Nevertheless, She Persisted

by Mindy Klasky

  The internet continues to thrive and expand, and development of new tech devices and ways to use them keeps many major cities humming. But the underlying infrastructure that keeps the world connected is not well distributed, especially in the places that never got much coverage in the first place. Travelers like Irene and the Chatauqua provided a different kind of network.

  I spent ten years with the Chatauqua Frontera. They gave me a life in a time when an orphaned child—especially a dark-skinned one of uncertain parentage—would have fallen through the cracks. Irene and the others rescued many people, adults as well as children, and made all of us feel we were special and loved, no matter what horrors we had seen. They didn’t just rescue us because we needed help, though they helped everyone they saw in need; they saved us because they thought—no, knew—we had something to offer to the future.

  Irene brought me to Berkeley when I was sixteen and convinced the powers that be to let me start taking classes. I ended up with a PhD in microbiology and a lab where I could continue my work on the interactions of bacteria and viruses.

  Irene had faith in me. I’ve tried to live up to that.

  “What was it like, growing up with Travelers?” Lin asked. The truck was moving slowly, and electric engines are quiet, so we could hear each other even though Naheem and I were in the back and all the windows were open to give us a breeze.

  I had a lot of trouble answering that question before I became friends with people who were raising children, because I didn’t understand how different my life had been from that of people who lived in relatively stable urban areas. Watching my friends at the university who were raising kids in as safe an environment as you can get these days showed me what the question meant.

  “A different place every week, studying things as they came up, taking care of the little ones, performing in our plays. Tech tools so far out of date that you wouldn’t have believed they would still work. And sometimes the bus broke down in the middle of nowhere and we ran out of food and the grownups worried a lot.”

  “I think all grownups worry a lot,” Amanda said. She grew up in a co-op community in West Oakland where adults outnumbered kids two-to-one and everybody made a point of providing support for each other.

  “But not all of them have to worry about breakdowns and a lack of food,” Lin said.

  “Mine worried about sea level rise,” Naheem said. “We were in Alameda, and the house kept flooding. We had too much money tied up in the house to move—it kept dropping in value—so we were stuck trying to work with it.”

  “We had to keep moving because the rent kept going up,” Lin said. “I wish we’d had co-ops down the Peninsula back then. Real estate stayed crazy even as the roads fell apart from floods and landslides.”

  Maybe nobody growing up in the twenty-first century gets a stress-free childhood at that, even the ones in the good places. Mine was just more exotic.

  “I loved it, most of the time,” I said. “It was like being on permanent vacation. And I was too young to realize how much I should worry.”

  “Did you ever get attacked?” Naheem asked.

  I flashed on the image of Adrienna, who had entranced audiences when she told stories, falling off the stage as a self-proclaimed protector of the white “race” opened up with an assault rifle. Blood everywhere, and the local authorities let him get away to kill again. “Let’s just say I learned to handle a gun at an early age.”

  That was something else we had in the truck: weapons. We were peace-loving folk, for the most part, but we weren’t planning to be anyone’s victims.

  Even back when old I-5 still functioned between Berkeley and Coalinga—before neglect, not to mention serious floods in the Central Valley, took their toll—it took four hours to get there unless traffic was unusually good. These days travel time is double or triple that, minimum. There’s not much in the way of traffic, but the roads that still exist are small and full of potholes. As we moved out of the urban areas into what had once been farm and ranch country, the road got worse.

  Five years back the area had seen a lot of floods, but now we were firmly back in the drought. Even though it was spring, the landscape along the road was brown—a decayed brown, not the golden color that used to come when the rain patterns were something close to normal. There were no animals grazing along the road, and nothing was growing in the fields that had once held garlic or strawberries. The farther south we drove, the worse it got.

  The landscape kept us on edge, so none of us was really surprised when Amanda, who had been running a wide-range satellite-based scan of the area as we drove, said, “We’ve got a situation ahead.” We’d just turned down State Highway 25, a few miles south of Gilroy.

