Jane and the Exodus

by T. R. Woodman

  Still coasting, Jane craned her neck to the side and absently glanced into the forest off to her right, when something caught her eye.

  She slammed on the brakes, skidding to a stop on the gravel and sending up a cloud of dust.

  Was that a face? Jane wondered as she peered into the woods. She was completely caught off guard and wondered if her eyes were playing tricks on her. After all, she had just spent the past half hour thinking about ghosts.

  Jane stared into the woods, looking for a sign of life. Seconds passed, and she saw nothing. Shaking her head, she started to ease her foot off the brake, letting the truck roll ever so slightly forward, when she saw some movement out of the corner of her eye. From behind the brush and a tall but thin pine tree, Jane saw the tiny face of a young girl emerge.

  Jane eased her foot down on the brake to stop the truck again, being careful not to turn her gaze from the girl. She was about twenty yards away, and still hadn’t moved from her spot, but she continued to look at Jane as if she was curious about what Jane might do next. Jane put the truck into park and started to roll down the passenger’s side window.

  “Why have you stopped, Jane?” Evelyn asked through the earbud. “Do you remember us talking about being focused and quick?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I remember,” Jane replied. “But there’s a little girl in the woods who’s staring at me.”

  “She’s probably a scavenger. Put the vehicle in drive and get moving. Now.”

  “Ease up, Evelyn. Maybe she needs some help.”

  “Even if she does, little good can come from this,” Evelyn countered. “Chances are, she’s not alone, and that puts you in danger. But even if she is alone, she is a scavenger. If she gets caught by the authorities because of you, she could be executed along with anyone else she is found with. Get moving now, Jane.”

  Jane paused.

  The little girl cautiously moved from behind the tree and, looking around, carefully stepped out into the dirt.

  Jane could see her more clearly now that she was in the open. She looked to be about seven, though it was hard to tell. Her curly hair fell in ringlets down to her shoulders, and even from twenty yards away, Jane could tell her hair had been roughly cut by someone using shears, or a knife, or something other than a proper pair of scissors.

  The girl was wisp-thin and filthy. Her heavy wool sweater looked more like a blanket draped over her shoulders and seemed entirely inappropriate given the late-summer heat in the south.

  Jane looked at her and gave her a concerned smile. Looking beyond her into the woods, she didn’t see any other movement.

  “I think I’m okay, Evelyn,” Jane whispered. “Nobody else is around.”

  The girl stepped forward, glancing around as if she was unsure about what she was doing.

  “It’s okay, sweetie,” Jane found herself saying. “Are you okay?”

  The girl continued to ease closer to Jane’s truck and stopped a few feet short. She had a look about her that suggested she would bolt back into the woods if Jane so much as flinched.

  The girl looked away from Jane, who was now leaning into the passenger’s seat to see her.

  “Are you by yourself?” Jane asked. “Where are your parents, sweetie?”

  The girl continued to look at the door of the truck. “Do you—?” she began and then stopped.

  “What is it?” Jane asked.

  “Do you have anything that I could eat?”

  Jane felt her gut wrench at the site of the little girl and hearing her plea for food. She wondered how long it had been since she had eaten anything but figured her meals had come few and far between, given how skinny she was.

  It occurred to Jane that she had not eaten anything either since the morning of the day before. She had been so wound up about her dad, Tate, and the plan to leave, she had completely forgotten to eat. Not only that, but she hadn’t brought anything with her. Some adventurer I’m turning out to be, Jane berated herself again. How stupid could I be?

  Jane looked over the edge of the car door at the girl and put a smile on her face. “Well, I don’t know, sweetie,” Jane started, “but let me see what I can find.”

  She looked around at the floor of the cab, which seemed unusually clean for a workman’s truck. There weren’t any wrappers or trash that she could see. Glancing over at the glove box, Jane leaned further into the passenger’s seat.

  “Let’s see what’s in here,” Jane said, almost lying across the bench seat to press the button on the glove box.

