“Don’t even think it, human . . .”
He imagined answering the imaginary warning: “I’m not interested in your babies,” he’d say if he spoke goose. But then he stopped. Imagined something else. Did the math. Belatedly.
Momma bird plus daddy bird equaled baby birds. But before the baby birds . . .
Bingo! Somewhere in Devonshire—or very near Devonshire—there were nests full of goose eggs. And given their size, they weren’t likely to get away with the sorts of hiding places favored by robins. Something hidden away, but closer to the ground. Or so he hoped.
And so, for the second time that spring, he found himself thinking like a bird. If he were one, where would he build his nest, assuming there was a problematic human with a baseball bat in the area? Well, someplace the human wasn’t, obviously. Of course, the most obvious place Dev wasn’t was on the other side of the wall, which he’d preemptively bombed with his own urine and salted with broken glass—more or less stacking the deck against nesting there.
Of course, the wall was just three sides of the perimeter that defined Devonshire. There was still the river, blocked off by a steel guardrail beyond which the land dropped off suddenly to the water below. He’d almost forgotten it was there because a funny thing had happened over the winter: the Ecorse River stopped smelling like embalming fluid. The surface had frozen over, which was apparently all it took. Allowed to sit still for three, four months, unstirred by hot industrial spillage or its own current, the crap that made the river a toilet settled out, dropping to the bottom, where it silted over, out of sight, out of the ecosystem. The water flowing there now wasn’t brown and didn’t stink. It sparkled in the sunlight dappling through the branches and leaves spreading over the river from either bank. The water seemed to giggle to itself—apparently delighted at this posthuman second chance. Dragonflies hovered like little helicopters while other, smaller insects traveled in clouds over the water, the surface broken now and then by hungry fish, helping themselves.
And here was the missing piece that answered the question of why the birds had chosen his neck of the woods. It wasn’t Dev. And it wasn’t even the woods. It was the river flowing past the former and through the latter. Geese were water birds. He’d forgotten about the water because it didn’t stink anymore. And so the waterfowl came because the water wasn’t foul anymore.
Leaning over the railing, Dev looked in the direction of the current, then turned and faced upstream. A beaver had started a dam with some fallen branches but must have been driven off by its new neighbors—the ones that let their beaks do the talking. Their nest rested in the crook of a lightning-split tree, out of the way of ground-dwelling scavengers with plenty of other options, now that the river was back. From where he stood, Dev could see four eggs, each large enough for two breakfasts without compromising his preapocalyptic expectations re portions.
He returned with some rope, some Bubble Wrap, and a pillowcase. He’d take two and leave two, counting on their bird brains not being very good at counting. He’d find the other nests, rotate, taking no more than enough for a few days at any given time. There was a fairy tale he vaguely remembered, something about geese laying golden eggs. He could attest to that; they were quite golden inside, surrounded by white, and even tastier than the chicken kind.
Happy spring, indeed.
43
“I’m not crazy, right?” Lucy said as the two stood next to the river where a tree had fallen across and around which a few dozen plastic grocery bags bobbed. Many of them were still knotted and full of what the one she’d torn open was full of: garbage of varying degrees of freshness wrapped in pages from a newspaper whose singular date suggested the pair might have company after all.
Poking through the spilled contents with a stick, Marcus did his best to tamp down her enthusiasm. “It’s somebody’s garbage,” he said, the big whoop silent but implied.
“Check out the newspapers,” she insisted. “Check the dates.” She paused, corrected herself. “The date, I mean.”
He did but really didn’t need to. “Oh,” he said, feeling more caught than surprised. “Wow,” he added, trying to make it sound like he meant it.
“I know, right?” she enthused. “People!” The word itself spun her, albeit awkwardly in her condition. “Still-alive people. Finally . . .”
“Wow,” he echoed hollowly as his heart sank, gasping for air.
“It’s a morning edition,” he tried. “This could all still be from before.”
“Who wraps up garbage in a newspaper from the same day?”
“Speed readers?”
Lucy folded her arms above the globe of her pregnant stomach. “Why are you peeing all over this?”
“I thought that’s what you did,” he said, a lame rejoinder, but he didn’t seem to have much else.
Lucy smacked her forehead. “I forgot.” She gestured for him to turn his back while she stepped to the other side of the fallen tree. “I was so excited,” she said, tinkling into the flowing water.
With his back to her, Marcus tried thinking of other reasons to dismiss her discovery, only to find himself regretting that girls didn’t pee as recreationally as guys did. Because barely had he put two thoughts together when there she was again, tapping his shoulder.
“So?” she said.
“So?” he echoed.
“What do we do?”
He wanted to say, “Act like it never happened” or “Tiptoe away,” but settled for stalling, instead. “The only way to know for sure,” he said, “is to see if another one comes in.”
“You mean when,” she said, as buoyed by her discovery as the bags themselves.
He didn’t quibble; he already knew she was right. It wasn’t a matter of if but when. And so he helped her fish the bags out, clearing the way for the next one, hoping he’d know what to do by the time it showed up.
