Epitaph Road

by David Patneaude

  “I guess nobody’s sounded an alarm yet,” I said.

  “But now they know who we are,” Sunday said. “And where to find us.”

  We accelerated. We were running out of time.

  What color did you see last?

  The melancholy blue of afternoon sky?

  The jelled-puke beige of a cinder-block wall?

  Prison isn’t a place to die.

  I’ll miss you, Mikey, shortcomings and all.

  — EPITAPH FOR MICHAEL BALDERSON

  (JUNE 12, 2048–AUGUST 10, 2067),

  BY KAREN BALDERSON, HIS FAVORITE (AND ONLY)KID SISTER,

  DECEMBER 3, 2068

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  We kept moving. Here the highway was once divided into separate belts of two-lane concrete. But what had been the eastbound lanes was now in ruins. Its surface was heaved up and fractured, and vegetation — everything from dandelions to blackberry bushes to forty-foot-tall alders and firs — reached skyward through the jagged, widening cracks. The westbound lanes accommodated two-way traffic with no worries of congestion. On both sides of the old thoroughfare, abandoned buildings shed layers of paint and façade as they crumbled and settled and faded into the backdrop of greens and browns.

  Nature, resurrected.

  As time moved us deeper into morning, we came across travelers — all men and boys — on bikes and motor scooters and muscle-scooters and skateboards and skates. Bare-bones transportation. If these guys cared about status, they must have looked for it in intangibles. Most of them waved to us as they passed. Our brothers. I thought again about the Fratheists, gliding along in their flowing crimson robes, treating me like I was someone special.

  We were getting close, but we were closer to seven o’clock. We sped downhill and around a curve and in front of us, too late, we saw another roadblock. Four sets of eyes took us in as we kept pedaling.

  “What if they know?” Tia said without moving her lips.

  “Cross your fingers,” Sunday said.

  We braked to a stop. I took it as a good sign that they hadn’t jumped us and put us in handcuffs yet. Sunday handed the free pass to a PAC cop, a tall, square-jawed woman with friendly eyes. She looked over the form, me, Tia and Sunday, me again.

  “Trials soon, Kellen?” she asked, handing the paper to her partner.

  “Three months,” I said.

  “You studying hard?”

  “Night and day.”

  “You Dr. Dent’s — Heather Dent’s — son?” the other cop asked. She was older, shorter, and had eyes like a cod — round and cold and emotionless. And, suddenly, I was sure we’d had it. All the congeniality had just been preliminary crap.

  “Yeah,” I said casually. I looked for an escape route. Could I make a break for it? Crash off into the woods? I didn’t think they’d shoot me. I could maybe get the rest of the way to Dad by foot.

  “I met her once,” fish eyes said. Her name tag read PELLEUR, INVESTIGATOR. “She gave a talk to a group of us a while ago. A smart woman.”

  “Kellen’s smart, too,” Tia said. “He’s going to ace his trials.”

  “Wonderful,” the tall one — MILNE, INVESTIGATOR — said. “Then you won’t have to bother these young women to escort you around anymore.”

  “We don’t mind,” Sunday said. “He’s our cousin.”

  “That’s generous,” Milne said. “But I’m sure you have better things to do.” She handed the form back to Sunday and gestured for us to continue on.

  The pleasantries were genuine after all. But I kept my mouth shut. Better to keep a low profile. I’d been dislodged from the conversation anyway. And we’d been dismissed. We mounted our bikes and moved out. “Study hard,” Pelleur said to our backs. “All of you.”

  Another close call had given us a little rest. But how much longer before Mom discovered we were gone and every cop on the peninsula knew? The adrenaline came roaring back. I had no problem keeping up with the girls as we topped a hill and raced down its windward slope.

  Ten minutes later we caught our first glimpse of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, blue, flecked with white, its landmasses rising in the distance. Vancouver Island was one of them. It was once part of Canada, a foreign nation. Now we were all united on this continent. Unless you were a guy who hadn’t passed his trials, you flowed freely everywhere, even across those arbitrary borderlines on PE maps.

