What Came After (30 page)

“I wouldn’t do this for any other reason. She’s in a hospital in New York.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re insane.”

“I’m not.”

Janey stood up straighter. “But New York’s gone,” she said.

“No. It isn’t gone.”

“It’s infested.”

“It’s not.”

“It is. It’s infested with mutations and worse. The new breeds. The ones that won’t die and the ones that can’t.”

“No. None of that’s true. Its all fairy tales.”

But she knew her history, or what passed for history here. “Come on,” she said. “Everybody knows New York was the first to fall.”

“It didn’t fall. And if it’s infested with anything, it’s infested with rich people.”

She cocked her head.

“Nothing fell, Janey. It wasn’t like that. Everything just kind of gave out. Ran out of steam. Except in some of the big cities. They’ve still got everything there. Everything that everybody used to have. Telephones. Telephones with pictures, which is why I want to get into the comm center. You can hook us up.”

“I don’t get it.”

“My daughter. My wife. They’ve got a phone.”

“In New York.”

“Yes. In their room at the hospital.”

“You’re imagining things.”

“I’m not. It’s all true. A phone with a television screen, and I’ll bet you can hook into it.”

“If you’re not crazy, that is. If they’re actually out there.”

“Oh, they’re out there.”

“If they are, then I’ve been lied to my whole life.”

“You have.”

“Which would make you the first person who’s been straight with me in forever.”

“I’m sorry. Somebody had to do it.”

“It’s a pretty big if, though. But I guess we’ll find out.”

*

Since no one ever got in to see Marlowe anyway, they figured they didn’t need an appointment. They didn’t even need to wait until morning. The town office was just on the other side of the street and they slipped across and tried the door. Nothing. There was a little white card faded to yellow in the window with the word HOURS printed on the top of it by what looked an old typewriter, but if there were any actual times written underneath that they weren’t visible in this light. The light from the mercury vapor lamp down on the corner. Just houses beyond here under the lowering gradient of darkness and those all buttoned up. People inside them settled down in their beds.

Either there was no light upstairs where Marlowe lived or else the shades were drawn. They saw a dim light burning somewhere in the depths of the office, but it was so small and so faint that it probably signified nothing. Just a night light chasing off the darkness. Marlowe was an old man, at least Oates’s age, and Weller pictured him creeping down here in the dark after something he’d left behind and relying on that little glow to find his way. They went around to the back and saw through sheer curtains the same dim light the same distance away. Apparently in some alcove or passageway near the center of the first floor. Its solitary glow was the grandest thing in the world to Weller. An electric light burning with nobody around to do anything by it. Nobody reading or working or whatever. Just a light. Turned on and waiting.

The rear door was locked just like the front. There was nothing back here in a residential way, just an alley leading someplace dark, and from this angle the houses on either side weren’t really houses at all as much as bunkers without windows or any other kind of opening, so they just started knocking on the back door. Politely at first but then with more urgency. Making noise. Standing on the stoop and using their fists on an old wooden door with a window in it. There was a bicycle leaned up against the wall and Janey said that’s Marlowe’s bike right there. That’s how he gets places.

Weller didn’t care about any bicycle. He just kept hammering on the door.

Janey frowned through the glass and said, “The problem is he isn’t always here. He goes out some.”

“He won’t go anywhere at night. He’ll be here.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t mean just out. I mean
out.
Like
outside.”

“Outside? I don’t think so,” said Weller. “You know the latest. Opening up is against Marlowe’s own orders.”

Holding up a hand to make him stop pounding on the door for a second. “Maybe for you,” she said. “Not for him. He goes out for recon. Those reports we get.”

Weller looked down at the bicycle with its fenders rusted out and the chain off and hanging down. Drooping down pooled in the dust. He started hammering on the door again.

Janey said this is no good. How about we go see Oates.

Weller said no. We’re going straight to the top if we’re going anywhere at all. Knowing there was no way Oates would let him into the comm center. Not after he’d burned that picture. But there was still a chance with Marlowe. He pressed her aside with one hand and elbowed the windowpane hard and the glass shattered. He reached in through the mess and turned the knob.

The downstairs was one big rambling kind of old-fashioned office with indoor-outdoor carpet and steel filing cabinets like anywhere municipal. Chairs on casters and stacks of paper on tabletops and a map on the wall like the map of a city. Drawn by hand and marked up in colors that all looked more or less gray. In one room was a big iron desk with nothing on it but a blotter and some pens in a cup. A big leather chair behind it. The carpets hadn’t been vacuumed or swept or whatever they did to them in a long time and there was dust on the tabletops, kind of white behind the white curtains.

The little light they’d seen was in a narrow stairwell going up into blackness. That same gradient of light shading off and dark taking over. There was a rope across the opening with a wooden sign on it that Weller couldn’t read because the night light was behind it. He guessed it said PRIVATE and he unhooked the rope and let it all fall. The hook clattering on the stairstep and the sign bumping the wall. He called Marlowe’s name up the stairs and nothing came back. He found a switch that turned on the light on the landing, and they went up.

*

He was just an old man.

Just an old man in a bed.

That was all.

His voice still had some power in it though, and when the bedroom door came open he said, “Major Oates?” The words not loud but abrupt. Clipped. He was not hoping for an answer but demanding one. “Major?” Growing impatient.

The low sound of a compressor in the room. Light leaking in around blackout shades lowered down past the sills, and a solitary red glow alongside the bed. One little red LED in the dark and an old man’s wracking cough. Marlowe collecting himself and speaking again, wetly this time, “Major Oates, what time is it?”

