The Salt Line

by Holly Goddard Jones

  “You think I’m lying?” Wes asked.

  “No,” Lee said, “but I think you’re stupid if you buy this load of horse crap. Miracle tick cure, out here in the boonies? Gangsters commanding the Atlantic Zone military to mow down innocent women and children in their beds? Use your brain. What sense does any of that make?”

  “Sounds plausible to me,” Anastasia said. “ConspireWire has been reporting for years on the outer-zone insurgency problem. Just last month they posted—”

  “Don’t even start with that conspiracy nonsense. I won’t hear it. I tell you, it’s horse crap.”

  “So why do all of this?” Edie asked him.

  “Money! You heard the man. She’s going to send him home with some magic beans and he’s supposed to send her back a pile of cash.” Lee’s face was bright pink, and a thatch of iron-colored hairs sprouted from the open neck of his microsuit. It’s a wonder they didn’t make him shave all that along with his head, Edie had thought the morning they embarked—was that not even two days ago?—picturing him in a pastel golf shirt and plaid trousers, driver tipped over a shoulder. He carried himself like a man used to bossing around underlings, underlings who called him Mr. Flannigan, sir, and picked up his dry cleaning during their twenty-minute lunch break.

  Wes shook his head, exasperated. “It wouldn’t be as simple as that. What good does money do out here? They don’t have a Pocketz account. I don’t even know if they have a computer. I can’t just make a transfer. They’re taking a huge risk, trusting that I’d follow through on my end of the deal once I’m back in-zone. You can call me stupid, but I believe June when she says that her object is to get the drug out in some public form before Perrone can act.”

  “And anyway,” Berto said, “so what if they’re just magic beans? Let Wes give her what she wants. I’ll chip in. We should play their game and go home.”

  “Like they’re going to just let us pay our own ransom and leave,” Wendy said. “She made her deal with Wes. Not us.”

  “I wouldn’t make any deal with her that didn’t guarantee the safety of everyone here,” Wes said.

  “Do you think she’ll just let all nine of us go back in-zone, knowing everything we know about this place?” Anastasia asked. “Genuine question.”

  “I think,” Wes said, “it’s a risk she’s willing to take, given what’s at stake for them.”

  Jesse, who had been strangely quiet through all of this, finally spoke. “So it’s your fault this all happened, Feingold. You’re the reason the rest of us are here.”

  Silence fell again. Wes’s jaw tensed and his eyes watered. Edie still felt the sting of his proposal, but the pain on his face was real. And she had her own dose of guilt to bear, didn’t she? If she’d gone along with Tia, would those two teenagers have been killed?

  “Don’t start that nonsense,” Marta snapped. “He couldn’t have known.”

  “But he makes a good point,” said Wendy. “The rest of us are just dragged into this, for nothing.” She hid her face in her hands, muffling her words. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe Ken and I paid four hundred thousand for this.”

  “Did you say four hundred?” Berto asked. “Ani and I only paid two.”

  Jesse leaned in eagerly. “Me, too. For me and Edie, I mean.”

  Ken cast Wendy such a thunderous look that Edie felt real concern for her, real alarm about what he might do. She was reminded again of her initial impression that the two were spouses rather than siblings. There was a strangeness between them, though maybe that was just Ken’s strangeness, because he was brooding, distant. Unfriendly. Though Wendy’s English was thoroughly American, even accented with the slight twang that Edie associated with the southern reaches of the Atlantic Zone, Ken, unless forced by Outer Limits procedures or the barest demands of politeness to speak, only talked to Wendy, and then only in Japanese. The reason Edie had thought them married, she had to admit to herself now, was that there seemed between them a power imbalance particular to a certain kind of couple. Though Wendy was the one who did all of the asking and engaging for both of the Tanakas, and Ken stood silently, even meekly, to the side, he gave off the unmistakable air of being in charge.

  “That’s interesting,” Marta said. “Because Andy told June that the two of you were the only ones in the group other than Wes getting the inoculation. She didn’t know why.”

  Wes’s eyes darted Marta’s way. Marta, staring at Wendy and Ken, missed this, but Edie did not.

  “Wendy misspoke,” Ken said softly. “We also paid two hundred thousand.”

  “Was there a premium package?” Lee asked. “Because I would have sprung for it.”

