by Beaman, Sara
“We heard something about a... community?” Josephine said. “At the University?”
“That’s right. We’re a post-capitalist cooperative collective of intellectuals. Everyone has a role to play. We provide for each other, and we protect one another from outside elements.”
That last term—outside elements—set Isaac’s teeth on edge, but he said nothing.
“Okay,” Josephine said.
“So tell me a little about yourselves,” Steven said.
“Well, I’m not sure we want to join your... thing,” Josephine replied.
“Oh! That’s fine. I totally understand. I’m just curious.”
“We’re here because we have some information we thought you might be interested in,” she said. “For, uh, the future.”
Steven quirked an eyebrow. “Really.”
Josephine nodded, looking at Isaac.
“Well, as you noticed, I worked for Odyne,” she said. “I was in R and D. I have some valuable proprietary information.”
“May I ask what it is?”
“An herbicide that kills strangle runner,” she said in a low tone. “Destroys it completely, at its root.”
Steven nodded slowly, his eyes half-closed.
“What do you think?” asked Josephine, her voice wavering slightly.
Steven shrugged. “Strangle runner’s not so much of a problem up north.”
“I think it’s just a matter of time until it becomes a problem,” Josephine insisted.
“You might be right,” Steven said. “I don’t know, though. I’m not really here to buy information, if that’s what you’re asking me to do. I’m supposed to use my stipend to send strong candidates back up North.”
“We don’t want money,” Josephine said. “We want to go home.”
“Still.”
Josephine smiled. It was not a kind smile.
“All right,” she said. “You want to know more about me? I have a PhD in biochemistry from Duke and an MBA from Harvard. I was Odyne’s assistant director of research and development for the eastern seaboard before they demoted me and threw me in their breeding barracks with everyone else.”
“I see,” said Steven.
Josephine’s face went stony.
“What about you?” Steven asked Isaac.
“BS in mechanical engineering,” Isaac muttered. “I worked for Toyota.”
“How did you two meet, if you don’t mind me asking?”
Isaac did mind.
“Match dot com,” said Josephine.
Steven laughed.
“So can you get us out of this hellhole or not?” Josephine asked.
Steven stood up.
“Yes,” he said. “I think I can arrange something.”
****
After that Steven went off the way Isaac and Josephine came, leaving them alone in Margaritaville. The water Alex had given them was nearly gone, but Isaac didn’t relish the thought of going back to the populated areas to find more. He scoured the restaurant instead. Beneath one of many useless sinks he found a large plastic tank full of clear water. He sniffed it; he had Josephine sniff it; they came to the consensus that they might as well try to drink it. Isaac went first. It tasted stale but he supposed it was probably potable.
“What do you think of what Steven said?” Josephine asked him.
“I don’t know,” Isaac said. “In a certain sense we might be safer in a community, you know, not having to fend for ourselves. But it sounded...”
“Creepy?”
“Well, yeah. Like Alex said, I guess.”
She nodded.
“But I think we let them send us north for sure,” Isaac said. “And we’ll figure out what to do once we get there.”
“All right, but I want to be clear. I don’t want to trade one group of fascists for another,” Josephine said.
“Not sure it’s really fair to call Odyne fascist. I mean, who’s the suspect class?”
She laughed, nudging his shoulder. “Shut up.”
****
It took Steven a week and a half to find a way to get Isaac and Josephine back to North Carolina. In the meantime he brought them water and food, always with a smile on his face and no mention of money. What seemed like genuine human kindness on Alex’s part seemed self-serving coming from this kid, and Isaac thought he’d easily trade Alex’s interest in his wife for the interest “the University” had in her. But it was going to get them back home, and maybe that was all that mattered.
In the end Steven found space for them on a sailing ship headed for Miami. He sent with them two letters. One, in an unsealed envelope, was supposed to guarantee them passage to North Carolina with some kind of electric car taxi service. The other was sealed, and he’d signed his name over both sides of the triangular envelope flap. This was their recommendation to the University, and they were not to open it. He made this abundantly clear. Do not open the sealed envelope.
The boat trip took five days. The ride was steadier and less harrowing than the speedboat had been, but by the end of it Isaac felt he never wanted to see a body of water larger than a lake ever again.
He thought he’d be excited to set foot back on American soil, but as Miami slowly expanded on the horizon he felt a growing sense of apprehension. Every mile brought them closer to succeeding at Josephine’s plan, to eking out an independent existence on the fringe of nowhere, and Isaac wasn’t sure how he felt about that. The constant hunger in his gut made him miss the Odyne compound, even though he hated to admit it, even in the silence of his own head.
He frequently had to remind himself why they had left. For their baby. The baby that Odyne would have taken away. But now he looked at Josephine, her thin body quickly wasting under the ragged coveralls, and he had to wonder if she was capable of carrying a child to term.
He wasn’t sure humanity had a future.
****
Aside from a few dozen traders and travelers camped along the edge of the marina, Miami was deserted, a maze of dark towers and palm trees. Just like in Cancun, bodies lay here and there in the streets, but these were old, sun-bleached skeletons in warm-weather clothing. The buildings were mostly intact, windows solid.
