What Came After

by Sam Winston

  She pulled on her cigarette and took him down a notch or meant to. Told him the problem was that there wasn’t anybody in the shop old enough to work on that equipment. The old-timey mechanical stuff without an interface you could plug into. That antique machinery. Looking at him like he was a relic of the deep past. An antique himself.

  He didn’t even notice. It wasn’t his way to notice but she didn’t know that. He was too busy thinking. He said he didn’t intend to stay around long, but if she kept her eyes open she might learn a thing or two. He’d show her if she wanted. Thinking as he said it that he could show Penny the same things one day, now that she’d be able to watch. Thinking that now that he’d given her a future he could give her a little of the past too. The knowledge that he carried with him. Feeling good about the future for a change and realizing it.

  The girl ground out the cigarette under the toe of her boot and picked up the leavings. Wadding the paper and carrying it to a trash bin a few steps away and coming back. Weller saying as she came, “The first thing you ought to learn is that tobacco’s bad for you.”

  “Come on. Nobody lives forever.” They were all tough around here.

  “Live forever?” he said. “You never know. Why take chances?”

  “You’re a fine one to talk about not taking chances,” she said. “At least I haven’t gone outside.”

  More people were entering the diner and more people were leaving and there was a little group of folks milling on the curb. People down along the way in the dimness of their porches lighting candles in jam jars and glasses. Setting up folding tables and dealing out cards. Weller said the candles looked nice and the girl said she hadn’t thought much about that since for the most part they just kept the bugs away. Weller said there weren’t bugs where he came from. There weren’t birds and there weren’t bugs because the whole world was sterilized. He said bugs were mysteries to him.

  She said, “If you show me what there is to know about that old tractor, I’ll show you where those bugs come from. Work starts at eight in the morning, but meet me here at seven.”

  * * *

  A cornfield. An actual cornfield under a yellow sun that blazed down through a rent in the roof that seemed just about the size of Kansas. An opening outlined with razor wire and what looked like electrified fencing but an opening nonetheless. Ripening green plants below it in long rows, tended by someone riding another cantankerous tractor. Different rectilinear fields surrounding this one like a patchwork quilt, ramifying out in all directions, teeming one after another with soybeans and potatoes and sorghum, green beans and red peppers and peas. Acre after acre of green in every hue. He thought he saw what looked like cotton in the distance and it probably was. Along one side were pastures fenced off for cattle and sheep, and there was dappled shade down there where trees grew, live oaks and maples and weeping willows clustered around irrigation channels dug to direct runoff. A vest-pocket apple orchard beyond that.

  Something buzzed past his cheek and he swatted at it.

  The girl looked at him like she’d told him so. She laughed and said her name was Janey. They walked through the field with their boots sucking mud and the tractor still coughing away in the middle distance. It crossed Weller’s mind to think Oates might push his luck and require him to modify that one too. He wondered how many more of them there might be. How many more tractors and what all else of that vintage. He hoped Janey turned out to have a quick mind, because it looked like he was going to need an apprentice who could take things over.

  In the shop they worked alongside one another but not together. Demonstrating things to each other when they could. Revealing secrets. Old magic on her part and older magic on his.

  Janey attended to a blinking screen in her bay, tuning up the engine of a rusted-out Volkswagen Beetle without so much as touching it. The car was a generation newer than the dull red one Weller had in Connecticut. Loaded with electronics. He watched the screen and imagined the numbers flowing between the car and the computer along those cables, thinking if he’d found a car this new up north he’d have never gotten it running. He’d have had to leave it at the dump. Thinking he was a creature suited to an older time and maybe a worse one.

  He showed her what a carburetor was. Going piece by piece through how these things actually worked. Where the fuel mixed with air and how you could tell a lean mixture from a rich one just by looking. This competent young girl who didn’t know a float pin from a ball joint. Weller took the tractor engine down to its bones and she marveled like this was something that had just now been invented.

  They talked about other things too. She said the drill they’d gone through yesterday was something that she and the other volunteers had run a million times. That drill where after the perimeter alarm goes off and you open up and it turns out to be just a regular person out there. What to do with him. It wasn’t as if the alarm ever went. It had gone only once before in her lifetime. But they drilled anyhow, just in case. Just in case it went and it turned out to be a regular person out there needing to come in. Needing sanctuary.

  Weller guessed she meant a regular person as opposed to some kind of armed force on a mission. He said, “I’ll bet you were glad it was just me.”

  She said sure.

  He said, “I don’t mean me personally. Just that I wasn’t some Black Rose squad. Like that helicopter you folks shot down way back when.” He fitted some modified parts back together but they didn’t go. It didn’t bother him. He kept at it slow and steady.

  She shook her head. She didn’t even look up from what she was doing. She said nobody ever shot down any helicopter that she knew of.

  He said this was before your time I’ll bet. It was just an old rusted shell. An old shell hanging from a tree a couple of miles north, just swaying back and forth in the breeze it was so light. So desiccated. The tree grown up around it and through it.

