Epitaph Road (3 page)

I fidgeted with my other sock. “What about Dad?”

“I know this feels as if I'm stepping on your toes, Kellen, but I just want what's best —”

Her e-spond chimed. She got to her feet and moved to the window, eyes out on the gloom and splash. “Heather Dent,” she said into the mouthpiece, just loud enough for me to overhear. “I'm home,” she said. “I was just talking to Kellen. We've hardly had time —”

A pause. “Nothing new,” she said after a long moment of listening.

Another pause, then: “Four days. We may not hear from her again.”

More listening. A glance at me. “It's all in motion on this end. I'm monitoring everything.” She snuck another look at me. I tried to put on a bored expression. “And there?”

She hesitated, listening. “If you need me,” she said. Then: “Let me check.” With her back half turned to me, she fingered her display, studied the feedback, and resumed her conversation. “The earliest flight will get me to San Diego about eight. I'll be on it.”

She returned to the couch but didn't sit. “Give me a hug,” she ordered.

A hug. Her cure for everything. “You're leaving again?”

“I have to. But Paige will be here.”

Aunt Paige. Aunt Reliable. “How long this time?”

“A few days. We'll talk when I get back.”

“Sure.” I got up and let her put her arms around me. I let her stand on her tiptoes and kiss me on the cheek. Then she was off, hurrying across the room and angling for the stairs.

An angry
rat-a-tat-tat
sound pulled my attention away from her and toward the window. Hail had replaced rain. While strong gusts of wind threw the hard white ice pellets against the glass, I stood and watched and wondered what was going on.

I listened to the two new girls — Tia and Sunday — outside my bedroom door, giggling, talking loud, like spectators at the zoo waiting for feeding time. Besides their names and ages — fourteen, same as me — most of what I knew about them was that they were cousins and they hadn't spent much time around boys. When we'd met the day before, they couldn't keep their eyes off me. Of course I'd been a curiosity my whole life, so I was pretty much used to the animal-on-exhibit treatment by now.

The girls had just moved from a small town in Nebraska where the male population was in single digits. The big rooming house my mom and aunt owned had vacancies, and it was near the University of Washington, where the girls' moms were starting new jobs. From halfway across the country they'd negotiated a package deal that meant they could keep their families together.

Coincidentally, Nebraska also happened to be the birthplace of my grandfather, Joshua Winters. So in my mind the girls had something going for them already. Besides the cute factor, that is.

Silently, I got up, slipped into shorts and a T-shirt, and yanked open the door.
“Hey!”
I growled, and the taller, blond-haired girl — Sunday — almost went backward through the hallway wall. I hadn't surprised the dark-haired one, though. Tia just looked at me as if she was bored, meeting my gaze in a little contest. Then she laughed. It was a great laugh, from somewhere deep inside her chest.

“You're funny for a boy,” she said. “Most of the boys I've seen have long faces.”

“I wonder why,” I said. The irony in my voice was supposed to remind her of the reason for her long-faced boys. Everyone knew the cloud we lived under. The bug that had caused Elisha's Bear — the name some female Bible scholar, and then the world, had given the monstrous plague of 2067 — had visited three more times since then. So far the outbreaks had been away from North America, away from cities, never involving more than a few thousand males, and throwbacks at that, but who could predict when or where the next one would arrive?

“He
ain't
funny,” her cousin said, shaking off her collision with the wall. “He scared the crap out of me.”

“Sorry,” I said, although I wasn't. “But you woke me up. And
ain't
isn't a word.”

“Sorry,
professor
, but I spend my time on the things that count — the stuff we'll be tested on in our trials. And grammar
ain't
one of 'em.”

“Our trials
ain't
until September,” I said.

“Spoken like a true slacker,” Sunday said.

“Before your aunt left for work,” Tia said to me, throwing her cousin a little frown, “she told us you'd show us the neighborhood. We
were
hoping it would happen
this morning.
”

“I have a history session,” I said, “in an hour.” School was out for the summer, but history was a year-round subject, separate from the rest of the curriculum. Unlike grammar — or creative thinking — history was a major piece of our trials.
Disregard the past, suffer the future,
the oft-repeated saying went.

“We know,” Tia said. “We're registered, too.”

“We'll keep you company,” Sunday said.

“I have plenty of company already.” All the time. Everywhere. My aunt. My mom. A dozen official or unofficial watchdogs.

“But we can go with you?” Tia said.

“If my aunt said you can, then you can. But when I'm ready to leave the house, you have to be ready, too. I don't like being late.”

“We're set to go,” Tia said.

“So you really
do
care?” Sunday asked me.

“I have to,” I said. Passing the trials was important to me — at least the practical me — because it would keep my options open. If I decided to stay within the confines of PAC-dictated society once I got to be an adult, I'd have educational, career, and citizenship opportunities (like voting, for instance) not available to people — guys, especially — who didn't make the grade.

We took off on our bikes for the Learning Center, which was located on the Seattle waterfront. I pedaled hard, keeping to the wide but busy bike trail at first but weaving in and out of car and bus traffic, attracting the usual stares, glares, and honks, once we left the trail downtown. I thought Sunday and Tia might show their nerves in big-city traffic, but they looked comfortable on their tandem, Tia doing the steering, like one well-oiled four-legged machine, like they'd been riding together forever, and they stayed on my tail. They had some incentive — they didn't want to get lost.

They pulled up closer. “
Why
do you have to?” Sunday yelled over the traffic noise, but I didn't follow her question.

