The Salt Line

by Holly Goddard Jones

  “I don’t want this,” the blond woman said. “I don’t want to leave my husband.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” her husband snapped. “We’ve talked about this. Go.”

  Wendy Tanaka looked from her brother to June and back again, as if checking his reaction before forming her own. “But why are you even willing to do this? Why not hold us here by force?”

  “It’s the best compromise I could hope to reach with you,” June said. “We need time. This seemed like the surest way to proceed with your cooperation. And we want your cooperation.” She cleared her throat, thinking about Roz’s face this morning in the mellow Sunday light. The love in it, and the understanding. “We’re not bad people.”

  “When do we go?” Lee asked. He seemed calm now, even content. He was going home, and he was leaving no one here to worry about. Good riddance, June thought. She was glad to be shed of him.

  “This afternoon,” she said. “Eat lunch. Say your goodbyes. Andy will be here with a van in two hours.”

  —

  Half an hour later she was sitting in her favorite spot down by the creek, watching a school of minnows throw darts of light and thinking about how this day would end, when she heard someone approaching from behind. Joe. With Marta Severs. Marta walked across the grass in her sock feet, wrists bound behind her, Joe steering her elbow with one hand and his other poised near his holster. If this had been Randall, Andy, even Violet, June’s reaction would have been exasperation. An assumption that her will was being thwarted, however well-meant the thwarting. But Joe was a rare man: steady, slow to anger, slow to action. Careful without being timid. If Joe was bringing Marta Severs to June’s quiet place by the creek, he had a reason.

  “What’s this?” she asked him.

  “She had something to say that I thought would interest you,” Joe said.

  June nodded. “Cut her loose. I don’t think she’s going to run for it. Are you?”

  Marta shook her head.

  Joe took a pocketknife from a pouch in the quilted fishing vest he always wore, drew it open, and sliced through Marta’s zip tie. Marta rubbed the insides of her wrists across her hips.

  “You can sit,” June told her. She indicated the grass beside her. Marta peered at the ground, then lowered herself gingerly to her bottom, drawing her knees up and sitting rigidly, balls of her feet lifted, back arched.

  June laughed. “You may as well stand if you’re that uncomfortable.”

  “I was bitten on our way out here, sitting on grass just like I’m doing now. I don’t want to repeat the experience.”

  “Fair enough,” June said. “Let’s make this short, then. What’s on your mind?”

  “You should keep me here,” Marta said. “I’m not saying to keep me instead of Wes. Keep us both. But don’t send me back.”

  “You like it here that much?”

  Marta took a deep breath. Swallowed. “I can help you. I’m useful to you. More than you realize. More than Wes, maybe.”

  June waited.

  “My last name isn’t Severs. It’s Perrone.”

  June had a meager electronic dossier on David Perrone—some information Andy had been able to turn up for her (photographs, birth records, real estate transaction records, a portion of a medical file indicating that Perrone was being treated for Addison’s disease)—and she now realized what had been nagging her about Marta Severs. There was one photograph in the dossier, taken at long range with a telephoto lens, of David Perrone, his wife, and their twin sons. They were at the funeral of David’s predecessor, and so June could be forgiven for not putting the face from that image—mid to late thirties, lips a pop of bright red, high cheekbones framed with a glossy near-black bob—together with the fiftysomething, shorn, unmade woman before her. But yes, June could see it now: the cheekbones, the full lips, the severe brow line, and the dark eyes.

  “My husband is David. Our sons are Salvador and Lorenzo. They’re in England right now, and the only demand I have is that no one touches them, ever.”

  “Done,” June said softly. Though that was rich, really. The idea that June could order hits on people living in England. Or protect them. “So what is this? You’re here to spy for your husband?” She tried to make sense of how that would have worked. How could Marta have known she’d end up here? Did that mean Andy was working for David Perrone?

  “No,” she said. “I don’t know how to convince you of that. Well, the fact I got bitten because I didn’t know to take my vitamins. That’s something, maybe. But other than that, you’ll have to take my word for it. David sent me and our boys off because he said something big was happening. That he was making some kind of move. He owns shares in OLE, so he said this would be a safe bet. I thought I was going on a camping trip, nothing more. The rest is coincidence.” Something passed over her face.

  “What?” June said. “You’re leaving something out.”

  “He wanted me to keep an eye on Wes, get to know him. He didn’t tell me why.”

  “Well, the suit deal,” June said.

  “I can see that now,” Marta said, somewhat testily. “I’m just telling you he didn’t explain himself when he sent me off. He never explains himself.”

  A crow cawed. The sunlight was golden, warm at their backs, and a broad yellow leaf detached from a branch above them, spun, then landed in the water and was carried off toward the Little Tennessee. June felt her love of this place powerfully and painfully—a love made larger and dearer because it seemed borrowed. Ephemeral. She was willing to sell her soul to protect this thing she had built. But what if even that wasn’t enough?

  “What are you proposing?” she asked Marta.

  “I don’t know, exactly,” Marta said. “You could let my husband know you have me. That might give you some leverage. Or not. The truth is that I don’t know my value to him. Our marriage is . . .”

  “What?”

