What Came After

by Sam Winston

  Table of Contents

  Prelude: In The Empowerment Zone

  One: The Polaroid

  Two: The Shelter

  Three: The Tigris and the Euphrates

  Four: The Driver

  Five: One Police Plaza

  Six: Some People Wait Forever

  Seven: Make Straight in the Desert a Highway

  Eight: Old Royalty

  Nine: The Approaching Storm

  Ten: Salted Earth

  Eleven: The Garden of Eden

  Twelve: The Coming of the Fall

  The Author

  PRELUDE:

  In The Empowerment Zone

  “Close your eyes.”

  But the boy looked. At eight years old, why not? At eight years old, he hadn’t seen anything.

  And they passed by torchlight, adults and children. Not one of them was old, for nobody out here got old. Nobody got old in the cities either, in New York or Washington or Los Angeles, but it wasn’t like this. In the cities people stayed young for years, young for nobody knew how long. It was out here in the Zone that they decayed and died. Died without even aging. Without the dignity of it.

  “Seriously, son. You don’t have to look.”

  But he did.

  And they passed by torchlight, this parade of the fallen. Walking if they could. On homemade crutches and in wheeled chairs and stretched out on the low beds of wagons.

  “We’ve done our best for them. You know that.”

  The boy nodded. The boy who couldn’t take his eyes away.

  “Once they’ve reached this point, it’s just too late.”

  And they passed by torchlight and by lamplight and by no light at all. Some with extremities intact and senses working and no visible signs of their inward troubles. Help us, their presence said, and See what you’ve done. And You have a duty to make this right.

  “Live and learn,” said the man to his son. “You are what you eat.”

  ONE:

  The Polaroid

  A howling drew them to the road. The high-pitched wail of air horns dopplering in the distance, beyond the derelict town and beyond the cultivated fields and beyond the thin margin of trees. One by one and two by two they appeared on the roadside, moving hesitantly but with intent, their heads cocked. Shy of the traffic. Their workday done, they were mudstained and boneweary and they came from the woods like a vaporous army roused up against its will. Moving toward a yellow car that had come to rest at the edge of the highway.

  They’d never seen anything like it. A big SUV slumped on the shoulder with its engine going and a little exhaust shimmering out of the tailpipe and the front end collapsed down onto the gravel. Tilted forward like an animal feeding. The SUV was bright yellow, the color of panic, and it drew attention. Trucks careening around it into the left lane, avoiding it and avoiding whoever might be behind the wheel of it. Some dangerous lunatic, out here unauthorized and probably unbranded. The truckers were old timers on old time CB radios, giving one another the heads-up and wondering over the air what might be going to happen between that stopped car and those ghostly figures now coming from the treeline. But not stopping to find out. It was none of their business and they had schedules to keep.

  Only trucks from National Motors used this road. The company owned the highway and they owned the trucks that traveled on it and they owned the security that kept order even though there wasn’t much call for security. The trucks were their own security. The need for them that no one would deny or disrupt. Not even out here in the no-man’s land between New York and Boston, so deep in the Zone that the cell towers and the power lines had long ago been taken down for salvage. Imagine the industry and daring of bringing them low. The muscle and the risk and the sheer courage.

  The trucks rolled on. There was nothing to keep these ragged figures from converging on the broken car.

  * * *

  People inside it. A man and a boy watching them come. The man cut the engine and pressed the button to lock the doors but the circuit needed power so he started the engine again and pressed the button again but it turned out the doors were already locked. His mind wasn’t working right. The boy beside him taking an old Polaroid camera from the glove box and unhinging it and holding the lens up near the window. Tinted glass blocking a good deal of the light and the man saying, “That’s going to flash and wash everything out.”

  The boy not listening. The boy not caring.

  The man saying, “You don’t need the flash,” and wondering where he got the clarity of mind to say it. To focus on such a small thing while these people were edging toward his car and himself and his son. Advancing like an army of insects or ghouls. Some of them with mismatched limbs and strange sprung gaits and some of them with faces twisted like old burled wood but most of them just worn out. Broken by time and labor. Worn out but coming.

  With the engine off, the interior warmed up fast. The yellow sun beating down on that yellow car. He had half a mind to turn the engine on again for the air conditioning but he didn’t. The boy kept scrambling around trying to get the right angle on the scene outside and he said to his father, “Gee it’s hot in here,” and the man said, “Tough it out. Those people never had air conditioning and I don’t see them complaining about it.”

  This is what had become of their adventure. Anderson Carmichael and his son, bound for Boston from New York. Just about the richest man in the world doing it the hard way because he dared to. Any other man of his standing would have teleconferenced or flown, but not Carmichael. Call him eccentric. When you’re poor you’re odd but money makes you eccentric. Money buys you better words for things, and he had money. Money for this car, for example. The last of its kind anywhere. A yellow Hummer of all things.

