What Came After

by Sam Winston

  “Of course I would. But I know these people. He can’t fix the car. I don’t want him fixing the car. I don’t even want him touching it.” He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and told him to go back to sleep. “Don’t listen to them, son. That mechanic of theirs. The miracles they say he can do. It’s just an old wive’s tale. You’ll learn for yourself soon enough. People who are afraid will believe anything.”

  * * *

  Carmichael awoke to the sound of a hammer. A high ringing, steady and insistent, metal on metal. The blows had a machine regularity to them except for the way they stopped and started and stopped again. Coming and going through the trees from off in the direction of the highway on a fine light breeze from the south that pushed the window shade back an inch and set it bumping. He sat up and shook himself and groaned. Groaned and stretched and realized. There was only the faintest gray light coming through the window. Hardly anything at all. People out here didn’t begin working until the sun was up. They couldn’t.

  It was that mechanic. Damn him.

  He let Peter sleep and went out, following the sound toward the woods. Hearing people rising inside other houses and smelling the smells of cooking and listening to the sounds of talk. He kept going past where the houses gave out and walked across a cultivated field with his shoes sucking mud and entered the little woods. The hammering got louder but still had that little thoughtful pause now and then, and he went through the woods and came close to the far edge of it and the hammering stopped and he stopped too. Saw the car propped up in the mud on a jack with boards under it. Saw a man drawing himself out from underneath the car, wet mud from the wet ground streaking his back. Weller, the mechanic. In one hand he held the hammer and a bent iron bar with a hole in each end. With the other hand he was slipping something into his pocket. He stood looking at the car. The car and the ground it was sinking into. Rapt and greaseblack and concentrating hard. He slung the hammer into a loop on his coveralls and held the bar out against the horizon. Running his thumb along the top to gauge the bend in it. Cocking his head.

  “Get away from my car,” said Carmichael.

  Weller gave him a slow look, letting his eyes adjust to the distance. He wore a thick pair of horn-rimmed glasses, third or fourth or fifth hand, things that had passed more than once through some Lions’ Club donation box back when there’d been a Lion’s Club. Back when there’d been lions. He gave him a slow look that was adjustment and appraisal at the same time and after a minute he nodded once and he stepped backwards. Slow. Like it had been his idea. Nothing to it. He was just leaving anyhow. He had work to do.

  * * *

  The boy was gone when Carmichael got back. He wasn’t in the kitchen, and he wasn’t in the bedroom, and he wasn’t anywhere. His father felt the bed and it was warm. He tried the outhouse but the outhouse was empty. The boy was gone and it wouldn’t be long before Black Rose lifted off from New York and how would they know him from anybody else. A little kid like that who could be anybody. Goddamn it. The town couldn’t be that big. He’d find him.

  * * *

  Peter had woken up alone and explored the house and gotten hungry. There were familiar cans on the kitchen shelves but no way to get them open that he could find. Boxes and bags with familiar labels but no way to reconstitute what was inside them. No way that he trusted. He’d been brought up suspicious and it served him well. Looking at the faucet and picturing drinking the water from it raw and imagining the kinds of things that would happen next. Horrible things. Things he’d seen by torchlight the night before. Worse things if worse things were possible.

  There was still food in the cooler in the back of the SUV but he wasn’t sure which direction the highway was. He was disoriented because they’d come to the house in the dark, and he didn’t want to get lost. So he set out straight down the street that fronted the house, figuring he’d come to the end of it and then decide what next. Be methodical. Ask somebody if somebody showed up. Or else he could just keep turning the same direction at every corner he came to, as if he were in that maze he’d read about with the torches burning and the thing that was half-man and half-bull chasing after you in the dark. That maze in the story. You couldn’t get lost if you kept turning the same way. You could only get out.

