Authors: Wayne Wightman
At the moment, Martin didn't want to concern himself with Paul and Leona. It was enough to watch the landscape for clues to the weather during the past year, to keep an eye on the road and the performance of their vehicles, to monitor their water and gasoline supplies, and to be half aware of how Catrin and Land were taking the trip. So the neuroses that Paul and Leona brought along as baggage they could carry themselves, for the time being.
There was the softest of night breezes, and when it was calm, the stars sparkled in the bottom of the lake. Every few minutes, a fish jumped and slapped the water, and twice through the evening they heard a dog, or a coyote, bark and howl.
Winch interrupted his thoughts. “How about fresh fish for breakfast?”
“Sounds like a confident offer,” Martin said.
“Watch this.” Winch had a can of dog food. “Found this at the gas station down the road. It's my grandfather's trick.” With a can opener, he poked four holes in both ends, then he walked over to the shore and gave it a good toss into the water. When he came back he said, “By morning there should be a good-sized school hanging around that. Fresh fish for breakfast.”
Leona was standing nearby, her arms wrapped around herself. “I don't like fish,” she said.
....
They had perch for breakfast, big ones. Even Isha and Mona had fish. Paul and Leona ate a can of chopped meat. After everyone swam and bathed, they got on the road again.
They kept their speed at forty miles per hour to get the most out of their gasoline and to minimize the strain on the car and truck. Mountains, pastureland, and rolling hills passed slowly by. With all the people gone, it seemed to them that everything was further apart, that miles had stretched their length.
Every town of any size had burned to the ground. “I guess all it takes is one little fire,” Jan-Louise said, standing with Xeng as they looked over the blackened remains of another town.
The weather was dry and hot and in the once-rich pasture land they could see the scoured white ribcages of cattle and sheep sticking up through the dead weeds.
Late in the afternoon, the road left the mountains, and they could look down on the Los Patos River. In the hazy distance, it fanned out as it met the Pacific. They stopped to look at what could be home. Some ten miles away, up the river, was the vague shape of the town of Mariquitas.
“I like it,” Winch said to Martin, surveying the land from where the road clung to the side of one of the low mountains. Catrin stood beside them.
“Enough sun for a reasonable growing season,” Martin said, “without killing us with summer heat. I hope the learning curve isn't too steep. We have ten people to feed.”
“Eight,” Jan-Louise said, coming up to them from the back of the truck.
“Paul and Leona,” Martin said.
“Right,” she said. “I must've been doing the sleep of the dead. When I woke up a minute ago after you'd stopped, they were gone. I looked around — over the edge to the stream down there, but I didn't see them.”
They were all looking at each other, each knowing what the other was thinking and wondering who was going to say it first.
“I'll say it,” Catrin said. “I'm not going to mount a search, and I hope nothing bad happens to them, but I'd be happier if nothing happens to them somewhere else besides with us.”
“We should wait half an hour, in case they want to come back,” Martin said.
Catrin nodded.
“I don't want any guilt over those kids,” Jan-Louise said. “You know, thinking maybe we ran away and left them when they just went off for a private movement.”
“They can always find us. They knew where we were going.”
“Waiting is the right thing to do,” Catrin said. “Unfortunately.”
....
Just up an embankment from the Los Patos and two miles inland from the Pacific Ocean, they found a roadside strip mall of a dozen shops, including a hardware store. In a pizza parlor, they found a hundred pounds of bug-free flour in sealed containers. Jan-Louise glowed. “I always wanted to make bread! Let's stay here.” Best: just up the road, an enclave of half a dozen expensively rustic houses, two of them with expansive enclosed yards, ideal for gardening.
They parked their car and truck and walked the place over. Below them, the Los Patos River had overflowed its banks and flushed itself out. Now it was a steadily moving river, thirty feet wide. Along the south and west, in the low coastal foothills, the forest was dense and green.
“The weather is very nice,” Xeng said, standing with his face turned up to the sky. Evening was coming on, and it was only just cool. “I know how to fish in the ocean,” he said.
Half a mile away, next to the river was a wide fenced pasture where two horses grazed without concern.
“Winch,” Martin said, “you up to learning about horses?”
“A horse bit me when I was a kid so I have no love for them. But I'll give it a shot.”
“I can't wait to start a garden,” Catrin said. “I miss having dirt on my hands.”
“Pardon me,” Jan-Louise said to Catrin and then wrapped her arms around Martin's neck and gave him a big kiss on the lips. “Thanks for keeping us all organized,” she said. “The first loaves of bread are yours.”
Martin felt his face prickling red.
Later, Catrin said, “You were cute. It's nice to know you can still be embarrassed.”
“I'd never been kissed by two men's wife before,” Martin said.
....
They picked two houses separated by a twenty-foot wide strip of weedy grass. They cleared out the personal remnants of the previous residents and settled in for the evening. Martin found a box of champagne in the small basement of his and Catrin's house and by nightfall, they were all sitting in front of a burning fire, the third bottle of champagne already opened. Solomon, Missa, and Land lay asleep on a pile of cushions and Winch sat on the floor with his arm around Jan-Louise, who held Xeng's head in her lap.
The fire was the only light in the room, and the heat on the redwood-plank walls made the air in the room rich with the smell of warm wood.
Martin sat in one of the large chairs with Catrin on the floor, leaning back against his legs. He rubbed her neck and shoulders.
“I've never been this happy,” he said. "With all the other stuff we had in the old days — cars, cities, being able to travel anyplace in the world, years of free time — with all that, I was never this happy.”
“Me either,” Jan-Louise said. “My life was a dump. After puberty, I never had friends.”
