The dwindling sunlight broke in pieces through the canopy to illuminate patches on the forest floor. A lone chroner dashed through the yellowing light. His green fatigues blended with the brush, but he still showed signs of unease, a gun in each hand, as he sprinted in ten-foot bursts from one tree to the next.
After several sporadic dashes, he reached an old brick building cradled deep in a circle of trees. It was a standard safe house in the Collective for any chroner caught out too late in the New Wilds. The wall facing outward was a doorless bay entrance, revealing a stone floor and empty, insecure interior. The chroner went to a back corner in the structure, where a wood-plank lattice concealed a basement stairwell. Someone had recently disturbed the area around the opening, and the chroner paused to examine the bootprints in the dust before proceeding down the wooden steps, pulling the board back over his head once he was underground.
The building had a large basement filled with old chairs and divans. The walls were made of smooth concrete blocks painted gray, although the chipped and peeling paint revealed a coat of white hiding underneath. Sitting in a far corner, on an old recliner sloughing its fabric, was a soldier – obviously a soldier for his green flak jacket and MR105 rifle. He held the gun vertical, the stock on the ground, his forehead resting against butterfly muzzle. He watched without word or movement as the chroner came down the stairs. The chroner paused at the bottom step as his sight adjusted to the wavering light. The soldier had two candles burning in the basement, one near the foot of the stairs and the other on a stack of rotting wood a meter to his left. As the chroner discerned more detail on the soldier, he lowered his guns, sliding one into a side holster. The soldier remained leaning against his rifle, his eyes heavy, his hands and fingernails outlined with dirt, his light brown hair streaked with grease and mud.
The chroner surveyed the basement with a quick glance into the dark corners. “Only you?”
“Only me.”
“How did you know about this place?”
“You guys didn’t hide it very well.”
“We never had to worry about people in this area. Not before that damn Pioneer Pass.” The chroner paused. “When did you get back?”
“Why? You worried about infection?”
“I seen thousands of soldiers, alive and dead,” the chroner said. “If I ain’t adapted to whatever you guys are carrying, then I’m already dead. This is just conversation since I’m stuck with you.” He sat down at the bottom step, nudging away the candle so he too sat in partial darkness.
“I came back almost two years ago,” the soldier said. “Before the travel embargo.”
“Didn’t they tell you what was going on here?”
“Yeah. Not specifically, but we all got travel passes, and I know a lotta guys who went to Azania. Final vacation, they called it. That’s what they used to call the Army.”
“I woulda gone to Azania. Fresh fruit. Water reserves. No troggs.”
“I needed to come back. I was looking for someone. I am looking for someone.” The soldier looked up. “Have you seen a girl with some long ink on her left arm? It looks like a dragon, but it’s actually a snake.”
“Nope. But yer chances of finding one person in this land of corpses—”
“Her name is Eileen. I met her on my Web disk. When I was overseas.”
“Thought soldiers weren’t allowed.”
“We found ways.” The soldier again rested his forehead on his rifle muzzle. “The one-point-o disks were easy to open. Helped pass the time, and there were hundreds of girls online wanting to talk dirty to a soldier.”
“It was the same way with us,” the chroner said. “Used to be, we were the only ones who could deal with the end of the world. Girls liked that. But then the Elders build a road, and suddenly everyone thinks they’re a soldier. No offense. There are trogg packs on one side and the Southern Alliance on the other, but people see a road and it makes them soft and they have soft kids who think they can go anywhere and suddenly we’re on the way to another collapse.”
“I don’t know about that. I just want to find Eileen. Funny thing, when I first met her online, she was killing time. It was during an outbreak. She got into the heavy chat well enough, but one night, it was before the Sea of Japan, we started talking. Regular talking. Her dad had been killed by a pack of troggs, and they were moving inland. She told me she was going to get ink for each thing she lost, her dad, her house, her pet cat. So she would never forget.”
