That was one pretty town, she thinks, empty as it was. Maybe she’ll go back there one day. But that was a low town, none of the buildings over six stories tall. Unlike the city she’s staring at now, whose downtown, from where she sits, looks like a castle on a hill, all silver spires and metal majesty.
She climbs down from the billboard and walks another fifteen minutes toward the tall buildings of downtown, where the long shadows stretch across the street from sidewalk to sidewalk and feel good on her overheated skin. She finds a jewelry shop and stands for a long time staring in the window. There are dusty baubles hung around artificial velvet necks and rings set deep in cute little boxes. Meaningless. These objects once took the measure of value in a gone epoch. She has known people in her past who have collected such things, hoarding them against a future restored to the glory of a trinket economy. They collected them in small boxes contained within larger boxes contained within larger boxes still, and they brooded atop them like envious royalty.
But there is one thing Temple wouldn’t mind keeping in her pocket to put her fingers around and feel on occasion—a ruby pendant shaped like a teardrop, like her island. It has a gold setting attached to a chain, but if it were hers she would tear off the metal bits and keep just the stone, rolling it between her fingers.
Gazing at it, she sees a reflected movement in the glass of the shop window, a shape approaching her from behind.
Without thought, she draws the gurkha knife from its sheath and spins around, raising it over her head and ready to bring it down.
And that’s when she sees the rifle barrel pointed directly at her face.
Whoa there, mister, she says and lowers the blade. I was preparin to chop you for a slug. What’s the idea sneaking up on people like that?
As soon as he hears her speak, the man lowers the rifle.
I thought you were one of them, he says. You were standing there for so long doing nothing.
Well excuse me for takin a perusal.
He looks around, a good-looking man, in his thirties, she would say, with straight blond hair that falls into his eyes. He’s freshly shaved and has a look of alertness that makes her think of a cat or a rodent, some animal that is always hunched for running.
It’s not safe here, he says to Temple. Come with us.
Who’s us, golden boy?
At that he puts two fingers in his mouth and whistles, and from around the corners of buildings and out of alleys rushes a small army of men—maybe twelve all told—and they circle around her.
One man, wearing glasses, approaches her and begins examining her arms and the skin of her neck.
Are you hurt? he asks. Are you bitten anywhere?
I’m dandy. Lay off me.
He puts both hands on the sides of her head and looks into the pupils of her eyes. Then he turns to the blond man.
She looks all right. We can do a full exam when we get back.
Not if you’re fond of breathin, she says.
Come with us, the blond man says. We’ll take care of you. You’ll be okay.
You got ice?
What?
You got ice to put in drinks?
We have freezers, yes.
Okay, then. Lead away, mister man.
They guide her through the lofty towers of downtown, shooting a couple slugs in the head on the way.
To keep the population down, explains the blond man, whose name is Louis.
Louis is at the head of the group, and the others trail along behind scanning the area in all directions.
Temple follows, but off to the side, keeping a fixed space between herself and the others. There’s one man in particular she doesn’t like the looks of. He’s skinny and has an oily mane of hair kept in place by a baseball cap—and he seems to be distracted by her. She can see his gaze on her, heavy, reflected in the dark shop windows. She slows her pace and falls to the back of the group to try to get away from him, but he simply does the same until they are together at the rear of the line.
My name’s Abraham, he says to her. What’s your name?
Sarah Mary.
Sarah Mary what?
Sarah Mary Williams.
How old are you, Sarah Mary?
Twenty-seven.
He looks her up and down, his eyes lingering with a little sneer over every part of her.
You ain’t twenty-seven, he says.
Prove it.
My brother Moses says I got an intuition for truth and lying. He says I can sniff out a liar at a hundred yards. It’s my secret talent. I can sniff you out, Sarah Mary.
She looks straight ahead, grinding her teeth and thinking about a tall glass of Coke with ice in it from top to bottom and a bendy straw.
Let’s see, he goes on. I would say you’re sixteen, seventeen at the outside.
I lived some years. Don’t guess it matters how many.Where’d you come from, Sarah Mary?
South of here.
See, that’s how I know you’re not bein truthful with me. There’s nothing south of here. That’s creeper country all the way down to the Keys.
She can feel his eyes on her, trying to shimmy up under her clothes and press against her skin.
