She didn’t know.
But if she insisted now on going back, and either left Jesse to find another buddy or put him in a position that made it impossible to stay—either way, essentially initiating a breakup—what did she have to go home to? She had quit her job. She had broken her lease to live with Jesse. Worst of all—and God, how she hated to admit this to herself—she had gotten used to the lifestyle. She had gotten used to not pouring drinks and fending off the advances of drunken, middle-aged men, and she had gotten used to not having to count every credit she spent in the last week of the month, and she had gotten used to good wine, fresh fish, VIP access, chocolate, honey for her tea, the safety of living on a street where break-ins weren’t reported several times a week. She had come to depend on the variety and novelty of Jesse’s lifestyle; it dulled the ache of her loneliness, let her forget, sometimes for hours on end, that both her father and her mother were now lost to her forever. None of these things had gotten her into bed with Jesse, but she found now that they made it hard for her to leave it—at least without some kind of plan in place.
And she did love him, she thought.
“Are you sure?” Andy asked. “I’m going to need you to say yes out loud if that’s really your decision. And it is your decision—not anyone else’s.” He looked around. “That goes for everyone on this bus.”
“Yes,” Edie said. Jesse was trying to smile at her, but she refused to meet his gaze. “It’s my decision.”
—
In the end, they all decided to keep going.
And as promised, the view once the bus topped the rise and turned a corner, penetrating the wall of garbage, was everything the brochures had assured them it would be, the land spreading out generously ahead and then rising suddenly into mist-shrouded peaks, the closest mountains at this distance a muted orange, the more faraway ones charcoal-smudged and out of focus. Soon, Edie noticed, even the residual tremor of the TerraVibra had fallen completely away. The windows opened three inches and were protected by double screens, so Edie shoved hers down and leaned her temple against the glass, letting the fresh cool air rush into her nose and take away some of the lingering scent, or scent memory, from the landfill. She was suddenly exhausted and limp. She had been rigid with fear before, and getting past that first bad moment outside the gates had given her, she knew, a temporary and false sense of relief, a lulling certainty that she could close her eyes now, let the slight sway of the bus rock her to sleep, and not worry, for a time, about problematic boyfriends, great walls of trash, ticks.
But there was much to see outside her window. Well, strike that—what was compelling, actually, was the relative emptiness of the landscape compared to inside the zone, or at least the reaches of the zone beyond the perimeter of the TerraVibra, where you could hardly expect to pass, outside of the arboretums and parks, an empty lot, much less undeveloped kilometers populated by nothing but grass, trees, and rock. And the trees! The ones at home were mostly young, thirty or forty years on the top end, and though there were, in the parks, some of the larger species, the oaks and the cedars, the inner-zone trend was toward small, slim, and ornamental: Japanese maples, crepe myrtle, dogwoods, redbuds. The trees weren’t to blame for the ticks, but there was a strong cultural distrust of woods and canopies, not to mention a limited amount of space for them. But these outer-zone trees climbed stories.
Also fascinating were the signs of the old life, the one that had been finally abandoned so many years ago, well before even her mother was born, when construction on the Atlantic Zone’s perimeter was complete and the last group of refugees was granted entrance. Little things. Like road signs, large and green with bold white text, designed for view at a fast-passing distance: Old Fort, Black Mountain, Swannanoa, they sounded like storybook places, like places where the villagers and the shaman might have lived. And those blue signs with their simple declarations of “Food, Gas, Attractions,” the little squares with logos reminding her of the home screen on her tablet—how strange was that? “Gas” and half a dozen places that sold it. No rations, no digital counters, no yearly fuel audit requiring drivers to keep track of kilometers traveled and the purpose of that travel (work, recreation, family, public service), then to calculate a taxable footprint based on the results. She knew that the old times weren’t simpler, that the lack of foresight then was in part what had led to the necessity for strict regulation now, but it was amazing to ponder that freeness. And hard not to feel some jealousy of it.
“Look,” Jesse said, pointing.
