Esterhaszy said, “Spivey’ll pay for anything, long’s he doesn’t pay much. If you care to work for food and a corner to sleep in, he’ll send you out to locate intact housing and drag it in.”
But Sam only saw the bright colors for a moment before the world darkened and they faded away. She saw the low, sway-roofed building (looking carefully, she could pick out the three original houses that had been swallowed up by the additions) and the fields and woods around it in gentle pastels then, under a smoky dark sky in which the sun was an angry red coal. Fairy tracings of radiation ran through the valley, separating out into tentacles that wound about and—sooner or later—converged upon the house, tracked in by the inhabitants of the valley. There were sections of land that were almost clean—the top inch of dirt was stripped from the fields yearly and dumped into the nearby river. But even there, the radioactive dust was creeping back, tracked in by farm workers, wafted over by gentle breezes, washed down from the trees by the rains. Invisible and pervasive, it returned.
The radiation was in the trees—she could see the thin veins shooting up through the bark like glowing fuses, bright needle-tracings of light. It was in the lesser plants too, drawn up from the soil and concentrated in the tissues.
As she watched, it all cycled through a full rotation. The trees sprouted from seeds and soared toward the sky, holding the sickness within and sucking up more from the soil, so that they grew and decayed at the same time, curling downward, stunted and malformed. They died and fell and returned to mulch and soil, and the radioisotopes were drawn into new plants. The gently glowing groundcover was eaten by brightly shining herbivores—crippled cattle and squirrels with running sores—and the concentrated radioisotopic dust within the plants was concentrated even more within their organs. They in turn were eaten by carnivores that burned like neon—twisty-legged coyotes, and flightless owls, and teratoid humans. The concentration of radiation was highest among these, and their pups and children were born malformed and mutated, sickly and treasuring cancerous growths within from the very start.
Sam shivered, and the vision was gone. Not so much as a single pulse of the Reactor had gone by while she was in the fugue state: neither Keith nor Bob had noticed. But she could read it all now, the colors and glowing lines of radiation all about her.
She understood what it meant.
Spivey himself finally appeared on the third day.
Sam was reading a girl with a blind eye and a cluster of tentacular growths on one cheek when he came growling up the halls. She could hear Spivey scattering those waiting in the narrow alcove outside. They cried out, startled, as he bulled through, but scurried aside for him.
The door slammed open and Spivey stood in the frame. Alarmed, the girl leaped to her feet, and snatched up her blouse. Awkwardly trying to button as she ran, she darted around the big man and was gone.
Spivey was a barrel-chested man with a full, black beard. His nucleopore hung loose around his neck, though there was a light breeze picking boneseekers off the hillside, and Sam had the windows open. He had the arrogant stance of a man who believed he could command the winds themselves. “Okay, what is this crap I’ve been hearing?” he demanded.
Esterhaszy had started forward when Spivey burst in. Now he cautiously returned to his seat by the medical bags. Uncrossing her legs, Sam sat up straighter on the crate of whetstones. One foot just barely grazed a sack filled with heavy chain. She looked the man in the eye and said, “I was told you didn’t care what was sold in your house so long as you got your ten percent.”
“I don’t give a royal fuck what you were told,” Spivey said. “Answer the question. When you arrived, you said the midget was going to set up as a doctor.”
“I offer a free physical to all of Ms. Laing’s clients,” Esterhaszy said. “Unfortunately, not everyone takes advantage of the offer.”
Spivey glanced down at the dwarf, as if seeing him for the first time. “You look like a sensible guy. Don’t tell me you believe in this mumbo-jumbo.”
“No,” Esterhaszy said, “as a matter of fact I do not.”
Oddly enough, Spivey looked reassured. He grunted. “So it’s all a scam then, is what you’re telling me?”
“It is not,” Sam said indignantly. “I have the vision, and I can prove it.”
“That so?” he asked dubiously.
She tightened her lips and nodded. “Take your shirt off.”
