Ab Ovo

The grim line of the railroad trestle lay across the river just where Cian had drawn it on the map. Jay's stomach gave a sudden twist. Now her real journey had begun, through the forests and everything else that had grown up in the intervening years. The deep river here ran swift, and it was only about a hundred meters downstream that she found a backwater to ground her canoe in. Five fat crows calculated their chances from the bridge, black eyes shining under the gray sky. Canoe unloaded, Jay considered releasing the light craft into the river to seek its own way in the world. Instead, she drew it up above the water line and concealed it carefully behind the thick brush at the river's edge. It would be imprudent to just let it go. The thought made her laugh out loud - a short, ringing sound, like the crack of ice in the spring thaw. What could be more imprudent than setting out alone with a small child, to walk East until she reached the sea? The boat would be safe though, and would have to wait a while longer for its own journey south, to the open waters circling the world.

Jay strapped on her travel supplies, slung Holly over her hip in her wool rebozo, and slid the paddles under the canoe. Once she moved away from the river, the forest opened up, trunks arcing overhead, and she was up on the rail bed in a few minutes, looking east down the leafy tunnel until it faded into the soft shifting green of branches sprouting new buds. This was the long tunnel that Cian had pulled her through fourteen years ago, and the long tunnel she and Holly would follow to return to her people. Her other people. If there were any people left.

In a few minutes she had adjusted to the step-half-step gait of walking on rail ties. In many places the tracks were so deeply buried in leaves and humus that the rusted rails were barely visible, and the walking was more natural, but still the odd rhythm disoriented her, bringing a swirl of flickering images, a rush of memory so strong it doubled her over with nausea - the towers of smoke on every horizon, black-ice scenes of hiding under rocky crags, or the bright shock of blood. And hunger.

She had learned many things from Cian. How to hunt, how to pass unnoticed, how how to kill when necessary, and when necessary without hesitation. To never show fear. Most importantly, how to convince an opponent that her death would cost them dearly, and so, to live. If only Cian, were alive now to share her journey, it would be so much easier. But they had buried him eight years ago, an air burial, open to the sky. She had visited the mountaintop every spring, watched the raptors and vultures wheeling slowly in the sky, and thought how he traveled with them now, carried to the four corners of the Earth. He would be an old man if he had lived, but she still remembered him from their escape to the West, and later, when he helped the People of the Flint organize raids on armories and abandoned towns for supplies. Sometimes at night she said a prayer for him, but every morning she remembered what he had left with her - the hard package tucked into the top of her hip sack like a curled fist. He had protected her when her parents no longer could, and still did.

At first there had been others like them, fleeing from the Slippage, who found their way to the lands of the People of the Flint. Some were allowed to stay, some were asked to move on. Others came to take what they could, but not many, for the People of the Flint had little to take, and were determined to defend what they had. In any case, their most precious possessions could not be taken from them by force. There was no shortage of things to be had elsewhere, either. That was not one of the miseries of the Slippage. The Empire of Dreams had been overflowing with things to own, steal, use or discard. The work was to build a life out of so many shrugged-off pieces of things, and most found that they could not.

News of the Slippage came in patches, increasingly incoherent and garbled, until the last who came could only spit out clots of words hinting at mountains of ruin, teeming rats, blood and fire. Few of them could speak clearly, or seemed to see through fully to the world around them. They spoke and thought in a strange corkscrewed babble that never could be made to walk straight and upright under the sun. By common decision, they slept at the outskirts of the camp; when they awoke screaming in the night it would not frighten the children, or disturb the rest of the others as much. Often then would pass the dark hours awake and staring, or wandering in the forest, huddled in makeshift dugouts or tree shanties screened with branches. The sleepless were useful sentinels, at least to the extent that most were not particularly good at anything else.

