by Eisele, Kimi
She sagged into the office chair and pushed it back, inadvertently knocking into the filing cabinet, which teetered, sending a box toppling to the floor. Beatrix stared at the box for a second, then leapt from her seat. Chocolate. The box was full of chocolate bars! She did a quick count. Six boxes, all full but one. All told, over five hundred chocolate bars.
The chocolate was a little waxy with age, but the flavor instantly reminded her of the rain forest: the almond-shaped leaves of the cacao trees, an orchestra of birdsong, the squish-clomp of the burros as they made their way over damp trails, burlap bundles strapped to their sides. The earthy sweetness lit her up with joy.
Currency, she thought. This chocolate was valuable.
The raiders arrived in the city mostly by bicycle. They were kids, scrawny and pimpled, though some had mustaches already. They lit torches and hurled them into parks. The trees and trash went up in flames, along with cardboard shanties and whole families asleep inside them. They took food wherever they found it. They knifed and chained and struck those who tried to stop or slow them.
When the loud pops woke Carson up in the middle of the night, he first thought they were fireworks. More cracks and pops. Then shouts and screams from the stairwell, and footsteps down the hallway. First one set, running, then many. He stood motionless in the dark, the gun in his hands, his heart racing.
Disoriented, he went to the window. Giant flowers of orange flame bloomed across the city. He put one hand on the glass and stood watching the burning.
He slept fitfully, fears of flames engulfing his thoughts. Several times, he imagined the building was on fire and he sat up to look out the window at the darkness. His only sense of assurance came from his packed bag.
Morning sun came through the window with a pewter-like cast, and Carson thought the room looked odd, both utterly familiar and completely foreign—the way a place looked when you knew you were seeing it for the last time. He gathered up the rest of his food—bread, pasta, some random cans of vegetables, a few spices—and tucked the gun in the side pocket of the backpack. Out of habit, he locked the door behind him when he went.
The street was quiet and smelled strange. A large black trash bag had been tossed on the sidewalk ahead of him, likely the source of the smell. As he approached, he saw that the bag was not a bag but a body, twisted and charred, burned black, except for a bit of clothing that remained. Carson gasped and turned away, incredulous, his stomach churning. Dear God. Was it someone he knew?
He went quickly to Rocco’s Café, which was tucked between a Chinese restaurant and a vintage bookstore, neither one in service. Next to the café’s fading yellow sign, a bell hung from a long cord. Carson reached up and rang.
When Jairo appeared, Carson held out two envelopes, one for his sister, one for Beatrix.
Jairo looked closely at the addresses, then slapped the envelope for Beatrix. “Shit, mister. I don’t know if the network goes that far.”
Carson held out a thick stack of bills. “Is a hundred enough?”
Jairo nodded and shoved the bills into his pocket. His eyes met Carson’s. “And prayers never hurt.” Before returning inside, Jairo said, “You take care, mister, alright?”
“You too,” Carson said, calling after him. Then he pulled from his pocket the piece of paper on which the cabdriver had written his address. He hurried toward it, hoping he wasn’t too late.
The chocolate in her backpack, Beatrix left the office and biked back through the neighborhood. Just a few blocks from home, she came upon a man sitting in a folding chair, a red bandana on his head. A man with a rifle slung across his shoulder paced the sidewalk a few feet away.
“You a resident?” the first one said. He was stocky, with a toned chest and biceps that pushed out from his short shirtsleeves like large apples.
What was this? Were they here before, on her way to the office, or had they just materialized? Beatrix felt a trickle of sweat slide down the inside of her T-shirt.
“You can approach. No need to be afraid, ma’am.” The man’s light-green eyes were striking, but his cop-like manner put Beatrix off.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Neighborhood checkpoint,” he said. “Just state your address and you can go on through.”
Beatrix grimaced. “So you decide who gets in and who doesn’t?”
The man smiled, the green eyes narrowing. “That’s right. If you live here, you’ll be glad for that.”
