CHAPTER SIXTEEN
We would have ridden the horses right past it and never noticed.
Jorge cradled Marina against his chest and pushed through the thick rhododendron branches. The trail was little more than an animal path winding through the dense vegetation, but the man in the green jumpsuit navigated it as sure-footedly as a goat. The man paused once in a while to look back and make sure they were following, although he hadn’t removed his cloth mask.
Rosa held back the branches as best she could so they wouldn’t scratch Marina. Jorge had cuts on his cheeks and the backs of his hands, but he’d been able to shield his daughter from the worst punishment.
She is so light. Like a dream.
Jorge didn’t like that idea because it made her seem even more fragile and vulnerable, so he shifted his thoughts to the man in the jumpsuit. Why was he helping them? If he was truly afraid of catching a sickness, he would have watched them pass by on the logging road and gone about his business.
The man had even let Jorge keep his rifle, although he insisted they leave the horses tethered on the road. Jorge wasn’t sure why, but he suspected the man was afraid they harbored some kind of disease.
“How is she?” Rosa asked, wrinkles appearing around her frown. He’d never seen wrinkles on her before, and he wondered if perhaps the sun had changed them all.
Some changed more than others. Yes, Willard would gladly trade a few more wrinkles in exchange for his hand, and Mr. Wilcox would have given up his “hunnert acres” for another day above ground.
“She is well,” Jorge said. Lying came more easily when one was trying to comfort others. But Jorge wasn’t far enough along in his new morality to believe his own lies. Marina was pale and sweaty, even though her skin was cool to the touch when he pressed his cheek against it.
The trail opened up onto a twin set of ruts that marked another logging road. Or it could have been the same road they had just left. Jorge had been so obsessed with protecting Marina that he hadn’t paid attention to their route, although he suspected they’d been trudging through the dense vegetation for at least twenty minutes.
“Watch your step,” said the man in the green jumpsuit, pointing to the ground near Rosa’s feet. A thin metal wire stretched six inches off the ground. Jorge thought of the American movies he’d seen where the tripwire sprung a trap of sharpened spikes that punctured anyone in its path or detonated a crude explosive device.
The man must have read Jorge’s face, because he said, “Don’t worry none. It’s just a signal wire, not a booby trap. I don’t kill unless I got no choice.”
Jorge thought of the bodies back at the farm. Most people never knew the line they would cross before they could kill, but it was thin and almost invisible. Most horrifying of all, it could be triggered completely by accident.
The sun was no accident. It was simply there, doing sun things, with no consideration of the men beneath it.
Rosa stepped carefully over the wire and watched with dread as Jorge also crossed it. The man in the jumpsuit dug his gloved hands into a thick tangle of red vines—“Poison oak,” he said—and retrieved a hidden strand of rope that descended from somewhere in the trees above. He threw his weight against it and with the squeal of a pulley overhead, the vegetation blocking the logging road parted. The metal gate had been so cleverly concealed that, if Jorge turned his head for a few seconds, he wouldn’t have been able to locate it if the gate were closed again.
The man ushered them through the gate, gave a slow scan of the road and surrounding forest, and entered behind them before closing it. They were in a compound that blended with the trees and boulders and was constructed with such genius that Jorge doubted it could be detected by a low-flying airplane. If airplanes still flew, that was. He hadn’t seen one since the solar storms.
Rosa gripped his arm, and then felt Marina’s forehead. “Her fever is worse.”
“Get her in the house,” said the man in the green jumpsuit, motioning to a massive maple tree with low-hanging branches. A structure was built into it, sided with sheaves of bark so that it blended with the tree. Narrow slits of windows glinted here and there. A couple of smaller sheds, roofed with rusted tin, stood in a cleared area that featured a garden and a pen where goats and chickens scratched at the ground.
The man led the way up a series of wooden rungs that were nailed between two branches. The thick wooden door was eight feet off the ground, and he opened it and motioned to Jorge. “Can you carry her? Hand her here if you can’t.”
Jorge didn’t want those gloved hands touching his daughter. “I can do it.”
“Suit yourself,” he said, entering the tree house.
Rosa whispered, “Can we trust him?”
