300 Miles to Galveston (2 page)

The Devils in prison got regular Cheerios. The generic kind. “Great Value Toasted Whole Grain Oat Cereal.”

Verily, Wal-Mart serveth both the living and the dead.

* * *

Kurt unlocked the front door. Sophie looked at him through the patio door; she was playing with the dog. He held up the bags of meat and pointed his thumb to the left. She nodded and waved, understanding what his gesture meant.

Going down the street to salt the meat. Back in a bit.

If there ever were sociologists again, they would note with interest that even in this greatest of all disasters, when the west side of town was abandoned and their McMansions lay empty, people tended to stay in their own homes. Partly this was practical. New houses, which took up 80% of the lot they were built on, were saunas without constant air conditioning. When the electrical grid went dark, most were abandoned. The old houses on the east side of town were more livable. With shade trees in front and back, and windows that were built to be opened, you could get a nice cross-breeze going on most days, slow and gentle but oh so crisp when you had a wisp of sweat on your forehead.

Kurt and Sophie, like most people on the east side of town, stayed in their house even when nicer ones became available.

Partly for the cross-breeze. Partly for Kristine.

* * *

Kurt gave the shave-and-a-haircut knock, then unlocked the door to the fellowship hall. The others looked up from their work and smiled or said howdy, and that was that.

“What have you got there?” said Brother Travis.

“Dog.”

“That was your shot I heard awhile back?”

Kurt nodded.

“You OK?”

He nodded again.

They walked to the kitchen together.

The Reverend Travis Hurt, 51, had spent much of his professional life overseeing activities that brought people together – charity work, social activities, and worship – but now he had no need to invent reasons to get together. People gathered naturally at his small neighborhood church, bringing pallets of bottled water they found in an abandoned semi-truck trailer, more books from the library, or meat from something recently killed. They volunteered their expertise not for brownie points with God or each other, but just to belong to something worthwhile. Brother Travis would try his best to convince people he had no idea what was going on – he’d never liked The Revelation, and wished the fourth century Council of Nicaea had left it out of the New Testament – but eventually he realized that no one was asking him to explain anything. They just wanted to be together. They wanted to know there was an order to things, that there was right and wrong, good and evil, charity and selfishness, blindness and sight, and that they each had a part to play in it, even if that part was salting fresh dog meat or digging the next latrine.

There was no need to chair capital campaigns, or even pass the plate when services were held. When the roof leaked, a couple of young men got together and patched it with shingles from an abandoned house. On Sundays, people brought what they had and left it on the altar for Brother Travis to distribute as he saw fit: An unopened box of Band-Aids. Half a bottle of vodka, for sterilizing. A hammer.

They called him Brother because that’s how he acted, not because that was his title. His title was Senior Minister, Northern Texas Region. Titles were echoes of a social order that no longer existed. He hadn’t seen any of the church leaders in months, not even his mentor, Tom.

Many in this small neighborhood church didn’t know if they could trust in their faith to get them through this horrible time, but they knew they could trust Travis to give the Band-Aids and vodka and hammers to whomever needed them most.

* * *

Sophie took her walkie-talkie from her belt and gave it a few cranks, even though the charge read 90%.

“Kristine. It’s me. Are you there?”

The green light indicated that her signal was received, but she could not know if it was her father's walkie-talkie, the one she had sneaked out to Kristine, or both.

Sophie decided it was Kristine, partly because her dad usually turned his walkie talkie off when he came home, but mostly because she needed it to be Kristine.

“You remember those two brothers who used to mess with us? The ones who lived by the bus stop in that crap shack? I fought them today. I knew they liked to hang out by the creek, and I didn't want to take one of Dad's weapons because then he'd know I was gone, and he’s been kinda hard ass since the Missus Wallace thing, so I unscrewed the mop handle, and took that with me when I brought you the walkie talkie. Anyway, I think I killed them.”

She was silent for a moment.

