Jonah, she knew, had been a DMT junkie and a recovering addict. He’d been brutally honest and afraid that the admission would drive her away. She also knew that he’d stayed clean for her, and that whatever had happened in her previous life had scared him straight.
For his sake, she hoped that his final moments had been peaceful and that the chemical rush had helped him escape this life free of pain.
The windshield wipers squeaked as they rode over the tough plastic shell, where the thick layer of mist resettled instantly.
“We can’t stay on the road,” Kaizhou said.
“Nickelsville is out the question.” Going back was too much of a risk because the black-hole nature of the homeless camp made it an obvious hiding place. They’d gotten lucky once, but pushing their luck would be foolish. Plus, the havoc those drones were capable of… If the drones were in play, Mesa refused to put all those lives in jeopardy.
After a half hour of driving, they found themselves alone on a single-lane forested route, debating the merits of finding a motel to hole up in and wondering how water-tight Rameez’s false-ident packets were.
“They’ll log your plates on check-in,” Mesa said, nixing the hotel idea soon after her boyfriend mentioned it. “We shouldn’t even be using this car.”
“So far, being fugitives isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
“I don’t think we’re very good at this,” she said, scraping her fingernail over a small stain on the leather accent beneath the passenger window.
“Running around with false idents and cloner masks, driving around in a car registered to me, which is probably flagged by psychotics who want to kill us, and on our way to becoming car thieves.”
“Been a heck of a day,” she admitted.
The laughter felt good and broke up the tension, even if for but a moment.
“Where are we gonna go?” Kaizhou asked, his voice cracking under the strain.
Mesa shrugged, staring absently out the window.
Oregon had pretty open borders, but they were still more than one hundred and fifty miles away from Portland, over eight hundred miles away from the Sun Belt provinces and the rough-and-tumble outlaw territories of the Southwest Conclave. Given her current appearance and Kaizhou’s ethnicity, stepping foot in Texas would probably guarantee a slow and painful death. Her punk appearance would probably be enough to have her burned at the stake as a witch or a lesbian. The good old boys would probably show Kaizhou some traditional Christian love and have him drawn and quartered then fed to the pigs. And the Corn Belt region, where they could probably find a measure of safety with the eastern Alliance states, was roughly two thousand miles away.
“An entire country of bad options,” Kaizhou said.
“We have to do something. We can’t just sit around and wait to die or spend the rest of our lives in hiding.”
“What are you thinking?”
She bit her lower lip. Then she let out a long, defeated breath and shoved her skull into the headrest, rubbing her face with her palms.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know how we do it, but we need to get proactive. They know who we are. We need to figure out who they are.”
Kaizhou had taken his foot off the gas pedal and let the vehicle coast to a stop. The deserted road was as good a place as any to ditch the ride. Hoofing it wasn’t an attractive proposition, but the car was one more link in their data chains, which were liable to strangle them to death.
Kaizhou pushed, she steered, and in a few minutes, the car was lost in the forested shadows, far enough off the road that it could easily go unnoticed for quite some time.
Halfway between Seattle and Tacoma was Des Moines, once a close-knit seaside community on the East Bay of Puget Sound. War, as it often did, changed all of that.
Even after all these years, the damage wrought by the PRC invasion was apparent. The marina was a ruined shell of crumbling structures. The docks were rotted, on the verge of collapse. The storage yards and yacht club were nothing more than scorched husks. Sailboats were beached along Redondo, their hulls dulled by sun and surf, scraped raw by sand.
They followed Marine View through the suburbs, seeing no signs of life. Dark, empty houses lined the street. The lawns were unchecked wilderness that threatened to overtake the homes. Des Moines had been among the first areas evacuated as officials scrambled to respond and withdraw the non-combatants from the conflict. None had returned, and the city was nothing more than a forgotten ghost town.
Mesa gazed past the blasted-apart walls of one residence and into the remains of a young girl’s bedroom. Rubble littered the twin-sized bed. The pink comforter was stained with black mold; vines and weeds spread across the dirty floor and interior walls.
The sight brought on an eerie recollection, a déjà vu that left her disquieted. Even more troublesome were the sudden flashes of phantom memory and the fleeting, scolding moment of familiarity.
“Maybe we can hunker down in one of these places for a bit, get out of the rain,” Kaizhou suggested.
She didn’t trust the soundness of her voice, and when she spoke, her tenor was flat and quiet. All she said was, “Sure.”
Hand-in-hand, they looped through the empty neighborhoods, seeking a relatively safe and secure shelter.
Mesa was chilled to the bone and ready to get indoors. Most of the structures, including office buildings, had been severely damaged during the PRC bombing runs, and even a lot of the homes that looked sufficient were marked with x-codes deeming them structurally dangerous and warning people away. After more than an hour of circling through the blocks to find a suitable house, they found one that still had four walls and a roof. As an added bonus, the door was one of the few they’d seen whose markings bore a measure of good news.
Kaizhou deciphered it for her and explained the compass-like markings of the X, starting at the upper wedge and moving counter-clockwise. “The top is the date”—he moved his finger to western portion of the X—“looks like a rescue team of volunteer firefighters from Vancouver entered the structure.”
