“We can help your brother,” Miriam says.
Nora instinctively grabs Addis’s hand, and Miriam’s demeanor adjusts.
“Nora,” she says, tilting her head with a look of deep empathy. “I know you just met us. We don’t expect you to trust us that quickly. But just so you know, in a few minutes a train will be pulling up to this station. We’re going to get on it with all these sick people, and we’re going to ride it all the way to South Cascadia. And if you want to, you can come with us.”
“Our community is two hours east of Post,” Peter says. “It’s a beautiful little town. We have everything we need there. And no pressure at all, but if you decide you want us to…we can help you take care of Addis. We can make a life for him.”
Nora’s feet are embedded in the ground. She looks at Addis, but his open face gives her nothing. She can’t tell if he knows they’re talking about him, or if he even understands a single word. The decision is hers.
In the silence of this hollow town, she hears the distant chug of a train. It’s a sound she hasn’t heard in a very long time, a storybook sound, and it makes her feel that she is dreaming. In this dream, she is stranded in a desert, and a magical mystery train is coming to take her away. In this dream, beautiful friendly people are offering her everything she needs. And outside the dream, people are pursuing her. People who have hurt her and people she has hurt. People whose faces will destroy her if she lets them get close again.
A speck appears on the tracks. Peter and Miriam and Lindh smile at her and wait.
Nora grabs her brother’s hand and closes her eyes. She will let the dream decide.
I
I REMEMBER what it felt like to set the fires. It felt good. All of us had grown up powerless, reminded over and over that we were dirty, broken dolls that should be grateful to be played with by God’s hand. We were to withdraw from the world, to barricade ourselves in our homes and wait patiently for God to pull the plug, and if we emerged it should be for one reason: to drag others in.
The fires changed everything.
We were no longer refugees; we were warriors. We had been a small circle of saints persecuted by the mob of the world, but it was remarkably easy to turn the tables. With the flick of a lighter, we could preach a sermon that no one could ignore. We could transform centuries of human endeavor into a blazing reminder of its futility. We didn’t have to wait for God’s timing; we could nudge him along, push him to do what we knew he wanted to do anyway, and it wasn’t pride, it was prayer. Every city we burned was an eloquent orison urging God to act. Our message was for Earth, but it was bright enough to be seen from Heaven: let it end.
It took only twelve of us to destroy Helena.
We had no fancy munitions then. No napalm or phosphorous grenades. We were just a few kids with Coke bottles full of gas and gym socks for fuses. We spread across the grid, positioning ourselves at the densest points, and when our watches beeped, we sprung. We tossed and ran, tossed and ran, pulling bottles from our backpacks like arrows from quivers, and by the time the first fires were called in, we had already set dozens. By the time the first trucks left the station, there were more fires than there were firefighters, and it was ludicrously too late.
I remember thinking how strange it was, that it should be this easy. We could have done it anytime. Anyone could have. All it took to crash the system was enough people deciding to do it.
I watch the last few razed houses fade into the distance as we leave DC behind. That’s who I was, then. A mad young man with a heart of hot coals, capable of winning minds and changing the world, but only for the worse.
Who am I now?
How much of that charred foundation is still under me, and can I use it for anything good? It’s much easier to burn a house than to build one.
I hear a groan from the back of the RV. M is sitting up, cradling his head and wincing at the floor like each heartbeat is a boot to the face. Julie glances over her shoulder at him.
“She packs a big punch in those skinny fists, doesn’t she? I learned my lesson the first time I tested her.”
Tomsen looks shocked. “Nora punched you?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Why would Nora punch you? I thought you were friends.”
Julie shrugs. “Sometimes friends punch each other.” She looks at the floor and a nostalgic smile creeps over her face. “That’s how we became friends, actually.”
“Is that usually how it happens?”
Julie chuckles, failing to notice Tomsen’s straight face. “I was out of my mind back then,” Julie says. “My boyfriend cheated on me and somehow that was Nora’s fault, this bitch who ‘stole’ my man, like he was an inanimate object. She didn’t even know me, the problem was between me and Perry, but I went running up to her room…” She shakes her head. “She tried to talk me down but I started swinging at her like the dramatic little kid I was…so she knocked me out. One punch.” She laughs and shakes her head. “When I woke up, she was sitting next to me holding some ice on my face. She shook my hand and said, ‘Hi, I’m Nora. You want some vodka?’ And that was it. Friends forever.”
Tomsen stares at her like she’s not speaking English.
“So Marcus,” Julie calls back to him as he stumbles toward the front, “try not to despair too hard, okay? These things find a way to work out.”
He looks at her blankly. “I ate her brother.”
Julie shrugs. “Yeah, well…not all of him.”
Abandoned farms rush past us on both sides. Most of them are just fields of baked dust, but a few of the more high-tech crops refuse to die with dignity. The highway plunges between two fields of “Mayze” brand corn and the stalks tower above us like trees, their bloated ears breaking off under their own weight and littering the ground like lumpy cysts. The gnarled trees of a Rad Delish orchard cling to their fruits long after they should have fallen, masses of mealy pulp wrapped in leathery skin, left to rot on their branches. Even the birds know to stay away.
I wonder if there are any crops left that were never redesigned by a board of directors, never stretched into transparency to fit the ballooning demands of population and profit. I wonder if these plants, with enough time and guidance, can find their way back and become food again, before the next generation starves.
I feel an eye on my cheek. Sprout is looking at me, a faint smile on her face, like she’s reading my thoughts and finding them funny. Joan and Alex watch me from the other side of the little fold-out table, and it occurs to me that the next generation is sitting right in front of me. It occurs to me that they are different from any before them, stronger and stranger, and there is no way they’ll give up their turn.
I release my anxious breath.
“Do you see it?” Sprout asks, looking past me into the twisted jungle of a Durapeach orchard.
“See what?”
“The train.”
I assume this is one of her “visions” and I follow her gaze mostly as a courtesy, but I’m surprised to see a flicker of movement behind the stooping trees. We emerge into another empty field and the trees sweep aside like a curtain, and there it is: four freight containers grinding along behind two silver passenger cars and a rusty green engine belching clouds of black smoke.
“We’re pretty far from people and this is probably just a reality vacillation,” Tomsen says, “but is anyone else seeing a train over there?”
The engine wears a fearsome mask over its front: a massive wedge of crudely welded steel, like an old locomotive’s cow catcher redesigned to catch bigger things: abandoned cars, blockades, and other modern obstructions.