Drink for the Thirst to Come (5 page)

The whole thing? Ten minutes. Less, he guessed: one or two, sliding and slinking, five waiting, another couple, three him damn near getting cocked stupid by a ’Tweener ambuscade! Ten minutes ago they’d been having a bite. Now his nuts throbbed, the side of his face was starting to buzz, and she’s running. What for? Not for life!

He caught up, grabbed her arm. “Wait!” he whispered. She spun toward him and…

The world came back into focus. He was on the ground. She was leaning over him again. He hated the taste of pulver. “Cripes,” was all he had.

Her voice chittered. “Collateral damage. It’s instinct. Jesus on a stick!” She snuffled, “World War’s what, five years old, and I just now make my second kill?” She offered her hand. “Almost my third. Sorry. Not a good American, I guess.” She was babbling. She looked at his face, touched it. “Look, as Big as it is, there’s not a lot going on in the Tunnel. Once you fuel the gennies, clear the vents, clean the filters, make sure the batteries are charging, there’s not a lot to do for the day except walk past each other from time to time and get ideas. We had different ideas, Mike and I.

“Anyway, he’d made sure there was a gym. Important his Eve keep fit. Me, that is. I did. Unarmed combat Blu-rays were to my taste. I learned a lot. In theory. Mike had other tastes.” She pulled Chris to his feet. “Don’t like being grabbed, I’m sorry. Mike found out.” She shivered, looked at her hand. “That’s irony,” she said.

He didn’t ask any more. Her “plump” was mostly muscle.

The
bong-bongs
were close.

“Funny,” he said. He winced. Talk hurt. “Woke this morning thinking ‘I’d like to find out about that…’” His face hurt as much as his nuts. His nuts felt better, though. The over-sky was still swirly black, but the air had settled some. No wraiths. No static. Good seeing was a hundred, hundred and fifty yards. In the last quarter mile, the ground had flattened. Blast and firestorm had blown it all to flinders, reduced the residue to ash, left only pulver ground and basement holes and they walked a graveyard of neatly spaced holes.

“Man,” she said, “that’s, I don’t know, it’s familiar.”

“What?”

“That gong! Jesus. Drive you nuts or what?”

“Been there’s long as I been here. Almost don’t notice it no more.”

“Like living near the ‘L’”

“Like?”

“Never mind. That tone. It’s so…”

The ground was rising.

“Fifteen minutes,” she said.

“What?”

“That.” She cocked her chin at the
gong-gong
. “Every fifteen minutes. Four
per
hour.” She looked at the watch. “Like clockwork.”

“Someone keeping time?”

She shrugged.

“So it ain’t wind…”

“That is
really
familiar,” she said.

“Coming up on something,” he said.

The rising ground resolved into a gray mass that blocked the way.

“The Kennedy,” she said. “I-90, I-94. Collapsed.”

A solid ridge of blasted concrete and fused metal, eight, nine stories high, stretched north to south as far as sight took them. The highway supports had dissolved in the blast, girding, signs, arches had evaporated, been blown away. Roadways, clover leafs, on-ramps, interchanges, overpasses, vehicles and people had tumbled, pancaked, one atop the other. What had been a highway was a gray-green range of cliffs. Rivulets of black water emerged from it, caught the dim light. The runoff chattered and rippled. Here and there waterfalls cascaded from halfway up the face.

“What’s sourcing that?” she said.

He shook his head but she was talking to herself.

“Artesian? Hydrostatic pressure?” She was shaking her head.

“You wanted a bath!”

“Smell. You don’t bathe in that,” she said, “you test for it. Come on, this is your trip.”

Smelled like too-long dead.

Took a nasty hour, meaty water washing their feet most of the way. Mosses and wild toadstools had gone to grip along the seeps and runoffs. The slick masses, inches thick in places, made the climb difficult, made Chris look clumsy. Here and there, the ground gave way as fissures opened or the cliff face collapsed inward. Echoes of falling debris came back. Lousy stinks oozed from the interior.

Just short of the top, a crevasse six, seven feet wide cut their way. From what seemed deeper darkness came a hollow rush of distant running water interlaced with questionable splashes, chatterings. A yawning groan sounded as Chris leaned over to look.

“Like a mama lion with cubs.”

“Don’t wonder at it,” she said. “I spent five years below. There are things you want to stay away from.”

