What Came After (26 page)

“I guess I could,” said Weller. He hadn’t realized how exhausted he was.

For the next hour the medic studied him like a specimen. Poked him all over. Looked into every single orifice as if he expected to find something treacherous lurking inside of him, dying to get out and ruin everything they’d built here. He worked from an old Black Rose field manual that had been passed down from one generation to the next. The highest medical authority they had. He laughed to himself about the jungle rot because it was something you found in the field manual but not in real life. In real life you saw pregnancies. There wasn’t anything about pregnancy in the Black Rose manual, as Weller could imagine. As for jungle rot, the manual said you could lose bone. You could lose the whole leg. He held the book up to the light and paged through. Checking the index and going back and reading closely to refresh his memory. His finger underlining. Yes. It was a combination of sanitation and nutrition. What you ate played a big part. No doubt whatever Weller had found to sustain himself out there in the world hadn’t done him any favors.

“Then again,” he said, “Food was the least of your troubles. You’ve seen things that would give all of us nightmares.”

“I suppose.”

“Marlowe still goes out there sometimes, you know.”

“Marlowe.” Raising his head.

“He goes out all by himself.” Shaking his head. “Out there where you’ve been. He’s the fellow who runs this place.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“And he
still
does solo recon. A week at a time. Sometimes longer.” Stricken by Marlowe’s courage and selflessness. “Out there among them.”

“Among who?”

The medic said Weller didn’t have to pretend on his account.

*

He fell asleep on the table with the saline dripping into his arm, and when he woke up the major was there. The one who’d done the trick shooting. Time had passed but Weller didn’t know how much. His belongings were on the chair in a sack, everything studied and sorted and his clothes put through the laundry. An old pair of boots from somebody’s closet standing on the floor below them at least two sizes too big. The major had a tray in his hand with a plate of food and a cup of coffee. A .44 in a black Kevlar holster slung diagonally across his chest. He set the tray down and pulled the needle from Weller’s arm like he was unhooking a fish and had Weller sit up. Told him his name was Oates. Standing there with a long face, watching Weller get dressed, saying he’d been disappointed when his team had filled him in on the Black Rose gear they’d found in his pack. The satellite phone. A knife and a compass and those rotten boots he’d been wearing. Not to mention the .38 special. He shook his head and consulted a list of Weller’s belongings on a slip of paper and said in other words they’d pretty well established his
bona fides,
hadn’t they? He said if Weller didn’t mind, he sure would appreciate hearing whatever story Black Rose had cooked up to explain why he was down here in the first place, instead of up in Washington where he belonged.

Weller said there wasn’t any cooked-up story.

Oates said fine. He said have it your way. He said the only other time they’d sent a scout down here he’d come complete with a nice cooked-up story, was all. He’d been a raggedy-looking individual like Weller and he’d seemed as if he’d lost his way and the story he told was just as pretty and sorrowful as it could be. But it hadn’t smelled right, and in the end it had done him more harm than good.

Weller said he didn’t have any story. Thinking about Penny and deciding that it would be best not to mention her just yet.

Oates said fine. That was all right with him. The last Black Rose scout should have saved his breath and maybe Weller had more brains than he did. Maybe he wouldn’t try getting smart like that last one had.

Weller said getting smart how.

Oates said never mind that. He said if Weller didn’t have a cooked-up story or had decided not to tell it, then why didn’t he just skip right to the facts and save everybody time?

Weller touched the breast pocket of his coveralls, the pocket where he kept the picture. Whoever had done his laundry must have taken it out and cataloged it and put it back once his clothes were clean. He touched the place near his heart where he kept it and the touch itself was a kind of apology for not seeing fit to mention Penny. Reaching for the tray with his other hand. “For Christ’s sake,” he said, not even looking at Oates, determined not to have a story if Oates didn’t want to hear one. “I just came to see about a car.”

Oates laughed out loud.

Weller took that for a good sign, and he started working on the plate of food.

Oates quit laughing. “If it weren’t for all that Black Rose gear, I might almost believe you.”

“That old junk?” Weller didn’t even look up. Talking with his mouth full. “I took it from your friend Patterson.”

“Patterson was no friend of mine.”

“You knew him.”

“I sure did. We served together in Afghanistan. Afghanistan or Iraq, one or the other.”

“I can’t help you there.” Looking over the rims of his thick glasses instead of through the pale shroud they’d become over this rough passage. “I get those two mixed up myself.”

“Of course you would,” said Oates. “You weren’t even a gleam in your old man’s eye back then.”

Weller nodded. “I appreciate what you fellows did, though.” Sitting there looking ruined. Unshaven and bone-thin. His bandaged feet bleeding through in patches and his fingernails black and broken. Those great thick lenses that magnified his eyes and magnified the weariness in them.

Oates thought about it all. How hard the journey had been on the poor bastard. How he’d lacked rations or anything else in the way of food out here a million miles from nowhere. How those eyeglasses he wore were anything but a prop. He thought for a minute and then he asked, “You came for a car, huh?” Because you couldn’t get into Black Rose with vision that lousy. No way.

Weller nodded.

“We’re not exactly in the car business down here.”

“I can see that.” Smiling up. “I was hoping I might change your mind.”

“Right, right. All that money sewn into your pack. That chip full of credits.”

“You noticed.”

“We notice everything. Like how you don’t seem to be the kind of individual who’d be walking around with that much money in burning a hole in your pocket.”

“It’s a long story.”

“I’ve got time,” said Oates. Leaning against the wall. “Let’s start with Patterson.”

Weller was cautious. “What do you want to know?”

