The Salt Line

by Holly Goddard Jones

  “Let’s try looking at this from another angle. Wes, I’ve heard a rumor that you’re about to make a big investment in”—she made a show of looking him up and down—“well, fashion.”

  The righteous redness in Wes’s face drained away. “How did you—” He stopped himself and shook his head, lips pinched together.

  “Don’t be so shocked. Outer Limits Excursions is invested in your deal happening, and they’ve taken steps to make sure that your little publicity stunt goes perfectly.”

  “What do you mean, publicity stunt?” Marta asked.

  June turned to Wes, politely concerned. “Is this a secret? Should I send her away?”

  Wes rolled his eyes. “Jeez. It’s not a done deal yet. Pocketz is looking to partner with SecondSkins microsuits. I came on this trip to test-run the product myself. If it goes well, we make the announcement when I get back.”

  David’s major “legit” deal, Marta realized. So this was it. This was the reason he wanted eyes on Feingold.

  “So now we circle back to my original point. You said ‘if it goes well,’ Wes. And I’ve told you that OLE is very, very determined it go well.”

  “OK,” Wes said. “So?”

  June peered at him. “I wasn’t sure if you knew or not. My guess was that you did. But now I wonder.”

  “For God’s sake. What?”

  “You’ve been taking Ruby City’s inoculation for three weeks, as part of your regular vitamin supply. You could strip that suit off now and roll around in the grass naked, Wes. No tick is going to bite you.”

  “Bullshit,” Wes said.

  June shrugged. “Nope. Not bullshit. The drug exists, and people in-zone know about it. Some of them even get to take it.”

  “What about everyone else on the excursion?” Wes asked.

  “This is where I get a little confused,” June said. “For more reasons than one. The Tanakas got the vitamin. At extraordinary cost, I’ll add. And, for some mysterious reason”—she paused dramatically—“Marta Severs. That directive came down to Andy from the very top. He did as he was told.”

  “But Marta got bitten,” Wes said with satisfaction. “I gave her the Stamp myself.”

  “Again,” said June, “that’s why I’m confused. Marta? Any insights here?”

  She hesitated for a moment, but didn’t see the profit in lying. “I didn’t take the vitamins. I’ve been dealing with . . . a stomach thing. They made me sick. I had no idea what they were actually for.”

  “Well, that’s one mystery solved. What about the other? Why you?”

  Marta shrugged uncomfortably. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  June smiled humorously. “I’ll bet it is. But let’s leave it alone for now. There’s too much to discuss. There’s the matter of your new business partner, for instance. What do you know about David Perrone, Wes?”

  Marta’s face burned. Thank goodness it was dark.

  “Stop playing this out. Just tell me what you want to tell me.”

  “OK. I will. He puppeteers an entire economy that your Pocketz doesn’t touch,” June said. “Or touches indirectly. Drugs, of course. Our street Salt, for example. Illegal electronics and data mines, contraband of every possible stripe. And girls. Boys, too. Some women. But mostly girls. It might fascinate you, Wes—this shadow economy. The outer-zone camps like the one where Violet’s life began still exist. The one at Flat Rock still exists. Groups like yours travel out here on vacation. The accommodations can be pretty luxe, from what I’ve heard.” She eyed Marta now for some reason, shrewdly. “Of course, prostitution’s legal in Atlantic Zone now, so these camps have to cater to somewhat”—she pursed her lips around the word—“specialized interests. OLE makes regular runs out to Flat Rock and another camp up near Roanoke. They’re booked as hunting excursions. Andy has led several of them. He tells me that hunting is sometimes involved, matter of fact.”

  “Oh my God,” Marta said softly.

  “Yes,” June said.

  Marta was overcome with vertigo, or something like it—a sensation like falling, but what she was falling into was the black, fetid pit of her own willful ignorance and cowardice. Oh, she’d kept the lights off—the drugs helped with that—and she’d stumbled around blindly in the dark halls of her marriage, but she’d felt around the edges of things in order to keep moving safely forward. She had intimate knowledge of the shapes in the dark.