  We reached the fringes of a town. Clumps and rows of houses and other buildings rotting under the weight of neglect and weather began to appear on the sides of the highway and down intersecting roads that had decomposed into haphazard patterns of pavement and dirt. The skeletal remains of traffic lights and streetlights and billboards materialized in the distance.

  We passed a battered road sign. Under the words PORT ANGELES, the word POPULATION could still be deciphered. After it, someone had painted over the number, whatever it was, and printed neatly: Only God Knows.

  We passed another sign, handmade: Afterlight, it read.

  So we’d arrived. But I didn’t know where, exactly, Dad kept his boat.

  The water was to our right, to the north, a half mile or so beyond what was now a dense dilapidated collection of houses and other buildings.

  A few people, mostly men, walked the streets. I pictured them gasping for breath, falling, lying still. Guilt laid a heavy hand on my shoulder, shouted in my ear: They deserve to be warned.

  I ignored the words. Dad was my priority; he was the only one who counted right now. But I couldn’t help comparing myself to Mom, who would have gone to any length to get me out of Elisha’s path but wouldn’t consider alerting anyone else.

  Even Dad.

  “See if you can see anything that looks like a marina,” I told the girls from landlocked Nebraska, pedaling determinedly just ahead of me. “Masts, or a sign sticking up above the roofs.”

  Sunday, sitting on the front seat of the tandem now, looked behind us. A frown darkened her face. “Let’s get off this highway,” she said, and turned down a lumpy side street. We worked our way toward the waterfront and along it. But there was no moorage in sight, and we were nearly out of town again.

  On the side of the road, a prehistoric blue-and-rust pickup truck idled. Genuine engine sounds escaped from under its hood and all along its ancient exhaust system. Behind the pickup was an empty salt-corroded boat trailer, and an old guy messing with the hitch and chains. In the back window of his truck hung a rifle, something I recognized only from photos.

  Tia and Sunday stopped. I stopped. “Are you going somewhere to get your boat?” Tia asked the guy sweetly. It sounded sweet to me anyway.

  He looked her up and down. He wasn’t as old as I’d first thought. He’d just let himself go — oily ball cap, dirty tattered clothes, unruly grayish-brown beard. What showed of his face was red, maybe from weather, maybe from drink. “Gotta get her in for some bottom work,” he said. “Even old girls need their babying. And fishin’s about to get hot.”

  “Where do you keep her?” Tia asked.

  “Second-Chance Marina,” he said. “Just outside town.”

  “The direction we’re going?” Sunday said.

  “A mile or so,” the guy said. “Why?”

  “We’re looking for someone,” I said. “A fisherman. You know a man named Charlie Winters?”

  “He a loner?” he asked. “I know a loner fisherman named Charlie.”

  “Yeah,” I said. My heart thumped at the possibility of good news. “You know where he moors his boat?”

  “Right near mine,” he said. “Slip C-forty-four.”

  “Is he there now?” Tia said.

  “Don’t know. I been away from the docks for a bit, doing my security job.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “We’ll go take a look.”

  We pedaled away. I could feel the guy’s eyes on our backs, boring in. What would he tell the cops if they stopped and talked to him the way we did? “I’m glad you asked him, Tia.” Despite all that was going on, I recall
ed Sunday’s advice.

  She gave me a fake annoyed look, but I detected the unmistakable hint of a smile at the soft corners of her mouth, in the deep brown of her eyes. “It’s really true,” she said. “Guys never stop to ask for directions.”

  “We were getting there,” I said.

  “Maybe,” Sunday said. “Or maybe we would’ve gotten discouraged and wandered around and around in a circle for an hour.”

  I didn’t argue with her. She could have been right. I pedaled harder, following this waterfront road as it snaked through the outskirts of Afterlight. The pickup truck passed us, its empty trailer bouncing and rattling along behind it, and the guy gave us a toot and a wave. The rifle barrel glinted in the morning sun.

  To our right, a hill cut off our view of the water. On top of it stood an old lighthouse, striped in red and white like an antique barber pole. Beyond the dirty glass of the windows that surrounded the watch room, there was no sign of light or life.

