“What do you think happened?” Henry asks.
“Bombs,” says Kai. “They were hitting bridges in the South too.”
“Who was?”
Kai shakes his head. “APL, The Pastor’s freelancers. Who knows at this point.”
There are more vehicles at the bottom of the valley buried under the wreckage, leaking fluid, people possibly alive praying for EMTs or at least Prion search and rescue. Maybe they’d been caught in the blast or maybe they’d driven right over the edge. No one had come along to so much as put up an orange cone.
“C’mon,” said Quinn. “We’re going to be way behind now.
She ushers you into the van, so you can head back the way you came.
The detour takes over an hour, and while navigating crumbling county roads, the storm finally breaks. You’ve seen hail maybe a handful of times in your life, but never like this. It begins crackling across the roof, the big white stones thwacking the windshield, some the size of golf balls. Traffic has slowed, red taillights stretching ahead and the oncoming white blurred by the storm. Many have pulled over under the safety of overpasses.
“Got a tornado warning too,” says Kai. “Severe weather from here down to Georgia.”
Quinn flares her nostrils. “Goddamnit,” she hisses. Then with a strange, begrudging smile admits, “There is some humor in this, I guess.”
Kai takes the next exit and pulls into the first charge station, where you’ll wait until the supercell passes. You bum a cigarette off Quinn and stand under the station’s vast awning watching the hail slam. A few of the bigger crystals are leaving small dents in the metal of the cars, the sound somewhere between a waterfall and a war. You almost tell her about Reverend Andrade and his wife, but something stops you. You want to trust her, you realize, because you’ve put your family and your future in her hands. But this is not an actual reason to trust her. Instead, you ask, “Why’d you want me? For whatever this is? Would’ve thought I’d be toxic to you.”
She assesses you before answering. “I’m sure your friend told you how impressed we were that you did your time and didn’t give him up.”
“I’m no snitch.”
“Sure, but as we’ve discovered, most people are. The benefit of your situation, John, is that—”
“Keeper. Please don’t call me that. My name’s Keeper.”
“The benefit of your situation, Keeper, is that law enforcement is now fully algorithmified. They plug people’s stats into a computer and let the AI tell them who to go after.”
“If they knew I wasn’t who they wanted why’d they try to put me away for fifteen?”
“Just our justice system doing what it does. We know from our sources they kept tabs on you for a year after you got out but then moved on to other priorities. You’re LPS now—a low-probability subject. There are twelve-year-olds they’re tracking with more resources than you. They thought you were a patsy.”
“Well wasn’t I?”
She plucks the smoke from her teeth and a tight smile pushes at one corner of her mouth.
“You might not believe in what we’re doing, but this is the kind of action on which history pivots. This is a choice between revolution against the power structures or our extermination by those structures. People like you and your family? You’re what they harvest. Everything you do, everything you buy, everything you believe in—that’s just product and profit for them. You’re their cash crop.”
“Sure. Everyone’s got an explanation for who’s committing the sin. No matter whose religion it is, funny how I’m always the one on the losing fucking end.”
She flicks the cigarette into the dwindling hail. “The storm’s letting up. We should keep moving.”
She walks back to the van. You smoke yours down to the nub and then follow.
That night, Kai finds a rest stop so you all can sleep for a few hours. You pass out right into a nightmare. You dream of your church. The men from the PRCC are there, Schembari’s crew is there, the dead people you pulled from the ashes and the water are there.
On the road the next day, the worst of the storm has passed, but the sky remains dark. Kai follows the highway into a river valley, a pale scar through black hills. The woods crowd the road to form a shadowed tunnel. Even when you’re climbing the low mountains of the Cumberlands, you feel as though you’re in descent, slipping farther and farther into a gray-green dark. You finally pull into the lot of an abandoned gas station. You follow Quinn and Kai over the wet, puddled pavement to a big semitruck with a green logo and SMITHBACK FOODS CATERING AND SUPPLIES on the side. Quinn raps three times, and the doors of the freight trailer swing wide. This woman is tall, wide-hipped with a mouth of enormous teeth, fidgeting with ARs perched on the end of her nose.
“Hiya! Hop aboard. We need to hurry if we’re going to make the delivery hour.”
You and Henry follow the others, pulling yourself up and squeezing past a row of boxes that serve as a false front. Behind them, there’s a workspace with desks and tablets and another man, big, fat, white, and bald. He looks like he’s sick or maybe just tired. Purple bags under each eye. He nods at you but says nothing.
“When are we going to hear what our job is?” Henry asks. Everyone ignores him.
“We shouldn’t have stopped,” says Quinn. “The timing for the delivery is wrong now. What if they call actual Smithback fucking Foods? Then our little house of cards crumbles.”
“Call and say the delivery is coming at five p.m.,” says the ugly woman, who reminds you of a stork. “Tell them there were accidents and road closures. There’s enough chaos out there right now that they’ll buy it.”
“Could someone please tell us what the damn job is?” says Henry, laughing. He’s standing by a metal chest, a kind of footlocker that’s held closed with a bike lock in the latch.
The stork keeps smiling when she addresses Henry, “All in good time, eager beaver. I’m Jansi, by the way.” She holds a hand to a flat chest, and then gestures to the fat white guy. “And this is Murdock.”
Murdock gives you a little two-finger salute. There’s a tattoo on his arm you can’t quite read.
Kai leaves the trailer and goes back to the van. Quinn stays and gestures toward two seats bolted to the wall. You and Henry sit side by side, and soon you feel the truck moving. Henry waits until the three of them are distracted by a screen to lean in and say, “Yo, this is kind of fucked. At least tell us what we’re getting into.”
“What’d they offer you?”
“Ten grand. You?”
“Yeah,” you say, nodding. “Same. So for that amount, we don’t ask questions.”
“Man, I just need run money, you know? Gotta fuck off from Milwaukee before the whole place comes unglued. Fuck, I just want to know what we’re s’posed to do. I don’t like secrets. How’d you get hooked up with these guys?”
“Long story.”
He shakes his head. “That old bitch Quinn said this would be simple. Said it would be an easy earn. Doesn’t feel easy to me. Doesn’t feel easy at all.”
You feel the truck come to a stop. You don’t know how long you’ve been on the road, but you overheard Jansi say “Virginia.” Quinn comes to stand in front of you and Henry, flanked by Jansi and Murdock. She pops a seat on a bench opposite you.
“Sorry for the hectic nature of this,” Quinn says. “We’ve had some setbacks as you can tell, but everything is still going to work out just fine.”
“What we want to do,” says Jansi, “is make this as easy for you two as we can, but that means following our instructions without question or hesitation. Understand?”