Adam hesitates, like he doesn’t want to be the one to break the news. “It
was
Diablo, Mom. Just like Mister said. The solar flares, the electromagnetic storms shutting down the grid, the nuclear reactors melting down—it all happened.”
Dobbs sometimes referred to what was happening on the surface as AD, meaning After Diablo. Diablo Canyon was supposedly a nuclear reactor in California that was the first to melt down.
“Ninety reactors around the world, all told,” Marcus chimes in.
“There’s no more Korea,” Adam adds. He looks as though he might weep. “Or Russia. Almost everyone in Europe died.”
No, no, no. It’s supposed to be a fossil-fuel crisis. It’s supposed to have affected only parts of Kansas, not the entire country. Not the world. Hollowed out is how I feel.
“We took the biggest hit, even bigger than the Asians,” Marcus continues.
“Not everyone died, surely,” I manage. Twelve people here, the four visitors, the people living in the abandoned train, the charred soul in the old farmhouse. Mightn’t there be a chance that my kin survived? That in some tucked-away place Mama is still waiting for me?
“No, not everyone.” But the way he says it—apologetic, cautionary—means I shouldn’t go asking for specifics. I ask anyway.
He explains that in the first month, the population of the country saw a 20 percent drop. Six months later, fewer than 20 percent were still alive. By the time a year rolled by, there was nobody around to keep track of the numbers. Estimates still swing widely, he says. Being an optimist, he puts the number somewhere between seventy-five and two hundred thousand. “That’s just North America. Nobody can hazard a guess as for the other continents.”
He runs his hand across his brow. “Hard to believe that this coming May will make it fifteen years since Diablo. Seems a lot longer. Many a day I wake up and wonder how come I’m not six feet under yet.”
I think back. Adam would have been three months old. Dobbs moved down with us around that time. I remember because Adam had
started teething and I was worried because it was too early for a baby to start teething, and his crying made Dobbs even more testy than usual. I told Dobbs to sleep in his own house if it bothered him so, but he jumped down my throat: when would I get it into my thick skull that he didn’t have a home anymore, is how he put it. I thought this meant he’d lost his job and the bank had taken his house. For eight months straight he stayed down there, not once going up for supplies. Then there’s the time he rushed Below and went for his shotgun, before dragging me up to the exit door and telling me the Scalpers were after us. I thought perhaps the police had come for me. I kept waiting for the door to bust open. When Dobbs did eventually make a foray back outside, I was bitterly disappointed. It meant that he wasn’t on anyone’s radar. No one was coming for us. All that talk of the Last Days during those months—I mistook it for craziness. He’d come back with few supplies but plenty of biblical references. The Parable of the Sower was a popular one. He spoke of refugees on their way to Mexico, likened them to seeds falling by the wayside. Where they fell, they were literally eaten by crows. The seed left to wither on stony ground were the survivors who supposedly stayed put and tried to tough it out, only to starve later. The criminal element that rose up was the weedy patch. Dobbs would talk Bible stories, and then look over at Adam as though one boy wasn’t going to do the trick. I thought all of it was to get me to stop begging him.
“Is there any way to know who survived?”
To my surprise, he mentions a group in Utah. “Cockroaches, yeah, but Mormons? Who’d have thought, right?” The Saints, he says, spend their days baptizing posthumously the millions who have died using something called the Ancestral Index, a handwritten database of the deceased. Updates are made to it frequently, although he doubts a request for information on surviving relatives has been submitted to them in the last few years. Everyone pretty much knows by now who made it and who didn’t. “Tricky part is communicating with them. That much distance with the CB radio has gotta involve a lot of Skippers, and once you involve more than two or three of them—well, it’s often a case of the Telephone Game.”
“What are Skippers?” Adam asks.
“You know about skipping stones on a lake? Well, it’s kinda like that with broadcasting a message across the country. You gotta bounce it from one CB operator to another. Get some rookie mixed up in the process, and a request for information on Uncle Joe could end up getting you a report on radiation levels in Uganda.”
Radiation levels in Uganda seem to Adam to be a topic worthy of conversation, but I ask them both to be quiet for a moment.
Silence doesn’t help. I ask Marcus if I might get some air.
It is my turn to stand in the rain.
