by Rachel Caine
So we traveled the old-fashioned way, miles passing under wheels. It was a lot of miles, because we were moving very fast despite the dangerous and unpredictable conditions. I woke up periodically, prodded by anxiety or bad dreams, hunger or thirst, or the more basic bodily functions. Food and drink turned out to be no challenge at all; shops were deserted, and many had already been looted. I didn’t mind drinking store-brand cola if it was all that was left. I tried not to see what it all meant, what all this widespread smoking devastation and desperation meant for civilization as a whole.
Things were falling apart. There were people in small groups, and they ran when we roared by.
The internet on Cher’s mobile phone had gone down in a haze of 404 Not Found errors. Then her mobile had failed, too. And mine. And Kevin’s.
We all had different network providers. I assumed that, too, was not a good sign.
We were just heading into the St. Louis area, from the Missouri side—a long and exhausting ride, with as few stops as possible in places that were only marginally dangerous. I’d hoped that maybe the calmer center of the country might still be holding its own.
I was wrong.
You could see the dull red-orange glow of flames coming from St. Louis a long way off against the cold night sky, and low-hanging, constantly rumbling clouds.
“I hate this,” Cherise said, fidgeting anxiously. She’d been fidgeting a long time, nervous with the crackle of power in her blood and the fear of actually letting it loose. I’d managed to get that through her head, finally, and we’d done long hours of power exercises, with Kevin as her spotter, to teach her how to use the aetheric properly, how to center her power and ground it, how to use it in more delicate ways than sledge-hammering every problem into smithereens, along with everything that wasn’t a problem.
She was actually not sucking at it. I couldn’t help but feel that maybe this was a little bit due to my excellence as a teacher, but it probably wasn’t.
Over the radio, David’s voice said, “I need to prepare you for what’s coming.” That was ominous, because he’d never said that before, and we’d already been through some rough patches on the way. He sounded very sober. “You’re going to come up on some problems in the next ten miles. I’ll direct you on the blockage in the road, but we may have to take detours as things get worse.”
“That’s it? Roadblocks?” I felt a little surge of irritation. “Not exactly news, David.”
“It’s not cars,” he said. “It’s people. They’re desperate, and they’re terrified, and they’re angry. They’ll attack the car if it gets too close. They think they can run to safety, but there is none.”
That was very different, and we all knew it. Cherise asked, in a small voice, “How many people?”
“Right now, there are three main groups,” he said. “Two of them are fighting each other for food and transportation. All together, they number about fifty thousand.”
“Fifty—” Words failed me. I couldn’t even echo the number. I glanced in the back and saw that Cherise was staring fiercely at the radio, tears welling in her eyes. “Fifty thousand people. Refugees.”
“That would imply they have some kind of refuge to flee toward,” David said bleakly. “They don’t. If they try to leave, they’ll get picked off by the storms, the fires, the sinkholes. Animal attacks. And there’s no safe harbor for them, not anymore.”
“The Wardens—,” Kevin began.
“They already killed the Wardens who were trying to help them,” David said flatly. “Mob mentality. Just don’t get close. If you don’t share their beliefs, they’ll kill you, too.”
“What beliefs?”
Kevin didn’t need to ask the question, because we topped the next hill and saw the first of the crowds that David was talking about. They were filthy, ragged, wild-eyed, and armed with rifles, axes, sharp sticks—I didn’t see a single person who didn’t have some kind of weapon, even if it was just a stone to throw. A few were carrying badly painted signs that looked like they might have been written in dried blood.
REPENT OR DIE.
Oh man.
“You want to know the biggest joke?” Whitney’s voice said, echoing through the silence in the car. “These are the Episcopalians. You don’t even want to run into the hard-shell Baptists right now, brothers and sisters.”
Kevin crossed himself. He did it in a rush, like it came from someplace deep within him, and I wondered how he’d been brought up, in his early days. Catholic, probably. Cherise and I had both been churchgoing girls, too, until recently; I wasn’t what I could call committed, but I had always honored God. Wardens never doubted the presence of higher powers. Heck, we had a direct line to something, even if it wasn’t the Head Bearded Guy.
