Edie had long ago known better than to expect a literal line of salt, or even a less literal band of earth that had been treated with salt; the internet feeds had shown her plenty of grim pictures of long reaches of black earth, places where the old paved roads had boiled and run in bubbling eddies, at some point cooling and freezing in strange, almost beautiful formations. Andy himself had warned them, during one of the training sessions, that the first few outer-zone kilometers were “not pretty to look at.”
But the sight meeting her gaze as far as she could make out from her window was not merely burned, empty earth, as she had expected. The world just past the Wall was a wasteland of garbage—a seemingly endless mountain of trash that emitted a sulfurous odor that she realized now she had been smelling for kilometers and attributing in the back of her mind to the bus, which ran on one of the new biofuels. A couple of bulldozers trundled sluggishly across the surface, pushing the pile of trash ever upward, away from the wall, so that it peaked perhaps a couple of kilometers off, at a ridge that blocked out the sight of anything that lay beyond it.
“I know this looks bad,” Andy said from his position at the head of the bus.
“That’s a fucking understatement!” an angry male voice called from behind Edie.
Jesse, tight as a guitar string beside her, sunk clutching fingers into her forearm but didn’t speak. A panicked din rose in the bus, and another male voice, Lee Flannigan, it sounded like, called, “Turn this thing around! This was not disclosed!”
Andy murmured something to the driver, and the bus slowed to a stop. He stood stoically, hand raised as if he were a student waiting for the teacher to call on him. After a moment, the conversation ebbed.
“I’m going to talk briefly. If you don’t like what I say, we can turn around, but I warn you that you’ll have to go straight into Quarantine 2 for a week, regardless. So: May I speak?”
He received a surly silence in reply.
“What you see outside your windows lasts for another four-point-eight kilometers, and it stops as suddenly as it began. Your Outer Limits Excursion tour is exactly what you were promised it would be. There’s a lot of beauty to experience if you’ll trust me for just a little bit longer.”
“Why didn’t you just tell us it would be like this?” Marta asked.
“Honestly? Because this is unprecedented,” Andy said. “Our usual route through the Wall along the old Blue Ridge Parkway corridor has been closed by the Atlantic Zone Department of Border Security for maintenance, and we don’t know when the gate will reopen. We were, as of a week ago, granted permission to pass through this service entrance along the old I-40 corridor, which is normally only used for outer-zone contractors.”
“Why?” Edie found herself asking.
Andy gave her a surprised look. “Why, what?”
“Why did they bother giving you permission? Why not just make you cancel the excursion and refund us our money?” She felt a flutter of embarrassment at her automatic use of the word “our”; she wondered if Jesse had noticed and, if he did, what he thought.
“Well, a couple of reasons. One is that two million credits had already been invested into this excursion by some of the zone’s most influential and prominent citizens, and it’s bad economics to interfere with a transaction of that scale, especially on the basis of what amounts to a trifling technical issue.”
“Trifling,” Mickey Worthington said. “You call this trifling.”
“I do,” Andy said. “What you’re looking at is no secret. Congress passed legislation over thirteen years ago OK’ing the use of the outer-zone perimeter for waste disposal. This”—he thumbed out the window—“is nothing more than what you’re producing. Your garbage collector hauls it off in a truck once a week. You knew it was going somewhere.”
“It’s just a shock,” Wes Feingold said. “The scale of it.” He had a hand over his nose and mouth. “The smell.”
“It’s an efficient solution to an ongoing problem,” Andy said, “which is maintaining a perimeter that resists miner tick infiltration as well as border crossings by outer Zoners and zone refugees, mostly from Gulf. When this area was left empty, it required regular chemical treatment to prevent reforestation. Zone waste does the same job. The landfill ends up becoming a habitat for certain animals, of course, especially rodents, but many researchers argue that controlled habitats are as efficient a way to operate as eradicating the habitats entirely. And for whatever reason, the miner ticks seem not to like the rats very much. There’s a science team stationed just south of here trying to figure out why that is—what we can learn from the rats.”
What we can learn from the rats, Edie thought. Jesse would probably want to write that into a song later.
“It’s good environmental policy, and it’s good politics. In twenty years, this waste wall will extend along the western front of Atlantic Zone, a distance of almost sixteen hundred kilometers. The methane emissions are already helping to power the TerraVibra, which has resulted in considerable energy savings. I mean, listen. We’re one of the most advantageously positioned zones in the country, with the Appalachian Mountains to our front and the ocean to our back.” An ugly, almost angry expression flashed across his features, so quickly that Edie wondered if anyone else had seen it. “Other zones are not in such good shape.”
“They’re building fortifications,” Wendy Tanaka said.
“Something like that,” said Andy. “At any rate, this is one of the other reasons the excursion wasn’t canceled. The folks controlling the Wall are banking that you’ll like what you see, even if you don’t really like what you see, if that makes any sense.”
The murmuring now was more measured and subdued. Andy waited it out with patient aplomb.
“So what do you think?” he asked. “Do we keep going forward? Do you want to see what you pained and trained for?”
“Is this an all-or-nothing proposition?” Berto asked. “We all go or none of us?”
“Of course not,” said Andy. “This is a recreational excursion. It won’t be recreational if anyone is forced one way or the other. Though I will say that you of course have to be accompanied by your buddy, or able to pair off with a new buddy. And we need at least six travelers per guide, so if there’s less interest than that, my going forward becomes unfeasible. I like you all”—he smiled in a wry way, eyebrows raised—“but even I don’t operate purely out of the goodness of my heart. I’m sure you understand.”
“And refunds?” Lee Flannigan asked.