The humans shuffled out, leaving the T-Isolate with the woman who had never left its side. They were going.
MC355 called after them. They nodded, understanding, but did not stop.
MC355 let them go.
There was much to do.
New antennas, new sensors, new worlds.
TURKEY
Belly full and eye quick, we came out into the pines. Wind blowed through with a scent of the Gulf on it, fresh and salty with rich moistness.
The dark clouds are gone. I think maybe I’ll get Bud to drive south some more. I’d like to go swimming one more time in those breakers that come booming in, taller than I am, down near Fort Morgan. Man never knows when he’ll get to do it again.
Bud’s ready to travel. He’s taking a radio so’s we can talk to MC, find out about the help that’s coming. For now, we got to get back and look after our own.
Same as we’ll see to the boy. He’s ours now.
Susan says she’ll stay with Gene till he’s ready, till some surgeons turn up can work on him. That’ll be a long time, say I. But she can stay if she wants. Plenty food and such down there for her.
A lot of trouble we got, coming a mere hundred mile. Not much to show for it when we get back. A bumper crop of bad news, some would say. Not me. It’s better to know than to not, better to go on than to look back.
So we go out into dawn, and there are the same colored dots riding in the high, hard blue. Like camp fires.
The crickets are chirruping, and in the scrub there’s a rustle of things moving about their own business, a clean scent of things starting up. The rest of us, we mount the truck and it surges forward with a muddy growl, Ackerman slumped over, Angel in the cab beside Bud, the boy already asleep on some blankets; and the forlorn sound of us moving among the windswept trees is a long and echoing note of mutual and shared desolation, powerful and pitched forward into whatever must come now, a muted note persisting and undeniable in the soft, sweet air.
EPILOGUE
(twenty-three years later)
JOHNNY
An older woman in a formless, wrinkled dress and worn shoes sat at the side of the road. I was panting from the fast pace I was keeping along the white strip of sandy, rutted road. She sat, silent and unmoving. I nearly walked by before I saw her.
“You’re resting?” I asked.
“Waiting.” Her voice had a feel of rustling leaves. She sat on the brown cardboard suitcase with big copper latches—the kind made right after the war. It was cracked along the side, and white cotton underwear stuck out.
“For the bus?”
“For Buck.”
“The chopper recording, it said the bus will stop up around the bend.”
“I heard.”
“It won’t come down this side road. There’s not time.”
I was late myself, and I figured she had picked the wrong spot to wait.
“Buck will be along.”
Her voice was high and had the backcountry twang to it. My own voice still had some of the same sound, but I was keeping my vowels flat and right now, and her accent reminded me of how far I had come.
I squinted, looking down the long sandy curve of the road. A pickup truck growled out of a clay side road and onto the hardtop. People rode in the back along with trunks and a 3D. Taking everything they could. Big white eyes shot a glance at me, and then the driver hit the hydrogen and got out of there.
The Confederation wasn’t giving us much time. Since the unification of the Soviet, USA and European/Sino space colonies into one political union, everybody’d come to think of them as the Confeds, period—one entity. I knew better—there were tensions and differences abounding up there—but the shorthand was convenient.
“Who’s Buck?”
“My dog.” She looked at me directly, as though any fool would know who Buck was.
“Look, the bus—”
“You’re one of those Bishop boys, aren’t you?”
I looked off up the road again. That set of words—being eternally a Bishop boy—was like a grain of sand caught between my back teeth. My mother’s friends had used that phrase when they came over for an evening of bridge, before I went away to the university. Not my real mother, of course—she and Dad had died in the war, and I dimly remembered them.
Or anyone else from then. Almost everybody around here had been struck down by the Soviet bioweapons. It was the awful swath of those that cut through whole states, mostly across the South—the horror of it—that had formed the basis of the peace that followed. Nuclear and bioarsenals were reduced to nearly zero now. Defenses in space were thick and reliable. The building of those had fueled the huge boom in Confed cities, made orbital commerce important, provided jobs and horizons for a whole generation—including me. I was a ground-orbit liaison, spending four months every year at US3. But to the people down here, I was eternally that oldest Bishop boy.
Bishops. I was the only one left who’d actually lived here before the war. I’d been away on a visit when it came. Afterward, my Aunt and Uncle Bishop from Birmingham came down to take over the old family property—to save it from being homesteaded on, under the new Federal Reconstruction Acts. They’d taken me in, and I’d thought of them as Mom and Dad. We’d all had the Bishop name, after all. So I was a Bishop, one of the few natives who’d made it through the bombing and nuclear autumn and all. People’d point me out as almost a freak, a real native, wow.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said neutrally.
“Thought so.”
“You’re…?”
“Susan McKenzie.”
“Ah.”
We had done the ritual, so now we could talk. Yet some memory stirred….
“Something ’bout you…” She squinted in the glaring sunlight. She probably wasn’t all that old, in her late fifties, maybe. Anybody who’d caught some radiation looked aged a bit beyond their years. Or maybe it was just the unending weight of hardship and loss they’d carried.
“Seems like I knew you before the war,” she said. “I strictly believe I saw you.”
“I was up north then, a hundred miles from here. Didn’t come back until months later.”
“So’d I.”
“Some relatives brought me down, and we found out what’d happened to Fairhope.”
She squinted at me again, and then a startled look spread across her leathery face. “My Lord! Were they lookin’ for that big computer center, the DataComm it was?”
I frowned. “Well, maybe…I don’t remember too well….”
“Johnny. You’re Johnny!”
“Yes, ma’am, John Bishop.” I didn’t like the little-boy ending on my name, but people around here couldn’t forget it.
“I’m Susan! The one went with you! I had the codes for DataComm, remember?”
“Why…yes….” Slow clearing of ancient, foggy images. “You were hiding in that center…where we found you….”
“Yes! I had Gene in the T-Isolate.”
“Gene…” That awful time had been stamped so strongly in me that I’d blocked off many memories, muting the horror. Now it came flooding back.
“I saved him, all right! Yessir. We got married, I had my children.”
Tentatively, she reached out a weathered hand, and I touched it. A lump suddenly blocked my throat, and my vision blurred. Somehow, all those years had passed and I’d never thought to look up any of those people—Turkey, Angel, Bud, Mr. Ackerman. Just too painful, I guess. And a little boy making his way in a tough world, without his parents, doesn’t look back a whole lot.
We grasped hands. “I think I might’ve seen you once, actu’ly. At a fish fry down at Point Clear. You and some boys was playing with the nets—it was just after the fishing came back real good, those Roussin germs’d wore off. Gene went down to shoo you away from the boats. I was cleaning flounder, and I thought then, maybe you were the one. But somehow when I saw your face at a distance, I couldn’t go up to you and say anything. You was skipping around, so happy, laughing and all. I couldn’t bring those bad times back.”