An automated voice interrupted to tell Mitchell he could not leave a message because the mailbox was full.
The bus departed Portland at eight in the morning, destination Montreal. It was suddenly full summer again, indigo sky, the windows hot to the touch and fogging from the refrigerated air. Mitchell and Jane were the only passengers to debark at Augusta State Airport, which doubled as the Augusta bus station. There were no airplanes in sight. The terminal was closed. The only vehicle on the runway was a brown station wagon. Its side was crosshatched with scrape marks.
The door to the station wagon opened and a freckled, large-limbed woman clumped out. She wore a baseball hat that struggled to stay perched above her cloud—a feathery, cumulonimbus cloud—of bottle-brown hair. Her face was abnormally tall and creased, a billowing sail of a face. Across her T-shirt was written, in shaky letters, GENUIS.
“You need a ride?”
“Are you a livery driver?” asked Jane.
“I’m Judy. From two ten Winthrop Street.” She pointed at a row of houses several hundred yards away. “But I’m afraid that will have to do.”
“Can you take us to Starling?”
“Let me guess: Camp Ticonderoga.”
“You know it?”
She chuckled, shaking her head. “I’ve been running people the last two days. Desperate people.”
Mitchell pretended not to notice Jane’s death stare.
“I can take you as far as Kents Hill,” said Judy. “That’s under two miles from the camp. Then you’ll be on your own. I’m not going any deeper.”
What else could they do? They got into the station wagon. It had a warm smell, burnt wood and burnt cigarettes. The interior paneling was simulated wood grain. Judy removed a copy of that morning’s Kennebec Journal from the passenger seat to make room for Mitchell. He caught the headline: TAMMY WAVE CRASHES ON CENTRAL MAINE. There was a photograph of flood refugees lined up in a tent city that had been erected in downtown Augusta by the local chapter of the Elks Lodge.
“Going rate’s fifty bucks,” said Judy. “Can you pull it?”
“Yes,” said Mitchell, glancing at his Go Bag. After paying for snacks at the vending machine in the Eastland Park lobby, his cash supply was down to $51,996.50. “I can pull it.”
Judy sped off the runway and turned onto Winthrop. They passed graveyards.
“Why won’t you go any farther than Kents Hill?” asked Jane.
Judy caught Jane’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “You never know what happens when you throw a bunch of city people into the woods. They can lose their bearing.” Judy was withholding information—there was a dark suggestion on her face as she turned back to the road. Mitchell was relieved that Jane, in the backseat, didn’t catch it. Otherwise she would have asked Judy to elaborate. And that would have only created more problems. They had already escaped from Hell. It was difficult to imagine that whatever awaited them in Starling could compare with the floating children’s books, cats, corpses. Besides, if Elsa was in some sort of danger, he owed it—to himself, if not to her—to help. And what secrets would be revealed in her letter to him?
“I have nothing against the hippies,” Judy continued. “Heck, I’ll admit it, I even went in eighty-eight to see the Grateful Dead play at Oxford Plains Speedway. But there’s a hundred miles between talking about the land and living on it.”
Augusta gave way to apple orchards and blueberry fields, which yielded to forest. After twenty minutes they reached a fork in the road. Judy stopped the car.
“You have second thoughts,” she said, “call me.”
She tore off the front page of the Kennebec Journal and scrawled her phone number.
“I’ll take that.” Jane reached over the seat to snatch the paper from Judy’s fingers. She folded it carefully into her wallet. When she looked up, Mitchell was staring at her.
“I just don’t want it to get lost,” said Jane. She hiccuped.
Judy drove right at the fork. Mitchell and Jane went left onto a dirt road, where they were greeted by a porcupine.
* * *
Jane gasped when she saw it, the clumsy black beast with little swords protruding from its swaying haunch.
“After all we’ve been through,” said Mitchell, “this scares you?”
She started laughing. Then, in the space of another hiccup, she was crying.
“Jane?”
She looked down, her hand over her eyes, and the sob passed. After a brisk shake of her head she looked up. Her smile was bright, if insincere. She wiped her eyes.
