by Alex Irvine
When he was done, Frank said, “You got a pretty good concussion there, I bet.”
“I might,” Aurelio agreed. His vision had resolved, and he wasn’t having any cognitive troubles. Who was president? Andrew Ellis. What month was it? May.
He swished some water around in his mouth and spit it out onto the road. Back in New York, he might have taken a day off to make sure the symptoms didn’t stick around and indicate an actual brain injury. Out here, though, he didn’t have those kinds of resources, and he didn’t have that kind of time. He had to find Ike Ronson.
A few miles down the road, Frank reined the horses back to a walk.
“They’ll be coming after us, won’t they?” Aurelio asked. His shoulder was killing him. He was pretty sure he’d separated it, but it wasn’t popping out of joint when he moved it, so with any luck it would heal with rest.
Not that he had time to rest.
“Might be,” Frank said. “But I can’t afford to hurt my horses. Hurt ’em more, I should say.”
At first Aurelio wasn’t sure what he meant, but when he took a closer look at the horses he saw one of them was bleeding. Frank brought them to a halt and they got out. Aurelio watched back down the road for pursuit while Frank checked on the horse. His eye was starting to swell. “Lucky,” Frank said after a minute. “Looks like it just peeled away some skin.”
Aurelio came around to see. The bandit’s bullet had plowed a furrow about six inches long on the horse’s rib cage. But there was no exposed bone. “If you have to get shot, that’s the way to do it,” Aurelio said.
Frank patted the horse’s forehead. “I guess,” he said and climbed back into the wagon. “Let’s get on to Sandusky before it gets dark. I can stitch you up there.”
29
APRIL
The steamer’s first stop was in Erie, a fact that Captain Schuler had neglected to mention to April when she got on board. “I thought we were going to Cleveland,” she said.
“We are, after we go to Erie.” He started shouting instructions at the crew. April leaned against the outside wall of the wheelhouse, fuming as the steamer eased through the channel from the lake into Presque Isle Bay. Before that moment, she had never given Erie, Pennsylvania, a single thought, but the harbor setting was picturesque. Probably it had been a nice small city before the Dollar Bug. Hard to tell what it was like now, though the waterfront just this side of the channel was bustling. She even saw uniformed police officers. A row of small windmills spun in the shore breeze at the far end of the harbor, and somewhere along the docks she heard the unmistakable rattle of a generator. Did they have electricity here? How much?
It was becoming clearer to April that the effects of the virus varied pretty widely. Some places seemed completely depopulated, but in others people seemed to have reestablished something like an equilibrium. For every burned-out ruin she’d seen, there was another place where people had pulled together, survived, and maybe begun to thrive again. For every territory controlled by the Jamestown Aryans, there was a town like Erie, where people of every color seemed to be working together toward the common goal of getting through the day.
New York wasn’t the whole world. That was good to know.
Still, she was irritated with Schuler for not being completely truthful about their itinerary. Also for making it sound like they were going to be under attack during the entire trip. They had only seen three other boats the whole trip, largely because they’d stayed out of sight of land. The lake was calm in the aftermath of the brief rainstorm, and Schuler held a course straight across to Erie instead of hugging the shore.
“Sometimes we ride the Canadian border the whole way until we’re due north of Erie, then cut down,” one of the crew had told her when they were about halfway there. He was soaked with sweat from stoking the boiler and had come up on deck to take a break and cool off. Ash speckled his dreadlocks. “The Canadian Coast Guard will yell at you to get away from the border, but they also usually help out if you get in trouble.”
“Usually?”
“Can’t always count on anybody,” the stoker said. He’d drunk two liters of water since coming up on the deck. He untied the bandanna holding his locs, shook them out, and retied them. “Two hours to Erie, give or take,” he said and went back below. April watched the southern horizon, waiting until land came into view again.
Erie? April went to find Schuler.
* * *
• • •
Now there they were, waiting to take on firewood and offload a few passengers. Nobody else got on. After ninety minutes and a fierce negotiation between Schuler and the dockworkers who loaded the wood, they chugged back out the channel onto the lake again, making the turn around Presque Isle and angling southwest toward Cleveland.
April went up into the wheelhouse and found Schuler steering the boat around a wrecked freighter that lay half-sunk in the shallows. “We’ll be in Cleveland by tonight,” he said.
“Okay. Doesn’t seem to be much trouble out on the water.” April watched the wreck slide by. It seemed to have run aground, and then the winter had already begun to break it apart. She wondered if the crew had died of the virus and left the ship to drift.
“Not yet. We’ve been lucky so far.” Schuler glanced over at her. “But don’t let your guard down.”
“I spent five months in Manhattan. I’m not sure I could let my guard down even if I wanted to.”
“Is that right,” Schuler said. “What’s it like there? It looked pretty bad on TV before the power went out.”
“It was pretty bad. It’s a little better now.”
“But not so good that you wanted to stay. I mean, you must really have wanted to get the hell out of there to risk heading out by yourself.”
