What Came After (33 page)

The Beltway was just as bad as Ninety-Five had been. Indistinguishable from it, really. They had to get out of the car and cut through a dense patch of greenery halfway around a low spot in an access ramp, where the road ran through water. Brush and reeds and a great weeping willow right in the middle of the lane. It took forever. Weller taking down the willow and worrying that its movement against the skyline might be a flag to someone watching for them. Janey cutting brush with the hand axe and looking like a person who wondered what she’d gotten herself into.

“There are people working to make things better out here,” Weller said once they were back in the car and moving. “People disengineering crops. The idea is to bring back the old days, when you could grow something for yourself and eat it for supper without having to sell it to PharmAgra first and buy it back. Feed it right to your family.”

“You mean the old days like in Spartanburg right now,” she said. Fishing in the back seat for breakfast. Rummaging in one of the burlap sacks and pulling out a summer squash and rejecting it and pulling out a muskmelon instead. Little Jack Horner himself. “Remember Spartanburg?” she said. “That place we just left?”

“Point taken.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out a jackknife. “Anyhow,” he said, opening it up and locking it back and handing it over, “now that I think about it, you’ll want to save those seeds. I know somebody who could use them.”

He told her all about the tobacco farm in Connecticut. How Dr. Patel had disengineered one of the oldest agricultural products in the world, stealing untainted tobacco back from PharmAgra. A regular Prometheus. He told her how she sold it on the black market to fund more research, and how the next thing on her agenda was wheat.
Wheat.
The staff of life. Once people got their hands on wheat, he said, there’d be no stopping them.

Janey turned and looked at what they had in the back seat and said maybe they should have brought more.

He said maybe. “Then again,” he said, “I understand there are places all over where folks are doing the same kind of thing. Places close to the highways where people can travel in and out, but not too close. Like that old underground railroad during the Civil War. Maybe somebody already has muskmelons going. She’d know. We’ll stop in Connecticut after we get Penny and Liz, and we’ll drop off everything we’ve got. Seeds included. Especially seeds.”

She was already scraping them from the muskmelon and transferring them wetly into one of the cup holders for safekeeping. A fortune in seeds and a future too. Either way, he said, it was contraband of the highest order.

*

The road ahead was closed off, but not by a Black Rose roadblock. This was a permanent thing. It meant they’d gotten the jump on Bainbridge, which was good news. The bad news was that it was National Motors security. Just the thought of those hard men in their black serge and black leather sent Weller’s mind back to the trip south. His last minutes on Ninety-Five with the driver who’d smuggled him through one checkpoint and turned on him at the next on account of the tobacco he’d been carrying. How security had pulled the driver clean out of his cab and gotten him down on the ground with that taser they had, gotten him down on the ground twitching. How they’d cut his brand out and sent him off to live in the world however he might be able to live if he lived at all. How one of them had taken Penny’s chin in his hand in the middle of it and told her not to worry about a thing. The cruel audacity of it. A little child.

They’d never treat Anderson Carmichael that way. No sir. And there was nothing special about Anderson Carmichael except his money, a good bit of which Weller himself was still sitting on since nobody in Spartanburg had had any use for it.

They drew near the place where the road was closed off, chained hurricane fence and soggy sandbags and barbed wire, and he slowed the car to a stop. This sleek maroon car straight out of some old dream of the future. Caked with dust and splashed with mud and scraped here and there by passing branches but fantastic nonetheless. Fantastic in the old true sense.

He blew the horn and flashed the headlights. Got the flashers going and climbed out. Approached the barricade and climbed on the sandbags and put out one finger to touch the fence in case it was electrified but it wasn’t. Back in the car, Janey blew the horn again and again. Weller climbing a few feet up the fence to holler through it at a little guard shack standing all alone about fifty yards distant but deciding that climbing on a chain link fence wasn’t something that a man with Carmichael’s money would do. It was undignified. So he climbed down and just stood. Stopped hollering and signaled over at Janey to quit blowing the horn and just waited there beyond the fence with the car’s emergency flashers going. Patient as any other man with money in his pocket.

Someone came out of the guard shack by and by. A kid or not much more than a kid. His uniform didn’t even fit him. It was loose and kind of cockeyed and bunched up around the waist. The belt buckle was off-center, yanked tight. It all looked as if it belonged to someone else. He came out of the guard shack and looked around and drew his pistol from its holster. Came walking toward Weller unhurried. Little clouds of gray dust coming up around his shoes as he walked across the empty pavement. Even his shoes looking new in spite of the dust, smooth and deeply waxed and the color of oxblood. With the dust accumulating they were beginning to resemble the dark maroon car behind Weller. Everything got dirty no matter what.

Weller raised his hand in greeting. Didn’t look away. Didn’t look over his shoulder to have Janey kill the flashers but she killed them anyhow. Their red glow on the wires of the hurricane fence blinking out.

The kid’s uniform looked brand new, perfectly clean out here in the middle of nowhere and pressed sharp. He had the barrel of the pistol pointed right between Weller’s eyes and he kept it there as he approached. Calling out as he drew nearer. “What you want?” He stumbled over a rough spot where the pavement had heaved up. The gun unmoving. Like it was the only steady thing in the universe, the thing holding him up. Like he was following it.

“I want to pay to use your road.”

As the distance closed, the kid’s face began to resolve. He had a pinched and sour look, dull and irritable and mean. He didn’t wear a helmet the way the National Motors security men on Ninety-Five had, and his yellow hair jutted up in the front like he’d been caught napping. Weller didn’t like him and he didn’t like the way he was studying him from behind that gun. He didn’t like the way he wasn’t wearing whatever headgear was required or the way his uniform didn’t fit or the way his belt buckle was off-center. Like he was just an ignorant and ill-tempered kid out here unsupervised at the end of the line. Only the gun in charge of things.

