Tack and Hunter weren’t able to salvage many supplies from the Rochester homestead. The bombs and ensuing fires did their job. But they did find a few things miraculously preserved among the smoking rubble: cans of beans, some additional weapons, traps, and, weirdly, one whole, entirely unmelted chocolate bar. Tack insists that it remain uneaten. He straps it to his backpack, like a good luck charm. Sarah eyes it as we walk.
It does seem like the chocolate brings good luck—or maybe it’s just having Tack and Hunter back, and the way it changes Raven’s mood. The weather holds. It’s still cold, but we’re all grateful for the sun.
The beans are enough to give us energy to move on, and only a half day after we’ve left the last encampment we stumble upon a single house, entirely preserved, in the middle of the woods. It must have been miles from any major road when it was built, and it looks like a mushroom sprouting up from the ground: Its walls are covered in brown ivy, thick as fur, and its roof is low and round, pulled down like a hat. This would have been a hermit’s house, back before the blitz—far away from everyone else. No wonder it survived intact. The bombers would have missed it, and even the fires might not have spread this far.
Four Invalids have made it their home. They invite us to camp on their grounds. There are two men and two women, as well as five children, none of whom seems to belong to either couple in particular. They all act as one family, they tell us over dinner, and have inhabited the house for a decade. They are nice enough to share what they have: canned eggplant and summer squash, bitingly sour with garlic and vinegar; strips of dried venison from earlier in the fall; and various other kinds of smoked meat and fowl: rabbit, pheasant, squirrel.
Hunter and Tack spend the evening retracing our steps and slicing patterns in the trees, so next year when we migrate—if we migrate again—we will be able to locate the mushroom house.
In the morning, one of the children runs out as we are getting ready to leave. He is barefoot, despite the snow.
“Here,” he says, and presses a kitchen towel into my hand. Inside are hard, flat loaves of bread—made, I overheard one of the women say, from acorns and not flour—and more dried meat.
“Thank you,” I say, but he is already running back, bounding toward the house, laughing. For a moment I am jealous: He has grown up here, fearless, happy. Perhaps he will never even know about the world on the other side of the fence, the real world. For him there will be no such thing.
But there will also be no medicine for him when he is sick, and never enough food to go around, and winters so cold the mornings are like a punch to the gut. And someday—unless the resistance succeeds and takes the country back—the planes and the fires will find him. Someday the eye will turn in this direction, like a laser beam, consuming everything in its path. Someday all the Wilds will be razed, and we will be left with a concrete landscape, a land of pretty houses and trim gardens and planned parks and forests, and a world that works as smoothly as a clock, neatly wound: a world of metal and gears, and people going tick-tick-tick to their deaths.
We ration carefully, and at last, after another three days’ walking, we come to the bridge that marks the final thirty miles. It is enormous and narrow, made of vast ropes of steel, all slicked with ice and blackened by weather. It looks to me like a gigantic insect, straddling the river, plunging its jointed legs into the water. Barricaded years ago, it has been so long out of use, except as a passage for traveling Invalids, that the clumsily erected wooden boards at its entrance have all but rotted away.
A large green sign, detached from its metal supports on one side, now hangs so that its words run vertically. I read as we pass: TAPPAN ZEE BRIDGE. It sways in the wind—a brutal wind; exposed as we are, it drives right through us, bringing tears to our eyes—and fills the air with ghostly moaning.
Below us, the water is the color of concrete, and capped with waves. The height is dizzying. I read once that jumping into water from this height would feel just like a plunge into stone. I remember the news story of the uncured who killed herself by jumping from the roof of the labs on the day of her procedure, and the memory brings with it a feeling of guilt.
But this is what Alex would have wanted for me: the scar on my neck, miraculously well-healed, just like a real procedural scar; the ropy muscles, the sense of purpose. He believed in the resistance, and now I will believe in it for him.
And maybe someday I will see him again. Maybe there really is a heaven after death. And maybe it’s open to everyone, not just the cured.
But for now, the future, like the past, means nothing. For now, there is only a homestead built of trash and scraps, at the edge of a broken city, just beyond a towering city dump; and our arrival—hungry, and half-frozen, to a place of food and water, and walls that keep out the brutal winds. This, for us, is heaven.