  The town was bigger than he’d thought. Maybe more than a town. The street he was on didn’t seem to end, running on and on through cross street after cross street, the houses along it taking on variations he hadn’t expected. Brokenbacked lean-tos and rusted sheetmetal sheds and tumbledown duplexes leaning into each other, half against half. A couple of tall brick buildings that looked like apartments but were empty. Commercial buildings too. Vacant storefronts. Blackfronted offices with the windows knocked out and the terrifying mouths of underground parking garages. He kept going. People were waking up in the houses and cooking and talking to one another in a hundred different voices. Men were coming out front doors and coming out shed doors and coming out underneath moldy sheets of blue plastic nailed up over holes in plywood walls, entering into the day. Looking at him the same way they’d look at any boy.

  He walked on. Up a long hill with a grassy yard gone to dirt along one side of it and a big mansion sitting up on the hill past the yard. Stranded there like it was beached. Rotting down to a cage of bone. He kept walking until he saw the gray rooftops of a ruined city in the distance, and then he stopped and turned back. Whatever fields and woodlands stood along the highway weren’t in this direction. He went all the way back to the house where he’d started and past it. Keeping pace with more men walking. Men coming out of houses and gathering in little groups to pause and talk and smoke and walk on together. The farms must be this way. He was learning.

  He walked past a corner lot with an old service station set back in it and sounds of work coming from inside. He drifted across the broken pavement. Drew near. Looked in through the one raised overhead door with the words Mechanic On Duty! painted across the lintel and saw a man at work. A welding helmet on his head and a leather apron going from his shoulders to his knees. Greasy coveralls underneath that, workboots scarred and cut raw, and big ruddy leather gloves insulated against anything. The man was hunched over a Franklin stove salvaged from someplace. It glowed around its edges with a red light and it gleamed blue inside. He had one of the double doors open and he was pushing something inside of it around on a grate over the blue flame. Tapping at it. Turning it and studying it through the welding helmet and lifting it out with tongs. Kicking the door shut and hollering at somebody behind him in the shadows to stay clear and aligning the hot thing he’d taken from the Franklin stove on the flat top of a big iron block. He hammered at it with a kind of brutal delicacy, the blows ringing and the metal sending off sparks that flew out the door and either vanished into the air or slipped into the cracks in the broken concrete. Running into those cracks and down along them like water and dying.

  The boy was enchanted. He watched as the man sized the metal he’d been hammering and grunted some sort of rough satisfaction toward it. Watched as he snapped his head backward to raise the helmet’s big pitted visor on its hinges and kept watching as he plunged the worked metal into a bath of water that boiled and steamed and sighed and finally grew quiet. Wondering how much heat the metal might hold even now. Wondering when you could touch it again if you ever could.

  The man’s thick glasses were fogged over and he didn’t see the boy and he didn’t see the boy’s father when he came. Careening around the corner and spying the boy and launching himself across the lot to embrace his son and squeeze him tight for protection or punishment or both. Probably not making any distinction between the two. Carmichael looked up from his knees and saw the man with the iron bar raised up for appraisal and the raising of it could have been a threat, some territorial maneuver not quite comprehensible from this side of those fogged glasses, but it didn’t seem that way.

  “Tell you what,” said the mechanic to no one but himself. “I think we’ve just about got
it licked.”

  “Got what licked?”

  The sound of Carmichael’s voice surprised the mechanic, and he slid his glasses down to see. One fingertip of his glove leaving a crooked black trail along the bridge of his nose. He set down the bar and saw Carmichael kneeling there on the pavement and looked at him the same way he’d look at anybody. Unsurprised. “That little problem you’ve been having.”

  “With the car?”

  “With the car.” The way you’d say it to a well-meaning idiot. Like what other problem was there.

  The bar was still smoking and the water bath was still steaming and the Franklin stove was still glowing, blue inside and red outside. Carmichael studied it. “That’s not a wood fire you’ve got going in there,” he said. Not a question. He wasn’t accustomed to asking questions. He knew everything.

  ‘“No sir, it’s not. It’s natural gas all the way.”

  “I’ll be.” Carmichael shook his head. “Where would somebody get natural gas out here?”