  “Last year,” June continued, “a military unit out of Atlantic Zone leveled a community like ours in West Virginia. They burned it to the ground in the night as people slept. Gunned down the runners. It’s an open secret that Perrone initiated that raid to settle a score with a rival crime boss out of Midwest Zone.”

  Marta could see that Wes wanted to protest again, to claim these things weren’t possible. But he pressed his lips together, making a thin white line.

  “That put us here in Ruby City on alert. But we thought we had fairly safe status. We thought we had a product Perrone wouldn’t want to do without, and we thought we’d done a pretty good job of safeguarding that product, keeping it proprietary, even keeping our village’s location secure. Perrone’s been trying for years to get us to make a onetime deal with him. He wants seeds, plants, formulas—for the street Salt and the therapeutic Salt. Says he’ll make a big one-time payout to us and then leave us alone. Sounds nice. But I’m not stupid. I know what happens if we hand all of that over. I know what he’s capable of. So I’ve put him off in every way I know how. So far, it’s worked.

  “Then, three things happened.

  “First, we got word of your deal. Microsuits, of all things. We’ve braced ourselves for all kinds of possibilities here, but I’ll admit that wasn’t high on anyone’s list. What’s the next big Pocketz investment, Wes? Aluminum foil hats?”

  Wes seethed. June, unruffled, continued.

  “Around that same time, some of our raw product went missing. Some seeds. Not much—it’s pure luck we caught the discrepancy, because whoever took the stuff was careful. It was literally a matter of a pouch being a tenth of a gram off during a chance weigh-in. Once we knew, though, we discovered the other thefts pretty quickly. And we haven’t figured out the who or the how, but we know the what. We have to assume David Perrone has them, or soon will.

  “The last thing happened after your training started, and that’s when I told Andy to pull the trigger and get you to Ruby City. Another community out here became a crater in the ground. I don’t know the ins and outs of this one, but I have it on good authority that the community housed a lab bankrolled by private interests in Gulf Zone. Three, four hundred people, easy. I’m guessing they had their own little vitamins. I can only assume other people have figured out what we’ve figured out, or else they’ve solved another dimension to the problem, like curing Shreve’s specifically. Either way, it’s all gone now. And we’re looking at the sky, wondering if we’re next. We’re Perrone’s pet lab. We’ve got that going for us. But if he’s gotten his hands on our seeds, that might not matter. He hasn’t come knocking with his buyout offer again, and that makes me nervous. And if he’s making microsuit deals, maybe he isn’t interested any longer in getting into the business of fixing the tick problem. Maybe he’s discovered that he likes the tick problem just fine.”

  She stopped finally. Downriver, the revelry continued. Marta shivered against a sudden breeze that rattled the weeds lining the water. A light rain started to fall, little more than a mist, but Marta sensed something heavy and ripe in the air, a coming storm.

  “What is it you want from me?” Wes asked. He sounded very tired.

  “First, I want you to process a hard truth. Those three or four hundred people outside Gulf Zone—that happened because of your microsuit deal. That’s what this man is willing to do. That’s who you’ve partnered with, and those are the stakes if you keep this deal with him.”

 
I have to do something kind of bold to clench it, David had said. None of Marta’s suspicions about David had prepared her for a possibility like this. But she couldn’t muster enough disbelief to doubt June. Could David have done what June said he’d done?

  Yes, she had to admit. Yes. He could have.

  Wes’s eyes were bright with dampness. “I had no idea—you have to believe I had no idea anything like that could happen.”

  “I do believe it,” June said. “But now you know.”

  “So what do I do then? Back out of the arrangement? It’s done. I won’t do it. You have my word.”