She followed his finger to the eastern side as he explained, “The only hazards present were food or water. We’re lucky the rats didn’t take up residence.”
“What does the zero-zero mean?” she asked.
He tapped the southern quadrant, a small smile on his face. “No survivors, no corpses. House was empty.”
“This is as good a place as any.”
He studied the ruined neighborhood surrounding them. “It’s better than any.”
The jamb was a splintered affair. The door was a sheet of plywood that had somehow gone unmolested in the years following the volunteer team’s search. All of the windows were busted; shattered glass littered the ground. They walked around the perimeter of the house, tramping through overgrown weeds and unkempt grass, seeking an entry point.
Kaizhou explained that most of the remains of Des Moines had been picked over by scavengers. At the rear entrance, the wood had been pulled away for entry, leaving the rear of the house exposed.
“Feels good to get inside,” Mesa said, unplastering a long swatch of hair from her face.
“Long as you don’t mind the smell,” he said, his face crinkling in disgust.
The house stank of mold and decay. The food had gone past rotting long ago, but the stench clung to the stale air. Their feet crunched the occasional insect corpse and the soft bones of once-furry critters that had decomposed into nothing more than skeletons and fuzz.
They worked their way around the toppled kitchen chairs and a kitchen table marred with old food, black stains, and deep knife marks. The kitchen sink was busted up, and the floor around it was missing where scavengers had torn it apart to get at the piping. They had taken sledgehammers to the interior walls so they could steal pipes
and electrical wiring.
In the living room, more walls were broken apart, down to the studs. The sofa was intact but heavily soiled and pungent with mildew. The carpet was caked in dirt and excrement.
Keeping his voice low, Kaizhou said, “We should check upstairs, but we’ll stay down here.”
She nodded, following him to the stairs. He kept his feet close to the wall, in an effort to avoid creaky boards.
Upstairs, the walls were marred with water damage, and liquid dripped steadily from the ceiling of the master bedroom. The bathroom was torn apart, the ceramic tiles shattered. If not for the total absence of scorch marks, she would have thought a bomb had gone off in there.
They checked the closets and under the bed in both rooms but found nothing more than filth, repulsive odors, and the signs of scavengers.
“You can have the couch,” Kaizhou said.
“I don’t know if you’re being chivalrous or punishing me for something.”
He laughed, and she took him in her arms.
“I don’t even know if I can sleep.” She was exhausted, and despite her words, she yawned into his shoulder then rested her face there. He rubbed the knots in her back, drawing a pleasant moan from her.
“God, that feels good,” she said, forcing herself to relax. After a long moment, she pulled away and sat on the couch. She wanted to take off her shoes, but her feet were swollen from walking, and she worried she would never get them back on. She didn’t want to risk being barefoot if they had to make an emergency exit.
She pulled her hood up and lay on the musty couch, trying to get comfortable on the ruined, swollen foam pads.
Kaizhou dragged in a couple of chairs from the kitchen and set them up across from one another so he could sit in one and put his feet up on the other.
“What was it like?” she asked. “The war?”
He sat quietly for a moment. A cloud passed across his eyes.
She’d never asked him before, at least not with the expectation of a deep answer. He never brought up the topic, but she knew the basics of the invasion from the history recall programs. Jonah never really talked about the war, either. Sitting there, in the center of a prime staging area for a battle that had destroyed Washington, she felt compelled to ask.
“It was bad.” After a pregnant pause, he took a deep breath and went on. “After the PRC invaded, the US Army started rounding up Asians. Soldiers broke into our home and arrested my father and me. They hit hard and fast, you know? Beating any resistance out of us before we even knew what the fuck was going on. Then they pinned us to the ground and handcuffed us, forced us out of our home and into vans that were filled with our neighbors, our friends, people we didn’t even know but who had slanted eyes.
“One day we were Americans, and the next day, we were enemies because of how we looked. The EMPs went off, the attacks started, and we were all rounded up and tossed into prison camps because maybe one of us might have been a traitor or a sympathizer. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t, that I’d never even been to China or Japan or Korea or any of the Coalition lands. Hell, I’ve never even been outside this state. They didn’t care, though. My dad and I, we wound up in Topeka. I guess that was our first family vacation.”
Mesa knew that his mother had died from ovarian cancer when he was a small child. His father had died in the prison camp, but Mesa didn’t know the specifics.
“They didn’t demand anything of us. They let us keep the clothes we were wearing, gave us some prison garb, three squares a day, and stuck us in these overcrowded huts surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers. They installed inhibitors on those of us with DRMR, cut us off from the world. No online access, no commNet, no nothing. There was no Miranda, no lawyers.
“The US fell apart before the Supreme Court got around to deciding that maybe this wasn’t exactly legal. The jihadists took care of DC,” he said, referring to the dirty bomb attacks along the Eastern Seaboard that had irradiated the nation’s capital and killed millions.