But this . . . this was people clutching at straws, using religion as an excuse for murder and destruction. And it made me sad and angry.
“We avoid them,” I said. Some of the crowd had already caught sight of us and were streaming in our direction. “If we can’t stop them, we have to stay out of their way.”
“But they’re just people,” Cherise said. “The same people who’d help you out if you had a flat tire. What happens to them? What happens to us?”
“Survival,” I said softly. “It’s selfish, and it’s dark, and we’ve always been a species willing to do anything to satisfy our needs. Individuals have morals. Mobs have appetites.”
The Djinn had taken a sharp left turn down a side road and rocketed along it at insane speed, dodging falling tree branches, a wrecked and still smoldering SUV, and some things in the road that it took me long-delayed seconds to realize were actually dead bodies. I started to ask, but then I realized that I didn’t want to know how bad this was, how far it had gone. I just wanted to stop it.
And I didn’t see any way to do that.
Misery crept up on me, and I swallowed hard against an ache in my throat and stomach. I wanted David. I wanted his arms around me, his strength beside me.
“Jo,” his voice said, and I closed my eyes and pretended he was here, physically here. It was easier than I’d thought. Maybe I was going crazy. “This has happened before. It’s happened in other countries, to other people; it’s even happened here, in some areas. Riots, purges, wars, genocide. There’s never a moment on Earth when someone isn’t suffering and dying at the hands of others. You know that. Human nature isn’t your fault.”
“I know,” I whispered. “But it feels like it is.”
Maybe he would have tried to offer me more therapy, I don’t know, but right then, Cherise screamed and yelled, “Stop the car!”
David must have been the one in control, because there was no debate about it. The Djinn braked the Boss to a stop on the damp pavement in a noisy slide.
“Uh, Cher, that mob is still heading this way,” Kevin said, sensibly checking out the rearview mirror. “Might take them a few minutes, but—”
Cherise wasn’t listening. She bailed out of the car and darted out into the glow of the headlights, and I saw her scramble over debris toward the side of the road. “Dammit,” I said. “Kevin. Go with her. Hurry.”
He was already on his way, and shot me an irritated look. “Like I wasn’t going to anyway,” he said. “Thanks, Mom.”
I was so glad he wasn’t my kid. It felt like cowardice, but I stayed behind. I was nothing but a liability right now, and at least one of us needed to stay with the car. Kevin didn’t seem to mind that decision in the least. In fact, he grinned fiercely as he passed through the headlights, plunging after Cherise to the side of the road.
It seemed to take forever. I watched anxiously through the back window. The mob was coming, and I could hear them screaming. It was a deep, animal roar, and I imagined this was how those soldiers throughout history had felt, holding their ground and waiting while the enemy charged.
It wasn’t good.
I got so focused on the approach of the crowd that it surprised me (complete with yelp) when Cherise yanked open
the back door and climbed in with something bundled in her arms in a dirty blanket. It squirmed. Kevin piled in after, looking grim, and yelled, “Go go go!”
Off we went, leaving the swiftest of the mob to clutch at a spray of gravel and dust.
The bundle in Cherise’s arms wailed. It wasn’t the cry of a hungry or tired baby; this was more—aware. A toddler, maybe two or three years old. Cherise unwrapped the blanket, and I saw a small, round face capped by shiny, thick black hair. The child looked as miserable as I felt.
“Cher,” I said. “We can’t—”
Kevin leaned forward, cutting me off. “There was a whole family back there,” he said. “Mom, dad, two other kids. This one’s the only one still breathing. So shut up, okay?”
I swallowed. “What happened to them?”
“What do you think happened? They had something. Somebody else wanted it. Probably a car; they didn’t look like they’d been walking, and they didn’t have any bags.”
