The Survivors (9 page)

“Definitely a Traveler,” Rachel says. “And we could tell anyway, because Traveler kids always tried to charge their cell phones at school.”

“Remember how Sharelle ‘accidentally' stepped on Kara's phone and smashed it?” Mackenzie says.

Rachel laughs wildly.

Mackenzie wrinkles her nose. “Anyway, there were lots of icky homeless people from the cities who just showed up thinking they could freeload on all of us who actually live here. I'm really glad they passed that law so they all had to leave.”

“Me, too,” Rachael says. “Most of them smelled funny.”

“They should never have put Kara in the yearbook,” Mackenzie says.

“For sure not!” Rachel says.

Sarah fakes a yawn. “I'm tired,” she says, flopping onto her sleeping bag.

“Me, too,” Mackenzie says. “And I have a tennis lesson in the morning.” She flicks the light switch as the girls snuggle down under comforters and into sleeping bags. They giggle for a while longer about Dylan and Django and other cute boys and then, slowly, the room grows quiet. Eventually Sarah hears Mackenzie's deep, rhythmic breathing and Rachel's tiny snoring sounds. But she is wide-awake.

Icky homeless people
. That would pretty much be her.

ON SATURDAY MILES TAKES HIS
mother to town on his Kawasaki motorbike. It's his second trip; he had to pick up Sarah from her stupid sleepover. For some reason he wasn't supposed to arrive at the Phelps house, so they met downtown. But Saturdays are good for riding. There are more people around that day—the grocery stores are busier, and there's more traffic—which makes it easier to blend in with the locals.

“We'll get groceries on the way home,” Miles says over his shoulder and through his bandana.

“Okay,” his mother says, her voice muffled against his back. She hangs on for dear life; Miles knows that she hates the dirt bike, but she's a businesswoman and not dumb. The bike is the perfect solution for now: It gets close to a hundred miles to a gallon of gas and has knobby, off-road tires for escaping into the woods if needed. A dirt bike and a gun: two things he never would have owned back in the suburbs.

On the highway, the bike leaves a dark stripe in the pale ash. Pumice dust rolls up behind them like a contrail of jet exhaust in the sky. He can only see gray in the little rearview mirror—not that there is much traffic to worry about. Soon the nose of a pickup grows in the oval glass of his mirror, and its rumbling V-8 comes on fast. Miles veers onto the shoulder to let it pass. When the truck streams by, the highway in front is gone—lost in a rolling, gray dust cloud. Disorientation hits—like a pilot losing which way is up—and he concentrates on keeping his handlebars straight. When the air doesn't clear, he looks straight down beside his right boot and picks up the seam where the shoulder meets the main highway. A line, somewhere between gray and brown—enough to keep them on the road—unwinds ahead. Gradually the wider highway returns to view. Behind, his mother coughs and presses her head tighter against his back.

He takes the back route into town, passing the high school and the entrance to a juvenile lockup. He goes over a railroad crossing and up a grade to the traffic light by the post office, where they pick up their mail once a week.

PLEASE REMOVE DUST MASKS AT THE DOOR
, a sign reads. Miles waits on the motorbike while his mother goes in. She's out in two minutes, thumbing through a handful of letters and clutching a couple of packages—book manuscripts probably—under her other arm.

“Let's roll,” Miles says. “You can look at that stuff later.”

“‘That stuff' is how we make a living, thank you very much,” his mother says.

“How you do that is a mystery to me,” Miles says as he stashes her mail in the right-side saddlebag. His mother playfully squeezes his rib cage as they motor off. It's one more thing they would never have done in the burbs: get his mother to ride on the back of a dirt bike.

The next stop is the library, a modern, one-story building with outthrust roof angles where Nat does her e-mail and internet thing once a week, plus charges Artie's iPod.

“See you here later,” she says.

Miles nods, then chains the Kawasaki to a bike rack, after which he walks over to the Alternative Education Center. It's a low brick building open on Saturdays, which only makes sense. And that's what he likes about the AEC—there are no bells. No principals.

Inside the waiting area the old couch is occupied by two girls, one with a lot of piercings and raccoon-style black eye makeup, the other with a real baby under a small blanket. “Hey,” Miles says.

The young mom smiles tiredly. She's about Miles's age and pretty in a skinny, pale kind of way; it's as if all of her physical powers went into her baby, which makes smacking and sucking noises under the blanket. As she shifts the baby, the white top of one breast curves upward. Miles quickly looks away (the dark-eyed chick gives him a disgusted look). Carrying his packet, he slides past her to the check-in desk.

“Mr. L in?” he asks.

“Sure am!” a man's voice calls from a cubicle just beyond. A head pops up, bald on top but with a thin gray ponytail behind. “Be with you in a few minutes, Miles.”

The teachers here are cooler than at regular school, too, ones such as Mr. Lewandowski, who didn't fit into public school—“The Machine,” as Mr. L called it.

Rather than hang with the girls in the lobby, Miles heads to the bathroom, where he takes a long time on the toilet. Afterward he spends time at the sink washing up all over, including his armpits, which were, he has to admit, a tiny bit rank. Clean, he reemerges, ready for a second chance with the girls on the couch. The young mom and her baby are gone, but the pierced girl glares at him as if daring him to say something. He sits down anyway. Looks through a gummy magazine.

“I hate this,” the girl says suddenly.

“What is
this
?” Miles asks pleasantly.

“Everything,” she mutters.

“Let's turn that frown upside down!” Miles says. It's supposed to come out funny—a parody of an overly cheerful host on a kids' television show—but it clanks.

The girl stares at him. “Are you insane?”

