by Lynda Engler
As they walked along the dilapidated highway, Isabella realized that she was not aching all over anymore. Her body had grown tougher to meet the demands of the trek. Without knowing it, she had been improving as an explorer. Physical aching no longer dominated her every moment.
Just over an hour later, they came to a fork in the road. Clay examined the map again with Kalla peeking over his shoulder. “Both roads are orange, both the same thickness,” he said, tracing the line.
Kalla scrutinized what was left of the pavement in front of them then turned to the paper in Clay’s hands. “The road to the right is clearer. I vote for that way.”
“Any other reason, Kalla, or just because it’s easier?” asked Malcolm. As if an easy route would be a bad thing right now!
Isabella surveyed the two roads ahead. White lines had once delineated the road into lanes, but now the broken lines were scarcely visible. Cracks wiggled this way and that and weeds rose up between. Most were shades of green but others had wilted and turned brown in the hot August sun, the same brutal sun that had turned Isabella’s fair complexion a ruddy brown. The road to the left was noticeably more overgrown. A flock of small yellow birds lingered on purple thistles that swayed in the breeze on the clearer road to the right. Shade trees sheltered the road’s edges. “I think we should go right,” agreed Isabella. Maybe the birds were a good omen.
Kalla exclaimed, “Malcolm, it feels right. You wanted me for my sense of direction, didn’t you? I’m not just choosing that road because it’s easier. From what Araddea described, I deem the roach factory is right, not left.” She stared, unblinking, at Malcolm. Her manner was so mature, so positive that she was suggesting the correct course, that it was easy for Isabella to forget that she and Clay were just eleven years old.
Clay did not say a word, but nodded at Kalla’s assessment of the situation.
A long moment passed as Malcolm considered it and finally said, “Someone has used that road to the right. Maybe not recently, but it’s been traveled many times since the Final War to be this passable. If anyone is still alive and working at a factory, then people must travel to it, at least once in a while. Okay, right it is then.”
As soon as he made the decision, the two little girls made a dash for the right fork. “Slow down!” Malcolm yelled after the girls, as the rest of them ran to catch up. They were getting close. They could all feel it.
The air shimmered as the heat rose off the road surface, mirroring the tension Isabella felt deep into her core. Finding the old man in Araddea’s vision had become a quest that Isabella could not ignore. She longed to find him, ached to find him. If he indeed had a cure – a way to keep her people safe Outside – she would go to the ends of the Earth to find him and bring her people out into the world. Bring them out here with her, together with all the Outside people.
It was a dream worth chasing.
Chapter Five
Luke
Luke did not need to remind Oberon and the mutants in Telemark to beware of human visitors, certainly not after he had shared the secret he carried. Now that Oberon knew about the military’s plan, Luke also brought him up to speed on active-camo chem-rad suits, night vision goggles and other technology he knew they possessed. He did not know if any of that information would keep the mutants of Telemark out of harm’s way, but it was better they knew what they faced. Even in the short time he had been in their company, Luke understood that these were good people. They were not part of the human culture – they knew nothing about enemies, wars or government. If they wanted to be left alone, they deserved to be left in peace. What his government was doing was immoral and criminal. It was inhuman.
Perhaps it was the mutants that retained the world’s humanity, and not the shelter folk after all.
Since the minute that he had overheard his grandfather’s phone call and decided to leave his shelter to find Isabella, that feeling had been nagging at him, wearing at his soul, but it took until he got to Telemark to truly understand his own thoughts. He knew in the deepest part of himself that he despised the plan of his government – despised them.
Isabella had known this. She had felt this way, even without knowing about the plan to use the mutants as slaves… she had set off to change the world, thinking the danger was fifty years away. She left her safe home, and walked off with no more than an idealistic plan.
He knew he could never be what Isabella was, he would never be as selfless; but he would do his part so she could survive to do hers.
Luke was standing in the front yard of the village leader’s log cabin with Violet, Oberon, and a few of the young people who had found him outside their village. The breeze that blew across the yard was just enough to keep the August humidity at bay. He heard bird whistles in the trees and felt the sunshine on his face and arms. Resupplied with food and water, clean clothes, and a direction to travel, Luke was finally ready to leave. He left bottles of INH2 with the medicine woman, with instructions on dosage and use, in case anyone came down with the “wasting disease.”
“Oberon, before I go, I have a special request. I know this is asking a lot and I’ll understand if you choose not to, but would you send someone out to find Chloe?” When Luke found out that the little boy his sister and Malcolm had adopted had died unexpectedly, he had finally found out the mutant girl’s name. He still felt bad that he had not asked her himself when he came across her in his travels. “You can take her medicine – you can save her. And someone needs to tell her about her son. If she’s still alive, that is.”
Archer, the boy who had led the sentries that found Luke, spoke up. “I would like to lead the team to find her, Oberon.”
Oberon concurred with a slight nod of his head, and Violet added, “And if she’s not, we can give her a decent burial in our cemetery with her son.”