“Let me guess. She asked for gold. Or your rations. So she could buy ink. Or pay the artist.”
“No. Never.”
“Then she was waiting for a bigger payoff.”
“She wasn’t.”
“Trust me. There are a thousand scams out there.”
“I know. I know a scam when I see one. Eileen was real. She got ink of her dad on the top of her foot.”
“That what she told you?”
“She sent me pictures. It was the word ‘DAD,’ and her foot was puffy and bleeding.”
“Probably infected.”
“She did that one first, on her own. Then she wised up. She recruited needlers while they were on the road. She got her cat,” the soldier touched his right forearm, “her house,” he touched his left shoulder blade, “her younger brother,” he touched his right ankle, “and the beach across her lower back. I think she was saving the left foot for her mother. But she would never say that.”
“How did the snake come in?”
“What?”
“You said she had a snake on her arm.”
“That was some stupid thing on the road. The group she was with, they found a guy with a pet snake. They wouldn’t let him join unless they could eat the snake. Pretty simple request but he started crying. He was gonna go off on his own, and they were gonna let him die, but Eileen said she would put the snake on her arm, to make it live forever, you know, as part of the deal. And he agreed. That’s just the way she is. I would have shot the snake and then the guy. But she’s a peacemaker. Even with everything going wrong in the world.”
“I haven’t eaten snake in years. Can’t remember the last one I saw.”
The solider sighed. “Eileen asked for my picture after that. Right before the Battle of Formosa. I was going on her right shoulder blade. I sent it to her, even though it was bad luck.”
“Bad luck? You survived, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. But I never heard from her again. I was supposed to die there, like everybody else.”
“Maybe you got your bad luck switched. A lot of people died leaving the east coast.”
“Nah, she’s alive,” the soldier said. “That’s why I’m here.”
The chroner grinned, stifled a laugh. “So you’re out here looking for her? Are you worried the ink isn’t representin’ you properly?”
“No. I just need to find her. I been all kinds of places, looking for her. I was with Bob Betterton.”
“You were a Betterton boy?”
“He was looking for soldiers. I needed transportation to the middle.”
“I saw the Betterton group once. In a settlement. It was so crowded I couldn’t get to the stage to see how he did it.”
“Did what?”
“Faked it. Faked the cures.”
“We weren’t selling cures. We didn’t fake anything.”
“That was the pitch. You can’t deny that.”
“We had to exaggerate the Betterton Method at first, to score a treaty with the Southern Alliances. But it wasn’t a cure. We would go into these settlements, hundreds of people with the yellowed eyes, all hunched over, and they would give us anything, food, gold, horses, so Betterton would take their blood.
“He had a device, three large silver balls fused to a silver platter, and he would take a blood sample, drop it in a reservoir in the center of the platter, and he could trace your infection back through every person who had it.”
“That’s it? That’s what people were paying for?”
“Betterton called it disease memories.”
“That’s trogg slop. Everyone I ever met, they want to forget.”
“That’s what I thought. But Betterton was smart. He had been working at a blood lab, before the floods, and they’d figured out how to read the history of the virus. Betterton could explain it better. See, the virus gets a mark from each carrier. It’s like a floatin’ family tree. One drop of blood and you can learn who had it right before you, three times back, even a hundred times back. And I seen thousands of people throw down everything they own in this crater to learn who had the virus before them. Betterton knew, somehow, this would happen. He took the blood reader and carrier database, after the lab flooded, and started doin’ readings for people on his own, and in less than a month, he had enough silver, food, and water to hire his own army. Then he started to plan his trip into the New Wilds.”
“Hell,” the chroner said, spitting on the floor. “Why not move down to New Beach Haven. Live like a king.”
