by Eisele, Kimi
“And he promises to uplift you once you arrive,” Dragon said.
“Which is bullshit. It’s like all that heaven talk or waiting for the Messiah,” Beatrix said. “It absolves you of your responsibility to make change right here. We should be sharing stories about how to live right here in our new world.”
Rosie came up the walkway, looking guilty.
“Where’ve you been?” said Dragon.
“Just at the end of the block,” Rosie said.
“With whom?” Dragon said, his gaze fixed on her.
“What are you, her father?” Beatrix said.
“God.” Rosie sighed. “I swear, if I go one inch past this block, everyone yells at me,” she said. “I might as well wear a leash. Seriously, I was a block away, not a foot off Halcyon.”
“Halcyon,” Beatrix said. “Halcyon Radio.”
“Oh my God, right,” Dragon said. “That’s perfect.”
“What are you guys talking about?” Rosie said. “What’s Halcyon Radio? And who is Halcyon anyway? Some historical figure?”
“Halcyon days,” Flash said. “Peaceful and easy, right?”
“Yeah,” Dragon said. “From Greek mythology, actually. Alcyone was a Greek goddess who threw herself into an ocean in grief after Zeus killed her husband. She got turned into a bird—I forget what kind. When it was time for her to lay eggs, she did it in a floating nest at sea, kept calm and safe by the god of the winds.”
“Dude, how do you know all that?” Flash said.
Dragon shrugged. “I looked it up once.”
“You’re alright, man,” Flash said.
“Thank God for the wind god,” Beatrix said. “Some compassion for a grief-stricken bird-woman.” Some calm and safety is what they all needed now, she thought, wishing she could ask Carson about this mythical bird.
Carson stayed three nights in the blue tarp camp called “the Jungle,” an old hobo term. “A refuge in the wild for the weary travelers,” Franklin had explained. “There’ll be many more as you go.” On his final morning, the rain finally let up. Carson woke to the smell of summer and a thick floor of mud.
“Stick-to-your-ribs mud,” Nora said. “Just like this cornmeal.” She scooped up a gray lump from a pot and let it plop down again.
“Hey, it’s food,” Carson said, shaking out his sleeping bag and looking for a place to hang it out to dry. “I’m grateful for it.”
“Me too,” Franklin said, eating a big spoonful. “Yummy grubworms, too,” he said.
“Another thing to live for,” Nora said.
“That and the Ascension,” said the father of the baby. The man joined them, sitting next to Carson on the log.
“Right,” Franklin said. “That’s what happens to you if you pray hard enough.”
“Surely you’ve heard of this place, the Center, where the man who preaches the Ascension is gathering his disciples?” the father said to Carson. “They have all kinds of things up there—food, drink, electricity. It’s somewhere near the center of the country—on the Plains, I think.”
“I heard Wyoming,” Franklin said.
“Jonathan Blue,” the father said. “He’s the one who runs the place. He’s monopolizing the airwaves.”
“Some of his followers have come through here,” Nora said. “You know them from the skirts. The women all wear skirts.”
“Not all of them,” Franklin said. “All kinds of people going now.”
“I get wanting to believe in redemption,” Nora said. “But I don’t get having to walk to a specific place to get there.”
“Gives them something to do,” Franklin said, then laughed loudly. “It’s tempting if he’s got all he says he’s got. But what’s the cost? I think there are other ways to make do.” He opened his arms. “I mean—this isn’t such a bad spread.”
The father cleared his throat. “I’m not sure I buy his promises. But this is no holiday. We’re eating squirrels and mush. There’s no power, no jobs, no reliable way to communicate with anyone. We’ve lost everything, and we’re supposed to be celebrating? My wife and I have a baby to feed. What kind of world is this for a child?”
Nora looked startled at first. Then her eyes softened. “We have learned to make do. We find crumbs. And there is a whole pot of cornmeal over there, which you are welcome to. And when that runs out, we’ll grind more corn and berries. Or mice. We’ll keep going. And every now and then, we’ll find something shiny and pick it up and put it in our pockets and keep it as a reminder of what’s good and what’s bright.”
