“You’re kidding.” Cally’s jaw dropped.
“Nope.” She grinned tightly. “Well, unless you count the porno mags under Agent Thomas’s bed. I’ve been that bored. Oop, gotta go. Try the peaches.” She shrank a bit from the face of the middle-aged woman looking out the plastic and duct tape “window” of the grill and began rapidly collecting empty dishes and silverware.
Cally stared after her for a moment before rummaging in her backpack for a battered paperback copy of Pygmalion and staring at it a moment.
I can always get another prop. She tucked the girl’s tip in the inside cover and finished her water, making her way to where the waitress was returning for another load. Her mouth tightened at the reddening print on the girl’s face and her hot eyes. She pressed the book into the girl’s hand.
“Never give up,” she told her firmly, grabbing her chin gently and pulling her face around for eye contact. “Never give up. Not ever. You will make it out.”
The teenager paused for a second, looking at the other woman as if she had sudden sneaking suspicion that she was far older than twenty, whatever else she may have been. She smiled grimly and tucked the book into her front pocket where it was bulkier but probably safer, and got back to work.
Cally heard her mutter, “Thanks, ma’am,” as she strolled back to the van exactly like a student tourist, trying not to visibly berate herself for breaking cover.
Outside the walls, Cally grimaced at the profusion of roadside kudzu. “Hell of an abat hazard, isn’t it?”
“What? Like, oh, yeah, totally bogus. Happens a bit in some of these places. If it’s not good farmland or right next to your house, it’s somebody else’s problem. It’s a lot of work to get in and clear that stuff and if you’re doing that, like, you aren’t getting bounties or raising your own crops. Until some poor schmuck gets stung by a grat. There’s just totally not enough money in the world to get me to bounty farm, man.”
As the land and the road got more hilly, first the small trees and undergrowth rose beside the highway like green walls, then the huge granite cut-throughs and drop-offs passed by as they climbed into the Blue Ridge, which rose in front of them in a great green wall, softened by the afternoon haze. With the changing terrain eliminating the need for a Roundup zone, clumps of grass vied for purchase in the rocky soil with brown-eyed Susans and some small purple flower she didn’t recognize. Occasionally she caught a dull orange flash of Virginia creeper, or the more brilliant orange splash of what she vaguely remembered were mountain azaleas. Reefer flipped off the air conditioner and opened the windows to let in the cooler, fresher mountain air. She suppressed the urge to wrinkle her nose at the exhaust fumes from the rest of the convoy and pulled her hair back into a quick ponytail to keep the dark curls from flying around her face.
At one of the cut-throughs you could still see the scraps of exotic rubble where they blew the Wall and relaid the road after the Green River Gorge drawbridge came on-line as part of reopening the route to Charleston harbor.
There was no delay at the drawbridge, the lead truck having radioed ahead the time-synchronized codes to signal the attendant. Cally was reassured to see the unusually alert and attentive man obviously watching the convoy and all his sensors as the van clattered across the lowered bridge.
After the first exit past the bridge, they started to pass some local traffic — the occasional ancient pickup truck or SUV from the mountain communities that, after the great postwar RIF of the surviving soldiers, had gone back to living mostly as they had for the past four hundred years. A bit poorer, perhaps, but for a people who had come to love these highlands as their ancestors had loved an earlier home, they had their mountains, and they had their neighbors, and the mild poverty wrapped around them felt more like a comfortably broken-in and familiar set of work clothes than any true hardship. Their mountains weren’t for the soft, or the greedy, or the lazy, but they had protected them from a hazard that had gone through softer and richer peoples like a hot knife through butter. This knowledge had cemented the locals’ attachment to their mountains from a rough affection to a respectful devotion approaching reverence, so that rural Appalachia had one of the lowest out-migration rates on the planet. While the mountain folk knew there were many places men could live in the modern galaxy, this one was theirs, and they reckoned they’d keep it.
It was early evening but still quite bright when the convoy entered Baldwin Gap, home of the Southeast Asheville Urb. Turning off the Blue Ridge Parkway onto Victory Road, they came into the valley through the dilapidated remains of forty-year-old fortifications, topped with a mishmash of sensor boxes and transmitters probably emplaced and maintained by local farmers who were more interested in protecting their stock than in any bounty. With power, protection, and ample refrigeration, Asheville was cattle country, selling much of its lower grade beef to the local Urbs and shipping the better cuts back down to Charleston for the tourists’ surf ’n’ turf dinners. Her driver, obviously city-bred, had switched back to closed windows and the AC at the first whiff of rural cow manure — not that she minded.
The first thing Cally noticed when they came in sight of the Asheville Urb Vehicle Assembly Zone was the increased number of people manning the wall and their relative inattention to that job. Some wore headphones which, judging from the rhythmic nodding of the wearers’ heads were for music rather than information. At one corner of the wall, a female in a guard uniform was chatting up a male in civvies. One of the more alert guards was standing over the entrance gate facing outward. While she looked out, eyes scanning the hills, most of the time, judging from her hand movements she also appeared to have a game of solitaire going on the top edge of the wall.
“I guess they don’t get many ferals this close to civilization,” she said, slipping her sandals back on and closing up the novel on her PDA as they drove through the gates.
“Huh?”
“Those were just, you know, some pretty bored looking guards. Not that I have much to compare with. We don’t have them back home,” she said.
“Oh, yeah,” he nodded. “They’re like, pretty laid back here, you know? I hung out with a couple of guards on one of my trips through. This girl I talked to said it pays pretty well, and they’re feds, so they get good bennies.” He swallowed hard and added a fresh piece of gum. “It wouldn’t be the gig for me, man. I mean, okay, it’s not major stressful or anything, but I just couldn’t, like, handle being a fed.”
“Me neither,” she grinned. “So what happens now?”
“Well, like, I gotta wait for this chick from one of the restaurants and, you know, see how much stuff she wants to buy, and put my van down for the convoy out tomorrow. Then I guess, like, food and someplace to crash. Maybe find a party, if, you know, there’s one mellow enough that I won’t be too fucked up to drive in the morning.” He looked sheepish for a minute. “Oh, like, sorry.”
“You must come through here a lot. I hate to ask when you’ve already done so much for me, but could you recommend anywhere to eat and, well, stay that’s okay but not too expensive?” she asked, dropping her eyes and scuffing the ground a bit with a foot.
“Oh, like, no problem. I’m, um, meeting a friend, so I’m gonna be like totally out of the net until morning, no offense. Um… the cafeteria is totally bogus, so don’t even go there. They sell the food in Asheville Urb Calorie Credits, and they seriously scalp you on the exchange rates. Your best bet is probably the mall food court. The Taco Hell was okay the last time I tried it, but that was like a few months ago when I was majorly low on cash. For rooms, I’d tell a guy to take the no-tell motel outside the walls and leave all his stuff in the van, but if I were you I’d honestly pick up an Urbie dude for a one nighter before I did that ’cause it’s not exactly your high-rent district.” He frowned, scratching his chin through the beard and looking glum. “Shit. Why don’t you hang around until Janet gets here? Maybe she can, like, find you some crash space for the night. Urb hostel prices are, like, well, the bogosity is beyond belief, I kid you not.”