Free What Came After by Sam Winston Page A

“They’re getting close. Not close enough, but close.” She put down the envelope and sighed. “I guess you know about close.”
    Weller sighed too.
    He went out and saw the two runners sitting on a dirt berm with a couple of other men he knew. Loading up their packs with bricks of tobacco and filling water bottles and getting ready to go. It made him long for the road himself. For the road and for what lay at the end of it. Penny healed and the both of them home. Liz.
     
    *
     
    He dug in and persevered for as long as he could. Another week of breaking his back and passing on what he knew and getting the trickiest parts of everything nailed down. Drawing plans for others to follow. When he was satisfied enough but not entirely satisfied he knew the time had come to leave. He stocked up for the trip to New York. Food and water and clean clothes for both Penny and himself, washed by somebody else. Somebody else doing their part.
    Half of him wished that he could go home for Liz right then and bring her back and dig themselves a hole and settle in. In a place like this where people worked together toward something. But no. Not with Penny the way she was.
    At the end Patel slipped him a bundle of cured tobacco leaves pressed flat and wrapped in aluminum foil against the weather. She tucked the bundle into his pack and said, “This is worth more to other people than it is to you. Don’t spend it all in one place.”
    He followed Penny out. He let her lead, because she knew the path from going to the schoolhouse and she was proud to be able to show it to him. They said their goodbyes and lifted their packs and went across the tobacco field toward the culvert. Heading toward no-man’s land but some distance to go yet. The sun just coming up. Penny chirped at him and something buzzed in his ear and he slapped at it and pulled back his hand disbelieving. He told her to stop for a minute. Knelt down beside her and said, “Look here, honey. Have you ever seen the likes of this? What’s next? Birds, maybe? Give it time.”
     

FOUR
The Driver
     
     
     
     
    They left the farms and the rolling hills and the distant emptied-out suburbs, creeping down mile by mile into a denser world of broken concrete. Not all at once but little by little. Moving into it as it moved into them. It was a hollow place devoid of people and empty of their recent signs. Commerce and residence tightly packed together and no more of either one remaining. Weller held tightly to his daughter’s hand as they walked, helping her when she stumbled over cracks and curbs and heaved-up places where the annual cycle of freezing and thawing had rippled the streets of the old densely settled towns and commercial strips and industrial parks. Heaps and valleys of blacktop, like little mountain ranges thrown up.
    It was areas like this, thickly populated stretches along the outskirts of the cities, that had died the slowest. The old mythical megalopolis that ran from Washington to Boston, the tightly packed suburbs of Chicago, and the freeform sprawls of southern California. In the beginning, people had come here to be close to the cities, to partake of what the cities offered them in the way of work and riches and culture, but when the economy fractured fully and the cities turned their backs they had nowhere to go. No jobs and no savings and no hope.
    Some stayed put, and when the price of food soared beyond reach they cultivated their own little yards and windowboxes with seeds that they’d saved and dried and pinned their hopes upon. Knowing what they knew about genetically altered PharmAgra stock but hopeful nonetheless. Others moved outward, fleeing to the countryside for the plainer life it promised. In either event the results were the same. You never knew what treacherous homegrown unprocessed food might be lurking in plain sight, either in your own kitchen garden or on some farm stand table. Take and eat and die uninsured, or risk watching your