  There’d been a day when just about anybody could have owned one, but that day was gone. Before everything collapsed, any working man in America could have bought one at zero percent interest for five or six years. Just sign and drive. Anderson Carmichael’s bank had ended up holding the paper on most of those loans by the time they’d all gone south. But that was just paper and this was a car and it was the only Hummer left in the world. Not that it was a particularly good example. It wasn’t top of the line or anywhere near it. Just a cheap H3 with a cloth interior, not much of a step up from a Chevrolet if you could get your hands on a Chevrolet that ran, which you couldn’t. But nobody else had one. That was the thing. That was the reason they were out here on this adventure to begin with. Out here in what used to be Connecticut. The Northeastern Empowerment Zone. Now if only the damn thing hadn’t broken down.

  The boy settled on a vantage point and pressed the big button on the Polaroid and sure enough it flashed. The man put his hand over his eyes and said, “That’s not going to come out,” and the boy ignored him. Watching the big white square feed out of the camera. Blinking his eyes from the bounced light and waiting for the picture to materialize.

  * * *

  A burst of light from inside the car.

  They drew nearer and surrounded it up close. Exactly enough of them to do that and no more. Waiting for a gap to open in the traffic and moving in, a wall of them, and then bending as if they had one mind. These people who labored side by side every day of their lives, the lame and the sound together, lowering themselves with their backs straight and their knees bent and straining all at once to lift. They picked up the SUV with Carmichael and his son inside it. Ants with the weightless husk of a bumblebee. Two and a half tons of solid steel set moving. They didn’t know who was in the car but they knew it was somebody. Somebody important. Ownership. Capital O. They didn’t take the car any great distance, just off the shoulder and down into the damp swale at the edge of the woods out of harm’s way. One last truck wailing past on th
e highway with its air horn fading out to nothing and one more flash from inside the car. Just that one burst of light and dim figures moving through smoked glass and then nothing.

  They set the car down and backed away. Some of them wiped their hands on their pantlegs and one or two pushed at their lower backs and blew out air and winced. Most of them just stood in a rough circle waiting for a sign. Anything at all. Any sound or movement.

  Inside the car they waited as well. Waited for whatever these people meant to do, until it became clear that they meant to do only this. To perform this service. At which Carmichael told his son to stay right where he was, and unlocked his own door, and got out.

  At his appearance, they collapsed to their knees.

  * * *

  In the end there was nothing to do but go where you were invited and where you were made welcome, no matter how little you liked it. So it was that Carmichael and his son came to witness that long slow passage of the suffering, of those damaged by life in the Empowerment Zone, of those who had eaten the wrong things and suffered consequences beyond the imagining of whatever God had created them.

  Beyond the Zone it was different. In the cities Ownership made the decisions and Management looked after the details and there was plenty of credit to go around. Credit to buy food grown out here under PharmAgra licenses and trucked south to PharmAgra factories for irradiation prior to sale. Green beans and asparagus and squash and corn, sealed up airtight and shipped down south to have the poisons burned out. Straightening the crooked genes that kept off the bugs and the mold and the disease. Making it all safe for human consumption. A miracle of science.

  Out here in the Zone, people got desperate. They didn’t always have the money to buy back what they’d grown with their own hands, so they ate untreated food that they had no claim to or else they ran risky experiments of their own. Going back to nature. This was the result. Damage that passed from generation to generation. Father to child.

  Carmichael sat on a pile of metal scrap like some reluctant caliph. The president of AmeriBank and the very definition of Ownership if Ownership needed a definition. Nothing but a silvery metallized blanket between him and the world. His son at his side. The two of them eating for supper the things they’d brought with them from New York, delicacies refrigerated in the cooler built into the SUV. Fresh fruits and vegetables from distant blue islands remote as Eden, islands dotted about the Pacific and shielded around by gunships in ring after bristling ring. Preserved meats straight from the fabled stockyards of Chicago where men still butchered cattle fed on real grass in certain sectors of the Midwest. Walled sectors where undoctored grass still grew free or at least free enough, provided you had the means to acquire a leasehold.

  A man stumbled against the scrap metal pile and the boy jumped. Dropped his fork. The man was blind and he tracked the fall of the fork by the sound it made. He stopped and bent double at the waist and retrieved it, and then he pulled himself upright and held the thing straight out. An offering. Smiling sweetly and saying, “What’s your name, child?”

  “Peter,” said the boy. Reaching toward the upraised silver until his father stopped him.

  The man just stood. Arm out and trembling. “Peter,” he said. As if he’d learned a secret.

  Carmichael spoke to his son. “You tell him he can just hang onto that. It’s solid sterling. Not plate. We don’t use plate.”

  “Many thanks, Peter,” said the blind man. Rubbing his thumb against the family monogram cut into the handle. “Solid. I could tell.” Raising the tines to his pale tongue and licking them clean. “Many thanks to you as well, sir.” He bowed his head and moved on.

  * * *

  They spent the night in a borrowed farmhouse. More like commandeered. Darkness and dead quiet all around. No trucks on the distant highway and no insects in the tall grass and no creatures scrambling through the underbrush or calling from among the trees. The lack of sound made an unearthly void, although it wasn’t so unearthly anymore. A normal night on a poisoned earth.