From what Isaac understood, the outbreak had hit this place hard and fast, just like any other major metropolis. The people living here had no more than thirty-six hours to get out or die trying. At least that’s what he’d heard online, in the midst of everything, back when there still was an Internet. Durham hadn’t gone down quite so quickly; he and Josephine had gotten on the Odyne van to Mexico a full five days after Patient Zero.
Isaac tried not to wonder too often what had become of all the people they’d left behind. There was no way of knowing: no email, no phone, not even any postal service to send word back home. All of America was dark.
The Black Plague killed one third of Europe, Isaac had read somewhere. No one ever talked about what the Outbreak’s mortality rate was. Fifty percent? Sixty-six? Seventy-five? Ninety nine point nine? Probably no way to tell. But walking the streets here, it looked like one hundred. Maybe everyone back home was long gone. It wasn’t the first time the thought had occurred to Isaac, but now he was faced with hard evidence, rotting in the streets, impossible to ignore.
The complete desolation of the city did have an upside, however: convenience stores and supermarkets, windows smashed but not thoroughly looted. Boutiques selling everything from t-shirts to Prada purses. Drugstores and superstores. Before dark they found beef jerky, pretzels and Gatorade, fresh clothing, sunglasses and hats, sunblock, and as many medical supplies as they could carry. They spent the night in a mattress store, and for the first time in who knew how long Isaac didn’t wake until morning.
Steven had said they would find the taxi service operating out of an Enterprise Rent-A-Car by the airport. When the sun rose they got up and started heading away from the ocean, following plane pictographs on street signs to Miami International. On the way Josephine got sick, so the
y stopped in an overgrown public park to let her rest. Isaac held her hair out of the way and offered to pour Gatorade over her head. She declined, half-smiling, half-glaring at him.
They scrounged for lunch before moving on to the airport. They had yet to find any bottled water, but soda was widely available, as well as juice that had certainly gone bad months and months before. Most of the canned goods were gone, but all kinds of nonperishable junk remained: potato chips, snack cakes, Cheez Whiz. It all left a film on Isaac’s tongue, but after subsisting on rice and beans and worse for so long he really didn’t mind.
After lunch they crossed over a dead highway, its pavement already starting to crumble even without the wear of traffic, and found the Enterprise. No fewer than fifty cars sat in its lot, heavy with accumulated dirt, dust and sand.
Isaac peered through the windows of the rental office. He saw no one inside. Shading her eyes, Josephine scanned the parking lot and the surrounding concrete landscape.
“Hello?” she called, and her voice echoed through the quiet.
It came as no surprise to Isaac when they heard no reply.
****
Isaac and Josephine searched every inch of the premises. They found no sign of the electric cars or their drivers. They sat on the curb and waited until sundown in the hope that someone would show.
No one did. They returned to the mattress store for the night.
****
Isaac awoke expecting to find himself back at Odyne and late for his shift. As he realized he was still in the dead city, a mix of relief and terror set in.
He heard rustling coming from the street. He sat up with a start and bolted for the window, hoping to find another human being. He just managed to glimpse the tail of a raccoon as it skittered into an alleyway.
He shook his head and returned to Josephine’s side.
They made their way back to the Enterprise, newly-pilfered yellowing newspapers in hand, and sat reading of the final days of Western civilization while waiting for a sign of the taxis. A herd of deer walked through, grazing on the median, but no one came. At first Isaac suspected that Steven had deliberately given them bad information, but as he considered that idea, he couldn’t think of why. Why pay to send them up here to a dead end? More likely he had made a genuine mistake, or perhaps the taxi service had stopped functioning without him knowing about it.
A week went by and no taxis arrived. As time went on Isaac started to lose interest in the entire thing. He figured they could sustain themselves for months, maybe longer, just by scavenging. But Josephine insisted on going back to the Enterprise every day. Scavenging was not sustainable, she said. They’d need to find a garden supply store and try subsistence farming to have any hope of living long enough to raise the kid. And it would be much easier to do that back in North Carolina.
Isaac anticipated that lifestyle with more than a little dread. What the hell did either of them know about farming?
They were smart, Josephine said. They would figure it out.
A second week passed with no sign of the taxis, then a third week. At first they spent as long as six hours each day at the Rent-A-Car, waiting together, but as time went on, they were forced to spend more time looking for drinks and food. They took turns waiting while the other scoured local stores. They started cutting the waiting time down an hour at a time, until at the end they didn’t wait around the place at all, just checked it once every morning on their daily rounds.
They moved out of the mattress store and into an abandoned ranch house full of new-looking furniture—an abandoned summer home, maybe. Its tiny yard was full of knee-high grass. Although they never really discussed it, Isaac could tell that Josephine was slowly coming to the realization that this may be their home for the rest of their lives, however long that might be.
They started looking for seeds to plant in the yard.
****
On a rainy morning more than a month after their arrival in Miami—Isaac had stopped counting—they heard the faint rumble of an engine as they approached the Rent-A-Car. Josephine broke into a sprint, and Isaac followed her, nerves humming with anxiety.
