American War(33)

Every month, for the better part of a decade, Gerry Tusk would have taken this trip. He would have seen those children plead desperately for a cure he could not give them. Perhaps over time it turned something within him bitter.

How cathartic it must have been then, on that April day, when finally five of those near-vegetative subjects momentarily came alive, their faces breaking into ecstasy, their fingers gingerly uncurling. How the young scientist must have wept with delight that one of his potions finally worked. How he must have wanted, against his better judgment, to open the fortified door and lead his patients out to the laboratory’s great central lawn, to show them off like prize crops in spring.

And how cruel the universe must have seemed by the end of the same week, as the bodies of the momentarily unfrozen subjects were cast lifeless into the incinerator. In time, the thing Gerry Tusk created would come to be known as the Quick—a virus even more contagious than the one that put Carolina to sleep, and universally lethal. But at the moment of its genesis he knew it only as he knew all his failed creations, by a simple serial number: 032-072.

There exists no written record of the scientist’s own thoughts. But it is difficult to imagine those two days in April, when so bright a light so quickly turned to darkness, and not believe that it was at that moment that Gerry Tusk made the decision to trade his old life for something—anything—else.

It is all but known now that the Bouazizi Empire, eager to prolong the American civil war as much as possible, arranged the deal that granted the virologist his escape. On the morning of December 3, 2094, Gerry Tusk boarded the merchant vessel El Fattah at the Richmond harbor, bound eastward. His lethal creation paid his fare. The following year, the monster he bred would come alive on the steps of Reunification Square in Columbus, Ohio, and the first of more than one hundred million people would die.





CHAPTER SIX


By the banks of Chalk Hollow, Sarat hunted for pet food. She moved in graceful rampage over the broken branches and dried-up leaves, the dead things emitting a satisfying crunch beneath her bare feet. The branches were sharp and the leaves dusted with nettles but the girl felt none of it, her soles tough as leather.

She knelt and dug into the soil near where it met the water. On the surface the soil was warm from the sun but below it was cooler. She dug an elbow-length hole, looking for the little burrowing worms she recalled from her childhood. But there were none. Soon the bottom of the hole began to fill with river water, and she abandoned it.

Nearby, Marcus Exum picked at the fungi growing on the bark of stunted sweetgum trees. He slashed with a penknife at the roots of the wide, white-fleshed mushrooms and placed the bounty in his stitched blanket knapsack. One tree, collapsed completely, was barely visible beneath a second skin of mushrooms. Marcus picked at the parasitic growth until his bag was full, and a small segment of the tree’s coal-black bark was bare.

“He’ll eat that for sure,” Sarat said, climbing over the dead tree. “Heck, I’d eat that.”

“I don’t know,” Marcus replied, bending the edges of the mushroom back and forth. “Maybe it’s poisonous. My dad says a lot of the stuff growing out here is. Says anything growing out here people can eat, they already ate.”

“We’re feeding it to a turtle,” Sarat said. “A turtle ain’t people.”

“Yeah, but poison’s poison. It don’t know who’s eating it.”

“Well, she’s gotta eat something around here. Keep looking.”

Sarat wiped the soil from her hands on the sides of her COSCO Shipping T-shirt and scrambled back down the ravine in the direction of the creek.

She was confined to boys’ clothes now, there being no girls and hardly any women in the camp as tall as she was. And although it limited her to the worn-through jeans and scuffed shirts that once belonged to Simon and his friends, she found it liberating to no longer be measured against the unbearable standard of her sister, who counted in her sprawling wardrobe not a single piece of clothing fit for adventures like these.

She picked the green leaves and tiny flowers of an Alabama supplejack perched low against the water, its branches limp and thirsty. On the ground she discovered a small tangle of sweetgum seeds and black peppervine fruit. All these she deposited in her knapsack.

A few feet away, a clearing led down to the water’s edge. Sarat scrambled down until she was ankle-deep in the warm, muddy creek. A fine sheet of blue-green scum covered the surface of the water. She brushed it away and dipped a thermos into the river and filled it. The water below was tinted brown and, lifted to the light of the sun, glistened with fine particulate.

A hundred feet beyond, the sheltered estuary of Chalk Hollow fed into Sandy Creek, and a mile further to the east, Sandy Creek met the Tennessee River. Sarat could see the rebel skiffs in the far distance, docked near the ruined wharf of an abandoned marina. When the daylight began to fade, they would cross.

Many times the children had seen the rebels, and the rebels had seen the children. Often they crossed paths at Chalk Hollow, where the camp’s feeble fencing was bent and torn to shreds. Over the years, the camp’s residents had learned not to venture this far east, where the rebel boats docked, nor to the north, where clashes between the rebels and the Northern militias had grown more and more frequent.

But to Sarat this place was a small paradise—a land teeming with life, away from the human pollution and unmagical monotony of the camp itself. Soon the rebels became used to the site of the broad, fuzzy-haired girl and her runty friend. They ignored the children, saw in them neither threat nor enticement; the boy was too small, the girl too big.