“We’re on the run from the Centers for Disease Control, heading for a gas station that caters to drug-runners and mad scientists, and we’re fighting about the meaning of state flags.”
Becks blinked at me. Then she put her tablet down on her knees, bent forward to rest her forehead on the dashboard, and began to laugh. Grinning, I hit the gas a little harder. If we were laughing, we weren’t thinking too hard about what was waiting for us down the road.
Years before I was born, President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs,” like drugs might somehow realize they were under siege and decide they’d be better off going somewhere else. That war went on for decades even before the Kellis-Amberlee virus gave us something more concrete to fight against. A sane person might think the dead rising would be a good reason to stop stressing out over a few recreational pharmaceuticals. It turns out the lobbyists and corporations who stood to benefit from keeping those nasty drugs illegal didn’t agree, and the war on drugs continued, even up to the present day.
Smuggling is a time-honored human tradition. Make something illegal, create scarcity, and people will find a way to get it. Better, they’ll find a way to make it turn a profit. In some ways, the Rising was the best thing that could have happened to the world’s drug smugglers, because suddenly, there were all these roads and highways and even entire towns with no population, no police force, and best of all, no one to ask what those funny smells coming out of your basement windows were. They had to be constantly vigilant, both against the threat of the infected and the threat of the DEA, but they had more space than they’d ever had before.
The question remained: How were they supposed to move their product into more civilized areas? If drugs had been the only things in need of smuggling, maybe the answer would have involved tanks, or strapping backpacks to zombies before releasing them back into the wild. But drugs weren’t the only things people needed to move. Weapons. Ammunition. Livestock—the illegal breeding farms on the other side of the Canadian Hazard Line were constantly looking for fresh genetic lines, and would go to incredible lengths to get them. George and I once followed a woman all the way to the California state border as she tried to get her Great Dane to safety without being stopped by the authorities.
I don’t know whether she made it or not. We lost track of her shortly after she crossed into Oregon. But Buffy convinced George to let her scrub the identifying marks from our reports. These days, after spending some time on the wrong side of the rules, I sort of hope that woman and her dog made it over the border, into a place where they could live together the way she wanted them to.
That’s because you’re a sentimental idiot, said George.
“Probably,” I said, getting my laughter under control. “But isn’t that why you love me?”
Becks lifted her head from the dashboard, still chuckling, and went back to tapping on her tablet. “How much farther?”
“About ten miles,” I said. “Get the trade goods.”
“On it.”
The smuggler’s supply stations were largely maintained by people in the business of stealing the most forbidden commodity of all: freedom. They were the ones who chose to live in the places we’d abandoned, not because they were breeding large dogs or making meth, but because they wanted to live the way they always had. They wanted to open their doors on green trees and blue skies, not fences and security guards. I couldn’t blame them. Oh, I was pretty sure they were insane, but I couldn’t blame them.
Living off the grid came with its own set of problems, including limited access to medical care. So while the people we were on our way to buy gas from might take cash, they were likely to be a lot more interested in fresh blood test units, antibiotics, and birth control. More than half the “trade goods” we’d received from Dr. Abbey were contraceptives of one type or another.
“They choose their lives, and they love their lives, but bringing children into that environment isn’t something you want to do by mistake,” was her comment, as she showed Becks how to load the contraceptive implant gun. “This stuff is worth more than anything else you could possibly carry, and it’ll keep them from trying to barter for your ammunition. Just make sure they see that you’re armed, or you’re likely to find yourselves at the center of a good old-fashioned robbery.”
Becks unbuckled her seat belt and climbed over her seat into the rear of the van. I could hear her banging around back there as she got our kits ready. Glancing into the rearview mirror, I could see the back of her head. Her medium-brown hair was pulled into a no-nonsense braid, the streaks of white-blond from Dr. Abbey’s chemical showers striping it like a barber pole.
“We need gas, and maybe some munchies,” I called. “I think we can make it another eight or nine hours before we need to stop for the night.”