After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

bridge.

Oh, I almost forgot, and I want to put this in, write down what I can recall of it. On the way home, we came across Mr. Benedict. He was sitting on a rusty barrel not far from the NOW|HERE wall. In THE BEFORE, Mr. Benedict—Mr. Saul Benedict—was a physicist. He’s one of our teachers now, though he isn’t well and sometimes misses days. Max says something inside his head is broken. Something in his mind, but that he isn’t exactly crazy. Anyway, there he was on the barrel. He’s one of the few olders who ever talks much about THE GOO. That afternoon, he said hello to me and Max, but he had that somewhere-else tone to his voice. He sounded so distant, distant in time or in place. I don’t know. We said hello back. Then he pointed to the bridge, and that sort of gave me shudder, and I wondered if he’d noticed us staring at it. He couldn’t have overheard us; we were too far away.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he said.

“What doesn’t make sense?” Max asked him.

“It should have fallen. Steel and concrete, that’s one thing. Iron, steel, precompressed concrete, those materials, fine. But after the bots were done with it…that bridge, it should have collapsed under its own weight, even though, obviously, its not nearly as heavy or dense now as it was before. Plastic could never bear the load.”

This is the thing about Saul Benedict: he asks questions no one ever asks, questions I don’t understand half the time. If you let him, he’ll go on and on about how something’s not right about our understanding of THE EVENT, how the science doesn’t add up right. I’ve heard him say the fumes from the outgassing plastic should have killed us all years ago. And how the earth’s mass would have been changed radically by the nano-assemblers, which would have altered gravity. How lots of the atmosphere would have been lost to space when gravity changed. And how plate tectonics would have come to a halt. Lots of technical science stuff like that, some of which I have to go to the library to find out what he means. I’m pretty sure very few people bother to consider whether or not Mr. Benedict is right. Maybe not because they believe the questions are nonsense, but because no one needs more uncertainty than we have already. I’m not even sure I spend much time on whether or not he’s making sense. I just look up words to see what the questions mean.

“But it hasn’t fallen down,” Max protested, turning back toward the bridge. “Well, okay. Some pieces broke off, but not the whole bridge.”

“That’s just the problem,” Mr. Benedict said. “It hasn’t fallen down. You do the math. It would have fallen immediately.”

“Max is terrible at math,” I told Mr. Benedict, and he frowned.

“He doesn’t apply himself, Cody. You know that don’t you, Max? You don’t apply yourself. If you did, you’d be an exemplary student.”

We told him we were late for chores, said our until laters, and left him sitting on the rusty barrel, muttering to himself.

“Nutty old fart,” Max said, and I didn’t say anything.

Before I went to cross the bridge, I did some studying up first. In the library, there’s a book about the city that used to be Jacksonville, and I sat at one of the big tables and read about the Mathews Bridge. It was built in 1953, which made it exactly one hundred years old last year. But what mattered was that it’s about a mile and a half across. One morning, I talked Mr. Kleinberg at the garage into lending me his stopwatch, and I figured out I walk about three miles an hour, going at an easy pace. Not walking fast or jogging, just walking. So, barring obstructions, if I could go straight across, it would only take me about half an hour. Half an hour across, half an hour back. Maybe poke about on the other side (which, by the way, used to be called Arlington) for a couple of hours, and I’d be back before anyone even noticed I’d gone. For all I knew, other kids had already done it. Even more likely, some of the olders.

I picked the day I’d go—July 18, which was on a Friday. I’d go right after my morning chores, during late- morning break, and be sure to be back by lunch. I didn’t tell Max or anyone else. No one would ever be the wiser. I filled a canteen and I went.

It was easy getting over the fence. There isn’t any barbed wire, like on some of the fences around Sanctuary. I snagged my jeans on the sharp twists of wire at the top, but only tore a very small hole that would be easy to patch. On the other side, the road’s still asphalt for about a hundred yards or so, before the plastic begins. Like I said, I’d walked on THE GOO before, so I knew what to expect. It’s very slightly springy, and sometimes you press shallow footprints into it that disappear after a few minutes. On the bridge, there was the fine dust that accumulates as the plastic breaks down. Not as much as I’d have expected, but probably that’s because the wind blows it away. But there were heaps of it where the wind couldn’t reach, piled like tiny sand dunes. I left footprints in the dust that anyone could have followed.

I glanced back over my shoulder a few times, just to be certain no one was following me. No one was. I kept to the westbound lane. There were cracks in the roadway, in what once had been cement. Some were hardly an inch, but others a foot or two across and maybe twice as deep, so I’d have to jump over those. I skirted the places where the bridge was coming apart in chunks, and couldn’t help but think about what all Mr. Benedict had said. It shouldn’t be here. None of it should still be here, but it is. So what don’t we know? How much don’t we know?

I walked the brown bridge, and on either side of me, far below, the lazy crimson St. Johns River flowed. I walked, and a quarter of a mile from the fence, I reached the spot where the bridge spans the island. I went to the guardrail and peered over the edge. I leaned against the rail, and it cracked loudly and dropped away. I almost lost my balance and tumbled down to the crimson river. I stepped back, trying not to think about what it would be like to slowly sink and drown in that….

And I thought about turning around and heading back. From this point on, I constantly thought about going back, but I didn’t. I walked a little faster than before, though, suddenly wanting to be done with this even if I still felt like I had to do it.

I kept hearing Max talking inside my head, saying what he’d said, over and over again.

Since there’s nothing over there, you’d have to be extra crazy.

You know what suicide is, right?

Ain’t nothing over there except what THE GOO left.

It took me a little longer to reach the halfway point than I thought it would, than my three-miles-an-hour walking had led me to believe it would. It was all the cracks, most likely. Having to carefully jump them, or find ways around them. And I kept stopping to gaze out and marvel at the ugly wasteland THE GOO had made of the land beyond the Mathews Bridge. I don’t know if there’s a name for the middle of a bridge, the highest point of a bridge. But it was right about the time I reached that point that I spotted the car. It was still pretty far off, maybe halfway to the other end. It was skewed sideways across the two eastbound lanes, on the other side of the low divider that I’m sure used to be concrete but isn’t anymore.

But all the cars were cleared off the bridge by the military years ago. They were towed to the other side or pushed into the crimson river. There weren’t supposed to be any cars on the bridge. But here was this one. The sunlight glinted off yellow fiberglass and silver chrome, and I could tell the nano-assemblers hadn’t gotten hold of it, that it was still made of what the factory built it from. And I had two thoughts, one after the other: Where did this car come from? And, Why hasn’t anyone noticed it? The second thought was sort of silly because it’s not like anyone really watches the bridge, not since most of the Army and National Guard went away.

Then I thought, How long’s it been there? And, Why didn’t it come all the way across? And, What happened to the driver? All those questions in my head, I was starting to feel like Saul Benedict. It was an older car, one of the electrics that were already obsolete by the time THE EVENT occurred.

“Cody, you go back,” I said out loud, and my voice seemed huge up there on the bridge. It was like thunder. “You go back and tell someone. Let them deal with this.”

But then I’d have to explain what I was doing way out on the bridge alone.

Are you enjoying this, Max? I mean, if I’ve let you read it. If I did, I hope to hell you’re enjoying it, because I’m already sweating, drops of sweat darkening the encyclopedia pages. Right now I feel like that awful day on the bridge. I could stop now. I could turn back now. I could. I won’t, but I could. Doesn’t matter. I’ll keep writing, Max, and you’ll keep reading.

I kept walking. I didn’t turn back, like a smarter girl would have done. A smarter girl who understood it was more important to tell the olders what I’d found than to worry about getting in trouble for being out on the bridge.