Kevin was right. I couldn’t say no to helping this kid. Maybe I should have; maybe Lewis would have. Maybe he would have said something about the greater good and saving the most number of lives.
All I could say, looking at that little face, was, “Okay.”
Whatever David thought, he kept it to himself. The Djinn proxy driver guided us through a winding set of back roads, turning left, then right at intersections until we arrived back at a main highway again. I didn’t know where we were, and I wasn’t sure maps had much relevance anymore. Cherise and Kevin had something to do now; they had found some crackers and juice boxes in their stash of snacks, and were now arguing over whether a kid that age wore a diaper. I didn’t add any insights. They both seemed very earnest about the whole thing, which was a little endearing.
The night passed quietly enough. We’d outrun the worst of the storms, for the moment; no wildfires chased us through the silent trees. It almost looked normal. I rolled down the window, and night air fluttered over my face like a damp veil. I breathed it in and felt, for a moment, a little calmed. This still exists. There’s still hope.
David said, “We should have good travel for the next few hundred miles. This part of the country’s still relatively unaffected.”
“Yeah, why is that?” Kevin asked.
I already knew the answer to that. “It’s rural,” I said. “And the trouble is focusing on centers of population first. That doesn’t mean it won’t spread fast, but for now, people out here are as safe as they can be.”
“It’s more than that,” David said. “There’s a black corner near here—a small one. It’s been here for a thousand years or more. But it tends to keep the Djinn and the Wardens well away.”
I blinked, because I hadn’t known that. It made sense, though—black corners were places that canceled out supernatural forces, all kinds of supernatural forces. It was wasting energy to go near one.
Which made them perfect for hiding people who didn’t, and couldn’t, tell the difference.
“Pull over,” I ordered.
“It’s better if we—”
“David, pull the car over now!”
He did. There was no use trying for Google Maps or GPS; I went at it old-school, rifling the glove compartment for maps. There was a road atlas, years out of date but good enough. I flipped through it until I found a map of the entire continental USA.
“Show me on the map where the black corners are,” I said. Small black areas painted themselves out. There weren’t many, but they were there . . . and they were scattered from coast to coast, north to south. Almost . . . deliberately. “Okay, looking good. David, you’re talking through the radio.”
There was a long pause, and then David said, in the tone of someone who really didn’t understand why I was stating the obvious, “Yes . . . ?”
“Is that just to us, or can you do it anywhere?”
“Define anywhere.”
“All radios in specific areas.”
Another pause, and then he said, slowly, “Yes. Yes, I can.”
“Awesome. You are the new Djinn Emergency Broadcast System.” I got out of the car and spread the atlas out on the hood of the idling car. Cherise and Kevin got out with me; Kevin was holding the toddler, who had fallen charmingly asleep in his arms. “I need dimensions on these black corners. Specifically, how many people they can hold, whether there’s any food and water, shelter, that kind of thing. Get me all the information you can.”
“Uh—how?” Cherise asked blankly. She held out her phone. It still said NO SERVICE. “Internet go boom.”
“The aetheric’s still there,” I said. “You and Kevin get up there, find me these two black corners; they’re the largest ones. Tell me whatever you can. Do it fast.”
Kevin handed me the baby, which was a smart move. I wasn’t sure he wouldn’t drop the kid on his head at the best of times, but being out of his body wouldn’t help him be Best Surrogate Dad Ever. The child was surprisingly heavy and warm, and settled against me with a sleepy murmur. I smoothed dark hair, balanced him (her?) on my hip, and stared down at the map as Cherise and Kevin stood, immobile and vacant next to me. Both of the areas I’d indicated to them were remote; whatever had happened there to damage the planet’s awareness had been significant, but it had also probably happened a very long time ago. Maybe even before humans began building their first mud huts. Maybe they’d been even larger, and the Earth was slowly, steadily healing in those areas.
But what was important to me was that if I put people inside those borders, they’d be safe from supernatural forces. As safe as I could make them, anyway.