Lucy set up camp by the river and waited. Spring had most definitely sprung in southeast Michigan, and the canopy overhead was thick enough to shield her from the lesser storms that blew through, just as it kept scavenging seagulls away from the buffet of trash she’d stumbled upon. Walking up the river earlier, she’d found that the bags that hadn’t survived intact had snagged on low branches as they rafted down the river or been nudged to shore by others that came after them. The usual vermin had helped themselves to whatever they could reach from shore, turning the newspaper into confetti, splintering poultry bones for their marrow, licking the dregs from an unhealthy number of eggshells. Styrofoam trays from packaged meat had been nibbled into a flurry that still stirred among the ground clutter when the wind was right.
As she sat vigil, Lucy wondered what was making Marcus so skittish. It was almost as if he was looking for excuses not to find the others she now knew were there. But the more she thought about it, the more she saw they might not agree about the desirability of her discovery. She could see where he might feel threatened—the whole alpha-male thing. As far as she was concerned, though, the more the merrier. Unlike the apocalypses of fiction, in this world, their enemies wouldn’t be other people; their enemies were nature and time. Whatever others there were would welcome them because the commodity of value wouldn’t be stuff, per se, but people themselves and what they could bring to the community.
Needless to say, the most valuable people would be the people who could make more people—a thought that made her smile as she rested her hand on the passport in front of her, stretching out her waistband: another person on preorder. What Marcus could bring to the party, he’d already brought (see waistband and the stretching-out thereof). What other services he might render, well, that was up to him.
Of course, if their new neighbors were Amazons (the female kind, not the online retailer or rain forest), then there might be more interest in her traveling companion. Good for him. But if she knew women—and being one, Lucy figured she did—she knew this: even Amazons would be suckers for babies. And bingo! Another win for Team Abernathy!
/> Frankly, the only downside she could see was if the people on the other end of all this garbage turned out to be serial killers or something. Man, it would suck being a serial killer nowadays. But what were the odds? Using regular statistics, not great, but using the ironic kind . . . Still, even serial killers would probably defer to a pregnant lady, if only in hopes of building up a victim pool for later. Plenty of time to win them over with her charm or—you know—kill them first.
As she waited, Lucy wondered how much you could tell from a person’s garbage. On those CSI shows, they could practically reconstruct a person’s head from a wad of gum. Herself, she’d already figured out the most obvious conclusion: whoever it was was a wee bit anal. Why else bother wrapping your garbage before throwing it out? She just hoped whoever it was fell on the Martha Stewart, not Hannibal Lecter, end of that spectrum.
While she waited, she began poking through the garbage she’d unpacked, looking for evidence of a personality. Would there be doodles on celebrity faces—blacked-out teeth, an arrow running from temple to temple, gratuitous stitches across flawless cheeks? Would there be mysterious psycho scribbling, full of archaic symbols and sixes? Would they have answered all the trivia questions, filled in the crossword, completed the relationship quiz? Perhaps they’d scribbled snide comments next to the horoscopes destined to fail epically or run a line through the five-day forecast . . .
Nope. No marks, remarks, or marginalia. No good or bad guesses. No defaced faces. Nothing but the stained pages of the really final, final edition of the Detroit Free Press, full of stories rendered meaningless by the afternoon of the day they’d been printed. There wasn’t so much as a fingerprint or ink smudge left by anything except for what had been wrapped inside. It was a little creepy, in fact, how much nothing she found.
And then she hit the jackpot: a separately bagged bundle of digital photos, helpfully time-stamped, post-whatever, came floating down the river like a PS to all that other anonymous garbage. The pictures were of a Labrador retriever, jet-black, except for the last one, which featured a selfie of the photographer—a boy around her age—lying next to the dog. She imagined showing the picture to Marcus—finally, proof positive—but then paused. She looked at the picture again. Thought about Marcus. Folded the photos and slipped them into her pocket.
Whether he’d see what she saw in the stranger’s face and feel threatened wasn’t clear. Of all the things humans can empathize with, the sexual attractiveness of their own sex—assuming they aren’t already attracted to their own sex—seemed especially elusive. Take the coked-out anorexics that once graced fashion magazines—she didn’t get that. They looked unhealthy. Not necessarily the same sort of unhealthy she’d affected in her zombie-goth days, but she’d been making a statement about the death of culture (or innocence or whatever); her unhealthy appearance was decidedly not the byproduct of a fashion-friendly drug habit.
But all the boys she knew except gay Max drooled over those pencil-thin blond waifs. Max, on the other hand—discounting their one, mutual lapse—would probably agree with her about this handsome boy waiting to be found somewhere upstream.
“Swipe right before I do,” he’d say. “And that heart thingy. Make like Astaire and tap that bad boy.”
And so Lucy did, or would have, if they still lived in a world where Tinder was a dating app as opposed to something gathered for the setting of actual fires. As it was, she just patted her pocket and thanked her dead friend for his sage advice.
The next bag of forensic trash came bobbing down the river shortly thereafter, cementing the conclusion she’d already drawn that the photos had been separated on purpose, though what that purpose might be, she had no idea. She intended to ask—in person—when she returned them to the handsome boy who’d taken them in the first place.
