What Came After

by Sam Winston

  Marlowe opened his eyes wide and fixed them on Weller. Eyes pale as blue milk. Saying what more do you want. Pausing for a ragged breath. His eyes swimming. Saying I already gave it to you.

  Janey cocked her head in the doorway.

  Weller saying what did you give me. What did I take.

  Janey stepped into the room. “He thinks you’re somebody else,” she said. Looking past Weller at Marlowe as at some truth revealed.

  Weller spoke to her without turning. “I don’t know who.” Then to Marlowe. “What did you give me?”

  No answer.

  Abandoning that. Asking instead, “How long have you been here? How long have you been here like this?” One hand on sheets that were anything but clean.

  Marlowe sucked air through his nose.

  “In this bed, with the oxygen and all.”

  Marlowe looked up at him like a man with no use for time or its passage and no means for describing it. He opened his mouth and one word came out. Oates.

  “I’m not Oates. Jesus.” Throwing a look back over his shoulder at Janey, saying, “Oates told me this place runs itself and I guess he wasn’t kidding.”

  Marlowe lifted a hand and poked at the side of his neck. Fingering a scar just above the gray collar of his shirt. His long nail like a talon grazing it and a sly look growing in his eye, accumulating there. Weller reached over and touched the spot and although there was a hard ridge of scar tissue on the loose skin there wasn’t anything else. There wasn’t anything beneath it. Marlowe lifting his chin and Weller taking the flesh between his thumb and his finger and finding nothing. An empty socket. Marlowe with that sly look like he’d fooled him. Saying, “I gave it to you already.”

  “I didn’t take your brand,” said Weller, looking him in the eye, “but somebody sure did. How come is the question.”

  “The comm center,” said Janey. “That Black Rose scout from before.”

  “Oates said he’d gotten smart. He told me not to do the same.” Letting go of Marlowe and Marlowe’s head drooping.

  Janey reminded him. “He went there to sabotage us.”

  “Maybe not. Maybe he just wanted to call home. Maybe he wanted to make a point to somebody. It could be that he wasn’t Black Rose any more than I am. Maybe all he wanted to do was prove to somebody that there’s a whole different world out there.”

  Marlowe’s head was on his chest. Sunken down into that sunken cage. The oxygen compressor humming away and the old man fast asleep once more.

  “And you think Oates didn’t want him to.”

  “It would be the worst kind of sabotage, as far as Oates is concerned. I get the impression that he likes things just the way they are.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “Me.” Weller rose and went to the door and Janey got there before him. “You might not either, if you’ll give me a chance to prove it.” He switched off the light and they went down the stairs and out the back door. Out the back door and into the night. But not to the comm center. There was no getting in there now, not with Marlowe’s brand missing. They went to the car instead.

  * * *

  But they didn’t go straight. They stopped at the workshop and picked up some portable equipment. A diagnostic scanner that ran off batteries and a handful of adapters for it and a long cable that Weller looped around himself. “There’s some kind of hands-free phone setup in the dashboard,” he said. “You think you can tap into that?”

  She thought maybe she could if she could get the car going at all. Hurrying along under the weight of the scanner.

  The fields weren’t much out of their way and they stopped for provisions. Zucchinis and green beans and ripe melons heavy with water. Sweet corn and red potatoes and summer squash shaped like something a child would have drawn with a crayon. They filled burlap sacks they found between the rows and Weller took off his shirt and buttoned it up and used that too. Saying we’ll need all we can carry and Janey saying what do you mean we.

  Weller said, “I thought you’d want to go out and see the world.”

  She said she’d help him get the car running and she’d help him find a way out if he was so crazy about going, but that was it.

  He said what if we get Penny and Liz on the phone.

  She said we’ll see. Like she was his mother or something. The kind of thing a person says to a child. We’ll see.

  The moon was high over the ballfield. It was the middle of the night or almost. Neither one of them had a watch, but they figured they had a few hours before people were up. Before Oates stopped by Marlowe’s place and found the window smashed in. Before whatever fate had befallen that Black Rose scout befell them.

  They found the car and opened the hood and connected the scanner. Booted it up and waited. She and Weller watching a round logo materialize on the screen and spin a few times like a propeller turning before it disappeared. Janey telling him you never knew. She’d never seen a car like this one before. If what she knew about working on other cars didn’t pay off right away, this could take forever. It would be ten minutes if she was lucky or ten days if she wasn’t, and no telling until it happened. Weller said they didn’t have ten days and she said she knew that. Weller said if they ran into trouble she should get back to her apartment before dawn and go about her business. Let him take the heat since it was his to take.

  At which point the scanner began talking to itself and to the car and then the car talking back. A pair of machines communing one to another without need for intervention. Janey said this was what she’d been hoping for, they’d shaken hands, and Weller liked that idea. Picturing them with hands to shake. The GPS booted too and it locked onto the satellites and a little likeness of the car began pulsing on its own dashboard against a map of the old South. Cities that were gone to ruin now and roads that weren’t entirely navigable these days and other roads that didn’t exist anymore period. Weller thinking that this car was a time machine. The trip to New York would be easy if only he could go back under its power to the world glowing on that bright and hopeful map. A world with smooth roads and cheap gas and fast food at every rest stop.