The soldier shook his head. “I don’t know. I didn’t worry about it. I was happy to get the money. I was in Ithaca, back from Formosa carrying nothing but this rifle. I was looking for Eileen, one person in this mess of people. What else could I do? Betterton was hiring soldiers to guard him, protect his equipment. Gave us free blood readings too. Eileen wasn’t in his list. I checked. So I didn’t think I would stay, you know. Earn a little silver. Get some food. Then leave to find Eileen. I didn’t expect anyone to show up anyway. But that first day, Betterton set up a small tent, where people could come in, one at a time, get a finger prick and the platter would tell them their virus history. In less than an hour there were hundreds of people lined up, beyond the tent, beyond the town, maybe for three miles. So I stayed. Figured it was a matter of time before she appeared.
“I was crowd control for Betterton. I walked the line. Made sure people kept straight, didn’t fight. I only had to kill two people in that time. They were pretty well behaved. They wanted to get pricked. I didn’t know why, but I was too busy looking for Eileen to think about that.
“After a month, Betterton rotated me into the tent. He always had two soldiers with him. In case the people got too rowdy, agitated, or whatever. I remember this family. They came in one after the other, first the dad, then the sister, then the mother and she had vials of blood for all the family members who were too sick to step outside. I’m surprised they still had a house to go home to, when they finished paying for all that, but they had to know, they were rabid to find out, who was the first in the family to get infected. Who brought it into their home. It was the son. Vial number two. He had picked up a strain from the southern coastline. Kid was half-dead already, and the father helped him with the rest.
“There were hundreds of families like that. They paid in food and guns and shoes and silver. Betterton could have retired after that first month. I’ll bet he had a hundred houses by then. But he wanted to go into the New Wilds. It was a crazy move, risking his own life, all our lives, going out here just to collect blood. I was still looking for Eileen, so I was ready to go, but many of the soldiers held out. They were ready to leave the Betterton caravan, take their pay and leave.
“But Betterton explained to us once, why he did what he did, why we had to go into the New Wilds. He said everybody already knows the people in New Beach Haven, old politicians, businessmen, military leaders, but despite all that they’ve done, no one’s gonna remember them after another five years. History’s squeezing down to this narrow tube, like a funnel, with room for only a few people to go through to the other side. There’s only one person in this world people’ll remember. The person who finds the cure. Other than that, thousands of people, they live and die, and it doesn’t matter. Betterton said, he knew he wasn’t the one to find the cure. Didn’t have the right tools. So he had to do something else. This was it. And it worked, you know. I been everywhere, even in places the caravan never went, and everyone’s heard about Betterton. No one but maybe Vick Popplewell is as famous. And they both had their own army. Betterton bought us guns, explosives, vehicles. That convinced most of the soldiers to stay with the caravan. We were a whole company marching along on the Wild trails, as if we were gonna fight a whole pack of troggs.
“Made things tense at the Southern Alliance settlements, at least in the beginning. This was before the Pioneer Pass, before the Elders, when the militias still had a choice who could stay and who died. Not that they could have done anything against us. But Betterton didn’t want confrontation. He wanted to offer his services to the people. Maybe he exaggerated a bit at first, and after a while, maybe someone starts thinking Betterton has a cure. And you don’t correct his misinterpretation. In the end it didn’t matter. He didn’t charge at first, but pretty soon people were payin’ us, the camp leaders, the other people, just to get to the head of the line. So the Southern Alliances gave us free passage.”
“But you never found Eileen,” the chroner said.
“Betterton got too big. People would crowd the caravan, day and night, pushing to the front, stepping on bodies and babies, and we needed extra rows of bodyguards, with the biggest guys we could find in the front. Got to where I didn’t see anyone unless they had something to trade, food, clothes, anything to get to the front of the line. And when everyone is giving you everything you could want, pretty soon that’s all you think about. Your head fills up, pushes other thoughts out to the edge where your memory’s not so good. You get a whiff once in a while, you know you’re forgetting something, but it’s out of reach, on the edge of remembering. That was me. Every day I woke up and forgot about Eileen, like a part of my brain was closed off from the rest. So I could either spend the day in a daze, trying to break into those memories, or I could focus on the stuff in front of me, which just kept piling up. These boots—” The soldier pulled up his pants cuffs to show a pair of stiff leather boots. “They came from an old guy. He was missing three fingers. He had all his toes, so I didn’t feel bad about taking his boots. He had three daughters, one for each missing finger, and he wanted them tested. Had to donate these boots to get to the front of the line. To get into Betterton’s blood tent, he had three daughters for that.”
