“You get a lot of these defectors?” Goog asked suspiciously, like the scabbie they sometimes forgot he still was.
“Oh, the pilgrims have really picked up the economy round here! I’ll be right back with your grub.”
After their late lunch, they returned to the highway and then pulled over. About a mile down 58, straight like the interstate it paralleled, Nollie’s fleX indicated the border with Nevada. Sure enough, some sort of edifice rose at the end of the road—it was hard to tell from here how high, or to discern whether guards with snipers’ rifles crouched atop it. Willing and Nollie agreed that getting any closer in a populous area was a mistake. Better to steer farther south on small, local roads, and explore the nature of federal defenses in the middle of nowhere.
“Look, I know we haven’t always got along,” Goog told Willing from the backseat, as dust rose around the car. “That doesn’t mean I want your brain to burn out like a light bulb. Can’t we call a truce? This trip has been a hoot. Turn around, maybe we can dip into Colorado on the way back. I’ll even pay the larcenous fee the platefaces charge to see the Grand Canyon. Really, it’s on me, for all three of us. I promise I won’t turn you guys in. I won’t report the abduction. I’ll even let you keep your yunk pistol.”
“That’s incredibly generous,” Willing said.
“I can never tell when you’re being sarcastic,” Goog snarled. “Listen, why risk mental meltdown? The US—it’s not so bad!”
“Isn’t that what the founding fathers had in mind,” Willing said. “A country that’s not so bad.”
“Not so bad is better than splug!” Goog implored. “I know it’s rough going for a while, but once you hit the age of sixty-eight it’s a free ride! Just put in your time!”
“Why don’t you come with us?” Willing said.
“No way,” Goog said. “You don’t know the Bureau like I know the Bureau. These guys are not joking around. You think they wouldn’t stroke out noncompliant taxpayers? In a heartbeat. Hell, it’s amazing they’re not already staging public executions. And not because we’re goons. The regular public—they’ve got no appreciation for how desperate things are. The budget. It’s a biggin’ catastrophe. A miracle we can keep the Supreme Court in sandwiches.”
After they’d traveled far enough out of town, Nollie cut west again. The pitted dirt road resembled the one that had led to the underground silo. Associations: not good. Goog made unfunny cracks about Nollie’s homing instincts for corpses.
Yet as they approached what the GPS identified as the end of the world as they knew it, no Great Wall rose up to meet them. Their vehicle did not explode from tripping a landmine. Where Nollie stopped the Myourea and they all got out, two strands of rusted barbed wire stretched limply across the road between listing, poorly anchored posts. The fence continued along a north–south axis in both directions. On the other side, a hand-lettered sign read, “Welcum to the United States of Nevada.”
Hands on hips, Goog surveyed the notorious border with disgust. “I can’t believe this.”
“That fence,” Nollie said, “wouldn’t keep chickens out.”
Ten yards beyond the barbed wire sat a small red clapboard house. On the porch, an old man tilted back in a rocker, smoking. Rarer these days than an SUV, his rollie looked like a real cigarette. Willing waved. The old man waved back.
Willing advanced to the right-hand fence post. The ends of the wires were looped, and hooked around up-tilted nails.
“STOP!” Goog shouted, as his cousin reached for a loop. “It makes total sense to me now! They’re happy to let unchipped shrivs like Nollie totter out of the country. Grateful, even. They cost a fucking fortune. But as for all-give-and-no-take taxpayers like you, Wilbur—there’s only one possible reason there’s no wall, and no guards, and no mines: they don’t need them. If you want iron-clad evidence I’m right about the self-destruct, this sad-ass fence is it.”
Willing unhooked both wires and walked them out of the way of the car—staying in the US of A. Nollie resumed what she insisted on calling the driver’s seat, glided into the land of treachery and secession, and parked.
The line was now drawn literally in the sand. A dare.
By God, it was touching: Goog covered his face with his hands. “I can’t watch this.”
With no further ceremony, Willing stepped into the Free State.
• CHAPTER 5 •
WHO WANTS TO LIVE IN A UTOPIA ANYWAY
The loud cackle from the red clapboard’s porch was startling. Willing had been fairly sure, but that wasn’t the same as certain. So he had stood there for a moment, sizing matters up, doubtless wearing the expression of patting his body down after an accident: being here, and continuing to be here, with an intense awareness of one point in time connecting to the next that one seldom appreciates. Maybe from the outside it looked funny.
The old man slapped his thigh. “I swear,” he cried, “no matter how many times I watch, it still cracks me up.”
Despite protestations that he didn’t want his cousin’s head to detonate, Goog looked consternated that it hadn’t. “Okay, then,” he said, only two feet away but still in the USA, “what about the cannibalism?”
Willing nodded at the old man. “That guy doesn’t look like he’s about to eat me. Now are you coming?”
“I can’t.” Goog looked shredded. “Where you just stepped—it’s the new Wild West. Whatever it’s like, it has to be primitive. And I have a good job—”
“I wouldn’t call it a good job.”
“A lucrative job, then. Perks. Nothing to complain about. And over there—they must lynch people like me.”
“What’s the young man do?” the old man shouted. He was eavesdropping.
“Scabbie,” Willing shouted back.
“Tell him he’s right!” the old man said.
Ceremonially, Willing took out his pocketknife and severed the sagging duct tape looped around his cousin’s wrists. He rooted in a pocket for Goog’s commandeered maXfleX, and fetched a bottle of water from the car. “If you really have to go back,” he said, handing over Goog’s survival kit, “there’s an airport a few miles from here. You could probably walk.”