Luke did not know much about funerals except for what he had read in the fiction novels back in his shelter. Violet had told him about the religious ceremony that the people of Telemark had used while burying the little boy, Davin, and how it was a melding of all the religions that different groups of settlers had brought to their community. His grandparents had never taught them about gods or religion, so the ceremony itself was of little importance to Luke. However, Luke did understand that dead bodies, especially diseased ones, needed to be disposed of properly.
“Thank you. And thank you all for helping me,” said Luke to the group of well-wishers.
“Isabella’s group has a three-day lead on you, but if you keep up a good pace, you can catch up to them,” said Oberon, shaking Luke’s hand firmly.
Luke nodded, and then gave Violet a quick hug before turning toward the road.
Violet called after him, concerned. “Are you really sure about this, Luke? You don’t need to go after her. They promised they’d be back before winter. You could wait here for her, you know.” She seemed to be always looking after everyone’s safety.
Luke turned back to his group of new friends. Violet and Oberon were holding hands. “I need to go,” said Luke. “Besides the medicine, I have to warn them about the military’s plan. They don’t know the danger they’re in if they get picked up by the soldiers.”
“Luke, she’s not a mutant,” said Oberon. “They’ll probably let her go.”
“I’m not so sure about that.” Colonel Ericcsen’s assessment of his sib gave him reason to doubt. If she would not return to her family’s shelter, she was as inconsequential to the military as a mutant. He offered up a final wave, then turned and left Telemark to follow Isabella’s trail.
* * *
Isabella
Isabella could tell they had crossed into the Yellow Zone without even glancing at her map. She could feel the left over radiation from the small nuclear bomb that hit New York City the first night of the Terror War. The Final War. It had different names. How the world changed overnight!
Fifty years after the explosion, there was still a good amount of radiation in the area. If there had been t
housands or even just hundreds of bombs, the radiation would have circled the world and killed everyone – but a mere thirty bombs meant sections of the Earth had survived. Some of the Yellow Zones were not even contaminated with radiation – but no one knew if the chemical and biological weapons used to destroy the smaller cities still posed a threat. Everything outside the Yellow Zones was somewhat habitable these days, if you did not mind only living twenty or so years. Or if you had no choice.
They could stay in the outskirts of the Yellow Zones for a short period of time, but the longer they stayed, the worse off they would be.
The Zone was much more industrial than where they had traveled before. It had block-like, squat structures with more garage doors than Isabella had ever seen. Low buildings surrounded by large, parking lots stretched to the horizon. Only a handful of rusted cars stood in the lots. People had worked in this area. When the bombs started falling, anyone still in those buildings probably tried to make it home to their families. Her grandfather said the extremists had struck at night, so there likely would not have been many cars around at that time to begin with.
The almost empty parking lots had room for weeds to force their way into the cracks, obliterating solid pavement in most areas. Only a practiced eye could see the roadway. They walked under the shade trees to avoid the hot afternoon sun, farther and farther into the radiation-infested zone marked in caution-yellow on their map.
As they cleared a rise, Malcolm pointed to a large complex of buildings surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. Even the little girls followed his gaze. A big sign loomed atop the tallest building. Isabella read with excellent French pronunciation, “Le Rochér.” She stared at the four-foot high blue letters, hanging six stories up from the side of the concrete edifice. The letter ‘L’ hung sideways, held up only by its electrical wiring.
“I think we’ve found the roach factory,” said Isabella, her smile revealing humor only she could comprehend.
Kalla sounded out the word on the sign, not understanding that the name was not English. “Rocher,” she stated, and then laughed, finally understanding the mystic seer’s mistake. “They don’t make roaches! That’s the name of the place.”
“How do we get in?” asked Clay, his webbed fingers wrapped around the tall-chain link fence that surrounded their destination. The top of the fence angled outward and had nasty metal barbs jutting out in uneven increments. Scaling it would be difficult, if not completely impossible.
“We cut it,” suggested Kalla. Malcolm and his tribe had prepared well for their travels when they left the city of Ewr and they had several hand tools, including a pair of heavy-duty wire cutters.
Malcolm retrieved the tool from his pack and knelt by the fence, working it repeatedly on the wire link to no avail. “This isn’t going to work. The cutters aren’t strong enough. This wire is tough, like a rock. It won’t budge.” He strained and grumbled as he continued trying to cut the fence. “At this rate, it would take all day to cut through enough of the fence to crawl through.”
Just then, the striped tabby jumped from Andra’s arms. “Pumpkin! Come back here.” The cat deftly squeezed through the gaps in the fence.
“We have to go get him!” shouted the three-year-old, her eyes pleading as effectively as her words implored.
Isabella tried to climb the fence but her shoes would not fit in the holes.
“Take them off,” suggested Clay, as he began climbing the fence.
She removed her sneakers, jammed the laces through a belt loop, and tied them together, securing them to her waist. Her feet were small and fit easily between the links.
Clay was a good climber despite his webbed toes and fingers, and quickly scrambled up the fence, while Malcolm was still fastening his own hikers to his backpack.
Isabella reached the top just behind Clay. She hung on precariously, trying to figure out how to get over the top without getting stabbed by the spiky protrusions or falling backwards over the outward-angled section.
Clay yelled down to Kalla. “Throw me your jacket!”