“Ah, I don't think so,” Miles says. “But you never know.”

That clanks, too. The girl crosses her arms across her chest and looks out the window. Miles is trying to think of something not insane to say when Mr. Lewandowski calls his name.

“Sorry, got to go,” he says to the pierced girl.

She does not reply.

“So, how are things?” Mr. Lewandowski asks. They shake hands, and Miles sits down.

“No problems, really,” Miles says.

Mr. Lewandowski leans back in a creaky chair. “Your stuff is all good—math especially.”

“Thanks.”

They take a few minutes and go through his packet, after which Mr. Lewandowski hands Miles the next one. This school proceeds at the student's pace; and since Miles is all caught up, they have time to BS about the state of the world. “I try to remain optimistic,” Mr. L says as he kicks back, “because, hey, what's the alternative?” He laughs.

It takes Miles a second to get the joke.

Back at the library, Miles finds that his mother is still waiting for a computer terminal. She holds up her hands and shrugs, so he skulks along the magazine shelves. He picks up a Fun FAQs About Volcanoes sheet that has been scrawled upon and defaced. It's good to see that some kids—by the looks of the handwriting—are on guard against stupidity. He glances around the library but sees only adults and little stumblers plus a couple of crying babies.

He scores a well-thumbed
Popular Mechanics
. He reads and people watches over the top of his magazine. The library patrons have some rough edges; their clothes smell like dogs and wood smoke. A mother and her three squirming kids check out a stack of DVDs. The bestseller display is picked mostly clean. Audio books are mostly gone, too. In the far corner there's a big-screen television in a small room, with headsets for listening. On the silent screen, a rolling banner beneath two talking heads reads “Climate conditions improving: full summer growing season predicted.” Right. That's what they said at the beginning of the summer, and barely a seed sprouted. If adults obsessed about the weather before the volcanoes, now the weather report is the only topic. Miles is tempted to listen, but the television room is crowded and warm, and anyway, he has given up on television. There's no good news, and if there is, who knows if it's true?

A fat woman gets up from a computer terminal. The librarian calls out, “Natalie?”

His mother hands Miles her purse and the mail for safekeeping, and takes a seat at computer station number four.

The woman librarian glances at the sign-up sheet. “It's Natalie—?” she asks. She wants a last name.

“Just Natalie,” Miles's mother says cheerfully, and turns to her work.

The librarian pauses, then moves on. Computer terminals have a one-hour limit, and his mother is just getting up to speed—she types faster than a woodpecker pecks—when the reference librarian returns with the clipboard.

“Excuse me,” the librarian says to Nat.

Miles lowers his magazine.

“Yes?” Nat asks. There's annoyance in her voice.

“Do you have some form of identification?” the woman asks.

Nat is silent. People turn to stare. “I'm sorry, say again?” Miles's mother asks the librarian.

“ID,” the librarian repeats. “A driver's license. Something.”

“And why would I need that?” Nat asks, still keeping her smile, though it has slipped big-time. “I come here all the time.”

“We have … orders. Instructions to serve our local community first. If you live outside of Beltrami County—if you're traveling through—you'll have to give up the terminal if there are local people waiting.”

“Who says I live outside the county?” Nat says.

Miles glances around. To the side, a scrawny guy in clothes two sizes too big looks away.

“I'm not at liberty to answer that,” the librarian says. She looks toward the scrawny guy, whose cover is blown.

He swallows. “What she's saying is you're either local or you're not,” the guy says to Miles's mother. He stays back as if to keep an escape route open behind him.

Nat gives him a glance as if he's a passing fruit fly. Miles slips behind a row of tall bookshelves—the stacks—and glides up behind the guy. “You got a problem?” Miles says, making his voice low and weird.

The guy flinches and turns to Miles, who puffs himself up as tall as he can. It gives him an inch on the little man.

The guy's eyes go to Miles's wind-blown hair, his dusty red bandana. He swallows. “Not really,” he says.

“Oh, there you are, son. I thought I'd lost you,” Miles's mother says with very fake cheerfulness.

“I wuz over dere readin' the magazines,” Miles says. He makes his voice sound like he's seriously abnormal.

“Good,” she says. “Why don't you go on back there and sit in a chair until I'm ready, all right?” She uses her talking-to-a-child voice.

“All right, den,” Miles says.

Nat turns back to the librarian; it takes his mother a second to find her groove again—but only a second. “Anyway, do you realize what you're asking?”

The librarian stares. “Yes. I'm asking for identification.”

“The library is the last place in America where people should be asked for their ID,” Nat says. Her voice rises.

Miles lingers nearby. He's not at all sure where this is going.

“Well, these are really not
my
instructions,” the librarian says. “The governor himself—”

“Governor, schmovernor!” Nat says, rising from her chair to her full five feet two inches. “I know a few things about freedom of information. Just because we have an environmental crisis doesn't mean we have to have a police state!”

The librarian lets out a half hiccup sound; people all around stare, which doesn't bother Nat. She can do confrontations.

“You show me the rule where I have to show you my ID,” Nat continues, getting up in the librarian's face. “I want to see it!”

“Excuse me! Excuse me! Is there some trouble here?” a stocky older man says. He's a shaved-head dude wearing a tie. An in-charge kind of guy.

“Yes, there is,” Nat says.

“I only asked to see her identification,” the woman librarian explains to her boss.

The tie guy pauses. “Technically, we really don't need to do that,” he says to the librarian.

The woman's face begins to redden.

“You're thinking of our community first, which we all appreciate,” he says calmly, and pats her arm. “But we don't need identification unless she wants to get a library card.”