The Salt Line

by Holly Goddard Jones

  “OK,” Edie said, tired.

  “We have value.”

  There was something ahead, at the side of the road. A sign, large, close to the ground.

  “Can you read it from here?” Jesse asked.

  Edie peered ahead. “Not quite yet.”

  Another ten steps and the vague shapes of words fixed themselves into something faded but legible: “Ruby City Mine and Campgrounds.” A half dozen meters more and she could also make out the words below that, in smaller typeface:

  MINE FOR RUBY’S, SAPPHIRE’S, & MORE!!!!!

  GEM CUTTING AND GIFT SHOP.

  “A TREASURE IN EVERY BUCKET GUARANTEED.”

  CLEAN RESTROOMS & SHOWERS, LEASHED PETS WELCOME.

  TURN R ¼ MILE AHEAD!

  “Clean restrooms and showers.” Jesse sighed. “I have a feeling that’s out-of-date.”

  “You’re probably right,” Edie said.

  But she was sure they’d take the turn when it arrived, and they did, onto a gravel road curving steeply downhill and around a bend, its destination out of sight. The events of the last day had taught her not to anticipate—not to hope that the next thing would be better. But she hoped anyway. She fantasized, even. Her feet, numb with fatigue, trundled forward, and she imagined being welcomed by a grandmotherly type with flour handprints on her thighs, and she’s telling them that they each have rooms, and there’s hot tea and warm bread just as soon as you’re settled in. This was a terrible misunderstanding of some kind, unfortunate, but they’d be put on buses tomorrow and shipped straight to Quarantine.

  A radio on Andy’s hip crackled, making them all jump, and some unintelligible string of words issued forth. Andy unhooked the radio, depressed a button, and spoke into it: “Yeah, it’s us.”

  They finished circling the bend and approached a break in the trees. As they advanced, the edge of a building came into view, and Edie started noticing a sound—steady, familiar, coalescing after a moment into something identifiable: moving water. By then the building, too, had revealed itself fully. It was small, one story. The siding looked freshly painted, and flowers—daisies—were blooming in clumps on each side of a bright yellow door. A sign above the door, in faded lettering, announced, “Welcome Prospectors!”

  The door opened. A man moved his considerable bulk from inside to out, stooping to clear the lintel, and Edie saw that he was coarsened with age, skin the color and texture of old saddle leather, the hair atop his head and his brows and covering the lower half of his face a frizzy cloud of steely gray. He stood, she guessed, six foot five or six foot six, and he had a tall older man’s hunch, broad shoulders, soft belly. He, like the guards, didn’t wear a microsuit. Edie couldn’t imagine him in one. Instead, his shirt and trousers were cut from the same heavy dark gray weave, softened with wear and washing, and leather suspenders framed the row of mismatched buttons marching down his front. This must be the man in charge, Edie thought—the man who would decide their fate.

  When he spoke, his voice was unexpectedly soft. “Y’all be needing to go see June then, I guess,” he said.

  Eight

  The camp stretched along both sides of a river that the tall man told them—mildly, as if he were leading a tour group rather than a collection of hostages—was the Little Tennessee. Marta noticed, as they followed the bank for a stretch, that the river was traversed by two footbridges. The first, a suspension bridge, was walled off with what appeared to be scavenged chain-link fencing, and it swayed alarmingly as a woman crossed with a large duffel bag hoisted over her shoulder. The second bridge, perhaps half a kilometer ahead, appeared newer and sturdier, engineered from something other than scrap metal and desperation.

  Their guide waved to the woman with the duffel. “Morning,” he said.

  The woman looked at the group with undisguised curiosity. She, like their guide, wore what seemed to be the local uniform: colorless button-down shirt and trousers, suspenders. The cuffs of her pants were tight-rolled over thick, bright red socks and old-looking leather work boots. No microsuit. No tell-tale bulge of a Stamp. “Heavens to Murgatroyd, Curtis. This is them, then?”

  “Seems so,” said their guide.

