top up the phone’s battery in return for labor. But the last charge-up had been a long time ago, and the few seconds or minutes each day he allowed himself to turn it on were steadily draining the energy.
He held his thumb over the power button. But then the screen sparked to life, with a text message. “Don’t switch off. Am coming. Will find U.” It was from Thandie Jones.
59
A jeep came barreling along the road, open-topped, driven by some guy in uniform, with Thandie and another woman in back. The jeep was at least fifteen or twenty years old, and looked a lot older. But evidently the Army at least still had access to gasoline. People stared. Aside from the city’s own little electric carts, you rarely saw a moving vehicle nowadays.
This was a thrill for Gary. He hadn’t seen Thandie for five, six years, not since the time she had briefed Lone Elk in Cadillac City. He knew she’d been roaming the shore of America’s gathering inland sea, studying its formation and advising the Denver government on its navigability, ecology and other issues. He’d actually been expecting to meet up with her in Lincoln, if the mobile city got that far. Now here she was coming out to find him.
The car pulled up alongside Gary’s little encampment. Gary could smell it, smell the rubber of its tires and its oil and the sickly sooty exhaust, the scent of an American childhood.
Thandie swung her legs out of the jeep and came striding over. She had to be forty-five now, or more. But though the hair she wore scraped to her scalp was now shot through with gray, and her face was grooved and tough-looking, almost mannish, she moved with strength and grace. And when she gave him a hug, wrapping her arms tight around his chest, he felt his ribs crush.
“Jeez, Thandie, you’re keeping fit.”
She stood back and held him. “Well, so are you. The life we live nowadays, huh? The global extinction event has claimed the couch potato.”
Her companions followed her. The slim ash-blond woman who came to stand by Thandie, about forty, her expression serious, was Elena Artemova. The Russian ecologist was just as Gary remembered from all those years ago when he had met her en route to the Caspian Sea, if anything her beauty enhanced by the lines around her mouth, the hint of silver in her hair. When she stood by Thandie their arms brushed, but Thandie didn’t move away; they both seemed unconscious of the touch.
“You know,” Gary said,“ what I remember of you two is how you fought the whole time. When we were in that dacha by the Black Sea-”
“That’s dykes for you. Women without men, eh, buddy?” This was the soldier who had driven them. He was a strong-looking man, stocky. He wore a sergeant’s stripes, and his face was hidden under a helmet and behind big dusty sunglasses. “Gary Boyle, right? You don’t remember me.” He took off his helmet, rubbed a grizzle of gray stubble on the scalp of his head, and plucked the glasses off the bridge of his nose. He was older than the others- sixty, maybe, Gary thought. He had striking bright blue eyes in a suntanned face, but the eyes were bloodshot, and his fleshy nose was marked by crimson blood vessels. “The Trieste, remember?”
“Gordo,” Gary said, remembering. “Gordon James Alonzo.”
“That’s me.” He tapped the stripes on his arm.“Sergeant Alonzo now. I joined up again when the Mormons started kicking up shit. I’m too old, but hell, they aren’t going to turn away an astronaut.” He glanced around at the linear encampment, the people scratching in the dirt.“And I guess there are no spaceships to fly around here, right?”
“No,” Thandie said.“But soon there’s going to be a harbor for ocean-going ships at Lincoln. A harbor in Nebraska! Makes you boggle. Gary, it’s thanks to Gordo that we made it out here to find you. I’m not sure you’re going to reach Lincoln anytime soon.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s a war a-brewing,” Gordo said. “So you going to invite us in? Some hospitality you’re showing here, fella. You got anything to drink?”
Gordo walked into Gary’s little camp, glancing around at Thurley and Grace and their bits of gear. Grace sat by Thurley, uncertain; she was always wary of strangers, and Gary saw she had the hilt of her knife showing at her belt. To Gary’s relief Gordo didn’t show much interest in Grace. Perhaps older women like Elena were more to his taste.
Gary fussed about, spreading more of their blankets on the dusty ground, setting rolled-up sleeping mats for the guests to sit on. He showed them his solar stove. “Hot drinks we can do. Tea, if you like it stewed. Otherwise it’s water. We filter it well enough.” He looked at Gordo. “Alcohol, no.”
Gordo grunted. He dug out a hip flask, unscrewed its cap, took a slug. He held it out to Gary. “You want?”
Gary stared at it longingly; he could smell the whiskey. But he shook his head. “I guess not. When we started walking it took me a while to kick a habit I didn’t know I had. Probably isn’t a good idea to go back to it now, right?”
Thandie and Elena came into the camp area and sat down, side by side, cross-legged. “We’re not going to impose,” Thandie said. “We can see how you’re fixed. But we’ll stay the night, if that suits you. Look, we brought gear of our own in Gordo’s jeep. A tent, other stuff. I’ll take a tea, Gary, but you can be our guests later.”
“Courtesy of me,” Gordo said, lifting the flask again. “Me and Uncle Sam.”
Thandie turned to Grace.“I don’t know if you remember me, honey. You would have been about ten when we last met.”
Grace looked away, studiously unconcerned. Gary knew the look. She was always uncomfortable whenever relics of the past showed up. She preferred to dwell in the present, this dusty world of camps and walking and latrine ditches and bandits-the only world she had known, save for those strange early years when she had been a hostage of a Saudi royal family.
Elena got up and looked more closely at Thurley, where he slept under his blanket. “This man-”
“He’s Michael Thurley,” Gary said. “Once a UK government guy who tried to help Helen and Grace.”
“He is injured,” Elena said. She lifted the blanket cautiously to inspect Michael’s wound.
“We ran into bandits,” Gary said. “A couple of days and a few dozen kilometers back. We’ve been walking down from the prairie, the Nebraska Sandhills.”
“They must have wanted something pretty bad,” Gordo said.
Gary forced a smile. “His boots. That’s all. But he fought back.”
“And he won,” Grace said.
“That he did. But he took an injury.”
The bandit’s knife hadn’t gone deep into Michael’s belly; it had been a swiping slice rather than a stabbing, which might have been fatal. The wound was clean, but it was long and had spilled more blood than Michael could afford in his weakened state.
Gary hadn’t been able to get hold of a doctor, so he and Grace had had to handle it themselves. Gary had pushed the flaps of sliced flesh together, while Grace had sewn it up with a length of their fishing line, precious stuff liberated from a broken-open sports store hundreds of kilometers back. With her finer fingers and clearer eyesight, she made a much better fist of jobs like that than Gary ever did; it was always Grace who patched their clothes. They had had no anesthetic, no disinfectant save the heat of water boiled by their mirror stove. But they had got it done.
Elena nodded gravely. “Well, it was necessary. Good work. But now we live in a world in which it is commonplace for a sixteen-year-old girl to perform life-saving surgery on a wounded man.”
“We do the best we can,” Gary said sternly, feeling as if he was being criticized.
Grace stood up sharply. “Gary, I’ll go find my friends.”
“Sure, honey, if you like,” Gary said. “But you don’t have to go-”
“Yes, I do. Then you can all talk about me to your heart’s content. I can see that’s what you want.” And she stalked off, heading down the line of the column away from the roadblock.
Gary said, “Sorry about that. I have a feeling she did the same thing last time you visited us.”
“Don’t apologize,” Thandie said. “She’s got spirit. Why the hell shouldn’t she ditch us old stiffs? Hey, Gordo,