Chris gave the expressway a good plink. “Guess we’ll work back a ways,” he started.

The girl landed easily on the other side. “’S okay. Just a long step, really.” She held out her hand.

He hardened his plink on her. “I wasn’t asking. I said we scout another way.”

She reached a little farther.

The jump
was
easier than it looked, even for a guy near fifty. He didn’t need her help!

“By the way,” she said, “what’s down there? They want to stay away from you too.”

As they neared the top the clouds opened some and Chris’s shadow preceded him. The air cleared. For a good three minutes, it stayed that way. What had been a river cut along the base of the Kennedy ridge. Ahead, hollow ponds caught daylight like silver paddies. Bright pools dotted the landscape, north and east. The stump of the Monadnock and other masonry ruins rose from the waters like jagged islands. Between the ponds and the buildings spread flat heaths of brown and green.

The
bong
tolled from the peak of a shattered building directly across the river from where they stood. The sound gained detail. Each peal arose from a soft impact, not metal on metal like bell and clapper. Each stroke quivered pure but ended as a ragged buzz that emerged from under the main tone.

“
Turandot
!” the girl said. “I knew it was familiar. The gong!” She pointed to the source. “It’s the Lyric Opera’s
Turandot
gong. I saw it a year before The Day. They—whoever they are—hauled that thing up and mounted it on top of what’s left of the Civic Opera House.”

The gong was a good fifteen feet in diameter and hung from a frame. When the man struck the quarter hour the sound reached them a good two seconds after. “A half-mile,” she said quietly. Her voice quivered.

They stared, gathering the sight. Not wanting to.

“Hm,” he said.

The thing wielded by the ringer
was
soft, and for the first few strokes, still alive.

A dozen or more people surrounded the gong and frame. Men, women, hard to see detail, harder to figure what the hell.

“What are they?” she said.

“What you think?” he said. “Yep. Taking pieces. Just what you think.”

The shattering buzz that lingered on the end of each tone was a voice. Next toll, he thought, the voice would be different. The ringer would probably use up his hammer.

“But what…?”

“Religion, I guess,” Chris said.

The girl ralphed.

She
is
a girl
, Chris thought.

A rubble dam blocked the slow dark river upstream from their position. The nearest crossing was directly below.

They waited for sinking light to pitch shadow darkness across the Wetward face of I-90/94. Even in near dark, the descent was easier than the climb. Two toll cycles and they’d reached the ford. Day was falling into the west and the girl was squirrelly to be away, far as possible, from the
bong-bong
.

“Religion?” she spit it. And took off.

The pour began when they’d cleared the river and skirted the Opera Tower. The gongs never slacked through the Wet, marked each quarter hour with certainty. They pressed until the Opera was in the dark, then they sheltered in the base of a building that rose from one of the mossy heaths and a now-gray, rain-pocked pond.

“Willis Tower,” the girl said. “Maybe not. Hard to tell.” Chris wiggled his toes and thanked his socks, the Old Guy.

The girl shook. From the walk, the kill, the climb, the
bong-bongs
from the Opera? Chris didn’t know. Maybe she was cold, tired. Who could tell about girls?

The pour became a downpour, the downpour wanted to be snow then damn near was. Each dirty drop, a slushy mud ball, fell hard. They sheltered in a stairway landing above a basement pond that stank of green rot. Looked pretty from on high and in the light. Girders overhead sagged like candles in July. Chris dipped a metalized polyfiber tarp from his pack and strung it over them. The snudfall drops drummed inches from their heads. It was true dark, now. She was there. He could smell her, feel warmth, hear her…
What the hell? Crying.

Chris didn’t like where masonry remained: the flash-black walls were thick with white niter, bearded with pale roothairs curled into a near-living mat. Leaves and stems bound the shattered foundation, held it against falling in. The walls chattered and crackled, as they did at the Center, elsewhere. Goddamn, he’d eat the butter of them but would not to see the critters, did not want them to touch! Sheltering in these living shells on the Long Walk, Chris had felt the spooks in the ruins. As a newson, sleeping unclaimed and rough, he thought the City was haunted by those evaporated on The Day. Night brought dreams, that much he knew. The folk he carried living in his head, Mom and Daddy, the guys, Jaycee, others, dragged their clean bright pasts from his dark and dirty now. Came to life as he slept, clawed the walls.

