“We don’t have much farther to go before we’ll be in an area where we can find shelter, and we have enough food to last a couple more days.” Mike was short and stocky. He was clearly the brains of the group of three men who’d initially headed out into the wilderness together. The third man, Steve, seemed to be mere window dressing. But not like in a clothing store. More like a mannequin you’d find on display in a hardware store or in outdoor gear store. The strong silent type, with a heavy emphasis on silent.
“Steve, would you like a little more stew? I think we have enough for everyone to have another bite.”
Steve nodded and held out his cup.
“Ken?” Val asked, offering him the spoon.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake! It’s Kent!” Kent was the fourth man. The outsider. He made a point of spitting the last letter off his teeth. “Kent. The ‘T’ is not silent. If we’re going to call each other by new names, the least you could do is try and get the name right,” the round-faced man said, his eyes burning with fire. It was clear that he didn’t like Val, and from the way the brute arched his back at the tone of Kent’s voice, one could tell that the feeling was mutual. Val turned to face Kent, squaring his shoulders as the smaller man sat forward on the log and seemed about to rise.
Mike smoothed their ruffled feathers. “Gentlemen! Give it a rest. We have a while still to travel, yet. Perhaps you can learn to get along better so that Steve and I,” he made a nod to the silent man to his left, “don’t have to douse the both of you.”
“I can’t help it, Mike. He burns me.” Val made a motion toward the smaller man as if he would slap him with the back of his hand if he didn’t have better self-control, and it wasn’t clear that he really did. The round-faced man didn’t flinch, and his eyes betrayed no fear. He simply sat and looked back at Val and spread his hands. He made them into fists and did a little punching motion into the air, and then, turning away, he looked with boredom into the fire. Reflexively, he reached up and removed his glasses and began to clean them.
****
Calvin Rhodes was born in Austin, Texas, in 1994, where his parents lived as they attended the University of Texas on student visas. His father, a Chinese pharmaceutical engineer, had come to the states to complete a graduate degree program, sponsored by the Chinese government in an ongoing effort to reform China’s national healthcare system. His mother, a musician, died giving birth to Calvin, and thus his father had to raise him alone.
When it came to being a single father and trying to maintain his course work at the university, Cal’s father was lost from the very start. In fact, he’d have simply withdrawn from the university and returned home to China to enlist his family’s help with the child, if it weren’t for the mildly aggressive way his embassy office had handled the news of his wife’s passing. Gently, but firmly, and with no room left for doubt, the consular attaché told him that he was to continue his studies. A small stipend was provided so that he could secure childcare, but nothing else was offered by way of help – certainly not understanding.
Cal’s father had done the best that he could. One of the things he’d done while he was looking for answers and for strength to face his struggles, was turn to the search for spirituality. He’d never been a particularly religious man, and he’d always made his way in the Chinese system by offering the kind of public acceptance of science as the supreme answer for everything that was expected of him. While he secretly admitted to an appreciation for traditional Chinese medical practices, and he had a deep and abiding faith in certain ancient Chinese cultural mores, he’d been successful in his career, to the point that some in the Chinese politburo were eying him for regional directorships. His success therefore, was precisely a result of his being seen as a man of industry and science and not of mythology. He’d been exactly the type of man the country needed as China moved toward more Western-style medical standards. At a minimum, he was good at managing business, a useful thing in a time when the pharmaceutical business in his country was on the ascent.
Still, there was the matter of the boy. Calvin was a fussy baby. From his very earliest days, he behaved as though he took it as a personal affront that his mother wasn’t there for him. This was understandable, but it didn’t make matters any better for the harried young father trying to raise him. The fact that Cal’s father had proved to be only a middling student made things even worse. In order to advance, he’d been forced to spend many hours reading and rereading texts that other students simply seemed to grasp at first glance.
Perhaps the turning point for Calvin’s father was the day he’d received, in the mail, from his family back home, a small book by a moral philosopher named Li Hongzhi. This philosopher had recently become famous in China for developing a movement founded on traditional Chinese physical exercises combined with the practice of certain moral beliefs. Chief among these beliefs were truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. The book had changed Calvin’s father forever.
The pharmaceutical engineer became a member of the outlaw movement that eventually became known as Falun Gong.
Drawing strength from his new-found religion—if it could rightly be called a religion—Calvin’s father threw himself into his tasks. He took to his studies with a new vigor and seemed to grow in his role as a father in a way that surprised even his family back in China, as well as the few friends he’d made on campus. He became, in short, a zealot, and that zealotry infused him with energy.
All of this is by way of explaining why, on a day he’d taken to get out of the city and tour the beautiful hill country he’d heard so much about, he was doing his exercises in a small park next to the Vereins Kirch in Fredericksburg, Texas, and not caring a whit for the stares that he got from the people in that small Central Texas tourist town.
