The Salt Line

by Holly Goddard Jones

  “Let me tell you all about Andy,” Violet said. “Andy who wants to see his kids so bad. Andy’s been sneaking over to Ruby City for ten years. June had him recruited out of a mental institution. Andy’s had a thousand chances to change his mind about helping us. Andy could have sold us out before you ever got on that bus to the Salt Line.”

  “It’s all true,” Andy said. “And worse. Worse than that. I betrayed my best friend and got her killed. I did that, too. You’re still going to need my help.”

  “Roz was right about you,” June said. She sounded tired and resigned. “She never liked you. She said it wasn’t even a matter of trust. She said you’re weak. She said you’re just looking for a crusade and it doesn’t matter what it is.”

  “I guess you should have listened to her,” Andy said. “What did she say about Violet?”

  June looked at Violet with unmistakable love. “She said Violet was a gift. She was right about that, too.”

  Violet, Marta noticed, was making a concerted effort not to meet June’s eyes. “So you just changed your mind about everything,” she said to Andy.

  “I thought I could do it. I thought I could leave them. But I can’t.”

  “But you did,” Violet said. “You’re here. You were doing what June asked of you. That’s why you’re sitting in that chair with your arms tied.”

  “Yeah, I’m a cowardly asshole. I’m an opportunist. I still want to go home.”

  Edie said, “I believe him.”

  “Me too,” said Ken Tanaka.

  “Do we vote?” Wes asked.

  “Do we vote? Jesus Christ,” Violet said. “This isn’t a goddamn club.”

  “I say we take him,” Edie said. “We can put him in the trunk.”

  “Sure! Put me in the trunk,” Andy said.

  “Let’s take him,” Ken said. “We can always dump him later if we have to.”

  Wes actually raised his hand. “Yeah, I say we take him.”

  “I say we shoot him,” Berto said. “Or are the rest of you forgetting who drove off with our people? My wife? This piece of shit. I say we shoot him, then we shoot the other two, and then we figure out how to get back ourselves.”

  “No one is shooting June,” Violet repeated. “That isn’t negotiable.”

  “Marta,” Wes said. “What do you think?”

  She stared at Andy, trying to have an opinion. Fatigue had settled upon her now that the flood of adrenaline in her system had begun its retreat. Maybe Andy was lying about knowing a way to get them home. Actually, he hadn’t even made that promise, had he? He’d just said that they needed him.

  Maybe they did. Only time would tell.

  “I say we take him,” she said. “If he’s willing to go in the trunk.”

  “I have experience traveling in tight places,” Andy said. “As June knows.” He seemed almost cheerful. “Let’s do it.”

  The OLE travelers looked at Violet, who sighed. “Fine. Get him out to the car. I’ll finish up in here.”

  —

  Even with Andy in the trunk of the car—a mongrel four-door sedan with a front passenger door that had to be tied shut and overlarge patchwork tires—things were going to be tight. Berto, by far the biggest of the group, agreed to drive. By unspoken consensus they saved the front passenger seat for Violet; Marta wasn’t sure if this was an act of gratitude or deference rising out of some residual fear of her.

  Their boots hadn’t been restored to them. They stood on the gravel driveway gingerly in their sock feet (Edie’s feet, clad in Marta’s spare pair, were comically white), heads cocked for activity from within the house. Berto stood behind the car with his gun resting on the roof, pointed toward the front door. Though, if Randall were to somehow best Violet and escape, she imagined he would steal out the back. That, or aim Violet’s gun between the boarded-up windows and pick them off as they ran.

  “I can’t believe we’re not shooting them,” Berto said again.

  “We made Violet a promise.” This was Edie.

  “You made Violet a promise,” Berto said. “I didn’t promise her anything.”

  “It’s her mother,” Marta said. She was leaning against the hood of the car. Today was November 1, she thought. She’d seen that on the computer’s task bar just before they called David. (What must be going through David’s mind now?) “I’d be more worried about traveling with her if I thought she was a person who could kill her own mother.”

