The Salt Line

by Holly Goddard Jones

  “Can we get inside now?” Ken asked wearily.

  This was cause for more negotiation. Wes had thought himself immune to spoiling, prided himself on how well he’d handled his early fame and success: he didn’t do drugs or drink; he didn’t sleep around; he donated a generous portion of his Pocketz profits to a variety of worthy causes; and he lived simply, keeping a modest apartment (and, OK, a modest beach house, little more than a shack, really), a compact car, a wardrobe of mostly blue jeans and fleeces and whimsical canvas sneakers. But it had been a long time since he’d been denied anything. Even in his gawky, geeky early teens he’d not been ostracized or bullied so much as left alone, and that had been fine with him since he did his best thinking alone and could find company in Land of Shadows if he really needed it.

  But being Wes Feingold, Pocketz creator and CEO, came with perks that had become nearly invisible to him now: how quickly people accommodated him, ceded to his opinion. More than that—how often his needs and wants were anticipated. He never had to apologize for choosing the vegan restaurant when he went out for a business lunch. He never had to feel self-conscious when he entered a meeting in yesterday’s fleece and jeans. When he was dating Sonya, she complained once about the lighting in his office and his apartment. “Are you a vampire?” she’d asked. “Do you have some kind of light-sensitivity disease? Are you developing film? I can’t stand how dark you have to have things.”

  “I don’t have to have things dark,” Wes said. “I like it that way at home, but the office—I mean, that’s the office managers. I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “Ha!” Sonya said. “Keep telling yourself that, bud.”

  One tick bite, though, and he wasn’t Wes Feingold anymore. He was toxic.

  “Doesn’t bringing Wes in compromise the chalet?” Ken asked. The chalet was built into the side of a mountain, an elegant, mod structure of horizontal lines and spindly structural pillars, with a broad bank of windows that glowed brilliantly in the sunset. They had approached the entry—a small door built, like something from a fantasy novel, into the hillside. The chalet loomed out maybe twelve or thirteen meters above them, and Andy had told them that this door was the single access point. “The only way you’re getting in from up there is with a wrecking ball or a missile.”

  “Each room has its own vac seal,” Andy said now. “So the answer is, I guess, ‘Not exactly.’”

  “What happens when the ticks come out?” Berto asks. “Do they just . . . crawl off?”

  Wes felt faint, and again he wished he could just separate himself from the arm. Ken’s talk of amputation didn’t seem so ghastly all of the sudden. It seemed, in fact, like precisely the thing to do. His body knew this with as much certainty as it knew that it needed water when it thirsted, or sleep when it dragged with weariness.

  “Pretty much,” Andy was saying. “One thing you can do is what they call a water birth. You submerge the hatching site, and when it happens, they kind of float off and it contains them—”

  But Ken would want to set up an operating room, probably, scrub his hands up to the elbows the way the doctors in the webshows were always doing, boil the knives and stuff—

  “—assuming, of course, that there’s only the one hatch site—”

  Wes’s instincts screamed at him, suddenly, to just GET IT OFF. But how? How—Violet. She had a knife. She had—

  He staggered toward Violet and grabbed her arm. “I’m sorry,” he said, not recognizing the strength that suddenly powered him. There the knife was, tucked into a pocket on her utility belt. He snatched it with tingling fingers—

  “Grab him!” Andy yelled.

  “Man, I don’t—”

  Wes twisted in the hands that were suddenly gripping him, trying to turn the knife toward his right arm, but he was using his stupid hand, and he couldn’t—quite—get there. He wasn’t capable of actually cutting the arm off, probably (stupid to think he could, he thought, sweating and grinding his teeth), didn’t have the strength, probably he’d pass out, but if he could just dig the blade tip into the swollen part and let off some of the goddamn pressure—

  “He’s trying to cut himself!” Marta cried.

  He went down on his back, hard. Breath knocked out of him. As he struggled to inhale, something came down on his wrist and his hand popped open. The knife was removed from his still-grasping fingers.

