“Let’s have a peek at that factory.”
Fry was leaning over the pommel. “We ain’t got but two hands of light, Gordo.”
“You want to go back without something to show for it? You heard those folks.”
Fry thought for a moment. “Let’s be quick on it.”
They rode into the compound. The plant comprised three long, two-story buildings arranged in a U, with a fourth, much larger than the others, closing the square—a windowless concrete bulk connected to the grain bins by a maze of pipes and chutes. The skeletal husks of rusted vehicles and other machinery filled the spaces between the weeds. The air had stilled and cooled; birds were flitting through the glassless windows of the buildings. The three small structures were just shells, their roofs long collapsed, but the fourth was mostly tight. This was the one Eustace was interested in. If you were going to hide a couple hundred people, that would be a place to do it.
“You got a windup in your saddle bag, don’tcha?” Eustace asked.
Fry retrieved the lantern. Eustace turned the crank until the bulb began to glow.
“Thing won’t last more than about three minutes,” Fry warned. “You think they’re in there?”
Eustace was checking his gun. He closed the cylinder and reholstered the weapon but left the strap off. Fry did the same.
“Guess we’re going to find out.”
One of the loading dock doors stood partially open; they dropped and rolled through. The smell hit them like a slap.
“I guess that answers that,” Eustace said.
“Fuck
me,
that’s nasty.” Fry was pinching his nose. “Do we really need to look?”
“Get ahold of yourself.”
“Seriously, I think I’m gonna puke.”
Eustace gave the lantern a few more cranks. A hallway lined with lockers ran to the main work space of the building. The smell grew more intense with every step. Eustace had seen some bad things in his day, but he was pretty sure this was going to be the worst. They came to the end of the hallway, and a pair of swinging doors.
“I’m thinking this might be the time to ask about a raise,” Fry whispered.
Eustace drew his pistol. “Ready?”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
They pushed through. Several things hit Eustace’s senses in close order. The first thing was the stench—a miasma of rot so gaggingly awful that Eustace would have lost his lunch on the spot if he’d actually bothered to eat. To this was added a sound, a dense vibrato that stroked the air like the humming of an engine. In the center of the room was a large, dark mass. Its edges appeared to be moving. As Eustace stepped forward, flies exploded from the corpses.
They were dogs.
As he raised his pistol he heard Fry yell, but that was as far as he got before a heavy weight crashed into him from above and knocked him to the floor. All those people gone; he should have seen this coming. He tried to crawl away, but something awful was occurring inside him. A kind of … swirling. So this was how it was going to be. He reached for his gun to shoot himself but his holster was empty of course, and then his hands went numb and watery, followed by the rest of him. Eustace was plunging. The swirling was a whirlpool in his head and he was being sucked down into it, down and down and down.
Nina, Simon. My beloveds, I promise I will never forget you.
But that was exactly what happened.
V
The Manifest
We must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
—SHAKESPEARE,
JULIUS
CAESAR
46
It was nearly nine o’clock when Sister Peg walked Sara out.
“Thank you for coming,” the old woman said. “It always means so much.”
A hundred and sixteen children, from the tiniest babies to young adolescents; it had taken Sara two full days to examine them all. The orphanage was a duty she could have let go of long ago. Certainly Sister Peg would have understood. Yet Sara had never been able to bring herself to do this. When a child got sick in the night, or was down with a fever, or had leapt from a swing and landed wrong, it was Sara who answered the call. Sister Peg always greeted her with a smile that said she hadn’t doubted for a second who would be gracing her door.
How would the world get on without us?
Sara figured that Sister Peg had to be eighty by now. How the old woman continued to manage the place, its barely contained chaos, was a miracle. She had softened somewhat with the years. She spoke sentimentally of the children, both those in her care and the ones who had moved on; she kept track of their lives, how they made their ways in the world, and whom they married and their children if they had them, the way any mother would do. Though Sara knew the woman would never say as much, they were her family, no less than Hollis and Kate and Pim were Sara’s; they belonged to Sister Peg, and she to them.
“It’s no trouble, Sister. I’m glad to do it.”
“What do you hear from Kate?”
Sister Peg was one of the few people who knew the story.
