“You get up,” Jesse said to Marta, and Edie winced at his rudeness. He motioned. “You sit on him, and Edie’ll sit on me.”
“Now wait a minute—” Wes began, but Marta shushed him.
“It’s fine,” she said. “It probably wouldn’t work any other way.”
The door rattled shut behind them. So Edie and Jesse hunched and slipped their packs over their heads, then arranged themselves in the back between Wes, Marta, and the Tanakas. The air was close and hot. The van chugged loudly into motion, and Edie, perched clumsily on Jesse’s knees, straddled the tent between her legs, leaning on it for balance each time the van hit a bump in the road, which was often. Jesse weighed only twenty pounds or so more than Edie, most of it in his length, and he grunted in an affronted way whenever the bumps sent Edie’s weight back onto him. Bastard, she thought. Her head kept knocking against Marta’s, and she muttered an embarrassed “sorry” each time, but Marta patted her knee as if to say, “Don’t be.”
Time inched forward. The windows, which ran only along the driver’s side, were caulked shut and grimed with filth, so it was impossible—from Edie’s vantage point, at least—to make out where they were going, what they were passing. Trees and more trees, probably. Every now and then a wedge of bright sunshine pushed through a window to land hotly on a face or arm. Someone sniffled and hiccupped. Edie’s hips and calves burned with the strain of keeping her upright, and she thought about the exercise ball she used at night (in another life) when she watched her webshows, the one that was supposed to firm up her core and better her posture.
She strained to peer over her shoulder, planning to ask Jesse if he still had his watch, but Jesse’s face was slack with sleep. She caught Wes’s eyes on her.
“Must be nice.” His words dripped with contempt.
“Jesse can sleep anywhere,” she said. Dared to say, because she knew that a sleeping Jesse was beyond the reach of her voice, beyond anything but a scream or vigorous shaking. “He’s like a child that way.”
She could see Wes wanting to retort to that, to take the opening she’d given him, but he only smirked. He was, Edie was beginning to think, the kind of man who wanted to be capable of greater nastiness than was really in his nature.
“He always does this before concerts,” she continued. She was whispering, but the bodies around her were silent, yearning for distraction. Her words, she knew, were going into every ear. “A thousand people in the audience, and they’re all chanting his name, and Jesse’s flopped out on a couch backstage. Then his manager yells, and he’s up, he’s ready to go.” She was bragging out of habit, in the way she used to do in those heady days of their relationship after the abortion, when—freed of the crushing burden of pregnancy—Edie’s life shifted surreally from bartending, grieving, and suffocating worry into months of extended play: travel, good food, late-night jam sessions in Jesse’s penthouse apartment, where nothing more was required of her than to lean on the arm of a sofa, consider the twinkle of the city outside the expanse of windows, and nurse a whiskey and cola, watching Jesse and his bandmates cover old folk songs, spirituals, Irish punk, weird, wonderful stuff that they would never play at a paying show. That was all done now. Those easy days were gone. She was so tired she could barely keep her head up, and Jesse’s bony knees were digging into her thighs, and she was wan with the van’s rough motion.
Suddenly, they stopped. The travelers started murmuring to one another: “Can you see anything?” “How far do you think we went?” Jesse came gasping violently awake, as he did in bed whenever Edie tried nudging him into a position where he wouldn’t snore. He’d have dumped Edie into the floorboard if there was any empty floor for her to land upon. “Wha—?” he gasped. “What? What? Where are we?”
“No one knows yet,” Marta snapped. “Be quiet.”
The van’s door rolled open.
—
The idea of walking was as appealing to Edie now as the idea of sitting had been to her mere hours ago. The van and car were parked along the shoulder of a road that, while in significant disrepair, was paved. Wooden poles, reaching a couple stories high, were driven into the earth at semiregular intervals, leaning under the freight of snarled green vines that dripped down, touched the ground, and rolled off in waves across the surrounding hillsides. Kudzu, Edie recalled. The scale of it—how much the green sea of vines had consumed—was beautiful and terrifying.
