The images became more hopeful as the narrator switched tone to what Tom recognized as the wind-up, necessary to all documentaries and news articles as well. However amateur the technique, he knew someone at least knew what they were doing when they cobbled the infomercial together – even if it threw up a hell of a lot more questions than it answered, which was perhaps the most professional touch of all.
Tom looked at the dark-haired doctor as she waited for Lila and her brother, and for Tom to commend them to her care.
“This doesn’t tell me anything about how your City actually works,” Tom said. “I take it that’s deliberate too, huh?”
“Your arrival’s timely, Mr Vanicek.”
“Tom.”
“Tom,” she said like she agreed, as if his credentials were still in doubt.
“The train will be here by midafternoon,” the doctor said. “You’ll be able to see the City for yourself by nightfall.”
She gave him a final cursory look, her unwitting model’s pout at odds with the nasty white scar marring her face.
*
THEY REGATHERED WITH their backpacks on the open ground beside the tents, still only fifty yards into the camp. Drake and Loxley mustered the other six survivors.
The side of the liquor store had a chain-link fence turned into a barricade of more shipping containers, then the intact walls of an old grocer’s mart. Several rusting four-wheel drives were pressed together, corralling a small precinct for humanity. Past another Army tent, the overgrown road surface narrowed to a path leading to another chain fence and a proper gateway and turnstile, with the monolithic dark brickwork of an old train station on the other side of the track. As they followed Drake, the view opened along the platform to reveal about twenty more people, including Walter and his abattoir survivors who sat nursing their gear under the watch of half the camp’s guards waiting to end their shift.
A pair of men hurrying across their path jostled Tom from his reverie. Dressed in dingy old lab jackets, the men carted a dead man on a stretcher and cut down a muddy path off to the side between two of the tents.
“So there really is a train?” Lucas asked undeterred.
“There is a train,” Drake said.
“They didn’t mention that on the TV.”
Drake smirked, removing her shades like a rare indulgence. Her eyes flicked towards the now-disappearing camp orderlies and their grisly burden.
“There’s a lot of things they don’t mention on the TV.”
“I noticed,” Tom said. “For instance, how we’re going to live.”
“And what do I do?” Lucas chimed in. “Do I have to work too?”
“Ha,” Drake said. “Not sure you’re gonna want to hear this, kid, but there’s school.”
“School?”
Indignation vied with Luke’s disbelief. He eyed his father wildly and gestured with open palms as if there was something Tom could do about it.
And that was the first time in months they heard their father belly laugh.
*
TOM STARTED TURNING over the light-hearted feeling of amusement like it was a weird taste in his mouth, uncommon and unusual and almost certainly wrong-placed. He trailed behind his children as Drake marched them over the crossing to the platform’s end, and one glimpse of Walter and his extended family sent Tom back into his usual chill. The older man in his cap tried to make a show of not noticing, but Tom felt Lucas and Lilianna close ranks.
“Head on up to the platform,” Drake said. “Don’t forget to collect an arrival pack each, when you disembark.”
She noted their inaction and traced their eyes to the source.
“There a problem?”
“Just some creeps we’ve seen before,” Lila said.
“Keep your wits about you,” Drake said to her as if they’d finally won her over.
“You’re heading into a madhouse.”
*
THEY EDGED CLOSER along the platform, both children sensing their father’s caution.
“What is it, dad?” Lila asked.
“Nothing to be worried about.”
Tom’s eyes betrayed him. Like ferrets, Lila and her brother’s attention snapped onto Walter and his kin. There were about a dozen guards resting on the far side of the survivors, and another four miserable-looking randoms clutching meager possessions too. The off-duty sentries sat clumped together, several smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. The end of shift dispelled any illusion these were professional peacekeepers. If Tom’s eyes were locked on anyone but the past night’s threat, he might’ve discerned among the guards a former teacher, a factory worker, a taxi driver, a single mother of three, rather than the body-armored group squatting together in camaraderie. A lone sentry remained on watch, her strapped Kalashnikov at a ready angle.
Walter saw Tom looking and first tried his neighborly act once again, but it broke, over-ripe, soured before it even started. The teenage son bristled at his father’s side and the bearded fella who drove the truck sensed the alarm, staring over at Vanicek and his children with a cold neutrality almost more menacing than anything else.
“Dad, what the hell?”
Lilianna eyed him sideways.
“Dad?”
Lucas started hyperventilating. Tom squeezed his shoulder.
“Relax,” he said. “Just drop it.”
“You never tell us anything,” Lila snapped. “I’m sixteen years old, dad. I’m not a little kid anymore.”
Her brother objected, just as their timeworn dynamic required, Lucas otherwise for all the world like in the middle of an asthma attack. Tom dared a moment with his daughter, eyes on Lilianna’s gaze she almost instantly avoided. Then he knelt closer to Luke’s eye level, hands on both shoulders now.
“Hey, breathe easy.”
“I’m scared.”
“I know.”
Lucas took a few quietening breaths. He didn’t have any medical condition. Tom was still surprised by the flare of anxiety, even though he’d watched it slowly build during the last week of their trek, the closer the mythic City loomed.