  “That’s something, but it might not be enough for us. Because Perrone has our seeds. I have to operate on that assumption, anyway. So here’s what I propose: you make us your partners, instead.” June shook her head suddenly, as if arguing with herself. “Not even partners. Partnership is more than what I’m asking for here. I’ll let you have the deal Perrone wanted. I give you seeds, plants, and formulas to take back to Atlantic Zone, and you give us some kind of reimbursement to cover our losses from the alliance with Perrone. I can promise you we’ll be a lot cheaper than Perrone’s deal, and you’ll be getting a product that actually does something.” A sadness settled into her face, making her features sag. “A product that changes everything.”

  “You don’t seem so happy about that possibility,” Marta said.

  “I’m not. You know why this zoning business has gone on as long as it has? Because lots of us like it this way. The David Perrones of the world like living behind walls. Me, I like living outside of them. When Salt gets tested and packaged and distributed, and people’s insurance starts covering it, that’s the beginning of the end for all of this.” She motioned downriver, where the glow of bonfires etched the edges of the starlit sky. “It won’t be long before the zones are fighting about who owns us, which government gets to tell us when to bend and squat. But what choice do we have? I’ll take a few more years over nothing. I have lives to protect.”

  Wes ran both hands over his shaved head, thoughtfully. It was quiet enough now that Marta could hear the dry rasp of his palms against the new stubble.

  “If I do this,” Wes said. “If I agree to it. You let everyone go home tomorrow.”

  June shook her head firmly. “No, Wes. I’m sorry. I have to keep you here until you’re scheduled to report back to Quarantine 1. Otherwise Perrone’s going to know something’s up, and we can’t risk that.”

  “What will you do with us?” Marta asked.

  “We’ll treat you like guests,” June said. “We have comfortable bunkhouses. You’ll all get doses of Salt—we drink it here in a tea, and it hits the system faster—and so you won’t be at any risk of disease. We’ll feed you well. Heck, you can spend the time doing all of the things you planned to come out here to do: hike, swim, fish. Sit under a tree and read. You won’t have to use a Stamp. And Wes, I can show you how our operation works. You can gather all the information you’ll need to bring back to your people.”

  She held out her slim, pale hand. Wes studied it.

  “You know it will take years—maybe four or five years—for a drug to get FDA approval. That’s a conservative estimate.”

  “I’m counting on it,” June said, letting the hand drop. “We want the time. We need it. As long as you publicize the development of the drug, as long as Perrone knows you know about us, we might be safe. If there is such a thing as being safe.”

  “Jesus,” Wes said. “How do I explain this to everyone else? You’ve terrorized them. Us. Your”—he searched for a word—“daughter shot one of our group in the head. Whatever Andy says about that, the bite, the infestation, it doesn’t matter. This is the guy who held an assault rifle to our heads and marched us through the woods all night. Why didn’t you just kidnap me and leave everyone else alone?”

  “Because OLE procedure would have called for a halt to the excursion and immediate return to Quarantine, which would have set off alarms. As for terrorizing you, yes, I wish it hadn’t had to be that way. I wish we could have led you off kindly and been assured that you’d wait patiently for an explanation. But you know and I know that wouldn’t have worked. As for the man Violet shot, I believe Andy when he says he was dying. But it’s unfortunate. It wasn’t part of the plan.”

  Marta said, “And who’s to say this plan will work any better than that one did?”

  “It did work,” June said. “You’re here. You’re hearing me out. The question is: Will you help?”

  Wes looked at Marta. Thinking of all she knew and hadn’t told him, even now—and could she? could she confess that she was married to a man who’d done the things June was saying he’d done?—she dropped her gaze. What would she do when all of this was over? Return to that house, that bed? Resume her place at David’s side?

  But how else would she see Sal and Enzo again?

  June was holding her hand out to Wes again. He considered it for an uncomfortably long moment, letting it hang in space. He was reaching out to take it when a cry rose up behind them, in the village, and footsteps pounded their way. Marta stiffened, startled. Her scalp prickled. She could hear the rasping exhalations of runners—sprinters—and braced herself to be leveled by a stampede.

  Andy drew to a careening stop in front of them and hunched over. He put one hand on his knee and gasped. The other he pointed uphill, toward the Town Hall.