  “He’s gone fucking nuts!” someone—Berto, he thought—said.

  His cheek flared with sharp pain. “Hey. Hey.” Now the other cheek. “Hey. Dude, snap out of it.”

  Wes blinked. Rasped another few shallow breaths. He focused his eyes in time to see the hand coming toward him again and flinched away.

  “Jesus Christ!” Yes, that was Berto. “He’s going to try to fucking kill us! No way in hell he’s coming in with us. No way.”

  “He’s not trying to kill anyone,” Andy said. He touched Wes’s face with surprising gentleness and peered into his eyes. “You calm now?”

  Wes shrugged. Then nodded. “I—I don’t know—”

  “I know you don’t,” Andy said. “This can happen,” Andy said, raising his voice for the others’ benefit. “There’s a psychological term for it, probably. I can’t remember. But a frenzy sets in. I’ve heard of guys hacking their own legs off.”

  “Jesus.” Edie this time. Softly.

  “So no knife for you,” Andy said to Wes.

  “I don’t feel it now,” Wes said. He didn’t. That other desire seemed so alien and distant now that it had felt like being possessed.

  “You probably will again,” Andy said. “And worse, as the hatching gets closer. That frenzy—I felt a version of it. Not something that caused me to try to hack myself to pieces, thank God. But I would have clawed my back to shreds if I could have.”

  “Great,” Wes muttered.

  “We need to get inside,” Ken said. “It’s getting dark. I need something to drink.”

  “Wes comes, too,” Marta said firmly.

  “Hell, no,” said Berto.

  “This could be any of us,” Edie said. “You can’t treat him like that. He’s a human being.”

  “Yeah, and so am I,” Berto said. “And so is everyone else here. I don’t see what putting all our lives at risk will accomplish. He just needs to stay out here until we know what’s up.”

  Edie’s dark eyes were flashing in the diminishing light. “We don’t have any camping gear. We don’t even have a blanket. You just want to leave him down here alone with nothing over his head, nothing to protect him?”

  “You can stay down with him if you want,” Berto said. “And we can probably find some things in the chalet. Bring him down food and water, a sleeping bag, whatever he needs. I’m not saying he can’t have some of what we’ve got. I’m saying he doesn’t bring that fucking diseased arm of his into the one safe haven we’ve got.”

  “I agree with Berto,” Ken said.

  “You are monsters,” said Marta.

  “And you haven’t lost anyone yet,” Berto said. “So shut up.”

  Wes felt the moment coming when he’d have to do the decent thing again, the thing he could live with, even if it meant not living. A sleeping bag out here wouldn’t be so bad compared to the car trunk. It wouldn’t even be so bad compared to the shed in Ruby City. At least he’d lie there in the knowledge that he could get up and walk twenty feet if he wanted to. And then twenty more, if he wanted that.

  (All the way to the Wall. Where he’d be promptly shot.)

  But still.

  “He goes up with us,” Andy said.

  “I don’t think that’s up to you,” Berto said.

  “Actually, I do.” Andy had his big scarred arms crossed and a little smile on his face. Though his action was on Wes’s behalf, Wes nonetheless registered a flash of uneasiness. This was the man who had driven Wendy, Ana
stasia, Lee, and Jesse to the Wall to be shot, after all. “I have the codes for this door. And the upstairs door. I know how to get the generator running. I know the codes to the supply pantries. You want access to any of it, you need me.”

  “Why would you do that for him?” Berto asked.

  “Because I can,” Andy said. “And because I don’t like you.”

  Twenty-Two

  The chalet, though modestly appointed by the standards of most OLE travelers, was paradise after the last week. The living room, dining area, and kitchen were all one open space, lined on both sides by windows offering panoramic views of the east and west, the west now singed by the very last of the day’s light. Long, broad sofas formed a U around a huge stone fireplace. Gas logs, Edie saw. Wouldn’t want an open flue in this place, of course. The coffee table was huge—a rough-hewn timber base topped with a giant stone slab. How on earth did they get that up here? she wondered. It made her tired to think of it.

