What Came After

by Sam Winston

  Hardly, she said. She’d never been branded at all, and it was the only kindness ever done her by PharmAgra. An accidental kindness at that. They had shown her the door just as they were showing others the knife. She recalled seeing her old labmates at the gas station and the grocery store during those first few weeks, when the surgeons were at their busiest. Seeing them marked. Their necks bandaged white. Each of them proud of having been singled out, and each of them reluctant to meet her eyes.

  She remembered paying with plastic in those days, showing identification and signing here, while the others kept their heads high and presented their necks to the scanners that appeared everywhere. Assuming that haughty stance. She remembered watching them and paying with plastic and then paying with cash and then not being able to pay at all. Using food stamps until food stamps gave out. And finally this. This experimental station built of refuse and earth. Out here in the Zone.

  * * *

  They went to the dump. Just the two of them. “No limits,” Weller said. “I want you to imagine how anything here might help, and then we’ll work toward it.” There were treasures everywhere. Washers and dryers. Stoves and microwaves. Dish antennas and aluminum siding and fleets of rusted bicycles all tangled up. She settled on a gas range and a chest freezer, fire and ice, refusing to hold with any particular convention as to how the world might end. The freezer was going to need electricity and the gas range was going to need gas but Weller had promised. He located some old generating equipment and some welding gear with a tank still half full and he brought men to haul it all back. He paced off the distance between the tobacco field and the landfill and drew up plans for a gas installation like the one he’d built at home and set people to work gleaning iron pipe for it from the fencing they’d stockpiled. Had them sorting it by length and fitting it together and digging a trench to bury it in. Sank collection columns and gave welding lessons because he couldn’t stay forever.

  Penny went to school and she loved it. It occupied her entirely, her mind and her heart and her imagination. She was a natural. Only at night did she miss her mother, only at night in the lamplit underground where she kept her father company, watching him work and helping him where she could. Holding a light maybe. That flashlight from the bunker. It was cold until he got the generator working again and hooked it up to a space heater that hadn’t ever run before and the temperature finally began to rise. Things starting to dry out.

  They slept side by side on a pallet, beneath a low ceiling with roots reaching down. Clusters and strings of shallow roots and runners entwining themselves with the salvaged barn timbers, all of it combining into one unmovable thing.

  Patel herself slept behind a curtain. She had made do this way for all these years. She needed nothing, or at least nothing that she could obtain here. As Weller drifted toward sleep he whispered to his daughter, and his daughter whispered back, and behind her curtain Patel couldn’t help but overhear. She hadn’t slept right since Bangalore.

  An hour before dawn he came awake and lay listening to Penny breathe. Wanting to be up making things happen and wanting to be on his way to New York and wanting to stay right here with her in this moment of darkness and hope. Calculating how long he might delay getting her seen by a doctor in return for helping build a world where mutations like hers might never rise up again. Imagining the other children to be saved. The potential children. But unable to put them over his own daughter for long.

  * * *

  He was on his knees in a ditch, checking welds on a length of pipe, when footsteps startled him. Two men with oversized backpacks and weary postures and steady gaits, coming through the high grass. Two men worn out with traveling. He hailed them and asked where they were bound as if he had the right to ask, and they looked at him the very same way. Suspicious men in a suspicious world. He could be anybody. They asked what was he doing here.

  He scooped sweat from inside his thick lenses with a dirty finger and looked up at them and said in case they hadn’t noticed he was installing a gas line and they said oh is that what that is. They’d thought it was just junk lying in a ditch. Ha ha ha. The two of them adjusting their shoulder straps and moving on. Saying good luck with that. The undiluted arrogance of the man of the world, the man connected to nothing.

  He climbed out of the ditch and followed them back to the compound. In spite of their weariness they moved along with the steady rhythm of machinery. Into the culvert and through the long darkness and up again into the sunlight. Mud on their feet and mud on Weller’s feet. In the tobacco field no one paid them the least bit of attention. People bent over plants or tending low fires or working looms. People grinding vegetable compounds into paste between stones in support of Patel’s work. People cutting iron pipe in support of his. One by one they looked up at the travelers and looked away. Weller followed anyhow, along the rows and down the ramp into Patel’s lab. They knew exactly where they were going.

