by Tom Abrahams
“How many others?” asked Marcus.
The conductor picked at her index finger with her thumb. “Other what?” she asked. “Conductors or forms of transport?”
Marcus scratched an itch on his chin. “Both, I guess.”
“I couldn’t tell you.”
Marcus looked west toward the horizon. The sun was hanging lower in the sky now. It cast longer shadows. The sky was cloudless, though the blue was pale, muted. Exhaustion crept into his joints as he stood there. The adrenaline that had powered him across the dirt, from truck to horseback, and had given him enough strength to end the fight, had long since dissipated.
He uncrossed his arms and flexed his fingers. They were stiff at the knuckles. He rolled his wrists to loosen them. “Let me ask you this,” he said. “Where exactly are we headed?”
“I can only tell you the first stop,” the conductor said. “Then I hand you over to someone else. C’mon, enough talk. We need to get you back to the funeral home.”
“I’ll walk,” said Marcus. “I’ve got stuff to check. You go ahead.”
The others shot odd looks at him, though none of them argued.
Lou stepped closer to the conductor. “Since he’s walking, can we take Andrea and her boy?”
“Who?” asked the conductor.
Lou stepped closer still. “Don’t look at her now, but she’s the dark-haired one sitting by the dead horse. She’s got a little boy. She helped me.”
Dallas stepped into the huddle. “Why would we do that? Take her, I mean.”
“We have room,” said Lou. “The conductor said we could have six people. You, me, David, Marcus, Andrea, and her son. That’s six.”
“Not if you give birth,” said Marcus. “It looked to me like you were in labor when I got here.”
Dallas’s eyes widened. “You’re in labor?”
Lou put her hands on her belly and shook her head. “No. I keep having false contractions. I’ve had three of them the last couple of days. I’m close but not there. When my water breaks we’ll both know.”
“What about her?” asked the conductor, jutting her chin toward Andrea. “Is she close? She looks like she’s about to pop.”
Lou frowned. “Nice,” she said sarcastically. “And I don’t know. But we can take her.”
The conductor shrugged. “Fine with me. But somebody will have to sit on a lap. I only have four seats.”
“David can sit on Dallas’s lap,” said Lou. “Andrea can hold her boy.”
“I’ll tell her,” said Marcus. “You all hop in. I’ll meet you at the funeral home.”
“Better yet,” said the conductor, “I’ll drop them off and let them in the building. Then I’ll come back and get you. That’ll give you time to do whatever you have to do.”
Marcus nodded his thanks. He leaned onto his right leg and stuffed his hands into his pockets. Andrea eyed him suspiciously when he approached, tightening her hold on her boy. Marcus squatted like a baseball catcher in front of her and kept his voice low.
“My name’s Marcus,” he said. “I hear you’re Andrea. What’s your boy’s name?”
Andrea’s eyes flitted toward the VW then shifted back to Marcus. She studied him without answering.
“Look,” he said, talking with his hands, “Lou over there has taken a liking to you. She says you helped her. She wants to help you and…” Marcus settled his gaze on the boy, letting his sentence hang in the air between them.
“Javi,” Andrea said. “His name is Javier. We call him Javi.”
Marcus tipped his hat to the boy. “Nice to meet you, Javi.” He turned his attention back to Andrea. “We’re headed to safety. My guess is it’s a tough journey. Won’t be easy. Maybe more Pop Guard, coyotes, who knows? But you’re welcome to come with us. It’ll be Lou, her son David, her husband Dallas, and me. We also have a guide. Someone on the railroad.”
Andrea’s expression wrinkled with confusion. “Railroad?”
“Underground railroad,” Marcus said. “It’s a secret path to freedom from the government, like before the American Civil War in the nineteenth century.”
“Civil War?”
Marcus pressed his lips into a flat line and shook his head. “Never mind about that,” he said. “Point is, you have help if you want it.”
Andrea rubbed her nose with the back of her hand and turned to look at the water. The other women were preoccupied. None of them seemed to notice the conversation between the two of them.
