by Eisele, Kimi
Rosie smiled. She liked how Flash was always so creative and optimistic.
“I like to think of this place as the great equalizer,” Frida said. “Everything returns to its origin. Car becomes metal again. Clothing becomes fabric. Cans of gourmet organic soup or cans of cheap pinto beans—they’re all just steel cans again. Ready for repurposing.”
She looked at Rosie’s feet. “Case in point,” she said. “Great shoes.”
Rosie smiled, feeling seen. She hoped Diego would think the same.
They settled their barter with one of Abuela’s herbal remedies, a few dozen tortillas, and some jars of tomatoes and peaches Flash had earned the week before. Then they loaded up the bike trailers, and Rosie put her sneakers back on, tucking the sandals into a small tote bag on her back.
Before reaching the Perimeter, they rounded a corner and came upon four bright lights, one flashing quickly, five times. “Oh shit,” Dragon said. “Turn around, everyone. Now!”
Something whistled past Rosie’s ear and shattered on the asphalt.
“Bottles! They’ve got bottles,” Flash said. “T-Rize. Gotta be T-Rize. Those light flashes. It’s a code.”
T-Rize? What was T-Rize? A bottle bounced off Flash’s trailer. Another hit the road ahead, spraying glass in front of them. Rosie tried to go faster, but as they turned down an alley, her foot slipped off the pedal and she stopped to avoid a fall.
“Rosie!” Beatrix called out.
A bike was coming at Rosie fast. She reached into the tote bag, pulled out one of the sandals, and hurled it toward the cyclist, hitting him right on his helmetless head.
Stunned, she jumped back on her bike, just as Flash and Dragon came circling back, and then the four of them sped through the neighborhood to Halcyon.
Carson woke with a deep hunger. He’d eaten the last of his protein bars and had only thistle root and half a dozen small apples he’d pilfered from an orchard. He left his sleeping bag to dry in the sun and retraced his steps through a dew-covered field to the deadfall trap he’d set the night before. It had taken him a good two hours to make it. He closed his eyes and made a wish for a squirrel, a raccoon. Anything.
The bait was gone, but the trap appeared untouched. Clearly, he didn’t remember how to set a deadfall trap.
Later that morning, the apples gone, Carson veered from the tracks into a small town. He craved grilled ham, cheese, and banana. Fat chance. His mouth watered. He heard people chanting. He followed the sound through a stand of trees to a large white tent. He ducked inside, where over a hundred people were on their feet, hands in the air, voices ringing. “God wants you to have new life! God wants you to have new life!” A young preacher with long, tousled hair led them, pumping his heavily tattooed fist upward like a rock star. The air was thick with human sweat and breath.
Carson spotted a table against one of the tent walls, full of fruit, bread, some bowls, a stainless-steel pot.
“God wants you to have new life!” the preacher shouted. The crowd thundered its response.
They are hungry for salvation, Carson thought. I am just plain hungry.
A line formed in the center aisle, and as the initiates stepped forward, the preacher touched them one by one. Their responses ranged from trembling to hopping up and down to dropping to the ground in convulsions. Carson hurried to the table and loaded up a bandana with rolls, two (hard-boiled?) eggs, a handful of carrots, and a drumstick that looked too big to be from a chicken. He hurried out and ate voraciously, nearly choking as he swallowed. “Bless you,” he whispered to the sky.
He headed back the way he’d come, sated and only a touch guilty. Near the tracks, he came upon a man carrying a sack stained with blood. Carson slowed, feeling cautious, but the man turned and said, “Don’t recognize you. Where are you coming from?”
The man looked about Carson’s age, with brown hair grown past his ears and a sweat-stained cloth tied around his neck. “Just now, from a revival,” Carson said. “But I’m just passing through. It’s not really my thing.”
The man smiled. “Seems we’re few and far between.”
Two women approached on bicycles, and the man waved them over. One wore a baseball cap, and the other, a green rain poncho that fanned out like a short dress. Both had dust masks covering their faces.