The girl pulled the clothing from her pack and tossed it up to him. Clay skillfully picked it out of the air with his toes and flung the heavy coat over the barbs. Without missing a beat, he climbed the fence and jumped to the ground.
“Come on, Isabella. You can do it!” Clay shouted from the other side of the fence.
Tired of clinging to the fence and spurred on by Clay’s encouragement, she kept the heavy wool between her stomach and the metal barbs, and rolled over the top. She fell to the ground eight feet below like a rock in an avalanche. Ouch, she mumbled as Malcolm asked from the other side of the fence, “Belle! Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, just clumsy. Help the girls up.”
The fence links were no problem for Shia and Andra’s small shoes. Both little girls turned out to be natural climbers, scaling the fence in monkey fashion. Kalla followed behind Andra in case she fell and Malcolm stuck to Shia like glue. They needed help at the top, but once over that hurdle, they both descended much more elegantly than Isabella had. Three feet from the ground, Andra let go and landed cat-like on the ground. Shia came all the way down as if she had been climbing fences for years. It was likely that Clay, Kalla and Malcolm had actually been climbing since they were Andra’s age, growing up in their devastated city. Malcolm pulled Kalla’s coat off the fence before dropping expertly to the ground.
He held the thick, gray garment out to Kalla. “It’s ripped,” he apologized. A foot-long jagged tear stretched down its back.
“Yeeesh! That could just as easily have been our skin,” said Kalla, shoving the heavy coat back into her pack. “I’ll have to fix it when we get back home.”
Having done a fair amount of sewing in her underground compound, Isabella knew mending thick wool would be difficult, but Kalla seemed to take it in stride, not mentioning it again.
“Why did you bring such a heavy coat in August, anyway?” she asked the younger girl.
“Just in case we don’t get back before first frost.”
“Oh.” Isabella was used to the steady temperature of her climate-controlled underground shelter. The change in temperature from winter to summer went from slightly chilly to mildly warmer. Nothing like Outside! She had heard how cold the winters had gotten since the war. The climate had changed drastically. It was not uncommon for winter temperatures to reach twenty below and summers, as she had found out, averaged 100+ degrees most days. Malcolm had shown her some old thermometers with red liquid inside and a scale of numbers on the side marked with an “F” and she had taught him that the “F” meant Fahrenheit. She struggled every day against the heat and humidity, her lungs unaccustomed to soggy air.
How this temperature change could have happened from a chemical and biological war, she did not know. Everything her grandmother had taught her and her sibs about weather and climate change indicated that this situation was not related to the war. Widespread nuclear war would have caused it, but there were not that many nukes. Of the thirty detonated bombs, only a third had contained dirty nuclear material.
Within moments, Shia and Andra cornered the orange cat, who had pinned down a meal. Pumpkin sat at the base of the tall metal and glass building, working his way through a fat gray mouse, one small limb at a time. He pointedly ignored his human companions.
“Eeew!” squealed Shia, looking at the cat’s impromptu feast.
“It’s okay,” said Andra. “He won’t eat the bones, just the fur, and the meat.”
“Uh huh. Still gross.” Shia seemed to lose interest in the cat and scanned their new environment, as if seeing for the first time the place they had entered. “What’s that?” She pointed up at a small metal box with a one-inch square window that hung off the wall several feet above their heads.
When Kalla stepped closer to Clay, the box turned to the right with a whirring noise, as if following her movement.
“It’s watching us!” she exclaimed, her eyes tracking the object as
it tracked them.
“It really is,” agreed Isabella. She took a few steps closer to the building to get a better look. “Somebody in there has working machinery. That’s a camera.”
“We need to get inside,” said Malcolm, his eyes squinting into sharp points.
* * *
Luke
Luke hoped to narrow the three-day gap between himself and the group ahead of him and catch up to Isabella. They had little kids with them, so maybe, just maybe, he could move a little faster.
Araddea had given him the same travel directions she had provided his cousin-sister so he traveled south on the main road out of Telemark until he hit the old interstate, then turned east at mid-morning. His map showed only one clear route for the next ten or twelve miles, then a messy juncture of roads. Up to that point, Luke knew which way to go.
He reached the complicated intersection late that afternoon and searched for signs that Isabella and her adopted “family,” as Violet had called them, had been there – and most importantly, which road they had taken. He wiped his brow for the umpteenth time, the sweat evaporating from his shirtsleeve rapidly in the scorching temperature.
Luke still had trouble believing Isabella had run off with this mutant boy, Malcolm, and now he had discovered that she actually considered herself married to him! He did not believe it but Violet and Oberon insisted that the mutant and his sib were husband and wife. And now she was mother to two little girls as well. Not even seventeen yet, married and mother – had she lost her mind?
Luke hated to admit Colonel Ericcsen might be right about anything, but he understood now that Isabella did not ever intend to go back to their family shelter with him. Which made it all the more important to find her, get her the TB drugs he was carrying, and warn her about the military’s plans for the mutants. If he could not bring her home to safety, he had to do everything he could to protect her Outside. Right now, that meant knowledge and meds. Once Isabella was safe, he would deal with his own future.