand places, puncturing the brown canvas. We’re on one of the lower parts of the Hesse. Some of the islands drop into the water real steep, and that’s how we messed up the canoe. Sometimes you can’t see when the ground comes back to you, up out of the brown. Then it jumps up on you, smacking the boat. We almost drowned six times I’d guess since we hit Wyoming. At least Russell says it’s Wyoming, and the Hesse mountain, and the Bighorns. I couldn’t tell you if we were in the Himalayas or not. But I trust Russell.

  The canoe smacked into a sharp rock when we tried to land it, and
it cut a long line along the side. The cut is near the top, so it doesn’t draw water. But the line is getting deeper, even though Russell won’t mention it. I feel like it’s splitting the whole thing in half real slow, and that it will finally happen when we’re out somewhere on the water, somewhere where we can’t swim back. Then we’ll just go under. And we’ll go right down, I know.

  I see the thin little layers of frost that Russell doesn’t, clear blue, like purity is trying to conceal the canvas of pattering sea. It’s cold enough up here. I can barely keep my hands from freezing. If we go into that water, I’m out. It’s not that I can’t swim half decent, but I’ve stuck my finger in along the way, all the way since Rapid City I’ve been touching. I tried to tell him it’s getting colder, and too cold, and that we need to go south, or back west. But he said no, we have to push on. There’s nothing else to go back to, and the water is running too fast through the Great Plains in the south.

  I don’t know how he knows all this. I think he learned it in Rapid City, and maybe even as far back as the Sea Queen Marie. People were always trading rumors, as if they were news, something that just happened. But it was always the same tired legends. A place where there’s no rain. A place where a city is entirely above the waterline. Leadville.

  When I first noticed the crystals on the water, as we drew close to the Bighorns, Russell started to put his own finger in the water. I yelled at him, “Told you so!” I meant it to be playful, to cheer him up, because I could tell he’s been getting sicker. When I was little, he had chubby red cheeks. Hell, he was fat. He was a smiling fat person though. I guess I was 8 or 9 when I realized he wasn’t fat anymore. It was like I hadn’t noticed. But then, when he kept getting skinnier, and I didn’t, I thought he was dying. I thought he had cancer, or a parasite. But he didn’t. He kept on just fine. But he was skinny. Now, he looks skeletal. And paler than I’ve ever seen him. He has dark olive skin—he used to anyway. Now, he looks like some of the bodies I’ve seen floating past the canoe.