“It’s hot,” Goog grumbled. The fetching of a second bottle didn’t matter. He’d meant, It’s lonely.
“Tell Savannah, Bing, your parents, and Jayne and Carter I said good-bye. And spread the word that this border scare is treasury.”
“Nobody would believe me,” Goog said glumly. He was probably right.
They knocked each other’s shoulders with rare warmth. Willing restored the two barbed wires to their nails. With a wan wave to Nollie, Goog slouched off toward Wendover, where perhaps another Lethal Injection could dull his disappointment—in his country. In himself.
Meanwhile, Nollie was shooting the breeze with the man on the porch. His old-timer folksiness seemed hyped for effect. He’d got plenty of sun, but up close looked perhaps only a few years older than Lowell, which these days was nothing. The denim overalls were too crisp to be anything but an affectation, and the floppy hat looked crushed on purpose. Given the fields planted behind the house and the cattle beyond, he didn’t spend all day jawing with new immigrants. Sitting sentry at this entry point must have been what he did for fun.
“According to our friend here,” Nollie told Willing, “that big barricade on US 58 is only plywood.”
“The town can’t have tourists dancing back and forth over the border in plain view and their heads don’t blow up,” the codger explained. “Ruins the mythology. Which is a money-spinner. Nobody’s ordering a gi-normous final feast at lunch if they’re planning on supper.”
“If I wanted to find someone over here,” Willing asked, “what’s my best bet? Vegas?”
“Where most folks head. Save yourself some trouble, try the internet.”
“I thought you people didn’t have any internet.”
He chuckled. “Got our own server. Oh, the Outer Forty-Nine block us from the world-wide-whatever. Don’t think you’ll get all of Google books. But there’s plenty local advice on growing alfalfa. Sites for finding loved ones. If they want to be found.”
As Goog had warned, the technology was primitive. Their adoptive homeland provided neither satellite connection to http://usn nor the public radio-wave access that blanketed much of the US—a country whose territory began a few yards from here, but which Willing was already starting to think of as far away. Their good-old-boy guide was kind enough to provide the password for his private Wi-Fi. It was unbearably slow.
“Got it,” Willing announced after an excruciating five minutes. “Jarred Mandible, 2827 Buena Vista Drive, Las Vegas. That was easier than I expected. Though I don’t understand the site I found him on. Something about cheese.”
“It’s after four o’clock,” Nollie noted restlessly, “and Vegas is three hundred miles from here.”
“Before you two hit the road,” the geezer said, with a glint of mischief in his eye, “might try a local parlor game while you’re still by the border.”
Curious, Willing followed the gatekeeper’s instructions, extending his maXfleX over the barbed wire into the land of his old life. The device could immediately contact http://www.mychip.com again. Once more, the codger hooted. “What’s it say?”
“Zero-zero nuevos,” Willing read. “And zero-zero cents.”
That earned a second thigh-slap. “Another drama I never get tired of! Only part of that fairy tale about the chip that’s dead on. But they don’t suck the life from your head. Put one foot in the Free State, they suck out the money instead.”
“Displays a certain grim consistency,” Nollie said.
“Don’t matter,” the man said. “Nobody use a chip here anyways. Think of it as shrapnel from the Income Tax Wars. But better get used to it, kid: you’re broke.”
“What about bancors?” Nollie asked warily.
“The USN don’t trade, with nobody,” the man said, enjoying himself. He had a sadistic streak. “Part philosophy, part practicality—’cause ain’t nobody will trade with us. So if you can’t make it, mine it, fix it, grow it, or invent it in Nevada, you can’t get it. Which means, ma’am, a bancor is about as useful for the purchase of provisions as a drowned rat.”
“Do Nevadans use money at all?” Willing asked.
“What do you think, we use beads? We’re not savages. Carson City issues continentals. First currency of the original thirteen colonies. But it went to hell pronto in the late 1770s. ’Cause it wasn’t backed by nothin’. We fixed that.”
“Don’t tell me,” Willing said. “You’re on the gold standard.”
“Ain’t you quick! Before we cut loose, the Free State produced the majority of American gold anyways. But supply of continentals is real restricted. Learned our lesson from the thirties. Everybody round here pretty much agree that on the face of it the gold standard’s dumb. Arbitrary, the governor calls it. Not much to do with the stuff but wear it around your neck. Can’t eat it. But for currency, it works. Even if we don’t quite know why. One continental buy you a whiskbroom today? One continental buy you a whiskbroom tomorrow. So it’s not that dumb.”
“Well, thanks for the advice,” Willing said, by way of getting a move on.
“I don’t recall dishing out any advice,” the man objected. “Though I worry you’re not focused on your sichiation. You got no money. Even if you do find refueling stations for that fancy jalopy of yours, how you going to pay? Here’s your advice, and I hand it out free to all the dewy-eyed newcomers who duck through that fence: Nevada ain’t no utopia.”
“Did I say anything to imply I thought it was?” Willing asked.
“You all think so,” the man dismissed. “But your friend there. A lovely lady, I’m sure—”
“Watch who you’re calling lovely,” Nollie barked.
“But she ain’t exactly fresh off the conveyor belt,” he went on. “You bring in old people, you pay for old people. No Medicare here. No Social Security. No Part D prescription drug plans. No Medicaid-subsidized nursing homes. No so-called safety net. Every citizen in this rough-and-tumble republic gotta walk the high wire with nada underneath but the cold hard ground. Trip up? Somebody who care about you catch you, or you fall on your ass.”