“Dinner later, after the burial,” said the woman in the poncho. She looked at the man’s pillowcase. “What’d you get, hunter?”
“Raccoon.”
“Raccoon stew then. And plenty of venison left for the immediate,” she said. She turned to Carson. “You staying, too?” She rummaged in a bag and threw him a mask. “You’ll need this. We got flu here,” she said.
“We buried someone today,” said the other woman. She had removed her cap to reveal a shock of white hair on the front of what was otherwise a frizzy dark mane.
“I’m sorry to hear it,” Carson said, putting on the mask. “No one at the revival wore masks.” When the woman in the rain poncho rolled her eyes, he clarified. “Just stopped in to hear the chanting.”
“Going on all the time. Like amplified mosquitoes,” said the woman with the gray streak. She handed him some dried venison from her bag. “You staying for dinner?”
Carson weighed the invitation. Why were they being so nice to him? He would be hungry again soon, yes. But flu? He didn’t want to risk it. “Thank you,” he said, holding up the venison. “I’m going to push on for another hour of light.”
“Can’t say I blame you,” the hunter said. “There’s a house a few miles up. No one lives there. Probably a dry porch.”
“What’s your destination?” asked the poncho woman.
“Heading west.”
“What’s west of Ohio?” the hunter said, smirking.
“Gold?” said the woman with the gray streak, who had put her cap back on.
Carson smiled and could see in her eyes that she was smiling. “I’m recording history, I guess,” he said.
“Write about us,” she said. “Fulton County, Ohio, where some searched for God and some survived the flu.”
“And some planted trees,” the man said.
The women looked at him. “It’s true,” he said. “We’re known for our trees. The whole state of Ohio is.”
“Then, there you have it: flu, God, and trees,” the woman in the baseball cap said. “Write that.”
Carson nodded and bid them well. He walked for another hour and found the house. Indeed, the porch was dry, but he found no dry wood for a fire. He unrolled his sleeping bag and bedded down.
When he woke in the morning, there was a plate on the porch with a biscuit and some gamey meat he guessed was raccoon. “Bless you,” he said again.
B.,
Ghosts everywhere. But I don’t feel afraid. The wind nudges me west.
CHAPTER 6
In a thin patch of woods not far from the Wabash River, a giant blue tarp was strung up in the trees. At first, Carson mistook the fraying canopy for the sky. Below it, a handful of people circled a fire pit, but no fire was burning, the summer afternoon warm and humid. Nearby was a picnic table, a bookshelf full of kitchenware, and three metal barrels.
A woman moved around the picnic table in a gold-colored party dress, a funny thing to wear in the middle of the woods, but she was smooth in her movements, like a dancer, and slow, like a mountain lion. As he entered the camp, the faces at the fire pit turned toward him, looking almost unreal, as if cast in wax.
“Who goes there?” asked a man.
Carson introduced himself and mentioned how far he’d come. “I’m traveling through. I’m a teacher, by trade.” Miles ago, he’d decided identifying himself that way was the safest bet. What was more innocuous than schoolteacher?
“Well, you’ve come a long way just to arrive in paradise,” the man said. “But come on closer! Give us a lesson. We’ll plant seeds in Dixie cups, if you’ve got seeds.” He cackled at his own joke.
Carson laughed, too. Not that kind of teacher, h
e wanted to say, although sometimes teenagers and kindergartners shared traits.
“Welcome to the Jungle,” the man said. “I’m Franklin. Where you headed?”
“West,” Carson said.
“Well, you got as far as Illinois. That’s something,” Franklin said.
“Kudos to you,” said a woman in a pink knit hat. “Teaching is hard stuff.”
“Schools are closed out west, you know,” Franklin said. “But you could teach along the way. Lord knows, kids still need the lessons.”
“He’s right,” said a small-faced man in a red parka. “Kids are so lost now they’re just sniffing and snorting whatever they can find.”
The woman in the pink hat gestured to a pot on the picnic table. “Slop’s on the stove. You got your own bowl?”
