A New Day in America (22 page)

“How ‘bout this, Christian, we find somebody, we take your head, we don’t, you can take mine, whatddya say?”

The door of the closet swings open.

“What the…”

Silence. Naomi sits on the floor of the closet, and Nos hears her sneeze again. He can’t see her, because he is behind the closet’s false door.

“She’s being punished,” says Abe. “Now, about that head…”

***

Once the soldiers are gone, Abe removes the false back of the closet before Nos. Light pours in, shinning off the silver Star of David, the bronze menorah, a bejeweled hamsa, a sapphire eye unblinking in its center. There is a stack of yarmulkes, some woven, some patterned, one mimicking the sphere of a basketball from some bar mitzvah long ago.

“As a young man my grandfather ran from the Nazis for three years. He was a medical student in Austria, and one day Nazi SS soldiers made him clean their barracks with his socks. The next day Nazis flooded the streets of the town square in a rally. From a balcony above my grandfather laid eyes on Hitler in the distance. A small, shouting dot above a sea of green men. Enraged, he grabbed for the nearest thing—a flowerpot, and went to hurl it below, but was stopped and wrestled to the ground by friends. They saved his life. For three years he ran, hid, was captured, and escaped, only to be seized again. Strangers risked their lives to take him in. Without the aid of good citizens I would never be here to this day. I’m proud to say I completed his ambition and became a doctor, a psychologist, only to have that honor stripped from me by these times. Wherever your journey may take you, whatever your name may be, you have a friend here and safety in my home.”

“Nostradamus Greene. And this is Naomi.”

***

Naomi is out cold on Abe’s spare bed. It’s the most restful he’s seen her in a while. Nos rustles from the bag on the floor. Dawn breaks on the bottom half of the drawn shades.

He quietly makes his way to the porch. Abe joins him with two cups of hot coffee. The drink warms his bones. Best cup he’s ever had.

“Heading back downriver?” asks Abe.

“Surest way.”

“How far you heading?”

“Looking for passage out to San Fran.”

Abe smiles and nods. “My wife, she’s Sephardim. Generations ago, her family lived as secret Jews in Spain, so she showed me the routine. She’s used to it. They dodged the Holocaust, though. So her sympathies fall a bit short of mine.”

“Understood. We’ll be out of here before she wakes.”

Nos downs his coffee and heads inside.

“Got your route planned out?”

“Probably better off not knowing.”

“Fair enough,” says Abe. “Though I think there’s room in that back closet for a couple more secrets.”

Nos thinks, scratching the growth of hair on his chin and neck.

“You mind, Abe, if I trouble you for a razor?”

Days of boredom pass on the river. Nos steers though the webs of channels, checking the map Abe gave him.

A road is visible past the tree-lined shore. Decaying homes emerge without light or smoke or sounds. The spidery green overgrowth spills onto the river and narrows their path. Nos hugs the shallows and rocks scrape the bottom of the boat. Nos pulls the boat to the muddy bank and looks for clams in the dying sunlight. Naomi wades in barefoot on the uneven rocks near the rush of the center of the river.

“Not too far,” Nos warns, feeling the slippery rocks beneath his own feet. She ignores him.

She wades deeper toward the running waters until the current sweeps her off her feet. She vanishes under the current.

“
Nay
!”

She appears, sliding downstream like debris. Nos dives in after her. He swims with the pull of the water and watches as Nay’s small head submerges again into the depths. He dives under and sees her struggling through the dark green murk.

She is held in place at the bottom Her foot is caught under a rock and her ankle contorted, body waving at the mercy of the river’s force.
The river, of all dangers
.

From rock to rock, Nos skims the floor until he reaches Nay. Her ankle is horribly bent in the crook of the stones. Nos pries them apart and holds Nay on his shoulder. He lets go and shoots to the surface, and they exhale at once. They are helpless against the flow, running downriver as Nos kicks them toward the bank until he can grab onto a tree branch and pull them ashore.

Nos cradles Nay in the soaked half-mile walk back to the boat. She is shivering and broken against his chest. He feels the back of her head, and his fingers come away with blood and river grime. Her ankle is badly broken, and a huge cut slices down her thigh.