Andy, who was starting to look as exhausted as Edie felt, had merely waved his gun in a direction: uphill. The incline wasn’t bad yet. The sun had risen above a mountain peak, penetrating the mist, and it was quite beautiful out, actually, almost cheering. The trees that weren’t netted in kudzu, whose crowns penetrated the leafy mass and reached toward the blue sky as if gasping for breath, were red and golden—a version of the world promised on the Outer Limits feeds. People began, tentatively, to murmur to one another; to Edie’s surprise, their captors seemed willing for now to allow it.
Wendy Tanaka had been a problem that led to another unexpected lightening of the tension. She couldn’t walk more than a couple of steps unassisted, and Ken, with his wrists bound, couldn’t do much to help her stay on her feet. A trickle of blood still pulsed from her temple, where Andy had struck her, and the captors—Edie had finally started thinking of them as such—had a fierce whispered conference as the OLE travelers watched warily on, bracing themselves for another matter-of-fact gunshot to the head.
Instead, Andy produced a pocketknife and started cutting zip ties.
“You and you”—he pointed to Ken and Berto—“see to her. If she can’t keep up, carry her, or we’ll leave her where she drops. Got it?”
The men nodded.
“The rest of you,” Andy said. “I’ll let you loose for now. Any trouble and I’ll hog-tie and leave you in the vines over there. You don’t want to test me on this. Got it?”
The rest of the group nodded eagerly.
When Edie’s turn for release came, Andy wielded his knife quickly, grazing the back of her hand, but she could barely feel it—could barely feel anything below both of her elbows. The pop! of her zip tie flooded her with a pleasure so intense that she nearly collapsed. She lifted her arms, stretched, rubbed her wrists briskly, stretched again. Her fingers tingled, and her back cracked luxuriously. She unslung the tent from around her shoulder and shoved it wordlessly into Jesse’s hands as soon as his were free. He grunted, slipping his head through the straps without comment. Now, she guessed, would be the time to run—but no one appeared to be up to it. Not even close. No, what Edie saw were ten slack-faced people, clad pathetically in fitted white bodysuits, each of them gazing gratefully at their unbound hands, their bruised and chafed wrists. When Andy began trudging ahead again, they all followed dutifully.
Wendy had one arm slung around her brother’s neck and the other across the shoulders of the strapping Berto, whose wife, Anastasia, lagged behind the threesome, carrying Wendy’s gear as well as her own. Edie, eager to escape Jesse for a few minutes, took two long steps to match her stride to Anastasia’s.
“Want to pass that off for a little while?” she asked, motioning to the extra pack.
Anastasia looked at it, smiled a tiny smile. She was her husband’s physical counterpart: long, slimly muscled, with the broad shoulders of a weight lifter. “Nah. Not yet, anyway. It isn’t much.”
“It might be down the road,” Edie said. “So holler if you change your mind.”
“Thanks.” Their boots scuffed along the old asphalt with everyone else’s. “I will.”
“I’m embarrassed that we didn’t really talk before,” she said.
Anastasia gave her a confused look. “We talked—” She paused. “Yesterday. Feels like longer ago. But we did talk.”
“At the training center, I mean,” Edie said. “Well, I don’t know what I mean. Just that it seems a shame now.”
“Becaus
e they’re going to kill us.” She said this without inflection.
“What? No!” Edie hissed. “No. What do you mean?”
Anastasia crooked an eyebrow. “I guess you missed what happened to Mickey.”
“Of course not,” Edie whispered. “But what would be the point of all this?” She flapped her arms, trying to indicate the group moving in a sluggish mass up the old highway. “Why not shoot Wendy back there? Why untie us?”
Anastasia pointed to a figure a few feet ahead. “Feingold,” she mouthed. Edie could barely hear her.
“Wes?”
“Don’t you follow any of the alt-news feeds?” she whispered. “The Underground? ConspireWire?”
