“Her,” said Marci. “It’s the bones of a girl. Where did he find the little girl?”
“Last night. In the fire. The house is gone now,” said Hopper. “This is all that’s left. Her name was Disney.” He showed them the tag in the pink puffy dress. “I found the house and I found her this way.”
When Marci touched the label, Hopper pulled it back.
“How old was she?” asked Seth.
“I don’t know.”
“You’re not verified, are you?”
“No.”
“But you’re not a Drifter, either. You’re something else.”
“I’m looking for my wife. I have to keep walking up the river until I know where to turn.”
Hopper rolled the bones in the towel and tightened the wrap with the belt before putting it back in the bag.
“And when we leave the river, where are we going?” asked Seth.
“We’ll find it. My Silent Voice will tell me.”
Marci tugged on Seth’s hand and whispered to him. “Seth, what do you mean ‘we’?” asked Marci. “What are you talking about? You want to follow this Drifter with a child’s bones and a gun?”
“What else are we going to do? He has some kind of goal. We don’t. I’d rather follow a man with a goal than walk around without one.”
“I’d rather not follow a man who can’t put seven words together, especially if he’s carrying the skeleton of a child and thinks her name is Disney. Disney is the label. It’s the name of a movie company, and it’s not her name. There were Disney gifts in every gift shop in the airport.”
“Well why didn’t you tell him? It’s not good to let him get a name wrong.”
“It’s not good to correct anything this man is doing when he’s pointing a gun at us.”
“We don’t have to whisper,” said Seth. “He’s not trying to listen. What do you want to do? We can’t stay here.” Seth put his arm around Marci’s shoulders. “We don’t have a choice. Treat this like conscious drifting. A force we don’t understand is moving us. We have impulse but no memory. That makes life so much easier than the other way around.”
“When did we ever live with memory but no impulse?” asked Marci.
“I don’t remember,” said Seth. Marci thought of pointing out all the ways she could disassemble his confusion, but when she tried to form a thought with branches, she came back to the bad choice she made on the runway at LAX. She couldn’t trust her powers of discrimination and with no confidence in her own judgment, and no light of intuition, there was nothing better to do except to follow their new leader, as Seth wanted, and drift with him. After her years at the airport and her months in the garage serving AutoZone, the opportunity to take a walk beside a quiet river toward mysterious Burbank, a place that was new to her, seemed in itself to be worth the risk to her life. Perhaps more than that, a stroll in support of a stranger’s quest to find his destiny could provoke forces of mercy to release her from the burden of fighting every day for herself. And in return for the sacrifice of her freedom, she’d find both peace and power. She had a glimmer of her cosmic helplessness. If aiding Hopper meant that her spirit of mercy offended the malevolence that had already punished the world with NK3, then fine. Let a gesture of goodness aggravate a supernatural wrath to destroy her where she stood today. She had regrets now: regret for lying to AutoZone, which evoked a memory of his affection, regret for kidnapping Seth, regret for leaving the plane, regret for staying on with Seth when everything he did annoyed her, regret for not having the courage to go out on her own. She felt sick about herself, a feeling that might have once been her general condition but was new to her, and painful enough to make her wish to be erased.
Frank Sinatra, Siouxsie Banshee
Frank didn’t like BMWs the way he loved Audis, but Audi didn’t make a convertible like the BMW 650i, and he owned, or claimed for himself, a light blue model with a few hundred miles on the odometer. He knew that Siouxsie would like the convertible and he didn’t bother offering a choice.
It was a fast, bad trip from one empty warehouse and box store to another. A hundred and fifty locations were marked and after looking at thirty they found eight that were full.
Vayler
In the first year, Chief told Vayler to count all the boats at Marina del Rey, the concrete lagoon south of Santa Monica, built below the bluffs that defined the lower wall of the Los Angeles basin. The airport was a few miles beyond the bluffs, and Chief said it was best not to let people wander there. But there might come a time when the boats would be useful if the First Wave ever needed to escape by sea, and he wanted a full inventory. Four years later, the hulls of 5,246 boats in Marina del Rey were heavy with barnacles and green beards of algae, food for the fish that attracted the seals and dolphins that fed on them.
The boat yards had the equipment to scrape the boats and the chemicals and paint to clean the hulls, but the boats needed to be hauled out of the water to get that work done, and the hoists needed electricity, and even if Toby Tyler herself brought power back to the Marina, she didn’t have the dredging barges to clear the silt that blocked the entrance to the main channel. The tide couldn’t flush the rot into the bay, so the Marina stank of dead fish mixed with the acrid white droppings of the gulls and cormorants that nested on the masts.
There were a few massive yachts over a hundred feet long, with marble floors and large wine lockers. The beds were comfortable and the decks were too far above water for the sea lions to settle in, but Vayler made a den for himself in an empty condominium facing an interior garden. He didn’t want anyone to see the light from his propane lanterns and he had an arsenal of guns.
From his first discovery of the shortages, Vayler had siphoned enough food from the existing supplies to fill every room of every apartment unit on his floor, so that if he never left the condominium, he could stay fed for over a year, enough time to outlast the looming famine. He was proud of his self-control, not to make himself too comfortable.