  Jane heard footsteps and quickly looked up and out the passenger’s side window. The girl had turned and was running back toward the woods.

  “Wait!” Jane yelled after her, afraid she may have frightened her. Quickly she slid across the bench to the passenger’s side seat and pulled the latch to open the door. Hopping down onto the gravel, Jane looked around nervously and started almost jogging toward the tree line where the girl had disappeared into the woods.

  “Little girl, wait!” Jane shouted again, slowing down and stopping just before the shrubs. She had no idea how the girl had done it, but she had disappeared like a startled doe bounding into the brush.

  Jane put her hands on her hips and looked around. There didn’t appear to be anyone around, and she still hadn’t seen a soul driving on the roads.

  She stepped backward a few steps toward her truck, hopeful that she might see the girl again, but after a few more seconds passed, she realized the hungry little waif was gone.

  Feeling bad, Jane marched back to the truck and dug into the glove box, pulling out nothing but a stack of maps, a utility logbook, and a small canvas first-aid kit. “There’s got to be something in this truck to eat,” she mumbled.

  Tossing everything back into the glove box and slamming the passenger’s side door, Jane moved around to the bed of the truck to look more closely at its contents. Most of it appeared to be junk, as far as she was concerned. There were several metal canisters and boxes with heavy cables protruding from them—what use those had, Jane had no idea. But there was also a length of garden hose, several shovels, a couple of rakes, a chainsaw, and a rather large and somewhat rusty metal toolbox.

  “Well,” Jane mumbled at the tools before her, “if I can’t leave the poor thing something to eat, I can certainly leave her something to trade.”

  Walking around to the back of the truck, Jane pulled down the handle to lower the gate and climbed into the bed. Ignoring the equipment she didn’t recognize, she tossed the shovels and rakes and the garden hose onto the dirt below. She also moved the chainsaw to the edge of the truck bed, along with a gas can she missed seeing on her first inspection.

  Thinking she would also leave the toolbox behind, Jane grabbed the handle, and figuring correctly that it was going to be deceptively heavy, she slid the box with an enormous effort toward the gate.

  “There’s no way I’m lifting that thing out of here by myself,” Jane muttered, a little out of breath at her efforts. Determined to leave it anyway, she sat down in the bed of the truck, braced her back against the wheel well, put the soles of her shoes on the box and pushed. The toolbox reluctantly slid toward the edge of the gate, and with a final heave, Jane sent it crashing onto the dirt below.

  The dissonant sound of metal scraping metal, and metal clanging into more metal was horrendous. As the toolbox smashed into the dirt, the lid popped open, scattering tools into the dirt.

  Jane hopped down from the bed and looked at the tools, most of which she didn’t recognize. Lifting the lid to the box, she glanced inside at even more junk she didn’t recognize, but saw something that quickly put a smile on her now mildly perspiring face.

  Jane reached in and counted four protein bars, each wrapped in plastic. She didn’t know how old they were, or how long they had been in there, but she figured they probably had a shelf life that would outlast her own.

  Tearing into one of the bars, now realizing how ravenously hungry she was, she bit off half the bar and started to
chew. It smelled like peanuts. It chewed like taffy. It tasted like dirt. Jane curled her lip, a little disgusted at the pasty, gritty, dusty sensation in her mouth, and thought for a second about spitting it out. Then she remembered the little girl, who looked like she hadn’t eaten yet that year. Jane swallowed hard and looked at the bar in her hand. Yes, it was gross, but it was food, and she felt bad for having taken one of the bars for herself. She was hungry, but she wasn’t starving.

  That little girl wouldn’t have been such a snob about it, Jane thought as she looked back over at the trees.

  Evelyn barked in Jane’s ear. “Jane. Get moving. Now.”