Marcus pressed. “Do you want it?”
She nodded. “Okay, but what about the others? I’m not any better than any of them. There’s a newborn too.”
“They’ll get help,” said Marcus, “but they won’t be going with us. The railroad will take care of them. They’ll go in smaller groups. Five or six people at a time, at most. They’ll get their help. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Marcus stood, helped Andrea to her feet, and guided her to the VW. The others were already stuffed inside. Andrea lowered herself into the front passenger’s seat and then waved Javi into the space between her belly and the dash.
The others greeted her and she thanked them. Marcus shut the door and knocked on the roof. The conductor started the engine and puttered back across the lake bed, pushing dirt into the air.
Marcus pulled his hat from his head and fanned the dirt from his face. He coughed and started walking toward the truck. From the back of it, he pulled out his pack. He picked up the gas containers one at a time, testing their weight. One of them was full. Another had plenty left. Awkwardly, and without using his legs, he pulled the cans from the bed and set them on the dirt. No doubt the VW could use the fuel.
He crossed the expanse toward the water, his shadow cast to his left, and walked south. He adjusted the pack on his back and pulled from it two jars of honey. He called for the women to move toward him. There were four women, five children, and an infant. All but one, the one holding the infant, moved closer to him. She hung back, standing ankle deep in the water, not far from the boots of a dead man lying facedown, blood staining his back.
Marcus cleared his throat. “All right, you’re all going to be fine. The woman in the car who just left is coming back for you. She and her friends are going to find a way to get you and your kids somewhere safe.”
He scanned their faces. They reminded him of the women he’d seen in Syria, the ones whose husbands had died, whose homes were obliterated in war. Their faces were gaunt, their clothes hanging on them as if made for someone two or three sizes larger. Their children clung to their sides, with knobby knees and distended bellies only somewhat smaller than the pregnant ones their mothers carried with arched backs and measured hobbles. None of them reacted to what he’d told them, and he wondered if they spoke English or could hear.
The one in the water, swaying with the infant at her chest, finally spoke. She lifted her chin and looked down her nose with distrust. “Why should we believe you? How do we know you’re not like them?”
She lowered her chin and jutted it toward the body in front of her, then the one with a hole in its neck, lying closer to Marcus. She sneered. Actually, Marcus realized it wasn’t a sneer. She was one of those people whose mouth never fully closed. The teeth were always visible.
Marcus shrugged. “You don’t. And nothing I do or say is going to prove to you I don’t have bad intentions. But what choice do you have?”
“What’s that in your hands?” the woman asked, not really answering the question but hinting that she might give him the benefit of the doubt.
Marcus tested the weight in his hands and looked down, running his thumbs across the embossed glass design on the faces of the mason jars. “It’s honey. Pretty fresh. It’s got some sugar in it, which could give all of you a little boost. It’s also got some other health—”
“We know what honey is,” said the infant-holding woman. “Are you giving it to us?”
Marcus ignored the snark. He couldn’t know what hell the wome
n had been through. And given that the one holding an infant was also pregnant, he imagined there was a story there he didn’t want to know. So he smiled.
“I am,” he said. “I’ll leave it here for you. Divvy it up however you want. The woman with the VW will be back for you. Before dark. Promise.”
He squatted enough to set the two jars on the dirt. He spun them so that what he considered the front of the jar, the embossed side, was facing the water. His knees protested as he stood, and his back seized for an instant, but he tipped his hat and started scouring the beach for leftover ammo and weapons.
He shouldered four rifles and stuffed another six magazines into his pack. His body didn’t like the extra weight as he began his march back to the truck. It felt as if the top half of his body was pressing down onto the lower half, like a telescoping cup or rod.
Before Marcus reached the truck, the VW was speeding back toward him. Its engine whined and the tires whooshed along the dirt until she stopped next to him. He motioned to the gasoline containers. “Think you can use those?” he asked, unhooking a bungee cord hooked to the handle opening the trunk.
