Immortality (37 page)

“It’s because of my dog that I want to drive, but I can do it nonstop.”

“No, honey, that’s fine. Take a day or two. Drive safe. The job will be waiting.”

“Thank you, Mary. Umm... there’s one more thing. Since I don’t need airfare, can the department loan me the money for a rental car?”

“Sorry honey, we can’t loan money, but Virginia State PD has a reimbursement arrangement with Hertz,” said Mary. “I’ll make a call and set up a car voucher. All you have to do is go to any Hertz, show your ID, and secure the car with a credit card.”

“What if I don’t have a card?”

Henry gave Sarah and Ralph a lift into Allentown. He used his credit card for the security deposit. Things were moving almost too fast. In one day, she’d gone from leaving behind a stolen car and hiking down a lonely highway to having a job in Virginia and a new friend willing to trust her with a rental car on his own credit card. Something had to go wrong.

Sarah kissed Henry on the cheek. He looked like he might blush. Sarah got into a brand new Ford Taurus and shut the door. She just sat there for a moment watching Henry as he walked away. Ralph was sitting in the front seat. He had on a new red bandanna that was a gift from Karen. Sarah wiped the tears from her cheeks. She started the engine and pulled out onto the road.

The midmorning sun shone through the windshield of the patrol car. Sarah picked up a pair of sunglasses from the seat. She wore the uniform of a Virginia State Police officer. The world was again a place where she fit in. It felt good to be working, but there were things about the job that disturbed her. A week ago, the New Jersey quarantine had been her prison and now the same kind of barrier was her lifeline.

So far, the day had been uneventful. A radio dispatch came in to increase her speed to ninety-five. She adjusted the cruise control and leaned back. Similar orders came in about every fifteen minutes. Central dispatch acted like an air traffic controller maintaining all the cruisers at different but constant distances apart. At any given time, over a hundred cars patrolled the I64 Line. To a stationary observer, the cars appeared to be randomly spaced at intervals of up to ten minutes. Predicting the gap was almost impossible and that made it difficult for jumpers to time when to break through the barricades and cross the highway.

The Line was the largest quarantine barrier in the country. The barrier was over a thousand miles of patrolled highway stretching west from Virginia Beach to Louisville, Kentucky where it turned south on I65 until it reached the Gulf of Mexico in Mobile, Alabama. The Line separated a supposedly uncontaminated southeast from a north pockmarked with death. A new world order was beginning here where societal classes were defined by acceptable exposure risk instead of education or money.

Patrol cars running back and forth shared the southern lanes of the highway. A barrier was being erected in the median or the northern lanes, when the median was not wide enough. Construction was still going on everywhere. The barrier was being deployed in four stages. The Army, National Guard, and hundreds of private construction companies were all involved in this massive expenditure of taxpayer dollars. Stage one was a razor wire fence eighteen feet high. Stage one had been completed for the entire length of the line. Stage two was floodlights and wireless video surveillance. This stage had been completed for most of the line, though it was a guarded secret that fully fifty percent of the video cameras were nonfunctional decoys. Stage three was an additional eighteen foot razor wire fence spaced twenty feet behind the first fence. Stage three had been completed through Virginia and some of Kentucky and Alabama; the other states were lagging behind. Stage four was the construction of vehicle obstacles in the ‘no man’s zone’ between the two fences. The types of obstacles varied. At its simplest, the obstacles were piles of construction debris which was mostly broken concrete and stone. At its most advanced, the obstacles were prefab military barriers made from a reinforced concrete pad with a tangle of steel spikes as teeth. The spikes were made from sharpened, six inch diameter pipe set into the concrete pads. The spikes varied in height up to two feet, protruding from the ground like a bed of spears. The obstacle could disable anything short of a battle tank or heavy bulldozer. The spikes could impale tires, engine blocks, tread, and even whole vehicles. At a spot near Charlottesville, a punctured delivery truck had been left in place to illustrate ‘by example’ what the obstacle did. Stage four was complete through most of Virginia while other states lagged seriously behind. Virginia was clearly the poster child on how to put up a good barrier. So far, no one had made it to the other side. People tried, but no one made it.

