Sydney had taken one of the vouchers and was folding it into an origami hand-game, adding it, when she finished, to the row of folded vouchers on the dashboard.
“What kinda sense does that make?”
“Bet they taste good, though.”
Timeica barked a laugh, then started the car. “Speaking of which, how’d you know about them horses?”
Sydney hunched her shoulders up then down, fishing another voucher out of the dashboard. “Felt something beautiful was nearby. Been a while since we seen a miracle. Felt like we were due.” Her words had a rasp to them, from disuse.
“What kinda sense does that make?” Timeica asked, believing her nonetheless.
“‘What kinda sense does that make?’” Sydney said, nasally and annoying, in something nowhere near Timeica’s voice.
But Timeica laughed, pulling onto the road.
Before Shiawassee and watching Wyatt don a park ranger uniform and bend low, pouring concrete into potholes, and use a machete to clear brush; before him training to hold and shoot a rifle proper and not how they learned to shoot and miss on the road; before Wyatt began bulking up his body and turning it into a suit of armor; before Shiawassee, the two of them, Timeica and Wyatt had arrived at a seawall and Timeica had climbed it, because Timeica had wanted to and Wyatt didn’t but she was littler than him, so sometimes, on the basis of that fact alone, she got what she wanted.
They skirted the water foaming against the black rocks that made a natural barrier between the water and the beach, and Timeica skipped ahead on the brown-black sand while Wyatt tried to pull up their digital map. The holograph flickered. With each time Wyatt slapped the Navigator against his thigh, the picture got worse, and that was when he noticed the Geiger counter blinking itself mad. They had to go.
But Timeica was already up the seawall, and Wyatt’s shouts were a faint echo of the terns going kyarr kyarr over the wave-crashes. She paused at the top and looked out over the first town they’d come across in ages. They’d stayed off the highway, picking at the leavings of each settlement they encountered but only after making sure there’d been no traps left behind. But this … this was something else. Something bigger. It wasn’t the urban sprawl they’d left behind with its shadowed corners and blinking streetlights and hollowed skyscrapers out of which poked sniper rifles. It wasn’t car bombs, and it wasn’t stretches of too-quiet punctuated by the too-loud boom and chatter of heavy ordinance and gunfire. This was smaller. But it was still something you could lose yourself in. It wasn’t people, but it was something they’d left behind. Not like the scorched earth of those sometimes booby-trapped settlements. This could be made into something.
She shrugged her backpack off her shoulders and pulled out her drone, checking its battery life before turning it on and sending it into the sky. The screen on the back of the camera she held in her hands was small, but if she focused, she could make it her whole world. So she sat cross-legged on the seawall and followed the thing’s course over brown-green fields dotted with leafless, coal-black trees. Lining a road were squares and almost-squares somewhere between gray and blue. The drone dipped low to reveal the shapes for foundations of houses demolished long ago. Nearby fields and backyards, the drone told her through annotated holograms, had been used to plant pumpkins and spring onions. There used to be a springtime festival down the road, according to the geotag’s annotations. The drone followed the route to what it told Timeica was a nursery school and, swooping down to the front entrance, it zoomed in on a metal rack holding folded, mottled umbrellas. By an empty house, an RV sat camouflaged by weeds. Similar tall grass had grown to colonize other homes whose roofs had collapsed or whose walls had been blown in. Toward the other end of the town stood cadaverous forest. Some of the wood lay chopped in piles. That was the thing about this place. She couldn’t tell if whatever happened here had happened last month or ten years ago. But she needed Wyatt to see this. Needed him to see what she was talking about when she laid out the vision she had for them, the park they could rebuild together, the house they could clear out and renovate, the fields they could start tilling, the things they could grow. With no one around to bother them. See, Wyatt, we don’t need anyone to make it work, the “it” something larger than she had the words to articulate.
“Wyatt!” she shouted, turning away from her camera. “Wyatt! Look!” She turned back to her camera, the drone sliding lazily through windless sky, over and under streetlights, across the empty, soundless place. “WYE-ATT!” Maybe he couldn’t hear her over the surf or those annoying terns. She turned around so he could hear her better and saw a shape that looked like her brother sprawled out on his back, looking like something dead. “Wyatt!” She dropped her camera and scrabbled back down the seawall, sliding for the whole second half until soft ground jolted her into a crouch and she stumbled forward, falling onto her brother’s body. “Wyatt,” she said, smaller, more urgent, hands to his chest, shaking him. A thread of blood ran from a nostril. His fingers twitched around a Geiger counter and that’s when Timeica saw the frantic beeping and the digital numerals turned to flickering gibberish.
She shook him, kept shaking him. “Oh no. No, no, no. Wyatt. Wyatt. Wyatt, tell me what to do. You have to tell me what to do.” Timeica shook him more and more. “Wyatt, what do I do?” Her fingers dug into the cloth of his worn-down coat. “Tell me, please. Please.”
A foreign sound cut through the shush of the surf. A neigh and what sounded like someone blowing a raspberry. She looked up and saw the ghostly white horse that would take them to Shiawassee. Maybe the mud had hid the sound of its hooves. But maybe it had come out of the shoreline mist in answer to a prayer she didn’t even realize she’d uttered. She was afraid to touch it lest it disappear. But she felt Wyatt’s fingers spasm again and was reminded of the Geiger counter and the fact of his dying. So she pulled his dead weight up onto her shoulders, then hefted him belly-down onto the horse. At the added weight, it pranced, throwing Wyatt into the mud, and right there Timeica almost burst into tears. The beeping continued. She hurried to the horse and put her hands to its flank and shushed it and brought it back and tried again, gentler this time, before climbing on.