“I'm not sad. I'm not happy, either. I don't know what I'm saying. I'm just tired of being alone. I miss Mom. Dad is good, but he's busy, and angry, and maybe a little scared.

“I wish we could talk. But if you can hear me, that's cool, right?”

She waited.

“OK. I'm gonna go. You'll need to crank the handle a few times every day. It doesn't take much to keep it alive.

“OK. I love you, Kristine. Bye.”

She released the button, and the green "Receiving" light faded out.

* * *

Kurt lowered the walkie talkie from his ear.

“Everything OK?” said Brother Travis.

“Yeah. She’s... Sophie’s lonely.”

Travis nodded. “Maybe we should get a softball game going tomorrow.”

“I don’t think a softball game’s going to do it.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised.”

Kurt smiled and washed his hands of the blood and salt as Travis poured the water. He decided, right then, not to confront her about the killings. First, because he wasn’t sure it was true, and by the time he checked on it, they would have risen. Second, because he didn’t want to think his youngest daughter had changed.

When he got back home Sophie was drawing something, but quickly put it away. She’d changed into shorts and a t-shirt, and as she stood up from where she lay on the floor, he realized how strong her legs had gotten.

“What is it, Thursday?”

She nodded.

“Seiyunchin.”

She nodded again, and they walked to the back yard together, closing the patio gate so the dog wouldn’t bother them.

Seiyunchin
was an Okinawan karate kata, a solo training form against an imaginary enemy, with lots of squats and slow, muscular hand movements, interrupted by bursts of footwork and hip rotation. They did the kata a few times together, and he watched her more carefully than usual in his peripheral vision. Stepping away, he gestured that he wanted to watch her perform it while facing him, as a teacher evaluating a student.

Something had changed in her eyes as she performed Seiyunchin. At the slow movements, and at the pauses, she wasn’t thinking of the next move, or where her feet were, or how to hold her hands. She wasn’t doing some odd dance routine. She was killing the imaginary enemy.

That’s when he knew that she had killed those boys, that she wasn’t just making up stories to sound tough.

When her kata performance was over, she bowed to him, and he bowed to her, and he held his bow a little longer than usual.

She turned to go back into the house, and when she realized he wasn’t following, asked if there were any more chores to do. Kurt shook his head, and decided to play with the dog for a while.

* * *

Women’s inability to have children added a new fear to the Dallas suburbs. A young child would be discovering flowers,
oh look at those, oh look at these,
wandering off into the park, and then the mother looked back to where she expected her to be and poof she was gone.

Usually it was a woman in the same neighborhood, because people kept to themselves. An outsider would have been too obvious.

Sophie was small for a nine year old, shy, and used to her older sister, her father, and other people telling her what to do. When 33 year-old Jessica Wallace took Sophie’s hand and walked off with her, she just went along.

A week later she escaped, and it was all she could do to keep her father from walking the two blocks to her house, knocking on the door, and blasting Jessica with a shotgun when she answered the door.

They went to Brother Travis, who reluctantly held the first church trial in their neighborhood clan.

Jessica cried and apologized. Losing her pregnancy during the Leonids had broken her. She asked Kurt for forgiveness.

Kurt had calmed down by then. He forgave her, but did not trust her.

Brother Travis and the 10 elders and deacons of the church debated in private, and concluded that she was to be banished. It was known that she had a sister in Flower Mound, a farm community 25 miles away that had grown into an operations center for a dozen major companies when DFW airport was built just south of it. Instead of binding her limbs, putting her on a horse, and scaring it off, which is what most folks in that church thought of when they heard the ancient word “banishment,” Brother Travis and two other members helped her pack, and walked her there personally.

Though that was three years ago, Kurt had been terrified that something would happen again to Sophie. Now, as easily as Jessica Wallace had walked off with tiny, nine year old Sophie, his fears started walking away. She was not a frail child anymore. She was capable of facing enemies, both imaginary and real.

As Kurt knew well, the ones in your head were the most persistent.