  “You just said you didn’t even think the drug existed,” Wes said. “You just said I’m stupid and this whole story of June’s is a fairy tale.”

  “I said it was a load of horse crap,” Lee said. He seemed unbothered by the contradiction.

  “I don’t know what to believe anymore.” Anastasia put her head in her hands.

  “If there was a premium package,” Marta said carefully, almost soothingly, as though she were speaking to a skittish animal, “that’s important information for us to have right now. That’s information we’d need as we decide if we can trust June’s story.”

  Wendy seemed as interested in Ken’s response as everyone else in the group was, but he only shook his head. “We also paid two hundred,” he repeated.

  Berto huffed and rubbed his face. “OK. Say it’s all a lie. What can we do about it? They have our Stamps, our shoes, all our gear. I don’t even know what we’re arguing about. There’s one way forward.” He made a jabbing motion with his hand. “Go along with whatever they want. Hope for the best.”

  “There’s still Tia,” Anastasia said. “If she gets back, gets help—”

  “That’s a big ‘if,’” Wes said. “What’s our plan if she doesn’t?”

  A long, empty stretch. Time to listen to the rain on the roof. Edie closed her eyes against the lantern light, watching its afterglow lick at the inside of her eyelids.

  “It’s on you, Feingold.” Jesse again. Edie opened her eyes in time to see what she’d missed before in Jesse’s eyes: his cellular-level terror. “You have what they say they want. You have the power. You believe what they’re selling. Get them to let the rest of us go.”

  “You should at least try,” Wendy said.

  Wes took a deep breath. Then nodded. “Yeah, OK. I’ll try.”

  “Or maybe Tia will get back home,” said Anastasia. “Maybe help will be here soon.”

  Twelve

  The dogs were named Tauntaun and Wampa—dumb names, Andy thought, but it was their handler’s doing, some kind of inside joke, and the handler, Roz, was quick-tempered and absolutely indispensable to June and so Andy kept his thoughts about the names to himself. The dogs themselves were magnificent mongrels, littermates, both male: at least forty kilos apiece, brindled coats, big square skulls and powerful jaws, strangely long ears that hung around the dogs’ block faces, making them look a bit like they were wearing women’s wigs. Roz was more trainer than breeder, June had explained to Andy long ago (Roz explained herself to no one but June), but she kept about a dozen dogs, knew all of the neighborhood dogs, and was always on the lookout for what she called hill curs—muddy-colored dogs with muddled pedigrees, tick-resistant, feral but not too wild. Coaxable. She mated the dogs by instinct and whim rather than system, kept the pups she thought she could work with, gave away the ones she couldn’t, drowned the rest. (June had laughed when this disclosure made Andy flinch. “You really are a Zoner, aren’t you? God love you.”) Those she kept she raised up to whatever seemed to be their strength, for there was ever a need in Ruby City for good trained dogs, hunting dogs especially but also guard dogs, herding dogs, and even service dogs, of a sort; after all, blind children out here stayed blind, and if you were lucky enough to get o
ld out-of-zone, you did it without the benefit of laser surgeries and retinal reattachments and even corrective lenses, unless you could get your hands on an old scavenged pair of glasses or something smuggled from in-zone.

  The one or two dogs—never more than two—who struck Roz as most versatile in their intelligence, steady, loyal, hale: these she called the princes (whether male or female), and she kept them by her side at all times. When Andy first came to Ruby City eleven years ago, there had been a different prince—Leto, that one was called—a tall, spindle-legged dog with shaggy gray fur and the narrow haunches of a greyhound. Leto had been regal, aloof. Tolerated petting, but didn’t seem to enjoy it. Tauntaun and Wampa, when they weren’t at work, were sweet, loving dogs, kissers, playful as pups. Woolers, June called them. “Look at ’em woolin’,” she’d say, smiling her serene smile down at the dogs wriggling on their backs in a patch of hot sunlight, chortling, rolling each other.