  “Right,” Jane replied, snapping into the moment. She quickly pulled the chainsaw and the gas can out of the truck bed, put the tools back in the toolbox, and rested the three untouched protein bars—and the half-eaten one—on the lid. Closing the gate to the truck bed, she jogged back to the driver’s side and climbed in.

  The sun was well above the tree line now. The clouds had broken somewhat, and Jane couldn’t help but glance over at the spot where the girl had appeared and vanished. There was still no sign of her.

  Putting the truck in drive, Jane eased her foot down on the pedal, leaving the tools and the girl behind, but she figured she had wasted enough time worrying over her. She had tried to help, and now she needed to focus on trying to help her brother.

  SISTER

  The road leading into Ironhead was every bit as bad as Evelyn had described, and Jane was relieved to finally pull into the village limits. The junk in the bed of the truck had freely clanked around—now that there was less of it back there—and every time she hit a pothole, it rattled the junk, the truck, and her nerves. The wear of the last twenty-four hours was getting to her.

  Though it was overcast, it hadn’t rained in some time, and the dirt from the semi-paved road billowed behind Jane’s truck as she drove into town. She didn’t figure anyone would care about the dust, except perhaps the person driving the car some ways behind her—the only other person she had seen driving all day.

  Jane bumped along in her truck toward the center of town. Though there were some respectable-looking buildings, for the most part, even the best of them had the look of being well-worn, and everything else looked to be completely exhausted.

  The houses Jane passed on the outskirts of town were tiny shacks. If they had once had paint, it had long since weathered away. Little was left of most but the bare wood underneath, which had darkened and cracked, unprotected from the sun, and which was held together by nothing but the dirt that had caked into the crevices from years of neglect.

  There weren’t many people out and about. The few people she did see were old—or at least they appeared to be—and they seemed to be keeping busy pumping water from the community well centered in each cluster of homes, or stacking wood for the upcoming winter.

  “It appears your brother has moved, Jane,” Evelyn said as she drove closer to the center of town. “He’s probably in the chapel below the rectory.”

  “Thanks, Evelyn.” She drove toward the plume of smoke which was leaking from the towering brick chimneys, painting the watery-gray sky with an inky-black smudge.

  Tate hadn’t been in the town all that long. He had only been ordained as a priest a year ago, was quickly sent to Atlanta, and was pushed out to Ironhead shortly thereafter. Even so, and while they were careful not to do anything to reveal his identity, Jane and her dad had come to visit him a couple of times. She knew he was often in the chapel or the orphanage—and that both were situated not far from the smelting chimneys of the steel mill.

  Jane looked at the clock on the truck’s display. It was just past eight. As the only priest in town, Tate was the only one to celebrate daily Mass, and she suspected that’s where he was. Given the lack of people she had seen so far that morning, she didn’t expect that there would be many in attendance.

  “Be sure to park on the back side of the chapel,” Evelyn suggested. “You may be driving a utility vehicle, but it still has the CP Interstellar logo branded on the side. There’s no sense in attracting more attention than you have to.”

  “Good point,” Jane agreed as she continued to roll down the empty street.

  A moment later, Jane caught sight of the chapel and turned down an alley separating it from the orphanage. Following the alley to the back of the building, she parked in the small lot next to a completely neglected and overflowing dumpster.

  Jane opened the door of the truck and was instantly overwhelmed by the stench of garbage. Her body’s reaction to retch the stink from her sinuses and lungs was hampered only by her instinct to hold her breath as she bolted from the truck.

  Emerging from the alley, Jane paused for a moment and took a deep breath of the less putrid but still polluted air. It was quiet. She listened for a moment to the whisper of the gentle breeze, cool against her face but completely lacking the strength to cleanse the toxins from the slum’s air. She could hear the rhythmic long squeak of the rusty swing set in the park across the street, rocking, unmanned in the breeze, and in desperate need of oiling. Behind the squeak, Jane could hear the cicadas in the large open field beyond the playground, buzzing tirelessly.