  “Huh,” she said. Thoughtful, swinging her gaze from face to face, pausing, it seemed to Marta, longest on Wes’s. Her own face was sun-spotted and lined, but she might have only been in her thirties—hard to tell. Rare that a person in Marta’s circles made it past twenty-nine without some kind of tweak or polish. Her frizzy hair was tucked back in a ponytail, revealing a bare circle of scar tissue at her right temple. But it was an old scar, pale as milk, and Marta didn’t see any others. “Well, then,” she said. She dropped the duffel at her feet and dipped in a sarcastic little curtsy. “Welcome to Ruby City.” The bag shifted, slumped, and a small dead animal slipped out. Squirrel or rabbit, something fluffy and brown. “Enjoy your stay.”

  “You know,” boomed Lee from the back of the pack, the first time Marta had heard him speak since Mickey was shot, a moment that seemed distant but hadn’t even been half a day ago, “that this one”—he pointed a shaky finger at the disfigured woman they called Violet—“murdered a man this morning. One of our group. No reason at all. Murdered him.” Marta, along with everyone else, held her breath, aghast and impressed at his nerve. Violet’s cratered face flushed dark, and her hand went up to the stock of her gun.

  “Really,” the woman said tonelessly. Her expression, unlike Violet’s, lacked malice—but it was somehow worse than Violet’s. This was a disregard that couldn’t even muster passion. “Then I’d not piss her off, if I were you.”

  Violet laughed hoarsely.

  “That’s enough lollygagging,” said their guide—Curtis. “See you later, Vic.”

  “See you tonight,” the woman replied.

  As they continued their walk, Marta amended her impression of the setting from “camp” to “village.” A township had coalesced around what she assumed were the remains of the old Ruby City campgrounds: a cluster of a dozen or so small, cube-shaped cabins, all built with porches facing the river. The air smelled of wood smoke and crackling animal fat (the travelers’ stomachs rumbled loudly in chorus). Outside one cabin, two men, shirtsleeves rolled above their elbows and aprons tied across their middles, worked in rapid synchronicity at a galvanized metal box, one turning a hand crank with sure, steady motions, the other dropping whole ears of corn into an opening at the top, the two of them creating a terrific clamor, a growing pile of shucked cobs, and a trembling pan full of kernels. They didn’t pause as the OLE group filed by, but the man at the crank watched them, puffing air off his bottom lip to part the hair dangling over his eyes. In front of another cabin, a woman and man tended a huge outdoor stone hearth. This, Marta saw, was the source of the delicious aroma. The woman, using a brush with a long wooden handle, daubed a row of small pink bodies with brown liquid, and the coals beneath them sizzled as they dripped. The man hunched down, added a log to the flames, and blew through cupped hands. Behind them, a broad, makeshift table was pinned with the hides of whatever the couple were roasting. Each hide stretched in six different directions, like a starburst. The effect wasn’t graphic or disturbing, even to Marta’s sheltered gaze—just grimly efficient.

  Beside her, Wes said, “Wow. This is a whole community. Can you believe it?”

  Marta murmured an agreeable sound, but she didn’t share his surprise, exactly. When she was a girl, and the news drones still flew, you heard all the time about camps, towns, even small cities hanging on between zones. There had been a webshow called Roughing It!, Marta remembered. Her father and brother liked it. Her brother, when teasing her, would threaten to send her to one of the smoking heaps of rubble depicted in shaky night-vision video. Glowing green outlines of humans, eyes flickering in the infrared light like coals. Satellite footage of shanty villages, not so different from this one, built along once bustling city thoroughfares, ri
verwalks. No, what surprised her wasn’t the existence of the community but its normality, its calm. No microsuits, no Stamps. And yet, somehow—no obvious fear of ticks, either. How was it possible?

