Parable of the Sower (30 page)

“Thank you,” I said to Harry.

Five minutes later, he and I went first to the toilet area, then around it, searching. There was no one, or rather, we could see no one. Still, there might be other people around—others camping overnight, others involved in the shooting, others prowling… Still, I called Bankole’s name once, aloud. I touched Harry as a kind of warning and he jumped, settled, then jumped again as I said the name. We both listened in absolute silence.

There was a rustling off to our right where there were several trees blotting out the stars, creating a space of impenetrable darkness. Anything could be there.

The rustling came again, and with it a whimper—a child’s whimper. Then Bankole’s voice:

“Olamina!”

“Yes,” I answered, almost limp with relief. “Here!”

He came out of the pool of darkness, a tall, broad shadow that seemed bulkier than it should have been. He was carrying something.

“I have an orphaned child,” he said. “The mother was hit by a stray bullet. She just died.”

I sighed. “Is the child hurt?”

“No, just scared. I’ll carry him back to our camp. Will one of you get his things?”

“Take us to his camp,” I said.

Harry collected the child’s things, and I collected the mother’s and searched her body. Between us, we gathered everything. By the time we finished, the little boy, perhaps three years old, was crying. That scared me. I left Harry to push the dead woman’s pack along in her baby carriage and Bankole to carry the whimpering child. All I carried was the gun, drawn and ready. Even when we got back to our own camp, I couldn’t relax. The little boy wouldn’t be quiet and Dominic joined him with even louder cries. Zahra and Jill worked to comfort the new child, but he was surrounded by strangers in the middle of the night, and he wanted his mother!

I saw movement over near the burned out carcass of the truck. The fire was still burning, but it was smaller now, burning itself out. There were still people near it. They had lost their truck. Would they care about a crying child? And if they did care, would they want to help the kid or just shut its mouth?

A lone, dark figure came away from the truck and took several steps toward us. At that moment, Natividad took the new child, and in spite of his age, gave him one breast and Dominic the other.

It worked. Both children were comforted almost at once. They made a few more small sounds, then settled down to nursing.

The shadow figure from the truck stood still, perhaps confused now that it was no longer guided by noise. After a moment, it turned and went back past the truck and out of sight. Gone. It couldn’t have seen us. We could look out of the darkness under the trees that sheltered our campsite and see by firelight, by starlight. But others could only follow the baby noise to us.

“We ought to move,” Allie whispered. “Even if they can’t see us, they know we’re here.”

“Watch with me,” I said.

“What?”

“Stay awake and watch with me. Let the others get a little more rest. Trying to move in the dark is more dangerous than staying put.”

“…all right. But I don’t have a gun.”

“Do you have a knife?”

“Yeah.”

“That will have to be enough until we get the other guns clean and ready.” We’ve been too tired and in too much of a hurry to do that so far. Also, I don’t want Allie or Jill to have guns yet. Not yet. “Just keep your eyes open.” The only real defense against automatic rifles is concealment and silence.

“A knife is better than a gun now,” Zahra said. “If you have to use it, it will be quiet.”

I nodded. “The rest of you, try to get a little more rest. I’ll wake you at dawn.”

Most of them lay down to sleep, or at least to rest. Natividad kept both children with her. Tomorrow, though, one of us would have to take charge of the little boy. We didn’t need the burden of such a big child—one who had reached the “run around and grab everything” stage. But we had the little boy, and there was no one to hand him off to. No woman camping alongside a highway with her child would have other relatives handy.

“Olamina,” Bankole said into my ear. His voice was low and soft and only I reacted to it. I turned, and he was so close that I felt his beard brush my face. Soft, thick beard. This morning he combed it more carefully than he combed the hair on his head. He has the only mirror among us. Vain, vain old man. I moved almost by reflex toward him.

I kissed him, wondering what it would feel like to kiss so much beard. I did kiss the beard at first, missing his mouth by a little in the dark. Then I found it and he moved a little and slipped his arms around me and we settled to it for a little while.

It was hard for me to make myself push him away. I didn’t want to. He didn’t want to let me.