“Nothing so far, but I didn’t expect to. The mail is so slow.”
“That was a hard thing, with Bill. But Kate will know what to do.”
“She always seems to.”
“Would it be all right if I worried about you?”
“I’ll be fine, really.”
“I know you will. But I’m going to worry anyway.”
They said their goodbyes. Sara made her way home through darkened streets; no lights burned anywhere. It had something to do with the supply of fuel for the generators—a minor hiccup at the refinery, that was the official word.
She found Hollis dozing in his reading chair, a kerosene lantern burning on the table and a book of intimidating thickness resting on his belly. The house, where they had lived for the past ten years, had been abandoned in the first wave of settlement—a small wooden bungalow, practically falling down. Hollis had spent two years restoring it, in his off hours from the library, which he was now in charge of. Who would have thought it, this bear of a man passing his days pushing a cart through the dusty shelves and reading to children? Yet that was what he loved.
She hung her jacket in the closet and went to the kitchen to warm some water for tea. The stove was still hot—Hollis always left it that way for her. She waited for the kettle to boil, then poured the water through the strainer filled with herbs she’d taken from the canisters that stood in a neat line on the shelf above the sink, each one marked in Hollis’s hand: “lemon balm,” “spearmint,” “rosehips,” and so on. It was a librarian’s habit, Hollis said, to fetishize the smallest details. Left to herself, Sara would have had to spend thirty minutes looking for everything.
Hollis stirred as she entered the living room. He rubbed his eyes and smiled groggily. “What time is it?”
Sara was sitting at the table. “I don’t know. Ten?”
“Guess I fell asleep there.”
“The water’s hot. I can make you some tea.” They always drank tea together at the end of the day.
“No, I’ll get it.”
He lumbered into the kitchen and returned with a steaming mug, which he placed on the table. Rather then sit, he moved behind her, took her shoulders in his hands, and began, with gathering pressure, to work his thumbs into the muscles. Sara let her head slump forward.
“Oh, that’s good,” she moaned.
He kneaded her neck for another minute, then cupped her shoulders and moved them in a circular motion, unleashing a series of pops and cracks.
“Ouch.”
“Just relax,” Hollis said. “God, you’re tight.”
“You would be too, if you just gave physicals to a hundred kids.”
“So tell me. How is the old witch?”
“Hollis, don’t be nasty. The woman’s a saint. I hope I’ve got half her energy at her age. Oh, right there.”
He continued his pleasurable business; bit by bit, the tensions of the day drained away.
“I can do you next if you want,” Sara said.
“Now you’re talking.”
She felt suddenly guilty. She tipped her face backward to look at him. “I have been ignoring you a little, haven’t I?”
“Comes with the territory.”
“Getting old, you mean.”
“You look pretty good to me.”
“Hollis, we’re
grandparents.
My hair’s practically white; my hands looks like beef jerky. I won’t lie—it depresses me.”
“You talk too much. Lean forward again.”
She dropped her head to the table and nestled it into her arms. “Sara and Hollis,” she sighed, “that old married couple. Who knew we’d be those people someday?”
They drank their tea, undressed, and got into bed. Usually there were noises at night—people talking in the street, a barking dog, the various small sounds of life—but with the power out, everything was very quiet. It was true: it had been a while. A month, or was it two? But the old rhythm, the muscle memory of marriage, was still there, waiting.
“I’ve been thinking,” Sara said after.
Hollis was nestled behind her, wrapping her in his arms. Two spoons in a drawer, they called it. “I thought you might be.”
“I miss them. I’m sorry. It’s just not the same. I thought I’d be okay with it, but I’m just not.”
“I miss them, too.”
She rolled to face him. “Would you really mind so much? Be honest.”
“That depends. Do you think they need a librarian in the townships?”
“We can find out. But they need doctors, and I need you.”
“What about the hospital?”
“Let Jenny run it. She’s ready.”
“Sara, you do nothing but
complain
about Jenny.”
Sara was taken aback. “I do?”
“Nonstop.”
She wondered if this was true. “Well,
somebody
can take over. We can just go for a visit to start, to see how it feels. Get the lay of the land.”
“They may not actually want us out there, you know,” Hollis said.