  Upstairs, the hallway opened into five rooms, each with four single beds, and two bathrooms. The bathrooms were tiny and identical: small metal sink bowl underneath a cloudy shatterproof mirror; a small toilet that vacuumed away waste like an airplane toilet; a cramped shower stall that a plus-sized person wouldn’t be able to fit into with the door closed. But the water was hot—even for Edie, who drew the last turn—and she wept with joy for most of her fifteen minutes under the stream, lathering twice, a third time, with the rosemary-scented soap, switching the sprayer to the massage setting and letting it pound her neck, then her lower back. Finally, the suds gathering around her toes were white. A few minutes after that, she shut off the water and folded herself into a clean white robe that smelled a bit musty, of storage, but still felt luxurious.

  Andy had given them each a little toiletry kit from one of the locked pantries. She brushed her teeth with the fresh toothbrush and paste, flossed. She clipped her toenails and fingernails, rubbed a thin greasy lotion into her face and the backs of her hands, rubbed a tube of ChapStick over her dry lips. The microsuit she’d been wearing for the past week was—thankfully—in the incinerator. A new one awaited her in her room. Well, the room she was sharing with Marta. Her underwear and sports bra were in the washing machine, mingled with everyone else’s to save time and water. Which was a little strange, though there wasn’t much left to hide from these people, for good or ill.

  She passed Berto in the hallway heading back to her room. He looked almost absurd in his white robe, which barely reached his knees, tall as he was—like a bodybuilder stopping by the sauna after a tough workout. “I guess you’re happy,” he said. “You got your way.”

  “I don’t think there’s a lot in this situation to be happy about,” she said. “But yeah, I’m glad that we didn’t leave Wes out all night to go through this alone.”

  “You don’t even know him, really,” Berto said.

  “I don’t know you, either,” Edie told him.

  He looked like he was thinking of saying something else. Instead, he sighed—huffed—shook his head a little, and went to his room. Edie thought he probably would have slammed the door shut behind him if that had been an option, but instead the door snicked softly closed, and then the vac seal engaged.

  In her own room, Marta was stretched out on one of the beds, head nestled against a pillow. She raised up sleepily when Edie entered.

  “Didn’t mean to wake you,” Edie said.

  “Mm. Just dozing.” Marta rolled onto her back and stretched, the crack of her back and toes audible even across the room. She rubbed the bottoms of her feet against the sateen duvet. “Bed. Pillows. You would think it had been years and not days.”

  Edie crawled under the covers and exhaled. “Yep.”

  They lay there several minutes more, not quite asleep and not quite awake, drifting enough that Edie thought she heard Wes calling for her from down the hall, and then she roused enough to realize that she hadn’t heard him, that she wouldn’t be able to hear him even if he shouted, because his room was vac-sealed.

  “I want to go in there with you,” Edie said. “You’re going to need the help. And he’s going to need the support.”

  “No,” Marta said firmly.

  “But why would you—”

  “I’m not trying to martyr myself,” Marta said. “I’m being absolutely practical here. You’re the only one I trust on the other side of that lock. Not Andy. Not Ken or Berto. Not even Violet. If you’re not out here, I don’t know that they’ll open the door after the hatching.”

  Edie nodded. She hadn’t thought of this. But she recognized the truth of it, and she realized, with that recognition, what a grave responsibility had fallen on her. If it came down to it—Edie against four—she would have to find a way to act. She would have to do it for her friends.

  “Besides,” Marta said, “I don’t think he’d want you there.”

  “Why?” asked Edie, wounded a little.

  “Because he’s going to be at his worst. And he won’t want you seeing him like that.”

  She recognized the truth of this, too, though it hadn’t occurred to her before.

  “Tell him . . .” She hesitated. She had no idea what she wanted Marta to tell him. “Tell him I’m worried about him. And—and that I was willing to come with you to help him.”

  “I’ll tell him,” Marta said kindly.

