“Daddy?” Sprout says. She’s standing in the middle of the aisle, eyes wide with terror. Abram ignores her. He shoves the throttle forward.
This missile’s aim looks true. It will pierce through the center of the cockpit and burn everything to ash, all our rebellious hopes and prideful visions of a world better than the one God gave us, a world where we make our own rules, worthless creatures that we are—the missile explodes in front of us and knocks the plane upward like a punch to the chin. I topple back into the aisle and my head strikes a chair and as I sprawl out on the floor, the plane plunges into the fireball. The cabin is a cavern in Hell, red-orange light in every window and the roar of the angry damned demanding justice, real justice, not this kangaroo court of cosmic entrapment, the screams of children who never asked to be born, punished for the flaws in the world that greeted them—
“Help me!” Sprout is screaming over the howl of wind through two broken windows. She clings to a seat as the suction pulls at her hair and sucks drops of blood from a cut on her forehead.
Julie jumps off the floor and runs to her side. Sprout reaches out and Julie picks her up, though the girl isn’t much smaller than Julie herself. She carries her into the cockpit and sets her in the copilot seat and grabs Abram by the collar of his jacket.
“Turn the fuck around!” she roars into his face.
Abram looks from Julie to his daughter to the cyclone of dust and garbage swirling out the windows. “God damn it,” he hisses under his breath. He cranks the controls left.
I tumble back into my seat as the plane banks hard, rivets creaking under the strain. We tip until the window is looking straight at the ground, the dirt sky of an inverted world. I feel the air getting thin. An oxygen mask dangles in front of me and I remember the old instructions, their startlingly blatant reversal of ethics: Secure your own before helping others.
But before I can debate this moral puzzle, the air thickens again. My ears pop. We are descending so rapidly I wonder if we’re crashing, but then I see our runway lining up in front of us: a five-lane section of freeway stretching off toward Detroit.
“Landing . . . on that?” M says through clenched teeth. “The fucking road?”
Abram says nothing. No warnings, no instructions. He’s either consumed with the task of landing or he’s simply done dealing with us. But we don’t need him to tell us we’re in for a rough touchdown. Julie slips into her seat next to me. Her face is tight, but not with fear. Something else. I take her hand and she allows it to be taken, but her fingers remain clenched.
“Fuck,” M says. “Fuck.”
“Marcus,” Nora says. “Take a breath. You remember breathing, right?”
He concentrates, then sucks a deep breath through his teeth.
“It’s not that bad. We’ll be fine.”
“How . . . do you know?” M squeaks with tight, overfilled lungs. “Never flown before.”
“Maybe I flew in another life.”
“Maybe I . . . crashed in another life.”
Nora smiles and slaps his knee. “It’s nice to see such a big man act like such a little bitch.”
M glares at her.
“Really! It’s endearing.”
He closes his eyes and releases his lungful of air in a slow, meditative sigh.
“There you go,” Nora says. “Maybe just keep them closed.”
The freeway spreads out in front of us, cutting through miles of fields whose only crops are brambles and dust. Most freeways in America are permanent traffic jams, but this one runs between a sealed nation and an ancient ruin, a road from nothing to nowhere. It hasn’t been traveled in a very long time, so other than a few patches of blackberry vines creeping in at the edges, our runway is clear.
We come in fast and hard, and a little squeal escapes M when we hit. The wheels dig grooves into the thin asphalt with a continuous crunch, joining the engines and the broken windows in the chorus of noise. The cabin rattles so violently I expect the whole plane to dissolve into a pile of rivets. But then it calms, the engines rev down, and we roll to a stop. An “I Love NY” mug falls out of an overhead bin and breaks on the floor. Then silence.
I feel that fluttering again. I feel a chill through the wall of the plane, like clammy fingers pulling at my skin. That lonely necropolis that we avoided from above is suddenly uncomfortably close.