  To the boy it was a source of terror. He had never heard such silence in the city. Not even in the high walled nighttime precincts of Central National Park, where his father had taken him on another of their adventures. It was closed at night and they had it all to themselves. The park preserved such wildlife as had once made New York its home. Coyotes and alley cats and field mice. Cockroaches and crickets. A tiny tattered population of scavenging pigeons that flapped like rags against the wire mesh that overarched the compound. To the boy’s innocent ears, that small wilderness had been a roaring arena where a million blood contests took place at every moment.

  This was different. This terrible silence. It made him claustrophobic and self-aware, it filled his head with the sound of his own blood, and he wanted to stopper his ears to keep it out.

  He was alone in the bedroom and his father was in the front with some people. The people talking low and his father listening. He’d left the boy alone hours ago, after trying the satellite phone one last time and reminding him that a Black Rose team would be on the way before long. On the way to pull them out. Extract them, he’d said. Using that military term. They wouldn’t just send little bitty choppers either, but those big Hueys and Black Hawks they kept for real emergencies. The ones that no eight-year-old could get enough of. Wasn’t that right? Maybe even that twin-rotor Chinook they had down in Washington under glass. What did he think of that? The office would wait twenty-four hours and they’d decide something had gone wrong and they’d send Black Rose after them. Guns blazing if necessary. Wouldn’t he like to see that? Sure he would. That’s what they paid that Black Rose retainer for.

  His father had said there were a half-dozen radio tracking devices built into the SUV, as if that yellow paint weren’t enough to get their attention. You could practically see it from outer space. “So don’t you worry about a thing,” he said.

  But now his father was gone and the boy was alone. Poking at his throat with one finger, trying to locate the brand that had been implanted there the day he was born. The brand was a transmitter too. It wasn’t long-range, but it might help. If these people cut the Hummer up into a million pieces and Black Rose couldn’t find them and he and his father were at the end of their rope. Out here in the Empowerment Zone, where anything could happen.

  He lowered himself out of the bed and crept to the curtain that hung across the door and listened. His father humoring a handful of locals. The truth was they sounded pretty polite out there in the dim front room. Taking turns. He held his breath and put out one hand and drew the curtain back no more than an inch and looked. A half dozen of them on the floor, squatting or on their knees. His father on a wooden chair. There were five other chairs around the kitchen table but those chairs were empty and everybody else was sitting on the floor so his father would have the highest place.

  Kids he knew in the city had a name for the people out here—Zoners—but what did they know? They’d only heard about them secondhand. They hadn’t seen them right up close the way he was doing. As far as he could tell, at least when they weren’t suffering from bad DNA or malnutrition or something else you could see from the outside, they looked like regular people. People who knew their place in the world.

  One of them was talking the most. A little man no bigger than a child. No bigger than Peter himself. He was stunted somehow. Down there kneeling on the floor, a little beyond the reach of the candlelight from the table, he almost disappeared. He was broad in the shoulders and sinewy from a lifetime of hard work, and he twitched as he spoke. Animated against his will. Moving from side to side on his knees, and his arms waving. He was talking about a man he knew. A man named Weller. The mechanic, he called him. He said Weller could fix anything and he could fix that SUV if he got the chance. Get them on the road again right away. Call off Black Rose. Save Black Rose for more important things.

  Carmichael nodded and said that was fine. No doubt the little man was correct. No doubt this Weller of th
eirs was a highly skilled individual. All the same, he was extremely fussy about who touched that car of his. It was among his most prized possessions, and that was saying something.

  The little man jumped to his feet and caught himself and kneeled back down again and begged Carmichael’s pardon. He said he hoped not to offend him or to press too hard, but Henry Weller wasn’t just anybody. Henry Weller had a gift. The way he said the word made it sound religious.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Carmichael said. “And I’ll consider your recommendation very carefully.” Anybody could have heard the finality in his voice. He tilted his head down in the lamplight and set his voice lower and told the little man that he ought to put Black Rose out of his mind if that was what had him so keyed up. Whispering to him like you’d whisper to a baby. Saying he hadn’t meant anything when he’d mentioned Black Rose. Not anything that he and these other nice people needed to worry about. They should think of Black Rose as they’d think of the fire department, rescuing somebody from a little trouble they’d gotten themselves into. That’s all. As simple as that. He said the words fire department as if these people had ever had a fire department. As if these old houses of theirs wouldn’t burn straight to the ground in a heartbeat with nobody prepared to do a single thing about it.

  The boy let the curtain close and went back to bed but didn’t go to sleep. When his father came in later he asked him about what he’d heard. About the man who could fix the car. His father shook his head. “Don’t pay them any attention,” he said. “These people believe all kinds of stuff. Plus they’ll say anything.”

  The boy asked him why.

  “To get a little bit of what we have,” he said. “Something to make them more like us.”

  “You’d pay him though. You’d pay him if he fixed the car.”