“Do they meet?” Serena studied the road. “It looks like it. But we never get there.”
“No, they hope to meet but don’t, just look like it. A tragic love story. Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot and Guinevere. Orpheus and Eurydice. Pocahontas and John Smith. Rama and Sita. Frieda and Diego Rivera.”
“The Fantastic Four. The Black Panther,” Serena added, smirking. “The Three Stooges.”
“John and Yoko,” Nana added. “Jimi Hendrix and the sky.” She felt a catch in her throat. They were all dead. Was there anything that wasn’t? “I barely remember,” she said.
“They are so over, Nana.”
“Why are they over?”
“Why don’t we ever get there?”
“That’s a very good question, Serena.” She thought, There’s nowhere to get, that’s why. It was strange, how she felt safe on the road, in danger if cooped in a farmhouse with people they might trust or in a city where people might or might not give a shit. She remembered Martin Gonzalez. That had been more than a year ago. She was still a handsome woman, she knew that; but the last man she came across after Martin, who had been good, had wanted something from her but wouldn’t give a thing in return. He had turned her to the ground and taken her from behind but let her live. Serena had not been in the yard at the time, but it would have made no difference to him.
That would never happen again. She staked her life on it.
The road is better than the roadhouse. Live free or die. She liked the sound of that.
The two of us and nobody else. Nobody else in the world. The last two people on Earth, except for the caravans of homeless with haunted eyes and filthy faces they saw sometimes in a field camping for the night or driving ahead of them in battered vehicles that she would go out of her way to avoid. The military convoys, coming from someplace and going someplace else. The occasional farmer in a combine plowing the fields, often with a son or wife or friend standing guard, holding a rifle—the equivalent of a scarecrow meant as a warning not to birds but to people like her. “There’s nothing for you here,” the profile with its rifle said.
It was impossible to know how much of the contagion the land carried, so Nana had no interest in scavenging food from fields. Some people were still good. They would help an older woman and child, but she kept her foot on the accelerator. “We need gas,” she said. “Goat Hollow is up ahead. The pumps there are still open, I’ve heard.”
“Heard from who?”
“You know. Word gets around. The telephone telegraph. Things have changed; I don’t know why, but we still find company, don’t we? This is still adventure, isn’t it?” The words rang hollow, but she repeated them anyway, for Serena.
“You don’t know why?” The question was high-pitched. Nana could hear a twang in Serena’s voice, anxiety rising. What were the rules of this game? Were they all of a sudden talking about something else?
“I have an idea, but I don’t want to give you the wrong information. Why don’t you pull out your crystal ball?” Serena had an old smartphone, which had long ago belonged to her mother, Ava, who was now (so far as Nana knew) so far away, up in the Boundary Waters, taken there by one of the men they were running from, who would find them if they stayed put, especially in Fargo, that she might as well be in another galaxy. Ava knew Serena had the phone, still with the same area code and number. Maybe one day she would call, Serena hoped, but Nana didn’t think Ava would be heard from again. Not in her lifetime, anyway.
Sometimes the phone brought them news. It was useful to know where the bands of Marauders were last seen. Law enforcement had mostly abandoned the Dakotas to the Militias, and word of mouth was essential, but the interstates and cell towers were still patrolled and protected. What good that would do on a lonely stretch, she couldn’t say. The phone was the most precious thing Serena owned, because it came from her mother and put her in touch with the world. It also gave her something to do. The world inside the phone often—too often, Nana thought—absorbed her attention, so that the world—the real world, Nana thought—vanished. As the Dakotas emptied out, the virtual world blinked on and off too.
There were no guarantees anymore. Had there ever been?
“Will we ever reach the horizon, Nana?”
“No. It’s like tomorrow. We never get there. We wake up and it’s today.”
“Nana, we do get there. Tomorrow we’ll be there.” Serena had the white, burnished phone with a cracked screen in her lap. Nana noticed a black SUV approaching fast behind them. There was a rumble in the sky, the sound of fighter planes flashing past, the supersonic boom of one breaking the speed of sound. Had the country’s Dear Leader started another war to divert attention from the chaos everywhere? She couldn’t keep up anymore.
“We need gas,” Nana said. The gauge was close to empty.
“Won’t we get there tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow when you say “tomorrow,” you won’t mean the same day that you mean right now when you say that word. Get it? We can’t step in the same river twice because the water in it isn’t the same water that was there the first time we got our toes wet.” Nana found her mind perambulating from where she was and into the kind of trance that lets a driver go for miles lost in the thunk-a-thunk of tires kalunk-ing over seams in the asphalt. The gas gauge was in the red zone. The last three stations had been closed. For good. One had been ransacked, the attached convenience store’s picture window shattered and shelves emptied. She could feel tears well up and fought them back. It wouldn’t do to weep. Not in front of Serena.