* * *

Sophie cranked the radio several times, then set it to shortwave. WWV in Fort Collins, Colorado, was still broadcasting at 20 MHz, and she found the clicks that marked the seconds soothing. At the hour and half-hour, a synthesized but pleasant voice said, “National Institute of Standards and Technology time. This is Radio Station WWV, Fort Collins, Colorado, broadcasting on internationally allocated standard carrier frequency twenty megahertz, providing time of day, standard time interval, and other related information. Inquiries regarding these transmissions may be directed to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Radio Station WWV, 2000 East County Road 58, Fort Collins, Colorado, 80524.”

There was no “other related information,” ever. No weather reports for the Atlantic or Pacific. No satellite confirmations for the Coast Guard. Just a tick, every second, and that announcement every 30 minutes. The clock of the world was on autopilot.

She liked to hear the mailing address. She’d lip sync it as she stared out the window, imagining what Road 58 looked like, imagining a mailman in a white Jeep with plastic boxes of junk mail, Christmas presents, and magazines, bouncing on an ill-kept country road, the stars bright overhead.

She spun the dial to the right, out of boredom. Static. She spun it to the left. Static. She spun to the right, as if finishing the spins of a combination lock... and heard garbled static. The dial was not near 20 MHz. She turned the dial until the signal became clear.

“This is the USS
Fort Worth
at Coast Guard Station Galveston. We have room for 41 survivors. We will update the count as we accept new passengers. Message repeats.”

She sat up to make sure she was awake. For a minute, nothing happened.

“This is the USS
Fort Worth
at Coast Guard Station Galveston. We have room for 41 survivors. We will update the count as we accept new passengers. Message repeats.”

It was a human voice. Female, Southern. Not Texas, maybe Tennessee. It was a recording, but of a live person.

“Dad!”

She heard him slide the screen door open.

“You need to hear this.”

Chapter 2: When Girls Wore Skirts

Kurt, too, needed to hear it twice before it soaked in. This was real. He went to the driveway, opened the passenger door, which coated his fingers with thick, yellow pollen, and got the old accordion map out of the glove box. He hadn’t started the car in a year. There was a gallon of gasoline left, though he’d never added stabilizer, so it was junk now. He knew it was silly to keep the car in the driveway, but he didn’t want to give it up, even if it had flat tires and would become a home for squirrels and dandelions. In Texas, a car was more than transportation; it defined status, as a horse did when the land was part of Mexico. A man without transportation was a
peón
, not to be respected.

Holding the flashlight in his mouth, he opened the map wide, moving the beam from Dallas to Houston to Galveston, then looked at the map legend.
About 300 miles. Maybe we could do 20 miles a day on foot, maybe a little more. That’d be two weeks. Too long. Bikes! 15 miles an hour... no, she’s still a kid... call it 10 MPH, riding 10 hours a day, 100 miles a day, three days. That was doable. That could happen.

Kurt smiled and took the flashlight out of his mouth.

“Sophie!”

She yelled back, from her room. “Yeah, Dad?”

He smirked. Why don’t kids just come when they’re called?

“Come here.”

She came, and was happy to see that he was happy.

“Let’s go bike shopping.”

They packed their gear and headed out.

* * *

There were thousands of bikes in the Dallas suburb of Frisco. Some rusting in the weather, but most were in garages, or still in stores. Kurt decided he wanted to do it right. He’d not had a bike since he was a kid, but knew there was a branch of the famous Richardson Bike Mart down Preston road. Before leaving the yard, he and Sophie spent a few minutes filling a plastic bag with pecans from a young tree.

Society was both more brutal and kinder than it used to be. Unexpected visitors showed up with gifts – usually fruit or cornbread, sometimes jerky. Water was too heavy to carry as a give-away.

The gift showed you came in peace, that you probably weren’t there to rob them or kick them out. It was a little odd to visit at night, but not unheard of. The days were often too hot to socialize, so people gathered at sundown to chat, trade, or tell of good spots for berries or fish.