“Care,”
she said. “Why do you have to
care
?”

“For myself,” I yelled back at her. “And my mom expects it. If I don't ace my trials it'll damage her hard-earned PAC image. And there's pressure from my aunt Paige, too. But she's thinking more of me. She wants me to be a doctor.”

“Do you?” Tia said. “Want to be a doctor, I mean?”

“I wouldn't mind,” I said. “It's one thing PAC allows us guys to do.”

“I'm gonna be a doctor, too,” Sunday said. “A vet, though. No crap from people. Lots of gratitude from the patients.”

“Environmental science,” Tia said. “The oceans, maybe.”

I wondered for a moment if that job was on the guy-approved list. I actually had my eye on something else, though — a different job, a different life. But unless I wanted to attract dark looks and more “visits,” I couldn't mention it to either Mom or Aunt Paige — or anyone, really. I couldn't talk about leaving all this “civilized” stuff behind, taking off for the hinterlands, trying out the loner life, being like my dad. Working with him.

Experiencing freedom.

A small blue car, a neglected-looking Lectra-Cell, passed uncomfortably and probably intentionally too close to me. From under its hood rumbled the simulated sound of an old, barely muffled internal combustion engine. Most vehicles on the road, powered by some form of noiseless electric motor, were equipped with collision-avoidance sound systems designed to let people know they were nearby. Sometimes, instead of fake engine sounds, cars broadcast music, crowd noises, nature recordings, a medley of assorted stuff.

In the crowded traffic we were in now, instead of distinctive sounds, I heard a jumble of noise, loud and obnoxious enough to cause an instant headache and a longing for solitude.

For the hinterlands.

But it wasn't loud enough for Sunday and Tia. Just to annoy me — I was 99 percent sure — they turned on their own sound effects, jangly-clangly ice-cream-vendor music and some guy singing an antique song about a bicycle built for two.

My bike wasn't equipped to produce fake noise. I liked it that way.

We arrived at the center, a glass-faced thirty-story building that was once — pre-Elisha (PE) — crammed top to bottom with law offices. In the lobby, I headed for The Groundskeeper, an espresso stand run by a girl named Petey. She'd failed her trials three years earlier but planned on trying again in another year. She'd asked me more than once if I wanted to study with her, but I'd been putting her off. I thought a boy-crush was involved in her offer, and I'd already had my bittersweet experience with an older girl.

She raised her head at our approach. Her cool day-of-the-week sunglasses were in the shape of fat
W
s. “Company today, Kellen?” she said. She had a hoarse, sexy voice, the remnant of an infection she'd suffered as a little girl. That same infection robbed her of her eyesight, but she seemed to do okay without it. Effortlessly, she began putting together my mocha — whole milk, extra shots, extra chocolate, extra hot.

I introduced her to Sunday and Tia. Petey's blindness wasn't obvious, and I wondered if they noticed. When she finished with my drink she stepped out from behind the counter to hand it to me up close. She held on to the tall paper cup even after I had my fingers wrapped firmly around it, touching hers, and she leaned nearer. Her nose practically brushed my shirt while she inhaled deeply, as if walking up and sucking in someone's scent was the most natural thing in the world. As if we were two dogs meeting in the park. Then she leaned back and let go of my coffee and smiled. “Don't you just love the smell of this boy, girls?” she said.

I no longer wondered if Petey's blindness had gone unnoticed.

Tia and Sunday exchanged an amused look. They followed me to the elevator and we rode it to the seventh floor, where our classroom overlooked Puget Sound, blue and sparkling in the morning sun. Through tall windows we could see fishing boats moving north and south, ferries east and west. I could tell the girls were impressed, although Sunday pretended not to be.

They found their desks, a couple of previously vacant ones next to mine, with shiny-new
SUNDAY
and
SEPTIEMBRE
— Tia's given name — labels taped to the top surfaces. By design, I was surrounded by girls. There was one other boy in the class, a long-faced guy named Ernie, but he sat far away, inside a triple picket fence of more girls.

Ernie and I didn't talk much. Anxious over his upcoming trials, he spent most of his time studying and the balance of it worrying. Like the rest of us, he'd have to wait another four years to undergo a more difficult battery of tests if he flunked the first time around. Like the rest of the boys, he was facing longer odds to begin with. In an average year, 87 percent of girls passed their trials. For boys, the number was 72 percent. And it was no secret that the difference was accounted for by the scores in the oral exams. Women gave them. Women scored them. Boys floundered.

And then there was the whole aftermath thing, even if you passed. For girls, the career choices were limitless. For boys, they were pared down and capped and dead-ended. Thus, Ernie's chewed-down fingernails and chewed-up pencils and long face.

Despite Mom's continual fretting, I tried not to worry. Aunt Paige said she had confidence in me. She said the questions were common sense, and I was a sensible kid. If she wasn't worried, why should I be? I listened (usually) while I was in class, I took notes, I remembered some of the stuff — the big stuff, anyway — I read and studied archives on the Net and watched movies and looked around a lot, at what was and what used to be.

According to everyone I'd talked to, the main thing to do when I underwent my trials — the oral parts anyway — was to impress the examiners with my knowledge and sensitivity, to look sincere when I was doing it, and to exhibit my awareness of how EVERYTHING (almost) HAD IMPROVED SINCE WOMEN TOOK OVER THE WORLD
.
And that didn't seem too hard. I was a guy, but it would have been foolish to deny pre-PAC history. It would have been silly to deny the improved condition of society under PAC governance. And I didn't want to.