Carson set down his pack, pleasantly surprised by the hospitality. He pulled out a water bottle, half-full, the last of his supply. “Any water around here, by chance?” he asked.
“In the barrels, sir,” Franklin said. “You can refill what you take from the spring that way. A few hundred yards in.” He pointed into the woods. “We’re blessed around here.”
“Which is why we stay,” said the woman in the party dress, who walked over and smiled. She looked about sixty, and the muscles in her arms were sculpted and strong. “If you bathe, and we hope you will, do it downstream, please,” she said, still smiling.
“That’s my Nora,” Franklin said, putting his hand atop hers.
Carson walked to the stream, where he filled his water bottles, then sat and took off his boots. The cold water stung the sores on his feet, but he kept them submerged in the current until they went numb.
When he returned to the fire circle, the others were in the midst of a conversation.
“Don’t know why they let it get so out of hand,” said a man in flannel. “I mean, shit, I didn’t mind the critique of big government, but fuckin’ A, that doesn’t mean they can just wash their hands of everything.”
“You were one of those stupid asses who thought government was too big for its britches?” Franklin said. “That’s why we’re in this mess, because the government deregulated everything, gave up all its power to corporations.” He turned to Carson, lifted off his hat for a moment, and grinned. “Have yourself a seat, man. We were just discussing the fall. Joy to the world.”
His eyes scanning the group, Carson sat down at the end of a long log. He was glad to listen, but he stayed on guard.
The man in the red parka passed him a bottle. “Care for some whiskey? Traded a raccoon for it.”
Carson accepted but poured a swig’s worth into the cap of his water bottle so as to avoid any flu germs. The liquid warmed his throat, his stomach, his mood.
A woman holding a baby joined them, sitting down next to the man in flannel.
“We lost our home to the bank,” the man said.
His wife jiggled the baby and said, “And our jobs, our car, and our community.”
She held the child out to Carson. “Will you take him for a minute?” she said. “Mother Nature calls.” Carson took the baby and set him lengthwise on his lap, tucking his hands just under the baby’s head and gently bouncing his knees. The baby stirred, a small muscle moving near his upper lip, another near the eyebrow.
Carson and June had wanted a child, but they’d wanted everything to be in order first. You couldn’t just be haphazard about these things, they’d thought. You had to have a plan. You had to be established. They’d had it all wrong. Or maybe not. He shuddered to think of making this journey with a small child.
Franklin leaned forward in his lawn chair, making it creak. “You got your dropouts and escapees,” he said. The conversation had moved to the taxonomy of travelers. “Then you got the probos, the professional hobos, who started wandering long before all this happened. They never intend to stop.”
“Is that what you are?” a woman in glasses asked Franklin. “A probo?”
Franklin smiled. “Maybe. But most of you all are the destined,” he said. “You’ve left behind what you know, but you have a new plan, and you’re destined to get there come hell or high water.”
That’s me, Carson thought, but he kept quiet.
Beatrix stood at the edge of the garden and poked at the wilting lettuce. Where the hell was the rain? The sun beat down on her neck, and sweat dripped into her eyes.
They were down to rationing the last of the yerba mate. How spoiled she’d been, she thought. She pinched the back of her neck, trying to relieve her headache.
But it was the least of her worries. Now the T-Rize were here. That’s what the youth gang called itself, short for “Terrorize,” people said. Supposedly the first cell had formed in some small rural town in Nevada, right after the blackouts started, and made its way into major western cities, wreaking havoc along the way.
“These are unhappy kids,” Flash had said after they’d been ambushed. “They’re young and aimless. Given that everything is falling apart anyway, they just wreck whatever they can. They travel by bicycle, in cells. And they’ve multiplied like crazy.”
Flash and Dragon were most nervous about the fleet of bikes in the yard. There was one for everyone in the household, plus half a dozen more they’d fixed up and were ready to sell or trade, or lend out to riders on PBB missions. Not to mention all the random parts. The bikes were locked and covered with a big tarp, but just having them made them a target.