“I wanted to see the rest of the country,” she said. “It’s interesting how different things are. Every twenty miles things change.”
“So you ran the blockade to be a tourist.” Schuler’s tone told April he didn’t believe her.
“No, I’m looking for someone,” she said. It was true in a way. She was looking to complete her final picture of Bill, his life and death.
“Uh-huh.” With the wrecked freighter behind them, Schuler called down the old-fashioned voice tube to the boiler room. “Full steam.”
“Full steam, aye, aye,” a voice floated back up.
A minute or so later, the paddlewheel started to dig harder into the lake, and April felt the boat accelerate. It was kind of a thrill. She hadn’t been on any kind of motorized transportation since the first week of December. It lifted her mood, just like seeing those windmills had lifted her mood. People were hanging on. And if the BSAV was real, and the government hung together long enough to help distribute it, maybe things really were about to start getting better.
Her good mood held all the way to Cleveland, which announced itself from miles across the lake with the unmistakable glow of electric light in the sky. “My God,” April said. “Does the whole city have electricity there?”
“Oh, no,” Schuler said. “Not hardly. Just a couple of areas down near the water. JTF has things settled down enough that they’ve got some big generators wired up, and I think some windmills, too, down the shore.”
They slowed and cruised into a container port next to a lakefront airfield. When they had the boat moored, April said, “Sure you’re not going any farther?”
“Yep,” Schuler answered. “We’re picking up cargo and passengers, getting a good night’s sleep, and heading back to Buffalo.”
“All right, then,” April said. “Thanks for the ride.”
“You’re welcome. Glad you didn’t have to show me you know how to use the shotgun there. You’re about a hundred miles from Toledo if you stay on Route 2 along the lake.”
“Good to know. Any idea what it’s like along the way?”
“Nope,” Schuler sa
id. “But there’s a JTF base over at the football stadium.” He pointed west, and April saw the stadium looming on the lakeshore. It was one of the places that had power. “You might try there.”
“I will. Good luck with those pirates,” April said.
“Consider yourself lucky you missed them,” Schuler shot back. He went belowdecks to yell at the stokers, and April walked around the glass pyramids of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the direction of the stadium. She passed crews loading and unloading other boats. Again it struck her how different things were here than back in Manhattan. Without a blockade to deal with, people were trading here, keeping themselves alive. She wondered what would happen if the blockade on Manhattan was lifted. Would the island export its troubles to Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx, or would the situation stabilize as people found themselves able to get the things they needed without engaging smugglers and black-market middlemen?
If she ever went back, maybe she would find out.
That thought had never occurred to her before. She didn’t have to go back. It was a little too big to wrestle with right then, so she just let it sit in the back of her mind while she walked around the Great Lakes Science Center toward the open eastern end of the football stadium. A perimeter of Jersey barriers extended a hundred yards from the entrance, with a fortified JTF checkpoint at its only gate. She walked up, careful to keep her hands in view and the shotgun slung over her back.
“Hold on,” the sentry said. “Identify yourself.”
“My name is April Kelleher. I’m looking for a way to get to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and I’m wondering if you can help.”
“Help how? Give you a ride? I don’t see that happening.”
“I’d settle for some advice. What’s the situation like between here and there?”
The sentry pushed his helmet back. He was maybe twenty years old. “What are you going to do, walk?”
“If there’s no other way to get there, yeah.”
“Forgive me saying so, ma’am, but that’s nuts.”
“Maybe.” You should hear about some of the stuff I’ve already done, April thought. Then you’d really think it was nuts.
“Well, the suburbs out to the west are pretty much emptied out,” the sentry said after a pause. “If you go that way, I’d stay real close to the lake, especially when you get out by the old steelworks. We’ve had trouble there. Past that, jeez, I don’t know. It’s pretty much country from there to Toledo, except right around Sandusky.”
“Thanks,” April said. “That’s the kind of information I was looking for. Do you mind if I refill my water before I go on?”
“Be my guest.” The sentry stood aside and pointed at a tanker truck sitting just past the checkpoint inside the security perimeter.
April filled both of her water bottles, then drained one and refilled it again. Plenty of times along the trip she’d drunk from a stream, and her stomach was used to it now, but she wasn’t sure it was a good idea so close to the city. Even with industry shut down, there were enough toxins left in those rivers to be washing out for decades.
She had just gotten her pack resettled on her back when a voice behind her said, “Excuse me.”
She turned and saw a Division agent. Lean, with dark skin and eyes, suspicious set to his face. He cradled an FN SCAR assault rifle. “Hi,” she said.
“You mind telling me where you got that pack? And the Super 90?”
Looking him right in the eye, she said, “I recovered them from the body of a Division agent named Doug Sutton, who died saving my life.”
“Is that so,” he said.
“It is,” she said. “I was being held hostage, along with some friends of mine, by a violent gang. He found us.”
“Where was this?”
“New York.”
“New York?” the agent echoed. “What the hell are you doing in Ohio?”
“Passing through as fast as I can,” April said.
