I slept fitfully that night and was awake with the first rays of light that brightened up the fog around us. And I realized that the fog was heavier than ever. And that was when I knew what I had to do.
I slipped out from under Infinity’s arm and stood up. My body was stiff from lying on the cold ground all night. I stretched and looked down at Infinity, still lying on the ground, sleeping peacefully.
“Goodbye, Finn,” I said quietly. “And God be with you.”
Having said that, I waded back into the water. I tried to remember the part of the island that we’d landed on, then set out from there. I waded for quite a few minutes through the cold water, then after a while leaned forward and began breast stroking in the direction I thought the sunken town of Despond lay. I turned over on my back and looked behind me. Already the island had disappeared into the fog. I waited for Infinity’s voice to come through the fog, calling me, wishing me to come back to her. And chances were I would have turned back at that point. I’m really a chicken at heart. But her voice never came, and I kept swimming back toward the town.
Ten minutes of swimming brought me back to sunken rooftops, and another five minutes later I saw the church steeple where we’d hidden from the crazies two nights before. Now I had a choice. I could turn right and go back the way we’d come, up the hill onto the levee and try to find my way back to the backpacks. Or I could take the road that I’d seen coming out of the valley in the other direction.
I treaded water for a full minute, trying to decide which direction I should take. Going back risked me running into the crazies again somewhere along the road. But I had no idea where the other road would take me, and I was tired of surprises. So in the end, scared out of my wits, I opted to go back the way we’d come.
I climbed out of the water where the road had dropped in, just where we’d been two nights ago. And I was relieved to hear no animals or human voices. I slowly made my way back onto the levee and headed back the direction we’d come. By the time I got to the patch of brambles that we’d gotten lost in, my clothes had dried. The path seemed easier this time, which I imagined was because I didn’t have wild men chasing me now. I skirted the bramble patch and found the hill where we’d camped on the other side.
By the time I’d started climbing the hill, the fog had begun lifting, and I was encouraged when I got to the top and sunshine shone on me. But I was also disappointed to learn that someone had taken the packs. I didn’t know what I do if I’d found them, perhaps return to Finn with them, for once playing the hero? But that scenario wasn’t going to happen, and so I decided to go back to Harmony.
Now that the sun was out, I was encouraged, my clothes were dry and I had a pretty good idea how to find the town. It didn’t take me long to get there, and sure enough, Flo was still there as usual, selling her burgers. I’d forgotten how old and overweight she was, but considering where I’d been that morning, she looked pretty good to me.
“Where’s your friend?” were the first words out of her mouth.
“We decided to go separate ways,” I told her.
“Oh, you did, did you? And you decided you wanted to come back and get another burger?”
“Actually, Flo, I decided that life on the road wasn’t for me. I was wondering if you might consider a partner.”
Flo frowned and looked down. “I don’t really need a partner.”
I sighed. “That’s what I was afraid of. But to tell you the truth, Flo, I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
Flo looked at me as if she were trying to determine my monetary worth. “I don’t take in strays, either, if you catch my drift. But I know that the road is a dangerous place, especially for a young girl like you. How about this: you can sleep in the back of my shed tonight and keep out anyone who might steal something. I’ll feed you today and tomorrow. Tomorrow I’m expecting some business people to come into town. Maybe they can suggest some ideas.”
I brightened. A hot meal and a place to sleep out of the cold was more than I’d had just hours before. Flo brought out a plate full of scraps left over from sandwiches she’d made and not sold, and I wolfed them down. I stayed the day with her and chatted about our lives before the Event. That evening around sundown, she shut down her burger stand and I found a soft place to sleep inside.
The next morning I was awakened when Flo opened the shed not long after sunrise. She had with her two raccoons that she’d caught the night before in traps. I worked with her to clean the raccoons and get meat from their skinny bodies. She then put the meat into a grinder. I was still hungry, and tempted to take raw meat from the grinder as it fell out, but Flo warned me that wild animals often carried diseases that would easily transfer to humans unless they were cooked. I wondered if there were also diseases that transferred even though they were cooked, but said nothing.
Just as it started to get warm, Flo started cooking burgers and people began to file forward. I learned a lot about post-Event commerce from Flo, and noticed that even though she’d said she only did business in caps, there was still a lot of bartering going on.
She hadn’t offered to feed me early on—I suspected she wanted to see how much business she would have and if she would have enough food—but when things slowed down, she went ahead and made both of us a sandwich. I didn’t like raccoon burgers as much as I had liked the possum burger, but I didn’t complain. I was still licking the grease off my fingers when I saw several men in grey uniforms come up to the window.
“Right on time,” she said. She spread a half a dozen burgers on the grill.
“Got another one for us, I see,” the older man in the group said.
“Yup,” Flo said. “She’s a little bit on the bony side, but fatten her up and I think she’ll work for you.”
It took a long minute before I realized that they were talking about me. I stood there, mouth agape, until a young boy, not much older than me, came around behind the counter and looked at me like a dog inspecting a bone.
“Hold your hands out,” he barked.