The Perimeter guards were on high alert, apparently, which made sense but also unsettled Beatrix. These T-Rize, they were kids, after all. How bad could they be? “Maybe they’re just hungry,” she kept saying.
Into the backyard came the resonant voice of Jonathan Blue, from the radio inside the house. “You’re weary, you’re hungry. You long for what you no longer have. But now there is something more fulfilling for you. It is here.”
Maria del Carmen had been listening for a few days now. Beatrix heard the volume go up.
“. . . my story reveals a common one. I, too, once placed my faith in technology. It was my drug, but I thought I was its master. Constantly seeking the next upgrade. Always chasing the newest version. Until I realized there was no other version. There is only one version. Listen, my friends, listen to the truth. What is it that you’ve lost? What more do you have to lose?”
A breeze carried the stench of the neighbor’s pit toilet into the yard. Beatrix tossed a handful of weeds into the compost bin and cursed. Hearing Mr. Blue’s voice pissed her off. What was it that she’d lost? What hadn’t she lost? And just how would going to this Center help her find it again?
She heard the bells from the water cart down the street. It was her turn to fetch. She looked for the small wagon but couldn’t find it, so she carried as many empty jugs as she could and headed for the cart.
But Dragon and Flash were already coming down the sidewalk, the small wagon in tow, full of water. “You beat me,” Beatrix said.
“No sweat,” Flash said. “It was quick. Not much of a line today.”
“More people leaving, maybe,” Dragon said.
“Going where, the Center?” She shook her head and helped them unload the jugs.
“This is a new world, this is the upgrade. We can help you see it here, at the Center.” Jonathan Blue’s voice continued inside the house. “You can leave the filth of your cities and neighborhoods and come here, where we are creating a new technology. A simple technology. There is food and water and shelter. There is community. We come together to ascend. The choice is yours.”
“He’s still at it, I see,” Flash said, sitting on the top step of the porch to rest.
“‘The filth of your cities and neighborhoods’?” Beatrix said.
“He makes it sound pretty nice, doesn’t he?” Dragon said, winking.
“What the fuck?” Beatrix said. She swatted a fly off her arm and sat down next to Flash.
“I’m just saying it’s easy to see why folks are tuning in. All those promises,” Dragon sai
d.
“Are you kidding? Who really believes that shit?” Beatrix said. “I mean, I get the appeal and utility of communal living, but I thought you couldn’t really run from your problems. That running was a sure way to keep them with you. Isn’t that what they say? So why not just stay home, face your issues, and build a community here?”
Dragon squinted at her. “Yeah, why not, Beatrix?”
Beatrix opened her mouth to respond but then stopped.
A breeze shook the cypress tree in the front yard, and it sounded like someone was saying, Shhhh. Beatrix closed her eyes and heard the water bells on some other block now, and a muffled conversation somewhere. Flash drummed his hands against the floorboards of the porch. It was true what Dragon had said, that sounds got louder when you closed your eyes. That’s why radio was sometimes more powerful than television. The idea took hold in her chest as a burst of purple.
“We need to give them something else to listen to,” she said. In other places in the world, rural communities used radio for popular education. Soap operas shared messages about birth control, good nutrition, conservation. Why couldn’t they do the same thing here? An alternative to Jonathan Blue.
“Real broadcasts,” she said.
“I’m not following you,” Dragon said.
Beatrix stood up. “Think about it. What is Jonathan Blue doing?”
“Preaching,” Flash said.
“He’s trying get everyone to jump ship, to leave their communities and get to some mythical ‘Center.’ He’s appealing to their desire for comforts. But it’s the same old story. Like false advertising,” Beatrix said.
“Fake news,” Flash said.
“Where you are sucks, so come here where it’s better,” Dragon said. “Beatrix is right. Blue is all about ‘the grass is greener.’”
“And everyone is so desperate and scared, they just want to be saved,” Flash said.