Oates smiled at him and maybe he meant it. “How you got that brand of his, for one thing. He sure as hell didn’t give it away.”

“Oh, that.” He waited a beat. “I thought it might come in handy, so I helped myself to it.” He waited another beat. Letting a light come on in his eyes. “The rag full of ether helped.”

That got Oates’s attention. He smiled from behind his big mustache. “I’m sure it did.”

“Besides, I figured he could spare one little brand. He had a whole pile of them. A whole collection he’d cut out of other people.”

Oates erupted.
“I knew it.”
Slamming a hand against the iron door. “A bounty hunter.”

“Correct.”

“Counting coup like some damn Indian.”

“You could say that.”

“All his training, and he threw it away. For what.” He made a fist and unmade it. “With all due respect, time was a civilian like you could never have gotten the drop on him. But a man gives up the structured life of the service and heads out on his own, next thing you know he’s in trouble. First his training slips and then he loses his moral compass. Everything falls apart.”

Weller said he guessed so.

Oates smiled a tight smile. “Then again,” he said, “you look like you’ve had some experience with things falling apart.”

Weller sat up straight in the chair. Squared his shoulders. “Yes sir, I have.”

Oates nodded.

“That’s how I ended up signing on for this trip.”

Oates shook his head. “After a car.”

“Oh, it’s not just
any
car.” As if that were the only thing he had to think about. A man with a singleminded and mechanistic mission. Just another mercenary like the rest of them.

Oates chewed his mustache. “You did the right thing taking that bounty hunter,” he said, as if he’d forgotten the old man’s name already. As if he’d willfully set it aside, just like that. “No hard feelings.”

“I appreciate it,” said Weller. Reaching for his things. “Now can go see about that car?”

“I’m sorry, but that’s a few notches above my pay grade. You need to see Marlowe, except nobody sees Marlowe.”

“Nobody?”

“Nobody but me.”

“How about that money I’ve got. All that credit. That ought to get his attention.”

“Money’s no good here. Whoever gave you an idea like that wasn’t using his head. It’s not like we’re on the old spice routes to the Orient.”

“I’ve got more than money.” Thinking of the letter from Carmichael. The overarching promise. Still hopeful.

“Not that we found.” Oates consulting the list on his slip of paper. Folding it over and jamming it into his pocket. “Besides, we’ve got a funny belief in pulling your own weight around here. You want something, you work for it. Tell me: What do you do when you’re not counting coup and stealing cars?”

“I wasn’t stealing cars.”

“It’s a manner of speaking.”

“I do a little of this, a little of that.”

“Meaning.”

“Mechanical work mostly. Machinery. Small engines. Repairs and whatnot.”

“What kind of call is there for that out in the wilderness?”

“More than you might think.”

“I wouldn’t think much.”

“You’d be wrong.”

Oates gave him a look that said he didn’t like being wrong and probably wasn’t. “I’ve got a spot in mind for you,” he said. “A couple of little jobs. Do as you’re told, I’ll go see Marlowe and get you that car. For all the good it’ll do you.”

*

The factory or compound or village or whatever it had become over the years must have occupied a square mile under roof, maybe more. It sure seemed big to Weller, clomping along with his bandaged feet hurting in those oversized boots. Some parts of it were original, and other parts had been expanded and modified far beyond the plans of the engineers who’d built it in the first place. Again and again until it had taken on an organic life of its own, fitted to the people who lived within it and tended it and modified it to suit their lives as their lives changed.

The character of the place shifted with each turn they made, and the more ground they covered the more Weller saw how complex and well-regulated it all was. A city-state in the antique mold. A world unto itself. Oates showed him hospital rooms and schoolrooms. Facilities for power generation and water treatment. In one place, a corridor they walked along opened up as wide as a street in some ordinary town. Facades of single houses and double houses and row houses springing up one after another on each side, with a few vehicles parked in front of them. Old cars like the cars he’d seen up north, Toyotas and Subarus. A couple of muddy old American pickup trucks looking hard-used. There were little lawns in front of the houses, a reel mower leaned up against one front stoop, and some porch swings hanging from light gauge chain. The factory ceiling was high here and there was glass overhead that opened for ventilation, letting in the air and the light and the day. The street if you could call it a street reminded Weller of where he’d come from, exactly the way it was meant to.

“Home sweet home,” said Oates.

Weller asked how many people lived here.

“Just over five hundred,” said Oates. Raising a hand in greeting to a middle-aged man who was emerging from behind the screen door of a little bungalow, dressed for farm labor and heading toward one of the pickups. “Running late, Harry?” The man looked abashed and didn’t answer.

They walked on, Weller keeping his eyes open and noting the places where these houses had been knitted together at the seams. There were no yards at all between them. No alleys and no driveways for the cars. Just a solid surface built up from pieces. Fronts of one house butted up against the next and patched together, not so much like a real town as like something made to suggest one. The pickup truck rattled past, and Oates pointed back toward the little bungalow the driver had come from. “For all intents and purposes,” he said, “That’s the house where that fellow grew up.”

“Honest?”

“We dragged them here board by board,” Oates said. Waving his hand to take in the entire street. “Every single one of these houses. Marlowe’s idea was to make things as homey as possible. If America insisted on going to hell, then by God we’d have our own little America right here.”

There was a crossroads up ahead. A commercial district, with a grocery store and a diner and the rest of it. The necessities. Around the corner a public library and a three-story apartment building side by side, each of them made of actual red brick. “Housing for the younger crowd,” Oates said, pointing at the apartment building. “Folks born after we got here. It turns over, of course. There are still a couple of spare slots where we can put you up.”