On the half-built roof, Jonathan found peace. On the half-built roof, work gloves off and his legs splayed out, paint and dirt and plaster dotting his jeans like pockmarks or the boils on a leper, light beige weatherjacket folded in a messy pile by his toolbox, sandwich in hand, sharing an eye level with the tops of the pines and the evergreens lining the road where sat the family pizza spot and the colonial landmark that was the home of somebody famous three hundred years ago and where sat the hairdresser’s spot and the ancient Patriots/Red Sox bar, trying to keep the mayo from dripping down between his thumb and forefinger and sliding a stream down his palm, Jonathan found peace.
Aurora had hipped him to the supplies deliveries that only ever went through the remnants of the Little Italy neighborhood by Wooster. And what began as rations and air tanks and breathing apparatuses, through the alchemy of the black market, soon turned into deluxe sandwiches and building supplies and radiation-proof electronics. Plastics somehow reinforced against the poisonous air, Net connection hacks, and if one saved up, one could even trade for DIY dome-building materials. Jonathan could tell which settlers came from Colony wealth by whether or not their building managed already to find itself ensconced in an ultramarine embrace. But now, with this filtration mask around his neck, his shoulder heaved with each breath. The air wasn’t nearly as bad here as it was closer to downtown. Enough smaller domes in close proximity seemed to scare the air pollution away. It was all magic to Jonathan anyway.
Amid the detritus of the half-redone roof was a Dunkin’ Donuts holder with a couple cups of coffee and a lunch pail filled with burritos. He should know the other two day laborers with whom he shared this roof, he’d seen them work on a couple other projects in the area so far, subcontractors who knew the same guy who knew Aurora and Eamonn. They wore their tool belts and worked like regulars, not quite all the way broken in but definitely more than competent. It struck Jonathan now that maybe this was their side hustle. Either way, it was break time, so he turned away and devoted the rest of his attention to his sandwich and his cigarette.
The first smoke of the day was always the best.
After seven hours of dreamless abstinence, the vertigo was like reuniting with an old lover. He lay back on the shingles and didn’t care whether or not his weight caved the whole thing in, nor did he care about whether or not this was a foolish thing to worry about, whether or not the Black day laborers would make fun of him for it.
The workers stirred back into motion and Jonathan rose out of whatever reverie had taken him, leaving even the memory of it behind. After stuffing the remains of his sandwich in his mouth and before turning back to the task at hand, he slipped his Flex out of his pocket, aimed it at the once-downtown with its vines and cracked concrete and evergreen trees, snapped a holo, and sent it to the Cloud he shared with David.
In Mercedes’s car, Timeica and Sydney ambled out of New Haven, west-by-southwest, tracing the old Metro-North line. The farther they got from the city, the slower Timeica drove. And maybe Wyatt would’ve been proud, because other people would have thought she was just moving this way to take in the scenery, like she had never seen backroads so overgrown with vegetation that they’d turned into corridors filled with red admirals and the occasional peacock. They would’ve thought she was listening to the birdsong and maybe admiring how the departure or death of the people who’d lived here had turned this place into the Garden of Eden again. But, really, what she was looking for, listening for, was threats. The gangs and Marauders filled open road and interstate highway well enough, but the truly fucked up found shelter in forest. Sydney was silent next to Timeica and Timeica hoped that Sydney was thinking this as well. There was no smile on the quiet girl’s face, no wonder radiating from her eyes. Maybe she’d seen stuff like this before. Maybe she didn’t care.
But their GPS was outdated. Heading into Bridgeport, they were supposed to have passed through at least four radiation checkpoints, even if the surveillance drones overhead told the guards in the QZ that you’d stayed along mandated routes. But every station was the same, abandoned cars stripped for parts, dragonflies and mosquitoes hovering over ponds of stagnant water, a dog lazily baking in the shade of a massive leaf.