“He could have killed us on the trail, or just let us pass,” Jorge said. “Besides, he let me keep the gun.”
“Why would this strange gringo help us? “
“Not all gringos are like Mr. Wilcox. Some of them are human beings.”
“I don’t like this.”
“What choice do we have? We have to let Marina rest and recover. And if she has the sun sickness…”
Neither of them wanted to contemplate the thought. Before Rosa could respond, the man stuck his head out the door. He’d removed his mask, but his mouth was still disguised by his bushy beard and mustache. “You folks coming or not?”
Jorge gave Rosa his backpack and the rifle, balanced Marina on his left shoulder, and ascended the rungs. The interior of the tree house was surprisingly spacious and bright, with the windows placed for maximum sunlight. The man removed his gloves and placed them on a shelf which also contained an assortment of hand tools, two pistols, a pair of binoculars, and an oil lantern.
“Put her down over there,” the man said, motioning to a bundle of blankets on the floor. Jorge thought for a moment the man was going to extend his hand, and Jorge wondered if he would shake it. But the man turned his attention to an old radio on a hand-hewn table, fidgeting with the dials.
Rosa smoothed the blankets, giving them a suspicious sniff, and Jorge laid Marina among them. Her eyelids fluttered and parted, and Jorge tried his best to smile at her, but his face felt as if it were carved from wood. “Hola, tomatilla, how are you feeling?”
“Where are we?” the girl said, her voice so small that Jorge had to lean forward to make out the words.
“Somewhere safe,” Rosa said, immediately taking the caregiver’s role.
“Will you have to shoot anybody else?”
“No, there are no sick men here. They were all back at Mr. Wilcox’s farm.”
“But I’m sick, too. Will I be like them?”
Rosa looked at Jorge, who bent forward and kissed her forehead. “No, you just have a small fever. We will rest and then be on our way.”
“Our way where?”
“Hush, pequeña tomatilla, you don’t have to think about that.”
“Where’s my pony?”
“Eating sweet grass. He’s resting, too, while he waits for you to get better.”
“There’s water in that pantry,” the man in the jumpsuit said, and Jorge walked over to a wool blanket suspended on a wire. He pushed the blanket to the side, revealing a small closet sporting shelves packed with food, some in cans, some in glass jars, with bulging burlap sacks on the top shelves. The pantry was cool and moist, with a sink at the far end, clear water streaming into it from a pipe.
Jorge found a clean glass jar by the sink and filled it with the frigid water. Looking out a window above the sink, he saw the metal pipe angled up into the rocks on the slope above the tree house, allowing gravity to carry the water from a spring.
This man has been planning for something like the sun storm.
After taking the water back to Rosa, he joined the man at the table. The man barely looked at him, intent on calibrating the radio, which was a jumble of glass tubes, wires, and plastic knobs connected to a series of car batteries.
“I want to thank yo
u,” Jorge said.
“I should have let you go on about your business,” the man said. “I hate meddlers.”
“My daughter—”
“Better keep an eye on her. These solar shenanigans might not be over yet. These things tend to come in spurts.”
Jorge hadn’t even considered that the worst wasn’t yet over, that even now they might be exposed to whatever strange radiation had killed most of the people around them and turned others into mindless killers. What would he do if Marina showed a violent streak, if she became like Willard or a lame horse and needed to be put down?
There is no such thing as a mercy killing. Only killing.
Rosa gave Marina some of the water and Jorge was comforted to see his daughter sipping it. The sweat on her forehead had dried, and her complexion had returned somewhat to its usual almond color.
“Were there many of the solar storms?” Jorge said. He had little understanding of science, having attended vocational school to learn welding, a craft that hadn’t led to a job back home.
“Hard to tell without any astronomy gear,” the old man said. “O’ course, all that went out with the first big pulse, when the magnetic fields got all scrambled. But if what they were saying is true, then we might have been hit with storms for a solid week, wave after wave of radiation. Might still be going on now, for all we know. It’s not like you can really see them.”
Jorge thought of all the time he’d spent in the fields over the past few weeks and wondered about the invisible rays and currents that might have washed over him. Worse, in his ignorance, he’d exposed this family to danger. He glanced at his daughter huddled in a coarse blanket.