Sarah spotted car number one-twenty-five heading in the opposite direction. All that separated them was a dotted white line. They closed on each other at a combined speed of over two hundred miles per hour. When they passed, air pressure first pushed them apart then a vacuum pulled them in. Sarah adjusted the wheel correcting for the pull. This was the most excitement of the day, and it came about every five minutes. She wondered what the accident rate was at night when officers were sleepy at the end of a long shift. The barracks was run on a non-rotating schedule. Sarah suspected it was to make sure that everyone was fresh for their shift, and that no one was out there on two hours of sleep.

Sarah was nearing the halfway point of her patrol. Her route was from Richmond to Virginia Beach and back. She ran the loop three or four times a day. She passed a Coppertone lotion billboard. The ad was from an old-fashioned campaign that had recently been reissued. There was a small blonde girl whose tan line showed as a dog tugged her suit bottoms down. There was something oddly exploitative about the image that bothered Sarah.

She thought about the billboard for a while and tried to figure out what specifically bothered her. Her leather uniform jacket was folded on the seat next to her. She unconsciously withdrew a miniature voice-recorder from a pocket. The device still contained a recording made on the last night of old New Jersey. She played it. From the tiny device came the sounds of a car moving, and wind, and a radio news show. A man’s voice was dictating to his secretary then coughing. She heard the crunch of an accident and car horns, followed by a stillness filled only with a doomed radio news show which soon went off the air, leaving nothing but a hiss. The haunted recording immersed her into the night when the world she knew was destroyed. She had played it countless times before. Tears streamed down from her eyes. She was tugged by an instinctive urge to leave this place and travel farther south. She felt like a creature that was not finished with her migration, trying desperately to put down roots.

~

The sun was bright and warm as Sarah pulled into the Command Center at Richmond. Her shift was over and she needed to unwind. Another car pulled in next to her. She recognized the officer; she’d chatted with him a few times before. His name was Alex Breaux, a very attractive older guy, maybe in his forties. His shift ran the same as hers, four in the morning to twelve noon.

“Hey, Alex.”

“Sarah.”

“Another day, another fifty cents...”

“What, you got a raise? Damn, that fries me.”

Sarah smiled. She liked Alex and thought of him as a possible friend. She’d been here a week and had socialized with no one except a few people she worked with.

“Want to grab something to eat?” said Alex.

He’d never asked that before.

“Sure,” said Sarah. “As long as I pay my own ticket.”

“I never argue with a lady.”

Sarah was pleased by the opportunity for some conversation and food. Lunch turned out to be a Cajun hole-in-the-wall that served the spiciest food she’d ever eaten. The blackened catfish was out of this world, if she could only get her eyes to stop tearing and her nose to stop running. Alex seemed to think her suffering was funny. He had this Creole accent that was one part French and one part country. Sarah liked the way he spoke even when he teased her.

“You remind me of my kitty when she went after a piece of cayenne pepper shrimp,” said Alex. “Her eyes watered fiercely, but she wouldn’t stop eating that shrimp. There’s a lesson in that, I think.”

“What? Good things make you cry?”

“Maybe, but how about it’s that we all have to feel pain so that we can appreciate life.”

“Well, thanks for that nice thought.”

“Hey, all us coon-asses are philosophers at heart, philosophers of life.”

“Well, Mr. Philosopher, mind if I try some of your crab?”

“Help yourself.”

Sarah picked up a claw with her fingers and snapped it open. She drew out the meat with her lips and, only afterwards, realized how provocative that might have looked. Alex didn’t seem to notice.

“How long have you been working the line?” asked Sarah.

“From the first day, before they added all that wire and other Berlin Wall paraphernalia.”

“Do I detect a bit of sarcasm?”

“There’s something not right here, and I don’t mean the moral stuff about keeping people from crossing state lines or other dribble like that. I mean cold hard irreversible wrong. People have been shot crossing that line.”

“I’d heard gossip and seen reports,” said Sarah. “But no one’s willing to talk about it.”

“I’ll bet. Especially if you’re the someone who pulled the trigger.”

“Have you?” asked Sarah.

“No, but what if I see a family who’s made it over the fence, women and children? What if they’re almost into the woods, and there’s no chance of stopping them any other way? Am I gonna shoot them?”

