by Sam Winston
Weller kept himself between Penny and the old man. Letting his mind clear. Looking at him over his shoulder. His child just breathing, which was enough. “You didn’t find anything,” he said.
“No sir, I did not.”
“I told you.”
“They all tell me. They all lie.” He blew smoke at the glass bottle. “Alcohol’s right here if you want it. Cotton balls and so forth. Bandaids in the locker.”
Weller imagined the sting of the alcohol and turned away and drew Penny tighter if that were possible. Thinking of what he’d have to do. How it would hurt his child again and how he had to do it. “Soon,” he said. Bouncing her a little. “Soon.” And then looking back at the old man. “I’ve got a little money if you didn’t take it already.”
“I don’t want your money.”
“It’ll make up for what you didn’t get.”
“I don’t want it. I start doing a cash business where does that end? What kind of people have I got to deal with then? I’ll stick to credits, if you don’t mind.”
“Then let us be on our way.”
“On your way.” He said it like it was a joke. “On your way to where, is what I can’t figure.”
“That’s my problem, isn’t it.”
“There’s nothing out there. Just more of what you came from.”
“Let us go, then.”
“Absolutely,” said the old man. “Go on and good riddance. I won’t stand in your way.”
“All right.”
“You’ve wasted enough of my time as it is. You’re a total loss already.”
The girl had begun to cry. Great deep sobs. Weller looked at the old man and the gun on the crate. He said he was going to gather up their things.
“Fine by me. I’d use that alcohol pretty soon, though. Just from a medical point of view.”
Weller didn’t want to put her down. Keeping an eye on the old man and the gun he went to where they’d dropped their packs and kneeled and picked them both up with one hand. Coming back to a standing position. Drawing breath. “We’re going now.”
“Bye bye.”
The girl sobbed.
Her father carried her through the doorway out of the cold bunker and into the bluelit stairwell. The girl risking a look back over his shoulder.
“You take good care of that kitty cat, now.”
Weller had never climbed faster. The girl howling all of a sudden and both of them bleeding still and his clothes stinking of her sickness. Up the concrete steps and through the blue tarpaulin and into the heat and the sun as if the heat and the sun were cures for everything. The alleyway cut into the school building was bright and the space beyond it was brighter still. Hot as noon. A playground off to one side partly wrecked but mostly just abandoned. A splintered see-saw weathered back into a plank. He sat Penny on the long end of it and she didn’t want to let go of him so he picked her up and held onto her longer. Tried again and this time it took. He asked her if she knew what this was, knowing she didn’t. He told her to watch. He put down the packs and he stepped away and she called him back and then he stepped away again and this time she let him. Went to the other end of the plank and pushed it down and took her for a little ride. Just lifted her up a foot or two into the air. Into a kind of heaven.
She laughed.
It was a lever, a thing with which a person could move the world, and in different circumstances he would have described that possibility but he didn’t do that now. He just let her down slowly and lifted her up again a few more times and then he said honey we’ll do lots more of this in a minute. Just you wait. I forgot something we need. He backed away and she let him. Sitting on the long end of the plank certain he’d come back to lift her up again. The sun working on her and brightening things and helping bring her back.
He entered the little alley and pulled open the tarp and went back down the stairs.
Found the old man sitting right where he’d been. Looking disgusted and weary but not entirely unsurprised. Tipping his head toward the bottle of alcohol and saying, “I knew you’d come for it.”
Weller asked about the locker with the bandaids and he told him where it was. Helped himself to all there were and a spool of adhesive tape too and some gauze pads and a little tube of antibiotic ointment. Loaded his pockets with these rarities. Things that were only rumors out in the Zone. He noticed the flashlight and pocketed that as well. He left the locker and came to where the old man was sitting and took the alcohol. Cotton balls and a rag that was there too.
The old man said, “You can have the rag or the cotton but you can’t have both.” A cigarette between his lips. Picking up the lighter and flicking the top open with is thumb.
“Don’t,” Weller said. “Wait on that a little.”
The old man saying why not. It’s a free country. Just choose one and go. Don’t try telling me what to do. The old man acting ornery and tired and maybe a little sick of what he’d done. Saying go on clean up that little girl of yours.
Weller put down the rag and that seemed to satisfy the old man, who turned away and studied the table and the mess on the floor with a look in his eyes that said he regretted that he’d have to clean it up sometime soon. Weller took the rag again while he wasn’t looking and put down the bottle and took up the other bottle, the brown bottle full of ether. He opened it and doused the rag in one motion and he fell upon the old man. Knocking him backwards and pressing the rag to his face. Saying don’t smoke around this stuff unless you want us both getting killed. But the old man was already out.