Wyatt was heavy on her back and kept slipping, but she stuck his hands through her belt to keep him fastened to her and by the time the seawall could no longer be seen on the horizon, she grew accustomed to the weight.
As they rode, thinking it might wake him up or maybe keep him awake, Timeica thought to tell him about her plans for the place, how she’d hoped they’d finally made it to a place where they could rest for a bit, where they could sleep for more than a few nights in a row, a place where they might some day have neighbors they’d see day after day, a place that could give them routine, like hanging their laundry out or talking the shapes of animals out of the clouds, a place that maybe might have a supermarket where she could get honest-to-God pads and not make do with what nature gave them. I just wanted home, she thought to tell him, but she couldn’t figure out how, so she just said “I’m sorry” over and over for the first three miles, through tears and through their drying, until that had become routine. “I’m sorry” for every time she’d disobeyed him and gotten them in trouble or scared away their food or missed a pistol shot and wasted a bullet or talked too much. She thought she’d be saying “I’m sorry” forever.
They were a dozen miles away before she remembered her drone—which had fallen on its way back to her, on a giant green rhomboid, one in a curling row of thirteen, that held two metric tons of radioactive soil.
Rodney, hammer leaning against his shoulder, skin still coated with plaster, led the white woman up the hill and looked back from time to time to see how she was navigating the weeds.
“What’d you say your name was again? Alison?”
“Yeah, just, Ally is fine.” Were her voice an octave or so higher, she’d sound like a sparrow or hummingbird or what Rodney imagined one of those really tiny birds would sound like if they could say human words.
But he liked her where the others grudgingly tolerated her. “Well, Ally, how you doin’ back there?”
“All right,” she managed to say, words broken up by the effort it took to navigate the brush.
He saw the way she looked at things, turning and staring for long enough to snap a photo with her eyes, and that was how he knew she had a braincase. She probably had a Cloud she uploaded all her stuff to, even though she carried around a tablet fashioned to look like one of those old-school leather notebooks.
They made it to the gravel, and Rodney had her take a seat at the picnic table out front. “You want anything to drink?” She was breathing pretty hard. “A mask? I got one in the house if you need it.”
“No,” she breathed, “I’m fine. Thanks, though.”
“All right.” He laid his hammer on the table and stretched his back, then looked out over the place. “That concrete wall you see,” he said, pointing at a span of barrier that stretched beyond the vision of unaugmented eyes into the distance. “That wraps around here. We’re right in the buffer zone. And this was around when things were real bad at first and they just set about decontaminating things. As you can see, the weeds done got so tall you could climb them to get on the other side. ’Course, there’d be nothing waitin’ for you there. Before this spot was decontaminated, the radiation levels in this here yard were about ten microsieverts per hour. Even if you’re meched up, that’s way over the limit for what’s healthy to be around. But the city government and the feds were really dead set on making sure people could still live here. Big PR effort behind it too.” He took a seat opposite her.
Her gaze was equal parts earnest and calculating, and a part of Rodney couldn’t help but feel bad for her. Whatever it was she thought she was doing, she probably thought it was nobler than it really was.
“There’s a spot in the garage. Here, let me show you.” And he got up to lead her to the house extension, its door open and baring his tools and dusty, no-tires Benz to the elements. He crouched and pointed to a spot beneath the downspout. “That spot’s been decontaminated maybe thirty times since I been here. Rain kept washing the radioactive particles off the roof, turned it into a hotspot. There are plenty of other places in New Haven like that, ten microsieverts at least. And if you don’t call the government, then they don’t come and excavate. It’s only gotten worse since everybody started leaving.”
He returned to the table and felt his limp again. His arm sleeve was soaked through, but he wasn’t about to show this Ally the metal beneath the peeled-away skin. “You ask me, I think it’s good people are coming back. What are they called, ‘returnees’?” He chuckled. “I mean, they grandparents, great-grandparents, they the ones that left, and they ain’t the ones coming back. I know some of the others looked at that first wave of white folk and thought they was all settlers and whatnot come to take over the land and whatnot, but just wait till they water gets turned back on or the roads get fixed. Wait till a dome go up over their place and they ain’t gotta pay for it. We’ll see if they still complaining.”
“You don’t worry about house prices increasing?”
“What it cost me to live here? Only a lung and a liver.” He laughed. He’d been saving that joke for a while.
Quiet hung between them as he waited for her smile.
“You got anything written so far or you just takin’ pictures?”
“I dunno. Still kinda finding my way through it all.”
“Only way to finish is to start.”
At this, she smiled. Then she unfolded her tablet and tapped it out of sleep mode. It glowed blue. She tapped the air just over the screen a few times, swiped some, then slid it over to Rodney.
“Am I in it?”
“Not yet. I mean, not if you don’t want to be.”
“I’m just messin’ with you. Write what you’re gonna write.” Rodney took a pack of smokes out of his pocket, tapped one out, then lit up. He made sure he was gentle when he picked up the tablet and started to read.