Could it be that they are all gone? Could it be that they suffered something I can’t even comprehend? Something far worse than what I have had to endure? Could it be that Dobbs, my assailant, my jailor, the man against whom my will was sharpened, then dulled, and then sharpened once more has, in fact, saved me, saved my son? And having surely saved my son from suffering and death, is he not owed a debt, a debt for which I can never repay him? Am I not now beholden to him in a way I wasn’t before? Will I now never be free of him? There has been but one constant over the last seventeen years: the moral certainty that comes from distinguishing right from wrong—Dobbs was wrong; I was right. Once such a sure platform, that moral certainty now seems no more dependable than a trapdoor on the gallows. Was he wrong to take me? Was he right to keep us down there?
Behind me, I hear Adam tell about the strange blue street signs. Marcus explains about evacuation routes. Did Mama and Daddy live long enough to be evacuated? Adam mentions the mound with all the buried things, and Marcus explains the massive cleanup of anything that might have been contaminated by fallout. Dobbs used to say the very young and the very old were most susceptible to radiation, that Adam had to be sheltered as long as possible. What chance is there that my brothers and sister have survived?
Adam mentions the mangrove swamp. Marcus explains, “We got species of trees from South America I don’t even know the names of, but that’s what happens when birds don’t know which way to migrate.”
“My mom thinks the trees are ugly.”
“Some of them are, the ones from the early years. The newer ones are doing better. People the same way. Won’t be no more Defectives in a hundred years, some say.”
I cringe at the word.
“What’s a Defective?” Adam asks.
“The ones who don’t come out right. The exact opposite of you.”
Marcus is in the chair with his elbows on his thighs and his hands clasped. “Doctors and scientists have been working for years to come up with someone pure, who ain’t going to pass on radioactive cells, and then you guys show up outta nowhere. Man, they must think they’ve hit the jackpot with you, pal.”
So that explains their fascination with Adam.
“My mom thought they were making bombs here. She doesn’t like weapons.”
“Bombs? Ain’t no point in making bombs. But they’re cooking up stuff, that’s for sure.”
“Hill!” Nobody has heard Harriet Fletcher come in. She marches over to us and plants herself between the sitter and me. “What exactly are you doing?”
Marcus winks at Adam, as if to counter her crossness.
“You are not here to fraternize with the patients.” She checks the small container next to Adam’s bed.
“He’s not giving any more urine samples,” I announce.
“I see.” She narrows her eyes at Marcus as though this is somehow his doing. Her tone softens when she speaks to my son. “Adam, you do need to give us a specimen. We really are trying to help. Despite what your mother thinks.”
Harriet Fletcher pulls Marcus to one side. Something about getting restraints from Quadrant D should the need arise. Before leaving, she takes an armload of files off the shelf and dumps it into his arms and says, “Since you’ve got so much free time on your hands.”
I approach Marcus. “These tests they want to do on my son—”
He cuts me off by flicking a chart. “This patient’s got failed kidneys.”
He pulls out the folding chair, sits down, and leafs through another chart. “This one’s got no iron in her blood, and this poor kid’s got lymph nodes the size of oranges. We get a lot of sick people come through these doors. I’ve been doing this job for two years, and it never ceases to amaze me, the things they do. Cut open a man’s throat, take his thyroid out and sew it up again, good as new. Tumors the same way. Fifteen years ago, you couldn’t get treatment, good or otherwise. This place, they got the aces working here.”
“You said they hit the jackpot with Adam. What do you mean?”
Marcus points up at a little black speaker and says unnecessarily loud, “What you got here is a five-star facility. That’s right, uh-huh.” Judging from the look on Marcus’s face, this fact is not something about which we should feel thrilled. He pulls us close and whispers for Adam to bring over his notepad. He draws on the page, and hands it to me.
A squiggle. I frown and shrug.
He outlines his drawing again, and this time it looks like a tadpole, until he draws a big circle next to it.
I mouth the word.
Sperm?
Marcus nods and then erases his sketch. I snatch the pad from him and fill the page with a giant question mark.
Marcus spends several minutes designing a comic strip. The first square is jam-packed with stick figures, the second square has half as many, and in the third square the remaining stick figures fall on top of one another. Next is a diagram of a big syringe with bubbles inside, and a fried egg. I draw a complete blank. Adam, on the other hand, is spurring Marcus on with vigorous nodding.
