by Sam Winston
Oates picked it up. Saw the faded traces of a blue sky and green grass. The yellow Hummer and the two fathers and the two children. Smiling, all of them, out there in the world somewhere.
“That’s my daughter,” Weller said. “She can’t see very well, and that fellow there is getting her vision fixed right now. Real doctors and everything. No expenses spared. I said I’d bring him back a car in payment.”
Oates looked quizzical. Opening his drawer and taking out a magnifier. “This is your daughter?” he said. “The one looking off to the side?”
“Yes sir. She began losing her vision the minute she was born.”
“That’s a very sad story.” Looking through the glass.
“I’ll tell you what, though,” said Weller. “That’s the kind of mutation you’ll find out there. Little children going blind. Not monsters. Just little children like Penny. Damaged by what grown-ups have done to the world.”
“Really.” Putting down the glass and reaching into the drawer again. “Little children,” he said. His hand coming back with something silvery in it.
“No matter of what you think,” Weller said, pointing to his daughter, “regardless of what you’ve told yourselves, that little girl right there is the reality.”
“Not according to Marlowe it isn’t,” said Oates. In his hand was Weller’s old Zippo. He spun the wheel and touched the flame to the corner of the Polaroid, which went up instantly. Vaporized. Oates letting it go and then just sitting there with his pistol in its shoulder holster. Smiling and waiting for him. Daring him to contradict the accepted wisdom.
* * *
He vacillated between cursing Oates for burning the picture and telling himself that it didn’t matter. That he didn’t need it anymore because he’d be back north soon. Back north delivering the ransom and taking Penny and Liz home where they belonged. All he had to do was find where they kept the cars and get one running and hit the road. Steal it right out from underneath them since that’s how it had to be. Oates could burn anything he liked. He could but the whole place down if he wanted and everybody in it, if that was what it took to sustain Marlowe’s lie.
Once he freed himself to begin looking, the cars weren’t hard to find. They were impounded together in a concrete lot thick with weeds, out where the outskirts of town would have been if there’d been a town. Near where they’d come off the line and not far from the loading docks. Past a grassy lot where kids were playing a game of softball in the light that died early inside these walls. The boy at home plate sizing up a pitch and swinging for the bleachers if there’d been bleachers and the ball arcing into ironwork overhead and bouncing and clanging around scraping loose rust and falling back to earth close to where Weller stood. He caught it and tossed it back overhand like he was some kind of natural. His youth returning. Even his feet feeling better. Every particle of him invigorated now that he was through depending on somebody else’s promises. Now that he was back to relying on himself one hundred percent.
The cars were beautiful. Sleek and smooth and darkly gleaming. Some of them wrapped in clean white paper like the most elegant of gifts, each glowing in the gathering night. There were probably a hundred of them altogether, row after row, two or three different models by the look of it. He walked among them, a countryman moving among cattle, and he dared not touch a single one. Not until he’d found the one he was after.
It was almost dark by the time he saw it. The X9 he’d been sent for. In this light he thought it was black and it would turn out that it wasn’t but it was close enough. A kind of dark bloody maroon. It was smaller than he’d expected. Not like that big Hummer. Sitting lower than the Hummer had and lower still on tires that had gone flat years ago. There was something feline about the shape of it. Leaning forward like it wanted to run. A white paper sticker still hung inside one rear window with a price printed on it representing more money than would pass through Weller’s hands in a lifetime. Ten times more. A hundred. He opened the door on the driver’s side and the change in air pressure made the white paper came loose and flutter down. He picked it up and began folding it over as a souvenir, and it crumbled in his fingers. Brittle where he creased it and falling apart. Weller deciding he didn’t need a souvenir anyhow. Not with Penny and Liz waiting at home. Then he popped the hood and took a look to see what he was up against before the light went out for good.
* * *
They’d wheeled in a huge water pump for him to work on the next day, part of the sanitation system, and Janey was helping. He gave her chores that kept her busy while he slipped away on vague errands, pretending to go measure something or consult with somebody while he was actually ransacking back rooms and storage areas for wherever it was they’d put the batteries belonging to the cars in the lot. The batteries and whatever else he might need. By and by he found everything, stored away on pallets and shrink-wrapped in clear plastic, gathered up and fitted together and entombed like the treasures of some pharaoh. Everything was grouped and tagged by serial number. Manuals and empty batteries and shipping instructions. Brake fluid and transmission fluid and motor oil. Keys and remotes and touch-up paint in little vials, along with carpeted floor mats and fancy spring-loaded trim pieces that he didn’t recognize and didn’t care about. Thanks to Janey, he’d already scoped out the shed where they kept the high-test.
For the next couple of weeks he worked two shifts. By day in the shop and by night in the lot. He used borrowed tools and worked by the beam of a flashlight, propping it on an oil can or holding it in the crook of his arm or gripping it between his teeth in the time-honored way of mechanics everywhere.