  She said it didn’t matter how long ago it was. She knew her history. Military history especially, which was big in Spartanburg. She said never once had they had to fire a single shot surface to air. Everything was electronic. Radio gear scrambling the signals that other radio gear relied on. They had a few surface to air weapons, sure—RPGs and a couple of old drones that ran on high-test gas and jet fuel they stockpiled in a shed down by the loading docks—but those were strictly for use as a last resort.

  In other words. she said, Black Rose never saw what hit them. Just zap. Zap and their screens went dark and their helicopter turned into a piece of metal in the air with noplace to go but down.

  Weller shook his head. What a world. He asked her where they did that kind of thing. Scrambling radio signals.

  She said the comm center. Communications. They had drills they did with the comm gear too. She knew all about it. She’d brought down a couple of hypothetical helicopters herself, if he wanted to know. They were all hypothetical now. You couldn’t prove by her that Black Rose even existed anymore.

  He said he hadn’t seen any comm center when Oates had shown him around. Hammering away while he said it. A little propane welding torch hissing and him tap tap tapping with a ball peen hammer on hot steel that he couldn’t get quite hot enough. His thick glasses glowing yellow and red from the flame of the torch. Back in his element.

  She said that’s because the comm center was off limits to pretty much everybody. There was a scanner at the door and it was tied to Oates’s brand and Marlowe’s brand and that was all. Oates let the team in for drills.

  She asked if maybe Weller had heard about that other fellow who’d shown up out of nowhere one time, and he said he had, that Black Rose scout, and she said right. They’d let him inside rather than leave him to die out in the world, and before they knew what he was up to he was trying to get into the comm center. Some kind of sabotage.

  * * *

  The counterman had mentioned the Garden of Eden, and he hadn’t been exaggerating. The food here was overwhelmingly good, and it was plentiful, and it was everywhere
for the taking. In the diner and in the grocery store across the street and at lunch counters set up where people worked. Heirloom tomatoes that looked monstrous and tasted like heaven, as opposed to the PharmAgra variety he’d gotten accustomed to at home. Out there in the world you could almost believe that the chief purpose of a tomato was to fit squarely into a carton for shipping. Here, in the absence the historical imperative that bent the natural world to fit the mechanical world, a carrot tasted like a carrot and an apple tasted like an apple and a roast chicken tasted like a roast chicken. Every bite came with its own little shock of long-delayed recognition.

  Nothing had a brand name, either, which took some getting used to. Nothing was vacuum-sealed and stamped with the PharmAgra logo. There were no labels glued to the apples and no brands inked into the fatty edges of the meat, nothing to reassure you that all was well, no proof that the bred-in poisons had been blasted or nuked or burned out via the proprietary techniques that gave PharmAgra such leverage in that other world. PharmAgra had beaten or bought every one of its competitors over the long haul, and out there in the Zone it was easy to assume that they’d triumphed on the basis of superior technology. Down here in Spartanburg, it was easier to believe that technology just got in the way. That it crippled people who depended on it too much.

  And it didn’t just cripple them the way it had crippled Penny, whose thin frame and freckled face and vague eyes he pictured with every bite of every meal. Had she been raised here, she would still be whole and perfect. There would have been no need for everything they’d been through. No need for her to undergo the struggle of treatment and recovery, no need for Liz to have left home to help, no need for this long journey he was on. Its endless struggle and its uncertain outcome.

  No wonder the people here were happy.

  When they spoke of Marlowe they spoke as of a generous deity, and when they spoke of his man Oates they sounded only slightly less reverent. Oates suffered under the burden of familiarity, though. He was a real human being with real human faults, an individual known witnessed among them on routine basis, and thus a figure less easily worshipped. Marlowe, on the other hand, had developed an air of mystery as the years had gone by. The old-timers who recalled the founding of this place remembered his many acts of vision and heroism and plain hard work. How he’d led his renegade forces all the way from Washington and Kill Devil Hills to Spartanburg, way out here in what was rapidly disintegrating into a no-man’s land of the mutated and the dead. How he’d realized his dream of preserving the simplest slice of old-time American life inside the walled security of a German automobile factory. How he’d bent his own back to the unrelenting work of tearing down and building up.

  His followers had both remembered these things and added to them, the way people will. Expanding them and elevating them and lifting them up rung by rung from fact to memory, from memory to history, from history to myth. And finally from myth to the untouchable realm of pure belief. Creating for themselves a structure whose sustainment no longer even required the presence of Marlowe himself.

  * * *

  People were leaving the library as Weller stepped out of the diner after supper on the second night. Not just a few people but a crowd. A mass of them scattering down the street and into the various houses and buildings and storefronts, slowly losing density as it went. Infiltrating.

  Weller recognized some of them as members of the team that had brought him inside and taken him off to be deloused. Young men and women with a certain military ranking, he guessed. The rest were older. Upstanding citizens. Pillar of the community types. Each one of them, young and old alike, had a scrap of paper in his hand.