It was another green sign: “Exit 55, E Asheville/VA Hospital.” Edie glanced at the overhead monitor and confirmed their progress; the little pulsing dot on the map that represented their bus was almost on top of the destination flag now. The bus didn’t exit at the first sign, or the next couple, but it slowed as highway 25A approached. Edie’s stomach sloshed uncomfortably as the bus veered right, onto the off-ramp. She pulled off her glove so that she could gnaw on her thumbnail.
Andy stood in the aisle, grasping the backs of two seats for balance. “We’re approaching the first checkpoint. It’s just a few minutes after nine o’clock, which means we’ve managed to stay on schedule. Our driver, Johnny, made up some time on the road. Give him a hand.”
There were a few claps.
“We’ll rest for an hour here, so double-check to make sure your watches are synced with the bus’s clock.” He pointed at the monitor. “Nine-oh-four. We want to be loaded and ready to go by ten after ten. If you’re not on the bus by then, tardiness penalties go into effect. We would never leave a traveler behind, but we’ll make it very expensive for you to waste our time. Got it?”
Heads bobbed.
“Tia and I will be handing out power bars and orange juice. Please dispose of your waste in the designated OLE trash cans around the checkpoint facility. They’re bright red and marked with our logo. Hard to miss.”
The bus pulled into an empty parking lot and stopped. The silence initiated by the shut-off engine was sudden and eerie.
“We monitor this site for ticks, but you should be on your guard and near your buddy from here on out. Don’t panic, and don’t psych yourself out, but remember the things I told you. You’ll know the itch when you feel it. It’s unmistakable.” He gestured to the sprawling brown building on the driver’s side of the bus. “This place was a restaurant, a kind of curiosity. We’ve got generators hooked up, and the bathrooms are converted to chemical toilets, so you can use the facilities more or less as you normally would, have your snack at the tables, look around the store. You may not remove or purchase items from the store. Think of it as a museum. We have video monitoring inside, and we’ll be doing bag checks. No souvenirs.”
Wes Feingold, shoulders hunched as he leaned in for a better look, raised a hand and said, “What’s a cracker barrel?”
“Beats me,” said Andy. “But this place was a restaurant with a little store attached, part of a big chain of them. For whatever reason, this location has held up pretty well, and the general store wasn’t looted. I think you’ll get a kick out of it.”
They disembarked the bus sedately from front to back, no one rushing the aisle or holding up the line to pull things from the overhead bins, and, like schoolchildren, accepted from Andy and Tia their designated morning snacks. The foil pouch of juice with the plastic nozzle was the same brand Edie had carried in her kindergarten lunchbox. Comforting. She walked a few steps away from the pack to get a look around. Not much to see here. A chilly but fresh-smelling wind blew into her face, and she tugged her goggles down over her streaming eyes. The restaurant was situated on a rise, surrounded by a parking lot that appeared to have been recently resealed, as was the road leading from the interstate up to it. The air out here, beyond the Wall, was different. The word that sprang to Edie’s mind, oddly, was uncluttered. No trace of smoke or of corn fuel. No cooking oil or perfume of a hundred different competing strains of c
uisine. No musk of many bodies, bottled together in subway cars or tiny apartments or watering holes like O’Henry’s. It was beautifully empty air, remarkable to Edie for its surprising neutrality.
There were a few standing structures down the opposite direction, away from the interstate, but they were empty, dilapidated; the overhanging roof on the thing that looked a bit like a fuel station had collapsed completely into a pile of rubble, and the windows on the attached structure were shattered. Edie felt an urge to walk down that way—she wondered what other damage she’d find, what story it would reconstruct—but now wasn’t the time to wander. Or wonder. And Jesse was eyeing the relic of a restaurant with enthusiasm.
“Cracker Barrel Old Country Store,” he read. The sign was faded but still fairly clear, brown print on a yellow backdrop. “What a goddamn riot.”
He strode across the parking lot, and Edie hustled to keep up, but he stopped to hold the oak double doors open so she could pass through. “Milady,” he said.
Edie sighed. I love him, she told herself. I do. I do.