“Sorry.” She cleared her throat. “That happens sometimes.”
Who was this woman? Had they met?
“Anyway. I’m not scared of him.” She indicated the porcupine, who watched from behind a bush. “But why isn’t he scared of us? Aren’t animals supposed to run away when they see people? It’s like he owns the place.”
“By rights he does. You can tell from the way he’s marked the turf.”
His hand on her shoulder, Mitchell guided Jane around a sturdy stack of porcupine feces.
“That’s why I moved to New York,” she said.
“To avoid porcupines.”
“I like my nature domesticated, housebroken, manicured, neutered, fearful. I take that back. I don’t like nature at all. I like buildings and cement and electrical wires. Love them. I’d kill for a nice flat stretch of pavement right now. A stoplight. Those little green gates they put around every single tree on the sidewalk.” Jane sniffled one more time and wiped away the last of her tears.
So this was Maine. The air actually did smell like taxicab pine fresheners. Only it was fuller, deeper, rich with wet dirt.
“Listen, Mitchell.” She gave him a sharp look. “I wasn’t very sensitive back in Fort Lee. I’m sorry. I know this matters.”
“I was going to drag you along with me one way or another. I just didn’t realize I’d have to go so far as create a new business.”
“No, that’s not enough. Your sense of loyalty to this girl is impressive. Crazy, definitely. But I respect it. And I’m not just saying that as your new deputy at Future Days. Or because you saved my behind in the storm. I’m saying it as a friend.”
“That isn’t necessary.”
“I mean it.”
The road became muddier, sucking at their sneakers. The forest on both sides became thicker. It was choked with gigantic floppy ferns the size of elephant ears, black spruce, and tall firs, their needles shivering with insects.
“I’m not sure what exactly you’re after here,” said Jane, and Mitchell could sense in her voice a coy sexual insinuation that made him uneasy. Because hadn’t he considered it himself—that there was a scenario, not necessarily a best-case scenario but not a worst-case scenario either, in which Mitchell might just stay there with Elsa, at Ticonderoga? That Elsa would come out of her trance and cure him of Fear once and for all, and that she might find comfort in his presence too, and then she might, perhaps, offer herself to him? Right there in the middle of the softball field, surrounded by heirloom tomatoes and zucchini and whatever the hell else they planted there, and she’d want it quickly, quickly, before Brugada could strike again—
“I’m not sure what you’re after,” Jane was saying, “but if it all goes bad, I want you to know that you’ve still got me. I may not know how to hunt a moose or grow carrots, but I know how to listen. And I know what you’re worth.”
“What am I worth? The profits of Future Days?”
He was sorry as soon as he said it.
“I deserve that. Sure I do. But I mean what I said.”
There was nothing casual about her. Fiercely opportunistic one moment, fiercely devoted the next. She did everything with an intensity that charmed and unnerved him equally. From her spastic canoe stroke to her chatty telephone manner with business clients, she was always committing her full energy, exhausting herself—total engagement all the time. And then his thoughts returned to Elsa, or rather all the Elsas—E
lsa the Cripple, Elsa the Hippie, Elsa the Black Star, and Elsa, Nymph of the Fields—and he tried to figure out whether any of them existed in the place that she called the Actual World.
After half a mile the road bent again, now to the right. They turned the corner, and Mitchell understood why Judy wouldn’t drive them any farther.
4.
Were the circumstances different, were this the same world as the one into which he’d awoken on the day before Tammy hit, he might have assumed that the people were assembling for a county fair. Fried Dough, Tilt-A-Whirl, Milk Bottle Toss. Only their eyes were all wrong: fluttery, blinking, bloodshot. The mood was not carefree, not at all. This was high panic.
Families dragged luggage on wheels, college kids lumbered under hiking backpacks, and children sullenly kicked their sneakers on the ground as they walked. No one acknowledged anyone else. Several cars with New York license plates began to pass at speeds too high for a twisting dirt road. He wondered if any were the same cars he’d seen from his window before the storm, sitting in the traffic on the ramp to the Queens Midtown Tunnel.
