his pack and sliced it up with a scary hunting knife while Sophia and Jean Paul brought out some bread, peanut butter, and cookies they’d manage to grab as they fled. Colin and Jeannie retrieved water from the stream and hooked the water filter to the energy pack. The filters were one thing we hadn’t had in our first stint as nomads that would make this trip a little easier. Ah, progress.
We sat along the edge of the trestle, our feet hanging over the edge, and ate dinner. And lunch, for that matter.
“What is this?” I asked Cortez as I worked to dislodge a piece of meat jammed between my back teeth.
“Just eat it,” he said, his voice low.
“I just like to know what I’m eating,” I said.
He sighed. “Dog, okay? You’re eating dog.”
“Okay.” I was hungry enough that dog was fine. I just wanted to know. “Thanks.”
Below us, oil glistened on the black water.
“It sucks to kill a dog,” Cortez said.
An image flashed in my mind, of Cortez holding out food, luring a dog to him, then cutting its throat, then butchering it. I hadn’t realized he’d gotten that destitute since losing his place. “I bet it does.”
“It sucks to kill anything,” he added.
“Yeah,” I said. I knew what he was referring to.
“Boy, what I wouldn’t do for a moist towelette,” Colin said to no one in particular, wiping his greasy fingers on bamboo stalks.
When it got dark we lay in the tracks, our asses and elbows dangling over the stream between the ties.
“Somebody tell Deirdre to turn off her music,” Colin said. “She’s had it on for half an hour.”
Deirdre was on her back, eyes closed, her arms cradling the back of her head. From ten feet away I could hear the buzzing of her music pod.
“Deirdre,” Cortez called. Then again, louder. Deirdre didn’t flinch. Cortez dragged himself up, went and tapped Deirdre on top of her head.
“What?”
“We need you to turn off the music. We’ve got to conserve our energy.”
“Fuck you, I brought most of it.” I recognized the music bleeding out of Deirdre’s earphones. It was her own.
“I know you did,” Cortez said, “but when you’re part of a tribe, everything is community property. We all take care of each other.”
Deirdre sighed loudly. “Fine.” She rammed the pod into her pack.
“Is anyone’s phone working?” Ange asked.
“Nope,” Colin said after a pause. “Ours is dead. Nothing.”
Cortez had a radio. Most of the stations were off the air, but a few were still broadcasting. While we prepared to travel, we listened to a report. New York was in flames. Seattle was in flames. Los Angeles and a few other cities were under the control of federal troops, but elsewhere federal troops were battling various warlords, gangs, corporate entities, police, and fire departments that had claimed control of territory ranging from city blocks to entire states. General Electric had claimed ownership of a chunk of upstate New York and declared it a sovereign nation. At least that’s what the radio said. They didn’t sound all that certain. The feds had announced that all males between the ages of eighteen and forty-five should report for military duty. Evidently it was written somewhere that they were allowed to do that during an emergency. The radio guy sounded more certain about that.
“Let’s be ready to move in about ten minutes,” Cortez announced. “Statesboro’s about twenty miles. It would be nice to make it there by tonight.” He turned to Jean Paul. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but it would be safer if you changed clothes.”
“What’s wrong with my clothes?” Jean Paul asked. He was wearing a green designer jogging suit.
“You don’t look poor. It’s best if we look like we have nothing worth killing us for.”
“Excuse me, but who exactly put you in charge?” Jean Paul said, balling his fists on his hips. The immature part of me perked up, hoping Jean Paul would make the mistake of provoking a fight, which he would lose badly. The mature part of me knew it was every tribe member’s job to make sure there was peace and harmony within the tribe.
“We did,” I offered. “Not exactly in charge, I guess, but he chairs the ‘keep us alive’ committee.”
“He’s also in charge of wardrobe,” Colin added.
Jean Paul didn’t look at us. He just pulled off the jacket and squatted next to his pack, muttering something under his breath as he dug through it.
As we trudged forward, the ties glided by beneath our feet, the bamboo giving the illusion that we were moving briskly. Occasionally there were breaks and patches in the bamboo; these were usually filled with groups of refugees. As we passed them, many begged for food. In some places an entire half-acre might be relatively bamboo free, but for the most part it was omnipresent.
“So,” Cortez asked, joining me. “You got a girlfriend these days?”
I laughed at the absurdity of the question, given our current situation. Cortez grinned. He was clearly trying to lighten me up a little.
“No, not really. How about you?”
“I’m taking a break. A spiritual celibacy fast.”
“Really? Why’s that?” That would mean he was out of the Ange business, at least for the time being.
He struggled for words. “A lot of reasons, I guess. One of them you know about.”
“Yeah. Can’t say I’ve been feeling very romantic myself these days. But I’m also tired of being alone, you know?”
“Yeah.”
Up ahead, Sebastian shouted. He, Colin, and Ange had stopped. They were eyeing a huge trailer park buried ass-deep in bamboo.
“What is it?” I called. Sebastian waved us on. He wasn’t smiling for a change.
Then I noticed the smell.
I’d seen a lot of dead bodies—everyone who doesn’t live in the elite enclaves has—but I’d never seen anything like this. There were thousands of them, maybe tens of thousands. Men, women, children, filling a dried pond between the tracks and the trailer park, a tangle of arms and legs and faces and muddy clothes, the occasional bamboo shoot pressing up between them.
“They all look Latino,” I said.
Sophia’s eyes went wide when she got in sight of them. She put her hand over her mouth and began sobbing. Jeannie put a gentle hand over Sophia’s eyes and led her away.
“Foreigners, probably,” Ange said. “People don’t take kindly to strangers competing with them for food when there isn’t enough to go around.”
“I don’t think locals did this—not this many people.” I thought of the holding pen we’d recently escaped, how they’d separated out the foreigners.
As if on cue, a train whistled in the distance. We pushed into the bamboo and waited.
The engine was rigged with a long, low, V-shaped blade, like a snow plow for bamboo. The cars rumbled by, drowning out all other sound. Federal troops armed to the teeth stood on top of many of them. There must have been a hundred cars.
“Supplies for the troops, coming from Atlanta,” Sebastian said. “That’s where the closest push packages are stored.”
“Push packages?” Colin asked.
“That’s what the military calls them—packaged supplies for troops, stored for years for just this sort of occasion. Each one might contain upward of a million bottles of water, a hundred thousand MREs, generators and fuel to run them, tents, everything the well-dressed soldier might need.”
“And when that train gets to Savannah, they’ll fill the empty cars with bodies, and dump them in that dried- out pond,” I said. No one argued. If the government was willing to sink foreign fishing boats to cut down on the competition for food, it was capable of dealing with the illegals pouring over the border by killing them by the trainload.
When the train had passed we squeezed back onto the tracks.