The rest of them stared into the nonfire. No one said a word. The woman in the pink hat came to sit down, her hands wrapped around a mug of tea. “What? Did someone die?” she said.
“We’re just contemplating the so-called Ascension,” Franklin said. “Or decline, as it were.”
Nora turned to the father. “Open your hand,” she said. She placed something in his palm.
She asked the same of Carson, then handed him a small glass marble—opaque white, with swirling stripes of orange. It made him think of an orange Creamsicle, and he conjured the taste of one.
They sat in silence for a few minutes. Then the father stood up, tossed his marble into the fire pit, and walked away.
That afternoon, Carson followed Franklin into the woods to check a deadfall trap.
“You don’t use a skill, the knowledge of it dries up, doesn’t it?” Franklin said. He moved the collapsed sticks and squatted down next to a large rock. “Something’s in there.” He lifted the rock and found a small mouse, crushed dead and flattened. “Puny little thing,” he said, sounding disappointed.
Franklin retrieved the sticks and showed Carson how to set them up in the shape of the number 4. “You put notches in the wood like so,” Franklin said, pointing to small wedges in each of the sticks. “Then there’s where you set your bait.” He motioned to the end of the innermost stick. “When the animal tries to get at that, the sticks move and the rock falls. You need a heavy rock. You want that animal dead.” He stabbed the dead mouse with a stick and lifted it.
“Never touch a mouse,” Franklin said. “Hantavirus. Will kill you quicker than the flu. Gotta dunk it in running water right away or put it in the fire to burn away the fleas.”
They found some wood dry enough to burn and started a small fire. “Just hold ’im in there, good and hot.” Franklin handed Carson the mouse-on-a-stick. “There’s your Fourth of July barbecue,” he said. “Happy Independence Day.”
The flame singed off the mouse’s fur and shriveled its body. Carson pulled it from the fire and extracted the meat from the tiny bones with his teeth.
PART TWO
The Center
CHAPTER 7
Beatrix loathed the idea of giving Gary any more reasons to be proud of himself, but if anyone knew how to start a radio station, he would. She walked the block to his house. “I’m here with questions,” she said when he opened the door.
“Nice to see you,” he said. “Come in.”
She followed him up a short staircase, her flip-flops sinking into the thick carpet, to a tidy living room, where a blue-brown plaid sofa faced a giant unusable television on the wall.
“Tell me about your ham radio,” she said, cutting to the chase. “Could it do more than what it does now?”
“More?”
“Yeah, like broadcast. Real radio. Something else to listen to.”
“With a few equipment changes, yes. You have something in mind?”
“I want to broadcast stories and interviews, let people share their stories about the good, creative things they’re doing. Give people real information.”
“Like NPR?” he said, sounding somewhat suspicious.
Beatrix nodded. “Kind of.”
“A news show? With reporters?”
“How long would it take to set up?” Beatrix said, ignoring his questions.
“Well, we’d need a different kind of transmitter, and a better antenna.” He held her gaze. “I could work on i
t. Maybe you get the People’s Bicycle Brigade to search out a few things.”
“The PBB—they can find anything,” Beatrix said, turning to go.
“I heard about the T-Rize ambush. Sorry that happened.”
“Me too. But Rosie saved the day.”
“Lucky. We’ve been hearing about them on the ham,” he said. “They’re everywhere.”
She sighed. “Like a new flu. What do we do?”
“We stop them from coming in.”
“And then?” Beatrix asked.
“We find a place for them.”
“Lock them up?” she asked, relieved he hadn’t suggested killing them off.
“Honestly, I don’t know,” Gary said. “Reform them somehow. But in the meantime, we need to protect ourselves.”
“You mean imprison ourselves,” Beatrix said, annoyed.
“Beatrix, these kids are beyond pissed. They no longer have Xboxes and Game Boys and iPhones and iPads and all the things kids had before. They aren’t going to have anything we had.”
“Xboxes? What are Xboxes?”
“Something you’d want really badly if you were twelve.”