  They passed a soap maker. A baker. (The sour-sweet smell of yeast—such delicious agony.) The tradespeople mostly worked out of the onetime vacation cabins, or on the lawns outside them, but there were buildings of more recent construction, too: trim, simply made cabins comprised, almost charmingly, of scavenged materials as well as new lumber. There was art here, Marta thought, evident all the more as they left what appeared to be the trade district and entered the town proper, which extended broadly along both sides of the river, joined by the newer footbridge she had spied when their walk began. Here the land had been cleared to make room for a scattering of structures, each unique, several beautiful enough to imagine they were somewhere back home, perhaps in one of the posh little eco-communities around the university. The first such building they passed was clad in multicolor scraps of corrugated metal; the windows, all mismatched, flanked a set of mismatched double doors, which were thrown wide open onto a broad front porch. Here, folks gathered—old, gray, stooped over knotty canes or games of what appeared to be checkers and chess. A dozen of them, men and women, their drab garb brightened by odd touches. One man, she noted as she passed close, wore a vest stippled with all kinds of pins and yellowing buttons—from this distance, she could read “Vote Reed” and “I ∏”—reminding Marta of the waitstaff at a restaurant chain that the boys liked back home, Looney’s. (The boys—how her heart twisted at the thought of them. Would she see them again?) The woman by his side had her wispy gray hair tucked up into a brimmed red velvet hat, which was moth-eaten and adorned with a spray of feathers. Her lips—the upper lip was seamed with scar tissue—were painted a matching shade. She pursed those crimson lips with distaste at the OLE group. Maybe she could smell them. Marta could no longer smell herself, but she guessed that this wasn’t because she had suddenly started sweating rosewater.

  The building wasn’t marked with a sign, but the glimpse Marta got through the open double doors revealed what appeared to be a kind of general store: rows of canned foods, piles of furs, a slumped burlap bag, near the door, with a handle jutting up out of it.

  “Town grocery and supply,” Curtis confirmed. It was the first time he’d spoken since bidding the woman at the footbridge goodbye. There was a note of pride in his voice, as if he couldn’t quite resist showing off a bit for his captives, though he considered them beneath such effort.

  “How does it work?” Wes asked. “Do you have a currency?” His face was pink with the walk and cool air, with the sun and the breeze, and he looked very young to Marta—of course he was young, a baby, really, no matter his accomplishments—and he sounded almost enthusiastic, as if he were posing a question to one of his college professors rather than speaking with a gun to his back.

  Lee, from somewhere behind them, made a disbelieving grunting noise.

  Curtis seemed amused. “You want to study our economy, Mr. Feingold? We do have money of a sort. June may want to explain to you. Or maybe she won’t. The grocery is a co-op. Everyone in town owns an equal portion.”

  Wes nodded vigorously. He looked as if he had a follow-up question, or a series of them, but Marta nudged her shoulder into his, and after casting her a quick, apologetic look, he pinched his lips closed.

  Who was June? That was Marta’s question. But she knew better than to ask it.

  “Bye, baldies,” one of the old men called as the group moved off behind their guide, and the collection of porch geezers roared with laughter.

  The slow pace of their progression through the village, at first a relief, had lulled Marta, allowing her exhaustion to catch up with her. Her feet, tender and slick with sweat that had worked its way down her legs, throbbed with pain. The Stamp on her calf pulsed hotly. Her stomach was empty to the point of near nausea, and she wished that David had thought to cleverly disguise a piece of candy in her Smokeless rather than the Salt, though the thought of the Quicksilver—a miracle that the hideous woman called Violet hadn’t confiscated it—still gave her a small measure of courage and hope. Tiny. Minuscule, really. But better than nothing.

  There was a bar of sorts—a long low building with a shed roof, doors thrown open to a dirt yard with half a dozen picnic tables. More old people, adorned with punches of color—four of them, heads bent over mismatched glasses filled with tawny liquid. If Marta hadn’t seen the woman called Vic and the middle-aged tradespeople, she’d have wondered if Ruby City weren’t some kind of outer-zone retirement village.

  They walked on. The land around flattened and broadened away from the curve of the river, climbing gently uphill, and Marta saw where at least some of the town’s younger residents were spending their day: among dozens, maybe hundreds, of long raised beds, shoulders brushing the leafy stalks of a flowering plant. She couldn’t have named the plant if she tried. Gardening didn’t remotely interest her. The blocks of green were punctuated occasionally by crimson blooms with black centers—beautiful, but the sight unsettled her in some unnameable way. The plants seemed swollen, out of proportion. They didn’t belong, so red and vibrant on this cool autumn day.

  As they drew closer to the nearest bed, Marta could hear the rustle of the stalks, the murmur of the women and men working among them. “Seen June?” Curtis asked the first person they encountered—a young man, late teens or early twenties, of a beauty as improbable as the nearby flowers. He was tan, lithe, with wide-set eyes so light blue as to be almost clear, and he was, so far as Marta could tell, utterly unmarked, as fresh and unscarred as a Zoner. Again, she wondered at this—and she wondered if Wes had also noticed. How could he not?