The disease, the fanatics, and the soldiers. Now the water
.

“Sorry, sweetheart,” he repeats.

“I’m sorry,” she cries. “I didn’t listen. I didn’t.”

The cut on her head is superficial, but the bump is substantial. He is more concerned with the cut on her leg. The fresh red is open a few centimeters and may be as deep. He tears his T-shirt in half and wraps one half around her head and one around her leg. He has nothing to treat the cut and is sure it will get infected. He cups her Achilles and runs his other hand along, shin to foot. Her ankle is nearly a whole inch off to the left and needs to be reset.

He finds two solid sticks of even length and begins to shave them straight with his knife. He sits Nay on a tree stump. Her ankle dangles down, and Nos grips her top foot and the bottom of her heel. He’s filled with dread.

“Sweetheart, this is going to hurt.”

She nods, tears in her eyes.

He yanks both up and down to make space in the bones as she screams, and the ankle clicks three, four, five, six times. Then he rests.

“Is it over?” she cries.

“Almost.”

His thumb pokes her swollen instep to feel how off set she still is.

“We’re getting there.”

He cranks her stubborn bones, and they click a few more times.

“Is it over?” She is balling with pain.

Nos repositions closer for more leverage.

“Brace yourself.”

Her, of all people to feel agony at his hands.

He wrenches down and apart with all his force, and her scream rips the air. Birds and bats flee in a fury.

That was fucking miserable
.

It’s done. He sets the two sticks on either side of her foot and ties them evenly around with the torn sleeve of his shirt. She cries, and he strokes her hair.

He hopes she will sleep for the restless night. Nos will watch the flames wide-eyed until dawn.

Naomi is secure in the pack, and she clings to her father’s shoulders. Nos walks the abandoned highway as the city gradually erects around them. A visitor’s center sits intact before the fallen façade of an office building. The wreckage of Sacramento comes into view.

The road narrows past rubble and rows of abandoned buildings. Shops are long since looted and bare. The smell of airborne concrete and plaster dust is all around. Nos can feel a thin layer coat his face. Fires burn that seem to have been burning for days.

This wasn’t a nuke. The destruction is random, with buildings intact beside buildings destroyed.
The city was a warzone
.

He wonders if there was a fight for the McClellan Air Force base, not too far north.
Maybe the base held out against the Revelation
. He wonders if some wings of the old guard fold easier than others. Maybe the Army caves and the Air Force holds.
Or maybe there’s no communication, so everyone is on their own
.

Nos thinks of General Westbrook and the look on his face as half his men signed up to join the Revelation Guard Corps. Westbrook was hard to read, and Nos wonders what he would do if he knew about the Revelations’ executions.
Think about all the sick people from Nevada to the Dakotas to Texas to Illinois. All of them murdered. Would Westbrook stand for genocide? He’d closed his gates to civilians. Hard to say
.

Whoever is fighting, the city is a wreck. He had hoped to find medicine for Nay’s cut.
Looking less likely. Still, there has to be a hospital to search, even if it’s buried
.

Nos hugs the side of the road until a clearing in the broken concrete floor leads to the alleyways. A hospital is sure to be near the downtown area. Disembodied voices buzz from around corners and from windows above.
Fighting may still be live
. Nos has his Sig ready.

The rubble blocks yet another passageway. Wreckage leads them once again back to the wide berth of the main street.

A monstrous cranking of machinery rumbles from the straightaway. Nos squats inside the dormant cover of a store, once a Victoria’s Secret, now with bare walls and mannequins scattered like the dead. Crouched at the window, he watches the giant green-gray tank patrol the city, its head swiveling.

Nos maneuvers though the rubble of the backstreets. The façade of a glass office is a smattering of broken glass and concrete. Jagged shards cut into the sky. The pass is insurmountable, and Nos turns deeper into the narrowing alleys of the city, remembering the sudden flash attacks of treacherous Afghan patrols. He does not want to stay far from the downtown highway, knowing hospitals must be close, yet that’s where he’s most likely to be seen by the Revelation.
Or whoever
.

