He had long since shed every gram of excess fat. His feet were like pads of leather, the muscles of his legs and buttocks hard as rock. His boots were so worn and supple and polished they were like part of his skin. He wore his old AxysCorp-durable jumpsuit, so faded it was the color of the dust itself. On his back was his pack containing another jumpsuit, his single change of clothes, underwear washed so often you could see through it, and other lightweight gear, plastic sandals, a silvered poncho that could keep out the rain or the sun’s heat, a thin but warm sleeping bag and inflatable bed roll, elements of a blow-up tent, cooking gear. He had a few things that wouldn’t fit into the pack, a light spade and pick, and another bag was slung at his waist, heavier, holding food and water canteens.
All his stuff had self-selected in the long years of walking, surviving a Darwinian filtering based on utility, robustness and lightness, where other junk had broken down or proven too awkward or heavy. All of it products of a civilization that had pretty much vanished, all of it unbearably precious.
Which was why, of course, Thurley had got himself into so much trouble a few days back. You couldn’t afford to let your boots be stolen, even at risk of your life.
This country wasn’t like Iowa, where at harvest time they had walked through country that glowed with life, the red barns bright in the yellow and green fields, the gleaming water towers, the mighty white grain elevators. There had always been a good chance they could find work, for nobody had any gasoline now. The big harvesters stood idle, and the gathering had to be done by human and animal muscle.
But in Nebraska there was nothing but emptiness, a plain that went on and on. The towns were little one- street places with not much more than grain silos and defunct gas stations and dead cars, with ad billboards painted over with uncompromising messages: NO FOOD. NO GAS. WE SHOOT. KEEP WALKING. DOGS. Between the towns the roads were empty save for an occasional motor home or SUV abandoned where some earlier emigrant had run out of gas. The population was gone, save for those who found it easier to prey on those who passed by than to produce anything for themselves. And in the end Thurley had been preyed upon.
That was why, today, Gary couldn’t switch off his awareness of the walk, because of the burden of Thurley. The shopping cart, that had traveled far from the supermarket where it belonged, was on loan to them from the mayor. It was just big enough to carry Michael with his thin legs tucked up to his chest, though he was jolted when the small wheels jammed. Michael’s boots were lodged underneath his body at his own insistence. Michael had nearly given his life for the damn things, and he wasn’t about to lose them now.
Gary was sharing the burden of pushing the cart with Grace. But walking like this was unbalancing him, and as the kilometers clicked away he could feel that asymmetry niggling in his hips and back. He resented it, he admitted it to himself, as the long day bore down on him, and his aches grew worse.
By mid-afternoon he felt so bad he was actually relieved when the F-15 came screaming down the road over their heads.
Everybody ducked, stumbling. Gary let go of the handle, and the cart tipped off the blacktop. Thurley was rattled around, and groaned in his pain-filled sleep. The column stopped, raggedly, and a murmur of conversation replaced the steady shuffle of feet.
“Wow,” said Grace. She took off her worn baseball cap and wiped sweat off her brow. The plane was a glittering jewel, receding along the dark stripe of the road.“What do you think? Denver or Salt Lake City?”
Gary grunted. “Far as I know the Mormons haven’t got an air force yet.” But, he reminded himself, he actually knew very little, and that plane had been an antique.
Grace checked on Thurley. He had fallen back into his deeper sleep. He was drooling, the spit clinging to the papery flesh of his thin cheek. “Yeck,” Grace said, pulling her face; sometimes she looked much younger than her sixteen years. But she bent and wiped his mouth with the collar of his own jumpsuit. Then she dug a canteen out of her pack to give him water.
Gary stepped away from the road, treading over the scrub grass of the prairie. A city guard eyed him, but made no move to intervene. Looking down the line Gary tried to see what was going on at its head. Vehicles in military olive were lined up on the road, blocking it, and a quite enormous Stars and Stripes hung, unruffled by any breeze.
“Roadblock,” he murmured.
“You got it,” said the guard.