“I want to pay to use your road,” Weller said again. Not louder. Not different in any way. Just stating a fact that the kid might not know.

“No can do,” said the kid.

“I’ve got plenty of money,” said Weller.

The kid came near the fence with the gun steady. Indicating the car by tilting his head a few degrees in that direction, but not moving the gun. “What kind is that.”

“BMW X9. From the plant in Spartanburg.” Saying it flatly, like it was an ordinary thing not worth remarking on other than to inform ignorant people like this kid here.

“Never seen one,” said the kid. “I guess they ain’t making them no more.”

“They’re not. But they had this one. They had a few. You could go down and get one for yourself if you wanted.”

The kid looked at Weller through the chain link as if he were looking at a gorilla in a zoo. A talking gorilla that said words that didn’t make any more sense than a gorilla would make. Just words. “I guess I could,” he said, “but I’m happy right here. I don’t need no car to make me happy.”

“I’ll bet you don’t. You look like a very contented individual.”

The kid narrowed his eyes and held his breath. Holding that pistol even steadier than before. Daring Weller to press his luck.

Weller said, “I’m going to reach into my pocket now if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” said the kid. Not moving the gun. Still daring him.

Weller dug around in his pocket and began to pull something out and the kid smiled. It wasn’t a smile that made a person comfortable. “You’re sure it’s all right?” Weller asked. His hand still in his pocket.

“It’s all right with me,” said the kid.

Weller drew out the chip loaded with Carmichael’s credits. “I don’t know how much you folks might be charging these days—”

“I don’t know either.”

“You could look it up. You could find out.”

The kid didn’t say anything back. He pointed the gun at the car. At Janey in the car. “Who’s the gal?”

“She’s with me.” Which he figured was all that needed saying. A rich man keeping his private life as close as he kept everything else.

“I know she’s with you, shit-head. I got eyes.”

“Whoa.” Hands up in front of him, that little silver chip gleaming between the index finger and thumb of his right hand and the sun glinting on it.

“Just don’t try me,” the kid said.

“I won’t. We’re hoping to use your road is all. We’ll pay our own way. How much do you suppose it would be, from here to New York?”

“Like I said, I don’t know.”

“I figured you might charge by the mile. Or it could be just a flat amount.”

“Like I said, mister, I don’t know.” The gun wobbling a little now. The kid looking back at Janey.

“All right. All right.” Weller put his hands down slow. “I’ll bet you’ve got some kind of manual back there that we could look at. Something we could consult. A price list or something in the shack.”

The kid looked hurt. “That’s where I live.”

“Nice place.”

“That’s where the guard always lives.”

“It’s very nice.”

“Ever since I can remember.”

“I understand.”

“It ain’t no shack.”

“I didn’t mean anything. It’s a common term. A guard shack.”

“All right.”

“Let’s go see if we can find some kind of an operations manual. Maybe call somebody.”

“The phone don’t work.”

“There still might be a manual.” Moving slowly toward a hinged gate in the fence, held shut by chains and a padlock. A man-sized gate inside a bigger gate. Giving the kid the idea.

The kid went toward the gate too. The pistol still in his hand and a keyring in the other. Sorting through the keys. Without looking up he said, “If she wants to get out of that car and come on in too, it’d be all right.” Talking about Janey.

Weller said no, he thought she ought to stay. But if they could leave that chain unlocked just in case, well that would be great.

The kid said no, he thought she’d better come.

Weller said but he’d hate to leave the car all alone. Out here unprotected.

The kid said all right then, he’d come back for her later on if he had to.

*

The guard shack was a steel shipping container repurposed. One door cut into the front with a muddy shovel standing beside it, and a window cut into each wall. Inside were two rooms with a plywood door between them. An office out front where the guard worked, and what was probably a bedroom behind it. Solar panels on the corrugated roof to power the lights and the refrigerator and the water pump, and behind a curtain something that smelled like a chemical toilet.

“Nice place,” said Weller. “Are you here all alone?”

“Most times.”

“How far are we from the nearest checkpoint?”

“Fifty miles I guess. They say everything’s fifty miles.” The kid was ill at ease in here. He holstered the pistol and pointed to a little stack of books on a table and said Weller could check those if he wanted to find that manual and figure out how much money to give him. He’d try the phone again in case it had come back on.

The books were old. Paperbacks read and reread dozens of times. A couple of mysteries with the mysteries all gone out of them by now, and three or four thrillers emptied out the same. The book on the top of the stack had a picture on its cover of a woman lying on her back looking toward you with her lips red and wet and Weller thought it was probably dirty and it was. This last one was the one most ruined by use if it was possible to tell such a thing.

The kid slammed the phone down and said, “You find it?”

Weller said yes, he believed he had.

“And?”

“How about you show me around the rest of the facilities first,” he said. “I’d like the grand tour.”

“I don’t think I’m supposed to do that.”

“It says right here you can.” Opening one of the books and pointing. “Visitor policies are pretty liberal, according to this.”

“I don’t know,” said the kid. But he showed him into the bedroom anyhow. More dirty books and a lamp on a nightstand and sticky twists of flypaper hanging here and there. A chifforobe in one corner standing open, full of freshly laundered uniforms in plastic. The bed unmade and a pair of filthy boots kicked off under the edge of it. Muddy footprints leading toward them across the tile.