Spivey crossed his arms. “I will do no such thing, little lady. You want to read my fortune, do it with my clothes on.”
The radiation lines glowed on his forearms like Aztec carvings, and ran over his face and across his brow, crowding one upon the other. They were small and cluttered, the tracings of a complicated life, but she could read them. “Okay,” Sam said. “To begin with, you’re dying and you know it.”
Spivey cocked his head slightly to one side, as if listening more carefully, and smiled.
“You’re coughing up blood every night. You’re a lot weaker than you used to be—that’s why your skin is so pale. On a bad day you can’t hide it, and the good days are getting scarcer. That’s why nobody sees you around much anymore, why you stay hidden in your rooms. You don’t want them to know that your body is failing.” She followed a green line up and around one arm, wishing she could see where it lead, ascertain fully what it meant. “Right now the backs of your hands have no sensation whatsoever. You’re having some trouble with your spine that you’re able to control, and a periodic tremble in your cheeks that you can’t. Your liver is losing function. It’s going fast, but you’re not going to have the time to die of it.
“Because you’re going to die of pseudopneumonia within six months.”
Spivey uncrossed his arms. “Is that all?” he asked ironically.
“No,” she said. “You haven’t been able to get it up for a year.”
The mule train slowly climbed the valley, following the pre-Meltdown road up in a long curve. Keith, who had been called suddenly from his provisioning, was in the lead.
“You sure made Spivey mad,” Esterhaszy said. He chuckled. “I thought he was going to burst an artery right there on the spot.”
“No,” Sam said. “He’s going to die of pseudopneumonia.”
Ahead, where the road curved around a stand of creeping willows, there was a pale figure standing calmly in the middle of the way, pack on back, leaning against a Drift-made rifle. Sam noticed that Keith let one hand rest on his saddlebag as they approached.
“Howdy.” Keith reined in the lead mule. Bob had faded back, to cover the rear.
“Howdy.” The boy was thin and lanky, about eighteen years old, and an albino. His hair was a fierce white thatch. “Name’s Flinch. Used to live down at Spivey’s Trading.” They had seen him there the day before; Sam had given him a reading.
After a brief pause, Keith said, “Yes?”
The kid stared out into the woods, as if he were about to say something profoundly unimportant. “Heard you’re going to Honkeytonk. Wondered if you minded people joining your party. Got my own food, and I can shoot. Can carry my own weight.”
Keith shook his head, but before he could speak Esterhaszy called up, “Hold on a minute. It wouldn’t hurt us and it might even help. The size of your party matters in the Drift. Some yahoo with a gun might want to have a go at us.”
Still shaking his head, Keith said, “It doesn’t matter what you …”
“He’ll come,” Sam said suddenly. They turned to look at her. “It’s written on his forehead like a crown of fire. He’s coming with us.”
Flinch nodded and shouldered his gun. “Okay, Davey,” he called up into the wood. “Lady says all right.”
Leaves rustled, and a young boy ran out into the road. He had two short flippers where his arms should have been, like rudimentary, useless wings, and they flapped slightly as he ran.
By the time they made camp that night—in a clearing that Sam declared free of boneseekers—they had an additional entou
rage of ten, all dropouts from Spivey’s Trading.
On Esterhaszy’s advice (though she would have done the same without it), Sam was careful to hide her vampirism from the Drifters. Bob slipped her a canteen of blood he had drained earlier and treated with oxylate. She drank it privately in her tent; it tasted of the anticoagulant, but was still good.
When she emerged, they were waiting for her. They formed a half circle a respectful distance from the tent, and fell silent at her emergence. Their eyes stared hungrily at her, and for an instant she quailed. But almost instantly, she rallied.
“I’ll do one reading tonight,” she said. “No more. They tire me out too much.”
The Drifters consulted among themselves, murmuring, then let a dark-haired woman of about thirty come forward. She had the same blobbish blue tattoo on her forehead as did Sam.