  “Complicated,” Marta said. “I feel safe saying that he’s possessive, if not loving. He won’t like that you have someone who belongs to him. It will get his attention.”

  June, who knew the self-spiting way that David Perrone’s possessiveness had played out in the past, wasn’t encouraged.

  “Or maybe I have information about him you can use. I’m not being cagey when I say maybe. I just don’t know. Question me. I’ll tell you everything I can tell you. I’ve lived with him for almost thirty years. I don’t know his secrets, but I know his ways.”

  “Like what?” June asked.

  “Like, you were right about one thing.” Marta held June’s gaze. “If he thinks you pose a threat to his deal with Wes, he’ll make you go away. That’s how he handles problems. And even if you make the deal with Wes the way you’ve planned . . .” She trailed off. “I don’t know. He holds grudges. And he has ambitions back home. Political ambitions. He won’t like loose ends.”

  “Political ambitions,” June repeated with scornful wonder.

  “I can tell you everything I know about it. Some campaigns he’s donated to, politicians he’s done deals with—backroom or otherwise. Who he’s been working with. There’s a woman on his staff now who’d been on the president’s staff. She—”

  June held up a hand. “OK. Stop for now. I need to think about this,” she said. “Where to go from here.” She looked up at Joe. “Take her back to the others. Let Andy know she’s staying with us. The rest go as scheduled.”

  “Thank you,” Marta said.

  “Don’t thank me yet.” June considered the creek, the minnows. She let her mind go out with them, along the current, around the bend, over the rocks to the Little Tennessee, its course steady and true. Marta had no idea how radically her own course might have diverged. “We’ll talk,” she said. “Later.”

  Fifteen

  They rode silently in the van’s middle two bench seats, blindfolded, wrists bound, Anastas
ia and Wendy up front, Jesse and Lee in the back. Andy had expected questions, demands, protests, complaints. Requests for a bathroom break. Chit-chat among themselves to pass the time. Three hours on the road, though, and nothing. The occasional cough or sniff, some gas passing odiferous enough to eclipse, briefly, the smell of body odor, but silence ruled, and it was a relief to Andy after the frantic pitch of the last few days.

  Following June’s instructions, he exited the old I-40 corridor at Morganton. The road here was in very bad shape. Potholes abounded. Whole sections of the pavement had sloughed away. The biggest craters had been leveled with gravel at some point, and the bridge over the Catawba was in good enough repair to traverse (heart lodged in throat), but Andy was giving the shocks on the old van a workout, and the vibration through the steering wheel was strong enough to make his arms go numb from elbows to fingertips. Soon, too, there was the other vibration, the one coming off the Wall, and as usual—as many times as he’d made this approach, from one side or the other—Andy was struck by a sense of deep unease, of wrongness. The Wall bothered some people more than others. Tia had claimed to hardly notice it. “I had it worse when the muffler on my car came loose,” she said once. For Andy, the vibration was insidious, alive, and he found it hard to think clearly when he was operating within the Wall’s shadow.

  “You took us off the interstate,” Anastasia said, raising her voice to be heard over the noise of the van’s progress.

  “There’s a smaller gate into the zone through Lenoir,” Andy said. “Video surveillance along the route isn’t as extensive. I can get you closer before leaving.”

  He drove another five minutes, ten. Checked the map June had given him. As she’d indicated, there was a parking lot ahead on the right, and the remains of an L-shaped building with a red metal roof. He pulled in, shifted to Park. Shut off the engine.

  “You can take off your blindfolds,” he told the four.

  They did—more tentatively than he would have expected—and squinted against the late afternoon sun.

  “This is where we part ways,” Andy said. “Go on and get out of the van. Then I’ll clip your wrist ties.”

  They hesitated. Andy exhaled loudly and grabbed his gun from the passenger seat where he’d tossed it. “Jesus Christ. Don’t make me wave this thing around anymore. Do you want to come back to the village with me? Christ.”

  Jesse Haggard moved, hunching over to pull the door handle, awkward with his hands still bound, and slid it open. Oh, he’d had no trouble leaving his girlfriend behind to return to the land of milk and honey. Made a big show of kissing her goodbye. Didn’t even offer to trade places with her—Andy had thought him capable of that much—and hopped into the van as if they were heading out on a field trip to the water park.

  Lee followed. Then the women. When they were all out, Andy grabbed the duffel bag from the passenger floorboard and joined them, sliding the revolver into his holster.

  “Wrists,” he said, brandishing his knife. They offered them to him. Four pops. Four neon-colored plastic ties left on the ground where they’d dropped. They did their dance, now familiar: wrist rubbing, stretching, craning their necks left, right, cracking their backs.

  “Your boots and Stamps are in that bag, along with some water and energy bars.” He pointed up the road. “The checkpoint is about three kilometers ahead. Follow the road. You’ll walk right into it. Don’t expect them to roll out the welcome wagon for you. Be polite, be agreeable. Do as they say. Yes sir. No sir. Let them know you’re unarmed. When you’re into Quarantine and they’ve confirmed your IDs, you’ll get treated like VIPs again.”

  They looked down at the bag, then up the road.

  “What are you waiting for? Kiss goodbye?”

