by Sam Winston
* * *
Noon on the fourth day. North of Greensboro, with the tallest of her buildings just beginning to creep into view, he found the highway blocked entirely. Concrete barriers thick with lichen, and vast piles of broken roadway heaped up behind the barriers and crumbled and treed over, and behind the trees and screened off by them a chaos of upended shipping containers and gaping railroad cars and ruined automobiles all rusted into one solid thing. All of it strewn like the aftermath of some terrible accident except there hadn’t been any accident. This was willful. Man had done it. Weller climbed the barriers and stood among the young trees looking out over the sea of jumbled iron and thought Marlowe. Marlowe at work this far from Spartanburg. Wondering exactly how long it had been since Bainbridge’s men had seen this place from the air. They’d said years. They’d meant it. This cover of trees and underbrush hadn’t grown up overnight. This lichen that carpeted the concrete barriers. It all took time.
He’d have to go straight through Greensboro proper, so he got back on the Harley and turned it around and headed back for the last ramp. Thinking he might have difficulty spotting it and relieved when he didn’t. The directional sign had collapsed into the dirt on the shoulder and rusted down to nothing, but another smaller sign still advertised lodging and food and pointed which way to go for what. The Courtyard and the Hampton Inn. Burger King. Places that sounded like destinations in a foreign country. Places frequented by old royalty in a lost world.
The ramp was grassy and absent of trees and he took the long open curve of it down into a broad dry canyon of ruined commerce. Car dealerships and restaurants and grocery stores on either side of the road. Great square castles barely glimpsed through greenery, their broken signs reading Target and Staples and Petco where you could read them at all. He rode along under the trees toward the city, marveling that people had once been rich enough to have filled up these buildings with merchandise and taken it all back home with them at will. Filled it up again and kept on going. They had been royalty indeed. Kings and queens, and every last one of them gone now. Weller their poor bastard child, penniless and in possession of nothing. Not even their memory.
He pictured their children. Children raised up amid such impossible abundance. What were they like? How did they think? What did they know? They couldn’t possibly have recognized their privilege for what it was. Not when privilege was commonplace. It must have been an Eden of fine fat children as healthy as horses. Not one of whom would have known hunger for a moment. Not one of whom would have eaten something homegrown instead of storebought and paid the consequences. Not one of whom would have been given such a treacherous thing by her own unknowing father. It must have been a paradise.
The road grew more difficult. Greenery closed in again. He passed through intersections wider than any he’d seen before but still choked. Intersections wide enough for four cars in each direction. Roman roads. In some places traffic signals still hung overhead on long galvanized steel beams miraculously intact, but the beams were wrapped and enmeshed now with vines and branches and creepers. The road was straight for the most part and he checked his compass to stay oriented and he kept on, thinking to stay parallel to Eighty-Five. Stay on the commercial road or the access road or whatever it became and keep close to the highway and get back on it as soon as he could. Not that he was making any worse time down here than he’d been making up there. It was a strategic matter. A matter of principle. You could get lost down here even if he wasn’t lost yet, which he might have been for all he knew. He caught glimpses of the highway through the canopy of trees only now and then, and sometimes what he thought was the highway wasn’t the highway at all. Just some concrete building. The ramps of a parking garage. Keeping track of where he was going and where he wanted to go divided his attention, a thing that could get him into trouble faster than anything else.
An overhead sign with an arrow pointing to the northwest said Greensboro Commercial District but he didn’t follow it. He kept on for a mile or two until Eighty-Five swung west by a few degrees and the road he was on veered south and cut straight underneath and went God knows where. He didn’t like the look of the underpass either. He came close to it and stopped and switched off the Harley’s engine to save gas like always and he got out a map that he knew would prove useless. It’d have been one thing if he knew what exit he’d taken and could tell from that which road he was on, but he didn’t. Maybe someone in a Black Rose helicopter could have correlated the maze on the map to this deeper maze, but he doubted it. His natural impulse was to go back to that last intersection and follow the sign pointing toward the commercial district, but he didn’t. He needed to recon. A word he’d never even heard before Washington. His month with Black Rose turning out to be good for something. So he leaned the Harley against the concrete of the overpass and drove the tip of his machete into the ground and took off the heavy bandoliers and laid them on the saddle. Checked the pistol at his hip and shook out the map and folded it again into his pocket and found handholds and footholds in the vines meshed over the concrete and began to climb.