  She greeted them and they laid out the contents of their backpacks on her worktable. Money first, of course. Cash. A sheaf of tattered old U.S. greenbacks and AmeriBank scrip mixed together. The colony’s cut. She laid a hand on it and said they’d come just in time. She had to get a supply run under way and back before the fall closed in. They’d have trouble making it through the winter otherwise. The two men nodded their understanding. The filthy pair of them standing there like heroes, smiling through grime. She riffled the bills and cocked her head and said were they sure this was all of it. She said it seemed low.

  They said no, that was all.

  She said don’t make me count it. I don’t have all day.

  One of them smiled at the other one and then at her saying he thought maybe they could part with another hundred just to show how much they cared.

  She said make it two. Two hundred.

  The second one said one-fifty but only because we love you. Teasing her and teasing out the money like this was some game. Weller watching from the bottom of the ramp and hating them for working her over and wasting her time.

  She leaned on the table and said all right, before we settle on a number let’s see how much you love me to begin with. And then she counted the money. Not just once. Twice. Making them wait while she did it and making Weller wait if he cared to see how this turned out. Maybe doing it for his benefit. He didn’t know. Putting the dollars in one pile and the scrip in another and scribbling out a calculation based on the exchange rate between the two. Last thing she knew scrip was going for almost double what the old currency was.

  When she finished she said to hell with that one-fifty they said would make up the difference. Unless they’d given her tobacco away, they owed her another five hundred and that was being generous on her part. Even if they had given it away. She didn’t want U.S. dollars either. She wanted another five hundred in good solid AmeriBank scrip. They weren’t the only runners in the world.

  They said four and she said five. They could find another source if they wanted.

  They said all right five. Five just because they loved her.

  She said she knew they did. She had known it all along.

  * * *

  The rest of what they’d spread out on the table was a varied lot. Tools. Knives and a file and some wirecutters. A tin of multipurpose oil and a couple of empty flasks bound up in rags. What looked like medicine, tablets of some kind in a plastic bag and dark red fluid in a bottle with an eyedropper in it. Patel went over these and counted them off on her fingers against some mental list and asked about a few things that were missing. Things she needed. The men didn’t have them but they had plenty of excuses instead. Places they hadn’t been able to get to and people they hadn’t been able to see. Short supplies and bounty hunters. She said never mind. She’d go to some other source. They didn’t argue. She counted out a little money and said there would have been twice that much if they’d gotten everything she needed and they didn’t seem to feel any regret over it. They just shrugged, as if to say let somebody else take ca
re of the details. They had troubles enough of their own.

  At the far end of the table they had left some burlap sacks and bundles, rough fabric tied up roughly. When Patel was finished with everything else she turned her attention to these. Took a scalpel and slit the packages open one after another. Vegetable material packed solid inside each one of them. Weller was no expert. It was all just leaves to him. Leaves and pods and fibrous stalks in various stages of drying or decay. Everything labeled on little paper cards half rotted themselves. Smaller bundles inside the bigger bundles with seeds and seedlings separated out, clumps of delicate threadlike roots wrapped in some kind of moss and kept damp. The way Patel looked at them, Weller could see that the rest of the world had fallen away from her. She was beyond happiness or astonishment or delight or any other possible reaction. Picking up the labels and holding them out at arm’s length where she could read them and putting them back down again. Fingers flying from one sample to the next and lingering there for no more than a few seconds before passing on. Ideas forming in her mind. He could see them coming together. She raised her head and noticed that the runners were still there and she dismissed them. The only word for it. Dismissed them like subordinates who’d been waiting upon her word. They left. Weller stayed.

  She took a bundle of glassine envelopes from a drawer and began parceling out some of the samples into them. Writing on the envelopes with the nub of a crayon. Rapid little flicks. Weller looking over her shoulder and after a few minutes hazarding a question. “So it’s not only wheat, then?”

