What Came After (38 page)

Patel stood up. “Where would you have us go?”

“Anywhere. North.” Opening the freezer and glad to see that it was still working even though it wouldn’t stay working for long. “Someplace other than here.” Thinking if you could do this once you could do it again. Start over. Build everything up from nothing.

“Not north,” Patel said, going to Liz and beginning the process of take this, don’t take that, take this. “The climate is better to the south, if anything.”

“South, then. Fine. South it is.”

“Where?”

“You said there were others. Other people doing this.”

“I don’t know where they are.”

“The runners will still be out there. They’ll know.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

“I’m not wrong. There’s a whole army coming and we want to get out of their way.”

“But if you’re wrong?”

“If I’m wrong we’ll come back. No harm done.”

“We.” A statement and a question. Patel was the one who said it, but she was speaking for everyone.

Weller was leaning over into the freezer, chipping away at ice. “I thought the chances of saving this stuff would be better if all of us pitched in. We’ll all go south if we’re going south and we’ll all see a little bit of the world we haven’t seen. Janey knows some people down there, don’t you, Janey? In Spartanburg. They’ve got tomatoes down there like you wouldn’t believe.”

But Janey didn’t hear. Janey was gone.

She’d heard the sound of rotors, and she’d be damned if that helicopter would get away from her again. Coming up the ramp into the sun with the air smelling of smoke and a high hammering everywhere. The unnerving and unplaceable sound of a helicopter you can’t see yet. She ran to the car. If she couldn’t see the helicopter she probably couldn’t raise it on the scanner but you never knew.

There were people out. Adults and children both, with sacks and backpacks and bed linens tied up into bundles. Some of them sitting patiently on their belongings and some of them pacing along the tobacco rows or ducking down into their underground houses for something they’d missed and some of them just standing still, watching the sky. Watching Janey watch the sky. She hollered at them to go down. Go down below where it was safe. She’d stay with the car. She had something she had to do. She watched them go and she thought how they’d never get away from here if those helicopters were still circling. Thinking they could gather up what they needed while she rode shotgun. She started the engine and the scanner fired up and she opened the sunroof again to look at the sky. It wasn’t enough. She couldn’t see enough. She unspooled the cables from the scanner and got out of the car and stood alongside it. Seeing everything now. Seeing that she was all alone up here, and glad of it.

The hammering kept up and it didn’t seem to be coming from anywhere in particular because it was coming from everywhere. Janey looking from the scanner to the sky and back again. The hammering growing louder and more oppressive and one or two faces appearing in doorways as people came to look. Other doorways closing up. People withdrawing and lowering the doors after them. Weller sticking his head out, though, and Penny squeezing up in front of him.

Janey looked over toward them and he said, “You be careful.”

She said, “I will.”

Penny piped up. “You be careful.” Like father like daughter.

Janey said, “Don’t worry.” But the words didn’t make it back to Penny because they were drowned out. Drowned out not by one of those little bumblebee helicopters she’d been expecting, but by the real thing. That one last Black Rose Chinook. It came in low over the trees and the fences, as slow and stately in its forward movement as a battleship or an undersized planet or death itself. Ungainly and unappeasable.

Weller saw the flamethrowers on the belly of it and he knew. An array of black tubes spitting fire. Warmed up in hell and staying hot now for the real event to come.

Napalm.

He hollered at Janey to get clear, but she didn’t hear him. She was working the scanner and dust was flying everywhere and clods of dirt and metal and loose fencing mingled with it because the pressure of the Chinook’s passage was enough to uproot a swath of tobacco twenty yards wide. Just tearing a slice in the earth without even touching it. She had been able to see the pilot in the other helicopter, the little helicopter that was nothing compared to this, but she couldn’t see whoever was controlling this one. He was faceless, a machine inside a machine. She shielded her eyes against the dust and looked into the car to see the lights on the satellite phone blinking in time with the display on the scanner. Meaning she was in. The Chinook almost overhead but at least she had enough signal. It was close enough and she wasn’t going to lose it this time. Not this one and not this time. She didn’t hear Weller shouting at her. Shouting at her to get clear, not to risk it. Not to risk bringing that thing down right here with the load it was carrying.

He knew he couldn’t reach her. He knew because he couldn’t hear his own voice. He couldn’t hear anything as he watched her work the keys on the scanner and as he doubled himself over Penny’s small body in the hole and said close your eyes, honey. Wrapping himself around her entirely. Offering himself up to withstand the worst that the world might have in store for this his only child.

The helicopter went down in slow motion, the same way it had come. A ponderous black blot moving through the air and battering it. The sound of it growing unsteady and beginning to wobble and smoke coming from someplace it shouldn’t have been coming from. The two great rotors going out of synch and the whole machine staggering as if it had struck some invisible obstacle. The ground itself seeming almost to draw up to it. As if the big black Chinook and the earth itself possessed equal gravity, but only one of them could endure.

Only Janey saw it go. The arc of its passing overshot her by a hundred yards or more, and when the helicopter finally struck ground the drums of jellied gasoline in its belly burst and caught fire. The scorched earth that Black Rose had had in mind from the beginning but not quite. Janey dropping the scanner and covering her face with her arms and then falling to her knees. Doubling over and feeling the heat of the burning Chinook on the back of her neck. Breathing slow and deep to collect herself and then deciding she was ready to go on. Standing up.

Down in the hole, Weller began to unfold himself as well. The ruin of the helicopter a good distance off to the north. The world silent, and the way ahead clear.

He loosened his hold on Penny. “Open your eyes,” he said.

* * *

Sam Winston is the pen name of Jon Clinch, award-winning author of
Finn, Kings of the Earth,
and
The Thief of Auschwitz.

Web site:
jonclinch.com

Twitter:
@jonclinch

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