The Salt Line

by Holly Goddard Jones

  She paused here, unable to look at him. When he didn’t jump in, she continued.

  “Anyway, I’m dealing with it. So let’s move on. You don’t owe me anything.”

  Another silence, which she itched to fill—but she wasn’t sure what was left to say. She chanced a look at him. He seemed . . . thoughtful. Not shocked or panicked. Not angry.

  “I mean,” he said, “do you want it? Like, to have it?”

  “Of course I don’t fucking want it,” Edie snapped. “Of course I don’t want to fucking have it. What goddamn choice do I have? I’m going to go to one of those agencies and sell it.”

  He cleared his throat. “You don’t want to have it.”

  She felt a charge in the air—a sense that they were moving toward some new understanding. “I don’t want to have it,” she replied carefully.

  “Because—you don’t have to.” He leaned over and rubbed his mouth. “This doesn’t have to be a big thing is what I’m saying. I know people. It happens all the time.”

  “Has it happened to you?”

  “Once,” he said. “A few years ago.”

  “And you got it taken care of.”

  “It really wasn’t a big deal.”

  She rocked in her mother’s chair, absorbing all of this. The gulf between what was and wasn’t a big deal, and for whom.

  “I’d have to go somewhere? Out-of-zone?”

  “Oh, hell no. It would happen right here.”

  “And this place—it’s safe? I mean. Clean? Sterile?”

  He laughed. “Sorry. I don’t mean to make light of this. But yeah, of course. It’s totally up-and-up. They just offer certain after-hours services.”

  “How much?” she said flatly.

  He shook his head dismissively. “On me.”

  “It might not be yours.”

  “Or it might. If you want to feel better about this, it’s a lot cheaper for me to help you now than to take the risk you change your mind later about raising it.”

  She started to cry. It was the first time she had cried since all of this—what she thought of as all of this—had started: her mother’s sickness, her death, Edie’s madness in the wake of the death, the dread news of the pregnancy. She cried hard, for all of it, and at some point Jesse put his hands on both of her upper arms, gingerly, and he said, “Shit. I didn’t mean that. It’s up to you. Of course it is, honey. I’m not trying to force this on you.”

  Now Edie laughed, just as hard as she’d been crying, and she mopped tears off her face with her shirttail. “That’s not why I’m crying. Hell yes, I want this. Yes. I’m crying because I’m thinking about how lucky I am I fucked a rich guy.”

  He didn’t reply right away—she supposed he wasn’t sure what tone to take, what was allowed—but then he said, “Glad to be of service,” and she hugged him. He hugged her back, firmly, and kissed the top of her head. He returned to her bed that night, and then they fell asleep, exhausted, and when Edie lifted a swollen eyelid ten blissfully blank hours later, he was still there. His narrow back, ridge of spine. The tattoo of a golden eagle taking flight across his rib cage. I think I could love this guy, she told herself. If love is what he wants from me.

  A few months later, Jesse heard about Outer Limits Excursions, and he became obsessed with this excursion-into-the-wild-beyond stuff. There had been a session musician named Neil—a guy Jesse’s producer had hired to add a layer of classical guitar to a track on the new audio feed—and Jesse, who had never seen a Stamp in the flesh (or, as it were, on the flesh), was fascinated. Edie had been hanging out at all of the recording sessions by then (“Please stay, baby,” Jesse would say in his insecure, yearning way, and his producer would scowl), and so she had seen firsthand the mix of boyish emotions that had crossed Jesse’s face as Neil displayed the welts on his arm, stomach, neck, and ankle: the jealousy and crushing admiration, the thrill of possibility. “Experience of a bloody lifetime,” this Neil guy kept repeating, and by the end of the day, he had gotten paid for as many hours of storytelling as guitar playing, as Jesse had him recite and repeat the entirety of his eight-week adventure. Three weeks of boot camp. Three beyond the Salt Line, in what had once been the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Two weeks in Quarantines 1 and 2. Drinking water from pure mountain streams, eating rabbit charred over an open fire. An open, undisturbed sky crusted with millions of stars.