  “Do we negotiate?” Lin said.

  “No. From what I’m picking up, they’ve got the road blocked with something huge. People around here are pretty desperate, and someone must have recruited a lot of folks to block the road that thoroughly. Turn left next chance you get. We’re going to go the long way round.”

  We went east for several miles before the road turned south again. “This will get us back to 25 way south of Hollister,” Amanda said. “That ought to do it.” But she kept watching the scan.

  Nothing happened as we circled around, except that the lack of pavement meant we were going ten miles an hour. No one would take this route out of choice. We didn’t talk much.

  We got back on 25 a few miles north of Los Pinos. “Look at the land,” Amanda said, gesturing to the brown fields and hills in all directions. “It’s even worse than I thought down here. No telling what we’re going to run into.”

  The next hour was uneventful, but I didn’t relax because it was clear that Amanda hadn’t. She continued to watch the scan. Just south of the Pinnacles, she said, “Fuck. There’s something a few miles ahead.”

  “Go around again?” Lin said.

  “We can’t. None of the roads off of here go anywhere except up to a few houses. I doubt that would be a safe choice.” She sighed. “This looks like a small deal. We might be able to negotiate our way through it. It’s either that or turn around and go back, see if we can get east over to one of the roads on the other side of where 5 used to be.”

  Before one of us could point out how that would take hours, she added, “And there’s no guarantee we won’t run into something similar over there.”

  Lin nodded. He slowed down. The rest of us reached under our seats for guns. Amanda set a small automatic rifle on the console by Lin. Negotiate, yes, but be prepared for more. The truck was well-armored, but it wasn’t invincible and neither were we.

  I did deep breathing exercises. As we got closer, we could see that the roadblock was a couple of dead trees piled in the middle of the road. Maybe ten people stood around them, most of them holding a weapon of some kind. Lin pulled to a stop about thirty feet from the barrier.

  “Stay put,” Amanda said. She got out of the truck, holding her gun loosely in her hand. We aren’t fools, her gesture said. “What can we do for you folks?” she said.

  “That’s a fancy vehicle you got there. Think we’ll take it.”

  “No,” she replied. “We need it. But we can trade some supplies for safe passage.”

  “What kind of supplies?”

  “Something to treat Dorcas virus. Maybe some food.”

  “You got something for the virus?”

  “Naheem, hand out some of the antiviral,” Amanda called. She backed up to the truck, never taking her eyes off the guy who seemed to be in charge.

  Naheem held a package out the window. Amanda took it and walked toward the spokesperson, who was also holding a rifle loosely. She handed it to him. “A sign of our goodwill.”

  The man took it, glanced at it, then tossed it back to someone behind him. “Get Gail to look at that,” he said. “What about the food?”

  I had already pulled out a box of the freeze dried stuff. It took two hands to hold it. Amanda pulled out a weapons sling made to hold h
er gun in a ready position, and put it on, still never taking her eyes off the crowd. She stuck her gun in it, then picked up the food and carried it over.

  The man pushed the box behind him and someone opened it. “A lotta stuff here,” the person said.

  “Good enough,” the spokesman said. “Okay. You can go by.” He turned to his people. “Start moving those trees.”

  Amanda backed toward the truck as a couple of people began to pull on the barrier. And then, without warning, someone behind the trees fired a shot. Amanda went down.

  Lin was out of the truck before I could move. The spokesman screamed, “Get that son of a bitch.”

  I thought he meant Lin at first, but then I could see a bunch of people piling on somebody back behind the barrier. The spokesman meant to keep his bargain, and his people had grabbed the shooter. Lin pulled Amanda into the back of the truck, and Naheem went to work on her while Lin jumped into his seat and gunned the engine. He drove into the ditch, people scattering out of our way, and around the barrier, and sped away as fast as that truck would go.

  “How is she?” I was scared of the answer.