He dumped the rifles and his pack into the otherwise empty space. They mostly fit, re-snapping the bungee into place with the lid half open but secured.
“Sure,” said the conductor through the open driver’s side door. “I’ll get them on my final pass. I figure I’ll take you first. We’ve already got your next conductor waiting for you. He’s going to take you to Tyler.”
Marcus walked around to the passenger’s side and climbed in. His knees hit the dash, and though he tried sliding the seat back, there wasn’t enough room.
“Tyler?” he asked. “Texas?”
The conductor put the idling bug into gear and pushed the gas. The car zipped in a semicircle as she turned around. “Yes. Tyler, Texas.”
“Why?”
“That’s where you’ll meet up with the conductor who’ll get you close to the wall,” she said, shifting the manual transmission into second and then third gear. “I don’t know what happens after that. I’m surprised they told me as much as they did.”
The car bounced and whined up an incline toward the highway. The guns rattled in the trunk.
“So you’re taking us to Tyler?”
The conductor shook her head. Her hair whipped into her face and she brushed the bangs aside. “No, I’m getting you loaded up. You’re taking the horses.”
“All of them?”
“All but the one you left with the women at the lake,” she said. “There are four horses at the funeral home. You’ll take one. So will Dallas. Lou will share with David, as she’s been doing. Andrea will share with Javier.”
She downshifted to second and then skipped first, slipping the car into neutral as she coasted into the parking lot. The horses were still tied at the telephone pole. The front door to the building was open.
“Where are we going?” Marcus asked.
“To Tyler,” she said. “Then to—”
“No, on the horses. You said it’s a short trip to meet the next conductor.”
“Purtis Creek State Park,” she said, slowing to a stop. She applied the emergency brake, which ratcheted into position. “It’s not far from here.”
She opened the driver’s side door with a metallic pop that sounded like the door didn’t quite sit properly on the hinge. The conductor slid out of the VW and marched toward the entrance to the funeral home. Marcus sat in the low seat, his knees against the hard dashboard, taking an extra moment. He puffed his cheeks and gathered the strength to get up.
Like someone climbing through a hatch, he spun to his side and, with his door open, used the frame to pull himself from the low seat. It was approaching the golden hour. The sun was high enough to provide plenty of light but low enough not to dampen the colors of the landscape. Everything seemed to glow. The air had cooled but was still warm. He walked around the front of the VW and checked the rifle supply, then stepped to the covered entry to the funeral home.
It was darker inside the building. The air was thicker, stale, and musty. Dust floated in the space, suspended and heavy.
Marcus coughed against it as his eyes adjusted to the dim illumination in what he saw was a welcome area. The burgundy carpet was worn in a path that forked from the door to a pair of archways opposite it. Intricate moldings of dark stained wood framed both arches. To Marcus’s left was a sitting area with two large wingback chairs and a round table. Atop the table was a single yellow rose in a vase. There wasn’t any water in the vase. The rose was fake.
To the right was a hallway. Marcus couldn’t see more than a couple of feet down the corridor. It was too dark.
He took another couple of steps inside the building, leaving the door open behind him, and moved toward the arch to the right. Muted conversation and flickering candlelight came from that space. Its twin to the left was dark and silent.
Before he reached the arch, the conductor appeared from beyond it. Eyebrows arched, she had a quizzical look on her narrow face.
“You coming?” she asked. “We don’t have a lot of time.”
Marcus moved stiffly into the room. It was larger than he’d expected. At the far end of it there was a rectangular platform, like a permanent catafalque.
On the walls were framed oil paintings of waterfalls and leaf-strewn wooden paths. They reminded him of the cheap artwork hung above the sagging beds in cheap motels. He remembered them from his childhood, the long road trips with his parents that doubled as vacations and treks to see extended family.
