Twelve years later they were a broken field of rubble. Arches and overpasses had collapsed, potholes had opened up as cracks in the earth and then widened to become great fissures in the concrete, deep holes within which lurked rusted twists of rebar that could slash a tire to ribbons. Every fleck of water on the road could be a puddle or it could be a deep hole in the earth big enough to swallow them up. Mud and dirt had spilled across the roadway, blocking it in places, washing it away entirely in others. Plant life sprung up from every pit and pock mark. Here and there a simple crack had been opened up by a line of trees, running at crazy angles across the road, their roots hurling up fist-and head-sized chunks of paving material.
Erasmus kept the truck moving at a steady five miles an hour and stopped every time an obstruction presented itself. Still Ayaan was thrown around in her seat like a doll in an empty suitcase. She held on to a thick metal handle mounted on the dashboard and tried to keep her head from cracking against the window every time the car bounced over another piece of rubble.
The truck could just as easily have gone off-road but conditions out there were far worse. Looking out the window Ayaan was startled to see that New Jersey'a place she had always associated with toxic chemical plants and forgotten factories'was apparently one vast forest that went on forever. The trees did part from time to time but she saw no cities, just burnt-out electrical sub-stations and mazes of housing developments as convoluted as the passages of the human digestive system. It was hard to find a single house still intact. The roofs of the houses fell inward on themselves, or their walls had devolved into unorganized piles of bricks. They passed through great zones where fire had taken its toll and ashes whipped through the air as thick as snow. In other regions it looked to Ayaan like a massive earthquake had tried to suck the suburbs down into the very belly of the earth. A fault line ran through one neighborhood of Trenton, a vast and inclined plane of ground at the bottom of which glass and brick and steel had collected in a kind of homogeneous mass, a stagnant pool of sharp edges.
After about six hours of rumbling and rolling over the fragmented highway they stopped to stretch their legs. This was mostly for her benefit, Erasmus told her'she was still newly dead and prone to fits of rigor mortis. He must have seen the look on her face when she heard that, even if she had quickly hidden her mouth with her hand.
'Everybody pays,' he told her, his voice weary. Then he popped open his door and leapt down to the hot black surface of the road.
They had stopped in a region halfway between housing developments and farmland. The concrete lip of the road stood at a slight angle, with a twisted mass of green and rusted signage hanging over them on steel pylons. One half-obscured sign read:
WELCO.... TO ..........YLVANIA Popu.ation 12,281,054
Beyond lay a grassy depression in the earth, a mile-wide bowl of land half-filled with weather-beaten, falling down houses, giant concrete blocks with crumbling faces, subsidiary roads only recognizable now because they were less overgrown than the surrounding land. A thin mist hovered in the bowl, a last shred of vapor as yet not burned off by the rising sun, protected by pine trees.
With a flurry of motion from one of the concrete blocks a bird launched itself into the air and threw itself in a long curving course over the hollow. Erasmus looked up at the green phantom on the roof of the truck and one of the corpses in the flatbed twitched to life. It spilled out into the depression like a top jerking away from its string.
Ayaan frowned and did some deep knee bends, some toe-touches. She could feel where her muscles had started to seize up and cramp. She wasn't expecting it when a few minutes later the accelerated ghoul returned and knelt down before her. It had the bird, the same bird she'd watch wing through the late-morning mist, impaled on one ulna.
The bird was still alive. It kept trying to tuck its wing under its breast but the spar of bone got in the way. Its blood splashed on the asphalt. Ayaan saw very little of that. What she saw was its energy, its tremulous golden energy, already flickering away. It was precious, that energy, that life. She reached out and freed the bird. She brought it closer, brought it toward her body.