“What are you talking about? Who are you?” I barked back.
In response, Flo slapped me across the cheek. It surprised me, and I found myself holding my hands out in front of me without thinking. In an instant, the young soldier had slipped plastic cuffs over my wrists and began pulling me out the door.
“Flo, what is this? Flo?” I yelled behind me. I felt betrayed.
“This is the best thing for you, girl. Best thing for me too. Now where’s my 50 caps?”
The six soldiers got back on their horses after getting some food and rode back down the road. I was forced to follow them on foot, my wrists bound and a leader pulling me ahead at a horse’s pace. Fortunately we didn’t go far.
A mile outside of town, a convertible car pulled up, driven by a chauffeur and with a familiar face in the back seat. It was Damien, dressed in the gray uniform of an officer. The others saluted him when he drove up, and Damien reluctantly returned their salute. Damien stepped out of the car he was riding in and looked at me.
“Damien, is that you?” I said weakly.
“Hello, Ellie,” he said smugly. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”
“Can you…can you help me out….”
He looked at me, then at my bound wrists.
“Of course, of course,” he said, motioning to the young soldier to drop the lead he had attached to his horse. “Get in the car.” He motioned to the soldiers to go on down the road, which they did. After I climbed into the car, he climbed in after me.
“Where’s Finn?” he asked.
“Damien, what are you doing in that silly uniform?” I answered.
He responded by back handing me across the face.
While I held my mouth in shock, he spoke again.
“Let me ask you one more time, Ellie. Where is Infinity Richards?”
It was then that my memories came back to me like a bolt out of a thundercloud. Back to ToC
12. regrets
; ELLIE: EASTERN TENNESSEE: DAY 716
I was wrong. Somehow I knew that I was wrong, that I was making a wrong decision, that what I was doing would condemn me to hell on earth as soon as I said Goodbye to you, Infinity. And now I’m paying the price for that wrong act. This is my letter of contrition, my apology, my sincerest way of saying I wish I would have been as loyal to you then as I had been in years past.
When I saw Damien, it was like a high school reunion—for about five minutes. Then when I realized that Damien had changed, that he was no longer Damien Wiseman, prankster and goofball, but was now Lt. Damien Wiseman, an officer in the occupation forces of the Reformed United States—well, something clicked. I was no longer at St. Eloise’s Academy for Girls. I was a refugee fleeing from a concentration camp. And the guy who was sitting next to me was going to imprison me and worse. He wanted my best friend, and I knew that he would do anything, anything, to make me tell him where she was.
I knew that I wasn’t brave, or tough, or any of those things. In the end, I knew that I would give him the information that he wanted. And when I thought back to what happened that day at the train station, I knew what he wanted it for.
Because I did remember. It was the last brick in the wall that my subconscious had built to protect us from the horror that we’d experienced that day. And now it was gone, and my memory was crystal clear. And I wish that it wasn’t.
OUTSIDE BALTIMORE, MD: DAY 1
The State Troopers had the five of us in the back of their wagon behind a padlock. And what would normally take a 20-minute drive in moderate traffic on the interstate took five hours. It was getting late afternoon by the time we drove—drove, what an ironic word to use here—east into the middle of Baltimore. I was amazed at what I saw there. There were the predictable lines of cars on every street, still where they were left the day before, some crashed into buildings or abutments or trees because they had lost power and control at a crucial moment. Signs were no longer lit up. People—tons of people—were walking.
But I was surprised how quickly the city government had made the transition to a non-powered society. Posters had been printed—somehow—and posted everywhere stating that the energy crisis was temporary and that people should remain calm. The city’s electric trolley had been disconnected from the power lines above and was now being pulled by horses. And there were bicycles—thousands and thousands of bicycles—everywhere.
What made a lot of this possible was the simple fact that people grouped together and cleared off the main streets for continuing traffic. That meant pushing vehicles—cars and trucks, even 18-wheelers—off the road so that trolleys, pedestrians, horses and bicycles—could get by. And I could tell that new rules were being written as I watched to help society get by without power. It would be hard, really hard, to make things work, but Americans were resourceful, and I was seeing evidence of that right in front of my eyes.
That gave me hope. I looked out through the chicken wire that we were enclosed in at the world passing by, and felt like things would indeed get better. And even if it took a while, I could wait, because I knew that people who were smart were taking matters into their capable hands.
I sat back on the wooden plank inside the wagon and smiled to myself, even as Marcie and Kimmy fretted and stressed about what was going to happen to them. I suspected that we’d end up at the county jail, where they would process us, yell at us a little bit about being irresponsible, then send us back either to our parents or to the school.
Instead, we ended up at Union Station in downtown Baltimore. It hadn’t occurred to me that even with an electromagnetic pulse, something that would fry the electronics on every modern electronic gismo, including cars, planes, buses, motorcycles, phones, radios and TVs, a train could still operate. I discovered that I was only partly correct. There were still a few older diesel and even steam- and coal-powered locomotives in operation that had been built before the electronic age, many of which were still being used for freight transportation and for short-range needs, such as pushing boxcars and flatcars and cattle cars where they were needed. Now I was sure that the railroad was glad they held onto these dinosaurs. They wouldn’t solve all the transportation needs of a country at war, but it was a start.
