John Ringo - Cally's War

“Do we have time for me to grab a five-minute shower?” She rubbed the side of her face that smelled like unwashed male, telling her he’d been her pillow in the night.

“If you really mean five minutes and you don’t care if I foam my face and brush my teeth while you’re in there. I need one too. I’m pretty ripe. Sorry,” he said.

“No problem.” She snagged her backpack in one hand and went.

Later, as they waited for the convoy to finish assembling and pull out, she drank coffee and munched a protein bar, looking up at the mountain that rose above the Urb. Scott Mountain, the sign said. She didn’t know the name of the smaller one to the east, but she could still see the remains of the old defensive works through the trees. Unmanned, now, of course. With each winter the ice must work a bit further into the cracks.

“Thanks for last night,” the deadhead interrupted her reverie. “Um… Janet says you’re, like, welcome to ‘trip’ at her place, any time.”

“I was half asleep.” She took a healthy swallow of coffee. “Do I want to know what you did with them?”

“Probably not.” He grinned.

“Was it fatal?”

“Oh, hell no! You can’t just go around killing cops, no matter how bogus they are. It’s, like, unhealthy, man.”

“Okay.” She shook her head. “Sorry, I’m still not awake. They were cops ? Are they, like, going to be able to track us down or catch us or something?” She looked around anxiously as if police were about to sprout from the parking lot around them.

“Don’t panic.” He laid a reassuring hand on her arm. “In forty-two years of my life, I’ve only been caught twice, you know? And none in the last ten years. Cops are, like, only human.”

“Did you have to go to jail?” Her eyes got a little rounder as she looked at him over the rim of her cup.

“Nah. I learned the trade from my mom, like, she was fabulous. She knew the right people, you know? It was, like, expensive as hell, though.” He looked off into the distance and popped a fresh piece of gum in his mouth. “My mom said that, like, before the war, the cops and politicians used to be really anal about, you know, what people took to get high. Like, now, though, some of the cops care, but most of ’em are on the take, and you just have to go up the line until you get high enough, and poof, for the right price, it all goes away. But, like, killing cops — they’re still real anal about that. There’s nothing’ll make that go away. Or if there is, I don’t know it, you know?”

“Quit talkin’ about killing people, dude.” She shivered delicately. “You’re starting to scare me.”

“Oh, well, like, yeah.” He shrugged, punching in his favorite cube and setting it to shuffle. “Looks like we’re starting to move.”

She opened her PDA and went back to Marilyn’s novel, yawning occasionally at the altitude changes as they moved on out to I-40 and the Smokies.

…Never mind how I stumble and fall. You imagine me sipping champagne from your boot for a taste of your elegant pride…

The funny thing about the Smokies was that it didn’t matter how many times you’d been through them, they always kind of took you by surprise.

The Blue Ridge was no kind of preparation for the great, sweeping walls of wet, dark rock, almost any of which could have served for wartime fortifications way back when, but none of which had, given the ease and economy of rigging the I-40 tunnel for rapid demolition. Fortunately for the people back in Asheville, it had never been necessary.

There was obviously less time and money spent on road maintenance through here than had apparently been the case in an earlier age. Remnants of netting or fencing or whatever still clung to the bare cliffs above the highway, but the going was far slower than it had to be, because you never knew when you’d have to swerve around a boulder sitting in the middle of the road that nobody had gotten around to moving yet. A few places, probably some of the worst judging from ancient, rusted signs warning of falling rock, had been Galplased over at some point, but judging by the dingy and mottled finish of those surfaces, it had been in the distant past.

After the tunnel and crossing the state line into Tennessee, the road maintenance improved dramatically, but, then, UT had made the Tennessee economy one of the bright spots of postwar Earth. With federal highway funds a thing of the past except in very rare circumstances, like the stretch from Charleston to Green River Drawbridge, a state’s plenty or need could be clearly read in its roads.

Coming into Knoxville, she looked up as they reached the Tennessee River, looking out over the water as they crossed the bridge. On the road from Asheville, especially after the exit to Gatlinburg, they’d seen more and more nonconvoy traffic joining into the mix of cars and trucks on the roads. Even midmorning, they slowed surrounding traffic a bit coming into the Asheville Highway exit.

“We’re, like, coming up on the end of the convoy up here at Volunteer Park,” he said as they pulled off the interstate. “You’ve been a pretty cool passenger, you know? You’re, like, totally welcome to, you know, hang out with me all the way up to Cincinnati, man. You won’t, like, technically be a guard or anything, but, like, with no convoy dudes to maybe narc on me to my boss for having a passenger, it, like, doesn’t really matter anymore. I can always say I dropped you off in Knoxville, you know?”

The parking lot was freshly paved and recently painted, and large enough to accommodate about twice as many vehicles as the present convoy. The park had a couple of ball fields, vacant in the middle of a school day, and, surrounded by a handful of cedars and well-tended flower beds, a brightly colored playground where a few mothers watched a gaggle of toddlers and small children swarm over the climbing gym and slides. Two of the little girls, in shorts and T-shirts, one with wispy child-blond hair and the other with tangled light-brown curls, were busily building a sand castle in a sandbox shaped like a giant turtle.

“So, like, if you need to take a leak or anything, you might want to hurry and get in line before the bus unloads, you know?”

When Reefer spoke, she jumped slightly as if for a moment she’d forgotten where she was, looking at him blankly as he continued, “It’ll only take me a couple of minutes to check out from the convoy list and get my deposit back, and then we can, like, really make up some time. Gotta have the convoy for safety but, damn, it’s slow.”

He shooed her out the door and as she hurried across the parking lot to beat the rush, she saw him walk off towards the circle of drivers gathering around the convoy master.

The restrooms were in a strictly utilitarian cinderblock building, but there was a whole line of them. Having beaten the bus, she didn’t have to wait. Never miss a chance to eat, sleep, or pee goes double when you’re female — at least for the last bit.

She checked her reflection in the mirror. The perm was, as expected, holding up well. Contacts were fine, but she’d want to take them out and clean them tonight. Nail polish was chipped and needed a touch-up — bad.

She got back to the van before Reefer did, so she sat down on the back bumper and took out the rose nail polish. She made her hand shake very slightly to keep the inexpert effect going. When he got back a minute or two later, they were already dry.

Back in easy wireless range, she downloaded another couple of novels while he checked his tanks. “I’ve got one stop downtown, you know? We can, like, grab some food in Lexington.”

“I was surprised you sold off any of your stock in Asheville. I mean, wouldn’t they pay more in Chicago? I know what I’d pay for live blue crab in Cincy, if I could find it.”