What Came After by Sam Winston

Author:Sam Winston [Winston, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, Adventure, Sci-Fi & Fantasy
ISBN: 9780615580579
Publisher: Porridge Hat Press
Published: 2011-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

*

Noon on the fourth day. North of Greensboro, with the tallest of her buildings just beginning to creep into view, he found the highway blocked entirely. Concrete barriers thick with lichen, and vast piles of broken roadway heaped up behind the barriers and crumbled and treed over, and behind the trees and screened off by them a chaos of upended shipping containers and gaping railroad cars and ruined automobiles all rusted into one solid thing. All of it strewn like the aftermath of some terrible accident except there hadn’t been any accident. This was willful. Man had done it. Weller climbed the barriers and stood among the young trees looking out over the sea of jumbled iron and thought Marlowe. Marlowe at work this far from Spartanburg. Wondering exactly how long it had been since Bainbridge’s men had seen this place from the air. They’d said years. They’d meant it. This cover of trees and underbrush hadn’t grown up overnight. This lichen that carpeted the concrete barriers. It all took time.

He’d have to go straight through Greensboro proper, so he got back on the Harley and turned it around and headed back for the last ramp. Thinking he might have difficulty spotting it and relieved when he didn’t. The directional sign had collapsed into the dirt on the shoulder and rusted down to nothing, but another smaller sign still advertised lodging and food and pointed which way to go for what. The Courtyard and the Hampton Inn. Burger King. Places that sounded like destinations in a foreign country. Places frequented by old royalty in a lost world.

The ramp was grassy and absent of trees and he took the long open curve of it down into a broad dry canyon of ruined commerce. Car dealerships and restaurants and grocery stores on either side of the road. Great square castles barely glimpsed through greenery, their broken signs reading Target and Staples and Petco where you could read them at all. He rode along under the trees toward the city, marveling that people had once been rich enough to have filled up these buildings with merchandise and taken it all back home with them at will. Filled it up again and kept on going. They had been royalty indeed. Kings and queens, and every last one of them gone now. Weller their poor bastard child, penniless and in possession of nothing. Not even their memory.

He pictured their children. Children raised up amid such impossible abundance. What were they like? How did they think? What did they know? They couldn’t possibly have recognized their privilege for what it was. Not when privilege was commonplace. It must have been an Eden of fine fat children as healthy as horses, not one of whom would have known hunger for a moment. Not one of whom would have eaten something homegrown instead of storebought and paid the consequences. Not one of whom would have been given such a treacherous thing by her own unknowing father. It must have been a paradise.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.