  And then there were the tick stories, which Neil told with as much nostalgia as he did those of nature’s majesty. This one—he’d point—I got when I stripped down to bathe in a waterfall. Fucker was on me the second I pulled off my microsuit. This one—he pointed again—had stopped itching the second before I managed to use the Stamp, and I worried for days that I’d gotten to it too late. Jesse nodded and prodded, and he kept saying, “Fucking rad,” and Edie had gotten uneasy. Shut up shut up shut up, she wanted to snap at Neil. Because she knew enough by now about how Jesse’s mind worked to guess how this would go. She had seen it the previous month, when Jesse had spotted a man outside a club who had pulled up on one of the new CO2 motorbikes, and instead of just waiting to place an order for one at a dealer, Jesse had transferred the guy ten thousand credits on the spot, taken the key, and gotten Edie to drive his Zepplyn 8.0 home. Or how, at a rave, he’d accepted a Bullet from some weirdo stranger with eyelid rivets and popped it before Edie could protest. He had finished that night stripped naked and running down the side of the road, screaming, “HEEEEEEEEEE!” until he fell over in a ditch, unconscious.

  He was an innocent. What he saw in himself as hot-bloodedness and boldness, a masculine thirst for thrills, was actually just a longing for acceptance and admiration, and a childlike confidence in the goodwill of others. It made Edie’s heart break for him, and it made her feel that it was her duty, as the one person in his inner circle beside his parents who wouldn’t indulge and lie to him if it meant getting an opportunity or a freebie, to look out for him. And she owed him. Didn’t she? And so she had agreed to join him on this Outer Limits Excursion, though she knew all too well the dangers that awaited them on the other side of the Salt Line. The thought of one of those miner ticks burrowing under her smooth skin had awakened her every night of their strange stay in this sumptuous brick training facility, sweat popping on her brow, heart racing.

  —

  On the final day of boot camp, they shaved their heads. Edie twisted her long brown hair into a sloppy ponytail and took up a pair of scissors, then hacked above the rubber band until her hand ached and the last hairs finally gave way. There was a bulletin board where the women and some of the men hung their ponytails—“Wall of Manes,” the placard read. Smiling, she added hers to the display, spearing it with a thumbtack, and the group clapped good-naturedly. Jesse snapped her picture and posted it to his feed before she could tell him not to. Edie could just imagine the comments that were pinging his alert box, the now-familiar assortment of insults and promises of sexual aggression and expressions of dismay from Jesse’s adolescent female fans (and even some of his middle-aged ones).

  Now her scalp was bristled with fine hairs, and she couldn’t stop running her hands across it, listening to the rasp against her dry palms. Jesse, robbed of his cap of waves, looked a bit older, the angles of his cheekbones sharper, but still handsome. He was surveying the wall, all those flaccid tassels like the trophies of a hunter, and he must have sensed that Edie was rattled because he said, “It reassures me, actually.”

  “The hair wall?”

  “Yeah.” He pointed a few different places. “How many do you think are up there—a hundred or more? And they all came back.”

  “They didn’t all come back,” Edie said.

  “They mostly all came back. And heart attacks? That could happen anywhere.” He took her hand. “If anything, it makes me feel like—I don’t know—it’s not that big of a challenge. It’s a little disappointing, even.”
r />   Edie laughed. “You’re nuts.”

  “About you,” he said, and he gave her a very full, sudden kiss. “Damn, honey, if I knew your head was going to be so pretty, I’d have suggested you shave it months ago.”

  “I don’t look too militant?”

  “You look fucking rock and roll is how you look.” He kissed her again and then resumed his pacing, lace-up boots squeaking a little on the polished floors. They were waiting for Andy to come down and give them one last pep talk before lights-out, and the nervous energy in the gymnasium was so palpable that Edie vibrated with it. The three-week training had sounded excessive, even dull, when she and Jesse were doing their research, but it had gone by in a blink. And Edie didn’t feel ready. Her hair was on the wall, and the small, circular burn scar was on her ass, but she didn’t feel ready.

  The Andy who had revealed himself to Edie that day in the weight room had not made a reappearance since, and it was hard now, watching him work the room on this last night of boot camp, to believe he had even existed.