Weller didn’t approach the bed. He stayed close to the wall, feeling for a switch. “It’s after midnight,” he said. Then, finding a table lamp on a bureau and running his hand over it, “I’m not Oates.”

The man in the bed was withdrawing into himself when Weller got the light on. Recoiling from the light and from whoever had switched it on. Wound up in his linens and receding deeper into them, he looked to Weller like nothing so much as an insect suffering under the influence of some poison. A delicate larval creature heartlessly exposed to sun or salt. Weller came near and Marlowe pulled away but a thin plastic tube held him. A tube stretched between him and the compressor. He was tangled up in it and Weller saw it pull away from his nose and catch around his ears and bend them downward. Pitiful flesh speckled and fishlike. Marlowe gasped for air and Weller kneeled and put the tube back into his nose and he gasped some more but with an end in sight. Slowing. Calming but still withdrawn into his linens. Janey watching from the door.

Marlowe opened his eyes wide and fixed them on Weller. Eyes pale as blue milk. Saying what more do you want. Pausing for a ragged breath. His eyes swimming. Saying I already gave it to you.

Janey cocked her head in the doorway.

Weller saying what did you give me. What did I take.

Janey stepped into the room. “He thinks you’re somebody else,” she said. Looking past Weller at Marlowe as at some truth revealed.

Weller spoke to her without turning. “I don’t know who.” Then to Marlowe. “What did you give me?”

No answer.

Abandoning that. Asking instead, “How long have you been here? How long have you been here like this?” One hand on sheets that were anything but clean.

Marlowe sucked air through his nose.

“In this bed, with the oxygen and all.”

Marlowe looked up at him like a man with no use for time or its passage and no means for describing it. He opened his mouth and one word came out.
Oates.

“I’m not Oates. Jesus.” Throwing a look back over his shoulder at Janey, saying, “Oates told me this place runs itself, and I guess he wasn’t kidding.”

Marlowe lifted a hand and poked at the side of his neck. Fingering a scar just above the gray collar of his shirt. His long nail like a talon grazing it and a sly look growing in his eye, accumulating there. Weller reached over and touched the spot and although there was a hard ridge of scar tissue on the loose skin there wasn’t anything else. There wasn’t anything beneath it. Marlowe lifting his chin and Weller taking the flesh between his thumb and his finger and finding nothing. An empty socket. Marlowe with that sly look like he’d fooled him. Saying, “I gave it to you already.”

“I didn’t take your brand,” said Weller, looking him in the eye, “but somebody sure did. How come is the question.”

“The comm center,” said Janey. “That Black Rose scout from before.”

“Oates said he’d gotten smart. He told me not to do the same.” Letting go of Marlowe and Marlowe’s head drooping.

Janey reminded him. “He went there to sabotage us.”

“Maybe not. Maybe he just wanted to call home. Maybe he wanted to make a point to somebody. It could be that he wasn’t Black Rose any more than I am. Maybe all he wanted to do was prove to somebody that there’s a whole different world out there.”

Marlowe’s head was on his chest. Sunken down into that sunken cage. The oxygen compressor humming away and the old man fast asleep once more.

“And you think Oates didn’t want him to.”

“It would be the worst kind of sabotage, as far as Oates is concerned. I get the impression that he likes things just the way they are.”

“Who doesn’t?”

“Me.” Weller rose and went to the door and Janey got there before him. “You might not, if you’ll give me a chance to prove it.” He switched off the light and they went down the stairs and out the back door. Out the back door and into the night. But not to the comm center. There was no getting in there now, not with Marlowe’s brand missing. They went to the car instead.

*

But they didn’t go straight. They stopped at the workshop and picked up some portable equipment. A diagnostic scanner that ran off batteries and a handful of adapters for it and a long cable that Weller looped around himself. “There’s some kind of hands-free phone setup in the dashboard,” he said. “You think you can tap into that?”

She thought maybe she could if she could get the car going at all. Hurrying along under the weight of the scanner.

The fields weren’t much out of their way and they stopped for provisions. Zucchinis and green beans and ripe melons heavy with water. Sweet corn and red potatoes and summer squash shaped like something a child would have drawn with a crayon. They filled burlap sacks they found between the rows and Weller took off his shirt and buttoned it up and used that too. Saying we’ll need all we can carry and Janey saying what do you mean we.

Weller said, “I thought you’d want to go out and see the world.”

She said she’d help him get the car running and she’d help him find a way out if he was so crazy about going, but that was it.

He said what if we get Penny and Liz on the phone.

She said we’ll see. Like she was his mother or something. The kind of thing a person says to a child.
We’ll see.

The moon was high over the ballfield. It was the middle of the night or almost. Neither one of them had a watch, but they figured they had a few hours before people were up. Before Oates stopped by Marlowe’s place and found the window smashed in. Before whatever fate had befallen that Black Rose scout befell them.

They found the car and opened the hood and connected the scanner. Booted it up and waited. She and Weller watching a round logo materialize on the screen and spin a few times like a propeller turning before it disappeared. Janey telling him you never knew. She’d never seen a car like this one before. If what she knew about working on other cars didn’t pay off right away, this could take forever. It would be ten minutes if she was lucky or ten days if she wasn’t, and no telling until it happened. Weller said they didn’t have ten days and she said she knew that. Weller said if they ran into trouble she should get back to her apartment before dawn and go about her business. Let him take the heat since it was his to take.