A few more newcomers clambered up the wooden steps at the end of the platform just behind them and hurried past. Tom was surprised to see the scar-faced doctor pass with a travel bag strapped over her medical garb. She scanned Tom as he stood beside his son, a clinical inspection perhaps checking she wasn’t required. Tom followed her with his eyes as she walked on, line of sight continuing along the platform so that Tom nudged Lucas to show him the distant form of the approaching train.
The potential spectacle distracted, just as he hoped. Luke forgot everything else, an expression momentarily passing over the children’s faces hard to fathom until Tom remembered what excitement looked like.
“I’ve never even been on a train,” the boy said.
His sister laughed. Tom could almost inhale the sound, like a woman’s perfume, eyes narrowed on the jostling of the pair as Lila teased him and Lucas shook her off, getting stronger every day now, it seemed, soon inching past his willowy sister’s height.
“Hey, screw you, sis,” Lucas said and allowed the laughter in his own voice like a disavowal of the fear from just moments before. “I don’t even remember going into Knoxville, back before everything happened.”
“The Emergency, the doctor called it,” Lila said.
“We were spending more time in mountains, after you were born,” Tom said.
Any talk of that era stilled them and Tom immediately regretted trying to explain.
The hush returned their awareness to the locomotive. It dared not sound its arrival, the fields on the far side of the station still unpatrolled, but the train managed to lumber towards them carrying all the majesty of its vanished past, even with the blocky, uncomfortable-looking contraption bolted to its front, and the occasional low-key screech caused by the rusty tracks.
The train wore a jacket of jerry-rigged photovoltaics and rough-welded cables amid protective covers wrought from crude, repurposed
steel plates. It came in a whistling rush, not exactly stealthy, and the sentry with the AK covered the far end of the platform as the other irregulars gathering at the station clambered to their feet as one.
Tom’s gaze shifted problematically and found the RV guy looking at him.
Walter gave a visible nod towards Tom’s daughter, a lascivious wink. Provocative and cowardly at the same time as the train slowed and eased towards them, filling the air with its approach. Three carriages followed the engine, a guy in a denim shirt working the cabin controls. And whether by design or ill fortune, the train slowed to a stop amid many muted screeches with a set of doors right between where Walter and Tom stood facing off, Vanicek half on guard with his children.
The doctor swanned between them as if she couldn’t taste the tension in the air, which clearly wasn’t the case as she wrenched open the carriage door, awkward with her satchel, her good eye and its milky twin swinging Tom’s way.
“The train only runs every two days, Mr Vanicek,” she said. “Your timing’s been perfect so far. Let’s not blow it now.”
She moved on into the carriage, a few other passengers already on the train sitting fascinated yet dejected with their belongings piled upon the old subway car’s cracked seats.
Tom’s eyes shifted back to Walter.
The other man’s extended family piled up behind him, women more focused on the children than any threats they left for the men to handle, the second man nudging Walter’s son so he’d help with their baggage as well. The surly-looking kid threw a sniff of derision Tom’s way he couldn’t back up and they both knew it. The father too. Walter tipped his cap at Vanicek, though not without a dismissive little chuckle of his own as he pushed forward and Tom and his children only watched as the others clambered aboard.
“Let’s go to the next carriage,” Tom said.
Like following mother duck, Lila and Lucas trailed him further up the platform as fresh troops and medical personnel alighted from the next carriage with battlefield stares, not even taking the new arrivals in.
*
THE BATTERY-POWERED train made two more stops on its stolid journey around the City. The track was a serious undertaking for the ragged Council behind the reconstruction effort. It diverted onto another line across a fresh-made embankment framed by new zombie fencing reflecting the work of professional engineers, or at least someone able to marshal them.
Tom and his children sheltered along a window seat. The outline of the City’s decrepit skyscrapers drew their attention across a landscape of half-demolished suburbs. Most of the homes they passed had dull orange X-es sprayed on their doors. After the first stop, they passed a disused parking lot and caught sight of an orange-painted armored personnel carrier and a half-dozen men and women in riot gear standing around it. The figures turned as the train went by, one of their number raising a hand in salute that saw Lilianna place her palm on the scratched plastic window almost absent-mindedly.
“There’s people, daddy.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe lots of them.”
Lucas squeezed into his father’s shadow, gnawing on his fist. There were twenty more survivors in the carriage with them now, most wearing red zip-ties around their wrists. A sniffling man holding a little dog opposite wore a white tag like the type you’d get in hospital. He caught Tom’s eye and shuffled further away and said something wistful to himself or maybe it was to the dog.
Housing gave way to abandoned fields. Rusting irrigation systems twinkled dully beneath the afternoon sun. The burnt wreck of a tractor lay near a shed also crossed out in orange. A solitary Fury loped across the scene and disappeared into a corn field overgrown around a long-since-landed light plane.
Old-world agriculture gave way to more homes, again the distinctive X-es, and then more placid scenes. Summer coaxed the color from the rampant foliage despoiling what were once landscaped gardens, stands of tasteful boxelders, birches and pines cloaking forgotten technology parks, a police complex, industrial sites along the old rail line long-since picked clean of vehicles and anything else of use. Apart from the X-marks of systematic clearing, the City’s outskirts were abandoned to their ruin and unguarded.