“Whatever government officials were left went into hiding and started trying to figure out the conditions of their surrender. Canada worked out their deals with the PRC and redrew their borders. Eventually, our guards all just kind of walked off the job and disappeared, leaving the door unlocked behind them.”
He stretched in the chair and put his stiff legs down. He bent forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and wiped away the tears streaking his face. The contrails wound down his cheeks and jawline, shiny in the moonlight that reached through the cracks between boards.
“The first winter we had at the camp was a rough one. This polar vortex came through, dropped us into, like, negative sixty degrees. A lot of the old folks died off pretty quickly, froze to death outside. Nobody helped them. The guards didn’t care, and the rest of us were afraid we’d get shot or something, or freeze to death ourselves.
“My dad lived long enough for the thaw to come around, and then he had a massive heart attack. Even if anybody had tried, nobody could do anything for him. He just dropped dead, you know?”
“I’m sorry,” Mesa whispered, regretting her question.
“No, no, it’s OK,” he said, balling his fists in his lap. “All this was a while ago now. The soldiers took his body away, did whatever they did with those who died there. I remember him clutching his chest, his eyes going huge, and then he was falling. I didn’t even know what to do. I held him, screaming for help loud enough to pull something in my throat. The guards, though, they threw me off him and dragged him away, and that was that. Last time I saw him, he was being dragged away.”
She got off the sofa, intending to hold him, comfort him, and dry his face, but he stopped her.
“You should sleep,” he said.
The wires bit into Mesa’s neck, strangling her. She tried to wedge her fingers beneath the plastic coating, but they were drawn too tight. The cords, slick with her blood, were slicing into her skin. Her nails fought for purchase, but they bent and broke.
Standing, her attacker leaned back, trying to pull her off her feet. She elbowed him and was rewarded with a painful grunt and a brief slackening of the wires. Her throat burned, and beneath her, she saw, for the first time, herself—her other self. Laid out on a slab, her porcelain skin was bare. Her eyes were wide open, staring up aimlessly as if unaware of the violence surrounding her.
She slammed her foot down into his instep and elbowed him again. A tacky wetness warmed her skin, and she delivered another sharp elbow blow. He let out a small cry, then she was carried off her feet as he fell backward, landing on top of his body. The impact was solid, and the last bit of air blasted from her lungs. Her vision was dimming. A mad ocean pounded in her ears as the world turned black.
Her fingers reached toward the table, scrabbling for the girl’s—for her own—hand. Trying to reconnect. Trying simply to be. She kicked at the form beneath her. Without even realizing it, she was trying to pull the wires away again. Her face was burning from the trapped blood pooling in her skull. Her lungs were on fire. Her whole torso ached, and her limbs felt too heavy.
The wires dug deeper, as if trying to burrow inside of her despite her flailing, clumsy grasps.
The cables cinched tighter. Her tongue protruded from her open, gasping, dying mouth, lapping at the air while her fingers tried to work. She tried to find the peace of her other self, of that empty shell bathed in light across from her.
Mesa woke with a start, heart hammering.
Dust motes glittered in the thin shaft of sunlight beaming through the wooden boards. It would have been filmic if her thoughts weren’t glued to her mortality.
Kaizhou was snoring, slumped in his chair, his long legs splayed out across the seat of the other, arms crossed over his belly.
Her first instinct was to grab her pack and quietly sneak out. To lea
ve him.
That’s what you were really good at before, wasn’t it? a dark voice said. The vicious snake curled up in the recess of her mind struck quickly. Running away. The sneer in her inner voice stopped her. The violent recrimination of her tone made her lie back down and left her feeling guilty.
She closed her eyes, but sleep was impossible. Mesa listened to Kaizhou snoring. In the still dawn, the noise was an ugly ripping that eroded her guilt into an angry shine. She snapped the pillow out from under her and lobbed it at him, her aim true.
Startled awake, he kicked out of the chair and sent it toppling. A thick puff of dust heaved out around it.
“Get up,” she said. “We’re leaving.”
“You OK?”
“Fine. Let’s go. C’mon.” She shrugged the backpack on, taking stock of her dusty clothes. She brushed off what she could from her arms and pants legs then shook her hair loose. Kaizhou was a bit cleaner, but his ass was covered in thick, tan-colored grime from the dirty chair.
They set off with no clear destination in mind, knowing only that they had to find a vehicle. She wondered what their odds of success would be.
When the war began, evacuations were hasty and disorganized. Abandoned vehicles had clogged the thoroughfares for months after people had decided they would rather risk escape on foot than be bombed or shot to death while sitting in traffic. Plenty of people hitched a ride out of town with National Guard rescue caravans or in Army Humvees.
Lots of cars would have been left to rust in the residence’s garages, and therein lay the real problems. If Mesa and Kaizhou did find a car, it might not even work. Odds were, they would open up a garage and find that scavengers had stripped the car for parts. If the vehicle was an old gas guzzler, fuel was yet another problem. A smart car with an ignition coded specifically to the owner’s thumbprint—and it probably would be—would also be a problem. Granted, hacking a car was easier than finding gas and oil. She shoved aside the thoughts. First, they had to find a car, period. Then they could worry about the rest.
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