THE OUTSKIRTS OF DETROIT loom on the hazy horizon, and in every other direction: nothing. A scrubby empty plain on its way to becoming a desert. Abram stands on a ladder propped against the nose cone and digs around inside. The entire fuselage is sooty with smoke, but other than the broken windows, there is no visible damage.
“Well?” Nora says.
Abram slams the cone shut and descends the ladder. His eyes move across the ragged group assembled in front of him and I see despair. How did I end up here? With them?
“We need a part,” he says, sounding like he can barely muster the words. “We’ll head to the airport, salvage it from a wreck.” His eyes narrow on Julie. “You always get your way, don’t you?”
Julie is silent.
“So you can fix it?” Nora asks. “We can keep going?”
“Yes, we can keep going,” he says with a drop of venom. “We can keep going and going and going.”
He grabs Sprout’s hand, glances briefly at the cut on her forehead, then pulls her back into the plane. A moment later, he rolls down the ramp on his motorcycle, his tool bag stuffed in the cargo box, his daughter clinging to his back.
“I could use his help,” he says, nodding toward M. “The rest of you can stay here.”
“No thanks,” Nora says, already on her way up the ramp.
“There’s nothing to see. Detroit is dry bones.”
“Never know where lost treasure might turn up. I’m coming.”
Abram throws up his hands. “Well someone has to stay with the plane. Whoever shot us down is probably on their way here to loot the wreckage.”
Nora stops at the top of the ramp and scans the dusty horizon. “Assuming that was actual people shooting at us and not just automation, they’re at least two hours away by land. And if they do decide to come after us, we probably don’t want to be here to greet them.”
She disappears into the plane.
“We’re staying together, Abram,” Julie says, following Nora up the ramp.
Abram gazes skyward as if praying for patience, but he doesn’t argue further. Nora and Julie roll down the ramp on the remaining two bikes, Abram clicks his key fob, and the ramp rises. Do my kids have any grasp of what’s happening around them? Will they feel abandoned, or are they too busy navigating the multidimensional mazes in their minds? Either way, they’re safer here than with me. No one is getting into the plane without a tall ladder and a cutting torch.
“No offense, R,” Julie says, stopping the bike in front of me, “but I should drive.”
I sigh and climb on behind her, wondering if Abram might have left the other two bikes in Helena just to see how we’d handle the awkwardness.
Nora looks at M. “Hop on, beefsteak.”
He chuckles. “Not happening.”
She straightens up indignantly. “Really? The man’s gotta ride in front? What is this, the 2020s?”
“Not that,” he says, shaking his head. “It just . . . it won’t work.”
“Why not?”
He shrugs and climbs on behind her. His girth pushes her onto the gas tank and his chest looms over her head, forcing her to hunch down into the handlebars.
“Okay, okay!” she laughs breathlessly, jabbing an elbow into his ribs. “Get off!”
He gets off and Nora does likewise, still chuckling. She sweeps some hair out of her face and aims an after you palm at the bike. It’s still too small for this duo, but Nora’s slender frame clinging to M’s mountainous bulk works better than the reverse.
“Can you even ride, though?” she says.
M hits the throttle and does a quick lap around the plane, barel
y even wobbling.
“Well okay then,” Nora says with a satisfied nod.
I want to knock M’s grin off.
“Hey,” Julie says, twisting around to look at me. “Will your kids be okay by themselves?”
I look up at the plane. I see them watching me through two rear windows, having apparently broken out of their restroom prison. They stare at me blankly, their faces offering no clues to their inner states.
“They’re Dead,” I mutter. “What’s safer than that?”
Abram sighs loudly, tiring of our deliberations, and blasts off down the freeway in a cloud of dust. M follows him and Julie follows M, and the ancient city of Detroit ripples like a mirage on the horizon.
• • •
The apocalypse didn’t happen overnight. The world didn’t end in a satisfying climax of explosive special effects. It was slow. It was boring. It was one little thing at a time. One moral compromise, one abandoned ideal, one more justified injustice. No dramatic wave of destruction sweeping across the world, just scattered spots of rot forming throughout the decades, seemingly isolated incidents until the moment they all merged.