Hopper, Seth, Marci
Marci watched Seth work hard to keep his balance as he trailed Hopper on the steep banks of the river, slipping in the ash. Hopper moved easily, and was no more a real Drifter than she had been a real Driftette. Marci knew she could run ahead of Seth but then he’d ask her to slow down and she was tired of him, tired of his fear. Where was Eckmann now? Where were her friends from the airport? They weren’t chasing anyone carrying bones and pink dresses.
She missed pretending to be a Driftette. That’s it, she thought. She was happy being stupid, happy dancing badly for the First Wavers in the garage. She didn’t like to spy on anyone. That wasn’t the good part of each day of those months living so simply. The good part was the job, the work of sweeping the garage, arranging the tools, sorting through the loose hardware on the garage floor, being laughed at, bullied, and teased, being ignored, and being fed good enough food. She felt badly for betraying the trust of the men in the motor pool. She didn’t know if her deception was discovered after she left without saying good-bye, but only another Shambler would be stupid enough not to see that she disappeared the same the day the doctor was kidnapped from the hospital. She betrayed people who had been kind to her. I betrayed Eckmann and I betrayed AutoZone, Carrera, and Tesla. Whoever I was in the days before NK3, she thought, I must have hurt a lot of people.
She caught up with Seth, fifty feet behind Hopper, who moved along the uneven path as though every obstacle was there to help push him along.
“Seth, I have to talk to you.”
“This isn’t the time.”
“Yes it is. I have to say something to you.”
“We can’t stop until he stops.”
“We can stop whenever we want. I’m stopping now. This is where I say good-bye.” She called out to Hopper. “Disney!”
Hopper looked back but didn’t stop.
“I’m leaving now,
Disney.”
He half raised a hand to wave good-bye but kept his pace.
Seth stopped, waiting for Marci to catch up with him, so he could talk her out of going.
“No, Seth, I’m not following this man. You can if you want. I’m going back down the river.”
Hopper was on the level path at the top of the riverbank. Seth wanted to say more to Marci than just good-bye, but every word he might have said would put him that much farther behind a man who didn’t care what he did. Marci cared, but she wasn’t inviting him to go with her.
“Good luck,” he said, and ran up to the path.
“Good luck,” she called after him, although luck was a theology that Eckmann discouraged in Camp LAX. “Luck can’t fly an airplane,” he told the crew when they started. “There’s a difference between patience and luck, and don’t confuse them. We will find a pilot. I don’t know when, but there will come a day when we will leave here, wheels up.” She couldn’t think of anything that Seth could consciously wait for, so patience was a wasted virtue to wish for him. It was right to wish him luck, the gift of an unexpected rescue by a force she couldn’t imagine, because luck is a free deliverance from bad circumstance, and Seth’s circumstance now was vapor. Whatever would pull him into coherence was more complicated than a wounded pilot’s need for a doctor. What does a frightened doctor need? Seth was gone around the bend in the river, on the road to Burbank, and Marci’s own hard breathing had settled before she realized that Seth was right to leave her without negotiating the terms of the parting, or without trying to convince her to stay with him. The man with the children’s bones is probably going to be shot, and Seth knows this and wants to be there to remove the bullet and save another life. Getting Marci off the plane was his way of saving her because he couldn’t stop the plane from leaving. Maybe he only said he loved her because without that, she would have stayed on the plane.
How many choices do I have? she asked herself. That’s all anyone can ask herself in these times. What are my choices? Stay or go.
Then she saw she had no choice, and this made her happy because she knew the worst of her troubles were over. She crossed the shallow river, sure of herself that when there is only one thing to do, there is no choice. The herons and ducks in the water ignored her splashes. Like them, she was a safe part of nature.
With his last look at the river, Hopper saw that the woman was gone but the man still followed and his Silent Voice advised him: “Don’t worry. He’s not going to hurt you. He may stop chasing you but if he doesn’t, leave him alone.” A question took shape but Hopper didn’t want to ask it out loud. The thought was more complicated than Hopper was used to working through, but the general shape of the idea depended on a few clear features.
He was following a particular path in a particular order.
He was compelled to do this without knowing why.
The first part of this compulsion brought him safely across the desert.
The second part led him to the house.
The third part of the compulsion was so powerful that he walked through fire to retrieve the package.
He had felt no impulse to follow this river until after he had uncovered the bones. If he had not found the bones, he wouldn’t be here. Something was waiting for him in a place he had yet to discover only because he had passed through the stages to get where he was without dying. His Silent Voice recognized the steps in a sequence only when the next goal in that sequence was met.
Instead of feeling secure, though, the neat order of this mission woke another voice that was behind and superior to the Silent Voice, and this voice couldn’t be named because it didn’t use words or sound.
“Please don’t leave me,” said Seth. “I want to help you.” He waited for Hopper to accept him or push him away, but Hopper said nothing, and Seth panicked in the silence. “I’m a doctor. I can’t help without a bag of medicine and surgery knives, and I don’t have any, but if we get some, I’ll know what to do with it. Can you walk more slowly?”