He had a brand in his neck all right, that little square with two metal prongs mounted in rubber. Once Black Rose, always Black Rose. Weller took the lighter and worked the bottom part of it open and put the brand inside, in with the soaked cotton wadding. Pushing it deep, burying it there for safekeeping. The lighter fluid cleaning the blood from his fingers. He draped the rag over the old man’s face and dribbled some more ether onto it and capped the bottle, not knowing what the end of that would be and not caring. How much ether could a person breathe before it killed him. Then he slid the lighter into his pocket and went out to the bluelit stairs and back to the playground.
Almost running.
Lifted up.
THREE:
The Tigris and the Euphrates
Children on the broken road. Eight or ten of them in a cloud, all ages, raising dust as they went. A little army moving between green fields, half of its motion forward and the other half a busy side to side tussling.
Penny’s face brightened when her father pointed to them from the top of a rise. The swarm of them down below, moving along the valley floor. She caught their movement and their long shadow and heard the sound of their voices, a song filtering up, and she took her father’s hand and they walked a little faster. Aiming to meet them at a fenced-in crossroads. The fences were tagged with the PharmAgra wheat stalk and her father was certainly aware of trespassing on this road, but how much trouble can you get into when eight or ten little children are doing the same. No tire tracks on the gravel whatsoever. It had been forever since this road was last traveled by anyone but the likes of these.
They came near, and the children shied. Penny and her father at the center of the crossroads and the children hanging back a few yards, milling, as if they’d met some invisible resistance. Weller raised his hand and called out to them. The sun so low that at this distance he stood practically in their shadow. His own stretching a mile behind him. They didn’t answer. They just shied, their eyes like horses.
Penny broke the spell, dropping her father’s hand and running forward. The children swarmed around her and enfolded her.
They were brown children, and they made Weller think of Indians. They were creatures of the outdoors and they looked it, even though they’d been on their way home from school. Chattering like birds now that they’d been let out. Imagine that. A school out here. One room, they said. It must have been like in the old days, before education turned into an
industry and then into an industry that failed. Just a little antique falling-down one room schoolhouse, as if there was something to learn and some reason to learn it. Something up ahead to get ready for.
He and Penny followed them home. Down the broken blacktop and through a hole in a chain link fence and up rows of tall corn. The children invisible beneath the plants this late in the summer and Weller almost invisible too. They said there were other ways. Other ways for other seasons and other cover. They passed through a wirecut fence again into a different field and down into a mansized culvert running slow with mud. They passed a couple of men coming the other way with backpacks and exchanged not a word. Came up in a tobacco field.
* * *
There were fences all around, but they were different. Tall fences tagged PharmAgra but poorly kept. Rusted in spots and painted over and rusting through again. Weller guessed the pieces had been dragged here from some great distance. Salvaged elsewhere and brought here for camouflage. To make this place look ordinary. He thought of how much work that must have been. Work and stealth combined.
And all because there was something different about the tobacco here. The leaves were too small, the plants too weak and spindly. It was nowhere near as dense and vigorous and large-scale profitable as the big engineered plants growing everywhere else. It wasn’t PharmAgra. Weller didn’t know much about agriculture but he knew this. He thought of those men with the backpacks, going out. Pictured them with their payloads of old-growth plants or disengineered plants or whatever it was they were growing here. Risking a run-in with some bounty hunter like that old Black Rose. The amount of trouble that men doing a job like that would face. And the rewards.
“Children.” A voice came from behind him, soft. “They trust everybody.”
Weller turned.
“Grownups like us, not so much.” The woman speaking was small and intense, her dark hair shot through with gray. She watched the children pick up some game they’d left off before school. Penny included. Lines and squares scratched into the dirt. Pebbles tossed into the grid and shouts raised. She smiled as she stood there watching, but her eyes were rueful. An afterimage of something in them. Burned there.
Weller said, “This will do my daughter a world of good.”
The woman nodded.
“Which of them are yours?”
“None.” Not looking at him. “None of these. I did have two. A boy and a girl. My husband kept them behind.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Bangalore.”
Weller was silent.
“His parents. Tradition. The plan was that I would fly back once a month.” Toeing the dirt. “I did it for the longest time. These days, Bangalore may as well be on the moon.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me too. They’re grown up now, I would hope.”
“I’m sure they’re doing fine.”
The woman was silent.
In between the rows it was Penny’s turn to throw and her stone happened to land somewhere close to the right place and a cheer went up.
“Take good care of her,” the woman said.
“I’m trying.”
“It’s a shame about her eyes,” she said.
“Yes. Yes it is.”
“Was it—”
“Yes.”
“I thought so. It’s a twisted world we live in.”
“No question.”
“You grow something in God’s earth with your own two hands and you can’t even eat it.” She looked at Weller and he didn’t look back. Studied the vertical slit alongside his windpipe. Freshly crusted over. Better to talk about that. “Tell me how you went generic,” she asked.
“I didn’t.”
“I don’t think you cut yourself shaving.” Narrowing her eyes toward Penny, Penny standing on her toes and clapping her hands together. “She certainly didn’t.”