  Ahead of us the pickup slowed. One broken brake light flashed on. The truck turned right, just as a forest of masts appeared through a clump of evergreens and above a shallow layer of morning fog.

  I scanned the marina entrance as we got nearer. “I don’t see any cops there yet.”

  “Could be at his boat already,” Sunday said.

  We arrived at the gate. It was permanently open, lying twisted on the ground; no one was around. Beyond the opening was a short weedy gravel road that forked in the directions of the main dock and a launch ramp where the familiar pickup truck and trailer were backed up to the water’s edge. The old guy was already making his way down the dock.

  The marina was big, a crossword puzzle of docks and boats with a rock breakwater in the distance. A storage shed stood just inside the gate. It was open and apparently empty. “Wait in there with the bikes,” I said. “I’ll go the rest of the way on foot and see what I can see.”

  “Forget it,” Sunday said. “We can be as sneaky as you.”

  “Why should all of us get caught?” I said.

  “We’re in this together,” Tia said. She laid her hand on my arm, my left forearm, right on my skin, and let her fingers rest there for a moment, raising my temperature and pulse and anxiety level. Her big eyes were serious, all business. “They won’t do much to us, anyway, even if we get caught. They’ll put us in handcuffs, maybe, and take us back to Seattle in the back of one of their cars. It’s you who has to worry. You and your dad.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But let’s hurry.”

  We ditched the bikes in the shed and hustled onto the main dock, following the route our friend the fisherman had taken. There was no sign of PAC cops yet, but we kept checking ahead of us and behind, scooting stealthily from piling to piling, hull to hull, shadow to shadow. Far ahead of us, the fisherman took a left and headed down a side dock. We hurried on; no one was between him and us.

  We stopped. A half dozen slips away from us the fisherman was untying his bowline. He tossed it on his deck and disappeared between boats. A moment later his ancient tub backed out of its slip. The rumble of its engine changed pitch, and the boat headed out as we continued on, passing number C-39. Peering anxiously ahead, I got a bad feeling. I didn’t glimpse anything that looked like Dad’s boat.

  A few seconds later, we were there — C-44.

  It was vacant. I looked around, hoping we were at the wrong space or he was nearby, on his way in or out.

  But there was no Mr. Lucky, there were no boats moving, nothing familiar anywhere.

  “What do you want to do, Kellen?” Tia said.

  “Maybe he’s coming right back,” I said.

  “Maybe,” Sunday said. She left the alternative unsaid: Maybe not.

  “We should wait awhile for him,” Tia said. “We have some time before the quarantine.” She left the reason for the quarantine unsaid: Elisha’s Bear.

  “We can’t wait here,” Sunday said, and I agreed. It was after eight o’clock now. Mom expected me downstairs by eight thirty. So far we’d been blessed, but we probably had only a few more minutes before the cops came calling.

  “But somewhere nearby,” I said. “A place where we can keep an eye on the marina.”

  We started back, jogging. “The shed?” Tia said.

  “Too obvious,” Sunday said as I looked around for other options. “It’s right on the way in. They’d look there first.”

  We reached the main dock and a space between boats. For an instant, I saw the shoreline, old buildings, the road, and a quarter mile away, maybe, a candy-striped tower. “The lighthouse,” I said. “Maybe we can get up in the lighthouse.”

  “You think it’s open?” Sunday said.

  “We can try,” Tia said, and we continued running, eyes mostly on the road, ears tuned to the approach of cars. But as we dashed toward another boat, this one an antique wood cruiser that someone had converted into a commercial trawler, I noticed something behind its dirty windshield.

  “Just a minute,” I gasped as I hurried down the finger pier. I gazed inside. Everything was dusty and cobwebby. No one had been here for a while. I scrambled over the side and landed on the deck. It was slippery with morning dew, and I half skidded to the cabin entrance.

  The door was unlocked. I swung it open and stepped down into the cool staleness of the cabin and spotted what I was looking for. Just above the steering wheel a battered pair of binoculars gathered dust and salt. I snatched them up and headed back out to rejoin the girls.

  We took off again. I half expected a lecture about thievery, one of the curses of man. But Tia just smiled. Sunday flashed me an appreciative grin. They both knew what we needed to do. The binoculars could help.