  Once Janey had the car running the phone circuitry booted itself. An interface coming together on the screen, but no signal to go with it. Apparently it wasn’t a complete system itself after all. It was asking for a cell phone, and a cell phone was a nearly mythical thing down here. Just a rumor of something forsaken during Marlowe’s Retreat. Never mind that whatever cell towers were nearby couldn’t possibly be functioning anymore. Weller hadn’t even thought of that. But he had an alternative. The dead Black Rose satellite phone that had set off alarms in Oates’s mind. Let it set off some more alarms if it could. He dug in the back and found it in his rucksack and tossed it to Janey, saying the battery was dead but she could probably rig that too while she was at it.

  Telecom had been deregulated under who, Reagan maybe, in a period as unknowable as some dark age. It had been a no-man’s land of competing sources and signals back then, after the first phone company had exploded into a million pieces in that big deregulatory bang and before the slow cooling of it all into one great big corporation, the unironically named Ma Bell that ran what was left of the business anymore, its logo a stylized rendering of a grayheaded old woman at a switchboard or what some artist imagined as one. Not even Black Rose had been able to make Ma Bell share bandwidth, thus this crippled sat phone right here that Janey made fast work of fixing. She wired it straight into the car and used the scanner to make them communicate. The car and the phone. Not just audio but video, at least incoming. Then the phone talking not just with the car but with the world, and not only the military channels but the civilian channels too.

  Directory Assistance alone persuaded her that Weller had been right. Directory Assistance. Imagine that. A voice asking for the city and the state as if there were cities left and states too. Demonstrating the truth of it by the asking. The same voice asking for the name of the party once Janey had said New York New Y
ork and then Janey giving up and handing the phone to Weller saying I don’t know what hospital in case there’s more than one. Saying maybe you’d better take it from here and giving him the phone and Weller’s hands shaking.

  A face bloomed up on the dashboard screen. Weller didn’t think it was the receptionist he remembered from the hospital desk, but it could have been her twin. Another sophisticated old woman made young by science. Another strange miracle, this one working the night shift. The woman at the desk reached up a manicured hand and tapped on the screen in front of her as if it had gone dead. Leaning forward and squinting into the monitor without so much as a crow’s foot materializing to mar her perfect skin.

  Janey took Weller’s arm and held on to it as if he might rescue her from something. Some sudden shifting of the universe.

  “Hello?” the woman on the screen said. Her voice came through the car audio, eight or ten speakers’ worth of it turned up louder than it needed to be. Weller finding the knob and turning it down. “Hello?’

  Janey held on and studied the woman’s face on the screen and whispered to Weller is she real? Thinking she might be a film of pixels wrapped over a wireframe. The look on her face was such a perfect approximation of genuine human curiosity. The mechanics of her face so strangely evocative of both great age and unblemished youth.

  “She’s real all right,” he said low, and the woman quit tapping on the screen and sneezed into a lace handkerchief as if she intended to prove him correct.

  Janey laughed out loud and the woman cocked an ear and leaned in again toward the monitor. Her eyebrows up in two perfect half-circles. “Hello?”

  Weller asked for his daughter by name and room number and the woman said it was after visiting hours. No calls now. Weller said he was the girl’s father and she said family included. He said it was an emergency and she said emergencies were an entirely different department, raising her hand and looking for a second as if she were going to transfer him, until he said he was working for Anderson Carmichael if she didn’t mind, Anderson Carmichael who paid the bills that no doubt covered part of her salary and not just her salary but her benefits package which included that surgery she’d had and she’d keep having as long as she kept wanting to look young, and that changed everything. She patched him straight through.

  * * *

  “Henry?”

  “It’s me.”

  “I can’t see you.”

  “That’s all right. I can see you.”

  A dim light in the room and Liz hardly visible by it. Almost no light at all. Just the scattershot glow of the video screen with nothing to display but interference. On the table behind her, silhouetted by light rising up from the city below, he could still see the flowers. Those identical bouquets that came every day from Mr. and Mrs. Anderson Carmichael and Your friends at PharmAgra. Fresh and brand new, just as if he’d never left. As if nothing had changed.

  “Oh, thank God, Henry. They told me you were dead.” What looked like a tear in that weird light.

  “Not yet. What do they know?” As if it were funny.

  “Where are you?”

  “Spartanburg.”

  “Jesus, Henry.” Her look woeful and lonesome.

  Weller wished he could comfort her somehow. Forcing a smile at her image on the screen as if that might do any good. “Never mind me,” he said. “I understand Penny’s had some setbacks.”

  “Penny’s fine. Penny’s perfect.”

  “But Bainbridge said—”

  “Who’s Bainbridge?”

  “From Washington. The one who calls to check on you.”

  “Nobody calls, Henry.”

  “I told you he’d get word back to me.”