  The young man thumbed uphill. “Number six or seven, I think,” he said.

  They moved in the direction he’d indicated, passing more beds, more gardeners—or maybe you’d call them farmers?—two or three of them to a bed, most youngish, around her sons’ ages, and there was a general atmosphere among them of cheerful industriousness, and it occurred to Marta that industriousness—and cheer, frankly—weren’t qualities she associated with the youth back home. There wasn’t a tablet in sight. When was the last time she’d seen a group of twenty-year-olds without at least a few heads bent over an electronic device? And yet they were recognizable. A burst of laughter erupted from somewhere a few beds over, followed by a shushing sound, but the shushing was amused, lighthearted. There wasn’t any real fear of reprisal in it. It was almost warm here, where the midday sun could hit the slope with full force, and a pretty young woman had her brown face lifted up toward that rich light, as if she herself were a flower. Beside her, another girl drew a small, scythelike blade across the chalky green flesh of a golfball-sized bulb or fruit on one plant. She made three quick hash marks, and as Marta passed close, the girl pressed the tip of her pinky to the milky liquid that had surged from one of the slits, then, eyes locked fixedly on Marta, placed the fingertip between her puckered lips. She winked. Marta looked quickly away, flushed.

  What on earth was this place?

  Their guide finally stopped. Andy and his armed associates, who had grown uncharacteristically quiet during the walk through the village, flanked him, turning to face the group and lifting their weapons again, though Marta doubted that any among the OLE travelers had the energy left for raising their voices, much less staging an attack or making a run for it.

  “Here they are, June,” Curtis said. “Andy got ’em here. He did good.”

  His words seemed to be directed at the back of a diminutive figure standing in one of the flower beds. The figure turned, lifting a forearm to brush hair and sweat off her forehead, revealing an almost ordinary middle-aged woman’s face, the face of a woman maybe a few years younger than Marta, a woman who, in-zone, might have been tending the flowers lining the front walk of a trim bungalow with a screened-in front porch. The only thin
g compromising this effect was a single Stamp scar on the woman’s freckled high cheekbone. The rest of her visible skin—neck, chest, bare arms—was unmarked. She had something in her hand that resembled a trowel; it was coated in maroon-colored sludge.

  This, Marta supposed, was June.

  “Why, yes he did,” the woman said. “Well done, Andy.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.” He lowered his gun to bob his head and shoulders toward her, nervous, it seemed, as a boy called in to the principal’s office.

  “And it’s all of them?” she asked. She appraised Marta and the others with a more genial version of the interest those back in the village had shown them.

  “All that matter,” Andy said. “Along with several that don’t.”

  “Well, that remains to be seen.” She had a soft but commanding voice with a southern lilt you hardly heard any longer in-zone. She stepped up on the plank lip of the raised bed, and even those seven or eight inches didn’t bring her to chin level with their guide; she was not just short but practically rendered in miniature, with narrow shoulders and wrists as delicate as a ten-year-old’s but a woman’s curves, a woman’s laugh lines, and a woman’s frizzy cloud of amber-going-to-silver hair. She wore the trouser half of the local getup—grayish brown, baggy, rolled at the ankle and cinched at the waist with a leather belt—but the shirt tucked into them looked like something that could have been purchased off the rack at any one of the in-zone department stores: red and blue plaid, soft flannel, also oversized. Cheap. Nothing special. But anomalous out here, robbed of its mundane context.

  “I’m June,” she said, unnecessarily. She set her trowel down carefully in a ceramic bowl at her feet, hopped down from the flower bed, and approached the group. Andy and the other guides stiffened, but she took the hand of the first person she approached—it was Anastasia—with the confidence and measured warmth of a schoolteacher or an aunt you only saw once a year at the family reunion. Anastasia towered over her. She let her hand be shaken, but the expression on her face was dazed and disbelieving. June released her hand, smiling, and reached for Berto’s. He, too, consented to being touched. June proceeded to shake the hand of each of her captives, that mild smile still on her face. When Marta’s turn came, her fleeting thoughts of staging some sort of protest—withholding her hand, turning her back—dissipated in the face of June’s calm reserve. Her hand was cool, dry. Very small. She placed her free hand over her and Marta’s grasping ones. She fixed her hazel eyes on Marta’s, demanding contact.