He slowed to wait for her. “Shawn was sick most of his life,” he said. “He had a lung disease. But he was a fighter. Have you heard that before? It’s a cliché that they use here about people who are sick—that they’re fighting their condition. That’s not what I mean, though. Shawn hated talking about cystic fibrosis. He was a big baby about it. He would get stuff in the mail from the hospital and just tear it up unopened, without seeing whether it was a bill or test results, or anything. I always had to get to the mailbox before him. What I mean when I say Shawn was a fighter is that he was a fighter. A regular scrapper. Tough guy, you know? One time, he caught me and my friend trying on his new cologne, this stuff I saw him buy on clearance at the Rite Aid. Man, he beat our asses for that. But he always kept me safe. Had my back, like a big brother should.”
They turned up a sort of alley. Hel noticed a fleet of candy-pink stones to the left, their inscriptions carved in a script she didn’t know. A family. “You come here a lot?” she asked.
“Never.”
“Oh. How long has he been dead?”
“Years. Three years.”
Hel thought about what that meant. Maybe he was right about her self-centeredness. On the day her life fell apart, the day she won the lottery and stepped through the Gate to begin a new one, Dwayne Sealy and his grandmother had been newly bereaved and grieving.
“So, what about your kid?” Dwayne asked her. “Vikram says you lost a son.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Jonas didn’t walk across the country. That would have been crazy. He traveled out from Western Refuge, the renamed township where he lived with his father, on a borrowed blazer. Even including the stops he had to make to scavenge for fuel and for food, the cross-country trip took under two weeks. Not bad. Not bad at all.
Hardly any of the main roads had been repaired since Jonas was a child. He had a map, but it was hard to predict which routes would still be passable. In the first years, when there was still fuel to be bought, some municipalities sent out wrecking crews to clear away the junked pods, but in other places, rusted pileups impeded passage, forcing Jonas to wheel the heavy bike along the shoulder. He knew enough, as he moved east, to avoid the cities.
He was close enough now to the Exclusion Zone that he needed to seriously consider his entry point. The highway Jonas had been following since the ruins of Buffalo now led south and east and ended right at a checkpoint. That meant that for any nonmilitary purposes, it was a dead end.
He’d been warned about this already by a stranger he met on the road. Together, the two of them broke the window of a room in a chain motel, a Du-Sleep-Inn. They took the unit on the far end, which ended up having two double beds. Jonas opened the door and wheeled the blazer inside, leaving streaks of grime on the carpet, and then he and the stranger piled the two dressers in front of the window, put the dead bolt on, and spent the night in there, taking turns watching the approach through an old-fashioned spyglass John wore around his neck under his dirty coat.
John. That was the guy’s name. “I always take the end room,” John said. “It’s good luck.”
John? Like John Gund, in the book y’all keep talking about?
No. Hiram. That was the guy’s name. “I always take the end room,” Hiram said. “It’s good luck.” He gave Jonas a fishy look. “Normally, I like to leave the door open, too. That way, I can see what’s coming. Anybody comes up on me, I take off before they can bother me.”
Jonas could see the logic behind the strategy. Hiram was younger than Jonas by a few years—maybe young enough to have been born Before, but too young to remember much about it—and he had a cough. He didn’t seem strong. Probably chronic radiation syndrome.
“Too bad,” Jonas said. He felt no pity. His mission had to come first. If anyone spotted them, he’d never be able to wrestle the big diesel bike out from where he’d propped it. The better option was to pretend they weren’t even there. That meant a closed door.
In the morning, the two went their separate ways. Hiram headed west, out of the Neverlands, while Jonas continued east.
People told him he couldn’t do it, and maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he would stop at the fence. But maybe not.
Neverlands, did you say?
That’s what I said.
Also, is this now? Wouldn’t Jonas be, like, thirteen? That seems too young to be out on his own.
This isn’t now.
Oh. OK.
He’s older. Why couldn’t he be older? I want him to be strong. I want him to live a long time.
Jonas passed through a town as he started to lose the light. It was clear immediately that no one lived in this area anymore. Even the people who’d weathered the crisis years on their own, refusing to be evacuated, tended to stay on the outskirts, avoiding the populated areas where Homeland Defense was more likely to conduct sweeps. So this was a ghost town. And it hadn’t been resettled. Everyone knew what the officially sanctioned radiation levels were, but no one knew how far you could push it. If you’d lived on the verge like this, it was usually wiser to pull up stakes. Jonas found his way to the streets in the center of the town, where the post office was and the routing station. Then, he found a house with an attached shed. He didn’t like staying in other people’s homes, even if they were never coming back. Even if they were dead.
That night, he curled under his two tarps. He’d had enough to eat—canned goods pillaged from a small grocery store he’d hit the night before—and so he slept soundly, without dreams. He’d heard tales of people in the Neverlands who grew their own crops and actually ate them, but Jonas would never do that. Don’t take any risks, his dad always warned him. All you have is your health. Not everything his dad said was foolish; they’d seen so many get sick, even in Western Refuge, 1,500 kilometers from the nearest site, the one in Escondido.
What kind of parent would let his child—
Teenager, like I said. And I’m not saying he would let Jonas do anything. He’s a stubborn kid. He would have snuck away. Raym—my ex—he would know Jonas enough to see it coming. That’s all.
Can I ask, without sounding rude—can I ask what the point is, of all of this?
The next morning, Jonas found his way to the fence. He’d left the highway and was feeling his way on local roads. The map wasn’t much help so he consulted his compass frequently, always heading east.
And then, up ahead, he saw it.
They’d put fences all around the Exclusion Zone. Barbed wire topped the chain-link, and charge boxes placed at intervals hinted that the fence was electrified, but Jonas doubted the current still ran. What would power it? Of course, he wasn’t sure. He’d never seen an electric fence in operation in his whole life.
He wheeled the blazer to the far side of a little meadow—farther from the road than you could get, most places, without a machete or something to hack through underbrush—and laid it on its side beneath the low-bending branches of a blight-resistant crab apple tree. He covered it with his larger tarp, which had a subdued green-and-brown camouflage pattern.
Leaving the blazer didn’t trouble him too much. He’d done the best he could to hide it. Either it would be here when he got back, or it wouldn’t.
And he continued inward on foot, through the second-growth forest.
I was there in the hospital. I saw Shawn die, so I could never pretend that he wasn’t gone. But I used to think about what he could have done in life, if he hadn’t been taken from us. I still do think about that, sometimes.