A burst of static and a muffled voice came from the direction of the other guard, who was fiddling with a walkie-talkie or a radio.
“We live in the neighborhood. We ask everyone to declare themselves. We’re just protecting the place.”
Beatrix looked around nervously. What if he searched her backpack? The precious chocolate.
“Look,” he said, seeming to noticing her discomfort, “we’re just trying to keep people in line. There’s a lot of confusion, and that makes people do crazy things. Things you wouldn’t expect. We’ve got word of some kids who are particularly dangerous. They ride bikes, as a matter of fact. You could be one of them, for all I know.”
Oh, so she’d gone from “ma’am” to a dangerous hoodlum kid in two minutes? “I live that way,” Beatrix said, pointing west. “On Halcyon.”
More hissing static came from the radio, then a voice: “Water coming down the hill. Should be there by tomorrow, no problem.”
“What is that?” Beatrix asked, gesturing to the sound.
“Local radio. Whatever we can get. Usually ham radio.”
“Bandits have been cleared from Highway Eighty-Four now, along with the barricades. It is now passable. Highway Eighty-Four is now passable.”
“That’s KH47,” he said. “He’s up north. About a hundred seventy-five miles away. Earlier, he reported that the grid went out. As in, there will be no more intermittent power here. All the way black.”
“Really?” Beatrix said.
He nodded. “The last domino.”
Beatrix thought of Carson, all the miles between them. A light inside her went out.
The radio spewed static. Her mind went then to Hank and Dolores. Maybe there was a way to communicate. “Can you talk back?” she asked the green-eyed guard.
“Not from here, but in my garage I can.” He squinted at her and stiffened. “Wait a minute, where did you say you lived?”
“Halcyon,” Beatrix repeated.
More static on the radio, and then another voice came, this one clear and absorbing. “. . . the floods would come, and they came. We said the flu would come, and it came. We said darkness would come, and it came. Look around, what do you see through the darkness: desperation, illness, starvation. Who do you turn to? Who can you trust when your neighbor is the one trying to steal your food?”
What was all this? Beatrix wondered. Was the right wing back at it, instilling fear again?
“You can walk away from all that. You can come to an abundant world. Our coffers are full. Nothing missing here but you. We are waiting for you. We will rise.”
The green-eyed guard raised his eyebrows. Beatrix couldn’t read him. Did he believe all that?
“That’s Jonathan Blue,” the guard said. “Aside from us ham operators, he’s the only thing of substance. We can’t quite figure—”
“Substance?” Beatrix said.
“Meaning his signal comes through clear as day, all the time, on AM.” He stiffened. “Miss, what’s your name, please?”
“Beatrix,” she said.
“Bee-tricks,” he said. “Don’t be so quick to judge.” He then swept his hand out grandly, as if holding open a curtain. “Go ahead.”
Pushing her bike, Beatrix peered at the radio. She wanted to know more, but right then she was simply glad for passage. She looked back at the guards, skeptical. What was it about bandanas? She thought back to the activists she knew, the sense of communal identity they’d had when wearing them. Had they just been guises of self-importance back then, too?
“Hey,” Beatrix called out. “Who are those men in red bandanas? With rifles.”
“Our protectors,” the redhead said, with a southern accent. He put one hand on his hip. “Place your trust in them, child.”
When Beatrix didn’t respond, he said, “I’m joking!”—without the accent this time. “They mean perfectly well. They’re neighbors here. They probably have rescuer syndrome, which can be attractive in its own way.”
“And annoying as hell,” said the other gardener.
“Oh, Finn,” the redhead said. “Don’t be difficult. Be thankful. Our food is precious here, and they do protect it from those who want to steal it. And some of those men keep us all well-informed with their radios.”
“Yeah, they had a radio,” Beatrix said. She was about to say more, but Finn rested his massive head on the redhead’s bony shoulder.
“So this is your garden?” Beatrix asked.
