It wasn’t supposed to be this way. He’d had plans, hopes. Sure, a lot of people had accepted the offer to evacuate to Texas in those first years; Eustace had expected that. Fine, he’d thought, let them go. The ones who remained would be the hearty souls, the true believers who viewed the end of the redeyes not merely as a liberation from bondage but something more: the chance to right a wrong, start over, build a new life from the bottom up.
But as he’d watched the population drain away, he’d begun to worry. The people who stayed behind weren’t the builders, the dreamers. Many were simply too weak to travel; some were too afraid; others so accustomed to having everything decided for them that they were incapable of doing much of anything at all. Eustace had made a run at it, but nobody had the slightest idea how to make a city work. They had no engineers, no plumbers, no electricians, no doctors. They could operate the machines the redeyes left behind, but nobody knew how to fix them when they broke. The power plant had failed within three years, water and sanitation within five; a decade later, almost nothing functioned. Schooling the children proved impossible. Few of the adults could read, and most didn’t see the sense of it. The winters were brutal—people froze to death in their own houses—and the summers were almost as bad, drought one year and drenching rains the next. The river was foul, but people filled their buckets anyway; the disease that everyone called “river fever” killed scores. Half the cattle had died, most of the horses and sheep, and all of the pigs.
The redeyes had left behind all the tools to build a functioning society but one: the will to actually do it.
The road through the Flatland joined the river and took him east to the stadium. Just beyond it was the cemetery. Eustace made his way through the rows of headstones. A number were decorated—guttered candles, children’s toys, the long-desiccated sprigs of wildflowers exposed by the retreating snow. The arrangement was orderly; the one thing people were good at was digging graves. He came to the one he was looking for and crouched beside it.
NINA VORHEES EUSTACE
SIMON TIFTY EUSTACE
BELOVED WIFE, BELOVED SON
They had perished within a few hours of each other. Eustace was not told of this until two days later; he was roiling with fever, his mind adrift in psychotic dreams he was glad to have no memory of. The epidemic had cut through the city like a scythe. Who lived and who died seemed random; a healthy adult was as likely to succumb as an infant or someone in their seventies. The illness came on quickly: fever, chills, a cough from deep in the lungs. Often it would seem to run its course only to come roaring back, overwhelming the victim within minutes. Simon had been three years old—a watchful boy with intelligent eyes and a joyful laugh. Never had Eustace felt a love so deep for anyone, not even for Nina. The two of them joked about it—how, by comparison, their affection for each other seemed minor, though of course that wasn’t quite true. Loving their boy was just another way of loving each other.
He spent a few minutes by the grave. He liked to focus on little things. Meals they’d shared, snippets of conversation, quick touches traded for no reason, just to do it. He hardly ever thought about the insurgency; it seemed to have no bearing anymore, and Nina’s ferocity as a fighter made up but one small part of the woman she was. Her true self was something she had shown only to him.
A feeling of fullness told him it was time to go. So, another year. He touched the stone, letting his hand linger there as he said goodbye, and made his way back through the maze of headstones.
“Hey, mister!”
Eustace spun around as a chunk of ice the size of a fist sailed past his head. Three boys, teenagers, stood fifty feet away among the headstones, guffawing like idiots. But when they got a look at him, the laughter abruptly ceased.
“Shit! It’s the sheriff!”
They dashed away before Eustace could say a word. It was too bad, really; there was something he wanted to tell them. It’s okay, he would have said. I don’t mind. He would have been about your age.
—
When he returned to the jail, Fry Robinson, his deputy, was sitting at the desk with his boots up, snoring into his collar. He was just a kid, really, not even twenty-five, with a wide, optimistic face and a soft round jaw he barely had to shave. Not the smartest but not the dumbest either; he’d stayed on with Eustace longer than most men did, which counted for something. Eustace let the door bang behind himself, sending Fry jolting upright.
“Jesus, Gordo. What the hell did you do that for?”
Eustace strapped on his gun. It was mostly for show; he kept it loaded, but the ammunition the redeyes had left behind was nearly gone, and what remained was unreliable. On more than one occasion, the hammer had fallen on a dud.