Parked outside of the front entrance was a minivan covered in solar panels. A white guy with a linebacker’s build got out of the driver’s seat and watched Isaac and Josephine approach with a slight smile.
“I take it you two were expecting me?” he said. He took off his baseball cap; his dirty-blond hair was patchy underneath, not balding but falling out. He gave them a crooked smile with a few missing teeth.
“Yes!” Josephine said, panting. She pulled the backpack off and rifled around inside it, produced the unsealed envelope and thrust it at the man.
He stepped under the overhang to read it. “All right,” he said. “I’ll be taking you to Raleigh, then?”
“Yes. Please. Yes.”
“All right, well, give me an hour or three. I’m gonna see if anything of value is left in the cars out back. Can’t order parts when they break, you know.”
Josephine nodded.
“Could you get me something to eat in the meantime?” the man asked. Isaac noticed that his hands were shaking as they held the letter.
“Sure,” Isaac said, “as long as you don’t mind Twinkies and Combos.”
The man laughed.
****
Isaac and Josephine, stunned silent, went back to the little ranch house to collect their supplies. On the way back to the taxi Josephine found her tongue. “Where’s the first place you want to go when we get back?” she asked Isaac.
Isaac thought for a long moment before replying. “I don’t know.”
“If it’s okay, I’d like to go check on my parents’ house in Thorn Creek.”
“Of course it’s okay, Jo,” he said. “But... well, never mind.”
“What?”
“You know they probably won’t be there,” he said as softly as he could.
She nodded, and he thought she might be holding back tears. It wasn’t an expression he’d seen her make in months. Years, maybe. He put an arm around her shoulder, prepared to offer his sympathy, but she quickly composed herself.
“I know,” she said. “Let’s go.”
****
They left Miami before noon that day. Marcus, the driver, barely spoke another word for hours. He kept his eyes fixed on the road, squinting at road signs obscured by grime. He'd instructed Isaac and Josephine to each watch one side of the highway. This car was valuable, he said, and things sometimes happened on highways.
The highway itself was a death trap, all fractures and potholes and even collapsed overpasses. For long stretches the pavement was hidden under layers of sand or dirt. It strained the mind to consider how quickly it had gone to shit. It made sense to Isaac that certain things had evaporated immediately: satellite television, cellular phone networks, social norms. But he’d thought these roads were made of stronger stuff.
On the crazy roads the solar van had a top speed of maybe thirty-five miles per hour. By nightfall they were still somewhere in Georgia. Marcus pulled off the main road and into the parking lot of a Holiday Inn. He took out a camouflage tarp and threw it over the van, which he’d parked behind a dumpster. Marcus lent Josephine a shake-to-charge flashlight and they headed inside the hotel. They spent the night in adjoining rooms.
Isaac slept badly, with the vague awareness that Josephine was awake. He woke up well before dawn to find her sitting at the room’s little desk, reading something by flashlight. The sealed envelope with Steven’s signatures lay open on the floor.
The recommendation letter.
“You opened it,” Isaac said dumbly.
She turned to him, eyes wide with dread. Without a word she handed him both the flashlight and the letter, handwritten in nearly-illegible, cramped little letters.
****
Dear Mother:
Please consider my recommendation of Dr. Josephine Cameron for admission to the University. Dr. Cameron, a graduate of Duke (PhD,
Chemistry) and Harvard (MBA) appears to be of birthing age and should make an excellent addition to the pool.
I believe Dr. Cameron’s husband to be unsuitable. He may in fact pose a threat to our security. I found military insignia among his personal effects. I would recommend him for immediate expulsion if not termination.
I hope that you may consider sending a replacement for me as soon as possible. My stipend is nearly gone.
Sincerely,
Steven Poole
****
“What do we do?” asked Josephine.
Isaac closed his eyes and gave this some thought.
“We steal the van,” he said.
“Marcus has the keys—”
“I’m pretty sure I could get them off of him.”
“How?”
“By stealth. And if necessary, by force. We have a gun.”
Josephine stared into nothing, eyes half-closed, then shook her head no.
“We can’t let him take us there,” Isaac insisted. “We’ve known this all along. This—” he indicated the letter— “is just a reminder of that.”
Josephine took a breath.
“Do you have another idea?”
“What if we wait until we’re close. I’ll ask to pull over so I can go to the bathroom. You follow me, and we’ll run.”
“Carrying all our things?”
“Well, yeah...”
“Won’t he be suspicious?”
“Why would he care if we run off?” she asked. “It’s not like the University knows we’re coming.”
Isaac sighed. He wasn’t sure it would work, but he had to admit it sounded better than breaking into the man’s room and shooting him in his sleep. Marcus had done nothing to them.
Slowly he nodded assent. He picked up the envelope from the floor and placed the letter back inside.
****
The morning was sunny and cold. Isaac and Josephine shared some of their rations with Marcus, and then they were back on the highway, slowly heading north over craters of loose dirt and fallen trees.
They passed through the scrubby, sandy flatlands of South Carolina. In some places the underbrush nearly blocked the road. Rabbits and whole flocks of birds scattered as they approached. All the houses along the highway were dark and dilapidated.