“No car seat,” Dor said, swinging Ruthie to the ground. “Sorry.” He took off his pack, opened the passenger door and set it on the floor under the backseat, then held out his hand for Cass’s. She handed it over and circled the Jeep, peering into the cargo area.
There was a cardboard box, labeled Dole Certified Organic Bananas, butting up against six one-gallon jugs filled with water and three two-gallon drums. Probably gasoline. Inside the box were plastic bags of food: roasted kaysev beans and hard cakes, cold fried rabbit, fringe-topped celery root from her own garden, harvested before its time and nestled in rags. She felt her face grow warm; Dor must have picked it in the predawn hours; it was undisturbed the day before when she made a last check on the garden.
She crouched low to speak to Ruthie. “We’re going to ride with Dor in this car.” She smoothed a curl of hair off Ruthie’s forehead. “I don’t know if you remember about riding in cars.”
Ruthie nodded, her expression careful. Cass had owned a small white Toyota so old that the finish had gone dull, but she had made sure that Ruthie’s car seat was settled and strapped firmly into place everywhere they went. Mim and Byrn favored heavy American sedans in dark colors. These were the cars that Ruthie had ridden in Before.
“This is a Jeep,” Cass said. “It’s a little different. The roof is off so you can…so we can feel the wind as we drive. But it’s very safe. Dor is going to drive us very safely.”
Ruthie put a hand on the handle of the door.
“You’re ready to go?”
Ruthie nodded solemnly and when Cass opened the door for her, she scrambled up into the backseat. She found the seat belt and tugged at it, holding out the buckle for Cass, who stretched it across her tiny body and fastened it.
“Don’t worry,” Dor said, as they got into the front. Cass buckled her own seat belt, the motion so familiar and yet so strange now. The interior of the Jeep was stark, the cover ripped off the glove box, the steering wheel wrapped in duct tape. The radio was missing, too, leaving a gaping hole in the console. The Jeep had undoubtedly been chosen because it was rugged and would perform well off road, but it was short on comforts.
Joe, who had been standing nearby and watching with arms crossed over his chest, raised his hand in a small salute. “See you in a couple of days.”
“Right.” Dor turned the key and the Jeep coughed into life, the acrid smell of doctored gas wafting through the air. Almost since the moment kaysev appeared, people had been making ethanol out of it, and it had become common for those who had any gasoline at all to cut it with the homebrewed stuff. It smelled noxious and didn’t often work, but after a few hiccups the Jeep started moving, slowly at first as they left the Box and the stadium and then all of Silva behind and then it was almost like driving Before.
Cass twisted in her seat to make sure that Ruthie was secure in her seat belt and saw the ghost of a smile on her lips as she played with a Top Dog sticker stuck inside a rear window. Then, leaning back in the passenger seat and closing her eyes, she felt the road rumble under their wheels and the air rush past her face and after a while she let herself pretend she was sixteen again, riding in her friend Taylor’s car with the top down. And they were headed back from a concert in Stockton late at night, pleasantly high and sleepy and still believing that there was no way every year ahead wouldn’t be better than the one before.
12
THEY’D DRIVEN ONLY HALF AN HOUR OR SO, Dor taking it slow, when he cursed softly under his breath. Cass’s eyes flew open and she saw the dawn was breaking, a pale pink crack in the sky.
“What-”
“Shhh. Ruthie’s sleeping,” Dor murmured. Cass looked and Ruthie had indeed drifted off, slumped forward against the seat belt, her hair falling in her face. “It’s just that there’s a block up ahead.”
Cass looked and sure enough, far ahead on the road, the car’s headlights illuminated an SUV turned sideways and jammed up against a pair of smaller cars that had collided. On one side of the road the skeletons of pines shot up jagged against the murky sky; on the other side a cabin was set far back from the road down a dirt drive, the only building Cass could see in either direction.
“What road are we on?”
“Jack Born. It’s the old canyon road from before they built the highway. Wanted to stay far clear of 161 and Matts Valley Road. The Rebuilders watch the bigger routes into Colima. I’d like to come into town with as little fanfare as possible.”
“How do you know they aren’t out here, too?”
Dor shook his head. “No. I send Joe down to Colima once a week or so to check. He’s like the Box ambassador. He loads up on enough shit to keep them happy, takes ’em a crate or two of whatever we have too much of, call it a land tax. Nothing formal, just a handshake deal to keep them from coming knocking at our doors.”
“What, like a bribe?”
Dor looked grim. “I don’t know. You want to call it that, I guess that works. Price of doing business. It was also my way to keep from ever having to go face-to-face with them. Ever since I started the Box I figured I ought to keep a low profile, let someone else be the public face. Now I’m glad I did, because no one down there has any idea what I look like.”
“So Joe drives this route?”
“No, never this far, anyway. He goes straight down 161, but while he’s down there he takes a drive around the area a bit, checks out where they have people stationed. Joe’s good, Cass…he won’t tell me what he was in Santa Rita for, and I don’t want to know, but he’s smart and he’s loyal. In fact, this is his Jeep.”
Cass thought about Joe, a quiet, soft-spoken man with dark eyes and dark skin whose racial makeup was difficult to fathom. Joe had been teaching Smoke obscure Chinese martial art techniques, and though he was not a large or powerful-looking man, Smoke swore Joe could take him down any day of the week. Mostly, the man kept to himself. Cass saw him drinking at Rocket’s sometimes, and once in a while he sat with Smoke for a round or two, rarely with anyone else.
“I didn’t know.”
Dor laughed without humor. “That’s the point, sweetheart. Got to pick someone discreet. I mean, he finds an issue, we get it taken care of. No one’s the wiser. We keep the roads into San Pedro cleared, we keep the Beaters relatively under control in the neighborhood, patrol it tight. And rumor gets around, the Box is the place to go for the good stuff. Joe makes sure it stays that way-get it?”
“So if there’s, I don’t know, a problem, a nest you overlooked…”
“Yeah, but it’s more than that. Joe looks out for anything that tells a story,” Dor said. “For instance. Lance and Nina? Came up here on that three-wheeler a while back?”
“What about them?” Cass tried to remember the few conversations they’d had, came up with nothing memorable. They’d traded the three-wheeler and the contents of Lance’s father’s gun cabinet and moved in.
“Told me about a bridge out a few miles out of San Pedro on the road into Tailorville. So I have Joe go and take a look. The bridge is out, yeah, just like they said. Now, that could be a problem for us. A perception problem, anyway.”
It took Cass a moment and then she got it. “Because that’s the only way into town. Anyone past there-”
“Sure as hell no one’s driving in or out, and haven’t for months. Place is dead. So Tailorville doesn’t exist anymore,” Dor confirmed. “Not in a way anyone wants to think about, anyway. So we have a little talk with Lance and Nina. Make it worth their while to keep quiet. And no one has to go to bed at night worried about a ghost town full of Beaters a couple miles up the road.”
Spin control, Cass thought, amazed that such a concept could reroot so quickly after the cataclysms. She looked back at Ruthie. Maybe spin was the enduring human trait, allowing survival.
“Let me go first, okay? Just give me a minute and then I’ll hook up the chains and we’ll get this hauled. Cheap Chinese tin cans, shouldn’t take long.”
Cass watched him walk away, pistol in one hand, the other on his belt. Cass had seen his blade before, a wicked curve-handled hunting knife with a gut hook that he kept in a worn leather sheath.
Ruthie, stirring in the backseat, made a soft smacking sound with her lips, a holdover from when she was a
