Things began to flatten out. The air was brownish gray. He was getting into dust-bowl territory now, the sad dry heart of the continent, where the vast farms once had been, before the summers became furnaces and the air went bad and the rain moved elsewhere. The spacious skies and purple mountain majesties were still there, yes, right there behind him in Utah and Wyoming, but now he was east of there, Nebraska, maybe even Iowa, and the fruited plain had gone to hell and he could find no sign of the amber waves of grain.
Yet people lived here. Through the deepening afternoon he saw the lights of towns and cities on both sides of the freeway. Why anyone would want to make his home in this place was more than Carpenter could understand, but he realized that they had probably had no choice about it, they had been born here and saw no hope of going anywhere better, or else they had been cast up by the waves of bad fortune on this beach without a sea, and here they were. Here they would stay. R.I.P.
But at least they had homes, he thought.
Carpenter wondered what he was going to do when this long grim odyssey from nowhere to nowhere and back again was finished, and he was ready to begin the next stage of his life. What next stage? Go where, do what? There was no place he could call his home. Los Angeles? He scarcely knew the place any more. San Francisco? Spokane? The Company had been his home, moving him around from Boston to St. Louis to Winnipeg to Spokane as it pleased. Wherever he might be, still he had always been in the Company.
And now he wasn’t. Carpenter could hardly begin to comprehend that. No slope at all. Off the curve entirely. Level Zero.
Imagine that, he thought. What an accomplishment. The first kid in your class to attain Level Zero.
Somewhere in the middle of Illinois, an hour or two west of Chicago, traffic began to back up on the freeway and the car told him there was a roadblock ahead. No vehicular traffic was being admitted to Chicago from the west or the south except through approved quarantine stations.
“What’s going on?” Carpenter asked.
But the car was only a cheap rental job, not programmed to provide anything more than basic information. The best it could do was flash him a map that showed a red cordon zone covering a vast swatch of the region from Missouri and western Illinois south all the way to New Orleans, and up the far side of the Mississippi from Louisiana to Kentucky and parts of Ohio. According to the car, the closest point of entry to the protected zone for travelers intending to reach Chicago was Indianapolis, and the vehicle proposed a detour accordingly.
“Whatever you say,” Carpenter told it.
He turned on the radio and got part of the answer. They were talking about an outbreak of something called Chikungunya in New Orleans and the fear that Guanarito or Oropouche might be spreading there too. Secondary occurrences were reported in the St. Louis area, they said. Carpenter had never heard of Chikungunya or Guanarito or Oropouche, but plainly those were the names of diseases: there must be an epidemic of some sort raging down south and the health authorities were trying to keep it from reaching Chicago.
When he reached Indianapolis, around mid-morning, he was able to learn the rest of the story at the quarantine station while he was waiting to be interviewed. The diseases with the long names were tropical viruses, he was told. They were emigrants from Africa and South America and had become rampant in the new rain forests of Louisiana and Florida and Georgia—carried in nonhuman hosts, spread by ticks and other disagreeable bugs, moved along by them into the bloodstreams of the myriad gibbering monkeys and innumerable giant rodents, themselves refugees from the rain forests that once had existed in the valleys of the Amazon and the Congo, that now infested the wet, steaming jungles of the South.
Everyone who lived in the new jungled regions had to be vaccinated constantly, Carpenter knew, as one virus or another went jumping from some animal that carried it into some hapless member of the human population, setting off yet another epidemic. But this was no rain forest, up here. Why were they worrying about jungle diseases like Oropouche and Chikungunya in the drier, cooler environs of Chicago?
“Bunch of infected monkeys got on a barge full of fruit coming up the Mississippi from New Orleans,” Carpenter was told at the quarantine station. “Some of them got off at Memphis and started biting people. The rest stayed aboard until Cairo. Memphis and Cairo are sealed off, now. We don’t know exactly which bug it is, yet, but they’re all bad. You get bitten, you puff up and turn into a bag of black blood, and then the bag breaks and what was in it runs along the floor like slime until it’s empty.”
“Jesus,” Carpenter said.
“We think we stopped the virus before St. Louis. If this stuff ever got to Chicago, the place would go up like a bonfire. Four million people all packed together like this? Disease that you can spread just by looking at someone the wrong way? Forget it! —Let’s see your route plaque, please.”
Carpenter turned the record of his journey over for inspection.
“No side trips to any part of eastern Missouri that don’t show up on the plaque? Any deviation into Tennessee or Kentucky?”
“I came in by way of the north route,” Carpenter said. “You can see what day I left California. There hasn’t been time for me to go anywhere but straight across the mountains and through Nebraska and Iowa.”
“You here on business?”
“Business, yes.”
A sticky moment. Carpenter was still sailing under Samurai colors: a Level Eleven salaryman, coming to Chicago for the Company. One phone call could spike that. But the Company still carried him on the roster. His megacorp affiliation got him through, on into the fumigation chamber, and on beyond it to the highway that led to Chicago.
Memphis and Cairo are sealed off, now.
Highways closed, air routes shut down, nobody goes in, nobody comes out. Memphis and Cairo might just as well have vanished from the face of the Earth. Monkeys come out of the jungles of Louisiana, doing their job for the forces of chaos, and your city disappears from the world while you wait for the Oropouche viruses, or whatever, to get into your veins and make your body swell up and turn into a bag of black blood. Lord, have mercy, Carpenter thought.
Christ, have mercy.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
In Chicago, finally, about four in the afternoon, Carpenter phoned Jeanne Gabel at the Samurai headquarters at Wacker and Michigan, and got her after only about half a minute of hunt-and-seek maneuvering.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“In a parking lot at—mmm—Monroe and Green.”
“All right. Stay there. It’ll be all right if I leave here early. I’ll come and get you.”
He sat in the car, weary and bedraggled from his journey, staring in awe and dismay at the dark smoggy sky. The air in the city was a kind of oily soup that left black smears on the car’s windshield. It was fantastically splotched and streaked with dense patches of mottled color, yellow and purple and green and blue all running together, the color of a bad bruise, with the sun glinting vaguely through the curtain of crud like a small, rusty brass coin. Carpenter had not been in this part of the country for a very long time; he had forgotten what kind of poisons lived in the air here. Everyone he saw was wearing a face-lung. He put his on, making sure it fit snugly over his cheekbones and jaw.
Jeanne arrived with surprising swiftness. Carpenter felt a surge of joy at the sight of her—the first familiar face since Oakland—and then, immediately, a crosscurrent of confusion. He had no idea why he had come here or what he wanted from her, this woman with whom he had maintained a kind of long-distance flirtatious friendship for nearly half a dozen years without ever once having kissed her on the lips.