by Alex Irvine
He was also seventy miles ahead of Aurelio. Given the nationwide shortages of fuel, that probably meant he’d caught a ride with a JTF convoy. But given Ike’s betrayal, he might have met up with someone else.
There were too many variables in that line of thought, so Aurelio refocused on what he could do right then. He headed over to the staging area and found a command shed at the edge of the concrete expanse of the tunnel’s approach lanes. The smell of diesel fuel was thick in the air. Standing in the open doorway of the command shed was a harried-looking JTF officer. He saw Aurelio and nodded.
“How you doing,” Aurelio said. “Listen, any way I can catch a ride on one of these trucks?”
“A ride to where?”
That was the problem, Aurelio thought. Where was Ike Ronson going? He pinged Ronson’s location on ISAC, and it showed Ronson stationary just outside Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. “Stroudsburg?” he suggested.
The officer consulted his schedule. “Nobody going that way tonight. But I can get you to Harrisburg.”
Harrisburg, Aurelio thought. That was way past Stroudsburg, and he didn’t know whether Ronson was staying in Stroudsburg or just getting some rack time before hitting the road again. Still, Harrisburg was closer than he was now. “I’ll take it,” he said. The officer pointed out a truck idling on the other side of the tunnel approach. Aurelio walked across and found the driver in the trailer securing a pallet jack to the wall.
“You headed to Harrisburg?”
The driver snapped a bungee cord into place and climbed down from the trailer, pulling the door shut as he dropped to the asphalt. “Soon as I take a leak and get a sandwich,” he said. “Why, you want a ride?”
“Matter of fact, I do,” Aurelio said.
“Cool.” The driver started walking toward a low building near the command shed. Over his shoulder he called, “You want a sandwich, too?”
“Sure,” Aurelio said. The driver shot a thumbs-up back in Aurelio’s direction. Aurelio went around the passenger side of the truck and climbed into the cab.
19
APRIL
By her fourth day on the canal, April was finally beginning to relax.
She was on a barge about the size of two semitrailers lashed together, fifty feet long and maybe twenty wide. The deck was divided into three parts: crew quarters, animal pen, and cargo. The crew quarters, toward the bow, was a lean-to nailed together out of two-by-fours, plywood, and tarps. The animal pen, occupied by a dozen sheep and lambs, was at the stern. In between was a huge jumble of sacks, crates, and piles of items that couldn’t be put in a sack or a crate: furniture, pieces of wrought iron, a car engine, a small pyramid of tires. Lying along the starboard railing was a mast and carefully folded sail.
They’d spent the first three days winding their way from the Hudson up the Mohawk River and then to Utica and Rome. Usually the barge moved twenty-four hours a day, pulled by horses or mules walking along the edge of the canal. Once there had been a towpath there, but now the animals did their work mostly on paved bike trails. They had to stop fairly often when they arrived at locks. Each time, a local crew would drain water out of the lock until it was at the downstream level, open the gate, then let water back in until the water level matched the upstream gate. All that work had to be done manually, so each lock transfer took about an hour. Luckily none of the gates had jammed yet. The boat’s pilot said that usually happened at least once every trip. Her name was Sonia Whitmore, ex-navy, recreational sailor, now crewing a cargo barge with her spouse, Julia, and their two boys.
April had been amazed to see an intact family of four. The odds on such a thing in Manhattan were tiny. “Yeah, we all made it,” Sonia said. The boys, twelve-year-old twins named Tim and Jake, were coiling rope in the bow and watching the horses on the towpath. “Just lucky.”
According to Sonia and Julia, the Dollar Bug had gone through Albany and the surrounding area, but without the ferocity seen in bigger, more densely populated cities. She didn’t have any specific idea what percentage of people had died. “A lot, though. It’s a lot quieter, even if you account for no electricity, so no TV, no car stereos, that kind of thing.”
As soon as it became clear that neither electricity nor gasoline was coming back anytime soon, people along the Erie Canal started seeing it as a substitute for road traffic. The interstate highways had killed commercial canal traffic in the 1950s; now the worm had turned again. “So we went down the river until we found some barges we could use, hauled them back up here, and got to work,” Sonia said.
“I heard you can get to Buffalo in a week. Is that true?” April still wasn’t sure how she was going to get the rest of the way, but she tried to be methodical about planning. That character trait had gone a long way toward keeping her alive these past few months.
“If there’s no jammed locks and no trouble along the way, yeah,” Sonia said.
“How often is there trouble?”
“Well, I’ve only done this run . . . let’s see.” Sonia thought for a moment. “This is the fourth time. We had to wait until the weather was good enough to make the trip. And we’ve only had trouble once. But”—and here she nodded at April’s shotgun leaning against the railing near the lean-to—“that was enough to make us take precautions.”
At the first lock, where Blake had dropped her off, April had asked around about a ride and the first question she got in return was about the gun. You know how to use that? When she said yes, one of the lock crew called over to Julia, who called over to Sonia, and two hours later April was moving at a steady pace west on the Erie Canal. They kept a watch around the clock, one armed person fore and aft. The fore job was better because you couldn’t smell the sheep pen.