People were not used to seeing a Chinese man with a toddler at his side standing in the middle of an artsy Texas village next to an old Colonial-era Lutheran Church moving his body as if he were pushing the wind. The folks walking by stole their furtive glances and tried not to stop and stare. They were polite in their peering insouciance, but if one had stood to the side and watched, it would have been clear that their reaction was unimportant to Calvin’s father. He was impervious to even their walking amazement.
One young man in his later teens, standing in the park, did not steal furtive glances or peer through the side of his eyes at the Chinese man’s antics. That man noticed both the crowd and the man’s practiced disregard of them. He knew what it was like to be watched sideways and marginalized, and he figured that if you were going to look at a man, you should just go on and look at him.
His name was Jonathan Wall.
In the future, Jonathan Wall and Calvin’s father would become very close friends - and Mr. Wall would become even closer to Calvin.
CHAPTER 27
“Stephen, we have a serious problem.”
Veronica looked at her son with her fists on her hips, frowning—not at him particularly—but at the problem.
“We have to ride south through Brooklyn, and that will be difficult enough, boy, but then we have to cross the Verrazano Bridge, and that could be next to impossible. The bridge will almost certainly be blocked by bandits; people who will want to take our bikes; people who will steal our food if we will let them; people who might want to take our lives.”
“You think it will be that bad, mom?” Stephen asked. He concentrated on making sure that his face showed bravery and masked his fear.
Veronica noticed Stephen’s efforts and she was pleased. Half of any hard victory consists of overcoming the fears that might keep us from the battle in the first place, she thought.
“I think it will be worse than I think it will be,” she said, smiling.
“What’s the plan?”
“Getting over the bridge is the first thing. We’ll take our battles one at a time. We need to be prepared to ride fast and yet carefully. Watch for trash on the roadways, son, nails in particular. A flat tire on your bik
e makes it as useless as not having one. I found spare tubes in the storeroom, but there will be no time or place to stop and change them. We need to avoid anything that will keep us from getting out of here quickly.”
Stephen looked at his mother, wanting to mention a thought that had occurred to him While she was sleeping, he’d been silently drumming because drumming always seemed to help him think clearly. As his hands worked the rhythm in his head, his mind flashed back to a day when he’d been riding the subway. Beating the heels of his hands like a madman on the tops of his knees, keeping time to a song playing in his ears, he’d looked up and noticed that people had slid away from him on the seats, leaving him alone at the end of the train.
“What if we put on the fallout gear now?” he said, smiling. “It will freak people out. They’ll think we’re scientists or something, or maybe from the government, or that we’re sick. Maybe they’ll leave us alone.”
“Boy,” Veronica said, placing her long thin fingers on his cheek and giving his nose a little tweak, “I knew some sense had crept into you. Yes. What a great thought! And the suits will keep us warm… and… and…. they’ll be one less thing we have to carry. That’s an excellent idea!”
Within half an hour, they had packed, dressed in the hazmat suits, and were ready to go. They opened the bunker door, and, checking the area carefully, they proceeded out into the night.
****
Calvin Rhodes climbed into the cab of the truck and put the key in the ignition. He turned it forward a bit and heard the slow, whining grind of the starter kick in, pumped the gas pedal slightly and felt the motor rumble to life.
Pulling out of the circular driveway, he waved to the small crowd of people standing at the foot of the porch, and then proceeded slowly along the gravel driveway, hearing the crunch of the tires underneath him, until he came to a stop where the driveway met the county highway. He looked both ways, although that wasn’t really necessary. His was the only vehicle moving on the road. He pushed the knob forward, finding his gear, and gave the truck some gas. Cautiously, he drove the first ten feet of a journey that he hoped would take him halfway across the country. Gently shifting gears, he settled his butt into the seat.
The first hundred miles were mostly uneventful. He stuck to the back roads, cruising through the rural scenery of the rolling hill country, passing family farms and churches and schools and small towns, or the burned out buildings that had once stood for them.
Mostly, there was an eerie quiet, although in some yards kids were still at play as their parents watched warily from the windows. In many places, the storefronts along streets were smashed, and the shelves were emptied, leaning over like dominoes one against another, tossed by looters or panicked citizens or both.
Coming to a stop at a rural junction, Calvin saw two corpses splayed out over the hood of a broken down car. Pockets were turned inside out, and the doors of the car stood wide open and the trunk was pulled up. The scene left little to the imagination, and it played before Calvin’s eyes in seconds in blue-black flickers, and ended just as he saw it now, in tragedy.
He slowed just enough to hope for peace upon the souls of the families of the dead, and to be grateful that he wasn’t the one lying there, perforated with bullets, stretched out like a deer across the hood of a car.
The advantage to being in the country during this moment was the benefit of not having as many people to dodge. The people in this neck of the woods were probably hurting and hungry, but they weren’t competing with millions of others for the rare materials of sustenance and survival. Statistically speaking, that was a very large advantage indeed. Calvin would drive along highway 79 almost as far as Memphis in order to avoid the Interstate highways, and he would pass, almost exclusively, through a few widely separated small towns—towns such as Hearne and Henderson and Carthage.