He hadn’t thought about those trips in forever. The only things missing were the laminate wood-paneled walls made to look like oak or mahogany and the cheap televisions that promised HBO but rarely delivered. All of that was before the Scourge. Before he’d met Sylvia. Before he’d signed on the dotted line and served his country. Before he’d killed people. Before everything that now defined him in a way he didn’t much like.
He was thinking about a particularly cheap motel in Hardee, South Carolina, near the state line, his mother complaining about the lack of hot water in the shower, when the conductor interrupted his ill-timed reverie.
She put a hand on his shoulder. “Hey, old-timer,” she said, “you with us?”
Marcus blinked himself back to the present. “Yeah,” he said, ignoring the ageist nickname. “I’m here. What’s next?”
The conductor motioned over her shoulder with a thumb, drawing Marcus’s attention toward his companions. They were sitting in chairs, stuffing their faces and their packs with rations.
Lou was digging into a jar of peanut butter with two fingers, scooping it out, and shoving it into her mouth. David was munching on cookies or crackers, while Dallas kept taking long pulls from a bottle of water, a jagged piece of jerky in his other hand. Andrea held a canteen in her lap. It was next to her son’s head. He was asleep, his legs curled into the adjacent chair. It didn’t look remotely comfortable. The kid had to be as exhausted as Marcus, if not more. Who knew what he’d suffered at the hands of the smugglers?
“Grab something to eat,” said the conductor. “Take what you can’t. You’ll need it on the road. We’ve got about fifteen minutes; then we need to get you on the move. I’ve got to get back to the women at the reservoir.”
“Hey,” said Marcus, “why is the town abandoned? I would have thought somewhere with readily available water would be a draw. You’d think it would be overcrowded here.”
“It is on the other side of the reservoir,” said the conductor. “The north side is pretty packed and so is the west side, closer to Dallas.”
Marcus watched Lou slather her fingers with another blob of peanut butter like a child raiding the pantry while her parents were away.
“Why not here?” Marcus asked.
“It was crowded, relatively speaking. But there were a couple of incidents in Gun Barrel. It got a reputation as unsafe and people left. That was a couple of years ago. Nobody’s come back. They
will. Eventually.”
“Incidents?”
“Unprovoked violence,” she said. “Families attacked. Tribal caravans.”
“No gangs have set up here?”
“They stick to the cities,” she said. “There’s the occasional nomad who wanders through. At worst there’s a tribal caravan moving between cities, but that’s it. It’s kind of a good secret right now. The railroad will use it as long as we can.”
Marcus thanked her for the explanation and walked to Lou. He picked up an overturned plastic chair and set it next to her. He sat on it backwards and leaned on the back with his forearms.
She licked her teeth, sucking the peanut butter from them, and worked the insides of her cheeks. Aware Marcus was judging her, she stared at him with half-lidded eyes and a flat expression. “What?”
“Peanut butter?”
“I haven’t had it in years,” she said. “It’s heaven.”
Marcus rubbed his chin with his thumb. “You’ve got some heaven right there. Or maybe you’re saving it for later?”
“I’m not apologizing for enjoying peanut butter. Not even a little bit.”
His eyes darted to her fingers, the ones that had served as a spoon. Then he smirked. “When’s the last time you washed your hands?” he asked. “I mean, it’s not like I’m Mr. Manners, but sheesh, Lou. That’s gross.”
She stared at him blankly for a moment. Then she lifted her peanut-butter-coated fingers, the index and middle on her right hand, and lowered the index. A smile spread across her face before she took the middle finger and sucked the remnant peanut butter from it.
“That’s twice now,” said Marcus.
“Twice what?”
“The finger. That’s twice. I take it your passive-aggressive nature has remained intact?”
“Is that a question?”
“An observation,” Marcus said.
“Nothing passive about it,” she said and offered Marcus the jar.
Dallas piped in. “I don’t miss this.”
Marcus took the jar and tipped it to look at the contents. It was raked with finger drags. He considered passing, but he was hungry. “Don’t miss what, Dallas?”