by Alex Irvine
Wiley was sobbing. Noah and Violet held his hands while the medics got him onto the stretcher. “Can I go with him?” Noah asked. “He’s my brother.”
“Can’t take unaccompanied juveniles,” the medic said.
“I’ll come, too,” Junie said. “The rest of you, get home with all this salad we collected.”
Mike stood up with the help of another JTF medic. He tested his weight. “Son of a bitch, that hurts. You sure it’s okay for me to walk on it?”
“Won’t hurt anything, if that’s what you mean, sir,” the medic said. “The bullet pretty much carved a piece of muscle off the outside of your thigh. Keep it clean and you should be good as new in a couple of weeks.”
“Good news,” Mike said. “So all I have to worry about is a broken arm.”
“It’s not displaced.” The medic skimmed one palm off the other. “Bullet glanced off it. I got it cleaned out. Same as your leg, keep it clean and it’ll heal just fine.”
“I don’t have anything to keep it clean,” Mike said. They were pretty much out of all medicines at the Castle.
“I’ll send some meds along with you.” The medic dug in his pack. He shook a few pills out of a bottle and held them out to Mike. “This is about all we can spare. Once a day, with food.”
The patrol leader looked the group over. “How about we come with you on your way home? We’ll call in another team to get the kids and your den mother back to base.”
“Thanks,” Mike said. “Maybe you can ask them to bring a crutch.”
An hour later they were all back at the Castle. Safe and sound, Violet thought.
For now.
14
APRIL
It was morning by the time April finally made contact with Blake. She’d made it to the Riverdale Yacht Club just after midnight, and found it dark and quiet, with a padlocked gate closing off the driveway that led down to the clubhouse.
This was not what Brother Michael had said would happen. Had something gone wrong up here? If so, April was still off Manhattan Island, but she would have to figure out another way to get across the river. The most obvious solution would be to walk across the Tappan Zee Bridge, but that was miles north.
The other possibility was that Blake didn’t know she was coming. That seemed likely enough, since telecommunications were only a fond memory, at least in this part of the country. Only the JTF and some other government organizations still had phone and data networks.
Well, she wasn’t going to stand on the railroad tracks all night. She swung up and over the fence surrounding the yacht club property. The clubhouse was dark, and all of the cars in the parking lot looked like they had been there since November, with drifts of sand and grit around their tires. April didn’t see any boats anywhere. She didn’t hear any voices nearby, but the rain could account for that.
She was sick of the rain.
Across the parking lot, attached to the main clubhouse building, was a white tent. She ducked under it, working her way through plastic chairs tumbled over by winter storms. The tent was torn in several places, but near the clubhouse door was a sheltered spot. She dropped her pack and sat. Hell of a thirty-six hours, she thought. I found Merch, learned more about what happened to Bill, and got smuggled out of New York.
Oh, and found out that there might be a vaccine for the Dollar Bug.
Could that be true? Was someone even now making it? Maybe in another year, everyone in the United States—and wherever else the virus had spread—would be looking back at Amherst’s virus. Putting it in the past where it belonged.
She had to know. Mostly because if Bill’s work had helped the process along, that would make it a little easier to deal with him being dead.
* * *
• • •
She hadn’t meant to fall asleep, but the next thing she knew someone was kicking her feet. “Hey. Wake up.”
A man was standing over her, pointing a gun at her heart. He had one foot on the barrel of her shotgun. Beyond him, she saw sun gleaming on the river. Slowly she raised both of her hands. “Are you Blake?” she asked.
He blinked. Then she saw understanding dawn. “Did Andrew tell you to come here?”
Andrew . . . oh. She put it together. The Master.
“Yeah,” she said. “He said to give you . . .” She paused. “I’m going to reach into my coat pocket.”
“Slow,” he said.
She found the small Buddha and held it up. The milky jade caught the sunlight reflected from the river, making it look like the Buddha himself was glowing. “He said to give you this,” April repeated.
“For what?”
“To get across the river.”
Blake considered her for a long moment. Then he considered the Buddha. Then he holstered his gun and lifted it from her palm. “Nice piece,” he commented. His demeanor had completely changed from the suspicious scowl he’d worn when kicking her awake. “So why is Andrew doing you a favor?”
“Because someone else asked him to.”
“And who is that someone else?”
“You know Roger Koopman?”
“Nope. But I wanted to see if you would tell me. Okay. Where do you want to go?”
“Eventually, Michigan,” April said. “But today I’ll settle for New Jersey.”
“Michigan? Jesus. I won’t ask why, but that sounds nuts to me.”
“You’re not the only one,” April said with a faint smile. She stood and stretched. “So . . . I don’t see any boats.”
“I don’t keep my boat here. JTF assumes any boat on this part of the river is smuggling something.” Blake looked the figurine over one more time, rubbing his thumb across the Buddha’s belly. He put it in his pocket. “Here’s how this is going to work. You go inside, get yourself something to eat if you want. I’ll be back in an hour with the boat. Then there are two places in Jersey I can drop you. I mean, two boat landings. If you’d rather, I can just swing in close to the riverbank somewhere and you can hack your way through the woods.”