“You’ve been in the Drift how long—about three years?” The woman nodded quickly. “Well, first of all take off that mask.” The woman obeyed. She did not wear a nucleopore, but a homemade mask. It consisted of two linen squares sewn together with cotton batting in between, and two pairs of draw strings. Not terribly effective, but better than nothing. “Take a good, deep breath. The air’s clean here; it’s safe. Feels pretty good, eh?”
The woman nodded, flashed a shy grin.
Sam read her slowly. When she read the chest, she had the woman unbutton her blouse and open it, keeping her back to the others. Distantly, remotely, she noted how the woman’s breathing quickened as she traced a radiation line across one nipple, and down past the navel. “Liver’s in pretty good shape,” she noted. “Lungs are clean. You’re pretty lucky, you know that?”
The woman dipped her head, blushing.
Finally she had all the data and let it wash around in her head before pronouncing judgment. “Fifteen years,” she said. “That’s pretty good for the Drift, too.”
As she retreated to her tent, she noticed Bob and Keith off at the outskirts of the group, watching her intently. Alone among the group, they both wore masks.
Sam’s followers grew in number as they progressed north. By ones and twos they trickled in, guided by rumors and chance encounters with those already in the entourage when they ranged outward, hunting or foraging. They came from settlements of ten to fifty people, places so small and hidden that half of them had no names, and most of them Esterhaszy had never heard of.
By week’s end there were close to fifty, and they significantly slowed the group down. Keith was visibly upset at this, and annoyed as well, Sam could see, by the realization that control of events was slipping out of his hands.
Bob advised Sam to caution. “Drifters are a skittish lot to begin with, and you’re picking up the superstitious fringe. I’ve seen a dog-faced boy torn to shreds because the rumor went out that he was a werewolf. These people are volatile.”
“I can handle them,” Sam said.
But what proved harder to handle were her feelings for Keith. It was almost unbearable, sometimes, being so close to him day in and day out, and yet being unable to do anything about it.
The problem was not so much the difference in ages as the difference in experience. There were too many areas, Sam realized, where she was naive, young and dull.
One night, after brooding on the problem for a long time, Sam crept from her tent unnoticed, and quietly slipped to the pallet she had seen Flinch build. His hair was a dull red in the light of a dying ember fire. She touched him lightly on the shoulder and he started up from sleep, immediately alert and calmly watchful.
When she told him what she wanted, he didn’t ask any questions, but slung his blanket over one arm and, taking her hand in his, led her away from the camp, deep into the woods. “So we won’t be interrupted,” he explained.
He was a careful lover, and considerate, and if the experience wasn’t exactly wonderful, it was at least … sort of comforting. Afterwards, he held her in his arms, and she liked that.
For the longest time she lay there simply thinking. About the experience, about Keith, about how rapidly her life was changing. It hadn’t been as profound and moving as she’d expected, giving up her virginity, and she thought about that too.
“Flinch?” she said.
“Mmmmm.”
She hesitated because she didn’t want to appear ignorant. But it was something she really wanted to know. “Why did you pull out all of a sudden right there at the end?”
“So you wouldn’t have a baby.” If he was surprised by the question, he didn’t let it show.
“Oh.” Sam filed away the information for future reference.
But Keith still remained aloof, distant, untouchable. The trouble was that she didn’t have the slightest idea of how to approach him, how to let him know she was available.
The procession grew. There were over a hundred in the following by the end of the second week, and they formed a straggling tail a mile long in passage. Some few had motorized transit, Detroit three-wheelers or Cambridge steamers, and these would leap-frog ahead many miles and then set up their stills to brew fuel for the next day’s trek. Others had horses or mules, or even wagons, and most simply walked.
Evenings, they pitched tents and built lean-tos, forming a camp with a certain carnival atmosphere to it, full of chatter and laughter and even games. Many fast romances formed around the campfires. There were liaisons made and broken, enmities that came out of nowhere, and even a knife duel that ended badly. The hill people lived at a fast pace.