“I was going to say thank you for coming after me,” he said. “That woman was conscious almost until she died. The only thing I could do for her was stay with her.”

“I was afraid you might have been shot out there.”

“I was flat on the ground until I heard the woman groaning.”

I sighed. “Yeah.” And then, “Rest.”

He lay down next to me and rubbed my arm—which tingled wherever he touched it. “We should talk soon,” he said.

“At least,” I agreed.

He grinned—I could see the flash of teeth—and turned over and tried to sleep.

The boy’s name was Justin Rohr. His dead mother had been Sandra Rohr. Justin had been born in Riverside, California just three years ago. His mother had gotten him this far north from Riverside. She had saved his birth certificate, some baby pictures, and a picture of a stocky, freckled, red-haired man who was, according to a notation on the back of the photo, Richard Walter Rohr, born January 9, 2002, and died May 20, 2026. The boy’s father—only twenty-four when he died. I wondered what had killed him. Sandra Rohr had saved her marriage certificate and other papers important to her. All were wrapped in a plastic packet that I had taken from her body. Elsewhere on her, I had found several thousand dollars and a gold ring.

There was nothing about relatives or a specific destination. It seemed that Sandra had simply been heading north with her son in search of a better life.

The little boy tolerated us all well enough today, although he got frustrated when we didn’t understand him at once. When he cried, he demanded that we produce his mother.

Allie, of all people, was his choice for substitute mother. She resisted him at first. She ignored him or pushed him away. But when he was not being wheeled along, he chose to walk with her or demand to be carried by her. By the end of the day, she had given in. The two of them had chosen each other.

“She used to have a little boy,” her sister Jill told me as we walked along State 156 with the few other walkers who had chosen this route. It was empty. There were times when we could see no one at all, or when, as we headed east and north, the only people we could see were heading west and south toward us, toward the coast.

“She called her little boy Adam,” Jill continued. “He was only a few months old when…he died.”

I looked at her. She had a big swollen purple bruise in the middle of her forehead, like a misshapen third eye. I don’t think it hurt her much, though. It didn’t hurt me much.

“When he died,” I repeated. “Who killed him?”

She looked away and rubbed her bruise. “Our father. That’s why we left. He killed the baby. It cried. He hit it with his fists until it stopped.”

I shook my head and sighed. It was no news to me that other people’s fathers could be monsters. I’d heard about such things all my life, but I’d never before met people who were so clearly their father’s victims.

“We burned the house,” Jill whispered. I heard her say it, and I knew without asking what she wasn’t saying. But she looked like a person talking to herself, forgetting that anyone was listening. “He was passed out drunk on the floor. The baby was dead. We got our stuff and our money—we earned it!—and we set fire to the trash on the floor and the couch. We didn’t stay to see. I don’t know what happened. We ran away. Maybe the fire went out. Maybe he didn’t die.” She focused on me. “He might still be alive.”

She sounded more scared than anything else. Not hopeful or sorry. Scared. The devil might still be alive.

“Where did you run from?” I asked. “What city?”

“Glendale.”

“Way down in L.A. County?”

“Yeah.”

“Then he’s more than three hundred miles behind you.”

“…yeah.”

“He drank a lot, didn’t he.”

“All the time.”

“Then he’d be in no shape to follow you even if the fire never touched him. What do you think would happen to a drunk on the highway? He’d never even make it out of L.A.”

She nodded. “You sound like Allie. You’re both right. I know. But… I dream about him sometimes—that he’s coming, that he’s found us… I know it’s crazy. But I wake up covered in sweat.”

“Yeah,” I said, remembering my own nightmares during the search for my father. “Yeah.”

Jill and I walked together for a while without talking. We were moving slowly because Justin demanded to be allowed to walk now and then. He had too much energy to spend hours sitting and riding. And, of course, when he was allowed to walk, he wanted to run all around, investigate everything. I had time to stop, swing my pack around, and dig out a length of clothesline. I handed it to Jill.