“Is there some kind of refugee center around here?” asked Jane.
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
By the time they reached the lake they could hear the mumbling noise of a crowd. Mitchell was out of breath. Not because of anxiety, he realized, but because he and Jane were rushing to keep pace with the others.
They found themselves in a traffic jam of dozens of abandoned vehicles. Past the cars were tents, set up in haphazard rows, facing the rock wall that marked the boundary of the Ticonderoga property. Personal belongings were scattered everywhere, as if at an auction. Two boys urinated beneath the broad wooden sign that welcomed visitors to Ticonderoga. The camp’s slogan had been rewritten in a graffiti scrawl.
CAMP TICONDEROGA
A PLACE FOR KIDDIES!
WHERE THE NEW LIFE BEGINS
There were more than a hundred people, perhaps twice that, sitting and standing and lying in sleeping bags. And lighting fires—campfires, bonfires, pyromaniac fires. But still there was too much smoke. Ash was falling like snow. Then he noticed a darker plume rising above the trees of the property itself.
“What the hell is going on?” said Mitchell.
“Hell,” said Jane. “Hell is going on.”
Mitchell felt a sharp prodding behind his knee. A skinny woman sat beside them in a lawn chair, a tattered issue of Glamour on her lap. She looked exhausted, lines cutting sharp diagonals from her nostrils. Her gray eyes were soft and watery in the smoke. Thick, straight black hair hung from her skull like overcooked spaghetti.
“Who’s that?” said the woman, pointing at Mitchell’s stomach. “On your shirt. Leonardo Fibo, Fibo—?”
“Fibonacci,” said Jane. “Hall of Fame field-goal kicker. Green Bay Packers. What, you never heard of him?”
The woman frowned. “Sounds like a dago.”
“Can I ask,” said Mitchell, “what exactly you are doing here?”
“Reading. Got a better idea?”
“I mean here.” He gestured at the road, the people camping out, the smoke, the chaos. “What is this?”
“Ticonderoga.” Seeing Mitchell’s confusion, she sat up straight and flipped her magazine over on her lap. “What, you just stumbled on this?”
“In a matter of speaking,” said Jane.
“It was a real good thing,” said the woman. “For the first couple days at least. If you could make yourself useful on the farm, you could stay. Indefinitely. They didn’t pay nothing, but they served food and the cabins have cots. Vegetables in the fields, water from a natural well. The water was clean and fresh. Cold. Bottom-of-the-ocean cold.”
Jane regarded this woman suspiciously, uncertain of her sanity.
“Ma’am,” she said, in a patient, anthropological tone, “if you don’t mind my asking—if things are so good in there, why are you out here?”
“It’s not safe now,” said the woman. “And law enforcement won’t come for days. They’re overwhelmed in the capital. It’s sad. This place was a little treasure, but they’ve ruined it now. Like they always do.”
“Who ruined it?”
“People. Human beings. Well, to be specific, men. It’s the men that did it. They’re doing it still.”
And Mitchell then noticed something about the crowd milling around them on the road: it was composed almost entirely of women and children. There were only a few elderly men, sprawled in the shade like wounded soldiers.
“What exactly is happening in there?” said Mitchell. “In the camp?”
“You want to know?” said the woman. She gave him a vicious sneer. “Take a look for yourself.”
Mitchell approached the front gate cautiously, Jane following. The gate—a black metal bar on a hinge—was unlocked. They entered the property. Fifteen feet ahead loomed a stand of pine trees. Behind it a slope led down to the camp. The dirt was soft under his sneakers; after the toxic filth they’d waded through in the ruined city, it might as well have been milk chocolate. The smoke grew thicker. Blackened pine needles cracked beneath their feet like little bones. When they came to the pines they could see the camp below. Jane grabbed his arm.
“Sweet Jesus,” said Jane. “Shine on.”