Edie wasn’t even sure what an alt-news feed was, and she certainly hadn’t heard of the feeds Anastasia had mentioned. She didn’t even follow any of the regular news feeds, except occasionally Snark Park, and only that after she’d started dating Jesse. What a panicked thrill she had felt the day her picture appeared below a headline: “Jesse Haggard Steps Out with Bartender Girlfriend.” The thrill had ceded to dismay when she glanced into the comments matrix just long enough to see that the biggest trending threads were “Appearance”—thousands of variations on “She’s not that hot”—and what Snark Park called, charmingly, “Doability,” where Edie had rated a 7 out of 10 on the “I’d FAP to THAT” meter, most of the comments animated with graphic porn snippets.
So she just shrugged. “I guess I don’t read the ones you read,” she said.
“Outer-zone insurgency groups,” Anastasia said. “There’ve been rumors about them going back forever. You remember the plane crash at the Memorial to the Lost Republic, don’t you?”
Barely. It happened before Edie had moved to Atlantic Zone, and there had been an information placard about the incident on her school field trip. Some nutjob in an antique Cessna. The plane came down off target, passing the central monument spire to land in the reflecting pool. Minimal damage to property. No casualties.
She nodded.
“So you know about the manifesto?”
It was like being in high school again. Pretend to have done the reading and fumble forward? Or admit her ignorance? She found she didn’t have the energy to fumble. “I guess I don’t.”
“Wow,” Anastasia said. “I’d like to move to the island you must be living on.”
Edie bit back a sharp retort. “So, the manifesto? What about it?”
Anastasia dug a Smokeless out of her pack, looked to make sure Violet wasn’t paying attention, and sneaked a quick puff. “He had this crude device on his plane. It worked kind of like an old cell phone. Basically, it was set up to send out one small data burst to the nearest networked device. When the plane went down, the phone grabbed a signal and shot its wad just before the crash. And then the thing got forwarded before the NSA could run a confiscation, though they did a pretty good job of discrediting it after the fact.”
“But what was it?”
“Like I said, a manifesto. The guy said he lived in a village in east Tennessee. He said there were hundreds of people just in that one town and hundreds of towns just like his. He said the ticks were a government conspiracy. Cures for Shreve’s had been suppressed. Anyway, he got a plane over the border somehow.”
“Wow,” Edie murmured.
“There are reams of intel about this stuff, all of it authenticated,” Anastasia said. “There’s no doubt people live out here. Probably whole communities of them. People resettled Chernobyl, after all. Whatever this is”—she waved her arms to indicate the pretty landscape surrounding them—“it sure isn’t Chernobyl.”
Edie didn’t dare confess that she had only the foggiest idea of what Anastasia meant by “Chernobyl.” “All right,” she said, “but I’m still not clear on what this has to do with him.” She pointed at Wes.
“The manifesto had a list of strategies for how outer Zoners would revolt. One of them basically amounted to economic terrorism, cutting off supply lines, setting fire to out-of-zone production units, that sort of thing. It happens a lot, actually. More than you’d think. A guy in my practice, he works for a biofuel company with half a dozen farms out here. They have to pay out the nose for security. Even so, there are a couple of incidents a year. Mostly just tick-bit wackadoos hopping the fence and getting promptly laid out, but sometimes they do real damage. Or make off with a big haul of goods.”
“So you’re saying that these people are those people. The terrorists.”
“They have to be,” Anastasia said. “Andy knows who every one of us is. He knows what he’s got in Feingold. He knows what he’s got in some of the others, like the Tanakas. You know they’re the Tanakas from the bioelectronics company, right?”
Edie didn’t.
“She’s the techie. He’s a neurosurgeon. There’s another brother that is a biologist or something, but he’s not here for some reason.”
“They’re brother and sister? I thought they were married,” Edie said.
“They put off a weird vibe, don’t they?” Anastasia said conspiratorially. “But no. They’re siblings.”
“And you think these people are going to use them somehow. The Tanakas and Wes.”
“I don’t know what value they ultimately have as hostages, or whatever we are. The president would probably see us all dead before he opened the gates to the great unwashed, but those three have symbolic value, at the least. They’re proof of a vulnerability. Or a lot of vulnerabilities. And that will scare people, which is probably the best weapon these people have got.”