The train carried them into Columbus from the east, wending past more old factory sites, a burnt-out car dealership, an abandoned McDonald’s like the forgotten temple of a lost world, and then more and more convenience stores cleared out by the reconstruction effort. Overgrown housing and abandoned stations crowded claustrophobically close as the train chugged along. On more than one occasion, Tom was sure he spied Furies standing listlessly in the ruins. The lack of any obvious security effort gave him chills.
Then they passed an expressway barricaded six-high with cars abandoned in the mad scramble of the early days of the event. But no patrols. No sentries.
Tom plucked at the zip tie around his wrist for the fiftieth time.
“On the TV, it looked like they had a power supply,” he said. “Do you think they’ll have computers?”
Lila gave an eloquent shrug. Lucas’ eyes were glued on the view, a subtle smile wringing value from the novel experience. Tom’s expression softened.
“Sorry, there’s no computers,” a woman in one of the closest seats said.
Tom, Lila and Lucas turned as one. The woman laughed, adjusting her glasses.
“Didn’t want to get your hopes up, OK?”
“If there’s light, why not computers?” Lilianna asked.
The woman grew more serious.
“Well, first, the most reliable power we’ve got’s from the sun, and that ain’t that reliable,” she said with a Texan twang. “We don’t have the time or resources to enter all this data and then not get it back when it’s needed, anyway. And lot of computer gear’s been left to rust for nearly five years, remember.”
“All your record-keeping’s manual?” Tom asked.
“It’s a big effort,” the woman said. “I don’t think they expected so many people.”
“You’re not part of the reconstruction?”
The woman declined an immediate reply, again adjusting her glasses and then more keenly examining Tom, nothing licentious in her appraisal. There was a tag Tom couldn’t read on the pocket of her military tunic, her outfit mismatched with jeans and a fine pair of mountaineering boots.
“I am now,” she said. “So we’re all, right?”
“Yes,” Lila said. “You’re part of the City Council?”
The stranger laughed again.
“Nothing so lofty,” she said. “But yeah, I work for the Administration.”
“Administration,” Tom said under his breath in a tone he couldn’t help himself. “Sounds pretty important, huh?”
“I’d love to help,” Lila said quickly – probably also to cover her dad’s sarcasm. “I’m going to have to find some kind of work or a way to contribute –”
“We work to eat,” the woman smiled. “Yes we do. How old are you, babe?”
“Sixteen.”
“So . . . you haven’t handled a computer since you were eleven.”
“I could learn,” Lila said with the defiance her father knew so well.
“Honey . . . forget about computers for good.”
The woman’s kindly tone didn’t match the harshness of the words, but she offered Lilianna a handshake like some sort of consolation prize.
“I’m Gwen Stacey. Don’t make fun of the name,” she said, though of course Lila didn’t have a lot of pop culture references to draw on.
“Once you’ve settled somewhere, come to main Admin and ask for me,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do to find you work in Records, OK?”
Lila beamed, and the Texan woman then looked again at Tom, now something definitely flirtatious slipping into her grin, though Tom wasn’t much interested in the subtext.
“We’ll be given housing?”
The woman gave a dry laugh, again seemingly tempted not to reply.
“You’ve got a lot of questions
, mister,” she said more coldly. “Sure you didn’t use to be a reporter?”
“I’m nobody,” Tom said and hated how his pulse leapt up. “And I hate computers. Maybe that’s something good we got out of all this.”
“Oh, don’t start,” Gwen said and laughed as if she didn’t really mean it. “You sound like one of the Luddites. You’ll get a care package and set-up housing when we arrive. Just keep those blue tags handy, you hear?”
And she punctuated the discussion with a sharp Texan laugh.
*
THE TRAIN TOOK them nowhere near the skyscrapers. The City was all low-rise and semi-industrial along the tracks, and then Tom glimpsed a stretch of water, the river, and at the same time the train slowed and now let off its decisive horn.
The left view showed the water, the far banks dominated by a fair stretch of parkland gone to seed in the past years, old sporting grounds hidden from sight for now. The train decelerated past a scattering of brick buildings which blocked the view, and then they went through a modest underpass. Looking out the other way, more brick buildings solidified their surrounds and soon became absolute. An urban center. Cross streets were blocked with tall sheet fencing. A lookout tower revealed a pair of guards with rifles, a dark-skinned woman in the far distance training binoculars on the carriages as they clattered past, rounding a slight turn, a booming noise inexplicable somewhere far away in the City.
An even bigger brick building played shepherd to the view and then the train was past it, slowing, halting along another platform that started life as a row of flat-bed trucks and had become more solid over time. Everything had a hasty feel to it, sea containers and wheel-less school buses and huge segments of metal sheeting belting everything together into one singular corral at which the train finally stopped. Off behind the platform was an open hangar built almost entirely from salvaged metal sheets. A row of at least thirty men and women in paramilitary gear and surgical face masks held rifles at the ready.
After The Apocalypse Season 1 Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 4