  “She was wearing Kevlar,” Naheem said.

  I’d forgotten that. Of course Amanda wouldn’t have got out of the truck without wearing some kind of armor.

  “I’m fine,” Amanda said, though her voice was weak. “It just felt like a bad punch to the plexus.”

  “Which is why you went out,” Naheem said. “The Kevlar just barely stopped it. Where are they getting that kind of artillery out here in the boondocks?”

  “We need the scan running,” Amanda said. “There could be more trouble down the road.”

  Lin said, “Keryn, would you give it a try?”

  It was fancy new tech, too expensive for anyone but security folks and cops, so I’d never used anything quite like it. But it turned out to be similar to most GPS systems; it just provided more information. The satellites had been collecting that kind of data for decades, but it had taken a long time—and a collapse in a lot of government oversight—for someone to make a workable portable device.

  It took me a few minutes to get the hang of it. “I don’t think anyone’s chasing us, and there’s nothing up ahead in the next ten miles.”

  “This is probably the best place for us to stop, if we need to,” Lin said.

  “Don’t stop,” said Amanda.

  “Naheem?” Lin said.

  “Stop,” he said. “Don’t argue, Amanda. I can’t check you out for internal injuries while we’re rattling around like this.”

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “No point in running any risks, when you’ve got me here to make sure. We’re likely to need you again.”

  A dirt road came up on our right. It seemed to lead down to a creek bed—bone dry of course. “This should work,” Lin said. “Out of sight, but not much of anywhere.” He pulled off and turned the truck around so we were facing out. Leaning over the seat back, he asked Naheem, “Do you need any help?”

  “It would make things easier, but we might need you to get us out of here fast.”

  “I can drive,” I said. “It’s been awhile and I’m sure I can’t maneuver as well as Lin, but I know how.”

  Both men exhaled. It was clear Naheem did want help. Lin crawled between the seats. “You sit there, ready to move. If you see anything on the scanner, yell out and then take off.”

  I nodded. I stared at the scan, which wasn’t showing anything. From the back I heard a slight whir from the portable imaging device. Amanda let out a soft grunt a couple of times as the two men moved her around to check for other damage spots.

  I would have sworn we sat there for an hour, but when I checked the time only fifteen minutes had passed when I heard Naheem say, “Looks like you came through okay. No bleeding that I can find. I’ve taped up the rib you cracked when you hit the ground. Let’s get down the road.”

  I moved over, and Lin crawled back through. He drove off without fanfare. I kept my eye on the scan. Once we were a mile or so down the road, with nothing showing up, I asked him, “How come you jumped out to get her instead of opening fire? I was ready to shoot until you did that.”

  He shrugged. “Instinct. It felt like those folks were dealing fair with us, by their standards. Grabbing Amanda instead of shooting anyone seemed like the right call.”

  “I’m glad it was.”

  “Me, too.”

  We drove in silence for the next hour. The sun set. “How’s our power?” I asked Lin, more to be social than because I was worried.

  “We’re okay. Got lots of sun today and haven’t had to pull on the battery too much. And it’s not likely to be overcast tomorrow.”

  No. Not much chance of that.

  “We’re getting close. Can you check the GPS and see if you can take us directly to their location? I don’t expect they’re in town, and I’d rather not meet any more people.”

  “Sure.” I plugged in the numbers and gave him directions. Twenty minutes later we were driving down a dirt road that didn’t seem to go anywhere when I saw our lights flash onto a familiar shape. “That’s them,” I said. I reached for the door handle—we were driving about five miles an hour—but Lin stopped me. “Wait. Give them a yell first.”

  I’m sure he was right, and I wasn’t wearing Kevlar, but I leapt out anyway. “Irene,” I called out, giving it the Spanish pronunciation to let her know it was me. I’d always preferred to call her that, though she answered either way.

  “Keryn, is that you?” said a young voice. It cracked a little.

  “Yes. Where is Irene?”