  “She took out Miles and Leeda,” he said hoarsely. “She’s gone.”

  “Who?” June said. “Who are you talking about?”

  “Tia.” He drew fully to a stand, mopped his face dry with a rag, and stared balefully at Marta and Wes. “She killed Miles and Leeda. She disappeared. She has their weapons.”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Wes said. “What do you mean, killed them? Are you sure they’re not just unconscious?”

  Andy bum-rushed Wes, knocking him to his back, and Marta huffed out a startled little squeak that might have been funny under other circumstances. Andy slapped Wes’s cheek, leaving behind a dark print. Backhanded the other cheek, streaking it, too. There was a smell in the air, iron and mud, and Marta grasped suddenly that she was seeing blood, a lot of it. Andy’s fingers dragged red marks across Wes’s microsuit as Randall hauled him off by his armpits, and he screamed, “She bashed their heads in, you piece of shit! She murdered them!”

  Wes lay on his back, too petrified to move. Marta knew the feeling. Her knees were so weak they couldn’t even knock together.

  The expression on June’s face was cold. Cold. “Go after her,” she said softly to Andy, who was still being loosely restrained by the guards. “Get Roz. You know what to do. As for the two of you”—she turned to Wes and Marta—“well, I’m afraid this changes things.”

  Eleven

  Within three hours of Tia’s escape, the hostages, once again with wrists zip-tied, were moved roughly at gunpoint, through a driving rain, from Town Hall to a grim corrugated storage building with narrow horizontal windows positioned near the ceiling, so that only the tops of trees and a wedge of night sky were visible. A single doorway separated inside from out, and it would be guarded at all times, June promised, by an armed villager. A curtain strung up in a corner hid a waste bucket. “The facilities,” June said, loading those two words with more malice than Edie would have imagined possible. The floor was oiled dirt.

  The group clumped together, cold and soaked, in the middle of the room, trembling as June directed Joe and Randall to pat them each down. Their backpacks had already been confiscated. Into a satchel the shoes went. “What’s going on?” Lee kept saying. “What are you doing?”

  “Where’s Tia?” Edie dared to ask. Afraid of the answer.

  “Gone,” June said. She gave Edie a shrewd look. “She killed two of our villagers and took off. A nineteen-year-old girl and a seventeen-year-old boy. Good kids. Really good kids. They were found in the woods with thei
r heads bashed in.”

  Edie looked at Wes before she could stop herself. His eyes widened, and he shook his head, an anguished expression flickering across his face. I didn’t know she was going to do that, the headshake said. It wasn’t part of the plan.

  “Those so-called good kids had guns,” Berto said.

  “They weren’t loaded. But that’s not a mistake we’ll make again.”

  “What are you going to do to us?” Wes asked.

  “I haven’t decided,” June said. “I’d hoped to work this out peacefully. I had thought I could have you back on your way home in a few weeks’ time. But that required some trust and goodwill.”

  Marta snorted. “Trust and goodwill.”

  “That’s funny to you?” June asked.

  “It’s absurd to me,” said Marta tiredly. “And not funny at all.”

  June’s lip curled. “I was talking to Wes when this news came in.” She was addressing the larger group now. “We seemed to be close to an understanding. A mutually beneficial arrangement. Maybe Wes will tell you about it. Maybe that understanding isn’t out of reach. But I can’t look at any of you right now.” With that, she walked out. Randall followed her, eyeing each of them with cold amusement, and pulled the door closed behind him. A deadbolt turned.

  The rain roared against the metal roof. It was a sound Edie normally loved, but tonight it felt like an assault. Like the sky was falling in.

  “What’s this arrangement she mentioned?” Ken Tanaka asked. All eyes shifted to Wes.

  He squirmed under the scrutiny. There were red streaks marking the chest of his microsuit, and angry red blotches on both of his cheeks. June had left them with a single lantern, and it flickered wanly across his face. “It’s a long story. Marta, you’ll have to help me tell it.”

  —

  “I don’t believe it,” Lee said. “I don’t believe a word of it.”