  “No one said that she had to be the one to pull the trigger.”

  “We have to have some honor here,” said Edie, “if we’re going to trust each other long enough to get out.”

  Berto shook his head, disgusted, and clammed up. Marta remembered her first conversation with him and Anastasia, back at the OLE training center. They were lawyers, they’d told her—lead partners at a firm specializing in commercial litigation. Anastasia was thirty-eight, Berto, forty-one. No children. “Maybe after we get back in one piece,” Anastasia had said with a laugh. They had beauty, money, early success in their chosen profession, a profession they both seemed legitimately to enjoy. They had each other. Funny how much you learned in a month of intense acquaintance, but how little you really knew, still. Marta had learned Berto’s first dog’s name—Luther—and that his beloved father died two years ago of cancer of the esophagus. She’d learned that he and Anastasia met during law school, when they were both part-time baristas at the campus Starbucks. She’d learned that their politics were conservative, their zone loyalties fierce, and a lot of what motivated them to do the OLE tour was their belief (or Berto’s—this had felt more like Berto than Anastasia) that very bad days were ahead, apocalyptic days, and they had to train for every exigency. She’d learned that they had been doing weekend training retreats for a full year before the three-week mandated training, and they considered themselves experts now on all sorts of matters: how to kill and dress game, which fungi of the eastern Appalachians were edible, the quickest way to start a fire, the best brand of portable water-filtration system. Lots of other things. And yet: they’d been cheerful, warm—more like people engaged in a satisfying hobby than people who truly believed that their acquired skill set was the only thing standing between themselves and the loss of everything they held dear. And yet: when the day came that they might have tried to stage a heroic escape, take Marta’s Quicksilver, and steal off with Tia toward home, they’d declined.

  And so Marta didn’t know if Berto could really shoot someone—as an act of rage, even as an act of defense—or if he just really wanted to believe that he could. She suspected he didn’t know, either.

  The front door opened, and Violet strode out, businesslike. “Let’s go,” she said. “It’ll take them a while to get out of there, but I want to put plenty of miles between us before then.”

  Berto started, “Why don’t we just—”

  “Enough,” Violet said. “Enough. Have you ever killed someone?”

  Berto’s jaw clenched, but he didn’t respond.

  “Because I’m up to four now. No more.” She threw open the front passenger-side door, and it emitted a squeal so sharp everyone winced. “Who’s driving?”

  “I am,” Berto said.

  “Good. Let’s go.”

  Marta, Wes, Ken, and Edie crowded into the car’s backseat. Violet dug a set of keys out of her pocket and selected one. “Here,” she said to Berto.

  He started the engine.

  The noise of tires on gravel was very loud, the car’s motion choppy. Marta twisted around to watch through the back window, a part of her certain that the door was going to fly open and out would come Randall, firing some gun he’d found in the house. Then the drive curved, and the house disappeared behind a row of trees. In another few minutes, they were back on the paved road, or at least the crumbling remains of it. “Left,” Violet said. “You go right and you’ll drive us ri
ght into the Lenoir substation.”

  Berto turned left.

  They drove for ten minutes, fifteen. Marta only realized how tightly she had been gripping the handle over her door when she relaxed her hold on it. Her palm was hot, the fingers aching.

  “We did it,” Ken said disbelievingly. “We got away from them.”

  Marta nodded a little. He reached for her hand and gripped it. She smiled, squeezing it back.

  “Is that right, Violet?” Wes asked. “Are we clear?”

  She threw a glance back at him. “Yeah. Yeah, it looks that way.”

  “OK,” Wes said. “Then please find a safe place to pull over, Berto.”

  “What?” Berto said. “You need to take a piss or something?”