  Someone stepped out of the bus and stood in our headlights. Short and skinny was all I could make out. “Come inside. She’s been waiting for you.”

  She was in the back part where everyone slept, lying on a bottom bunk, propped up by pillows. A toddler sat beside her, holding a picture book. “I knew you would come,” Irene said as I leaned over to kiss her.

  Her thin white hair was brushed up behind on her the pillow, as if she’d been too hot and pushed it off of her neck. There was an ashy tone to her skin, turning the light brown to gray. When I’d seen her on the bus’s last trip to the Bay Area a couple of years back, her hair had reached this stage of stark white, but had still been thick, and she’d moved with the same vigor I’d always known. I’d realized then she was getting old, but that hadn’t prepared me for the shock of seeing her so frail.

  The other thing that was different was that there were only the three of them—Irene, the teenage boy who’d showed me in, and the toddler. The last time there’d been at least fifteen adults on the bus along with the usual scrum of kids. I didn’t know which frightened me more: seeing Irene so weak or seeing the bus without that teeming community. It was as if everything important from my childhood was disappearing all at once.

  In the spring of 2040—thirty years back—I was sitting on the bumper of an ancient sedan on the shoulder of a highway outside of Flagstaff, waiting to flag down the next vehicle that came along. My mother lay dead in the back seat. I thought she was very sick and was hoping that someone would come along to help her. I was five years old.

  I’d been there six hours. Four vehicles had passed, and all four had refused to stop for a tiny child standing in the road. One had even tried to run me down; I’d scratched up my legs and arms landing on the gravel shoulder when I jumped out of its way. That had reduced me to tears, but I was still determined to get help when I saw the bus lumbering along in the distance. Once again I walked out to the middle of the road and waved my hands. It came to a stop about twenty yards short of me.

  The bus had once transported children to school, but any trace of its original mustard yellow color had long been painted over with symbols and pictures. The top was covered with PV panels. There were words on the message board above the driver, but they weren’t ones I had learned in the reading lessons I’d had from my mother. Irene got off the bus and walked toward me.


  A short woman, with generous curves, her gray-streaked black hair pulled back carelessly, skin a lighter brown than mine. She squatted when she got close, so she’d share my level, and said in gentle tones, “Hello there. What’s your name?”

  “Keryn,” I said—the automatic response of a child to that question from an adult. I grabbed her hand. “Mommy’s sick.”

  She let me drag her to the car. My mother’s body had already begun to decay in the warmth of the Arizona sun, and Irene knew the truth from the smell before she reached the car. Despite that, she opened the door and took my mother’s wrist, to feel for a pulse. I am sure she did this for me. Then she led me back toward the bus, where some of the others had raised a shade and unloaded some chairs. She sat me down and explained that my mother had died, and then she held me while I cried and cried and cried.

  Others from the bus took my mother’s body out of the car, examined and washed her. Someone stitched together two sheets of canvas to make a shroud. Others dug a hole in the ground in an area past some stunted trees, out of sight of the road. When I finally stopped crying, Irene got me a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of water. They let me touch my mother one more time before they lowered her into the grave, covered her with dirt, and said a few words. Then they packed up everything of value in the car—including the solar panels from the roof and the certificate documenting my birth in Houston—and put me and my things on the bus.

  I remember all the details of that day with a crisp clarity. My memories of the time before it are little snatches—with my mother in a store somewhere, a scary man, a tiny house where I had a tinier bed in a corner. My memories of the time afterward, with Irene and the others on the bus, make up most of what I know of my childhood. But I do not forget that first day.

  I learned later that burying her in that way was illegal, even in the chaos of the Forties, but that they had examined her well enough to conclude she had bled to death after an abortion. Had they called the authorities, I would have been put in an overburdened and badly run child “welfare” system, and the others might have been arrested even though all they had done was stop to help. The Forties were not a time when Travelers could trust officials in the areas they passed through, and the people on the bus were permanent Travelers.