The store inside smelled oppressively old and musty in contrast to outdoors, despite the evidence of regular and recent cleaning. There was a faint odor of burned wood and of something fleetingly but recognizably musky or uric—maybe the promised chemical toilets, maybe the lingering scent of the rats and raccoons that would have bedded down here in the years of the store’s abandonment. Andy wasn’t exaggerating, though; the store was remarkably well preserved. And remarkably . . . strange. Where to begin? Where to lay her eyes? There were obvious gaps in the wares, items that had been lifted over the years, or thrown away because of rot, or chewed up by animals, but still, everywhere she looked, junk: piled up on tables, strung by wire from the ceiling. A bicycle, marked Schwinn, dangled above her head; elsewhere hung other items, each random and not just old but used-looking: a battered aluminum fuel can, tennis rackets, a gas lamp, a rusted mailbox. Stuff that would have been antique by the early twenty-first century.
At eye level was the merchandise. The table facing the front door displayed a set of plates glazed with the old American flag pattern. Nearby was a pyramid of once-white boxes, each marked with the faded, peeling images of the product they contained: “Elegant Christmas Angel,” the photographs depicting porcelain yellow-haired women wearing ruffled blue gowns, their faces blank and unsettling, red lips rounded like a sex doll’s. A display of yellowing cardboard, slumped with dry rot, advertised “Music by Today’s Top Artists Only $14.99,” and Jesse, wagging his eyebrows at her, flipped through the slim square packages and read names and album titles aloud. “Mercy on Me by Alan James Flint. Never heard of him. Get a look at the costume.”
“He was a country singer,” said Edie, thinking of her father and the music he’d always played in his pickup truck. “That’s the kind of thing they wore.”
“Albums,” Jesse said with a laugh. “Can you imagine? What an arbitrary way to put out songs.” He flipped to another disc, mouth tucked around the nozzle of his juice pouch, and Edie wandered to the next table. More plates, though these were merely decorative, edges scalloped, resting on little gilded easels. They were printed with a portrait of a long-ago British royal family and their handsome children. She stared at the image until her vision blurred, imagining the person—the people—who would patronize a place like this, an Old Country Store, but also cared enough about the British monarchy to purchase a commemorative plate in their honor. It made her suddenly and inexplicably sad.
When she was sixteen, her high school class took a field trip to Washington, DC, to tour the old American capital landmarks, some museums, various memorials. The centerpiece of the trip was supposed to be the Memorial to the Lost Republic, a two-acre park, flanked on both ends by infinity pools symbolizing “the shining seas,” with fifty sculptures, each completed by an artist from every state of the old republic. Edie and her classmates were given some nominal assignment—choose a sculpture, document it, describe it, analyze its significance—but most of them spent about five minutes taking pictures and jotting down notes in their tablets, then gathered in clumps out of the teacher’s line of sight to talk and smoke. Edie and her best friend, Sasha, had staked out a good hiding spot behind the Kentucky sculpture, which was an abstract representation of the log cabin where Abraham Lincoln was born, and passed a joint back and forth. The sculpture is significant, Edie had gigglingly written in her report, because it is shaped like a box and boxes contain things like important ideas and memories. She got a B+.
She hadn’t felt anything at the Memorial to the Lost Republic. The old United States was long gone—c’est la vie—and the people who had known the people who died in the epidemic or got shut out-of-zone were long gone, too, with the exception of a couple of senile old crones who were interviewed each year on the local news feeds. Only now, contemplating this cheap novelty plate, did Edie feel a stirring of what she was probably supposed to feel at the memorial. So many people gone. A whole way of life reduced to a roadside novelty.
She wasn’t sure she wanted to look around anymore. She didn’t know if she had the stomach for it.
“Jesse,” she said. “Hey, I need to go to the toilet.”
He was holding what looked like some kind of an old-fashioned puzzle: wooden, triangle-shaped. He moved a plastic peg from one hole to another, removed the peg he’d jumped, and paused, then cursed. He replaced the jumped peg and moved the other peg back to its original position. “Umm?”
“Bathroom,” said Edie.
“I’ll be right out here,” Jesse said without looking up. He moved another peg. Edie noticed that his Stamp wasn’t in its designated holster-pocket and was instead jutting out of the hip pocket of his microsuit. “Ten feet away. Just yell if you need me.”
“You sure?”
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “Go do your business.”