Whenever he got the opportunity, he brought equipment he’d need for the trip north and stowed it away. Gas cans and water bottles. Cartons of food that would keep. A chainsaw and a hand axe and a short-handled shovel. He liberated a couple of mounted tires from another car of the same model and tied them to the roof, and one night he labored for seven straight hours with a hand pump just airing them up. Seeing Penny and Liz in his mind the whole time, there before him in the dark. He didn’t finish even then, but he had to get back to the shop for the start of the workday.
He never told Janey what he was up to. He just let her believe that maybe he’d found the same kind of sanctuary here that everybody else had. That he was happy to have come in from the cold. That he might never go back.
When he was finished, when he’d topped up the reservoirs and gassed up the tank and adjusted the brakes and charged the battery, when he’d checked and double-checked to make certain that he’d followed every step in every manual he could get his hands on, he got in and put the key in the ignition. Dawn just beginning to gray the sky above the ballfield. He sat in the driver’s seat with the door open listening to something chime. A soft insistent tone like a bell telling him to close the door but he didn’t close the door. He sat with one foot on the concrete and the other on the soft gray carpet watching the sky turn the color of a pearl and seeing lights coming on someplace down a little lane past the ballfield where people lived. People waking up and going about their business. Watching the signs of their lives such as they were and thinking he was almost done. Thinking this was it. There’d be some fine-tuning maybe but that wouldn’t amount to much and then he’d just load up the car and vamoose. Sitting there half in and half out of the driver’s seat, watching the sky and watching the lights and picturing the acetylene torch that he’d hidden underneath the car, the tanks and the hoses and the protective helmet lying there just waiting for him to cut open one of the loading dock doors.
But the engine didn’t start. All he got was a low ticking sound from under the hood and a sequence of images on a big bright screen mounted in the dashboard. A picture from the backup camera mounted in the rear, and some words scrolling past about a hands-free cell phone connection, and then a long series of numbers in some hexadecimal code. An error message never intended for human eyes, streaming past and past and past.
* * *
&nb
sp; “I need your help,” he told her. As much as it hurt to say so.
Janey stood silhouetted in the door of her little apartment. Soft lights inside and music on low. It looked like the kind of place where a person could live his life and grow old and not have too many regrets about it. A world of its own inside another world of its own. Janey’s world inside Marlowe’s world.
She looked at him and saw his need. The weariness he’d been covering up in the shop all week and the abrupt failure that had just now followed it, both of them conspiring to bring him low. She asked what she could do.
“It’s the car.”
“No.” Slumping against the door.
“It is.”
“I thought you’d given that up.”
“I didn’t. I found one. Oates wouldn’t give me one but I found one anyhow and I’ve been working on it. The problem is I’ve gone as far as I can go.”
“You can fix anything.” Kidding him and not kidding.
“I can’t fix this. It’s got one of those screens. Digital stuff. It’s beyond me.”
“Then maybe you’d better just let it rest.”
“I can’t.”
“Let it go.”
“No.”
“It’s a terrible world out there and you’re not meant to go back out into it.”
“It’s not terrible and I am. I’m meant to go back. I have to.”
“There’s a place for you here.”
“No”
“You’re crazy.”
“No.”
She stepped back and made to close the door. If she didn’t help him, no one would. He’d be stuck here. “It’s not worth whatever they’re paying you.”
“It’s not about what they’re paying me.” Weller stood outside the doorway wishing he hadn’t trusted Oates with the picture. Thinking that if he were going to tell the truth to somebody, he’d picked the wrong person when he’d picked Oates. It was too late now. “Look,” he said, “if we can get into that communications center, I think I can show you something you won’t believe.”
“What would that be?” she said.
“The reason I’m here.”
Her whole frame went slack. “I know why you’re here.”
“Right. I came for a stupid car. But there’s a reason behind it and it’s not money. It’s not anything like that. It’s my daughter.”
“Your daughter.”
“My daughter and my wife. Oates won’t let me go back home to them.”
“Your daughter.”
“I wouldn’t do this for any other reason. She’s in a hospital in New York.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re insane.”
“I’m not.”
Janey stood up straighter. “But New York’s gone,” she said.
“No. It isn’t gone.”
“It’s infested.”
“It’s not.”
“It is. It’s infested with mutations and worse. The new breeds. The ones that won’t die and the ones that can’t.”
“No. None of that’s true. Its all fairy tales.”
But she knew her history, or what passed for history here. “Come on,” she said. “Everybody knows New York was the first to fall.”
“It didn’t fall. And if it’s infested with anything, it’s infested with rich people.”
She cocked her head.
“Nothing fell, Janey. It wasn’t like that. Everything just kind of gave out. Ran out of steam. Except in some of the big cities. They’ve still got everything there. Everything that everybody used to have. Telephones. Telephones with pictures, which is why I want to get into the comm center. You can hook us up.”
“I don’t get it.”
“My daughter. My wife. They’ve got a phone.”
“In New York.”
“Yes. In their room at the hospital.”
“You’re imagining things.”
“I’m not. It’s all true. A phone with a television screen, and I’ll bet you can hook into it.”
“If you’re not crazy, that is. If they’re actually out there.”
“Oh, they’re out there.”
“If they are, then I’ve been lied to my whole life.”
“You have.”
“Which would make you the first person who’s been straight with me in forever.”