So what’s your story, Sarah Mary? You runnin away from a boyfriend? Lookin for someone to take care of you? You can tell it to me true—I’ll make sure you’re all right.
She bites the inside of her lip to keep quiet and trots ahead to the one who seems to be the leader, Louis.
Where we goin anyway? she asks.
Look up, he says.
Above her rise four identical towers, each taking up a full city block. There are retail stores on the ground level and most likely business offices on the rest of the floors. The four buildings are connected, about six stories up, by enclosed footbridges to create one massive insular complex. You could safely house a thousand people in such a structure.
Louis leads the group around one of the buildings to the alley behind it where the concrete dips down to a loading dock. They approach a small door by the steel gate and look around once to make sure there are no slugs following—then Louis quickly unlocks the door and ushers the others inside.
This your fortress? Temple asks.
When everyone’s in, he shuts the door, locks and bars it.
This is our fortress, he says.
THEY HAND her over to a woman named Ruby, who feeds her and gives her new clothes from the barricaded department store on the ground level of one of the buildings and shows her a place she can sleep on the sixteenth floor where the offices have been converted to residences.
Ruby tries to dress her in a sky-blue gingham dress, but Temple insists on cargo pants like the ones she already wears except not torn through and not covered in dried brown blood. Ruby examines them when Temple hands them out to her from the dressing room, and the woman shakes her head and titches her tongue like some kind of desert bird.
You poor thing, Ruby says. It must have been a tough road for you to get here.
The road was all right, Temple replies. It was the meatskins were the problem.
Oh this world . . .
It seems like Ruby may have more to say on the subject, but she trails off as though despair has gotten the better of her.
Hey, Temple says. You got ice here, right? I’m thinkin a tall ice Coke would hit the spot right about now.
So Ruby brings her a glass of Coke with ice in it and the two go down to watch the children playing in one of the lobbies. A swing set and plastic slide have been dragged over from one of the department stores and hopscotch squares are drawn on the floor with chalk.
We have a school too, Ruby explains. My sister Elaine runs it. Six days a week in the mornings. Education is the most important thing, of course. So we can rebuild when all this is over. Did you go to school?
I learned some things.
I was just a young woman when it started. I guess you weren’t even born yet.
No, ma’am.
This must seem like a strange world to you.
No, ma’am.
No?
The world, it treats you kind enough so long as you’re not fightin against it.
Ruby looks at Temple and shakes her head, sighing. She’s a chubby woman, Ruby is, with a round face and eyes that wrinkle on the sides when she laughs. Her hair is done up in a style that Temple has never seen before. It’s piled on top, mostly, but some of it hangs down too. She wears a long shapeless dress and sandals, and her fingernails and toenails are painted a pretty shade of burgundy red—exactly the same color, Temple thinks, as spilled blood when it’s about twenty minutes old.
The sounds of the playing children echo off the marble walls of the lobby. There are twenty of them, of different ages. The windows are painted over so that, Temple assumes, the slugs don’t see them in here and start congregating outside. Large yellow floodlights are set up around the perimeter of the lobby to help out the diffuse sunlight absorbing through the thin layer of streaky brown paint.
She thinks of Malcolm, picturing him here among these other children. No doubt he would have wanted to go outside—he would have scraped the paint off the windows so he could see. But that was two years ago. He would be older than a lot of them now.
How many people you got here? Temple asks.
We have seven hundred and thirteen spread out between all four neighborhoods. You make seven hundred and fourteen.
Neighborhoods?
The four buildings. We like to call them neighborhoods.
Is this all the kids?
Most of them. It’s hard for people to have children here. We have a doctor, but our medical facilities are limited. But also, it’s just hard for people to be . . . optimistic.
Oh.
Ruby smiles broadly at her, as though she herself is the prime emissary of optimism.
I like your hat, she says, nodding at Temple’s panama. We don’t have any hats like that here.
Thanks. I like your nail polish.
Do you? Do you want some? Most of the women here don’t bother to paint their nails, so we have a lot left.
Ruby takes her back to the department store, to the cosmetics area, and shows her a rack of dusty glass bottles with a hundred different colors and names on the bottom that describe the colors. Temple settles on a kind of pink Ruby says is called Cotton Candy, even though she has no idea what cotton candy is—but it puts her in mind of lollipops made out of T-shirts.