  No. It wasn’t only wheat. And this little compound in the tobacco fields wasn’t unique, either. There were others elsewhere. The Midwest. The West. The South. Hidden places like this one set back from the roads, and even more deeply hidden places where there were no roads at all. Isolated outposts where research and development went on night and day, season after season, research and development whose goal was to recover the world as it had once been. To reverse time and bring back the dead.

  “These runners, then. They’re—”

  “Only incidentally. Truth is they’re in it for the money. They don’t care what they carry. It is risky, though. These samples are worth a whole lot more to my old employer than every single leaf of tobacco we’ll harvest this year. They’re world-changers. Fortunately, there isn’t a market for them. If one of those fellows got caught, though, or turned them over to PharmAgra, it wouldn’t be pretty.”

  “There wouldn’t be a reward?” Thinking of the bounty hunter.

  She laughed. It struck him that he’d never heard her laugh before. “They’d take him to pieces,” she said. “They’d move heaven and earth to find out where he’d gotten this stuff. Waterboarding, the whole works. And once he confessed, they’d kill him. I know these people.”

  “Cheney all over again.”

  “Nobody forgets the good old days, do they.” She was holding up a glassine envelope to the light that came streaming down the ramp. Everything else having fallen away.

  “You do all of the lab work right there?”

  “Most of it.” The envelope held a damp tangle of sprouted seeds. “Soy beans from Pennsylvania,” she said, tapping on the glassine with a finger. “They’re getting close. Not close enough, but close.” She put down the envelope and sighed. “I guess you know about close enough.”

  Weller sighed too.

  He went out and saw the two runners sitting on a dirt berm with a couple of other men he knew. Loading up their packs with bricks of tobacco and filling water bottles and getting ready to go. It made him long for the road himself. For the road and for what lay at the end of it. Penny healed and the both of them home. Liz.

  * * *

  He dug in and persevered for as long as he could. Another week of breaking his back and passing on what he knew and getting the trickiest parts of everything nailed down. Drawing plans for others to follow. When he was satisfied enough but not entirely satisfied he knew the time had come to leave. He stocked up for the trip to New York. Food and water and clean clothes for both Penny and himself, washed by somebody else. Somebody else doing their part.

  Half of him wished that he could go home for Liz right then and bring her back and dig themselves a hole and settle in. In a place like this where people worked together toward something. But no. Not with Penny the way she was.

  At the end Patel slipped him a bundle of cured tobacco leaves pressed flat and wrapped in aluminum foil against the weather. She tucked the bundle into his pack and said, “This is worth more to other people than it is to you. Don’t spend it all in one place.”

  He followed Penny out. He let her lead, because she knew the path from going to the schoolhouse and she was proud to be able to show it to him. They said their goodbyes and lifted their packs and went across the tobacco field toward the culvert. Heading toward no-man’s land but some distance to go yet. The sun just coming up. Penny chirped at him and something buzzed in his ear and he slapped at it and pulled back his hand disbelieving. He told her to stop for a minute. Knelt down beside her and said, “Look here, honey. Have you ever seen the likes of this? And what’s next? Birds, maybe? Give it time.”

  FOUR:

  The Driver

  They left the farms and the rolling hills and the distant emptied-out suburbs, creeping down mile by mile into a denser world of broken concrete. Not all at once but little by little. Moving into it as it moved into them. It was a hollow place devoid of people and empty of their recent signs. Commerce and residence tightly packed together and no more of either one remaining. Weller held tightly to his daughter’s hand as they walked, helping her when she stumbled over cracks and curbs and heaved-up places where the annual cycle of freezing and thawing had rippled the streets of the old densely settled towns and commercial strips and industrial parks. Heaps and valleys of blacktop, like little mountain ranges thrown up.

  It was areas like this, thickly populated stretches along the outskirts of the cities, that had died the slowest. The old mythical megalopolis that ran from Washington to Boston, the tightly packed suburbs of Chicago, and the freeform sprawls of southern California. In the beginning, people had come here to be close to the cities, to partake of what the cities offered them in the way of work and riches and culture, but when the economy fractured fully and the cities turned their backs they had nowhere to go. No jobs and no savings and no hope.