Cherise came back first, staggering as her spirit reunited with her body and catching herself with both hands against the car’s fender. She snatched her palms off it immediately. “Ow!” she said. “Damn. Hot. And I’m not talking about myself, you know.” I didn’t need to put her back on track. She took in a deep breath and continued. “It’s pretty large, but it’s wild out there. Overgrown. No shelter or structures I could see. There’s a stream, though, so fresh water. You’d have to arrange for the food.”
“Roads?”
“There’s a kind of road—damn, that map’s too small. Guess you can’t zoom in.”
“It’s paper, Cher.”
“Kidding. Anyway, yeah, there’s a way in, you could probably drive it. Not sure how tough it would be, though.”
“How many people could it hold?”
“It’s about as big as half of Manhattan, so you figure it out. Of course, unless they’re living in trees, you can only put them on the ground floor.”
It was better than nothing. Not a lot better, but still.
Kevin returned a few minutes later. He had better news, from the western black corner—which was large, empty, and easy to reach. Only problem was, it was barren. Really barren. No source of fresh water running through it, or even near it. It was also hotter than hell there, and even with tents and temporary shelters it might be fatal conditions for many.
But we didn’t have a choice. I ordered everybody back into the car. Kevin took the kid back from me; the baby woke up and started fretting. Kevin bounced him in his arms, waking a surprisingly cheerful set of giggles, and the kid put its chubby arms around his neck.
“Boy or girl?” I asked. Kevin gave me a long- suffering, disgusted look.
“Boy, obviously,” he said. “Wow. I thought you were all up on the birds and the bees.”
I tried again. “What’s his name?”
“How am I supposed to know? The kid was lying underneath his dead mom. He didn’t come with papers .” Kevin’s eyes glittered in the white backwash of the headlights, but not with Djinn power, not anymore. Those were real, human tears. “They left him there to starve or get eaten. So maybe his name ought to be Lucky; what do you think?”
“Kevin,” I said, gently. “Deep breaths.”
“Fuck you,” he snapped, and got in the car. I ached for him, because nobody—not even Kevin—should feel the kind of agon
y I could hear in his voice. He hated this as much as I did, as much as Cher did. I could feel that pain and panic burrowing inside me like a carnivorous small animal. Make it stop. I don’t want to do this anymore. Make it all go away.
For a few seconds, it was so overwhelming that I wanted to scream. I forced myself to take deep, steady breaths, and stared at the map until my eyes blurred. I blinked, and tears slid cold down my cheeks, but I wiped them away impatiently. I have no time for this crap, I told myself. Sack up, Jo. Right now.
I wanted to be strong, but it seemed like the solid rock I’d always felt to be inside me had turned to slippery, clinging mud, and I wasn’t sure I had any emotional footing anymore.
“Jo?” That was David’s voice, coming from the car. I grabbed the atlas and got back inside. The second I slammed the door, we got moving again at Djinn speed, turning the night into a shadowy blur beyond the windows.
Except for the cold white moon, almost full, that floated up overhead like a balloon. Its glow almost eclipsed the stars. Out here in the dark, there were so many of those, thick as spilled sacks of gems in the heavens. Easy to feel small.
Easy to feel a sense of the ice-cold infinite out there, too, for whom the death struggles on this planet were of merely academic interest.
Perversely, that made me feel better.
“David,” I said, and was glad that my voice sounded steady now. “I need you to send messages to all the Wardens you can reach. Tell them we’ve identified two main areas where they can send refugees, and give them coordinates and the details. Give them the coordinates of the other black corners, too. Even if some will only hold a few people, it’s something. We should use it.”
“I’m on it,” he said, and oddly enough, he laughed.
“What?”
“Coordinating. Isn’t that what Lewis tried to sentence us to from the start?”
The radio turned itself off.
I leaned back in the seat, which no longer felt remotely comfy after the long, long hours, and glanced over at the Djinn driver. “So,” I said. “How you doing?”
I didn’t really expect an answer, and I didn’t get one.