He was nearer the city than he’d thought. The vista from the high roadbed suggested he’d arrived in Greensboro without even knowing it. It wasn’t like any place he’d seen before. It was low-lying, for the most part. And small, at least compared to New York. Small but spread out in all directions including this one. The city becoming the suburbs and the suburbs becoming the boulevards of commerce. It was bigger than Hartford back home but not as dense. Empty, though. Emptier than Hartford, which got emptier every year but wasn’t quite empty yet. Greensboro was empty because nobody could live here. There wasn’t any commerce. There wasn’t any safe food coming in. The Great Dying that had winnowed down the population and left places like this unsustainable as markets. The few people to survive had moved out. Taken the last train or the last truck or gone on foot. In search of what, only they knew. Each other. Likeminded souls capable of building something up together. Only the most stubbornly individualistic of them could have stayed on once everything public closed down, once the cops and the firemen were gone, once the hospitals were shut for good, once the final delivery truck had dropped off the last loaf of untainted bread.
He checked his compass and studied the roads and when he had his bearings he climbed down. Got on the Harley and doubled back and took the turnoff for the commercial district after all, trading this maze for that one. Roads for streets and all of it green. The American South, recalled to itself now that there wasn’t even an America anymore.
* * *
Movement on a rooftop. He was certain of it. It wasn’t some branch shifting in the wind. There wasn’t any wind. The roof was four or maybe five stories up, although it was hard to say exactly how high the building was since the outside of it gave few signs. A church, he thought, or maybe a theater. He’d seen it for only a second as he’d passed through an intersection and the view to his right had cleared momentarily. A big building with a big space inside instead of regular floors with windows you could count. It was surrounded by other buildings of similar size or lower and there was definitely a church behind it with a steeple so maybe it was a church and maybe it wasn’t. The top was flat, so probably not. His mind ran. Whatever the building was, there had been movement on it. Definitely. A flat roof with a parapet at the edge and movement along the parapet like someone looking over and then ducking back down.
He kept going, his speed steady. He put city blocks behind him. Every inch here had been paved over with concrete and blacktop, and there was less of the jungle about it than there had been on the outskirts. It was a harder environment that had put up a better fight. A place without many footholds for nature. He drove on, feeling glad for the clear pathway and telling himself that he’d imagined that figure on the rooftop. Either he’d imagined it or else it had been some animal. Surely it wasn’t a man. He passed intact buildings and crumbled buildings one after the other, and he wondered why some stood and the rest fell. He
passed by buildings that had been dismantled for raw materials with some of the raw materials still piled in front of them. Iron beams and copper wire in loose coils. Wallboard and plumbing. Alongside one a midden of raw garbage, a great spreading heap of food scraps and bones and excrement and what have you. The tailings of something like civilization but he didn’t think about it. He was distracted by a figure going through the pile. Something about mansized and black and furred over. Something secretive that crouched as the Harley neared but didn’t hide itself completely, a simplicity about it that seemed like a kind of fearlessness. The fearlessness of a creature unaccustomed to man and untamed by him and thus unafraid.
Greensboro was a city taken over by bears, he decided. It must have been a bear he’d seen on the rooftop, and now here was another. They’d moved in when the people moved out. Bided their time and returned when the city had been empty for long enough and made of these concrete caves new caves of their own. He wondered how many there were. Hundreds maybe. Possibly more. He wondered how large a territory such an animal required and how much proximity to one another they could tolerate. Whether they had been out prowling by night on Eighty-Five when he’d been asleep in his hammock. Thinking he ought to sling the hammock higher next time, rig a pulley with some spare motorcycle parts and climb in and haul himself up just as high as he pleased. No sense making it easy for them. Not now that he’d seen how big they really were.
