Some people sat alone. Others in groups. Most kept on their surgical masks. The children’s faces seemed completely gauze covered. I smelled coffee, and alcohol from a bottle passing between three scruffy-looking men. I found a corner and settled in. I told myself the cold wasn’t so bad. I wondered how long this train would take to reach New York State, or if, as the gang kid had said, the cars would be split up in Baltimore. I wondered whether, after a hundred miles or so, we’d enter the territory of a different gang.
Nearby, a tall woman was on a cell phone, loudly voicing second thoughts. “What if two gangs are working together? What if when we get to Baltimore, we’ll be robbed? Or they make us get out?”
There was nothing to do but wait. I pulled from my parka the busted tape, the words of Harlan Maas, half shredded, proof, if I could patch the thing, get the tape on the spool, and get the spool to the right place.
But just then a man’s voice said from right above me, “How about slipping that mask down for a second and showing us your face, mister? Face and hands! Now!”
SEVENTEEN
The trio of vigilantes stared at my face, as if bacteria might be visible on skin, crawling and multiplying, eating me from the inside. They bent closer, human tropisms of fear and ignorance. “Show us your hands!” Satisfied, they went on toward the next refugee party, young women, a couple, and two young girls. None showed visible signs of disease.
Which means nothing, I thought. They could still be carriers.
My heartbeat slowed to normal rhythm. But suddenly the last of the vigilantes spun back and reconsidered me. The others turned, too. The man, walking back toward me, was thick necked, unshaven, and red faced, from bad blood pressure or too much liquor. His peacoat was too thin for this weather, but the lumpy bulked-up chest suggested that he wore layers of sweaters beneath. Paint-stained corduroy pants ended at Doc Martens, with more white paint spots on top. House painter, I figured. Handyman. I was wrong.
“Do I know you? You work at Health and Human Services, right?” he said.
“Wrong man.”
“Third floor? Measles-rubella group?”
“Everyone tells me I look like someone they know.”
“I’m good with faces,” he insisted. I felt a throbbing in my neck. He came closer, then he brightened. I saw his day-to-day persona when he wasn’t terrified. “Tuesday night softball, right? By the tidal basin!”
“That’s it.”
“Which team?”
“Senator Vialisek’s office.”
I had no idea if Senator Vialisek had a softball team. But most Senators’ offices fielded teams. Grinning, the man lost his thuggish aspect. Give him a shave and a Starbucks go cup, he’d be at home in the office measles-rubella group. “I told you I’m good.” He seemed happy to talk about something normal. He tapped his forehead. “I never forget a face,” he said, and then transformed back into vigilante mode, rejoining his new friends.
I was glad I’d not pulled out the Glock.
By the time we reached Baltimore, the riders had relaxed a bit; the inspection was over. No one looked sick. Some people tried to doze, but between the cold and the rocking, sleep was impossible for all except the most exhausted. In areas where mobile devices worked, riders texted or phoned loved ones. I’m safe, Daddy. Strangers sat as far apart as possible, but we were crowded. One impulse was to learn about each other in order to feel safer, the other impulse was to stay away.
Where are you heading, miss?
To live with my brother. He has a farm in Connecticut.
Do you think we’ll be robbed at Baltimore?
My cousin rode the rail yesterday and said the system works.
Baltimore. Clearly the yard crew had been paid off here, too. More gang members — a dozen hard-looking young men — waved us out of the car like customs officials, separated riders onto other trains, one going west toward Pittsburgh and Saint Louis, the other north. Younger kids — nine- and ten-year-olds — sold ham sandwiches and sodas for ten times the usual price. The crew worked as smoothly as Lufthansa flight attendants. Flight attendants don’t carry semiautomatics, though. These guys did.
“We’re like the old underground railroad,” one teenage boy told me, herding a half dozen of us into a rust-colored boxcar. “You’re like the runaway slaves.”
By Delaware, I learned from a rider holding up an iPad that a United pilot had just flown his 737 into the Rockies, killing all aboard. He’d been infected. In southern New Jersey, stumpy pine barrens flashed past as we listened to a volume-up podcast talk-show argument between a CDC disease expert and one from India, over whether the “Bible Virus” had evolved naturally or come from a lab. By the dilapidated rail yards of Secaucus, New Jersey, I eyed oil storage tanks and winter brown swamps, and watched a YouTube video of U.S. Marines on an aircraft carrier off Nigeria, allegedly ordered to hit Islamic militant sites in less than forty-eight hours from then. Muslim militias in eight countries had jointly threatened retaliation against American embassies, travelers, and companies should the United States hit Islamic targets, the maker of the video — a self-styled freelance journalist — claimed. There was no way to verify the information.
“We will not be deterred by threats,” a White House spokesman said on another rider’s screen.
No, you’ll just hide under the earth and send troops to die, to make yourselves feel like you’re doing something.
I tried to phone the admiral, Burke, even Chris, and tell them about the cassette tape. Their comm-system was down or blocking outside calls. The wagons were circling. The bulk of the country was shut out.
I fought off doubts about whether my journey could achieve anything. I was probably on a wild-goose chase. At a switching yard over the New York State line, forty more refugees climbed in. I kept expecting troops or police to stop us, but for the moment, the gangs controlled this old smuggling route. They’d probably been paying off yard crews for years.
North of New York City we began losing more people at stops — a bridge, a crossroads, a rural intersection — than we took on. The tracks rolled alongside the Hudson River, with pancake ice drifting, bare trees on the right, high palisades, gouged-out cliffs created during the last ice age, on the left, a mile across the river. Those glaciers had towered up a mile high. The animals who saw them were long extinct. Had they died of disease?
The Tapanzee Bridge was empty. The guards on Sing Sing prison’s towers peered out. We rolled through centuries-old industrial towns and past Revolutionary War battlefields, and the narrows where the British Army once strung a chain across the Hudson, to split the thirteen colonies in two. Divide and conquer.
Some of these towns had successfully climbed out of the recession and looked prosperous, albeit too quiet. Others were decaying, with trackside signs promising hope. COMING SOON, GLOBAL GENOMICS LABS AND RESEARCH PARK, thanks to Governor Wilcox’s science and economics initiative.
What is Global Genomics? I wondered.
A tinny iPad voice said, “Paramount Pictures, site of the most recent Los Angeles outbreak, was burned to the ground today by order of health officials. The historic studio is now a pile of embers.”
New riders shared stories as the weather cleared, but the mercury dropped. Our unheated railcar rolled into snow country, past fallow cornfields, red-sided barns, and ice-covered winter pastures and rock walls and stumpy third-growth forest.