  “I’m sorry. Nobody calls. Nobody’s ever called.”

  “He told me she’d had setbacks, Liz. This was couple of weeks ago.”

  She shrugged in the buzzing video light. “I don’t know where he got that idea. Penny’s fine. She’s more than fine. You should see her.”

  “I will.”

  “I know.” A little pause. “I hope so.”

  “Maybe he said it to light a fire underneath me. Like I needed that.”

  “We all want you back.”

  “Not Bainbridge. He just wants the car. Carmichael too.”

  “I don’t care what they want. I want you. Just come home.”

  “I will.”

  “Hurry.”

  “I will.”

  “The thing is, Henry, they’re getting ready to release her.”

  “Good. They’ll take both of you home. Carmichael promised.”

  “Not without you. They’re just going to turn us loose.”

  “I told Bainbridge that I wanted Carmichael to take you straight home.”

  “Carmichael doesn’t care. He thinks you’re dead.”

  “I’ll bet he heard that from Bainbridge too. That guy’s a fountain of good news, and not much of it’s accurate.” Looking at Liz on the dashboard screen, her face the only thing in the world. “I’m on my way now, honey. I’m keeping my promise. Don’t you worry.”

  “We’ll only be around until tomorrow or the next day. The doctor wants to run a few more tests and that’s it. That’s the end.”

  “I’ll be there. You hang on. We’ll all go home together.”

  * * *

  Janey had already found the acetylene torch over by the sealed-up loading dock, as if she’d read his mind. She had everything set up by the time he got there, and she’d put on the helmet and snapped the visor down and was firing up the torch. He watched her adjust the yellow acetylene flame and watched her add oxygen through the regulator until it turned pure white. That little blue flame inside the stream of white fire. He squinted through his fingers as she knelt to the floor and began cutting a thin line straight up. Sparks like fireworks erupting into the air and falling to the concrete floor and bouncing. Janey moving the torch as slowly and steadily as a machine made for the job and stopping only when she’d gone as high as she could reach, and then Weller dragging the ladder over. She nodded thanks through the helmet.

  He went back to the car and disconnected the scanner and tossed it into the back seat and closed the doors. Started the engine and let it rev for a minute until it smoothed out and settled down. The headlights came on all by themselves which struck him as a nice touch. He had a little trouble navigating among the other parked cars and his initial impulse was to be careful so as not to dent anything but he thought of Bainbridge and Carmichael and he said to hell with it. A few badges of honor wouldn’t hurt. It was going to be a rough ride anyhow. Inside of five minutes the steel door had fallen forward with a monstrous clang and Janey was in the passenger seat and they were on their way.

  Through the opening and down the ramp and out into the world.

  TWELVE:

  The Coming of the Fall

  It was just dawn and from the driver’s seat Weller could see the footprints he’d made on the way in. The sun filling them up and the shadows overflowing them. He followed them like a trail of breadcrumbs and where he couldn’t follow them he made his own path. It was easier after he got frustrated and took a chance and cut one of the tripwires and nothing happened. No explosion. No alarm. No landmine. The whole business a charade. He got back into the car and put it into gear.

  Janey said she’d been told there’d be bodies out here, bodies among the fences and the trenches and the bombs. Corpses of everything that hadn’t been able to get inside and wreak havoc. Everything that had made the attempt and gotten caught in the defenses and died trying. That’s what Oates had said.

  Weller shook his head and concentrated on the path in front of him. The barbed wire was real enough and they had only those two spares on the roof. Three or four solid days’ driving ahead if they were lucky, and Penny undergoing those last few tests, and then what. There was no time for a blowout.

  Janey said Oates had described the circle around Spartanburg as a battle zone and a graveyard. A hideous pla
ce filled with the bones of things that weren’t human anymore. Poisonous things.

  Weller said you never know.

  Checking the rear view mirror and seeing the vacancy of the cut-open doorway gaping behind them like a missing tooth. A black spot in the rising sun. He imagined light filtering in through it and he wondered when someone would notice. They’d step away from that open doorway as if the very air and sunlight coming in would burn their skin. He thought how desperate Oates and his people would be to seal the gap before heaven knows what got in and ravaged them all. But the look backwards was just one rapid flick of his eyes, and an instant later he was concentrating on the path ahead once more. Just a few hundred yards and they’d be free. Free of Spartanburg and free of Oates. Free to locate the highway. Free to head north, all the way to Liz and Penny.

  * * *

  There were two of them now and they could take turns driving. Drive all day and all night if possible. If the headlights kept working and the roads didn’t deteriorate much more. The car had four-wheel drive but the suspension wasn’t built for anything much rougher than a tabletop. It rode hard and Weller fretted that something might give out if they pushed it, but he worried more about Penny and Liz so they pushed it anyhow.

  They located Eighty-Five and got onto it where that exit sign for Spartanburg had been blown half to bits by machine gun fire. Weller realizing that that was meant as a warning too. SPARTA. Like in the history books. As if there were people here to be wary of. It was just a sign.