The Road is a River. Nick Cole

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      Look what I found today …

      An antique double-barreled shotgun with scrollwork engraving.

      Fifty feet of surgical tubing.

      This beautiful painting. Each day at breakfast there are fewer and fewer of the villagers who come and eat in the dining hall at the Federal Building.

      They are making their own lives now behind their fences in the houses where they store their treasures rescued from Before. Not like in the village where we all ate together in the evenings and the sky was our painting.

      At night he returns to the Federal Building. The sentry gun, waiting on its tripod, its snout pointing toward the entrance, waits like a silent guard dog. He pats it on the head-like sensor, like he might pat a friendly dog, and returns to his room.

      For a while he listens to the radio, their little station that Jason the Fixer had up and running in a day, playing the old programmed music from Before. Even Jason cannot figure how to change that. But, if they ever need to, they can interrupt the program and broadcast a message. Each night one of them takes a turn at the station. Watching the ancient computers. Just in case there is an emergency. Then all the radios in all the new homes of the once-villagers can be used to summon help.

      We can still help one another that way. We are still a village.

      So the Old Man leaves the radio playing softly through the night just in case there is some kind of emergency that will bring them all together again. Every so often he hears the voice of the villager whose turn it is to watch the station, saying something as the long dark passes slowly into dawn.

      And he reads.

      He has read the book once more.

      He is glad he had his friend in the book, Santiago, there with him out in the desert. When he reaches the end of the book he is glad for Santiago, that he made it home to his shack by the sea and for the boy who was his best friend. Again.

      He thinks of his granddaughter.

      She is my best friend.

      But for how long?

      Girls become women.

      He remembers being sick and hot and hearing her voice calling him back from wherever he was going.

      If I think of the sickness, I will think of the nightmare and then it will come while I sleep and I will wake up to get away from it.

      So he goes down to the library.

      He tries to pick a new book. But so many of the modern books, books from right before the bombs, seem like they might remind him of people and times that are now gone.

      I’ll pick a classic.

      How will you know which is and is not a classic?

      The Old Man stands before the quiet, dusty shelves inhaling their thickness and plenty, then sighing as the burden of choice overwhelms him.

      A classic will be something from a time I never lived in. That way I will not be reminded of war and all that is gone because I never knew it. I’ll read about the Roaring Twenties as told by a southerner or the London fog of Dickens or even the Mississippi as it was.

      I have not seen a river in forty years.

      Nothing with war.

      In a corner between other books he finds one that he knows is a classic, knows it from school though he cannot say whether he’d ever read it. But he knows it was a classic.

      He takes it back to the office, his room, and lies down on his sleeping bag. He watches the night sky for a moment and listens to the radio playing softly on the other side of the room.

      It will play all through the night, even while I am asleep. Like Before.

      He opens the first page and begins to read.

       Chapter Five

      Sam Roberts had a few more hours to live.

      He wanted to know how much radiation he’d absorbed in escaping the front entrance of the bunker, but the dosimeter had stopped working by the time he was clear of the massive door and the freaks in front of it.

      Still, he would’ve liked to know how many rads he’d soaked up.

      It was just before dawn.

      He could see the lights of Tucson far off to the west, lying on the southern side of a gigantic black rock that heaved itself up from the desert floor. The pinpoints of light twinkled softly in the rising pink of first morning like tiny jewels set amid gray pillars of sun-bleached stone.

      Earlier, outside Hatch, a small town that had collapsed into the drifting sands and rolling weeds, he’d stopped to scribble a message onto a piece of paper, his hands badly shaking.

      ‘Wouldn’t that be something,’ he’d thought. ‘To come all this way and I’m too sick to tell them the message.’

      As he threw up again he tried to say, “Help me!” But no sound came out. His voice box was gone. Either scorched by the acid his stomach seemed to churn up, and that came out of him constantly, or fried by the radiation of two high-yield Chinese nuclear warheads deposited at the front door of his lifelong home forty years ago. Either way, he would never speak again. So he wrote the note. Then he added, Please stay away from me. I’m contaminated with radiation.

      He watched the far city. Morning light opened the desert up to Captain Roberts. There were so many different colors. The golden sand. The pink rock. The blue sky. The red earth.

      ‘Best day of my life,’ he thought. ‘And I saw it all at least once’ …

      He blacked out.

      When he came to, it was noon.

      His heartbeat pounded throughout his entire body, but it was slow and intermittent. Captain Roberts reached into his chest pocket. He took out the emergency syringe and jammed it into his thigh. His vision cleared as his heart began to race.

      ‘Last one,’ he thought.

      On the horizon, Tucson looked gray amid the shimmering heat waves that rose above the road. Already his vision was starting to blur. ‘These injections aren’t lasting long,’ he thought.

      He started the engine. The cells were below half full. He’d forgotten to set them to charge. I don’t know if it’s enough, but it’s all I have.

      He took a safety pin out of the medical kit that lay sprawled across the passenger seat. He’d done a bad job of bandaging his own blisters. He pinned the message to his jumpsuit. ‘All I gotta do now,’ he thought, ‘is get close enough for them to find me.’

      He gunned the engine and felt the acceleration press what was left of his thin body backward. He did his best to keep the dune buggy on the road with what little time he had left. The road shifted and swerved СКАЧАТЬ