  Edie looked at the ceiling, thinking. At first what she saw didn’t register, and then it did: a water stain. There was a water stain. And she wasn’t shattered or even surprised by that, but it was proof, if she needed more of it, that there were no impenetrable fortresses, out here or maybe anywhere. Maybe even in-zone.

  She had wanted away from Ruby City. Out of that storage shed. But what now? Where now? Jesse was dead. She couldn’t return to the set of rooms he kept at the Hilton or to his little apartment on Savoy. Her old workmate, Inez, would probably let her crash on her couch until she could find somewhere more permanent, but Edie could eke out only a couple of weeks that way, a month at most. She didn’t have a job. She didn’t have any family left. The absence of her mother . . . God, that ache was still so fresh, even after all of this. As long as she’d had Jesse to take care of, his whirlwind lifestyle to emulate, she could keep the grief at bay. But now?

  “Is it weird that the thought of getting back home makes me feel almost nothing?” she asked Marta.

  Marta didn’t answer right away. Finally she said, “I don’t know. For me, getting back past the Wall means seeing my sons again. Well, and showers and a soft bed like this one. That, too.”

  “Yes, that,” Edie said, smiling a little. “Beds are good.”

  “But if my children were on the moon, the moon is where I’d want to be. If they were in hell, hell is where I’d want to be.”

  “I don’t know if I should be jealous of you or sorry for you,” Edie said. “That’s heavy stuff.”

  “Both? Neither? I don’t know. Do you want kids?”

  “No,” Edie said. “I mean, I’m pretty sure I don’t.”

  “Well, you’re young yet. You may change your mind.”

  “Women your age always say that.”

  Marta laughed. “That’s true.” She rolled to her side to face Edie. “May I ask why not?”

  Edie closed her eyes against a flood of tears, glad that the room was too dark for Marta to see her. She swallowed until she thought she could speak without her voice warbling. “My mother was this tiny dynamo. Mexican and Filipino. Hard and sweet, like rock candy. She worked at an industrial laundry after my daddy died. When we moved to Atlantic Zone.”

  “How did you pull that off?”

  “Death benefits. Daddy worked out here for a timber company. Died of Shreve’s.”

  “Oh,” Marta said.

  “I was eight. We left everything behind. Her family, Daddy’s family. Never saw any of them again. Well, we
messaged, you know, but I never got to sit in my abuela’s lap again, or hold Granddaddy Emilio’s hand. But they understood, because it was a no-brainer to them. You find a way to get into a good zone, you go. Whatever it costs, or whoever. Say goodbye. Hold them in your heart.”

  “That must have been hard,” Marta said.

  “A little hard for me, but I was eight. I went to school, I made new friends. My mother, she worked and took care of me. She got the laundry job. Paid the rent. She did it alone. She didn’t date. She didn’t remarry. She was like you, Marta. She had no other purpose in life but keeping me alive. Then, you know, she got cancer, like everybody does, and she got the treatments she could afford to, and there might have been enough money to save her if we’d stayed in Gulf. But we didn’t. So she finished up in terrible pain, and what she has to show for it at the end is a daughter who waitresses at a bar.”

  “I can guarantee you that she was proud of you,” Marta said. “You’re a wonderful girl. Any mother would be lucky to have you.”

  “Oh, she was proud,” Edie agreed. “I’m not trying to say her sacrifice was pointless or that I’m ungrateful. I’m not entirely sure what I mean, actually.” She thought. “I’m trying to explain why I don’t think I want kids. It probably sounds like I’m going to say I don’t want to sacrifice the way my mother did. That’s not it, though. I’m willing to sacrifice. I just don’t know if a child is what I want to do it for. For one person. Or even a couple. And everything you do is for them, and then they have children, and everything they do is for them. If I had a child, I think I’m the kind of person who would live in this world in a really narrow way. I would only want what would make my kid happy. And fuck everything else. That’s not how I want to be.”

  Marta stared at her long enough that Edie started to feel uncomfortable. “I’m sorry if I offended you,” she said finally. “I’m only talking about how I see myself.”

  “No, you’re right. I don’t disagree at all.”