Sam was required to give several readings nightly, the demand was so great, and the questions were taking a trend that she did not feel entirely comfortable with, away from the medical and toward the personal.
A boy with one shoulder much lower than the other and barely into his adolescence did not look grateful when she told him he would die at age thirty-six. “But it hurts,” he said. “My insides hurt all the time. Every night I ask God to make it stop hurting, but every morning it hurts all the same. You got to make it stop.”
And when she told him that she could do nothing, he spat at her feet. Glaring at her accusingly, he called his pregnant wife to his side, and the two angrily left the camp.
Halfway through the next reading, a gaunt-looking woman stopped Sam as she started to unbutton her blouse. She seized one arm, digging her gnarled old nails in deep. “No,” she said. “I don’t want to know about my death. I want to know how I can have a healthy child.”
The woman’s ovaries were so tightly packed with radioisotopes that Sam could feel them, through flesh and skin and clothing. “You can’t have a child,” Sam said.
“I’ve had five children,” the woman said in a monotone. “Three died coming out, one was killed by the hex doctor, and the last was crippled up real bad and died. I want to have a baby that’ll live.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t do anything for you.”
The woman would not let go. Hard, blunt fingernails dug deep into her arm. “I’m starting to lose my hair.” Tears were rolling down her cheeks, but still her voice sounded dead. “There’s only the time for this one more. It don’t got to look pretty or anything. Just so long as it lives.”
Sam was tugging at her arm now, trying to free it. Esterhaszy and Keith were away off by their campfire, arguing over something on the map. They could not see that she needed their help, and the Drifters sitting nearby simply leaned forward intently, watching. They did not move to help.
“What do you want from me?” the woman demanded. “I do what you want. I kill for you, if you ask.”
Frantic, almost panicked, Sam glanced down to where the woman’s gnarled hands held her, and froze in horror. She saw the lines glowing on her own forearm and read their gnostic message.
Death.
She burst into tears and, shocked, the woman let go. Leaping to her feet, Sam ran, crying, into her tent.
When Keith came in to find out what was the matter, she just dug her face deeper into the blankets and shook it helplessly back and forth. Unt
il finally he had to go away.
She cried for several hours that night.
The next morning was spent crossing a brown valley, a place where the Meltdown rains had supersaturated the soil with radioactive dust. Very little grew there, and what did grow soon died. The grass crunched underfoot, and little puffs of dust flew up at every step. Sam kept her nucleopore firmly on, and the entire procession bunched together to cross the valley as quickly as could be done.
The clouds of dust blinded Sam. It was like passing through flames.
In midafternoon the crew passed a reasonably clean spot, and—after warning them all not to take off their masks—Sam declared a stopping place. When Keith heard this, he came back to angrily remonstrate with her. “We’re moving at no speed at all! These clowns are only holding us back. By the time we reach Honkeytonk the whole fucking war will be over.”
“There are more important things than your war,” Sam said. It hurt her to see how hard he took those words. But they were true. It was her procession and she didn’t have to take it to Honkeytonk if she didn’t want to.
Esterhaszy had joined them. “There’s a lot of talk going up and down the line about building ‘the New Jerusalem,’” he said. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about it, would you?”
“I’ve heard,” Sam said. “I haven’t made up my mind yet, though.” She turned, and left them behind.
She managed to slip away from camp unnoticed by the simple expedient of pitching her tent by the verge of the woods. She walked in through the front flap, and a moment later crawled out under the back wall. Half a mile back along the road they had come up was her reason for calling an early halt—an old church.
The church was a great old Gothic monstrosity from two centuries before, and the town it had stood in was almost gone, its buildings collapsed into piles of rubble overgrown with mutant thorn vines and small scrub. Only the church walls remained. The roof had fallen to the ground, and the stained glass that had filled the arched windows had long ago been picked up and taken away by scavengers.
In the Drift Page 11