“The canal zone,” Domingo said. He gestured. “We are looking northeast, roughly. Yes? Just here the isthmus”-a word he could barely pronounce-“takes a detour. It connects North and South America, but here it curls to the northeast for a couple of hundred kilometers. So you have the Atlantic to our west, over there, and the Pacific to the east. This whole area was transformed by the engineering of the canal-which was more than a mere canal. It was a kind of liquid bridge, with locks to lift up the ships on either side. The Gatun Lake was right here, formed by damming on the Atlantic side.”

Gary glanced down the slope. “This isn’t Gatun Lake. Best case it’s some kind of inland flood. Worst case the sea has broken through.”

“Either way we are in trouble,” Domingo said.

“Only one way to find out which,” Grace said. She stood, fixed her ancient baseball cap back on her head, and walked cautiously down the slope toward the water.

The sun was high, and cast dazzling highlights from the water. From Gary’s point of view Grace was silhouetted, the brilliant light around her body making her seem slimmer, even taller than she was. She wore her arms bare, and he could see her muscles, the wiry biceps. She was twenty years old now; a difficult teenager had grown into a strong woman. She could not be called beautiful, Gary always thought, not conventionally anyhow. She looked like an athlete, a worker. But he recognized beauty in her health and strength and poise, a kind of Cro- Magnon beauty fitting to the world she had grown up in-a world where she had been a refugee since she was five years old.

Watching her, Gary felt proud. He could never have saved her from the flood-he and Michael Thurley, poor Michael who had died far from home of the knife wounds that had been inflicted on him in Nebraska. But they had got her through to adulthood confident, competent, healthy, equipped for a dangerous world, sane. There were probably a lot worse fates for a young woman growing up in this dislocated age.

She reached the edge of the water. She crouched down, dipped her hand into the lapping water, and lifted a palmful of it to her mouth. She spat it out. “Salt,” she called.

“So that’s it,” Domingo said bitterly. “The most magnificent of all mankind’s engineering creations-gone! Drowned like a sandcastle on the beach.”

“And the isthmus is severed,” Gary said. “North and South America separated for the first time in three million years. Astonishing when you think about it.”

Domingo raised an eyebrow at that. “Our problem is,” he said more practically, “if we are ever to reach your friends in the Andes we must cross the water. But how?”

“How about we sail?” Grace stood and pointed, east along the shore of the strait.

A boat, a battered-looking cruiser with a gleaming mast, lay on the water, tied up loosely to a dying tree.

63

They were hailed from the boat. “How many are you?”

Gary glanced at Domingo.“American accent. Florida maybe?”

“Could be.”

Gary cupped his hands and shouted back, “Three of us here. Others in the forest.”

There was a pause. Then,“I got you covered from here. And some of my boys are above you, they have you from the back. Got that?”

“Got it.”

It was always this way, at best, when you encountered strangers. A show of strength, a posturing of weapons and warriors that might or might not exist. On a bad day you’d get shot at before you realized there was anybody there.

“So what do you want?”

Domingo answered now. “Passage.” He pointed. “Across the canal zone to Darien.”

Gary called, “We just want to pass through. We’re heading for Peru.”

“Peru, huh.”

“Yes. We’ve no intention of staying here.”

There was a longer pause. Then Gary saw a rowboat being let down into the water, lowered on ropes from capstans. “I’ll come talk it over. Remember, I got you covered. This is my country, and I know it a damn sight better than you do.”

Gary spread his hands. “We’re no threat.”

Two men clambered down a rope ladder into the boat, one moving a bit more stiffly than the other. They rowed briskly across the few hundred meters to the shore. Gary, Grace and Domingo walked down the slope and along the littoral to meet the boat as it came in. It ran aground in a place that, Gary could see, had been cleared of tree stumps and rotting lumber to be made suitable for landings.

The two men in the boat looked alike, both black, heavyset, square-faced; they wore tough-looking denim jeans and jackets and battered, salt-faded caps. The older man had a face twisted into a wrinkled glare. The other, younger, more nervous, had an open expression, wide eyes. Father and son, Gary guessed. The father seemed to be unarmed, but the son bore some kind of automatic weapon, and he stood back, out of reach of the newcomers. He kept the muzzle pointed at the ground.

Gary stepped forward, hand outstretched. “The name’s Gary Boyle.”

The older man took his hand and shook. “Sam Moore. My boy Tom.”

The boy nodded.

Domingo cautiously fingered the straps of his backpack. “May I? I have gifts.”

Moore glared harder, and the boy waved the automatic around. But they let Domingo take off his pack. He drew out two cans of Diet Coke, the walkers’ standard gift for Americans. “A token of friendship,” he said.

Moore was still wary, but he took a can, and passed the other to his son. “Shit, haven’t seen this stuff in years. How old is it?”

Gary said, “They’re still manufacturing it in Denver.”

“No kidding.” Moore popped the can, listened to the hiss of the carbonation. “Needs to be cold, really.” He took a deep slug of the soda.

The boy fumbled with the tab, spilled some of the soda on his face when he tried to drink out of the can, and then pulled a sour expression.

Moore had drained his can.“Shit, that’s good.” He crushed the can in one hand and tossed it in the water. “So much for saving the planet! You guys remember that stuff? Gifts, huh. So, Gary Boyle, who are you and what do you want?”

Gary said they were a scouting party for a band of travelers.“The rest are back in the forest.”

“You’re on foot.”

“Yes, aside from barrows and carts and the like.”

“You folks come far?”

Gary glanced at Grace. “Depends where you start from. I’d call it from Lincoln, Nebraska. We’ve been walking south since then.”

Moore whistled. “All the way to Peru, right? Down the spine of the Americas.”

“That’s the idea.”

“When I was a young man I once drove down the Pan-American Highway, from Laredo, Texas, down through Central and South America, all the way to Paraguay. Hell of a trip. And the only stretch we had to hike was back there.” He pointed his thumb back across the strait. “The Darien Gap, eighty kilometers of jungle. Was then, is now. But I knew the country, grew up here. On the other side we hired a car and drove on into Colombia.”

“The Highway is mostly flooded now,” Domingo said.“We have had to trail through higher ground. It wasn’t easy.”

Gary asked, “What about you? You say you grew up here?”

“Yeah. My grandfather was a canal zone shipping agent. I was born and raised here, and worked on the canal myself. But we moved to Florida in twenty aught aught when sovereignty over the canal passed back to Panama.

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