After the first years, the trickle of survivors stopped, and no one came to the land of the People of the Flint, high in the mountains. It was a rich, wild land, but cold, and not giving to those that did not understand it. The vast flocks of crows, grown fat on the remains of the cities and their owners, also ceased to fly overhead. The sharp shake of the Slippage slowed, and pulled in against itself, slumping to a miserable halt. Then Jay knew it was time to go back, to look for Salt House, to smell the sea, and to find what was left, if anything, of something like home.

--

It was still spring, but summer came early in the Hot Age, and she had been traveling south for days. The forest was thick and it was not hard to forage a few extra handfuls for their meals.

At night she was joined by fellow travelers, ghosts drifting through their own future. A group of elegant revelers, hung with a blinding array of jewels  and baubles paused nearby, chattering cheerfully and glancing uncomfortably at her patched fleece jacket, goatskin skirt and leggings, perhaps asking themselves, "Is this what is to come?". Jay could see them clearly, but heard only the rustle of the leaves, and the occasional proud grunt of a bullfrog in a pond nearby. Very occasionally the hint of laughter or a wastingly thin word filtered through the air. A dark skinned girl sat at her campfire for hours, baby cradled gently in her arms. The infant was as still and silent as the tomb, staring emptily up into the night sky. A broken doll. She was not surprised to see them; few had came as far as her old home, but she had heard of the ghosts from others. Here they passed every night along her path, rustling like last season's dessicated leaves. As she drifted off to sleep, curled under her hammock's rain fly with Holly, she heard snatches of their conversation as they passed; "... lost twelve points in after hours trading...", "...fly to Paris for the...", "...can't get any worse...".

Dreamers are always the last to let go.

After less than a week, Jay was spending much of her time moving carefully through the forest parallel to the road. The railways here had been used; there were charcoal smudges from campfires along the track, some strewn with bones. Trees had been cut. The undergrowth was tramped down and the tops of the rails were even clean of rust in places.  She stopped making campfires. There was precious little goodwill to be had on the road, and the Bloom could appear anywhere, spreading, as Cian used to say, "...like a red fucking tide".

That night she smelled smoke, and saw the glitter of fires along the river, She didn't make camp. Near her, a group of teenagers in shorts, one with an orange basketball tucked under his arm, paused as well, uncertain. The ball was stenciled confidently with "Wilson" and "NCAA" in faded black letters. A bulging woman with two bulging shopping bags sat heavily on a fallen tree trunk, and began to massage her calves, without a sound. There was an old town here, on the edge of the river, where the railroad bridge crossed. The far bank was dark. There was sure to be a watch.

As a child growing up with the People of the Flint, she had learned many ways to silence her steps, skate across crisp twigs and brittle leaves. But she had not learned to make herself invisible, and a railroad bridge left no place to hide. Jay gently stuffed Holly's ears with cloth, so she would not wake to any sudden sounds, and re-wrapped her rebozo so the sleeping child was held tight behind her pack. Then she unwrapped Cian's gift, prepared it in the way she had been taught, and held it in her right hand. She normally used her left, but this tool was made to be used with the right, and so she always had.

Jay closed in on the river, keeping the rail line to her left, barely in sight. It would be guarded. Sure enough, the rail took a turn just before the bridge, and there was the inevitable watch, set up behind a crude bunker just after the track leading from the bridge started to curve. She carefully made her way around them in a broad circle, approaching the tracks between the curve that hid the bunker and the trestle where the track crossed the river. The shopping bag lady climbed down the banking and stumped in their direction, right along the rail bed.

About three quarters of the way across the bridge, floating in the air, a red ember glowed for a moment. Either there were few other people out this far in the woods, or these fighters were so poorly trained as to smoke on a night watch. She guessed it was something of both. The teenagers began to pass the ball around, running and jumping in a complicated dance of keep-away through the trees and across the tracks. The older woman seemed to have thought better of her choice, turned and started back toward the bridge. Jay stepped into the open near the head of the trestle, and began to walk unhurriedly, from one rusty beam to the next, toward the tiny ember floating over the water in the dark. The moon was just a sliver in the sky. The river flowed quiet and deep beneath them.