Marcus hands us the notepad when he’s done. Something about sick people, and beans on a conveyer belt, and beans being packaged in a bag, and the bagged beans going for a ride on a cart into a forest.
I would still be wondering what beans have to do with this place if Adam hadn’t whispered, “Mom, they’re making babies here.”
So there can be no doubt, Marcus nods deliberately.
“And they intend to use Adam in their operation?”
Marcus shrug-nods.
According to the booklet Harriet Fletcher gave us, when geomagnetic storms knocked out the transformers and shut down the grid fifteen years ago, emergency generators were used to pump coolant so the nuclear rods at power stations wouldn’t melt down. Some plants didn’t have more than a few days’ worth of diesel to keep the generators running. Trucks carrying diesel got waylaid in massive traffic jams and then hijacked. The government called for the pumping of more diesel, but you can’t pump it out of the ground by hand. Just as you cannot pump by hand water to houses or sewage from them. Without power, ATMs and credit card machines were useless. Good-bye, NYSE; hello, mattress money. Refugee camps sprang up hundreds of miles from cities where rioting, looting, and murder became the order of the day. Most camps dried up quickly for lack of supplies, but a few became cities themselves, with local municipalities run like co-ops. Apparently, there are no more states, no central government. There are prefectures,
provinces, something called the North American Confederacy. America is now a no-name-brand country. A hand-drawn diagram on the back page shows only two borders—the Atlantic and the Pacific.
“What if his clock and this clock are different?” Adam asks.
“Time is time; it’s the same for everybody.”
“But who decides what time it is?”
I don’t know anymore. Is there still Greenwich mean time?
“There’s something wrong with this clock,” Adam says two minutes later. “It was going much faster last night, and now it keeps stopping.”
I look at the clock; the long hand snaps to the next marker. I suggest Adam open his notebook and work on some of his designs.
“Why does time go slower in the day than it does at night?”
“It only seems that way because you are waiting.”
“Last night was ten hours and thirty minutes long,” Adam announces. “That means today will last thirteen hours and thirty minutes. Is that normal? Shouldn’t it be equal?”
I don’t know any more what’s normal. I still can’t tell from the weather what season it is. “It means it’s probably late spring, or else early fall. Nothing to worry about.”
But Adam does look worried. He keeps his attention fixed on the clock. “Do you think he’s going to come back?”
Don’t get your hopes up about people, I want to tell him. Don’t get your hopes up about anything.
I should keep reading, but every page I turn, I see more of Dobbs’s disaster play out. The world is not my home. Instead of returning to the scene of my youth, I am set down among the artifacts of Dobbs’s invention. Between every line, lines he could have written himself, his face appears, taunting.
How you going to protect him now?
I hear him wheeze in my ear.
What are you going to do without me?
I don’t know what to say to him.
Marcus returns a little before noon. Besides the deaf woman, he is the only other face we’ve seen all day.
I finger the shiny foil paper.
“Brought something for you, too, Sunshine.”
Adam perches on the end of my bed and eagerly accepts the small yellow pillow in a plastic wrapper. He’s elated. “What’s it for?”
“Eating, kid! That right there is the genuine article. I have a friend who’s a trader; says they’ve got another factory running again. On the black market, Twinkies used to fetch an arm and a leg. Now, you can trade as little as a sack of flour for one.”
Marcus has something else tucked behind his back. “Got you another present, but you have to guess first.”
I catch the look on Adam’s face: oh no, not another birthday—something bad’s about to happen.
Something bad has happened.
“Hey, don’t look so worried.” He hands Adam a silver bar not much bigger than the Twinkie.
“Thanks.” Adam inspects it one way, then another, and holds it up for me. “Isn’t it great?” He has no idea what it is.
“What’sa matter? Never taken a bite out of a tin sandwich before?” Because Adam still looks foggy, Marcus shows him. The instrument disappears in his palm. He cups his hand around his mouth, and the room fills with honky-tonk. After a few bars of “Oh! Susanna,” he rubs the harmonica on his trousers and gives it back to Adam.
Nothing has ever fit Adam properly, not the clothes Dobbs occasionally brought for him or the sweaters I knit; not the belt to hold up his pants or his newly acquired pair of shoes. But this harmonica seems custom-made for him. Who knew the first thing to fit my son so perfectly would be music?
Adam runs the instrument back and forth across his lips, puffing out one chord after another. He beams at Marcus.