  Some stayed put, and when the price of food soared beyond reach they cultivated their own little yards and windowboxes with seeds that they’d saved and dried and pinned their hopes upon. Knowing what they knew about genetically altered PharmAgra stock but hopeful nonetheless. Others moved outward, fleeing to the countryside for the plainer life it promised. In either event the results were the same. You never knew what treacherous homegrown unprocessed food might be lurking in plain sight, either in your own kitchen garden or on some farm stand table. Take and eat and die uninsured, or risk watching your children die the same in a few years. Soon the hospitals were overwhelmed and soon after that they were shuttered, because there is only so much charity in the world.

  By and by the farthest suburbs and country towns closed ranks, shunning outsiders who arrived without the skills that they had come to prize. Mechanical aptitude. Physical strength. Plain endurance. People sold off what land they had to PharmAgra and signed PharmAgra contracts and turned their full attention to the soil again, with the kind of focus that comes only from desperation. Sharecroppers raising poisoned plants and selling them under contract and buying them back again sterilized. Which left outsiders, those who had once believed in their own potential to rise up and those who now believed no more, to suffer and weaken and perish. The time of the Great Dying. At least here in the North some survived, for there were cities to supply. The South was different. The South took it harder and the South died faster. Ruined not by aggression but by neglect.

  Weller and Penny walked on. Over collapsed highways and around treacherous sinkholes and across wide inter
sections dotted with cars and trucks that had been left where they stood when the last of the gas in their tanks had run out. Rusted hulks propped on bare axles in little shining pools of shattered glass. They walked down railroad tracks and through switching yards jammed with railcars of every description, most of them lived-in at one time or another but all of them empty now. Weller telling his child that once upon a time people and goods had ridden these rails to pretty much everywhere. Children have big imaginations but she couldn’t imagine that.

  They heard Ninety-Five before they saw it. The familiar roar of trucks, echoing down these empty canyons. The land was flat here, flatter than back home, and the road was elevated. They saw it first from between rows of buildings that might have been either commercial or industrial, it was hard to say. There was no indication other than a number of scarred places high up on certain walls where signage had been taken down a long time ago. Salvaged for glass and metal and plastics. Plastics that had become as precious as gemstones for a little while, back when the factories that made them were closed for good.

  * * *

  Every National Motors highway had a checkpoint every fifty miles. More regular than the old rest stops had been and existing for a different reason. There was nothing about them of rest or convenience. Just a McDonald’s counter and restrooms with one or two shower stalls smelling of bleach. A single diesel pump out front. Otherwise it was all company business. Scanners and cameras and men with guns. Building these checkpoints out here on this regular plan had been trivial once the suburbs were empty. Zoning. There wasn’t any zoning. Not in the Zone.

  They drew near to the highway not far past a checkpoint and walked along on the southbound side for a little, hearing the trucks rumble overhead, watching for a place where they might find access. A grassy berm leading up. Everything was fenced. National Motors fences with that big red star logo. Weller found an accessible place just far enough from the checkpoint but not too far, and he scrambled up with Penny right behind him. He knelt by the fence to open his bag for the wirecutters. One eye on the road. The spot was narrow and Penny stood beside him and a truck appeared in the distance and they dropped down flat in the tall grass. Invisible enough, since the truck didn’t slow or stop or sound its air horn. He got to his knees and put out his hand to steady himself on the chain link and as he touched it voltage ran through his body. Not enough to kill anybody but enough to discourage an ordinary man. He sat dazed. Shook himself. Told Penny to go back down into the swale. Wait there. Don’t touch anything. Then he cut strips from the blue plastic tarp for insulation and doubled them over and doubled them over again and used them to grip the wirecutters. There was still current coming through, but not so much. A buzzing. He made a line of cuts and turned to look at Penny looking back at him. Trying to. He was certainly just a blur against the sun. Her own father just a blur. He turned back and made more cuts and pushed the fencing back and called her up and had her hug herself and put her through. The needle’s eye.