When she was several meters away, one of the two men called out, "Hey Misha! Did you bring me a midnight snack?". The other chuckled and took a deep drag on the stick he was smoking. They were the last words she would hear either of them speak. Jay smiled grimly, never breaking her stride. When only three meters separated them, she stopped, raised her arms in a sharp wedge, to reinforce what she held, the same way she had learned to concentrate herself into a deadly kick when fighting. Her voice was calm, but the words were spoken with the same unshakable focus.

"Neither of you have to die. Move, and I kill you both." One had a rifle slung over his shoulder, the other stopped with his hand halfway to his weapon, leaning against their pile of sandbags. It was as much her voice as anything that made them obey, place their hands on their heads, and walk back across the bridge. When they were halfway to the other side, she turned to go. She would be safe. It would be madness to follow her into the night.

As she reached the far bank, she looked back and saw the basketball boys, and the old woman, standing and watching her closely from the far shore of the flowing water. Rivers run always toward the sea. And the sea itself runs deeper than dreams, swallowing their broken remains washed downstream. Eventually, constantly new life rises up from the depths, fresh, untangled form the dusty cobwebs of the past. Those silent dreamers would not cross.

Jay stretched in her hammock that night, far from the bridge, Holly curled in sleep at her side, mouth like a soft little fish, her little hands half open, as if grasping something spongy and invisible. They had eaten well - apples from an overgrown orchard, and an unwary rabbit. The last of the days light filtered through the leaves above them, and the evening breeze was cool and pleasant, rustling through the trees, half drowning the dry whispers that continued to scratch across the world's night, slowly fading, burbled snatches of nonsense replayed over and over. "... It has been thirty-four minutes since my last confession...", "...FUNNY CAR RACE!!".

A man was singing a song, half-familiar, but so softly it was mostly lost. " ... Dark and cold or bright and warm - long or thin or small ..." A flurry of bats flickered between the branches overhead, sweeping the air of moths and mosquitoes.  She wondered idly if she had heard the song before, it sounded vaguely familiar.  "...only a fool would blame the death of rock and roll." Made her smile. It had been a very long time since she had thought of "rock and roll". Jay found herself straining to hear the rest, but it was gone. A strange, gentle little song. But she knew she would not remember what it was, stretched, and went to sleep.

...

The journey was not easy, even in the summer. The paths were muggy, although the green pelt of the forest kept out the worst of the heat. It rained often, sometimes for days at a stretch. During the second week Jay rigged a rain-fly for her hammock, and from then on she moved faster, neither setting nor breaking camp, and only lighting a fire infrequently, when she had game to cook. There were few signs of human occupation, and she avoided them, remembering the phantasmagorical tales she had listened to, on those sleepless nights she wandered out to sit with those broken people who had escaped from the Slippage.

But they meet no one on the path, and the signs of burning and wreckage were softened by the regrowth of the forest and the soft scrubbing of the elements. Holly was quiet and observant and helpful beyond her two years, gripping loose cords for her mother in her pudgy fingers when needed, staying close by, scolding the squirrels energetically when they tried to investigate the contents of their packs, all with the bedrock earnestness of a sun-dried mountain yogi. When the rains fell hard enough to keep them sheltered under the branches of a broad mother tree they would sit and sing all the songs they knew until their voices dissolved into laughter - waves of swift minnows darting between the silver drops and on into the fresh-washed sky.

A few days later, Jay was roasting wild mushrooms over a campfire, in a dense stretch of old forest. She had hunted a swan that morning, in the rain, and camped and coaxed a fire to clean and cook the carcass, in her broad-brimmed hat. Holly had eaten and was sleeping in the hammock. There was a spring nearby, so she decided to boil the meat with wild mushrooms and herbs right there. Swan was tough. Across the fire from her a dark-skinned man with knotted ropes of hair was carefully folding sheets of newspaper into large, flat packages and long tubes. At the edge of the firelight a skeletally thin man with a large, hooked nose stood silently. He was dressed for a diplomatic reception, in white tie and tails, and looked hungry. Jay took a bowl full of soup and a chunk of smoking meat, and began to eat with her hunting knife, sipping at the hot broth from the bowl.