It was dark when we pulled up in front of the station and the state trooper unlocked the back of the wagon. They didn’t seem as friendly as they had appeared before. One of the first things I noticed was that Damien began to stand with our captors, rather than with us. We walked into the crowded railroad station, state troopers ahead and behind us.
“Where are we going?” Infinity asked finally, but no one responded. I started to repeat it, then saw a familiar face in the crowd ahead of us.
“Dr. Wiseman!” I said. “We’re sorry for what we did.”
Dr. Wiseman didn’t seem to hear my apology. Instead, I saw worry lines on his face. He gestured for the Troopers to hurry us along.
“Here are the last four,” he said. “Quickly, the train is about to leave.”
“Train?” Infinity echoed. “Where are we going?”
“Someplace safe,” Dr. Wiseman said.
“But what about my father?” Infinity asked. “He’ll need to know where I am.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it. Right now, we need to get you out of Baltimore.” The troopers hurried us through the crowd to an old locomotive and boxcars that stood chuffing on the far corner of one of the gates. Steam rose from it, and I thought of all of the romantic old movies that had lovers leaving each other at the train station. But I had no boy that I considered a romantic interest (their loss), and so I watched Infinity and Damien to see what would happen.
Infinity looked longingly at Damien, but Damien seemed to have forgotten about his girlfriend. He didn’t even walk with us, but paraded along with his father. I caught Finn’s eye and mouthed the words, what’s up? to which in response, Infinity merely shrugged.
I kept surveying the train as we went along, the smoke from its old locomotive curling my nose hairs and choking me. Finally, the troopers and Dr. Wiseman stopped at a cattle car and one of them slid open the door. Inside were another two dozen girls, none of them much older than we were. They stared out at us as if they were just as disbelieving as we were.
“You have got to be kidding,” Kimmy said. “Hell, no!”
The four of us turned, ready to run, only to find that two more troopers had fallen into position behind us. We found ourselves grabbed by heavy hands and physically thrown into the cattle car, all the while girls screaming at them at the top of their lungs.
I felt myself picked up and forced to climb into the smelly car, the last of the four to go. I was numb and unbelieving, even when I heard the door slide and slam behind us. Then I heard the lock click into place.
I stood quickly and looked out through the metal bars, and heard the whistle of the train blow once. Then as it began chugging out of the depot, my last sight of Damien and Dr. Wiseman was one of him paying each of the troopers for their assistance.
“Tell me I’m dreaming,” Kimmy said. “This kind of thing just doesn’t happen.”
“Well, all I know is that the family lawyer is going to have a field day,” said Marcie. “Dr. Wiseman just made us all rich.”
“Don’t you girls get it?” Infinity said. “The old rules don’t apply anymore. There are no lawyers, no judges, no justice. We have to fend for ourselves, just as we were trying to tell you yesterday. People have always taken advantage of other people. It’s just that now they’re a lot less subtle about it.”
“So where are we going?” Marcie asked. Nobody answered for a long time. Finally one of the girls who’d already been in the car spoke up.
“I heard someone talk about a camp,” she said quietly.
“Oh, cool,” Kimmy said. “I always liked camp.”
“Not that kind of camp, Kimmy,” said Infinity. “At least I don’t think so.”
We rode the train without stop, without w
ater and without food for the next 22 hours. For a restroom, the girls found an old bucket in the far corner of the car and took turns holding an old blanket while whoever used it squatted in whatever semblance of modesty we could find. It wasn’t much, and the encouragement we felt as we saw how the people of Baltimore were pulling together left us as we wondered what would become of us.
Finally, late the next day we pulled into a depot and the brakes squealed to a stop. We waited another five minutes before a parade of men in gray uniforms took position outside our car. Someone rattled the lock outside, and then the door slid open with a clank.
“Out,” we heard simply, and one by one, we girls jumped down from the old cattle car. The men led and prodded us into a large room off the depot that had walls, ceiling and floors painted white. We stood on one side of the room, with the soldiers standing between us and the only door to the room. We stood there waiting for a long time before a heavyset but powerfully built woman entered the room. She was immediately set upon by a dozen questions from a dozen different girls. In response, she held up one hand for silence.
“I know you have many questions,” she said. “And there will be a time to answer those questions. But first, I have important but sad news to share with you.
“This morning at 4 a.m. a series of nuclear weapons were exploded along the Eastern Seaboard, stretching from Boston in the north to Richmond, Virginia in the south. The city you have just come from—Baltimore—has been obliterated.”
A gasp went out over the crowd.
“This was the concern we had when we put you on that train,” she continued. “The authorities were confident that a military attack would follow the EMP explosion two days ago, and it was imperative that we get some people out of the area of destruction. You young women—because you are future mothers and are nearing child-bearing age—were chosen to leave.”
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