“Should I do that?”
“Is the JTF after you? Usually that’s why people are trying to get out of New York.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think the JTF even knows who I am.”
“Then you might as well use one of the marinas. Right that way”—he pointed southwest across the river—“that’s the Englewood Boat Basin.” He swung his arm ninety degrees to the right, now pointing northwest. “Up there about three miles is the Alpine Boat Basin. Englewood’s probably quicker, but shit, if you’re going six hundred miles I guess you don’t have to sweat an extra couple hours of walking.”
“Which place has fewer people?”
“Probably up by Alpine. It’s right in the Palisades Park, and then once you get inland it’s all golf courses and suburbia for miles. Englewood’s closer to I-80, but lots more people.”
April considered, but not for long. “Alpine.”
“Done.” Blake opened the clubhouse door. “Like I said, come on in. Make yourself at home. I’ll be back in an hour.”
* * *
• • •
Before Blake went to get the boat, he showed April the clubhouse kitchen. In the fridge, sealed but of course not cold, there was dried fruit, canned tuna, cheese. All kinds of stuff. She realized she was very hungry.
“Take whatever you want,” Blake said.
She looked over at him, figuring he must be joking. “Really?” In New York, this much food was enough to make you a target. He was just giving it away?
Blake saw what she was thinking. “You’re not quarantined anymore . . . what was your name?”
“April.”
“You’re not quarantined anymore, April. Things are tough out here, but after a while it’s going to seem like paradise compared to where you’ve been.”
She a
te until she was full, and then she added some cheese and a couple of cans of tuna to her pack. Then she took a bag of raisins, too. No reason to refuse someone’s generosity when generosity overall was in such short supply.
Blake was back right on time, easing a twenty-four-foot Parker fishing boat up to the retaining wall at the river’s edge. She saw him through the big windows facing the river and gathered up her gear to go meet him. He held out a hand to help her aboard, but she was already stepping down onto the boat’s gunwale without it. The boat had two swivel chairs in its open cockpit, with the steering wheel on the right side. April dropped her pack behind the left-hand chair and laid the Super 90 on the deck next to it. Blake was already dropping the boat into gear. “You get everything you need?” he asked, raising his voice over the sound of the boat’s motor and the rush of the wind.
“I did, thanks,” April called back. She wondered where he was getting fuel for the boat, then decided she didn’t need to know. Ex-military guys probably had all kinds of contacts in the JTF. Or maybe beyond New York it was still possible to actually go out and buy gas. Now she did want to know. “I haven’t traveled in anything with a motor for months,” she said. “Can you get gas out here?”
“Well, you can’t just pull up to a pump and get it,” Blake said. “But it’s possible to find, if you know where to look.”
That was about what she’d figured. Now she was wondering what other differences there were. Even being a couple of miles from Manhattan had galvanized her curiosity about the rest of the country. Also, now that she’d found Koopman, all the parts of her brain that had been devoted to that obsession were freed up to think about other things.
“So it’s more normal out here?” she asked.
Blake laughed. “For certain values of normal,” he said. “I don’t know much about what’s going on in the rest of the world. Or what’s happening in Washington. I heard President Waller died, but I don’t know if that means Mendez is president now, or somebody else. That kind of news doesn’t get around. Truth is, things are still pretty shitty. But like I said, compared to Manhattan, you’re going to think you’re in Shangri-la.”
She thought about that for a few minutes, as Blake powered the boat north against the current. April remembered reading in Koopman’s book that it was four miles an hour. That was a brisk walk. Faster than her average speed would be between here and Ann Arbor. “Is that for everyone, or just people with connections in the military?”
“I’ll be honest with you, April. I have no idea. I do have those connections here and there, and I use them. Once in a while I can help someone out. It’s kind of funny,” he added as he slowed the boat and steered across the river. She could see the Alpine Boat Basin ahead, with the green bluffs of the Palisades rising behind it. “Andrew and I deployed together a couple of times, back in the late nineties. Never figured we’d still be in contact now.”
“That’s weirder than him leading an order of warrior-monks?”
Blake laughed. “If you’d known Andrew when I knew Andrew, that part wouldn’t surprise you at all.”
He steered around a tree trunk drifting with the current, slowing as they approached the western bank. “Hey, listen,” he said. “If you’re seriously going to Michigan, there’s probably a faster way than walking from here. At least at the beginning.”
“What would that be?”
“This is going to sound funny, but the Erie Canal.”
“Seriously? Isn’t that way upstate?”
“You can pick it up in Albany and it goes all the way to Buffalo.”
April thought about this. Buffalo was a long way north of the direct route.
“I know it seems out of your way, but you’ll get to Buffalo in a week. How far can you get on foot in a week?”
“I don’t know,” April said. They were approaching the marina. “Probably not that far. Are you sure?”
“One of the things about fuel shortages is people start going back to nineteenth-century modes of transportation,” Blake said, sounding for a moment like a college lecturer. “There’s all kinds of cargo traffic on the canal now. As long as you have something to trade, you can catch a ride on one of the barges.”