The skinny man stepped into the firelight, "May I join you?". The paper-folder looked up for a moment, then returned to his work. The ghosts never speak. Jay continued chewing, slowly, weighing her chances of killing him before he got to Holly, or got away to warn anyone else. As usual, they were never good enough. His arms were long, and he could have weapon concealed under his jacket. She nodded, and he sat next to the dark-skinned man. Not for the first time she wished she had brought Xip and Xap, her hunting dogs, on this journey, even though she knew it would have been more dangerous with them than without them.

Opera Man, as she decided to call him, seemed uneasy, glancing around at the flickering shadows of the trees, jogging his leg nervously, picking at the frayed bark of his seat. He would not have come here alone and unarmed, into the wilderness. Jay dug in her pack for a bowl, surreptitiously glancing behind her into the trees, but she saw nothing. Ever since the river crossing she had kept Cian's gift prepared and available, and she carefully shifted it to the top of the bag, within easy reach, but out of sight of her guest. She tossed him the bowl. "Help yourself."

His eyes, which had been wide and fixed on her, relaxed into a sheepish smile. "Thanks! Thank you." His voice was like the sound of dry sticks cracking, clumsy, but honest. He scooped up a bowl of soup and cupped it carefully in the hot metal bowl, shifting it from hand to hand. Jay had decided that she would not kill him immediately when the others came - she might be able to use him has a hostage, or at least a shield. She sighed, and set down her bowl so her hands were free, ears tuned to any sound behind her. She could remember when life was not like this, when meeting people didn't involve planning how to destroy them as quickly as possible. It had been a long time, but she still remembered.

"Where are you going?" he asked, blowing carefully on the steaming bowl. Jay snorted through her nose. If this was the best they had, she felt more optimistic. Then again, maybe they sent him because he was expendable. Too stupid to be of much use. She rubbed her forefingers across her eyebrows, glancing carefully to the side as she did.

"Far away from here, don't worry. I won't be coming back this way again." He nodded, lowered his lips to his bowl. She considered the unpleasant option of using him to draw the others out. She would have to hurt him badly to do so, and the thought was a heavy, dead thing in her belly. It would have to be done if this went on for too long - she needed to make her escape under cover of darkness.

There was silence for a few minutes, each with their thoughts. The damp branches in the fire popped, sending out fountains of sparks while they both carefully pretended not to be startled. It was mostly embers now, and Jay let it die, to even the darkness around them, let her eyes grow more accustomed to the night. He was continually making delicate, unnecessary movements with his hands, like a smoker.

Finally, "Take me with you." Jay looked at his face closely for the first time.

"What?"

"Take me with you. I have been here since this all started" He waved his arms broadly, "Since the beginning. I can help you. I know things."

"No. You can't come with me." What kind of trick was this? Her hand strayed into her pack, fingers slipping around the impassive object there.

"OK, I didn't mean to... Look. I don't know if I can live here like this much longer. I can't live like this anymore. And things seem to be better now. People are traveling through the forest. Regular people, I mean. Like you. So, where are you going? Who is there? What is it like? It must be safe."

Jay paused with her mouth cupped open. Where, exactly, was she going? Would there be anyone waiting? And what should she tell this scrawny stranger? Anything? With a start she remembered to check the trees, but nothing had changed.

"I can't take you with me. And I am not going to tell you where I am going, or what there is there." He didn't seem overly happy about that, but didn't answer. Since he didn't seem ready to say anything else, and she was not going to waste her time, Jay settled with her back against the tree next to Holly's hammock, gave one last surreptitious scan of the area, and closed her eyes. The night wood unfurled around her, gossamer strands webbed across her senses, the world gone silver and gray. Nothing moved without being registered, even as her mind drifted outward, examining the scratching wings of the three crickets in the wood nearby, the damp log hissing in the remains of the fire, the nervous shifting of the strangers hand-sewn boots. She drifted toward sleep, a dark, still surface, as calm as a pool of oil, slipped under for a moment, and rose again into a bubble of wakeful sleep. When Jay was a girl, she had gone to summer camp. As a drill, they would flip canoes and duck underneath, resting unseen and alert in the cool cavern of the boat with the loud slapping of the lake's tiny waves. This sleep always reminded her of that, lurking like a crocodile on the edge of consciousness, motionless, prepared to move quickly when an necessity wandered into view.  And so she slept until the cold dawn demanded attention to the fire and preparations for the new day.