“Everyone’s garden, really. Just gotta put in the work. Food for labor. We can always use help,” Finn said. “This is Rog. And I’m Finn. You want some oranges? Someone brought a cartload the other day.” He gestured to the gate, and Beatrix wheeled her bike in.
“They gutted a grove somewhere south of here, I guess,” Rog said, showing her three cardboard boxes full of glowing navel oranges. “Just when you think the world had run out of kindness.”
“Will you sell them?” Beatrix asked.
“We’ll eat them,” Rog said, tossing one to her. “And trade them.”
Beatrix studied the orange in her hands for a moment, savored its color. She peeled it slowly, the way her aunt Vera always did, spiraling the peel off in one single piece. Afterward, Vera would gently re-form the peel into a sphere. As a kid, Beatrix had loved this act of ordinary magic, the transformation of something into nothing, then back into something again. Everything with Vera was like that, it seemed. She’d been gone for over ten years, but Beatrix still missed her magic.
It was Dolores who’d inspired the idea for the global geography lesson. “A little Earth,” she’d said one time when Beatrix held up a hollow peel.
She looked at the peel in her hand now and thought of Carson, how he’d smiled and pulled out his pen right away after she’d tossed him the orange that day in the classroom.
A white-haired man in a faded sports jacket pedaled by on a bike, announcing through a megaphone: “Neighborhood meeting tomorrow at three o’clock. Be a part of the solution!”
Just like in Ecuador, Argentina, Mexico, El Salvador, Beatrix thought, the roving vendors and politicians announcing their wares and positions via prerecorded looping messages. She told the gardeners about having just returned from Mexico, about Hank and Dolores and their map to the farm.
“There are hundreds of farms up there,” Rog said.
“And there’s this farm right here,” Finn said, opening his arms to the garden. “It’s about to get bigger. Why don’t you tell your friends to come on back here and farm with us?”
Beatrix felt a tightening in her stomach, the sense of lostness returning.
“It’s hard, I know,” Rog said. “No other family around here?”
Beatrix shook her head. “Dad died a long time ago. Mom remarried—the guy’s an alt-right nut. They drink in Southern California.” She paused, hoping her mother, despite her politics, was okay. There was no way to know. She sighed. “Hank and Dolores were family.”
“Oh, honey. I’m sorry. I understand that perfectly,” Finn said. He handed her a big sack of oranges. “For what it’s worth, we could use you here.”
“Thank you. That’s very kind,” she said. “Oh!” She reached into her backpack and pulled out a bar of chocolate.
“Oh, help me, Jesus,” Rog said. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Honey, if you have more of this, you are one lucky gal,” Finn said.
Beatrix’s anxiety dissipated. Her bike basket full of citrus, she rode away feeling good for the first time since boarding the cargo trucker.
At home, she stopped in the front hallway, took a few oranges out of the bag, and left the rest, along with two chocolate bars, on the bottom step for Dragon, Flash, Maria del Carmen, and Rosie.
Because he could, Jairo rode at breakneck speed down the carless city streets, darting around campfires and pedestrians and parked cars, all of which blurred like film on either side of him. It was freedom, riding without traffic and just a small bundle of letters on his back.
He slowed as he neared the tunnel, the end of his city-bound route. He circled the intersection until another rider cycled into view: a woman, longhaired and lean, wearing an orange jacket. Sweat beaded her upper lip. She raised her chin to acknowledge him. Without speaking, he reached down and rubbed his thumb on his bike chain, then pressed a greasy print into the back of the envelope. Then they made the trade, one bundle for another. The woman turned around slowly and picked up speed down the hill.
He watched her for a moment, then called out, “Godspeed!”
“Velocipede!” she answered, the last syllable stretching into silence as she disappeared into the tunnel.
The cabdriver Fernando had traded his family’s basement apartment for a full tank of gas and three five-gallon containers of reserve. Carson packed into the cab with Fernando’s wife, daughter, two young sons, and eighty-five-year-old mother.