Later, Marcus joined her and poked through the contents of the latest one. Same old, same old: not-old garbage wrapped in a now-old newspaper knotted in a plastic bag that had been inflated, he assumed, to facilitate its journey downriver. He recognized the bones of a goose in that one but didn’t say so, bits of uneaten meat still fresh enough to be pliable. He kept poking instead, looking for an excuse to dismiss the confirmatory evidence he himself had stipulated as his condition for following these bread crumbs to their punch line. If he backed out now, she might finally claim the testicles she’d been threatening, even though they’d become largely decorative since the pregnancy.
“Well, it’s not like there’s an address or anything” was the best he could come up with.
But Lucy was way ahead of him. “It’s practically as good as,” she said, pointing out the eastward flow of the current and how the banks on either side were as good as train tracks leading from point A to B. All they had to do was follow the shore upstream until they came to . . .
“What?” he asked, a little hastily.
The cute boy, she thought, but said instead, “I’m kind of hoping it’ll be obvious once we get there.”
Marcus—remembering the silencer and all it suggested about the shooter’s desire to remain unfound—didn’t say a thing.
There were no paved roads running alongside the river, meaning they had to drive the ice cream truck down the grassy incline between railed-off dead ends. Turning the wheel slowly as they approached the nearest shore like they were preparing to parallel park, Marcus negotiated the not-enough space between the river and the trees growing next to it on shore, the truck riding at a slant with the driver-side wheels splashing in the shallow water while those on the passenger side rolled along packed mud. Lucy had to cling to her door handle to avoid sliding across the bench seat into him as he steered reluctantly toward his appointment with a silent bullet.
He could have confessed his concerns, except doing so would mean telling Lucy how long he’d known without telling her, which was unlikely to turn out well for either him or his testicles. Better to get shot by a sniper, he reasoned; at least he wouldn’t hear it coming. There was nothing stopping him from pointing out the obvious, however.
“You found that garbage by accident,” he said. “It wasn’t some kind of invitation. There weren’t any flares at night. No sweeping spotlights or beep-boop-beeping over loudspeakers like in Close Encounters.”
“No signaling.” Lucy nodded. “Roger that.”
“Which means they’re hiding,” Marcus said. “They’re not trying to be found.”
“Which also means they’re not trying to lure us into some kind of ambush,” she countered.
True, he thought. “But . . . ,” he said.
“Go on,” she prodded. “But what?”
“But,” he repeated, “why don’t they want to be found?”
“Maybe they just gave up looking. Or maybe there’s enough of them that they don’t need to find more people.”
“But how many is enough?”
“More than two, definitely.” Pause. “Probably an even number, at any rate. If there was an odd number, they’d probably want to make it even, so they’d keep on looking.”
“What if they’re hiding because they’ve got something worth hiding?”
“Which would make them worth finding.”
“Which would make them fight to protect it.”
“Or share, if we’re nice,” Lucy said, “and contribute to the greater good.”
Marcus didn’t know what to say to that kind of naïveté. He was pretty sure he knew what she imagined her worth to be: she had a womb. She could make copies. But what did he have to offer? Bomb making and ball throwing, neither of which seemed especially useful in this egalitarian paradise she imagined they were driving toward. He could contribute his seed, he supposed, but he was pretty sure they’d have that base covered. Not that he was sexist or anything, but it was clear the shooter was male. It just was. She’d probably argue with him—“Women can shoot too”—which was just another good reason for keeping his mouth shut about the iper-snay.
They followed the riverbank through a series o
f switchbacks and straightaways, hairpins, and long, slow curves, the last of which hid what they were looking for until they reached the other side of it, and there it was: the Great Wall of Devonshire, just ahead and above them, perched on the crest of the valley they’d been driving through for the better part of a day. They would have gone more quickly had they not needed to stop every few yards to hack through generations of dead vines gone woody, some as thick as Marcus’s thumb. But now that they could see where they were headed, it was just a matter of throwing the truck in reverse and easing back up the incline diagonally, steadily, steadily until they reached street level and scraped both sides—driver’s, passenger’s—squeezing the cab through the gap between concrete berm and steel guardrail.
“So much for the paint job,” Lucy observed as Marcus, on pavement once again, executed a series of left, right, lefts until they were facing the Great Wall once again, this time on a level playing field and close enough to touch.
It had rained while they skirted the river under the canopy of vines and leaves; they’d heard the pattering overhead. The wall hadn’t enjoyed such protection from the elements, and the pavement around all that rendered fat had foamed to the point that it looked like someone had just washed the trucks and been called away suddenly while hosing them off.
“I’d be okay with turning back,” he offered, looking at the world’s least welcoming welcome mat. “Let sleeping dogs lie . . .”
Lucy shook her head. “We’ve come this far,” she said. Paused. Added, “That sounded like something they’d say in a slasher movie, didn’t it?”
“I wasn’t going to say that,” he said, totally missing her teasing tone, “but . . .” He reached under his seat, making sure the shotgun was still there.
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