“You’re welcome, Sunshine.”
Adam takes off to the far side of the hut looking like a drum major in front of a marching band. For him, the world is emerging one note at
a time, one new face at a time; my world, however, continues its retreat. Beloved faces turn out like lights, one after another. Like cardboard cutouts, Mama’s house, Grandpa’s farm, the old redbrick schoolhouse fall flat. The longed-for is now a parched idea existing only in my faulty memory. I wanted so much to give Adam a tour. I wanted the forgotten things to pull me from the tomb. I am not resurrected; I am merely aboveground.
Marcus takes a seat, folds his arms across his chest, and seems perfectly content to watch Adam. Adam told me earlier that Marcus is his friend, told me to be nice to him. He said the way I talked about Mercy, the way we’d become instant friends, how we’d just looked at each other and knew right away we could tell each other things we’d never tell anybody else, that’s how it is with him and Marcus.
With Adam out of earshot, I ask Marcus if things are as bad now as the brochure makes them out to be. Marcus keeps his seeing eye on Adam. In his voice is nothing but patience. “Folks don’t talk anymore about what’s bad, what’s good. Bad and good all got mixed together. Still mixed together. Nobody can say for sure which is gonna come out ahead.”
Marcus smiles at the string of flat notes. “I had a boy. About the same age as Adam when he died. He and his mother lived in Wilmington, eighteen miles from the Salem plant. The government had to send people door-to-door with orders to evacuate, the communications satellites being fried and all. Turns out, they get to the poor neighborhoods last.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sometimes, I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better for a bomb to drop, ended it right there in one fell swoop instead of being hit with wave after wave of radiation. Folks starving. Cities on fire. Armed militias gunning people down for stealing bread. You can be glad he missed all that.”
Marcus clearly divulged more than he ought to last night, but I’m not sure he won’t rat on us if I ask him straight-out about the closest community and how we might get there. I feel him out by asking him
about tent cities. “People are pack animals,” he says. “All those preppers from before Diablo—the one thing they failed to prepare for was our need to congregate.”
“Are any of these places near Eudora?”
He shakes his head. “Except for a few, these are mobile villages. The most they spend in any one place is a couple of months. A certain caravan might pass by here every four or five years, depending on how big their loop is. Some folks, their whole entire lives are spent on one migration.” Marcus explains how each nomadic group establishes its own migratory pattern, some tied to seasonal availability of wild crops, others to trade exchanges. “Chances of survival went up once people started to move. You settle down somewhere and you have to defend yourself against looters, wildlife, squatters. If the fires come through, there go all your provisions.”
I tell him Harriet Fletcher mentioned a few old people in Eudora.
“Some of us ain’t cut out for a life on the road, the old-timers, especially. Some of them get road-weary, and some are still perfectly capable of keeping up with their group, but they opt to move back to their hometowns anyway. Homesick is what it is.”
“What about kids?” Adam has stopped playing. The images that sicken me, tales of a land gone to seed, seem to have no effect on him. And why should they? This is the boy who has been immunized against disaster, who has been told his entire life that the day would come for him to fulfill his destiny in a postapocalyptic world. Why shouldn’t he look as if he’s poised to do exactly that?
Marcus pegs his nose with his fingers, as if he’s equalizing pressure in his ears. “You don’t see many kids out there.”
“Where do you live?” Adam asks.
“Where I live ain’t no picnic.” Marcus studies my face, sizes up my intentions. “Look, folks would be lining up to get into a place like this. Round-the-clock security, health care, three squares a day. You gone and won the lotto, they’d say.”
From outside comes the sudden sound of marching. Adam goes to the window to check.
“I don’t tell you this to scare you,” Marcus says quietly, leaning toward me, “but out there, you could cross paths with traffickers, and if they get their hands on him, there’s no telling where he’d end up. In the early years, you’d hear the occasional story of a family popping up from their storm shelter or crawling out of a cave, and you couldn’t help but feel sorry for them. You knew they were going to die from exposure or starvation or because they hadn’t become part of a pack, like the rest of us. But we haven’t heard of survivors for years, and now I’d say the premium for an untainted boy, one with clean genes, is sky-high.”
When two men wearing hoods and army fatigues come in, Adam races back to us and takes shelter behind Marcus.
“We’re here to escort Adam Hallowell to the conservatory.”