“Your memory seems fine,” the chroner said.
“I had total recall. You hear about that, like when there’s an event that pops it all back into place. You see, I got sloppy at work. I was too busy sorting through a pile of donations. Forgot to check a woman before she went into the tent. I swear, it was the first time I forgot to frisk someone. But how would I know that for sure, huh? Doesn’t matter. She had a knife hidden in her belt, and she was swinging at Betterton the minute the tent flap closed. She didn’t hate him or nothing, she just wanted to borrow some of the Betterton fame. I had to blow the back of her head off. Hell, it could have been Eileen right there. It wasn’t until she was on the ground that I thought to check for ink. That’s when it all came back to me. I started tearing off her clothes, checking her shoulders, her back, her arms. I didn’t know why I was doing it at first. Then I started to remember, the snake, the beach, the names on her feet. Like I was finally able to put Eileen back together, piece by piece in my head.
“I had to leave Betterton. He had reached the end anyway. He’d always had a purpose with his blood database, but he wasn’t willing to die for it. That woman, she was the third or fourth who had tried to steal a little of his fame. So Betterton closed up the database, said it was near complete already.”
“Couldn’t have been that close to done,” the chroner said. “He never got me.”
“He could find you in the gaps. There were holes in the lines, sure, but he could fill those easy. He showed me the hole that was Eileen. He traced the history of the virus to her home, the one inked on her left thigh, to a short gap where his record skipped a few carriers. She was there. It had come from a kid, a dead kid. The parents had nothing but his hand to be tested. From the kid, the virus went into the hole – and on the other side was a guy, an average guy like you or me with nothing to trade. Betterton had given him the test for free. He did that sometimes, just to fill the holes. He was carrying the virus from Eileen and he passed it to an old woman who lived in the Southern Alliance settlement closest to the coast. They were all alive. And she is too.”
“Yeah, good luck finding her,” the chroner said, his eyes drooping. “I have to say, I been around, heard lotta stories about missing kids, girls, families, and yours was definitely the longest. I’m not complaining. It’s probably early enough now that you got some sunlight up there. You can continue your search, and I can finally get some sleep. We both get what we want.”
The soldier had stiffened as the chroner spoke and now stood up, holding his rifle parallel at his waist. “It ain’t daylight yet.”
“Yeah, but I don’t think you’re ready to get in a shooting match down here, what with all your unfinished business. So I’m gonna ask you to leave anyway.”
The solider fingered the trigger on his rifle but nothing more. “I will keep looking for Eileen,” he said. “And once I walk up those stairs, I won’t remember you.”
“Not that it matters, but I think you will,” the chroner said. “It seems you’re pretty good at remembering these little encounters. You don’t really have a choice, do you?” The chroner also stood and moved away from the stairs, into the inky black deep in the basement, until his voice was floating out of the darkness. “Go on, kid. I’m sure you get a lot of sympathy with that story. But not here. Yer thinking’s soft. You’re not seeing the world like it really is. I ain’t gonna talk you out of it. I just don’t want to see you any more.”
“You want me to leave you down here?” the soldier said. “I might roll a rock over the exit. You’d be trapped.”
The chroner, still in the dark, shrugged, discarded that possibility. But the soldier couldn’t see that, only the final, ominous command floating out from the blackness – “Eileen is waiting.”
The soldier held his stance for another minute, then pounded up the stairs, his heavy footfalls shaking the wooden structure. He left the trapdoor open, forcing the chroner to ascend the stairs and again seal off the basement so he could rest.