Which was when he hit the wire. It was strung tight across the road at chest height, heavy gauge copper wire salvaged from someplace, and it swept him clean off the motorcycle. The Harley kept on, tipping over and going into a slide and the engine slowing to an idle without his hand on the throttle anymore, momentum carrying it on down the empty street in a shower of sparks. Weller landing flat on his back and his helmet clanging against the machete and the bandoliers cutting into his shoulder blades. Nothing broken by how it felt when he rolled over onto his side and sat up a little. He was scraped and cut everywhere though, and the first aid kit lay open and scattered on the street with everything else that had come loose from the Harley. His pack burst wide and his gear strewn. One of the gas cans unlashed and crumpled and torn open, emptying itself onto the pavement. He came to his feet and heard the motorcycle coughing and saw the drive wheel rotating erratically and the front wheel crushed against a curb, absolutely beyond straightening. Turned away furious and despairing at once and rubbed at his chest where the copper wire had taken him and lifted his eyes from the street to find himself surrounded by men. Men wearing castoff rags and men wearing bearskins, primitive men looking hungry and desperate and ready for anything. Dead silent in a half circle.
The pistol held six rounds. There were that many men. He raised his hands above his head and they came toward him.
NINE:
The Approaching Storm
With his wrists tied behind his back, Weller was the only one who went empty-handed. The men mobilized as if they were used to this kind of work and he guessed they were. The way they’d strung that copper wire and waited for him to run into it. The way the one who looked like he might be the leader helped himself to the pistol and snapped opened the cylinder and spun it. Hunters. They’d seen him coming and they’d set a trap. They worked together silently now, and in a moment the street was picked clean. Everybody carried something. One of them had a rolling cart and the wrecked Harley went onto it. Two men to push. Nobody spoke. Nobody except Weller, who said go on take what you want and you can even keep the motorcycle it’s no use to me now. As if he would have any say in the disposition of his belongings. As if he were in charge. They didn’t so much as dignify him with a denial. The ropes cut into his wrists and they ignored him.
They took him to the building he’d noticed before. It was an old theater turned into a fortress. No windows at all, just a hole sawn through the roof to let in light. Late as the afternoon was, the light was dim in there but for a gleaming column in the middle full of dust and smoke. Most of the seats were torn out and the floor slanted down in the direction of the old stage and trash was piled high down there. Not piled exactly. Just come to rest. They came into the lobby through big glass doors. Two of the men staying out front with the Harley and three of them beginning to sort through his belongings on the moldy carpet and the last one, the one with his pistol, pushing him toward a narrow stairway going up. From a landing on the stairway he could see the auditorium below and a balcony cantilevered out. Scrap lumber nailed over the doorways that led onto it by way of precaution. Everything smelling of rot.
There was a fire going in the auditorium right under the ceiling hole and figures moving around it. Every now and then getting one another’s attention and pointing or jerking their hands in abrupt gestures as if signaling. Communicating without words. From this vantage he calculated that there might be a dozen people altogether, counting those who’d taken him. Mostly men and a couple of women. How they worked out that detail he didn’t want to know. There might be a child or two but it was hard to say. A dozen people living like animals in animal skins and their own filthy skins too, one as bad as the other. The man walking him up the stairs directed him through a small doorway and up a couple of steps and into the projection booth without saying a word. The booth had a heavy stubborn wooden door that opened hard and locked from the inside and the outside both. Some slots cut into it high and low for ventilation and a square window on the opposite wall that looked down. The rest of the room was raw cinderblock and concrete, unfinished and utilitarian. Trash everywhere and garbage decaying and decayed. Ragged bedsheets and rotten foam rubber on the floor bunched into a pallet that he couldn’t look at, and a teetering pile of old movies in steel cans rusted together into a leaning tower. In the center of it all was the big projector itself, an antique twice over because it had been old even when the theater was in business, two big vertical reels and a housing finished in pale green enamel and a maze of chromed metal parts. Thick with dust and black with soot from the fire they kept going down below.
