“The better world,” she whispered as she guided the Mercedes forward through the woods, feeling the sharp thump of rocks beneath the tires. Trees surrounded the car, ghostly white pillars in the glare of the headlights. “It’s out there, so close we can almost touch it.”
She kept an eye on the side windows and rearview mirror; there were probably some people living out here somewhere, though they’d need some serious weaponry to break into this car, which had steel-reinforced windows and was built like a tank. But she saw no one, and after twenty minutes of carefully crawling along, she emerged onto the public highway. Highway 84 was much wider than the private roads, its northern span stretching six lanes across, and without the ten-foot walls that bordered most private freeways it felt very wide, almost limitless in its emptiness, remnant of a bygone era when everyone could afford cars and gas. Signs on Lily’s right advertised the speed limit as sixty-five, but Security never bothered to police the public highways anyway, and sixty-five seemed ridiculously slow, almost like standing still. Lily sped up, then sped up further, easing the car over eighty-five and up toward ninety, finding a pure pleasure in going fast, in watching the miles fly by.
Several times she saw the remains of old barricades on the highway shoulder: piles of trash, blown tires and tree branches that had simply been cleared to one side and left for wind and time to disperse. She couldn’t fathom the purpose of such barricades, and this, more than anything else, drove home to Lily how little she knew about life outside the wall. Even as a child, she had always used the private roadways, always had temperate weather, never needed to worry about starving.
Occasionally she saw fires lining the sides of the road, large bonfires surrounded by the silhouettes of many people. The poor, moving out of the cities and into the forests … safer, most likely, but also harder to survive. Lily couldn’t slow down to take a closer look; armored or not, a Mercedes rolling at street speed was an open invitation. But she couldn’t help staring at them in the rearview mirror, all of those human shadows standing around the flames. She couldn’t help imagining the lives they led.
“The better world,” she whispered, repeating it every time another mile ticked off the odometer and into the night at her back. Green exit signs flew by, some of them so worn that Lily could barely read the white letters announcing their towns. Vernon, Tolland, Willington. Some of these were undoubtedly ghost towns, while others were alive but given over to lawlessness. Lily dimly remembered hearing Willington mentioned on a news site a few months ago, something about a cult. But she couldn’t remember, and then Willington was behind her. She was halfway to Boston now, only seventy-five miles to go.
Her phone beeped, and Lily gave a small croak of fright, certain that Greg had woken up, that he had gotten hold of a phone. She could barely bring herself to look at the screen, but when she did, she saw the word Jonathan shining against the bright blue background.
“Answer … Jonathan?”
“Where are—Mrs. M.?” His voice crackled with static, dropped out. But of course, cell service would be wretched outside the walls. People like Lily weren’t even supposed to be here. With the advent of panic buttons in cars, no one even used a phone for emergencies anymore.
“I’m on my way to Boston.”
“What’s in Boston?” She might have been imagining it, but even under the static, Lily sensed a sudden, guarded quality about Jonathan’s voice.
“The warehouse! The port! They’re in trouble, Jonathan. Mark had Arnie Welch over for dinner—”
“Mrs. M.? Can—hear you. Don’t—” Now the static cut in for a long moment, “Boston!”
“Jonathan?”
The call dropped.
Lily redialed, but she knew already that it was an empty gesture. She didn’t even get Jonathan’s voicemail this time, only a dead and empty silence. Peering down at her phone, she saw that she had no service. Too late, she realized that the brief call had surely been recorded by Security.
“Fuck,” she muttered. Jonathan had told her not to go to Boston, she was sure of it. But Jonathan didn’t know what she did, and inertia had taken over now. She was already in trouble. There was no turning back.
At Sturbridge, she switched over to the Massachusetts Turnpike. For the first fifteen miles of the Pike there were no freeway lights at all, not even the old arc-sodiums; the highway was completely dark except for the faint glow of moonlight, and Lily was forced to slow down to forty-five, which felt like crawling after the pure, open speed of 84. She navigated on intuition rather than sight, squinting for the outline of things ahead, knowing that she should have turned back long ago. She breathed a sigh of relief as she passed Auburn and spotted the thin orange glow of lights in the distance.
“The better world,” she whispered, watching another green digit trip forward on the odometer. “So close we can almost touch it.”
She was only forty miles away.
WHEN LILY WAS growing up, Boston had still been a good place to visit for a day. Mom and Dad would take her and Maddy; even though Dad had grown up in Queens and was a diehard Yankee fan, he had a secret admiration for Boston. Mom liked to see the sights and shop, but Dad’s bent was historical; he took Lily and Maddy to Boston Common, to the Kennedy Library. Once they had even gone to the docks, to the site of the Boston Tea Party, and Dad explained what had happened there, quite a different story from the one Lily had heard in school. Maddy said that Dad’s version might get him in trouble, so Lily had never repeated it, but it had been a struggle in tenth grade not to raise her hand and tell the teacher he was wrong. Whenever Lily thought of Boston, she always remembered standing on the docks and looking down at the water.
Now Boston was buried under a haze of smog. The last few times Lily had been here with Greg, in the daytime, there had been no sunlight, only a thin, sickly luminescence, and now, in the middle of the night, the sky over the city was bright orange, reflecting the streetlights below. When Lily rolled down the windows, the air tasted foul. When was the last time she had breathed outside air? She couldn’t remember, she was so used to scrubbed air, the purifiers that covered New Canaan.
As soon as she passed the Washington Street exit, Lily’s phone chirped happily to let her know that service had been restored. If Greg had woken up, he would be able to track her by her tag, but that would take some time in the middle of the night. Her phone, though, was in Greg’s name, and he would be able to look up its location himself. After a moment’s thought, Lily chucked the phone out the window.
She took the exit for Massport Haul Road and began to wind her way down Summer Street, heading toward the vast black emptiness that signified water. She had never been down to this part of the port; Dad had taken them up to the Congress Street Bridge and—in those days—the many child-friendly amusements up at Boston Harbor. But here at Conley Terminal, the waterfront was a sea of containers, and Lily was struck by the ghostly outlines of the container cranes, an endless row of storklike apparatuses towering over her head. They would be different colors, probably, but in the yellow light they all took on varying shades of jaundice. The terminal seemed empty; Lily saw no people walking across the seamed pavement, no cars or movement of machines. Security was down there, she knew, probably hidden in the shadows of buildings and containers. What if they stopped her on the way in?