I begin protesting, but the cadet pulls out a piece of paper. “Dr. Fletcher signed an order for tests.”
I ask Adam for the walkie-talkie. “I’ll straighten this out.”
While I am scrambling among the sheets looking for the darn thing, one of the cadets has whipped some kind of canvas sack over Adam’s head, transforming him into a beekeeper.
“Mom,” he mutters through the mesh.
I throw myself at the cadet, but it is like trying to move a tank. They hustle Adam out the door despite my thrashing. “There is some mistake! Let go of him!” The fight spills out onto the path where I am almost knocked off my feet by the noonday brightness. Light can be a violent thing, a thing that screeches and howls so loud you have to force yourself not to turn and run the other way. It is a pushy thing, greedy. Daylight lathers my face and spreads down my neck. I can’t help but gasp as it forces its way down my throat. Searing, scalding, like acid. Still, I keep screaming for them to unhand Adam.
“It’s okay, Mom. I’m okay.” Adam’s had to grow up with Dobbs clanging on about how unreasonable survivors are—fear-riddled, squabbling rumormongers who’d sooner slit a man’s throat than shake his hand. If anything, Adam is at risk of believing people aren’t nearly as bad as they’ve been made out to be.
The cadet makes the mistake of assuming phrases like “just a few doors down,” “back by dinnertime,” and “painless procedure” are going to change my mind. I lunge for Adam and get shoved hard enough that I lose my balance and land on all fours. I look up. Already Adam is ten yards away. It’s like watching a maple leaf on the surface of a rushing river. A picture flashes into my head of Mama standing at the back door. In her face is the tepid morning sunlight. She blows me a kiss, then waves as I rush to meet the bus. I don’t want to blow my son a kiss because this is not a good-bye. This is a rescue.
I stumble to my feet, rub the dust out of my eyes, and start to run after Adam just as the sky turns grainy. Oddly, the grains shift and swoop into a dense shadow eclipsing the sun. A sudden wind stirs up more dust, and I hear the whining of a two-stroke engine. I realize the sound is the massive shadow plummeting toward me. For some reason my legs will not move. I am in that dream where I’ve gone lame. Run. Run! Somebody is screaming at me.
An arm scoops me up and yanks me back inside. The door slams. It sounds as if an army has opened fire on it. I cover my face, but it doesn’t help. Flapping, creeping, biting things are all about my head, tangled in my hair. I flog my legs, but three-inch bugs with wings are glued to them.
“Get them off!”
“Locusts.” Marcus is picking them off me. “They come out here from the east, looking for food.” Some fly about the room, dive-bombing me and taking off again for the windows. Before Marcus has clobbered them all, I run to the window. The day looks benign, sunny once again. Picnic weather. Adam is gone.
There is only one place to start my story. With him, my story begins. Without him, it might as well end, too.
I pick up the walkie-talkie, check to make sure it’s on channel thirteen, and then transmit. “Marcus, are you there?”
Nothing.
I try a second time. “Marcus?”
Again, nothing but static.
I’ve already wasted too much time. I dash outside and dart down the side path. No use consulting my instincts—they are entirely useless to me here. Other than a desperate need to hurry, I have no sense of where to go next. I am right-side up after all these years, and everything feels upside down. I have become hopeless at anticipating. If I guess left, trouble is likely to come from the right. I follow the row of sheds. Each screened window I pass is thick with odor. I am about to cross an intersection when I hear what sounds like a squadron approaching from the
side street. I dash into the nearest shed and close the door. Quite miraculously, the footsteps race by without stopping. Relief is so overwhelming I have to keep myself from collapsing to the floor.
I spin around, aware that I am not alone. Sitting on a small wooden pallet are a middle-aged man and a boy so hunched he could be ten years old or a hundred. Both of them have thick, white padding bound to their necks, with plastic tubing leading from the dressing to bottles beside them. Each is naked from the waist up. On their chests are several circular white stickers, each with a metal nipple. The man has a thick black mustache, but no eyebrows and no hair. The boy’s head is too large for his body. He looks like a cartoon character, only one with no laughs in him.
Neither seems surprised by my intrusion.
I say very quietly, “I’m looking for my son.” I lift my hand a couple of inches above my head. “About this tall, blond hair.”
The man clears his throat, gargles, “Operating room.” He points to the way I’ve just come.