“I doubt it,” Beatrix said. “When I was twelve, all I wanted was for the school cafeteria to stop serving hamburgers made from beef bought in Brazil, where they were chopping down rain forests to—”
“Yeah, yeah, Beatrix, I get it.” Gary held his hands in the air. “But you weren’t like normal twelve-year-olds.”
No, she wasn’t. She turned again to go, and saw on one of his walls a painting of a night sky, a distant city beneath it, all lit up with white lights. “Pretty,” she said, trying to be nice.
“Thanks. I painted that. The Iraqi sky.”
This surprised her. “What else did you see over there?”
“A lot of blood, explosions of lights in the desert.”
His candor took her off guard.
“Men are forced to make difficult decisions,” he said, then paused and looked directly at her. “Historically, I have disliked protesters.”
She stared back at him, silent.
“Have you ever done anything you later regretted?” he said.
She considered the question. She could lie and say no. She was good at convincing people. There had been a time when she was quite sure of herself. “Yeah,” she said. “In Miami. At a protest against the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. My friend Hank and I got separated in the crowd. I stopped to try to find him. Suddenly, there was this girl, her face all smeared with war paint. For some reason, I was holding a rock. I don’t know why. The girl looked at me and said, ‘Do it. Break it.’ I don’t know if I picked the rock off the ground or if she handed it to me. But there I was with the rock, and this girl, telling me to throw it.”
Beatrix noticed Gary was leaning forward slightly, listening with interest. She continued. “We were next to a Vietnamese restaurant, and I looked in the window and saw this man, small and thin, glasses. A young boy was in there, too. Maybe his grandson—I don’t know. When they saw me, the man pulled the boy behind him, started shaking his head. I remember the look on his face. And his baggy khaki slacks. He was so thin, that man. But the girl next to me said, ‘Do it!’
“So I threw the rock. The glass shattered, and I ran away, pushing through the crowd. For a second, I felt exhilaration, and then I just felt shame. We thought the only way to wake people up was to do something big and dramatic.”
Gary widened his eyes.
“I never did anything like that again.”
“Courage,” Gary said.
“Courage? I don’t see it like that.”
“In the moment, you did what you believed was right. You had the larger view. Right or not, you followed through.”
Beatrix shrugged. “I guess so.” She opened the front door. “Let me know when you have a list of supplies ready, and I’ll get the riders on it.” She paused for a moment, then turned back and said, “Thank you, Gary.”
Carson stayed south, following country roads at Franklin’s advice, to avoid the rails in and out of Chicago. Lead in the water supply had upended the city even before the grid went, and now there was nothing but mayhem, he’d said. He followed Route 24 for many miles, passing signs for Peoria, a town he maybe had heard of once. The sun was merciless, but a wind pushed at his back, cooling his sweat. An arc of birds flew over the treetops, a mini migration.
On the side of the road, chairs from a Ferris wheel hovered in the air, the centerpiece of an abandoned carnival, its traveling days long over. Ivy crawled over the rides and kiosks, its plentiful green leaves obscuring the dulled colors. Thick electric cords snaked along the pavement, and Carson had a sudden hankering for a Coca-Cola. He heard a shout and turned to see a group of kids hiding on the other side of a rickety carousel. When he called out, they scattered.
A plywood clown grinned menacingly at the foot of the ramp to the Tilt-a-Whirl. no one under my height gets on this ride read the sign. Carson walked up the ramp, his footsteps echoing against the metal. He remembered the swing of the ride, its quick successive loops, the tilting and whirling of his stomach.
He wandered past empty food kiosks and came to a freestanding mirror. Not quite a fun-house mirror—he wasn’t squashed or elongated—but something was strange about his reflection, which he hadn’t seen in months. He’d grown thin, his hair longer and maybe grayer, and he had a full beard now. His face seemed crooked. The mole on the lower side of his cheek was on the wrong side. He lifted his right arm, and the reflection lifted its right arm also. No mirror mimicry. He noted tiny words etched into the top of the glass: true mirror.