Some cities maintained the illusion of independent prosperity for many years, like the leaves of a felled tree denying their severed roots. But Detroit was the bottom branch. It’s been dead so long, it looks more like an archaeological site than an American city. The modern climate has turned much of the surrounding grassland into desert, and brown sand covers everything, piling up in drifts against crumbled buildings, forming small dunes in parking lots. The rising sun catches the tops of broken towers, lighting them up like beacons while the rest of the city sulks in shadow. I have no doubt we’re the first people in years to travel toward this place.
I tighten my grip on Julie’s waist as we bounce onto the bridge over the river that was once the Canadian border. Gaps in the bridge’s pavement reveal the murky reddish waters below, choked full of rusty cars and garbage and ancient human remains. I lean into Julie’s neck, inhaling her cinnamon scent as a defense against the aromas from below.
Some might find my position on the back of the bike emasculating, but there are worse ways to travel than pressed against the backside of a beautiful woman. Bumps in the road produce movements that belong in a bedroom, and I’m glad M is in front of us where he can’t watch. For a moment I worry about embarrassing myself with an inopportune erection, then I smile darkly. Still these adolescent worries. Still the fears of a fresh pink boy living in a world of shame. That world died years ago—people struggling to survive have no time to fear their own bodies—so why does its corpse still cling to me?
We are human beings bonded by love and we deserve the gifts our bodies offer us.
Which of these assertions do I doubt?
• • •
Once we’re over the bridge and into the city, the road worsens dramatically. The ride loses any trace of eroticism as the bike bucks under us like an angry bull, levitating me above the seat then slamming me back down. Julie eases up on the throttle, but these are street bikes and this can barely be called a street. I see M and Nora struggling, too, Nora’s arms pressing deep into M’s sides to keep from flying off the bike as it sinks into potholes then bounces back up over chunks of debris.
“Ab-b-bram!” Nora shouts over M’s shoulder. “We have to st-st-stop!”
I can see Abram weaving through the junkyard with equal difficulty, Sprout clinging to his back like a frightened baby monkey, but he predictably ignores Nora’s advice. He ignores it for two more blocks, then he rounds a corner onto an arterial street, and the city overrules his decision.
The road is completely jammed with car carcasses, a river of rust and rubber. Stacks of flattened vehicles occupy all the side streets, remnants of some long-ago effort to clear a path. What made this particular traffic jam the last one? The one that would endure through the ages like a monument to a bad idea? Was it a war? An undead invasion? A descending cloud of unbreathable air? Or simply a mass realization? A thousand people getting out of their cars, looking around at the unnatural disaster of their lives, wandering home to their families? I doubt anyone knows for sure. Under the smothering cloud of fear and jamming signals, history has gone the way of art and science and most other human achievements: backward. Fact has blurred into rumor, knowledge into suspicion. Even the current year is open to debate.
Abram stares at the impassable wall of rusty steel. He pulls an ancient map out of his jacket, a relic of those strange days when technology began to roll backwards, when information returned grudgingly to the physical realm as the collapse of the digital loomed closer. He consults the lines on this wrinkled sheet of Tyvek and looks ahead, searching for street signs in the rubble. He gets off his bike.
“Thank God,” Nora sighs, detaching herself from M’s back and stretching her arms.
Abram pulls the tool bag off his bike, grabs Sprout’s hand, and climbs up the hood of a PT Cruiser. From there, he hops to the roof of a minivan.
“You’re going to climb over all that?” Julie says, staring down the canyon of rust and broken glass.
“Airport’s just a couple miles, and I don’t see a better way through. But like I said, I don’t need you. Go play FBI agent, uncover Axiom’s evil plot, or whatever you wanted to come here for.”
Julie hesitates as if considering the offer. Then she glances at Sprout. “And her? No need for her to go into that mess if you’ll be back in a few hours, right?”
“She’s coming with me.”
Julie nods. “Yeah. Then so am I.”
Abram smiles coldly. “Oh, you’re going to guard me, are you? Make sure I don’t run off and desert your revolution?”