“No, he’s not having surgery. The conservatory?”
I want to get him by the shoulders and shake him so he will spit out the words he seems to have such difficulty forming.
“Is he. A candidate?”
I have no idea what this means. I nod vigorously.
This time he points in the other direction. “Big. building.”
“Thank you.”
The man shrugs. The boy never looks up from the dark stain on the floor beside the bed.
At the end of the row is a warehouse-looking structure with a sign on it that reads,
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
I try peering in the side windows, but the dark tint makes it impossible to see anything. Through the air vents come strains of classical music and the faint smell of lilacs. The door around the back is unlocked. The handle turns without making a sound. I slip in.
I turn around to leave, but the one nearest me calls, “You can have Linda’s spot.” A tall woman with graying hair in a loose bun ambles over. She points out an available bed. Everyone turns to stare. “We ain’t going to bite you.” She stares at my shape, as though trying to assess how far along I might be. “Bashful one, Bernice,” she says over her shoulder to the woman with the book.
“Sorry, I think I have the wrong place.” I try to retreat, but the tall woman blocks the door.
“Bit late for second thoughts, don’t you think?”
“Leave her be.” The one called Bernice steps forward. She might have been pretty once, if it weren’t for the dark blemish that covers one whole side of her face, the discolored teeth, heavy hips that come from bearing many children. “It’s all right; we’re all just girls here.” There is something about her voice, something about her soothing tone. “Name’s Bernice.” She sticks out her hand. “I’m the Supervising Birther. Why don’t you put your things down and introduce yourself.”
I don’t want to raise the alarm, so I ask her as casually as possible if she would direct me to the conservatory.
Her head falls to the side, and her eyes soften. “Oh, honey.”
Some alarm goes off inside me. I stare at the woman, Bernice, but there is nothing familiar about her face. It’s that word—
honey
—and the way she uses it on me, as though she’s sorry for all the things I have yet to learn. Bernice. Bernice. A tendril of a memory, a voice from long ago.
“Lord help us, Bernice, but I think they sent us another soft-boiled one again.”
“Bernice,” I say, tentatively, because I’m not sure I ought to risk it. “From Eudora?”
All those years ago on the phone, Daddy’s lady-friend told me to go looking for rainbows. It’s a wonder cracked lips can form words, a throat this parched can issue sound. “I’m Blythe.”
She starts to say what you’d expect from someone with good manners—what a nice name—but stops. She draws in her lips, frowns. I let her search my face. Her chin begins to quiver. So she will not have to ask, I tell her my last name.
The instant Bernice starts to cry, the women rise up. They close in and form an outer circle of murmuring. “Didn’t like the looks of her the moment she walked through that door,” I hear someone say; meanwhile, Bernice might as well be watching the dead being raised.
“What happened to my family, Bernice? Did any of them survive?”
She covers her mouth. “It can’t be.” Her hand reaches out to touch my arm, then stroke my face. As though to alleviate a sharp pain, she clasps her side as I tell her I just now got free, that I want to go home, if she could just tell me if anyone’s there. “Oh, honey, they never stopped looking for you. Not even after Diablo. Every time those posters faded, I’d see your ma out there putting up new ones, sick as she was.” She takes my hand and starts rubbing the back of it. “She took it hard, real hard. We all did. Your friend, Mercy, she was about the only one your ma could stand to talk to. Remember that boy you were with that night? What was his name?”
“Arlo.”
She snaps her fingers. “Arlo Meier, that’s right. You being gone tore him up something awful, too. He joined the force because of you. Swore up one side and down the other he was going to find you. Folks figured you had to have been taken by one of those rings—that you were probably in Mexico or someplace overseas.”
I tell her about the silo, about Dobbs Hordin keeping me there. Describing him in objective terms is near impossible. “He was a survivalist.
He predicted all of this. That’s why he took me. I have a son, Bernice. They’ve taken him somewhere. He’s never been around people before. He’ll be scared. Please, you must help me!” Bernice looks terribly confused. I don’t know if it’s because of what I’ve said or what the woman whispering in her ear is saying.
“He’s not a trader, by any chance?” Bernice rattles off Dobbs’s weight, height, and hair color, all the details I should’ve been able to provide.