“Maybe not. But if it seems right, and everyone’s agreed, we can put in for a homestead. Or build something in town. I could open an office there. Hell, you’ve got enough books right here to start a library of your own.”
Hollis frowned dubiously. “All of us crammed into that tiny house.”
“So we’ll sleep outside. I don’t care. They’re our
kids.
”
He took a long breath. Sara knew what Hollis was going to say; it was just a matter of hearing him say it.
“So when do you want to leave?”
“That’s the thing,” she said, and kissed him. “I was thinking tomorrow.”
Lucius Greer was standing under the spotlights at the base of the dry dock, watching a distant figure swinging over the side of the ship in a bosun’s chair.
“For godsakes,” Lore yelled. “Who did this fucking weld?”
Greer sighed. In six hours, Lore had seen very little that she actually approved of. She lowered the chair to the dock and stepped free.
“I need half a dozen guys down here now. Not the same jokers who did these welds, either.” She angled her face upward. “Weir! Are you up there?”
The man’s face appeared at the rail.
“String up three more chairs. And go get Rand. I want these seams redone by sunrise.” Lore looked at Greer from the corner of her eye. “Don’t say it. I ran that refinery for fifteen years. I know what I’m doing.”
“You won’t hear any complaints from me. That’s why Michael wanted you here.”
“Because I’m a hard ass.”
“Your words, not mine.”
She stood back, hands resting on her hips, eyes distractedly scanning the hull. “So tell me something,” she said.
“All right.”
“Did you ever think it was all bullshit?”
He liked Lore, her directness. “Never.”
“Not once?”
“I wouldn’t say the thought never crossed my mind. Doubt is human nature. It’s what we do with it that matters. I’m an old man. I don’t have time to second-guess things.”
“That’s an interesting philosophy.”
A pair of ropes drifted down the flank of the
Bergensfjord,
then two more.
“You know,” Lore said, “all these years, I wondered if Michael would ever find the right woman and settle down. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine my competition was twenty thousand tons of steel.”
Rand appeared at the gunwale. He and Weir began to hitch up the bosun’s chairs.
“Do you still need me here?” Greer asked.
“No, go sleep.” She waved up at Rand. “Hang on, I’m coming up!”
Greer left the dock, got in his truck, and drove down the causeway. The pain had gotten bad; he wouldn’t be able to hide it much longer. Sometimes it was cold, like being stabbed by a sword of ice; other time it was hot, like glowing embers tossing around inside him. He could hardly keep anything down; when he actually managed to take a piss, it looked like an arterial bleed. There was always a bad taste in his mouth, sour and ureic. He’d told himself a lot of stories over the last few months, but there was really only one ending he could see.
Near the end of the causeway the road narrowed, hemmed in on either side by the sea. A dozen men armed with rifles were stationed at this bottleneck. As Greer drew alongside, Patch stepped from the cab of the tanker and came over.
“Anything going on out there?” Greer asked.
The man was sucking at something in his teeth. “Looks like the Army sent a patrol. We saw lights to the west just after sundown, but nothing since.”
“You want more men out here?”
Patch shrugged. “I think we’re okay for tonight. They’re just sniffing us out at this point.” He focused on Greer’s face. “You okay? You don’t look too good.”
“Just need to get off my feet.”
“Well, the cab of the tanker is yours if you want it. Catch a few winks. Like I said, there’s nothing going on out here.”
“I’ve got some other things to see to. Maybe I’ll come back later.”
“We’ll be here.”
Greer turned the truck around and drove away. Once he was out of sight, he pulled to the side of the causeway, got out, placed a hand against the fender for balance, and threw up onto the gravel. There wasn’t much to come up, just water and some yolky-looking blobs. For a couple of minutes he remained in that position; when he decided there was nothing more, he retrieved his canteen from the cab, rinsed his mouth, poured some water into his palm, and splashed his face. The aloneness of it—that was the worst part. Not so much the pain as carrying the pain. He wondered what would happen. Would the world dissolve around him, receding like a dream, until he had no memory of it, or would it be the opposite—all the things and people of his life rising up before him in vivid benediction until, like a man gazing into the sun on a too-bright day, he was forced to look away?