As he drove through the Piney Woods of Texas, he thought about all the places he’d seen and known and loved in the state. It was difficult for people who weren’t from there to understand it - how Texas had plains, mountains, mighty rivers, and woods and forests, as well as deserts, and oceans… and skies. Plenty of skies. Of course, the state also had its large cities and its little towns, and that was what made it special for him—as a native Texan who was also an outsider of sorts. Texas didn’t necessarily have the best in anything, but it had the bestof everything. It was self-contained in a way that other places weren’t. As the people often said, Texas is a whole other country. As he drove through the silent night, he looked up at the stars and saw that they were big and bright, and already he missed being deep in the state’s heart.
****
Outside of Shreveport, Calvin took gunfire. There was simply no other way around it. Shreveport, that is. The Louisiana city was a vexation that could not be avoided. Literally. He had to go through the town in order to reach the bridge that would take him over the Red River. The river, usually an afterthought, its muddy waters rolling lazily along as if the world and its affairs were none of its concern, had become a barrier that he needed to breach. Bridges, by nature, were bottlenecks, and danger always loves a bottleneck.
Calvin timed his approach so that he’d come to the crossing in the middle of the night. Winding his way south around the city, he came up to the bridge on 70th Street, running adjacent to the old skeletal structures of Hamel’s Amusement Park, which had closed down more than a decade ago when a tornado bent its Ferris Wheel in half.
He’d been thinking of the Ferris Wheel and comparing it in his mind to the recently destroyed one on Coney Island—the one from Hurricane Sandy— that he’d seen on the television and the Internet just before those forms of media had gone black forever. He was driving alongside the amusement park looking out over the rusty machinery, the steel and wood standing alone in its abandoned memories, remembering how the recent world had simply stopped in the wake of Hurricane Sandy when, out of the blue—or the black, actually—he heard a ping. Then another.
The shots ricocheted off the fender of his pickup, and he swiveled his head to see where they were coming from. He almost ran off the bridge just as he entered its mouth.
Somewhere back at the amusement park, he thought. Not amusing at all.
He hit the gas, tore across the river, and looked up into his rear-view mirror to watch the rusted old skyline disappear into the night.
****
“Why do you keep taking off your boots? Are you trying to slow us down?”
It was Val. He was standing over the round-faced man and sneering at him. The bespectacled young man, currently called Kent, peered into his boot and seemed to be searching for something that wasn’t there. He was a little drunk. They’d taken turns watching through the night, and Kent had spent most of his turn sneaking drinks of vodka from a flask he’d kept secretly in his pocket. In his mind, his life had turned to dung and the vodka made it almost, but not quite, bearable.
“Leave him alone, Val. Just don’t start it up again.” It was Steve. The silent one. Like his comrade Mike, he was getting tired of the constant bickering back and forth between Val and Kent, and he’d come to conclude that Val was mostly to blame. Val was like a rooster who, with nothing worthwhile at which to peck, pecked at anything near him that he deemed to be weaker than himself.
“Yes. Listen to our amigo, Esteban, here.” Kent felt himself slurring his words. When he said ‘Estaban,’ it sounded to him like ‘Esh-tra-gon.’
“Time’s out of joint…” (He was speaking so slowly!) “…no need to get your nose out of joint, too.” The words came out like molasses, awkwardly, and ran together in his ears like they did not in his head.
The brutish Val looked at him and thought that someone getting his nose pushed out of joint was exactly what was needed. They were waiting for Mike to come back from a little hike up ahead to scout out their direction, and passing the time with Val was, as usual, not turning out to be rewarding for Kent, so he excused himself to walk over to a small group of bushes to let
the vodka finish its pass through him.
“Stupid idiot,” he muttered to himself as he half stumbled and half climbed up a small rise toward the bushes. “Of course, I’m trying to slow you down, you moron…,” he slurred to himself.
Walking over the rise, he stood at a small hedge line and was just about to unzip his pants when sobriety snuck up on him and a shot of adrenaline flew through his system like lightening. There, at the bottom of the hedges, in a small clump of trees, was a man dressed like an accountant. Blood, turned black and inky like impenetrable night, lay frozen in a pool around him.
****
The man held up his hand for his friends to shut up. They were gathered in a group at the foot of the bridge where they’d been sitting for several days – doing business. Stalled cars and buses formed a zigzag maze purposefully designed to block access to the bridge from all vehicles, and to force pedestrians to walk across the bridge – but only after paying a toll.
The friends had learned that it was easier to allow the food to come to them by standing across its mouth with knives, boards, and chains, than it was to go out in search of supplies for themselves. Looting was turning out to be dangerous business in the city. The rumor was rampant that some looters had even been cooked and eaten. Charging tolls was much safer. They’d placed a sign on the off-ramp side of the bridge that told the people who were escaping out of the city that they needed to pay to cross—a fee for the right to exit hell. The gang told the citizens that the toll was something like an indulgence, and the gatekeepers, the popes and priests of the new world disorder, administered punishments upon anyone who tried to exit purgatory without paying. The sign made it clear what forms of payment were acceptable…
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