  “I don’t know where somebody else might get it,” he said. “Me, I get it from the dump. I pipe it in.”

  “The dump.”

  “The dump. The garbage dump. Anaerobic decomposition. If you wait long enough, all kinds of things will turn into gas.” He reached behind the stove and turned a valve and the flame died.

  “I’d forgotten that,” said Carmichael. As if he’d ever known. Rising to his feet to reassert his position.

  “I’m not surprised you’ve forgotten,” said Weller. “People have forgotten a whole lot of things.”

  * * *

  Behind the shop was the house and behind the house was a leaky quonset hut full of machines. A ruined wonderland brought back to something near life. Old tools restored and new tools invented. A dozen pumps and engines in various stages of restoration. A handbuilt gasburning generator piped into the same cobbled line as the Franklin stove, making electricity to run an air compressor and drive a handful of scavenged power tools and heat water for the house. A water tank on the roof to pressurize the plumbing.

  Like everyone else in the cities, Carmichael had heard stories about the wonders and oddities to be found out here in the Zone. Wonders and oddities and terrors too. But he’d never heard the first suggestion of anything like this. Nobody’d heard of anything like this. Gas power and hot water and rudimentary sanitation. All of it, old technology and new, made to rise up and walk by one man.

  What looked like a boarded-up greenhouse was attached to one end of the quonset hut, with pipes from the rooftop water tank going down into it. Rusted now and disused. The greenhouse glass painted over. There was an actual Volkswagen in the far corner, a dull red Beetle with a convertible top, underneath a plastic tarp to keep off the rain. Judging by the tire tracks coming in from the dirt yard, Weller had had it running. Imagine that. Where he’d gotten gasoline was a mystery of its own. MobilGo still had plenty of gas, but most of it was tied up in National Motors contracts. Once upon a time the federal government had investigated those deals, and there’d been hearings and lawsuits and at the end of it MobilGo had had to keep its stations open and sell gasoline to private citizens. But that was fifteen years ago now, back when there’d been a federal government. Here they were not even halfway into the century yet, and so much had changed.

  Carmichael rushed to the Beetle and lifted a corner of the tarp. Weller barked at him to leave that alone and Carmichael did as he was told. Laughing at being given orders. Thinking this mechanic might deserve a chance at fixing the Hummer after all. So he played along, smiling and raising his hands before him like a person up against a bandit. Saying that’s some car, is all. It really and truly is.

  He asked Weller where he’d gotten the gasoline to run it, and Weller said that was the problem. You could scavenge the dump for what might be left in old plastic gas cans and the tanks of lawnmowers and what have you, but it never added up to much. A dribble at a time. And what you got hardly sparked. He said he couldn’t imagine filling the tank of something like that Hummer and just driving. Never mind getting access to a National Motors highway. A real highway going somewhere and you on it.

  Carmichael had to admit that he was a lucky man.

  Weller showed him around the rest of the place. He gave most of the tour with a little girl riding on his shoulders. His daughter. She was five years old, but compared to Carmichael’s son she was tiny. Not skin and bones tiny, but tiny in the way of something magical. Exactly as large as she needed to be and no larger. Skin like milk. Dirty blonde hair cut by her mother on the run, looking like a raggedy cloud in a high wind.

  Mainly, though, she was all eyes. Wide eyes blue and deep and springfed. Eyes hungry for something not yet seen.

  Her name was Penny. Penelope. It was a lot of name for a girl that small, and no one used all of it. From up on her father’s shoulders she looked down at the boy with a patient wonder that soon revealed its true self. She was going blind. It was plain from the way she turned her head and studied him. Studied him as they made their way through the quonset hut, pausing here and there and the light shifting so she could make him out better and then worse and then better again. She studied the boy so as to put him together from pieces she could gather up one by one.

  Gather up and keep, because even at her age she knew that she had to collect these treasures or lose them.

  Weller brought them back through the house and into the kitchen to meet his wife, Elizabeth. Liz. He stooped and put Penny down on the countertop where she sat content, running a toy truck over her knees. Peter looking at her up there, wishing her down on his level or below it.