He comes to a sign lying cracked in the street. It reads Saint James Infirmary. He can piece together some of the word—South and Delaware Street and 1908. Nos climbs the driveway beneath the hood of the hospital. He pries apart the automatic doors against the resisting mechanism. It’s dark inside. In the emergency room triage is a pile of bodies stripped naked and desecrated. Their tongues are sticking out unnaturally from their mouths. They wear Air Force uniforms with no flaming chalice. Scabs and burns are fresh. Blood is caked and black where genitals once were. Nos steps closer and sees that they aren’t sticking out their tongues. Their severed cocks are in their mouths.

Nos quickly moves on before Naomi can see.
But she sees. She may not know what she sees but she sees. One day she will know
.

His boots click on the marble hallways, broken wheelchairs, and gurneys littered about. The drawers of each passing room are open and bare, dormant, cracked computer screens, dull and dusty. Windows are boarded where combatants once holed up. They’ve left nothing but candy bar wrappers and a pile of black ash. The bathrooms reek with overflowed feces. Sinks were used for piss. Nos moves quickly. If life is fresh here, then patrols might roll through.

They come to a large open room with a puddle of rainwater filling in the center. They must be close to the roof. Nos hurriedly weaves in and out of rooms, searching inside dangling cabinet doors and empty shelves and gutted drawers. He finds only an old blood pressure machine and a box of latex gloves. He pockets a handful. A stairway leads up.

Daylight is a shock to the eyes. The roof creaks. Far off bombings rattle the city. He breathes sulfurous fumes. He aims his sniper scope to the horizon. The city is a patchwork of rubble and buildings. Endless flames burn along the skyline.

Three Revelation soldiers stand in the clearing just over three hundred yards, five o’clock. Nos levels his sights as they chitchat, AR’s pointed at the ground. He could kill them all in seconds. He could take their medical supplies and food and ammo. But he is no assassin. The last few he took out would have discovered them. These, he can avoid. Though the six-hour limit for suture is long past, and Nay has little time.
Don’t be a fool. It’s their lives or hers
.

But he puts the gun away.

The rhythm of the river is like a homecoming. With the latex gloves Nos is able to spread the thin green outline of Naomi’s cut just enough to see its depth. She screams. The cut is a good half an inch deep.

He needs a plan. He wants to be further from the city, yet he needs to find people—risk a town of some sort where he can take care of Naomi before the infection gets any worse. She is positioned awkwardly in the boat, she must keep both her leg and head elevated. Her leg rests on the front bench and her head on Nos’ folded up coat and pack underneath.

The boat hums at top speed through a bay and traces the land’s edge. Nay’s cut is one problem. The dot in the sky is another.
A helicopter. For sure. No telling whether they are a part of the fight in the city or tracking us
.

Nos has felt the hovering presence of the helo since they left Abe’s. They pass the peak of Elk Neck and turn inland toward the great open pool between Aberdeen and Red Point. Nos cuts the engine and listens.

The helo is coming closer. If he’s going to hit them, he’s got to hit first.

He looks at Nay. Shivering, cut, bruised, infected. Never a less ready wartime vessel than her vulnerable body.

Nos takes a man-size life vest from the hull’s cabinet and slices a smaller rectangle with his knife. He measures the band around Naomi’s tiny waist and cuts it once more, fastening the vest tightly around her and covering her back in the blanket.

He checks the land ahead with his Barrett scope, adjusting with the bob of the boat. The water grows green as it funnels into Furnace Bay. He sparks up the motor and drives on.

The land curves into the water at the threshold of the bay. He cuts the engine and checks the scope once again. Through the mists he finally gets a good look at the hovering black Apache. Virtually invulnerable in a head on attack, but a .50-caliber round through the tail rotor could do the trick, as he knows from personal experience.

Nos dials the scope and crouches to stabilize in the swaying waves. He will only get one shot before the chopper realizes it’s been spotted and moves into missile range. At over four thousand yards, it’s a Hail Mary.
At best
.

He lays his crosshairs along the tail rotor. The chopper then turns, and he loses the shot. The waves shift his boat, and they turn west. The steering wheel spins of its own volition. He stands and goes back to the wheel, adjusting so the boat points back to the helo.