“I’m sorry. Somebody had to do it.”
“It’s a pretty big if, though. But I guess we’ll find out.”
* * *
Since no one ever got in to see Marlowe anyway, they figured they didn’t need an appointment. They didn’t even need to wait until morning. The town office was just on the other side of the street and they slipped across and tried the door. Nothing. There was a little white card faded to yellow in the window with the word HOURS printed on the top of it by what looked an old typewriter, but if there were any actual times written underneath that they weren’t visible in this light. The light from the mercury vapor lamp down on the corner. Just houses beyond here under the lowering gradient of darkness and those all buttoned up. People inside them settled down in their beds.
Either there was no light upstairs where Marlowe lived or else the shades were drawn. They saw a dim light burning somewhere in the depths of the office, but it was so small and so faint that it probably signified nothing. Just a night light chasing off the darkness. Marlowe was an old man at least Oates’s age and Weller pictured him creeping down here in the dark after something he’d left behind and relying on that little glow to find his way. They went around to the back and saw through sheer curtains the same dim light the same distance away. Apparently in some alcove or passageway near the center of the first floor. Its solitary glow was the grandest thing in the world to Weller. An electric light burning with nobody around to do anything by it. Nobody reading or working or whatever. Just a light. Turned on and waiting.
The rear door was locked just like the front. There was nothing back here in a residential way, just an alley leading someplace dark, and from this angle the houses on either side weren’t really houses at all as much as bunkers without windows or any other kind of opening, so they just started knocking on the back door. Politely at first but then with more urgency. Making noise. Standing on the stoop and using their fists on an old wooden door with a window in it. There was a bicycle leaned up against the wall and Janey said that’s Marlowe’s bike right there. That’s how he gets places.
Weller didn’t care about any bicycle. He just kept hammering on the door.
Janey frowned through the glass and said, “The problem is he isn’t always here. He goes out some. He has to.”
“He won’t go anywhere at night. He’ll be here.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t mean just out. I mean out. Like outside.”
“Outside? I don’t think so,” said Weller. “You know the latest. Opening up is against Marlowe’s own orders.”
Holding up a hand to make him stop pounding on the door for a second. “Maybe for you,” she said. “Not for him. He goes out for recon. Those reports we get.”
Weller looked down at the bicycle with its fenders rusted out and the chain off and hanging down. Drooping down pooled in the dust. He started hammering on the door again.
Janey said this is no good. How about we go see Oates.
Weller said no. We’re going straight to the top if we’re going anywhere at all. Knowing there was no way Oates would let him into the comm center. Not after he’d burned that picture. But there was still a chance with Marlowe. He pressed her aside with one hand and elbowed the windowpane hard and the glass shattered. He reached in through the mess and turned the knob.
The downstairs was one big rambling kind of old-fashioned office with indoor-outdoor carpet and steel filing cabinets like anywhere municipal. Chairs on casters and stacks of paper on tabletops and a map on the wall like the map of a city. Drawn by hand and marked up in colors that all looked more or less gray. In one
room was a big iron desk with nothing on it but a blotter and some pens in a cup. A big leather chair behind it. The carpets hadn’t been vacuumed or swept or whatever they did to them in a long time and there was dust on the tabletops kind of white behind the white curtains.
The little light they’d seen was in a narrow stairwell going up into blackness. That same gradient of light shading off and dark taking over. There was a rope across the opening with a wooden sign on it that Weller couldn’t read because the night light was behind it. He guessed it said PRIVATE and he unhooked the rope and let it all fall. The hook clattering on the stairstep and the sign bumping the wall. He called Marlowe’s name up the stairs and nothing came back. He found a switch that turned on the light on the landing and they went up.
* * *
He was just an old man.
Just an old man in a bed.
That was all.
His voice still had some power in it though, and when the bedroom door came open he said, “Major Oates?” The words not loud but abrupt. Clipped. He was not hoping for an answer but demanding one. “Major?” Growing impatient.
The low sound of a compressor in the room. Light leaking in around blackout shades lowered down past the sills and a solitary red glow alongside the bed. One little red LED in the dark and an old man’s wracking cough. Marlowe collecting himself and speaking again, wetly this time, “Major Oates, what time is it?”
Weller didn’t approach the bed. He stayed close to the wall, feeling for a switch. “It’s after midnight,” he said. Then, finding a table lamp on a bureau and running his hand over it for a switch, “I’m not Oates.”
The man in the bed was withdrawing into himself when Weller got the light on. Recoiling from the light and from whoever had switched it on. Wound up in his linens and receding deeper into them, he looked to Weller like nothing so much as an insect suffering under the influence of some poison. A delicate larval creature heartlessly exposed to sun or salt. Weller came near and Marlowe pulled away but a thin plastic tube held him. A tube stretched between him and the compressor. He was tangled up in it and Weller saw it pull away from his nose and catch around his ears and bend them downward. Pitiful flesh speckled and fishlike. Marlowe gasped for air and Weller kneeled and put the tube back into his nose and he gasped some more but with an end in sight. Slowing. Calming but still withdrawn into his linens. Janey watching from the door.