He looked at her for a long time. She had a feeling he was already receiving information from the Division’s comms system about whether or not there was an agent in New York named Doug Sutton, and what they knew about the circumstances of his death. “Listen, a word of advice. There are a lot of agents who would not give you the benefit of the doubt the way I did,” he said.
“What exactly do you mean by that?” April asked, even though she was pretty sure she knew.
“I mean quite a few agents tend to shoot first and ask questions later when they see a civilian wearing Division gear. Nine times out of ten the person wearing it is the person who killed the agent. Only reason I didn’t put you down is you were already inside a JTF perimeter and I didn’t figure you’d be dumb enough to start anything in here.”
One other time an agent had noticed her Division gear and spoken to her about it. That was right before she’d gone into the Dark Zone for the first time. He hadn’t said anything about agents killing people who scavenged Division gear. Maybe it was a new thing. Or maybe not every agent did it.
“Well, thank you for the consideration, Agent,” April said. “I’m going to go now. I have a long trip ahead of me.”
“To where?”
“Ann Arbor.”
“What’s in Ann Arbor?”
“Answers about who killed my husband, if I’m lucky,” she said. Already the partial truth had come to seem natural. Soon, if she got to Ann Arbor, she would have to start asking about SBGx and the broad-spectrum antiviral . . . but she wasn’t going to just yet.
“All right.” The agent was giving her a hard look, but he wasn’t pointing his gun at her just yet. “ISAC tells me your story about Agent Sutton checks out. You’re free to go, but I’m telling you, it’s not smart to be wearing our gear if you’re not one of us.”
“I appreciate the heads-up, Agent,” April said.
He turned away, and she got the hell out of there.
The sun was getting low, but she wanted to get out of Cleveland into the rural areas where she would be less likely to run into other agents. Now that she had the warning in mind, April realized that she couldn’t count on Division agents to help her. They had their own code of honor, and to a lot of them, apprehending her—or worse—would be a way of upholding it.
So she had to move, and move fast.
Around the other side of the stadium was a large undeveloped area covered with vehicles. Most of them were horse- or ox-drawn, but April heard engines running, and smelled . . . french fries? She hunted through the rows of trucks and wagons until she came to an idling flatbed with two men standing in the bed lashing down sections of steel scaffolding. At the back of the cab stood two large plastic barrels filled with what could only be fryer oil. The smell was intense, and it filled April with nostalgia for fast food, which she had rarely eaten before the virus.
She’d heard of people doing conversions on cars and trucks to run on vegetable oil, but this was the first time she’d ever seen one of them. “Excuse me,” she said. “Where are you going?”
“Out by the airport,” one of the men said.
“Which way is that?”
He pointed west.
“I have a favor to ask you,” she said, “and an offer to make.”
He stood up, finished with the scaffolding, and said, “What?”
April dropped her pack and got out the plastic bag Sonia had given her at the end of the canal trip. She pinched a tiny tear in the bag and held it up. “Smell that.”
He bent his face to the tear and inhaled. His eyes got wide.
“Five pounds of tobacco,” April said. “Half of it’s yours if you give me a ride to Michigan right now.”
“Where in Michigan?”
“Ann Arbor.”
He thought it over. “Don’t have the fuel to get there and back. But I’ll get you to Toledo.”
“Deal,” A
pril said. She climbed onto the bed of the truck and settled herself next to the barrels. Patting the bag of tobacco, she added, “Can we go now?”
30
IKE
The next time Ike checked in with Mantis, from inside a huge outdoors and camping store in Dundee, Michigan, he got a big surprise.
“We have an important update for you, Sentinel: April Kelleher was in Cleveland twelve hours ago.”
“She was?” Twelve hours ago Ike had rolled into the vast parking lot in front of this store. Then he’d had a little trouble with locals who took exception with him going into the store, but he’d taken care of them, no muss, no fuss. Then he’d passed the night in a brand-new sleeping bag from the camping section, and this morning he felt ready to take on the world.
“A Division agent called her out for wearing SHD gear,” Mantis said. “He let her go after she explained where she got it, but he reported the interaction and it was entered in SHD operational logs.”
She was lucky, Ike thought. He would probably have knocked her out and taken her in for a more forceful interrogation. A lot of agents would have. But without knowing the whole circumstance, he wasn’t going to judge. The whole point of the Division was agents had the discretion to assess a situation. The agent in Cleveland had the same training Ike had; for all Ike knew, he would have done the same, although his instinct would have been to assume she was hostile.
“So if she was in Cleveland twelve hours ago . . .” Ike calculated. Walking, she would be close to Toledo by now.
“The surveilling agent reported that she confirmed her destination as Ann Arbor. Proceed there immediately, Sentinel.”
“Probably better if I intercept her before she gets there, Mantis,” Ike answered. “That will give me more time to gain trust.”
“We have considered that, Sentinel. Our judgment is that it is not worth the risk of having her reach her objective before you contact her. Imperative that you make contact before she does that.”