The man with the gun pressed him to the wall face first and untied the ropes from around his wrists and backed out the door. Locked it behind him. Weller put his ear to the ventilation slots and listened to him go. The man muttering to himself as he went down the steps. Or maybe growling. Something low and harsh that didn’t sound like words. Not human words. Weller wondered if people could lose the capacity for spoken language. He thought that if it were possible it would take longer. Longer than they’d had. He thought it would take a few generations if it could be done at all. Talk was like machinery and the longer you were human the more complicated you made it, ideas getting more complex and words and tools keeping up with them. One feeding the other. Then again maybe these people had some mutation. It was possible.
He kicked his way through trash and squeezed between the projector and the wall to get near the square window, through which he could see everything below. He saw the fire going in the center of the auditorium and he saw something big roasting on a spit over it. Someone in heavy skins giving the spit a half turn now and then. A halfhearted half turn. The person was small and he figured it was a child but it didn’t move the way a child moves. It moved slowly and as if it were in some kind of pain that was offering it constant resistance. Like an old person, although how a person would get old out here he didn’t know.
The smoke from the fire burned his eyes and the scent from the roasting animal made his stomach growl. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast and he didn’t know when he’d eat again. Not with his supplies gone and the men from out in front of the theater bringing them in now and storing them among the various piles of wreckage and salvage and trash down there. His tent and his sleeping bag and everything else. Dividing everything up and distributing it all with the rest of the junk they already had. His pack and his satellite phone and his Black Rose rations. Arguing over one thing or another with their hands. He watched long enough to see the small figure give the spit another half turn and then he beg
an searching his own cell before the sun went down and the light died entirely.
* * *
The main thing was that the door opened in, so the hinges were on this side of it and he could get to them. They were rusted from a leak in the roof, but so what. He just had to find a tool. Something to work at the pins with. A spoon or a screwdriver or a knife or just about any stiff piece of metal that was flat enough and thin enough.
The problem was that there was nothing. Nothing made of metal but the stacked film cans and the projector and the hinges themselves. The film cans were too perforated with rust to hold up and the projector was monolithic and he got filthy hunting through the rest of the garbage. Bat shit and rat shit. Slime from the corpse of a possum or a woodchuck or something along those lines, a corpse whose bones were too weak and flexible to be of any use although he tried because he didn’t have any other choice. The leg bones were too fragile and the ribcage was too soft and the skull just crumbled. He stood against the door and watched the bits sift down onto his shoes. Dropped the skull and searched some more. In the gathering dark he blundered into an abandoned hornets’ nest and the papery dried mud from it stuck to the slime on his hands and his clothing and everything else. Got in his nose. If it had been a bees’ nest he could have broken it open for honey but not a hornets’ nest. A hornets’ nest was just an impediment.
He went to the window and watched the last of the light fade from the little circle of sky and watched the fire below take over. Its orange light rising and shapes flickering on the walls. Accidental shapes that lurched and wavered. Black shapes against black walls filmed with soot. He imagined how this auditorium must have been in the old days, the days before the collapse of the economy and the Great Dying and the exodus of the survivors from cities like Greensboro. When families would have come here in the evening and filled this place up and a different light would have flickered. A bright light from up here, making images on the screen opposite. He turned his head and sized up the projector, now just a scattering of little gleaming points and arcs reflecting the variable dark like the burnished weapons of a distant army, and he decided that one of those parts would have to come loose and serve his ends tomorrow. Wishing he’d started there instead of digging through everything else but knowing that he’d been reluctant to tear apart anything so beautiful and complete.