He’d missed the point again. But there were plenty of people nearby, and she didn’t suppose that the chemical toilet would be tick central. She hoped not.
The bathroom smelled strongly of cinnamon deodorizer and, under that, the chemicals. The shit. It wasn’t a place you’d want to linger, and so Edie made a beeline for the first empty stall, not registering, until she was unzipping and hanging her bottom over the toilet seat, that Anastasia, who had been examining the reflection of her bare stomach in the mirror over the sink, was not wearing her microsuit.
“Uh, Anastasia?” she said. “You OK out there?” She finished as quickly as she could and arranged her microsuit back into place, heart pounding. Lifting a shaking hand to her waist, she felt for the hard line of the Stamp in its pocket. “Anastasia?” she repeated.
“I’m fine,” Anastasia said with a tone of casual distraction. When Edie snagged the Stamp and exited the stall, arm raised at the ready, Anastasia caught her eyes in the mirror and laughed. “Seriously. You can put that away.”
“You’re not wearing your suit.” Edie let her arm drop. The suit made a pool around Anastasia’s boot-clad feet; she hadn’t even stepped out of it. Her boxer shorts were pulled down a little, exposing the ridges of her hip bones, and her tank top was rolled up to rest under her breasts.
“I gave the room a once-over,” Anastasia said. She picked up something from the countertop and ripped it free from a paper sleeve. A syringe. “For all the difference it makes.”
Edie hadn’t talked to Anastasia much during the weeks of training. Why? Edie couldn’t say, though she had hardly noticed at the time their disinterest in each other, had found it natural, unremarkable. But it was strange, in retrospect. Women were a minority in the excursion group. Anastasia, thirtysomething, was the woman closest in age to Edie. And yet, for some reason, these facts had driven a wedge between them rather than bonding them. Edie tried now to reconstruct her first impression of Anastasia, the flutter of quick observations and judgments that had snagged in her semiconsciousness before she had a chance
to second-guess them. Initially, she’d been uneasy. Anastasia, with her athletic build and long honey-colored hair (the cruelest sacrifice to the shears, in Edie’s opinion), had looked at a room’s distance like a potential rival, the kind of woman Jesse might fix his gaze upon. Closer, that anxiety dissipated. Anastasia’s age became more apparent in her freckled face, the lines around her mouth, an almost unnoticeable softness (to eyes less hungry for fault than Edie’s) around her jawline. Her chin was too long, her chest too flat. So then it was superiority Edie felt. Confidence in her own beauty and youth. And finally, though she’d acknowledged no dislike at all, having nothing real to base it upon, she had sensed the falling away of it when Anastasia linked hands with Berto, leaving in its wake amiable indifference. Married, some part of her had noted. Older than me. Not as pretty. Unworthy of her jealousy. Unworthy of her notice. Maybe she was exaggerating, being hard on herself, but she burned now with the shame of it.
Shyly, Edie took a couple of small steps forward, still looking at the mirror and not directly at Anastasia. “Um. What are you doing?”
Anastasia pulled a plastic cap off the end of the needle with her teeth and spit it out on the bathroom floor. “Heroin,” she said. Catching Edie’s look in the mirror, she laughed and shook her head. “Fertility drugs. I’m having my eggs harvested right after we get back in-zone.”
“OLE lets you bring those out here?”
“They didn’t have any choice if they wanted my money.” She lay the needle tip at an angle against her stomach, slid the point under the skin, and depressed the button, biting her lip with a little grimace. Then she pulled the needle free and sighed. “I’m almost forty. I can’t go on hiatus for eight weeks.”
“So why come at all?”
“You’re just full of questions,” Anastasia said.
“Well, it’s the question I’ve been asking myself.”
“And I bet my answer’s the same as yours. My man.” She said it in a jokey way, my mayun. “He wanted a last great adventure before I started chaining myself to the exam table. Well, really, so did I. To be fair. My preference would have been Iceland or something, but it’s cool. He drew the long straw.” She pitched the empty syringe into the wastebasket, hunched over, and grabbed the rumpled microsuit, wriggling into it and pulling the zipper to her chin. “Hood, you think?”
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