“Yes, that’s him.” A trader? Dobbs coming back to the silo with tinned food, that ridiculous prom dress, one time a full set of dishes—did he get our supplies here? And if so, in exchange for what? It occurs to me just how much stuff is left Below. Not only food provisions, but the books, the guns, Krugerrands, all those historical documents. Aren’t they going to be even more valuable now? And if he came here to trade, can I? Will these women help me find Adam if I promise them Dobbs’s nest egg?
“The Hoarder’s what we call him,” the tall one bellows. “Always suspected he was feeding an army, the amount of contributions he makes. He certainly never acts like he’s doing it for the enjoyment.”
“Contributions?” Besides those stupid tracts, I can’t imagine what Dobbs might have taken from the silo to trade. Unless. The thought stops the blood dead in its tracks. “Did he bring you a child?” Was Dobbs one of those human traffickers that Marcus was telling me about?
A snicker breaks the silence. The tall one gives herself away with a hee-haw. “A child? Can’t say the poor bastard didn’t try!” The group erupts into raucous laughter. Bernice’s deadpan splits into a wide grin, which she quickly covers with her fingers. Other women are not so similarly restrained. They hold their bellies and slap their thighs.
“You don’t know what he was up to?” Bernice asks me, putting her hand on my knee.
I shake my head. Something’s off about these women. I’m not at all sure I should bring up the idea of trading with them.
“He came here to trade his seed for supplies.” For a second, I think she’s talking about tomato seeds, his precious repository, and then she
says, “We do it the old-fashioned way here, not like test tubes or anything. I think the only reason management kept him on as a contributor was because there are so few men who aren’t contaminated.”
The smell of lilac perfume, him not looking me in the eye when he put the duffel bag on the table, scrubbing his hands till they were almost raw. These were the women he was having sex with?
“Bernice, I need you to help me find my son.”
To signal that the time for discussing Dobbs is over, that we really must be about finding Adam, I stand. Bernice, though, is flagging over a tiny middle-aged woman with buck ears, a receding chin, and the beginning stages of a baby bump. “Fiona was the one most often assigned to him. This may or may not be his doing.”
The tall one snorts. “We’ll know if it’s born with horns and a forked tail.”
“He’s dead,” I say impatiently, because we must hurry now.
For a moment, the women fall silent. And then a couple of elbows are jammed into Fiona’s side, and she heaves a sigh, and the tall one makes a snorting sound. “Can’t say it’s a loss.”
“Where do they keep the kids?” I grab Bernice’s arm.
Gently but with a warning attached it, Bernice removes my hand and says the birthers are kept separate from the offspring.
“She’s not in enlisted in the program, is she?” asks the tall one. There is suddenly a straightening of maternity gowns, the shuffling of feet, clucking of tongues. What was camaraderie only a minute ago is now out-and-out hostility.
Bernice is directing everyone back to their respective beds, and I have begun to insist in a crazy banshee kind of way that someone take me to my son. “I’ll pay you!” I shout. “I’ve got money!” And all at once, I realize how ridiculous it is to offer money. Money is surely worthless now. But what do I have that would be of value to these people? I try to fight the panic, try to push it way down so I can think straight, but it only causes havoc with my innards. Everything’s coming loose. Bernice is ushering me to the back door, suggesting that I should probably leave,
when it flies open. Marcus, sweating and breathing heavily, is on the other side of it. He has a plastic garbage container with him.
“All the trouble I went to find you a ride as nice as this, and you split.”
“That’s him!” I yell, pointing the walkie-talkie at him. “He’s one of them who took my son!”
Bernice and Marcus try to conduct a conversation while I pound on his chest.
He catches my wrists, but before he can drag me outside, my protests are interrupted by a pulsing, earsplitting ring. All heads swings in one direction. Near the front door is the tall woman. Her fingers are pressed against the red button.
Bernice and Marcus push me outside. He lifts the lid.
“I’m not getting in there!”
Bernice drops my backpack and suitcase on the ground, wishes me good luck, and hurries back inside, slamming the door.
Marcus grips me around the waist. I did not kill Dobbs for this. I did not live through that hell so someone could pull me into another one. I ram my hand up against his jaw and wriggle free. “Adam!” I call, taking off. I scream for him again, this time into the walkie-talkie. How far can he be that he cannot answer?
Marcus tackles me from behind. He clamps his hand around my mouth and tells me for the love of God to quit yelling. “I’m getting you outta here. Like I told you.”