“Tell your sister to try harnessing him with this,” I said. “It might save his life. One end around his waist, the other around her arm.”

She took the rope.

“I’ve taken care of a few three-year-olds,” I said, “and I’ll tell you, she’s going to need a lot of help with that little kid. If she doesn’t know that now, she will.”

“Are you guys just going to leave all the work to her?” Jill demanded.

“Of course not.” I watched Allie and Justin walking along—lean, angular woman and pudgy, bumblebee of a child. The boy ran to investigate a bush near the roadside, then, startled by the approach of strangers, ran back to Allie and hung on to the cloth of her jeans until she took his hand. “They do seem to be adopting each other, though,” I said. “And taking care of other people can be a good cure for nightmares like yours and maybe hers.”

“You sound as though you know.”

I nodded. “I live in this world, too.”

We passed through Hollister before noon. We resupplied there, not knowing when we would see well-equipped stores again. We had already discovered that several of the small communities shown on the maps no longer existed—had not existed for years. The earthquake had done a lot of damage in Hollister, but the people hadn’t gone animal. They seemed to be helping one another with repairs and looking after their own destitute. Imagine that.

❏ ❏ ❏

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

M
ONDAY
, A
UGUST
30, 2027

T
HERE IS STILL A
little water in the San Luis Reservoir. It’s more fresh water than I’ve ever seen in one place, but by the vast size of the reservoir, I can see that it’s only a little compared to what should be there—what used to be there.

The highway runs through the recreational area for several miles. That gave us a chance to travel through on the road until we spotted an area that would make a good rest-day camp and that wasn’t occupied.

There are a lot of people in the area—people who have set up permanent camps in everything from rag-and-plastic tents to wooden shacks that look almost fit for human habitation. Where are so many people going to the bathroom? How clean is the water in the reservoir? No doubt cities that use it purify the water when it reaches them. Whether they do or not, I think it’s time for us to break out the water purification tablets.

Around several of the tents and shacks, there are small, ragged gardens—new plantings and remnants of summer vegetable gardens. There are a few things left to harvest: big squashes, pumpkins, and gourds still growing along with carrots, peppers, greens, and a little corn. Good, cheap, filling foods. Not enough protein, but perhaps the people hunt. There must be game around here, and I saw plenty of guns. People wear holstered handguns or carry rifles or shotguns. The men in particular go armed.

They all stared at us.

As we went past, people stopped their gardening, outdoor cooking, or whatever to stare at us. We had pushed ourselves, had been eager to arrive ahead of the crowd I believe will soon come in from the Bay Area. So we didn’t arrive with the usual human river. Yet by ourselves we are enough of a crowd to make the local squatters nervous. They let us alone, though. Except during disaster-induced feeding frenzies like the ones after the earthquake, most people let one another alone. I think Dominic and Justin are making it easier for us to fit in. Justin, now tethered to Allie’s wrist, runs around staring at the squatters until they make him nervous. Then he runs back to Allie and demands to be carried. He’s a cute little kid. Lean, grim-faced people tend to smile at him.

No one shot at us or challenged us as we walked along the highway. No one bothered us later when we left the highway and headed into the trees toward what we thought might be a good area. We found old campsites and toilet places and avoided them. We didn’t want to be within sight of the highway or of anyone else’s tent or shack. We wanted privacy, not too many rocks to sleep on, and a way of reaching the water that didn’t put us too much on display. We looked for over an hour until we found an isolated old campsite, long abandoned and a little higher upslope than others we’d seen. It suited all of us. Then, with hours of daylight left, we rested in enormous comfort and laziness, knowing we had the rest of today and all of tomorrow to do almost nothing. Natividad fed Dominic and the two of them drifted off to sleep. Allie followed her example with Justin, although preparing him a meal was a little more complicated. Both women had more reason to be tired and to need sleep than the rest of us, so we left them out when we drew lots for a watch schedule—one for day and night. We shouldn’t get
too
comfortable. Also, we agreed that no one should go off exploring or getting water alone. I thought the couples would soon start going off together—And I thought it was just about time for Bankole and me to have that talk.