Julie ignores him, dismounts the bike and starts to climb the Cruiser.
Abram chuckles. He hops from the van’s roof to the bed of a truck and stumbles back a little under the weight of the tool bag. Sprout barely makes the jump.
“Hey,” M says, climbing up beside him. “Let me take that.” He holds out a hand for the tool bag. “You watch your kid.”
Abram hesitates, studying the collage of scars covering M’s face, then gives him the bag. He uses both hands to help Sprout onto the next roof, and they proceed forward with a labored but steady rhythm.
I climb up behind Julie. I notice a small pistol stuffed into the waistband of her jeans, like an afterthought beneath her shotgun holster. I don’t recall her having a pistol. I wonder where she found it and why she didn’t remark the find. She glances back at me and I see in her eyes that steel I admire so much, but I’m not sure I like the cold edge that glints in it now.
• • •
We creep from car to car like mountain climbers traversing treacherous terrain, choosing only the sturdiest vehicles and testing each step before putting weight on it. At first we climb in silence, everyone lost in deep concentration, but after an hour or so it becomes instinctive enough that we allow our thoughts to wander.
“Marcus,” Nora says. “Who fired those missiles?”
M is absorbed in crawling onto the roof of an articulated bus, which will earn him eighty feet of easy travel if he succeeds. He doesn’t answer.
“You said they were Gray River. Even if Canada still had a military, they wouldn’t have Gray River missiles, would they?”
“Nope,” M grunts as he achieves the summit of the bus and begins his leisurely stroll to the end.
“But Axiom would.”
“Yup. Parent company.”
Nora walks up and down the rolling hills of a few coupes. “Why the hell would Axiom arm the Canadian border? Who do they think is invading? And what do they think they’re protecting?” She gestures to the desolation around us. “This?”
Silence.
“Abram?” she prompts.
“If I understood why Axiom’s doing what it’s doing,” he says, “I wouldn’t be here right now. I’d be settling into my new office in Citi Stadium, drinking some good Scotch, and enjoying a few company girls
for my acquisition-day bonus.”
This rings false, an unconvincing impression of the Axiom good ol’ boys he’s known but never been. I find it hard to picture this man enjoying Scotch, or women, or really much of anything.
“I’m here because I have no idea what they’re doing,” he says. “And I don’t think they do either.”
“So you think they’re just flailing?” Nora says. “They seemed pretty damn organized when they invaded Post.”
“Flash and Grab was an old operation, planned before the hiatus. Axiom’s good at repeating itself, and some of the old moves still work. It’s when it tries to move forward that the cracks start showing.” A windshield spiderwebs under his weight. He ignores the pun. “If I had to guess, I’d say they’re trying to reestablish the border. Give America some hard lines again. Even before the hiatus, they never liked ambiguity.”
“What’s a border if there’s no one on the other side?” Julie wonders dreamily, like it’s some absurd Zen koan. I didn’t think she was even listening; for the last several blocks she’s done nothing but stare down alleys and side streets, alert but distant. “Might as well draw borders on the moon.”
“You mean like the Lunar Republic of Heavenly Korea?” Abram says with a grim smile.
Nora chuckles. “I remember that. If you ever want to travel north of the Apollo landing, you’ll need a visa signed by Dear Leader’s ghost.”
“When the moon hits your eye . . . ,” M sings in a low baritone, “. . . that’s Korea.”
None of this levity seems to reach Julie. Her eyes have stopped roving and she stares straight ahead. “So we’ll have to go around the wall.”
A pause. “Go around,” Abram repeats.
“Up through Maine and around Nova Scotia.”
Silence. The steady scrape of boots on metal, the creaking of old suspension.
“Canada is out. You know that. We have to get off this continent.”
“I told you,” he says without looking at her, “I can’t navigate across the ocean without radio.”
“Drop that bullshit,” she snaps. “I didn’t buy it at the beginning and I certainly don’t now after you got us from Post to Helena to Ontario like we were on rails.”