This man looked nothing like the man Carson had once been: the school principal who’d worn a jacket and tie and made uncomfortable compromises, who had risen up the ladder rapidly, without even trying, as if he’d tricked the system. Tapping young male teachers for leadership roles early in their careers was a common practice. Carson had been in the classroom for just four years. He loved it there. But the offer to move up made him feel singled out, competent. And the salary meant he and June could start on their future. This future?
He raised an eyebrow, giving himself a dubious look. Then he smiled, aiming for authenticity. A flicker of wisdom showed behind all the hair, a certain conviction. He did not know who he was anymore, but he no longer felt like a fraud.
Something darted behind him in the mirror. One of the kids? His backpack! He spun around, then realized he was still wearing it. Thank God. Then he saw the kids: five boys and a girl. The oldest couldn’t have been more than thirteen; the youngest, about six or seven. They stood there looking steely, holding metal bars, tree branches. One had a brick.
Carson’s heart quickened. His gun was in the top of his pack. If he had to, he could reach for it. He put up his hands. “What do you want?” he said.
“Food,” the girl said. She was wearing an oversized sweater and pants ripped at one of the thighs. Her hair was a tangled mess.
No, he thought. He’d just foraged that morning. Jesus Christ, no. He considered running, but what if there were more kids? Or armed adults? The girl’s brown eyes bored into him. He could forage again.
He dropped his pack and pulled out a clump of dandelion greens, a few wild onions, a handful of roots, and some blackberries he’d tucked delicately into a sock and placed at the top. There was also a ziplock bag half-full of peanut butter he’d traded for a week ago and a few hard chunks of bread. He laid it all out on the ground. “That’s it, kiddos,” he said. “All my fucking food.”
The oldest boy, in black Converse high-tops, dirty jeans, and a ragged black T-shirt, nodded to the girl, who scuttled forward and swept up the food. “Nothing else?” he said. He inspected the bundle of whitish carrot-like roots. “What are these?”
“Thistle roots,” Carson said. “Boil them or eat them raw. They taste like dirt, but they’ll fill the belly.” He kept his cool. They had weapons, but they were weak with hunger.
&n
bsp; The boy bit off the end of one of the roots, then gestured for the girl to pass the rest around.
“That’s all I have,” Carson said, wondering how they had managed for this long. He considered pulling out his field guide to edible plants but couldn’t risk losing that, too.
The oldest boy was watching him now, holding the metal bar steady in the air. “Water? You got water?” he said.
He did. He had just filled his bottles in a stream that morning. He pulled one out and set it on the ground. He reached for his notebook, and the boy let out a whistle. The others firmed their hold on their weapons. Two of them inched closer to him. Carson opened his notebook. Draw for your life, he told himself.
With a ballpoint pen, he drew small leaves, and tiny flowers with square petals, and, since he didn’t have color, he labeled the petals white, the flower center light green or yellow. He looked up, “You can read, right?”
The boy nodded. Another boy, younger, with red hair, said, “So can I.”
“Me too,” the girl said.
Below the first drawing he wrote, Common chickweed, crop and ground cover. Then he got to work on the next drawing: lamb’s-quarter, an elongated oak-like leaf. “You can eat the seeds of this one, too,” he said, drawing his best rendition of a stalk of seeds. The oldest boy began parsing out the rest of the food, divvying up the berries, breaking the thistle roots in half, and squeezing peanut butter thinly on the stale chunks of bread.
Carson drew wild carrot, wild asparagus, burdock, sorrel, and sumac. The children came closer. One little boy leaned a hand on Carson’s shoulder, his breath quick and warm in Carson’s ear.
The girl pointed to berries Carson had darkened in with black ink and said, “Those are red. I’ve seen them.”
“Sumac,” Carson said, nodding. He wrote the word “red” next to them. “They are indeed red. And some red berries are poisonous, so you have to pay attention. These are edible. But don’t overdo it. They’ll make you vomit.”
The boy who’d been leaning on Carson took a bite of thistle root. He broke off the rest and offered it to Carson.