by Sam Winston
Up on the highway the world exploded in all directions. Janey hadn’t known what to expect but she hadn’t expected this. These wide green expanses. These cornfields and beanfields, these vast undulating acres of kudzu. Everything mingled together and burgeoning. Weller said one thing they’d had correct in Spartanburg was that any plant you found growing out here might be poisonous. And the more familiar it was, the more likely it was to do you harm. He told her he’d run out of food on the way down and had had to eat kudzu. Nuts and berries. A two-headed turtle he’d come across in a ditch. Things that people didn’t typically eat, which meant things that PharmAgra and NutraMax and the other chemical companies hadn’t bothered modifying.
She reached into the back seat and rummaged around. Came back with a couple of knobby tomatoes all yellow and green and red. Splotchy things almost ready to explode with the power of their own ripeness. “Want one?”
“I don’t think just yet,” he said, looking down the long mossy road. “I believe I’ll wait until I get good and hungry.” Giving her a quick glance that sent both of the tomatoes back where they’d come from.
He planned to keep as much distance between himself and Greensboro as he could. South of town the highway was blocked just the way it had been from the north, barricaded with junked automobiles and shipping containers and railroad cars heaved up into a wall. They had to back away from it. Weller told Janey how on the way south he’d thought such a thing must be Marlowe’s work, how he’d been led to understand that Marlowe ran a heavily-armed frontier fortress and it wasn’t too big a leap to think that he’d have made it even more impregnable by setting up barricades as much as a day’s ride distant. How he’d been wrong about all that. Wrong about everything. Wrong to have thought that Spartanburg was a big idea when it was really just a small one. Just a cramped little selfish idea huddling all by itself in a great big world.
“Somebody put all this junk here, though,” she said. Looking away from the barricade as they backed up. Looking over the guardrail at Greensboro’s tallest buildings.
Weller said she was correct about that. He said Greensboro was one tough town. He’d been held prisoner there for a week and more by people dressed in bearskins and rags. People who didn’t speak English or any other language because one of them had been born without a tongue. Mutated.
“And he passed it on?” Being born without a tongue was bad, but it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. It wasn’t the worst fate she’d heard about by any means. She was having to adjust her perspective.
“Oh, he passed it on all right,” Weller said. “But not the way you’d think. Not genetically. He was the big man, you see. He was the one with the power. And if you didn’t want to go up against him, you had to pledge your allegiance.”
“By—”
“That’s right.”
“Ow.”
“The only one who escaped was his mother. Even his own little girl got caught up in it.”
“No.”
“People get caught up in things. I’ve learned that. People get caught up in things they shouldn’t get caught up in.”
“It must have broken your heart.”
“It kind of did, but I was too busy trying to get out,” Weller said. “Trying to get out and hoping they didn’t eat me for dinner.”
Janey was making herself small, sitting low in the passenger seat as they took the exit ramp. “So you don’t think we could have gotten through that barricade?”
“Nope. And even if we did, there’s another one just like it a few miles north. I’d hate to be trapped in between, wouldn’t you?”
“I guess I would.”
They stayed clear of the city and paralleled Eighty-Five as best they could, sticking to service roads and grassy embankments and only stopping when the way ahead grew utterly impassible. The two of them getting out together and cutting a path clear with the chainsaw and the hand axe. Weller volunteered to do the job himself each time, but she didn’t want to be left alone in the car if something happened. If the roar of the chainsaw drew somebody. But it didn’t. And by the time the sun was going down they were back on Eighty-Five.
* * *
He told Janey that Eighty-Five led to Ninety-Five below Richmond and Ninety-Five led to the Beltway around Washington and from the Beltway things would get easier. Somewhere on the Beltway National Motors took over, and the road would improve. It would actually be maintained. Smooth and fenced in and safe.
She wondered who National Motors was.
He explained everything as best he could. How National Motors ran the highways and the trucks that traveled them. How PharmAgra ran the food business and Family Health Partnership ran insurance and MobilGo ran energy. How AmeriBank handled the paperwork that tied everything together and kept it all going. He explained how he was working for Anderson Carmichael, the head of AmeriBank and one of the richest men in the world. Driving his car. A fortune in Carmichael’s scrip in his back pocket and a chip loaded with credits in there too. More money than either one of them could imagine.
She asked what money was good for. Just like that. As innocent as that. She didn’t know.
He said one thing it would be good for was getting them onto those nice smooth National Motors highways. He didn’t guess there was any direct provision for that, any kind of a toll-taking mechanism set up, but money had a way of getting around things. He’d met Carmichael while the banker was driving his own private car on a National Motors road, hadn’t he? It could happen again. It would happen again. No question.
* * *
The phone rang in the middle of the night. On Janey’s watch, with Weller asleep beside her in the passenger seat. How a person could sleep in a car lurching over terrain this rough was a mystery to her but he did it all the same, with the moon shining down through the sunroof and a pair of high-output headlights turning the whole world blue. The image of a telephone appeared on the dashboard screen and Janey pressed it and the call connected.