“She’s second-generation. Me, I’m one of those that the Zone just kind of came up around. I still live in the house where I grew up. I still run my father’s old workshop.”
“Tradition.” She nodded. She knew all about tradition.
He touched the cut.
“So what about that?” she said.
“That? That was basically a misunderstanding.” He told her about the old man in the bunker. A corporate mercenary gone freelance.
She said knew all about him. Said he’d never managed to find his way to the fields that they kept under cultivation but then again he’d never needed to. All he had to do was haunt the edges, stay near the spots where the gravel roads met the highway and close by the big culverts where men with packs and duffel bags might hide themselves and their merchandise—where they might meet other men with credits in their brands and black market scanners and ideas about the redistribution of wealth—and a bounty hunter like him didn’t need to bother locating the actual source. The reward money was more consistent if he didn’t. That old scavenger. It hadn’t been much more than a day since Weller had left him, and there were reports already that he wasn’t in any of his usual hiding places. That he might be out of commission. Apparently they owed Weller a debt.
He said some food and fresh water would do if they had any to spare. He’d left that bunker in kind of a hurry.
* * *
The people here buried themselves alive underneath the ground, because even though planes didn’t come over very often what if they did. They dug wide, deep holes in self-defense. Six of them altogether shared by a dozen families in a clearing that wasn’t quite a clearing. Dirt hauled out and heaped up into little low quarter-domes like somebody had buried a gigantic sphere and left part of it poking up by accident. Propped up inside with barn timbers. A doorway cut in and covered over with fencing material with a ramp beneath it leading down, a hole in the middle of the roof for ventilation, and tobacco plants growing everywhere as if these were just humped-up places in the ground. As if in the absence of plows and cultivators the earth had begun retaking its old unknowable shape.
The sun sank low and food appeared and tables materialized. Long tables where they all ate together. The children at one end. The woman at the other, running things. Directing. Not quite the oldest but surely the most revered. Her name was Patel. She was a doctor, but not the medical kind. A laboratory scientist. “A fish out of water doesn’t begin to describe it,” she said. And yet she persevered. She had equipment, although it wasn’t anything like the tools she’d had in Bangalore, back when she’d been working for NutraMax. She’d done tobacco there, too. Tobacco was what NutraMax did best. It was the reason PharmAgra had bought them, and the reason they’d shut them down once they’d transferred the technology and commercialized the plant stock. She’d done the transfer and she’d helped with the commercialization. And then the bottom had fallen out and the federal government had quit paying its bills and international relations had gone all to hell. She’d found herself stranded here jobless and hopeless and surrounded by poisons she’d engineered herself. Her two little children back in Bangalore, growing up without her.
She told herself things were better in India. Probably not as good as they were in China, but better than they were here. A mother bereft of her children could take some comfort in that. In the technology and manpower and investment capital that were concentrated where her children were these days. Concentrated to such an extent that India and China didn’t need the western hemisphere at all anymore. North America wasn’t worth thinking about as a market or even as a source of cheap labor, the transportation costs were so high.
It had taken twenty years and more, but little by little Patel had recovered these tobacco plants. Torn the doctored ones apart cell by cell and reassembled them into something close to the original. The thing she’d started with. Real tobacco, nothing poisonous about it except in the ordinary old-fashioned way, and if you insisted on smoking it then you got what you deserved. Some of that danger had been bred out of the commercial strains when the proprietary code had gone in, and won
der of wonders here it was again. You can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but it keeps on coming back. Nonetheless, people who sought the real thing and had the means to buy it and the health insurance to cover the consequences wanted it just the way it was, cancer and all. They thrilled to the risk.
These last couple of years she’d been working mainly on wheat. Just imagine, she said. Tobacco was profitable, tobacco kept their little village going on this tiny patch of land, but with wheat you could expand. You could reclaim the world. Anyone could grow wheat, practically anywhere. Civilization would spread out again from this very spot. It would seek the most remote of places and recover them by means of its own generative power. The Connecticut River and the Long Island Sound would be the new Tigris and Euphrates. Where it all began.
She looked Weller in the eye. Saying just think how the generations to come will remember us.
Stars began to show and candles burned on the table. The children down at the other end raising up their laughter in the dark, and one tall young man riding herd on them. Their teacher from the schoolhouse. Now and then he turned his head and looked over at Patel in the way he might look upon a saint. Only just daring to permit himself.
Twenty years and more was a long time, she said. Things broke. Things wore out. She studied Weller and said he’d mentioned running his father’s old workshop. She wondered exactly what that might mean. What kind of a workshop it was. She hated to be forward but if he could help she needed to know.
Machinery, he said. All kinds.
Oh thank God. The Cradle of Civilization wouldn’t wait.
* * *
Over breakfast in the flat light of sunrise he watched her swallow, trying to spot an incision in her neck. Her own stigma to match his. But there was none, and he asked was she still branded after all.