Free What Came After by Sam Winston Page B

children die the same in a few years. Soon the hospitals were overwhelmed and soon after that they were shuttered, because there is only so much charity in the world.
    By and by the farthest suburbs and country towns closed ranks, shunning outsiders who arrived without the skills that they had come to prize. Mechanical aptitude. Physical strength. Plain endurance. People sold off what land they owned to PharmAgra and signed PharmAgra contracts and turned their full attention to the soil again, with the kind of focus that comes only from desperation. Sharecroppers raising poisoned plants and selling them under contract and buying them back again sterilized. Which left outsiders, those who had once believed in their own potential to rise up and those who now believed no more, to suffer and weaken and perish. The time of the Great Dying. At least here in the North some survived, for there were cities to supply. The South was different. The South took it harder and the South died faster. Ruined not by aggression but by neglect.
    Weller and Penny walked on. Over collapsed highways and around treacherous sinkholes and across wide intersections dotted with cars and trucks that had been left where they stood when the last of the gas in their tanks had run out. Rusted hulks propped on bare axles in little shining pools of shattered glass. They walked down railroad tracks and through switching yards jammed with railcars of every description, most of them lived-in at one time or another but all of them empty now. Weller telling his child that once upon a time people and goods had ridden these rails to pretty much everywhere. Children have big imaginations, but she couldn’t imagine that.
    They heard Ninety-Five before they saw it. The familiar roar of trucks, echoing down these empty canyons. The land was flat here, flatter than back home, and the road was elevated. They saw it first from between rows of buildings that might have been either commercial or industrial, it was hard to say. There was no indication other than a number of scarred places high up on certain walls where signage had been taken down a long time ago. Salvaged for glass and metal and plastics. Plastics that had become as precious as gemstones for a little while, back when the factories that made them were closed for good.
     
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    Every National Motors highway had a checkpoint every fifty miles. More regular than the old rest stops had been and existing for a different reason. There was nothing about them of rest or convenience. Just a McDonald’s counter and restrooms with one or two shower stalls smelling of bleach. A single diesel pump out front. Otherwise it was all company business. Scanners and cameras and men with guns. Building these checkpoints out here on this regular plan had been trivial once the suburbs were empty. Zoning. There wasn’t any zoning. Not in the Zone.
    They drew near to the highway not far past a checkpoint and walked along on the southbound side for a little, hearing the trucks rumble overhead, watching for a place where they might find access. A grassy berm leading up. Everything was fenced. National Motors fences with that big red star logo. Weller found an accessible place just far enough from the checkpoint but not too far, and he scrambled up with Penny right behind him. He knelt by the fence to open his bag for the wirecutters. One eye on the road. The spot was narrow and Penny stood beside him and a truck appeared in the distance and they dropped down flat in the tall grass. Invisible enough, since the truck didn’t slow or stop or sound its air horn. He got to his knees and put out his hand to steady himself on the chain link and as he touched it voltage ran through his body. Not enough to kill anybody but enough to discourage an ordinary man. He sat dazed. Shook himself. Told Penny to go back down into the swale. Wait there. Don’t touch anything. Then he cut strips from the blue plastic tarp for insulation and doubled