“Weller?” A man’s voice, all gravel.
“Hello?” Janey was amazed at her own reflex. At how easily you could talk on the telephone to people who lived in a place that you’d always thought was long gone.
“Weller?” said the voice. “Weller, is that you?”
“He’s right here.”
Weller stirred, coming awake in the glow of the screen. A man’s face resolving.
“Put him on.” A little squirt of audio interference on his end and nothing on the screen but a map. No video at all from Weller’s end. “Put him on, for Christ’s sake.”
Weller sat up. “Bainbridge?” Mouthing Black Rose to Janey. Mouthing Washington.
“Where in hell have you been, buddy?”
“On my way,” Weller said. Thinking if the phone was powered, its GPS was powered too. He’d forgotten that. “How’s Penny?”
“Never mind Penny. Where’ve you been?”
“I told you. On my way.”
“On your way my ass. Two weeks ago you were in Greensboro. Two whole weeks of travel time and you’re not even in Richmond. What gives?”
“This car. It’s a little touchy. Delicate.”
“You’re moving now, though. You’re moving right along. I can see that.”
“For now. We’ll get there when we get there. Tell Carmichael it won’t be long.”
“He’ll be happy to know that, son. I’d told him you’d gone silent. That’s never a good sign. Tell you the truth, he didn’t take it all that well. He offered to double our bonus if I could track you and that car down, but I told him he was out of luck. No way I’d send my own men down there. No offense.”
“None taken.”
“I sure am glad you’re alive.”
“Me too.”
“It’s a dream come true.”
“It sure is.”
“Who’s the girl, anyhow?”
“What girl?”
“The girl who picked up the phone. Who is she?”
“S
he’s one of Marlowe’s. Off to see the world.”
“No kidding. Leaving that paradise you told me about?”
“No kidding. But how’s Penny?”
“Penny’s fine. She’s all better. They sent her home a week ago.”
Janey looked at Weller. He looked back.
“Honest?”
“Honest.”
“You’d said she was having setbacks.”
“The miracles of modern medicine, my boy. She’s recovered and she’s gone home and your wife’s gone home too. Safe and sound. Just waiting for Daddy.”
Static burst through the speakers and Janey drove a little faster, thinking they might come to a place where the signal was clearer.
“Tell you what,” Bainbridge said. “Since that car’s so fussy, don’t bother trying to drive all the way to New York.”
“No?”
“Why mess with it? Just come right here to Washington. We’ll airlift it up, and we’ll fly you back home in the bargain. We’ll use that big Chinook I showed you.”
“That would sure be nice.”
“I know you’d like to see that little girl as soon as you can.”
“I sure would.”
“Why wait?”
“Why wait.”
“I figure you’ll be here late tomorrow.”
“Could be.”
“We’ll keep an eye out.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
“You can bunk at my place for old time’s sake. One last night underneath the Angler. And I’ll have you home the next day.”
“It’s a very kind offer.”
“Think nothing of it.”
Bainbridge clicked off and the dash went dark. Nothing but the moon through the sunroof and the blue light streaming ahead, two hard beams cutting the car a pathway north.
Janey didn’t even turn her head. “I guess we’re still going straight to New York,” she said.
“No question about that,” said Weller.
* * *
They’d have to go dark if they wanted to get back unseen. No GPS, no phone. No progress reports to Liz at the hospital, either, but she’d managed well enough on faith so far. She could endure. They’d have to make time, though. Not just to reach Liz and Penny, but to get on the Beltway and under the protection of National Motors before Bainbridge saw them coming. He’d said they could reach Washington late tomorrow, hadn’t he? Weller figured that gave them until noon if they were lucky. Come dawn Bainbridge would start thinking about helicopter patrols. He had that double bonus money burning a hole in his pocket, but he still wouldn’t start before the middle of the day. He wouldn’t want helicopters out there wasting expensive fuel. Then again he might start early with a single unit. Send it south to intercept them on Ninety-Five and forget the Beltway. On the other hand he might even get started now. Especially if he saw how they’d cut the GPS and guessed that they were onto him. That they were trying to evade Black Rose altogether. He could go low-tech instead, throw up a couple of roadblocks, blow a couple of overpasses. That would be easy enough, and it would solve the problem of how to get his hands on the car without damaging it. Because even if Weller and Janey were worth less than nothing on the open market, the car had real value.
Janey asked if there wasn’t another way around Washington. Weller said sure, there were a million roads and some of them might even be passable. A million ways to get lost down there too. Plus he didn’t know where along the Beltway National Motors took over. They’d be better off making a run for it.
* * *
It cost them both of their spare tires before they were much past Richmond. And not the little self-inflating donut buried in the trunk, either—they still had that one, for all the use it would be on these impossible roads—but the two actual tires that Weller had roped to the roof. He cursed himself and wished he’d taken more but it was too late for that now. Nothing to do but keep moving.