“They scared me,” Edie admitted.
“You should be scared,” Anastasia said. “Shit is getting very real. Berto and I have been bracing ourselves for this for a long time.”
Edie looked over her shoulder back at Jesse, who caught her gaze, a pleading in his eyes, and lifted his chin in greeting. Something in her softened. He wasn’t perfect. But he was what she had.
“What do you think we’re walking into?” Edie asked.
Anastasia laughed, short and bitter. “You ever watch that show Crater Plain?”
“Never heard of it,” Edie said.
“It’s obscure. Comes out of Australia, and it hasn’t really taken off here, which is kind of surprising because it’s pretty good, smart but not too smart. Berto and I have a little group who comes over for viewing parties when the new episode streams.” A sadness passed across her face. Edie could imagine Anastasia’s house—all low horizontal lines, shiny metal, glass—and her friends, good-looking, successful. They’re drinking red wine, eating little canapés, shouldering in companionably on a big sectional couch. Anastasia says, “OK, quiet! It’s on!”
“The first episode starts after a nuclear war. The people who are left have all of these weird little powers. They can’t make food out of nothing or draw water from a rock. Their powers don’t guarantee their survival. But clumps of people complement each other. Like, the female lead can generate a perimeter of warmth. One of her love interests is resilient to radiation, so he can go foraging where others in their party can’t. The other love interest is a telepath. Which has its down side, you can imagine, but it also means he can hear the thoughts of another group if they get too close, and he can tell if they mean well or not.”
“OK,” Edie said. Asked, almost. She couldn’t tell where Anastasia was going with this.
“There are always two love interests in these things,” Anastasia said. “A bad boy who’s really a good boy, and a good boy with a dangerous streak. That’s what makes the show addictive, and you need something, because it’s just relentlessly awful, actually, people with their faces melted off and rape gangs and cannibals. There’s this assumption that most people, if you strip society and its laws away, are capable of evil. I agree with that.”
“That’s just a webshow,” Edie said.
“Yeah, maybe so.” Ana
stasia shifted Wendy’s pack to her other shoulder. “But don’t kid yourself. These people shot Mickey. They didn’t give it a second thought. They’re herding us. I don’t know what toward, but I can promise you it isn’t good.”
“You’re so fucking casual about it,” Edie said, fighting tears.
Anastasia was silent for a while. Edie could hear now the churn of arms and legs, the rhythmic rustle of pack straps against microsuits. The air, cool and moist, made her nose start to run. She could pick out a half dozen different whispered conversations. Some light talk: How many kids do you have? Where did you grow up? And heavier: I’m starving. I have the shakes. Where do you think they’re taking us? Randall, who carried his gun in his hands instead of slung across his back, was holding forth to Joe, loudly, about some technical matter concerning the vans. These old Jap cars run forever, but you can’t work on them. I keep telling ’em and they keep saying yeah-yeah and not doing nothing about it. I know where we could—
“I don’t mean to be unkind,” Anastasia said finally, “but I’m a realist. I don’t get any comfort from pretending things aren’t what they are.” She looked at Edie shrewdly. “You’re what. Twenty?”
“Twenty-six,” Edie said.
“Well, close enough. You live in the reality you want to believe in. That’s easier to do at your age than mine, what with the drugs and the fucking and all that fun shit. And hey,” she said, putting her hands up in a warding-off gesture, “no judgment here. I miss the drugs and the fucking. Well, sort of.” She took another secret Smokeless puff.
Edie couldn’t think of a reply. She kept pace with Anastasia, wondering how she could exit the conversation politely, and then she registered the absurdity of that—of worrying about conversational politeness. So she slowed down, falling back into step next to Jesse.
“Making friends?” he asked.
“Something like that, I guess. She was kind of freaking me out.”
“She has issues,” he said. “She’s crazy. She and her husband both. They’re gun rights activists. Survivalists. Didn’t you hear them talking at boot camp? Listen, if Andy and these people were going to do something to us, they’d have done it by now. You’re with me. They know I have money. I have a public platform. We have value.”
The Salt Line Page 14