  “Not exactly.” He pushed up the sleeve of his microsuit and held out his right forearm. On the plump healthy skin just below the elbow was a taut red bump, about the size of a mosquito bite. A little dark spot, like an apple seed, was visible under the surface. Around this bump were three smaller red dots. Wes dug into these welts with the fingernails of his other hand, leaving pale grooves, and Marta, cold with fear, grabbed his hand to stop him.

  He tensed in her grasp, shuddered. His temples, she now saw, were beaded with sweat.

  “I got bitten during our little showdown,” he said between gritted teeth. “I didn’t want to say anything. I mean, I didn’t want to be a distraction.”

  “Oh, Wes, no,” said Edie.

  “So pull over, please,” he said. “I don’t know how quickly these things will burst.”

  Twenty

  The sun was setting when they finally emerged from the room. Of all the people Violet could have left her with, June wished it hadn’t been Randall, though she doubted that Joe or Andy could have managed as quickly as Randall did to come out of his zip tie (Randall half-sawed, half-pried his off using a crooked nail head on one of the boards over the room’s one window), or to wriggle the pins out of the door’s three rusted-over hinges. In the hours it took to do this, Randall cursed and raged, and June sat watching him uselessly, hands still bound because he didn’t bother to free her after he’d freed himself. “There’s the nail head,” he said, face slimy with sweat. “Have at it.” She tried with no luck. It was too high for her to reach at any kind of a workable angle, and she couldn’t get her balance if she stood on one of the rickety chairs.

  “Their asses better be gone if they know what’s good for them,” Randall kept saying. “I will slaughter them. I will bash their fucking skulls in.”

  June, for the first time in twenty years, was mute—afraid to contradict him, afraid to pose a suggestion. A couple of zip ties, a tiny room, a nailed-shut door: and suddenly she had no power. Had Violet known it would be like this? Surely she hadn’t.

  At last he’d pulled the door free, almost growling, with a terrific screech of the hinges and a crack as the wood along the nailed side splintered. The board that Violet had propped under the knob as she left clattered to the floor.

  Randall walked out without looking behind him to see if June would follow.

  He went to the front window and peered between the boards. June hung back, watching him.

  “They took the Prowler,” he said, more to himself than to her. “But they left the other car. If they didn’t cut the brake lines or something.”

  “I don’t think they would,” June said. It was the first thing she’d said in hours, and her throat cracked with thirst. “I think Violet wanted us to be able to get back to the village.”

  “You obviously don’t know the first fucking thing about what that bitch wants,” Randall said. “Who the hell would’ve had sex with her? That’s what I want to know.”

  June retreated to the kitchen, found one of the water skins on the counter. She nosed it to the edge, mouthed the nozzle, and pried the cap off with her tongue, guzzling down as much as she could before Randall could find her and stake a claim. He had driven the lead car in; he had the keys. Violet and the OLE group had taken all the weapons. Satiated, she backed up to the counter and opened a drawer as softly as she could, hoping to find something, anything: a knife, a screwdriver, a goddamn fork. The room was on the east side of the house and dim. She was working blind, anyway. She twisted her shoulders until the bones popped and reached her bound hands as far back behind her as she could without pushing the drawer shut with her bottom. The pad of her middle finger caught a splinter, nothing else. Kill him with a splinter, she thought senselessly. She leaned forward again and scooted to the right. Eased open another drawer.

  “What are you doing back there?” Randall yelled from the living room.

  She debated whether or not to answer him. Her fingers fumbled against something smooth. Cool and metal. Gritting her teeth, she leaned back and was able to close her hand around it. “Trying to get some water,” she called back.

  His heavy footfalls thundered toward her. She hurried back to the counter and stood beside the drained skin just as he entered.

  “You have better saved me some,” he said. He picked up her skin and tossed it down, throwing her a dark look. She bobbed her head toward the cooler.

  “There’s more in there. I promise.”

  He threw the lid open and found a full skin, dipped his head through the strap and mouthed the nozzle. His throat worked. Then he exhaled, pawed around in the cooler some more, and found a second skin. This, too, went around his neck.