Opera Man was curled in fitful sleep by the cold fire, muttering to himself and shifting under his thin coat. Even the cold damp couldn't smother the promise of a new day, the flaming red-orange flickering between the branches of the trees overhead. She had the hammock and the rest of their things packed in a few minutes.

"You leaving?"

"Yes, I am leaving," she answered, suddenly impatient. Clearly this strange person was alone, wandering in the forest like an orphaned doe, completely unarmed and helpless. She found the idea deeply irritating. "We are leaving. You can go back home, wherever it is that you live. Bye." She slung her pack onto her back.

"You can't get through the Hoosac without my help."

"Fine with me. The Hoosac can go to hell, whatever it is."

"The Hoosac. The Tunnel. The Trogs won't let you in, but they will me."

Jay adjusted Holly in her rebozo. "I don't need your help. I don't plan on going into any tunnels."

"It is the shortest way to the sea. It will take you forever to go around. Here, let me show you." He rose and rambled off into the woods, apparently expecting her to follow him. Since he had headed East, and it seemed like a good idea to keep him in sight, she followed, hand on the gun. There was a narrow trail through the woods, but they weren't on it long. The woods seemed to lead to a clearing bright with morning sun behind the trees, and she found him waiting on a rocky outcrop overlooking a deep valley. A healthy river ran peacefully down it, still in the shadow of the enormous rocky mountain on the other side of the valley.

"There, the Hoosac. The tracks go through it. Underneath it. The tunnel is right down there." he said, pointing to something unseen in the valley. "Here, use these." He handed her a compact set of binoculars, produced from who-knows-where, and stepped aside to brush a few burrs and dead leaves from his pants. For such a gangly man, he walked through the forest hardly touching anything.

Glancing around from time to time, in case this was some odd trick, Jay set the binoculars to her face and began to search for this "Hoosac" in the purple shadows of the mountain. It was hard seeking a darker black in the mottled green and onyx of the forest. But there was movement. She drew it into focus. Tiny figures dancing, long yellow-white hair flying in the pre-dawn penumbra under the mountain, playing in a graveled riverbed or road across the valley. Children. Tiny, naked children playing under the stately trees of the ever-present forest. Where were their parents?

Another movement drew her attention, and she saw the entrance to this Hoosac, a brick and stone doorway into the mountain, overgrown with brambles and weeds. Things hulked out of the darker shadows of the tunnel, hunched and furred, shuffling on all fours toward the group of children playing below. Jay could almost hear the gravel crunch under their thick knuckles, twigs snapping as they moved downslope. Where were the parents? The tiny shapes dancing like sparks in their halos of fair hair, how had they been left alone? She wanted to cry out, but the sigh of the morning breeze across the empty distance silenced her. Too far. Too late. The heavy shapes plodded downward, an avalanche in slow motion. Now the children saw them, and ran shrieking in all directions. She knew what would come next. The hunched figures moved faster now.

A slim figure leaped out from the cover of a rangy thicket and hurled itself on the first of the apelike creatures, wrapping her arms around its neck. The other children came racing into view as well, attaching themselves in twos and threes to the hulking forms that settled into place now, rocking back on their haunches, dandling the tiny children in their brute hands. Their parents. These ponderous, shaggy creatures were human.

"I can get you past them. I can get you through the Hoosac. It is the only way." She turned and looked at Opera Man, so skinny his clothes hung off him like wet moss.

"All right, then. Show me."