Johnny, on the other hand, was much more important to the cause, so he got an eight. At the end of the day, you took your ration card to the commissar, who’d hand you as many food stamps as your ration card indicated. Food stamps were currency. You could spend a few extra at the meal queue and treat yourself to something better than the usual gruel, or you could take them to the market.
It was a free market, absolutely free. That was the beauty of it. Men, women, kids would go out through the city scavenging houses, piling anything interesting into shopping carts and wheeling them back to their stands at the market. You found all kinds of crazy things in the market. One time Johnny bought some bottle rockets and set them off right outside the barracks window while someone was on the can, just for the heck of it. He was kind of a punk like that.
But Tuesdays—you didn’t mess around on Tuesdays. Tuesdays, one of the top brass would come down for an inspection. If you were forging ration stamps, he’d learn about it. If you were setting off bottle rockets, you’d turn around and see nothing but his army-issue boot-heel ready to crush you like a bug. He was always totally serious—stuck up serious, like he’d sat on a rod of rebar and never took the time to pull it out.
Tuesdays put Johnny on edge. You couldn’t smoke weed, so that only made it worse. He just wanted the day to piss off and go bother somebody else.
His job was easy, the kind of boring-easy that flew by you like a cloud in the sky. (Or maybe that was just the weed.) All he had to do was stand beneath a bridge and make sure Mad Max didn’t come barreling up the road at eighty miles an hour, electric guitar riffing and spewing fire.
Johnny could have used some electric guitar right then. Maybe it would have relaxed him.
The thing was, almost nobody ever came down that road, and certainly not behind the wheel of a gas-guzzling semi truck. Oh, sure, there’d been plenty of traffic in the early days, people in a hurry to get inside the city and look for handouts at the nearest soup kitchen, or else in a hurry to get outside the city so they could invade some millionaire’s well-stocked bunker. Always in a hurry to get one place or the other, thinking the grass must be greener on the other side.
But Johnny? Oh, no sir, Johnny was in no hurry. No hurry at all. Thing was, he kind of felt all this was happening just for him. Before the price of milk soared into the triple digits and people started making Grocery Store Runs (that was what Johnny called them; like when people mobbed banks in 1930, but there wasn’t enough cash to go around), Johnny had been a straight-B student who split his time between rating college brochures and trying to convince his girlfriend not to get a perm. (She got the perm.)
His life had been all about rules: What you need to do in order to avoid becoming the dreaded DISAPPOINTMENT; how to use credit cards to raise your CREDIT SCORE; how to evaluate a potential mate to avoid the AWFUL IN-LAWS; how to make it through the rat maze and get the CHEESE at the end (the trick was to trip the rat next to you).
Rules, rules, rules. But when had he decided he wanted to be in this race in the first place? For that matter, when had he decided he wanted to be a rat? He didn’t recall being asked. He had no memories of filling out a questionnaire before his parents took him home from the hospital.
So when he saw the scientists on the news discussing one of those dreaded acronyms (OCD, CDO, CDC?), he had to scratch his cheek to hide the smile blooming there. Everything that transpired in the next few weeks was like a dream in which he had the power to do anything.
Get out of going to school?
Check.
Stop hearing lectures about why this college was better than that one?
Check.
One time he even smoked weed and forgot to change his clothes, and nobody noticed. It was pretty wild.
The only real negative was that mom and dad were around the house all the time. What a buzzkill. They talked about going to a cottage up in Maine or staying overseas until things calmed down (as if everything was peachy overseas). They seemed to think they were dealing with a swine flu epidemic and all you had to do was put some distance between yourself and the disease.
But unless you had a ticket to Mars (or were a good friend of Elon Musk), there was no getting away from it. The reports were soon surfacing across the globe—Britain, France, Russia, Pakistan, Malaysia, Australia. By the time people realized there was a disease, it was already everywhere. Nothing to do about it now except bury a time capsule and hope it would be discovered by a more advanced human race centuries in the future, a race smart enough not to accidentally screw up the entire planet.
(Speaking of races, Johnny had a Secret Theory that aliens were responsible for the disaster. He didn’t tell anyone, though, because if aliens could find a way to destroy a third of the world’s food production, they were certainly capable of eavesdropping on conversations light-years away. Heck, their babies could probably do that—assuming aliens had babies. That was one of those details most sci-fi movies didn’t address.)
Yes, life without the Parental Unit could be pretty great—though, if he was honest, he’d admit there were times when he’d give anything to hear them argue one more time. He’d been separated from them during one of the aforementioned Grocery Store Runs, set adrift in a sea of hungry strangers. When, hours later, he finally got back to where the family Taurus had been parked, he’d found a grungy minivan instead.
Had they just abandoned him? Seen his disappearance as their own bit of luck?