A series of buildings and fields lay arranged in a long strip along the plateau at the bottom of the slope. To the right were the softball and soccer fields. They were now bare dirt. The vegetables had been uprooted and messily devoured, as if by wild beasts; all that was left were scraps of torn vine and the occasional tomato lying on the ground, rotten and burst, oozing white bugs. To the left of the fields lay the tennis court, cleaved in half by a fallen electric pole. Directly below them was the large three-story wooden building that Mitchell knew to be the old infirmary. This is where Elsa and the others had slept. But no one would sleep there again. It was burning down. The wood walls shifted and bent, engulfed by wild curtains of flame. The roof had already collapsed in several places. The fire was deeply entrenched; it had moved in, taken up quarters. You could see it through the blown-out windows, lapping thirstily at the lintels from within. A file of elm trees stood beside the building; their leaves had vaporized. All that remained of their branches were attenuated fingers of charcoal. Mitchell could feel it even from where they stood, the crackling heat. Glowing embers floated over them like falling fireworks. He wondered if any of the embers were made of the letter Elsa had left for him on the bureau inside the infirmary.
“The new life,” said Jane. “This must be the new life.”
Farther left, across the plain, stood the mess hall and a smaller administrative cabin, its windows shattered. Another churned field, then a curving path that reached into the woods. Along the path you could see the bright green roofs of the wooden bunks where the campers had once slept. Additional bunks were visible in the distance, extending toward the shore. The lake seen through the trees was like jewelry hanging in the branches.
The full horror of the scene took a few seconds to reach him. His eyes, as upon entering a cave, had to adjust to the darkness. But now he could see them—the men. Most of them were shirtless. They roamed the bunk areas like foxes, uncertain, fidgety, huddling low to the ground, moving in packs. When the air cleared momentarily between puffs of smoke, Mitchell noticed other men, deeper in the woods, their faces covered with mud and leaves, branches tucked into their pants in a crude camouflage. They were hunting.
But where, in this madness, was Elsa Bruner? Where was her design? His escape from the city, sternman—it felt meaningless in the face of this pandemonium.
“Retreat!” yelled Jane in his ear. “Re-treat!”
And then they were both running as fast as they could. But they went in opposite directions: Jane back to the gate, Mitchell down the hill. The dry, rocky soil, covered by the blackened pine needles and charred acorns, raced beneath him. As he sprinted toward the burning infirmary, the warmth became heat, then the heat became a blaze, and
he was a comet entering the atmosphere. His face was burning off.
“Mitchell! Oh God! Mitchell!”
When he heard the pain in Jane’s voice, the howling agony, he started to veer—it’d be so easy just to peel off to one side and avoid the house, run out into the field, away from danger and back to Jane. Yes, he realized, that would be the most logical option. And he remembered what Billy said in the message: They let us move her back to the infirmary at Ticonderoga.
So he kept running, accelerating as he flew down the slope. He was breathing deeply, and now the smoke, sharp and hot, was getting deep into his lungs, and it felt like he was ingesting the pine needles. He coughed bitterly, spitting black saliva. The air blurred. His eyes burned into the blurriness and he tried to make out details but there was only the nauseating blurriness. When he was within twenty feet of the building his foot caught and twisted, hard, spinning him, until the turf came up impatiently to smash his chin. The pain shook his mind into clarity, at least long enough to acknowledge the madness of what he was doing, and he felt the perverse satisfaction of total recklessness. It felt nothing like the canoe exodus from the city. That was dangerous, but it was calculated danger, better than the prospect of being marooned in his apartment without food and water. You couldn’t make the same argument for running into a burning building.
He was lying beneath one of the elm trees. He had tripped on a root, which now, like a crooked elbow, pressed into his ribs. The air at the ground was relatively clean. He inhaled deeply, and his exhalations were little puffs of smoke. It was just like breathing steam in the winter. From this position he was at an angle to the infirmary and could see slightly around it, to a section of the building that seemed to have been spared by the flames. It was a back entrance. There was a step that led to a green screen door. The door rattled slightly in its frame, breathing in and out. He didn’t want to get up, the air on the ground was so sweet and clean, but he begged himself to get up because he knew that Elsa was behind that door.
Odds Against Tomorrow Page 20