  At work now—a condition signaled to them by the leather collars Roz had buckled around their necks—Tauntaun and Wampa trotted seriously through the underbrush, Tauntaun ahead, off-lead, Wampa leashed by a six-meter rope tied off around Roz’s thick waist. Her tracking process was another thing Roz didn’t deign to explain to Andy—but he could gather the basics from watching her. Tauntaun went ahead, sometimes even out of sight, zigging and zagging, nose to the earth. When he caught the scent, he barked, and Wampa answered, lunging forward, slowing reluctantly at a yank on his lead and an unintelligible correction from Roz, then dipping his nose, too, to the ground. The dogs would reunite, sniff each other. Then Roz would cast off again by making some noise from the back of her throat, and Tauntaun became a brown blur, a smudge in the woods ahead.

  The morning air was gray. Opaque. That it was morning, and they had only been on the trail for two hours, frustrated Andy—but Roz refused to set out at night, said she was too old and fat to go off gallivanting into the woods during a turd floater, couldn’t even see your own hand in front of your face. What do you want, for me to break my neck? And Andy knew it would be useless to try to track Tia without the dogs. So he agreed to wait. He went to his cot in the bunkhouse, lay back with his boots still on, and looked at the plank ceiling while the cookout revelry continued out by the river, most of Ruby City’s residents oblivious to the tragedy that had just occurred uphill from where they shoveled in plates of barbecue and gulped glasses of foamy beer. June’s call. “I’m not laying that news at the feet of a bunch of happy drunks,” she said. “They’ll go after the hostages, and I’m not sure if even I could stop them. Let’s see if we can bring them some good news first.”

  Bring them Tia is what she meant. For what purpose, Andy couldn’t say. He had lived a double life for almost a decade, but it wasn’t a life split neatly into halves. Most of the eleven years, for him, transpired in-zone. And even in his time spent on OLE tours, he could only escape to Ruby City for brief visits, after lights-out, stealing hours from time he was supposed to be sleeping, leading his groups on hikes and hunts the next day in a drowsy fog. A wonder that he had never shot himself in the foot or walked off a cliff. He knew Ruby City less from firsthand experience than he did from encrypted electronic correspondence with its residents and his memories of that three-month-long stay eleven years ago, when June had brought him here, shown him her world and, in so doing, showed him his world back home—the horrendous lie of it. And then she had shown him his purpose. He’d had no regrets. Not even with the sacrifices. But still, he knew only in the abstract what justice looked like in Ruby City, and as furious as he was at Tia, as grief-stricken as he was at the senseless deaths of Leeda and Miles, he didn’t relish the idea of leading Tia to the gallows, or whatever fate Ruby citizens reserved for those who murdered one of their own.

  I’m knocked up, Tia had said to him just before boot camp for this excursion had begun. He couldn’t stop remembering her words, the look on her face. The desperation in her eyes that she’d hidden, as she always did, behind a defiant bravado. I might be off my game. And what he could see now, flat on his back on this cot, was that Tia had wanted to be talked out of going on the excursion or even tattled on. OLE had a policy against sending pregnant women, guides or paying customers, on excursions. Liability was too high. Andy could have gone to Larry Abrams, excursion director, and let Tia’s secret slip. She might have been fired for noncompliance, or she might have been moved to an office job at a quarter of her regular salary, but she would have been safe. Why hadn’t he done that? Some screwed-up sense of loyalty? Maybe. He hadn’t wanted to betray her, even to help her. Distraction? That, too. What had popped in his head at her confession was, Great. Of course. His silent work all these years, never really knowing if, or when, his time would come—it had all led up to this trip, and so of course it was just his damn luck that Tia would come up pregnant, that Tia, whom he’d regarded, always, as a real friend—as real a friend as a man whose entire life was a fabrication could hope to make—would be assigned to this excursion at all.

  But that wasn’t the whole of it, he admitted to himself.

  It had been crazy, half-formed, foolish, fantasy, stress-induced, exhaustion-induced—if he’d stopped for even a moment to think this impulse through, he’d have recognized its absurdity—but Andy had always liked Tia, there had been fleeting moments over the years when he’d wondered if he might more-than-like her, and he was giving up everything to serve June and Ruby City and his own ideals: his wife, his sons. (June and Ruby City and his ideals predated Beth, predated Ian and Colby, but that didn’t make abandoning them any easier.) Maybe he didn’t have to be so alone. Maybe he didn’t have to give everything up. And it was the baby, weirdly, that had triggered this fantasy, because he knew what a baby would mean to June and the rest, imagined it as a beautiful sort of gift he and Tia could make to the community.