  “Wow,” he said with a laugh. “I sure see a lot of cue balls.”

  The travelers murmured and smiled, touching their heads self-consciously.

  Andy’s face grew serious, but his eyes twinkled. “I’ve got to tell you. I had serious doubts. If someone had told me three weeks ago that every single one of you would be Stamped and shaved and ready to load that bus at oh-six-hundred tomorrow, I’d have wagered otherwise. But you proved me wrong. You did good. Damn good.”

  Mickey Worthington’s mouth tilted, and he folded his arms across his chest, nodding with satisfaction. Even the Japanese couple who’d begun boot camp in such a perpetual state of affront, Ken and Wendy Tanaka, seemed pleased. Jesse whooped and raised a cheer, which the rest quickly chimed in on.

  Jesus, Edie thought. We’re a bunch of suckers. But she felt her own tiny, reluctant swell of pride, too.

  “I would be proud to lead this group anywhere,” Andy said, setting off a second round of applause. Edie joined it halfheartedly and stared at Andy, willing him to meet her eyes, but he kept his focus elsewhere, bobbing his head in a modest way and finally lifting a hand to ask for silence.

  “You won’t sleep well tonight, probably, but try. The first few nights out there are always rough. You’re going to feel aches in muscles and joints you didn’t even know you had. You’re going to feel hot and constricted in the micro-sleepsacks, which is why I urged you to start using them during boot camp, even though I realize how hard it is to give up comforts you know you’re not going to have for much longer.

  “Worse, though, is the fear, and the way that fear fucks with your head. You’ll wake up dozens of times convinced something is crawling on you. It won’t matter that I’m telling you now it’s going to happen. It won’t matter that the combination of the micro-sleepsack and micro-tent makes the risk of infiltration negligible. It will be so real to you that you’ll sit up, snap on your light, and wake up your tent partner. And the second you finally slip off into real sleep, someone else will shout or switch on a light and bring you right back. You won’t be happy campers these first few nights.”

  A hand shot up, and Andy nodded his acknowledgment.

  It was the woman who’d worn diamond earrings on that first day. The earrings were, Edie supposed, now locked up with the rest of her valuables in her room safe. “Will you dispense sleeping pills?” she asked. It was stated explicitly in the tour company’s brochure, and in the Traveler Contract they’d each had to sign, that weapons, most pharmaceuticals, liquids, and unpackaged food items were forbidden for travelers; the guide and his two assistants would control the stores for the safety of the group. There was a note of something in her voice—desperation, defensiveness—and Edie felt vaguely uneasy.

  “I think you know the answer to that,” Andy said, the glint in his eye extinguished. “No sedatives or mind-altering drugs on the excursion. It’s better for you to wake up to something that isn’t really there than to not wake up when something is. I can’t stress enough the importance of that.”

  The woman—her name was Marta, and something about her quiet bearing gave Edie the sense that she must be the wife of a powerful man—blinked and pursed her lips. Andy seemed to take that as assent.

  “Of course,” he added with a laugh, “the company tends to turn a blind eye to the two or three bottles of whiskey I’ve got hidden away out there, and we all get a share out of that.” He was being the good buddy again. This was a group of people for whom surrender of personal luxuries was cause for the deepest distrust—even when they had knowingly signed away their rights to those luxuries—and his job, Edie supposed, was to walk the very fine line between treating them as underlings and treating them as customers.

  “Any other questions?”

  An uneasy silence had fallen. The spell of camaraderie had been broken; Edie could see in the faces around her sudden doubts, regrets, a flash or two of panic. Even Jesse was looking at his hands, picking at a dry triangle of skin beside his thumbnail.

  “I have never failed to bring every single one of my travelers back to Quarantine 1 alive and free of serious injury,” Andy said. “In the four-year history of Outer Limits Excursions, only two deaths have occurred on any excursion: One was by heart attack. The other was a single incident of Shreve’s, and though we hate to say this, by all accounts the person was infected because he failed to adhere to recommended best practices, even after repeated corrections from Outer Limits staff. So, one more time: What’s our mantra?”