“That’s . . . huh.” April had a few things in her pack she could trade. In a pinch, she could offer herself as a guard, literally riding shotgun. “You sure you want to take me all the way up to Albany?”
“Ah, why not? It’ll get me out of the house. Plus, I like seeing what’s going on in other places. You can never trust what you hear through the grapevine, you know?” Blake slowed the boat near a sign that said NO WAKE at the outer edge of the boat basin. “What do you think?”
Around them, abandoned boats floated in their berths. Several of them were partially sunk. The boathouse looked like nobody had been in it for months.
April surveyed the area. Long narrow parking lot to her left, with a park road switchbacking up the bluff behind it. Open grassy area to her right, with more docks and more sunken boats. Not a human, or sign of human presence, to be seen. “Are there many people in Albany?”
“Some, yeah. It’s a mess like everywhere else, but a lot of people have started coming there to trade because it’s on the river and the canal.” Blake held the boat steady against the current. “So . . . ?”
“All right,” April said. “Albany it is.”
* * *
• • •
Eleven hours later, Blake was holding the boat steady again, this time at a landing in Waterford, New York. A largely abandoned, once-touristy downtown street ran parallel to the landing, lit by torches set into the streetlights. A few people walked along the street. Straight ahead, up a short side channel of the Mohawk River, April saw a canal lock gate, also lit by torches. A crew was manually cranking the gate open, revealing a barge in the lock. The barge was piled with crates, and three horses stamped and tossed their heads on its deck.
So it was real, April thought. The Erie Canal.
Blake pointed. “You go right up to the other side of the lock there, and you’ll find a . . . well, I don’t know what you call him. Customs officer or something. He’s the guy who keeps track of what comes and goes. Tell him you want to go to Buffalo and he’ll put you in touch with someone.”
“Tonight?” It was almost ten o’clock.
Blake shrugged. “Maybe. Barges go as long as there’s water. Might be easier to pick up a ride in the morning, but you might get lucky tonight.”
April picked up her pack and gun and stepped up onto the stones of the landing, feeling the boat rock behind her. When she turned around, Blake was dropping the boat into gear and backing slowly away. “What are you going to do with that Buddha, anyway?” she asked. “Trade it for something?”
“No. God, no. I’m a collector. That’s how Andrew gets me to do dumb things like smuggle people across the river.” Blake touched the brim of his cap. “Take it easy, April. But not too easy. You might not be in New York anymore, but it’s still pretty rough out there.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I will.”
Blake finished backing the boat around and chugged back out onto the Hudson with a final wave. She waved in return, wondering what his story was. Art collector, smuggler, cheerful cynic . . . she would never know the rest of it. Still, it comforted her to know that there were people like Blake out there, not just clinging to the bare edge of survival. The Dollar Bug hadn’t killed kindness.
When she couldn’t see his boat anymore, April stood there for a while, looking around at the little town of Waterford. No skyscrapers. No burned-out ruins. No roaming gangs, no JTF. Just people walking around on a cool spring evening. Some of them looked at her, some of them didn’t. It took April a minute to figure out what was different about them. Then it hit her: None of them acted like they could be attacked at any moment, which was how everyone in Manhattan acted.
S
he was free. Now she could find out the rest of Bill’s story.
And if the BSAV was real, she would find that out, too.
15
IKE
Six forty in the morning, sun shining low over Long Island and a pleasant chill in the air, Division agent Ike Ronson got the call.
“Sentinel, this is Mantis. Acknowledge.”
“This is Sentinel.” Ike checked his watch to make sure his response wasn’t being picked up by ISAC. All communications with Mantis were on an encrypted frequency and should appear as noise on ISAC’s spectrum scanning. Everything looked good. “Go ahead, Mantis.”
“We have intercepted comms indicating a civilian in possession of valuable intel has left Manhattan. Your orders are as follows: Pursue the individual. Engage and assist as needed. Ascertain her destination and observe.”
“Who is she?”
“Name Kelleher, April. White female, early thirties, hair red-brown, eyes blue, height approximately five-seven, medium build. May be in possession of Division backpack. Armed.”
“She has Division gear, but she’s a civilian?” More often than not, that meant the civilian in question had killed a Division agent.
“Affirmative.”
“Engage and assist,” Ike echoed. The standard, unspoken protocol when an agent encountered a civilian wearing a dead agent’s gear was to put them down, no questions asked. But Ike was already way outside protocol. He would have to adjust. “Where is she now?”
“Last known location was the Cloisters. Analysis is, she’s across the river and headed west. Probable destination Ann Arbor, Michigan.”
Ike had trouble believing a lone civilian had just up and decided to walk from New York to Michigan. “Confirm, Mantis. You said Michigan?”
“Correct.”
“Roger that.” Ike envisioned the route in his head. Pretty much a straight shot out I-80, across Pennsylvania and Ohio until you hit Toledo. Then up U.S. 23 and there you were.