Christie passed him a bowl. The mixture of soy and a synthetic protein had been flavored to supposedly resemble chili.
It only reminded Jack that there were no beans here, no meat.
It was filling. And that was about it.
“I don’t like it,” Simon said. He stuck out his tongue and tried to continue talking. “It makes my tongue feel hot.”
Christie laughed. “Okay, maybe a bit too spicy.”
“Not for me,” Jack said.
He noticed that Kate had barely touched hers. “Not hungry?”
“For this?” Kate said. “Can I go, like, read or listen to music or something? This stuff makes me sick.”
“Kate.”
The girl looked at her dad.
“Yes?”
“Something wrong?”
“Shelly’s having her party when I’m away!”
Jack shook his head. “Not sure we agreed that you could even go to that. I mean, a party—”
“Let’s cancel birthdays, too.”
Finally, Christie jumped in. “So, you’d rather stay and go to her party than this vacation?”
Kate looked as if she was actually weighing the choice.
“Maybe. No. I don’t know. I can’t even remember what parties are like.”
She turned back to her plate and took a forkful of the pretend chili. “This tastes
Real food, real fruit, vegetables, or even more rare, meat—when available—were incredibly expensive. The fact that the Paterville Camp offered regular meals, with food fresh from their own protected farm area, seemed nothing short of miraculous.
The kids couldn’t wait. For that, and the swimming, the boats, the fireworks, the mountains.
Like going to a different planet.
And despite his fears, Jack started to feel as if this was something he should look forward to.
It wasn’t just something the family needed.
* * *
Jack waited until the kids left the table.
“Maybe this trip
Christie turned to him. “Good to hear you say that.”
“Yeah. You may be right. Getting away. Having fun. Doing things together.”
She smiled. “Good. That will make for a less grumpy driver.”
He smiled back.
For a moment, the only cloud in the kitchen was his secret.
What he had done to the car.
But that would stay a secret.
on the road
9
Leaving
Jack leaned back from the dining room table, where his ancient laptop sat with a printer on the floor. Ink needed to be conserved; printing was rarely done.
Christie stood in front of the refrigerator, packing food and drinks for their ride.
An eight-hour trip lay ahead, maybe more with the checkpoints along the way.
Jack turned back to the computer screen. He entered his password for the NYPD secure site and navigated his way to an innocuously titled tab labeled ROAD REPORTS. Sometimes there’d be a connection, torturously slow, sometimes he’d get nothing.
Today he got lucky.
A screen appeared, showing a map of the metropolitan area.
A section of the Long Island Expressway glowed red. Another red spot flashed in Williamsburg, where the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway passed the Brooklyn Bridge on its way toward Queens.
And up in the Bronx, lots of red spots.
Par for the course for the Bronx.
All the hot spots were clickable, and Jack could see the details of whatever the incident was. But these would be no normal accident reports, no tractor trailers overturned and spilling diesel on the highway, no five-car pileups as commuters raced home.
No, this folder only carried reports of road incidents carried out by Can Heads.
And those could make for interesting reading.
Once, Can Heads had rolled barrels on the Belt Parkway after a fence breakthrough. The cars hit by those barrels became flaming traps; the people within turned into the pickings for the crazed Can Heads, who dug the screaming humans out.
Jack had seen video of that one. Stomach churning didn’t begin to convey it.
Human barbecue.
Or the Saw Mill River Parkway attack near Van Cortlandt Park. Though the walkway over the highway near Van Cortlandt Park was enclosed by a heavy-duty, prison-gauge steel-mesh fence, somehow a hole had been cut.
And like cavemen attempting to leverage boulders down to stop a lumbering mastodon, Can Heads had tossed down rocks and then leaped—some to their own deaths—onto the roofs of the careening cars.
Road safety. Shit.
Did that expression even have any meaning at all anymore?
In Staten Island, lots of places still looked peaceful. Living on an island, accessible only by a pair of heavily guarded and fortified bridges, with all the communities with their own security systems, there were hardly any incidents on the island.
Would the Can Heads eventually figure out how to take charge of the ferry, and ram it into the St. George Terminal?
And once they got there, would their contagion spread? Was it even a goddamn contagion?
But that brought to mind another question that bothered Jack.
The holes in fences, the stopping traffic, the breakthroughs.
