“See you tonight,” the woman replied.
As they continued their walk, Marta amended her impression of the setting from “camp” to “village.” A township had coalesced around what she assumed were the remains of the old Ruby City campgrounds: a cluster of a dozen or so small, cube-shaped cabins, all built with porches facing the river. The air smelled of wood smoke and crackling animal fat (the travelers’ stomachs rumbled loudly in chorus). Outside one cabin, two men, shirtsleeves rolled above their elbows and aprons tied across their middles, worked in rapid synchronicity at a galvanized metal box, one turning a hand crank with sure, steady motions, the other dropping whole ears of corn into an opening at the top, the two of them creating a terrific clamor, a growing pile of shucked cobs, and a trembling pan full of kernels. They didn’t pause as the OLE group filed by, but the man at the crank watched them, puffing air off his bottom lip to part the hair dangling over his eyes. In front of another cabin, a woman and man tended a huge outdoor stone hearth. This, Marta saw, was the source of the delicious aroma. The woman, using a brush with a long wooden handle, daubed a row of small pink bodies with brown liquid, and the coals beneath them sizzled as they dripped. The man hunched down, added a log to the flames, and blew through cupped hands. Behind them, a broad, makeshift table was pinned with the hides of whatever the couple were roasting. Each hide stretched in six different directions, like a starburst. The effect wasn’t graphic or disturbing, even to Marta’s sheltered gaze—just grimly efficient.
Beside her, Wes said, “Wow. This is a whole community. Can you believe it?”
Marta murmured an agreeable sound, but she didn’t share his surprise, exactly. When she was a girl, and the news drones still flew, you heard all the time about camps, towns, even small cities hanging on between zones. There had been a webshow called Roughing It!, Marta remembered. Her father and brother liked it. Her brother, when teasing her, would threaten to send her to one of the smoking heaps of rubble depicted in shaky night-vision video. Glowing green outlines of humans, eyes flickering in the infrared light like coals. Satellite footage of shanty villages, not so different from this one, built along once bustling city thoroughfares, riverwalks. No, what surprised her wasn’t the existence of the community but its normality, its calm. No microsuits, no Stamps. And yet, somehow—no obvious fear of ticks, either. How was it possible?
They passed a soap maker. A baker. (The sour-sweet smell of yeast—such delicious agony.) The tradespeople mostly worked out of the onetime vacation cabins, or on the lawns outside them, but there were buildings of more recent construction, too: trim, simply made cabins comprised, almost charmingly, of scavenged materials as well as new lumber. There was art here, Marta thought, evident all the more as they left what appeared to be the trade district and entered the town proper, which extended broadly along both sides of the river, joined by the newer footbridge she had spied when their walk began. Here the land had been cleared to make room for a scattering of structures, each unique, several beautiful enough to imagine they were somewhere back home, perhaps in one of the posh little eco-communities around the university. The first such building they passed was clad in multicolor scraps of corrugated metal; the windows, all mismatched, flanked a set of mismatched double doors, which were thrown wide open onto a broad front porch. Here, folks gathered—old, gray, stooped over knotty canes or games of what appeared to be checkers and chess. A dozen of them, men and women, their drab garb brightened by odd touches. One man, she noted as she passed close, wore a vest stippled with all kinds of pins and yellowing buttons—from this distance, she could read “Vote Reed” and “I ∏”—reminding Marta of the waitstaff at a restaurant chain that the boys liked back home, Looney’s. (The boys—how her heart twisted at the thought of them. Would she see them again?) The woman by his side had her wispy gray hair tucked up into a brimmed red velvet hat, which was moth-eaten and adorned with a spray of feathers. Her lips—the upper lip was seamed with scar tissue—were painted a matching shade. She pursed those crimson lips with distaste at the OLE group. Maybe she could smell them. Marta could no longer smell herself, but she guessed that this wasn’t because she had suddenly started sweating rosewater.
The building wasn’t marked with a sign, but the glimpse Marta got through the open double doors revealed what appeared to be a kind of general store: rows of canned foods, piles of furs, a slumped burlap bag, near the door, with a handle jutting up out of it.
“Town grocery and supply,” Curtis confirmed. It was the first time he’d spoken since bidding the woman at the footbridge goodbye. There was a note of pride in his voice, as if he couldn’t quite resist showing off a bit for his captives, though he considered them beneath such effort.
“How does it work?” Wes asked. “Do you have a currency?” His face was pink with the walk and cool air, with the sun and the breeze, and he looked very young to Marta—of course he was young, a baby, really, no matter his accomplishments—and he sounded almost enthusiastic, as if he were posing a question to one of his college professors rather than speaking with a gun to his back.
Lee, from somewhere behind them, made a disbelieving grunting noise.
Curtis seemed amused. “You want to study our economy, Mr. Feingold? We do have money of a sort. June may want to explain to you. Or maybe she won’t. The grocery is a co-op. Everyone in town owns an equal portion.”
Wes nodded vigorously. He looked as if he had a follow-up question, or a series of them, but Marta nudged her shoulder into his, and after casting her a quick, apologetic look, he pinched his lips closed.
Who was June? That was Marta’s question. But she knew better than to ask it.
“Bye, baldies,” one of the old men called as the group moved off behind their guide, and the collection of porch geezers roared with laughter.