Milford and Stratford weren’t towns so much as they were two conjoined forests with towns falling apart inside them. And Timeica remembered that time she and Wyatt had stayed in an abandoned house on their way to New Haven that had felt much the same. It wasn’t huge, but it told them the apartment they’d grown up in had been too small for their family. And boars rampaging through the forest had given them plenty of meat for their meals. But then a wolf pack had cornered her in the house while Wyatt had been out scouting routes out east, and Timeica had had to use up all their bullets shooting each one of them dead. When she found out later that Wyatt had taken the wolf meat with them, for them to eat along the way, instead of burying the animals, she’d refused to speak to him for a week.
In Bridgeport, the roads didn’t really open up, but Sydney sat at attention in her seat, and that was when Timeica noticed that families had started to dot the landscape. An older man in a sleeveless shirt nursing a lemonade under a mulberry tree, kids in a cleared patch of land doing yardwork, so much yardwork that their denim overalls had turned a faded brown, corncobs drying on a line, an outside basin with a cistern filled from a well. And none of them coughing blood into their hands. Sydney turned her neck to watch each of them as they came into view and faded into the distance.
Maybe that was the thing with her, Timeica reasoned. Maybe she’s just gone too long without seeing people. She ain’t seem feral, and she ain’t seem particularly lonely. But she hadn’t hesitated when Timeica had offered to take her on a supplies run to Fairfield.
The maglev car eased off a backroad onto the remains of a highway, and the run-down Metro-North tracks were beside them again. The towers of the Fairfield QZ loomed ahead and against the sky was a blue dome, heralding their arrival at a safe haven. The line of cars wasn’t nearly as long as Timeica expected.
“Something’s wrong,” Sydney said, the first words she’d spoken the whole trip.
Before Timeica could so much as agree, Sydney was out of the car. Timeica fumbled through the glove compartment for their masks, rustling through the vouchers she’d picked up from everyone before setting off for here, then was out of the car and hurrying to Sydney’s side. “Here,” she said, handing Sydney the worn filtration mask and watching her to make sure she put it on properly. She didn’t look like the type of person who took care of herself, or who cared to. Before they got too far from the car, Timeica touched the small of her back to make sure she’d remembered to bring her and Wyatt’s pistol with her.
Inside each of the cars Timeica walked past was emptiness. They went forward at a slow enough pace that Timeica could stop at each one in the line up to the wall of the quarantine zone and cup her hands around her face as she looked through the dusty window. No skeletons, so at least it looked like people had left in time. No supplies, either.
“This place been gone a while,” Timeica said.
She looked around for a response, and that was when a rustling of greenery behind her announced Sydney’s departure.
“Hey!” She was more worried than annoyed. Sydney did seem a little off, but now they’d announced their presence, and Timeica only had so many bullets. “Syd!” She whacked aside branches and too-large leaves, ducked under a canopy of tree limbs, then stumbled to a stop at the edge of a broken piece of road. All the while checking for signs of habitation—a campfire, the memory of radio waves shimmering in the air, traces of a small makeshift dome—she noted Sydney’s trail.
She slid down the ledge and moved through the tallgrass at a crouch. Sunlight fell in slants through the leaves. She didn’t try to avoid it, nor did she try to move too soundlessly. She might have scared Sydney or someone with a hunting rifle. So she walked smoothly, then crawled under a fallen log and vaulted over another. Her body remembered doing shit like this with Wyatt when their travels took them off the road in Appalachia. Squeezing between slabs of dislocated stone wall, climbing through the levels of a deserted parking garage, trying to find their way from one end of a building all the way to its opposite while all the floors in between had rotted through their middles and furniture had fallen to block doors. The puzzle of it all, it was like those crosswords she would sometimes catch him doing on his Flex. While Timeica worried after Sydney, her body thrilled at remembering how to do this thing.
So accomplishment mixed with regret when she came out onto the clearing to see Sydney at its edge, still as a tree, watching three horses amble around and leap into the air and prance around each other while a fourth and a fifth nibbled grass in the midst of it all.