  At the shed we collected our bikes and checked the neighborhood and approaches for cops once more. Still nothing.

  We pedaled through the gate and out onto the road. An old car headed our way, then a couple of guys on bikes. Nothing that looked like cops. We got curious stares from everyone we passed. We were an oddity, I knew, especially Sunday and Tia — girls in man-country. I’d seen kids since we’d arrived, but they seemed to be even less common than the adult females who were here for a variety of reasons — adventure, escape, independence, rebellion, loyalty, love, lust.

  I wondered how nervous Sunday and Tia were about being here in this man-world. So far no one had bothered them, but the possibility had to be on their minds, especially when they looked at my skinny self. What could I do to protect them?

  The lighthouse loomed on our left, far off by itself, perched in the middle of a mound of greens and yellows long in need of cropping. A chain-link fence had once enclosed the grounds, cutting them off from the road, but the fence was now shredded and leaning. Its gate was open and hanging by one hinge. A mottled gray seagull, its feathers fluffed up and unruly like a bad case of bedhead, stood on a metal gatepost and scolded us as we rolled through the opening.

  It felt good to get off the road, out of the spotlight. We left what remained of an asphalt driveway and angled off through the unkempt grass and up the hill toward the lighthouse, then around it, to the water side, where we couldn’t be seen from the road. Here a red door stood brightly shedding its paint, framed by the candy-cane stripes of the lighthouse itself.

  We went to the door. A rusted latch and padlock held it in place. I rattled the door in frustration. It moved half an inch back and forth but no farther.

  When I turned back to Sunday and Tia, they were already hurrying toward a downed section of fence. Girls of action. I decided just to watch, breathe in, breathe out, waiting for the rubbery feeling to leave my legs, as the girls worked a half-fallen bare metal pole out of the ground. They lugged it back, one on each end. The base of the pole — Sunday’s end — was buried in a ball of concrete.

  “I’ve seen this in old movies,” Tia said. “SWAT teams used battering rams to get into locked places.” I didn’t know what SWAT teams were, but I’d take Tia at her word.

  With me facing the girls, we cradled
the pole close to the cement blob at hip height — the height of the lock — and from six feet away made a run at it.

  We smash-bashed into the door. I felt the thud all the way into my bones. The noise was loud, sending seagulls screeching into the air, warning one another of earthquakes and tsunamis and toppling lighthouses, no doubt.

  The impact had been a bit high. But we’d put a nice dent in the metal door, a good sign of things to come. So we backed up and gave it another go and this time we were on target. We hit the lock and latch. Neither of them broke, but the collision pulled one set of bolts halfway out of the building.

  We adjusted the height of the battering ram once more and retreated and charged forward and hit the latch square. And this time the bolts wrenched all the way out and dropped to the ground. Rust shavings fell like bloodstained snowflakes. The latch dangled freely, fastened only to the door.

  Using the knob of concrete, we gave the door a nudge. It swung in, creaking piercingly although not nearly as piercingly as everything else we’d done. But after we finally dropped the pole I moved to my left a few feet, anyway, nervous, and peered toward the road.

  “Success,” Sunday said just as Tia gave me a quick half-hug, but instead of enjoying it I looked past a wisp of her dark hair and spotted a state police car racing down the road toward the marina. No sirens, but its lights were flashing. An instant later another car followed, moving just as fast. Plain gray sedan, insignia on the side.

  Big woman, little man.

  I long for a conversation, a real one,

  full of give-and-take and laughter and memories and plans,

  not an urgent, gasping, prayerful dirge, you propped up on a pillow,

  coughing out frightened good-byes,

  me a mute lump, bathing your face in my tears.

  — EPITAPH FOR JOHN MATSUMOTO

  (SEPTEMBER 8, 2034–AUGUST 11, 2067),

  BY SANDRA MATSUMOTO, HIS WIFE,

  DECEMBER 5, 2068

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Cops,” I said. The girls joined me in shrinking back into the shadow of the lighthouse. A moment later, poking our heads around cautiously, we were in time to see a second PAC car race past.