The black SUV had tinted windows and was riding their back fender. Nana snapped her fingers. It was a sign. Serena stopped talking and reached to open the glove compartment. The muscles in her wrists straining, she took out the heavy pistol, keeping the barrel pointed away from them both, unclicked the safety, and passed it to Nana, who placed it snug in her lap.
The tension in the car didn’t break until the SUV swung into the passing lane and held steady beside them, a passenger with aviator glasses staring at her with such intensity that she showed him the gun. Nana saw white teeth before the passenger turned to the driver and the SUV roared past. She slowed to increase the distance between them. Soon enough it had disappeared into the horizon they never reached.
She handed the gun, safety engaged again, to Serena, who put it back into its compartment and played with her phone. “I found a site where they say the horizon is a question of perspective.”
It took Nana more than a moment to come back. “That’s right. Things look smaller when they’re far away. That’s perspective.” Though she kept the thought to herself, she was surprised the AI voice on the phone still functioned as normally as it did. Parts of the world still worked. The cell towers and relays, some of them, were still up. The Police protected technology more than people. Fargo might be safer than the road.
“Hmm. Sometimes they’re not that much bigger when you get close,” Serena said. Nana could hear dread in her voice. A panic attack—something new this week, but frequent in their picaresque life—itched to get loose. “Why can’t we ever get there?”
Uh-oh. She could tell that Serena might whine, then complain, which could become a tantrum, or worse. It could get so bad that it might crash the system until there was nothing to do but stop the car and wait it out. “We’re getting closer. It doesn’t seem like it because the landscape looks the same on both sides of the road as far ahead as we can see, all that dirty snow, the swirl of the wind on the road, but trust me.” Trust me, she thought, almost desperate. She could smell her stale stink, the funk of dread and fear. She needed a shower. “Soon enough we’ll be there, even though it feels like we never get any closer to where we want to be.” And where the hell exactly was that?
That was the question. To be or not to be?
To be, to be, to be, she thought.
A great sadness clouded her vision, like a mystic’s dream of peace destroyed by a false idol. “Your mother will find us, or we’ll find her.” She could see Ava, her daughter, as brave or braver than Serena, until the dope sickness took hold and congealed her life into tilting desire for the next fix.
It didn’t really matter anymore what Nana said to Serena. It was all BS.
It was past time to leave the Dakotas for good, just like so many others had done. Get down to Tulsa, the land of tornadoes, where it was supposed to be safe, where civilization was still intact, where people were welcome, more than welcome, or so she had heard, but that would be one long, white-knuckled drive, and she found herself hoping that Ava would find them first. Otherwise, they needed to join a convoy; Nana didn’t have the resources or skills to turn the tables and go find Ava, not up in the Boundary Waters.
They waited for the phone to ring but it never did, at least not with Ava’s voice.
“We’re not getting closer, Nana!” It sounded like a shriek; Serena had one hand tight around the phone. “It’s farther away! Nana! I want to be there! Stop the car!” There was panic in her voice. “Where are we?”
“I want to be there too,” Nana said, perversely stomping on the accelerator to tend to her own anxiety, glancing at the gas gauge, feeling her throat tighten, her own small hairball of panic finding purchase. She opened the window to clear the air and saw the exit for Goat Hollow, which was on a promontory, not in a hollow, and didn’t have any goats. It overlooked a lake with vacation houses around it, now mostly abandoned. “Goat Hollow will never lose its charm,” she remembered a friend, a historian of the region, telling her once. He was dead now. The Marauders had come through like a sky filled with locusts and left death and devastation behind. They had beaten him to death when he told them to get the hell out of town; he had always been a man who had no filters. That was what she had heard, anyway, that he was dead and gone, like an old blues song. He had been buried in a field of flowers. It gave her comfort to imagine blossoms growing out of his skull.
The gas station had survived, maybe bought safety with fuel. She hoped it was still open. We aren’t helpless, she told herself, and repeated the sentence like a mantra. Resist. Fight back. Prevail.
Snow swirled on the blacktop and made driving difficult. Serena’s phone pinged, a message from somebody better placed in the world, and she started thumb texting. She was very good at it. She had text pals all over the world, but not in the Dakotas. They gave her hope that something better was ahead, over the horizon.
