What Came After by Sam Winston Page B

Lines and squares scratched into the dirt. Pebbles tossed into the grid and shouts raised. She smiled as she stood there watching, but her eyes were rueful. An afterimage of something in them, burned there.
    Weller said, “This will do my daughter a world of good.”
    The woman nodded.
    “Which of them are yours?”
    “None.” Not looking at him. “None of these. I did have two. A boy and a girl. My husband kept them behind.”
    “Whereabouts?”
    “Bangalore.”
    Weller was silent.
    “His parents. Tradition. The plan was that I would fly back once a month.” Toeing the dirt. “I did it for the longest time. These days, Bangalore may as well be on the moon.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Me too. They’re grown up now, I would hope.”
    “I’m sure they’re doing fine.”
    The woman was silent.
    In between the rows it was Penny’s turn to throw, and her stone happened to land somewhere close to the right place and a cheer went up.
    “Take good care of her,” the woman said.
    “I’m trying.”
    “It’s a shame about her eyes,” she said.
    “Yes. Yes it is.”
    “Was it—”
    “Yes.”
    “I thought so. It’s a twisted world we live in.”
    “No question.”
    “You grow something in God’s earth with your own two hands and you can’t even eat it.” She looked at Weller and he didn’t look back. Studied the vertical slit alongside his windpipe. Freshly crusted over. Better to talk about that. “Tell me how you went generic,” she asked.
    “I didn’t.”
    “I don’t think you cut yourself shaving.” Narrowing her eyes toward Penny, Penny standing on her toes and clapping her hands together. “She certainly didn’t.”
    “She’s second-generation. Me, I’m one of those that the Zone just kind of came up around. I still live in the house where I grew up. I still run my father’s old workshop.”
    “Tradition.” She nodded. She knew all about tradition.
    He touched the cut.
    “So what about that?” she said.
    “That? That was basically a misunderstanding.” He told her about the old man in the bunker. A corporate mercenary gone freelance.
    She said knew all about him. Said he’d never managed to find his way to the fields that they kept under cultivation but then again he’d never needed to. All he had to do was haunt the edges, stay near the spots where the gravel roads met the highway and close by the big culverts where men with packs and duffel bags might hide themselves and their merchandise—where they might meet other men with credits in their brands and black market scanners and ideas about the redistribution of wealth—and a bounty hunter like him didn’t need to bother locating the actual source. The reward money was more consistent if he didn’t. That old scavenger. It hadn’t been much more than a day since Weller had left him, and there were reports already that he wasn’t in any of his usual hiding places. That he might be out of commission. Apparently they owed Weller a debt.
    He said some food and fresh water would do if they had any to spare. He’d left that bunker in kind of a hurry.
     
    *
     
    The people here buried themselves alive underneath the ground, because even though planes didn’t come over very often what if they did. They dug wide, deep holes in self-defense. Six of them altogether shared by a dozen families in a clearing that wasn’t quite a clearing. Dirt hauled out and heaped up into little low quarter-domes like somebody had buried a gigantic sphere and left part of it poking up by accident. Propped up inside with barn timbers. A doorway cut in and covered over with fencing material with a ramp beneath it leading down, a hole in the middle of the roof for ventilation, and tobacco plants growing everywhere as if these were just humped-up places in the ground. As if in the absence of plows and cultivators the earth had begun retaking its old unknowable shape.
    The sun sank low and food appeared and tables materialized. Long tables where they all