  Anastasia eyed him with loathing, hunched down, drew the drawstring on the bag. She rooted around, drew out a pair of boots tied together by the shoestrings, checked the tag in the tongue. Tossed them to Jesse Haggard, who sat on the rotten old cement and started to pull them on. Stamps followed boots. Water and food followed Stamps. Andy waited until the bag was empty, its contents transferred to the four men and women with stubbled scalps and grimed microsuits, and then climbed back into the van. He pressed the automatic lock button as soon as he’d done so.

  “Good luck,” he said through a crack in the window.

  Jesse Haggard threw up his middle finger. Andy laughed.

  “See you around,” he said, and he started the engine.

  He drove back southeast on Highway 18, moving his visor to block the red ball of sun ahead on the right. He’d noted the turnoff when he passed it, but he had a hard time seeing with the light in his eyes like this, so he slowed to a crawl much earlier than he probably needed to.

  Here it was. State Road 1430.

  Going maybe fifteen, twenty kilometers an hour, so he could refer to his map but also because this asphalt here was in even worse shape than Highway 18’s had been, Andy watched for Highland Road, then Nick Road, making a right both times, passing a half-buried old sign marking the Turtle (or was it Tuttle?) Educational State Forest. Less than a kilometer south of the intersection was the turnoff June had marked on the map with a star: Cannon Town Road. Comes to dead end, her note said. Park at house.

  He checked the van’s digital clock: 4:48. They’d been walking maybe fifteen minutes, so he still had plenty of time.

  The road here—dirt, with two wheel tracks defined by new gravel in the spots that would get muddy after a rain—climbed uphill, then leveled, and this was where Andy found the promised house. At first glance, you wouldn’t mark it as special. It seemed to be in perhaps marginally better repair than the houses Andy had passed coming up here: brick ranch homes with metal carports and large rusting septic tanks, the roofs decaying, window glass shattered, kudzu sinking its tendrils into the rotting mortar. At this house, glass glinted behind the boarded-over windows. The roof, though very old, seemed to be intact. But as he exited the van and approached, Andy’s eyes lit on other evidence of recent use, even upkeep. The nail heads fitting the old boards to the windows were untarnished. A steel plate had been affixed to the front door, and a new-looking padlock dangled from the hasp, its shank a good centimeter thick. Andy had the key June had given him on a string around his neck. He pulled the string out from under his shirt, fitted it to the keyhole, and popped the lock loose.

  He’d known what to expect, but still, how strange it all was.

  It was as if he had stumbled into an abandoned newsroom, or campaign headquarters—some space where clusters of people worked at computers in close proximity and downed cheap coffee by the liter. The living room’s perimeter was lined with couches and desks, scavenged and makeshift, the floor between them a spider’s web of intersecting power cords all leading to the place where a chimney might have been, once, but now sat a large, hulking piece of equipment with its own cords trailing up and through a hole in the ceiling. The solar generator. What was being powered were a handful of computers: four older, out of date by five or eight years, but one absolutely state-of-the-art, even by in-zone standards, with a beautiful two-hundred-centimeter TI Dimension-Tech display that depicted, in rest mode, an eerily realistic small waterfall finishing in a churning foam so detailed that a beam of sunlight slipping through the boarded-over windows picked up droplets of digital mist.

  “There’s a porch off the back of the house,” June had told him. “You’ll find what you need there.”

  He made his way through the kitchen. It was dusty but tidy, smelled of mothballs. A mousetrap rested unsprung on the tile floor, pellet of food untouched. The door to the back porch had a plastic sheet hanging over it; Andy pushed it to the side, slid three different deadbolts over.

  The porch had been screened in once, but most of the screens were missing, or damaged, big rough-edge holes marking the passage of raccoons, rats, nesting birds. Moldy latticework boxed the railing in now, curtained w
ith vines. A camera sat on a tripod, its eye pointing through an opening in the lattice.

  Andy hunted for its On button. Pressed it. A red light blinked. Inside, he’d been told, the fancy computer was now recording. He’d need to download the video to a thumb drive and bring it back to June.

  He glanced at the camera’s display screen. It showed the time—5:07—and a crisp view of the place where Nick Road intersected with Highway 18 and Atlantic Zone had built its Lenoir substation, a broad, gray cinder-block structure that blocked the old road, angled back with two long wings, and connected to a razor-wire fence eight meters tall and God only knew how many kilometers long. Behind the fence, eight smokestacks rose like turrets, emitting a steady gray trickle of foul-smelling smoke. This was an older section of the Salt Line, the new “waste repurposing ramparts” still creeping up this way from the south, eight years from projected completion. Not even Andy had known about this entry point. Not until yesterday, when June explained the day’s plan to him. The little house on the rise took advantage of a gap in the TerraVibra—the constant vibration had been proven to degrade power-generating facilities (a significant risk when dealing with some unsteady materials, some nuclear)—and so a Ruby City tech crew was able to grab a signal here from Atlantic Zone feeds. What’s more, the house offered a perfect location from which they could, undetected, monitor the comings and goings of Big Sky Fine Meats and V&M Logging, two of David Perrone’s biggest smuggling fronts.