The sky went from black to gray and the blue headlights shut themselves off and for a little while they didn’t feel so exposed. Weller drove and Janey kept an eye on the sky for surveillance, but there was nothing. Signs along the road ticked off the diminishing mileage to Washington. No roadblocks. All of the bridges and overpasses intact. Just the miles diminishing and the two of them thinking maybe they’d outsmarted Bainbridge by keeping up their speed overnight. Maybe those two flat tires had been worth it, provided they didn’t have any more.
Janey asked Weller about all these towns. The exit ramps circling down. Were there people there? He said probably not. Without National Motors service there wasn’t any way to get supplies. If anyone lived there at all, they were scavengers or hunters. Survivalists. Everybody had gone north in the Great Dying, north to the cities and then from the cities to the suburbs and then from the suburbs to the countryside where they could find manual work if there was any work to be found. Or else they died. Poisoned and whatever else. Just plain sick and nowhere to go. Eighty percent of the population of the country gone.
Janey said Spartanburg hadn’t lost anybody under Marlowe.
Weller said people died. You couldn’t say they hadn’t lost anybody.
Janey said sure, but Marlowe had still had to put limits on population growth. Two children per couple. Just one child for a while, around the time her parents had had her, which was why she didn’t have a brother or a sister. Her parents, God rest their souls.
Weller said he was sorry. He’d been wondering about her leaving. Who she might have left behind. He hadn’t thought at the time.
She said don’t be sorry. All this wreckage, though. She was beginning to wonder why she’d left home. It seemed to her like it was a bigger world all right, but it wasn’t a better one. People in Spartanburg had to be told not to have extra children. People up here, well. She let that thought kind of drift away.
Weller didn’t look at her. He didn’t acknowledge that she’d said anything in particular. Thinking that in his case people back home watched their children get sick and die. He moved his hands on the wheel and watched another sign go past with miles marked on it. They were almost there.
The Beltway was just as bad as Ninety-Five had been. Indistinguishable from it, really. They had to get out of the car and cut through a dense patch of greenery halfway around a low spot in an access ramp, where the road ran through water. Brush and reeds and a great weeping willow right in the middle of the lane. It took forever. Weller taking down the willow and worrying that its movement against the skyline might be a flag to someone watching for them. Janey cutting brush with the hand axe and looking like a person who wondered what she’d gotten herself into.
“There are people working to make things better out here,” Weller said once they were back in the car and moving. “People disengineering crops. The idea is to bring back the old days, when you could grow something for yourself and eat it for supper without having to sell it to PharmAgra first and buy it back. Feed it right to your family.”
“You mean the old days like in Spartanburg right now,” she said. Fishing in the back seat for breakfast. Rummaging in one of the burlap sacks and pulling out a summer squash and rejecting it and pulling out a muskmelon instead. Little Jack Horner himself. “Remember Spartanburg?” she said. “That place we just left?”
“Point taken.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out a jackknife. “Anyhow,” he said, opening it up and locking it back and handing it over, “now that I think about it, you’ll want to save those seeds. I know somebody who could use them.”
He told her all about the tobacco farm in Connecticut. How Dr. Patel had disengineered one of the oldest agricultural products in the world, stealing untainted tobacco back from PharmAgra. A regular Prometheus. He told her how she sold it on the black market to fund more research, and how the next thing on her agenda was wheat. Wheat. The staff of life. Once people got their hands on wheat, he said, there’d be no stopping them.
Janey turned and looked at what they had in the back seat
and said maybe they should have brought more.
He said maybe. “Then again,” he said, “I understand there are places all over where folks are doing the same kind of thing. Places close to the highways where people can travel in and out, but not too close. Like that old underground railroad during the Civil War. Maybe somebody already has muskmelons going. She’d know. We’ll stop in Connecticut after we get Penny and Liz, and we’ll drop off everything we’ve got. Seeds included. Especially seeds.”
She was already scraping them from the muskmelon and transferring them wetly into one of the cup holders for safekeeping. A fortune in seeds and a future too. Either way, he said, it was contraband of the highest order.
* * *
The road ahead was closed off, but not by a Black Rose roadblock. This was a permanent thing. It meant they’d gotten the jump on Bainbridge, which was good news. The bad news was that it was National Motors security. Just the thought of those hard men in their black serge and black leather sent Weller’s mind back to the trip south. His last minutes on Ninety-Five with the driver who’d smuggled him through one checkpoint and turned on him at the next on account of the tobacco he’d been carrying. How security had pulled the driver clean out of his cab and gotten him down on the ground with that taser they had, gotten him down on the ground twitching. How they’d cut his brand out and sent him off to live in the world however he might be able to live if he lived at all. How one of them had taken Penny’s chin in his hand in the middle of it and told her not to worry about a thing. The cruel audacity of it. A little child.
They’d never treat Anderson Carmichael that way. No sir. And there was nothing special about Anderson Carmichael except his money, a good bit of which Weller himself was still sitting on since nobody in Spartanburg had had any use for it.