  “I’m going to go see if the car will start.”

  “Are you planning to leave me here?” June asked.

  He stared, his eyes getting a faraway look that she assumed was his version of deep thought.

  “I should,” he said finally. “Look what you got us into. That crazy bitch you call a daughter, my God. Murdering Joe. Leaving us here to help those Zoners.”

  “I wonder how everyone would react if you came back without me,” June said.

  “If I told them you was dead and Joe was dead and Violet split crazy, I reckon they’d be grateful I made it back alive.”

  “Maybe,” June said. “Or maybe you overestimate how much you’re liked back home.”

  He considered this. “Maybe. Or maybe you do, June. Maybe you’re the one who has it wrong.”

  Violet’s parting words came back to her: I love you, but I can’t live with you. I’m sorry.

  “You could be right about that,” June said.

  “I always thought you didn’t have it in you to do what needs doing. Sometimes I wanted to just say”—he looked left and right, miming bewilderment—“are you seeing what I’m seeing? Is this our . . . I don’t know, our fucking mayor or president or whatever? Our dictator, more like it. But why? Based on what?”

  He waited for her to respond to this. When she didn’t, he shrugged. “Anyway. I’m checking the car. I might be back. I need to think about it.”

  “I’ll wait here,” June said pleasantly.

  “You do that,” Randall said.

  When the front door slammed shut, she thumbed the box-cutter blade and popped the zip tie; it took seconds. Which was good. She needed every moment she could get. She peered through the boards over the picture window. Randall had reached the car, opened the driver’s-side door. He was leaning over the steering wheel instead of sliding in behind it—also good. If he decided right now to turn the ignition, lock the doors, and take off, there wouldn’t be a thing in the world June could do about it. The chances she’d find a car out here that would start were one in a million, maybe one in a billion. But she didn’t think that Randall would take even that chance. No, if he was bent on returning to Ruby City without her, he’d kill her first.

  He turned the engine off, stood. Looked at the house.

  June’s heart, always doing its silent, mostly unnoticed work, made itself known now. She’d felt this before—this exhilaration and terror, this bodily response to so
me deeper call, some instinct in her marrow. She had more experience than Randall would guess at doing what needs doing.

  He drew the water skins off from around his neck, moving as deliberately as he’d done with the rifle when Violet held her gun on him. Tossed them into the car’s passenger seat. Leaned behind the wheel again, and the trunk popped open. Get the tire iron, Randall, June thought. Let’s finish this.

  —

  She didn’t like being on the road at night. With no streetlights to penetrate the darkness, she was forced to rely on the car’s weak headlights, which, even set on bright, picked up the craters in the road maybe seconds before June would have to swerve to miss them. So she went slowly. Maddeningly slow. What she wanted more than anything was to walk into her house and into Roz’s arms, and when she’d done that—when she’d been restored to the one person in this life that she could count on—she would find the words to explain what had happened today, and she’d try to make sense with Roz of how Violet had done what she had done, and why, and together they would decide what came next.

  What came next. What came next? They no longer had Marta Perrone or Wes Feingold. If Marta made it back in-zone, she’d be able to tell her husband everything about Ruby City. Violet could draw him a map right to their Town Hall.

  Violet wouldn’t do that. Would she?

  Randall had been right about one thing: June had no idea what Violet was capable of.

  Pregnant, she thought again, shaking her head in wonder.

  It had been the parting blow. “I’ll finish up here,” Violet had said, and the OLE group had left the house with Andy hauled between Wes Feingold and the big olive-skinned man, the pretty young woman following with a gun pointed to his back.

  When the outside door had slammed shut, Violet turned to June. She engaged the gun’s safety and slid it over her shoulder.

  “Is this when you explain to me why this happened?” June asked. “Because I really want to know, Violet. I really want to know what I did to make you hate me so much.”