He didn’t know then, and he didn’t know now.
Afterward, he slept under a bridge with a hobo who insisted he’d known all this was coming. Johnny didn’t much care one way or the other whether this bum could tell the future. What did matter was the bum’s gift for shoplifting. It was pretty swell for a while, Johnny playing the distraction while the old con did his work, until one day, as always happens with these sorts of things, they were caught and turned over to the National Guard.
Johnny convinced the soldiers he’d just been a victim of circumstance. As a reward, he was given a gun and told where to stand. He never learned what happened to the hobo.
___
Yep, that was his story and he was sticking to it. He was a latter-day lawman. This lonely stretch of highway (Nothing so friendless as the endless highway, as the song went) was his jurisdiction. Here he was judge, jury, and ex—
“Johnny, quit picking your nose,” Ash said.
Johnny raised his head, eyes still dull with day-dream, finger planted firmly inside his nostril.
“Huh?”
“Get. Your finger. Out of. Your nose. Jeez, sometimes I think I’m on babysitting duty out here.”
Ash was twenty, only a few years older than Johnny, but she acted like everybody’s mom. Well, no, probably more like everybody’s dad. She had a few facial scars from fighting off a rapist with a knife, which was why Johnny gave her such mad respect. Seriously, if there was anyone who scared him as much as the top brass, it was Ash.
“Not like there’s anything for us to do out here anyway,” Gus muttered. He was in the middle of a game of Texas Hold ‘Em with the other two of the group, Marshall and Stacy.
“What’s that?” Ash asked sharply.
Gus only shrugged. He had the dubious distinction of being the only person in the group on the wrong side of forty. When he wasn’t complaining about his knee and trying to convince everyone he’d been hit with shrapnel in Nam (it was pretty well understood he’d never ventured farther from home than the local deli shop), he was tinkering with his Leopard radio. That radio was the only reason Gus was part of their little squad.
Sometimes he’d pick up local chatter—other squads reporting back to command, patrols monitoring activity in areas of interest. Other times, though, he would broaden his search, and that’s when things got interesting.
The chatter was nothing compared to pre-collapse levels, but there were still plenty of conversations to pick up on: Pockets of survivors coordinating how to share supplies or reading off li
sts of missing people to one another; self-proclaimed “prophets” announcing the true reasons for mankind’s calamities; lonely souls sharing their feelings with the world (basically a primitive Facebook); altruistic types sharing instructions on how to purify water, stock food for the winter, etc.; talk-show types discussing their opinions on how the country collapsed so suddenly.
Gus would sit there half the day, surfing through the frequencies with half-lidded eyes. One day Johnny had an epiphany about this. Surfing frequencies was Gus’s version of a high.
When Gus wasn’t complaining about his knee or tinkering with the radio, he was usually losing at cards. The guy just had no luck. Seriously, if you carried luck in your pockets, Johnny would have emptied one of them and given it all to Gus, just to even things out.
Right now those three were betting food stamps, and Gus was down to his last one.
Johnny leaned back against the concrete pillar and stared up at the graffiti high above him on the underside of the bridge. Someone had sprayed the initials B.S. in big, blocky letters. Johnny wondered how the artist had found a ladder tall enough to reach the bridge. And why. And whether B.S. meant bullshit, or if it was really someone’s initials.
Bob Seger? Billy Squier? Boris Spassky?
“Johnny!” Ash snapped. Sometimes her voice hit you so hard, it could give you whiplash. “We’ve got company!”
Johnny fumbled for his rifle, peered over the barricade, and frowned at the figure walking toward them down the middle of the road.
No one came down that road. Nobody. Not for a while.
Now there were not one, but two figures approaching. (Or three, if you counted the short one Johnny supposed was a dog. His eyesight wasn’t so good.)
“Guess I live to die another day,” Gus muttered as he scooped up his last food stamp.
Chapter 23
Meatloaf was wearing his biggest salesman smile as he approached the barricade. It was really the best one. It was his Kevin Bacon smile, charming, disarming, a golden ticket that would buy him passage to any place his heart cared to go.
Just then, he would have settled for getting past the dark eyes of those five rifles.
“Drop your weapon,” a girl with scars on her face ordered. The ringleader.
Meatloaf let the meat tenderizer thump to the ground beside him. He splayed his hands, revealing just how very empty both of them were. He was as harmless as a fly, wasn’t he? Just a friendly middle-aged man searching for sanctuary from the scary outside world.
“Who are you?” the girl asked.
A strange thing happened. Meatloaf searched for his name (his birth name), but at first he could not remember. The time when people had called him “Oz, the Great and Powerful” now seemed a world away. He was surprised to feel a pang of nostalgia, of things irretrievably lost, like a favorite memento dropped through a sewer grate.