  She took another breath, tasted the dirt in the air, and listened deeper. There were no birds singing, no people talking, no children laughing, and just as she was about to turn to go inside, she realized she could make out another sound—a low, deep-bass rumble in the background. In hearing the sound, it was as if she noticed a papercut on her finger that had happened hours before, and she had only just realized the discomfort. It was a sound she had ignored on other visits, but it was there—it was always there—and it wasn’t one that was comforting or peaceful. It was a sound that she felt into her marrow was unnatural, and even though the villagers had learned to live with it—to tune it out even—it was the kind of sound that made everyone uneasy but unable to pinpoint why.

  It was the sound of the furnaces in the steel mill.

  The relocations in the wake of the Second Depression were brutal. Jane had heard the stories, but it had happened before she was born. Even Tate was too young to remember.

  Apparently, the economy had collapsed, bad enough and long enough that eventually a third of the population lost their jobs and many their homes. Still, most families wanted to be left to find their own way, to make their own work, to be close to their families; they didn’t want to be forced into the mill towns, the government’s desperate attempt to give people work.

  In the city, protestors marched peacefully at first, but the peace didn’t last. Panicked citizens standing in soup lines a mile long, starving and cold, had lost patience with their leaders. The rioting and looting that ensued drove many of the remaining businesses to shutter their doors. With people dying in the streets, some from the elements and others from violence, the city council flinched. In their desperation to restore order, they devised a simple, yet disturbingly effective, deterrent—they created the perimeter.

  City officials started defoliating a band two miles wide—in some places wider—around the city by spraying chemicals from drones in the sky. Despite the warnings, some people didn’t leave the defoliation zones, and they suffered, but most of the citizens, despite their disbelief that their government would do such a thing, left everything behind to escape.

  With plant life dead, everything in the perimeter became a fire hazard. It was as if there was an enormous ring-shaped box of matches surrounding the city, and the city officials didn’t have to do anything more—the rioters took care of the rest.

  Every time rioters set fire to a structure, the dry tinder of dead trees, shrubs, and rows of abandoned buildings acted like an accelerant. Entire neighborhoods were consumed in hours by one barrel fire escaping the confines of its steel prison. Gas lines and underground fuel storage tanks exploded, setting fire to commercial areas. Buildings crumbled. Homes disintegrated. Within just a few months, what was left in the perimeter had turned to ru
in. It had become a wasteland, effectively separating the cities from the surrounding communities—a moat around the city, completely devoid of life.

  In the years since, city officials propagated the lifelessness of the perimeter by spraying more chemicals and sending in teams to burn, bomb, and destroy what was left of the structures.

  Order had been restored.

  Tactically, the perimeter was more easily patrolled, especially by drones from the air—very little stood to provide shadows for people to hide in—but it wasn’t the tactical practicality of the perimeter that made it an effective barrier; it was effective because the entire citizenry had witnessed the government destroy thousands of square miles of suburban neighborhoods, businesses, and life. As people slowly realized what their leaders were capable of doing, the rioting stopped. The arguing and protesting stopped. People relocated to where they had been assigned. They gave up.

  Within a year, other cities across the country followed the same perimeter model. The effect had been the same. City officials everywhere were satisfied. With just a small loss of human life, the cities had been secured and order had been restored.

  After decades, the perimeter surrounding Atlanta had become even larger and more intimidating—a bald, flat, dry expanse of deserted wasteland. In a region that had once been covered by greenery—often uncontrollably so—the surface of the moon was capable of supporting more life than the perimeter was. And while life in the city remained comfortable, beyond the cities and the lifeless expanses separating them from the slums around them, the unfortunate toiled in the mills to which they had been assigned.

  The government leaders thought the mills would give citizens a purpose, a feeling of being productive in the wake of the depression. But each year, the conditions in the mills worsened. Each year, the death tolls rose. Each year, towns like Ironhead got closer to extinction, and the townsfolk fell deeper into the mire of despair.