Black Smoke

The eastbound was a funeral now.

I walked the rail line through the night with hundreds of others, farm families in caravans, a hospital generator on a flatbed pushed by hand, horses losing their minds at the crossings. Nobody spoke above a mutter. Somewhere behind us the guns kept up a staggered rolling argument, ours and then, half a minute later, nothing, which was how you learned the answer. The fires lit the underside of the smoke from below, and the smoke itself lay over everything like a lid, and I remember thinking that the whole sky had become the inside of a bellows.

The black smoke came at dawn.

We had heard of it by then on the working radios, gas, some gas of theirs, heavier than air, pours down the valleys like water out of a jug, keep to high ground, keep upwind, and most of us had no way to obey, because we were in the bottoms because the bottoms were where the roads and rails were. The column I was in had come down to the river flats at a place called Milburn Siding, a grain elevator and eleven houses and a bridge, and we were filing across the bridge in a slow strung-out line when the wind changed.

I smelled it before I saw it. Not smoke, exactly. Ink, I would say, a sweet inky smell like a printer's trap, and then over the eastern levee came the black itself, falling like liquid rather than rising like smoke, a glittering black waterfall that poured out of the high ground and spread down the slope toward the houses in a wide slow sheet, and where it touched the ground the sagebrush did not burn but blackened, curled, and dissolved.

The bridge was the only way east over the river for nine miles. What happened on it took four minutes and I have never been able to make those four minutes into a sentence that sounds like anything but the truth, which is: everyone ran, and the bridge did not care who had been ahead. I was on the span when the surge came. Railings, elbows, a hand truck, a man's hat turning in the air, the black sheet flowing up the far bank to meet us, and I went over the side onto a gravel bar with a nurse from the hospital named Priya Sault and we lay flat between the piers while the smoke poured over the bridge above us in a river of its own.

It is heavier than air. It stays low. It kills in the low places and it killed the bridge deck full of people, and then it sat there, a black lake lying in the fields, and drifted no further, because the wind had changed again, and that was the whole physics of our survival at Milburn Siding, wind and gravel and luck. Priya and I lay between the piers for two hours. She had a water bottle and a lithium whistle. We did not talk much. At one point she said, "I was supposed to be at the lake this weekend," in the voice of someone reading a shipping notice, and I said, "I know," and that was the entire conversation of those two hours, and it was enough.

Detail, since the detail is what I trade in: she had a penlight with a red lens and she spent some of the two hours reading the printout of a medication schedule she had folded into her shoe; the schedule was laminated and the lamination was intact, and the world had not taken that from her yet. She asked me once, in the middle, whether I believed in the toss of a coin, and I said I believed in gravel bars, and she said, same thing, and we shook on it.

We came up onto the east bank into a world gone silent. The smoke was gone, sunk into the ground or eaten by its own chemistry, no one has ever satisfactorily explained where it goes. The column was gone. The elevator still stood with its white paint scorched on one face. And down the rail line, walking on the ties with its feet in the river, its hood lifted like a man listening, went one of the walkers, paying us no attention at all, and I understood for the first time in my life what game means on the hoof, what it is to be the thing watched or not watched, counted or not counted. We stood flat against a pier until it was a dot on the western sky.

Priya went north to her sister's. I went east. We shook hands on a gravel bar like strangers at a funeral, which is what we were.

I walked the two days to the junction at Bexley Mill, sleeping in haystacks, drinking from irrigation ditches, and I will compress those two days because the mind already has: they were road noise, feet, canned peaches eaten cold in a field with my back against a dead tractor, a church basement full of strangers deciding by lamplight whether the Guard was coming or had already been destroyed, a boy of maybe ten asking me in perfect seriousness whether the Martians could be shot with hunting rifles, and my hearing myself explain about the hood, about the shells, about the distance, and watching his face accept my answer as children accept all answers, completely and without belief.

The basement debate at Bexley Mill deserves its record. It ran three hours, by lamplight, forty people, and the motion on the floor was whether the town should hold or walk east, and the argument never once mentioned the walkers. It was about the mill pond, and the wells, and whose grandmother was buried where, and whether the feed was counted and who had the count, and a man stood up in the middle of it and said, we are arguing about feed, and a woman said, feed is what we know how to argue about, and the room went quiet, because she had said the true thing, that in the end a town is a set of competences, and panic had not removed them, and the debaters drilled on down into what they could count, because the bottom of the count was solid and the top of the sky was not. They voted to hold. I walked east. Both decisions were correct, and one of us was alive at the end of the month, and it was arithmetic either way.

The red weed I first saw at Bexley Mill. The mill pond had gone red overnight, a scum of brick-red weed across the whole surface, growing as you watched if you watched long enough, a crimson blanket folding out from the banks with a faint cilia motion, and the old man who owned the mill stood on his own dock with a push broom, mechanically, over and over, sweeping the weed off his patch of water and watching it close again behind the broom like something out of a dream about chores. It had come down the river, everyone said. It was in the wells at Two Rivers. It smelled like iron and blood and pond.

That was when I understood that the walkers were the least of it. You can shoot a walker, or try. The weed was the land itself changing hands.

At Bexley Mill I bought, for the last money that would ever matter, a ride east in the bed of a produce truck, sitting on onions with nine others, and we rode through a country of absolute normalcy, hay fields, yards with sprinklers, a little league game called off because the umpire had to fetch his family from the river towns, and I sat among the onions and understood that the end of the world has a shoreline, and rolls over it gradually, county by county, and that somewhere behind that shoreline my wife was watching the same sky I was, and I was four days from her if the roads held.

The roads did not hold. Nothing held. I got out of the truck at the crossroads tavern at Flagg, where the eastbound highway met the wall of the mountains, and the tavern radio, the last working signal out of the city, was saying the words that everyone in the world now knows: St. Anselm is evacuating, all districts, it is over, the batteries are gone, they are coming down the river.