“He doesn’t even remember,” one of the guards said with a snort.
“Somebody’s cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs,” another added, rotating his finger by the side of his head, a gesture Meatloaf had seen used in his presence before. The skin around his neck began to itch.
The woman decided to rephrase her question. “What are you doing here?”
Meatloaf stared from one person to the next, to the next, to the next. His eyes landed briefly on a teenager with blond hair in his eyes. The kid looked away. Was that disgust or pity?
Suddenly Meatloaf found the tears. “Me and my daughter have been on the road for weeks,” he said in a tight voice. “We need help. We can work, of course, but we just need to find somewhere—”
“Your daughter?”
Meatloaf frowned. “Yes, my daughter. She’s—” He turned around, but Jenny wasn’t there. Neither was the dog, for that matter. He might have felt better if the dog had been there. He would have kicked it.
The girl with the scars scowled. “Listen, guy, we have a job here. We let the good people in and we keep the bad people out. I don’t know if you’re one of the bad ones or not, but you’re certainly no model citizen.” She thrust her finger into the distance. “So hit the road, bucko. If we see you creeping around here again, we’ll shoot you.”
This, Meatloaf felt, was the height of injustice. He didn’t give a shit about what little paradise these people thought they had. What mattered was that he had lost Victor’s trail, and so the only way of finding him was to predict where he would go.
Had Meatloaf been telling this story by a fire, he would have skipped the next part—the pleading, the groveling, the justifications for how much good he would do if they let him through. There was no indignity to which he would not stoop if the situation required.
But all his begging brought him nothing but laughter, mockery, and a few suggestions about where he could shove his “useful skills.” Then the girl with the scars was counting. If she got to three, she would shoot Meatloaf in the head. That gave him three seconds to decide if this was worth dying for.
One.
What would he do if he let them drive him away? Where would he go? There must be other ways into the city, sure, but would those other sentries be any more friendly? What if they too turned him away like a flea-ridden dog? What then?
Two.
Would he go back to the butchery? Pick up where his parents had left off? Could he shove all those terrible memories aside, start a new life for himself back where it all began?
Thr—
The girl’s tongue was touching her teeth to form the word. It was coming, just like the tightening of her finger on that trigger, just like the flight of that death missile from the end of the gun. Would she hesitate? Was it a bluff? No, Meatloaf thought not. These people had seen death before—dealt it, more than likely. If she hesitated, another would do the job for her.
So he said the only thing that might prove his salvation. The words gathered in his mouth and burst out together, racing to fill the air before she could utter the word that would end his life.
A dead silence followed. The soldiers glanced at one another. Their faces had changed, grown doubtful. They were no longer sure they knew who they were dealing with.
“The Baron?” the girl repeated.
Meatloaf nodded. Yes, that was the right card to play. Coincidentally, it had been one of only two cards left in his hand. The other had involved showing them his backside as he fled down the road.
“We don’t see the Baron’s men very often,” the girl said. Her voice was quieter now. Less dramatic. “And you’re going that way?” she asked. “To Kassel?”
His head bobbed up and down.
She nodded to herself, glanced at her companions. An unspoken understanding passed between them.
“Then maybe you can deliver a message for us,” she said.
___
When the fun was finally over, he started to crawl.
It was the most he could manage—dragging himself like an injured grasshopper, bits of gravel and stone imprinting themselves in his arms like mutant teeth. In some other universe, Meatloaf had convinced the sentries to let him through, and now he was strolling into the city like a kid with a fistful of cash at the arcade, whistling, not a care in the world, content to know all things must align themselves according to his wishes.
This Meatloaf, however, was on the wrong side of that barricade. He wondered if this might be the end. He wouldn’t be able to do anything more than curl up in a ditch and try to sleep, to forget, to protect himself from the cold stealing across his body. Of course he wouldn’t be able to do any of these things, but he would try.
He would also try to forget the toothy, hungry things that prowled in the darkness.
A bullet hit the ground a few feet from his legs, spraying bits of asphalt at him. They were playing with him. He wished they would just hit him and end the charade. He wished the almighty, that Cosmic Joker, would toss a lightning bolt from the sky and fry his circuits. Why let him live? Why should he breathe air he no longer deserved, since he was obvio
usly a colossal failure?
Something was bunched inside the pocket of his hoodie. He sat up, withdrew the crumpled newspaper he had been reading outside the walk-in freezer just before Victor gave his little pep talk.
The new world awaits you, the paper read.
He recalled a conversation with Angel and Bob the Garbageman. Angel had mentioned hearing people talk about a place with plenty of food where anyone could go if they could contribute. Meatloaf had wondered if it was more than a pipe dream, if the newspaper was more than a bizarre fiction cooked up by a reclusive printer.
Now he knew the truth.
The truth was it didn’t matter.
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