  Crazy, half-formed, foolish. Fantasy. Not even a conscious plan, not anything he could register as having entertained as a possibility until now, in retrospect, in this first quiet moment since he and the others had raised their guns on the travelers—but there it was.

  And Tia had made her own crazy, half-formed plan. Now she was God knows where, and two people—kids, really—were dead.

  All of this was why Andy spent his first night in eleven years under a Ruby City roof not sleeping—his eyes wide in alarm, head swarming with regrets—and embarked on his hunt the next morning in that same old familiar, albeit caffeinated, fog.

  Wampa was pulling now toward Tauntaun, who had lain on his belly, posture rigid. Roz had to yank twice on the leash, offering her guttural command, before Wampa’s loping slowed to a scamper.

  “That’s Tauntaun’s tell,” Roz said. “He found something.”

  They closed the distance. Andy extended his finger to graze the edge of the trigger guard on his rifle, holding his breath. He didn’t think Tia was here, or close. But he knew she was armed—though the guns were supposedly unloaded—and he no longer had a sense of what she was capable of. (She could say the same about him, he knew.) If he had been her last night, he’d have used the rain and night cover to gain high ground, as high as he could stand to get, and he’d wait, hidden, for his pursuers. Then pick them off. But Tia was not a good shot, even if she did have firepower. She’d started turning down hunting excursions after the birth of her first baby, even though he knew she could use the money. He was counting on her unease with the weapon, her desperation to get home. She wouldn’t lie in wait. She’d flee.

  That didn’t mean she wouldn’t turn and fire on him and Roz, if she saw them. In fact, he expected nothing less.

  Roz scratched Tauntaun’s head, slipped him a treat, then Wampa. Hunched down. “Hmm,” she said. “Ain’t seeing it.”

  “Seeing what?” Andy asked.

  “Whatever it is to see.” She beckoned. “Bend down here. You got young eyes. Tell me what you make out.”

  He did as he was told, setting his rifle c
arefully down beside him. Roz’s gaze was fixed on the ground at Tauntaun’s feet, where—Andy had to agree—all there was to see was dirt. A dried-up leaf. Some scraggly blades of grass. He could smell the dogs, their doggy smell, not perfume but not exactly unpleasant, and he could smell Roz and himself, their body odor after two hours of brisk, uphill hiking, and something else. Something unnatural but recognizable. Chemical.

  “I think she Stamped herself.” He looked around, grabbed a stick, and leaned in further, nose almost to the ground, pushing the leaf to the side, folding back the blades of grass. There. He picked the dead tick up between his fingers and rested it on his palm.

  Roz wrinkled her mouth as if she’d bitten into something sour, and shook her head. “Good lord. Throw that thing down.”

  “It’s been cooked in chemicals. It’s harmless.”

  “Don’t mean I want to look at it,” Roz said.

  A big one—almost the size of a pencil eraser. Five of its eight legs still attached. Andy turned his hand over, letting what was left of the tick fall back to the ground, and wiped his palm on his pant leg. He picked up his gun, stood. He could not remember, for a long handful of seconds, what was supposed to come next.

  “Wake up, bud,” Roz said. “We ain’t done yet.”

  “I know that,” Andy said irritably. He noticed Roz’s dark look and allowed himself a second to enjoy it, though he knew that he shouldn’t push her. The missus. What did June see in this woman? This coarse, humorless woman with her soft, shapeless body and her helmet of dry hay-colored hair? The two of them had been a mystery to Andy from the very start, though he had to say, if nothing else, that aging had hurt Roz’s looks no more than youth had helped them.

  Roz mumbled some order at the dogs. They took off, and she followed without a backward glance. Andy trailed after.

  —

  Andy’s mother had been sixteen years old when she accepted a hardship leave from Biloxi Secondary and decided, on a whim, to go ahead and try taking the Intra-Zone Career Aptitude Exam. She got one free crack at it, it was one Saturday of her life, and she knew in her heart of hearts that she was never going to be able to come back from her hardship leave, that her entire life was a hardship and only a miracle would change it. This was what she told Andy, years later, almost to the word: My entire life was a hardship. Only a miracle would change it. But she got her miracle. A few moments after she hit the Finish Exam button, the proctor called her back to his office.