Seth told Hopper about the airport and Franz and the decision to climb down the ladder instead of staying with the insane crew and crashing into a mountain. “It’s not as though life as a Drifter was good but here I am, still alive and even if I haven’t been alive for very long by the standards of our present experience of life, I don’t want to give it up. I’ve gotten used to the idea that life is surprising. One day here, the next day there, whatever life wants from me, I say, Let life have it. I don’t remember my wife and children. How long will I remember Marci?”
Hopper said, “I remember her.”
“Well, of course, that’s because she was just here. Now she’s going back toward the city, and that strikes me as a dangerous idea. You’re running in the other direction and that strikes me also as dangerous, but dangerous with new conditions, so I choose to take the surprise of whatever comes to us, even if it’s awful, over returning to the city and getting nabbed by someone with the authority to hurt me. I don’t want to tell myself, ‘Seth, you knew this was going to happen but you came here anyway.’ Now the same bad thing can happen but I won’t tell myself that I knew it was bound to find me. The plane was doomed. How could they expect to land safely? They were crazy, weren’t they?”
Hopper didn’t answer and Seth took this as his sullen revulsion at a man who would give in to fear and pass up the chance for a life where the Fence didn’t rule. Seth lost all the power of his conviction of the plane’s doom, and with that he replaced the silent image of the jet’s nose buried on a mountaintop with a noisy movie of all the members of Camp LAX safely landed in Seattle and eating fresh meat with advanced people whose purpose in life now was to help survivors of NK3 enlarge their capacity for sympathy and, with it, restore their lost memories. This thought propelled him to continue talking about it with Hopper. “But don’t you think that if they got their memories back, they might be more unhappy than any of us are now? If you remembered everyone in your life who was dead, wouldn’t you feel terrible for living?”
They were in an area of small factories, metal-plating shops, and plumbing-supply stores. Inventory had passed through and left a green triangle on the doors of the inspected buildings but no one had yet come for the construction supplies inside.
Seth asked Hopper, “Are we in the right place?”
“I don’t know.”
Hopper, who didn’t hear any caution from his Silent Voice not to tell Seth something of the time he could remember since leaving Palm Springs. “I have a Teacher. He sent me here and on the way I saw the buses. I was on the way here from Palm Springs.”
“What kind of teacher?”
“He taught me how to ride a bicycle.”
“And he sent you here to find the bones?”
“He said that when I got here I’d know what to do. My Silent Voice would tell me.”
“Like I knew how to take the bullet out of the pilot. It came back to me. So what do you feel here?”
And by now, so recently brought together, Seth felt closer to Hopper than he did to the doctor at the UCLA hospital or any of the people at the airport. Friendship made him feel light, even if the good feelings of affection went in only one direction.
“This way,” said Hopper, turning at an intersection. They stopped at a mini storage, three stories tall with a freight elevator that needed power and had none.
Hopper took the stairs and Seth followed.
He stopped at a locker with a heavy combination lock.
“Here,” said Hopper. He did what his Silent Voice told him. “Right four times to 36, left three times to 51, right two times to 7, left to 44.”
Inside the locker there were three bicycles, three cases of Fiji Water, a stack of boxes with bulk containers of freeze-dried food, changes of clothing in three sizes, knives, rope, power bars. The bicycles matched the bike the Teacher had given Hopper in Palm Springs
.
There was a leather briefcase, locked, for which there were no keys. Seth, the surgeon, snapped it with the screwdriver blade from a bicycle’s tool kit.
Inside the case was a photograph, the other half of the photograph Hopper found in the burning house. It was cut to leave off Hopper but here she was, her arm extending out of frame, the child half in her arms and half out of the picture.
Hopper took the charred picture out of his pack. The edges matched.
“I saw her,” said Seth. “She was inside the Fence. Her hair is different but I remember the face.”
“How is it different?” asked Hopper.
“It’s light brown in the picture but that was then and now it’s red and sticks out to the side.”
There was another photograph in the box, of two cargo containers on a train. Another train was visible in the space between the two cars. One of the cars had a number and symbol that matched the other number that until now had not yielded any clues.
“Why three bikes and three boxes with changes of clothing in different sizes?” asked Seth. “One photograph, three bikes, three different sets of clothing. This isn’t a good sign.”
“There hasn’t been a good sign in four years,” said Hopper’s Silent Voice. Hopper kept that to himself.
“You just heard something, didn’t you?” asked Seth. “What did your Voice tell you?”
“Nothing useful, but I don’t think I’m the only one looking for my wife.”
“Who set up this locker?”
“I think I set up this locker.”
“You think?”
“Yes. Before I lost my memory. I set this up so I would have supplies for the people who are going to help me.”
“Well, I’m helping you.”
“No,” said Hopper. “I wasn’t looking for you.”
Seth didn’t like the way he felt after Hopper said this. “What I mean is that you needed someone to help you on your search, and here I am.”
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