Leaving the city, they passed throngs of others on foot, rolling suitcases, pushing shopping carts, pulling wagons. The few cars that moved through the streets were crammed with people.
The highway was littered with abandoned vehicles, stripped of doors, hoods, motors, mirrors, bumpers, and tires. “Los bandidos,” Fernando said, and Carson remembered Ayo’s warnings. Under the pretense of needing help, these bandits would flag down cars, hold a gun to the driver’s head, and steal the car and everything in it. Fernando didn’t stop for anyone, and they drove all day, out of the city and along the interstate to Fernando’s cousin’s farm.
It took them half a day to travel 150 miles. By the end of the trip, Carson had learned to sing “Las Mañanitas,” the Mexican birthday song, and to say “Erongarícuaro” three times fast. Erongarícuaro was a town at the edge of a lake in Michoacán that Fernando had left behind thirty years earlier when he’d come to the United States. Carson wondered if Beatrix had ever been there.
Fernando invited him to stay on at the farm, said they could use another hand and a teacher, too. Carson considered it, grateful. But he wanted to stay in the river of momentum.
Alone now, Carson stood at railroad tracks, which reached west into an apparent infinity. The morning grass in Pennsylvania was damp, and buds appeared on the expectant branches of maple, birch, and oak trees. Even with the trees, the sky above looked wider without skyscrapers.
He looped his wrists through the straps of his pack and lifted it a few feet off the ground, testing its weight. Easily sixty pounds. He’d been an avid backpacker in his twenties, and back then the push of the pack against his body gave him a strange comfort and a sense of freedom. It had always signaled his entrance into the wild, where all priorities reordered themselves. That was before the job and the farmhouse upstate took up all his time, back when he’d believed in John Muir’s adage that the hope of the world lay in wilderness. Maybe it still did. He patted his pocket to feel the map from Ayo, and then hoisted the pack onto his back and stepped onto the tracks.
By early afternoon, he arrived at a tunnel. Likely no passenger train had passed through in more than a year, after the government ended subsidies to Amtrak and all the commuter services—part of its futile attempt to right the economy. His crossing would be safe. Nonetheless, he found himself trembling. Carson took a few steps into the darkness and smelled something stronger than the decomposition of rott
ing leaves. The noises were amplified, too—dripping water, wind at either end.
He focused on the ground, trying to keep his eyes on the railway ties, as the light from his headlamp bounced off small puddles and bits of broken glass. Every few feet, he glanced over his shoulder. Soon, the tracks curved and the tunnel opening behind him disappeared. He was completely inside the earth, rock wall on all sides. His headlamp created microshadows on the textured surfaces, and in places, water seeped down and made the walls shine. He heard a loud splash, like a large rock falling into a stream. He clicked off his light and stood in the pitch-blackness, holding his breath to listen. Nothing but the thin trickle of water. His mind went to Ayo’s stories of bandits. He turned on the light again, shining it in all directions onto nothing. Maybe he had imagined the sound.
When the opening at other side of the tunnel appeared—a white circle of light—he began to run, slipping on the ties but managing to stay on his feet. A small group of travelers was silhouetted against the daylight. He stepped out of the tunnel, debating whether to make himself known.
He remembered Ayo’s advice: Read people’s eyes. Notice their movements. Avoid the skittish ones. Carson questioned whether or not he possessed these special skills, unless reading teenagers for the past fifteen years qualified as any kind of training. He heard Ayo’s laugh in his mind.
“Hello,” he called out, catching his breath. There were four adults and a young girl. The men wore overcoats, and the women and the girl, skirts down to their ankles.
A hefty man with a dark beard and weathered skin stepped forward.
“Where are you headed?” Carson asked.
“Not much farther and we’ll bed down,” the man said. “Been walking about a few weeks, all said.”
“Where to?” Carson asked again, noting an accent. Canadian?
“We follow God,” the man said. “We look for signs.”
Cult Christians, Carson realized. He had heard about them, their renouncement of the cities, the amassing congregations in the heartland. “Signs?”