From the head of the line, whistles started sounding, blown by the mayor’s officials. That’s it for the day,” the guards called along the line of the column. “Break the line, form up, everybody off the road.” An electric car came driving down the line with a tannoy broadcasting the night’s instructions. “Surnames E to F on latrine duty, I to K on water sourcing, please report to the guards for local details. E to F on latrines…” The line split around the axis of the road, people clearing the tarmac, plodding into the dust. Packs were dumped on the ground, and the components of tents were drawn out, groundsheets and inflatable struts and guy ropes. Reluctant-looking men and women came out of the column bearing shovels and picks, preparing for the chore of digging the night’s latrine trenches.
Gary helped Grace shove their cart away from the road. They moved back fifty meters or so until they found a clear space. Grace threw their plastic tarp on the ground and lifted Thurley out of the cart. Wasted, worn out by walking, he was light enough for her to lift by herself.
Gary got out his cellphone. He pressed the power button gingerly, wincing at the single pip that showed how low the battery had run. But he left it on, and set it on the blanket beside Thurley, letting it make its connections and figure out where it was, and pick up any messages.
The sun was still high; that was one advantage of the unscheduled halt, earlier than the mayor generally planned. So Gary dug his mirror stove out of his pack and began to set it up. They had no fuel for a fire. Gary sometimes imagined the whole of the North American continent had been scoured clean of lumber by the clouds of human locusts that had passed back and forth across its face for years. But the mirror stove was a valuable piece of gear. It was a parabolic mirror with hollow struts, blown up with a few brisk breaths, that sat on a little wire stand. If you positioned it right, face up to the sun like a silvered sunflower, you could set a small pan of water to boil on a wire frame at its focus.
Grace said, “I think he’s OK. He’s not lost any more blood. And the wound hasn’t reopened.”
Gary grimaced. “Well, that’s good.” In fact it was a miracle, given the only doctoring Michael had had, for a wound that would have seen him in intensive care back in better days, had been first aid from Gary and Grace.
“Let’s let him rest a bit,” Grace said. “Then we’ll try to feed him.”
“Sure. Later I’ll walk up the line and see if I can get some time from a doctor.”
Gary dug in his pack for their tea leaves and tin cups, and he checked over their food. It was travelers’ fare, tough, difficult to chew, long-lasting: a jerky of rabbit meat, slabs of hard unleavened bread provided by the mobile city’s bakeries, and sun-dried fruit, raisins and apricots.
Grace saw he had his phone turned on. “So where are we?”
He picked it up and paged for the GPS functions.“A few kilometers north of Lincoln. I don’t think we would have made it tonight. Tomorrow, for sure. All depends on the holdup by the roadblock.”
Such a blockage was a genuine problem. The mayor had negotiated a stay on open ground north of Lincoln for a few weeks at least, with lodging and food and water in return for labor on flood defenses and harbor work around the Nebraska town, as well as work in the fields. The walkers could carry little in the way of supplies, and they were running low on food. A holdup of more than a day or two could see real hunger setting in. But there was nothing Gary could do about that now.
He took his boots and socks off, always a key moment of the day. He dug out the plastic sandals he wore around camp, open and soft, so his feet had room to breathe and relax. He hid his boots under a blanket, and took out his penknife and rasp, meaning to get to work on the hard skin of his heels. Like a soldier, he thought absently, maybe like the guys in the roadblock up ahead, and every infantryman right back to Alexander. You always took care of your feet.
“You’re daydreaming,” Grace said. “Switch your phone off.”
“Yeah.” He held it up regretfully. Its small screen shone like a window to a better place. Here was his only connection to the rest of the world beyond the walking city, the family he hadn’t heard from since his mother had died, his science colleagues, Lily from Barcelona. He had a charger but no power source. It had broken his heart when he had had to trade away his portable solar-cell array for food when the city had been going through its worst time, trapped by a dust storm somewhere near Dodge City. Occasionally, very occasionally, you came across a community where there was power, from the sun or biofuels or the wind or geothermal heat, and he was able to