That was where April was on the morning of the fourth day, as they cleared the last lock before a long stretch of open water, crossing Oneida Lake. There was no way to use horses here because there were too many houses close to the lakeshore, so they had to sail. April helped get the mast and sail up, then got out of the way. She didn’t know anything about sailing. It being spring in upstate New York, there was plenty of wind, but it was mostly out of the west, so Julia and the boys were hard at work tacking back and forth in a zigzag across the lake. “It’s a twenty-mile stretch to the other canal mouth, but we’ll sail more like fifty by the time we get there,” Sonia commented, watching Julia and the boys working the sail. “Plus, this thing wallows like a pig. It’s going to take a while.”
“I’m in no hurry,” April said. It wasn’t true, but it was the right thing to say. She was still trying to wrap her mind around the idea that in the twenty-first century, she was sailing on a cargo barge as part of a transit of the Erie Canal. How fragile all of the trappings of modern civilization had turned out to be. Take away electricity and you stepped back more than a century . . . unless you were part of the government, or the JTF. In a few places along the canal April had seen electric lights. Sonia explained that people were finding ways to tap windmills and other power sources here and there, but it was all local.
Everything was local. That was the big difference between now and the world before the virus.
And in this new reality where circumstances could change drastically in the course of a few hours’ walk, April was going on a six-hundred-mile trip, chasing the ghost of a vaccine, and beyond it the ghost of the truth about why Bill had died. She didn’t have to do it. She could go to work on one of these boats, or make a new life for herself in one of the small towns and cities dotting the canal route. Not everything was like New York City. Sure, even here on Oneida Lake there were people with guns on the deck, watching from the bow and stern for any threats that might come out of the woods, but the sentries didn’t really believe there would be trouble. You could tell the difference in the way they watched, their weapons casually leaning against a deck chair or a railing. In New York those same sentries would have been ready to fire any
second. April realized how much she’d gotten used to that way of life, thinking that at any moment someone might try to kill you for whatever you might have in your pockets.
Not what you did have; what you might have. For the past five months she’d been living in a place where lives could be snuffed out for the potential gain of a can of bouillon cubes or a pocket multitool.
Now . . . there were burned-out houses along the lakeshore, but whole ones, too. Someone fishing from a dock waved to the barge, and April waved back.
She could get used to this.
But she wouldn’t. She had a task to complete, and she would complete it. After that . . .
Let the future take care of itself, April told herself. Handle what’s in front of you.
“Once we get back in the canal,” Sonia called over the wind, “we’ll need to be a little more careful. There’s a . . . I don’t know what you’d call them. Gang, cult, something. They try to stop us sometimes, and they always demand ridiculous trades to let us use their horses.”
“I’ll be ready,” April said.
“Sorry,” Sonia said. “I saw you looking all peaceful there and figured I’d better ruin your mood ahead of time instead of surprising you later.”
April laughed. “Thanks, that’s very considerate.”
The wind shifted, and the barge swung around. They were halfway across the lake. “I’ve never been sailing before,” April said.
“This barely qualifies,” Sonia answered. She stepped over to the cargo and shoved a crate back into place. April joined her, making sure the cargo wasn’t moving around too much as the barge rocked through its turns. “One of these days,” Sonia went on, “when this is all over, you should go sailing for real. Who knows, you do your thing in Michigan and come back this way, maybe look us up.”
What a possibility, April thought. To be done with this and move on. “That would be great,” she said.
Sonia caught her wistful tone and got a little more serious. “What are you doing out there, anyway? I mean, planning to do.”
How much to tell, April wondered. “Well, this is going to sound a little crazy, but my husband was killed right after Black Friday and I think someone in Michigan knows why.”
“Oh,” Sonia said. “I’m sorry.”
April nodded. “I wish sometimes he had died of the virus. Then I could just grieve and get it over with and move on. But this . . . I can’t let it go.”
Sonia was quiet for a while. Julia and the boys hadn’t heard any of the conversation. They were still fully engaged with wrestling the sail to keep it at the right angle to the headwind. Then Sonia said, “Well, with the world falling apart around us, I guess it’s good to have an obsession to get you out of bed in the morning.”
April couldn’t help but smile. “I’ve thought that, too, sometimes. But it’ll be good to know and . . . I hate this word, but closure. It’ll be good to have some closure.”
Now Sonia was looking over at her family. “Yeah. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost any of them.”
“You all got through the virus,” April said. “That was the hard part.”
Unless it comes back, she thought. But she wasn’t going to say that out loud.
* * *
• • •
Late that afternoon, they reached the town of Baldwinsville, where they had to pass through a lock to avoid rapids on the Seneca River. They had taken the mast down after coming off the lake and stowed it again along the starboard railing, almost exactly as long as the barge hull. “This is the place I was telling you about,” Sonia said as they waited for the lock to drain. Julia was onshore, paying the kid who had led their horse team from the western end of Lake Oneida.
The lock gate ground open and the boy led the horses forward. As soon as they were in the lock, he cast off the towrope and got his team out of there fast. April could tell he didn’t want to be anywhere near Baldwinsville for any longer than he had to.