  Everywhere these people went, others approached them and pointed to the papers in their fists and cocked their heads as they began to speak. Lifting up their eyebrows and pursing their lips and nodding. Weller watched the people from the library answer other people’s questions, sometimes referring to the papers and sometimes not. Gesturing with an upraised hand or running a finger beneath a line of words. He watched the others listen to them and he saw their eyes go big and their heads shake and he decided that he was witnessing the distribution of some kind of news. Looking back over his shoulder as the last of them came down the library steps and seeing Oates coming behind them. Oates not talking to anybody. Walking fast to the curb and jogging across the street with a vigor belying his years and disappearing into an alley past the town office building.

  Weller wandered through the crowd until he saw Janey at the center of a dozen people, a scrap of paper in her hand. “The bottom line,” she said, that old phrase still possessing some currency in spite of itself, “is that Colonel Marlowe has elevated the threat level from Four to Five. It wasn’t an easy decision, but it had to be done.”

  An intake of breath all around. An old gray-headed man saying that never in his lifetime had he seen a Five. An old gray-headed woman who was probably his wife saying good heavens this must be serious.

  “Marlowe?” Weller asked. “I’ve been asking to see him, and it’s like he’s a ghost or something. Was he at the meeting?” Thinking he’d missed his chance.

  “Oh, no,” said Janey. “He’s up in his quarters.” Indicating with her chin the town office across the street. Dark windows below and a light burning above, behind curtains. Marlowe up there all by himself. Maybe with Oates if Oates had gone in around the back. “It’s Major Oates who always does the quarterlies,” she said.

  “The quarterlies.”

  “The quarterly reports. The threat assessments.”

  “What kind of threats would that be?”

  “The usual.”

  “Give me a for instance.”

  “You’ve been out there. You’ve seen it all. The mutations. The contagion.”

  Weller thought of what happened to Penny’s vision, and of how enormous the burden of repairing it had been. A burden so great that nobody undertook it anymore. Nobody could, nobody dared, nobody even dreamed of it except for him. Henry Weller, the only poor man in the world who hadn’t given up. And even he hadn’t finished the job yet. “I’ve seen what there is,” he said.

  “Then you know.”

  “I know you’ve got reason to be happy here.”

  “Especially,” said the old gray-headed woman, just about pointing her finger, “with the threat level up to Five and all.”

  Weller paused. “What does that mean, exactly? Five?”

  “Five’s the top,” she said. “Five’s as high as it goes.”

  “So it can’t get any worse than a Five.”

  “God help us if it does.”

  “Because what then?”

  “Then,” Janey put in, folding the scrap of paper and putting it away, “we seal up. We close the holes in the roof, which means the crops fail. We can live on our stores for twelve months and not a minute longer, after which we have to open up again, hoping that everything out there has returned to normal.”

  “Normal being a Five or below.”

  “Five or below.”

  “How low has it gone?”

  “Three,” she said. “It was always Three when I was a kid.”

  “What happens at One?”

  “At One it’s over. We open the doors.”

  “But it’s never gotten to One.”

  “It’s never even gotten to Two.”

  * * *

  He finished the tractor in a few days and had it running at least as smoothly as it had ever run on gasoline. So he went to see Oates. Said he’d done his bit. Said he’d done good and valuable work that nobody else around here seemed to know anything about and he was happy to have accomplished it. He’d even shown Janey how it was done. He’d broadened her limited horizons and set her up so that with any luck she could carry on without him. “Now it’s your turn,” he said. “It’s time for you to go see Marlowe about my car.”

  Oates had his feet up on his desk. Sighting in between them. “I’m way ahead of you,” he said. “Been there, d
one that.”

  “Thanks.” Brightening.

  Oates shook his head. “Don’t thank me,” he said. “You’re not going to like the answer.”

  “How do you mean.”

  “Didn’t you get the memo?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “We’re at threat level Five.”

  “Meaning?”

  Oates picked at a tooth. “Meaning the boss says no.”

  “No.”

  “No. No car, no leaving the premises, no nothing. I can’t give you any access to the outside whatsoever. Too big a risk.”

  Weller standing dumbstruck. Thinking of those boarded and chained entrances. The loading dock doors welded shut.

  “Consider yourself lucky,” Oates said. “We opened up to let you in, but it’s just too damned dangerous to open up and let you out. You understand.”

  “No. Frankly, I don’t.”

  “You’ve been out there. You know how it is. I’m saving you from yourself.”

  “You’re not.”

  “Then I’m saving my people from your lousy judgment. From the things you’d have me expose them to.”

  “And what things would that be.”

  “Come on. Just because you didn’t run into them doesn’t mean you don’t know.”

  “Try me.”

  Oates threw up his hands. “Good God, man. All of it. Mutants. Infestations. Monstrosities of every kind.”

  “It’s not that way.”

  “And I’m supposed to trust you over Colonel Marlowe.”

  “It’s not that way. Truly it’s not.”

  “That’s comforting, coming from a fellow who’ll do anything for money. You’re as bad as Patterson.”

  “I’m no mercenary.” Taking out the photograph. The Polaroid that had been through the mill and looked a hundred years old. The image on it just a dream of itself. Carmichael’s signature gone entirely. He put it on the desk in front of Oates and held one finger on it and slid it forward. Saying, “I came because of her.”