Several moments passed while Timeica took it in, this little glade full of kind, living things, maybe the only things moving for miles. Then she slid down the small cliff’s edge and came to Sydney’s side.
“How’d you know this was here?” Timeica asked her.
But Sydney didn’t answer. When she did turn to Timeica, though, behind her mask there was a smile on her face and a glint of mischief in her eyes like she had the beginnings of a plan forming behind them. And the first part of the puzzle had clicked into place.
ON their way back, the supplies vouchers like an accusation in the glovebox, they drew near the guy with lemonade and the mulberry tree. He looked like he hadn’t moved since they last saw him.
Timeica pulled over to the side of the road and handed Sydney her pistol. “You ain’t gotta keep it running. I just want to ask him some questions. Find out what happened.” She climbed out and shut the door loud enough to make sure the guy heard her, but he didn’t seem to be paying any attention. His gaze was fixed on something past her, and it wasn’t until Timeica came close enough to see the pulp swimming in his lemonade jar that his eyes shifted to take her in.
“Where’d the QZ go?” she asked, jerking her thumb back in the direction they’d come.
“They cleared that place out a while back. You ain’t know?” He moved a little, like he was making space. “Here, take a seat. Bring your friend too.”
“Nah, we gotta get back.”
“You don’t know me, and y’all are two women on the open road, but y’all got a gun on you and mine’s is way in the back. You could cap me before I’d ever get close to it. And now that that’s out the way, have a seat. I just need someone to help me finish this lemonade.”
“I’m good.”
The man didn’t frown, just sighed. “What’s safe anymore?” He shrugged. As Timeica turned to go, he said, “They’re gonna reduce that dome too.”
Timeica faced him again, almost all the way out of his yard by now. “Yeah?”
“Bunch of Fairfield County went and fucked off to space. That’s what killed the QZ. Rations down, so now they just send the drones out with the deliveries. Sometimes trucks too, but it’s folks like us driving. Sometimes, when I’m bored, I pick up a few shifts. You from New Haven?”
Timeica didn’t answer.
“Sounds pretty poppin’ up there. I hear y’all even keep some of the houses standing for the new arrivals. Exodusters really turned that into a place, huh.”
“Yeah, they did,” Timeica said, thinking back to the place New Haven was when they first got there, how welcoming and set up everything seemed, how good it felt to be around their people again. In a flash of kindness, she said, “You should come sometime. There’s probably a place for you there.”
“I can’t leave my blueberries.”
When Timeica said, “Cool,” she hoped it didn’t sound too harsh. But she was in the middle of the cracked road, broken magnetic rods poking through, when she saw Sydney and then, in her mind’s eye, saw the horses, then turned back. “I was serious about the offer. There’s people, security, food most days. And domes can get set up for cheap.”
“And I’m serious about my blueberries!” He rose slowly. “Matter fact, I gotta start layin’ down the straw.” At the question in Timeica’s eyes, he continued. “You lay down the straw in the fall,” he said, exasperated, “so when winter comes, the snow packs it into the ground. I got a straw-spreading rig in the back, so I won’t be needing y’all’s help, thank-you-very-much. Come springtime, you burn the field, but it’s gotta be just right. Day can’t be too humid, can’t be too windy. And you got this straw-laced field, then you burn it. See, the part of the blueberry plant we see aboveground is just maybe a third of the whole thing. Underground’s got this whole world a stuff going on. Burning what’s above ground enriches everything underneath. No pesticides, nothin’. Then it’s ready for planting and summertime harvest. If y’all woulda come by a month or two ago, I mighta had a bushel or two to sell y’all.” He turned and waved her goodbye and, stooped, picked up his glass and his lemonade pitcher. “Come by next year if you want some fresh blueberries. Better yet, come by springtime, help me with the burning, and I’ll set you and your friend up with a discount.”
Back in the car, Timeica shook her head, smirking. “Burns his field on purpose, can you believe that?”