A group of bearded men, all armed, emerged from an old hotel on the other side of the canal from the towpath. One of them, older and grayer than the rest, took the lead. “You’ll need horses.”
“That’s right, Deacon,” Sonia said. “We’re happy to make a fair trade for their use.”
“We’ll see about that.”
April didn’t pay much attention to the haggling that ensued. She was watching Deacon’s men from the bow of the boat, the shotgun in her hands but pointed low at the water. They had the look common to isolated fanatics everywhere, suspicious and hungry, like they were hoping something would go wrong so they could kill in the name of whatever they believed.
She was so focused on them, she didn’t realize right away that Deacon was pointing in her direction and had just said something to her. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I said where’d you come from?”
“Albany,” April answered.
“Before that. I’ve seen those backpacks before. You’re one of the government agents.”
“No. It’s just a backpack.” April held up first one arm and then the other, after switching her grip on the shotgun. “See? No watch. If you’ve seen them, you know about the watches.”
“Well,” the elder said. “We seen a lot of government around here lately. Convoys, helicopters. Traffic on the thruway. They pass us by and don’t give us trouble, but if you’re one of them, you carry the word. They don’t bother us, we won’t bother them. We’re free people.”
“Got it,” April said.
“Do we have a deal, Deacon?” Sonia was holding a plastic tote in both hands. April couldn’t tell what was in it, but from the set of Sonia’s feet she could tell it was heavy.
Deacon looked at her like he was thinking of something he wasn’t quite ready to say. Then he nodded at one of his men, who broke away from the group and jogged across the bridge just downstream. A few minutes later, he appeared on the other side of the canal, leading a mule team. A boy walked with him.
When the towlines were attached, Deacon’s man tousled the boy’s hair and walked back toward the bridge. “You’ll make sure he has a place to sleep,” Deacon said.
“Just like last time,” Sonia said. “We will.”
Deacon nodded. Then he pointed in the direction of Tim and Jake, who had just finished making fast the towlines. “You ought to leave those boys here,” he said. “We’d bring them up right.”
April could see Sonia biting back anger. She glanced over at Julia and saw the same emotions playing out on her face. This was a delicate moment. April shifted her weight, bringing the shotgun up just a little off her hip.
“No, thank you, Deacon,” Sonia said. “I need them to help around the boat.”
He held her gaze for a long time, distaste and scorn clear on his face. “Offer stands. You’d better go.”
The upstream lock ground open and the barge moved slowly through, back into the main channel of the Seneca River. April kept watch on the group until they were around the first bend in the river. Then she let out a long breath. “The virus sent us all back in time,” Julia said in the dusk. “Some of us farther than others.”
20
VIOLET
After the attack over at the pond, the adults at the Castle laid down some new rules. All excursions to search for supplies had to be in large armed groups. They were going to talk to the JTF daily to get briefings about what the armed gangs in the area were up to. They were going to petition the JTF to get them some guns, or maybe even a permanent garrison.
Also, the kids couldn’t go farther than a block from the Castle grounds in any direction without an adult.
They protested, but looking at Wiley, they knew it was probably a good idea. DC had seemed pretty safe for a month or so, but now it was getting more dangerous again. They had to adapt.
So they took to spending their days on the grounds, doing chor
es when they had to but otherwise playing games. Junie was talking about starting some kind of school, but everyone in the Castle was too busy to get that started.
Three days after Wiley returned, the weather changed. It was sunny and humid, the kind of day that made Violet wish there was a swimming pool on the Castle grounds instead of just a couple of small pools full of stagnant water and bugs. Saeed had found some chalk somewhere and they were playing foursquare with a soccer ball Ivan had brought from the first camp at the Mandarin Hotel. Wiley watched from a chair they’d dragged out from the library.
“Keep that ball out of the garden,” one of the grown-ups said as he passed by. They promised they would.
“You think they’ll know if we go somewhere without a grown-up?” Ivan asked when it was just the seven of them outside. All of the adults were out on supply runs or doing things inside. “I mean, they can’t watch us all the time.”
“Maybe not,” Violet said. She was already feeling trapped. But at the same time, it was good to know someone was looking out for them. Mike and Junie cared enough to make sure they were safe. There were probably a lot of kids out there who didn’t have someone to care about them.
After a while she got sick of playing foursquare. It was too hot to stay outside all day. She went inside thinking maybe she could find a book that wasn’t some kind of old history or reference. The inside of the Castle, especially by the thick stone walls, was much cooler, and Violet took her time looking around the ground floor where the library was. Most of the books were gone—someone had said people burned them over the winter to keep warm—but there were still a few here and there. Mostly it was boring stuff about the history of Washington, DC, and the Smithsonian, but she ran across a couple of cool picture books about expeditions to places all over the world.
Paging through them, Violet wondered if she would ever see any of those places. She’d never been out of the United States, except to Toronto once when her dad brought all of them along to a convention. She remembered the view from the top of the CN Tower. It had been a clear day, and she could see the city of Niagara Falls. That was where they had crossed into Canada, and on the way back from Toronto they stopped to see the falls.