I mumble against his hand and somehow he understands what I mean.
“We gonna go get your son. But you keep hollering, and it’s going to be next to impossible.” A big guy like this, you’d expect strong-arm tactics, especially with a siren going off, but he’s got his eyebrows raised, waiting for permission, and his eyes are wet with either apology or guilt. He pulls his hand away from my mouth just a fraction.
“How do I know you’re not going to turn me in?”
“You don’t. You trust me or you wait here for management, it’s that simple.”
“Fight like a cornered cat and weigh just as much.” The lid slams shut, and Marcus starts wheeling me away. “Hold on tight now. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.” We both know a bumpy ride is the least of our worries.
Marcus snatches a green one-piece and holds it up against me. “That’ll do.”
I hurry into it, zipping up the front. When I turn around, Marcus has changed from his outfit into a green uniform, too. We put on matching screened helmets. He grabs sheets from the table and towels from the rack, tosses them into a laundry cart, and then wheels it to me. He does likewise with a second cart. Pushing it, he heads for the door.
“Act normal, and follow me. You’re on housekeeping duty now.”
The siren is still wailing, in the nearness or distance, it’s hard to tell which with this thing over my head. “Aren’t they going to recognize us?”
“Nobody sees the laundry people. Come on, we’re close. It’s only four blocks.”
We wheel our laundry carts outside just as someone approaches from the direction we aim to go. I am about to make a U-turn and retreat into the laundry room when I hear Marcus murmur, “Keep going.”
Marcus spins around and drops to the ground beside me. “That wheel giving you trouble again?”
I hope my head is nodding. Through the mesh, I watch the person, wait for him to stop and jerk Marcus to his feet.
“How you doing?” Marcus says, tipping an imaginary hat.
Instead of answering, the man hurries around us without so much as a glance.
We roll the carts around the bend and into a great commotion. We are in some kind of courtyard, and the noise is not turkeys gobbling but a crush of young men, a few stooped and bald, some of them younger than Adam. I scan the group, quickly noting that Adam is not among them. They elbow and jostle one another to get closer to a concession stand from which food is being distributed. Those who are handed bowls eat standing up, tipping food straight into their mouths. Many of them are missing limbs. Marcus begins to steer us through the havoc when I notice a uniformed woman barking orders at the server. It’s Harriet Fletcher. The stand is in danger of being toppled by the boys. To avoid this, she grabs a bucket from the table and tosses its contents out into the crowd.
Sweat is pouring down my sides. I am sure Harriet Fletcher is going to notice us. A rush of blood fills my mouth when she flags us over. I must have bitten my cheek.
“Steady, now,” Marcus commands. He pushes the cart toward her. I swallow blood.
“Savages!” Harriet Fletcher complains. She leans into my cart to grab a towel. She wipes her hands, watching the mass of misery slither at her feet. She flings the towel into my cart and turns to me. “A little late for housekeeping, isn’t it?”
I freeze.
“Fecal emergency,” Marcus says in an altered voice.
“Is that what the fuss is all about? Every little thing, they sound the alarm.” She asks if we have a two-way so she might radio for someone to shut the darn alarm off, but Marcus shakes his head.
Dismissed with a wave, we pass by the crowd, turn right at the next intersection, and come to a huge glass building. Through the mesh, I read the sign out front,
CONSERVATORY—AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
Beside it are half a dozen Airstream trailers. Marcus has us stop at the first one. A face peers from behind a curtain when he raps against the door. “Laundry services.” He steps inside and a minute later throws me towels. I look in my basket and hand him a couple of replacements. “Thank you,” he says, closing the door. We move to the next trailer as two cadets jog by. Only one of them looks our way.
A brief glimpse of an arm is all it takes to convince me that Adam is the one behind the open door. I barge up the steps and into the trailer. Wearing what looks like a Mylar poncho, Adam is sitting stiffly on the edge of the bed. I fly into his arms, but he recoils from me. “Son,” I say. “Adam, it’s me.” Even then, he seems unconvinced. I lift the edge of my hood.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” he says, embracing me. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be silly; you haven’t done anything wrong.”
I hug my son. He smells of antiseptic.
Adam wants to explain something, but Marcus shushes us both.
“Do as he says,” I tell Adam when Marcus starts wrapping him in a sheet.