  They were all looking down now, like a classroom full of students who’d failed to do the assigned reading.

  “Come on,” Andy said. “Humor me.”

  “Stay in suit, stay aware,” Jesse said, raising his voice a bit.

  Andy nodded. “What else?”

  “Always have your Stamp,” said Wes Feingold, the young man who’d thrown up that first day.

  “Always,” said Andy. “I’m not kidding. If you lose your Stamp, you’ll be issued a replacement at a cost of one thousand credits. If you lose a second Stamp, the next one will cost you five thousand credits. The penalty is as harsh as it is not just because these are expensive pieces of equipment but also because for the next three weeks that Stamp is the most precious item in your possession. Always have it close at hand. And what else should you have close at hand?”

  “Your buddy,” said Anastasia, an athletic-looking woman in her late thirties or early forties. As if in illustration, she reached out and grasped the forearm of her husband, Berto.

  “Bingo.” Andy put his arms over his shoulders, as if he were trying to scratch an itch or give himself a hug. “There are places on the body that you can’t reach on your own. Period. And if you’re not within a dozen paces of a person when you’re bitten in one of those places, you’re screwed. I can’t emphasize this enough: We are all in this together. When the moment comes to administer a Stamp, you can’t flinch. You can’t second-guess yourself. You just do it.”

  Edie’s armpits dampened, and she could suddenly smell herself—a ripe, feral odor, a fear-sweat. She wasn’t afraid of giving Jesse the Stamp, or of giving it to herself—but what about Jesse? Would he hesitate? If Edie felt the blossom of intense itching between her shoulder blades, the itching that Andy had assured them all was unmistakable, would Jesse quickly do what had to be done?

  “The mantra,” Andy said. “One more time—say it together.”

  The group of travelers mumbled through it: Stay in suit, stay aware, keep your buddy close and your Stamp closer.

  “Who’s ready for the time of their lives?”

  Jesse, who seemed revived and reassured by the recitation of the mantra, cheered and waved his hands in the air. Edie stared at him, throat dry, her own hands still folded in her lap.

  “All right then, folks. Nighty-night. Sleep tight.”

  He didn’t f
inish the rhyme, but they all knew how it went.

  Two

  Marta Perrone was lying awake, eyes trained on a fine crack in the ceiling, long before the speakers started to emit the first soft strains of the “Sunrise Serenade.” It was a cheerful, rousing, but not overly obnoxious instrumental number, heavy on the flute and piccolo, that increased in decibels as the ceiling lights brightened, so that—this according to the Outer Limits brochure—“waking is as stress-free as sliding into a warm bath.” At 4:45 a.m., the automatic thermostat switched from its programmed sixty-eight degrees to seventy-two, and the floor tiles in Marta’s private bathroom started to warm. The rhetoric of this strange, awful place—the way a command, such as the time to rise from bed, was softened with luxuries—was not unfamiliar to Marta. She had lived a life of sumptuous captivity.

  She sat up and rubbed her face briskly. Her heart was pounding hard, the way it did the nights when she drank too much and stumbled from the bed to the bathroom, but Marta hadn’t had anything to drink last night—not last night and not for the last three weeks. She put her feet on the floor, retrieved her silk robe from the nearby settee, and crossed the room to an electronic panel. She could silence “Sunrise Serenade” only from here, a bit of electronic bitchiness that made her want to put her fist through something. But her thoughts of violence never extended beyond the want, and so she went on to the bathroom, slid dutifully out of her robe and nightgown, and tried to enjoy what she knew would be her last hot shower for weeks. Despite the heat of the spray—her skin was stinging and pink—she could not stop shaking. She was more terrified than she had ever been in her life, and that was saying something, considering her life. For fifteen years now, she had not driven cars without first running a scan on the doors and ignition for explosives. For fifteen years, she had not been able to step out for lunch with a friend or attend her daily Pilates class without being followed—protected, her husband always insisted—by a 250-pound goon in a dark suit loose enough to hide the pieces strapped to his side and his calf. For fifteen years now, her husband had been the boss of the Atlantic Zone’s organized crime clan, and she had learned all too well the fine print of her marital contract.