California(23)

Cal had just shrugged at Frida’s interest, didn’t want to encourage her curiosity. Not like Micah, who loved to discuss them. The Communities made him murderously angry. They pissed off Cal, too, but he tried not to think of a world he couldn’t enter.

“Did you ask August how many Spike People there are?”

“He wouldn’t say.”

After Cal’s conversation with Bo, when the work of survival was backbreaking and difficult and the night a stinging kind of cold, Cal thought he and Frida might like being among the Spike People. Sometimes he felt the loneliness wrap around them like a net, especially once the Millers had died and they were living in their house. It was then that he wished to be allowed inside those spiky borders.

But he knew better. At the end of his story, Bo had leaned forward. “It’s better to stay put, Calvin.” His voice was stern, and then it turned ragged, almost desperate. “They’re not afraid to use violence. That’s what August told me. You stay put, Cal. You understand me?”

Cal said nothing. Frida and Sandy were headed toward them, their voices getting louder, closer. “Don’t tell your wife about this,” Bo whispered.

“Why not?”

“No need to worry her,” Bo said, which had made sense at the time.

So Cal had never told Frida what he knew, maybe only because he had promised to keep quiet. He didn’t want to scare her, but now she knew so little that she might do something rash. She didn’t realize that they had to stay put in order to remain safe. Their curiosity would get them killed. How could he tell her that, without revealing all that he’d kept from her?

Cal realized now that Bo had known all along that he and his family would die soon. That’s why it was easy to pass on the secret. Maybe it was a parting gift.

After the Millers had poisoned themselves, Frida and Cal spent a lot of time trying to understand their motives. But they kept coming up empty-handed. Had one of them been sick? Had they felt a sudden exhaustion with this life? Was someone after them? They only had questions.

By the time August found them living at the Millers’ place, he didn’t ask many questions. He had wanted to know where the others were, and when Cal said, “They ate poison,” the man simply nodded and went on with his sales pitch, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“You don’t look surprised,” Cal had said to him, when Frida ran inside to grab something to trade. “About the Millers, I mean.”

August merely raised an eyebrow.

“I’m not implying anything,” Cal said quickly.

“I didn’t think you were,” August said. “But, no, I’m not surprised. Bo got the poison from me. He traded me his gun for it. He asked for assistance, and I gave it.”

“Are you one of the Spike People?”

“What?” But then August understood. “Bo told you.”

“Why don’t they come here?”

“They believe in containment.”

“Cut the cultspeak. I want to know.”

It killed Cal not to have the full picture. How could he live in ignorance after he’d used every argument he had, every fact available to him, to convince Frida to leave L.A.? He’d told her there was a better world beyond than the one they knew. It was untouched; it had to be. A year before they left, another flu epidemic had hit the Northeast, and the population had been cut in half. (At least there was an upside of the oil crisis, people said; disease couldn’t afford to travel very far anymore.) The storm that killed his parents in Ohio had been followed by bigger and worse ones, and before the Internet went dead entirely, Cal read that only a third of the population in the Midwest and the South remained. “Anyone who’s left is staying put,” he told her. That was true in L.A., where people hung on to what was familiar. The city was rotting, it couldn’t be denied, but at least it was their city. And even if people wanted to leave, the state of the roads and the rising price of gasoline kept most from doing it. Soon, the oil would run out. Kaput.

“What about the Pirates?” Frida had asked, many times. There were stories about people who had tried to leave town only to be murdered as soon as they crossed the city limits. Rumor had it that Pirates collected victims’ teeth and hair and recycled them into household goods. Women were raped, people said. Men tortured. Cal didn’t know what to tell Frida, except that there was no proof that the Pirates really existed. He’d researched it, asked around, and came up with only more gossip, more fear. First he told her they had to be a myth. Then he promised her they’d drive fast and that they’d only stop to refuel once they were safely in the woods.

“And I have the gun,” he’d said. Someone who worked with Frida had sold it to them a few months prior.

On their way, Cal and Frida had been vigilant, but there had been no trouble. A miracle, Frida said at the time. They’d seen no one but that one harmless man, and Cal’s theory turned out to be right: everyone left was either hibernating in the cities, waiting out hard times as if they’d ever end, or they were safe in the Communities. Or they lived out in the middle of nowhere and didn’t want to cause trouble. Could that be the whole story, though?

“It’s safe if you mind your own business,” August had said suddenly to Cal. “Don’t kid yourself—they can’t be bothered with you.”