They rode silently in the van’s middle two bench seats, blindfolded, wrists bound, Anastasia and Wendy up front, Jesse and Lee in the back. Andy had expected questions, demands, protests, complaints. Requests for a bathroom break. Chit-chat among themselves to pass the time. Three hours on the road, though, and nothing. The occasional cough or sniff, some gas passing odiferous enough to eclipse, briefly, the smell of body odor, but silence ruled, and it was a relief to Andy after the frantic pitch of the last few days.
Following June’s instructions, he exited the old I-40 corridor at Morganton. The road here was in very bad shape. Potholes abounded. Whole sections of the pavement had sloughed away. The biggest craters had been leveled with gravel at some point, and the bridge over the Catawba was in good enough repair to traverse (heart lodged in throat), but Andy was giving the shocks on the old van a workout, and the vibration through the steering wheel was strong enough to make his arms go numb from elbows to fingertips. Soon, too, there was the other vibration, the one coming off the Wall, and as usual—as many times as he’d made this approach, from one side or the other—Andy was struck by a sense of deep unease, of wrongness. The Wall bothered some people more than others. Tia had claimed to hardly notice it. “I had it worse when the muffler on my car came loose,” she said once. For Andy, the vibration was insidious, alive, and he found it hard to think clearly when he was operating within the Wall’s shadow.
“You took us off the interstate,” Anastasia said, raising her voice to be heard over the noise of the van’s progress.
“There’s a smaller gate into the zone through Lenoir,” Andy said. “Video surveillance along the route isn’t as extensive. I can get you closer before leaving.”
He drove another five minutes, ten. Checked the map June had given him. As she’d indicated, there was a parking lot ahead on the right, and the remains of an L-shaped building with a red metal roof. He pulled in, shifted to Park. Shut off the engine.
“You can take off your blindfolds,” he told the four.
They did—more tentatively than he would have expected—and squinted against the late afternoon sun.
“This is where we part ways,” Andy said. “Go on and get out of the van. Then I’ll clip your wrist ties.”
They hesitated. Andy exhaled loudly and grabbed his gun from the passenger seat where he’d tossed it. “Jesus Christ. Don’t make me wave this thing around anymore. Do you want to come back to the village with me? Christ.”
Jesse Haggard moved, hunching over to pull the door handle, awkward with his hands still bound, and slid it open. Oh, he’d had no trouble leaving his girlfriend behind to return to the land of milk and honey. Made a big show of kissing her goodbye. Didn’t even offer to trade places with her—Andy had thought him capable of that much—and hopped into the van as if they were heading out on a field trip to the water park.
Lee followed. Then the women. When they were all out, Andy grabbed the duffel bag from the passenger floorboard and joined them, sliding the revolver into his holster.
“Wrists,” he said, brandishing his knife. They offered them to him. Four pops. Four neon-colored plastic ties left on the ground where they’d dropped. They did their dance, now familiar: wrist rubbing, stretching, craning their necks left, right, cracking their backs.
“Your boots and Stamps are in that bag, along with some water and energy bars.” He pointed up the road. “The checkpoint is about three kilometers ahead. Follow the road. You’ll walk right into it. Don’t expect them to roll out the welcome wagon for you. Be polite, be agreeable. Do as they say. Yes sir. No sir. Let them know you’re unarmed. When you’re into Quarantine and they’ve confirmed your IDs, you’ll get treated like VIPs again.”
They looked down at the bag, then up the road.
“What are you waiting for? Kiss goodbye?”
Anastasia eyed him with loathing, hunched down, drew the drawstring on the bag. She rooted around, drew out a pair of boots tied together by the shoestrings, checked the tag in the tongue. Tossed them to Jesse Haggard, who sat on the rotten old cement and started to pull them on. Stamps followed boots. Water and food followed Stamps. Andy waited until the bag was empty, its contents transferred to the four men and women with stubbled scalps and grimed microsuits, and then climbed back into the van. He pressed the automatic lock button as soon as he’d done so.
“Good luck,” he said through a crack in the window.
Jesse Haggard threw up his middle finger. Andy laughed.
“See you around,” he said, and he started the engine.
He drove back southeast on Highway 18, moving his visor to block the red ball of sun ahead on the right. He’d noted the turnoff when he passed it, but he had a hard time seeing with the light in his eyes like this, so he slowed to a crawl much earlier than he probably needed to.
Here it was. State Road 1430.
Going maybe fifteen, twenty kilometers an hour, so he could refer to his map but also because this asphalt here was in even worse shape than Highway 18’s had been, Andy watched for Highland Road, then Nick Road, making a right both times, passing a half-buried old sign marking the Turtle (or was it Tuttle?) Educational State Forest. Less than a kilometer south of the intersection was the turnoff June had marked on the map with a star: Cannon Town Road. Comes to dead end, her note said. Park at house.
He checked the van’s digital clock: 4:48. They’d been walking maybe fifteen minutes, so he still had plenty of time.
The road here—dirt, with two wheel tracks defined by new gravel in the spots that would get muddy after a rain—climbed uphill, then leveled, and this was where Andy found the promised house. At first glance, you wouldn’t mark it as special. It seemed to be in perhaps marginally better repair than the houses Andy had passed coming up here: brick ranch homes with metal carports and large rusting septic tanks, the roofs decaying, window glass shattered, kudzu sinking its tendrils into the rotting mortar. At this house, glass glinted behind the boarded-over windows. The roof, though very old, seemed to be intact. But as he exited the van and approached, Andy’s eyes lit on other evidence of recent use, even upkeep. The nail heads fitting the old boards to the windows were untarnished. A steel plate had been affixed to the front door, and a new-looking padlock dangled from the hasp, its shank a good centimeter thick. Andy had the key June had given him on a string around his neck. He pulled the string out from under his shirt, fitted it to the keyhole, and popped the lock loose.