Alex shook his head. There were deep wrinkles in his expression.

“I just don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know.”

Sarah hadn’t wanted to think about it. A state of emergency and Martial law were in effect. The orders were that jumping the line was a capital offense, and standing policies were to use deadly force to prevent it. The justification was that a jumper might be bringing in a disease that could kill thousands. They were potential mass murders, but line-jumpers were not violent criminals. How could she kill a man or a woman for doing something she herself had done a week ago in New Jersey and then again, with state permission when joining the I64 Line? She couldn’t and that was that. She’d have to let them run for the woods and hope she wasn’t killing thousands. No, she couldn’t do that either. She couldn’t risk thousands of lives to ease her conscience. She would shoot. Had to...

“You know the worst of it?” said Alex. “There’re rumors that the CDC suspects this bug isn’t contagious and that it’s something you catch from water. All this police state oppression and murder could be for nothing.”

Alex tossed another empty can of beer into the lake. He was leaning against the front of the patrol car. Sarah was sitting next to him on the hood. Her legs were crossed Indian style. The sun was almost gone. She watched a bird flying to its nest across a darkening sky and then took another nip from a pint bottle of Southern Comfort. She was pleasantly warm from the liquor. The full moon was already a quarter of its path across the sky. In the twilight, the lake was turning an oily black. At the shore, the water was speckled with reeds. Small fish jumping at insects made occasional splashing sounds that were like bubbles popping. Neither she nor Alex had said anything for quite sometime. They were just sitting there in the simple unspoiled beauty of this place. Sarah glanced over at Alex. His expression gave the impression of deep thought. She felt herself drawn to him. She touched his shoulder. He turned toward her. Impulsively she kissed him. There was chemistry between them. She felt it. Alex backed away from the kiss.

“Don’t,” he said. “You’re a bit drunk and that’s no way to start something.”

“Don’t you like me?” said Sarah. She was confused. She knew what she’d felt and knew he’d felt it, too.

“I’m old enough to be your daddy.”

“Maybe I like older men.”

“I’m damaged, Sarah. You don’t want to get involved with me.”

Sarah picked up his hand and squeezed it. She forced him to look her into the eyes.

“What are you talking about? Tell me,” she said.

Alex let out a sigh which seemed to drain something dark from his body.

“I was in a shooting a few years back. I got who I was aiming at, but the kid also got me. A pair of bullets kicked around inside my belly and chest and chewed me up pretty good. The doctors were amazed that I’d survived, but they were wrong. The old me died that night, and what’s here now is damaged inside and out.”

“You look all right to me; and I’m not sure if I’ve ever met a kinder, more thoughtful man than you.”

“Sarah, that’s nice; but it’s not true. I killed a teenager that night and I was killed that night. And maybe on the outside I look okay, but the heart and the plumbing just don’t work right anymore.”

“Oh God, I’m so sorry.” Her cheeks were flushing. “I wouldn’t have kissed you if I’d known.”

“No, no, you don’t understand,” said Alex. He was almost laughing. Her expression must have been awful. “Not that kind of plumbing. The sex part works fine. Maybe it would have been more humane if it didn’t.”

Sarah was now even more intrigued but at the same time wasn’t sure if she could handle any more. Alex seemed to want to talk. Now that she’d opened the box, the least she could do was listen.

“I haven’t slept with a woman in over two years,” said Alex. “It’s left me kind of mixed up.”

“I don’t understand,” said Sarah. “If you’re umm, functional, why not?”

Alex lifted the bottle of Southern Comfort from her fingers and took a long drink.

“The injury left me with multiple bypasses on two big arteries. I’ve also got a shortened intestine, a pacemaker, and an amazing collection of scars. I can pop-off and die without warning, and that’s just not a fair burden to lay on someone you care about. And besides, what’s left of my body is not the prettiest thing for a woman to see, especially if she’s anticipating romance. You should have seen the look in my wife’s eyes when she saw me without a shirt. It was an ocean of pity, edged with revulsion. In that split second, I saw my future and knew it was over between us. Oh she said nice things and tried to be there for me, but she never once touched me again. To her, I was ugly and fragile. She left me a year ago and remarried.”