“I had a few months,” Winch said, “back when I was a teenager, in love with Evie. That was who I married. I got my first car that summer.” He was quiet half a minute. Then, “I remember going to the lake one night in July. We sat by the boat dock and I asked her to marry me. They were playing 'Blue Moon' on the radio and she didn't answer till the song was over.” He shook his head a little. “That was a good time. I had a few good months back then.”
The fire crackled and orange light flickered around them.
“I had two good years,” Catrin said, “when I met my husband and when the children came. I was always surprised when I looked at them, to think that part of them was me. Then everyone died.”
All of their everyones had died. They thought of this in the silence.
The third bottle of champagne was emptied and the fire had burned to embers. They covered themselves with quilts and slept. Outside the moonlight turned the land the color of blue cream.
Chapter 59
Isha nosed through the underbrush, breathing in the new smells of bark, mosses, and leaf mold. She had left the houses and had gone up the hillside, through the trees, along one of the streams that fed the river. There she smelled wet dirt and algae-slick logs and the bright odor of fresh water that splashed through rocks, turned white and filled the air with sound.
She trotted farther up the hillside, away from the stream and its noise, far enough away that she could almost hear the rush of the ocean waves a few miles away, down the last ridge of the coast range. All at once, she caught the smell of something different, something that didn't belong in the forest. She raised her nose and sniffed quickly, then several times slowly and deeply. People. Different people.
With her ears turning to scan for their noises, she moved cautiously forward, and the smell came stronger.
She finally heard eating noises. Strangely, unlike the people she knew, they didn't speak while they ate. By now, with every breath, she breathed in the smell of old meat, dried blood, and the strong smell of the people. Through the underbrush, she saw them crouching or sitting on logs, holding food to their mouths and noisily chewing at it.
Their clothes were as different as their smell — loose shapeless clothes — and their smell was different. Isha backed away slowly, ears flattened, and when she was at a safe distance and heard no pursuing sounds, she turned and ran back down the hillside to the familiarity of the sounds and smells of her own people.
Chapter 60
Diaz blew into New York City like hell with a megaphone. Teeth bared, eyes wide behind his goggles, he was ready to live, ready to die. He'd pulled the baffles out of the mufflers on his bike, and in the Holland Tunnel, he sounded like a chainsaw as big as the world.
In New York City, down Broadway, he saw people on their hands and knees, digging through garbage, feeding themselves. They were covered in gray rags, their faces the same color, and when they saw him, they paused with their fingertips at their lips, their frightened eyes dark and glittering.
Rats, Diaz thought. Human rats, with no mission except to survive.
He rode down the canyons of Wall Street twice until he spotted the Stock Exchange. After parking his bike, he went through the shattered doors, through the corridor, and onto the main floor.
Money was scattered everywhere, fifties and hundreds — nothing smaller than a fifty. Musty smelling money had been heaped into pallets and then crushed flat by sleeping bodies. Many of the overhead video monitors had their screens broken out, and in the gloom, bits of glass glittered on the floor.
From the balcony, where the signal had once been given to open and close the market, Diaz heard voices and saw the glow of lantern light. From up there, through the railing, a face turned his direction and said loudly, “You play cards? Come on up.”
So he did. At the top of the stairway, he saw three men who had long since stopped shaving, sitting at a flimsy card table playing five-card draw. Instead of money, however, they were betting peanuts, cashews, and almonds.
“Almond's worth two peanuts, cashew's worth five. Want in?”
“I don't have any nuts,” Diaz said.
The men chuckled as they continued playing. “Nope,” one of them said, “nuts don't do a man much good anymore. But all foodstuffs are playable.”
“I can't stay,” Diaz said. “I just stopped to say howdy from California.” Already his legs were starting to jitter from standing still too long. “How are thing's going here? What's happening? Who's doing what?”
They looked at him with mild suspicion and then went back to their cards.
“Time passes, and it don't heal many wounds these days,” one of them said, laying down a pair. “Now you want the good news? The good news is we don't think it can get any worse.”
“Eat, sleep, play cards, kill rats,” another said through his whiskers. He dropped his cards face down and shook his head.
“Killed a two-legged rat the other day,” said the third man, showing three fives and raking in a dozen peanuts and almonds. “He musta weighed close to two hundred pounds.”
The second man began shuffling the cards. “The fat boy. He used to be a Republican, didn't he?”
“Used to be. Now he's dead. He said he deserved what he stole because he was clever enough to steal it.”
“Food thief,” the shuffler explained. “That's the only way you get to weigh two hundred pounds around here. You got food, mister, I'll deal you in.”
“You got food, we'll be your friends forever, till it's all gone.”
“Thanks, I gotta go.” His legs vibrated in his pants. “Down to Florida. I gotta see me more of the land of the free.”
When he got to the stairs, one of the men called to him, “How's California?”
“Dead.”
“Well, there's some hope then.”
“Where there's speed, there's hope,” Diaz said, his feet taking the stairs faster than his eyes could register them.
Back on the road, heading south, he thought, Rats, yeah, rats are the key. Humans are a mystery inside an enigma — until you think of 'em as rats, and then they make perfect sense. Rats eat anything, sleep anywhere, suffer, bleed and die like we do, get experimented on, die of plagues, and probably have rat gods that created humans to torment and exterminate them for being born as rats. There you go. Original sin — in two-legged rats, the lingering suspicion that we deserve what we get.
He lay flat across the tank and cranked the throttle. He knew
he knew
that if he looked up, there among the radiant clouds would be the face of god, an immense rat-headed god looking down at him and remembering the endless crimes against his Chosen Ones.