  “Liz,” said Weller, “these are the folks whose car broke down.”

  Carmichael put out his hand and said his name. Syllables to conjure with all the world over, but not here. Not in this house. He introduced his son to better effect. The woman bent and put her hands on her knees to study him closer, and after a moment she decided he looked hungry.

  He certainly was, but he didn’t say. He just turned to his father, who looked at the thinly stocked shelves and glanced toward the vegetable bin and saw the familiar PharmAgra label. PharmAgra that had engineered the treacherous genetics inside just about everything that grew anymore. PharmAgra whose wheat-stalk logo meant reassurance.

  “If you’re offering to make us some breakfast,” Carmichael said, “we’ll be happy to accept.”

  The boy stiffened. Cast a look at Penny sitting up on the counter, Penny running her fingertips over the truck to know it better.

  One bite. God knows. That might be all it took.

  Carmichael leaned and took his son by the collar and got up close to him. “Go wash your hands now,” he said. And then, softly and rapidly enough that only the boy could hear, “It’s OK. We’ll get ourselves scanned in Boston first thing. Just in case.”

  They sat. All of them together around the table and all of them at the same level. Weller on one end and his daughter on the other. The boy held his breath to see such disrespect unfold and waited to follow his father’s lead but his father didn’t complain because what would have been the point. Weller was a man who’d achieved something. Carmichael could understand that. Let this be a lesson.

  Weller saw to it that his wife and daughter got served first and then his guests and then himself. He blew across his coffee cup and said he’d only need a few minutes to put that sway bar back into the SUV now that he’d straightened it out and tempered it properly and reamed the holes at each end back into round. Said he’d had to remove a pair of bolts to get it clear in the first place and neither one of them had been in any hurry to come loose, but he’d soaked them in penetrating oil and cleaned them up good and now they’d go right back on no sweat. Everything would be good as new. Carmichael and his son could be on their way as if nothing had ever happened.

  Carmichael said he guessed Weller had earned the right to finish the job after all.

  Weller nodded. He hated to see a beautiful piece of machi
nery like that out of service for no reason.

  Carmichael said he owed him a debt. Said he’d never thought he’d say it, but there it was. He owed him a debt.

  Penny sat at her end of the table all by herself, not eating much, her occluded vision lending her wandering gaze a kind of grandeur. There was enchantment in her eyes, as if she were seeing a world that no one else could see and not seeing the regular one. Her mother indicated her and looked at Carmichael and said, “Just don’t get the idea that my husband never makes mistakes.”

  Carmichael wasn’t stupid. That abandoned greenhouse. Of course. Leave it to Weller to try restoring that technology too. No wonder it was painted over and boarded up and rusting to pieces. No wonder the girl’s father himself sat unmoving now at his own end of the table, a bite of toast cold in his mouth, looking and looking out the window through those inscrutable glasses. As if he’d lost something.

  * * *

  They went down the street and through a couple of empty lots and across a field toward the trees and the highway. Like it was an outing. Liz choosing a path through the high grass and the little girl on her father’s shoulders carrying her toy truck in both hands. Peter balancing the black iron bar over his shoulder with the authority of a duelist. Carmichael bringing up the rear and Weller waving his arms and gesticulating with every step he took, talking as if he meant to describe the operation of every last thing in the universe to anyone who would listen. Every last thing, from the stars on down.

  In the roadside swale he took tools from his pockets and asked Peter for the bar and dove under headfirst. Asking if anybody wanted to join him for a look around but nobody did. Nobody wanted a lesson in automobile repair. Nobody trusted that jack. He didn’t stay under for long. The work went fast. He kept talking most of the time, naming parts and criticizing their manufacture and calling out ideas for improvement that he could have seen with his eyes shut. He said it was a wonder the suspension had lasted this long. That antique Volkswagen of his would beat it in a fair fight any day of the week. He asked what the world had come to, and nobody had an answer.