What an ass I was!
He looked at the darkness where the girl was.
An ass and likely still remain.

She squeaked, a mostly quiet little noise, unheard, but by him. He felt her jump, knew she was looking wide. “What’s…” she started.

“Sh.” He dared a moment’s drain of the Center’s batteries. Yellow light flickered on the wall. Where they’d always been, what they always were, the ghosts of Chicago, of the days past The Day: palm-long roaches, fist-thick ’pedes, their million footfalls rustling hairy white roots.

“Oh,” she said and scooted from the wall. He saved the bats. “Okay,” she said. The next bonging peal rasped over them. “Okay, here’s the deal,” she said. “That Adam and Eve thing Commissioner Mike was thinking? Didn’t work. Not with him. In retrospect, not a bad notion, what with racial suicide and all, but not with him. Anyway, he’s gone and his little Eden 400 feet below world’s end? It’s still operational, still stocked, still enough of everything there for hundreds.” There was a moment’s quiet. “For now it’s empty.”

“Yeah?” he said.

“It is. Yes.”

He might have been shaking. “So, you what? You have any suck down there?”

“Suck?”

“Weed? Cripes, smoke? Cigarettes?”

Her liquid chuckle came from the dark. “Sorry,” she said. “He didn’t smoke. Neither do I.”

“Oh.”

“So?”

Cripes
, Chris thought,
she ain’t going to ask…?

“Look, I came up to see if there might be someone. You know?”

He knew. She touched him, in the dark. What the Boss had said? What?
“What’s done with the goods, here to there, that’s your lookout.”
What did that mean? Shit. Deciding was never his strong suit.

“I mean,” she said, “you have a better offer?”

He thought.
Hard, this kind of stuff.
He touched the cell in his jacket pocket, keyed his number, the number of home. Just a thing, a meaningless thing.

“You know,” he said, “all along that walk from Dolph Station to here, I kept seeing Walking Will.”

“Walking…?”

“Will. Grampa talked about him. Something folks saw in Dust Bowl times: this old guy who walked the world giving warning, gettin’ rides, jumpin’ out. Saying stuff. One thing Grampa said he’d yell: ‘Drink! Drink for the thirst to come!’ No idea what it meant except maybe ‘Fill up now cause tomorrow you go dry!’ I dunno. Maybe that and something more. Maybe…”

He could only smell her, feel her touch. “One thing I been wondering,” he said to the dark. “What’s that smell?”

Silence. “What?”

“That smell. You got a smell.”

The water-running laugh again. “Chanel,” she said.

“Chanel. Okay. I got to tell you stuff,” he said. He could feel her waiting. “I got hiddens, a lot of hiddens. First, I’m older’n I look. I’m 47. I look younger and I let on I am.”

He went on. Told her everything there was. Everything he’d wanted to say but didn’t for five long years, maybe longer. That was that.

Snudfall stopped. They struck out for the Monadnock stump. An easy half-mile and they were there. The
bongs
behind them, every fifteen minutes, still buzzed with screams but they were behind.

The Monadnock was a gutted shell. The Heath and Hollows people? People. Mex’s mostly. Chris was used to Mex’s. Like home.

First, the people wanted to string them up, him and the girl, grab their worth. Like at the Center when newbies oozed in all strange. “
Al carillón, al carillón
,” they shouted.

“Señor Temoco!” Chris yelled. “We got Daley business with Señor Temoco!”

Down they were put for a few dark minutes, everyone muttering, plinking hard. Then there came Señor. Heard him before he saw him, a little
squeak-squeak, squeak-squeak
and the Mex’s parted sharp. Out of the shadows rolled Señor, a fat man on a chair, a legless fat man on a chair with wheels, big wheels, rolling on the paths across the pulver that had been packed down smooth for him.
Squeak-squeak.
The chair was topped with torches dripping burning fat or tallow. Puddles of liquid fire trailed back the way he came.

Chris laughed when he caught on. He wanted to slap someone’s back—the Boss’s back for a matter of fact—and shout out, “Why hell, that’s the best I’ve heard since The Day! You’ll know him by his bearing! His Goddamned burned out bearing!”

Squeak-squeak, squeak…
And the Señor stopped and was looking, his eyes bright flames behind ridges of fat. He looked at the girl, plinked Chris, looked at the girl again and licked a lip.