Zo by Xander Miller

Author:Xander Miller [Miller, Xander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

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All at once the wind from nowhere swelled and they had a last vision of the ravaged coast. Far and away, through the endless haze at twilight, the neighborhoods were wrecked in their hills. Yellow fires burned through the low country even to the seashore. But off to the east and north, against all odds, the coastal range had not toppled into the bay. The hills still stood bare and black above Lafiteau.

Zo had run the route Ozias prescribed, taking John Brown through Gros-Morne and Nerette, skirting the thirty-eight tangled districts of Delmas. They’d cruised by the fallen embassies of Panama and Mexico and passed the ruins of the Sunrise Supermarket, where the buried shoppers could be heard shouting for help. The darkness increased by degrees as they dropped in altitude toward the city on the sea plain, as if the night were engendered from below. The twilight thickened around them and had the flavor of pulverized cement.

They made steady progress until the traffic jam at Delmas 12, where John Brown crossed Canal Kayiman. Zo maneuvered up the deadlocked traffic until he couldn’t get any farther. He left the cart and its passengers under O’s care and walked up the traffic with Wens running after him.

The auto bridge over Canal Kayiman had broken into sections, and the twisted spans lay two hundred feet below on the scrubby river bottom. Hundreds of people stood along the ravine looking down. There was no way to cross from one side to the other.

Canal Kayiman, or Alligator Canal, was all that stood between Zo and the center of downtown. If he could get them across the river, they would emerge a half mile from the health complex, just beneath the nursing school. Both Zo and Ozias knew of the route that led down through the valley, as every taxi driver and deliveryman knew of it. A brutal shortcut that could rip out the underside of a truck. They called it Impasse Kayiman, Alligator Impasse, really just a pack trail made haphazardly by a century of women carting water up from the stream.

Zo returned to the wagon looking grim and ignored the inquiries of his riders.

“What is it?” O asked. “An overturned truck?”

He hauled them to the old mule trailhead and pivoted the wagon to face it. The trace descended through the bush by a series of steep switchbacks before cutting out of sight.

“Don’t even think about that,” O said. “That’s not a road but a mudslide.”

Zo told the old man to keep his advice to himself.

“I’ve run in this city thirty years. I ran when Duvalier was still boss and Delmas only numbered to fifteen. I was running when half the ships in the bay were still made of wood and ran on wind power.”

“You’re the one who told me to take John Brown,” Zo growled. “Now I have no choice.”

“A brouetye may not be able to choose his load or the time of day at which he runs it, but by God he can always choose his route.

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