“You were prepared for this disaster?” Jorge asked.
The man waved a hand, still fiddling with the radio. “This, or something else. It was bound to happen sooner or later. Personally, my money was on nuclear war, considering all the idiots in Washington.”
Jorge had heard of survivalists, who were often painted as well-armed crackpots who barricaded themselves in bunkers and dared federal agents to come and get them. But this man didn’t seem angry or confrontational. No, he almost seemed happy that the world had taken a turn for the worse.
“My name is Jorge, and that’s my wife, Rosa, and daughter, Marina.” Jorge opened his palm in case the man wanted to shake hands, but the man kept his attention on the radio.
“You can call me Franklin.”
“This is national park land,” Jorge said cautiously. “I thought no one could live on it.”
“Means the people own it, right?” Franklin said. “I paid taxes. At least for a while, ‘til I wised up and saw every single dime I mailed to the I.R.S. was going into killing us all one way or another. The government was bound to either starve us to death or drop bombs on our heads.”
A low whine issued from the radio’s speakers, and the man fidgeted with the thick copper wires attached to the slender antenna. He plugged in a handset microphone and keyed it with click. “Do you read?” the man asked.
Jorge thought this was odd. If someone was listening on another radio, that person likely wasn’t reading. The man turned the knob, yielding a scruffy burst of static, much like Mr. Wilcox’s TV. He spoke into the microphone several more times before giving up.
“Too much atmospheric interference,” Franklin said.
“Do you think others are out there?”
The man scrunched his bushy eyebrows. “Others like us, you mean?”
Jorge nodded and glanced at Rosa. This man apparently didn’t care that they were Hispanic, only that they weren’t crazed killers. “Like us.”
“Oh, hard to figure,” the man said. “But you can bet bear against cornmeal that the U.S. government got itself a dozen little hidey holes around D.C.”
“The capital,” Jorge said, to assure the man that he knew his U.S. civics lessons.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if the bastards had months of advance warning and took the time to make sure they were safe and living in luxury. Probably got a new bureaucracy running already, figuring out how to tax the hell out of the survivors.”
“Did you hear that on your radio?”
Franklin didn’t answer, concentrating instead on turning the knobs and listening intently to the whining pitch emanating from the speakers. Rosa came over and took Jorge’s hand, squeezing it as they watched their sleeping daughter.
“Her fever is passing,” Rosa said.
“Good,” Jorge said. “We must leave soon.”
“Might not want to be in too big of a hurry,” the man said. “The way I’ve seen them Zapheads acting, you wouldn’t have much of a chance if you ran into a pack of them.”
“We don’t want to trouble you,” Jorge said.
“I got plenty of food and water, and my solar panels, and the wind turbine. This is about as close to modern living as you’re going to get, at least this side of D.C. Plus, I could use a little help around here, to get ready.”
“Ready?” Rosa said. “Ready for what?”
“Let’s hope we don’t have to find out. But I’ve learned to plan for the worse, and then the worser, and then the worst of all. We’re just now barely on the ‘worse.’ The survivors out there will soon be going at each other’s throats once they realize the resources are dwindling. And if anybody figures out I got electricity up here, and a radio, and supplies, they’re all going to want in.”
“Why does your equipment still work?” Jorge asked as the man’s nubby, wrinkled fingers worked the dials.
“Stored it all in a Faraday cage out back,” Franklin said, hooking a thumb to indicate somewhere outside the cabin. “Shielded metal, it protects against electromagnetic currents.”
“Do others have this equipment?”
“Some,” the man said. “The smart ones. But as you probably figured out already, there ain’t a whole lot of smart ones on this planet.”
The radio’s whine turned into a crackle, and then a male voice cut in. It was clipped, British or Australian, and the words faded in and out: “…anyone there?...now is the time for…approximately one in three hundred survived…we are in need of…situation grave…”
The radio signal sharpened into a keening wail, and the man’s urgent voice emerged again from the static. “Situation grave…repeat, situation grave…”
Then it faded, like the ghost of the airwaves, emitting one last message before becoming swallowed by the endless high hiss.
“Situation grave…”